Unexpected Magic (7 page)

Mr. Platt did not want to meet Mr. O'Flaherty face-to-face again. He telephoned and pointed out that Daniel Emanuel was being allowed to run wild. It was not so much the tomatoes, he said, but the child's own good. … The person the other end rang off. “Will you come here, Danny!” Mr. O'Flaherty roared. Mr. Platt would have been shocked at the storm which broke out then.

When it was over, Mr. O'Flaherty went out in the car to cool down. Mrs. O'Flaherty lay down and read
The Count of Monte Cristo
to calm her nerves. Daniel Emanuel, very sore and sullen, went to watch television.

It was a program about birds. The hen-bird came tiptoeing onto the screen, thin and brown and nervy, jerking its little head in just the same way that Mrs. Platt did when she explained something for your own good. The cock-bird strutted on and bent its neck back just like Mr. Platt. Then it spread out a great circle of tail and looked exactly like Mr. Platt admiring a greenhouse.

“Platt, Platt!” shrieked Daniel Emanuel and ran to find Linda.

Linda was cooking. She had tipped in a bag of flour and a bag of sugar, and she was trying to crunch in a dozen eggs with a fork before Mrs. O'Flaherty stopped reading and found her. “I'm busy,” she said. But her sleeve was being pulled in a particular way. She went with Daniel Emanuel and a trail of flour and mashed eggshell and looked at the television. “Peacocks,” she said.

“Platts,” Daniel Emanuel said. He went into the front garden among the pieces of car and thought of a peacock. When the peacock came, it was blue and green and trailed its tail like a film star's skirt. It stood in front of a shiny hubcap of a piece of car and looked at itself and admired itself greatly. Daniel Emanuel nodded and thought of a peahen. She tiptoed up like Mrs. Platt going after somebody's stray pet. Daniel Emanuel nodded again. “Peacocks,” he murmured. “Hundreds and hundreds.” And he thought of himself holding open a gap in the hedge behind Mr. Platt's greenhouses to let a long, long line of peacocks and peahens tiptoe through. Hundreds, hundreds …

When Mrs. O'Flaherty had finished dealing with Linda, she was very relieved to find Daniel Emanuel curled up asleep beside the hubcap of a piece of car. “Oh, isn't he an angel!” she said.

And the Platts were suddenly overwhelmed with peacocks. They sat in rows on the cottage roof, and the garden was a mass of tiptoeing green and brown, mixed with spreading tails and horrible sudden peacock screams. Peacocks got in the greenhouses. They invaded the house… But long before this, Holly Smith had rushed home shouting the news. Mrs. Smith telephoned everyone in Chipping Hanbury and all the adults promptly pretended to be ill and sent their children to the football field. Mrs. Willis gave up typing for other people and typed instead the news brought by a stream of children on bicycles. James and Sarah cantered from house to house delivering little cryptic notes saying things like:
TWO MORE FELL THROUGH THE GREENHOUSES
and
SHE GOT PECKED
and
DROPPINGS ALL OVER SOFA
and
ONE LAID AN EGG IN THEIR LOO
and
ROOSTING ON TELEPHONE WHEN THEY TRIED TO RING VET.

A row of interested heads watched over the hedge when the Platts tried to get their car out and drive a load of peacocks to the vet. The running, the chasing, the shooing, the squawks and clouds of feathers was quite indescribable. Mrs. Willis's note summed it up:
THEY COULDN'T
. So Mr. Platt tried going around to all the houses asking for help. The peacocks seemed fond of him. Twenty or so followed him faithfully from door to door and drowned his voice with screams when the doors were opened. Mr. Platt was sorry to find that everyone opened the door wearing nightclothes and holding a handkerchief to their faces. There seemed to be quite a flu epidemic. So he went home, followed by his procession of birds, and the Platts waited for the peacocks to go away. But they didn't. If anything, there seemed to be more every day.

The Platts stood it for almost a month and then they went away themselves. Everyone recovered from flu in time to wave good-bye to their car as it drove off with peacocks clinging to the roof rack and more hastily waddling and flapping behind. Linda had a marvelous time that day. Mrs. O'Flaherty was touched and puzzled at the way everyone seemed to be thinking of treats for Linda and Daniel Emanuel.

The Platts' cottage is still standing empty except for peacocks, but some of the peacocks seem to have lost interest and wandered away. Since then there have been outbreaks of peacocks here and there all around the edges of London. This is because Daniel Emanuel has forgotten about them. He has started school now and has other things to think of.

T
his is the trouble with being a newly qualified vet. The call came at 5:50
A.M
. I thought it was a man's voice, though it was high for a man, and I didn't quite catch the name—Harry Sanovit? Harrison Ovett? Anyway, he said it was urgent.

Accordingly, I found myself on the edge of a plain, facing a dark fir forest. It was about midmorning. The fir trees stood dark and evenly spaced, exhaling their crackling gummy scent, with vistas of trodden-looking pine needles beneath them. A wolf-wood, I thought. I was sure that thought was right. The spacing of the trees was so regular that it suggested an artificial pinewood in the zoo, and there was a kind of humming, far down at the edges of the senses, as if machinery was at work sustaining a man-made environment here. The division between trees and plain was so sharp that I had some doubts that I would be able to enter the wood.

But I stepped inside with no difficulty. Under the trees it was cooler, more strongly scented, and full of an odd kind of depression, which made me sure that there was some sort of danger here. I walked on the carpet of needles cautiously, relaxed but intensely afraid. There seemed to be some kind of path winding between the straight boles, and I followed it into the heart of the wood. After a few turns, flies buzzed around something just off the path.
Danger
! pricked out all over my skin like sweat, but I went and looked all the same.

It was a young woman about my own age. From the flies and the freshness, I would have said she had been killed only hours ago. Her throat had been torn out. The expression on her half-averted face was of sheer terror. She had glorious red hair and was wearing what looked, improbably, to be evening dress.

I backed away, swallowing. As I backed, something came up beside me. I whirled around with a croak of terror.

“No need to fear,” he said. “I am only the fool.”

He was very tall and thin and ungainly. His feet were in big laced boots, jigging a silent, ingratiating dance on the pine needles, and the rest of his clothes were a dull brown and close-fitting. His huge hands came out to me placatingly. “I am Egbert,” he said. “You may call me Eggs. You will take no harm if you stay with me.” His eyes slid off mine apologetically, round and blue-gray. He grinned all over his small, inane face. Under his close crop of straw-fair hair, his face was indeed that of a near idiot. He did not seem to notice the woman's corpse at all, even though he seemed to know I was full of horror.

“What's going on here?” I asked him helplessly. “I'm a vet not a—not a—mortician. What animal needs me?”

He smiled seraphically at nothing over my left shoulder. “I am only Eggs, Lady. I don't not know nothing. What you need to do is call the Master. Then you will know.”

“So where is the Master?” I said.

He looked baffled by this question. “Hereabouts,” he suggested. He gave another beguiling smile, over my right shoulder this time, panting slightly. “He will come if you call him right. Will I show you the house, Lady? There are rare sights there.”

“Yes, if you like,” I said. Anything to get away from whatever had killed that girl. Besides, I trusted him somehow. When he had said I would take no harm if I was with him, it had been said in a way I believed.

He turned and cavorted up the path ahead of me, skipping soundlessly on his great feet, waving great, gangling arms, clumsily tripping over a tree root and, even more clumsily, just saving himself. He held his head on one side and hummed as he went happy and harmless. That is to say, harmless to me so far. Though he walked like a great, hopping puppet, those huge hands were certainly strong enough to rip a throat out.

“Who killed that girl?” I asked him. “Was it the Master?”

His head snapped around, swayingly, and he stared at me, appalled, balancing on the path as though it were a tightrope. “Oh, no, Lady. The Master wouldn't not do that!” He turned sadly, almost tearfully, away.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

His head bent, acknowledging that he had heard, but he continued to walk the tightrope of the path without answering, and I followed. As I did, I was aware that there was something moving among the trees to either side of us. Something softly kept pace with us there, and, I was sure, something also followed along the path behind. I did not try to see what it was. I was quite as much angry with myself as I was scared. I had let my shock at seeing that corpse get the better of my judgment. I saw I must wait to find out how the redheaded girl had got herself killed. Caution! I said to myself. Caution! This path was a tightrope indeed.

“Has the Master got a name?” I asked.

That puzzled Eggs. He stood balancing on the path to think. After a moment he nodded doubtfully, shot me a shy smile over his shoulder, and walked on. No attempt to ask my name, I noticed. As if I was the only other person there and “Lady” should be enough. Which meant that the presences among the trees and behind on the path were possibly not human.

Around the next bend I found myself facing the veranda of a chaletlike building. It looked a little as if it were made of wood, but it was no substance that I knew. Eggs tripped on the step and floundered toward the door at the back of the veranda. Before I could make more than a move to help him, he had saved himself and his great hands were groping with an incomprehensible lock on the door. The humming was more evident here. I had been hoping that what I had heard at the edge of the wood had been the flies on the corpse. It was not. Though the sound was still not much more than a vibration at the edge of the mind, I knew I had been right in my first idea. Something artificial was being maintained here, and whatever was maintaining it seemed to be under this house.

In
this house, I thought, as Eggs got the door open and floundered inside ahead of me. The room we entered was full of—well, devices. The nearest thing was a great cauldron, softly bubbling for no reason I could see, and giving out a gauzy violet light. The other things were arranged in ranks beyond, bewilderingly. In one place something grotesque stormed green inside a design painted on the floor; here a copper bowl smoked; there a single candle sat like something holy on a white stone; a knife suspended in air dripped gently into a jar of rainbow glass. Much of it was glass, twinkling, gleaming, chiming, under the light from the low ceiling that seemed to come from nowhere. There were no windows.

“Good heavens!” I said, disguising my dismay as amazement. “What are all these?”

Eggs grinned. “I know some. Pretty, aren't they?” He roved, surging about, touching the edge of a pattern here, passing his huge hand through a flame or a column of smoke there, causing a shower of fleeting white stars, solemn gong notes, and a rich smell of incense. “Pretty, aren't they?” he kept repeating, and, “
Very
pretty!” as an entire fluted glass structure began to ripple and change shape at the end of the room. As it changed, the humming, which was everywhere in the room, changed, too. It became a purring chime, and I felt an indescribable pulling feeling from the roots of my hair and under my skin, almost as if the glass thing were trying to change me as it changed itself.

“I should come away from that if I were you,” I said as firmly and calmly as I could manage.

Eggs turned and came floundering toward me, grinning eagerly. To my relief, the sound from the glass modulated to a new kind of humming. But my relief vanished when Eggs said, “Petra knew all, before Annie tore her throat out. Do you know as much as Petra? You are clever, Lady, as well as beautiful.” His eyes slid across me, respectfully. Then he turned and hung, lurching, over the cauldron with the gauzy violet light. “Petra took pretty dresses from here,” he said. “Would you like for me to get you a pretty dress?”