A Sudden Wild Magic

It was an awful journey. They could feel the sending pursuing them, taking on other forms as it came. The storm howled around the car, purposefully, and brought rain increasingly heavy as night fell. Once a tree came down in the road just after they had passed it. Mark had to ask Paulie to keep up constant protection, and she was soon tired out and angry.

“Must we go all the way to Gladys’s?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said. “Even if I hadn’t promised Amanda, that house is the one place I know that can keep out this sending.”

Paulie could not argue with that. When they finally arrived under Gladys’s storm-torn trees, to find another car parked on the verge and the gate fallen down, she refused to move. “I’m past caring about any of you,” she said. “Leave me be.” Mark had to drag her out of the car. “I just want to lie down and sleep!” she wailed as he hauled her through the pelting rain and up the muddy path. But she cheered up at seeing dim lights coming from the house. “There! She’s perfectly okay in spite of all your fussing!”

When Mark tremulously clattered at the ring on the verandah door, it was opened by Amanda. She was carrying an oil lamp, which she held high to see who they were. She seemed pale by its light, and her eyes very big and dark. “Good Lord!” she said. “You two look as if you’ve been through it!”

“We have,” Mark said. “Let us in and shut the door quickly. There’s a sending after me. And is there any coffee? Paulie’s about had it.”

Amanda stood back to let him guide Paulie through to a seat in the jungle room and then shut the door — both doors — with firm claps. There was a sense of something wrong. Mark realized that the dim light in the room came from a row of candles on the mantelpiece. He could have done without the shifting, clawing shadows they made among the jungle.

“The power’s out again,” Amanda explained, casting more shadows, huge, walking ones, as she came back with the lamp.

“That figures,” Mark said, thinking of the pylons.

“Oh, does that mean there’s nothing hot to drink?” Paulie moaned, putting her draggled head in her muddy hands.

“No. She’s got those gas cylinders,” said Amanda. “The kettle’s just boiled, but there’s only tea bags.”

“That’ll do,” said Paulie.

There was still a sense of something not right — a sort of silence and emptiness that was there in spite of the frustrated storm roaring around the house. “What’s wrong?” Mark asked. “Maureen?”

“Gladys,” said Amanda. “Vanished. And she seems to have taken the cats. Have you noticed there isn’t an animal in the place?”

That was it, of course. Mark had never known this house without the soft prowling of cats — and usually the rhythmic scratching of the beast Jimbo too. If Gladys had removed her animals, she had indeed gone. “Didn’t she leave a message?”

“No. I’ve only been here half an hour, but I’ve looked everywhere I can think of,” said Amanda. “There’s nothing, unless you know any secret place—”

“Oh, damn that! Let’s get warm and dry first!” Paulie cried out.

“Yes, yes, of course.” Mark seized one of the candles and forced himself to hurry about looking for dry clothes, while Amanda lit a fire and made tea.

Half an hour later, they were feeling much better. Mark had discovered various strange garments thrown around the bedroom that seemed to belong to Gladys. He selected a flowered kimono for Paulie and got her into it. For himself he found a gown of scarlet flannel, which Amanda, with great surprise, identified as a Cambridge doctoral gown. Now he and Paulie sat side by side drinking tea and staring into the fire, looking as if they were taking part in some new ritual. The sight amused Amanda. She was sitting on the hearth, being too tense to take a chair.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

Mark started to tell her, but Paulie, as she so often did, interrupted him. “Where’s Maureen? I thought she’d be here too.”

“No idea, and she’s not answering her phone,” Amanda said.

On cue, the telephone rang, hidden somewhere in the jungle.

“That’ll be Maureen, I bet.” Amanda leaped up and made the usual search among the plants. When she located the phone and answered, however, it proved to be yet another puzzle. “It’s for you,” Amanda said, holding the receiver out through the leaves toward Mark. “Sounds Scottish.”

“But no one knows I’m—” Mark began. Then he remembered that there was both a sending and a rogue rnagician abroad, and simply and grimly took the phone. “Mark Lister here.”

The voice was female and, as Amanda said, slightly Scottish. “Mark Lister, are you? I’m sorry to seem to doubt you, but I’ll have to ask you to identify yourself by your title. I was told to do that, you see.”