Prospero's Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

fancies.
    “I’ve never been too sure about hauntings,” said the Reverend Dinsdale. He was younger than Fern had expected, probably under forty, with a friendly bony face and a long neck in which a mobile Adam’s apple fluctuated expressively. “I can’t really imagine a human spirit is going to mope around the same old place for centuries just because it was murdered there, or something equally nasty. All the more reason to move on, I would have thought. On the other hand, some houses have a definite personality. I’ve often wondered if it’s the buildings themselves which remember—and maybe sometimes the memory can be strong enough to reproduce an old image, a sound, even a smell, so that human senses can detect it. Perhaps there’s a kind of house-spirit which lives in such places, a degenerate form of something that was once akin to mankind, craving the company of the living even while it resents them, reminded of what it might have been.”
    “A sort of
genius loci
,” Will supplied knowledgeably. He was in a beatific mood after the vicar’s wife had donated a packet of Frosties from her larder.
    “That’s it. Pure speculation, of course. Mind you, it’s fairly well grounded in folk mythology. In the past, every house in Yorkshire had its own hobgoblin. The occupants would put out a saucer of milk or a choice morsel of food to keep it sweet, and in return it would look after the house, see off danger and disease, that kind of thing. Much more efficient than a burglar alarm.”
    “Maybe we should get Fern to put out some milk for ours,” Robin suggested slyly.
    “Don’t be silly, Daddy,” his daughter retorted.
    “I don’t know about ghosts,” Will said, “but I heard a weird sniffing noise last night, going along the wall under my window. It was awfully loud.” Fern glanced at him with suddenly widening eyes.
    “Could be a badger,” the vicar said. “They always sound as if they have a cold in the head. What you want to do is go out in the morning and check for tracks. I’ve got a book in my study with some good illustrations: I’ll show you what to look for.”
    By the time they returned to Ned Capel’s house the daylight was failing. The cloud-cover had begun to break up and chinks of fire appeared in the far west above a muffled sunset, while eastward great lakes of pale green had opened up, with a star or two winking in their depths. The motorcyclist Fern had heard the previous night roared past them on the narrow road, a little too close for comfort, his exhaust rattling and a black visor hiding his face. Their temporary home loomed up ahead of them, its unyielding frontage looking no longer threatening but merely solid, sternly dependable, as safe as a castle wall which would keep them from the night. Fern went straight up to her room and gazed out toward the sunset: twilight dimmed the rugged hillside but she could still distinguish the paler thread of the path and the stump or boulder that resembled a seated man on the bank above, maintaining its timeless vigil over the house. Something like a bird swooped past, its wing-beat too swift for the eye to follow, its flight-path erratic. Then there was another, and another. They made a faint high-pitched chittering unlike any birdsong. Bats! Fern thought with a sudden shiver, part fear, part pleasure. She had never seen a bat outside the nature programs on television and although she was not really frightened of them they seemed to her alien and fantastical, messengers symbolizing her transition into another world. The teeming man-made metropolis where she had grown up shrank in her mind until it was merely a blob of meaningless ferment, and beyond it she glimpsed a boundless universe, with pockmarked moons sinking behind drifting hills, and blue voids opening in between, and dusty nebulae floating like clouds across the backdrop of space, and at the last a starry sea whose glittering waves hissed forever on the silver beaches at the