EIGHTEEN
She had to research Thurstaston, otherwise she would be letting her family down – Charlotte, who believed she was worth publishing, and Hugh, who'd already done some of the work for her, and even Rory, who had tried in his abrasive way to help. She didn't need to think about the mirror in the cliff, even though it must have been stuck among roots in a burrow, not held in the remains of a hand. Or perhaps she could think of it if she rendered it manageable by working it into her next book. After all, the first one seemed to be letting her come to terms with the injustice she'd suffered at the tribunal; indeed, her new chapters were rendering the memory remote. Perhaps Carlotta or Hugo or Roy could find a magic mirror buried on the common or hidden in a cave by a sorcerer, and why not Arthur Pendemon, if he was as wizardly as his name suggested? Each of them would look into the mirror and see the dream they most wished for, although what would Helen visualise? Presumably her old folk in miraculously rude health, except that as Ellen tried to hold onto the idea it was ousted by the thought of confronting an altogether less welcome reflection, not an old woman but somebody who didn't even have age as an excuse for her mass of pallid bloated spongy flesh, which managed to be both puffy and sagging, a feat unworthy of applause. This wasn't a memory, it had just been a glimpse too brief to be trusted. She mustn't let it reach her nerves again. She dismissed from the screen the chapter she'd started to reread to see if any of it was worth preserving. As soon as the jittering cursor lodged on the Frugonet icon she clicked the slippery mouse.
She'd had enough of her blurred reflection. Across the street a girl was baring almost the whole of her slim bronzed self in a minute bikini on a second-floor balcony. Ellen considered stepping onto hers to catch a little of the late-afternoon sun, and imagined herself as one of a pair of figures in an old-fashioned clock; if she emerged the other girl would have to leave her lounger and retreat into her niche. Equally, as long as the slim girl was out there could be no place for – Ellen left her musings at that, because the computer had brought her the Internet. Once it responded to her password – rohtua, which had started making her feel backward when she'd learned she had to rewrite her book but which no longer did – she typed 'Arthur Pendemon' in the search box.
She'd hardly clicked the mouse when the screen filled with pallor. It was displaying a page of search results, the first of which looked promising:
. . . Arthur Pendemon, who sounds like he fancied himself as some sort of demonic economist . . .
She must have leaned towards the monitor, because her ill-defined reflection appeared to swell up. She recoiled – sat back, rather – and clenched her clammy fist on the mouse to bring up the site.
It was called Mumbo Jumbjoe, which was also the pseudonym of its apparently solitary writer. A sidebar listed topics:
Blame the Victorians and a few Edwardians while you're at
it. Eras of scientific advance my arse. Maybe they were,
but they go to show too many people that ought to know
better can't cope with too much reason and get desperate
to believe in something else, anything you can't prove.
What's changed, eh? You'd think humanity couldn't live
without magic. Back then it was everywhere a lot of people
looked. You couldn't walk down your garden without
tripping over a fairy, and even Conan Doyle ended up
thinking they were real. Pity he didn't have Sherlock
Holmes to sort him out, because he got taken in by the
spiritualists after his wife died. Freud ought to have gone
into why their victims needed to see lots of white stuff
coming out of someone . . .
This startled a laugh out of Ellen, one that felt guilty and surreptitious. She'd begun to dislike the tone of the site so much that she might almost have been sharing someone else's resentment. She propped her chin on her fist, at least one of which yielded more than she appreciated, and scrolled down.
Doyle was just the best-known writer to get into the
occult. William Butler Yeats, horror writers like Stoker and
Machen and Blackwood, Sax Rohmer that thought up Fu
Manchu – they all joined the Order of the Golden Dawn,
Victorian England's cult sensation. So did the Astronomer
Royal (just the Scots one) and the President of the Royal
Academy (no Scot him) and Oscar Wilde's wife (bugger her).
The Order didn't order Baldy Crowley, but he was the
magician that got all the publicity, and maybe he gave away
what it was all about deep down. One thing was having
magical duels. Baldy challenged the founder to one, and a
couple of magic men who'd gone up north had a real old
witchy rumpus. Step forward Arthur Pendemon, who
sounds like he fancied himself as some sort of demonic
economist, and Peter Grace . . .
Ellen pushed herself to her feet and leaned forwards to drag up the sash of the window. Perhaps the cloying smell that reminded her of digging in the earth was outside the building, because her action seemed not to affect it. Of course, someone must be gardening. As the girl on the balcony raised a slim arm to acknowledge her, Ellen
