Free The Dragon Charmer by Jan Siegel

was well enough after, but she wouldn’t talk about it.”
    “I know,” said Gaynor as they entered the kitchen. “But—the man…?”
    “I reckon he was a crook, like his Alison. They were in it together, whatever it was. Anyhow, that fancy car of his sat here and sat here till the police came and towed it away. He didn’t come back at all.” She concluded, with a certain grim satisfaction: “And good riddance to both of ‘em.”
    Gaynor digested this with the sandwich lunch Mrs. Wicklow insisted on feeding her, though she wasn’t really hungry. Afterward, Fern and Will still being absent, she returned to her room. A flick through the newspaper had reminded her there was a program she wanted to catch on the television, an afternoon repeat of a documentary that she thought might be of professional interest. She told herself it was stupid to be nervous about switching the set on. She had had a nightmare the previous day, that was all, probably suggested by an item on the news—one of those vivid, surreal spasms of dreaming that can invade a shallow sleep. (Nightmares and dreams, pervading the dark, spilling over into reality…) All the same, she was secretly relieved when she pressed the button on the remote and a normal picture appeared, flat and off-color. Her program was already under way, the camera following a conscientiously enthusiastic presenter around a succession of museums and private collections. Presently Gaynor forgot herqualms, becoming totally absorbed in her subject. The camera panned over early printing on cracked paper, incunabula and scrolls, wooden plaques and broken sections of stone tablets. “Here we are in the little-known Museum of Ancient Writings,” announced the presenter, “hidden away in a back street in York …” Near enough, thought Gaynor. I ought to pay it a visit. The curator, a dingy young man of thirty-odd who appeared to have been prematurely aged by the manuscripts that surrounded him, talked in a lengthy drone that Gaynor tuned out, wishing instead that the image would focus longer and more closely on some of the documents. “A Historie of Dragonf,” she read on the cover of a medieval book gloriously inlaid with serpentine monsters in gold leaf. Invisible hands turned the pages, but too swiftly for her to catch more than a line here and there. “A grate dragon, grater than anye other lyving beaste … and the Knyghte cast his speare at yt, but yt was not slaine … Its mouthe opened, and the shafte was consumed with fire, but yt swallowed the hedde, which was … stone yet not stone, a thyng of grate power and magicke…” The picture changed, returning to the presenter, now interviewing a much older man who was evidently on the board in some significant capacity. A subtitle indicated that this was Dr. Jerrold Laye, a university lecturer specializing in this field. “Not a name I know,” Gaynor said aloud, and for a fraction of a second his hooked profile froze, almost as if he had overheard.
    Gaynor felt suddenly very cold. The camera veered from profile to full face, closing in until Dr. Laye’s physiognomy filled the whole screen. She was staring at him as if hypnotized, unable to avert her gaze without a degree of effort that seemed all but impossible. She saw a high, sloping brow from which the hair was receding in a double arch, the nose of a Roman emperor, the flinty jawline of a fanatic. Pronounced cheekbones pulled his skin into taut, sharp creases that had little to do with smiling. What hair he still possessed was gray; so was his complexion, gray as paste, though whether this was the result of poor color quality on the television or the aftereffect of disease she could not guess. His eyebrows formed another double arch, shaggy with drooping hairs, beneath which his eyes lurked, half hidden by membranous lidsof a curiously scaly appearance, like the extra eyelid possessed by certain reptiles. As the camera angle altered so did the direction of his