The Dragon Charmer by Jan Siegel

dreamed the idol. You heard the pipes. The evidence is all yours. Now, let’s go up to your room. At least I can get rid of that bloody TV set.”
    They went upstairs.
    The television stood there, squat, blank of screen, inert. Yet to Gaynor it seemed to be imbued with a new and terrifying potentiality, an immanent persona far beyond that of normal household gadgetry. She wondered if it was her imagination that it appeared to be waiting.
    She sat down on the bed, feeling stupidly weak at the knees, and there was the remote under her hand, though she was almost sure she had left it on the side table. The power button nudged at her finger.
    “Please take it away,” she said tightly, like a child for whom some ordinary, everyday object has been infected with the stuff of nightmares.
    Will crouched down by the wall to release the plug—and started back abruptly with a four-letter oath. “It shocked me!” he said. “The bloody thing
shocked
me!”
    “Did you switch it off?”
    He reached out once more, this time for the switch and again pulled his hand back sharply. Gaynor had glimpsed the blue spark that flashed out at his touch. “Maybe you have a strong electric aura,” she offered hesitantly, coming over and bending down beside him. The instant her tentative finger brushed the socket she felt the stab of pain, violent as a burn. For a fraction of a second a current of agony shot up her arm, her fingertip was glued to the power source, the individual hairs on her skin crackled with static. Then somehow she was free, her finger red but otherwise unmarked.
    “Leave it,” said Will. “We need Fern. She could deal with this. She has the right kind of gloves.”
    They went down to the kitchen, where they found Mrs. Wicklow extracting a cake from the oven. With her firm conviction that young people nowadays were all too thin and in constant need of sustenance, she cooked frequently and to excess, although only Will could be said to justify her efforts. But after the horrors of the afternoon Gaynor munched happily on calories and carbohydrates, thankful for their comforting effect. Fern was late back, having gone from the caterers to the wine merchants, from the wine merchants to the church. “We’re invited to the vicarage for dinner,” she called out as she came in. “Is the bath free?”
    Gaynor called back in the affirmative and was vaguely relieved to hear Will following his sister upstairs, sparing her the necessity of relating her story again. Despite all that Will had told her, she could not visualize her friend receiving it with anything but polite disbelief. She waited several minutes and then she, too, went up to the second floor.
    Fern was standing in the bathroom doorway, with the chundering of the hot tap coming from behind her and translucent billows of steam overflowing into the corridor. She had obviously been in the preliminary stages of undress when Will interrupted her: her shoes lay where they had been kicked and her right hand was still clutching a crumpled ball of socks that she squeezed savagely from time to time, apparently unawareof what she was doing. There was an expression on her face that Gaynor had never seen before, a kind of brittleness that looked as if it might fragment at a touch and re-form into something far more dangerous. Gaynor could smell a major row, hovering in the ether like an inflammable gas, waiting for the wrong word to spark it off.
    But all Fern said was: “I told you that TV was a mistake.”
    She led the way up to Gaynor’s room and headed straight for the socket where the set was plugged in.
    “You’ll need the gloves,” Will said. “Alison’s gloves…”
    Fern rounded on him, her eyes bright with pent-up rage and some other feeling, something that might have been a deep secret hurt. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’re
really
after. You want me to open her box—Pandora’s box—play with her toys. You want to drag me down into her