The Book of the Crowman (8 page)

Gunshots.

Gordon opened his eyes to darkness. Blinked. The darkness remained.

Where am I?

More gunshots.

No. Wait.

The noise seemed to come from somewhere below. Not gunshots but rapping. Stone on glass. Beneath his body was a soft surface, so comfortable his sleep had been dreamless and profound. A mattress.

I’m indoors?

Then it all came back: the girl with the shotgun, the Ward’s mounted patrol, the sick child who talked to the Crowman. He swung his legs off the bed, rubbing his face as he tried to remember the way back downstairs. Whoever was out there was hitting the glass with panicked urgency. He heard the glass smash, shards falling inward and hitting the basement’s stone floor. His knife slipped into his palm like an old friend. He opened out the blade and ran down the stairs, his left hand interpreting the shape of the house in the darkness, leading him to the basement.

Before he reached the last flight of stairs the noise began again; this time a stone knocking on the wood of the window frame. Gordon edged down into the cellar. The din continued, whoever was making it unaware he’d arrived.

“Who’s out there?” He called.

The knocking ceased.

“Is that you, Gordon?”

He recognised Denise’s voice.

“Yes.”

“Oh, thank God. Thank God you’re in here. Flora’s… she’s really sick. Can you come?”

He was already climbing out of the window. He set off in the direction of the green door in the back wall but Denise yanked him back.

“This way’s quicker.”

Using an old sofa as a step, she climbed over the property’s side wall and dropped into the next-door back garden. Gordon followed. Denise’s footsteps led him across a rubble-strewn expanse to the opposite wall, much of which had collapsed. They stepped over the bricks and she ran to the back gate in the next garden. The door had long before been torn off for shelter or firewood. She stepped through into the alley, able to run faster now. The alley opened out onto a street and a hundred yards further on Denise ducked through the blast hole in the wall that led to her own refuge.

As they climbed the stairs she said:

“I went to the old swimming pool first but I should have known you’d go to 257 after what you said about the countryside. All the greenery in London’s in that back garden.”

“What’s the matter with Flora?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her this bad before.”

She let Gordon ascend to the attic first, pulling up the ladder and closing the hatch after her. A candle burned on a saucer near Flora’s untidy rumple of bedding. Denise lit several more and placed them near the girl’s head so Gordon could see her better.

“I’m not a doctor, Denise.”

“There are no doctors. None that I know anyway.”

“What about your… friends?”

“You were closer.”

Gordon knelt beside Flora and pulled back the blankets so that he could see her better. Her hair was dark with sweat, her teeth chattered and the tendons of her neck were tight. He didn’t need to touch her forehead.

“This is a fever. Has she ever had one before?”

“Not like this. The arthritis sometimes sends her temperature up and her joints get hot and inflamed but this is different.”

“How long has she been like this?”

“When we went to sleep she was fine. I woke up because her heels were drumming the floor.”

A surge of guilt hit Gordon.

“You don’t think it was the fish, do you?”

Denise shook her head.

“I thought about that but you and I are fine. This is something else.”

Gordon watched the rigors shake Flora’s tiny, bent frame. The lids of her eyes rippled as the orbs swivelled beneath them. Once again, the Black Light expanded from the core of him to pulse behind the skin of his fingertips.

No, he thought. I mustn’t. All it ever brings is trouble.

He pressed his hands together, forced the living darkness back inside himself, shut it off. His stomach bulged and clenched with sickness. He chewed the nausea back, held it down.

And yet, there had to be something he could do.

“We have to cool her off, Denise.”

“But she’s shivering. Look at her. It’s like she’s freezing to death.”

“Her temperature’s sky-high and we’ve got to get it down. Fast. Take the bedclothes away and get her pyjamas off.”

Denise didn’t move.

“We have to do this.”

“OK. Alright.”

Denise shouldered him out of the way and stripped Flora of blankets and clothes. Gordon saw how crippling her arthritis was. Her knees, ankles and elbows were swollen and red her feet and hands already misshapen by the changes the disease had wrought inside her. Her skin was thin and waxen. Below it her veins and capillaries were visible. The bones of her pelvis jutted and her stomach was concave. Her whole body shuddered with fever.

Gordon sighed inwardly. I could make all this go away, he thought. The fever; all of it. But I don’t know these people. I can’t trust them. Not yet.

“Have you got some water?” he asked.

“Some. Not much.”

“You need to wet a towel or blanket and cover her with it. The dampness will draw the heat out of her skin. It should bring her core temperature down too.”

“I thought you said you weren’t a doctor.”

“I’ve been around a lot of sickness since I started travelling. And I had a fever like this once.”

Gordon sat and stroked Flora’s hair while Denise poured water onto an old towel, trying to soak as much of it as she could. Gordon helped her lay the towel over her daughter’s trembling form. Flora sucked in a hiss of breath at the cold contact and Denise flinched, not allowing her end of the towel rest on Flora’s body.

“Please, Denise. You have to do this.”

Denise draped the towel down as softly as she could, not softly enough to prevent Flora from crying out at the touch of it.

“Baby, I’m so sorry.” She put her face in her hands for a few moments, then wiped away her tears and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “OK. What do we do now?”

“We wait,” said Gordon. “That’s all we can do.”

After an hour or so, her shivering had lessened and Gordon was sure the fever had receded. Heartened by this and obviously exhausted by the worry, Denise sat back against a cushion and allowed her eyes to close. Gordon checked Flora several more times, noting the heat in her skin much reduced. He too made himself a little more comfortable and soon his eyelids drooped.

They both woke at the same time to the sound of choking.

Gordon sprang across the attic space colliding with Denise and knocking her onto her side. He was first to reach Flora. In her flailing, she had thrown off her towel and it lay in a dry, stiff mould beside her. Gordon recoiled when he touched her head. The heat was too intense, more than a human body could sustain. His hands froze in response, Black Light surging in painful beads from his fingertips and palms ready to do its work.

OK, he thought.
Alright
. I’ll do it.

Denise was so focused on her daughter, she didn’t appear to have noticed his moment of crisis. He moved to Flora’s side, opened his hands and stopped opposing the Black Light. He placed his palms on the girl’s emaciated chest.

He took a deep breath and let it go in a long, silent stream. As suddenly as it had arrived, the cold energy of the void was gone. His hands were frail, weak. He closed his eyes and sought the darkness within himself, the power at his core. A sinkhole had opened up within him and the Black Light had been swallowed.

Please, he whispered to himself. Come on. Not this. Not
now
.

Denise took hold of his arm.

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer;
couldn’t
answer.

I’ll never resist you again, he thought. I swear it. Come to me, please. Come to me now.

There was no moisture left in Flora’s tiny, crooked body; only this arid, impossible heat. Her leg muscles rippled with cramps and spastic twitches, her arms alternately hooking closed and extending in sudden snaps. Her wasted body arched and bucked. The noise of her battering the floorboards was thunderous. Cuts and grazes opened up with every bony contact but Gordon’s attention was drawn to the gurgling rasp in her throat.

Denise drained sallow with fear.

“Jesus, Gordon, what’s happening to her?”

“The fever’s back. It’s a convulsion.”

“What can we… Oh my God, is that… blood?”

A watery, pink-tinged discharge dribbled from Flora’s left ear and nostril. Her shaking and thrashing sent droplets left and right. The flow increased and thickened, turning cherry red. Blood smeared her face, dirtied itself on the floorboards, blackened her hair like a slick of oil. Her struggles decelerated from frantic to slow motion, the frenetic energy draining suddenly from her limbs. The tension released completely then leaving her cut, bruised body slack.

Gordon looked at her chest and saw no movement. Concentrated urine and a thin gravy of faeces darkened her thighs and groin. Her face was masked and tacky with blood and mucus. The smell was one Gordon knew from every scene of devastation he’d passed through. If they were outdoors now, if it was daylight, the carrion eaters would already be landing, blinking their obsidian eyes, fluffing their coal-dark plumes, shuffling closer.

As he thought this the strangled cry of a raven exploded in his head. The call, loud both in the distance and in the space around them, was clotted with grief and regret. Gordon chanced a look at Denise. She had heard nothing. This was a voice meant for him. Was it the Crowman? He’d never heard the corvid voice so strong, so encompassing. Or was it Flora’s soul, a bold crow spirit if ever he’d known one, cursing him as it left this world?

“Thank God,” said Denise. “Oh, thank God. She’s sleeping now. I’ll get her cleaned up.”

Denise busied herself finding a rag and soaking it with the last of the water.

“She’s gone,” said Gordon.

“She’d be so embarrassed to know you’ve seen her like this. She’s quite proper, really. I don’t know where she gets
that
from.”

Gordon took Denise’s wrist and pulled her towards him.

“She’s gone.”

“Don’t touch me like that. Don’t you think you can come in here and touch me… and talk to me like…”

Gordon pulled Denise close and held her tight. She struggled and whispered
no, no, no
. He rocked her the way his mother had rocked him when he was a child. When her weeping finally came it began as a howl. After a time, he didn’t know how long, the howling became a whimper. Gordon could have cried too. He wanted to, felt the tears needling the backs of his eyes, but knew he had no right.

After a time, he couldn’t tell how long, Denise pulled away.

“I really must clean her up. She wouldn’t want to be seen like this.”

“Of course.”

“Can you… come back in a while? I need to talk to her and it’s…”

“I’ll come back when it’s light.”

It was dark outside, the night thick with tainted, smoky mist. Gordon stood in the back garden for a few moments and listened to the sound of the broken capital of England. The silence of abandonment, the silence of fear; that was all he could hear. One thing Gordon knew with absolute certainty. He would not sleep tonight.

He returned through the smoggy midnight to number 257, treading quietly along Denise’s route. Unwilling to enter the property yet and still feeling the knot of swallowed darkness in his guts, he sat on the cold stone steps leading to the boarded-up back door. In a few hours, dawn would give him a view of the wild garden and over the wall into the next-door plot.

When the stomach contraction came it was a rush he could not control. Vomit erupted from his mouth as he hung his head over the steps. He didn’t need to see it to know it was darker than molasses and just as viscous. Nor was he surprised that it hit the basement level without a sound. Tomorrow there would be no sign of it, except perhaps a puddle-shaped patch of stone or concrete, scalloped and paled by its touch.

When the spasm had passed he whispered into the night.

“I’m so sorry, Flora. I could have prevented this. I could have made you a healthy little girl, given you the future he promised you.”

The tears he could not shed in front of Flora’s mother found their vent then, and Gordon pressed a fist to his mouth to stifle them. But who would approach such a sound in the night, the sound of weeping so desolate it was laughter, the sound of laughter so twisted it was tears?

Apa is away in the fields when Megan arrives home.

Amu opens the door and hesitates before drawing her over the threshold and clasping her to her breast. In Amu’s eyes, in that pause, Megan sees what she has suspected for some time now. She is changing. For a moment even her own mother did not recognise her. Both of them shed a few tears, just for themselves, and then step back to look at each other again, both pretending they are tears of happiness.

It is only days since Megan saw her but Amu has changed too. She has more lines at the corners of her eye and the skin of her neck is a little slacker, a little drier. Her full dark hair appears less lustrous than Megan remembers it, and thinner perhaps, if such a thing is possible in such a short space of time. As she appraises her mother, though, she realises that all these tiny differences, and they are tiny, are incremental, not sudden. Megan has been noticing them for a while without ever acknowledging it. It has taken some time away from home for her to return with honest eyes and see the truth. Her mother is ageing. She is still beautiful – she will always be beautiful – but time is working its slow magic on her, holding her hand and taking her gently into decay, guiding her to that final winter.

Megan looks into her mother’s eyes and sees her own eyes there. This is where she came from; out of the very meat of this woman, out of her bliss and agony from chaos into form, from the perfect nothingness of the beyond into the imperfect beauty of this world. It is impossible to conceal her sadness and wonder and she steps forward and hugs Amu again. Tighter this time, not ever wanting to let go of yet knowing all chalices will be cast down in the fullness of time. Her mother is surprised by the fierceness in her cling. She returns it and this time they both cry without pretending joy.

“I’ve missed you so much, Amu.”

“We’ve missed you too, Megan.”

They stand away from each other again, as mother and daughter and as women; drawn equal by nothing more magical than the inevitability of time.

Amu goes to her stove and places a pan on the hot plate. Megan takes her place on a stool at the table.

“You’ve lost some weight, girl. Gone from bonny to boyish in a matter of days. Is Mr Keeper starving you now?”

“He’s a kind man, Amu, and he’s for the good in all things. But we walked a long way this time.”

Amu folds her arms across her chest.

“Well, I can’t deny you look stronger. I see the granite in your eyes. You look like you could wrestle any man in the village.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that!”

They both laugh but only a little.

Amu steps close and touches Megan’s face.

“You’re more of a woman too.” Amu’s face creases; a smile of pain. Her voice falls to a whisper. “I’m so proud of you.”

She turns away and busies herself at the stove, pushing away tears with the back of a shaking hand. She changes the subject, finding cheer where, for a moment, there can be none.

“We’ll have some hot goat’s milk and powdered dandelion. That’ll keep the cold out. Winter’s here all of a sudden.”

Megan nods. She too feels winter’s touch. On her skin and in her heart. Amu’s bright tones are brittle on her ear.

“And when Apa comes home we’ll eat hearty. This feels like a special day. I’ll take one of the geese.”

Megan stands up.

“I can do that.”

“You can sit down, girl. You need to rest yourself. No doubt you’ll be locked away in your room for the next few days, scrawling in that book of yours.”

Megan half laughs.

“No doubt at all. Let me help with the cooking, though.”

“Stay where you are. In fact, bring your stool over to the fire and get some warmth into you. We can talk while I prepare the meal and before you know it, your father will come through that door just as surprised to see his daughter become a woman as I am. Who’d have thought such a thing could happen?”

“I’ve only been away four days.”

“Well, it was long enough for you to grow up, Megan Maurice.” Her mother turns and catches her eye. “And it seemed an age to me.”

Megan smiles. She has so dreaded the moment at which she must begin writing again that she has forgotten how good it might feel to be home. It’s better than she could have imagined. She promises herself that for the few hours she has before the work begins again, she will not think about it. She will not tread the Black Feathered Path and she will not invite the Crowman to dine in their home. Not tonight.

Apa’s return is muted by comparison. He walks in, ducking through the door the way he always does – as though the low crossbeam is an obstacle he’s seen for the very first time. When he sees Megan, the first thing he does is heave a sigh. And when he has let this long breath go, he is a smaller man; sad in a way Megan does not understand.

Has she disappointed him?

Never before has she been so acutely aware of the difference between the way she sees the world and the way her parents see it. She wonders if this is true for all children and their parents or just for her because she has become such a different kind of child, such an unusual and somewhat peripheral creature. For a moment she has the bottomless terror of believing that it has taken that one single moment for her father to stop loving her. And then he looks at her and smiles.

She runs to him and tears wet every face.

Grinding the ink and opening the book does more than merely dispel Megan’s fear of this moment. Gordon’s story rises up inside her, forgotten until this very moment, and her hand trembles, aching to be at the page. Her writing is deliberate and steady in the instant the raven quill touches the parchment and she writes with firm, flowing strokes. The story does not overwhelm her; it comes in a continuous thread, arriving just ahead of the words she is writing and in this way it draws her on.

She is cleaved by the act of telling; she exists now in two worlds: the boy’s and her own. One Megan sees and remembers every detail of the boy’s journey, his growth and pain. The other Megan sits, utterly still but for the whispered journey of her hand across each page and the slow sway of her head from one side to the other as the tale comes through.

What she has been told is true. She forgets nothing, not a single aspect. Not the shape of the clouds or the cast of the light. Not the expressions on the faces of those who travel with or oppose the boy. Not the sensation of the powerful muscles moving beneath his skin. She feels his strength and is astonished by it; even more astonished by his uncertainty. Even if he does not know it or cannot yet believe it, Megan knows that this boy will find the Crowman for that is what he was born to do.

The language comes to her also, fed by this same thread, not of memory exactly but almost of reconnection back into the boy’s world. She has the feather which gives her understanding of the language, but now she is convinced that even without it she could access his idiom and vocabulary and comprehend it totally. There is a joy in this realisation. Without questioning or judging, she writes, and the tale comes to her both as recollection and as myth. In telling his tale, she brings the boy and his world back to life.

She lives beside him in that world.

They buried Flora in the wild garden at number 257. It wasn’t easy but Gordon didn’t care about that.

He used his knife to clear a tiny grotto, carving it out of the bramble, weeds and overgrown shrubs. The position he chose left enough space between the roots of better established, woodier shrubs so that he could dig. A scout of the neighbouring gardens didn’t yield a shovel as he’d hoped but there was a workman’s pick leaning in what remained of a garden shed a few doors down towards the park. It turned out to be the perfect tool for breaking the ground and cutting through the tangle of growth which was almost as thick under ground as it was above. Such flowers as there were among the weeds and thorns, he picked and placed around the graveside. By the time the space was cleared, his palms and the backs of his hands were bloody.

He didn’t return to Denise until the grave was prepared. It must have been close to noon by then. The ladder was pulled up and the hatch closed. He hadn’t seen it like this before. If he hadn’t known the trapdoor was there he’d never have spotted it. He called up to her.

“Denise? It’s me. Gordon.”

He heard shuffling and a click. The hatch dropped open. Her face was puffy.

“I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“I wanted to make a place for her,” he said. “A good place.”

“I need more time with her.”

“There’s no hurry. Do you want to see it, though? Get out for a while?”

Her face disappeared and the ladder slid down. She descended without her usual confidence, her hands shaking. When she reached the landing she looked as much a little girl as Flora. Denise’s life, what little she’d had and everything she’d lost: Gordon felt responsible for all of it. He felt responsible for the world and everything that was wrong in it too. That was the price of knowing you had the power to make things better.

Fully expecting her to shake the contact off, he took her trembling hand and led her down the stairs. She didn’t seem to mind his touch, though, and as they descended her grip tightened. She appeared to take some strength from touching him and for that small thing Gordon was very glad. And yet, their touch was risky too, like striking a match near petrol. Part of him wanted arson.