It gapes dreadfully like a wound in the side of a horse, and there’s stuff hanging from it; bits of wood; long boxes. The hole is partly closed on one side, a smashed mouth, but nevertheless they can see it goes some way inside the cliff.
‘What is it?’ Rebecca asks, over the noise of the waves below. The sea churns, a thick brown and angry mess, eating away already at the newly fallen soil that the storm has presented to it.
‘I don’t know. But you know something . . .’
‘What?’
‘Our tunnel. Our tunnel pointed out to sea. Our tunnel pointed to the cliff.’ She stops, and lifts her hand, jabs a finger towards the chamber. ‘Right about there . . .’
Bones of You
It didn’t take much doing.
It didn’t need any discussion.
We both knew we were going to get inside that chamber.
The hole was in a section of the face that had fallen off, sheer and almost vertical, but we soon realised that it wouldn’t really be so hard to scramble over to the cave mouth.
From there, the beach was a long way down. Somehow, though we both knew that to slip, to miss a hand- or foot-hold, would be to fall and die, we were not afraid. It was just something that had to be done.
I turned to Rebecca.
‘You first?’
She shook her head.
‘You first.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that.’
But actually, it wasn’t so hard. Going across wasn’t hard at all. I moved myself bit by bit, and though my arms ached and complained, very quickly my feet found the edge of the cave mouth, and I staggered in.
‘Come on! I’m there!’ I called, and by the time Rebecca’s face appeared in the chamber’s entrance, I had already seen everything.
I saw the chamber.
It was large.
I saw the rails coming from the tunnel, entering the small room, coming to rest against a huge iron stop, into which was mounted a massive blade, at neck height, I guessed. It was rusty, almost completely eaten away, and yet it still looked terrifying. Absolutely lethal.
I saw boxes. Saw that they were roughly made coffins. Some lay spilled on the floor. I saw the skeletons inside.
I saw that they had no heads. Not one of them.
And I saw the niches in the wall, and in those niches, I saw seven skulls. Above each one was a label, written in a spidery hand, and so faded that I couldn’t really read the writing. I think I made out a name; it might have been Mason.
And I saw the eighth body, the eighth skeleton, and this one still had its skull, lying a little way up in the tunnel, as if heading for the outside.
We were silent.
I was filled with the horror of it all.
It was time to go.
I don’t know what it was that made me do it. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. I don’t know, I just don’t know.
Not really. I’d been playing games, all summer. At least I think I had. But when I decided, as we agreed to climb back out, to send that girl down to the rocks, I knew I wasn’t playing games any more.
The girl had to go, that was all I thought. I’d had enough of her, and she had to go, and find out for both of us what lies on the other side.
And do you know, she didn’t find it hard to die.
In fact, it seemed to be really, really easy.
1798, 12m, 24d.
The morrow is the day of our Lord’s coming on earth, yet I will pay Him no heed, nor His idle father.
It has been long long days since I last wrote in this book. And I will not write in this book for much longer, indeed I write now for the last time, perhaps.
When I wrote last, I heard the knock upon my door. What do sounds convey to us? How can it be that from the mere sound of that knock alone, I knew trouble had come? For it was not the knock of the kindly passer-by, or the concerned parishioner, or the troubled soul. It was a hammering of the enemy.
My heart fought to betray me, as I made my way down the stairs, and to the front door.
As I opened the door, among the rabble and taggle there, in the thick of the angry crowd, I saw Martha.
She saw me, and looked away, and so I knew I was correct. At her side stood a small boy, whose slim figure reminded me that I had thought a ghost troubled us at the Hall, when in truth, in truth . . .
What?
What is truth, now?
I have killed it.
They called for me.
I stood in the door and they called for me, and though they had brought iron and steel with which to hurt me, yet they did not dare, for I am of the cloth, and they still have the fear of God living in them, that I myself set there!
But oh!
They did call and wail and were ready to ignore the bounds of God and tear me limb from limb, and then I saw my only possible path ahead of me.
- Come, Children! I cried.
This was mine.
My moment. My skill. I knew my worth, for I have stood in the pulpit a thousand times and I have made these same cries to the world. These same lies.
I know how to speak lies and to make them sound like the truth.
- Come, Children! Hear me!
And now they heard. They listened to my call, and they swallowed my bitter lies, as if they were sweet honey.
- We are all betrayed, I cried. We are all betrayed by the evil in our midst. A foreign devil! The foreign doctor! He is at work among us and we have all been duped by his wrongnesses. We must go now. We must take him! Now! Now!
And in their eager hate, the stupid sheep took all my words as the gospel of the Lord, and they did rush, streaming with terrible vengeance through the village and towards the Hall, shouting and cursing and waving their sharp irons above their heads.
All of them went, save one.
Martha.
She stood alone, after the others had gone, and she stared at me.
And then she spake not, but she did shake her head at me, and made the shapes of words with her lips.
So, now, did I understand the shapes of her lips, and her words were these!
- You are the Devil. You are the Devil.
And I shuddered and I fell on the floor, for now at last I saw that these were the very same words that our seventh, Mason, had mouthed to me, before his eyes had closed for the last time in his severed head.
- You are the Devil. You are the Devil.
Tomorrow is the Lord’s day, the day He came upon us, and by chance it is the day that the doctor will be bricked up alive, in the chamber he built, with the remains of his doings around him.
Our doings.
My work here is done.
I leave tomorrow, for who knows where, but one thing I do know, is that I will take not God with me, for He is empty, and I shall go alone.
Resurrection
The earth quakes, the graves burst open, the dead arise and stream on in endless procession. The trumpets of the apocalypse ring out.
There is no judgment,
no sinners,
no just men,
no great
and no small;
there is no punishment
and no reward.
A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with bliss.
We know, and are.
And we know with all certainty.
God does not exist.
When I Am Dead And Worshipped
No, it’s not so very hard to die.
Fall from the cave mouth. Dead girl on the rocks below.
Easy.
Of course, when they found Rebecca, she was half mad, having been left in that chamber with eight skeletons, for hours on end, too hysterical to move, too scared to run the risk of the climb again.
It was her father who found her. He’d got himself released, because as soon as Rebecca was reported missing, all hell broke loose.
It didn’t take them long to work out who she was with, but then in the storm, it took forever to find her, till her father, walk
ing on the beach with one of the search parties, heard her cry from the cave mouth.
I saw them, reunited.
I know that Rebecca told her father what he needed to hear. That she believed in him. That she loved him still.
I know, from the way they held each other, that she did. And as she did, I could see just from the way he stood that something was healing, and that he’d found the strength to go on, to face whatever was coming for him.
And the dead girl?
The girl lying broken on the rocks below?
Well, I knew she had to go.
Ferelith had to go, and it only took the blink of an eye to step from the cave mouth. To hold my head high, and to give in to that urge, and just let go.
I was sick of her misery and her miserable life, and in a way, it was what I’d been waiting for. Rebecca and I had uncovered the truth behind the legend of the Hall, and it had taken its toll on us both.
Rebecca appeared to the rescuers to be so exhausted and upset that she’d become delusional. She told her father that I’d been with her in the chamber the whole time, talking to her, soothing her, telling her to never stop loving her father again, when they knew that she’d seen me leave the chamber first, and fall, to my end.
They tried to convince her of that, but she wouldn’t believe them. She would never believe them. She would always believe that after I fell, I came back.
As I had promised.
It was what my whole life was for, I see that now. And dying was not such a bad thing, because it was worth it.
For I am the crow.
The white crow.
WHITE CROW AUTHOR’S NOTE
Why White Crow?
There were three main inspirations for this story.
The first is the place - Winterfold is very loosely based on the ancient settlement of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, which, like Winterfold, was once a thriving medieval town, now just a quiet curiosity of an English seaside village.
Second, was the incredible, but true, account of a scientist, Dr Beaurieux, who genuinely tried to communicate with the still warm head of a guillotine victim. He concluded that consciousness persists for up to thirty seconds after beheading. Here’s a chilling excerpt from his notes:
I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased … It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: “Languille!” I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions … but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.
Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again…
And in case you’re wondering when this happened, the guillotined man was not a victim from the days of the French Revolution; Dr Beaurieux conducted his experiment on an executed prisoner in June 1905.
Finally, the White Crow itself refers to a quote by William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, (and brother of the novelist Henry James), who became fascinated with the possibility of the afterlife, around the height of the Spiritualist movement at the end of the 19th century.
“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
With these elements in place, I then used Rebecca and Ferelith’s stories to weave them together, and bring Winterfold to life. And death.
This is my eleventh novel for Orion, and looking back I can safely say that each and every one would not have been half the book it became without the graceful and precise skills of my editor, and publisher, Fiona Kennedy. Thanks be to you.
Marcus Sedgwick
Hadstock
January 2010
White Crow Page 15
