The Book of the Crowman

by Joseph D'lacey

  The paint on the green door was flaking away and the wood at its base was exposed and rotten. The round bulb of its handle was made of pale china, almost luminescent in the gloom of the alley. He turned it and pushed. The door moved but didn’t open. As he’d done with their own garden door so many times, he put his shoulder to it and tried again. This time the door gave way, opening a six-inch gap. Through this he could see the wilderness on the other side had formed a second layer of protection.

  When he took his body away, the springy growth pushed the door closed again. A second shoulder-barge created the space he needed to squeeze through. He let the door shut behind him. To his right lay a haphazard pile of old floorboards now fungal with decay. He kicked the upper ones away and found stronger ones below. He took one of these and wedged it under the door handle, bracing the other end against the roots of a sapling; it was no lock but it was better than nothing.

  The mess of growth looked impenetrable and much of it was bramble. Now that he was safely within the boundaries of the property, he could take his time. He leaned back against the wall and studied the knots of weed, tree and shrub. Close to the boundary was where the growth was thinnest. To reach the back of the house, he’d have to skirt the perimeter.

  The garden was long and some of the bramble had bunched against the wall like coils of barbed wire. Scratched but not seriously harmed, Gordon made it to the rear of the property and assessed his options. The windows on this side were nailed shut with chipboard and much of it looked weakened by the elements. Steps led down from the jungle to the basement windows. To his right a flight of stone stairs rose to a boarded-up back door. He ran down the basement steps for a closer look.

  From the street at the front and the alley at the back, number 257 looked impregnable. People needing shelter in a hurry would have disregarded its steel hoarding and impenetrable thorns in favour of an easy bolthole. Perhaps that was why there were no signs of previous break-ins at the rear of the house. And yet, the edges of the chipboard were soft and damp under his fingers. He unclasped his knife, using the tip to chisel away the disintegrating flakes of compressed wood. It didn’t take long to expose a glimpse of window frame beneath, its green paint bright and undamaged by sun or rain. Pulling the board away was easy. Most of it came off in a single tug, leaving only the top left hand corner of the double window covered. However, the wrenching and cracking was conspicuous in all the silence and he stopped to listen for a long time after the board hit the ground.

  Breaking the window was noisy too. He listened again for several minutes before reaching into the darkness and opening the latch. The window swung out and Gordon swung in.

  The next thing Megan is aware of is the smell of wood smoke, tobacco and cooking oats, and a cold ache in her nose when she breathes. She wraps her blanket around her shoulders and crawls out through the bender’s flap. The frosty morning turns her breath to fleeing ghosts. Autumn is kissing winter.

  Mr Keeper stirs their porridge with one hand and smokes his pipe with the other. Any sadness he may have walked with is gone and his face is kind, half-amused as it so often is. There’s not much frost in the cover of the woods, just a dusting of white on the most exposed, extended branches and the outer leaves of smaller plants.

  Beyond the trees, though, the land is stiff and unmoving. Tiny rainbow coloured points sparkle in the ocean of white. Megan starts as dozens of raucous calls echo from a distant stand of tall, skeletal trees. Black shapes detach from the black branches and flap into the air by twos until perhaps a hundred crows are in flight, flowing like ink across a page.

  She stares at the blank landscape long after the crows have gone, able to think only of empty pages.

  “I’ve so much work to do,” she says.

  Mr Keeper nods.

  “I won’t forget it, will I?”

  “You won’t. You can’t. It’s in you now. In your blood.”

  “But what if I make a mistake? What if I only almost remember it right?”

  “Then the book will always be wrong and the story forever untrue. The generations to come will misunderstand the teachings and the world will end soon after.”

  Megan sees all this as she looks out over the frozen land. Then she glances at Mr Keeper and sees him grinning. Her lips flatten white against each other. Why does he never take anything seriously?

  He chuckles.

  “Listen, Megan, the writing is the easy part. All you’re doing is recording what you see. You’ve done it right so far and you’ll keep doing it right until you’re finished. Don’t give it another thought. What’s difficult is walking the path, trusting in it when everything screams at you to turn away and give up. You have to be strong to move through that.”

  Does he know something, she wonders?

  He smokes his pipe and watches her, serious for only a moment before his eyes crease at the edges and he is smiling again, cheerful and mischievous.

  “There’s no point in me trying to convince you that you’re strong enough, Megan. That you’re worthy. You can only do that for yourself. And the only way you can do it is by walking the path.” Mr Keeper shrugs. “You’re already doing that, so you might as well stop worrying about everything. Here, have some oats.”

  She takes the proffered bowl and crouches on her haunches to eat it.

  “Carrick was your teacher, wasn’t he?” She asks. “When you walked the Black Feathered Path.”

  “Yes. He was.”

  “Why isn’t he still in Beckby?”

  “Keepers move around. Our group of villages only needs one Keeper because it’s quite small. Other places need more. Sometimes, a Keeper will make the world his village and move from place to place giving his knowledge and checking all is well. That’s what Carrick does. He uses the rivers to move from place to place. He makes sure the Crowman is alive everywhere and he keeps an eye out to make sure people keep the balance.”

  Megan stops eating for a moment. Surely, Mr Keeper must have been there with her, must have seen and heard it all. Or is it simply that the Crowman foresaw all this? As though she’s never heard of it, she asks:

  “What balance?”

  “All of it. You’ve experienced the dark and the light of the Crowman, so that’s one example but mostly it’s the balance of giving and taking. Keepers make sure no one falls into the beliefs that first brought the Crowman into the world. In times gone by folk believed the land owed them its life, not that we owe ours to it. That is the opposite of balance. It almost brought the world to an end.”

  “Is that what the people who lived in that city believed?”

  “Not all of them, perhaps but certainly most.”

  “I saw them.”

  “I know you did. I was with you.”

  “They looked desperate. I didn’t know so many people could be so unhappy.”

  Mr Keeper shrugs.

  “You shouldn’t be surprised, Megan. We all have it in us. Just as we have the capacity for joy. We can live anywhere we choose; in the depths of the blackest midnight or in the heights of the brightest dawn. And the Crowman soars through all of it. He has been everywhere and knows everything. Because of this, he cares not what is right or wrong but what is simply true. He knows how this world must be lived in, in order for it to flourish or to die. He shares that choice with each of us.”

  “Most of us live in the light, then.”

  “Most of us live with a foot in the darkness and a foot in the light. Or we stand at dusk moving into night or we stand at dawn moving into light. No one, no thing, is purely one or the other.”

  “But can’t we all just be light and good?”

  “No. We have to remember where we came from. Before light there was blackness. Blackness is where the light came from. And now we follow that light through time until it returns to blackness.”

  Megan’s porridge is cold. Her mind whirls. She believed the path would bring answers. She believed her training would make her calmer and wiser. But for each door
of knowledge she throws open, two more appear on the other side.

  “You’re saying that no matter what we do, everything will fall and die and be swallowed into the dark.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why should we bother to do anything?”

  “Because we have the honour of existing.”

  “Huh! Not for long.”

  “Life is a wonderful opportunity to be alive, Megan. We should all take it. Look at Carrick, skipping around like a boy, full of light even in the twilight of his years.”

  Megan is crying.

  “It’s so… sad.”

  “Perhaps. But it’s also very, very beautiful.”

  She wipes her eyes and nose on her sleeve.

  “But if this is all true, I just can’t understand why it’s worth trying to achieve anything when everything will be taken away.”

  Mr Keeper sets down his bowl, unfinished.

  “If you ask the question ‘why’ to every answer, eventually there’s only one answer left. That answer is: ‘I don’t know’.” He turns and stares into the cold, leafless trees for a moment before looking back at Megan. “I know in my heart that the things I’m telling you are true enough for me to live by, even if they’re not exactly correct. No one has all the answers, Megan. All I know is that by being alive, we’ve become part of something greater than ourselves, something vast and mysterious beyond our ability to understand. This life, this energy, instils us with natural passion and drive. It makes us seek things out and ask questions; questions much like yours. That, to me, is a sign that you, Megan Maurice, are very much alive and walking the path that was created for you.

  “Life brings with it a sense of duty and honour and you should listen carefully whenever those things call to you. Listen to what’s inside; watch the land and all its creatures for clues. Everything you need to know, you already know and all the things you’re learning are nothing more than a rediscovery of those things. I promise you with all my heart, Megan, that all is right with the world, even in its darkest manifestations. This is what the Crowman wants you to know. He needs you to be strong enough to hold that idea, not as a belief but as knowledge, housed in your very flesh. In your bones, in your blood and in your heart. If you can do that, not only will you have walked the Black Feathered Path to its endpoint – and therefore to its beginning – you will also have lived a beautiful, magical and full life. You will have been worthy of the gift of it.”

  Megan is silenced by the enormity of it all, by its great simplicity and the responsibility it places upon her shoulders. Without a word, she helps Mr Keeper pack up their camp and clean away their breakfast. She waits for fear to rise in the aftermath of Mr Keeper’s words but it does not. Instead she finds the hard granite of resolve that anchors her through every uncertainty and danger, a foundation rock that grows more firm and stable with every day she walks the Black Feathered Path.

  Her tears dry quickly. By the time they strike out for home across the brittle, white landscape she is calm again. Empty but calm.

  12

  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 a
nd 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.