Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  First published 2014 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-856-9

  Copyright © 2014 Stephen Gregory

  Cover art by Nicolas Delort

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  for Tony and Rauni, with love

  Prologue

  CHLOE HAD HER tongue stuck onto Robin Hood’s thigh.

  She’d run off as soon as we turned the corner and she saw the statue ahead of us. Before I could call out to stop her, she’d leaned up to lick the smooth green bronze, and her tongue had stuck.

  January 11th, one of the coldest days in memory. In the shade of the castle gatehouse, it was minus five or six. The cobbles were gleaming black ice. The ivy on the castle wall was frosted hard, as though cast in the same bronze as the statue, and the pansies in the municipal flower beds had collapsed into lifelessness.

  Why do children want to lick everything? Why do they need to explore their strange new universe by licking? And Chloe, not an inquisitive toddler anymore but a bonny seven-year-old, why was she still wanting to stick out her tongue and...?

  I ran up to her, a bit out of breath because the air was so sharp in my throat, a bit wary on the treacherous cobbles and nicely fuddled by the beer I’d had in the Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. She was moaning, half afraid and half laughing. She had her tongue pressed on the outlaw’s bare, muscular thigh, it had stuck because of the cold and she didn’t dare move. But with my arms wrapped around her, my face in her hair and her funny red bobble-hat, we both started giggling and I was muttering for heaven’s sake Chloe what on earth are you doing, and my beery breath was close to her bluey-chapped lips and her mouth which smelled of the chips we’d had in the pub...

  Together we thawed the air enough to unfasten her kiss from the freezing metal.

  We sat on the edge of the flower bed and we giggled and snuggled. She pushed out her tongue at me, and it was raw where the ice had burned her. She stared into my face, she smiled her blank, angelic smile, and she said nothing.

  Chloe, a perfect, silent angel. She hadn’t said anything for nearly a year.

  This was one of her favourite places. Our little day out together: a morning on the boat, then a walk from the canal to the pub for lunch, and afterwards up the hill to the castle gatehouse and hugging the legs of the Robin Hood statue. Down to Broadmarsh and the bus station and a bus back home. Oh, and I might drop in to see what odd and occult treasures Mr. Heap might have saved for me.

  Heaps. I said Heaps, she seemed to recognise the word and she tugged me away from the derelict flowers and the looming shadows of the gatehouse; an old corner of Nottingham, where the cobbled streets were narrow and winding against the massy boulder on which the castle was built, by the offices of solicitors and architects with their leaded windows and peculiar turrets... and when I said Heaps again, she pulled me into the shop doorway.

  It was dark and warm inside. Only a tiny ground-floor, it was a chaotic jumble of books and pictures and engravings and curios. There was a fire glowing in the hearth, and as we tumbled inside and I quickly pushed the door shut, the coals collapsed into a shower of sparks, brightened into flames and breathed a cloud of soot into the room.

  The man I called Mr. Heap appeared from behind his desk in the corner. He was very small and thin and wrinkly-ancient, as though he’d been huddling in his shop for decades or centuries and become mummified inside it, smoked and desiccated like the maps and manuscripts he’d accumulated around him. In faded gold letters on the shop window it said Heaps, and I’d never been sure if it referred to this man or the clutter of stuff in his shop. So when he emerged from the darkness and I said, as always, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Heap,’ and he just nodded, I reckoned, as always, that that was his name.

  I poked around. The warmth and the dust seemed to fold around my head and neck, pleasant at first after the sub-zero temperature outside, but then it was too hot and oddly suffocating. I was looking for books, but there was nothing different since our last visit. The buzz of beer in my head, which had been comfortably numbing in the frozen shadows of the castle, was more of a fug, the beginning of an afternoon hangover. I straightened up, from an avalanche of mildewed tomes and tatty paperbacks. Chloe was standing by the fire and staring into it, utterly silent, her eyes gleaming and her mouth fixed into its permanent, lovely smile... lost in thought, lost somewhere, lost in the locked-away memories she’d inhabited for the last nine months.

  ‘She doesn’t say much,’ Mr. Heap said.

  ‘She doesn’t say anything,’ I said. ‘She just smiles.’

  The man angled his head towards the little girl, frowned and then squeezed his eyes shut as though he was trying to remember something he’d heard or read a long long time ago. And then, reading my own thoughts and echoing them almost exactly, he murmured, ‘She seems lost... and yet, even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are...’ and he paused, opened his eyes and blinked at me and muttered, ‘I can’t remember, it’s a quote from somewhere or someone.’

  To lighten the moment, because on several of our previous visits to his shop the old man had commented on Chloe’s silence, I ventured to tell him how she’d stuck her tongue onto Robin Hood’s thigh and maybe that was why, today, she was so quiet. He smiled, disbelieving. He made a dry chuckling noise in his throat, and for the first time I saw that, among the reptilian wrinkles of his skin, there was a flicker of mischief in his eyes and on his lizard lips. Chloe heard him. She swivelled her head and held him with her gaze for a few seconds, before turning back to her communion with the fire.

  ‘Come on then, Chloe,’ I said at last, putting my hands on her shoulders. ‘Let’s not get too cosy in Mr. Heap’s shop. It’s going to get dark outside and even colder, and we’ve got to hurry and catch our bus home.’

  Indeed, as I pulled the door open, the fierce air of a January afternoon seemed to pounce into the room. The cold, or another puther of smoke from the fire, provoked the old man into a flurry of movement.

  ‘Got it...’ he was saying, ‘it reminded me, yes, the utterly lost and all that, I was trying to remember where I’d seen the little girl before. Here, let me give you something...’

  He’d rummaged behind his counter and come out with something in his hand. He pressed it towards me, saying, ‘Here, take it, I’d forgotten all about it, but I’ve been keeping it for you and for your little girl and waiting for you to come back again...’

  I took it from him. It was a little box covered in black velvet, a jeweller’s box for a ring or a brooch or some other kind of trinket.

  ‘Go on, take a look,’ he was saying, ‘and hurry up, you’re letting the cold in... it may be something or nothing, but it’s got a story and who knows if it’s true or just a bit of nonsense or...’

  I opened the box. Nestling on a bed of silver satin, there was a yellowing fragment of something. Something like bone or horn. A relic? I peered closer, held it to my face, squinted and sniffed, and for a moment, almost put out my tongue to touch it.

  ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s the story?’

  But by then he’d manoeuvred us outside and closed the door. Through the darkened window, I saw him cross to the fire and stand over it, a dim, wizened fi
gure in the glow of the flames, in a swirl of soot.

  I snapped the jewel box shut, pushed it deep into the pocket of my coat. I reached for Chloe and squeezed her hand. The ice seemed to nibble at our faces as we hurried down the narrow street and into the brightness of the big city.

  Chapter One

  NINE MONTHS? A year? To be exact, it was last April 3rd, a beautiful springtime afternoon, when Chloe had last spoken... before she’d been touched with a strange, random and rather brutal magic wand which had shocked her into a secret world of silence and smiles.

  The last thing she’d said? My wife, Rosie, asked me many times to recount how it happened: what Chloe was doing, what I was doing, what I’d said to her and what Chloe had said. I never told her the exact words, Chloe’s parting pithy words before she was touched by fate and switched off.

  April 3rd. It must have been a Saturday because I was looking after Chloe, otherwise she would’ve been at school. A Saturday, yes, and Rosie was at work, her bustling busy-body work as a dental assistant at Dowling & McCorrister, one of the biggest, smartest practices in Nottingham. So I had Chloe. No, not sweet, angelic, utterly amenable Chloe. I had rude, petulant and defiantly uncooperative Chloe. And I was manning, as far as I ever manned anything, Erewash borough council’s mobile library. That was my job of work. Six days a week I drove the library, a creaking, swaying old Commer van weighed down with hundreds of books on their sagging shelves, from one corner of the county to the other, stopping in village car parks and schoolyards, in town centres and leafy lay-bys, parking and waiting and serving the public.

  My last words to Chloe, on that April afternoon? ‘Chloe, don’t do that... do you have to do that? Why are you torturing the poor thing? It’s...’

  I didn’t mind the job. Five days a week I enjoyed the trundling around and the scenic stops and the odd enthusiasms of my customers. I had time, my own time. I could sit in my travelling room-full of books and brew a coffee or a mug of soup... on breezy bright days and gloomy dark days, on sparkling mornings with the door thrown open or torrential thundering afternoons with the door pulled shut and the van all cosy and steamed up... and I could read. I could fire my own enthusiasms, even if the fire was short-lived and fizzled and smouldered and went out. A dead-end, poorly-paid job, but it was alright, it was a world of my own, for five days a week.

  But on Saturdays I had Chloe.

  Saturday, 3rd April, and I’d parked in the middle of Breaston, a village about ten or twelve miles east of Nottingham, on the old Derby road. Breaston, with a modest, perfectly unassuming church in its own close, the Bull’s Head across the way, a Co-op and a fish ‘n’ chip shop, a primary school and a community centre... just the neatest and nicest of English villages which never a tourist would need to visit.

  ‘What’s so great about saxophones anyway?’ She’d been niggling at me, with a whining, wheedling edge on her voice. ‘You got your head stuck in that book and you’ll never learn to play a saxophone anyway. What is a saxophone anyway?’

  So yes, I’d been ignoring her. I wouldn’t say neglecting her. In fact I’d already sent her across to the pub with a five-pound note and she’d come back with a huge bottle of lemonade and an assortment of crisps and nasty cheesy crackers.

  And then a wasp flew into the van. We’d been parked an hour, and not a single person had come to the library although we were there at my scheduled time on my scheduled day. But then a wasp came in.

  Chloe flapped at it, screaming horribly and hysterically as though she were a surfer in the jaws of a great white shark. Her bottle fizzled into her lap. Crisps and cheeselets, a bag burst open. Only a wasp, but Chloe was screaming. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. To escape her swiping and yelling, the wasp dived into the top of her shirt and burrowed down, to find a bit of peace and quiet from her unnecessary violence. And then it stung her, in what it must have thought was the safety of her armpit.

  She peeled off her shirt. Though I say it myself, she was a pudgy, rather horrid little girl. She was squeaking and snivelling as if the puncture wound she’d received from the wasp would actually kill her, she might pop and go whizzing around the inside of the library and out of the door and die in the car park, wrinkled up like the rubbery remains of a party balloon. I couldn’t help laughing at her. Fatherly, I fumbled at her pants, which were drenched and sticky with lemonade, and she recoiled with a sneer of disgust. So when she caught the wasp and extracted its poor crumpled frame from under her arm, she grabbed the book from under my nose and pressed the insect onto it... and there, on top of a diagram of the saxophone I was daydreaming of learning to play one day, she started to pull off the wings of her attacker and flick them one by one out of the open door.

  At which point I asked her what she was doing, and why. She answered, ‘Fuck off, Dad, you can see what I’m doing. Because it fucking stung me, that’s why.’

  And then she flung the remains of the wasp out of the door, flung the book onto the floor, and flung herself outside as well. ‘Fuck you, Dad, and keep your hands out of my pants... I’ll tell Mum, I’ll tell her...’

  Best to ignore her, I thought. She was a spoilt, fatty kid, grazing and gorging and whingeing when she had hundreds of nice books to choose from.

  I retrieved the saxophone book, wiped off the crumbs and dabbed at the ooze of fluid she’d squeezed from the body of the wasp. Just as I ducked to the floor to try and grab her bottle before all of the liquid spilled out, I heard an engine revving loudly and I sat up and looked out of the window.

  It all happened in a second or two.

  There was Chloe, smearing at her tears of anger and frustration and huffing away from my van in the direction of the Co-op... oddly half-nude, a cherub with baby tits. A car came out of the pub’s back-yard, a neat little Triumph, dark blue with wire wheels and the soft-top folded down, and a good-looking young couple in it. Squabbling... I could see in an instant, they’d had a few drinks and a row in the Bull’s Head and hustled out into the sunshine, still snarling and spitting at each other.

  The woman was driving. She was turning to the man to say something and then squirming away from a hurtful retort. And there was Chloe, as the woman accelerated so sharply the tyres squealed, Chloe, squatting down and rubbing at her eyes with one hand, holding her wounded armpit with the other.

  No, the car didn’t hit her. Not exactly.

  Just in time, the woman saw Chloe and swerved to miss her. Didn’t quite miss. The wing mirror, protruding from the car on a chromium-plated stalk, slapped the little girl smartly and very hard, flat on the back of her head.

  That was all. The impact made a sharp metallic ping. Chloe wobbled for a moment and fell very slowly forwards, onto both her knees and even more slowly face down into the ground. There she lay, very still.

  The car stopped. Only for a second or two. There was another snarling moment, the man and the woman literally at each other’s throat. With a crunch of gears, she floored the throttle and the car went snaking around the corner and roared into the distance.

  Chapter Two

  IT WAS VERY warm on the bus back home. When we’d first clambered on, at the Broadmarsh bus station in the middle of Nottingham, we’d been so cold we’d huddled together on a cosy seat at the back and felt a lovely thawing in our hands and faces. By the time we were passing the castle, its enormous cave-riddled boulder glowing in yellow floodlights, Chloe had pulled off her bobble-hat and I was undoing the buttons on my coat. Her blonde hair smelled of the cold and the smoke of the city. I kissed her nose, pretended to grimace at the iciness of it, and she smiled and suddenly sneezed. Through Beeston and Chilwell, past the golf course and the army depot, past Attenborough and Toton, we were almost too warm, basking in the hot air blowing from the vents beneath the seat.

  And it got dark. January, deep mid-winter, and freezing dark by five o’clock in the afternoon.

  I watched Chloe. She sat beside me and she just stared and smiled into her own reflection in the window. And my
thoughts returned to that day in April, when she’d been so changed.

  As always, since that time and every moment of her new life and my new life since it had happened, I felt a stabbing of guilt. No, a gnawing, as if the blame I’d attached to myself was eating me, like a cancer deep inside my belly. So yes, I’d deliberately ignored my daughter, when she’d tumbled tearfully out of the library van. But then – PTO 725G, and 3.17 – something chemical in my brain, when I witnessed the accident through my window, had made me imprint the car’s registration number on my memory, made me glance for a millisecond at the clock and log the exact time... some extraordinary instinct for self-preservation which made me think that, by noting these details, I’d be accounted responsible and cool-headed and my momentary negligence might be overlooked.

  I’d run outside. People were running out of the Co-op. The landlord hurried out of his pub. I knelt next to Chloe and turned her gently onto her side. She was unconscious. A little breath bubbled from her mouth. There was a gush of blood from her right nostril.

  An ambulance was there in no time, and the paramedics had Chloe and me inside it and racing out of the village minutes later. They were reassuring, I’d described what had happened: no, she hadn’t been knocked down by a car, she’d been struck by the wing-mirror of a car going no more than ten or maybe twenty miles per hour... and they said she might be alright, she’d had a bang on the back of the head and no other injuries. We sped out of Breaston village. With the siren wailing and the blue lights flashing, we barely paused for any other traffic, only a momentary hold-up in Long Eaton, for a back-up of cars and police and some kind of incident outside the gates of Derwent College. I’d called ahead to Rosie. She was waiting at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham when we arrived at the entrance to A & E.