Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  I was excited about the shop. I’d tried to do a bit of publicity and had a number of responses to the mention of Edgar Allan Poe’s tooth... not all of them encouraging, some of them downright rude, poo-poohing the notion in the most caustic and withering tones. But most of them were from people who were intrigued, curious, for whom the idea was appealingly weird. Nothing wrong with that. And there’d been a phone call from a young fellow at the Nottingham Evening Post, who was coming around at four o’clock to have a chat and take a few shots and maybe do a piece for the paper...

  We’d crossed the college playing-fields, I’d clapped my hands and sent up the rooks and the gulls in a cloud of black and white wings. We crossed the brook and onto Long Eaton park.

  Not bad, not bad. Indeed, pretty good. For a nondescript, homely midlands town, somewhere between Nottingham and Derby in what was known as the Trent valley, Long Eaton had an unusually big and lovely park. Very flat, no particular features, but expanses of open fields and stands of mature trees, acres of space for runners and dog-lovers and cyclists... and for strollers like me, and Chloe pottering along beside me, the most beautiful of skies, over avenues of poplar and beech and the puthering cooling-towers of Willington power station. No, not exotic or romantic, only the suburbs of a satellite-town in the East Midlands, but somehow, even on the rawest of raw days in January, a place of unusual and ineffable loveliness.

  So I said all this to Chloe. I said to her, ‘Hey, not bad, Chloe... pretty good,’ as we paused at the entrance of the park and took in the cold, bare emptiness of it. The sky was blue: not a cliché, but an expression of purity, perfection. The distant towers were exhaling enormous white clouds of steam. There was a flock of lapwings on the rugby pitch, a shimmer of green. And was that a golden plover, gleaming among them? ‘Not bad, eh Chloe? For a funny little town no-one’s ever heard of? What do you think? Come on, let’s go to the pond and have a nice hot drink and a sandwich and see who wants any of our crusty left-overs...’

  The coots did, unassumingly handsome birds, urbane, smug, with their plump grey bodies and elegant legs and their striking white helmets. The swan did, surging towards us, so testy, so irritable. ‘Hey, Mr. Swan, why are you hissing and flouncing like that, when you’re ten times as big as everyone else and so gorgeous and you know you’re going get the biggest bits of bread just because you’re so big and gorgeous? Hey, just chill...’ And the mallard, the ducks demure and dumpy, like medieval wenches cowed by the presence of their lordship, the gleaming, iridescent drake.

  Chill. For these birds, the chill in the air was death, which might be postponed by swallowing a few mouthfuls of bread. We sat on a bench by the pond. Chloe tossed her crusts into the air and watched them spatter on the surface of the water, or she held on tight and waited for the bravest of the ducks to nibble her fingers and sometimes the swan come snaking and hissing and snap with its big yellow beak. She windmilled her arm and hurled the remains of a sandwich high into the air, and a gull would come... it would make such a daring and brilliant pass that all the air would sparkle around the little girl’s golden-blonde head.

  And then. And then it all went very quiet.

  I hardly noticed how it happened, but we realised that all our friends at the pond, the coot and the duck and the debonair gulls and even the bilious swan, had drifted away. Or rather, they had withdrawn from us. A few pieces of bread floated on the water. It seemed strange that, on such a bitter day, with another long dark afternoon and a freezing night only hours away, the birds would ignore the food which could save their lives and see them survive until tomorrow. A persistent sparrow pecked at the crumbs around our feet, its dun feathers fluffed up to retain a bit of warmth in its scrawny body. But then it fluttered away.

  Chloe looked up and around her. I followed her gaze. No hawk, no bully-boy black-back. We looked behind us to see if someone else, a man and his dog, had wandered by. There was no-one.

  Under our bench. A wriggle and a writhing flutter.

  A crow, but nothing like the swaggering crows I’d seen in the field. A raggedy thing. It was only a second, or two. Chloe squealed and lifted her feet off the ground. I found myself doing the same. A crow, which had skulked under the bench to snatch at the pickings, flapped away and was gone, almost before we’d known it was there. We saw it row into the air and grapple itself clumsily, like some kind of half-formed prehistoric bird, into the branches of a nearby willow.

  There were other crows in the same tree. But they were completely still. Although the tree shook and its branches rattled with the impact of the bird which had just landed there, the others didn’t move. They didn’t even adjust their weight or their grip to compensate for the movement and keep their balance. We both stared at them. And we saw one of the birds lean a little and stop, and lean a bit more and swing on the branch as though its claws were locked... and then it fell. Without opening its wings at all to stop itself falling, it slipped off the branch and dropped through the snapping cold twigs and landed on the ground with a curious puff of sound... as though it weighed almost nothing.

  ‘Let’s go home, Chloe,’ I said to her. She was staring at the crows which were still in the willow tree. They were all motionless, their claws locked. Only one of them was moving, the scrag of a rag of a crow which had somehow kindled a spark of life when the others had died in the night. Their withered, empty husks were frozen to the tree.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘VERY NICE, YES. Very cosy. But is that the atmosphere you really want to achieve? Nice and cosy? For a horror bookshop?’

  The reporter from the Nottingham Evening Post, who’d introduced himself as Joe Blakesley, was probably in his mid-twenties with a degree in journalism from Leicester Polytechnic, but he looked like a schoolboy, a skinny teenager conducting an interview for his social-studies coursework... earnest, with his notepad and camera and duffel-coat and his flopping fashionable hair, and a long red scarf looped casually around his neck. Before I could answer what might’ve been a criticism of the way I’d organised things, he smiled and went on, ‘But no, no it’s great, the church tower and coming through the big oak door and into this... the vestry, did you say? Tell me about the books you’re going to stock, anything about the history of the church... and the tooth, of course, I’d love to see it. I think it’s all great, it’ll make a great little piece for me, so please, fire away...’

  He’d said, disarmingly, as though he knew that his bookish, journalistic look wasn’t entirely convincing, that so far he’d only done a few weddings and funerals... and last week he’d been sent to watch Notts County play Tranmere, but the match was called off because the pitch was frozen. So this was going to be his first feature. He took some shots of me and the room, and me with Chloe, and he browsed around the shelves.

  Five o’clock. Outside it was as black as midnight, with the headlamps of the traffic swishing along the Derby Road. Every car that went by, on its weary journey out of town and home after work, shone an orange beam through our tall, narrow lancet windows and across the ceiling, a steady, unhurried rhythm of light. The vestry door was still open to the hallway, and the door of the church was open too, because I wanted to give the clear impression that it would be a shop, open to the street, open to the public. But the room was warm. I stood in front of the fire, which I’d built especially bright and hot, and I talked... while the young man sat at my desk and scribbled on his pad, while Chloe stood beside him and watched how his hand scurried and scratched like a mouse across his page.

  I’d got the shrine ready, but I hadn’t switched on the lamp yet. It would be the climax to the interview. And I hadn’t told Rosie. Indeed, I’d deliberately arranged it so that she’d be out at work, to make a surprise for her, to reveal the article to her unexpectedly if and when it came out.

  Firelight, the flicker of flames. The hiss of the traffic. The play of the headlamps on the ceiling and on the books on their shelves. The reporter writing at my desk. Chloe, so absorbed by the movement of his
hand that she seemed to be holding her breath.

  I told him about the church. It wasn’t very old, it didn’t have centuries of legend and spooky lore, a cemetery heaving with graves and lots of mossy headstones and such. No, it was an Anglican church, built in the 1880s, the architects were local worthies called Brevill and Bailey who’d designed many of Nottingham’s monuments and grand municipal buildings. Me and my wife Rosie, we’d bought the tower, converted very nicely into comfortable accommodation, and one day I was going to repair the clock in the tower. What else? oh yes, a man called Henry Wass had died during the construction of the church, he’d fallen from the scaffolding and...

  At this, the young man glanced up at me, as though he’d found the angle he needed to make something of his story, something gratuitously sensational to bring it alive. For a moment I thought he was going to hurry outside with his camera, to photograph the spot where the skull of the unfortunate man might have smashed on the pavement.

  ‘The books?’ I quickly went on. And as I strolled from shelf to shelf, with my eyes half-closed for mysterious effect, I murmured the names like a spell, the names of the immortals, forever and unforgettably enshrined in the pantheon... ‘Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Conan Doyle, MR James... Wilde, Dickens, de Quincy, Rider Haggard...’ and was surprised when I opened my eyes and caught a glimmer of impatience on the young man’s face, a surreptitious peek at his watch. ‘And of course, the modern masters of the genre, King and Koontz, Barker and Bradbury and Blatty and er...’

  He closed his notebook very gently. He screwed his face into a painfully apologetic frown and stood up.

  ‘Sorry, no offence but... but can’t I find all of these books in all of the bookshops in town? I mean, I don’t even have to go into Nottingham, I can get all of them, the so-called classics, in Long Eaton and Beeston and Ilkeston. I can rummage in any of the charity shops and find a tattered old copy of Frankenstein or Dracula or Turn of the Screw or Jekyll and Hyde or whatever. And the newer stuff, in Smiths and Waterstones, the big outlets. Can’t I?’

  He paused, and his earnest, journalistic face lit into a boyish smile, alive with excitement.

  ‘Poe,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that why I’ve come to talk to you? Show me the tooth.’

  I SWITCHED ON the lamp, bent it over the velveteen table and stood back. There was a gust of wind outside, or else a bus or a truck had just gone by, because all three of us turned at a sudden skittering sound in the hallway and a flurry of leaves blew in.

  He bent over the display I’d so carefully set up. Because the room was so dim and the night outside seemed to wrap itself so meanly, so grimly around the church, the velvet box and its bed of white satin shone all the brighter.

  And the tooth.

  Joe Blakesley, cub-reporter from the Nottingham Evening Post, leaned close and he stared. And he stared. He held his breath and he stared. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet, not even a whisper, hardly a gasp, barely a breath, that it was almost lost in the flutter of the flames and the stirring of autumn leaves across the floor.

  ‘How wonderful. How marvellous. Oh God, dentem puer, from the mouth of Edgar Allan Poe...’ His voice was lost, in a puff of smoke from the blazing Birchwood, in the holiness of the hiss of resin.

  Not wanting to disturb his reverie, but seizing the moment to give him the details he might need for his article, I stood behind him and recited the information I’d gleaned from the precious handwritten slip of paper. He nodded and nodded, hardly looking up from the tooth, as if to indicate he knew already that Poe had spent a few years of his boyhood in England, he knew the names, the facts, he’d done his homework about the Manor House School and Dr Barnsby and... and when I mentioned where the tooth had come from, the name of Mr. Heap seemed to freeze him for a second, he inhaled sharply as if by doing so he would commit the name to his memory.

  And what was Chloe doing? Oh lord, heaven forbid I should ignore her or worst of all neglect her for a precious millisecond, she was standing beside him on tip-toe and fixated on the tooth as much as he was... but also, at the same time, she was pushing something towards him on the purple velvet, trying to catch his attention with the glint and the razor-sharp edges of their diamond brilliance, she was nudging her diamonds of shattered windscreen under the focus of the angled lamp.

  Too late. He didn’t see them. Just as I took two strides forwards, to pull her away from the display and grab the pieces of glass in the palm of my hand, there was another flurry of wind in the hallway.

  More than a flurry. More than a whispering commotion of autumn leaves. A soft but sudden explosion of sound.

  We all turned to see what it was. ‘Hello my love, are you home?’ I blurted, and for a moment I thought it was Rosie, home early, and my stomach lurched with dismay. Chloe gave a shout of recognition.

  But no, it wasn’t her mother. Something, someone or something was in the church hallway. In and out so fast, it was no more than a shadow. A rag of shadow blown in and out by the night.

  Me and Chloe, we were framed in the doorway as the reporter whirled round. Some instinct triggered in his investigative brain made him reach for his camera. Pop, pop, pop... he fired off three flashes of dazzle-blue light.

  The two of us. And behind us, a rag of shadow, a blur of movement in the darkness. I thought I’d seen it. And Chloe had seen it, with a gurgle of surprise. Then it was gone. Gone with a glimmer of silver it had snaffled from the cold stone slabs.

  ‘Marvellous... it’s all I need, more than I need, some great snaps and a great story.’ He, Joe Blakesley, was bundling his way out of the vestry, into the hallway and out of the church door. ‘Poe...’ he was saying to me, although his voice was muffled in the winding and winding of his long red scarf around his face, ‘... it’s all you need... just get Poe, any old books and articles and stuff and the tattiest old paperbacks and stuff you can find... it’s all you need...’

  Chapter Eleven

  JOE BLAKESLEY HAD two pieces in the Nottingham Evening Post, in the same edition, a few days later. After nearly a year with the paper, a few weddings and making the editor’s coffee in the mornings, he had two pieces in one edition.

  Rosie was impressed by the article.

  ‘Poe’s Tooth? Is that a good name for a bookshop?’ She shrugged and admitted that yes, it might be. She read it all aloud, as we sat side by side in bed, with Chloe snuggled between us. It wasn’t long, it was hardly a feature, it was a modest piece on page nineteen, squeezed between a report on the opening of a new dialysis clinic in Beeston and another on the vandalism of a footballer’s BMW. But there were a couple of thumbnail photographs of me and Chloe at the fireside, me and the display of books, and, most importantly, a close-up of the relic after which the shop would be named; rather a blurry shot, dazzled by the overhead lamp, so the reporter had transcribed the handwritten note, verbatim, with his own translation.

  ‘“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...’’’ Rosie had laid out the newspaper onto the bedcover, across her lap and mine, with Chloe all but smothered beneath it. With a grimace, affecting a mock-portentous voice, she was re-reading the headline. ‘Oh dear, a bit corny, isn’t it? But the article’s good, I like it, I like it... a new bookshop to be called Poe’s Tooth Books is about to open... yes, well done, my darling, I like it.’

  She leaned towards me and we kissed. Chloe disappeared completely, under the newsprint and the blankets. There was another photograph, me and Chloe looking utterly startled, our faces pallid and oddly misshapen, like a couple of victims... a father and daughter retrieved from the bottom of a canal, maybe, or rescued from the ruins of a collapsed building. We were framed in the doorway of the vestry. Behind us, the blackness of the church hallway was a mouth, agape, leaning forward to swallow us. ‘Scary, look at the two of you. Hey Chloe, come out of there and take a look, you’re famous...’

  She emerged, tousled and hot. She pawed clumsily at the photograph, without any understanding of what it was except a fragment of m
aterial which her Mummy and Daddy had crumpled on top of her. If she was going to react at all, I thought without daring to say what I was thinking, she might sneer and snidely remind us that she was famous already, she’d been in the paper before, last year, and not on page nineteen but on the front page with a big photo. ‘Hey, be careful, Chloe,’ her mother was saying, ‘don’t tear it, your Daddy’ll want to keep this and get it framed and put it up in the shop for all of his customers to read...’

  The girl stopped batting at the paper, although the noise of her fists on it had seemed so crisply percussive. For a moment, she inclined her face to the photo. She fixed her eyes on it and she held her breath. And me and Rosie, as we’d done hundreds of times before, several times a day and every day for nine months, we held our breath too, in anticipation, in hope, in a state between joy and fear, that the moment had come... the moment when Chloe would emerge from her dream-like silence and speak, and be herself and be with us once more, as she had been before.

  She didn’t speak. After a long, literally breathless moment, we all exhaled. Chloe smiled airily again, as if her head was full of air, as if her poor little dented brain was nothing but an airy space.

  ‘No, it isn’t the best photo of you I’ve ever seen,’ Rosie said, disguising her disappointment with a breezy non-sequitur. ‘Looks like you’ve seen a ghost. Is that it, behind you? Spooky... hey, you can see it, flapping around in the hallway...’