Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  Smash. Shatter it on the pavement in front of a shuffling pensioner and see him recoil from its impact. Smash it on the bonnet of a Jag or a Merc and watch the driver stop and get out and huff and puff and stare disbelievingly at the sky. But the point of the exercise, apart from my childish pranks, was to see the crow come hopping out of the church and relish its breakfast. It would spring past the feet of wondering passers-by. It dared the stop-start traffic, in and out of the cars and buses and even the cyclists who were beating the queue into work, and it picked the morsels of flesh from the broken shells.

  Joe Blakesley? Was it him? I thought he might come back, or he might call me. I recognised him, even from this height and angle. He must’ve been having a coffee in Azri’s, maybe he’d been preparing his questions and wondering how best to tease out his story, because I saw him crossing Shakespeare Street from the little cafe and heading towards my sign on the pavement.

  He paused at the sign, right below me. He took out his camera, to take a photograph of it. Crack. I got him smack on the top of his head. The snail hit him fair and square and bounced into the road, where it was crunched by a green Suzuki. He leapt aside, as though he’d been hit by a sniper’s bullet. Rubbing his scalp, he reeled and almost fell over and he swivelled his head to see what had hit him. He saw the snail, the slimy wet place where its flesh had been smeared onto the tarmac, he saw the shards of the shell. And he peered up at me. Too slow, I recoiled behind the battlements. He’d seen me.

  And so I hurried downstairs.

  ‘You alright, Rosie?’ I threw the question at her as I passed the foot of our bed, not really expecting a reply. She was asleep again, after the tea and toast I’d taken her. ‘You coming, Chloe?’ I continued down and down, and I knew she’d be right behind me, once she’d bundled on some pants and a pullover and made sure the mouse was safely tucked away somewhere on her person.

  The reporter was inside the vestry when I got down there. He was sitting at my desk and he was picking splinters of the shell from his hair. There was blood on his fingertips. Before I could finish what I was saying, he was waving away my spluttered apologies and at the same time I had a moment to reach for the computer and switch off the monitor, in case he was nosey enough to touch the mouse and see what I’d been writing.

  ‘Yes, very funny, very funny,’ he was saying. ‘My first reaction, for a split-second anyway... was, you know, I’d got one of those paranormal kind of stories, like fish or frogs or whatever falling out of the sky. Until I looked up and saw you grinning from the top of the tower. Yes, very funny, and then I saw the crow in the road and yes yes very funny.’

  He’d finished feeling at his scalp. Like a chimpanzee, he fetched something out of his hair and examined it minutely, and even more simian, he actually tasted it with his tongue. Grimacing, he wiped it on the edge of my desk. ‘Escargots,’ he muttered, ‘alright if they’re fried up with lots of garlic, but not so nice raw, especially when they’ve just been smashed on the top of your head.’

  ‘I thought you would come,’ I said.

  Chloe appeared in the doorway and took her place at the fire, but it wasn’t lit yet and she huddled there, shivering, straight out of a warm bed. Like a puppy, she’d followed me downstairs, ready to do whatever we were doing, having breakfast or going out on the boat or just staying in the shop. She didn’t mind which, and she didn’t seem to mind the dead cold ashes of the previous night’s fire.

  ‘I was kind of expecting you,’ I went on. ‘After what happened the other day, I guessed you might want to do a story or something or.’

  ‘An obituary.’

  In just a few weeks since I’d first met him, he’d changed from cub-reporter, wet behind the ears and deferential even to me, to a snappy, hard-nosed hack.

  ‘I’ve been assigned to write an obituary. What did you think I was going to do? Another nice little plug for Poe’s Tooth Bookshop?’

  He softened again, bethought himself.

  ‘But alright, I couldn’t help making an excuse to slip out of the office and come out here and, I don’t know, just drop in for a coffee and a chat.’

  I lit the fire. We had a coffee. He’d brought a couple of croissants from Azri’s. We shared them, him and me and Chloe, and we threw crumbs for the crow. The room was still very cold and would take a while to warm up, so, after he’d pretended it would be out of the question to have a brandy as well, he allowed me to rummage in the cupboard for the bottle and splash it generously into his mug.

  I could see his eyes darting about. He was writing a feature in his head, if only he might persuade his boss to run it. The tower, the room, the girl, the crow... the snails landing on his head as if they’d been whirled up in the vortex of an alien space craft and dropped onto Long Eaton, of all places. As the fire crackled and I saw his face flush with the alcohol in his coffee, I had a real surge of affection for him, almost love, for this young man who was so like the urgently inquisitive writer I might have been, I could’ve been, I should’ve been. His hungry eyes flitted across the display of Edgar Allan Poe’s tooth, they puzzled at the jewels of glass which lay scattered about it and they saw how a litter of snail shells had already been left there, like offerings at a pagan shrine.

  ‘He died, you know,’ he said rather hoarsely, after he’d tried and failed to refuse a second and a third little splash of brandy. ‘Mr Leonard Vaughan, who would have celebrated his 91st birthday later this week, passed away after a fall etc etc. The organist and choirmaster at Shakespeare Street Anglican Church since 1948, much loved, a stalwart of harvest festivals and carol services for more than fifty years etc etc. It’s going to be a nice simple, respectful obituary, about him and his family and his life. Did you know he’d been in North Africa during the war, the desert rats and all that? and then a successful local businessman and a magistrate and... extraordinary, when you look at a feeble old man and think of all the things he’s done.’

  Sad. That was why I’d been sad on the top of the tower. Mixed into my silly mischief with the snails, my self-pity and general shittiness, not to mention the exhilaration I still felt at watching other people going to work while I was in my scruff, I was thinking about the old gent. Yes, even me, feckless and lightweight and glaringly obvious Oliver Gooch, I wasn’t impervious to sadness. I knew he’d died – an hour after he’d been taken in the ambulance, I’d called the hospital to ask how he was getting on and they’d told me. The books he’d brought me were still in their bag, on the desk. I hadn’t even looked at them yet. While the young man quaffed his coffee, while Chloe warmed her smile at the fire, I reached for the books and had a look.

  Nothing special in themselves. As he’d implied, they were the kind of classics you might find in comfy suburban homes all over the country. But some of them had been stamped inside them, or had beautifully embossed plates pasted onto the flyleaf, to mark them as gifts and prizes from long-ago christenings, Sunday school, confirmation, communion, the rites of passage of the old man himself and his children. So yes, they were special. They’d been special to Mr Leonard Vaughan and his family, whose voices had rung in these very walls, whose music had celebrated dozens of happy and sad events in this church.

  ‘But then I was thinking,’ the young man said, ‘I was thinking I might write a kind of feature and show it to the editor, a bit more about your shop and the tooth, and the angle would be...’ He hesitated, as though he was about to divulge something inappropriate. ‘Something about a kind of curse. It doesn’t have to be true, I can just make it up, something along the lines of the tooth bringing bad luck, you know like the curse of the mummy’s tomb or the monkey’s paw or whatever...’ He raised his eyebrows at me, over the rim of his mug. ‘What do you think? Of course, if you don’t like the idea I’ll drop it straightaway.’

  ‘I think it would be in very bad taste,’ I said, ‘and if you don’t mind me saying, a bit presumptuous.’

  I felt a bristling of annoyance, it was like a rash or a flush of blood in m
y chest and into my neck.

  ‘You’ve no idea, have you?’ I went on. ‘So, why do you think you can just go making things up? If you’d asked me first of all if you could write about how me and my wife came to be here, in this tower, about what happened to us and our daughter to bring us here and how I came by the tooth, I might’ve thought about it for a few seconds. And then I would’ve said no, because the whole thing’s so odd and disturbing and yes, tragic, that first of all you wouldn’t have believed it and secondly I’m going to write it all myself one day.’

  I could feel the heat rising into my throat and colouring my cheeks.

  ‘So no, thank you but no,’ I finished off. ‘Do your obituary for the nice old gentleman. Just because there’s a crow hopping about in here, and the tooth of Edgar Allan Poe, and the old guy happened to keel over and bang his head outside his own church, it doesn’t mean there’s a curse.’

  He shrugged, he got up and did a final sweeping appraisal of the room before he moved towards the door. He was not at all fazed by my blustering. He was young, and I remembered the time in my own late teens and twenties when I couldn’t give a shit and couldn’t be rattled by other people’s testiness or ill humour, when I didn’t care whether I’d caused offence or not.

  ‘The crow, yes,’ he murmured, amused by my reaction, ‘yes, I was going to ask about the crow. And your lovely daughter too, why she just sits there smiling and silent and she doesn’t go to school? But no need, it didn’t take me five minutes to look through our files and find out what happened to her. Oh, and the people in the car which hit her. And your wife, I asked around and I found out she works at Brook’s Academy, and when I phoned them they said she was off work right now, had a kind of stroke or something?’

  He was going outside, swaddling himself in his coat and deliberately eccentric scarf.

  ‘So, Mr Gooch, I’m sorry if I riled you a bit, with my ridiculous idea about the curse. But funnily enough, your denial of any such thing is kind of more revealing than if you’d agreed with it. You know what I mean?

  I followed him outside. He was smug. He had a tiny triumphant smile on his mouth, as if he’d baited me and I’d swallowed the bait and he’d pulled me in. He’d already done a bit of homework. He knew more than I’d thought he did.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he was saying, as he turned away, ‘I’ll just do the obituary.’ His feet crunched on the shells shattered onto the road, he rubbed the top of his head. ‘If I do get another story out of this, it won’t be anything about a curse or whatever. You can do that yourself. You’re living it, you’re living in it. But I might do a little spooky thing about snails dropping out of the sky, you know, X-Files or Twilight Zone or whatever...’

  He’d gone. His words were ringing in my head.

  I was living the curse? I was living in it? Who was cursed? Me, Oliver Gooch, or my daughter Chloe Gooch? No, it was nothing like the monkey’s paw. Long before I’d been given the tooth, I’d got the things I’d wished for: the money and leisure I’d craved, an angelic daughter. If I was living in the curse, I was very comfy too, in my swaddle of guilt. I was the lord of my tower, and my lady wife was miserably numb in her chamber, I was imprisoning her up there, keeping her pickled...

  So fuck off, Joe Blakesley. You think you know stuff, but you don’t. You think you’re a super-investigative journalist, but there are things you’ll never find out, things you’ll never dig out of your files. The curse I’m living in is real, you don’t need to make it up. I’ve been walling myself up inside it, like in another of Poe’s stories, with alcohol and deception and duplicity and the compliance of my daughter. And one day she’ll blink and we’ll get out. But is that what I want? And the tooth? Get rid of it, old man Heap got rid of it, he gave it to me. The bird, the tooth, they’ve got to go...

  In a blur of indignation, I went back towards the door of the church. I paused to move the sign. Annoyingly, the reporter had turned it a little bit, when he was going to take a photo, so I put it back exactly where I wanted it. And then I saw something in a crack in the pavement. The paramedic had joked that the old man had broken the stone with his head, and I’d wondered for a moment if this was the spot where that workman had landed when he’d fallen and died during the building of the church. Whichever it was, or whoever it was whose skull had left its mark, there was a small white object stuck there.

  It was a tooth. I picked it out and held it to the sunlight.

  The paramedic with her busy dustpan and brush must have missed it, after all it had been dark in the late afternoon, confused by the flashing lights of the ambulance and its puthering exhaust fumes. As I moved back to the doorway, I marvelled at the whiteness of the tooth, how purely perfect it had remained after more than forty years in the organist’s mouth. I supposed it was made of porcelain or something, and every night it had been cleaned in a solution and left to soak in a glass on the marital bedside table. I could picture the two of them, Mr and Mrs. Vaughan in the bedroom of their semi-detached house in Trowell Grove, snuggling up and exchanging gummy kisses. The tooth was pristine. It could’ve been new.

  Where to put it? When I went back into the vestry to make sure Chloe was alright, I was thinking I should call the hospital and tell them, maybe it was a legal requirement, maybe it was illegal to knowingly retain a piece of a recently deceased person. Chloe stood up from the fire, which was blazing brightly and warming the room. She’d been holding the crow on her lap, and the mouse was peering from her sleeve and disappearing again, instinctively wary of the bird and its heavy black beak. Just then, it seemed the obvious thing for me to do, to place the tooth onto the display, another gift at the shrine of Edgar Allan Poe, with the blood-stained glass and the fragments of snail-shell.

  Chloe, curious, came to look. She picked up the tooth and smiled at it. She put it to her mouth, as if she would taste it, and I said quickly, ‘No no, don’t, that’s not nice,’ and tried to take it from her.

  But she stepped back and withheld it from me. She held it close to her smile. Its whiteness matched hers. Of course, I suddenly realised, because the tooth was hers.

  ‘So that’s where it went to. Was it the crow who took it out there? What do you want to do with it, Chloe? Do you want to show it to Mummy, and then we’ll put it under your pillow for the tooth fairy to come? No?’

  She didn’t answer, of course, not in words. She put it where I was going to put it. By Poe’s tooth.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I WAS WOKEN by screaming.

  I lay on my back with my eyes wide open and I thought the screams were a part of my dream. The room had been very dark when I’d slipped into bed, so dark and silent that I’d done everything in my powers to keep it so – by tiptoeing, by holding my breath, by slipping between the sheets so softly that not a sigh or a whisper of my nakedness on the cool white cotton would be heard.

  But now the room was not so dark. And not silent. I leapt out of the bed and tumbled across the room to see what on earth was going on.

  A scene of gothic madness. Bedlam would have been like this.

  I called out, ‘Rosie! Rosie! What are you doing, Rosie?’ But she couldn’t have heard my voice. Because she was writhing on the bed and screaming.

  I’d been in Chloe’s bedroom, I’d sneaked in when I knew Rosie was unconscious after a nightcap of tawny port. After my banishment to the kitchen and the nether world of the moonlit vestry, I needed a bed. Now, naked, I’d blundered into our bedroom, where Rosie was in the throes of a terrible nightmare.

  Chloe was crouching beside her. If it weren’t for the inane fixity of her smile, I would’ve said she was paralysed with fear. She was clutching her goose-girl. The Robin Hood figure as well, he was sprawled across her pillow.

  Rosie... in the dim light of the bedside lamp, she was writhing on the bed. No words, at least no words I could recognise. Her mouth was wide open and red. It was a dribble of port and... a kind of sangria, fermented in the coils of her gut and bubbling back, a
bitter bile in her throat and on her tongue and spewing past her traitorous lips.

  ‘Rosie!’ I was stumbling forward and trying to take hold of her, but her flanks were slippery with sweat.

  I fell on top of her. She was writhing underneath me, and it was extraordinary and disturbing for me, and no doubt for the onlooking Chloe, to see how I was aroused, my nakedness erect on her hot, pneumatic body. She couldn’t really speak. Even when I’d quietened her and she lay heaving and her eyes rolling like a mare stuck in a ditch, she was muttering and cursing and rubbing at her face. She was a mess. And the bed too. I thought maybe she’d woken in a fit or a seizure, or she was having the stroke we’d suspected before.

  My mind was racing. I knew she’d fallen asleep drunk, of course I knew, because it was me who’d helped her to slurp down the port in a considerable quantity to make her comfortable, and I knew I’d had my share too. So, if and when she ever calmed enough to be manageable, it would still be quite a feat to get the befuddled two of us, and the bemused Chloe, dressed and into a taxi to hospital again.

  ‘Rosie! Rosie, my lovely Rosie. Be calm, be calm, relax and breathe and breathe and breathe...’

  She wasn’t lovely. She looked terrible. Her hair was a Medusa mess.

  I reached for Chloe and felt her little body trembling. The smile was nothing, of course we’d known this for a long time. Beneath the blissful calm of her face, who knew what torture she was enduring? I laid my hands on her and tried to soothe her, and at the same time I saw the madness in her mother’s eyes and felt her reaching for the mirror, that wretched mirror which was always there, somewhere in the tousled sweat of her sheets and she would rummage for it and press it to her face so she could see how her youth and beauty had collapsed so utterly.