Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  While Rosie was snoozing again, with a magazine lying on her face so that her lips blubbered softly against it, and while Chloe was lost in another epic journey with the mouse, I got off the bed and went down to the kitchen. Found rum, and ice.

  Ice. I could feel an icy darkness pressing around the tower. And I carried a jug of ice upstairs. And when I got there, finding that Chloe was burrowing somewhere in the bedding and fantastically removed from us, I lifted the magazine from Rosie’s face and did two mischievous things – I plopped a cube of the ice onto the dip in her throat, and, as she moaned and squirmed and tried to sit up, it slipped down between her breasts. At the same time, having swallowed a slug of the rum and kept a residue in my mouth, I met her gasping mouth with mine.

  The rum and the ice, hot and cold, it worked for both of us. It had done before, long ago when we’d been courting, if it was appropriate to use that genteel word for the boozy foreplay of our earliest dates. Alcohol-fuelled sex – a few months of it before we’d got engaged, another six months of it until our wedding. And then Rosie had remarked, after we’d been married more than a year, that we’d never made love sober, that maybe we should try it one day. We did try it, and it was ok. But now we let the rum into our heads and enflame us, and our love-making was better than nice, it was hot, slippery sex.

  Where was Chloe? She was somewhere down there, and maybe the urgent tumbling of the bedclothes around her and her mouse was a part of their quest, it was the rumbling of an earthquake or an avalanche or the eruption of a volcano. Me, I took more rum into my mouth and we shared it on our tongues, and then I kissed it onto her wound, so that she winced and panted as it stung into the tiny white worms which were writhing there.

  Alcohol and ice. Hot and cold, positive and negative. They jump-started us, like they were the red-and-black crocodile clips from a buzzing battery. Whatever, we made healing love.

  It made us drunk. The alcohol went straight to our loins. Chloe surfaced from the bedding. She was like us, red-faced and panting, and indeed I’d felt her bare skin against me as I’d lost myself in Rosie’s ample body. The girl was naked too. She must have slipped out of her pyjamas as part of her game with the mouse, maybe because of the heat of the bed as she’d been submerged inside it, or maybe in some precocious imitation of her mother and father and the proximity of our nakedness.

  The three of us lay together. Rosie and I must have slept again, and we made love an hour or two or three hours later, our bodies moving in a delicious slow-motion. We were buried in the bedding, we’d somehow pulled it over us so completely that our heads and faces were covered and we were suffocating sweetly in a fug of our own heat.

  And Chloe? In the fume of alcohol, in the stupefying darkness, there was a strange and giddying sense that she was there as well, somewhere, that her presence was on us and somehow between us and a part of us. In a blur between waking and sleeping.

  Chapter Thirty

  WHEN AT LAST I truly awoke, I found myself in a kind of limbo.

  The room was very dark, someone had switched off the bedside lamp. I knew I was awake because, beside me, Rosie was so fast asleep that she could have been dead. She was so still, she hardly seemed to be breathing. I leaned to her to feel for a flutter of breath from her lips, from her nostrils, and yes she was alive. The waft of rum from her body was strong, and I knew it was in the sweat of my skin as well. Rosie was drunk, and she had found peace in sleep, exhausted and spent.

  I turned and sat up. No sign of Chloe. I went unsteadily to the bathroom. I looked into her room and she wasn’t there either. Not for the first time, I shuddered with apprehension at the thought of her going up to the clock tower or even onto the roof, but the ladder above her bed was still stowed, up there on the ceiling, by the trapdoor. Our bedroom door was open. She had gone down.

  I hurried down to the kitchen, drunker than I’d thought. The darkness of the stairs was like a heavy black blanket hung in front of me, something I had to push through and past while it tangled in clinging folds around my face and my shoulders. Even before I’d started down and down towards the hallway, from where such a blast of icy air was coming that I was sure she’d opened the church door and left it open, I could see a glow of silvery-grey light from the vestry. And I could hear a sound, a pattering, a tip-tapping, and I was glad, because I knew that Chloe was in there. In a moment I was in the hallway, relieved to see that the door was shut – the draft was only from underneath it, a scalpel of cold, slicing into the body of the church as if it were unresisting flesh – and I could see Chloe in the vestry.

  She had switched on my computer. She was sitting, naked, at the keyboard. It was the only light in the room. She was rapt. Even when I walked behind and stopped, and she must have heard me and felt the warmth of my body close to hers, she seemed oblivious. She didn’t turn to glance at me. When I touched her shoulder, and I was surprised to feel how hot she was in the freezing room, she didn’t move. I was naked too, and shivering. The room had been empty and neglected all the previous night and all day, without a fire. When I squeezed her shoulder a bit, and whispered, ‘Chloe? Aren’t you cold? shall we get you upstairs and back into bed?’ my breath was as silvery as the screen.

  She didn’t respond in any way. She was pattering on the keyboard. With both hands and all eight fingers, with occasional bumps onto the space bar with her thumbs, she was randomly hammering at the keys. dckjfapis klkxcj alaflertiojfmamcositf ucklzerjlffopl ingpjkpaaaaaws tungmedspomrtha tsojoswhy oklkmlm

  She kept on hammering. Hammering is the wrong word, because she was rather delicately composing what she was writing, she was copying the way I did it with pauses and flurries and pretend hesitations and marvellous flourishes. Copying what her Daddy would do whenever a customer came into the shop and he was suddenly the great and gothic writer in his beard and oily hair and his pungent coat, when he was Poe. I bent over her shoulder and I could smell the soap on her body, the shampoo in her hair, the natural little girl fragrance of her skin. And just as I was leaning closer and about to plant a paternal kiss on the back of her neck, there was a different kind of flurry in the room... and the crow dropped off its top shelf and fluttered to the floor.

  It always did that. Normally I appreciated its timing, a kind of shock tactic, whenever there was a customer in the shop who was browsing the books and then ogling the tooth, it would reveal itself, a phantasm of Poe, and clinch a sale with a few miraculous beats of its wings. It was an embodiment of Poe, or, as Colonel Brook had written in his article, the spirit of Poe was alive and well and haunting the bookshop. Me, in my Edgar Allan scruff, all gaunt and haggard and sunken-eyed etc. I was just a ham, like one of those out-of-work actors doing ghost tours of York or hamming Heathcliff at Haworth. But the crow was phantasmal. And now it detached itself from the highest shelf and beat into my face and I knocked it away from me with an impatient hand.

  It shuffled itself back into shape. Like a pack of cards, its feathers shivered into shape again. Bastard fuck, I was thinking and hearing inside my head, and all the rum seemed to surge between my ears like an alcoholic tsunami, banging and crashing all its debris of fragmented memory and half-remembered dreams. Fuck you bastard, as it clawed itself onto the desk and onto the top of the monitor and adjusted its whole crow-like demeanour as though it was posing for a publicity shot. The crow, not quite a raven, but as near as dammit; Poe’s crow posing in Poe’s Tooth Bookshop, with the tooth itself framed carefully behind it.

  Poe’s crow, posing in Poe’s Tooth Bookshop. I tried to say it. Couldn’t.

  It stood on the top of the computer screen. I leaned closer again to Chloe, and again I read what she had written. Yes, she was still writing, more of the same, and although it was a whole lot of random gobbledegook I was kind of jealous, because, unlike me, at least she was writing something and it looked original and it had probably never been written before. This permutation of letters and words and phrases had probably never, never in the history of literature, bee
n written before. She’d composed another deliciously original sentence. ;xlknf;lkj;lkexffu als ckyouzpok[p daddkoopoi cososknmit fucppokuing 0ookstun -gme tha ts [ijokwh okjlpky

  I suddenly thought that I had never felt so cold. Not just the cold. But alone. And separate from... from everything and everyone.

  I was naked, nearly forty years old and just as naked as the moment I’d been born. My own daughter was sitting in front of me and I was touching her, but she responded not at all. It was as though, for her, I did not exist. I couldn’t make her hear me or feel me. And even when I lowered my mouth to her skin to kiss her, to kiss my own flesh and blood, there was a bird which came down and battered into my face to prevent me. My wife? She was somewhere upstairs, in a ridiculous tower, separated from me by walls of stone and a trauma which I had caused. Could you be more alone, Oliver Gooch, than to be naked and drunk and middle-aged, in the vestry of a mock-medieval church, with your alienated daughter and a crow?

  What to do? Drink more? I did so. The bottle was in the cupboard, in its place where I had left it; at last there was something certain and reliable in my shivering world. And fire. While Chloe was tooling at the keyboard and putting me to shame with the fecundity of her imagination, I could at least make fire.

  I did so. I tried to do so. Why was it so difficult? Because I was so cold and naked and it felt ridiculous to be sitting naked in a bookshop in the middle of the night with my naked daughter? I tried again. Twists of newspaper on top of yesterday’s ashes... splinters of wood... applying a match and instant satisfaction as it all bloomed into a brilliant yellow chrysanthemum flame. But then, as I started to lay a few of the logs I always used, the smoke from my incipient fire just coiled and confused and puthered, and instead of streaming up the chimney, it blew back at me, into my face, and back into the room.

  Chloe – she was still writing, but slowing and pausing and stopping. Whenever I turned to glance at her, I caught her watching me and smiling. And then she would bend again to the keyboard and resume her hammering on it. She was watching me trying to light the fire. Oblivious... not any more, she had pretended to be oblivious of me when I’d first come into the room, but now, although she was working on her next piece of purple prose, her next deathless phrase, she was alert to what I was doing,

  ‘So what’s up with the fire, Chloe? What do you think?’

  She threw me such a knowing glance, it was hard to imagine that she’d been so lost, so utterly lost for the past months.

  ‘Shall I not bother? Shall I leave it and we’ll do it tomorrow, together? Hey, it’s so cold in here, wouldn’t the sensible thing be for the both of us to go back upstairs and into bed?’

  She bent to her writing again. It was as though she was testing me. If she’d just smiled and sat there and done nothing, we could have turned off the screen and watched it fade into darkness and gone back to bed. But she did a little frown, something she’d learned from her father, and pattered at the keyboard again. She did another flurry, tossing her hair. She was goading me, she was making it look easy, just sitting there and thinking and then committing her thoughts to paper, as it were, as if to say what was so hard about that? Of course, she had the crow. Perched at eye-level, on a level with her thoughts, it was her muse.

  So I tried once more with the fire. I shoved more screwed-up balls of newspaper among the smouldering tinder and lit them with a match. Again, the gratification was instant, but short lived. There was a glorious blaze of light, which brightened the whole room and gave an illusion of warmth. The tinder caught, the logs caught, and their smoke was dense and blue and it swarmed to the chimney.

  But then it writhed back again. The fireplace coughed and belched and a great sooty-black cloud spewed into the room. I sprang away from it, choking. At the same time, I saw Chloe stand up abruptly from the desk and stare towards the door of the vestry.

  It was Rosie. For the first time in days, she’d come downstairs.

  ‘Are you there?’ she blurted. ‘What on earth are you doing down here?’ And she pushed through the smoke and into the room. She saw me spluttering by the fireplace, she saw Chloe in the light of the computer screen. ‘God, Oliver. What are you trying to do?’

  She pushed me aside, just as a mess of soot collapsed out of the chimney, totally quenched my feeble attempt to make fire and scattered all over the floor.

  ‘What is that? Can’t you see, Oliver? There’s something blocking...’

  Before I could stop her or try to see what she was doing, she was kneeling in all the soot and reaching her right arm up and up into the chimney. She grabbed something which was dangling there. Something stuck there. She pulled and pulled, and suddenly, with a tremendous whoosh, an even greater avalanche of soot came down.

  I helped her up and away from it, lifting her to her feet. She was covered in soot. I was covered in soot. Chloe came forward and the soot was all over her too. Rosie squirmed away from me, bent to the mess on the floor and lifted something out of it, the thing she’d tugged out of the chimney.

  It had arms and legs and a head, it was like a charred skeleton of a human figure.

  Rosie stared at it, aghast. She whispered, ‘So there you are, I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ and carried it away from the fireplace and across the room.

  I switched on the lamp which shone on the tooth. The smoke blew through and around the beam, a fume of blue mist. The crow was nowhere to be seen, fortunately. It must have flopped onto the floor and found a discreet place to keep out of the way, as Rosie sat at the desk where Chloe had been writing.

  Chloe and I stood beside her. There was a surreal calm. It could have been shouting and madness and a hellish nightmare, but Rosie somehow settled a motherly order on the strangeness of the situation. She didn’t rail and rant about her Maid Marian, who’d gone missing and been found stuck up the chimney. She examined the figure, which was so thickly caked with soot that it could have been a ghastly human relic, the body of a child recovered from a terrible fire. She glanced up at me. For a moment, as I shivered like a lunatic in my filthy nakedness, with my hair and beard awry, she might have thought that I had jammed the doll up there.

  But no, I could tell from the deep anxiety in her eyes that she knew I hadn’t. Who else could have done it?

  She looked sideways at Chloe.

  ‘Oh my poor darling,’ she murmured. ‘My poor baby, what have you been up to? Where do you get such silly ideas from? From your Daddy? From his silly books?’

  She looked across to the lamp, its circle of smoke filled light. To the tooth. It nestled on its bed of velvet and assumed the focus of the room, of the tower, of the moment. It drew all our eyes to it.

  ‘What do you think it is, Chloe?’ she whispered. ‘Is it just an old bit of bone? Or is it the tooth of a little boy, a boy who grew up strange and sad and had lots of mad ideas? I suppose your Daddy is right... it doesn’t matter what it really is, it’s the belief, it’s what you believe that matters.’

  She stood up. ‘Why don’t we go upstairs and get under the shower? Daddy can clean up his mess tomorrow. He’ll have plenty of time.’

  Her calmness was uncanny. It frightened me in a way I couldn’t fathom. It made my stomach sick with apprehension. As she manouevred Chloe away from the desk, she tossed the horrid rag of the doll into a corner of the room. It landed, and there was a scuttling movement in the shadows.

  Rosie heard it. She knew what it was. With a big breath, she managed to control her fear and anger. At the same time, she must have nudged the desk enough to bring Chloe’s writing back onto the screen.

  ‘And what’s this?’ she asked. ‘Has Daddy been doing a bit of writing? Anything original? Or is it like the beard and the hair and the smelly old coat and the getting pissed and... just a lot of copying?’

  She leaned to the screen and squinted at it. I put in quickly, ‘It wasn’t me, it was Chloe, she was playing, that’s all.’ And as usual, trying to counter her sarcasm, ‘It’s all her own work.’r />
  ‘She wrote this?’ Rosie leaned even closer. ‘What does it mean?’

  She peered at the screen. She was reading it. I was about to laugh out loud. Couldn’t she see it was nothing but random letters and spaces? But when she recoiled from it and turned to look at me, her face, already distorted by the wound on her cheek, was a mask of contempt.

  ‘You tell me, Oliver, what the hell do you think it means? Did she write this, or is it one of your sick ideas? Where did this stuff come from?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ I retorted. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s just her bashing on the keys. What do you mean what does it mean?’

  Rosie was dragging the girl across the room. She was hissing under her breath. It was sick and I was sick and she was getting out of here and taking Chloe and...

  They were gone, up the stairs.

  I DIDN’T STAY a lot longer in the vestry. I was naked and covered in soot. There was nothing in the room I could improvise as a blanket or a rug, otherwise I would have thought about swallowing the rest of the bottle, lighting the fire as big and blazing as possible – now that the chimney had been unblocked – and trying to sleep in front of it. But still, two out of three ain’t bad, as someone had once said, so before I dared to tiptoe up to the bedroom and negotiate a snarling Rosie, I opted for the bottle and the fire... kindling a tremendous crackle of flames and crouching over it like a caveman, and swigging the rum until my throat was burning too.