Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  Blinking tears, I thrust the mouse into my shirt, threw on my coat, herded the crow outside and brought in the sign. Closed the shop.

  Skating. The fields of the park were sheeted with ice. It was a dazzling world, huge and empty and perfectly flat. I marched along the footpath, between the tall black poplars and the frosted rhododendron, and then the emptiness of the park was breathtaking. Acres of ice and a vast blue sky. In the further distance, the town was a blurry dark line on the horizon, the cooling towers billowing steam. Lovely, the way the ice creaked and squeaked under my feet as I crossed towards the distant figure of the boy. He was sitting where he’d been sitting before, and I thought, yes, although just then there was no one else about. It must have been worth his while because I could see how the ice was scored with lines and curves and scratches and gouges, freshly made.

  Magpies went churring through the bare branches. Gulls, hundreds of gulls, whirling so high in the blue that they might have been wisps of steam from the power-station. And my crow. It was the only crow in the whole of that enormous sky, it beat through air as I crossed the field and it settled in the branches above the boy’s head.

  I chose some skates. The boy took my money, without looking at me, without even looking up. There was something furtive about him, he ducked his head and pretended to be busy with the money he’d made from his business initiative. I guessed that he was playing truant, he should have been in school, and so he didn’t want to engage in any small talk or even show his face in case some busybody queried what he was doing. I sat on the roots of the tree and put on my skates and didn’t say a word. I only saw an anonymous boy, wrapped in a coat, jingling a few coins in his mottled fingers.

  And then I was skating.

  For the first few minutes, it was an almost delirious pleasure. The purity and clarity of the air, the taste of it in my mouth and the fizz of it in my nostrils, as I found a rhythm and eased myself this way and that. The clean, cold sound of my blades, and, as I looked down, the myriad bubbles and the grasses crushed and frozen beneath the ice. Gaining confidence, I looked up and around me and even into the sky, and the world whirled about my head. At first it was good, so good it replaced every other notion or memory which had been troubling me. It wiped everything clear.

  But then... I heard the crow beating closely above me. I saw the shadow of its wings on the ice.

  And I was aware of someone else, another skater, somewhere behind me and following me. Mine were not the only blades scoring the frozen flood-waters on the park. I turned and nearly fell, and there was the boy.

  He sped past me. I could smell his coat and the fusty, unwashed-boy smell of his hair. Head down, face averted, he went by in a rush of curious odour. The crow followed him. It seemed to detach itself from me and became one with him. Its shadow blurred into his. He weaved around me, so close I could feel the flurry of wind he created. And with the flurry of wind, he created an inexplicable feeling of unease. More than that. It grew in my belly like a physical sickness. It was dread, utterly alien in the loveliness of the morning and my childish abandon.

  I stumbled. One of my skates caught on a tussock of grass protruding from the ice. And as I windmilled my arms and tried to keep my balance, I fell headlong and heavily flat on my face.

  Winded, I lay still for a moment. I could hear the swish and the crackle as the boy continued to skate around me, my cheek was on the ice and my lips could taste it, I could see his blades cutting close to me – closer, closer, throwing a powder of ice into the air, so fine it fell on my lashes like spray. And I felt something moving inside my shirt. Before I could stop it, the mouse came creeping out of the collar of my shirt.

  It scampered away from me. It paused and sniffed the air. It snuffled at the ice and seemed to wonder at the strangeness of it. Just as the boy came hurtling past. I cried out, but my voice was hoarse and I was still out of breath. Maybe the mouse was invisible to him, and in its perfect whiteness it was just another bubble trapped beneath the surface. So fast and so deadly true, one of his blades cut straight across it.

  Before I could get up or pull myself close enough to see what had happened, the boy was there. Maybe he’d felt an impact. He skidded to a halt and dropped to his knees, and with his head down so that his face was almost touching the ice, he was examining the mouse.

  ‘Get off it,’ I was saying. ‘Just get out of the way and let me have a look, will you?’

  When he kneeled up and aside, I saw the mouse. It was lying in a pool of blood which was spreading around it.

  Appalled, I touched it with one fingertip. So warm, and it seemed unmarked. There was blood, and I’d been expecting to find it gruesomely decapitated or even cut in half. But the body of the mouse was intact. Indeed, reacting to the tiniest pressure of my finger on its belly, it suddenly wriggled away and ran. No longer a pure white albino, but splashed with pink, it ran across the ice.

  I turned to the boy. He was still kneeling. He turned and grinned at me. Blood welled from his mouth. It dribbled from his lips and down his chin and splashed onto the ice.

  I recoiled from him. The crow was beating around his head. And then, seeing the mouse exposed and defenceless on the expanse of ice, it feinted in mid-air and dived towards it.

  For a second the crow had the mouse. It lifted it into the air. The mouse wriggled and fell back to the ice. The bird tried again, it landed with a clatter of its horny black claws and lunged forward with half open wings. I skidded forward on my belly and grabbed the mouse, just as the crow stabbed at it and banged its beak hard on the back of my hand.

  In doing so I’d rolled away from the boy. And by the time I’d sat up and cradled the mouse for a moment before slipping it back inside my shirt, I looked around and saw that he was already sitting under his tree, hunched over his coins as though nothing had happened. The crow, calmly oblivious, was perched in the branches above his head, nibbling its feathers back into place.

  I got to my feet and hobbled across the ice towards him. Out of breath, I leaned heavily on the tree and fumbled to undo the laces of my skates. My hands were shaking. I was staring at him, at the fall of his lank blond hair, and I heard my own voice inside my own head before I actually uttered a sound – Who are you? What do you want? What are you doing? – although the only sound I really made was the rasping of the breath in my throat.

  He turned his face up and towards me.

  A pasty, shivery boy. No blood. I must have been staring at his mouth, because he swiped at his lips with the back of his hand and said, ‘What you looking at? Just fuck off and mind your own business...’

  In a daze, I stepped back into my own shoes and stumbled away without bothering to tie my laces. He followed me with his eyes, with that defiant look of any disaffected teenager playing truant from a school he hated. When he sneered at me and showed his teeth, there was no blood in his mouth or on his cold, thin lips, no blood on his chin. And when I slithered across the ice where I’d been skating, and I could see the scratches I’d inexpertly made and the place where I’d fallen and banged my face and lost the mouse. There was no blood at all. Not a drop.

  I couldn’t remember getting back to the church. Only that the crow was moving around me. There was an unsettling duality in its presence, as unnerving as the vision of the boy. I mean, a blurring of dream and reality. As it whirled around my head and I could feel the movement of the air on my face, it was a real bird, it was the wretched starveling that Chloe and I had found in the clock tower. But then, as the wintry sunlight threw shadows around my feet and I wandered home in a state of fuddled distraction, it was a flicker of darkness, a fragment of nightmare. Not real.

  I got home, somehow.

  No, not home. I didn’t go upstairs. I was a vagrant, crouching over my fire, seeking the comfort of my blankets on the floor, cuddling my bottle. The mouse emerged from my shirt. And I wondered at its purity, for not a smear or a smudge spoiled its pristine whiteness.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

>   FROM THEN – FOR who knows how long? Because my days and nights seemed to blur into the timelessness of dream – the boy would come to me.

  Was it days and nights, or a week? How long was it, since Rosie and Chloe had left me and gone away? Was it last week, or only yesterday? Would they ever come back? In the bottom of my tower, locked away from the reality of the rooms above my head, I felt as though the normal parameters of time and space and routine had slipped away from me.

  The boy. Puer. Puer eapoe. I thought at first he was a dream. But then I thought he was not, because I could smell him and I could feel the touch of his hand on mine, and I could see every detail of his hair and lashes and eyebrows and the down on his cheeks and lip.

  I awoke in the night, I was lying by the fire. The flames had died down and I was cold, and was going to get up and put more logs on the embers as I’d done every night since I’d moved down into the vestry. I lay for a moment and I stared around me, and I could feel the buzz in my head and the dryness of my mouth which I’d got used to more and more since I’d been drinking more and more and falling asleep more or less drunk. And I sensed a someone in the room.

  I blinked and the boy was standing beside me. He knelt to the hearth and reached to the logs and rebuilt the fire until the flames were licking and crackling and I could feel their warmth on my face.

  If it was a dream, it was the clearest and most natural dream I’d ever been in. He gestured at me to get up, and I did so. I was in my clothes – I always slept in my clothes since I’d been sleeping with the bottle – and I followed him away from the brightness of the fire and to my desk. And I wrote, yes I wrote. He showed me how to write, he guided my brain and my mind and my hands.

  My muse. The boy. No need for a light, because the glow of my computer screen was enough. He brought me my glass and filled it. He threw my coat around my shoulders. With a snap of his fingers he summoned the crow, and it appeared from the shadows of its corner on the floor where it customarily cuddled with the corpse of the doll, and it beat once and then twice and three times and landed on the top of the screen. But, what to write? The screen was blank. I felt the fear in my belly, confronted by my own mediocrity, the dearth of ideas. Everything was in place, except for the very thoughts and words which I might tap out with my clumsy, lazy, drunken fingers. I had fire, I had alcohol. I had the crow in front of me and cocking its beady eyes at me like an irritable schoolmaster. I had the boy, the very warmth and scent of him as real as the flesh and blood of the boy whose tooth had been saved and kept since it loosened and fell out nearly two hundred years ago. But what to write? How to begin?

  The tooth, yes. The boy opened his mouth and smiled at me. His mouth was young and clean, but there was a gap where the tooth had been. And so, because I’d been its diligent guardian, and, more importantly, because I’d believed in it and deserved the reward of its inspiration, he reached for the tooth from its velvet box. He lodged it back into his mouth. And then, his smile complete, he reached for a book and opened it and laid it on the desk to the left of the keyboard. With a nod of encouragement, he signalled that I should write. To start me off, he ran his fingertip beneath the words as I slowly, hesitantly, began to tap the same words and phrases and sentences onto the screen, and once I had achieved a momentum only interrupted now and then as I took more and more fiery mouthfuls from the glass he kept refilling, he simply stood at my side and was there, a presence, my muse, as I wrote and wrote and wrote.

  How long did I write? For an hour? All night? How long is a dream? Is it merely the fluttering of eyelids, a few seconds of restless sleep, or is it real time?

  The fire dimmed and died and the boy rebuilt it. My glass emptied and the boy refilled it. The coat slipped from my shoulders and the boy lifted it back again, so that I might not feel between my shoulder blades the icy draft from beneath the door of the church. However long it was that I wrote, that night, he was there and it was a joy, an effortless flow of writing.

  Until the dream dimmed. I felt the flow of my writing falter.

  A strange thing – as the presence of the boy seemed to fade and he was less of reality and more of a shadow, the only piece of him which remained strong was his smell. Indeed, it grew stronger. It was a stale boy smell, the smell of the little boys who’d crowded me with their inky, blotted Latin books and pressed their fusty bodies against me. Even the crow cringed from it. It shivered its feathers, a kind of shudder of disgust, and it fell away, onto the floor, and I heard it scuttling into the darkness. The boy’s face swam in front of me. He was signalling me to slow down my writing and stop, he reached across me and his smell was strong and he closed the book from which I’d been writing. And at last – to switch off the power he’d bestowed on me, the power of his ideas and the torrent of his original thoughts – he smiled a horrid crooked smile and reached his fingers into his mouth. He pulled out the tooth.

  There was a gush of blood from the hole it left. It filled his mouth and overflowed his lips and down his chin. With bloody fingers he dabbed at the keyboard – delete delete delete. In a moment he’d deleted everything I’d written.

  A blank black screen. And I was asleep again.

  It was a recurring dream, a dream of great exhilaration, and then a horror which dashed everything. In the mornings, when I woke and crawled wretchedly out of my pit beside a cold dead fire, I would limp to the desk with the shreds of the dream clinging to the inside of my poor, addled, hung over brain like dirty old cobwebs, and I would search for any evidence that what I’d dreamed might have some connection to reality. Yes, the book was there, closed, beside the computer, but when I riffled through its pages I could never find the ones from which I’d been writing. When I switched on the computer, it was blank, there was nothing of the myriad, miraculous words I’d written. My glass was there, of course, and an empty, overturned bottle, but they were such a constant piece of my world that it didn’t matter if they inhabited my sleep or my waking or both. There was no evidence that the boy had been there. When I sniffed at the space where he’d been standing and tried to recapture that whiff of unwashed clothes and rancid hair, I only caught the smell of myself.

  I examined the tooth for a smear of blood. There was none. It was a bit of yellowy bone, nothing more, defying any rational or educated person to believe it was anything else.

  And the days?

  I had only a dim perception of them, the daylit hours between my nights with the boy. They were an unwanted interruption in my craving for his return.

  I think I washed from time to time, but maybe I didn’t. I drank coffee. Of course I lit the fire, a great spitting turbulent blaze which coiled and writhed up the chimney. I think I crossed the road for pies or pizza or whatever instant gratification I might get from Azri, and I got rum and vodka and similar solace from the shop next door. Customers? People? There were some. I would throw open the doors of the church, first of all to clear the stink of the air: the brew of alcohol and soot and crow and mouse and me. And then, with the first slurps of coffee and a deafening blast of Revolver or Rubber Soul to blow the dust of dreams from inside my head, they would wander in. And sniff around. And marvel at the dirt, at the crow, at me. And they might sneer at the tooth, or shrug, or frown, or gape in wonderment bordering on tears. And they might buy a book.

  The days... they were grey and cold and mercifully short.

  By mid-afternoon, when the light was fading at four o’clock and the fire was roaring and puthering great plumes of smoke into the room to tell me it was time to close the doors and shut out the gathering night and shut out the stream of lights of the hoipolloi in their traffic jam, I was glad to do so. I would clang the doors shut. Another day had passed in a dim, grey blur.

  So it was closer to dream time.

  Alcohol. Flames. The skittering of the mouse in the firelight, through my fingers and into my sleeves and inside my shirt and its little hot body wriggling on the skin of my belly and chest. The crow, the very embodiment in flesh, yes
the incarnation of the boy I was waiting for. With the closing of the church doors, it would creak and shuffle out of its corner, sooty from its canoodling with the doll. It might spring onto the top of the computer screen, as though taking up its position in readiness for the coming of the night, or flap to the lamplight and peck at the tooth of the boy. And then pick up a piece of glass and hold it to the light, so, that the blood would shine like ruby. It might pick up a different tooth, which was Chloe’s. When I clapped my hands, it would drop the tooth and return to its vigil on the desk.

  Waiting. I wanted him back. So I could woo him with rum and fire. The bigger my blaze, the more I drank, the more I stared hopelessly into the my empty unforgiving accusing screen and couldn’t write a word. I was willing him to come and inspire me, until I would tumble like a useless, sozzled soul in my soiled clothes into my bed by the fire and snore myself asleep.

  Soiled, yes, poe poo pee. What difference did a few vowels make? A loosening of the vowels. Edgar allan poe poo pee oh shit.

  One night I awoke on the boat.

  I opened my eyes and I knew where I was straightaway, my eyes on the wooden ceiling of the cabin and the smell of paint and the unmistakable fragrance of the canal. I hauled myself off the narrow bunk and crept out of the cabin, careful not to knock my head on the top of the tiny doorway, and there we were, cruising silently and beautifully along the canal on the frostiest iciest night of all creation.

  Ice. Moon. Stars. The boy was there, he was at the helm of my little boat, and we were slipping along the canal in utter silence. No engine, no chugging motor, the boat was crisping through the ice on the surface of the water. Only a hiss and a crunch as the prow of the boat cut through the ice and sliced it aside. I smiled at the boy and he smiled back. I leaned over and saw how the ice curled from the boat in a spangle of foam. I saw how the moon shone into the blackness of the water we had created, and then I looked up and saw the moon itself, and the stars.