Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  Even Chloe stood back. The brightness and the heat, too intense. The bird dived into the fire and was a living, burning part of it.

  The fumes, the stench of it; a crow on fire.

  Its blackness was a coat of gold. It was some kind of medieval monstrosity, a folk-memory of witches burning, of martyrs burning, a memory of images blazed onto our brains by legend and lore and the reality of human atrocity. When at last it recoiled from the flames, or rather the flames spat it out and onto the hearth, it was still alive, a creature born of the fire. And in its beak it had the tooth.

  It had plucked it out. For the tooth of the boy, it had endured immolation.

  We all three stared at it, as it beat and shuddered and rowed on the flagstones in front of us. Chloe was reaching for it, she too was reborn and shuddering with a new life, the invigoration of her awakening.

  ‘No, Chloe!’ I heard myself shouting, and I was holding her back with one hand while instinctively reaching for something, anything, with which I could quench the burning bird. Fool, utterly foolish and without a glimmer of sense in my brain, I grabbed for the bottle of rum and twisted it open and splashed the precious, golden liquid all over it. It exploded into a billow of blue and green and orange flames, the most repulsive dish a gourmet had ever created, with such an acrid pungency that it sent us all sputtering and choking backwards.

  But it had the tooth. And when the alcohol was consumed, and the crow – like a changeling from an arcane book of fantasy – was no longer a nightmarish vision of smoke and fire but a raggedy bird again, it held the tooth tightly in the tip of its beak and sprang away. Towards the door of the vestry.

  Chloe sprang after it.

  WAS IT CHLOE? Or the boy?

  They were one, at least in my eyes, in my tortured imagination. I could see both of them blurred into one, as she or he or the two of them went after the bird. They were a folding of blonde hair and limber young limbs, a boy and a girl from two hundred years apart fused into one.

  And with a single purpose, to get the crow. For the girl, it had her tooth, it had a piece of her deep in the coils of its gut. For the boy too, it had his tooth, a piece of him.

  By now, all but consumed by the fire, the bird was an appalling, smouldering thing. Could anything be more black than a burnt crow? A crow, black in itself and to the depth of its ravening soul, from the tips of its claws and satanic feathers to the tip of its beak – and now, blackened by burning – was there anything blacker?

  It couldn’t fly, its wings were all but destroyed by the fire. A pall of stinking blue smoke arose from it. Alive, infused by a seemingly unquenchable life, it avoided Chloe’s attempts to catch it. She, part girl and part phantasmal boy, chased it across the vestry and into the hallway.

  Rosie and I? We stumbled behind them in a strange somnambulant slow-motion.

  As we lumbered to our feet, from where we’d been crouched and cowed by the fire, it was a chaos of jumbled sensations, a dissolution of our senses. Belief, disbelief, what did it matter? Believing or disbelieving what we saw or felt or smelled or tasted in the whirling, fumey, sooty air, what difference did it make? It didn’t hinge on belief. It was all unhinged. Belief? the very word implied a process of thought and a rational conclusion. Didn’t it? Now it was smoke, it was a stink of burning feathers, it was our child, half-naked and filthy and yelling fuck this and fuck that and blurring with the sweat and breath of a boy whose tooth had come to me, into my life, coincidental with the damage and death I’d caused.

  Rosie was blurred by the dream too. My real-life Rosie, pragmatic and practical and untroubled by nonsense – she was consumed by the nightmare, I could see it in her eyes and the curl of her lip and the flaring of her nostrils. She’d seen the boy, she was seeing him still, she’d signalled her belief in him the split-second she’d thrown his tooth into the fire. There was no turning back from that, no room for doubt. The two of us, we blundered behind the girl, the boy, we were in their thrall.

  And in our dream, we were on the roof of the tower.

  How did we get there? How, in dreams, do you shift from moment to moment and place to place and world to world?

  Somehow, in pursuit of the crow – such a horrid apparition that only Poe himself could have imagined it – we were up and up the stairs and through the kitchen and the bedrooms, never mind the silvery ladder and the clock tower and the trapdoors... all of those real places were subsumed by the unreality of dream. We were on the roof, where a lowering mist of thaw and drizzle fell around us like a cloak.

  Nothing but mist. No town, no park, no clouds of steam on the horizon. No horizon.

  The charred remains of the crow summoned one last reserve of strength. A prehistoric half-bird, half-reptile, using its beak and claws and the exposed bone of its wings, it grappled itself up the stone face of the battlements and perched on top.

  Chloe stretched up to it, and her pudgy little body was disconcertingly taut for a second or two. She or he, Chloe or the boy, gleamed in the sheeting rain, wet hair darkened from blonde to gold.

  The crow juggled the tooth of the boy, tried to swallow but couldn’t. It rowed its pathetic stumps so furiously that it rose from the battlements and into the mist.

  Chloe clambered after it. She slipped, she grazed her belly on the stone, but still she climbed, pulling herself up with sinewy, long fingers, with a boy’s strength, with the lithe, lean muscle of a boy. She was there, high on the brink, when the bird fell back. And with a strange crowing of triumph that she might seize the bird and tear it apart for the relics it withheld, she lunged for it.

  It fell away. In a swoon of weariness, an acceptance of death, the crow slipped off the edge of the tower.

  Chloe too. She stretched so far into the mist that her fingertips were lost in it. She lost her grip on the stone and toppled forward. She seemed to swim into space, into a netherworld of cloud and rain and nothingness.

  She fell away, gleaming, slippery, so that, when I shook off the thrall of nightmare which had been so suffocating, when I hurled myself up and out and caught her wrist, I felt it slithering through my grasp.

  She was dangling somewhere below me. I had her fingers, but she was invisible. The dead-weight of a little girl, the wiry, prehensile strength of a boy.

  I saw the crow falling and falling, no more than a smudge of black in the grey cloud. And then it was gone.

  I pulled with all my weight and strength. The mist parted. Chloe reappeared.

  Epilogue

  BELIEF IS ONE thing. Disbelief is another. When the whiff of suspicion hangs about you, you protest too much and it starts to stink.

  It happened before, when I was finding out I couldn’t teach. Something happened; it was my word against another’s, and they believed a snotty little eight-year-old girl, not me. Actually, nothing happened, but when she sniffed and snivelled and whispered her dirty story, they believed her. Not me.

  Rosie believed Chloe. And so they went away again. Ironic, I might say, after nine months of grieving and praying and beseeching her beloved Chloe to come back from wherever she’d been despatched by the bang on her head... within an hour of her return to normality, Rosie had spirited my beloved daughter away again.

  Normality? Chloe woke up and yes she was normal again, she was her normal, sneering, foul-mouthed self.

  She recounted what had happened. She blurted a torrent of ugly words, as though they’d been pent up for all those months and couldn’t wait to come spewing out, as vivid as though it was yesterday, right up to the moment of her sudden loss of consciousness. The library van on a bright April afternoon, Daddy ignoring her, too busy with his silly old books. Her running to the pub for crisps and lemonade... the wasp... Daddy laughing and teasing, spilling the fizzy stuff all over her and trying to tug off her clothes, Daddy’s fingers, groping into her pants all hot and sticky and... and Daddy laughing as she ran out of the van and into the road.

  No good. The more I protested my innocence – that yes, I was t
easing but I never touched Chloe like that, I never oh god I never for the tiniest millisecond touched her like that – the more I could see the doubt in Rosie’s eyes. The disbelief. I could hear myself wheedling, feel myself wriggling, and I caught in my own nostrils the first whiff of it, the unmistakable suspicion of my guilt. I protested louder, more forcefully. It started to stink. She believed Chloe, not me.

  It’s March. Springtime. I’m on the roof of the tower. It’s a warm afternoon. I can see far across the fields of the park and there’s a haze of green in the blackened winter hedges. There are daffodils, splashes of yellow in the fringes of the woodland.

  Away to my left, the town is a shimmer of blues and greens, the houses and workshops and factories where thousands of people are busying their complicated lives. Ahead of me and on the horizon, the cooling towers of the power station are vast and yet strangely elegant, somehow at rest, not a wisp of steam emerging from them. Gulls in an empty sky – silent, soaring, silver and grey in the sunlight.

  I peer over the battlements and down to the world below me. The traffic on Derby Road, a few pedestrians, a customer emerging from Azri’s dabbing his lips with a paper tissue... My sign is down there, but I know I can leave the shop and come up for some air because there’s been no customers all morning, hardly a one for the past days and weeks. Why would there be? I don’t have any books which can’t be bought in the high street, either in the mainstream outlets or the charity shops. Poe’s Tooth? It’s just the name of the shop, it doesn’t mean anything.

  What’s become of the tooth?

  I lean out and over the battlements and remember how the crow fell into the mist. I see a darker mark on the pavement, not far from the door of the church, and I figure fantastically what it might be – a ghastly vestigial stain where the head of a workman hit, when he’d fallen from high on the scaffolding; the spot where the gentleman organist cracked his skull and joked about it, scattering his dentures like the confetti of his own long-ago wedding; the place where the crow might have landed, unseen, unnoticed, on a drizzly January morning, and was swept up by a council workman.

  The tooth?

  Dentem puer. Trodden into a crack in the pavement, just outside my doorway, until a mooching schoolboy or an eagle-eyed investigator like Joe Blakesley prises it out and slips it into his pocket? Pressed into the tread of a tyre, Anthony Heap or his daughter passing the shop and carrying it with them, unseen, unnoticed, until a curious traffic warden or mechanic teases it out and wonders what it is? Or is it lying in the hedgerow, bedding harmlessly into the earth, among the bones of the crow?

  A tooth of Edgar Allan Poe. Extraordinary that it’s somewhere here, in England, a few yards or miles away. A little, indestructible piece of him.

  And it was mine. I believed in it. So did Rosie and Chloe. No one else ever will. How can they? It’s just a tooth – no mischief or malice or sinister intent – an anonymous bit of bone. Without belief, it’s nothing.

  I’m about to go downstairs. Close the shop, have a drink. I watch the traffic for another minute and breathe in the smell of it, the fume of the road and the unmistakable fragrance of spring. From my left, a bus is coming. It’s the 7B from the Broadmarsh Centre in the middle of Nottingham, it’s come through Beeston and Chilwell and now into Long Eaton and it’ll go all the way through Breaston and on to Derby. It goes past the top of Shakespeare Street and I can see the great red slab of its roof beneath me. Next stop Derwent College, just another hundred yards, where I used to get off with Chloe after a day out on the boat and into town.

  The bus stops, away to my right. When it pulls away again, it leaves two figures on the pavement.

  A woman and a child. They stand for a moment, unsteady after negotiating the steep narrow steps from the top deck. Rosie leans down and fiddles with Chloe’s coat, straightening the collar and doing up the buttons. Chloe, fidgety as ever, squirms away from her. When Rosie reaches out to try and make her stand still a little longer, the girl avoids her outstretched fingers. She moves to one of the great pillars of the entrance to the school and her fingers feel at the smooth stone. She bends into the hedgerow, where the twigs are prickling with green shoots, and she makes to pick something up.

  Not for long. Rosie is quick and firm and uncompromising, not at all a soft touch like me. Whatever the little girl has caught up in her inquisitive fingers, Rosie shakes it all out. Jewels of light, they drop back into the hedgerow.

  Hand in hand, they walk along the pavement. When they pause and wait for a gap in the traffic so they can cross the road to the church, they both look up.

  They see me. I wave at them. I see the gleam of their mouths as they smile up at me. I hear Chloe’s voice as she calls out, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I’m back!’ And then, when Rosie bends close as if to prompt her what to say, Chloe is calling, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry.’

  The ghosts that haunt us are not always strangers...

  When his elderly father suffers a stroke, Christopher Beal returns to England.

  He has no home, no other family. Adrift, he answers an advert for a live-in tutor for a teenage boy. The boy is Lawrence Lundy, who carries with him the spirit of his father, a military pilot – missing, presumed dead. Unable to accept that his father is gone, Lawrence keeps his presence alive, in the big old house, in the overgrown garden. His mother, Juliet, keeps the boy at home, away from the world; and in the suffocating heat of a long summer, she too is infected by the madness of her son.

  Christopher becomes entangled in the strange household, enmeshed in the oddness of the boy and his fragile mother. Only by forcing the boy to release the spirit of his father can he find any escape from the haunting.

  ‘A first class terror story with a relentless focus that would have made Edgar Allan Poe proud’

  New York Times on The Cormorant

  ‘Gregory’s voice and vision are wholly original’

  Ramsey Campbell

  ‘Intelligent and well-written’

  Iain Banks on The Cormorant

  www.solarisbooks.com

  THIS IS THE HOTEL WHERE OUR NIGHTMARES GO...

  It’s where horrors come to be themselves, and the dead pause to rest between worlds. Recently widowed and unemployed, Richard Carter finds a new job, and a new life for him and his daughter Serena, as manager of the mysterious Deadfall Hotel. Jacob Ascher, the caretaker, is there to show Richard the ropes, and to tell him the many rules and traditions, but from the beginning, their new world haunts and transforms them.

  It’s a terrible place. As the seasons pass, the supernatural and the sublime become a part of life, as routine as a morning cup of coffee, but it’s not safe, by any means. Deadfall Hotel is where Richard and Serena will rebuild the life that was taken from them... if it doesn’t kill them first.

  ‘Tem’s Deadfall Hotel makes The Shining’s Overlook Hotel look like Butlins. Eerie, disturbing and yet strangely touching, you’ll check in but may never check out.’

  Christopher Fowler, bestselling author of the Bryant and May Mysteries and Hell Train

  ‘Rasnic Tem is at the height of his powers with this effort.’

  Fearnet.com

  ‘Truly brilliant.’

  Denver Post

  ‘Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.’

  Joe R. Lansdale

  www.solarisbooks.com