Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  He had known they would one day get to see each other again. Like most things in life, it was only a matter of time.

  32

  Scuttling things in the darkness

  Merlin was the first to arrive. He waited beneath the overhanging eaves of La Teatro Nuevo Rialto, a little worried that the ancient building might come folding forwards like a collapsing stack of books, but more concerned about being spotted by the groups of revolution-fuelled thugs that came stamping past. While the riots were taking place in the streets sandwiched between the port and Avenida Diagonal, pockets of fighting were breaking out all over the city as more and more residents were drawn into the fray.

  Soon the others began to gather. Slav the Russian came lumbering up, grunting a single-syllabled greeting then stepping back into the shadows to wait. Then came the Sleeping Beauty (a rather androgynous Belgian called Richard, awakened for just ten Euros), Hans, the Soccer Ball Juggler (a disillusioned German who had once had trials with Bayern Munich before breaking his ankle falling down a flight of stairs), and the Human Ivy, an older Spanish man called Luis who got up at five a.m. every day to paint himself green and stick flower petals all over his body.

  The five of them stood at awkward distances away from each other, not meeting each other’s glances, as if sensing their collective shame. Just five. Where were the others? And where was Peter?

  Merlin became more and more antsy the lower the sun fell in the sky and the louder the distant riots became. Unlike some of the others, Merlin had come in full costume, afraid of being considered an imposter.

  Slowly the others trickled in. With each new arrival Merlin felt a lessening of his guilt, the shame of wanting a murderer’s money gradually dissipated amongst them all until it could be trivialised, forgotten. There was still no sign of Peter, but by the time the sun dropped behind the buildings to the east, fifteen of the twenty members of the union were waiting in the shadows beneath the theatre’s wide entranceway.

  Almost at the exact moment that the last rays of sunlight slipped off the bottom of the theatre doors, they swung languidly open as if the sun had held them shut. Merlin was near the front, just behind Slav, as they entered into a lobby that had once been plush but was now all faded and dusty. Everything seemed to be a shade of grey, like a photograph left out in the sun. Merlin wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, a welcome party or a silver plate of hors d’oeuvres on a table, but what they got was neither, just the creaks and groans of an old theatre. Dim emergency lights in the ceiling cast everything with a sepia glow.

  A gasp made Merlin turn. Behind him, one of the others had changed their mind. It was a Portuguese girl named Candice, whose act was The French Flower Lady. As she rushed screaming for the street outside, the doors banged shut, cutting her off. She crashed into them, slamming her fists against the heavy wood.

  On Las Ramblas she was usually seen wearing an assortment of plastic roses and carnations, but tonight she had worn just a floral patterned dress. She screamed as something thin and metal whipped out of an alcove to the side of the entrance and wrapped itself around her, pulling her dress tight against her body.

  Candice dropped to the ground as the metal tentacle dragged her back towards a massive robotic spider that had stepped out into the light. Slav and a couple of others started to run towards her, but two more man-sized spiders appeared to their left, scuttling across the floor towards the first, their legs click-clacking in the discordant rhythm of a drunk tap dancer.

  Candice was now held in the front legs of the first spider. A whirring like the sound of fishing boats unreeling their anchor chains came from the spider’s maw and Candice spun around, a gluey rope that shone beneath the ceiling lights wrapping around her. The spider kicked her trussed body away, the girl tied so tight she could barely cry out. With a snarl like a misfiring car engine it turned towards the others, its metal tentacles swaying in the air like a cobra ready to strike.

  ‘This was a trap!’ someone shouted. To Merlin’s right, Hans was racing up the steps towards the stalls entrance.

  The German nearly made it. A couple of steps from the top something stepped out of the shadows, lifted an arm that seemed part of a giant wing, and Hans tumbled back towards the floor below, bumping down over the hard steps.

  Merlin went to help him up, but Hans stayed down, clutching his ankle, the old football injury. ‘Go,’ Hans said between gritted teeth, his eyes telling Merlin all he needed to know.

  Slav bellowed a war cry as the nearest spider charged. He got hold of its front legs and tried to flip it, only for a metal tentacle to wrap around his waist. He managed to spin free, only to have two more spiders converge on him.

  ‘Run, you fools!’ he screamed back at the others.

  Merlin glanced left and right. Something flashed through the air towards him and he brought his staff up reflexively. The wood splintered and broke, but it deflected the spider’s metal-tipped tentacle, knocking it clattering harmlessly against the steps behind him. It lay there for a second like a dead snake, then rushed back across the floor as the spider reeled it in.

  Their short resistance was almost at an end. Hans had scrambled away from the steps but three spiders had cornered him. The others were trussed up like sacks of garbage. Merlin had an image of them burning, their makeup seared off their faces by hot flames to form scars of red, blue and white down their cheeks. He tossed the remains of his staff away and ran for the nearest corridor.

  The clacking of metal feet announced his pursuer’s presence as Merlin stumbled forward into the dark, the only light beyond the lobby a flickering one, like a searching torchlight. The corridor, once home to milling crowds of visitors as they laughed and chatted and drank wine in the minutes before a performance began was now filled with blocky, sheet-covered shapes, angular mechanical ghosts. A chair leg poked out from under one, the corner of a table from another. As he ran past one precariously leaning pile, Merlin reached up and pulled it crashing down behind him. The spider squealed as the heap of chairs scattered across the corridor in front of it. Merlin paused as the light he had been using to see by vanished. It had belonged to the spider, he realised now, some kind of headlight it was using to give chase.

  He struggled on, feeling his way past more heaps of piled furniture. Then, as the light appeared again, dimmer this time with the spider further back, he started to run.

  The corridor angled right, a gradual arc around the stalls. He saw another light up ahead. Perhaps it was another lobby at the rear of the theatre, facing out on to the opposite street. If he could just get to those doors—

  Something snagged on his robe and he fell hard, cracking his cheek against the floor. Pain flared across his face and he shifted around to see the protruding wing of an old ceiling fan hooked through a shred of his robe. The light from behind him was flickering closer. He looked back as the spider came leaping around another heap of tables and launched itself at him.

  Merlin couldn’t think. He was living a nightmare, and his body turned to autopilot. As the spider flung itself on top of him he rolled sideways, grabbing the leg of a protruding chair and pulling the whole pile down on top of both of them.

  The spider took the full weight, the thundering crash of dozens of chairs slamming down on its torso. It squealed and its legs buckled, leaving just enough room below its buckled torso to prevent Merlin from being crushed. The headlight was still on, and as its body pressed forward, a face that was alien yet human pushed close to his.

  ‘Save me,’ came a whispered rasp, then the light switched off and the spider slumped, the heap of chairs shifting, threatening to collapse on Merlin’s face. One foot was trapped, but he kicked out and managed to wriggle free, vacating the pile just as the spider’s legs gave way and a couple of dozen chair legs slammed down onto its back.

  Merlin didn’t wait to see if it was still alive. He turned and headed for the second lobby area. There were more emergency lights here, but the wide doors where guests would have
entered were bricked up. Feeling a knot of despair in his stomach, he turned and looked up the steps towards the nearest stalls entrance. More scuttling click-clacks came from back in the corridor as other spiders came in pursuit. Hiding in the theatre itself was perhaps his only chance. He staggered up the steps, trying to ignore the pain in his cheek, and threw the doors wide.

  ‘Oh, abomination….’

  He slipped to his knees, tears filling his eyes, his hands pressed against the dusty, frayed carpet.

  The room looked like a torture chamber in the process of disassembly. Strange half-robotic creatures moved among lines of tables and conveyor belts, taking apart the equipment and packing it away. Several people in various stages of dissection and reconstruction still lay on metal slabs, every surface dulled as if the air secreted its own taint. Merlin watched in stunned silence as a humanoid robot approached one of the unfinished experiments, pulled a knife from its body and drew it across the person’s throat like a butcher slicing ham. As the experiment gargled and jerked, blood spraying out of its neck wound, the robot began to disassemble the equipment around it.

  The clacking sound was coming up the stairs. Merlin was unable to bring himself to move as two gummy ropes snaked around his waist and began to drag him backwards. He didn’t care anymore. After what he had seen, he wasn’t sure he could ever care again.

  33

  Nozomi in trouble

  Nozomi was awakened to the sound of a commotion in the corridors outside the dressing room. She looked up, waiting a few moments for her vision to clear, and realised that she was alone. The woman thing had gone, and a thin line of light peered under the bottom of the door.

  Her head ached. She wondered if she’d been drugged, because she felt like she’d been asleep for days. She had no idea just how long, but from the way her bladder was screaming at her she knew it was several hours at least.

  She relieved herself in a corner, unable to hold it in any longer, and dumped a pile of old curtains over the top of it to mask the smell. From the other side of the door came angry shouts in Spanish and another language that might have been German, but she couldn’t be sure. She peered through the keyhole, but all she could see was a blur of shadowy running things that might or might not have been people.

  Kurou had always been willing to teach her anything slightly criminal; she was adept at sleight of hand and could hotwire most older cars, even though she didn’t actually know how to drive one. In the cupboards and closets in the dressing room she found a couple of old wire coat hangers that could be bent into a shape that would pick the old lock, just one of many lessons Kurou had taught her. The door was too heavy for her to break even with the strength the metal inserts gave her hands and arms, but she felt sure if she could wedge something metal into the mechanism she could bust it open even if the lock was too rusty and gummed up with dust to be picked.

  But she was scared. Who were the people outside? Kurou had told her someone was hunting them. Had they been found? If she left the room she could find herself dead. Instead she waited, crouched down by the keyhole, until the sounds of fighting had died down. Something heavy, like a metal garage door, scraped as it was lifted up, then boomed as it fell back down again.

  After everything had gone quiet, Nozomi waited as long as she could stand it, crouched by the door, her eye pressed against the keyhole, until she was sure no one was coming back. Then she jabbed the end of the coat hanger into the lock and jerked it around, holding it loosely as Kurou had taught her, feeling in her fingers the resistance of the tiny levers that made up the lock.

  With a click it disengaged. Stifling a shout of excitement, Nozomi opened the door a crack and peered out.

  The key for the door was hanging on a hook outside the room. Her master’s neatness both amused and horrified her. It wouldn’t have surprised her to find a plate of tea and biscuits beside it.

  The floor was scratched and scuffed. A few pieces of metal and some sticky lengths of rope lay scattered about. Of the creatures or the people there was no sign. As she walked across the lobby towards the corridor beyond, she wondered if perhaps her master had taken them to La Sagrada Familia. Why, she couldn’t imagine. She wasn’t privy to his grand plans any deeper than as concepts. A light show to woo the world, a performance this city will never forget, a spectacle of exquisite mastery….

  From beyond the doors at the top of the steps leading to the lower circle came the clanking and thudding of equipment being moved. It sounded like her master was moving them out, just as she was getting used to the city. Not if she could help it. For some reason she thought of Jorge, the little boy who had tried to help her. She wondered where he was now, and felt a pang of regret at the way she had treated him. He had only tried to befriend her after all. It wasn’t his fault she was a freak controlled by an even bigger freak who had a love for turning normal people into horrific once-human monsters.

  Her master was the problem, he always had been. She had let him fill her with his twisted ideals and his endless lies, but when he had imprisoned her with the Akane thing he had left her behind, and there was no coming back.

  She could kill him herself, slide a knife in between his bony shoulder blades, feel his black heart pop beneath its tip, watch the tar that was his blood ooze thick and black from the wound as he sank to his knees in front of her, begging for mercy, begging for her to end it fast. She would withdraw the black, dripping knife, its blade already beginning to corrode from the acidity of her master’s soul, then pull it across the crusty, folded skin of his neck and release the last of his life into the world. He would fall to the ground in front of her, burning up in a puddle of his own blood, and it would be over.

  She would be free.

  The entrance doors creaked. Nozomi shrank back into the shadows as a man stepped through them into the light. He was short, barely taller than she was, with pale, northern European skin, a pinched face that seemed stretched by the long hair tied back in a ponytail. He wore a black trench coat over black trousers, which made his face look like an oval moon orbiting a pit of shadow. He moved with confidence in long, positive strides, and Nozomi knew instantly that this was him, the man her master claimed Uncle Jun had hired to kill them.

  The newcomer turned towards her, picking her out of the shadows. She glanced back, but the dressing room and its relatively safety was too far away. Despite the metal that pulsed under her skin, her legs felt like jelly as she stared into the emotionless hollow of the newcomer’s face.

  Then the doors at the top of the stairs opened and one of her master’s once-humans stepped out.

  She remembered him. His name had once been Jimmy Leaves, a jobless drifter they had abducted a few months before in Monte Carlo. Her master had fused his genes with the DNA from some mutated species of bat, then attached huge synthetic wings to his back and robotic fangs to his face. He was one of her master’s prized achievements, and with claws that could cut glass, one of his most deadly.

  Leaves had been left behind to guard the clean-up operation. At the sight of the man standing at the bottom of the stairs he dropped into a fighting crouch and screeched, his head rocking back, bat wings rising out behind him, each one tipped with glass and barbed wire.

  The man by the doors dropped to one knee as if praying. Leaves launched himself off the top of the steps and swooped downwards. The man lifted his arms above his head as if ready to catch Leaves like a thrown child’s toy. Leaves collided with the man, knocking them both backwards. Then Leaves was screeching again, but this time in pain, one of his wings hanging half off. A blur of motion and the other was twisted backwards too, snapping Leaves’ shoulder, leaving him a twisted, jerking mess on the floor. He swung one clawed foot and managed to catch the man across the cheek, then he was rolling over, the man pinning his wings to his back, seemingly oblivious to the barbed wire cutting up his arms.

  As Leaves struggled, the man leapt onto Leaves’ back, twisted and ripped the bat wings clean off, taking what was lef
t of Leaves’ arms with them. Leaves screamed and writhed as oily black blood oozed out of his bloody stumps.

  It took less than a minute for Leaves to bleed out, his struggles slowly weakening. The man stood with his arms folded and watched, as nonchalantly as a father watching his child on the swings in the park. Then, when Leaves was still, the man went to stand over his body, and stood staring down at him, arms folded, eyes not leaving Jimmy’s face.

  Nozomi heard a sharp pop as Leaves’ neck snapped. She gasped. The other man hadn’t touched him.

  Eyes shot up, looking straight at her, and Nozomi was unable to stop herself crying out at the sight of twin black orbs peering out of that face like pearls of onyx. The man turned to her and … flew … towards her, taking one step and launching himself far further than any human could jump unaided, to land just a metre in front of her. Hands reached for her neck, at the end of arms speckled with pink spots where just minutes before cuts and scrapes had scored his skin.

  ‘I know where he is!’ she blurted, just before her throat was too tight to breathe. She tried to shift his hands away, but his grip was iron hard, immovable. Strong fingers dug into her skin, and then she blacked out.

  #

  ‘Far,’ Jorge said. ‘We drive.’

  Jun looked at him. ‘We need to steal a car,’ he said.

  Jennie’s eyes widened. ‘We can’t do that.’

  ‘Not likely the taxis are all that useful now, is it? And the Metro’s shut up.’

  They’d passed two Metro stations that Jun had seen commuters going into and out of just an hour before. Now the shutters were down and crowds of angry people were milling about outside. There were no signs of any taxis and half of the roads were gridlocked.