Advent (75 page)

 
He only stopped because she flung her arms round his neck. ‘Stay here for ever,’ she was saying, in a voice worn soft by grief. ‘Stay here with me for ever. Stay here.’ She buried her nose in the hollow of his shoulder. ‘Stay with me. For ever, for ever.’

 
For a moment he had no idea what to do with his hands. They hung stupidly in the air. Then he folded them around her, with a tenderness no one had ever taught him.

 
‘OK,’ he said, and patted her hair gingerly. ‘OK. For ever.’

Corbo flew until it was almost out of sight of land, tracking the demon in the water, but it dared not go on further. It gave up the chase with a despairing cry, wheeling low over the swell and turning back to the northwest, loathing each condemned wing-beat that propelled it back towards solid ground. Hunger might sink it before it got there. If it could not be free, it must feed the flesh it was shackled to. Already it felt itself weakening. Its wings wrestled with the air, hammered it instead of stroking it.

 
There was death in the sky. Somewhere over land, things that were not alive rose up and flew, growling and roaring with dead voices. They had the smell that fouled the world, the poison-smoke smell. Corbo could not see them, but it feared their approach. Battling the agony of its craving, it flew faster, making for the shore and the sheltering woods.

 
As it neared, it felt the rustle of a crow-thought.
Meat!

 
Spurred, it beat harder and rose as it crossed the cliffs, the upwelling air carrying it high. It glided noiselessly over the house. It saw the half-girl and the once-boy below. They embraced, a little shivering huddle of persistent life, and went in under the roof.

 
Turning as it met the current of the southwest wind, it smelled its fellow prisoner Holly below. Her limbs stretched up. She sang out her greeting.

Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum

Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum

From the canopy beyond the house came the sweet stench of the crow-thought, gathering strength as more birds arrived to share it. Now Corbo too found the scent of fresh death and rejoiced.

 
Among the trees the chorus of crows drowned out Holly’s antiphon. From generation to generation the crow-mind had preserved its memories of the old feasting fields, tapestries of slaughter garlanded with smoke. In their roosts they hoarded dreams of their centuries of plenty, the long golden age when the earthbound had been too impatient to wait for death and killed each other instead, legions of them, in numbers that made a mockery of burial. Now they smelled the crow-banquet coming again. A new wind was rising, rich with plenty. They called from valley to valley, spreading the word.

 
They scattered as Corbo descended. The corpse was too fresh for them anyway. Their hunger was visionary; Corbo’s was urgent. It did not care about the coming feast. It ravened now. All it saw in its future was bondage to the misshapen body, its cravings, its ecstasies, its sufferings – that, and the labour of watching over the once-boy, who would need all its care, if the crow-thought saw the coming months and years rightly.

 
But that could wait. It stamped down undergrowth with its splayed talons and bent over the body.

 
Madness had descended on Caleb as a kind of mercy, numbing the torment of his thoughts. He had thrown off the last of his clothes as he crawled among the nettles and thorns. The winter night had judged him with kindness, quieting him slowly, inexorably, irrevocably, until he was silenced for good.

 
Talons gripped and dug.

 
When Corbo finally straightened itself, its hooked mouth was smeared and dripping, and its feet too were stained crimson. It was transformed: a horrific incarnation of the chough, the Cornish crow, black all over but for its red beak and legs, a blazon of night and fire and blood. The carrion birds cawed the chough’s name in welcome,
Pyrrhocorax, Pyrrhocorax.
Their grim revels shook the wood.

On the other side of the world, across land and water, in a place once called Tsaxis, a teenage girl zipped her coat up higher and burrowed down under the blanket.

 
She always slept with her coat on. When it got cold, like tonight, she put the hood up too. Its thick, furry trimming gave her a nice animal feeling, snuggling up to something warm while she went to sleep, like being a raccoon kit.

 
Not tonight, though. She couldn’t get comfortable. Mom wasn’t back yet, which wasn’t a good sign.

 
She checked the clock with the glow-in-the-dark Mickey Mouse hands. Two in the morning, they said. Mickey pointed up like he was doing a cheesy disco number. Over in the proper bed, Carl was doing that snore that was like a panting dog mixed with a stalling engine. The excuse was that he got the proper bed because he was the biggest. Actually he got the bed because he said so, even though she was older. He got plenty of use out of it too. Not just sleeping, though he was lazy as a piece of wood. Whenever Mom flipped the TV around to her channels instead of his, up he’d come and in he’d go, and if it wasn’t to sleep, then he’d push Jen and Cody out and shut the door and do whatever it was he did on his own. Playing with himself. He left the magazines lying around. Some of the pages stuck together. Jen tried to stuff them back under the mattress before Cody saw them. It was the only mattress in the room – she slept on an old couch – and she didn’t think it was going to last much longer, what with Carl getting almost too fat to put his own shoes on.

 
Cody slept noiselessly on a camp bed near the windows. He’d built his barricade next to it, as usual, between him and the door. It was only piled blankets and clothes and some other crap, cast-off hockey pads and empty cigarette boxes and things like that, but he built it up anyway, every night. He waited for Carl to fall asleep before making his little wall and then woke up before him so he could take it down again secretly. He was learning to hide his weaknesses, though Jen thought it was kind of a bit late for that.

 
As well as her two brothers there was baby Crystal, asleep in the folding cot. If she woke up, it would be Jen who’d have to try to keep her quiet. Or if Cody woke up with one of his screaming fits, it would be Jen who’d hold his hand and curl up with him until he stopped, and then walk him all around the house to show him Andy wasn’t home, and then take him outside whatever time of night it was to prove that Andy’s truck wasn’t anywhere near the house and he really didn’t live with them any more. If they both woke up at the same time, it would be up to Jen to combine the two jobs, crooking the baby in one arm while she led Cody around with the other. If Mom came back late and happened to be in one of her moods when she wanted to talk, it would be Jen who’d have to intercept her at the door before she set Cody off, and steer her to her own room and listen to the weeping and mumbling for however long it took that particular night until her bloodshot eyes went glassy and she tipped over and passed out.

 
Between one thing and another, Jen spent a lot of time awake in the night.

 
To make matters worse, she’d developed a pretty good sense of when these things were likely to happen. She’d learned to read the signs. These days she even had an idea of when the baby was gearing up for a bad night. Not so surprising, since she was the one who kept an eye on Crystal every afternoon and evening. When Mom got going she liked to whine about how hard it was looking after all the kids. Jen thought that was pretty funny, since she usually came back from school to find Mom downstairs with beer and smokes and the TV on loud and Crystal cooped up in a playpen in a different room with a big wet diaper. Come to that, Jen thought it was pretty hilarious that any of them complained to her about anything. They were the ones who dropped their burdens on her like she was paid to carry them. She made half an exception for Cody, who’d had a bad time when Andy’d lived with them, but she still reckoned she’d been in more trouble than he had, in the last few months of Andy’s stay. She’d seen that new look on his face each time he barged in the bedroom to take it out on Cody. Those wolf eyes of his would roam over her way. Taking a long hard look, before he got started on her little brother. She was sixteen; she was getting her boobs; the way they were coming along, she’d end up fitted out like the pink-fleshed girls in the magazines. That was why Mom had finally kicked Andy out. Not because he bullied and hurt Cody – she pretended not to notice that – but because she got jealous. She couldn’t stand him looking at someone else.

 
Jen had got into the habit of going to bed with her coat on and zippered up anyway. But the rest of the time she was actually pretty happy about the boobs. They were her ticket out. Mom would never let her go away, so her only chance was to get someone to take her. There’d be a white guy in town someday with a stack of cash, an address way down island and an eye for the boobs. Wham, bang, see ya later. All the girls at school agreed she’d be the first to make it.

 
There was a loud crash outside.

 
Jen’s eyes opened very wide.

 
It sounded like someone had gone through the woodpile. If Mom was so drunk she’d missed the house by that much, she’d probably crash out as soon as she got in the door. She’d still be in the chair in front of the TV when the kids went down in the morning. That was good; it meant a quiet night was more likely. But – Jen’s eyes flicked nervously from side to side, though her head stayed still, nestled in the hood – she hadn’t heard the sound of the truck coming back. She was sure of it.

 
Another clatter. They called it the woodpile because a guy up the road came three or four times a year and cleared out dead wood behind their lot for them, split it and stacked it neatly and covered it with a tarp. He did it just to be helpful. Jen liked watching him work. He took his shirt off when he was busy with the axe, even in winter. He had muscles all over his back and shoulders, not boy-muscles, not puffy gym-muscles like the jock kids at school, but man-muscles, stringy and supple and useful-looking. Mom tried to get him to come in for a beer but he always smiled and said no. It was never the nice guys who fell for Mom. Funny, that.

 
Jen wondered why he bothered coming back anyway, since all they ever did after he’d gone was toss their own sad ugly garbage around his craftsman-like stack. Their yard was an arrangement of junk heaps. You left anything out there more than a week, it became the bottom of a new pile. Mom kept everything. She had this idea that time would turn it all into money. ‘We could sell that someday,’ she always said. ‘Someone’s going to want that someday.’ Empty canisters, lengths of pipe, mower parts, fishing nets, old toys, a broken fridge, window frames, a boat trailer, tyres, outgrown bikes. All time ever did was rot it or rust it, whatever it was.

 
Something was climbing around in it. She heard glass breaking. Not Mom; it couldn’t be. Not drunk kids screwing around or she’d be hearing voices too. An animal?

 
A thunderous clang: something must have been knocked over against the old truck. Could an animal have come down out of the woods and got tangled in the junk? It sounded like a big one, elk or bear. But animals didn’t clatter around in people garbage unless there was food involved, and even Mom wasn’t stupid enough to leave anything out there that smelled. There was a lolling, clumsy rhythm to the sound of the thing’s progress through the yard. Animals didn’t get drunk, did they?

 
Her breath caught.

 
Andy?

 
She’d have heard a truck; surely she’d have heard a truck. Unless he’d got some scary idea about sneaking up along the road on foot. Maybe he knew Mom was still out.

 
The baby squirmed. That baby could be half a Carney, Jen thought, as she pushed back the blankets. Could be Andy’s child. We could be rearing a wolf cub right in this room.

 
She tiptoed to the bathroom and looked out of the window.

 
She thought at first it
was
a bear. Something dark and shambling was pushing through the scattered junk. Then she saw that the dark was some kind of big coat, and the shambling was two-legged. In the shadows cast by the single outside light it looked like a moving tent.

 
Noises came from it, smothered wheezy grumbling sounds. It got clear of the pile and shuffled towards the house.

 
It stopped. There was a shaggy head on top, which till then had been bent like it was rooting through garbage bags. The head lifted, twisted round and then looked straight up at the bathroom window.