The Book of the Crowman (7 page)

Gordon preferred hunting, but prey was scarce in London – in any city – unless you counted rats. He didn’t mind eating rat if it was unavoidable but he preferred a nice, plump country rat. The rats living amid the broken buildings, piles of refuse and overflowing sewers had fed on all manner of filth. Sometimes it was more prudent to hunt in the larder or fridge of a deserted house and survive on a tin of spam.

He checked out some of Denise’s suggestions first, almost choosing to stay in one of the administrative offices above the disused swimming pool. It was warm up there for some reason but the mouldy air tasted bad. What attracted him most was the idea of a green door and an overgrown garden. After a cursory glance at some of Denise’s other ideas, he set out for number 257, already set on finding a way in and making it his temporary dwelling.

Half a dozen steps led up to the front door. Like many of the neighbouring abandoned houses, it had been boarded up years before; however, this job was more thorough. Someone had fixed a steel grille over the front door and padlocked it. The padlock was rusted shut. A glance over the steps confirmed the windows on the lower floors and below street level had been covered with sheet metal. There were dents where someone had taken a swing or two with something heavy before giving up. Around the outside of one metal sheet, small curls in the metal suggested a failed crowbar attempt.

Number 257 was part of a short terrace of sizable Victorian houses and there was no way through to the garden from the front entrance. To the left of the row, there was a line of long abandoned business premises. To the right was an area of parkland. Gordon trotted along the deserted main road, heading for the open ground. Grass that must once have been thick and green was now knee high and parchment dry. It rustled and crackled making it impossible to tread silently.

The edge of the park was walled but the brickwork had provided cover in some forgotten fire-fight and there were many collapsed and shattered sections. He chose a solid-looking vee in the wall and scrambled to the apex. From there he spotted the alleyway which he hoped led to the rear of number 257.

He walked along the top of boundary wall until he was looking down into the alley. From there he could see the back gardens of the entire row. The garden of 257 was a jungle; too dense and thorny for him to climb down into without shredding his clothes and skin. At regular intervals there were doors set into the wall of each back garden, giving the properties access to the back alley. He could see the one which corresponded to 257 – its paint was the same colour green as the front door, reminiscent of the half-broken door in the garden wall of his home; the door Jude had shut on him the last time he saw her.

He pushed the memories away, dangerous reminiscences that would only weaken him, and dropped the ten feet to the alley floor. Broken glass further disintegrated under his boots as he landed in the dark, walled passageway. Rats scattered at the sudden intrusion, fleeing from the maggot-ridden carcass of a fox. The alley was just wide enough for him to pass through without rubbing his shoulders against the brickwork; more like a trench than a walkway. He moved fast, not wanting to spend a moment more than necessary in that vulnerable compressed space.

The paint on the green door was flaking away and the wood at its base was exposed and rotten. The round bulb of its handle was made of pale china, almost luminescent in the gloom of the alley. He turned it and pushed. The door moved but didn’t open. As he’d done with their own garden door so many times, he put his shoulder to it and tried again. This time the door gave way, opening a six-inch gap. Through this he could see the wilderness on the other side had formed a second layer of protection.

When he took his body away, the springy growth pushed the door closed again. A second shoulder-barge created the space he needed to squeeze through. He let the door shut behind him. To his right lay a haphazard pile of old floorboards now fungal with decay. He kicked the upper ones away and found stronger ones below. He took one of these and wedged it under the door handle, bracing the other end against the roots of a sapling; it was no lock but it was better than nothing.

The mess of growth looked impenetrable and much of it was bramble. Now that he was safely within the boundaries of the property, he could take his time. He leaned back against the wall and studied the knots of weed, tree and shrub. Close to the boundary was where the growth was thinnest. To reach the back of the house, he’d have to skirt the perimeter.

The garden was long and some of the bramble had bunched against the wall like coils of barbed wire. Scratched but not seriously harmed, Gordon made it to the rear of the property and assessed his options. The windows on this side were nailed shut with chipboard and much of it looked weakened by the elements. Steps led down from the jungle to the basement windows. To his right a flight of stone stairs rose to a boarded-up back door. He ran down the basement steps for a closer look.

From the street at the front and the alley at the back, number 257 looked impregnable. People needing shelter in a hurry would have disregarded its steel hoarding and impenetrable thorns in favour of an easy bolthole. Perhaps that was why there were no signs of previous break-ins at the rear of the house. And yet, the edges of the chipboard were soft and damp under his fingers. He unclasped his knife, using the tip to chisel away the disintegrating flakes of compressed wood. It didn’t take long to expose a glimpse of window frame beneath, its green paint bright and undamaged by sun or rain. Pulling the board away was easy. Most of it came off in a single tug, leaving only the top left hand corner of the double window covered. However, the wrenching and cracking was conspicuous in all the silence and he stopped to listen for a long time after the board hit the ground.

Breaking the window was noisy too. He listened again for several minutes before reaching into the darkness and opening the latch. The window swung out and Gordon swung in.

The next thing Megan is aware of is the smell of wood smoke, tobacco and cooking oats, and a cold ache in her nose when she breathes. She wraps her blanket around her shoulders and crawls out through the bender’s flap. The frosty morning turns her breath to fleeing ghosts. Autumn is kissing winter.

Mr Keeper stirs their porridge with one hand and smokes his pipe with the other. Any sadness he may have walked with is gone and his face is kind, half-amused as it so often is. There’s not much frost in the cover of the woods, just a dusting of white on the most exposed, extended branches and the outer leaves of smaller plants.

Beyond the trees, though, the land is stiff and unmoving. Tiny rainbow coloured points sparkle in the ocean of white. Megan starts as dozens of raucous calls echo from a distant stand of tall, skeletal trees. Black shapes detach from the black branches and flap into the air by twos until perhaps a hundred crows are in flight, flowing like ink across a page.

She stares at the blank landscape long after the crows have gone, able to think only of empty pages.

“I’ve so much work to do,” she says.

Mr Keeper nods.

“I won’t forget it, will I?”

“You won’t. You
can’t
. It’s in you now. In your blood.”

“But what if I make a mistake? What if I only almost remember it right?”

“Then the book will always be wrong and the story forever untrue. The generations to come will misunderstand the teachings and the world will end soon after.”

Megan sees all this as she looks out over the frozen land. Then she glances at Mr Keeper and sees him grinning. Her lips flatten white against each other. Why does he never take anything seriously?

He chuckles.

“Listen, Megan, the writing is the easy part. All you’re doing is recording what you see. You’ve done it right so far and you’ll keep doing it right until you’re finished. Don’t give it another thought. What’s difficult is walking the path, trusting in it when everything screams at you to turn away and give up. You have to be strong to move through that.”

Does he know something, she wonders?

He smokes his pipe and watches her, serious for only a moment before his eyes crease at the edges and he is smiling again, cheerful and mischievous.

“There’s no point in me trying to convince you that you’re strong enough, Megan. That you’re worthy. You can only do that for yourself. And the only way you can do it is by walking the path.” Mr Keeper shrugs. “You’re already doing that, so you might as well stop worrying about everything. Here, have some oats.”

She takes the proffered bowl and crouches on her haunches to eat it.

“Carrick was your teacher, wasn’t he?” She asks. “When you walked the Black Feathered Path.”

“Yes. He was.”

“Why isn’t he still in Beckby?”

“Keepers move around. Our group of villages only needs one Keeper because it’s quite small. Other places need more. Sometimes, a Keeper will make the world his village and move from place to place giving his knowledge and checking all is well. That’s what Carrick does. He uses the rivers to move from place to place. He makes sure the Crowman is alive everywhere and he keeps an eye out to make sure people keep the balance.”

Megan stops eating for a moment. Surely, Mr Keeper must have been there with her, must have seen and heard it all. Or is it simply that the Crowman foresaw all this? As though she’s never heard of it, she asks:

“What balance?”

“All of it. You’ve experienced the dark and the light of the Crowman, so that’s one example but mostly it’s the balance of giving and taking. Keepers make sure no one falls into the beliefs that first brought the Crowman into the world. In times gone by folk believed the land owed them its life, not that we owe ours to it. That is the opposite of balance. It almost brought the world to an end.”

“Is that what the people who lived in that city believed?”

“Not all of them, perhaps but certainly most.”

“I saw them.”

“I know you did. I was with you.”

“They looked desperate. I didn’t know so many people could be so unhappy.”

Mr Keeper shrugs.

“You shouldn’t be surprised, Megan. We all have it in us. Just as we have the capacity for joy. We can live anywhere we choose; in the depths of the blackest midnight or in the heights of the brightest dawn. And the Crowman soars through all of it. He has been everywhere and knows everything. Because of this, he cares not what is right or wrong but what is simply
true
. He knows how this world must be lived in, in order for it to flourish or to die. He shares that choice with each of us.”

“Most of us live in the light, then.”

“Most of us live with a foot in the darkness and a foot in the light. Or we stand at dusk moving into night or we stand at dawn moving into light. No one, no
thing
, is purely one or the other.”

“But can’t we all just be light and good?”

“No. We have to remember where we came from. Before light there was blackness. Blackness is where the light came from. And now we follow that light through time until it returns to blackness.”

Megan’s porridge is cold. Her mind whirls. She believed the path would bring answers. She believed her training would make her calmer and wiser. But for each door of knowledge she throws open, two more appear on the other side.

“You’re saying that no matter what we do, everything will fall and die and be swallowed into the dark.”

“Yes.”

“Then why should we bother to
do
anything?”

“Because we have the honour of existing.”

“Huh! Not for long.”

“Life is a wonderful opportunity to be alive, Megan. We should all take it. Look at Carrick, skipping around like a boy, full of light even in the twilight of his years.”

Megan is crying.

“It’s so… sad.”

“Perhaps. But it’s also very, very beautiful.”

She wipes her eyes and nose on her sleeve.

“But if this is all true, I just can’t understand why it’s worth
trying
to achieve anything when everything will be taken away.”

Mr Keeper sets down his bowl, unfinished.

“If you ask the question ‘why’ to every answer, eventually there’s only one answer left. That answer is: ‘I don’t know’.” He turns and stares into the cold, leafless trees for a moment before looking back at Megan. “I know in my heart that the things I’m telling you are true enough for me to live by, even if they’re not exactly correct. No one has all the answers, Megan. All I know is that by being alive, we’ve become part of something greater than ourselves, something vast and mysterious beyond our ability to understand. This life, this energy, instils us with natural passion and drive. It makes us seek things out and ask questions; questions much like yours. That, to me, is a sign that you, Megan Maurice, are very much alive and walking the path that was created for you.

“Life brings with it a sense of duty and honour and you should listen carefully whenever those things call to you. Listen to what’s inside; watch the land and all its creatures for clues. Everything you need to know, you already know and all the things you’re learning are nothing more than a rediscovery of those things. I promise you with all my heart, Megan, that all is right with the world, even in its darkest manifestations. This is what the Crowman wants you to know. He needs you to be strong enough to hold that idea, not as a belief but as knowledge, housed in your very flesh. In your bones, in your blood and in your heart. If you can do that, not only will you have walked the Black Feathered Path to its endpoint – and therefore to its beginning – you will also have lived a beautiful, magical and full life. You will have been worthy of the gift of it.”

Megan is silenced by the enormity of it all, by its great simplicity and the responsibility it places upon her shoulders. Without a word, she helps Mr Keeper pack up their camp and clean away their breakfast. She waits for fear to rise in the aftermath of Mr Keeper’s words but it does not. Instead she finds the hard granite of resolve that anchors her through every uncertainty and danger, a foundation rock that grows more firm and stable with every day she walks the Black Feathered Path.

Her tears dry quickly. By the time they strike out for home across the brittle, white landscape she is calm again. Empty but calm.