Wakening the Crow (29 page)

The crow was on the table. As it beat across it, knocking over the lamp with a crash and an explosion of the bulb, it picked up a glitter of glass and tossed it aside, it caught a corner of the velvet box and threw it onto the floor, and then it was on the keyboard again, skittering its claws across the keys this way and that, as though it wanted to add some more of its literary gems to the nonsense it had already written.

Rosie had a book in her hands, the biggest and heaviest she could find – the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. She raised it and smashed it down.

Where the bird had been. Like a wraith, it was there and then it was gone.

The book crashed onto the keyboard. The bird was already in mid-air, a filthy black shadow. Not real. A piece of imagination, a fragment of nightmare. A figment of bad dreams and horrid ideas fomented in the mind of a frightened and lonely little boy.

The boy? We all stared at him.

Me and Rosie and Chloe, we all saw him and stared at him, because he was standing beside the desk, where the collection of his monstrous, poisonous stories had been hurled at the bird. I could smell him. I could smell the cold stale smell of his breath, the stale smell of his unwashed body and his hair. He stood where he’d been my teasing, mocking muse for all the nights of my nightmares.

His breath was a cloud of ice. The crow reappeared in it. The boy exhaled and conjured the bird from within himself, as though he’d created it with the breath of his inspiration. And the bird was on the keyboard where he had urged me to write, where the bird had written more and more meaningfully than I had ever done.

Mocking. Yes, mocking me and taunting us...

The crow pecked into the cracks in the keyboard. For a moment it stood there, gleaming purple and black in the breath of the boy. It had Chloe’s tooth in its beak. It tossed it into the air and caught it again and swallowed it down.

Rosie stepped forward.

‘No!’ she yelled. ‘No! Not that! I don’t care what you are or what you do, but not that!’

She’d already lost a part of her Chloe, she would not relinquish anymore. Not even an unwanted tooth. She reached for the bottle of rum I’d put beside the computer. With a steely look of death in her eye, she set herself to swing at the bird and smash it, destroy it, kill it forever.

Chloe was right behind her. She seemed to blur into the body of the boy. Just as he faded and disappeared, just as Chloe assumed the very shape of him and the space in which he’d been standing, Rosie swung the bottle up and over her shoulder.

Bang
. It hit Chloe right between the eyes.

Chapter Thirty-Six

S
HE DIDN’T CRY
out. She didn’t fall over. She stood very still for a moment, her eyes wide open and very puzzled. Then she teetered slightly, and before either of us could catch hold of her, she sat down heavily on her bottom.

We were both of us there, kneeling to her. Rosie was mewing over her, with her arms around her body. I bent close and peered at her forehead where a bump was already growing.

‘Oh Chloe, I’m so sorry, so sorry my darling, my darling so sorry...’ Rosie was cooing into her hair.

She’d put the bottle onto the floor, and I saw it rolling slowly and beautifully in front of the fire, the rum inside it glowing golden in the light of the flames. I was muttering nothings into her ear as well, as she sat there and stared into a space between us, as she blinked and frowned and licked her lips.

And then she did a strange and unexpected thing. She shook her head, like a child awakening from a bewildering dream. She felt into her hair – no, not at the place where the bottle had struck her – she felt at the back of her head, as though it was the wounded place. She stared suddenly up at me, and her eyes were cold. She blinked again, recognising me. She started to get up...

‘Chloe? What are you doing?’ Rosie was quick to say. ‘Just stay still, stay where you are, don’t start jumping up and...’

Not quick enough. Chloe was on her feet.

She sprang away from me. With a snarl of contempt, she recoiled and started yanking at her clothes.

In a moment she’d torn off her pullover and was wriggling her t-shirt up and over her head and hurling it aside, and she was standing in the firelight, naked from the waist up. She clawed at her body, nubbing her little tits and scoring welts on her belly with long raking strokes of her nails. And she hissed at me, the first words she’d uttered for nine months.

‘Cos it fucking stung me, that’s why! And fuck you Dad! Keep your hands out of my pants. I’ll tell Mum, I’ll tell her...’

C
HLOE WAS BACK
. I thought she was coming for me, like a wild cat. No, she went for the bird.

It had flopped onto the floor as Rosie raised the bottle above it. It must have skulked into a corner as we were tending to the girl. Now it rose from the shadows of the floor, blacker and sootier than ever before, bigger and more threatening, as though it had gathered strength from the compliant limbs of the doll. It writhed up and out of the darkness and into the light of the grey wet morning as though it had a purpose. It confronted Chloe.

She sprang at it, reaching for it with both her hands and uttering a half-hissing half-screeching guttural cry, as though she knew it had her tooth in its craw and was working it into the toxic juice of its gut.

The crow – it avoided her with a clumsy feint, it tumbled from the desk where it had gathered itself and spread its wings in a defiant, mock-heraldic pose, and it thrashed past her, and past us, and plunged to the heat of the hearth in a raggedy confusion of feathers. It landed there, sudden and swift as a hawk, and just as terrible. Its claws were onto the mouse, it stamped and stamped and then it stabbed with its beak and tossed the creature into the fire.

The mouse ignited. No smouldering and smoking and blooming into flame. No, the heat was so intense that the mouse simply burst into a stink of fire and was gone, consumed in a second and crinkling into a ribbon of black stuff.

Me and Rosie, appalled, we cringed from the horridness of the spectacle.

Not Chloe. Half-naked, painted by the flames like a storybook savage, she flung herself forward. For her tooth? To avenge the mouse? To exact some retribution from the spirit of the crow?

Before we could intervene, she was so close to the fire that I could smell the heat of it on her skin, and she was grasping for the bird, her little hands and chubby childish fingers closing again and again on thin air as it fluttered and flapped in the smoke which puthered from the cremation of the mouse. And then, perversely, because I knew with a horrible certainty that if Chloe had closed on the bird she would have torn it into pieces and fed it into the fire, it poised for a daring moment in front of the flames and deliberately thrust itself in.

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.

W
AS IT
C
HLOE
? 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

B
ELIEF 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.