Wakening the Crow (30 page)
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 teasing 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
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