Wakening the Crow (22 page)

I held her very close, I folded her in my arms. So this was the strong, brave woman I’d married, this was bossy, controlling, wearing-the-pants Rosie. She was utterly disconsolate. I unrolled her from the towel and sprinkled her all over with talcum powder, put her back into our bed.

‘We’ll find her, Rosie,’ I whispered to her, although Maid Marian had disappeared.

A mystery... I’d searched under the bed, shaken out all the soiled bedding, I’d even pulled the bed away from the wall to see if the doll had slipped down.

‘I’ll find her, she’s got to be somewhere in this room. But more important, tomorrow we can either get you down to the clinic for some stronger antibiotics, or I’ll go the pharmacy, and hey, I think your mouth is a bit better, isn’t it?’

‘It might be, yes, a bit...’ she mumbled. She inhaled a huge breath, controlled the quivering of her lips and framed the words as clearly as she could. ‘Yes, it might be. Thank you, my darling, thank you for looking after me, and for looking after Chloe.’ She gazed up at me, and the love in her eyes was almost unbearable. ‘Where have you been?’ She was trying to say, ‘What’ve you been doing? I don’t want to lose you as well. I’ve lost Chloe, and me, I feel like I’m losing myself... and you too... what’s happening to us?’

I slipped into the bed with her. Chloe had moved to the door of her own room. She was standing there, with the two other figures in her arms. For a moment she just stood there and stared at us, her father and mother together again, and then she turned and disappeared. I heard the rustle and creak of her getting into bed.

BIG WET MOUTHS
. laughing, big wet mouths. library van, hot and full of people.

too many people. can’t read can’t think, all pressing around me, got books open on my table and the words and the pictures are swimming in front of my eyes.

saxophones, constellations. maps, telescopes and taxidermy. impossible to read them, people pushing and braying. so many people, the van swaying, and the noise.

can’t breathe. get up and push to the open door. a village square, a church and a pub and a shop. a few cars parked. nice little sports-car right outside, with the top down. nice, with wire wheels and shiny mirrors on stalks.

they’re all talking and laughing inside the van, i turn back inside and into their wet mouths, wet lips and tongues, loosened by drinking. a young couple, she’s blonde and he’s dark, type-cast in a soap. old heap, throwing his head back and laughing. his son, big man, braying too.

they’re laughing at chloe. i don’t like it. something she said. she’s naked, no, not naked, but her pudgy little body is mottled and reddened, her baby tits are striped as if she’s been nubbing them with her fingers, clawing them with her nails. something she said. she flails her arms around her head and she’s crying, her face is distorted with distress and pain and the unfairness of everything, everyone is braying with laughter and their wet big mouths are shouting fuck you dad it fucking stung me that’s why...

on the roof. on the roof of the tower. at last i can breathe. barbeque? was it my idea? big sky i can breathe. all on my own at the top of my tower and smouldering a smokey barbeque. and they’re coming up, one by one, oh fuck they keep on coming up and up through the little trapdoor, they’re coming up through the clock tower the belfry whatever and up and up to the roof of my tower...

look over the battlements, see that little nice car stopping at the kerb, far far below. they look up at me and get out and they wave. old heap, he pushes his head through the trapdoor and he’s wheezing. and his son, helping him, pushing his aged father up and onto the roof and then reaching down to help his daughter... and the other sister whoever she is with her medieval dolls there’s three fucking generations of heaps, elbowing and shouldering through the trapdoor and up and up onto my roof, onto the roof of my tower.

and blakesley? fucking cheeky, got that clever little know-it-all smile on his face and he’s reaching into a crevice in the battlements and pulling out snails and popping them onto the barbeque, and he’s murmuring about escargots and he’s turning them on the grill until the shells pop and the flesh oozes out and he’s...

colonel brook, in a waft of after-shave. old gent, mr vaughan, war hero and sunday-school teacher how fucking perfect can you get, he claws himself up and glances around as though it’s his tower, his church, he’s acquired it by all his years of being there. me and chloe and rosie, of course, oh, and the mouse, nibbling out of chloe’s sleeve and dropping out and great hilarity as it scurries and...

and the crow. it’s whirling overhead. lovely, criss-crossing the sun. no, not lovely, it’s a blot. the sun is lovely and cold and crisp and the crow is a blot. sick in my stomach, me, when i see the shadow crossing, criss-crossing.

at last we’re all gathered for our barbeque on the roof. trapdoor shut.

crowded and laughing. a lot of teeth. why are they all so perfect, the soap-opera teeth and the colonel and the organists’s dentures, and the youthful blakesley? rosie, as toothsome as only a dentist’s assistant can be, and chloe with her smile that smile that permanent smile? so crowded on the roof, i’m crushed to the battlements and leaning out. i’m standing on the trapdoor. i shut it and stand on it and everyone’s laughing...

and then they stop.

they all stop, as if they’re listening for something. holding their breath. the mouths are still. even the swoop of the crow is still.

something moving under my feet. i can feel it. i’m standing on the trapdoor and something is trying to push it open.

my weight is too much for it. but i can feel it pressing against my weight, trying to push me off the door, trying to lift me up and off it. i’m sick with fear. my stomach is sick.

help me, please help me. the fear is sick in me. i’m crying out, in a suffocating dream, for people to help me, to help me, oh please to help me stop whatever it is which is crawling out of the blackness of the tower... i’m calling for help fuck to try and stop the trapdoor from creaking up and bursting open ...

they don’t help me. they’re watching, and listening but they don’t help me. they are silent. their perfect smiles and laughter have been quenched.

someone is coming up. i step off the trapdoor. it opens slowly.

a boy. he looks up and he smiles. a mouth full of blood.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I
WOKE WITH
a start, stared into the darkness for a few seconds and then reached over Rosie to try and turn on the lamp.

But I stopped myself just in time. I didn’t want to wake her. A ray of orange light from the street was falling into the room, and I could see her face, so still and quiet and perfectly peaceful. She was lying on her back, snoring so softly that her lips barely moved. Her mouth was slightly open, drooping to one side, and a trickle of saliva shone on her chin.

I was afraid. The dream had shaken me. And I was cold. As I’d struggled, in my nightmare, to maintain my balance on the trapdoor and keep it shut with all my weight, I must have kicked the duvet off my side of the bed. I was naked and uncovered. I sat up and reached for the duvet to pull it on top of me again.

And I heard a sound.

Not a dream. Cold reality. The kind of reality which is so dreadful, literally full of dread, at two o’clock in the dead of night.

Footsteps. Not in the room. For a bewildering second I thought they were overhead, that someone was moving in the dusty darkness of the clock tower. Footsteps, very slow and soft. But no, they were not in the room and not above me.

Below me, somewhere. I turned my head on the pillow, as afraid as if I were a child, filled with the terror that children feel in their worst and most terrible dreams. I stared at the door of the bedroom. It was shut. But the fear I felt, like ice in every part of my body, was behind that door. And it was coming up the stairs.

I forced myself off the bed. I crossed the room and put my ear to the door, and I could hear the footsteps. More than that, I could feel them, their rhythm was palpable in the air around me. The footsteps grew louder. Not heavy, indeed they were as gentle as a child’s footsteps, but then, when I saw the handle turning, the fear was so great in me that I leaned with all my weight to try and stop the door from opening.

Nevertheless, it opened. I must have stood back and allowed it. I must have known, in my grown-up’s mind, that I was awake this time and there wouldn’t be, there couldn’t be a boy, with blood spilling from his lips...

Chloe. She stepped into the bedroom.

She brought with her a mist of ice, as though she had been so deep in the darkness of the stairs, down into the hallway and the vestry, that she’d gathered a cloak of the freezing night around her. She even smelled of the night. The smell of ice was in her hair.

‘Chloe?’ I think I said, although my voice was no more than a plume of frost. ‘Chloe, where have you been?’

She stepped past me. As she passed through the orange light from the road, I saw that her face and hands were smudged with something. Ashes? Soot? She had smudged her face with it.

When she saw the empty half of our bed, she crept onto it. Before I could reach her – I was standing naked and paralysed by the door – she tugged the duvet over herself and snuggled against the soft, warm flank of her mother.

I stood at the open door, a yawning, icy-black hole. I should have gone down, I was the man of the house and I should have gone to see what on earth Chloe had been doing and if she’d left the kitchen door open or even the doorway of the church for the night and all its whispering spirits to come in...

But I didn’t. I closed the door and I crept into Chloe’s room and into her bed. I lay awake for a long time. Like a child who’d had a nightmare, I was afraid to go back to sleep, in case the nightmare was waiting for me. If I closed my eyes, it was lurking in the shadows. My eyes open, I could see the trapdoor above me and imagine the boy pressing against it with his head and his shoulders and clenching his teeth so hard that the blood welled from the place where his tooth had been... and if I turned my head I could see across to the other bedroom door, the door I’d tried to hold shut until a sooty, smiling Chloe had somehow stepped through.

Where do you go, if both dreams and reality are too frightening? Where else is there?

I tiptoed to Rosie’s bedside. She and Chloe were breathing easily, in the bliss of each other’s body. I found a bottle on the floor. The remains of red wine? Was it rum or the last cloudy swirls of the port? Whatever, it was a friend in the night. I took it to bed with me.

Q
UARANTINE.
I
DIDN’T
open the shop the following day. All morning and all afternoon, I didn’t go downstairs. The three of us, we stayed in our tower, locked in, closed in from the outside world.

We didn’t need to go out, we didn’t need anything. All that morning and afternoon, we neither went up nor down. Rosie had awoken better and calmer and more herself, and said we might put off a visit to the hospital another day or so. She’d be alright, she said.

So the limits of our world were the bedroom and the kitchen just below it. Sometimes we heard the scrabblings of a rat or the flutter of a bird in the clock tower above our heads, but there was no reason to go up and look. And we heard the traffic in the road, far below, the movement of other people, but they could have been some kind of aliens going about their business, because they didn’t touch us at all.

A few times I heard the rattle of the church doorway, someone trying the door and maybe wondering if the shop was open, but I ignored it. Once, there was a persistent knocking; it became an exasperated hammering, one of those members of the public who thought a shop must always be open and available and the proprietor amenable and servile and obsequious and fawning and... anyway, it was so loud that Rosie and I looked at each other with eyebrows raised, and Chloe froze her smile in anticipation of my getting up and going downstairs. But after a while the hammering stopped.

All day we stayed in the bedroom. Me and Chloe, we went down to the kitchen now and then, to make coffee and toast and honey for a breakfast which we carried back upstairs so we could all three of us eat it in bed, and then at lunchtime we did scrambled eggs with mushrooms and bacon and brought it upstairs again. Rosie didn’t have to move from the sprawl of her bed. Her sheets were clean and fragrant, she had slept in the cuddle of her daughter and all would be well. Apart from eating, apart from waiting on Rosie and keeping her as cool and comfortable as possible, what did we do? We did Radio 4. We dozed, we read through a slippery heap of glossy magazines we found under the bed, until we could’ve been experts on the glitz and glamour of last year’s celebrities and footballers and eligible young royals. Chloe played with the mouse. She improvised a run for it. She made mountains and caverns and deserts through our bedclothes, so that Mouse could embark on his quests for adventure.

Mid-afternoon. We were still aloft in our tower. Whatever might be happening in the shadows of the clock tower or on the battlements of our roof, we didn’t care. And far below us, in the hallway or the vestry and in the scurrying, myriad world outside, there was nothing to touch us, nothing we needed, nothing we even needed to think about.

I blocked it all out of my mind. In my fanciful daydreams, whenever I thought of the shop downstairs and the relic which had come to define it, we were like the revellers in The Masque of the Red Death: we had deliberately and defiantly incarcerated ourselves in our great stone castle, we had everything we needed and the outside world could go hoot. I tried to block it all out, because I sensed, with a feeling of dread in my belly, that with sleep there would come dreams – crowded, baleful dreams which might bring back to me the reproachful reality of my life.