Wakening the Crow (6 page)

Not maybe. It was a certainty. After a few minutes cuddling with Mummy and Daddy, Chloe was breathing softly and easily and falling sweetly asleep. And, not a baby or a toddler any more but a bonny seven-year-old, she’d got her knees pressed hard into the small of Daddy’s back... so that I muttered, ‘Alright, sleep tight, I’ll just...’ and I slipped out of the bed, trying to dispel a resentful image of cuckoos and nests and so on, and into the next room, into Chloe’s still-warm and snuggly bed.

That was what usually happened. The difference this time, I didn’t sleep.

I lay there and listened, although I heard nothing, not a flutter of feathers or a skitter of claws. I listened and I thought of the crow and how wretched it had been, how it had come back to life and sculled like a hopeless cripple across the floor before launching itself out of the window. I lay very still and I listened, but there was not a sound. Probably, all but dead, it had fallen to the pavement far below and perished there, frozen to the ground. No matter. In the utter silence I stared at the ceiling, and then I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

The ladder. The ladder on the ceiling. The shape of it seemed to shine on the inside of my eyelids. It wouldn’t go away.

I opened my eyes and sat up. I swigged the milk that Chloe hadn’t touched. Reached for the biscuits. Hesitated, with one of them halfway to my mouth. Got out of bed and pulled on the cord, so that the ladder swung silently down and clicked into place.

So cold. At the top of the ladder, when I pushed up the trap-door and eased my head and shoulders up into the clock-tower, the cold seemed to rush at me and pounce and squeeze around me like the jaws of a trap, as if it had been waiting for me. There was a little orange light from the streets of the slumbering town. Nothing was moving in the icy dark room. The workings of the clock were locked into their sleep of obsolescence.

I crumbled the biscuits and tossed the pieces across the floor.

T
HERE WAS NO
sign of the crow, of course, when Chloe and I stepped out of the door of the church. Why would there be?

Cold, again. Cold, still. Minus three or five or six? A flock of grey and black pigeons whirled around the top of our tower. In the bare trees along Derby Road, the old nests of the rooks were exposed, like strange dead fruits still clinging to the branches. Always a magpie churring and chuntering through the blackened twigs of the hawthorn hedges... and gulls, the resourceful inland gulls, a mob of them, tumbling and somersaulting and soaring in the wintry sky, so far from the sea and yet thriving and voicing the triumph of their success with a never-ceasing cackling and laughter. Yes, there were crows, an odd pair across the playing-fields of Derwent College. But the sheen on their wings and the swagger of their gait said that neither of them was the moribund wreck we’d discovered in the church tower.

Rosie was at work. In the weeks following Chloe’s accident, of course the two of us had stopped work to look after her and try to settle ourselves in the aftermath of the shock. With the windfall of the compensation pay-out, we’d secured the church tower; but we would still need cash-flow, as Rosie put it, one of us would have to work, or maybe both of us part-time, and we would juggle everything around looking after Chloe. Rosie called Dowling & McCorrister, the dental practice where she’d been a highly-respected stalwart for years, expecting to be welcomed back after her traumatic time off. She wasn’t, she’d been replaced. Similarly, my cosy job in the borough council’s mobile library had been advertised, there’d been hundreds of applicants and the position was filled.

What to do? Rosie got a job twenty minutes’ walk from our new home, as a headmaster’s secretary. Brook’s Academy was a dismal private day-school in a dismal cul-de-sac, five or six disconsolate teachers cramming sixty-odd pupils for exams they’d already failed once or twice, and so-called Colonel Brook was, according to Rosie, a crank, a creationist. I would stay at home and look after Chloe. And every morning, as she girded her loins and every other part of her comeliness to set off into the teeth of an arctic winter, Rosie would do two other things. She would whisper her prayer into Chloe’s ear, her poignant appeal to the little girl to come back, to come back... and she would issue me with the necessary instructions or suggestions or precautions, entreating me to take every possible care, and I would see in her eyes the shadow of doubt that I was trustworthy, the flicker of fear that I might not be.

No sign of the crow. But I saw Chloe glance up at the tower, to the face of the clock, and then she angled her head slowly down and down and down to the pavement where we were standing, as though measuring the distance and trajectory of something falling. She saw me looking too. She just smiled, made a little chuckling noise, in the same way that she responded to anything, whether it be good or bad or nice or nasty, and together, hand in gloved hand, we set off for our walk across the park.

As instructed, we talked. I talked.

‘So we got our packed lunch, our sandwiches and our flask... is it hot chocolate this time? We’ve got some extra crusts for the ducks, yes the swans too if they’re there, and the coots, yes the coots, we like the coots best of all. We’re wrapped up warm, gloves and woolly hats and wellington boots... but Chloe, Daddy doesn’t want to go out too long today ’cos he’s got things to do with the shop, alright? I’ve got a visitor coming this afternoon, to see the shop and everything...’

I was excited about the shop. I’d tried to do a bit of publicity and had a number of responses to the mention of Edgar Allan Poe’s tooth... not all of them encouraging, some of them downright rude, poo-poohing the notion in the most caustic and withering tones. But most of them were from people who were intrigued, curious, for whom the idea was appealingly weird. Nothing wrong with that. And there’d been a phone call from a young fellow at the
Nottingham Evening Post
, who was coming around at four o’clock to have a chat and take a few shots and maybe do a piece for the paper...

We’d crossed the college playing-fields, I’d clapped my hands and sent up the rooks and the gulls in a cloud of black and white wings. We crossed the brook and onto Long Eaton park.

Not bad, not bad. Indeed, pretty good. For a nondescript, homely midlands town, somewhere between Nottingham and Derby in what was known as the Trent valley, Long Eaton had an unusually big and lovely park. Very flat, no particular features, but expanses of open fields and stands of mature trees, acres of space for runners and dog-lovers and cyclists... and for strollers like me, and Chloe pottering along beside me, the most beautiful of skies, over avenues of poplar and beech and the puthering cooling-towers of Willington power station. No, not exotic or romantic, only the suburbs of a satellite-town in the East Midlands, but somehow, even on the rawest of raw days in January, a place of unusual and ineffable loveliness.

So I said all this to Chloe. I said to her, ‘Hey, not bad, Chloe... pretty good,’ as we paused at the entrance of the park and took in the cold, bare emptiness of it. The sky was blue: not a cliché, but an expression of purity, perfection. The distant towers were exhaling enormous white clouds of steam. There was a flock of lapwings on the rugby pitch, a shimmer of green. And was that a golden plover, gleaming among them? ‘Not bad, eh Chloe? For a funny little town no-one’s ever heard of? What do you think? Come on, let’s go to the pond and have a nice hot drink and a sandwich and see who wants any of our crusty left-overs...’

The coots did, unassumingly handsome birds, urbane, smug, with their plump grey bodies and elegant legs and their striking white helmets. The swan did, surging towards us, so testy, so irritable. ‘Hey, Mr. Swan, why are you hissing and flouncing like that, when you’re ten times as big as everyone else and so gorgeous and you know you’re going get the biggest bits of bread just because you’re so big and gorgeous? Hey, just chill...’ And the mallard, the ducks demure and dumpy, like medieval wenches cowed by the presence of their lordship, the gleaming, iridescent drake.

Chill. For these birds, the chill in the air was death, which might be postponed by swallowing a few mouthfuls of bread. We sat on a bench by the pond. Chloe tossed her crusts into the air and watched them spatter on the surface of the water, or she held on tight and waited for the bravest of the ducks to nibble her fingers and sometimes the swan come snaking and hissing and snap with its big yellow beak. She windmilled her arm and hurled the remains of a sandwich high into the air, and a gull would come... it would make such a daring and brilliant pass that all the air would sparkle around the little girl’s golden-blonde head.

And then. And then it all went very quiet.

I hardly noticed how it happened, but we realised that all our friends at the pond, the coot and the duck and the debonair gulls and even the bilious swan, had drifted away. Or rather, they had withdrawn from us. A few pieces of bread floated on the water. It seemed strange that, on such a bitter day, with another long dark afternoon and a freezing night only hours away, the birds would ignore the food which could save their lives and see them survive until tomorrow. A persistent sparrow pecked at the crumbs around our feet, its dun feathers fluffed up to retain a bit of warmth in its scrawny body. But then it fluttered away.

Chloe looked up and around her. I followed her gaze. No hawk, no bully-boy black-back. We looked behind us to see if someone else, a man and his dog, had wandered by. There was no-one.

Under our bench. A wriggle and a writhing flutter.

A crow, but nothing like the swaggering crows I’d seen in the field. A raggedy thing. It was only a second, or two. Chloe squealed and lifted her feet off the ground. I found myself doing the same. A crow, which had skulked under the bench to snatch at the pickings, flapped away and was gone, almost before we’d known it was there. We saw it row into the air and grapple itself clumsily, like some kind of half-formed prehistoric bird, into the branches of a nearby willow.

There were other crows in the same tree. But they were completely still. Although the tree shook and its branches rattled with the impact of the bird which had just landed there, the others didn’t move. They didn’t even adjust their weight or their grip to compensate for the movement and keep their balance. We both stared at them. And we saw one of the birds lean a little and stop, and lean a bit more and swing on the branch as though its claws were locked... and then it fell. Without opening its wings at all to stop itself falling, it slipped off the branch and dropped through the snapping cold twigs and landed on the ground with a curious puff of sound... as though it weighed almost nothing.

‘Let’s go home, Chloe,’ I said to her. She was staring at the crows which were still in the willow tree. They were all motionless, their claws locked. Only one of them was moving, the scrag of a rag of a crow which had somehow kindled a spark of life when the others had died in the night. Their withered, empty husks were frozen to the tree.

Chapter Ten

‘V
ERY NICE, YES.
Very cosy. But is that the atmosphere you really want to achieve? Nice and cosy? For a horror bookshop?’

The reporter from the
Nottingham Evening Post
, who’d introduced himself as Joe Blakesley, was probably in his mid-twenties with a degree in journalism from Leicester Polytechnic, but he looked like a schoolboy, a skinny teenager conducting an interview for his social-studies coursework... earnest, with his notepad and camera and duffel-coat and his flopping fashionable hair, and a long red scarf looped casually around his neck. Before I could answer what might’ve been a criticism of the way I’d organised things, he smiled and went on, ‘But no, no it’s great, the church tower and coming through the big oak door and into this... the vestry, did you say? Tell me about the books you’re going to stock, anything about the history of the church... and the tooth, of course, I’d love to see it. I think it’s all great, it’ll make a great little piece for me, so please, fire away...’

He’d said, disarmingly, as though he knew that his bookish, journalistic look wasn’t entirely convincing, that so far he’d only done a few weddings and funerals... and last week he’d been sent to watch Notts County play Tranmere, but the match was called off because the pitch was frozen. So this was going to be his first feature. He took some shots of me and the room, and me with Chloe, and he browsed around the shelves.

Five o’clock. Outside it was as black as midnight, with the headlamps of the traffic swishing along the Derby Road. Every car that went by, on its weary journey out of town and home after work, shone an orange beam through our tall, narrow lancet windows and across the ceiling, a steady, unhurried rhythm of light. The vestry door was still open to the hallway, and the door of the church was open too, because I wanted to give the clear impression that it would be a shop, open to the street, open to the public. But the room was warm. I stood in front of the fire, which I’d built especially bright and hot, and I talked... while the young man sat at my desk and scribbled on his pad, while Chloe stood beside him and watched how his hand scurried and scratched like a mouse across his page.

I’d got the shrine ready, but I hadn’t switched on the lamp yet. It would be the climax to the interview. And I hadn’t told Rosie. Indeed, I’d deliberately arranged it so that she’d be out at work, to make a surprise for her, to reveal the article to her unexpectedly if and when it came out.

Firelight, the flicker of flames. The hiss of the traffic. The play of the headlamps on the ceiling and on the books on their shelves. The reporter writing at my desk. Chloe, so absorbed by the movement of his hand that she seemed to be holding her breath.

I told him about the church. It wasn’t very old, it didn’t have centuries of legend and spooky lore, a cemetery heaving with graves and lots of mossy headstones and such. No, it was an Anglican church, built in the 1880s, the architects were local worthies called Brevill and Bailey who’d designed many of Nottingham’s monuments and grand municipal buildings. Me and my wife Rosie, we’d bought the tower, converted very nicely into comfortable accommodation, and one day I was going to repair the clock in the tower. What else? oh yes, a man called Henry Wass had died during the construction of the church, he’d fallen from the scaffolding and...