White Crow

by Marcus Sedgwick

  We must.

  And that time is near at hand now, for the first of them arrives tonight.

  I wonder what will happen.

  Will the answers be revealed to us tonight?

  Or will we learn maybe at least some small secret, which may be as a foundation stone to the work we do?

  Or will we have the doors of perception slammed shut in our face, barring all, and permitting no knowledge at all?

  As I write, my pen shakes.

  What are we doing?

  What are we doing?

  Truly, will the angels lead us in God’s way? Or is this the Devil’s work?

  1798, 10m, 25d.

  Nothing.

  A false start.

  I had made my way by the cover of the night to the Hall, and together the doctor and I waited for the sound of the bell, but none came.

  We had expected a certain woman, not of this parish in fact, but of our neighbour’s, which does but show that our message has already been widely sent. We had expected this lady, by way of rumours reaching us through the boy the doctor uses to contact those outside the Hall.

  But she did not come.

  We waited all night.

  I slept ill on a cramped couch in the study.

  I go to my bed now, though the sun is high to noon.

  1798, 10m, 26d.

  What is it that I find to be so obstinate in the depiction of Heaven?

  I can paint paintings in my head of Hell. I think I can truly say, I know what occurs there. I can conceive of it, and I can see that it is a thing of logic. How it works, the way it is, how it is. Punishments for sins. The pain. The eternity of pain.

  The fact remains that I am unable to do the same for Heaven. What is Heaven like? Nothing I can think makes any sense. Nothing seems real, to have a place in the reality of my thoughts. To be believable. To exist.

  Is Heaven somewhere in the sky, with the clouds? Or is God so great that perhaps Heaven exists in some way that we do not understand, that we cannot understand. In some place that is not of this world.

  The same cannot be said of Hell. I know where Hell is.

  It is underground, it is beneath our feet. It is in the earth, down, down, in the direction that the doctor has dug under the Hall, but further. Yes, further, I pray.

  And if I know where Hell is, and what it looks like, and what occurs there, and if I cannot know the same for Heaven, then what does this signify?

  A monstrous thought assails me!

  Does this pertain because the one place exists and the other does not?

  How terrible would that be!

  That only Hell exists.

  1798, 10m, 26d.

  Perhaps our time is at an end now, our time of impatience, for rumour has reached us of another volunteer.

  A man in the village is near to death with some ailment, I know not what.

  I care not. So long as he succumbs, his illness will have served a purpose.

  He wishes to know what lies beyond, what lies in wait for him. And through him, we may learn what lies in wait for us all, when our own time is come.

  Praise be to God.

  Tuesday 10th August

  Ferelith refuses to answer any more of Rebecca’s questions as they tread the silent night summer-scented path to the churchyard.

  Wafts of honeysuckle and dog rose hang over their journey, and it is a warm and close evening, as if the air is desperate for rainfall that will not come. The path is dry and dusty underfoot, and Rebecca watches Ferelith’s slight and elfin form ahead of her, merely a silhouette, bobbing and weaving.

  She wonders about the odd girl she has met, and though she feels very close to her now, she realises with quick shock that she actually knows very little about her.

  She knows where she lives, but not really who with. She doesn’t know who owns the house where she lives, she doesn’t know how she gets any money to live on. A thought flashes through her mind that perhaps she’s a drug dealer; she could go into town once a month and sell enough to live on comfortably. Rebecca’s dad is always saying that this stretch of the coast is rife with drug-drops, and smuggling, as if this is the eighteenth century, not the twenty-first.

  She dismisses the thought. Wouldn’t she have tried to have pushed some on her by now, if that were the case?

  She knows very little too about Ferelith’s parents. Her father leaving. Her mother going crazy. That must have a pretty bad affect on anyone, especially at the age of fourteen. She doesn’t know if there are any brothers or sisters, she only knows that she is so intelligent that she finished school years earlier than normal people.

  There’s another word she catches herself using. Normal.

  And is it intelligent to be so very able with facts and knowledge at that age, or is it actually a bit weird?

  They’re nearly at the churchyard of St Mary’s.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Rebecca asks.

  ‘I told you.’

  Rebecca knows but she wants a better explanation. She tries another tack, forcing some lightness into her voice.

  ‘So, what’s my dare then?’

  Ferelith doesn’t even answer that.

  ‘This isn’t funny,’ Rebecca shouts, suddenly losing her temper.

  ‘Hey. Cool it. We’re there. You’ll see.’

  Rebecca sighs, and follows her round beyond the perfect front of the church, looking through the dark at the great front door that Ferelith opened to reveal her temple to the sea. It already seems a long time since that night.

  She thinks about her father, chasing his own daughter round a shadowy churchyard, but pushes the thought away.

  The sounds of the sea come clearly in the still night air, the rushing of the waves on the beach below the cliff sailing up to them like the soundtrack from a dark but gentle dream.

  Ferelith takes Rebecca by the hand.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ she says. But Rebecca doesn’t. Not at first.

  She’s still angry.

  It’s gone midnight and suddenly she feels very tired and cold. But Ferelith insists.

  ‘You have to do your dare,’ she says. ‘Shut your eyes.’

  ‘All right then. But if it isn’t over in ten minutes I’m going home.’

  She shuts her eyes and though the churchyard was pitch black anyway, now she can see nothing at all.

  It’s an unsettling feeling she thinks, being led, blind. It requires a great deal of trust, and she realises that she doesn’t trust Ferelith enough.

  She’s about to say so when they come to a stop.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ Ferelith says.

  When Rebecca does she doesn’t get it at first. It’s so dark now, and although her eyes have adjusted to night vision she can see absolutely nothing.

  ‘What?’ she says, feeling irritable.

  ‘There,’ says Ferelith. ‘Your dare. It’s right in front of you!’

  Rebecca looks, looks right down at her feet.

  She can vaguely sense something now, a greater darkness in the gloom that surrounds them.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Ferelith says. ‘And all you have to do is lie down in it.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘That’s your dare.’

  ‘What’s it even doing here?’

  Now she knows what it is, somehow Rebecca can see it more easily. A grave. An open, unused grave, only partially dug, with the spoil from the digging piled to one side, covered in weeds.

  ‘It was being dug at the time the church wall collapsed. For someone from the village, I guess. They never filled it up again. It’s been here for years.’

  ‘I’m not doing it.’

  ‘It’s your dare. That, or the forfeit.’

  Rebecca says nothing.

  ‘Your choice.’

  She thinks.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘As long as you want. But you have to lie down in it properly.’

  ‘Okay. But if I ruin these jea
ns you can buy me new ones.’

  ‘Okay. Deal.’

  Rebecca crouches, and then slowly sits down, her feet hanging into the empty space. In reality the grave is not so deep, and she can feel the bottom with her toes.

  She’s about to lower herself in, when Ferelith speaks again.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘There’s one other thing. You ought to see whose grave it is, first.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  And from nowhere Ferelith pulls out a torch, flicking it on and shining it at the head of the grave. The beam plays on something pale there and for a moment Rebecca is blinded.

  She blinks and then she sees what Ferelith is showing her.

  A gravestone.

  A gravestone with a name on it, and a date, and an inscription.

  It reads, In Loving Memory. She Departs This World.

  The date is 13th August 2010.

  The name is Rebecca Case.

  She swears and then swears some more, and drags herself out of the gravehole, the Winterfold, the Norse foldaen, the entrance to the underworld, and she staggers off, away through the graveyard, swearing at Ferelith and starting to cry.

  ‘No!’ she shouts. ‘No way.’

  Ferelith lets her go, but shouts one word after her.

  ‘Forfeit!’ she cries, triumphant. ‘Forfeit!’

  The Passion of Lovers

  I picked the right moment, I think.

  And having done that, I also picked up the gravestone and tucked it under my arm, thinking it might be a good idea to take it home.

  It was only two bits of painted cardboard stuck to a thick slab of polystyrene, but I have to admit in the dark it looked pretty good.

  Very realistic.

  I think it did the trick.

  I don’t suppose I’ll ever really understand everything that happened that summer. But I guess it had something to do with the way I felt about Rebecca.

  I loved her.

  But I hated her too.

  1798, 10m, 28d.

  Today is the Lord’s day, and I need the Lord’s love and goodness.

  But like an adulterous wife who cannot look her husband in the face, I fear I have sinned beyond all redemption.

  And yet, Lord, I only seek to know your design.

  Is that a crime? To know the world as you have created it, as from the void, from nothing to everything; the sheep, men, trees and rivers, the mountains, women, the grass, wine, potatoes, apples, the birds of the sky, and clouds, and rain, and sun, and yes, Heaven, and angels, and . . .

  And . . . ?

  If you created everything, Lord, then you must have created everything. And everything includes demons. And devils. The Lord of Decay himself. And you must have created Hell.

  Now why, Lord, would you want to do that?

  Today is the Lord’s day and I have never felt further from him.

  And yet I must set down here what happened at the Hall last night.

  He came.

  The young man came, past midnight, to the Hall. He spake little, and little did the doctor speak to him, save to ask him, a threetime, whether he truly wanted to know of his future.

  And each time that he was asked, all he did was to use a curse upon the Lord’s name, and looking the doctor in the eye, he gave a nod.

  And so this young man has become our first subject, and though my hopes were high, the results were low.

  I scorn myself to record it herein, but we learned nothing.

  Not a single thing.

  But, oh!

  The blood! The blood!

  Wednesday 11th August

  Rebecca dozes late into the morning, listening to the sound of her father downstairs, making breakfast, the radio on in the background, gently talking to no one.

  She sleeps, dreams of graves, then wakes again.

  Vaguely, she hears the front door closing and assumes it’s her father going out, but a few moments later she hears footsteps on the stairs and for some reason, she’s scared.

  She sits up in bed and is about to get out when her bedroom door opens, and Ferelith walks in.

  ‘Nice room,’ she says, going straight to the window and looking at the sea.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Rebecca asks, sliding out of bed and pulling her dressing gown on. ‘You can’t just walk into my room like that.You can’t just walk into other people’s houses.’

  ‘Like you just walked into my life,’ Ferelith says.

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’ Rebecca says, annoyed at having really walked straight into that one.

  Ferelith shrugs.

  ‘So, then,’ she says, ‘Your forfeit.’

  Rebecca doesn’t want to know.

  ‘That wasn’t funny,’ she says. ‘What you did last night. That wasn’t funny.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It was only a dare.’

  ‘But you set me up.You must have set the whole thing up.’

  Ferelith walks over to Rebecca and puts one hand out to her waist, but Rebecca pulls away.

  ‘Stop it. I’m not happy.You scared the hell out of me.’

  She sits down on the edge of the bed suddenly, and her head sinks into her hands.

  Ferelith kneels by her.

  ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It was just for fun, you know.’

  She soothes Rebecca, whispering to her, telling her good things, saying what she needs to hear, and Rebecca starts to cry properly now.

  ‘Hey,’ says Ferelith, ‘it wasn’t that bad, was it?’

  Rebecca shakes her head.

  ‘It’s not that. Not really. It’s just . . . Everything. Everything is going wrong. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it all being so hard, you know?’

  Ferelith puts an arm round her. To Rebecca, still warm from her bed, Ferelith feels cold, but it’s comforting nonetheless.

  ‘I know, I do know. But you’ve got me. I won’t let you down.’

  Rebecca lays her head on Ferelith’s shoulder and lets herself be held for a long time.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, at last. ‘It’s good to have a friend.’

  Ferelith stands up.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘And as soon as you’ve done your forfeit, we can be friends again.’

  And with that, she leaves.

  Four Sea Interludes - III

  I went up to the Lover’s Seat and sat by myself for a very long time.

  It’s a strange thing, this world of ours, I know that. But I can’t work out if it makes more sense if the strangeness was created by someone (I’m talking about God here, the bad boy upstairs with the beard and the big smock thing) or whether the strangeness is just because the world is a totally random place.

  And yet, the world is not totally random, is it?

  Things are the way they are for a reason.

  The cells of honeycombs are six-sided because a hexagon is the most material-efficient tessellation. That’s just the laws of geometry and so the bees have worked that whole thing out for themselves. Which is amazing in itself, but I think Darwin had a point, you know?

  I watched the waves far out to sea rolling in towards me and I thought about the pull of the moon that makes the waves in the first place, and again I thought, everything is like it is for a reason. Things are the way they are for a reason, and things happen for a reason too.

  It’s cause and effect.

  And I think that’s truest of all with people. I do something to you which makes you feel something, which makes you do something to me, or to someone else, either then, or years later.

  I was thinking about that.

  About how my mother went away. She was there when I went to school and when I came back all the therapy in the world had failed, and she was being carted off. So she went to that place that only made her worse and then one day (on a day when, I’ve always thought, she was probably feeling more sane), she managed to get herself alone for long enough to hang herself with a twisted sheet from the hot wa
ter pipes that ran along the ceiling of her room.

  They boxed all the pipes up after that (because now there was a reason to do that, too).

  But what I was thinking as I sat in the hot sun on the Seat, was that even that happened for a reason. She killed herself because of a long chain of reasons.

  I just don’t know what they were.

  Friday 13th August

  Rebecca spends two days sulking and feeling cross with Ferelith.