White Crow

by Marcus Sedgwick

  We studied his visage, and again the doctor called to him.

  - Mason! Mason! Speak to us! What do you see?

  His eyelids opened, and the orbs swivelled to stare not at the doctor, but at me.

  He fixed me with a stare that lasted for a full half-minute, during which time his lips twitched and moved as if to speak, but no sound came.

  And I bethought me of the deaf man, who has learned to read words from the movements of another’s lips, though he does not himself hear a single utterance.

  And though I tried and I struggled to see the shape of his words, I could not. It was a tantalising thing, for in the play of his lips, were words I knew, and yet I could not bring them to mind.

  And then his eyes closed, and he was gone from us forever.

  - Prepare the coffin, spake the doctor and I moved away around the tiny lower chamber to make ready with the rough box, gagging on the smell as I did.

  Our work done, I returned home, and slept late, and though the morning was frosty, the reception I had from Martha was frostier still.

  Finally my patience was worn through.

  - Heavens! I pronounced with full vigour and ire. What is come over you?

  But she spake not, and so, Lord, I struck her on the cheek.

  - Answer me!

  And she shouted back at me then.

  - You are at the Devil’s work, are you not? Are you not?

  Waiting for the Spirits

  I figured she’d had enough by then. So when the last flame went out, I called through the grille in the wall of the Candle Room.

  ‘And are you a God-fearing girl?’

  She screamed, which was kind of funny and kind of scary, and then there was silence. I guess that was her realising it was me, recognising my voice, and then she started yelling and shouting and swearing at me.

  I came in through the door and put the lamp I’d brought from home down on the floor.

  She blinked and screwed her eyes up but she didn’t stop shouting at me.

  ‘Jeez,’ I said, ‘calm down. It was just your forfeit. That’s all.’

  But she really wouldn’t calm down, and I had to get her to shut up so I told her I would only let her out if she stopped shouting and swearing and everything.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘it was just a laugh, just your forfeit. I said you had to do a forfeit, didn’t I? You didn’t take it seriously, did you? Did you?’

  I laughed then, which probably wasn’t a good idea, because she got really cross again. She called me all sorts of things. She called me a freak, which hurt. But then, I already knew that’s what she thought of me.

  I stopped laughing and I told her I wasn’t going to let her out. Ever.

  Then she started crying, so I did let her out and I started crying too, and we put our arms round each other and I said I was really, really sorry, and that it was only supposed to be a game, but I was sorry if I’d hurt her and so on.

  And I wanted her to be sorry she’d hurt me, but I didn’t say anything about that. Not yet.

  She calmed down a bit, and then she suddenly began hitting me and screaming at me again. I shoved her back and we wrestled in a clumsy way. Then I was strong enough to hold her off and after a while she stopped fighting and started sobbing again.

  I held her some more and it was really nice to be so close to her, and smell her smell.

  And the best thing? The best thing was that I could feel she needed me. Totally.

  She stood up, and looked around the room, as if she’d never seen it before, which I guess she hadn’t, not properly.

  It was quite boring, to tell the truth.

  Yeah, it has some cute wood panelling and all, but there’s nothing else to see, except the heavy chair, stuck to the floor.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘isn’t it weird?’

  ‘What?’ she asked, but she was miles away, her voice was all thin and dull.

  ‘The chair. It’s bolted to the floor. You know I found this place? The Hall had been boarded up in the fifties, but the door to this room was behind some panelling that looked much older. Someone hid this place. It’s underneath the main stairway, so you wouldn’t really see that a room was missing. But look at the floor, see where the chair is fixed. The floor looks funny there, like there’s something underneath, but I’ve never been able to find out what.’

  I stopped. She clearly couldn’t care less.

  ‘Don’t you want to know? If you helped me, maybe we could find out.’

  Then she said the worst thing she could have done, and I knew that my feeling of a few moments before had been a lie. She didn’t want me at all. She didn’t need me.

  She hated me.

  ‘Ferelith,’ she said. ‘I only want you to show me the way out of this place, and then I never want to see you again, as long as I live. Right?’

  Sunday 15th August

  It takes two days before Rebecca realises that her father’s heart is missing.

  She knows she was wearing the pendant when she went in, she knows she was wearing it as she sat bound to the chair, but now it’s gone.

  For reasons she only dimly understands, she’s shocked by the loss. It takes her quite a while longer to think calmly about where it might have got lost, and when she does, she knows immediately.

  She remembers the fight with Ferelith. That mad struggle after she’d been set free, and as she replays it in her head, she knows that her subconscious mind registered something that she did not. She feels a sudden tug at her neck, and knows that her father’s heart got pulled off in the fight, and is lying on the floor of the Candle Room, in the dark.

  Saturday 28th August

  Two weeks have passed since she ran from the Hall.

  It’s a slow and hateful time, which drags its sorry carcass through the days. Every waking second is torture to Rebecca. She had no idea that time could pass with such slowness and such pain, and yet each new morning dawns with a terrible vista to be got through, somehow or other.

  Her father does no more than exist in the same house.

  The evening she returned from the Candle Room, she ran straight into his arms, and cried, but when he asked what was wrong, she didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s that girl, isn’t it?’ he’d said, but Rebecca had said nothing.

  Her father had persisted.

  ‘She answered your phone, didn’t she? I knew it was her. What was she doing with your phone?’

  Still Rebecca had said nothing, just backed away from him, closing in on herself.

  ‘What have you been doing? Has she upset you?’

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ Rebecca said, heading upstairs.

  ‘That’s right,’ her father had shouted, ‘that’s right. I don’t have any other choice, though, do I? What else can I do? You won’t bloody talk to me, will you?’

  ‘What do you want me to say? You’re not here. You’re not actually here, are you? Don’t you know how . . .’

  ‘What? Don’t I know what? If you ever talked to me and not that freakish girl maybe I would know. I tell you right now, Rebecca, I want you to stop seeing her. You understand me? You stop seeing her right now. I can’t be dealing with any more rubbish. Haven’t you got a moment to wonder what I’m going through?’

  And with that Rebecca stormed upstairs, yelling as she went.

  ‘And don’t you know how lonely I am!’

  She’d gone, leaving her father staring angrily at the evening light through the kitchen window.

  Since then, all pretence of being a family has been abandoned.

  So it passes, two weeks of Rebecca’s life stretching into an eternity. She withdraws into herself, and though she doesn’t realise it’s happening, her mind changes. It darkens, it shrinks, it closes down, it becomes a wounded animal looking for a place to hide.

  Her thoughts become by turns frantic and desperate, then abnormally quiet and still. She feels as if she’s a zombie, but she knows she hurts too much to really be dead.

  A
nd then it happens.

  Her father doesn’t come home one night.

  She waits, uninterested at first, but as the hours crawl by, she starts to grow afraid.

  When her phone rings, she leaps out of her skin as though she’s been stung.

  She looks at the display, but it doesn’t say DAD. It says NUMBER WITHHELD, and immediately she knows something is wrong.

  She takes the call before the third ring.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Rebecca Case?’

  A woman’s voice comes down the phone at her. It’s not friendly.

  ‘Yes. What do you want?’

  Her voice is weak, already failing.

  ‘John Case’s daughter?’

  ‘Yes. What do you want? Is something wrong?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. I’m calling from the police station. I’m afraid there’s been an . . . incident.’

  Just tell me, thinks Rebecca. She can tell the woman is stringing this out. She’s enjoying it.

  ‘What kind of incident?’

  ‘Your father won’t be coming home tonight.’

  Rebecca holds her breath, waiting for the worst, but when she doesn’t speak, the voice is forced to go on.

  ‘He’s in trouble. He hit someone.’

  Rebecca doesn’t really hear after that, because all she can think is, he’s not dead. I thought she was going to tell me he’s dead.

  She doesn’t really hear the rest of the phone call, and hangs up.

  From nowhere she begins to cry, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until she’s screaming into a cushion to drown the sound.

  When she calms down, with quiet and awful anger, a dreadful compulsion comes over her.

  She knows she will go mad if she does not get her father’s heart back.

  Right now.

  1798, 12m, 16d.

  Lord, have I not followed your path for all my miserable days? Have I not been a faithful servant to your mission? I confess that I have strayed. Once or twice. Once or twice, but has not my aim been true in the greater number of my days?

  Why then do you turn against me?

  Why turn my fellow man against me?

  I grow afeared.

  For I returned home this evening early, and found that Martha is not here. I have waited all evening, and though she knows to be here to cook my supper, and to warm my slippers, she is not come yet.

  And if she does not come again, it can only mean one thing.

  We are undone.

  Saturday 4th September

  Rebecca moves through the crowding air like a ghost.

  She carries a bag over her shoulder. It looks both empty and heavy at the same time.

  It’s nearly nine o’clock, but it’s still amazing how hot the day has been, how humid and thick the night will be.

  It’s been this way all summer; the water shortages, the hose pipe bans, the cracked earth and the parched and scorched grass. The countryside is dying of thirst, everything is brown and covered with dust and sand. Ash trees in Long Lane have become so dry that whole branches have simply cracked from the trunk and fallen onto the road.

  Rebecca is used to it now, but it has been unearthly, other-wordly, seemingly invincible, and eternal. But all things change, and if she had her mind on more than one thing, she might have noticed the first flashes, far, far out to sea, somewhere over the Dutch coastline.

  She doesn’t.

  Instead, she remembers the way to the Hall.

  She’s only been a few times, with Ferelith, but it’s not so hard to find, even in the failing light.

  She makes her way past the church, not even bothering to wonder any more at its strangeness, and climbs over the broken-down wall to the Hall.

  Twisting through the stillness of the woods, dry leaves and twigs snapping underfoot, she picks up the right path.

  She gazes into the dark, but can see nothing.

  She stands quietly for a time, ears straining for the slightest sound. Again, nothing.

  She moves on towards the Hall, and makes her way to the side, to the window they used before. As she does so, she notices a flash of light, from somewhere behind her.

  Nothing, she tells herself.

  But she’s wrong, and as she makes it to the window, something suddenly taps her on the back. She jumps, turns, but there’s no one there.

  She can smell something though. The air has changed. From nowhere, it suddenly feels cold and fresh, and a sharp wind strikes her.

  Something taps her head now, and she puts her hand up. It’s wet.

  It takes a few more taps for her to realise it’s raining. It’s raining fat, heavy raindrops, slow at first, but with every passing second, more and more slap into her face and body.

  She turns to her work.

  She marvels at herself as she smoothly and calmly takes the crowbar from her bag and levers the boards aside as though she’s a professional thief.

  She shoves the bag ahead of her into the pantry, and climbs through after it. She flicks her dad’s powerful torch alight, and sets off into the heart of darkness once more.

  She’s totally unaware that she’s been seen.

  What Must Be Done

  I can only describe it like this.

  It was like a spell.

  A magic spell, a witch’s spell. I had worked all summer to get what I wanted and just when I thought I had lost the chance of it, it came to me, and walked into my arms, without me even trying.

  She came to me.

  I can’t tell you if up to then I had been playing games. Or something more than that. But it seemed to me later, that after the storm broke, the storm which the whole summer had been waiting for, that everything changed.

  I was not controlling things any more, things were controlling me.

  Saturday 4th September

  Moving through the silent Hall, Rebecca becomes aware of two sounds only. Her feet on the old boards, and the sound of increasingly heavy rain outside.

  A strange calm has entered her, as if she has detached herself from her body, and is a mere observer. So it’s really very soon that she finds herself at the door to the Candle Room.

  Once inside, Rebecca feels the calm disappear, blown to nothing like a candle in a storm.

  Her thoughts turn, of course, to the hours she spent in the chair, and her cheeks flush with shame at the things she said, the things she thought.

  She tries to push those memories away, tries to focus on the single beam of the torch, and what it finds. She swings the light across the room, and immediately she sees something shocking.

  She almost screams.

  She plays the torchlight onto the centre of the room, to the chair. Except it’s not there any more. Shining the light now to the sides of the room, she finds the chair against a wall.

  There is no explanation for this; it’s as if a poltergeist has been at work.

  She drags the light back to the centre of the room, and this time she sees what she did not before, something that at once explains and confuses the situation.

  There is a hole in the floor. Beside it lie some serious tools. A crowbar, and a mallet.

  Where the chair once stood is a gaping hole, surrounded by splintered boards.

  Rebecca approaches the hole cautiously.

  Then, from nowhere, footsteps sound behind her.

  A voice she knows well.

  ‘So. You came back.’

  She turns, and there’s Ferelith, looking, in the glare of Rebecca’s torchlight, like a demon.

  Saturday 4th September

  The girls stare at each other, and in the silence Rebecca is again aware of the sound of a storm outside, so loud that it’s even penetrating into this, the very centre of the Hall. There’s one other thing she can hear, and that’s the beating of her heart, pounding like a fist.

  She looks as Ferelith slides into the room, towards the hole.

  Ferelith crouches down on all fours like a cat, and shines her lamp down.

&nb
sp; Rebecca wonders if she hates her.

  She can’t decide.

  Ferelith strokes the floor with her fingertips.

  Because she can’t think what else to do, Rebecca moves over and crouches on the floor next to her. She wonders if she’s terrified, but even if she is, she’s not going to let Ferelith know that. Not any more.

  ‘Look at that,’ Ferelith says, waving her lamp. She speaks as if nothing ever happened between them, here in this very room. No horror, no fighting, no crying.

  Rebecca looks into the hole, and now she sees.

  ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘You were right.’

  She can see down easily enough, down the tunnel that leads away from the chair, sloping at an angle of more than thirty degrees, a long high and wide tunnel, leading away into the darkness.

  As far as they can see, it has no end.

  Rebecca shudders.

  ‘What do you think used to happen in here?’ she asks. ‘Really?’

  ‘What do you mean, really?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t actually summon angels, did they? Or devils.’

  Though even as she says it she wonders why she hesitated over the word. Devils. It’s only a word, after all.

  ‘Didn’t they?’

  ‘No, they didn’t. Because devils don’t exist. And neither do angels.’

  ‘Don’t they? Are you sure about that? I mean, you might be right, but are you absolutely sure?’

  Rebecca shakes her head.