Crow Shine

by Alan Baxter

  “Always and forever,” I whispered in return.

  Grief already tore at my gut, yet that uncertain calmness persisted. I wanted to scream and rage, push my father out of the way and run with Simon out into the world and never look back. But I knew, deep inside I knew without any doubt, that my father was right. It would cost us both if we ran from this, and that would be the worst price to pay.

  As Simon stepped back from our embrace my father put one hand to his shoulder. His other hand held a large bowie knife. “I love you, son,” he said. “I love you so much.” And he gripped Simon’s shoulder tightly and plunged the knife into my brother’s chest.

  Simon gasped, his eyes wide, and I screamed. I feel the loss every day, Simon tearing away from me. My father hugged my brother tightly against his body and Simon’s gaze met mine, his cheek pressed against my father’s checked shirt. My scream withered away as I watched the light slip from Simon’s eyes. “Always and forever,” I whispered again, as my father lay Simon’s body gently on the cold concrete floor, and wept again.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that, my father crying over Simon’s corpse as I sat numb and frozen. All I can remember is an icy laughter that seemed to echo and bounce around us, sweeping up and back, dancing in a satiated glee that chills me every time I recall it. Eventually it drained away from the room and my father stood and turned to me. “It’s done,” he said. “On your feet.”

  I struggled to stand, my legs like tissue paper. The grief, the misery, the sorrow in my father’s eyes was horrible to behold, yet still the calmness soaked through me. Surely it had been some magic of his to protect me.

  “Don’t let the temptations of power distract you like they did me,” he said, laying one palm across my cheek. “No matter how much you think you can gain, no matter how powerful you think you can be, it’s a game we mortals can never win. We’re pawns in the frivolity of greater beings, nothing more.”

  I wasn’t really sure what he meant, not then. I know now and of course I didn’t heed his advice, but then I simply nodded and said, “So it’s over now?”

  “You’re the new beginning. It ends here and starts again with you. Fresh, untainted blood at last.” My father stepped back, pointed at Simon. “Never forget,” he said, and drew the blade across his throat so quickly that for a moment I wasn’t sure I’d really seen him do it. His eyes were wide, like he couldn’t believe it himself, then his throat peeled open like a scarlet mouth, his lifeblood arced across the space between us. I felt it splatter on the backs of my hands, across my face and neck, hot and thick. As I stared he held my gaze with his and slowly crumpled to his knees and tipped facedown to the floor.

  It was hours before I staggered from the house into a life of foster homes and rage, abuse and arcane searching.

  *

  The wind whips widdershins around the room as the old man chants. His fingers raise and I drip blood onto the bones. It’s pooling, spreading out like a flower across the golden polished walnut surface of the table. I make a cut across my middle finger and switch, determined to control the bloodletting perfectly. My only active role in this ritual will not be the thing that lets us down.

  I feel the presence rise and my father was right. Older and meaner than sin, pure malice strides through the space, drawing the shadows from the corners with it. Evil howls in the world and things start to shift. From somewhere I feel my father again, for the first time since that basement when he left me all alone. He’s still crying.

  The evil bends and stretches and, for the first time in fourteen years, Simon is with me. I smile and almost miss the old man raising his hand. Things shudder as I swing my hand back over the table and squeeze free a drop of blood.

  The evil howls in anger and my brother is confused, uncertain, aching with such deep pain. It’s me! I scream through the aether. I’ve come to get you back!

  My father’s presence rips through me, his grief palpable, but overwhelmed by his anger. I told you not to! he cries as he slides through.

  The old man signals, still muttering, I drip my blood, and my father is whipped away. Fuck you, I owe you nothing! I spit after him. He may not really deserve this, but Simon and I are brothers, always and forever. He should pay the price, not us.

  The evil loses its grip on my brother as my father slams into his place. It’s screaming its anger, fury at a trade it didn’t agree to.

  “Now!” the old man shouts, and I drag the knife across my palm, clench my fist over my father’s remains. Blood floods across the table, washing the bones into a strange pattern, like a sigil of separation. But something isn’t working as it should. The connection doesn’t sever, the evil still builds. My father is screaming, my brother cries in my mind and cold, furious malice crawls through the blood and enters my hand. The old man’s voice goes up a notch in volume and desperation as he chants, his magic pushes against the rising evil, but it suddenly feels weak, insubstantial in the face of ancient malevolence.

  You think to stand against me? a voice booms into my head and my bowels turn to water, my mind freezes solid. That anything can be so all-encompassing, so total and insurmountable, is staggering. I’ve doomed us all.

  *

  Back then, as I grew up and began the quest my father forbade, searching the dark corners of human existence for the magic, the connections, the secrets best left buried, one lesson stuck with me beyond all others. A woman in a bazaar in Morocco, whose face bore burn scarring that was hideous to behold, said to me, “Never try to renegotiate a bargain.”

  She taught me a lot, that old witch, and helped me along my journey, but perhaps the lesson that always stuck with me, that I chose to ignore, was the most important after all. I’m a fool, like my father.

  *

  The presence crawls through my blood lasciviously, tauntingly, making the most of my complete inability to do anything about it. Without words it makes sure I know what it will do to me for eternity, and to my father as well. And to Simon, as it has all along. I’ve done exactly what my father managed to prevent. For all his mistakes, this thing only got Simon. Now it has us all.

  Then the malice screams in rage-filled denial and something slams ice through my arm at the elbow. Pain arcs through me, from fingertips to shoulder, white lightning through mind to groin and back again. I rock back in my chair to see the old mage, his face twisted in desperation. In one hand he holds high his blood-soaked machete, in the other is my severed arm.

  The evil screams its rage, but it and my father are carried away, swirling into the aether.

  The old man’s machete is over my head, ready to sweep down and end me. “Is it gone?” he screams at me.

  “I felt it go!” I shout back over the dying winds.

  His eyes narrow, his intention to let that huge blade drop all too clear. “Truly gone from you?”

  I’m weakening as the stump of my upper arm pumps my lifeblood across my lap, the table, the floor. I let my swimming mind search my body and every trace of the damned thing is out. It took its time to toy with me and that was its downfall. All I can feel is myself, and something else, in the back of my mind, lost and confused, but not evil. “It’s all gone,” I say weakly.

  As darkness closes in, the old man’s mind sweeps over and through me, searching. In the last dim moments of consciousness I see his blade sink slowly to hang by his side.

  *

  As I come to, the first thing I hear is the old man’s rasping breath. He tourniquets the pumping stump of my arm, muttering incantations as he works. My severed arm lies on the floor by his chair, withered and blackened from what it briefly contained. Quite a price, I’ve paid, but worth it. The magi’s magic as much as his first aid is keeping me alive. His eyes flick up from his work to meet mine. “Strong, you are,” he says, respect evident in his voice.

  “Stubborn is what I am,” I tell him.

  A flicker of a smile ghosts across his face. “It’ll never leave you alone, you know. Not after that. It’ll h
ound you forever, try to cajole you into a mistake, to exact its revenge. And you’d better be careful how you eventually die if you don’t want it to win in the end. One thing it certainly has is eternal patience. You have a hell of a burden to carry alone now.”

  I nod, and smile. “But I’m not alone.”

  The old man shakes his head slightly. “I suppose not. I hope it was worth it.” He bandages the raw end of my arm and I realise his magic is dulling the pain for me. “You’ll not have me caught up in all this. A man will be along in a moment and he’ll drive you to a hospital and leave you there. You’d better come up with a good story to explain this.”

  “Thank you.” I mean it, I’m genuinely grateful to him.

  Can you feel me, Simon? I think to myself.

  His voice in my mind is lost, scared, still a twelve-year-old boy. Jacob? Is that really you?

  Brothers, Simon, I tell him, as a burly man appears and lifts me like I weigh nothing, carries me from the magi’s dim apartment. Brothers, always and forever.

  All the Wealth in the World

  The time-maker’s expression is serious. I can’t stop looking at her translucent skin. She must be a thousand years old. Her eyes are almost lost in folds, but dark brown irises glisten, bright and sharp, in the tiny gap. “Nothing without a cost,” she says again, voice heavily accented. Eastern European, maybe Russian.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Do you really? Not just money.”

  “Whatever time you give me has to come from somewhere else. I get it.”

  The old woman sneers and turns away, busily shuffles among the detritus on her desk. Her tiny apartment is packed with the accumulation of countless years of hoarding. Books and magazines, trinkets and souvenirs, all covered in dust.

  She turns back holding a strange device of metal and glass. It’s beautiful, finely crafted and delicate. Cogs and wheels, tiny gears that interact with crystal spheres like miniature bubbles. I’m mesmerised by the craftsmanship of it and gasp when she moves away and sits, places it on her knees. She adjusts mechanisms, gnarled fingers sure and swift. She casts an appraising glance up at me, makes another adjustment.

  “Speak,” she says.

  “What do you want to me say?”

  “Anything.”

  “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow . . . ”

  “Enough.” Her disapproving expression reminds me of my mother. “Have you any idea how many people choose that rhyme?”

  “Lots?” I venture.

  “Almost all.” She shakes her head, returns to work.

  I remember reading that when Thomas Edison built the phonograph, the first words ever recorded were “Mary had a little lamb”. I wonder if that simple act has resonated through history ever since.

  *

  The world is empty and quiet out of time. I had no idea how lonely I would become. The magic restricts a person in space, so the Time-Maker warned me. I chose my house, of course, my comfort. But it’s so quiet and still. No radio, no television. No news. No phone calls. No people. Nothing is happening. I’m outside time, living day after day in a tiny sliver between one moment and the next.

  I have music and DVDs, but they feel so artificial. The inert world outside the windows, bathed in a white mist of temporal paralysis where I can’t tread, is too disturbing to look at for long. My eye keeps being drawn to one flower in the bed by the pond, leaning in a soft breeze and frozen there, like it’s desperately reaching for the water. It reminds me of her.

  As time froze, after I’d rung the Time-Maker to tell her I was home and ready, I had a moment of panic. The fear has dulled to a quiet boredom.

  It’s a small price to pay, the actual monetary cost notwithstanding. The first couple of days were the hardest, and strange. Meeting her disappeared, but the rest of our brief, torrid affair lived on in my mind. I still know what’s happening, because I still remember so much of our time together, but I’ve no idea how it started. It’s a strange dislocation, but I try not to think about it too much.

  Will I remember this silent, misty time once all memory of her is gone? I can only assume I will. I’ll remember what I engineered. I have to make sure I don’t try to find out what it was. There’s a note on the fridge door, just in case, large bold letters.

  Trust yourself, you needed to forget.

  *

  “How much time do you need?” the Time-Maker asks.

  “A month.”

  Her eyes widen, bloodshot yellow and white around hazel. “A month?”

  “I know it’s a lot.”

  She sits back in her chair, cups her chin, forefinger across lips. “People come to me for a few hours, occasionally a day.”

  I shrug, embarrassed.

  “You must be very wealthy.”

  “You will be too, if you give me what I need.” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice.

  “All the riches in the world can’t help some things, eh?” She chuckles, somewhere deep in her chest.

  “That depends on you.” I gesture to the device.

  “Giving a person more time is a delicate operation. If you spend an entire month outside the tempo of the world, you could wreak all kinds of havoc.”

  “You’re getting a conscience?” I ask. “After all the time you must have given people?”

  “I have a small and discrete clientele,” the Time-Maker says. “They call when they need hours to prepare for a business deal, get a jump start on the competition, or maybe they’ve forgotten an anniversary. They pick a place, call me, ask for a short time. This is powerful magic, designed for very concentrated use.”

  “I’m sure there could be quite serious consequences with even the smallest amount.”

  The old woman nods. “True.”

  “So, enough with the conscience, eh?”

  I can see in her eyes that she wants to ask why. She’s thinking about turning me down, but she must be considering the fee. So very much money. “You are well referred from a client I trust. I never thought anyone would pay for so much,” she says quietly.

  I look around the tiny, crowded, dirty apartment, the Time-Maker’s threadbare clothes. I don’t ask the obvious question, make the crass suggestion. “I have considerable wealth. I need this.”

  *

  I remember nothing now of the initial good times, those few amazing days, but finally the horrors are starting to go. Today I’ll forget the first time she cut me, in a sudden and inexplicable fit of rage. Grabbing the knife from the kitchen bench, swinging it at me with hate and fire in her eyes. Tomorrow I’ll forget forgiving her.

  In a few days I’ll forget the broken glass, the screaming and the restaurant I can never go to again. So much abuse and anger and violence in such a short time. Those few occasions when I had to fight back and the stain that leaves on my soul. The way my perfect life spiralled into madness so quickly. I’ll be a better person when the whole thing is wiped away. Money can’t buy happiness, they say. But maybe it can buy respite from things so beyond my control.

  *

  The Time-Maker nods, sits forward over the machine. “When would you like your month taken from? First month of life?”

  “Is that how people do it?”

  “First hours after birth, a day around one month old, things like that. Most people never use up more than one twenty four hour period of their life, even with several visits. Twenty four hours when they were nothing but a gurgling baby, nothing to lose. Time people think they would never miss. There have been mistakes.”

  “Mistakes?”

  “One regular client thought to scatter the time taken throughout her early life, ended up picking the day she took her first steps. Had to learn to walk again.” The Time-Maker looks up me, wags one finger. “Consequences!”

  *

  This is hard, painful. I can’t remember anything about her, who she was, what happened between us. All I remember is her pale skin, the blood-filled bath like she lay in wine. Her eyes staring g
lassy at the ceiling, mouth half-open as though she was trying to cry for help.

  What drove her to this? Whatever led her here must have been too painful for me to bear. The note on the fridge keeps reminding me to trust myself. If you can’t have faith in yourself, who can you believe? And I’ll certainly be glad when this image is wiped from my mind.

  She’s so beautiful yet her death is so ugly. So violent.

  As the day wears on I forget where I was before I found her. I forget finding her. Slowly, the memory of the frantic phone calls, the crying, the police, all wink out of my mind. It’s a frightening relief.

  *

  I don’t flinch from the Time-Maker’s hard glare. “I want you to take from March fourth to April fourth, last year.”

  She gasps. “You don’t want more time at all! You want to forget.”

  “I want it to have never happened to me.”

  “It will still have happened for everyone else. They’ll still remember.”

  I tap the side of my head. “As long as it’s gone from here. I plan to move away, start again. Wealth has a way of isolating a person anyway. There’ll be no one to remind me if I go away, cut all ties. There’s nothing here for me now.”

  Her face is sad as she shrugs, adjusts the machine. “I hope it works.”

  “So do I.”

  She points to a dusty laptop, a note beside it with numbers and the name of a financial institution. “Funds transfer, please.”

  *

  I’m standing in my kitchen staring at this note and I can’t believe it. I needed to forget? All I have left is this one day. This last, tear-filled day and by tonight it too will be gone. I miss her so much. I love her so much, but I barely know her now. I don’t even recall what she looked like. I remember nothing of our time except this deep love and terrible sadness. Am I really so weak? Has my wealth become so great that I’ll do something like this, just to be rid of a painful memory?