The Crowmaster

by Barry Hutchison

  Roaring, I kicked with my feet and swung out with my free arm, hurling myself around in a half-circle so my back was rushing towards the wall. At the same time, I brought my head sharply up and back.

  Realising what was about to happen, the crow released its grip. By then it was too late. It dropped down below my shoulders just as my back was driven against the tightly packed dirt. The bird gave a strangled cry, then dropped past my legs and rolled clumsily down the hill.

  I had no idea if it was dead, but nor did I have any intention of stopping to find out. Gripping the tree root with both hands, I clambered up the rest of the embankment, the thrashing of wings already filling the forest behind me.

  With my muscles burning, I heaved myself up over the top of the wall. The ground here was flatter, sloping only very slightly upwards. I scrambled forward on my hands and knees, my tired legs not able to give me the explosive start I hoped for. My right hand slipped on something wet and I almost landed face-first in a quivering mound of reddish-brown flesh and greying fur.

  It was the dog – well, part of it, at least – that first dog I’d encountered here in the forest only yesterday. The dog I’d seen torn to shreds. The dog I had at the time assumed must be…

  Toto. The word winked up at me from the dull grey metal of the animal’s nametag, which poked out from a fold in the blood-soaked fur.

  Toto.

  Toto. Toto. Toto.

  The word repeated in my head, over and over, like the steady clattering of an express train.

  Toto. Toto. Toto.

  Toto. Toto. Toto.

  How could this be Toto? If this was Marion’s dog, then what about the one at the house? The one that had appeared from nowhere at just the right moment and saved me from—

  The crows. In that brief moment of confusion, I had forgotten the crows.

  They suddenly filled the space around me; clawing, screeching, snapping, croaking, flapping, biting at me.

  Terror gave me the strength to push against them, hands over my head, until I was on my feet. Blindly I staggered onwards, tears streaking my face, a hundred different agonies stabbing through my skin.

  Panic smothered my power and kept me from using it. All I could do was keep my head low and try to run, but even that proved too difficult. With the birds covering every part of me, I fell forward on to the forest floor.

  I couldn’t see through the mass of beaks and wings and feathery bodies, couldn’t hear a thing above their crazed screeching. I was lost in a blizzard of black, inching along on my hands and knees, waiting for one final, inevitable strike.

  But then, without warning, the crows moved away. They pulled back, leaping off me and curving upwards to be swallowed by the darkening sky. I crawled forward, every centimetre of my skin awash with my blood, until a pair of dirty black boots blocked my path.

  I stopped crawling and for a moment just lay there, looking at those boots. This was it then. It was over. He had found me.

  I rolled on to my side and managed to turn my head enough to look up. The face that looked back was not the one I had expected to see.

  ‘Come on, get up, we need to move,’ Ameena urged, bending down and catching me by the hand. She pulled hard, but her grip slipped on my blood-soaked skin, and my arm dropped back down on top of me.

  The world blurred and turned shades of grey, like an outof-focus old movie. A tingling, like pins and needles, prickled at the back of my head. It wasn’t my abilities this time. It was sleep. Or unconsciousness. Or something more.

  I could feel Ameena’s hand on my face. It brushed against my cheek, leaving behind a tickly imprint of her palm. The numbness in my skull eased, and a vague focus returned to the world just in time for Ameena to slap me again.

  My cheek was still burning as she grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me into a sitting position. I could make out her face close to mine, her eyes wide. Panicked. Bloodshot.

  ‘Wake up, dammit,’ she shouted, raising her open hand. ‘They’ll be coming back. Wake up!’

  ‘O-OK,’ I muttered, ‘just please… stop hitting me.’ I leaned a hand on her shoulder. ‘Help me up.’

  ‘No time,’ she replied, glancing up into the treetops, ‘I need you moving on your own steam if we’re getting out of here.’ She looked me up and down, and I could see the doubt in her eyes. ‘Can you heal yourself?’

  I frowned. Even this tiny movement sent pain rippling across my face and down through my body. Far overhead, a crow cawed.

  ‘Let me rephrase that,’ Ameena said, the urgency obvious in her voice. ‘Heal yourself. Now.’

  ‘I… I don’t think…’

  She leaned in closer still, close enough for me to smell the Crowmaster’s stink on her clothes. ‘Listen, kiddo,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll spell it out. We. Are. Going. To. Die. Both of us. Here and now.’ She peered up into the trees again, then back down at me. ‘And your mum next. He’s going to finish what he started. And then, when he’s done with her, he’s…’

  Ameena continued to talk, but I was no longer listening. I was concentrating on my wounds, feeling the pain from every one of them, making a map of every injury. I had healed before, and I was sure I could do it again, if I could only figure out how.

  I tried to focus on each individual pain at the same time, imagined the wounds knitting together, sealing shut. An itchiness crept across my skin, up my arms, around my neck, and down my back. Steadily, the itching grew in intensity, until my whole body felt like it was burning.

  ‘I can’t!’ I hissed, feeling that my skin would blister any second. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ameena said, and her voice was little more than a growl at the back of her throat. ‘I need you healthy.’

  The words, and the way she said them, made me hesitate. Her eyes seemed to bore into me, wide and bloodshot. That smell from her clothes flooded my nostrils.

  The smell of the Crowmaster.

  ‘What do you mean, you need me healthy?’ I asked her. ‘Need me for what?’

  Her pause was so short it was barely noticeable, but it was there. ‘So we can, you know, run for our lives?’

  I pushed backwards on my hands, studying her face. ‘The birds flew away,’ I said, partly to her and partly to myself. ‘When you arrived, they all flew away. Why would they do that?’

  ‘How should I know?’ she shrugged. ‘Now come on, if you’re not going to fix yourself we need to move.’

  She held a hand out to me, but I didn’t take it. My eyes searched her face. She looked like Ameena. She spoke like Ameena. But Marion had looked and sounded like Marion right up until the point the scarecrow had burst out of her skin.

  ‘Get away from me,’ I said, my voice shaking.

  Ameena raised her eyebrows. ‘Say what?’

  ‘You’re him,’ I spat. ‘Aren’t you?’

  The thing that looked like Ameena shuffled forward on its knees. ‘What are you talking about?’ it demanded. ‘We don’t have time for this.’

  I let it get closer. Didn’t stop it closing in. Didn’t resist when its hand caught me by the arms. The monster opened Ameena’s mouth, spoke with Ameena’s voice, but I had no interest in hearing anything it said. With a sharp jerk of my leg, I drove my knee hard against its jaw.

  The thing cursed and swore like Ameena would, but I was beyond being fooled. I knew the truth – the horrible, sickening, heart-breaking truth.

  I couldn’t watch it happening, though. I couldn’t sit there and watch the Crowmaster tear his way free from inside the skin of my friend. I wouldn’t watch it.

  With a final kick against what had once been Ameena’s shoulder, I sent the thing sprawling backwards over the embankment and rolling down the hill.

  And then, finding strength from who-knows-where, I got to my feet and ran further into the forest, Ameena’s voice crying, ‘Kyle, come back!’ as I made my way up the hill.

  Chapter Eighteen

  SNEAK ATTACK

  I stumbled clumsily through
the woods, clattering into trees, tripping on weeds, barely staying upright. I was no longer even sure where I was running to, but I knew exactly what I was running from.

  She’d been my friend. Maybe my only friend. And now she was… she was… I couldn’t bring myself to think about it.

  I staggered on, but at every step I was bombarded by another image of Ameena. Her wide grin that made her nose crinkle up. Her boots under my mum’s coffee table. The feeling of her shoulder against mine as we’d looked out through Marion’s window.

  I heard the monster shout with Ameena’s voice somewhere behind me – not too far away. A knot of anger bunched my stomach up tight, and my feet decided to stop moving all by themselves.

  The voice called my name again, closer still, directly behind me. I tucked myself in behind the thick, straight trunk of a towering tree, bunched my fingers into tight, tight fists, and waited.

  For almost a minute I stood there, my legs cramping painfully as I struggled to stay motionless and hidden. My breath rattled in and out, surely loud enough to give me away. I could do nothing to quieten it, though, and when I heard the murderer’s footsteps thudding closer and closer, each breath came louder still.

  When the rustling of the grass was almost beside me, I leapt out of my hiding place, head down, shoulder out. The thing wearing Ameena’s body let out a gasp of shock. It couldn’t move fast enough to dodge my charge, and its ribs made a satisfying crunch as my shoulder slammed against them.

  The pain from my injuries was nearly overwhelming. It stopped me concentrating, made it impossible for me to use my powers. That suited me fine. I didn’t want to use the power. I wanted to pound on the monster, punish it with my bare hands, make it realise the mistake it had made by taking Ameena away from me.

  I would make the Crowmaster beg, make him plead with me to spare him. And when he’d done that – when he’d wept and screamed and cried out for me to let him live, I’d say just one word.

  I’d say ‘No’.

  My charge didn’t take as much out of it as I’d hoped. It twisted Ameena’s body, deflecting the brunt of my attack and sending us both spinning down on to the forest floor.

  ‘Have you gone mental?’ Ameena’s voice demanded, as we both scrabbled to get up. The Crowmaster was still trying to trick me, still trying to make me believe I was attacking my friend. I blocked it out and focused on the fight.

  We were halfway to our feet when I drove my fist hard against what had once been Ameena’s cheek, dropping down and letting my weight add power to the punch.

  The Crowmaster glared at me through Ameena’s eyes. ‘Right,’ he said, still sounding exactly like her, ‘that’s it.’

  A jab to my throat left me gasping for air. I was too busy choking even to try to defend myself when the thing in Ameena’s skin leapt on top of me, pressing a knee hard against my chest. I fought hard, kicking and pushing, but the tightness in my throat and the pressure on my chest kept me pinned down.

  ‘Spectacular a hissy fit as this is, we don’t have time for it,’ her voice growled.

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ I hissed. ‘I swear I’ll kill you for this.’

  ‘For what? What are you spazzing out about now?’

  ‘You don’t care, do you?’ I snarled. Tears ran in different directions down both sides of my head, pooling in my ears. ‘You took her away from me, and you don’t give a damn! She meant something to me – she meant everything to me – and you used her like… like…’

  I wilted beneath the puzzled gaze of those eyes, so brown as to be almost black. ‘You didn’t have to kill her,’ I mumbled. ‘You didn’t have to kill Ameena.’

  ‘Er… hello? What? Listen, kiddo, I don’t know what you think has happened, but I’m pretty sure I’m not dead.’ She glanced up into the darkness lurking between the trees. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  Kiddo. She’d called me ‘kiddo’. I hated it when she called me ‘kiddo’. She always called me ‘kiddo’.

  But no, it was a trick. He was messing with my head.

  ‘You’re not her,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘You’re the Crowmaster.’

  ‘I’m not the Crowmaster!’ she retorted, almost smiling at the suggestion.

  She didn’t smile for long. The spindly fingers crept like an insect through her hair, yanking her head backwards before either of us could react. The weight lifted from my chest in a sharp, sudden jerk. Ameena bit her lip, trying to resist screaming or swearing. Or both.

  ‘That’s right, you ain’t,’ the scarecrow said, his face split into a grin, that horrible laugh of his hissing in Ameena’s ear. SS-SS-SS-SS-SS! ‘I am!’

  I don’t remember getting up. One moment I was flat on the ground, and the next I was standing there in front of them both, the pain that had been ravaging my body a rapidly fading memory.

  The Crowmaster had one of his pets perched on his shoulder – a fat, ugly brute with blood on its beak. Its head twitched at every little movement I made, and I knew the scarecrow was watching me through the crow’s eyes.

  Ameena was staying unusually quiet, and I only had to glance at her to realise why. One of the Crowmaster’s long black fingernails was pressed against her throat. It dug in deeper with every breath she took, until a trickle of red crept down her neck.

  ‘Let her go.’

  ‘Now why would I go and do a thing like that?’ the scarecrow sneered.

  ‘It’s me you want, not her. Let her go.’

  ‘That’s one mighty big head you got there, boy,’ he hissed. ‘Some folks might think you’re somethin’ special, but me? I don’t care one little bit.’ He hocked up a mouthful of black saliva and spat it on to the ground at my feet. ‘I let this one go on purpose, see? Thought it’d be a real hoot to let you think she was me. Thought you might slit her throat and bleed her dry, or at least beat on her until she stopped beating back.’

  He pressed his talon harder against Ameena’s throat, making her eyes bulge. ‘But instead what do you do? You cry like a baby and get your ass whupped by a girl. Man, that was a disappointing moment.’

  ‘What is it you want?’ I asked.

  ‘I already got what I want, boy,’ he smirked. ‘Thanks to your daddy I got me a Get Outta Hell Free card. Now all I gotta do is kill you and there ain’t no way hell can follow me here.’

  ‘Then let Ameena go,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to hurt her.’

  ‘Oh sure, I don’t have to,’ he grinned, ‘but I bet it’ll be all kinds of fun.’

  His empty eye sockets widened and that flesh-crawling laugh hissed from his wide cavernous mouth. He yanked harder on Ameena’s hair until she couldn’t help but scream. His hand drew back, the stupidly elongated fingers splaying out, the claws extending to their full terrifying length, aiming for Ameena’s exposed throat.

  He was halfway through the movement, too far into it to stop suddenly. That was my cue. Clenching my fist, I did something I never anticipated I’d ever find myself doing.

  I punched a crow in the face.

  The Crowmaster may have been expecting me to attack him, but he wasn’t prepared for me hitting the bird. Nor, it seems, was the bird. It flipped backwards off its master’s shoulder, squawking and flapping as it tried to slow its fall.

  Still seeing through the crow’s eyes, the Crowmaster became instantly disorientated. His ragged nails swished narrowly past Ameena’s throat, throwing them both off balance. Ameena twisted her shoulder into him and bent at the waist, letting his momentum carry him up and over her back.

  Even before the scarecrow hit the ground, Ameena bounded over to where the bird had landed on the forest floor. Lifting her boot, she brought it down hard on the crow’s head.

  ‘Have some of that!’ she cried triumphantly, before a sudden fluttering filled the forest behind us.

  ‘Move!’ Ameena cried, catching me by the arm. Before I knew what was happening, I was fleeing again, hurrying through the trees, ducking and jumping and weaving through a denser and denser jungle of root
s and weeds and thin, tangling branches.

  That sound – that rhythmic rippling of rapid applause – was growing louder, the birds quickly closing the gap between us.

  Ameena moved through the trees like a shark through water, cutting effortlessly through the forest and pulling away from me with every bound. The mass of pain that I’d temporarily managed to forget about now came rushing back, making my head throb and my chest burn and my limbs turn achingly heavy.

  I would have given up then, I’m almost certain. With the crows screeching behind me and my legs buckling beneath me, I would have surely collapsed to the ground and let them do whatever it was they were going to do.

  I would have died there in the clawing darkness of the woods, had I not seen the clearing through a gap in the trees. ‘Over there!’ I shouted, my voice little more than a loud croak. Ameena turned and followed my finger, which was pointing ahead and to her right.

  It took her a moment to realise what she was looking at, but then she banked sharply and began to run faster. I was already crashing after her, and together we hurried towards the clearing.

  And towards the towering mast that loomed imposingly at its heart.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE MAST

  ‘What now?’ Ameena barked as I entered the clearing just a few paces behind her.

  I didn’t reply, partly because I was too out of breath to speak, but mostly because I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea what we should do next.

  The mast was much larger than I’d expected. It almost filled the width of the clearing, and stretched way up into the dusky darkness above our heads. From a distance it had seemed to shine with a near-supernatural silvery sheen. Up close, it was a dull gun-metal grey, with no sign of the gleam it had appeared to possess.

  I tried to tell myself it didn’t make any difference. What mattered were the components of the mast – the dishes, the antennae, the big knobbly bits that stuck out of the side – not how shiny it was. And yet, even though I knew this, the lack of that near-magical sparkle caused my heart to sink, and made me wonder if the whole plan wasn’t doomed to failure.