The Crowmaster

by Barry Hutchison

  The birds were still flocking after us, now just a few metres from the clearing. An image of their vicious beaks snapped into focus in my mind’s eye, closely followed by visions of Marion and Toto’s remains. Both Totos.

  Once again I found myself wondering about the dog that had come leaping to my rescue from… well, from nowhere. That big, powerful, savage animal that had appeared at just the right moment to save me from death, just like the mattress had.

  But once again I had no time to dwell on the mystery of the two Totos. The crows were swarming into the clearing now, and if we didn’t move fast the dog’s rescue – and death – would have been in vain.

  ‘Into the middle,’ I yelped, already running, ‘beneath the tower!’

  ‘I heard these things give you brain tumours,’ she said, moving forward, but not quite running.

  ‘Really?’ I snapped, hurrying past her. ‘Well I know for a fact those things tear your face off and eat it. Take your pick.’

  Ameena overtook me before I’d finished the sentence. She stopped almost exactly in the centre of the space beneath the mast. By the time she spun round I was beside her, gripping the sleeve of her jacket for no reason other than fear.

  A bubble of panic formed in my throat when I realised the birds weren’t slowing. They raced in our direction, a wide stream of black, flowing from the trees and heading directly towards us.

  ‘Do something!’

  I pushed down the pain, forgot the fact that fifty per cent of my face was so smashed up it looked like mashed potato. The birds were coming, and I was the only one who could—

  ‘They’re turning!’ Ameena yelled, before I could even attempt anything. ‘Check it out!’

  She was right. As the line of birds reached the mast it split in two, each half arcing around the outside of the structure until they crossed paths at the other side. They didn’t slow down then, just kept flying around and around, one half moving in one direction, the other half taking the opposite route, criss-crossing their way around the mast.

  Faster and faster they flew, until the sheer speed of their flight made it impossible to follow any one individual bird. Faster still they went, moving fluidly, somehow able to avoid crashing into all the other birds racing in the opposite direction.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Ameena asked. She was clinging to my arm now, as tightly as I clung to hers.

  ‘I… I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I thought the mast would send them crazy, make them fly away. Like the phone did.’

  ‘But it isn’t.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I whispered. ‘I’m not sure. They’re not coming in here. They’re not trying to get at us.’

  ‘Probably heard about the brain tumours,’ Ameena muttered.

  ‘Maybe…’ I looked up at the massive, towering structure above our heads. From directly below it seemed impossibly big, like some giant metal dinosaur. I wondered how many calls it could handle at once.

  And then a terrible thought hit me. The mast was up here on a hillside in the middle of nowhere, miles from anything even resembling civilisation. What if the birds weren’t being driven back because nobody was making a call? The phone had only scattered the crows when it had started to ring – the signal, I guessed, somehow breaking the Crowmaster’s hold on them as it travelled through the air.

  If no one made a call, then would there be a signal from the mast? Would there be anything to stop the birds?

  I hurriedly told Ameena my theory. Her face seemed to crumple before I was half finished. She glanced at the circle of screeching death that surrounded us, and not for the first time that night I could see real, raw fear in her eyes.

  ‘They’re not scared to come in,’ she said, realising the same thing I had just half a second before her. ‘They’re keeping us trapped. They’re keeping us in here.’ She tore her gaze from the birds and turned to me. There was no hope in her wide, dark eyes. ‘He’s coming. He’s coming for us.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, trying to sound like I believed what I was about to say, ‘I have an idea.’

  I could tell from the way she looked at me that she’d heard the doubt in my voice. Still, we both knew we were beyond even the clutching at straws stage. What we needed now was a miracle.

  ‘OK,’ she said, nodding slowly. ‘Spill.’

  I took a short breath, swallowed once, and then put the sentence out there.

  ‘I think I created that dog.’

  She blinked. Whatever insanity she had expected to emerge from my mouth, I had obviously surpassed it.

  ‘It sounds crazy, yes, and I don’t know if I believe it myself, but he just kind of appeared from nowhere, like, well, like Mr Mumbles and Caddie did back at the house. And there was a mattress too; I think I made that, and—’

  ‘Do it,’ Ameena said, cutting me off mid-babble. ‘Whatever you’re planning, do it.’ She stole another look at the wall of birds. ‘Although it’s going to take one mean dog to get through all that.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about a dog,’ I told her. I could feel my cheeks flush red at the sheer ridiculousness of what I was saying. ‘I was going to see if I could make a… a mobile phone.’

  She blinked again and her head made a very slight spasming movement, as if she was fighting back the urge to laugh. ‘Right,’ she nodded. ‘Good. Go for it.’ She squeezed her lips between her fingertips, trying to stop herself saying anything else. She failed miserably. ‘Just make sure you top it up first.’

  I ignored the jibe. Ameena and I both knew this was our last chance. All I had to do to save us was create a complex piece of telecommunications equipment from thin air. That was it. Simple.

  Yeah, right.

  Still, I had to try. I held out my left hand, palm facing me, fingers curled around a handset I had not even begun to imagine. As the birds whipped around us and my head throbbed like it was about to implode, I closed my eyes and tried to paint a picture with my mind.

  ‘If I can make a dog, I can make a phone,’ I said, steeling my determination.

  ‘There’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear out loud.’

  I ignored that comment too. All that mattered was the phone. The phone I was trying to imagine nestled in the palm of my left hand. The phone that would save our lives.

  Slowly, almost cautiously, I felt the first tingle inch across my scalp. It moved at such a crawl it took all my willpower to avoid concentrating on it and accidentally whisking myself off to the Darkest Corners. If it came to it, that place might prove to be a last-chance escape route, but going there would only delay the inevitable. Besides, I knew from experience that there could be something even worse waiting for us on the other side.

  I screwed up my face and tried to dredge up the details of the phone Mum had given me. It had been black, or maybe a very dark blue. The buttons were grey with… were the numbers yellow? Or white?

  Ignoring the detail, I concentrated on the phone’s shape, and how it had felt in my hand. Solid, but not too heavy. How long was the casing? I felt sweat on my brow. How wide was the screen? I cursed myself for not having paid more attention.

  Despite my uncertainties, the tingling filled my head. I heard Ameena whistle softly, before she blurted, ‘Something happening,’ in a voice filled with wonder.

  I kept concentrating, feeling something take form in the crook of my palm. I didn’t open my eyes, but maintained my focus, trying to pin down an image of the phone, trying to remember every last detail.

  When next Ameena spoke, the amazement was gone from her tone. Her voice was flat and deflated. ‘Oh.’

  Blinking open my eyes, I looked down at my hand. There was a phone there. Of sorts. It looked like three or four different phones melted together.

  It was as wide as it was long, with a jumbled mish-mash of buttons scattered apparently at random across the front. The screen was shaped like an upside-down letter L, but tapered to a point at one end. The casing itself seemed to be made of a number of different materials – from
shiny black plastic to dull chrome – with no obvious joins between them.

  I knew the phone wasn’t going to work. It was too distorted, too deformed to be operational. Also, I’d forgotten to give it an “on” button.

  ‘Well, it nearly worked,’ Ameena said, trying to sound encouraging, ‘which, I’ll be honest, is a damn sight more than I expected.’

  On the one hand I was devastated – the phone had been our only chance, and I’d screwed it up. But on the other hand I was amazed – amazed that I’d managed to create something out of nothing, just by thinking about it. OK, it wasn’t perfect, but it was there. It existed, and that set me wondering just how powerful these abilities of mine actually were.

  Ameena tugged on my sleeve and I looked up from the useless brick in my hand. It took me a moment, but then I saw him, standing just inside the circle of birds. His empty eyes were trained on us both. Another crow sat perched on his shoulder, watching us on his behalf.

  He began to prowl around the mast, but never venturing beneath it. And all the while, the crows flew by behind him, a blurred wall of living black.

  He didn’t speak, just stared at us. We watched him pad back and forth, like a tiger waiting on feeding time at the zoo. The only difference was we were the ones inside the cage, not him.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining,’ Ameena said in a whisper, ‘but why isn’t he coming in?’

  ‘Maybe because…’ I began, but the sentence ended there. I had no idea why he wasn’t coming for us. Nothing made sense any more. ‘It must have something to do with the mast,’ I guessed. ‘Maybe the signal’s stronger under it or something.’

  ‘But I thought you said it didn’t send out any signals unless someone made a call?’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not a mobile phone engineer, am I?’ I said, with more venom than I meant. ‘Maybe it’s something like that, or maybe he’s just claustrophobic, or maybe he heard you talking about brain tumours. At this point your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘Fine. Then care to hazard a guess at what he’s doing now?’

  The Crowmaster was no longer pacing. He was stretching up with his elongated arms, wrapping his spindly fingers around the first of the twenty or so horizontal metal struts that ran up all four sides of the mast. The gap between each bar must’ve been over two metres, but the length of his limbs meant he was able to haul himself up with ease.

  We watched him pull himself on to the first strut. It wasn’t until he reached for the second that we realised he was climbing the mast.

  I let my gaze overtake him, craning my neck and tilting my head until I could see what the Crowmaster was climbing towards. And I knew, in a flash, we were done for.

  ‘I was right, it’s something to do with the signals,’ I said, so quietly I could barely hear myself over the screeching of the birds. ‘And he’s going to stop them.

  ‘He’s going to smash the transmitter!’

  Chapter Twenty

  THE MONSTER WITHIN

  The wind cut like a knife. It sliced through my T-shirt and nipped at my lungs. In an attempt to keep my internal organs from freezing, all the blood was rushing from my fingers, making it difficult to hold on to the icy metal rungs of the ladder.

  For the first fifteen metres or so the trees had shielded us from the worst of the chill factor, but up here – past what I guessed must be twenty-five metres – we were completely exposed to punishing gusts of the harsh January wind.

  The ladder ran up the inside of the mast, just a metre or two from the horizontal struts the Crowmaster was clambering up. He was faster than I was, but the ladder was an easier climb, and despite the loss of feeling in my fingers, I was gaining steadily.

  Ameena, though, was catching up even more quickly. As usual, she had acted before I had, launching herself up the ladder before I had even realised the need to climb. I’d quickly followed, making a lot of noise about her letting me go first, but privately hoping she didn’t take the offer up.

  When we’d faced Caddie and Raggy Maggie, I’d been amazed at how quickly Ameena could climb a rope ladder, but that was nothing compared to how she darted up this one.

  Her movements were fluid and graceful, giving the illusion she was hardly hurrying at all. With each step, though, I fell further and further behind, and even when I worked my aching limbs to their limits, I still only barely managed to keep pace.

  She was eight or nine metres ahead of me now, just three or four below the Crowmaster. If she was scared, she wasn’t showing it, not even slowing as she began to draw level with the scarecrow’s monstrous form.

  The sky was a little brighter up here, away from the shadowy canopy of the trees. Through the covering of cloud I could see a hazy patch of light, just above the horizon. Over to my right, the embers of Marion’s house glowed brightly, rebelling against the dusk. Down below, I could still hear the birds circling around the mast’s base.

  The Crowmaster made another leap upwards, pulling away from Ameena. She climbed faster, hands and feet moving in perfect harmony, regaining the ground she had lost.

  It was a race to the transmitter, and they were neck and neck. For the first time since starting to climb, though, I wondered what we were going to do when we got there.

  A blast of icy wind hit me face on, pushing me backwards away from the ladder. For one heart-stopping moment I thought I was going to fall, but my fingers held their grip, and I was moving again in moments.

  I looked up at Ameena and cried out in triumph. She was pulling ahead of the scarecrow, leaving him behind. She was going to beat him to the top, although I still didn’t know if she’d planned any further ahead than that.

  ‘Keep going!’ I shouted. ‘You’re doing it!’

  The sound of my voice made her hesitate. She looked down at me. ‘What?’

  ‘I said— Look out!’

  He swung out at her, one arm holding on to the mast’s frame, the other held at full stretch. His fist jabbed between the rungs of the ladder, slamming into the top of her head with such force that I heard it over the whistling of the wind.

  And then he was back on his perch, hands already reaching for the next bar. And Ameena…

  Ameena was falling.

  She dropped backwards off the ladder, arms out by her sides, hands clawing at the air. I gripped on to a rung with one hand, swung out just as the Crowmaster had done. Her fingers touched mine, our eyes briefly met, but then she was gone, plummeting past me on the way to the ground far below.

  ‘Catch her, catch her, catch her!’ I screamed to the world in general, my hand still stretched out for her. Lightning exploded in my head, blindingly bright, but gone in a fraction of a second.

  A dark shape broke through the wall of birds, rocketing across the gap and wrapping its stubby arms around Ameena’s back. The wind nipped my eyes, bringing tears, so that I couldn’t see the figure in any detail. I could see, though, that it was short and stunted, but with a pair of feathery wings on its back, like some kind of deformed angel.

  I watched – barely able to believe what I was seeing – as the flying thing dropped Ameena awkwardly on to the grass, banked left, then punched its way through the circling crows. I looked for it, but it didn’t emerge on the other side of the birds.

  Ameena got up and spun on the spot, looking for whatever it was that had saved her. She shouted up to me, but I was too far away to make out the words. The sheer amazement in her tone told me she was OK, though, which left me free to concentrate on catching the Crowmaster.

  I gritted my teeth and pushed upwards. A large, drum-like dish loomed above my head. The scarecrow had almost reached it. There was no way I could beat him to it, but if I worked my legs hard enough, I could get there right behind him.

  The ladder vibrated a little in my hand, and I knew without looking that Ameena had rejoined the chase. It was reassuring to know she was coming, but she was too far away to make much difference. It was me and the Crowmaster now, and part of me – the small
part that wasn’t quaking with fear – wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  He was waiting for me at the top, hanging on to the curve of the dish, drumming his fingers against its side. I hooked an arm around the ladder, expecting him to swing for me at any moment, just as he’d done to Ameena.

  But he didn’t. Instead he smiled and said, ‘Sure took your time, boy.’

  I didn’t know what to say at first. The crow on his shoulder hopped up on to his head, then down on to the other shoulder, watching me all the way.

  ‘What?’ I asked. It wasn’t the heroic retort I’d been looking for, but he’d caught me off guard and it was all I could think to say. I tried to pull it back. ‘I’m not letting you smash that dish.’

  SS-SS-SS-SS. That laugh again. God, I hated that laugh. ‘Smash it? I ain’t gonna smash it, boy. Why would I smash it?’

  ‘Because it can stop you,’ I said, although even I couldn’t miss the uncertainty in my voice. ‘Because of the interference.’

  His face – or what was left of it – took on an expression of genuine puzzlement. ‘I ain’t got the first clue what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The way you control the birds,’ I said. ‘You send some sort of signal, the same way mobile phones do. That’s how you do it. But the signal from a real mobile phone messes your signal up. Right?’

  ‘Yup.’

  That surprised me. ‘I am?’ I said. ‘I mean, right. I am. That’s why you’re going to smash this, to stop any more signals interfering with yours.’

  ‘I told you, boy, I ain’t gonna smash nothin’.’

  My mind raced. He’d reached the dish well before me. If he had wanted to break it he could have done so before I’d been close enough to stop him. So why hadn’t he? Why come all the way up here if he wasn’t going to smash it?

  I looked down. Ameena was still far below. The birds were still circling around the outside of the mast. The clearing was…

  Wait.