Crow Boy

by Philip Caveney

  ‘You’re probably wondering what this place is,’ she said. ‘What we’re looking at here are the streets of the old city, underneath the Royal Mile, just as they would have looked in the 1600’s. Well . . . almost. If we’d been down here in the year 1645, we’d have been ankle-deep in raw sewage.’

  Tom felt Gillies’ elbow jam into his ribs.

  ‘Just like home, eh Manky?’ he whispered and there were muted sniggers. Mr McKenzie shushed them to silence and Agnes continued.

  ‘Everywhere, you would have heard the words ‘Gardez Loo!’ which was the signal that somebody was about to empty a chamber pot out of a doorway or an upstairs window. You certainly didn’t want to be in the way when that happened.’

  ‘See,’ smirked Gillies, ‘What did I tell you? Just like Manchester.’

  ‘The sewage ran downhill from here until it reached the loch, so you can imagine what that must have smelled like.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell everyone, Manky?’ hissed Gillies. More sniggers.

  ‘In 1753, The Royal Exchange decided to take down the top three floors of Mary King’s Close and use the lower ones as foundations for the new City Chambers. So all this was hidden from the public view, locked away until the year 2003, when it was decided to reopen the Close as a tourist attraction. Now, we’re going to walk down the hill and look at some of the homes of people who lived here in the 1600’s.’

  She turned and led them on down the slope.

  ‘Some tourist attraction,’ Tom heard Gillies mutter. ‘Place looks like it needs a good clean.’

  ‘Yeah, it stinks down here,’ agreed one of his cronies. ‘Dead borin’.’

  But Tom didn’t agree. He thought the Close was really atmospheric. In this strange, shadowy world beneath the city, it was all too easy to imagine what it must have been like to live in those times. He pictured the narrow streets filled with the bustle of human life – carts and carriages rattling over the cobbles, salesmen and women shouting out their wares as they wandered through the crowd, ragged children chasing after the carriages to beg for coins.

  Now Agnes paused in front of an open doorway and a serious look came to her face. ‘We’re about to enter the house of one of the Close’s residents, John Craig,’ she said. ‘It’s the year 1645, and the bubonic plague has come to the city. When we go into the room, be careful you don’t bump in to anybody.’

  She led the way in and the group followed. When it came to Tom’s turn, he saw that the room was in almost total darkness, save for the light of a lantern beside a roughly made wooden bed. There was a child lying in the bed, his face and bare chest unnaturally pale – and kneeling beside him was a strange and nightmarish figure, similar to the keyring that Tom had looked at earlier. Instead of a hat, he wore a tightly fitting leather helmet, but the face was the same, a great curved beak like a bird of prey and what looked like huge round eyes. It took a few moments to register that the figures were nothing more than waxworks, but it was still an unsettling image.

  There was an uncomfortable silence before Jenny said, ‘Who’s the Crow Man?’

  Everybody laughed at this, but Agnes took it all in her stride.

  ‘I’ve heard him called some interesting names,’ she said, ‘but that one’s a first for me.’ She moved closer to the figure. ‘This sinister-looking gentleman is Doctor George Rae, Edinburgh’s most famous plague doctor, and he’s here to treat young Thomas Craig who has contracted bubonic plague, as you can see by the telltale buboes on his body.’ She indicated a bright red swelling under the child’s left armpit. ‘Dr Rae is Edinburgh’s second plague doctor. The first, Dr John Paulitious, died in 1645, after just a short time in the job.’

  ‘What did he die of?’ asked one boy and his friend gave him a scornful look.

  ‘Work it out,’ he said.

  Agnes nodded. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Plague doctoring was a very dangerous profession, but quite lucrative. To take Doctor Paulitious’s place, Doctor Rae was promised the incredible salary of one hundred and ten pounds a month. His employers were happy to offer him that because they didn’t think he’d live to collect the money, but they were wrong. In the end he had to virtually sue the Town Council for his back pay.’

  ‘But why’s he all done up like a big bird?’ asked another girl.

  Agnes smiled. ‘Back in the seventeenth century, people believed that the plague was spread by something called ‘miasma’ – infected air. The mask that the doctor wore had a beak that was literally stuffed with herbs and flowers, which he thought would act as some kind of filter. He wore goggles to protect his eyes and, of course, his helmet and cloak were made of thick leather.’ She studied the class for a moment. ‘I wonder if any of you can tell me how the plague was actually spread,’ she said.

  Before he could stop himself, Tom’s hand went up. ‘Fleas,’ he said.

  There was raucous laughter at this, but Agnes soon silenced them with a stern look.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re laughing,’ she told them. ‘He’s quite right.’ She smiled at Tom. ‘What else can you tell me?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Tom was aware of Gillies and his mates looking daggers at him, as though The Manky wasn’t allowed to know anything about their history, but he ignored them and went on. ‘The fleas fed on infected rats and then, when the rats died, the fleas moved on to people.’

  ‘Have you been here before?’ Agnes asked him, suspiciously.

  He shook his head. ‘I went to this other place,’ he muttered. ‘Eyam, in Derbyshire?’ He’d been there on a school trip earlier that year. His class had done a project on it and, unlike most projects he’d been involved with, it had been really interesting. They’d got the plague there in the 1660’s (he couldn’t remember the actual date). The fleas came in on rolls of cloth that a tailor had ordered and near enough the whole village had ended up infected. The villagers were incredibly brave about it and opted to shut themselves off from the rest of the world, forbidding anyone to leave, so they wouldn’t spread the sickness. ‘I think over two hundred people died there,’ he added, ‘which was like two-thirds of the village.’

  The moment he’d finished talking, Tom regretted it. Gillies was looking at him now with a ‘just you wait’ expression on his ugly face.

  But Agnes smiled. ‘That’s brilliant,’ she said. ‘Thanks for sharing that with us.’ She looked around at the children. ‘You see, it wasn’t just Edinburgh that suffered from the plague; there were outbreaks all over the world. Perhaps the most famous was the Great Plague of London in 1666. I’m sure some of you must have heard of that?’ Nobody so much as grunted, so she continued. ‘But, going back to our ‘Crow Man’ here . . .’ She flashed a mischievous look at Jenny. ‘Although the herbs and flowers in that beak didn’t help him one iota, something else about his costume almost certainly saved him from infection. I wonder, would anybody like to hazard a guess about what that might be?’

  There was a long, baffled silence, before Tom felt compelled to speak again. ‘The leather cloak,’ he said. ‘The fleas wouldn’t have been able to bite through it.’

  ‘Correct!’ said Agnes. ‘You’re certainly on the ball, today.’ She looked around at the others. ‘Now, if there are no more questions, we’ll move on.’ She headed for the door and the children shuffled after her. Tom hung back, as ever, but noticed that Gillies was doing the same. The heavyset boy ambled closer until he was standing right beside Tom. He smelled of a mixture of stale sweat and cheese and onion crisps.

  ‘Think you’re smart, don’t you, Manky?’ he murmured.

  ‘Smarter than you, at any rate,’ said Tom. His success with the questions must have made him reckless.

  ‘Yeah, you enjoy it while you can. You and me are gonna have a little talk straight after this. We’ll see how clever you are, then.’

  ‘Come on, boys, stop hanging around,’ said Mr McKenzie, who was probably already regretting offering to shepherd this outing.

  The two boys moved obediently towards t
he door and Mr McKenzie followed them out. They caught up with the rest of the group just as they came to a halt in front of another doorway.

  ‘The room we are about to go into is in some ways our most famous one,’ Agnes told the children. ‘Lots of people know the story of it even though they have never visited Mary King’s Close. We call it, ‘Little Annie’s Room,’ and, before we go in there, I’m going to tell you the story.’ She paused for a moment to make sure she had everyone’s attention. ‘In the nineteen-nineties, this room was visited by a famous Japanese psychic. She claimed it was the saddest room she had ever visited and that when she stepped inside it, she felt a wee hand pulling at her sleeve . . .’

  She paused for effect and some of the more impressionable girls grabbed each other nervously.

  ‘The psychic turned around and saw the ghost of a little girl standing behind her. She was crying. She said her name was Annie and that she was looking for a lost doll. Then she vanished. Well, the psychic was so moved by this experience she went straight out and bought a wee Barbie doll, which she placed in the room in an attempt to cheer Annie up. As I told you, that was some time ago and, over the years in between, visitors to Mary King’s Close have added to Annie’s collection. Let’s go in and have a look, shall we?’

  She led the way into the room. Back at the end of the queue, Tom could hear gasps of surprise coming from ahead and, when he finally made it into the room to peer over the rows of heads in front of him, he saw that one corner was piled high with literally hundreds of dolls, teddy bears and cuddly toys of every shape and size.

  Agnes continued to talk, but Tom’s attention was distracted as somebody moved past the open doorway behind him. He turned his head to look and felt a chill tingling along the length of his spine; he saw that a young girl, perhaps ten or twelve years old, was walking by. She was carrying a straw basket of what looked like vegetables and she was dressed in seventeenth-century clothing: a tattered brown dress and a white cap like Agnes wore, from beneath which a tangle of blonde hair spilled. As she walked by she turned her head to look at Tom and he felt another sense of shock, because she had the most intense blue eyes he had ever seen. But she only looked at him for an instant before turning her head and walking on.

  Tom told himself that she was just part of the tour, a young girl dressed as Annie, put there to throw a scare into the visitors to her room, but that didn’t seem to make any sense. If that was the case, wouldn’t she be positioned somewhere in the room itself, ready to pop out and shout ‘Boo!’? As far as Tom could tell, he was the only one who had so much as noticed her. And, if she was just an actress, how had they got that flickery, shimmery quality to her? Some kind of special effect? A projection, something like that?

  Against his better judgement, he stepped back from the rest of the group and leaned out to have a look around the edge of the doorway. There was the girl gliding silently along the corridor, seemingly intent on going somewhere. Tom wasn’t sure why but he felt impelled to follow. The others were listening to what Agnes was saying and they didn’t even notice as he slipped out of the room and went after the girl.

  She’s not a ghost, he told himself as he walked. There’s a logical explanation for this.

  But he couldn’t for the life of him imagine what that might be and he couldn’t seem to stop himself from following her just the same.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said and she glanced back at him for a moment, a look of surprise on her face, but then she turned away and increased her pace, as though anxious to get away from him. ‘Hey, it’s all right, I won’t hurt you,’ said Tom. ‘Hang on a minute!’

  There was another doorway up ahead of her, a low opening with a stone lintel across the top of it but it was roped off with a length of thick cord, and prominent signs in bright red letters at either side made it clear that it wasn’t a sensible place to go.

  DANGER. NO PUBLIC ACCESS BEYOND THIS POINT. KEEP OUT.

  Tom had expected the girl to turn away from it, but no, she went straight through the doorway without slowing her pace and, here was the weird thing, she hadn’t even bothered to duck under the length of cord that barred the way, but seemed to go through it without disturbing it.

  In the heat of the moment, all Tom could think was that the girl was going into a dangerous place.

  ‘Hey, you!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you read?’

  He quickened his pace in an attempt to catch up with her, but she continued walking into the darkness of the room beyond and, almost without thinking, he jumped over the rope and followed her. As he ducked under the lintel he felt a strange, giddy feeling ripple through him and then found himself walking through almost total darkness, his feet clunking on wooden floorboards. He saw the girl up at the far end of the room, standing in front of an ancient stone fireplace. In the gloom she seemed to flicker and shimmer like a silent movie. Tom took a cautious step forward.

  ‘You really shouldn’t be in here,’ he told her. ‘I don’t think it’s safe.’

  She glanced at him again, her expression one of suspicion, and then she turned her face away from him.

  ‘Look, honestly,’ he said, ‘I really think it’s best if we go outside and I–’

  He broke off in alarm as he felt something sag beneath his feet; there was a slow creaking noise, the sound of ancient timbers protesting at his weight. He stayed very still. The girl was looking at him again now, an expression of concern on her face. She turned to face him and he saw with a stab of shock that the front of her dress was stained red with blood.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I think we’d better–’

  And then suddenly, shockingly, everything was falling away beneath him in a slow, grinding roar. He made a desperate attempt to turn back towards the entrance but his feet were no longer standing on anything solid and the next thing he knew, he was falling, falling in the midst of splintered wood and clouds of dust and he seemed to fall for a very long time before he hit the ground.

  Three

  He came gradually back to his senses, aware of noise all around him. He was lying face down, his head turned to one side. Something hard was pressing into his right cheek. He opened his eyes and saw a strange tipped-on-one-side world running vertically across his field of vision. He realised that his face was resting on a cobbled street, along which people were moving to and fro in a restless, shouting mass. People in fancy dress, he decided, judging by the many long coats, plumed hats and colourful bonnets he could see. He wanted to move but, for the moment, he felt too nauseous, so he just lay there, blinking, trying to gather his scattered senses. And then he became aware of a noise from somewhere behind him, separating itself from the hubbub all around, a juddering, clattering sound rising steadily in volume as something heavy came thundering towards him.

  Realization hit him and he rolled quickly onto his back. Whatever it was raced past, inches from his prone body, metal-clad wheels striking sparks on the cobbles. He tilted his head back and now he was looking upside down at the rear of a carriage moving briskly away from him, pulled by horses that he could hear but couldn’t quite see. A scruffy man wearing a weird triangular hat glanced back at him from the driver’s seat, an amused grin on his dirty face. He lifted a whip, cracked it in the air and the carriage lurched on along the street.

  Now Tom managed to sit upright. He stared around in open-mouthed astonishment. He was still on the Close, he decided, or at least on a wider road that adjoined it, but it all looked different now, packed with human life of every age and description, far too many people to be mere actors and, when he raised his eyes to look for the dark ceiling of the Royal Mile, his astonished gaze found nothing more than a row of high rooftops and above them, a clear blue sky and the sun streaming down into his face. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, hoping that somehow everything would go back to the way it was, but it didn’t.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked the world at large but, not surprisingly,
he received no answer.

  ‘Are you all right?’ The voice made him start. He turned to see the young girl he had been following. She was standing just a short distance from him, one hand on her hip, the other holding her straw basket. She had a quizzical smile on her pretty face and Tom was relieved to see that there was no sign of any blood on her dress. ‘You fell over,’ she added, just in case he didn’t know what had happened to him. ‘You said something to me and then you fell.’ She had a broad Scottish accent, thick and coarse, unlike any other he had heard since his arrival in Edinburgh.

  He sat there blinking at her, trying to find appropriate words but nothing seemed to fit the situation except ‘where am I?’ and there was no way he was going to say that. So he tried something else. ‘The floor gave way,’ he muttered.

  ‘Did it?’ She looked down at the cobbled street and even tried tapping it with the toe of one boot. ‘Seems all right to me,’ she said.

  ‘Not this floor, stupid. The other one: the wooden one in the room where you weren’t supposed to go.’

  She studied him warily as though she suspected he was some kind of lunatic. ‘I wouldn’t sit there if I was you,’ she said. ‘For one thing, it’s very dirty. And for another . . .’

  As if to illustrate her point, a second carriage came rattling towards Tom from the opposite direction, the horses wild-eyed and snorting as the driver urged them onwards with no concern for the confused-looking boy sitting in the middle of the road. Tom took the hint. He scrambled to his feet and dodged aside, then watched in amazement as the vehicle rattled past. Through an open window there was a glimpse of a man in a powdered white wig and a fancy gold jacket. He was staring expressionlessly out at the world but he grinned when he saw Tom, revealing twin rows of rotten green teeth.