Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

Chapter Fourteen

  I AWOKE WITH a terrible suddenness. With a jolt, like in one of those falling dreams, a dream of falling from a high building and being horribly, terminally weightless. A dream of imminent, certain death.

  I was dead. For a moment, a moment so empty and cold and black that I had no notion of where I was, I thought that I was dead.

  And then myself, my being, came back to me.

  The room, our bedroom high in the tower of an old church. The night, a real night in a real January, not yet the oblivion I was dreading. I was warm underneath a thick, soft duvet, and I could feel the radiant, living heat of my wife’s body beside me. But, although I should have been reassured and ready to snuggle down and go back to sleep again, I lay still and stared at the darkness of the ceiling and felt a gnawing, an aching in my belly.

  It was that time of night. Dire wakefulness and nothing but guilt. I lay still and I stared, and I listened.

  A sound. It was Rosie’s breathing. We’d drunk a bottle of red wine together, she’d tried to lift my spirits with wine and then with her hot urgent body in our bed, and now she was sleeping a fumey sleep and whistling through her teeth.

  Another sound. Something in the roof. A furtive scratching, so dainty and faint it could have been a mouse, pattering in the dust of the clock-tower.

  Another sound. It was Chloe. Nothing alarming. In her room, she was making the mewing, mock-pathetic noise she knew would be enough to wake one of us to come and see if she was alright, and then she would end up snug in bed with her Mummy while her Daddy was nudged out with her bony knees....

  Good. I lay for a moment and listened to the three sounds. I was glad they were there. They were real. I had awoken from the forgetfulness of sleep into a night of bitter self-reproach. But now I had something of the everyday world to preoccupy me. Something to do.

  I got up and crossed the room. Rosie didn’t stir. She was snoring, flat on her back. Naked, I pushed open Chloe’s door and blinked into the darkness. I couldn’t see her, I could only make out the mound of her bedding, the tumble of her duvet and pillows. I whispered, ‘Hey Chloe... what’s up? You alright?’

  She mewed. And she mewed again, her baby-sound when she needed attention and comfort. I took two steps forward and felt at her bed. She wasn’t there.

  There was a gleam of silver, it caught the corner of my eye. The ladder. I spun round and there she was, at the very top of it.

  ‘Chloe!’ I hissed the word at her. It came out as a puff of sound, no louder than the puff of a dandelion-clock. ‘What on earth...? How did you pull the ladder down? Hey, come down from there...’

  A gleam of silver, the faintest whiteness of her pyjamas, and the glint of her smile. Yes, she was smiling, and this time there was more in its metallic glimmer than the usual insipid nothingness. Mischief? A challenge? As I moved to the foot of the ladder and reached up for her, she made a tiny gurgle of laughter in her throat and she put up her hands to the trap-door.

  ‘No, Chloe, not a game, not now... I told you, didn’t I? I told you not to try and reach the ladder, didn’t I? Come on, back to bed...’

  She pushed at the trap-door and it yawned open, silent and smooth on its new springs. With another backward glance at me, daring me to follow, she was up the last few rungs of the ladder and disappearing into the darkness.

  In a second I was up the ladder. I pulled myself through the trap-door, stood up and narrowed my eyes into the surrounding shadows of the clock-tower. It was freezing up there. I was naked, straight from a hot bed. A shaft of light from the street outside beamed through the broken panes of the clock face. No traffic, no swish of tyres or movement of passing headlamps. In the further corner of the big, black space, there was the outline of the central-heating boiler. Otherwise, nothing. Nothing but dust underfoot, the crunch of a litter of twigs and dried-up leaves... and me, stepping into the middle of the room and turning slowly round and round, stopping, staring, turning again, calling out, playing a children’s game in a strange place in the middle of a sub-zero night.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Chloe... come on now, this is silly. Mummy would be really cross, shall I go and tell her? Let’s get you back into bed. Or you can go into Mummy’s bed, do you want to? Snuggle with Mummy all nice and warm and...’

  I saw her movement, just a flicker of shadow on the floor. And another movement, like a puddle of shadow, separate from hers. For a moment the two shadows were one, and I heard the girl’s giggle of excitement, a note of triumph in it. But then the smaller shadow freed itself from hers and scuttled across the floor.

  Yes, it scuttled; it made a sound of clicking and clattering claws on the dust and twigs, and the flutter of cold, dry wings. Because it was the crow. Chloe had heard it in the room above her head. She had come to find it. And now, as her shadow broke away from the clustered shadows of the wall beside the clock, she was chasing the crow to try and catch it.

  ‘Chloe, what...? Leave it, Chloe, just let it go, it’s dirty and nasty and Mummy will be really cross, she’ll...’

  The bird brushed past my bare legs. I instinctively recoiled from the needle-sharpness of its claws on my bare feet. And then, when I clutched at Chloe as she swerved close to me, she somehow evaded my clumsy grabbing and wriggled past, in chuckling pursuit of the crow. ‘Leave it, Chloe...’ Her feet were almost silent, no louder than the whisper of the dead leaves she disturbed, cushioned by years of dust. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw how the bird was trailing a wing and sculling around the edges of the room, rowing itself along and using all the traction it could achieve with its claws, and even with desperate jabs and tugs with its beak, like a climber making life-or-death use of an ice-axe.

  The girl was right behind it. She reached down with both hands and missed. She stomped with one foot to trap the injured wing and she missed. The bird sprang off the floor, managed a moment of frantic flight and lunged for the hole in the clock face, from which it had once before made a plummeting escape. But this time it missed. Dazzled and disorientated by the shaft of light from outside, it struck the edge of the broken glass, beat against it, a grotesque silhouette of wings and claws and beak, and it fell back to the floor. And just as Chloe was right there and reaching for it, just as I reached for her and swept her off her feet and away, the crow made another bid for freedom. It sprang to the trap-door. It fell, like a flutter of old rags, down into Chloe’s bedroom.

  ‘Oh great... oh that’s great...’ I heard myself panting. I squeezed the child’s body so hard against mine, almost overwhelmed by a fury of frustration, that she squeaked like a toy. ‘Chloe, you silly bad girl... now you’re coming down with me, you silly silly girl, and you’re going to get into your bed and stay still and I’m going to get the big nasty bird out, alright? Get it out, alright, without waking Mummy, alright?’

  She was suddenly compliant, as though I’d squeaked the mischief out of her. I got myself through the trap-door and onto the ladder without daring to let go of one of her wrists, and then I hoicked her unceremoniously down, managed to pull the door shut and then lumped her down to the floor.

  ‘Bed. You, into bed.’ I shoved her onto it and into it and she was still. Still, but breathing hard from the madness of the game, and yes, still smiling that infuriatingly angelic smile, as though Daddy had enjoyed the game as much as she had. And she watched from there, a delighted spectator, as I poked and rummaged under her bed and around her dressing table to try and find where the bird had gone, as I fumbled into her open wardrobe and it burst out of the darkness and scrabbled at my face and neck and chest before hopping out of her bedroom and into ours.

  ‘Oh great, yes that’s fucking great...’ I hissed again at Chloe. ‘Bed, you stay there.’

  Oh god, the bird was on our bed, it was a black stain on our duvet, a piece of a nightmare snagging its claws into the soft material and struggling to free itself right next to Rosie’s face. Oh god, but thank god for the wine and the fume of sleep in which Rosie was so deeply befu
ddled, because she just groaned and rolled over and swatted around her head with one lazy bare arm so that the bird was free and off the bed and thank god, oh thank god it was closer and closer to the bedroom door... so that, as I herded it in front of me with my naked legs and instinctively shielded myself with both hands in case the bird sprang up and pecked at my penis with its pick-axe of a beak, when I reached for the door and pulled it open, I could kick the bird out.

  At least, down in the kitchen, I felt the panic in my chest subside.

  Upstairs, Rosie was asleep. The worst was over. The crow had skittered so close to her wheezily snoring mouth that she must have felt its wings on her face. Now, with the light on in the kitchen, it was easier for me to take a breath, to take my own time and locate the bird...

  Trying to calm myself, I put the kettle on. While it was boiling, I sat at the table and waited and listened and saw a bristle of raggedy black feathers jutting from behind the fridge. Uninvited. Before I had time to reach for the brush leaning in the corner and force the bird from its hiding-place, it sidled out. With one beat of its wings, as though they’d been strong and whole all of the time, it was standing right opposite me, on the back of a chair, at the kitchen table.

  Carrion crow. Not in gleaming, rude health, but more or less intact. A starveling, a survivor. It had the defiant, dangerous look of an escaped convict. An escapee from deathrow. It looked at me and shuffled its wings and feathers together again. It looked at me and cocked its head, and it snorted through its bristly nostrils. Black bare legs, shiny and scaly like the legs of a lizard, knobby-knuckly feet tipped with ebony claws. Those eyes, blue-black, rimmed with a ripple of black skin, and a sudden blink of a pale, membranous lid. The beak, its means of survival, a tool for a lifetime of thievery and thuggery, a weapon for wounding and killing and eating. For scavenging carrion.

  A word whispered in my head. I said it aloud. ‘Poe.’

  The suddenness of the sound, its plosive force, ruffled the bird into action. It opened its wings like a cloak, wide and black and saturnine, as though mocking the ministers who had hitherto inhabited this hallowed tower. It stepped off the chair and floated to the floor, landing as lightly as a moth.

  And then it was easy for me, to open the kitchen door and let it hop down and down the stairs into the darkness of the hallway of the church.

  Gone. I would have to sort it out tomorrow. It could stay there, it could huddle in a corner and watch for the daylight beneath the great oak door, and in the morning I could put it out.

  I had tea. A naked man, sipping from a steaming mug and inspecting a strange map of weals and welts on my body, inflicted in the middle of a winter’s night by a mischievous crow. Mischief... the word made me think, as I sat there and felt the desire for sleep come over me, that Chloe had shown a spirit we hadn’t seen since the day of her accident. And I pondered the irony that, although I’d threatened the child back into bed with the ultimate sanction of telling her mother, Rosie might – after the initial shock of seeing the child up in the clock-tower with the bird – she might have been thrilled to see a vital spark in Chloe. After all, didn’t Rosie want her back, didn’t she want a naughty, rumbustious Chloe?

  I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. What did I know about anything? And what did I want? All I knew was that, hearing the crow in the room above her head, the child had been enlivened... was that the word?

  I dropped my mug into the sink. I switched off the light in the kitchen and went up to the bedroom. Rosie was snoring, in a sweet oblivion. Chloe was lying beside her, a sleeping cherub.

  So I went into her room. I returned the ladder, on its silent runners, to the ceiling, and I tied up the cord where I thought she could never reach it.

  Into Chloe’s bed. Game over.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘IT’S TIME YOU changed his straw. It smells. There’s a funny smell in here and I can even smell it upstairs in the bedroom.’

  The mouse, Mouse, was working its wheel with a manic intensity. No prizefighter, training in a remote camp in the weeks before a world championship fight, had ever worked harder. It drove the wheel relentlessly, harder and faster until the whole contraption might fly off and smash into smithereens against the bars of the cage, with the mouse mangled inside it. Rosie was almost ready. Chloe and me, we were doing toast and tea and cosying at the kitchen table. Rosie had been smelling funny things since she’d woken up and showered and dressed, she was crinkling her nose in the bedroom and down into the kitchen and looking curiously around her, and at last, seeing and hearing Mouse hurtling the wheel almost to destruction, she’d found the culprit.

  ‘Can you do that, Chloe? Change his straw? Daddy will help you, if he has a few moments between serving his customers in the shop. I mean, if there’s a lull for a minute or two, Daddy can grab a breather between the coach parties from China and Japan and Korea, and the Ph.D. students from America of course, and he’ll help you and poor little neglected Mouse will be nice and clean again...’

  She said all this, clucking and wittering, a gently sarcastic mother-hen, as she donned her gear for the arctic trudge down Shakespeare Street to Brook’s Academy. I let it all go, busying myself with Chloe, in a cuddle of coffee and Radio 4 and relishing my status as one of the unshaven, undressed, unemployed. Yes, there was a smell in the bedroom and in the kitchen, and Chloe and I knew what it was, something animal and oddly fetid, and wild, as though we’d had rats in the house and one of them might have died behind the fridge. The crow, in its scuttling from top to bottom of the tower, had left a curious, unidentifiable scent... unidentifiable, unless of course you’d been there and knew what it was.

  At last Rosie was girt for her expedition. And once again, as she nearly always did, she pecked me on the cheek and set off down and down into the cold dark hallway, and she said, ‘I may be some time...’

  I waited at the top of the stairs and held my breath. I watched the yawning darkness swallow her up, heard her tugging the church door open and her going out and clanging it shut... expecting any moment her squeal or shriek as she discovered our carrion-bird skulking down there and startling her and...

  But she was gone. The door was shut. I heard her booted footsteps fading along the pavement.

  OVER THE FOLLOWING days I had customers. No coachloads. But a few people came into the shop.

  And they bought a few books. Yes, there were doubters and cynics, there were gainsayers and poo-poohers, there were raggedy Romanians and shuffling vagrants who came in because they smelled the coffee and heard the music and saw the flickering flames of our birchwood fire. But I sold some books.

  Chloe and I settled in, that first morning, and she sat by the fire and let Mouse scurry around her shoulders and down the front of her woolly pullover and through her sleeves, let it explore the warm and snuggly labyrinth of her chubby, cherubic body. It emerged from time to time at one of her wrists, sat on the palm of her hand panting, as though exhausted by the suffocating heat of its journey, and then disappeared again into another sleeve.

  A man came in. For a bizarre moment, I was so surprised that I was going to ask him what on earth he thought he was doing just wandering in and snooping around... and then the reality of the shop came back to me and I was suffused with such a welling of warmth through my head and my body that I could almost have fainted. He didn’t say much. He didn’t need to. He was my first customer. No need to describe him, he was a nondescript guy in a coat and a hat and it didn’t matter who he was, I could’ve hugged him and kissed him, I was so happy to have him in the vestry of my old church, in Poe’s Tooth Bookshop. In reality, he was a time-waster, he was listening to the music, he was looking funny at Chloe, he wasn’t at all interested in the books or the tooth. But when he’d gone, without speaking a word or buying anything, I picked up Chloe in my arms in a huge Siberian bear-hug and we whirled around the room in a madcap Cossack dance inspired by the fragrance of the fire, because someone had come in... we were open!

 
There was a tiny, tiny scratting sound. I was changing the music, and in the quietness, in the lull, when the logs had collapsed into a shower of sparks and a billow of blue smoke, both of us heard a sound in the corner of the room. We looked at each other. We knew that the bird had come into the shop. Me and Chloe. We’d smelled it when we’d first come in, when we’d busied ourselves lighting the fire. We’d heard it. Mouse had smelled it and heard it, whenever it had poked out its pink little questing snout from the tunnels of Chloe’s clothing, it must have sniffed the smell of the bird. Even a mouse, especially a mouse, even a poor, pale, domesticated albino, it must have scented the danger in the air.

  Carrion crow. Death, in a raggedy black cloak. All of that morning, we’d seen not a glimmer of a feather, not a reptilian gleam of beak or claw, but we’d known that the bird was there. In the night, when I’d bundled it down the stairs from the kitchen, it must have sought sanctuary in the vestry... where a century of ministers had shaken the dust from their cloaks and hung them on big brass hooks and warmed their legs in front of the fire. As soon as Rosie had gone out of the door, without a squeal or a shriek, I’d known that the bird must’ve gone into the vestry.

  It emerged, dead on cue.

  I think it was Chloe who did it. With Mouse. A man came into the shop in the afternoon. He was very big and fat and he smelled, his clothes smelled of smoke and beer and of being unwashed – the same clothes he’d worn since before Christmas, when the cold weather had taken a grip on the days and nights and the winter seemed like an ice-age, not just a season which would inevitably pass by and give way to spring. He scanned around the room. He was poor and lonely and unhappy, but he conjured a little smile on his cold, wet lips, as though he hadn’t smiled for a long time, because he liked the fire and the room and the sweet little smiling girl. He peered and pondered at the lamplit tooth, and at me. I hadn’t shaved for a few days and I was scruffy and huddled in my baggy old pullover and coat and fidgeting at the computer as though I was some kind of tortured and tormented writer toiling on my novel. He seemed to like it all. And just as he was lifting a book from the shelf and turning it over to read the blurb on the back, there was a commotion which made all of us stop and turn and look.