Two and Twenty Dark Tales

by Georgia McBride

  The crow watches me, his head cocked to one side, eyes unblinking. I take a tentative step forward, and then another. I glance at the photographs of my sister and me, and then back at my visitor. He shows no sign of fear, so I take heart and edge a little closer. I am afraid he will leave before I manage to unravel this mystery.

  When I stand directly in front of the dresser, I look up at the top of the mirror and meet the bird’s serious gaze.

  I say, “Hello.” I only feel slightly ridiculous.

  The crow nods its head once, as though acknowledging my greeting.

  “What do you want with me?” I ask.

  He blinks.

  “Can I help you at all?”

  The crow flicks out his wings with a sharp snap that startles me. I take a quick step back.

  He settles again, watching and waiting, eyes steady and bright, like two drops of polished coal.

  I glance at his wicked claws and frown. What is that? There, on his left ankle…

  Keeping my gaze on his I move forward again, hoping for a better view of the glint of metal I’d just seen. I wonder what might happen if I try to touch the crow? Would he fly away? Try to escape? Flap around my room, squawking and shedding feathers until I open the window and set him free?

  I don’t want him to be scared of me, so I resist the temptation to reach out.

  He might attack me. Peck out my eyes, like in a movie I’d seen once upon a time.

  Chills sprinkle along my spine. What a thought! The crow wouldn’t hurt me.

  My crow is a friend.

  I get as close as I dare, so close that the dresser draws are pressed against my pajama-clad legs, and I look at the crow’s left ankle. His gray, scaly skin reminds me of the many colorful pictures of dinosaurs that used to fascinate me when I was a child.

  The metal winks as the crow stirs, and I gasp. I don’t quite know what I had been expecting. Something romantic. A ring of finest gold, perhaps. Something out of a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme. Like the stories Mom used to tell us when we were very small.

  Before the accident. Before she and Alice died.

  Silver circles the crow’s leg. It presses tight against the flesh, like a noose. There is no easy way to remove it. Not that I can see. There is a tiny loop of metal attached to the smooth edge, and threaded through that loop are three chain links. The final link is bent and partly open at one end.

  It is as though my crow has broken the chain attached to the silver cuff around his ankle. Had he been a prisoner? And if he was a prisoner, who, then, had been his jailer?

  Questions flutter around my mind, making me dizzy.

  I glance up and meet those intelligent eyes. This time, he doesn’t blink.

  But why would someone keep a crow chained by its ankle? What’s the point? Crows are hardly the sort of bird people would want to keep as pets. At least, not out here.

  I try to imagine this crow—my crow—in a cage, attached to a little perch by that cruel manacle. Like a songbird, only with no song that most human ears would want to hear.

  Before I realize quite what I am doing (or so I like to tell myself), I rest my finger against the tip of one of the crow’s wings. His head whips around, sharp like his beak. Sharp like a claw. He makes a crow-sound, deep in his throat.

  Caw! Caw!

  A warning.

  I pull back, ashamed rather than afraid. I hope the noise hasn’t woken Stella. My father is away, which is a small comfort.

  The crow shakes himself, ruffling those beautiful feathers for a moment before they settle again.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  Who am I to touch this beautiful creature? Here I am, already thinking of him—it—as my crow. What’s wrong with me? I have clearly lost my mind.

  The crow closes his eyes, ignoring me.

  I fold my blanket and lay it across the armchair by the window, then crawl into bed. The sun is just coming up and I don’t think I will be able to sleep, no matter how tired I am, not with the crow sleeping in the room. I am too aware of him. I imagine I can hear his breathing, the beating of his tiny heart. The faint rustle of his wings.

  But eventually, I do sleep. I fall into a nightmare that spirals down and down into darkness, like a narrow staircase. I dream of blood and decay and death. I dream of crows, too many to count, swarming around me like a black cloud.

  A murder of crows.

  ***

  Four hours later, my father’s wife knocks at the door and pokes her head around it, tugging me from the lingering threads of the nightmare.

  “Are you getting up today, Rose?”

  My gaze immediately darts to the dresser, but there is no sign of the crow.

  Stella leans against the door. “I know you don’t have school, but you shouldn’t keep staying up so late at night.”

  “I’m awake,” I say, burrowing deeper under the covers.

  “It looks like it,” she replies, smiling. Stella’s all right, considering. “I’ll bring you a cup of tea. I just made a pot and it’s still hot. That might help.”

  “Thanks.” I stifle a yawn.

  “I heard from your dad this morning.”

  “Good.”

  Her smile fades. “He sent his love.”

  Yeah, right, I think. “That’s nice,” I say.

  She finally pulls the door shut, and I poke my head out from beneath the comforter. There is no sign of last night’s visitor. No way could he have gotten out alone, not unless he can open a window with his beak.

  I slide out of bed, shivering as my feet hit cold carpet, and pull the purple curtains aside. The fields stretch out for miles beneath the blue-white sky. Not for the first time, I wonder whatever possessed Stella to marry my father. She isn’t cut out for farm life.

  But then, neither am I.

  I grab the blanket from the chair and shake it out. I stop as something flutters to the floor.

  Another feather.

  I scoop it up and cradle it in my hands. I know it must be my imagination, but I can almost swear it is still warm against my chilled fingers. This feather is even more handsome than the first, long and smooth and so black it shines ebony-bright.

  I place it next to its twin between the pages of my book.

  What does it mean? I try to figure out how the crow manages to escape my room. It’s like one of those classic “locked room” mysteries that Poe himself was so fond of.

  The only possible explanation is that my crow can disappear into thin air. In a puff of smoke, like magic. And, really, what kind of an explanation is that?

  I think about it all day. I worry at it like one of our neighbor’s dogs with a bone, trying to untangle The Case of the Disappearing Crow. While I help Stella with lunch, I imagine all kinds of wild scenarios. My favorite is the one where the crow turns into mist—like a vampire—and floats from my room through the tiny cracks along the window frame. Or perhaps beneath my door.

  If it weren’t for those two feathers, I would be convinced I had been dreaming all along.

  But the feathers were there. I even ran upstairs to check.

  I could hardly wait for night to fall.

  That night, however, my crow doesn’t return.

  I wait and wait in the chair by the window. It is bitterly cold and I can’t stop myself from worrying about the crow. Perhaps he is freezing somewhere. Alone and injured.

  Perhaps whoever chained him in the first place has somehow recaptured him. He might be in a cage, unable to free himself this time.

  He might be under a spell. A curse.

  Maybe he’s dead.

  “No,” I whisper, as I watch the window and pray. I haven’t prayed since the day of the accident, seven years ago.

  He will come tomorrow, I tell myself.

  But he doesn’t. Nor the next night, nor even the next.

  The crow does not return, not even on Christmas night. Not on New Year’s Eve.

  “Everybody leaves,” I s
ay, as I study the fields and the sky, searching for a dark speck that will give me hope. I see something dart and flit wildly across the setting sun, and my heart soars—

  Until I realize that it is just a lone bat, and I swallow disappointment sharp as a razor.

  Another week passes, and school starts up again. The vacation with its magical visitor feels more and more dreamlike. A distant memory. It is as though my crow has flown away forever, and taken my hopes along with him.

  Life falls back into familiar patterns. My father returns from the farming conference, so I spend more and more time in my room. I wish, not for the first time, that there is a lock on my door, but he removed it after Mom and Alice died all those years ago.

  The thought crosses my mind that my life is not unlike the crow’s. We are each, in our own way, prisoners—even though we come from very different worlds.

  ***

  My heart is heavy when I take the bus along plowed roads, dirty snow piled like miniature mountains on either side as we rumble toward school. I press my forehead against the damp glass and watch my reflection. I try not to think about the crow. My gaze catches on a sign by the side of the railroad crossing: Mind the Gap. I touch my chest, where a new space has opened. This new fracture has settled alongside the others, one for my mother and one for Alice, my twin. My other self. And now, strangely—perhaps, inexplicably—for a crow.

  I wrap my arms around my backpack and hold on as hard as I dare.

  Inside it I have the book of poetry, with my two feathers tucked between the pages like secret love letters.

  Throughout the day, Michelle keeps asking me how I am. I say “fine” so many times she gets annoyed. It’s not like we’re all that close, anyway. We just don’t have any other friends, so we sort of got stuck with each other as freshmen. Three years later, we are still stuck. Neither of us fits in—at least not here, in our little community of farming families. I am like a walking wound, someone to be avoided at all costs. Michelle Okorafor, on the other hand, holds her head too high for someone who looks so different, and Nigeria might as well be on another planet. Together, we are like an old married couple who don’t know what we would do if we didn’t have each other.

  It turns out Michelle is still upset that I didn’t make it to her seventeenth-birthday dinner, the one she had with her family. At the time, I’d told her that Stella needed me to help out on the farm, what with my father being away. That usually keeps her quiet, although missing her birthday was probably a step too far—even for me. This time she was hurt. I should have felt guilty, but I had been numb for so long it was difficult for something as banal as guilt to register.

  I just hadn’t wanted to do anything during the vacation. The snow had fallen heavily, and I had a lot of homework.

  And then there was the crow. At least his visits had made me feel something.

  Michelle and I walk into last period together, that first day back at school, and all I can feel is relief that it’s almost over. I got through the day. I wonder how I will make it through another day like this, and then another. What about the whole week? A month. A semester. Graduation seems so far away. How could I travel that far without wings?

  I sit in my usual seat by the window at the back. Michelle flops down next to me and immediately pulls out her cell phone, her quick fingers dancing across the keys. I rest my chin on my hand and gaze outside. It is already getting dark, so all I can really see is my own reflection: long brown hair falling in thick waves around my pale face and my serious grey eyes staring back at me.

  I look beyond myself, watching the reflected classroom as my fellow students settle themselves at desks and pull books from their bags. I can see Richard Poole in the far corner, sitting with one of his regular cronies. I see Hanna Skarsgård take off her woolen hat and fluff out her flattened blonde curls.

  My gaze shifts once more… and my eyes meet those of a stranger.

  I stifle a gasp, instinct kicking in and saving me from more of Michelle’s questions. Turning my head away from the black mirror that the window has become, I look across the classroom.

  A new boy sits across the aisle from Michelle, but she is too busy texting with her little sister to notice. He is looking right back at me.

  His scruffy hair is so black it shines cobalt blue beneath the lights. His eyes are dark and his face is almost as pale as mine.

  He smiles at me.

  My gaze flicks to Michelle, but she is still engrossed in her virtual conversation. I look at the strange boy again, wondering why my smile won’t work. I must look sullen and stupid. I try to swallow away whatever is stuck in my throat, but even that doesn’t help.

  Mrs. Brennan strides into the classroom and bangs the door behind her.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she says, holding up a sheaf of papers. “It seems we have a new student with us today.”

  All the muttered and not-so-muttered conversations stop. Even Michelle puts down her phone and glances around the room, finally realizing she is sitting across the aisle from the new kid.

  The scruffy-haired boy is now the center of attention. He doesn’t look too happy about this, but he leans back in his chair and accepts our assessment of him.

  “Let’s welcome—” Here, Mrs. Brennan stops to adjust her glasses and consult her paperwork. “James Vanderveer.”

  We all watch James Vanderveer like he belongs to a fascinating new species.

  All except me. I watch him for an entirely different reason. I can’t take my eyes off him, not even for a second. Not because I think he is beautiful—which I do—and not even because he is new and different, someone to brighten up an ordinary, dull day at school. Which he is.

  I cannot take my eyes off him because I know who he is. I know it, deep inside me, even as my logical brain tells my crazy heart to get a grip. This is… impossible. Crows don’t turn into boys so they can attend high school. That’s not how real life works.

  But perhaps my life has become something else. Perhaps magic is real in a world where lonely crows visit human girls at home on winter mornings.

  James tilts his chair back, and I see that he is wearing black jeans and heavy boots. He looks tough, like he can take care of himself. The leather of his jacket is cracked and comfortable-looking. He seems a little wild, a little bit Rebel Without a Cause, and my heart beats faster than it has in a long time. He tilts his head to one side and meets my eyes. His are so black they are like two pieces of coal. I know I should be afraid of the intense expression on his face, and yet I am not. Maybe it’s for the same reason he wasn’t afraid of me after I let him into my bedroom. When he had been nothing more than a bird.

  Mrs. Brennan’s voice drones on. Something about how Mr. Vanderveer’s application got mixed up, and his family thought he was starting the next day. That’s why he was so late to school today. But after that explanation, my mind drifts away from the class and all I can do is wait for the lesson to end. Not long, I tell myself. Not long.

  I watch the clock. I tap my foot. I sneak glances at the boy-crow and hope Michelle hasn’t noticed how weird I am acting. I chew the end of my pencil and pretend to focus on world history, while instead I am focusing on James Vanderveer’s hands as he turns the pages of the textbook somebody gave him.

  A flash of light catches my attention and I stare. Even though I already knew, this confirmation makes my stomach clench. I blink and look again.

  He is wearing a silver ring, like a miniature cuff, on the little finger of his left hand.

  There is a noise in my ears, like the whoosh of the train as the school bus waits by the tracks. I think I might faint, even though I am sitting down. My head feels all tingly.

  “Miss Crawford, are you unwell?”

  Mrs. Brennan is leaning over my desk, and Michelle is watching me with genuine concern.

  James is standing behind our teacher, and I wonder when he appeared there because I don’t remember him moving. I cannot read the expression on his face.

&n
bsp; “I’m fine,” I say. “I think I didn’t eat enough, that’s all.”

  There is more clucking and mother-hen behavior from Mrs. Brennan, and in the end I have to accept a slip from her so I can visit the nurse, just to stop her fussing.

  “Michelle,” our teacher says, “if you could go with—”

  “I’ll go,” James Vanderveer says. He speaks in such a way as to make it clear there will be no argument. The decision has been made.

  Michelle stares at him, open-mouthed, and I wonder if she will dare to contradict him.

  James stares back, his eyes like a storm in the calm planes of his face.

  My friend closes her mouth.

  Mrs. Brennan frowns, but that is the extent of her dissent. “Very well. Off you go then.”

  I grab my bag and cram books and pencils inside with shaking hands. My fingers touch one of the feathers and I shiver. I don’t look at Michelle as I leave the room. I don’t look at anybody. I watch my feet on the floor, and the only thing I am aware of is James as he walks beside me and opens the door.

  He gestures me out into the corridor ahead of him, but he stands so that I have no choice but to brush against him.

  When our arms touch, an image flashes into my mind, clear as a winter sky over the fields: the room is small and bare, apart from a cage swinging gently from a hook in the stone ceiling. The cage is made from dull metal, curved into claws that grip the base. I cannot see a door, but there must be one somewhere, for otherwise how would the cage’s occupant get in—or out? There is a narrow perch welded between the bars of the cage, with a silver chain attached to it. And attached to that is a crow—

  My crow—the boy who, even now, is looking down at me with an animal’s eyes in a human face.

  I stumble into the corridor, disoriented, my heart pounding a rhythm that threatens to drive me to my knees. I lean against the wall and breathe, in and out, trying to figure out what just happened.