Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  14

  The boy who built robots

  Rutherford Forbes pulled the steel door shut behind him and pulled down the security bar. None of those damn kids had seen him slip away, but he’d had a terrible sense of foreboding about such heavy snow.

  ‘Professor, where the hell have you been?’

  The spindly man in the white jacket seated at the computer terminal didn’t turn around, but Forbes heard a watery chuckle.

  ‘Just having a little fun, sire,’ he said in a reedy, pinched voice. ‘Just playing a few games in the snow.’

  ‘Damn it, Professor, how close did you get to that singer?’

  ‘Hahaha, I put the wind right up his shirt, sire.’

  Forbes looked up at the monitor screens. ‘Are they all settling down for the night?’

  The Professor stabbed a few keys and the screens flickered through a variety of different views. ‘We’ve lost a couple of the outdoor cameras,’ the professor said. ‘Methinks you need to change the wiring, hmm?’

  ‘Don’t mock me, you fool.’

  ‘Charmed, sire. Well, your special guest is sleeping in the King’s Bedroom, and your even specialer guest is partaking in forty or forty-five winks in the Queen’s Bedroom … two of those kids are playing snooker, and, um, drinking stolen Johnny Walker…’

  ‘Those thieving little bastards. I’ll have their school billed for this.’

  The professor chuckled. ‘Two others, the pretty glum girl and the pretty glum boy, are having a little lover’s tiff in the study. How … antiquated.’

  ‘And the others?’

  The professor flicked through a few screens. ‘No idea. Probably asleep. It’s after ten thirty, time for bed, sire!’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And … oh, look!’ The professor pressed a switch and a view of the lounge room of Stewart House appeared. The muscular one from the band and a young girl – presumably the unaccounted for one – were huddled together under a handful of blankets on one of the sofas.

  ‘What the hell are they doing?’

  The professor cackled. ‘Nerves be a little frayed, one suggests,’ he said.

  Forbes glowered. ‘Professor Crow … what did you do? We agreed on the singer, only.’

  Professor Crow pushed back his chair and spun round. Forbes gasped. He never got used to the professor’s hideously deformed face. The sneering bottom lip beneath the hardened beaklike nose, the downy feathers that covered his cheeks, the black beads of his eyes…

  ‘I gave them a little … serenade.’

  The professor threw back his head and screeched. Forbes slammed his hands over his ears, turned away and went back through the steel door, and up a staircase towards the Grand Mansion of British Heights, situated on the surface two flights of stairs above him. Even as he reached the door that opened out into the back of a cleaning cupboard, Professor Crow’s screeching laughter drew like fingernails across his eardrums.

  #

  The old Chinese woman had something she wanted him to see. She tugged at his arm and he let her lead him into the warren of back alleys off Daonung’s main street, into a pungent stench of boiled tofu and cooking chicken offal. Rutherford wrinkled his nose and grimaced, trying not to cough as the rich aroma of cooking food engulfed him.

  He glanced back at the road as it receded behind him, replaced by the crumbling walls of doorless shacks, but Rutherford felt no fear despite his obviously expensive clothes, or that he was the only Westerner in this town. He smiled at the sight of one of his factory’s uniforms hung up to dry in the glassless window of a shack, and smiled politely when a couple of people came to shake his hand.

  Was this what it was like to be a rock star? A politician? A demi-god, even?

  The school he had built educated the poor children who would grow up to work in his factory for pay far above the local average. They would grow up healthy, drinking the clean water the wells he had drilled provided, work hard, and spend their excess money in the revitalised shops in the town square. Rutherford had nothing to do with any other local businesses, but a few carefully placed bribes in the local government had ensured no other outside corporations could set up shop in the town, meaning the money stayed in the community. Rutherford Forbes, the enigmatic British businessman, was hailed as a saviour.

  Daonung’s mayor had wanted to erect a statue of Rutherford in the town square as a thank you for dragging the town out of abject poverty, but Rutherford had declined with thanks. On his visits he simply enjoyed eating and drinking as he chose, and taking the occasional pretty Chinese girl to his bed.

  Daonung was one of three towns in Sichuan Province which Rutherford had taken under his control. He liked to visit them all at least once a year, just to check on things. He especially liked to get out among the people. He spoke no more than a few words of Chinese, but that personal touch made him more than just a distant benefactor, it made him one of them.

  ‘Come, come,’ the old woman said, pulling on his arm. ‘Please … I show.’

  Rutherford had no pressing engagements until the following day. A girl named Fu Shi was waiting for him back at the modest villa he had built on the town’s outskirts, with a warm smile and a firm body, but he’d taken his fill of her once today already. He liked to mingle with his workers, and many of them lived in the little warrens of shacks either side of the single main street.

  Rutherford smiled as the woman led him past an outdoor toilet and shower block that looked lifted from a European campsite and deposited here in rural China. It was another one of his touches. Provide for one’s flock, and one’s flock will provide for you.

  At a piece of cowhide hanging down over a shack entrance, the woman paused. She turned to Rutherford and took hold of both his hands. He was no more than five foot ten inches, but she seemed tiny in comparison, peering up at him out of a sundried face.

  ‘Inside,’ she said.

  ‘Sure, let’s go.’

  He started to turn towards the door, but the woman held on with a grip that was surprisingly strong. When he turned back to her, she let go of his hands and held her fingers up over her face.

  ‘Here … no look,’ she said. With the other hand she pointed at her temple. ‘Here … look.’

  Rutherford frowned. Look with his mind but not with his eyes, is that what she was saying? What on earth was she about to show him?

  She gripped his hands again and nodded. When he copied her nod, she muttered, ‘Okay,’ then turned and went inside, pushing the hide door aside for him to follow.

  Inside, the woman’s home was as poverty-stricken as he had expected. Just a couple of shreds of dirty carpet covered a floor that was part earth, part concrete. A cable hung across the ceiling, allowing the woman’s home to have crude electric lighting. Rutherford, who ensured the local council received enough money to ignore the obvious theft lines connected to the electricity wires, admired the people’s ingenuity. In adversity they had found ways to cope, and he liked that in a potential workforce. It was one reason he had come to poor Sichuan to set up his factories, rather than a more industrialised province.

  ‘In,’ the woman said, pointing at another cowhide door leading to a separate room. ‘In … here.’ She pointed to her face and her temple again, repeating the same action as she had outside. Only when Forbes nodded and told her ‘Okay,’ did she pull back the covering and let him step inside.

  Something crunched underfoot, and Forbes lifted his shoe to reveal a silvery glinting man about the size of his palm, its square head now detached from its body. He frowned and nudged it aside with his foot, looking up at the treasure trove he now found himself in.

  The room looked like an electronics closet. Bits of wiring and pieces of metal covered the floor, while heaped in the corners were crude electronic contraptions built out of others. Rutherford recognised circuit boards and old computers, video players, and even the shells of a couple of televisions.

  Sitting on a stool in the middle of the tiny
room, bent over something, was a child with a big mop of brown hair. Dressed in what Rutherford could only describe as sacking, the kid was muttering to himself as he fiddled with his latest creation.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Rutherford asked the woman.

  ‘He build,’ she said. ‘Kurou! Kurou! Show … he.’

  The boy let out a whiny cackle that sounded like a squeaky bicycle chain. Rutherford winced, but the woman looked up at him and jabbed a finger into her temple again.

  Something small shifted in the dark, moving along the ground in short, jerky movements. It looked like a crude doll fashioned out of bits of metal. No more than six inches high, it took a few faltering steps towards Rutherford. When it got to within about a foot of him, the boy clapped a hand on the edge of the stool, and the tiny man jumped eight inches in the air and spun around. Then it began walking back towards its creator.

  Rutherford gasped. The boy was making robots.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Five.’

  Rutherford gasped. ‘Are you sure?’

  The woman nodded. She pointed to her temple again. ‘Here … strong,’ she whispered.

  ‘Let me have a look at you.’ Rutherford stepped forward, reaching for the boy.

  ‘No!’ the woman screamed.

  Only as his hand fell on the boy’s shoulder did Rutherford realise the child didn’t have a mob of brown hair, he was wearing a sacking hood over his head. He pulled it off before the woman could stop him.

  The boy jerked and fell of the stool, twisting around. The single dim bulb in the room pushed the shadows back from his face.

  Rutherford squeezed his eyes shut and looked away. He understood the gestures now.

  The boy—if he could be called that—was a monster. His nose, fused with his upper lip, was long and hooked, calcified, and his protruding bottom lip made him look like a remarkably ugly bird. His eyes were beady little dots peering out of a feather-covered face. His hands, pressed across his chest, were barely more than talons.

  ‘What the fuck are you?’ Rutherford whispered.

  ‘Kurou,’ the woman whispered. ‘My … boy.’

  Rutherford nodded. ‘Kurou,’ he said slowly. ‘Crow.’

  The boy was so ugly he was painful to look at. He was the kind of monster that would have been drowned at birth in years gone by, a monstrosity created out of mutated genes or radiation or both. He had a face that would grace darkened rooms and nightmares for the rest of his life. He was, without doubt, an abomination.

  But he was also a genius.

  15

  Jun talks to Akane

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Jun said from where he was slouched on an armchair in the corner behind the door, one leg up over the armrest, his hands behind his head. He stared across the study, at the window and the snow still falling outside. An ancient clock on the wall told him it was five minutes past midnight. ‘I just found him, and I froze. I couldn’t have stopped it. No one could have.’

  Akane, lying on her side on a sofa behind him, sighed. ‘I know, Jun. But you were there. When I came home from piano practice and I couldn’t find him, I went into the garage and you were there. I can’t separate you. When I remember his face I think of you.’

  ‘Can’t you try?’

  ‘I have tried.’ She shook her head. ‘I lost everything that was beautiful in my life. I lost my mother, and my father, and my best friend.’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Not to me, Jun. Not that same boy that I used to play with in the park, who used to help me with my homework. That boy is gone. Or if not gone, then … soured. Can’t you understand that?’ Akane rolled over on the sofa and pressed her forehead against the old, faded plush. ‘If you hadn’t been there, you might have been the crutch that could have helped me through it all. I could have still seen the old memories in your face.’

  Jun wanted to scream. It was like trying to break through a steel door when he had the key in his hand. ‘All you have to do is look forward,’ he said. ‘Stop looking back.’

  She didn’t reply at first. Jun stared at the old books on the shelves: a hundred million words of advice but not one line that could help him.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘What is there to look forward to? My grandparents are in their eighties. They’ll be gone soon. I’m an only child. I’ll be alone in the world. It won’t matter who I play piano for, the people I want to listen won’t be there.’

  Jun said nothing. It seemed there was no getting through to her. He was just thankful that she was still in the same room, that after so long she was talking to him. It wasn’t exactly progressing as he would like, but it was better than the silence, better than watching her with other guys.

  ‘Why Ogiwara?’ he said at last.

  The sofa creaked as Akane stiffened. ‘What?’

  Jun smiled. ‘I mean, we go to a school generally populated by fuckwits. I gather that you’ve been hanging around with those types because you don’t want to think about your past, but … I mean, did you have to pick the biggest fuckwit of all? There are plenty in the lower ranks that would have been just as unfulfilling.’

  Akane gave a welcome laugh. ‘Nothing by halves,’ she said. ‘But yeah, he’s a clown.’

  ‘He’s the biggest clown in the school. The guy is an absolute, bon-a-fide tit.’

  ‘He’s good looking.’

  ‘Mr. Kirahara is good-looking. You’re not banging him!’

  Akane slapped the back of the couch. ‘Shut up, that’s disgusting!’

  ‘I bet you’re thinking about it now. I bet you can’t get it out of your head.’

  ‘What, Ogiwara and Sensei?’

  It was Jun’s turn to laugh. ‘Yeah, you’ve got me.’ He shifted around on the chair to look at her. ‘He’s actually pretty cool, you know. He was telling me about how he was into metal, and that he once went to Scandinavia.’

  ‘Huh. Who’d have thought it?’

  ‘Yeah, I was kind of surprised.’

  Akane stood up. She came around the couch and pushed Jun’s leg down off the armrest. Then, giving him a reluctant look, she sat down beside him.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  She didn’t look at him at first, just stared straight ahead, her hands in her lap and her back rigid like a girl at convent school awaiting confirmation.

  ‘I’m scared, Jun.’

  He reached out a tentative arm and put it around her shoulders. For a moment she resisted, then she relaxed and leaned in against him. ‘Yeah, me too,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t think this changes anything.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘It’s getting cold though. I’m cold, Jun. And tired.’

  ‘We should go back to our rooms.’

  ‘No! I can’t. I can’t move. I want to stay here, with you.’

  Jun nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Everything will be all right, you know. We’ll wake up tomorrow, all the staff will be back, and we’ll have to go to some stupid class at nine o’clock to learn how to write in old world English or something. The snow will probably have stopped and Kirahara-sensei will have come back with all the others. They’ll probably be a bit pale, but they’ll be fine.’

  Akane said nothing. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing softly against his chest. Jun looked around. She was right, it was starting to get cold. There was a heater not far from them but the light had blinked off. It was probably on a timer. He lowered her back into the chair and went to look, but it had no manual controls.

  He didn’t want to leave her alone, but he had little choice. There was nothing in the room that could cover them, and the thought of going outside in the snow to return to their rooms filled him with dread. In the hall, the main lights had switched off, leaving just a handful of emergency lights at regular intervals in the ceiling.

  The stairs down to the reception area were totally dark. Jun considered going back for Akane and taking her downstairs. There was a fireplace oppo
site the reception, although it had been unlit earlier. If they could get a fire going, perhaps they could warm up a bit. Still, a strange foreboding feeling hung in the air like damp, and he didn’t want to leave the safety of the library. He knew the two ornamental bedrooms were locked, so he could find nothing to help him there … but perhaps towels from the recreation room?

  Again, he didn’t want to leave Akane alone while he went down to look. Frowning, he went over to the window to look out on the courtyard below. He pushed the curtains aside and looked out. A couple of streetlights cast a dull glow over the snowy world below. Beyond them, the illuminations outside the pub had switched off, but Jun could see that the snow had finally stopped. That was something at least.

  He started to turn away, then looked up. Of course, the curtains! There were none in the study or library, which meant the single-pane windows would let the cold in quickly, but out here in the hallway each window had thick drapes. Jun pulled up a chair, climbed up on its seat and began to unpick the nearest ones. They were old and dusty, but they were thick and at least ten feet long.

  Ten minutes later two of them lay in a heap at his feet. As he picked them up in his arms, straining under the weight, he glanced back out at the courtyard one more time, and froze as he saw a thin figure wading through the snow, moving across the buried road between the dormitory buildings and the pub. Jun couldn’t recognise the figure over the distance, but he watched until the person had disappeared out of sight behind the pub, probably heading to where Jun had seen the staff quarters to be on the map.

  A tingle ran down Jun’s spine. Sure, it was likely just a member of staff—a janitor, perhaps—out doing his nightly rounds despite the snow, but there was something about the figure that made him uneasy.