Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  Jun had other reasons for choosing the hotel, of course.

  It was close to midnight when he got back to his room. Ken, who would have gotten a lift or taken a taxi, had probably arrived back before him. Ken’s room, which he was sharing with Karin and Nozomi, was at one end of the third floor hallway, Jun’s at the other, on the corner, with windows that looked north and west.

  As soon as Jun entered the room he pulled open the curtains to reveal the night. Then he sat down and pulled his laptop out of a bag.

  He quickly logged on, found a roaming Wi-Fi signal and connected to the Internet. In a few minutes he had all his regular sites open: the rumour mills and the monster hunters, the speculative blogs and the pages concerned with local myths and legends, and their links to modern society.

  Ken knew about the resentments Jun felt. He had been at the study camp in the Japanese Alps where Akane Yamaguchi and three original members of Plastic Black Butterfly had died, along with more than a dozen of Jun’s schoolmates and his homeroom teacher. That Jun had been unable to let go of the horrors of those three days was well known.

  People the world over had been cast down by war and injustice, and were left to lick their wounds and curse silently into the night while attempting to repair their lives and carry on. Jun understood the attitude and could accept it, but it wasn’t so easy for him, knowing that the man responsible—if man was even the right word—was still out there.

  The world flowed through the Internet these days, and Jun had kept a close eye on the rumour mill these seven long years. Someone like the monstrosity they called Professor Crow couldn’t stay hidden forever, and within months of Jun posting anonymous information online there had been rumours of sightings from all over the world.

  Jun was no fool. The web was a meeting ground for crackpots and paranoids, and barely one in a thousand supposed sightings of Crow would be worth following up. But follow up he did, as often as time allowed, and he had sent off thousands of emails to online nutjobs asking for further information. He rarely got back anything useful, but ever so slowly, like a glacier creeping towards the sea, he had drawn a map of Crow’s possible movements since escaping the ruin of British Heights.

  There had been nothing solid, of course. No genuine photographs, no proof. But then, on a day when he had been bored of poring over speculation posted by crazy conspiracy theorists, he had come across an unexpected lead.

  In the burnt out shell of the study camp’s main building, firefighters had found some of Crow’s personal belongings. A laptop computer, so well protected by encryptions that not even the Japanese government’s secret services had been able to crack it, had yielded nothing except what they considered the most useless thing of all.

  The screensaver.

  And Jun had his clue.

  Unable to sleep, Jun brewed himself some coffee from the condiments in the room and read through Internet forums until it began to get light. Then, as the first mountain peaks appeared as spiky crags out of the gloom of pre-dawn, he pulled a chair up against the window, and lifted a pair of binoculars to his weary eyes.

  It was a few minutes before he saw one. There, swooping down through the dawn sky until it dived into the shadowy mass of trees below was a sleek black shape, its body a perfect spear. It reappeared a few seconds later with something tiny and helpless clutched in its jaws, before soaring away towards the distant mountains.

  A Romanian Black Eagle, critically endangered. However, in this part of the country, the population was thriving thanks to some conservationist backing that, try as he might, Jun had been unable to find a source for. There were no other known habitats for the birds, which had been common across Eastern Europe until hunting and poaching of their eggs had reduced the sensitive creatures to a mere handful.

  A year before, under pressure from the parents of the dead students, the investigation of the catastrophe at British Heights had been reopened. Jun had been called back in for questioning, and had finally been given access to the personal effects recovered from Crow’s apartment. For all their millions of dollars of investment and training, the secret services had failed to notice what Jun had immediately realised upon being shown Crow’s old laptop, that it wasn’t just adorned by an elaborate birds’ eye view screensaver, but by an actual live stream. Even then, Jun might never have guessed what creature was carrying the tiny camera giving astonishing aerial views of a bleak mountain range, had he not been watching when it returned to its roost. Several hours on the Internet over the next few weeks and he’d found pictures that matched the distinctive markings on the hatchlings he had seen.

  It was a long shot, Jun knew, but he felt certain that now he had found the birds, sooner or later he would find their benefactor.

  2

  A visit to Dracula’s Cave

  Jennie Nakajima wished she’d remembered to pick up some more headache tablets back in the last town. As the tour group’s bus bounced along the potholed forest road she could hear the cacophony of complaints building up like a wave about to break. If she was lucky, the customers would hold them in until they reached the hotel. If not, she would soon have to start trying to keep both the old folk seated and her own blood pressure down.

  ‘Do you want to point out those ruins?’ the driver asked her in heavily accented Romanian. An expert in several Eastern European languages—figuring there would be less competition for tourist guide jobs in that part of the world—she still found his rural dialect difficult to follow.

  ‘Um, where?’

  ‘Through the trees. Not much to see except foundations, but you can spin that whining lot another yarn about Dracula if you like. It was an old watermill, but you don’t have to tell them that. Tell them it was a dungeon.’

  She smiled. Lying wasn’t really in her nature, but as the bus suddenly lurched through a pothole that felt at least three feet deep, throwing her against the side of the bus and bringing a collective groan of both shock and disappointment from the Japanese tourists, she felt that it was time for a breather for everyone.

  ‘There wouldn’t happen to be a coffee shop nearby, would there?’

  The driver smiled. ‘Of course. Where isn’t there? There’s also a gift shop. The owner’s a distant relative, so I get a commission if you agree to a stop. I’ll split it with you.’

  Jennie laughed, attracting a few glares from the seats behind her. ‘Deal.’

  The bus swung around a corner and a small gravel parking area appeared out of the trees. The coffee shop and gift shop were little more than two wooden shacks leaning on each other for support, and the only other vehicle in the parking area was a tractor with an open-backed trailer attached, which Jennie suspected belonged to the store owner.

  She stood up and lifted a microphone to her lips. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll now be making a short stop for refreshments. You’ll have twenty minutes to get out and stretch your legs.’

  She turned towards the driver and put a hand over the microphone. ‘Is there a toilet?’ she asked.

  ‘If you could call it that. The forest is probably cleaner.’

  She grimaced. Turning back to the group, she said into the microphone, ‘You’ll have an, um, a chance to relieve yourselves and maybe pick up a few souvenirs. Please be back at the bus in twenty minutes.’

  She climbed down off the bus as the tourists began to shuffle out. Most of them were older Japanese, seasoned package tour veterans who had chosen this Romanian castle tour as a way of pushing themselves into uncharted waters. Unlike most tours that ferried their guests from one luxury hotel to another, this one was more rustic, taking its guests into areas that few package tours ever went, to lesser known attractions that were often far more rewarding than those in traditional guidebooks. The downside was that guests had to slum it a bit, something that often caused problems.

  This was her fifth tour into this region in the past year, and the others had all gone relatively smoothly. This one, however, had been a catalogue of disasters.
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  At the first hotel in Bucharest a fire alarm scare had left a group of jetlagged elderly tourists standing outside on the pavement for half of their first night in the country. The second day had seen a spate of food poisoning from a local restaurant, and three members of the party had been hospitalised, later to return home, meaning endless insurance paperwork which somewhere along the line had surreptitiously slid its way into Jennie’s job description. Then, on a bus tour out to a castle north of the city, the bus had suffered engine trouble and they’d been marooned by the side of the road for several hours until another bus had come to pick them up. They had never even got to the castle, and Jennie’s evening had been spent filling out more refund requests. It would be comical, she thought, if it wasn’t causing so much stress.

  The driver had already headed into the shady interior of the coffee shop, leaving the bus doors open. Jennie glanced around warily, worried about thieves—it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to get a commission from that as well—as she trailed the last of the tour customers across the car park. The coffee shop was little more than a barn with a collection of plastic tables set up inside, colourfully branded with the likes of Coca Cola, Pepsi and Stella Artois. Several of the customers had bought cans of beer or juice from a glum, bearded fellow behind the trestle table that qualified as a bar. Jennie looked around but didn’t see any sign of electricity, let alone a means of making coffee. What she really wanted was one of the beers that some of the old men were happily gulping back. It was hard for her to find time for a decent drink during a tour. Even when she was officially off-duty, there was always the chance one of the old folk would conjure up a problem that required immediate attention, so it was best to keep a level head.

  Someone tapped her arm and she looked around, thinking it’s started already, but it was just the driver, holding up a can of Coke with a sympathetic smile on his face. She thanked him and went outside, where several picnic tables stood on a patchy stretch of lawn at the building’s rear. The rest stop was completely surrounded by forest, the trees beginning abruptly on the other side of the picnic area.

  A small wooden sign leaned at an angle next to a path winding off into the forest. Jennie groaned. She had never been to this exact spot before, but she knew the drill. There was always someone among the party who would want a guided tour of whatever moss-covered ruins stood at the end of the path, with a full explanation as to their origin. She wasn’t a local expert; she was sent wherever the tour company told her to go and she rarely had more than a couple of days to read over the guidebook chapter covering the area they were heading to. Tourists often expected her to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every lump of manmade stone, and were of course disappointed when she didn’t.

  And started demanding refunds.

  As if on cue, three Japanese men in their late sixties stumbled out of the coffee shop’s rear entrance and made their way towards her.

  ‘Miss, what’s over there?’ one of them asked. The name card pinned to his chest identified him as Waribe, Naotoshi. ‘Any chance we can take a look?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Just be sure to be back at the bus in time.’

  They conferred a moment, and she turned away, enjoying the last of her Coke before the requests began to turn it sour. They were coming, she could sense it as sure as some people could sense the changing of the wind.

  ‘Can you show us the way?’ Naotoshi asked. ‘Not like we can read Romanian, is it?’

  She shrugged. ‘I… well….’

  The other two men, as was normal among polite human beings, began to um and ah, but Naotoshi, who’d already made a nuisance of himself on several occasions during the tour, wasn’t to be put off.

  ‘Look young lady, we’re paying customers. This tour is costing us a lot of money. We just want to have a quick look, would that be all right? If you come with us we can be sure not to get lost and guarantee we’re back at the bus at a reasonable time.’

  A reasonable time. She suppressed a sigh as she stood up. ‘Sure,’ she said, flashing them a twinkling smile that would have made her training manager proud. ‘Would you like me to ask the rest of the group if they would like to accompany us?’

  Naotoshi immediately put up a hand. ‘No, no, just us. Let them rest.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Jennie stood up and headed off towards the trees as the old men shuffled in pursuit. They, or most likely Naotoshi, wanted a private adventure. It was all about getting one over on the others. They’d wait until they were back on the bus and then start bragging about what the others had missed. It was a common situation, but just because she’d seen it happen a dozen times before didn’t make it any easier.

  The sign said ‘DRACULA’S CAVE’ in Romanian, with a faded drawing underneath of a cave with several bats flying around outside. That practically everywhere in this part of the country claimed a link to the fabled storybook vampire was no surprise; the name brought in bags of tourist dollars even though the great vampire himself was a work of fiction. What they were likely heading for was an old mine entrance, and Jennie glanced back at the knapsacks each old man had slung over his shoulders looking for any angles poking through the leather that might suggest a flashlight. The absolute last thing she needed right now was for one of the old codgers to go stumbling off into the dark.

  ‘Come on miss, tell us about this place,’ Naotoshi said. ‘Aren’t you going to earn your crust for today?’

  A biting retort tingled on the edge of her tongue, but she swallowed it down. ‘At one time almost eighty percent of Romania was natural forest,’ she said, trying to remember facts gleaned from her guidebooks and the Internet. Her training had taught her to always sound like she knew what she was talking about, in the hope that the customers would be too trusting to check.

  ‘Where’s this cave, then?’

  ‘It’s not far. It’s known in these parts as Dracula’s cave because of the large number of vampire bats known to roost inside.’

  ‘Can they kill people?’ one of the other men asked, and she wanted to smile at the look of uncertainty on his face. The innocent ones were always the ones who ended up giving glowing reports back to the company. She’d been asked enough times that she’d read up about it, and knew vampire bats were native only to Central America. Those in the cave were likely common European bats, insectivores and entirely harmless to humans. Of course, she had to tell the guests what they wanted to hear.

  As one of the men peered inquisitively upwards, as if expecting giant bats to be hanging from the branches overhead, their razor sharp teeth dripping blood, Jennie shook her head. ‘Of course, potentially they could. Only if they were carrying some kind of disease, like rabies, and the victim couldn’t seek medical attention in time. But a single bat against a human? No. Even a big one has a wingspan of no more than eight inches.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I heard they hunt in packs,’ Naotoshi said. ‘They drain their prey of blood until it’s too weak to move, then other animals such as wolves drag it off.’

  ‘No, that’s not—’

  ‘There are documented cases. Babies. Young children. I saw a program about it on NHK. You should pull your head out of the sand sometime.’

  The other two men looked nervous. The trees were all around them now, the car park and the comfort of the air-conditioned bus out of sight. Up ahead the forest was denser, closing in around the well-worn path so that they had to move in single file.

  ‘Technically, it’s possible,’ Jennie said through gritted teeth. ‘Just unlikely.’

  She glanced at her watch. They were due back at the bus in five minutes. There was no way they would be on time; she would have to just take the rap from the other customers and hope that Naotoshi’s boasting stole some of their ire, assuming he found something worth bragging about.

  ‘I think you’ll find that most cases go undocumented because of the illiteracy of the victims’ families,’ Naotoshi said.

  Then how would you or
anyone else know about it? she wanted to scream at him. Just great that I’ve got an amateur vampire hunter on the tour. Still, it was only for six more days. She would have to grin and bear it. She had done so before. By this time next month Naotoshi Waribe and his font of knowledge on everything vampiric would be a fading memory.

  ‘There it is!’ shouted one of the other men, pointing down a thin side path that Jennie had walked right past, into a shady little glade with a couple of dirty wooden picnic tables in the middle. The leg of one had rotted through and it leaned to one side like a drunken office worker.

  Naotoshi gave her a condescending shake of the head as if to say look, you don’t even know where you’re going, and then went after the other two men who had already headed off in the direction of the cave. Jennie sighed and followed. Much as she would be happy for them to just vanish into the dark, she didn’t want to lose her job.

  When she caught up, they were standing outside a dark cave entrance about eight foot tall and half that wide. A strip of orange restricted access tape hung across the front, but Naotoshi had already climbed over it and gone inside. Jennie rolled her eyes at the flickers of some kind of torchlight inside and realized that she had forgotten about their smartphones. The other two, at least, were politely waiting by the tape, nervously peering inside.

  ‘It goes on for miles,’ Naotoshi shouted out from the darkness. ‘There’s a fissure I can see that opens up a bit. I’m going to try to get inside.’

  ‘Your insurance doesn’t cover this!’ Jennie shouted. ‘If you hurt yourself it’s your own fault!’

  ‘Why don’t you guys take the tart back to the bus,’ Naotoshi shouted back. ‘I’ll be along in a few minutes, once I’ve finished my investigations.’

  Jennie wanted to scream. Worse, she wanted to pull the roof of the cave down onto the rude old man’s head.