Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  ‘You’ve lied to us again, bitch,’ Naotoshi muttered to himself. ‘What’s the likelihood a visit is a little bit over your tour’s budget? You cheap bastards. You’ll wish you never messed with me.’

  He was about to pull the curtains closed and begin writing what would be a slightly drunken letter of complaint, when a screeching wail broken the silence of the night. Naotoshi peered down from his window and saw something orange and flickering running along the street.

  He grabbed his binoculars and his camera. He took a couple of quick photos and then lifted the binoculars to his eyes.

  Immediately he wished he hadn’t. Dropping the binoculars on the floor, he strained his neck to follow the passage of the burning bird thing as it raced along the road. He managed to take a few more pictures before it disappeared out of sight into the trees at the western edge of town.

  Naotoshi looked at the images on the screen of his digital camera and shivered. The distance and the night had left them a little blurred, but they appeared to show a burning human skeleton with the long, gnarled beak of a crow.

  He nodded slowly. If that thing was what passed for vampires these days, then he had found one. He went over to his suitcase, took out a laptop computer, and set about connecting his camera so he could upload the photographs to the Internet.

  15

  Ken meets the police

  The hire car had been misfiring for the last hour, and each time the engine coughed and the wheels jerked Ken growled in frustration, punching the dash, as though that would make the rickety old thing keep moving.

  On short notice there had been little else available, but despite his initial misgivings the car had been fine until the roads really began to twist and steepen on the approach to Heigel. Finally, after one last wheezing groan, the engine choked and died.

  Ken sat for a few moments with the lights glaring down the dark tunnel made by the trees. He pulled out his phone and checked for a signal, but he was so deep into the hills that he had nothing but the occasional flicker of a single bar. He shook his head. If he tried to call Karen she would panic if he was cut off. He tried to call the car hire company, but it was after nine p.m. and all he got was a brief faltering answer-phone message in Romanian, which quickly died.

  He had passed a village some thirty minutes before, but he had taken several turns since then and in the dark he wasn’t sure he could find his way. The road he was on supposedly lead into Heigel so the best option was to keep going and hope he was closer than he thought. He had seen one or two other cars so there was a chance he could flag a lift.

  He climbed out of the car and looked around. The forest was quiet and still, barely even a wind rustling through the trees. With the car lights off the darkness was near absolute; the road revealing itself as a grey smudge between two dark curtains.

  He struck out in the direction of the town with a small hold-all slung over his shoulder, and within minutes he could barely be sure where he was walking. Ever fearful of accidentally stumbling off the road and down some forest lane, he pulled out his phone every few minutes and used the torch function to check his position. Overhead, the moon was near full, and whenever he came to a rise the trees would thin out a little and for a few hundred metres the road would be illuminated in a soft silver glow. Then it would dip back down into the next valley and the trees would close in again.

  He had been walking for nearly two hours when he finally got a bearing on his location. Near the brow of a hill, the trees suddenly gave way to a car park and viewing point, scattered picnic tables crouching like giant brown bugs in the dark. A raised viewing platform looked over the trees and he finally saw the lights of Heigel clustered around the base of a towering rocky bluff. The crooked silhouette on the top had to be Heigel Castle.

  The town was tiny; no more than a couple of dozen lights with a few brighter areas that must be floodlit car parks for tourists. It was still some way off, but at least he felt reassured that he was heading in the right direction.

  Ken was loath to leave the crest of the hill with its openness and view of the town, but the cold was creeping in, chilling the sweat that the hilly walk had caused. He hoisted his bag back over his shoulder and set off, hoping that he might make it in time to find a bed for the night.

  As the trees closed in again, a lingering dread began to grow, that he was getting closer and closer to something violent and destructive, a malevolent terror that had already drawn Jun into its clutches and was now working the same black magic on him. He felt like he was sliding down a rocky slope towards Jun’s inert body lying bloodied at the bottom, and no amount of scrabbling would find him a handhold to arrest his descent.

  He thought back to the early days of the band, before the arena tours and the money, the cases of champagne and the beautiful girls waiting backstage at the end of every show, back when it was him, Daichi, Bee, and O-Remo in the back of a tatty old van, sitting—and sometimes sleeping—amongst stacks of amplifiers and drums and guitars that they had picked up from junk shops across the country. Back to when they had taken to the stage at each tiny show as if it was their last, fighting against the overwhelming possibility of failure with their knees braced and their hands raised in defiance. They had gone to war with the likelihood of a career in obscurity, they had faced their fears and their demons head on, and for a while, they had won.

  Daichi, Bee, and O-Remo had all lost their lives at British Heights seven years ago. He was alone, but the spirit of Plastic Black Butterfly still ran through him.

  Heedless of the bumps in the road, he broke into a jog.

  He was breathing hard when he spotted lights again through the trees. He pulled up, giving himself a few moments to get his breath back, then walked slowly around the bend in the road to what he hoped were the first houses of Heigel.

  It was a police roadblock.

  He stopped, feeling a sudden trepidation. What if they mistook him for the murderer that was supposedly on the loose? What if they had guns and they fired at the sight of him? He considered cutting through the forest, but as he got closer he could see a handful of officers hanging around, and the possibility of human contact after several hours alone in the dark forest overrode his fears.

  Trying to appear as casual as possible, he walked up the centre of the road towards the roadblock, then, when he was within sight of the lights they had set up, he stopped and waved his hands over his head.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted in English. ‘I am lost! Can you help me, please?’

  A man came running out from behind the car and pointed at him, saying something fast to someone else sitting out of sight. Then he turned back to Ken and started waving him away.

  ‘Don’t come!’ he shouted in heavily accented English. ‘No entry here!’

  Ken took one look back over his shoulder at the dark forest road that seemed to fight against the police spotlights like a pulsing black wave, and shook his head.

  ‘I’m lost!’ he shouted again. ‘My car broke down in the forest.’

  A second man had stood up. Neither looked armed, so Ken kept walking towards them, holding his hands in the air just in case. By the time he had closed to within a few metres, both police officers had sour rules-are-broken looks on their faces, along with an air of resignation that told Ken there wasn’t much they were prepared to do about it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ken said. ‘I’m going to Heigel to meet my friend. My car broke down and my phone doesn’t work.’

  ‘I can’t see no car,’ the younger of the two officers said. ‘Maybe you’re the one who killed that old woman.’

  The older police officer clipped the younger around the ear and barked something at him in Romanian, which Ken took to mean you fool, that’s police information.

  ‘If you could just drive me into town so I can find a hotel, that would be great,’ Ken said.

  ‘The town is quarantined. That means no entry.’

  ‘Well, what am I supposed to do?’

  He glance
d over the nearest man’s shoulder and saw a foldout table set up behind the two police cars parked across the road. A bottle of something he was pretty sure they shouldn’t have been drinking was standing open, next to an overflowing ashtray and a little portable TV which was showing the grainy picture of some late night drama.

  ‘You can go back to your car and wait for morning.’

  Ken shook his head. ‘I’ve been walking for three hours.’

  The older man was staring at him. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I’m Japanese.’

  ‘You look familiar. What’s your name?’

  ‘Ken Okamoto. I play guitar in a metal band called Plastic Black Butterfly.’

  The police chief’s eyes widened. ‘I thought I knew your face!’ He reached out and began to jerk Ken’s hand up and down. ‘My name is Slav Wendall. I’m Heigel’s police chief, such as it is. My son is fifteen. He loves your band.’

  The younger police officer, clearly struggling to follow the English, frowned at his boss, but Slav pointed at the TV and said something in Romanian. The younger officer, whom Ken saw from a name tag on his chest was called Igor, shrugged and sat back down.

  Slav was looking around him as if searching for something he had dropped. ‘If you could sign something for my son, that would be wonderful,’ he said.

  Ken gave an embarrassed nod. ‘Sure, sure. Just take me to Heigel first. I really need to find my friend.’

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘My singer. We were supposed to play a show in Heigel tomorrow night, but it got cancelled.’

  Slav threw his hands up in the air. ‘Ahh, I know! My son and his friends, they all had tickets. So sad, they were.’

  ‘My singer decided to come and do an acoustic show instead. He doesn’t like to disappoint the fans. I … I … decided to help him out.’

  ‘A surprise concert in Heigel? Unplugged? Wow!’ Slav appeared to have forgotten the quarantine on the town, and Ken wasn’t about to remind him.

  ‘So, is there any chance…?’

  Slav was staring at him and frowning. ‘Where’s your guitar? Oh, I guess you left it in the car. I can take you back there to collect it.’

  Ken searched for an answer that might fool the police chief. ‘Ah, my singer, he’s got the gear with him.’

  ‘Right.’ Slav seemed satisfied. ‘Jump in the car, then. I’ll give you a ride into town. I imagine your singer is staying at the Castle View Hotel. There’s only one.’

  If Jun was really on the trail of Professor Crow, Ken thought it unlikely he’d be staying anywhere so obvious. It looked like he’d found a way into the town though, so he didn’t argue. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Ten minutes. Let’s go.’

  He got into the passenger side of one of the police cars and Slav Wendall drove them down the winding forest lanes into the town. As they passed through the first dark rows of houses Slav flapped a hand out of the window he had left open while he smoked. ‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘We have almost more houses than people. All the rich foreigners buying them up, then leaving them empty while they waited for us to join the Euro. Pigs. We should never have joined the EU. Worst thing our country ever did.’

  Ken nodded. ‘That’s unfortunate. No wonder we only sold a few tickets.’

  ‘Fuckers.’ Slav punched the wheel, making the car lurch, and Ken wondered how much of the alcohol on the table the police chief had drunk. ‘Foreigners should get the hell out of my country. Nothing but trouble. Except, you. You can stay, because my son likes your band.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Slav grunted something that might have been you’re welcome and tossed the latest in a string of cigarette butts out of the window.

  As they reached a brightly lit street that seemed to signify the centre of town, the police chief’s phone buzzed. He picked it up and frowned, holding the display out towards Ken, although all Ken could see was a picture of a middle-aged woman and a teenage boy wearing a Metallica t-shirt.

  ‘Look at that,’ Slav said. ‘Seven missed calls. That forest blocks everything. They once put a phone mast on the cliff up there and it made no difference at all. Like a fat woman,’ he said suddenly, cackling with laughter. ‘Swallows everything.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  Slav began to mutter and grunt into the phone, nodding and frowning. When he hung up a couple of minutes later, he turned to Ken and grimaced. ‘We need to take a quick detour,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the … how do you say in English? Where you keep dead people.’

  ‘The morgue?’

  ‘Ah, yes. We have to go there.’

  ‘Why?’

  Slav raised an eyebrow. ‘Police business, but since my son loves your band, you can know a secret.’ He turned and spat out of the window of the car. ‘Body disappeared. The dead woman.’

  Thirty minutes later, Ken found himself waiting in a cold, white-walled reception room for the police chief to return. Slav had given Ken the choice of staying in the car or sitting inside the morgue building itself, and the thought of electric lights and other people had won him over. However, the “other people” had turned out to be a single gaunt, bald guy in a lab coat with saddlebags under eyes that were tired and jaded from years of dealing with the dead.

  The man also had a bloody bruise on the back of his head where an intruder had clubbed him. When he woke, Gretel’s body had gone.

  A door opened and Slav leaned out, beckoning Ken through. ‘Come in here. We’d like a third opinion.’

  Ken shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  He stood up and followed them through into a little closet space filled with computers and monitor screens. The mortician pointed at one above his head. ‘Here. Look here.’

  He pressed a button on the screen and Ken saw an image of a blank, empty hallway. Then something appeared from behind at the bottom left of the screen. As it passed the camera it turned and looked up.

  Ken gasped and shrank back, closing his eyes. When he looked back, the thing had moved on, quickly disappearing out of view.

  Unlike Jun and Karin, Ken had never encountered the one they called Professor Crow face to face. He had seen the man from a distance in a snowstorm, but his memory of that moment was blurred and indistinct. He only had the descriptions of his wife and his best friend to go on, that Crow was as misshapen as a man could be, black, beady eyes over a protruding bone that should have been a nose but resembled a crow’s gnarled and twisted beak.

  ‘You recognise him?’ Slav said, and his tone suggested he hoped not.

  Ken nodded. ‘We call him Professor Crow,’ he said.

  16

  A fire in the fields

  ‘That’s a kind of stupid name,’ Slav said, sipping his coffee. ‘You say he’s killed a bunch of people?’

  ‘Him or the things he makes.’

  The mortician, who had introduced himself as Peter, and who also spoke English, nodded. ‘Quite grotesque, his face was,’ he said in a high, reedy voice, which Ken assumed was either the reason for or the cause of working with the dead. ‘Like the dead bird was sewn to his human face. Necromancy at play.’

  Ken’s limited English made the word “necromancy” a mystery, but when Peter suddenly stood up and lurched around the room in a caricature of Frankenstein’s monster that was both amusing and terrifying, he began to understand.

  ‘Professor Crow is a person, that’s for sure. He wasn’t gifted with looks, but his mind is something else.’

  ‘Sounds like a madman to me,’ Slav said.

  ‘No. He’s not mad. He’s too calculated.’

  ‘That he is,’ Peter agreed. ‘He came in through the front door, knocked me on the head while I was cleaning up, and wheeled that body out on a stretcher. It was premeditated, and well planned.’

  ‘Where did he take it?’ Ken asked.

  Slav looked up at the ceiling. ‘I’ll give you one guess.’

  ‘The castle?�
��

  ‘Bingo. Closed for renovations, I don’t think so. He’s in there, I’d bet on it.’

  He stood up and went out into the reception area, where he began to pace up and down. Ken and Peter followed him out.

  ‘We should get a force together tonight and storm the castle,’ Slav said. ‘Not content to murder that poor woman once, he wants to do her twice. I’ll not have it in my district, I tell you.’

  Peter started to laugh. He said something in Romanian, then for Ken’s benefit translated, ‘Oh, good luck getting in there.’

  For a man who had recently been cracked on the back of the head, the mortician seemed remarkably cheerful, Ken thought. Working with the dead really had to give you a different outlook on life.

  For his own part, though, he really wanted to get out of here and start looking for Jun. Plus, it was late into the night, and necromancy or not, he was exhausted.

  ‘Is it far to the hotel?’ he asked. ‘I really could do with finding a room for the night.’

  ‘Of course, of course!’ Slav said. ‘I’ll drop you off there now. Peter, I think you should go home. Make sure you lock the place up well.’

  Peter rolled his eyes. ‘There’s nothing left to steal. They’ve taken the only stiff I had.’

  Outside, Ken was relieved to climb back into the police car. His eyes were starting to sag, and the only thing he wanted right now was a warm bed. Karin beside him and Nozomi nearby in the next room would be preferable, but he’d settle for anything with a lock and a shower.

  As they drove down the road towards the town, Slav glanced across at Ken. ‘He’s an interesting fellow, don’t you think? How would you say in English? A nutjob.’

  Ken smiled. ‘That would sum it up. Although after getting hit on the head like that, I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Ah, he’s always been like that. Comes from working with the dead. And the old dead, at that. We don’t get much crime here. All Peter does is receive dead old people. Not much of a life, is it?’