Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  The police officer looked up as a hail came from the nearest trees to their left. Another police officer, his shoes covered in mud and his trousers wet up to his knees, came marching out of the forest. His cheeks were red and there was a sprig of fern sticking out of his hair.

  Ignoring Jennie and Jun for a moment, the first police officer turned to the newcomer and for a couple of minutes they talked in Romanian, their conversation becoming increasingly more animated until the newcomer swiped the sprig of fern out of his hair and marched angrily back towards the tent. Jun pretended to play with a callus on his palm while Jennie had pulled a tiny hand mirror from somewhere and was peering into it while poking at an eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry,’ the police officer said, turning back to them. ‘Police business.’ He thrust a sheet of paper towards them. ‘Here. Best of luck.’

  Jun pretended to be interested in the rushed squiggle of lines that was almost impossible to understand, then nodded and started walking away, Jennie following behind him. Glancing back, he saw the first officer heading into the tent. The officer who had come from the trees was standing a short distance away, wiping his shoes clean with a rag.

  ‘What was that about?’ Jun asked.

  ‘Jennie leaned close. ‘He said there was no sign of the tourist,’ she told him. ‘He said he’d looked as far as the swamp, I think, but there was nothing. No body and no sign of a struggle. He thinks the killer took the tourist hostage.’

  ‘Do you think it was one of your group?’ Jun asked.

  Jennie gulped. ‘I’m really, really hoping it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘But I think we need to go to the hotel to find out.’

  Ken’s phone number wasn’t working. Karin frowned as she stared at the display on her own phone, with its straight-to-voicemail message. He was going up into the mountains so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he had no reception, but it wasn’t like him to not find a way to call. There should have been a payphone somewhere, or an Internet café where he could have sent her a message, but she’d had no word since last night.

  She stared at the news report playing on the TV. She didn’t understand what was being said, but she recognised the name of the town. From the way a picture of a police officer kept flashing up, she knew someone else had been murdered.

  ‘Are you all right, Mummy?’ Nozomi said, coming over to the bed and sitting down next to Karin. ‘Will Daddy be back soon?’

  ‘Of course he will, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Of course he will.’

  On the desk by the window was a computer printout confirming two tickets for this evening to take them both back to Japan as Ken had wanted. She stared at them as though they were a timer, slowly ticking down.

  He wanted her to get away, to make sure she was safe, but he was her husband, and the father of her child. If he was in danger she couldn’t just walk away, could she?

  Life had been easy for Karin since the events of seven years ago. She had married Ken, given birth to Nozomi, and enjoyed a relatively peaceful life out of the glare of the media. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw a former pop star sliding into middle age with graceful elegance, her looks still shining through the lines that were slowly sinking into her face and the grey hairs appearing through the lustrous dark brown.

  But her eyes, when she looked closely, at times they scared her. In the aftermath of the events at the holiday camp at British Heights, the death of the British businessman, Rutherford Forbes, had been assumed as collateral, just one of a number of brutal deaths that day.

  Karin had kept the truth to herself.

  If Ken was in trouble she would have to help him, and she would kill to do it if necessary.

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t done it before.

  And then Nozomi squeezed her hand, jumped off the bed and ran off into her own bedroom with a little giggle.

  Karin sighed. Things were so different now.

  ‘Get dressed, sweetheart,’ she called into the bedroom. ‘We have to check out soon.’

  ‘Are we going back to Japan today?’ Nozomi asked.

  Karin paused a moment before she nodded. ‘Yes, sweetheart. We are.’

  As he looked at the hundreds of comments below his posted photograph, Naotoshi gave a satisfied nod. The net was going crazy. His Twitter and Facebook posts had been shared thousands of times, and the stills he had put on his YouTube account had already received more than fifty thousand views, in just a few hours.

  Naotoshi stood up, crossed an arm over his chest with his fist clenched, and gave a bow towards the computer screen.

  ‘Naotoshi Waribe, Kaiju Hunter, back in business,’ he said.

  He logged on to his old website, the one he had set up years after his public humiliation as a kind of retrospective of the peak years of his television career. The pictures of himself with the dead wolf had garnered just the usual ridicule, that here was the disgraced monster hunter wanting a little more attention in his twilight years, but while the same criticism had come in for his pictures of the strange burning thing, it had been drowned out by a chorus of positive responses. Finally, after all these years, Naotoshi Waribe had caught himself a real monster.

  Ludvic’s hands were still shaking as he drove the forest agency’s little minibus across town towards the Castle View Hotel. It was just after nine a.m. and the town was beginning to wake up. On a usual morning at this time of year the café owners would be setting up picnic tables outside, wheeling out racks of postcards and boxes of vampire-themed tourist trinkets. Hawkers would already be out offering their own—in Ludvic’s opinion, substandard—haunted forest tours, trips up to the castle, walks out to picturesque viewing points, visits to ancient ruins sites, even hikes up into the Carpathians. The handful of people who lived here all year round would be leaving for work, getting into their cars or cycling down the street, picking up newspapers from the stand outside the gas station in the village’s centre.

  Yet this morning, all he could see were closed signs, people packing suitcases into cars, pulling shutters down over their windows and locking their doors. In the light of the recent murders, the town was imploding on itself, and this was just the beginning. The younger folk—those come here in search of an easy life—they would be the first to go, easily uprooted by a little drama, packing their bags for their old lives in the cities. The older folk though, they would take some shifting. There had always been rumours of dark things in the woods, but they had lived through wars and revolutions. They weren’t about to let a couple of murders shift them out.

  He shuddered at the memory of that man Kurou, his words nearly as hideous as the rest of him. He remembered the touch of those twisted hands on his arm and the black, beady eyes filled with an intelligence he could barely imagine as they stared out from that abomination of a face.

  You are nothing to me, but you are something to yourself. Isn’t that right, sire? I could have you dead before I leave this room, but I don’t think you want that, do you? Then, in Slav’s voice: I’ve got a deal you might like to consider. Your life in exchange for a little delivery I’d like you to make. All so simple, barely a morning’s work. How does that sound, sire?

  And Ludvic had fallen to his knees and cried like a child as he agreed to everything Kurou had said.

  Even then, with his pitiful face turned up to his monstrous new master, he had not been convincing enough. Kurou had left a little friend to keep him company.

  Ludvic glanced up into the mirror and saw the figure sitting in the back seat of the minibus, leaning against the window, a hood covering its face. For a second its head lifted towards him, and he saw the black, gnarled point of a crow’s beak poking out.

  21

  Hunting for monsters

  ‘And this, for certain, is a Yeti footprint.’

  Naotoshi Waribe leaned down to point a stick at the muddy depression on the soft earth below him, the toe marks clearly visible as several inch-wide holes spreading out around a deeper bowl where the heel would have l
anded.

  He waved the cameraman forward, indicating with a stick where to film. ‘You can see he’s standing upright from the way the heel depression is deeper than those of the toes. This indicates a greater pressure down through the spine than there would be if this was, say, a bear, where the pressure would be more forward, and the toes would leave deeper impressions.’ Naotoshi stood up, and the camera swung towards him. ‘And with that, we have to say goodnight for now. See you all next week on Mountain Monsters. And don’t worry,’—he lifted a hand across his chest—‘we’ll catch him yet.’

  ‘And … cut!’ called the director off to the side. ‘That’s a wrap, people.’

  Naotoshi glanced back at the muddy depression in the ground, which the crew had spent twenty minutes preparing with a bowl and a couple of forks. Someone began kicking dirt into the holes until there was almost no sign of the fake footprint left.

  It was all bullshit. They had found some actual footprints up on a ridgeline half a mile from the TV crew’s camp, but the location had proved too inaccessible and the prints were too vague to be interesting. Instead they’d poured a couple of buckets of water on the ground and made their own.

  Naotoshi scowled up towards the ridge outlined against the evening sky as he headed back to his trailer. A make-up artist was already following along behind him with her bag, to remove the concealer they used to reduce the glare on his skin from the spotlights used when filming in twilight. He really didn’t want to be around anyone right now, but he had no choice; the stuff started to irritate his skin after a while and if he didn’t get it off soon he’d have a rash for a couple of days.

  He went straight to his chair and sat down, waiting for the girl. As he looked at himself in the mirror, he couldn’t help but admire the square, masculine jaw, the strong cheekbones, and the deep, intelligent eyes. Everything about his face breathed passion, resolve, and intellect. Yet here he was in the foothills of the goddamn Japan Alps, pretending to be hunting for a Himalayan Yeti.

  It was only a matter of time before everything broke down. Four years ago he had gotten into television with a well-researched and respected series called Monster Hunter: Nightmares of the Ancients, which had focused on tracking down evidence of ancient legendary creatures and discussion their origins, everything from the hydra to the kraken and Medusa, to more local creatures like the kamaitachi and the goro-jumo. He had visited locations mentioned in historical texts, analysed the evidence, talked to people about the effects of such legends on their lives today. The series had been fascinating, intelligent, and had shed light on many historical tales as well as presenting the possibilities of such creatures being able to exist undetected in the modern world.

  The show had run for three seasons, and Naotoshi had become a national celebrity. Offers of work had come in from all angles, and he been forced to turn most of it away. TV wasn’t the be all and end all, it was just the medium that best helped him present his ideas to the world, especially since Japanese TV had recently converted to colour and the audience was booming. It was a wonderful opportunity, as well as a lucrative one.

  Yet the directors weren’t satisfied. They wanted more tangible results. They wanted real monsters, and they wanted action.

  The girl began to clean the make-up off his face. Naotoshi closed his eyes and remembered the days when his series had been genuine, when he had found and presented real evidence of monsters to the nation. More than ten thousand people per year had been signing up for his quarterly fan club magazine, and he’d been on the cover of every historical publication in the country, as well as some overseas.

  The first of a new series, Monsters of the Water, had seen an unprecedented dip in ratings. He’d spent ten episodes sitting in a caravan outside Loch Ness, searching for a sea monster, the best evidence for which was a photograph acknowledged as a toy dinosaur glued to a plastic submarine. That it had grown to be acknowledged as the first genuine photograph of Nessie had been down to the public’s willingness to believe, even after the authors had admitted to its falsification. Naotoshi had wanted to visit a region of Argentina, where giant snake-like creatures had been seen in the rivers, but the budget wouldn’t fit. So he had sat next to an empty lake and waxed lyrical for ten episodes about sea monsters.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the girl asked him, the make-up removal finished and her hands now digging into his tired shoulders.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘You would be too if you had to put up with these idiots all day long.’

  In the mirror, she smiled at him. She was young, probably no more than twenty, and probably an intern, to save on the budget. Of course, they’d saved a fortune by performing their Himalayan hunt five thousand miles away, in the northern Japan Alps. The food in the mess tent had certainly levelled-up as a result.

  ‘Okabe-san asked me to relax you,’ the girl said. ‘He said you’re feeling tense about the live episode going out next week.’

  Her hands were working their way down his back. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience.

  ‘Okabe is an asshole,’ Naotoshi said. ‘He doesn’t believe in this project at all. He’s just a fucking sensationalist.’

  Okabe was the director. He was only twenty-five, younger than Naotoshi, who at thirty was a seasoned TV presenter. He was part of a new breed of directors who believed only in shocks and scares. Finding footprints suggesting some kind of upright-walking creature on a ridgeline in the Japan Alps, of all places, should have made national news. That they were pretending to be in Nepal meant they had to keep quiet about the discovery, but they couldn’t even pretend they belonged to a Yeti because the budget wouldn’t stretch to a helicopter to fly the crew up. Naotoshi had documented them and would launch his own expedition once this stupid show was over, but there was one more episode left.

  The live one.

  Naotoshi was dreading it. He had two days to prepare, then they were heading into the wilds with only a skeleton crew. He was contractually obliged to take part, even though he knew what was going to happen. Something would be faked to give the public what they wanted, but if it was done well enough, the television company would agree to finance another series.

  The girl had begun to loosen his belt. Naotoshi glanced down as she came around to kneel in front of him. As she took him in her hand and started to stroke him back and forth, she looked up and smiled. ‘I’m so happy to meet you, Mr. Waribe,’ she said. ‘I’ve always loved your work.’

  He gave a frustrated smile, but didn’t stop her as she took him in her mouth. Even though the line had been so scripted he could imagine her in Okabe’s trailer repeating it by rote as she lay on her back, he was a man after all. Sometimes the joke that his life had become made it necessary to find ways to forget.

  Naotoshi pulled his rucksack on to his back and took one last look at himself in the mirror before he headed downstairs. Many people mistook him for a sixty-something man recently retired, but at seventy-five he felt old, even if his looks didn’t suggest it. The old jawline was still there, and his eyes still had that familiar determination.

  And he wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. The growth of technology meant it was more difficult for the old monsters to hide, but he still believed they were out there somewhere.

  What he had seen last night was one of them, but he had always known coming to Heigel might open the floodgates. The dead wolves, the murder of the old woman, the strange burning thing running down the street, it was all just the surface. Heigel was a cauldron of darkness just waiting for its contents to be spilled out for the world to see.

  In his shoulder bag he had his camera, his phone, a handheld camcorder, and an iPad with a special satellite Internet link that had cost him a small fortune. Whatever happened from here on in would be documented in real time, and unlike the last time he had gone live, there would be no mistakes. Whatever he discovered—and he could just sense that it was very bad indeed—would be revealed to the world in all its dark glory.

  At
last Naotoshi Waribe would be justified, and the world would see what it had been missing all these years.

  When he got down to the lobby there were ten other people milling around, talking excitedly, waiting for the forest ranger to arrive. A couple of police officers stood outside, and Naotoshi felt a growing sense of unease that was both terrifying and thrilling. He went out to the car park, and stared across town at the craggy bluff with Heigel Castle perched imposingly on its top. It was quite a sight with the Carpathian Mountains looming up in the background.

  Far up in the sky, eagles were wheeling and crying against a bank of cloud rolling in to obscure the morning sun. Naotoshi took a deep breath and smiled. It was all so gothic, so Transylvanian. It was almost a certainty that something interesting would happen today.

  The other tourists had begun to follow him out. He looked up the street to see a minibus approaching, the forest ranger they had met yesterday at the wheel. It turned into the hotel car park and pulled up outside the main doors.

  ‘I am Ludvic,’ the forest ranger said as he got out. ‘Today I am guide for you.’

  Naotoshi wrinkled his nose. The man had “fake” written all over him. No doubt there was a jolly line up of time-wasting visits on the schedule for today, all rounded off by lunch in an overpriced restaurant and a forced visit on the way home to some rip-off trinket market. It was the usual stuff, but now even the stupid tour guide wasn’t around to pamper them.

  Where was she?

  He felt vaguely guilty for the way he had spoken to her, even though she had been a dumb whore who deserved it. She was an imbecile, but he probably shouldn’t have been so harsh. Like pretty much anyone who was led around by society she had been just a puppet, the tour company her shadowy, unseen puppeteer.