Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  ‘I need to call Karin, find out what he told her. Can you ask if I can use a phone?’

  When Jennie relayed Jun’s request to the receptionist, the young man shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, all the lines went down not long after I took your call. There’s some kind of blackout going on.’

  ‘What can we do then?’

  The receptionist shrugged. ‘There’s a payphone about a hundred metres up the street. It might be connected to a different line.’

  When Jennie told Jun, he nodded. ‘It’s worth a try,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there,’ Jennie said. ‘I just want to change my clothes.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Jun gave her a smile and hurried out. She watched him go for a few seconds, her eyes drifting over the trim, almost slender figure which had contained such strength as it held her close. She smiled. She hadn’t felt so safe since … well, since the early days with Brian.

  ‘Give it up, Jennie,’ she muttered to herself, turning away and heading for the stairs. Her path had crossed Jun’s for a few hours, but by the end of the day he would be fading into memory. She would head back to Bucharest with whatever remnants of her tour group she could find, and he would go off to the castle in search of his destiny.

  She sighed. Her marriage was over, her career was in ruins, and her beloved dog was dead … and she had escaped her own death thanks to a mysterious stranger who had appeared out of nowhere. Was it childish of her to feel something for him? Brian had sometimes treated her like a little girl, looking at her from time to time and giving a condescending shake of his head as if to say, oh you silly little fool. Only when he had taken her into the bedroom had she ever felt like a real woman, but then it had been a different kind of woman entirely, the kind of woman she didn’t want to be.

  Who was she really?

  Brian had taken everything from her, left her not knowing anything about herself. Then, in the forest, when she had almost given it all away, Jun Matsumoto had given her something back.

  He had given her Jennie.

  So what if nothing ever happened between them? Whoever this Akane was, she had been something special. Jennie was a no one, a throwaway piece of trash whose degradation could be viewed over popcorn and beer on dozens of freeview porn sites all across the net. Her entire person had been stripped away, but Jun had covered over the rawness beneath, replaced her skin with something that would only grow stronger over time.

  He might not want or need her help, but she wanted to give it, because just like her, he might not know he needed it until it was nearly too late.

  She turned and headed up the stairs.

  Jun squeezed inside the payphone on the corner of the street. It was a cubicle type, a little glass box with a metal phone inside designed to be vandal-proof. Even so, the casing had seen its fair share of graffiti, cigarette burns and dried lumps of gum shoved into the slots which other customers had tried to pick away.

  He lifted the receiver and fished into his pocket for some coins. To his surprise there was a dial tone. He knew Ken’s number by heart, but when he called it the line went straight to answerphone. Jun didn’t bother leaving a message. That could mean anything: Ken’s battery could be dead, he could be here in Heigel and suffering from the same mobile phone blackout as everyone else, or something bad could have happened. There was no way to be sure.

  Instead, he hung up the receiver and fished about for his own phone. He had a sliver of battery left, but it was enough to call up his phonebook and find Karin’s number. He could only hope she answered, because he was running out of coins and might not get another chance to call.

  With the receiver pressed closed to his ear, he waited, listening to the hollow, distant dialling tone. He stared out at the street through the grimy, scratched windows, at the bluff rising near-vertical to the north of town, at the castle perched on top. How he’d love to just blow the thing off with Crow still trapped inside….

  He jerked out of his daydream as an old woman shuffled past the phone booth, startling him. He couldn’t make out her features through the dirty glass but she was certainly ancient, walking up the slight hill towards the hotel so stiffly it was as if every bone in her body was brittle enough to snap. Jun could only imagine what she thought about all this—

  ‘Hello?’

  He jerked again as Karin’s voice appeared on the other end of the line.

  ‘Karin, thank god. It’s Jun.’

  ‘Jun? Where the hell are you? And where’s Ken?’

  ‘I’m in Heigel. I don’t know where Ken is. I can’t get through on his phone. Have you heard from him?’

  ‘No! Damn it, Jun! Why did you run off? You know he thinks he has to protect you! I couldn’t stop him!’

  ‘Karin, I….’

  He couldn’t think of anything to say. Further up the street, the old woman was hobbling towards the front entrance of the hotel. Jun watched her jerking from side to side as she moved, like one of those silly barking toy dogs you could get that would move a few steps, bark, then do a cartwheel, before repeating the whole process until the batteries ran down.

  ‘Jun, he has a daughter! How can you live with yourself if something happens to him?’

  ‘I didn’t force him to come, did I? I didn’t even want him to. I didn’t—’

  The line went dead as the front of the hotel seemed to bulge, silent fans of fire and shattered masonry belched out of its exploding windows and doors, scattering glass, wood and lumps of concrete all over the car park.

  A roar of sound struck him a moment later, followed by a burst of heat. The glass door of the phone booth shattered and Jun dropped to his knees and covered his face as a hail of safety glass exploded over him.

  As the initial sound died away, replaced by the roar of fire engulfing the hotel, Jun dropped the phone receiver and pushed through the ruined door out on to the street.

  The old woman had gone in there just a moment ago. She’d be dead now surely.

  It had been her. The way she had been walking, it was obvious now to Jun that she had been loaded up with something heavy that had made it difficult to walk.

  Explosives.

  ‘Crow, you bastard!’ Jun shouted, but he could barely hear his voice over the roaring of the fire.

  Jennie.

  Oh god, she was in there.

  The ground and first floor were a fireball, but the upper three floors were just belching smoke. What floor had her room been on?

  Without caring about what danger he might be in, he pulled a sleeve over his mouth and nose and sprinted back up the road towards the roaring inferno that a couple of minutes before had been a modern and comfortable tourist hotel.

  Part II

  The Castle of Nightmares

  24

  The forest tour

  The minibus had stopped in a small car park beneath the shade of several tall birch trees. To the left, a few hundred metres through the trees, the southern side of the bluff rose sharply, jagged, bare rock and jutting ledges, but up ahead it gradually levelled off. A river running out of the mountains had carved a gully on the gently sloping northern side, over which a stone causeway stood. It was still formidable, but compared to the sheer south face, it was a weakness for invading armies to exploit.

  Historically though, Heigel Castle had never been the subject of a siege. Built in the late 15th Century, it had been designed as a summer residence for the Romanian king, who had eventually given it as a gift to one of his noble landowners. For several generations it had been handed down through the same family, finally being sold off for private ownership in the mid-18th century. Since then it had been owned by a succession of businessmen, many of whom had allowed parts of it to be viewed by the public.

  As Ludvic stood up and cleared his throat, Naotoshi looked up from the Japanese language information leaflet on Heigel Castle he had picked up in the lobby of the hotel. At Ludvic’s shoulder stood the young police officer, and Naoto
shi rolled his eyes. They looked like a pair of typecast comedians long past their sell-by date.

  ‘Does anyone on this bus speak Romanian?’ Ludvic shouted in English, far louder than was necessary. ‘Come on, anyone? No? Okay. This tour will be in English then. Listen carefully.’

  Several of the other passengers were watching him intently, while others had already begun to take photographs through the windows.

  ‘This is a dangerous area,’ he said. ‘We will walk up through the forest, keeping the bluff to our left, heading around the back of the castle towards the Heigel River, where for generations the peasants of the village went to … how do you say … poach fish. This stretch of river is private property. No fishing.’

  A few of the old people began grumbling that they didn’t understand.

  Ludvic cleared his throat. ‘On the way, we’ll pass several sites of interest. Pay attention to what I say. Also, stay together. No wandering. We’re in grave danger here.’ As his eyes scanned the back of the bus to where Naotoshi was sitting, the authority in his voice faltered. ‘You don’t want to become lost in Wendelberg Forest. Just stay together, all right?’

  There were a few murmurs of assent. Ludvic and the police officer got off, and the tourists began to file off after them.

  ‘You getting off?’ Naotoshi asked the man still sitting in the corner, but the stranger just waved a bony hand toward the aisle without looking up. ‘Okay then. You go last.’

  He climbed down from the bus and joined the back of the group of assembled tourists. Ludvic was handing around a tube of mosquito repellent.

  ‘This is Igor,’ Ludvic said, pointing to the police officer. ‘He’s here for your protection. If you have any problems, or if you see anything suspicious, tell him immediately. He has a gun.’

  Naotoshi scoffed. The kid was a greenhorn. He probably couldn’t even shoot himself.

  ‘Right, we have a lot of distance to cover,’ Ludvic said. ‘Follow me.’

  He took a rising forest path that meandered through the trees in a gradual eastward direction, the tourists falling into step behind him. Naotoshi brought up the rear with the young police officer beside him. He glanced back as they left the car park behind them, but there was no sign of the quiet guy from the bus.

  Naotoshi shrugged. Perhaps he lived near here and had gone home. He hadn’t seemed like much of a tourist.

  ‘And this,’ Ludvic said, pointing at the large round rock in the middle of the clearing, ‘is where local women used to sacrifice crippled babies to keep the vampires out of the town.’

  At a wave of Ludvic’s hand, several tourists stepped forward to take photos of the rock. Ludvic took a turn standing in shot, a hunting knife held ominously above the nondescript lump of granite, a grin on his bearded face. Stepping aside to let the tourists take their turns posing, he continued, ‘Such was the pandemic of vampires stealing cattle and horses that every child was assessed by a local healer, who would have served as a doctor at the time. Children were put into three groups: able, partial, and full retard. Able kids grew up to lead normal lives. Partial retards became simple farm hands or labours. Those who qualified as full retard were brought here and sacrificed. Of course, the townspeople were uneducated and only had the doctor’s word to go on. Anyone who had wronged him or his family was likely to forever have their children sent to the rock.’

  ‘What a crock of shit,’ Naotoshi muttered, standing at the back of the group. Not one word that had passed Ludvic’s lips at the variety of sites they had visited had contained a single element of truth. Naotoshi had studied the legends of vampires in the area and there was no evidence of any kind of sacrifice.

  To their benefit perhaps, many of the tourists didn’t understand Ludvic’s English well enough to know they were being fed a bowl of filthy lies. They just stood waiting patiently for a photo opportunity. Naotoshi, however, had spent some years overseas, and while his English was rusty these days, at one point he had been near fluent.

  ‘Okay, let’s hurry up a little,’ Ludvic said. ‘We’ve got several more sites to visit, then we’ll head back to the bus and go to a local restaurant for lunch. Then in the afternoon we’ll visit a couple more sites of interest.’

  As the group moved off, Naotoshi fell into step beside the young police officer.

  ‘Does this clown actually do anything useful?’ he asked.

  The police officer shrugged. ‘He forest ranger.’

  ‘And what does that involve?’

  ‘Forest range.’

  Naotoshi sighed. Glancing up through the canopy above them he saw an eagle wheeling high up in the sky. It was an odd shape, its tail forked, almost like legs, while its wings seemed unnecessarily large. As he watched, it didn’t so much as flap but just glided in a gradual circle, around and around, slowly growing bigger until it was lost in the trees to the south. He wondered if it was one of those Romanian Black Eagles that he had heard people mention. He had seen them online, but while they were the ugliest birds he’d ever seen, for Naotoshi, someone who had seen his life and career turned into a circus of ridicule, they held a certain twisted charm.

  He sighed. This tour was a waste of time. Perhaps he’d be better off striking out on his own.

  A sudden tickle of fear made him turn his head, and he caught a glimpse of something back in the undergrowth shift out of sight behind a tree. He narrowed his eyes. Was that the strange guy from the bus, or something else? The overlarge bird, perhaps?

  Being led around by a hapless idiot had made it easy to forget that only a few days ago someone had been murdered not far from here. Naotoshi wondered whether they would visit the site of the murder itself. Now that would be something worth seeing.

  Fifteen minutes later Ludvic pulled them to a stop in a small glade which had an ancient oak tree in its centre, sticking at a near right angle out of a steep bank that rose in rounded steps up towards the side of the bluff some way off through the trees. Its roots spread out below and around it like some giant, mutant octopus, the thickest of them almost as wide as a man’s torso. Underneath, years of rain had hollowed out a crawl space, and Ludvic walked to the centre of the glade and began to spout another waterfall of lies.

  Naotoshi, standing off to the side, had had enough. He slipped off into the undergrowth and found a spot to relieve himself. As he let out a stream of piss that he wished was directed at Ludvic’s head, he heard the forest ranger’s lies drifting through the trees towards him.

  ‘Right here, on this very spot, lived a man named Henri Lufonte, a Frenchman who moved to Heigel to supposedly study the local plants.’ Ludvic laughed. ‘A botanist by name, he was a cannibal by nature. After several local children went missing, only for their grisly, chewed up remains to be discovered in the forest, the local townsfolk burned Lufonte’s house to the ground, and planted this tree, in order that it could purify the ground on which he lived from his evil. However, when seen at sunset, the tree takes on a slightly reddish hue, and it is said that it contains the blood of the children he killed. And furthermore, in the hollow under the tree it is said that the bones of children never discovered can be found.’

  Naotoshi zipped himself up. Back in the glade several of the tourists who had understood Ludvic’s story were asking to climb under the tree to take a look. Yet more lies, Naotoshi assumed. He was getting sick of it, and was thinking of calling Ludvic out on his bullshit when he caught another movement back in the trees.

  Some old explorer’s instinct made him drop to the ground behind a thick patch of ferns. He felt damp earth under his palms. He leaned forward and pushed aside some fronds until he could see back into the woods.

  The stranger from the bus was moving quietly through the trees towards the glade.

  Only now he wasn’t alone. Another cloaked man was walking beside him, but this one had pulled back his hood. Naotoshi suppressed a gasp of terror at the sight of the man’s face. He had human hair and human eyes, even a human chin. Where his nose and mouth shoul
d have been though was a huge, bony beak.

  I need to warn them, he thought, but the memory of the gutted wolf flashed into his mind, of its torso ripped open and its organs partially eaten. He was frozen to the spot as the two creatures moved towards the group of tourists standing in the glade.

  Ludvic’s voice came again, but this time it was faltering, and Naotoshi knew Ludvic had seen them too.

  ‘O-okay,’ he said, ‘but I think it would be a … a good idea for … for Igor here to go … to go first. Just to be … safe.’

  Naotoshi twisted around to look through the undergrowth towards the glade. Igor, the only man with a gun, nodded to Ludvic and headed across the clearing. As he reached it he turned back to the assembled tourists.

  ‘You need pay extra insurance to enter,’ he said with a sudden leer. ‘Ten dollars one person. Just to be safe.’

  You lying cocksucker, Naotoshi thought. You’re in league with him, but he’s in league with them. What the fuck is going on here?

  Igor got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl towards the hole beneath the tree roots. It was about two feet high, just enough to get through without lying flat. As he reached it, Igor twisted over on to his back and gripped the roots above him.

  ‘The best way is like this,’ he said. A dull echo sounded from the cavern beneath the tree as Igor slapped the thick roots with his palms.

  Ludvic expelled a heavy sigh, like a white water rafter who has seen a deadly waterfall approaching but knows that there is no other choice but to fall over the edge. He gave his beard a long tug. ‘Hold still a moment, o-o-officer,’ he said. ‘Let’s l-l-let these people have a photo o-o-opportunity.’

  Igor nodded. He lifted one hand in a peace sign while holding on to the roots with the other. As cameras began to flash, Ludvic pulled his hunting knife from his belt, and with no more effort than he might have used to prod a dead fish out of a lake, he lowered it through Igor’s uniform and into his stomach.