Buch lesen: "The Crow Talker"

Pigeons! Screech said, as if he’d heard Caw’s thought. You’d get more sense out of a brick!

Probably off his rocker, said Glum. A lot of humans are.

Caw heaved himself on to the roof and set off at a jog. But as he ran, he couldn’t shake the man’s parting words. He hadn’t seemed crazy at all. His face was fierce, his eyes clear. Not like the old drunks who stumbled around the streets or squatted in doorways begging for money.

And, more than that, he had helped Caw. He’d put himself at risk, for no reason.

Caw’s crows flew above him, wheeling around buildings and circling back as they made their way to the safety of the nest. Home.

Caw’s heart began to slow, as the night took him into its dark embrace.

t’s the same dream. The same as always.

He’s back at his old house. The bed is so soft he feels like he’s lying on a cloud. It’s warm too and he longs to turn over, pull the duvet tight to his chin and fall back asleep. But he never can. Because the dream isn’t just a dream. It’s a memory.

Hurried footsteps on the stairs outside his room. They’re coming for him.

He swings his legs out and his toes sink into the thick carpet. His bedroom is in shadow, but he can just make out his toys lining the top of a chest of drawers and a shelf stacked with picture books.

A crack of light appears under his door and he hears his parents’ voices, urgent and hushed.

The door handle turns and they enter. His mother is wearing a black dress, and her cheeks are silver with tears. His father is dressed in brown corduroy trousers and a shirt open at the neck. His forehead is sweaty.

“Please, no …” Caw says.

His mother takes his hand in hers, her palms clammy, and pulls him towards the window.

Caw tries to tug back, but he’s young in the dream, and she’s too strong for him.

“Don’t fight,” she says. “Please. It’s for the best. I promise.”

Caw kicks her in the shins and scratches at her with his nails, but she gathers him close to her body in a grip of iron, and bundles him on to the window ledge. Terrified, Caw fastens his teeth over her forearm. She doesn’t let go, even when his teeth break her skin. His father draws back the curtains, and for second Caw catches sight of his own face in the black shine of the window – pudgy, wide-eyed, afraid.

The window is flung open and the cold night air rushes in.

Now his father holds him as well – his parents have an arm and a leg each. Caw bucks and writhes, screaming.

“Hush! Hush!” says his mother. “It’s all right.”

The end of the nightmare is coming, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less terrible. They push and pull him over the ledge, so his legs are dangling, and he sees the ground far below. His father’s jaw is taut, brutal. He won’t look Caw in the eye. But Caw can see that he’s crying too.

“Do it!” says his father, releasing his grip. “Just do it!”

“Why?” Caw wants to shout. But all that comes out is a child’s wailing cry.

“I’m sorry,” says his mother. That’s when she shoves him out of the window.

For a split-second, his stomach turns. But then the crows have him.

They cover his arms and legs, talons digging into his skin and pyjamas. A dark cloud that appears out of nowhere, carrying him upwards.

His face is filled with feathers and their earthy smell.

He’s floating, up and up, carried beneath their black eyes and brittle legs and snapping wings.

He gives his body to the birds and the rhythm of their flight, prepares to wake …

But tonight, he does not wake.

The crows descend and set him down lightly on the pavement, looping back towards his house along a pale driveway running between tall trees. He sees his parents at his window, now closed. They’re hugging, holding each other.

How could they?

Still, he does not wake.

Then Caw sees a figure, a thing, materialising from the darkness of the front garden, taking slow deliberate strides to the door of the house. It’s tall, almost as tall as the doorway itself, and very thin, with spindly limbs too long for its body.

The dream has never continued like this before. This is no longer part of his memory – somehow Caw knows that, deep in his bones.

By some trick, he can see the thing’s face, close up. It’s a man – but the likes of which he’s never seen. He wants to look away, but his eyes are drawn to the pale features, made paler still by the blackness of the man’s hair, which sits in jagged spikes over his forehead and one eye. He would be handsome if it weren’t for his eyes. They’re completely black – all pupil, no white.

Caw has no idea who the man is, but he knows that he is more than just bad. The man’s slender body draws the darkness to him. He has come here to do harm. Evil. The word comes unbidden. Caw wants to shout, but he is voiceless with fear.

He is desperate to wake, but he does not.

The visitor’s lips twist into a smile as he lifts a hand, the fingers like drooping arachnid legs. Caw sees that he’s wearing a large golden ring as his fingers enfold the door knocker, like a flower’s petals closing. And now the ring is all he sees, and the picture inscribed on its oval surface. A spider carved in sharp lines, eight legs bristling. Its body is a looping single line, with a small curve for the head and a larger one for the body. On its back, a shape that looks like the letter M.

The stranger knocks a single time, then turns his head. He’s looking right at Caw. For a moment the crows are gone, and there is nothing in the world but Caw and the stranger. The man’s voice whispers softly, his lips barely moving.

“I’m coming for you.”

Caw woke up screaming.

Sweat was drying on his forehead and goose pimples covered his arms. He could see his breath, even under the cover of the tarpaulin that stretched between the branches overhead. As he sat up, the tree creaked and the nest rocked slightly. A spider scuttled away from his hand.

A coincidence. Just a coincidence.

What’s up? said Screech, flapping across from the nest’s edge to land beside him.

Caw closed his eyes, and the image of the spider ring burned behind his lids.

“Just the dream,” he said. “The usual one. Go back to sleep.”

Except tonight it hadn’t been. The stranger – the man at the door – that hadn’t really happened. Had it?

We were trying to sleep, said Glum. But you woke us twitching like a half-eaten worm. Even poor old Milky’s up. Caw could hear the grumpy ruffle of Glum’s feathers.

“Sorry,” he said. He lay back down, but sleep wouldn’t come, not with the dream throwing its fading echoes through his mind. After eight years of the same nightmare, why had tonight been different?

Caw threw off his blanket and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The nest was a platform high up in a tree, three metres across, made of scrap timber and woven branches, with a hatch in the floor he’d made using a sheet of corrugated semi-transparent plastic. More branches were knitted together around the nest’s edge with pieces of boarding he’d scavenged from a building site, making a bowl shape with steep sides about a metre tall. His few possessions lay in a battered suitcase he’d found on the banks of the Blackwater several months ago. An old curtain could be pinned across the middle of the nest if he wanted privacy from the crows, though Glum never quite got the hint. At the far end, a small hole in the tarpaulin roof offered an entrance and exit for the crows.

It was cold up here, especially in winter, but it was dry.

When the crows had first brought him to the old park eight years ago, they’d settled in an abandoned tree house in a lower fork of the tree. But as soon as he was old enough to climb, Caw had built his own nest up here, high above the world. He was proud of it. It was home.

Caw unhooked the edge of the tarpaulin and pulled it aside. A drop of rainwater splashed on to the back of his neck and he shuddered.

The moon over the park was a small sliver short of full in a cloudless sky. Milky perched on the branch outside, motionless, his white feathers silver in the moonlight. His head swivelled and a pale, sightless eye seemed to pick Caw out.

So much for sleep, grumbled Glum, shaking his beak disapprovingly.

Screech hopped on to Caw’s arm and blinked twice. Don’t mind Glum, he said. Old-timers like him need their beauty sleep.

Glum gave a harsh squawk. Keep your beak shut, Screech.

Caw breathed in the smells of the city. Car fumes. Mould. Something dying in a gutter. It had been raining, but no amount of rain could make Blackstone smell clean.

His stomach growled, but he was glad of his hunger. It sharpened his senses, pushed back the terror into the shadows of his mind. He needed air. He needed to clear his head. “I’m going to find something to eat.”

Now? said Glum. You ate yesterday.

Caw spotted last night’s chip container on the far side of the nest, along with the other rubbish the crows liked to collect. Glittering stuff. Bottle tops, cans, ring pulls, foil. The remains of Glum’s dinner were scattered about too – a few mouse bones, picked clean. A tiny broken skull.

I could eat too, said Screech, stretching his wings.

Like I always say, said Glum, with a shake of his beak. Greedy.

“Don’t worry,” Caw told them. “I’ll be back soon.”

He opened the hatch, swung out from the platform and into the upper branches, then picked his way down by handholds he could have found with his eyes shut. As he dropped to the ground, three shapes – two black, one white – swooped on to the grass.

Caw felt a little stab of annoyance. “I don’t need you to come,” he said, for what seemed like the thousandth time. I’m not a little kid any more, he almost added, but he knew that would make him sound even more like one.

Humour us, said Glum.

Caw shrugged.

The park gates hadn’t been opened for years, so the place was empty as always. Quiet too, but for the whisper of wind in the leaves. Still, Caw stuck to the shadows. The sole of his left shoe flapped open. He’d need to steal a new pair soon.

He passed the rusty climbing frame where children never played, crossed the flower beds that had long ago given way to weeds. The surface of the fishpond was thick with scum. Screech had sworn he saw a fish in there a month ago, but Glum said he was making it up. Blackstone Prison loomed beyond the park walls on the left, its four towers piercing the sky. On some nights Caw heard sounds from inside, muted by the thick, windowless walls.

As Caw paused by the empty bandstand, covered in graffiti scrawls, Screech landed on the step, talons tip-tapping on the concrete.

Something’s wrong, isn’t it? he asked.

Caw rolled his eyes. “You don’t give up, do you?”

Screech cocked his head.

“It was my dream,” Caw admitted. “It wasn’t quite the same. That’s all.”

The nightmare forced its way into his mind again. The man with the black eyes. His shadow falling across the ground like a shard of midnight. The hand reaching out, and the spider ring …

Your parents belong in the past, said Screech. Forget them.

Caw nodded, feeling the familiar ache in his chest. Every time he thought of them, the pain was like a bruise, freshly touched. He would never forget. Each night he relived it. The empty air beneath his wheeling feet; the crack and flap of the crows’ wings above.

Since then many crows had been and gone. Sharpy. Pluck. One-legged Dover. Inkspot, with her taste for coffee. Only one crow had remained at his side since that night eight years ago – mute, blind, white-feathered Milky. Glum had been a nest-mate for five years, Screech for three. One with nothing useful to say, one with nothing cheerful and one with nothing to say at all.

Caw scaled the wrought-iron gates, gripped the looping ‘B’ of Blackstone Park, and hauled himself up on to the wall. He balanced easily, his hands stuffed casually in his pockets as he walked along the top of it. For Caw, it was almost as easy as walking down the street. He could see Milky and Glum circling high overhead.

I thought we were getting food, said Screech.

“Soon,” Caw told him.

He stopped opposite the prison. An ancient beech tree overhung the wall, and he was almost hidden by its thick leaves.

Not here again! squawked Glum, making a branch quiver as he landed.

“Humour me,” said Caw pointedly.

He stared at the grand house across the road, built in the shadow of the prison.

Caw often came to look at the house. He couldn’t really explain why. Perhaps it was seeing a normal family doing normal things. Caw liked to watch them eating dinner together, or playing board games or just sitting in front of their TV.

The crows had never understood.

A shadow in the garden snatched him suddenly back to his nightmare. The stranger’s cruel smile. The spider hand. The weird ring. Caw focused intently on the house, trying to drive the terrifying images away.

He wasn’t sure what time it was, but the windows of the house were dark, the curtains drawn. Caw rarely saw the mother, but he knew that the father worked at the prison. Caw had seen him leaving the prison gates and returning home. He always wore a suit, so Caw guessed he was more than just a guard. His black car squatted in the driveway like a sleeping animal. The girl with the red hair, she’d be in bed, her little dog lying at her feet. She was about his age, Caw guessed.

AWOOOOOOOOO!

A wailing sound cut through the night, making Caw jerk up. He dropped into a crouch on the wall, gripping the stone as the siren rose and fell, shockingly loud in the moonlit silence.

From the four towers of the prison, floodlights flashed on, throwing arcs of white light into the courtyard and on to the road outside. Caw shrank back, sheltering under the branches, away from the glare.

Let’s scram, said Screech, twitching his feathers nervously. There’ll be humans here soon.

“Wait,” said Caw, holding up a hand.

A light blinked on in the upstairs room where the girl’s parents slept.

For once I agree with Screech, said Glum.

“Not yet.”

More lights came on behind closed curtains, and a minute or two later, the front door opened. Caw trusted the darkness to shield him. He watched as the girl’s father stepped out. He was a slender but tough-looking man, with fair hair receding a little at the front. He was straightening a tie and speaking into a phone clamped against his shoulder.

It’s the one who walks that horrible dog! Glum said, hissing with disgust. Caw strained his ears to hear the man’s voice over the siren.

“I’ll be there in three minutes,” shouted the man. “I want complete lockdown, a time-line and a map of the sewers.” A pause. “I don’t care whose fault it was. Meet me out front with everyone you can spare.” Another pause. “Yes, of course you should call the police commissioner! She needs to know about this, and fast. Get on it now!”

He slipped the phone away and strode fast towards the prison.

“What’s going on?” Caw muttered.

Who cares? said Screech. Human stuff. Let’s go.

As Caw watched, the girl appeared in the doorway of the house with the dog at her heels. She was wearing a green dressing gown. Her face was delicate, almost a perfect inverted triangle, with wide-set eyes and a small pointed chin. Her red hair, the same colour as her mother’s, hung loose and messy to her shoulders. “Dad?” she said.

“Stay inside, Lydia,” snapped the man, barely looking back.

Caw gripped the wall tighter.

Her father broke into a trot down the pavement.

The spider this way crawls, said a voice, close to Caw’s ear.

Caw jumped. He glanced up and saw Milky perched in a branch.

Glum snapped his head around. Did you just … speak? he said.

Milky blinked, and Caw stared into the pale film of the old crow’s eyes. “Milky?” he said.

The spider this way crawls, said the white crow again. His voice was like the rasp of wind over dried leaves. And we are but prey in his web.