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Where’d he come from? said Screech.
Caw sat up. A tall, thin man was holding the boy by the back of his neck. Brown wiry hair protruded from beneath the man’s stained woolly hat. He was wearing several layers of dirty clothing, including an old brown trench coat fastened around his waist with a belt of frayed blue cord. A tufty beard coated his jawline in uneven patches. Caw guessed he was in his mid-twenties, and homeless.
“Leave him be,” said the man, his voice rasping. In the semi-darkness, his mouth was a black hole.
“What’s it to you?” said the boy holding Caw’s left arm.
The man shoved the boy with the lip rings hard at the bin, letting him go.
“This guy’s crazy!” said the boy holding Caw’s legs. “Let’s go.”
Their leader picked up his knife and brandished it at the homeless man.
“Lucky you’re so filthy,” he snarled. “Don’t want to get my knife dirty. Come on, fellas.” The four attackers turned and tore out of the alley.
Caw scrambled to his feet, his breath coming hard. Looking up, he saw his crows perched together on the fire-escape railing, watching silently.
After the gang had rounded the corner, another smaller shape slipped from the alley’s darkness to stand close beside the man. It was a boy of about seven or eight, Caw guessed. His narrow face was pale and his dirty blond hair stood on end. “Yeah, and don’t come back!” he shouted, shaking a fist.
Caw darted towards the chips scattered on the ground. He started dropping them back into the box. No need to waste a good meal. All the while, he felt the gaze of his rescuer and the boy on his back.
When he’d finished, he stuffed the box inside the deep pocket of his coat and hurried to the fire escape.
“Wait,” said the man. “Who are you?”
Caw turned to face him, but kept his eyes on the ground. “I’m no one.”
The man snorted. “Really? So where are your parents, No one?”
Caw shook his head again. He didn’t know what else to say.
“You should be careful,” said the man.
“I can take care of myself.”
“Doesn’t look like that to us,” said the boy, tilting his chin upward.
Caw heard the crows’ claws shifting on the railing above him. The man’s eyes flicked up to them and narrowed. His lips turned in the ghost of a smile. “Friends of yours?” he asked.
Time to go home, said Glum.
Caw started up the steel ladder without looking back. He climbed quickly, hand over hand, his nimble feet barely making a sound on the fire escape. When he reached the roof, he took one last glance and saw the man watching him as the young boy rooted around in the bins.
“Something bad’s coming,” called the man. “Something really bad. You get into trouble – talk to the pigeons.”
Talk to the pigeons? Caw only talked to crows.
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.
(#u2f4bd70a-05b9-5ef6-ae1c-7f6c0f6d47cf)
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.
