Crow Boy (3 page)

But he couldn't for the life of him imagine what that might be and he couldn't seem to stop himself from following her just the same.

‘Excuse me?' he said and she glanced back at him for a moment, a look of surprise on her face, but then she turned away and increased her pace, as though anxious to get away from him. ‘Hey, it's all right, I won't hurt you,' said Tom. ‘Hang on a minute!'

There was another doorway up ahead of her, a low opening with a stone lintel across the top of it but it was roped off with a length of thick cord, and prominent signs in bright red letters at either side made it clear that it wasn't a sensible place to go.

DANGER. NO PUBLIC ACCESS BEYOND THIS POINT. KEEP OUT.

Tom had expected the girl to turn away from it, but no, she went straight through the doorway without slowing her pace and, here was the weird thing, she hadn't even bothered to duck under the length of cord that barred the way, but seemed to go through it without disturbing it.

In the heat of the moment, all Tom could think was that the girl was going into a dangerous place.

‘Hey, you!' he shouted. ‘Can't you read?'

He quickened his pace in an attempt to catch up with her, but she continued walking into the darkness of the room beyond and, almost without thinking, he jumped over the rope and followed her. As he ducked under the lintel he felt a strange, giddy feeling ripple through him and then found himself walking through almost total darkness, his feet clunking on wooden floorboards. He saw the girl up at the far end of the room, standing in front of an ancient stone fireplace. In the gloom she seemed to flicker and shimmer like a silent movie. Tom took a cautious step forward.

‘You really shouldn't be in here,' he told her. ‘I don't think it's safe.'

She glanced at him again, her expression one of suspicion, and then she turned her face away from him.

‘Look, honestly,' he said, ‘I really think it's best if we go outside and I–'

He broke off in alarm as he felt something sag beneath his feet; there was a slow creaking noise, the sound of ancient timbers protesting at his weight. He stayed very still. The girl was looking at him again now, an expression of concern on her face. She turned to face him and he saw with a stab of shock that the front of her dress was stained red with blood.

‘OK,' he said. ‘I think we'd better–'

And then suddenly, shockingly, everything was falling away beneath him in a slow, grinding roar. He made a desperate attempt to turn back towards the entrance but his feet were no longer standing on anything solid and the next thing he knew, he was falling, falling in the midst of splintered wood and clouds of dust and he seemed to fall for a very long time before he hit the ground.

Three

He came gradually back to his senses, aware of noise all around him. He was lying face down, his head turned to one side. Something hard was pressing into his right cheek. He opened his eyes and saw a strange tipped-on-one-side world running vertically across his field of vision. He realised that his face was resting on a cobbled street, along which people were moving to and fro in a restless, shouting mass. People in fancy dress, he decided, judging by the many long coats, plumed hats and colourful bonnets he could see. He wanted to move but, for the moment, he felt too nauseous, so he just lay there, blinking, trying to gather his scattered senses. And then he became aware of a noise from somewhere behind him, separating itself from the hubbub all around, a juddering, clattering sound rising steadily in volume as something heavy came thundering towards him.

Realization hit him and he rolled quickly onto his back. Whatever it was raced past, inches from his prone body, metal-clad wheels striking sparks on the cobbles. He tilted his head back and now he was looking upside down at the rear of a carriage moving briskly away from him, pulled by horses that he could hear but couldn't quite see. A scruffy man wearing a weird triangular hat glanced back at him from the driver's seat, an amused grin on his dirty face. He lifted a whip, cracked it in the air and the carriage lurched on along the street.

Now Tom managed to sit upright. He stared around in open-mouthed astonishment. He was still on the Close, he decided, or at least on a wider road that adjoined it, but it all looked different now, packed with human life of every age and description, far too many people to be mere actors and, when he raised his eyes to look for the dark ceiling of the Royal Mile, his astonished gaze found nothing more than a row of high rooftops and above them, a clear blue sky and the sun streaming down into his face. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, hoping that somehow everything would go back to the way it was, but it didn't.

‘What's happening?' he asked the world at large but, not surprisingly, he received no answer.

‘Are you all right?' The voice made him start. He turned to see the young girl he had been following. She was standing just a short distance from him, one hand on her hip, the other holding her straw basket. She had a quizzical smile on her pretty face and Tom was relieved to see that there was no sign of any blood on her dress. ‘You fell over,' she added, just in case he didn't know what had happened to him. ‘You said something to me and then you fell.' She had a broad Scottish accent, thick and coarse, unlike any other he had heard since his arrival in Edinburgh.

He sat there blinking at her, trying to find appropriate words but nothing seemed to fit the situation except ‘where am I?' and there was no way he was going to say that. So he tried something else. ‘The floor gave way,' he muttered.

‘Did it?' She looked down at the cobbled street and even tried tapping it with the toe of one boot. ‘Seems all right to me,' she said.

‘Not
this
floor, stupid. The other one: the wooden one in the room where you weren't supposed to go.'

She studied him warily as though she suspected he was some kind of lunatic. ‘I wouldn't sit there if I was you,' she said. ‘For one thing, it's very dirty. And for another . . .'

As if to illustrate her point, a second carriage came rattling towards Tom from the opposite direction, the horses wild-eyed and snorting as the driver urged them onwards with no concern for the confused-looking boy sitting in the middle of the road. Tom took the hint. He scrambled to his feet and dodged aside, then watched in amazement as the vehicle rattled past. Through an open window there was a glimpse of a man in a powdered white wig and a fancy gold jacket. He was staring expressionlessly out at the world but he grinned when he saw Tom, revealing twin rows of rotten green teeth.

‘What the . . . what
is
this?'

Tom turned to speak to the girl again and saw that she was moving off the main road and along a crowded narrow side street, as though she had dismissed him completely. He felt a sense of panic rising within him so he hurried after her into the Close, where tenement buildings reared up on either side of him, seven or eight storeys high. He didn't have the first idea what was happening and he hoped she might be able to explain it to him.

‘Annie!' he shouted. ‘Hold on a bit, wait for me.'

She paused and directed a baffled look at him. ‘Annie?' she echoed. ‘I think you have the wrong girl. I'm Morag.'

‘Oh, uh . . . OK. She said your name was Annie.'

‘Who said?'

‘The woman from Mary King's Close. Agnes. Agnes Chambers?'

‘I don't know anybody on the Close by that name.' Morag started to move away again. ‘I have to get going,' she said. ‘You'll make me late and then there'll be trouble.'

‘I'll come with you,' he said. He fell into step beside her and they walked on along the crowded street, having to push their way through the heaving mass of human traffic, while he tried to put everything together in his mind, so he could make some kind of sense of it. OK, so he'd had a fall. That much he was sure of. Chances were he was lying unconscious somewhere and all this . . . he stared in wide-eyed amazement at his surroundings in all their incredible complexity – all
this
was probably some kind of dream he was having while they fixed him up. He couldn't help thinking about Kane, the hero of
Timeslyp
, bursting through a doorway to find himself in an unfamiliar world. Maybe that idea had somehow wormed its way into his mind.

Either that or he'd time-travelled back to the seventeenth century. And there was no way that could have happened. Was there?

Meanwhile, it was hard to concentrate, because at every few steps there was some amazing new thing to grab his attention. Here, in the entrance to what must have been a butcher's shop, a pig was strung up by its back legs and a couple of men were removing its guts and heaping them into a series of metal buckets. Blood slopped over the edges and ran down the centre of the already filthy street. There, out on the cobbles, a man with a soaped-up face was sitting in a barber's chair while another man wearing a white wig shaved him with a cut-throat razor.

‘Gardez Loo!' shouted a voice from up above and an instant later a bucket of foul-smelling slops hurtled down from a balcony and struck the cobbled street, splashing in all directions. An old man who had failed to step back in time shook his fist at the woman who had emptied the bucket, an odd-looking creature with a white painted face and rouged cheeks. She was leaning over the balcony and laughing openly at his predicament, displaying quite a bit of cleavage as she did so. Tom tried not to stare. He moved on, taking more notice of where he was walking and he saw that, though the sewage was mostly dry and baked by the sun, a sluggish trickle of wet stuff still coursed its way along the middle of the street and his shoes were already plastered with evil-smelling muck. Mum was going to be delighted when he got home.
If
he got home . . .

‘Where are we going?' he asked Morag and she shot him a funny look.

‘
I'm
going to Missie Grierson's,' she said. ‘I don't know where
you're
going.'

‘I'm . . . I'm going there too,' he told her, quickly.

‘Why? Are you an orphan?' she asked him.

He thought for a moment. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Sure. Sort of.'

‘How can you be ‘sort of' an orphan?' she asked him. She didn't get an answer so she went on. ‘You talk funny,' she observed. ‘You dress funny too. What's that red coat you're wearing?'

‘It's just a school uniform,' said Tom defensively.

‘You go to
school
?' Morag seemed impressed at this.

‘Sure. Doesn't everyone?'

Morag laughed, as though he'd made a joke, but he couldn't see anything remotely funny about what he'd said. ‘And the voice?' she prompted him.

‘Oh, I'm from Manchester.' She looked at him blankly as though he'd said he was from Mars. ‘You've heard of Manchester, right?' He tried to think of something that might be familiar to her. ‘Manchester United?' he ventured. ‘You know, the football team?'

He might as well have been talking in a foreign language.

‘Are you a
Sassenach
?' she asked him and he frowned, nodded. He was pretty sure he knew what that word meant. A blow-in. An outsider. The kids at his school didn't use the word, but it was how they saw him.

Now Tom and Morag were pushing their way through some kind of outdoor market, grubby little wooden buildings with thatched roofs, where men and women stood shouting at the passers-by to come and taste their produce. ‘Mutton pie!' one man was shouting. ‘Finest in Edinburgh, who'll try my wares?' But nobody seemed interested in pies today. ‘Fresh fruit!' shouted an odd-looking woman with a painted face and very few teeth. Like her, the apples and pears piled up on her stall looked well past their best.

‘Missie Grierson says you should never trust a
Sassenach
,' said Morag, brightly. ‘She says as how they're all thieves and rascals.'

‘Not me,' Tom assured her. ‘And what does this Missie Grierson know about it anyway?'

‘Plenty,' Morag assured him. ‘She's the wisest person on the Close. When a woman's due to have a bairn, she's the first one they come looking for. Missie Grierson says if she'd been around when I was born, then maybe my mother would still be here to look after me.'

‘Your mother?' Tom didn't quite understand what she was saying. ‘Why, where is your mother?' he asked.

‘In heaven, with the angels, silly. When I came into the world, she had to leave. Missie Grierson says the angels wanted her because she was so pretty.' Her pale face grew very serious. ‘I spoke to an old woman who was there that night. She said there was a lot of blood.' She seemed to dismiss the idea. ‘But Missie Grierson took me in and looked after me and now I work at the orphanage.' She made a smile that was a little too forced. ‘She's been very kind.'

‘You
work
?' Tom stared at her. ‘But . . . you can't be more than, what? Ten or twelve? Shouldn't you be in school?'

‘Oh aye, and I should be the Queen of Scotland, while I'm at it.' She looked thoughtful. ‘So what happened to
your
parents?' she asked unexpectedly.

‘Er . . . they split up,' said Tom. ‘Dad stayed back in Manchester and Mum . . . well, she moved up here to Edinburgh.'

‘So you're not really an orphan at all!' cried Morag, sounding outraged.

‘I kind of am,' he insisted. ‘And anyway, I'm . . . lost.'

‘Well, I wouldn't get your hopes up,' Morag warned him. ‘Missie Grierson is not one to be . . . oh!'

Morag had suddenly spotted something up ahead and instinctively she stepped to the side of the street, grabbing Tom's sleeve and pulling him with her. He glanced down at her and saw that she was averting her eyes from whatever she had seen. He looked along the street and felt a shock go through him. A figure was striding towards them, a man dressed in an outlandish but strangely familiar costume. His leather cloak billowed out behind him and his weird goggle eyes, set either side of the long, curved beak, stared at the world like those of some alien being. In one gloved hand he carried a long stick and Tom saw that he was using it to prod and push people out of his way, as though they were no more than cattle. His heavy boots rang out on the cobbles.

As the man moved past, his head turned to look in Tom's direction and Tom felt his blood run cold as those hideous goggle-eyes came to rest on him. It was only for an instant, but Tom imagined that he could feel their gaze burning into him, looking deep within him as if to capture his innermost secrets. Then the boots rang on stone again and the cloaked figure swept past and continued on his way.

Morag seemed to remember to breathe. She stepped back to the middle of the path and continued walking. Tom had to run a couple of steps to catch her up.

‘That was Doctor Rae, wasn't it?' he said.

She nodded but seemed reluctant to speak.

‘The Plague Doctor?' insisted Tom.

Again she nodded but kept her gaze on the way ahead as though she didn't want to encourage him.

‘Amazing,' he murmured.

Morag glanced up at him. ‘What is?' she asked.

‘I saw him before. Well, not him, really, but a waxwork that was meant to be him. You know, a waxwork?' Again, that blank look. ‘It's kind of like a pretend person,' he explained. ‘Anyway, he looke
d
just the same . . .' He thought for a moment. Whether this was a dream or a hallucination, he might as well play along with it. ‘What year is this?' he asked.

Morag managed a smile. ‘How would I know?' she asked him.

‘You don't know what
year
it is?' He stared at her in disbelief.

Morag shrugged. ‘It's sixteen forty-something, I think.'

‘Sixteen forty-five,' he said. He glanced up at the clear blue sky overhead. ‘Summer. And . . . I'll bet there's plague here, right?'

Morag nodded. ‘Every day it gets worse,' she said. ‘Doctor Rae is new, only been around a week or so. We had Doctor Paulitious before him and everyone said he was a good man; he just wanted to help the sick people. But he got sick himself and died a horrible death. And this Rae fellow . . .' She shook her head. ‘There are many who say he is just out to line his own nest.'

Tom looked at her. ‘Meaning?'

‘He's being paid a lot of money.'

‘Oh yeah, I heard about that.'

‘People say that he'll die soon, anyway.'

‘He won't,' said Tom, and Morag gave him an inquiring look.