The Crowmaster (7 page)

My abilities had almost taken over completely when I was fighting Caddie, and now it had happened again. It was as if they were feeding off my rage, growing stronger as my anger increased, turning me into a… a
monster
.

Just like my dad had told me they would.

I didn't flinch when the body slid sideways towards the floor, assuming it was just gravity at work. It wasn't until the arms began to move and the hands snatched up the fallen head that I realised something was very wrong.

The wide mouth was twisted into the now-familiar grin as the arms held the head in place above the stump of the scarecrow's neck. The severed strands of straw began to wriggle around like skinny worms. It took just seconds for them to start knotting together. A few moments after that and you'd never have known the head had ever been removed.

‘Thought you had me there, didn't you, boy?' the scarecrow giggled. He idly plucked the shards of glass from his body and let them fall to the floor with a
chink
. His ‘wounds' knitted closed immediately.

‘If you reckon a little thing like that's gonna stop me, you ain't got no idea who you're dealing with,' he warned.

‘I-I do,' I told him, rocked by what I'd just seen, but trying not to show it. ‘I know who you are. You're Joe Crow.'

‘Wrong again, boy,' he said, holding his scrawny arms above his head. ‘They call me the Crowmaster!' The empty hollows that were his eyes turned towards the broken window.

‘And here come my babies,' he said proudly. ‘Don't you go running, now. I know for a fact they's all
dying
to eat you.'

T
he Crowmaster moved faster than I've ever seen anything move before. He'd barely finished speaking when he took a sudden hop towards me, raising one knee to the level of his chest.

WHUMP!
The sole of his boot crunched against my face, snapping my head back and driving me further into the bedroom. The pain came rushing in – a hot, firey ache that spread out from my nose and stabbed up into my brain.

The world around me went soft and wispy, like the inside of a cloud. Sounds became muffled and indistinct – the cawing of the crows; the giggle of the scarecrow hissing through his broken teeth; the pitter-patter of my blood as it flowed from my burst nose and dribbled to the floor.

I didn't feel myself fall. It wasn't until the rough hands caught me by the hair and dragged me towards the window that I realised I was on my knees. Fragments of glass tore into my legs as he pulled me across the floor. I kicked out, trying to stand up, but the one time I came close he knocked my legs from under me, forcing me back down.

‘Word is you's somethin' special, boy,' he drawled, lifting me so my head was level with what was left of the window. He spat a thick wad of sticky black phlegm on to the floor by his feet. ‘Don't look so special to me.'

Fighting through the pain, I concentrated on making the sparks come. It seemed to take longer than usual, but eventually I felt them pulsing through me, uncoiling their muscles and giving me strength. He wanted to see special? I'd show him—

KRAAK!
He drove my head hard against the wooden windowsill. Another burst of agony exploded at my temple. The sparks fragmented and shot off in every direction, like startled fish in a shallow pool. I tried, but unconsciousness was closing in too quickly for me to bring them back.

I felt his spindly fingers tightening around my throat. In one movement, he lifted me clean off the ground, shaking me like a rag doll until I forced my eyes to open.

‘Not so fast there, boy. Don't want you passing out on me or nothin'. Reckon I wants you alive when them babies of mine rip your eyes clean from your head.'

He pulled me in close enough that I could smell the damp and decay on his breath. Maggots squirmed in the hollow of one of his eyes, gnawing hungrily on the rotting cloth that covered his head. His blackened teeth jutted up like crumbling headstones in the graveyard of his mouth. There was no part of his face that wasn't repulsive, but I couldn't bring myself to look away.

‘Funny thing is, I ain't supposed to kill you. I'm just supposed to hurt you. Scare you. Do whatever I gotta, to make you do them special tricks of yours.

‘Y'see, boy, he reckons that every time you do them special tricks, the closer this here world of yours comes to disaster.' I felt his breath and spittle on my face as he yanked me even nearer to him. ‘There's a gateway between your world and ours, he says, like a great big barn door, all locked up tight. And he reckons you the only one with the keys to unlock it.'

‘Wh-who does?'

‘Don't tell me you don't know, boy! Your daddy,' he said. ‘Your daddy reckons you going to be the one to throw open them doors and let all us monsters loose.'

‘He's wrong,' I slurred, pushing open my eyes. The world swam, never quite finding focus. ‘It won't happen.'

‘Oh, I know it won't happen, boy,' the Crowmaster nodded. ‘It won't happen 'cos I ain't gonna let it.' He caught the confusion on my face and that laughter hissed out from within him again.
SS-SS-SS-SS.
‘Y'see, I got to thinking. I got to thinking, why share this place with anyone?

‘I been stuck back in that hell-hole for nigh-on fifty years. Fifty years of being hunted and tortured by all them ugly freaks. Fifty years of scrabbling about in the dirt and the filth, like a hog. Fifty years of having to fight and kill every damn day just to stay living. Fifty. Long. Years.' He stabbed a finger towards the skeleton on the bed. ‘Because of
that.
Because of
her.
'

‘But… she didn't forget you,' I wheezed. My forgetting Mr Mumbles was what sent him to the Darkest Corners, but Marion had been talking about her imaginary friend just the night before.

Flecks of foam were forming around the scarecrow's mouth as he ranted. ‘But she
outgrew
me. She didn't need me no more, so I ended up stuck in there with all them
things
.' He shook his head and spat on the floor again. I was no longer sure if he was even talking to me. ‘And what, he wants me to bring all that here? He wants me to go back to living like that? Like an animal? It ain't gonna happen. This here world is gonna be mine. Mine and my babies'. Ain't no one else gonna share it.'

‘S-so… you're going to let me go?' I asked.

His whole body was racked by his sickening laugh. ‘You soft in the head, boy?' he said. One of his long, pointed fingers jabbed me in the chest. ‘Ain't you been listenin'? I'm gonna kill you.'

He pushed me towards the window. I fought against his grip, but it was too tight. I hammered his arms and kicked at his chest, but he was too strong. I screamed at him – pleaded with him – to stop, to let me go. But he didn't listen.

The January wind howled at my back, forcing its way up inside my T-shirt like an icy-cold hand. From the corner of my eye I could make out the ground. It looked hard and solid, and a long way away.

I screwed my eyes shut and concentrated, frantically trying to bring my abilities under control. But the wind, the pain, the scarecrow's rasping laughter – they all made it impossible to focus.

I was bigger than the window frame, but that didn't matter. In one shove he drove me through the old wood. I felt it splinter and snap; heard the final shards of the glass shatter and crack. And then there was nothing.

Nothing but the birds.

They flocked around me as I fell, swooping and diving, their sharp claws and beaks shredding through my clothes and ripping at my skin. Through the fog of screeching black I saw the Crowmaster. He was perched on the windowsill, laughing and pointing as I plunged backwards towards the ground.

Although it must've been over in seconds, that moment seemed to last for ever. The pain. The fear. And then, the desperate flicker of hope as I felt a faint surge of power buzz through my skull. It all seemed to happen at quarter-speed, right up until the moment I hit the ground.

WHUMPF
. I bounced awkwardly off something soft, tumbled sideways in the air, then face-planted into the soil of Marion's vegetable plot. The crows' attack eased off, although I guessed they were just repositioning themselves for a fresh assault. Whatever, it gave me enough time to raise my head and look at what I'd crashed down on to.

A mattress lay beside me. It looked brand new – aside from a dark red streak where my blood had sprayed across it during the fall. It was thick and it was soft – soft enough to have saved my life.

And, without even thinking about it, I'd made it appear out of thin air. Despite everything that was happening around me, for a split second I just stared at the mattress. Had I created it? Or did someone somewhere suddenly have
their
mattress vanish out from underneath them? I thought again about Mr Mumbles and Caddie reappearing at my house. If I
had
somehow made the mattress, then maybe my theory was right. Maybe my imagination had brought both of them to life too.

A shadow grew larger around me, snapping me back to the present. I flopped on to my back just as the Crowmaster's boots crunched into the soil on either side of my head. From down on the ground he loomed like a giant; an unstoppable colossus, about to squash me underfoot.

‘Well lookee-loo at you, boy,' the scarecrow spat. ‘Maybe you's special after all.' He took a few steps back and raised his skinny arms. The crows flew into formation above him. They circled round and round just over his head, flying faster and faster until they were a tornado of spinning black. ‘You scared of me, boy?' he demanded.

I shook my head. I was terrified, of course, but I wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of knowing.

The grin on his face said he knew I was lying. ‘They are,' he said. ‘My babies here, they's afraid of me. They's terrified, the lot of them. They's so terrified they'll do whatever I tell them to do.' He gave another hiss of laughter. ‘Watch.'

The birds broke formation and flung themselves towards me. I curled my arms over my head. If I could protect myself for long enough, there was a chance – a slim one – that I could find a way out of this. The last thing I saw before I shut my eyes was a flash of open beak, and the jagged curve of an outstretched claw.

And then came an unexpected sound. The Crowmaster let out a roar – a furious shriek that echoed all the way from the house up to the forest, and back again.

I peeked through a gap in my arms and realised the birds were no longer moving to attack. They banked left and right, spinning and tumbling as they struggled to avoid crashing into one another. A few of them couldn't pull out fast enough, and collided clumsily in mid-air. Others thudded into the wall, flapped up on to the roof, or simply dropped like stones to the ground.

The Crowmaster stumbled through it all, his long arms waving around. He shouted and screeched and gnashed his rotten teeth, but his control over the birds had been broken by… something. But what?

It was then that my phone rang. I felt it at first – a sudden vibration in my jeans pocket that caught me by surprise and almost scared the hell out of me. A second later, the ringtone kicked in, shrill and tuneless, like the chorus of the crows themselves.

The ringing whipped the birds into even more of a frenzy. Their movements were panicked and erratic. Most of them were fleeing, while those that remained were either flapping around on the ground, or fighting among themselves.

Even the Crowmaster was affected by whatever had startled the birds. He staggered unsteadily on his feet and flailed wildly with his arms, as if feeling his way through darkness.

Through it all, my phone kept ringing.

My brain still felt like it was floating in soup, but as I watched him claw at thin air, something went
click.
The holes in his head were just that – empty spaces, serving no purpose whatsoever. He had no eyes of his own, so he relied on the eyes of others. The eyes of his birds.

‘I don't know how you did that, boy, but I ain't gonna let you do it again,' the scarecrow seethed. ‘When I find you, I'm gonna hurt you. I'm gonna hurt you so bad you'll beg me to slit your throat an' be done with it.'

He stopped moving for a moment and seemed to find his bearings. With two strides of his stick-thin legs he reached me. A boot crumpled into my stomach, rolling me over on to my back. He bent at the waist, until his face was hanging directly above mine.

‘Maybe I can't see you right now, but that ringer in your pocket's making enough racket that I can still find you just the same.'

He brought his right hand down and felt through my hair, then down over my forehead until he reached my eyebrows. He flicked out his middle and index fingers and pressed the blackened nails against my cheeks until I gasped with the pain.

Through it all, my phone kept ringing.

‘Maybe you stopped my babies taking your eyes, but you ain't gonna stop me. You ain't gonna stop me from scratching away them—'

Something about the size of a small horse hit him from the side. One moment he was there above me, the next he was on the ground less than a metre away, kicking and scratching at the ferocious, slavering beast that had pounced on him.

The animal was in a frenzy, using every part of itself to attack the fallen Crowmaster. It was moving too fast for me to make it out clearly, but I could see its gums were pulled back, revealing sharp, yellowing teeth. They snapped furiously at the scarecrow, who hissed and spat and swore, struggling to fend the creature off.

A fist – or it could have been a foot – was thrown from the thrashing mass of teeth and limbs. It caught me across the ear – a glancing blow, but the final straw for my bruised and battered body. My muscles went slack and I began to feel as if I were completely weightless.

Floating on a tide of incoming black, I could hear the Crowmaster squealing and howling as he fought with the animal on his chest. I heard the growling of the beast, the snapping of its wide, vicious jaws. I heard the wheezing of my own breath, flowing unsteadily in and out through my shattered nose. In and out. In and out. In and out.

And through it all – through every terrible sound I heard as I finally lost consciousness – my phone never once stopped ringing.