Authors: Marcus Sedgwick

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories

White Crow (19 page)

BOOK: White Crow

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She almost screams.

She plays the torchlight onto the centre of the room, to the chair. Except it’s not there any more. Shining the light now to the sides of the room, she finds the chair against a wall.

There is no explanation for this; it’s as if a poltergeist has been at work.

She drags the light back to the centre of the room, and this time she sees what she did not before, something that at once explains and confuses the situation.

There is a hole in the floor. Beside it lie some serious tools. A crowbar, and a mallet.

Where the chair once stood is a gaping hole, surrounded by splintered boards.

Rebecca approaches the hole cautiously.

Then, from nowhere, footsteps sound behind her.

A voice she knows well.

‘So. You came back.’

She turns, and there’s Ferelith, looking, in the glare of Rebecca’s torchlight, like a demon.

Saturday 4th September

T
he girls stare at each other, and in the silence Rebecca is again aware of the sound of a storm outside, so loud that it’s even penetrating into this, the very centre of the Hall. There’s one other thing she can hear, and that’s the beating of her heart, pounding like a fist.

She looks as Ferelith slides into the room, towards the hole.

Ferelith crouches down on all fours like a cat, and shines her lamp down.

Rebecca wonders if she hates her.

She can’t decide.

Ferelith strokes the floor with her fingertips.

Because she can’t think what else to do, Rebecca moves over and crouches on the floor next to her. She wonders if she’s terrified, but even if she is, she’s not going to let Ferelith know that. Not any more.

‘Look at that,’ Ferelith says, waving her lamp. She speaks as if nothing ever happened between them, here in this very room. No horror, no fighting, no crying.

Rebecca looks into the hole, and now she sees.

‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘You were right.’

She can see down easily enough, down the tunnel that leads away from the chair, sloping at an angle of more than thirty degrees, a long high and wide tunnel, leading away into the darkness.

As far as they can see, it has no end.

Rebecca shudders.

‘What do you think used to happen in here?’ she asks. ‘Really?’

‘What do you mean, really?’

‘Well, they didn’t actually summon angels, did they? Or devils.’

Though even as she says it she wonders why she hesitated over the word. Devils. It’s only a word, after all.

‘Didn’t they?’

‘No, they didn’t. Because devils don’t exist. And neither do angels.’

‘Don’t they? Are you sure about that? I mean, you might be right, but are you absolutely sure?’

Rebecca shakes her head.

‘I’m not wrong. They don’t exist. Any more than fairies, or UFOs, or the yeti, or the afterlife, for that matter.’

‘I thought you believed in God before? Have you changed your mind?’

Rebecca is surprised to hear her own answer.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I think I have.’

‘When did that happen, then?’

It happened in this very room, Rebecca thinks. You changed me. But I’m not going to tell you that.

‘Dunno,’ she says. ‘So what about you? You never did give me a proper answer.’

‘To what?’

‘There you go again.You can’t ever be straight, can you? Why don’t you see if you can give me a straightforward answer. An honest answer, what you actually think. You know what I’m asking. Do you believe in God?’

‘Oh, that,’ Ferelith says. She’s quiet, but eventually she answers. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘No buts? No maybes? No smart answers?’

‘No. I do believe in God.’

‘And?’

‘There is no and.’

‘Yes there is,’ says Rebecca. ‘I can feel it.’

Ferelith sighs. She leans a long way into the hole and directs her lamplight as far as she can make it go.

She pulls her head out again, and looks at Rebecca.

‘I do believe in God, but given the evidence of His nature, I have to conclude that it’s not a happy thing. It’s not a good thing. If God exists, then God is empty. Just like me.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Rebecca says.

‘No,’ says Ferelith. ‘Nor do I. But that’s how it is.

God is empty, His world is a painful mess, with so little beauty and order and very, very much hate and horror. But I believe He exists. And the Devil. And Heaven, and Hell. And angels. And an afterlife. Even an afterlife.’

‘Why? Why do you believe that?’

‘Because I have seen a white crow.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yes, you do. I told you once. About the white crow. If there’s one white crow in the world, it means that not all crows are black. It means that someone, sometime, somewhere crossed to the other side, but they came back. They came back to tell us. To tell me.’

Rebecca’s throat is dry.

‘To tell you? To tell you?’

‘Yes,’ says Ferelith. ‘To tell me.’

‘What did they tell you? Who told you?’ Rebecca whispers, her eyes wide.

Ferelith turns away from Rebecca and stares at the floor.

‘It was a few days after my mother died. I was at home, lying on my bed.’

‘Your old home? Before the Rectory?’

‘The Rectory is my home. It always has been. Those losers who live there do so with my permission. They pay me rent. And it was there it happened. I was lying on my bed, in my room.

‘It was a few days after my mother killed herself. And then without any warning, she walked into the room, and straight up to the bed. She looked down at me, and she said this: Look behind the mirror. That’s all. Look behind the mirror.

‘And then she turned and left, and went, and I never saw her again.’

Rebecca is silent, but she has to ask, though she knows she needs to do it gently. ‘Are you sure you didn’t dream that? Or imagine it, or something. You must have been very upset, and . . .’

‘No. I didn’t dream it. Because I didn’t know what she meant. I got up and I went and looked behind every mirror in the house. There was nothing behind any of them, and then I came to her room. My parents had separate bedrooms, and I came to her room, and she had this big mirror propped up on the mantelpiece over the fire, leaning against the wall.

‘And behind it I found the book of poems she’d given to me on my eighth birthday. The poems all about me. I hadn’t seen it in years. And when I read it again, I saw she’d stuck some extra pages in the back, and written a whole bunch more. New poems. New poems about me. So that’s how I know I didn’t dream it, because she told me where to find it.’

‘That’s . . .’ Rebecca begins, but she stops, because there’s no one word for the strange, creepy, sad, beautiful happening that Ferelith describes. Instead she asks, ‘What did the new poems say?’

Ferelith shakes her head. Then she answers in a small voice.

‘They weren’t nice.’

She stops, and Rebecca is speechless. She wonders what on earth Ferelith means by ‘They weren’t nice’. Something about the way she said it fills Rebecca with an unnameable terror. She can’t conceive of how a mother would do bad things to her own daughter.

She suddenly feels very empty herself, and sad.

‘So,’ says Ferelith eventually. ‘Why did you come back? Did life get too dull without me?’

Rebecca takes her time before she answers.

Something shifts inside her, something in the way she feels about this strange girl she’s come to know well, too well perhaps.Yes, she’s strange, but she’s not a freak, and suddenly she regrets calling her that in those texts. What she is, Rebecca realises, is lost.

Unbearably, irredeemably, terribly lost. Rebecca sees that she herself has always been loved, by one person at least. Ferelith hasn’t. That’s what sets her apart.

Ferelith is still waiting for her answer.

‘So?’ she says. ‘Why did you come back? Because you couldn’t live without me?’

‘Far from it,’ she lies. ‘But I lost something, and I think I lost it here. In this room.’

‘What did you lose?’

Rebecca suddenly realises there is more than one answer to that question, but rather than say that what she really lost was a friend, she decides to tell Ferelith nothing at all.

Kneel and Disconnect

I’d found something amazing.

I’d opened up a hole in the floor as wide as I was tall.

I’d spent a few days working on the chair, and then the floor. The boards that the chair was bolted to turned out not to be part of the floor: they were on some kind of hinged trap, that would have let the whole section angle and sink into the floor, and then, the most amazing thing: two rails, running away, like a miniature train track, down a long sloping tunnel.

I unbolted the chair and released the trap door for the first time just a couple of hours before Rebecca came and found it. I’d gone home to get something to drink, something to eat before I went on, and came back to find her, as if she was waiting for me.

We knelt over the hole and stared.

It was incredible.

Now, with Rebecca beside me, I knew it was a sign to explore, but she didn’t seem interested, and was searching around the floor of the Candle Room with her torch.

I climbed into the hole.

‘Hey!’ I called to her. ‘Coming?’

She ignored me, so I called again.

‘I could do with some help.’

Still she scanned the floor with her torch.

I looked up under the section of floor on which the chair stood.

‘It’s on wheels,’ I told her. ‘This whole section is on wheels. They’re set over the rails. The chair must have run down here. Backwards.’

Now Rebecca came over to me.

The skin on my neck began to itch and tingle.

‘Come on,’ I said.

Rebecca froze.

‘What? Where? Down there?’

‘Of course down here. You can’t tell me you don’t want to know where it goes?’

Rebecca didn’t answer.

‘There could be treasure,’ I said, as if I was a kid in a story book.

‘Or there could be something . . .’

‘Something what?’

‘Horrible. Bad,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Evil.’

‘But I thought you just told me there’s no such thing as evil.’

‘There isn’t,’ she said.

‘So come on, then.’

And she did, leaving her torch on the floor beside the hole, but leaving it lit, so we could see the mouth to the tunnel all the time.

She climbed down into the hole after me, and little by little, we edged our way into the shaft. It was quite easy, because the rails on which the chair ran were set into sleepers, which we braced our feet against to climb down.

It was like walking down a ladder on a hillside, and the roof of the tunnel was high enough to take the chair with ease.

The shaft was well built, and had been bricked and shored up with cross beams every few feet. It was old, the bricks were the tiny old-fashioned sort you see on ancient houses, and the wooden beams were rough, though strong.

I went first, and Rebecca came behind, holding the lamp, which cast strange elongated shadows of us both up and down the tunnel. I had limbs as long as a spider’s, I felt like an alien being investigating the archaeology of another world, another dimension.

And then, we reached the end.

We had gone maybe thirty metres down the tunnel, and it came to an end, but clearly not its original end, because there was a wall of bricks right across the tunnel, but the rails ran on underneath.

We got right up to the wall, and saw it was a very different thing from the tunnel walls. It had been hastily put together, from bricks and stones of different types and sizes, but it was strong.

It was very strong, and though we tried to kick at it for a while, lying on our backs, it wasn’t going anywhere.

‘What do you think?’ Rebecca asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s it for? Why did they put this here? What’s on the other side?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think that’s the right question. I mean, I think that if we knew what was on the other side, we’d know why it was bricked up like this.’

Rebecca nodded.

‘So now what do we do?’

‘Go back up for the tools, come down again and try and break it down. Yes?’

‘Okay.’

‘You wait here,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and get it.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘That would mean taking the lamp. We’ll both go. Together. Right?’

So I knew she hadn’t forgiven me entirely.

‘Fair enough,’ I said, so we started to make our way back up the tunnel, rung by rung, sleeper by sleeper.

I can’t remember exactly when the lamp went out, but it did so without warning.

BOOK: White Crow