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
