Wakening the Crow by Stephen Gregory

Author:Stephen Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

Chapter Twenty-Four

‘WHAT’S UP, ROSIE? Let me look at you? Maybe you should stay at home today. I’ll ring Colonel Brook and tell him.’

She looked different. Yes, we’d drunk a bottle of red wine the previous evening, maybe not a good idea, after her injection and the antibiotics she’d taken. When her alarm went off in the pitch darkness, and it rang and rang and she didn’t move, I fumbled for it and knocked it onto the floor, where it bumbled and buzzed like a huge fat insect, something like a cockchafer, which had crash-landed and crippled its wings. At last it stopped. I switched on the bedside lamp.

‘Rosie? You alright? What’s up?’

Something was wrong with her, something was different.

Although the crow had gone, it had changed us all. It had come to us, only a few hours after I’d come home with the tooth. The tooth was a dead thing. Once a part of a living human being, a piece of Poe, now it was only a discoloured fragment of bone. But the crow, in its passing through the tower, had been alive. It had touched us all with the spirit of Poe, and all three of us were changed.

Me, I’d been writing. And drinking. Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror I’d hung inside the vestry cupboard, I saw a shambling, rather disgraceful figure. A long black coat, a frayed shirt sticking untidily out of it, I was grizzly, unshaven, and my hair was longer than it had been for a decade, coiling around my ears and onto my collar. My eyes looked tired, there were dark shadows around them, but a strange spark of mischief gleamed within them, a spark which I myself found unnerving; a restlessness, an anxiety, which manifested itself more noticeably in a tic... I would look at myself in the mirror and catch myself blinking. There was something crawling across my eyelid like an ant and making it flicker, every few seconds. No, nothing there, except a tiny spasm in the muscles of my face. When I touched the place with a dirty fingernail, I saw that my hand was trembling. I would grin at myself, see something wolfish, a leering on my mouth, then reach deeper into the cupboard for the bottle of whiskey I’d been hiding there, take a long pull and feel the heat of the liquor in my throat and in my chest. Marvellous, miraculous, it was helping me to write. And after I’d stuffed the bottle back in its secret place, winked at myself in the mirror and whirled back to my desk, I could hardly wait to get writing again.

Hop-Frog, the Masque of the Red Death, Murders in the Rue Morgue, I had the collection on my desk, beside the keyboard and the glimmering silvery screen. The little lamp was bent over the tooth and its accompanying treasures – the diamonds of glass and the snail-shells. The feather of the crow I’d stuck into a pot on

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