White Crow

  ‘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 l
eaving 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.

  As it did, Rebecca moaned quietly.

  ‘No,’ she said. Just that. No more.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’ll find our way out.’

  And I knew we would.

  We began to climb towards the mouth of the hole, where Rebecca’s torch still shone.

  ‘Don’t go too far ahead,’ Rebecca said, and we moved on, but after a while I couldn’t sense her behind me any more.

  I stopped, and then I heard she was crying.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘What is it? We have to keep going.’

  She sniffed a bit more.

  ‘I was thinking. About my dad. He’s locked up in a prison cell. Tonight. Like he’s a prisoner, when he’s actually a policeman. A good man. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Anybody could hit some idiot reporter, you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘He’s alone and I’m stuck down this stupid tunnel and if we never get out . . .’

  ‘We’re going to get out,’ I told her.

  ‘But anyway, it’s just been so rubbish between us, but I don’t know what to do any more, or what to say, or how to be.’

  I thought for a moment. I was getting really cold and stiff, and I wanted to move, but I could tell I needed to get Rebecca out of her blackness first.

  ‘You said he hasn’t done anything wrong,’ I said. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what about the whole thing. Do you think he did wrong. About that girl?’

  Rebecca didn’t say anything, but sat in the dark in silence, thinking about what I’d said, I guess.

  She didn’t move, or speak. She just sat there.

  I fished in my pocket and in the gloom, I found her hand, pushing the heart-shaped pendant into it.

  ‘I found it. I knew it was yours. I thought you might want it back.’

  From the way her breath caught in her mouth, like she was holding back the tears, trying not to sob, I knew I was right.

  She did want her father’s heart back, after all.

  Across the Breeze

  And then, before either of us could say anything at all, the world began to fall apart.

  It started with a low vibration, a groan and a rumble and a crack.

  Heedless of the dark, we scrambled up the tunnel. I hit my head on the floor as we got to the top, but by then I didn’t care.

  The Hall was shaking.

  Bits of the ceiling started to fall on us, and though they were probably just tiny bits of plaster, it was terrifying.

  I groped my way to the door of the Candle Room.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ Rebecca shrieked, grasping for my hand.

  Hand in hand, we staggered into the hall, and I tried to get us towards the kitchens and the pantry, but as we came out into the entrance hall again, we stopped, because it was raining. Indoors.

  Then the world shook again. A terrible roar of failing wood and gusting wind tore through the room, and I guessed that the roof had given way, or been ripped off.

  ‘It’s the storm!’ I yelled stupidly over the noise.

  Rebecca couldn’t hear me, even though I was standing right by her.

  ‘The storm!’

  More rain fell on us from somewhere way above our heads, and with it some bit of the building giving way deafened us.

  We both screamed, and I think that was the first time I was really afraid for our lives.

  Still blind, I pawed my way along the corridor that led back to the kitchens. Panicking, we pulled each other out of the pantry window, kicking the boards completely off this time, since there was no need for subterfuge any more.

  We stumbled out into the storm.

  Hell had arrived and ripped into the coast. The storm that had started in Holland had torn across the channel and thrown itself at Winterfold.

  Trees were threshing madly, bending low to the ground in places, and every now and again there was a tremendous tearing noise as one of them was uprooted, though even this noise was drowned in the maelstrom of the wind and rain battering us from all sides.

  ‘Oh God! What shall we do?’ Rebecca screamed. To run through the woods now seemed like suicide, and behind us the Hall was making its own threats to collapse completely.

  ‘The footbridge! It’s stone. We can hide underneath till the worst is over.’

  So we took our lives in our hands, and ran towards the bridge, throwing ourselves under its protective arch and gasping for breath.

  And there we lay, listening to the destruction all around us, as the lightning flashed across the woods like a horror film, and the thunder banged, right over our heads.

  But if we thought that was the worst of it, we were wrong, because from nowhere, our small bit of the world literally fell apart.

  Sunday 5th September

  Dawn breaks, and casts a weak light on the remains of Winterfold Hall.

  In a gully underneath the old stone footbridge, two girls lie against each other, exhaustion having overcome their fear and the cold and the wet, so that they sleep a troubled sleep in each other’s arms.

  The storm has destroyed the woods, the Hall is a ruin, the roof gone, the floors collapsed; it looks like a pile of matchwood crushed by a giant’s foot.

  Rebecca stirs, and shivers. She opens her eyes, and sits up, and then she sees something that makes her scream.

  She’s not looking at the Hall, but in the opposite direction.

  Ferelith sits up too, rubbing her head. Blood flows onto her hand, and she realises that something must have cut her hea
d during their escape from the Hall.

  Fresh blood stains her soaked T-shirt, but she doesn’t care.

  Neither does she scream, but she swears silently under her breath as she sees what Rebecca has seen.

  When they hid under the footbridge, the cliff edge, at the bottom of the path, was twenty metres away. At least.

  Now, the edge of the cliff is within a stone’s throw of where they lie cowering.

  ‘It’s collapsed. My God!’ Ferelith says, standing up.

  The whole landscape has changed. The woods are decimated, unrecognisable; they can hear the crash of the waves beneath the new cliff edge easily now, so close they can smell the sea.

  Rebecca stands up too.

  ‘We could just have been . . .’

  She stops, but Ferelith nods.

  ‘And no one would have known. We wouldn’t have known it either. Here one minute. Then . . .’

  The two girls say no more, and without a word, start walking towards the new edge of the cliff.

  Somehow, coming so close to death, they are heedless of danger, and stand at the very brink.

  The whole coastline has changed for a few hundred metres.

  ‘Jesus!’ cries Ferelith. ‘Look! The church!’

  But there’s no church to be seen. It’s gone, almost entirely, swallowed into the sea in a single night. All that remains, now visible through the shredded woodland, is the boundary wall and a few graves, lucky enough to be further inland than most.

  ‘Come on,’ says Ferelith.

  There’s nothing else to do. The way the cliff has collapsed has cut them off, leaving them on a kind of peninsula. There are two paths off and both appear equally dangerous. But there’s a path down to the beach, that looks just possible to scramble down. From there they can walk along the shore, and home. If the tide’s out.

  There’s nothing to be scared of.

  So they start to climb down, and then Rebecca sees something in the side of the cliff.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks. ‘A grave?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ says Ferelith. ‘No. No, it’s too big. It’s way too big.’

  They scrabble sideways along the fallen earth and stones, and get close enough to see that halfway up the new cliff face is a gaping hole. A chamber, hidden from view for only-God-knows how long, now exposed to the bright still morning.