A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER Page 12

  ‘All right then, you bastard,’ he said at last, then climbed over the fence and walked towards The Crows.

  He passed between the twin, mismatched guardians of the entrance. The first sense he had was one of blessed relief, for it was cool in The Crows, in the shade of the cacti.

  Remember the clear path, he thought. Straight ahead. Straight through. As easy as pie. All the rest is just bullshit, stuff they say to frighten you.

  Straight ahead. Something crunched underfoot. He glanced down and lifted his boot, and saw that he’d crushed the remains of something, little white twig-like bones. A rat? A rabbit? It was hard to tell; there was no skull and pieces were missing. He walked on.

  Straight ahead. But the jutting, outflung arms of a cactus barred his way. They could be seen past, but not walked through. Dan moved to the side, intending to circumvent them, only to find that they reached out to, and linked with, the limbs of another cactus, like interwoven fingers. There was no passage through.

  Dan stood still, and felt a bead of sweat trickle down the back of his neck and trace the runnel of his spine all the way down to the cleft of his buttocks. He looked around. There was a gap between the second cactus and its neighbour. It would be easy to get round it, and from there, back on track. Remember the through-route. It’s your life-line.

  He squeezed round it, but there was no clear passage here either; the cacti were packed flush together. He would have to try and stay as closely parallel to the route as possible. There was another gap, between the cacti in front of him; he squeezed through. But here, too, there was no easy way straight ahead. Again, he had to look for a gap. The cacti reared up, high above him; fluted trunks pressed tight together, screening out sight. Imagine spinning round three times with your eyes closed, like in blindman’s buff, he thought. Could you tell which way was which? Where the clear path through the heart of The Crows might be?

  There was a smell, an unpleasant one that made him gag. It was a little like spoiled meat, but far, far worse, with a sickly sweetness thrown in. He turned and found himself regarding the corpse of a bird.

  Dan stepped back; there was something about dead birds he’d always found unpleasant. Just the sight of them unsettled him.

  A few grey and white feathers still clung to the remains, along with the fragments of its skin, and the beak was yellow with a red tip. A gull, at a guess. Well, it would hardly be a crow. No dead crows in The Crows. No dead crows in The Crows. The phrase rode around his head like a mantra. No dead crows in The Crows.

  He turned away, to press on, and there was a tugging at his upper right arm, and then a sudden slicing burst of brilliant, glassy white pain, and he felt the hot trickle of blood, running down his hand. He cried out; a moment later, borne in from the distance, he heard the chuckling laughter of the crowd on the hump of the road. He was sure he could distinctly hear the barman’s voice among them. Terror and anger whirled through his head like dogs chasing their own tails. Turning, he saw a patch of red gleam on the spiky skin of a cactus behind him, then realised he was backing towards another one and spun away from it. The spines were wickedly sharp and could lay hold on flesh as efficiently as any predator. He turned this way and that, shrank away from the dead bird. . . .

  Which way? Panic leapt suddenly, like an animal trying to clear the walls of its cage. Which side of him had the bird been on when he’d come here? There were about three gaps in the wall of green before him, and no way of seeing through. Pure pot luck.

  Which one? Which one, Dan? Eeny, meeny, miney . . .

  That one. In the centre.

  He slipped through the gap.

  From there it went from bad to worse. Each turning he took led him into more green stockades, a choice of more exits, and whichever he chose seemed wrong. He was tempted to try scaling a cactus to see what lay around, but every time he came close he saw anew the length and sharpness of the spines and retreated.

  The right way? The wrong way? It was impossible to tell. The panic clawed at him again. All he could see was the cacti, or if he looked up, the disk of visible blue sky and the boiling-hot coin of the sun.

  Dan realised at this point that he could die here. He could really, genuinely, literally die in this place, trapped and bleeding and frightened.

  Calm. He had to stay calm. Panic would kill him, here in The Crows, most surely of all. Oh, for a compass. For an axe or machete. For anything to add to what he had.

  Wings clattered; he looked up and one of the crows landed on a cactus limb inches above his upturned face, beak presented like a dagger raised at his eye. Dan cried out and recoiled, and fresh pain caught him as spines pierced him once more. He tore himself free and cried out again. More laughter drifted in from the road. Pure anger exploded in him like phosphorous; rage-blind, he lashed out wildly, and pain slashed through his hand up his arm. He bit down on the shout—don’t give the bastards the satisfaction—and stumbled away, still bleeding from his back, his arm, his hand. He lurched away from jutting limbs, staggered through gaps . . . where was he now?

  A dead end, it seemed. The cacti clustered together in front of him; between them some sort of matted, flattened bundle was squashed and crushed. All right then, he thought. A dead end. Just turn around and backtrack. But when he turned, he found himself looking to and fro, trying to work out where the gap had been that had admitted him. None of them seemed wide enough. Perhaps they’d looked different from the other side. But if they were narrower at one end than at the other, could he get back out again? A child’s verse ran through his head: ‘How did the lobster get / into the lobster pot? / When he climbed in he had no doubt / that there was a way out. / There was not.’ No, if he could squeeze through it once he could again. He turned, this way and that, and found himself facing the matted thing between the cacti. It seemed made up of some sort of vegetable matter, a moss perhaps. But there was something the moss was wound up with. He leaned closer and saw it clearly, its hanging, emptily laughing jaw and gaping sightless eyes seeming to lunge forward, in the groggy, drunken, half-real haze of the summer heat, and that was when he recoiled screaming; not crying out, not shouting, but screaming as it hit him; not I could die here but others have died here, every dark idea I’ve entertained in the front or back of my head is true and now——

  Needles pierced his back, plunged like hungry teeth into the back of his hand and he screamed anew, couldn’t stop himself. He thrashed about, still vaguely aware, on some glassy level of calm beneath the terror that was now running his body, of the distant laughter of the villagers. ‘Inbred fuckers!’ he screamed, and the rage made him flail the harder. He felt the teeth of The Crows rip his flesh and bite all the deeper now; The Crows clung to his left arm by the hand, spines fixed in deep. Fresh spines bit him from all sides. He thought of the Venus Fly Trap, the sundew, closing or stickily curling around its prey. This, then, was the same thing, on a grander scale.

  He was gasping for breath. His heart thundered. He looked up and the sun blazed into his eyes. And then there was a clatter of wings and it was blotted out.

  The crow touched down, once again, on the jutting limb of a cactus. It was no more than six inches above him. Its eyes, black and beady and cold, met his and locked. He could see the thin black dagger of its beak, the thin line separating its two halves. Was it his imagination, or did it seem to smile?

  So easy for it to peck at his eyes now. Helpless. Were eyeballs a delicacy to crows? He was still now, fixed like a rabbit before a snake. The bird perched and stared down at him, its chest pulsing as it breathed.

  Fresh pain in his hand, but suddenly the grip was gone. He didn’t dare look away from the bird, in case that made it attack, but from the corner of his eye, he saw the slow swinging of a cactus-limb. It had anchored itself to him by its spines. His struggles had worked them in the deeper. But left alone, his body still, the spines had slowly eased free.

  His own struggles. Still. Calm. He’d blundered into the thorns and his own thrashings had wra
pped his death around him, The Crows using his own panic to kill him. And now the carrion bird only waited to feed, watching with its blank, cruel, grinning face, confident that he would die like the others, succumbing to the twin indulgences of panic and rage. Still now, he felt other parts of the grip on him relaxing slightly. And still the crow stared down.

  His left arm remained stuck out from his body, but was free. So easy. So easy.

  The bird hopped forward and raised its beak.

  Dan lunged and caught hold of it, pinning its wings to its sides. The bird squawked and thrashed in his grip, almost got free. It had more strength than he expected; it pecked at his hand and the beak sank in by almost half an inch. He almost let go; Christ alone knew what might have happened then. But he didn’t. He kept hold. And then squeezed. Squeezed till he felt things crack. It thrashed, beak gaping horribly wide, blood spurting out now, splashing sickeningly warm on his gored hand.

  Squeeze. A terrible crackling of an imploding cage of bone as its ribs collapsed, shredding heart and lungs. Blood and something else spurted from its mouth and lower body; its claws scrabbled at him, and then it was twitching horribly in his hand. The feel of it revolted him. His skin seemed to ripple like water at it, writhing as if trying to crawl off him.

  Despite his crepitating skin and rising gorge, he kept a grip on the mauled and bloody rag of feathers as he slowly, painfully worked himself free of the grip of the cacti. The last of them swung clear. The sun beat down. Sweat. He cried out again as it ran down into the wounds that seemed to cover almost every inch of him, the salt of it the most exquisite kiss of pain all over his body. He backed carefully away, to stand in the centre of the little clearing. Now. Which way? There was a gap. There. A few trunks to the left of the body, which he refused to look at. He started squeezing through, hand still gripped, claw-like, round the raggy thing he held, which twitched no more but only oozed and dripped, though that feeling was unpleasant enough. He didn’t let go. It was his talisman. Was that stupid? Even if it was, it did no harm to hang on. Just in case.

  They were still laughing. They thought The Crows had got him. If they only knew. If they only knew. Well—they would.

  Through the gap. There were a few cacti before him, but well spaced. Across from that row was another row, he could see it. And between the two was a gap of three or four feet. He stepped easily into it and looked to and fro. Down the corridor among the cacti there was a clear view all the way to the little stand of trees that stood beyond The Crows.

  Step by slow, careful step, Dan went down it and out. Into free air, open views. He remembered what he was holding; his skin seemed to clench, like a fist, and he flung the limp, broken thing away with a spasm of revulsion.

  Looking round he saw that the field beside The Crows was heavily overgrown, so much so that if you followed the path that ran around the back of it there was a good chance you wouldn’t be seen. You could follow it all the way round the back of the hump in the road.

  And come up right behind the bastards, he thought.

  Which was exactly what he did. The ones at the back were the first to hear his slow, gritting footsteps, and turned to see, then fell back, faces paling even beyond their normal whiteness. They parted like the Red Sea as he limped forward, until there was only the barman, standing there with folded arms, gazing out across The Crows, and below, right where he’d been before, Smithy. It was Smithy who saw Dan next, and then the barman, finally sensing something wrong, turned and stared at him. His eyes widened and his mouth gaped without sound and he stumbled backwards with a faint moan.

  And Dan lashed out with his uncut hand, and the feel of the barman’s nose breaking was a satisfying one indeed.

  He looked savagely round at the villagers, and then down at the barman, who had started to whimper. ‘Right,’ he said harshly. ‘You owe me some money.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ Dan asked Smithy that evening, as he climbed stiffly into the driver’s seat. His wounds were dressed and his car repaired and he would never be so glad to see the back of any place as this, whatever The Crows might or might not be. ‘I don’t understand that. The land’s shit, because of that thing. Why stay?’

  Smithy shrugged. ‘In the end, you just get used to it. Sometimes . . .’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to stay with what you have. However shit it is. Sooner or later, someone always comes along you can take it out on.’

  There was a moment of silence. There seemed nothing more to say, but still Dan didn’t reach out to turn the ignition key. He didn’t know why. Then Smithy spoke again.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I started into The Crows and couldn’t get three steps. That was nigh on ten years ago, when my car conked out here. Just like yours did.’ He leaned forward and gripped the frame of the rolled-down window urgently. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Go now.’

  Dan needed no second bidding. He revved the engine and drove out through the village. Behind him, Smithy stared after him, forlornly, yearningly, till the car went over the hump in the road and he was lost to sight.

  Dan didn’t really want to look at The Crows, but he did. A big black bird perched on the hunched, nodding cactus at the entrance; alone now, he thought, only one.

  Something flitted over the roof of the car and alighted on the neighbouring cactus. Dan only tore his eyes away from them in the nick of time, before the VW could go into a ditch.

  He sat there for long seconds, heart hammering, then reversed slowly back from the brink. The car back on the road, he drove on, but kept glancing into the rear-view mirror, eyes drawn there against his will as the pair of crows, perched atop the green cacti, receded, looking like the baleful, beady black eyes of something forced to watch that which it deeply covets lost to it forever.

  Malachi

  ‘I WON’T BE FIVE MINUTES.’

  She was worried; no, she was frightened. Who could blame her?

  ‘Mark . . .’

  ‘It’ll be all right. I have to go out.’ He reached out and touched the swell of her belly. ‘Try to stay calm.’

  ‘I know, I know. There’s three of us now.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He went to the door of the narrow, squalid little flat. The walls were patchy with damp; a roach scuttled across the carpet, and from the kitchen came the trickle of the tap that wouldn’t, despite their best efforts, shut off. ‘Don’t open the door for anyone.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘Except me.’

  She lowered herself onto the threadbare sofa, bone-weary. ‘You going to look in on Mr Rosen?’

  ‘May as well.’

  ‘What’s he going to do?’ She shook her head. Pregnant, the world going to hell in a handbasket all around her, living in a small corner of the hot place itself, and afraid—afraid for herself, afraid for her husband, for their unborn child, afraid for, and of, almost everything—but she could still care for the old man. Such moments reminded him of why he loved her. Of late, with all the pressure, fear, and angry helplessness of being trapped where they were, he’d needed every one of them. But, with luck, not any more. After tonight, they could breathe easier, at least for a while. For however long it took the killing tide to well over the Dover Cliffs and into the Channel, and spread out to lap onto another, freer shore.

  He crossed the room again to kiss her, stroking her long, crinkly hair, relishing the feel of it. How long since he’d been relaxed enough to enjoy so simple a caress? ‘I don’t know, Susie. I offered to try and get him out too, but he wouldn’t. Said he’d run one time too many.’

  ‘He’s got one of those tattoos on his arm, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve seen it.’

  Susan took a deep breath and tried to keep herself composed, but her shoulders hitched. ‘People don’t seem to learn anything, do they?’

  ‘Sh.’ He stroked her face. He’d always been pale; the contrast of his skin against hers was so stark, like cream and chocolate. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he whispered.<
br />
  She snorted a laugh. ‘Yeah, with my swollen ankles and bags under my eyes and——’

  ‘You are.’ He kissed her eyelids gently. ‘You’re so beautiful.’

  ‘You’re so biased.’

  He laughed and kissed her lips. How could anybody hate her? But there were those who did—not for who she was, but what—and him too for bedding her, and the knowledge of their existence made his thoughts redden with a hatred all his own.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘You too, Mark. Please, be careful.’

  ‘I will. You know I will.’

  Then he quickly got up and went out.

  Mr Rosen’s flat was on the floor below. Mark knocked gently on the door and listened to the shuffle of approaching footsteps. A beat of silence. The click and rattle of locks and chains. And the door opened.

  ‘Hello, Mark. Do come in.’ The English was impeccable, but the German accent lingered still.

  ‘Hi, Mr Rosen. Look, I can’t stop long. I have to go out and see Spider.’

  ‘Spider . . .? Oh, yes. Him.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you . . .’

  ‘No. Thank you, Mark, but I’ll stay here. I’m too old to run anymore. But when they come for me, they won’t take me alive. You can be sure of that.’

  It was unnerving to hear him talk like that. Frightening. But Mark knew that the things he talked of would come to pass. That was why he was going.

  ‘You’ve been a good friend to me, Mark. You and Susan both. I wish you luck.’

  Mark looked at him. A sagging, wrinkled prune of a face, thinning white hair, the last wisps of a beard clinging to his wattled chin, or maybe he just couldn’t be bothered to shave anymore and this was all that would grow.

  There wasn’t much in the flat. It was barer even than Mark and Susan’s own. There were no pictures, no books. Only, on the mantelpiece above a gas fire that didn’t work (who cared about the people who lived on the Blackheath Estate?), a small clock, its tick tock relentless and slow as though measuring out each of the old man’s dwindling seconds of life, and a menorah. Odd, as Mr Rosen wasn’t even a practising Jew. A British citizen since the ’forties, he was an atheist. But faith they didn’t care about. Only blood.