Black Feathers Read online

  Mr Keeper is silent for a time. Perhaps Mr Keeper will stand up now, heave his pack onto his shoulders and leave, having satisfied himself that Megan had nothing important to tell him. That Megan – “little thing” – isn’t ready to grow up yet. That was what this is about, isn’t it? Her growing up? Her not acting like a little girl any more?

  When he speaks, he is kindly.

  “You’d every reason to be afraid. You can’t see such a thing and not be. But fear is only a sign of something else, a marker on a path. You mustn’t let it rule you. You mustn’t let it push you off course. Finish your story. Take your time.”

  Megan meets Mr Keeper’s gaze and holds it for the first time since he entered her family’s cottage.

  “It wasn’t the face of a man. I don’t know what it was. I saw so much in his expression that his features weren’t clear. He was full of sadness and rage and knowledge. He was kind and compassionate and mysterious. But how could he be a man? One moment his face was human, the next it was animal – a bird face, with a beak and sleek feathers and all. And his coat extended behind him as though it was his tail feathers and he stooped forwards a little and took a few steps towards me and he looked for all the world like…”

  She weeps the words into her hands. She knows what she’s said but she hopes Mr Keeper hasn’t heard her. He hasn’t.

  “Be clear, little thing. What face did he show you?”

  Megan sits up straight and takes a deep breath. She doesn’t hide her tears from Mr Keeper any more.

  “He was a crow. A huge black crow, and somehow he’d made me think he was a man. He tricked me, didn’t he, Mr Keeper? The devil’s come to our village and he’s tempted me into the woods. It’s Black Jack out there, isn’t it? Come to take my soul? Come to take me away from everything I’ve ever loved. Why? Why me? I swear I’ve never done anything wrong, Mr Keeper, I swear it to you. You know I keep my word and I tell you it’s true.”

  Megan is babbling. She stands up from her chair in utter dismay and looks around, but she knows there’s no place you can hide from the devil. When he comes calling, it’s your time and that’s the end of it.

  Mr Keeper is smiling. If she didn’t know better she’d say it was scorn he wore there, hanging between those hateful wrinkles.

  “Black Jack comes for my soul and you think it’s funny,” she shouts, and then she’s weeping again. “Great Spirit, what am I going to do?”

  “What you saw today was the Crowman. Black Jack, the Scarecrow – they’re his guises too, little thing, but he showed you his black feathers. He’s come to give you a message. I think it’s time we went and found your parents. But don’t you fret. This has been a good day. Not just for you but for the whole village. It’s not often we get a visit from the Crowman.”

  Mr Keeper stands up.

  “Come on, little thing. We must find your apa and amu and tell them the news. There’s much to do.”

  5

  Sunday began, as cloudless and warm as the day before. When Jude and Angela had helped to clear away the remains of breakfast – a quiet affair in the aftermath of their father’s rage – Sophie took Gordon outside again. She placed him as she usually did near the centre of the terrace and she sat down next to him in a straight-backed chair to do some sewing. She checked the treetop before she did any of this and even scanned the other trees in the garden for signs of birds. There were none. In the place where the crow had fallen, there was no sign it had ever been there. She assumed a fox had snatched the body in the night.

  After a couple of minutes mending a tear in Louis’s gardening trousers, she glanced up. There in the horse chestnut tree, perched on the same branch as the previous afternoon, was another huge crow. If she hadn’t known the first crow was dead, she would have sworn it was the same one; and Louis would have reminded her, had she said as much to him, that she wouldn’t be able to tell one crow from another even with binoculars. The appearance of the bird disquieted her. One hand had flown to her chest in alarm, the other was already gripping Gordon’s basket. The crow was a threat to her child. Since Louis’s response the previous day, it was also a threat to the harmony of her family. Louis had always been a protective father – over-protective at times – but his rage in response to the crow had terrified them all.

  She remembered in the instant she saw it that she had dreamed of a crow in the night, its black claws gripping the side of Gordon’s carry cot as it peered inside. From her angle in the dream, she couldn’t see Gordon but she knew he was in there and her fear was that the crow would peck out her defenceless son’s eyes. She reached for the cot, which had become a basket of woven willow sticks, and as she did, the crow began to flap, its wingspan suddenly vast. She felt the downdraught from its wings as it lifted off, still gripping the basket in its claws. The basket rose up beneath the bird as it gained height and she awoke to find herself alone in the bed. From down the hall she could hear Louis’s faint snores from the study. Gordon slept softly in his basket beside the bed but Sophie had pulled his cotton blanket up around his chin. Weeping, she’d clutched a pillow to herself until she fell back to sleep.

  Seeing the crow now and remembering the dream, she felt her pulse quicken. She dropped the torn trousers to the ground, the needle still embedded in the fabric, a stitch half finished, snatched the carry cot and ran back into the house.

  “Louis?” There was no answer. “Louis!”

  “What?”

  The reply was muffled and she knew where he’d be. Still clutching Gordon, whose nap had turned into a fairground ride, she trotted to the downstairs toilet and flung open the door. Louis looked up from the Sunday papers, surprise turning to annoyance.

  “What the bloody hell is it? Can’t I even have a crap in peace?”

  “There’s a bird in the tree again. A crow or rook like yesterday. I want you to get rid of it, Louis. I don’t want them around here.”

  “All right.” Louis glanced back at the article he was reading. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “No, Louis. I want it gone. Right now.”

  Louis sighed, knowing his precious moment of solitude had come to an end.

  “Can you pull the door to, please? I just need a moment.”

  Sophie went to their bedroom, closed the door and held Gordon’s head in her hands to deafen him. Angela was watching television and Judith was playing in her room when they heard their father fire his shotgun for the second day in a row. They ran to the windows, too late to see anything.

  Louis was the only witness. Anyone watching would have told him he was a useless shot, but Louis knew his skill. He’d been brought up with shotguns. He didn’t miss. And yet, he couldn’t explain what happened.

  He’d stepped out of the back door carefully, not wanting to startle the crow. As it had been the day before, the crow seemed unconcerned by his presence. Louis, on seeing the corvid, was struck by the similarity it bore to the crow of the previous day. He had to force the thought from his mind, telling himself all crows looked the same. He had to tell himself because part of him knew it wasn’t true; someone used to seeing crows and living around them would be able to tell them apart. When he raised the gun and sighted it on the crow, it half opened its wings and shifted position on the branch. As he aimed the bird let out a long, scornful cry.

  “Krrraaaaa…”

  Louis pulled the first trigger. The bird flapped, letting go of the branch. It fell backwards before gaining the air, turning and flying away over the trees in their garden towards the open fields. Certain he’d wounded it, Louis waited for a moment, expecting the crow to fall out of the sky. It didn’t. It beat its wings with great might, unharmed.

  He took a bead on it, aimed a little ahead and squeezed the second trigger. The crow was well within range and flying at an angle that had always suited Louis. The shot flew and nothing happened. Nothing except the crow shrinking smaller against the horizon and calling back an occasional caw of derision. Louis looked along the barrels, honest
ly wondering if he’d somehow bent them. They were straight and true, still hot from discharging. The satisfying, adrenaline-stimulating smell of burnt powder held no reward that day.

  As he walked back past the bedroom, Sophie opened the door. Her face still pinched and concerned.

  “Thanks, Louis.”

  “It’s OK. No problem. How is he?”

  “I covered his ears but he must have heard the shot. He’s just started to cry again.”

  Louis listened to the noise: such a soulful, drawn-out squall that it brought him down to hear to it.

  “Do you think he’s OK?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I think he’s just scared by the noise. It’s understandable.”

  “Should we take him to the doctor, do you think? I’ve never heard him sound this way.”

  “He was like this yesterday. You know… afterwards. But he was fine this morning.”

  “All right. If you think he’s sick, though–”

  “Louis.”

  “What?”

  “He’s fine. Relax.”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  He gave her a kiss on the cheek and took the gun back to the study.

  That morning, the wind picked up and clouds burgeoned from nowhere. In one instant the sun was bright, illuminating every room with pure glare. In the next it would hesitate and fade. There would be a flicker of brilliant return followed by a deep gloom making the rooms dusk-dark in less than a second. Within an hour or so, the sun lost the battle with the weather. The house swelled with midday shadows and darkness and the Black family shivered and ran for extra layers. Soon the wind flung rain and hail against the windows and the roof, turning the house into a prison, and Sunday, usually a day that passed far too quickly, became long and tedious.

  Outside on the terrace, Louis’s ripped trousers lay crumpled and squashed to sodden blackness. Every crack in the fabric of the house became a mouth for the wind and it spoke to them all saying but one word over and over with every whine and moan:

  Winter.

  6

  Down at the river the October sun lets the water break its smile into a million pieces of gold, each so brilliant they leave a mote of light inside the eye, each one unique and momentary.

  Megan allows the motion of the water and the fragmenting of the sun to lull her. They’re all sitting on the grassy bank and Mr Keeper is smoking his pipe again. She’s only half listening to the adults talking about her. Some part of her is waiting for them to understand before she gives them her attention.

  “You’re certain she’s all right?” asks her mother.

  “She’s taken a fright is all,” says Mr Keeper. “And you should understand also that what frightened her meant her no harm.”

  “We can forget it, then,” says her father.

  Mr Keeper shakes his head mid-suck on his pipe, inhales deeply and then blows smoke.

  “There’s no forgetting such a thing, Mr Maurice. This incident is the start of something, not its conclusion.”

  Mrs Maurice is confused.

  “What does that mean?”

  Megan can hear the tension in her mother’s voice. Poor Amu. She’s more frightened than I was.

  Mr Keeper smiles and puffs on his pipe but it has burnt out. He palms the ash and deposits it in his pocket.

  “I need you both to listen very carefully to what I’m going to say, and you need to let me finish before you ask any more questions. Do I have your accord?”

  Her parents are already silent. They only nod in reply.

  “Very good then.”

  He refills the pipe’s bowl with deliberation before lighting it with a match. Only when it is well lit does he begin to speak and now, instinctively, Megan turns away from the river, its sparkles still glowing inside her eyes, and listens.

  “I’m an old man. Older than you think. But I wasn’t even thought of on the eve of the Bright Day. The first of the Keepers was there, though, and he showed those who followed him the way of remembering those times forever. We call it the eve of the Bright Day, but really those times went on for many years. Everyone thought the world would end and that people would be wiped out. It was a bad thing to dwell on. Belief can make things happen, you know. Perhaps that’s why we came so close to making it true.”

  Smoke obscures Mr Keeper’s face for a moment. He waves it away.

  “Ha! Listen to me, rambling already. Never let an old man tell a story unless you’ve got all day, remember that.

  “The point is, even though I wasn’t there, I saw it all. Every Keeper returns to those times. There’s a way back through the Weave but it only opens for a few. I wasn’t born until generations later but I was there in the time of the Crowman and the Black Dawn. By moving between the strands of the Weave and retrieving the events of those times, I proved myself a Keeper. The Crowman said he’d live on in all of us, that he’d keep the land strong if we kept his story alive. And we do still tell Crowman tales at festival time, don’t we? And we tell his stories at the fireside when winter comes.

  “Children are still frightened of the Crowman and I think the grown-ups are too. If he knocked on your door after dark, you’d take a fright, wouldn’t you? Anyone would. But that’s not because the Crowman is bad, it’s because he’s powerful. All good and all evil exist within him. He was powerful before the Black Dawn and the mightiest of people were frightened of him even then. Scarecrow, they called him. Or Black Jack. They made him out to be a monster.”

  Megan sees a wild fire in Mr Keeper’s eyes. She glances at her parents but they don’t notice it. The old man points his pipe at his audience, then at his chest.

  “He was just like you and me. A person. With a good heart. Good as ripe corn and pale ale. But he carried a burden – the burden of power. And that darkened him over the years. The more power you have, the more dangerous you become. Takes a strong back and a strong will to carry it. He had both, though I think sometimes he doubted it.

  “He charged the Keepers with keeping his story alive, even though he’s long gone. Before my own time comes I must find a new Keeper, a child with a strong back and courage enough to carry the story. They don’t come along very often, I can tell you, but when one does the Crowman will show himself to them, he’ll mark them out. That child must rediscover the story of the Crowman and keep it alive until they find the next Keeper. And that Keeper in their turn, the next. And so on. That way, the Crowman will always be with us.”

  Mr Keeper glances up as a cloud dulls the sparkles in the river. When it passes, he continues.

  “You don’t want to go back to a world without the Crowman. That really would be the end of everything.

  “There’s a little bit of him in all of us, you know. But he’s stronger in some than in others. It’s my belief that the Crowman came to Megan in Covey Wood today. This is nothing short of a miracle, because I was beginning to think a new Keeper for these parts would never come along.”

  “Are you saying that our M–”

  Mr Keeper’s glance at Megan’s father is enough to silence him.

  “She’s been chosen. All I can do is find out if she’s worthy. That will take time and it will mean no more schooling for her other than what she learns from me. I won’t be able to feed or house her – you’ll continue to do all of that. But she must spend six out of every seven days with me from before dawn until after sunset. If she’s worthy, one day she will return to you, not as Megan any more but as Keeper. And if she fails then you’ll have Megan back – as she always was but full of knowledge.”

  Mr Keeper didn’t give them time to speak.

  “You must talk it through. It’s not a decision to take lightly, believe me. Megan needs to understand how difficult the role of Keeper’s Prentice will be. The Crowman’s story makes adults of children and she may not be ready. However, if she does complete the training, her contribution, not only to Beckby village but to everyone hereabouts, will be immeasurable. She will be a bringer of real joy and the land i
n these parts will love us all the more deeply.”

  Megan is sitting up straight, eyes wide, and something in her very blood is telling her that this is what she wants more than anything else in the world. There’s something magical about Mr Keeper but she’s not sure her parents can even see it. Yes, she is still frightened by the Crowman – terrified, if the truth be known. But the boy from the night country isn’t terrifying. He is gentle. Just remembering him awakens a dormant recess in her, locked tight until now. Deep within herself, stronger than any desire she’s ever known, the urge to follow the boy arises with crystal surety. This is her chance to find out who Megan Maurice really is.

  “I want to do it,” she says.

  Her mother, as though slapped, is speechless. Her father’s face reddens.

  “Now wait a moment, young Megan, it’s not your place to be deciding such things. You shall do as you are tol–”

  Mr Keeper holds up his hand.

  “In the end, Mr Maurice, the decision is entirely Megan’s, and not yours or your wife’s to make. You certainly cannot refuse her the right to proceed, should she be certain that is what she wishes to do. However, as I said, I think you should all discuss it very carefully before a… consensus… is reached. I will call on you in seven days’ time, at which point I shall want an answer. If Megan is to undertake the training, she will come to me the following morning before dawn and we will begin. If she is not, then I shall trouble you no more about it. Please understand that there will be no second opportunities in either case. A yes is a yes. A no is a no.”

  Mr Keeper scans each face. Megan knows he can see the smile inside her eyes even though, for the sake of her parents, she keeps her face blank. He stands, collects his ash again and shoulders his pack. By now the sun is casting shimmering shadows of willow trees onto the bank and afternoon is giving way to evening.

  Before he sets off, Mr Keeper says:

  “Do you all understand?”