"Crow Girls part 1" by Laura Peregrin

Crow Girls (rough draft)

Chapter One

            The bus doors clanked open, disgorging a crowd of jostling school children, all eager for the day’s final release. Behind them, at a more sensible distance and without pushing, the last boy stepped onto the tarmac.

            Henry was as eager as any of the others to be away from school and all things related to it. He was careful to hide it, though, and slouched along at a pace just slow enough to keep him from catching up with the main crowd and getting swept along with it.

Soon the crowd began to splinter and fragment, stringing out into little knots of three or four. The raucous voices of the twins, Katie and Cora, travelled back across the spring air, cutting effortlessly through the rest of the background chatter. Henry privately believed that even if he were sitting at the top of one of the village’s surrounding ring of mountains, he would still be able to hear them. Teachers and classmates alike had despaired of silencing the girls’ incessant chatter and bickering. At present, they appeared to be squabbling over something plastic and glittery.

The twins were in the year above Henry. Henry almost idolised the year above. The year above would take exams at the end of term. The year above could leave school at the end of term. Whereas Henry had a whole year, plus this term, of work and revision and careers interviews and breaktimes to go.

Of all the year above, Henry was most in awe of the twins. He emphatically denied, to himself most of all, that he might fancy them. Henry was determined that he would never fancy any girls. He didn’t see the point. However, the twins were so outgoing, so popular. They just didn’t care what the teachers or anyone else said about them. And unlike the other popular girls, they never bothered to pick on Henry, to remind him that he was shy and southern and a nerd.

“What ho, Henry old chap!” A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. Sniggering erupted all around him. Henry groaned inwardly. He had been so caught up in his own thoughts that he hadn’t noticed that one of the larger crowds of some of the larger boys had slowed their pace till it matched his, and now surrounded him. Thick fingers reached for his glasses, tried to ruffle his thick blond hair. Soon they’d be pulling and picking at his clothes and bag, if nothing worse. He lashed out. His foot swished through empty air.

“Now, now, old boy – that’s hardly sporting.” Further sniggering ensued in response to this sparkling wit, but Henry hardly noticed. He had seen a gap between two of the boys, and was preparing to run. Like a panicked pheasant, he took off, elbows whirring, ploughing through the gap and then pelting down the road to freedom, oblivious to the taunts and laughter that followed in his wake.

Nothing else followed, and soon he slipped down the gravelled lane to home …

Homework done, Henry lounged on his bed, staring idly at the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars and spacemen blu-tacked to the sloping ceiling. Sunlight flooded the little room, making the monitor screen unreadable. The walls seemed unusually close, the air stifling.

“I’m going out for a walk,” he announced to his mother a few minutes later. She raised an eyebrow.

“Well, OK, then but don’t get lost and make sure you’re back for tea. And don’t bring anything back …” Assuming that she was referring to his primary-school frogspawn collection, or the abortive attempt at a wormery last year, he made a token protest, grabbed his coat and set out.

He really had no idea where he was going. He could go round the lake – too many tourists – he could go up to the tarn – no chance of being back for tea – he could go to the frogspawn pond – if he could remember where it was – or he could continue as he was, just following the little dirt paths through the wood behind the house, seeing where they went. They reminded him of the river diagrams in Geography, with lots of little tributary paths joining larger ones that eventually all joined the wide signposted path that carried the tourists along to its car-park estuary. He wondered if he could find the source of the path, somewhere deep in the high hills above the wood …

A familiar chattering disturbed him. He looked up and ahead, but there were only a couple of magpies squawking to each other in the trees. They flew off in a flurry of black and white and noise as he approached. He vaguely remembered something about saluting magpies, and two of them being lucky or something. Or was it one that was lucky? He noticed a single glimmer of bluish-black iridescence on the path in front of him. One of them had dropped a feather. Henry picked it up, examining the intricate structure of it, holding it up to the leaf-filtered sunlight to catch all its colours. This had to be a lucky thing. And it didn’t wriggle or anything, so his mum surely couldn’t object to him collecting it.

The next morning, as he packed his already overstuffed school-bag, Henry noticed the feather lying on the bedside table where he’d left it last night. The sun glinted off it, and in a moment of impulse he knew he’d probably regret, he picked it up and slipped it carefully between the pages of a textbook…

At lunchtime, as he sat by himself at his preferred corner table, picking through the alleged macaroni cheese on his plate, the thought of the feather occurred to him again. He’d better check that it was OK. Pushing the plate aside, he rummaged through his bag till he found the right book. It fell open automatically as he put it down on the graffiti-scabbed formica, revealing the feather. It looked incongruous against the cheap paper and the lifeless subject of the book.

A shadow fell across the table. Henry snapped the book shut, though already sure it was too late. The boys would have seen it, and have something sneering to say on the matter. He looked up. Katie and Cora leaned on the edge of the table. This sight threw Henry into a completely different pit of fear. He sputtered something incoherent and blushed bright red.

The twins giggled. “You match your jumper!”

“Shhh!” Katie nudged Cora. “You’ve got a feather,” she continued in an accusing tone. Henry nodded, deciding it was safer not to try and actually say anything.

“Where’d you get a feather?”

This was going to require words. Henry gulped. “I. I. I found it.” The twins stared at him. Somehow, their rare silence was even scarier than their usual noisiness. More seemed to be required. “In the woods, last night,” he offered. He’d never noticed before how dark and yet bright at the same time the girls’ eyes were, or how deep, or how piercing. Like birds’ eyes, he found himself thinking …

“We want it. Give it to us,” one twin demanded.

“No!” said Henry, before he had time to think. “It’s my feather,” he continued apologetically. “The magpie gave it to me.” He had no idea where that thought had come from, but it seemed right, and he said it with more determination. He clutched the feather’s stem tightly.

“No, I d – !” Cora kicked her sister on the shin. Both girls whirled round and strode away, their heels clacking on the lino-covered floor of the dining hall.

Under the cover of taking his food tray back up to the hatch, Henry got up to follow them. The conversation clearly wasn’t over, and he was intrigued.

“Are you sure it’s …?”

“Yeah.”

“How do we make him give it back?”

“Silly! We can’t make him, that’s the point.”

“You’re the silly! You lost it in the first place …What are you looking at?”

Henry blushed violently again, almost dropped his tray onto the counter, and scurried off.

All afternoon, Henry wondered why the twins wanted a scraggy old feather so badly. By the final bell, he had come to a resolution. He would go back to the woods tonight and find a feather for twins, one for each of them. Finding feathers couldn’t be difficult, but girls like the twins who liked glitter and make-up wouldn’t want to go roaming around in the dirt of the woods looking for them, obviously, so they’d be pleased when he brought some as a gift.

Still busy with these, and related, thoughts, Henry hardly noticed when a white-coated man dropped into step with him as he walked away from the bus.

“Excuse me,” the man said politely. Henry stopped, and turned to face him, nearly dropping his bag in surprise. The man was tall, and dressed all in white – white trousers and shirt, long white coat that made him look a bit like scientists looked on TV, white boots – even his hair was white, though he did not look or move like an old man. Nobody else appeared to be paying any attention to him.

“That’s a pretty feather you have there. May I see it?” The man spoke softly, almost dully, and without any hint of a threat. There was something about him that Henry instinctively disliked, however. The man looked so clean. It was hard to focus on him. Besides, Henry had been brought up to Say No To Strangers, and this man definitely counted as a stranger.

“Um, it’s my feather. Look.” He flashed the feather in front of the man’s face, and then ran for it, pushing his way past the people in front.

“What’s the matter now, Henry?” called one of the boys. The others milled around in confusion, trying to see who it was who had caused poncy Henry Smythe-Wooton to lose it this time. Only the twins looked in silence, colour draining from their already-pale faces. Henry ducked through his garden gate, oblivious to what was happening behind it.

Chapter Two

            Henry sprawled awkwardly across his bed. He couldn’t sleep. It was too hot underneath the anti-allergy duvet, but too cold as soon as he pushed it away. He’d read a book for a while, but found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the story. The central character, a sentient robot, seemed increasingly stupid and implausible as the thick night wore on. He took another drink, hardly tasting the tepid water.

The darkness and the heat seemed to press in on him like another duvet. He swung his legs out of bed, padded across the carpet with the vague intention of getting a fresh drink or going to the bathroom. Anything that would allow him to move about, to force the air around him into brief motion.

As he reached for his glass, his hand brushed against something light – his feather. Flopping down on the bed again, he held it up above him and contemplated it. It was still his only feather. Despite his good intentions, he did not yet have any more feathers to give to the twins when he next saw them. He had begun a walk that evening, once again making for the woods behind the house. Whether it was the oppressive weather, or his meeting with the disturbingly white man, he did not know but something had felt wrong, unwelcoming, in the woods and he’d quickly returned home to spend the evening doing homework that wasn’t due till next week. 

The feather twirled round between his fingers …

He could feel the warm air not just pressing in above him, but all around him. It was no longer oppressive. In fact, it felt buoyant and he could almost believe he was floating in it, like he wished he could float in the chilly, chemical water of the school swimming pool. His arms were outstretched, and the air tickled his feathers as he drifted. He moved his arms. He was floating! He could even control his direction. He moved his arms again, several times. He moved faster – flying! He had often dreamt he could fly – piloting a streamlined space-craft, or just moving through the air without effort or wings. He flapped his arms – wings! – again and again, enjoying the easy rhythm of it, the way he moved through the air, so different from his laboured and ungainly progress up and down the school pool.

He became aware that he was not flying alone. At first, he felt a flare of anger at the intruder, before noticing the flash of white and iridescence from its feathers. He shouted a salute to the magpie, but the words came out as a harsh “caw!”, quickly returned. The other magpie shot off, cawing frantically. Not knowing what else to do, he turned to follow it.

A searing cold touched his tail feathers, and the air about him seemed to freeze. Panic saturated his mind. He couldn’t fly, he couldn’t move at all. The other magpie had disappeared. He was dimly aware of another bird approaching, moving with incongruous grace through the solidifying air. A pale bird …

He was lying wrapped and tangled in his own duvet. A draft from the open window was chilling the sweat that soaked him. The luminous numbers on his alarm clock glared 3.17am. He reached for the robot book.

Henry sprawled across the desk. The heat saturated the classroom. The voice of the maths teacher droned on. Even the clock on the wall seemed to have succumbed to the soporific effect, and could barely move its plastic hands. Henry became aware of a noise, an urgent, frantic sound, out of place in the drowsy classroom. It seemed to be coming from behind one of the plate glass windows, as if something were trying to break its way in. He thought he could make out a whirr of angry white through the slats of the blind. Memories from the previous night began to seep back into his consciousness.

“The blackboard is at the front of the classroom, Henry,” snapped the teacher. The other boys awoke briefly from their slumbers but their sniggering was half-hearted. Henry tried to focus on the diagrams on the board. The lines of the triangles swam before his eyes, seeming to form beaks or claws, bare and sharp. The tapping sound at the window inscreased its urgency, until it seemed as if it was tapping directly into Henry’s mind. He raised his hand.

“What is it Henry?”

“Please, sir, there’s something at the window, sir.” His voice came out thin and frightened. The teacher looked at him blankly. “Can’t you hear it, sir?”

The teacher sighed and muttered something, turned and yanked on the blind-cord. Whiteness exploded in Henry’s eyes…

Henry came to on the cold linoleum floor of the classroom. He was lying in an inexpert recovery position, and his teacher’s face filled his immediate field of view. He sat up. The rest of the class was clustered expectantly round him, whispering and giggling, but he hardly noticed them. He stared at the window. The blinds were still up, and the glass shone unbearably in the sun, whole and empty of anything except its usual view of some wilted trees and the back of the science block. Grabbing the table next to him, he pulled himself to his feet, pushed his way through the throng of delighted observers, and ran to the window. Hesitantly he touched the hot, smooth surface.

“How?” he whispered. “It came thro…”

 “Heatstroke can often produce hallucinations,” the teacher announced. “Alan, take Henry to the sick room. The rest of you, get back in your seats and get on with problem 14c.”

Henry slumped, and reluctantly followed the other boy out of the classroom, the prospect of the Nurse pushing all other worries from his thoughts.

By hometime, everyone in the school had heard of Henry’s latest spectacular performance. It seemed futile to deny it, so he sat hunched uncomfortably in silence at the front of the bus until he could leap from it and race away home. His parents knew too. The school Nurse had phoned them both at work, and of course they were concerned. Thermometers and an array of pills were lying in wait on the kitchen table. He made his escape as soon as he could, and wandered up towards the woods. It was a while before he realised that he was following the same path he had taken two nights previously, and had in fact nearly reached the spot where he had encountered the magpies. He scuffed his feet about aimlessly in the leaf litter, wondering why he had come here again. He flopped to ground, and began doodling a pattern in the soil with a fragment of stick. The forest noises washed over him, the rustlings and whisperings calming him. He had nearly finished his doodle, which looked a bit like the supposed chaos patterns his computer’s screensaver threw out, when he became aware that the forest noises had ceased. A dead silence was clamped over the trees. It seemed to tighten round his lungs and throat, and he staggered upright, fighting a rising desire to flee back home.

Squawking shattered the silence. Henry recognised at least one of the cawing voices. He ran towards the noise. There were at least two birds, and they sounded angry and frightened. As he stumbled closer, fighting his way through brambles and undergrowth, he made out a third voice, bird like but higher and clearer, like a girl’s voice. The brambles gave way, and he almost fell into a small clearing. A white bird flew over his head, so low and fast that he felt its claws raking through his hair, and he whirled round to follow its flight. It shrieked as it flew, and the hate and anger in its voice chilled Henry more effectively than the cruellest taunts of the school bullies could.

“What are you doing here?” a girl’s voice demanded. It was a familiar girl’s voice, though Henry had never heard it sound so high and fragile before. He turned to face it. One of the twins was kneeling in the leaf litter, holding a limp black and white form. Her fashionable clothes were torn and dirty, and red scratches stood out vividly against the skin of her exposed face and arms. If she were not one of the twins, one of the most popular and cool girls in the school, Henry would have thought that she had been crying.

“What’s happened?” he asked, knowing he probably wouldn’t get an answer, but determined to find out somehow, and help if he could. “Where’s Katie?”

“I’m Katie,” the girl snapped. “Don’t ask anything. Just go. Go away.”

“I … I can’t,” Henry stammed in bewilderment. “You’re hurt, and, and, Cora’s gone, and .. and, I could help! I did my first aid badge at Scouts, and I’ve got a first aid kit and I’m good at finding things, people …”  His voice wound down in the face of Katie’s expression.

“You found the feather.” It was a statement, an accusation.

“You can have the feather, if it matters so much!” Henry started rummaging in his pocket to find it. The tiredness and pain dropped from Katie’s face. The grin of hunger that replaced it seemed somehow worse. Henry stood still. “Why does it matter so much?” he asked slowly.

“It just does!” Katie wailed. Aware how childish this sounded, she continued sulkily, “it’s important.” She looked down at the broken lump of black and white feathers cradled in her arms. “It’s about … who we are … there must be two of us … ” she said softly, speaking to herself or the bird. She caught sight of Henry’s uncomprehending look. “Of, course, a boy like you would never understand,” she added in her more usual tones.

Henry fought down his affront at this, and said in a calm, nonchalant voice, “well, it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s gone.”