The Crows (Pagham-on-Sea #1)

by C.M. Rosens

“Your house is full of secrets. Old ones. I can’t tell you very much except that it used to be a monastery, founded in the eleventh century, I think. Quite poor, it was, never received many donations. By the Reformation, Henry VIII and his wives, you know, they only supported four monks. Thirteenth-century stone the crypt is supposed to be, and the king’s men tore the rest down. The Sauvants were about five miles away then, they were given that land and built their ‘new’ manor on top of it.” She paused, eyes raised to the ceiling, thinking. “What else? Well, there’s a smugglers’ tunnel, but I suppose you know that already, going into the cellars on the other side of the crypt, and it’s supposed to connect to the old priest hole somewhere near the grand staircase, well that’s Elizabethan. And then the ‘E’ shaped building went out of fashion, and they turned it into a square, and that was when Sir James decided to do a lot of remodelling and pulled down the old Pendle cottage and built the new one. I suppose you want to know more about the Pendles, and their cottage, is that it?”

Mrs Wend’s eyes were cold, with a dark red gleam that was surely just Carrie’s imagination. The brown of Beverley’s eyes had a reflective sheen that must come from somewhere, Carrie reasoned, but there...

“Oh, four or five generations, yes. Bramble Cottage was built for us, and was signed over to us eventually, when the Sauvants lost all their woodland and farmland. Crippled by death-duties, they was.”

The red sheen seemed to glow darker.

“Unless... that was the point. The chimney was important.”

“I just helped people, dear. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do.”

yep, she's not a concern

“Old houses have personalities of their own,” she said. “So full of memories and energies that there’s no room left for spirits, sometimes.”

i'm so gonna watch rose red again

“No Pendle is setting foot in my house.”

“Can we do this again?” She had no intention of ever going back to Wundorwick, but instinct told her to keep things calm and casual.

People disappeared on this road, the locals said. Cars and all. Gone.

Carrie shivered, clutching her keys in one hand. She pushed the sharp edges between her fingers and made a tight, hard fist.

the sense of an invisible watcher disappearing with the beating of strong black wings.

As soon as the front door swung shut behind her, she knew she was safe. The ominous feeling left her. The hall enveloped her in the smell of dry wood and dusty tiles like an invisible embrace, drawing her into the living room.

What was going on with the Pendles? What was wrong with the town?

a posed, taxidermy cat wearing a child’s waistcoat and little leather boots. It was Toffee. Someone had sewn antlers on his head, too big for the little skull. His forepaws had been replaced with the tiny hands of a human child. He was posed above the box as if pouncing on it or trying to keep the lid closed. Carrie moved the box away from those creepy little cat-fingers, and taxidermy-Toffee mraowled angrily and toppled over.

reassuringly real as sun-warmed bricks and copper piping,

He smelled like a library in summer with undertones of a loamy, overgrown garden, filled with night blossoms and flowering weeds.

She was left with a compulsive urge to go into the maze of the attics, but what she needed to find there escaped her.

she stood in front of the stained glass with some confusion, expecting to see a different door.

There was no fireplace up here, no Victorian study, no books with blue or green dustjackets. Those details returned to cycle through her mind, out of context.

It was an urge more than a command, and it pulled Carrie to her knees as if tugged by an invisible cord. Her hand reached into the hole before her conscious mind caught up with all the usual reasonable objections: her fingers hit something hard inside the wall before she could pull her hand away.

It was a dusty, battered music box, its key snapped in the lock and crusted with the grime of ages.

That’s ridiculous, she chided herself. You can’t cheat on someone with a house.

the long walk working its calming magic.

eel-slither of panic

It was the pose of a pounce.

Carrie listened to her own footsteps echoing through the house as she crossed the hall. The grand staircase behind her responded with a creak, wood swelling in the afternoon sunlight.

Walking around the garden gave her a strange, isolated feeling that she never got from the inside.

Fairwood watched her, protective.

The Chase was silent, green and brown with a glimmer of grey. The grey moved.

flittermice,

“Follow the track through the trees. I keep a light on. You’ll find us, if you need us.”

Sir Peter Sauvant (d. 1892) was the leader of an occult group who called themselves the Eleusinians, after the ancient rites performed each year in Ancient Greece by the devotees of Demeter and Persephone, based at Eleusis. Such an agrarian cult suited the surroundings of the East Sussex coast, but the name was a pretty deceit and had less to do with the harvest as it did with tampering with things men ought to leave alone. As far as this author can tell, it is from the activities of the Eleusinians and their own enacted Mysteries that the curious local phrase, ‘don’t plant what you don’t want to grow’ originates. Although this appears to be nothing more than agrarian wisdom, folk legend has it that during the time of Sir Peter and the Eleusinians, the soil around the town, situated in the South Downs below the clay of the Weald, became increasingly – some might say aggressively – fertile.

well, agrarian fertility was part of the jam & jelly

Carrie read aloud to herself and the listening room until her throat dried out and her voice cracked, and it was time to put the kettle on. She had never felt more at home, nor had the empty old place seemed more alive. It was as if The Crows had woken up, a yawning Sleeping Beauty from its bed of weeds, and she was its Prince Charming. Except some coward with a mysterious grudge didn’t want her administering that kiss of life.

boi-howdy, that's a concerning analogy

It reared up on its hind legs in one fluid movement, long-limbed and enormous.

so we have witches & werewolves & necromancy & a questionable fertility cult and, a seductive haunted house this is gonna be a wild ride

It doesn’t work, Carrie remembered. How can it be ticking?

Tick. Tick. Tick. The time was still wrong: two minutes to midnight.

You’re in the priest hole.

The susurrus suggestion was made all around her, from the wood itself.

What the hell? ...The smuggler’s tunnel, Carrie.

She dropped down the hole, feet finding rusty iron loops set at intervals like a ladder, or perhaps they found her feet, it was hard to tell.

She crossed a line of white beach pebbles scattered over the ground

The thing on their trail howled again, right behind them, and Ricky’s hood came down. Carrie wasn’t sure what she saw – he clamped a hand over her eyes, but between the cracks in his fingers she saw black coils rising above them like eels, writhing in the night air.

Carrie pushed Ricky off and rolled to the drystone wall and out of the way as Janet Varney tumbled in a heap on the ground, blood pouring from her open throat.

“Carrie!” She recognised the new voice, even though she had never heard it before. It resonated deep within her, the sonorous ring of a pipe being struck and the dryness of a creaking floorboard.

Bloody hell, Caro, he’s built like a brick shit-house.

The stranger standing before them was enormous. He towered over her, wide shoulders, broad chest, a sword sticking out of his sleeve and glinting silver-sharp as it changed in the pale moonlight. The tip of the blade, dripping blood that was almost black in the dark, flattened into a palm, long fingers unfurled. It was her imagination. It was just a hand, an arm. There was nothing silver about it. But the blood... the blood dripped onto the grass, and there was a dead woman on the ground.

He’s covered in tattoos? But that wasn’t it. No, she corrected herself dreamily, a fuzzy vice around her forehead. He’s engraved. Deep livid sores ate into the skin, etched across his cheeks in raw, indented teardrops, cutting down into his neck with pale forks of scar tissue. It was as if something had gouged chunks of his flesh away, dug out the fibres for sport.

She stared at him, taking in the deep gouges. The ones on his forearms had perfect corners, chiselled in wide lines like the steps of a staircase. They should have gone all the way down to the bone, but Carrie had the oddest feeling he didn’t have any. Beneath the white shirt, the triangle of torso on display was stippled and rough like the surface of brick tiles and natural slate, colours mottling and hard to see in the dark. She looked back up at his scarred face, where his eyes – bright, alive, and clear as water – stared patiently into her soul like windowpanes. In the corner of one iris, a jagged cobweb of blood-vessels had burst like smashed glass.

It was the same as the last colour plate in The History of Fairwood House: Sir John Douglas Sauvant, who had spent his final days addled with whiskey and tertiary syphilis.