The Crows (Pagham-on-Sea #1)

by C.M. Rosens

Fairwood watched her with its usual patience.

Her neighbour licked his lips and sidled up to her, keeping an eye on the hulking statue. He moved like a boxer, chest up and limber, but as she glanced down at him, she realised he was shorter than she was. She shook her head in flat denial.

“Good job your dreams weren’t all marshmallows and unicorns, or you’d be in deep shit right about now.”

“They don’t always need a full moon, if they’re in the mood for fun and games.”

The apparition of Sir John Douglas Sauvant, a bad statue of angles and lines in an approximation of a human shape, ducked through the door, and Ricky stayed at least three feet away from it as if it gave off a repelling aura.

to the bulky protector of her dreams. A house within a house.

“Your parents had better be alive, Ricky, I swear to God this had better not be like Psycho or some shit...”

“It’s fairly obvious what’s going on, I’d have thought. The old girl tried to kill you, except you made a wish first. Ain’t that lucky.”

Let’s say you are Fairwood. Why didn’t you stop her breaking in?” Fairwood shrugged. “I hid you. I – shouldn’t be like this. I don’t know why I’m like this.” He looked at the scarred arms and hands. “I am condensed. My rooms, my... I’m collapsed in on myself. How did this happen?”

“Alright, I admit it, I confess,” Ricky said, raising his hands. “I may have... given your wish a little more juice. Got her over the line, so to speak. But in fairness to the well, you did only throw in a fiver.”

Everything’s a ‘she’ down here. Excepting a tom-cat, an’ she’s a he.”

so, that kinda makes the house genderfluid now? does that mean this was a proto-leabian relationship?

“Great. I can’t even afford my own wishes.”

Some kind of lucid, rancid, rotten dream.”

“I can dredge up the memories

*rimshot*

“Like kicking a big concrete puppy.” “There’s no concrete in Fairwood House,”

Well, congratulations Mistress Rickard, your dreams have come true and now you can skip off into the sunset and take it home to meet the parents. Not that I can talk, you understand. Our lot like to keep it in the family so much I’m lucky I only got away with an extra mouth.”

Knew she wouldn’t get you. Saw it in the entrails.”

Omens were all good. I’m a soothsayer.”

Something flicked around his cheek, thin and pinkish-brown. Carrie couldn’t tell if it was a tongue or a tentacle, or just her imagination.

Want me to say your sooth?”

You know what a soothsayer does, don’t you? Tells the fucking truth.”

“Wishes come true. Werewolves are real. You’re some kind of magician.” “Soothsayer.”

“This way, roll up, roll up, all the fun of the ghost train.”

“Antique-silver-blade-for-hand dead.”

“Janet Varney, Second Pack. Shit, she’s DNR. We’ve got to cut her head off.”

this is a wild town

“If we don’t, she’ll Rise. Trust me, the only thing worse than a werewolf trying to kill you while they’re alive is one trying to kill you after they’re dead. Werewolf zombies are the absolute worst. Don’t put in the ground what you don’t want to grow.”

Carrie quickly learned there was nothing like disposing of a body to bind relative strangers.

Jazz explained that ‘mindless resurrections’, which seemed a weird qualifier, now only happened at certain times of the year thanks to the rituals performed in the town, but they had to wait for the full moon before all Risings could be limited to the mortuary itself. Until then, the Crematorium on the outskirts of the town was operating at all hours.

this town is bug-fuck WILD

“First of all, that’s not something you come out and ask. Even I don’t come out and ask stuff like that. You work it out from context, like, the street they live on, or their name, or physical characteristics, hobbies, interests, social circles, that kind of thing.”

yeah, but carrie doesn't have the context, so she's gonna have to ask

It was such a shock because she was the kind of old-fashioned Resurrectionist who didn’t ever share her number with anyone. ‘Only God knows the numbers of our days’, she’d say.

She had a dreadful idea, currently buried under layers of denial but slowly burrowing up to the surface, that nothing was going to be alright again.

The woman in the mirror with toothpaste around her mouth was bed-sheet white except for the blotches of nettle rash and tired purple saddlebags under her eyes. A few silvery threads glistened in the messy ponytail. The white peppermint foam made her look rabid, a zombie-shell of her old self, clawing its way into a life it didn’t understand.

Gerald

so, ricky makes his own friends

She was nice. The thought came out of nowhere. It stopped him dead.

Regularity was petty and mean, small and powerless. He couldn’t imagine going through life ignorant of the intricacies of the wyrd, blind to the woven threads of fate glistening within constellations of arcane knowledge.

i mean, i feel that

bending low to the balding fox-ear glued to the deer skull.

There was a suck of skin as his other lips parted, mucus-slick, the scratching quest of his air-roots as they coiled up from inside him, squeezing their way along his spine and twanging his oesophagus on their way out. The mattress behind his head felt spongey, tasted sour under the tongue-like lengths as they spread out behind him, seeking protein. (Feed, it won’t be long now, the Changes will be done soon.)

Moths were chalky, woodlice bitter.

Gerald never moved for him. Perhaps it wasn’t Gerald, he consoled himself, aware it had been a long time since he last minded Gerald’s determined inanimation. Just an owl.

Ricky remained in his foetal curl, mechanically comfort-eating his way through the fat, dark moths in his dank bedroom until his aching belly stabbed at him to stop, their dusty wing-scales waltzing through his intestines, sour-sharp as broken glass.

The house was in her head, rifling through her subconscious with fibrous fingers, picking over the images it needed and absorbing her into the mortar, scrapbooking her between the pages of its history.

It seemed as though Fairwood could either be condensed down into an avatar or be alive in its own construction, but not both at the same time: when the avatar was around, the rooms stopped whispering.

For the most part, Fairwood communicated in ideas and vibes, not words. Mainly what it communicated was a simmering, migraine-inducing indignance.

Hatred for the town, for the despoilers and the vandals, for the attack on its current possessor, roiled up from the coal cellar in choking billows of flammable rage. Next to this, the medieval crypt, the only remnant of the original monastery on ...

The upper floors had vengeance glinting in their windowpanes, shard-sharp. The living-room, which had seen the worst of Janet Varney’s attack, nevertheless held out as the moralising ce...

He never despoiled. Never fractured. Never hurt. ...Only for today. Then, we’ll see.

His eyes were moist, wonder-wide, about to cry. He held it together.

Could murder a cup of tea,

“Hi-ho, hi-ho, an ascetic life for me. No sex, no drugs, no rock ‘n’ roll. No processed sugars either, in case you was thinking of inviting me to a party, as would be neighbourly of you.”

Why aren’t you allowed in the house?” “A certain meddling old hedge-witch, name of Miss Eglantine Valmai Pritchard, if you please, thought Gran or her sisters had killed the kid,” Ricky said promptly, jerking a thumb at the chimney. “She stopped the Pendles setting foot here again. You have to tie a curse like that to something, some sort of condition. She thought she’d let the house decide to let us in, thought she was being clever. Of course, Fairwood wasn’t properly alive then, not like now, so she couldn’t decide shit. Oh, she called out, lured people in, but not, you know, coherently. Bit of a bitch for us, since that hearthstone from the old Pendle cottage is imbued with energies we need.” He grinned. “Bet no one told you that at the auction, did they? Caveat emptor applies, and all that.”