The Crows (Pagham-on-Sea #1)

by C.M. Rosens

The darkness closed in again, obliterating her worries and aches and the worrisome void of white in a rising tide of blissful black.

The energies were bringing on his Changes, faster now, and about damn time. Imagine pushing thirty and not fully Changed yet – they thought he’d done it, that was it, to Change again so late was unheard of.

Stroking the Pendle Stone was his solace, and slowly, slowly, achingly slowly, his farsight crept back. His third eye was only a metaphor (unlike his second mouth), but he felt it opening again and blinking into the warp and weft of the wyrd.

clever old shadowman with his face collection.

(No, I’m not like Gran, I don’t go in for all that controlling stuff, take it back.) (Wish we’d had a girl, George, a lovely little girl with lips honest as rubies.)

Ricky wrestled with his shadow of a conscience.

He hadn’t had Gerald in his bed since he was twelve, and his dad told him he was too old for all that. That was the night Ricky had poisoned his parents for the first time. Gerald had not been burned, but he hadn’t dared keep him in his bedroom after that, all the same.

It was odd, sleeping next to something after so long. Even odder to be next to something warm, something breathing.

She talked in her sleep sometimes, he caught odd words, and each time that happened he would jerk awake in a kind of panic. Bodies didn’t talk. Then he’d see her in the dark, smell the bandages and the preparation, relax his muscles one group at a time, let his tendrils fall back over the pillow and crawl up the wallpaper.

After four interesting days and three blissful, sleepless nights, Gerald the Second relinquished its name and was declared ready to be de-tubed and unwrapped.

Ricky realised she might not want him to sleep beside her once she was better, once she was Caroline Rickard again.

She set the soup in front of him, her lily-of-the-valley scent overpowering the whiskey for a moment.

You wouldn’t be looking for Mr Wend’s signs, not without explicit permission.”

Even now, even with the Pendle Stone energies opening him up to the Outside, she was older and stronger, had had those energies coursing through her frame for so long, and spawned the children from her own womb.

“Luck ain’t the easiest thing to harness. Like lassoing the business end of a Hydra with only one rope.”

“Once, that’s easy. Twice... trickier. Three times...” He leaned back, sucking in air through his teeth. “Luck don’t like that.”

For a moment, he saw the energies pulsing under her skin, tar-black.

(Delivery boys deserve tips.)

She loved chaos, stirring other people’s lives into maelstroms until she was their only anchor.

Her endearment was a honeytrap.

All it would take was a bit of extra energy, in a place where the veil between worlds was thinnest. The Pendle Stone was imbued with much older energies the newer shrine couldn’t channel yet, but it had been dormant for sixty years. Waking it up fully would take more time.

Come down to the cellar, my lovely lad, tell your Gaffer all that’s bad.

If that was the Voice, then it was speaking to him. The shrine welcomed him, shutting her out. His pulse quickened with his breaths. (Mine.)

“I’d rather not get involved in this,” she complained. “Burt’s moved out, Meredith bloody Blake is breathing down my neck about mysterious deaths connected to Barker Crescent, and honestly, Mez, I’d rather not be here. Curses give me the creeps.”

Mercy had dressed for the occasion using an ice-cream parlour palette, as if combatting a dark curse could be achieved through the power of pastels alone. Today, she was experimenting with hair extensions.

Tina wielded sympathy like a scythe.

“I’m guessing that’s someone best consigned to the bin of history?”

Carrie found herself recalling the chilling reputation of her stretch of road, and wished Phil would drive away into oblivion, disappear without a trace and be gone from her life fo...

It was all so mundane – how could something as simple as a knock on the door open the gateway to your own private hell?

“Great-Aunt Eglantine used to trap spirits that she couldn’t help cross over, the ones that... were resistant, let’s say, and tough to exorcise. That’s a bad sign as far as we’re concerned.

Can what? Go to the police? With what proof? Set the ghost on her tormentors? With what consequences?

“What should I do, then? Chuck it down the well? Not make a wish, obviously.”

If I’m going to be targeted for something they think I know, then I want to bloody well know what they think I know.”

“I learned ‘best practice’ from my mum, and she learned from her great-aunt,” Tina said. “She was pretty formidable. Bit of an Oracle, was Great-Aunt Eglantine.”

Oracles and séances seemed the thickest end of the wedge now, compared with werewolves, sentient houses and doctors who wore masks of human skin.

“Houses are alive in lots of ways,” Tina said, as if she had rehearsed this before coming. “You can feel their energies, their characters, sometimes even before you walk in the door. Animists believe even rocks and stones have a life force of their own. I suppose this one just... crossed a line somewhere and became alive in a different sense. A – dare I say it, more ‘mainstream’ sense.”

almost afraid that The Crows would be offended by her past insensitivity.

“Are we using Ouija boards or something?” Mercy had grown pale. “Bitch, please.”

“No,” Tina admitted. “I work with the dead. But I’m pretty certain it’s a preventative.”

“It – renders you dead to the one who cursed you. It makes you – a new person, to all intents and purposes.”

“That’ll ward off the Evil Eye and anything stronger. Or stranger.” Tina ran her fingers over her own. “I learned pretty fast that if you’re going to have anything to do with the Porters, the Shaws, the Foremans, the Wends or the Wend-McVeys, you’d better have one of these.”

“Ricky Porter, Mez said you’ve met, well, he’s their current – I don’t know what, but they all seem to look up to him. Spiritual guide of the clan? Truth-teller?”

“That’s what he calls it. He’s only about our age, but don’t let that fool you. There’s a lot of rumblings in the clan at the moment. I don’t get involved and I don’t ask, but when you’ve got Wes Porter on your quiz team you learn stuff.”

“God, this is weird. Normally I’d have a candle, the flame is... never mind. We’ll do that later, if the ghost doesn’t want to go back in the box.”

Carrie pinched the stem of the broken key, the nub sticking out a little way. To her surprise, it turned easily, the lid springing open with a rusty click. A broken ballerina with half her skirt missing and the rest of it sadly torn, face obliterated with age and grime, twisted drunkenly on her platform. One little arm swung from a dislocated shoulder, and all the paint had been worn away. It was playing Three Blind Mice, flat and out of tune. (Yet another thing to feel sorry for.)

part of a sorority of strangers bound by sweat.

but then she caught the words gaast and cargást, and realised it was Old English.

ghast, ghost

but then she caught the words gaast and cargást, and realised it was Old English.

banshee, anxiety

Carrie could hear the buzzing of fat bluebottles in the room, distracting her. She turned her head slightly, not wanting to break the circle for fear of what may happen if she did, trying to find the source of the irritating buzzing sound. A thick mass of flies crawling up and down the wallpaper in a river of tickling legs and vibrating wings made her flinch. Tina clamped Carrie’s hand in hers, while on her other side Mercy’s hot, slippery fingers nearly slid from her grasp as Mercy let out an involuntary squirming whimper. Maggots dropped out of the wall, curling and writhing on the floorboards and disappearing in the cracks.

what were y'all expecting?

Can’t tell - find my tongue.