A STORYTELLING OF RAVENS Read online

  A STORYTELLING OF RAVENS

  A DARK TALE OF OBSESSION

  R. H. DIXON

  www.rhdixon.com

  Corvus Corone Press

  Copyright © 2017 R. H. Dixon

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  ‘Without obsession, life is nothing.’

  John Waters

  1

  Twenty minutes after Sarah Jane Miller’s dad had left the house, her mother took two pre-packed holdalls from the downstairs cupboard.

  ‘What’re those for?’ Sarah Jane asked. She was halfway through a bowl of sugar-topped Cornflakes but lowered her spoon back to the bowl so she could pay closer attention to her mother’s curious behaviour.

  ‘Just hurry the hell up, will you?’ Roxanne Miller unhooked a car key from the peg on the kitchen wall then checked her wristwatch. ‘We’re going away for the weekend.’

  ‘No we’re not.’

  ‘Yes we are. If your dad can go gallivanting all over the place, so can bloody well I.’

  ‘Where’re we going?’ Sarah Jane’s face twisted at the unexpectedness and inconvenience of this new development; she’d anticipated a weekend at home, reading and writing and hanging out with her cousin Pollyanna, not spending unnecessary time with her mother.

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘You mean surprise.’

  ‘No.’ Her mother’s eyes flashed with a certain amount of impatience. ‘It’s not for your benefit, smart arse, it’s a secret because you’re not to go blabbing to your dad.’

  ‘Why not? Why’s it a secret?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Because why?’

  Her mother struggled to the back door with the holdalls; the task made difficult because of the five-inch wedges on the shoes she wore, which were almost always kept for special occasions. ‘Because we’re going to stay with Dean. Uncle Dean.’

  ‘Who’s Uncle Dean?’ Sarah Jane watched, unwilling to help. ‘And why would Dad care that we’re going to stay with him?’

  ‘Because your dad doesn’t like him.’ Roxanne Miller dropped the bags and opened the back door. ‘But I do. And life’s too short.’

  ‘Dad doesn’t like Aunty Sonia but you always tell him when we’re going to visit her.’

  Roxanne breathed in deep and fast, creating a sharp nasal hiss. ‘Hardly the same thing, Sarah Jane. No one likes Aunty Sonia.’

  Sensing and enjoying the fact she was calling her mother out on a big fat lie, Sarah Jane asked, ‘Have I met him before? Uncle Dean.’ As well as being more short-tempered than usual, Roxanne Miller was acting altogether too strangely and had that cagey, can’t-lie-for-shit look, the one she got when she told Sarah Jane’s dad that the expensive dress she’d just bought had been hanging at the back of the wardrobe for the past five years. It was a look that fooled no one, however well-planned and credible the untruth was. ‘It’s just, I don’t remember having met him. And I didn’t realise you have a brother.”

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘So he’s Dad’s? I thought there was just Uncle Trev on Dad’s side.’

  ‘No, he’s not your frigging dad’s brother either.’

  ‘So how’s he my uncle?’

  Roxanne Miller huffed, her glossed pink lips becoming unpleasantly thin. ‘Does it even matter?’

  ‘Well, yes, how can you say he’s my uncle when clearly he isn’t?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Sarah Jane, can’t you just leave it alone? You’re always asking bloody questions. He’s my cousin’s wife’s brother, okay?’

  ‘Liar.’ Sarah Jane lifted her spoon and slopped soggy cereal back into the bowl. Grinning openly about her dilemma, she hadn’t yet decided if she’d oblige her mother’s request not to tell Dad. ‘What’s my silence worth?’

  ‘Me not smacking you in the mouth?’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Wanna bet?’

  Sarah Jane shrugged, she didn’t doubt it. ‘Pollyanna will have to come too.’

  ‘Suppose I don’t have a choice. Just don’t tell your dad about any of this. I mean it!’

  Sarah Jane said nothing.

  ‘Promise you won’t or I’ll drop the pair of you off at Uncle Trev’s and you can spend all weekend watching him get shit-faced on Special Brew while Tyson craps all over the front room and Aunty Kelly has that weird friend of hers round, the one with the frizzy hair who spits when she talks.’

  Sarah Jane’s own lips tightened at the threat. ‘Alright. But you’ll have to make it worth my while.’

  ‘Just hurry the frig up and get ready, will you? And tell Pollyanna to keep her bloody mouth shut as well.’

  Sarah Jane sloped off to get dressed and complain to her cousin that they’d be going away for the weekend with some uncle of dubious family connection. As it was, Pollyanna didn’t mind. In fact, she said it sounded fun.

  Twenty minutes later the three of them left. They travelled north on the A1 till they were somewhere beyond the River Tyne. Roxanne Miller explained to the girls that Uncle Dean was recuperating after being seriously injured in Afghanistan. He’d served as a sergeant there for two years and, although the information she had was sketchy at best, she said after leading his men into a compound, somewhere in the Helmand Province (and, no, she didn’t know where exactly), disaster had struck when one of them had stepped on an explosive device (and, no, she didn’t know the ins and outs of this either and Sarah Jane was under NO circumstances allowed to badger Uncle Dean for further details). Three soldiers had been killed outright and Uncle Dean, who was standing close enough to the blast to be blown off his feet, was hospitalised for months. He lost the sight in one eye and was lucky not to have lost his left leg. But now, almost two years on, following numerous operations that involved metal plates and pins, and lots of physiotherapy sessions, he was up and about, walking again. Very recently he’d been diagnosed with PTSD, though, and his wife (some heartless bint called Claire) had filed for a divorce. Which was why, according to Roxanne, they were paying him a visit, to help cheer him up. As it was Sarah Jane didn’t care about the divorce stuff and had no idea what PTSD stood for (and doubted her mother did either, else surely she’d have said). But the fact that Uncle Dean had been in the army was hugely impressive. She’d never met a sergeant before. Or anyone with one eye and a metal leg. So the trip was now massively more favourable than staying at home.

  Once at Uncle Dean’s house they switched from Roxanne Miller’s car to his before heading further north. Roxanne sat in the front passenger seat, closest to Uncle Dean, with her hair all perfect and face too pretty, while Sarah Jane was stuck in the back with Pollyanna. Pollyanna sat unspeaking for the most part, her goon-face enthralled by the passing countryside scenery, whereas Sarah Jane could hardly take her eyes off Uncle Dean. She’d already decided that Dad didn’t need to know about him. Her silence had been sealed. Airtight. Uncle Dean was mesmerising. Her mother blatantly thought so too; she laughed and touched his arm too much in an infuriating display of kitteny playfulness that made Sarah Jane’s jaw lock tight.

  After a while, perhaps because he was aware of the silent attention he was receiving, Uncle Dean caught Sarah Jane’s eye in the rear view mirror and, in a voice almost as baritone as the revs of the car’s engine, said, ‘So, how’s school? Any favourite subjects?’

  Instantly Sarah Jane worried that he’d be able to see what she was thinking. His dead eye was white, the colour of a mood stone depicting boredom or frustration – probably because of her mother’s incessant prattle, she thought – but his blue eye, the one that was still very much alive, looked vibrant enough to delve right into her thoughts an
d sift through them one by one. To know that she was besotted with him in a way she never could be with Kieran Stock, the most popular kid at school, because when it came down to it Kieran Stock was just a boy. Moreover, a boy who had never been blown up. She broke eye contact and looked instead at Uncle Dean’s large, accomplished hands on the steering wheel. Hands that had handled real guns and weaponry, she thought. Hands that had known physical pain and hardship. Hands that had, perhaps, killed. She felt her cheeks flash hot, but managed to say, ‘English and drama,’ without sounding completely idiotic to her own ears.

  ‘So, we have an aspiring actress maybe?’ He sounded genuinely enthused.

  ‘Not likely,’ Roxanne Miller interrupted with a laugh, spoiling the rapport. ‘Pollyanna’s the actress.’

  At the mention of her name Pollyanna turned, eyebrows raised, and Sarah Jane glowered. Pollyanna shrugged, indifferent, and returned her attention to the side window, evidently happy to sit this one out. Sarah Jane tightened her hands into claws, dug her nails into the leather upholstery by the sides of her legs and imagined smashing her mother’s head through the windscreen. ‘I’d like to be a scriptwriter actually,’ she said, trying to control the fire in her voice in case it burnt what little scrap of mature credibility she imagined she’d been left clinging to.

  Roxanne Miller snorted mild amusement, but Uncle Dean cast a disapproving look that silenced her. Sarah Jane fell in love with him a little bit more.

  ‘Hey, sounds cool,’ he said. His eye, the one that was still alive, striking blue, winked at Sarah Jane, making a new wave of heat on her face cripple her ability to react or reply with any sense of unabashed dignity. She looked down again to the scars on his hands. The webbing of white on tanned skin. She imagined them bloodied; how they must have looked right after the bomb. Red. Sore. Agony.

  Her heart. Right now.

  She considered there might be a network of scars all over his body. Beneath his clothes. Ones she couldn’t see. Ones his wife no longer wanted to see. Claire, she thought, really must be a bint. When he started talking to her mother again, Sarah Jane felt comfortable enough to study his profile some more. His blonde hair, once kissed by hostile foreign sun, was pulled into a messy, short ponytail and he had the beginnings of a beard that was dirty blonde. Not a ‘dad’ beard, but a rugged display of confident maleness. An effortless virility because he’d survived what many wouldn’t have. The mangled flesh of his hands, and perhaps elsewhere, had healed. Knitted back together. And the whiteness of his dead eye was a badge of honour. It might be blind, but Uncle Dean had seen more than most ever would. Shrapnel had erased blue, but with white came wisdom and courage.

  Sarah Jane was sickly dizzy on new emotions which felt like a bellyful of E numbers fizzing up inside her, the concoction of artificial chemicals going straight to her head. She couldn’t make sense of how she could possibly feel, to the extreme extent, the way she felt, or why. Uncle Dean was physically attractive, that was true, but this lazy observation didn’t explain her absolute want nor the desire that burned in her core like lava. Rather, he was soul-captivating on some mysterious, primal level that Sarah Jane had never encountered before. So, while berating herself for her uninformed choice that morning to put on a hoody with a purple unicorn printed on the front, she continued to watch him, taking him in, for the remainder of the journey.

  It was at least another two hours till he announced, ‘Here we are,’ before pulling off a winding country lane onto a narrow access road, then parking on a gravelled area to the side of a large wooden cabin.

  The place seemed unreal. A pocket of idealism in the middle of nowhere. Not at all what Sarah Jane had expected. Not that she’d known what to expect; she didn’t know Uncle Dean well enough to form any real ideas or opinions of the type of man he was beyond the army sergeant she imagined, or of the places he kept. His cabin was weathered and aged to a degree that it fit snugly into its environment and, although massively impressive, it was not a showy piece of architecture that looked primped to scream Look at me! with any arrogant sense of boastful pride. Instead it was a comfortable presence that looked as though it had risen from the ground and grown alongside the trees. A tall, quirky tower rose from its westerly corner, making it look like a fairy tale prop; an organic woodland palace that wasn’t visible unless you left the beaten track and really looked for it. To the front of the cabin lay a huge expanse of water, as smooth as a mirror. It stretched as far as mountains on the horizon that were the colour of chestnut mushrooms. And to the rear, across the one-vehicle access road, was a thickly wooded area.

  Uncle Dean pulled on the handbrake and threw Roxanne Miller a wink. ‘Welcome to my home in the woods.’ Then he turned to the backseat and said, ‘Make yourselves at home, girls.’

  More than happy to accept his invitation, Sarah Jane hurried from the car. As she did, a raucous chatter of deep-voiced birds broke any tranquillity that might have been. Looking up at a large tree that stood alone by the west wall of the cabin, its full height scratching the bottom section of the tower, she saw its autumnal branches were busy not just with the rich orange of dying leaves but also with black feathery bodies. A murder of crows, she thought, delightedly. She skipped across the gravel, around the back of the car, skimming Uncle Dean’s paintwork with light fingers, and helped Pollyanna from the back seat.

  ‘I’m Rapunzel and this is where I’m going to live from now on,’ Pollyanna said, looking up at the tower. Its slate roof was a colder shade of grey than the late afternoon sky and its windows were impenetrable-black.

  ‘You’ll have to stay here forever in that case, shit for brains, because no prince in his right mind will want to come and rescue you,’ Sarah Jane said, trying to determine if the tower’s windows were obstructed by blackout blinds or whether the darkness lay within.

  Pollyanna narrowed her eyes at her cousin’s contempt, but didn’t argue.

  As the girls crossed the lawn to catch up with Uncle Dean, two birds from the tree swooped down and perched on the guttering above the veranda, their feathers black-velvet under the sunless sky. Sarah Jane decided they were too big to be crows and must therefore be ravens. Neither flew away when she and Pollyanna passed beneath, both just watched; their eyes inquisitive, intelligent.

  ‘Hi,’ Sarah Jane said, tilting her head back to maintain eye contact. The birds hopped along the guttering with a cheeky synchronicity which matched the girls’ pace, and one of them cawked a deep enthusiastic response.

  Sarah Jane left Pollyanna on the veranda and followed Uncle Dean through the cabin’s front door. He was a few inches shorter than the doorframe itself and his shoulders almost spanned its width. He walked with a significant limp, his left foot swinging out to the side due to the obvious limited mobility in his knee. Sarah Jane wondered which parts beneath the flesh were metal and whether he could feel the plates and pins grating and grinding, cold, against what was left of his damaged, splintered bones. She watched with great interest as he moved about the cabin, flicking switches down to test lightbulbs and opening blinds to let the last of the day’s light in. He cast his car key onto a worn, wooden coffee table in front of the couch and rounded everyone together before declaring a tour of the place. First he talked them around the lounge and kitchen then, while Pollyanna sat by the enormous lounge window watching a paddling of ducks out on the lake, he ushered Roxanne and Sarah Jane upstairs, their feet noisy on the wooden steps, while he trailed awkwardly behind. He opened the first door on the left and Sarah Jane peered inside. The air was musty, unused, and the space dark because the raven-tree outside partially obscured the window. Sarah Jane could hear the birds’ boisterous babble and wondered if they were happy or cross to have company again. She had no idea how often Uncle Dean used the holiday cabin, but judging by the layer of dust on a nearby chest of drawers, she didn’t think very.

  A king-sized bed, positioned centrally on the back wall, was covered by a thick velvet throw, maroon in colour. Like a r
oyal robe laid out. And a large stag’s head was affixed to the wall above the bed’s headboard. Its glass eyes watched them with a black sadness and the number of tines on its antlers suggested it might have been King of the Woods, once upon a time.

  ‘Is this your room?’ Sarah Jane said to Uncle Dean, even though she knew it must be.

  ‘Yeah.’ He ran a finger along the top of the drawers, distracted, and frowned at the grey fuzz it collected. ‘How on earth can an empty house gather so much dead skin?’

  ‘Dust,’ Roxanne Miller corrected. She was standing out on the landing, gripping the doorframe as though the room and her better judgement forbade her from entering but her feet were feeling wayward and so she had to stop them from moving forward.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Sarah Jane pointed at a heavy-looking oak door to the right of the bed. Its iron lock was sucking on a key and it looked like the sort of door that must surely conceal dusty heirlooms and family secrets.

  ‘Nothing,’ Uncle Dean said, side-stepping to block her advance. He took her by the shoulders and spun her round, then pocketed the door’s key and guided her back out onto the landing. ‘That is, nothing that need concern you, sweetheart.’

  ‘But,’ she looked up at the ceiling, ‘does it lead to the tower?’

  ‘Never you mind.’ He steered her along the landing to the other first floor room. This was a smaller space with a double bed dressed in plain white linen. A virginal display in contrast. An oil-painted swan swum forever on calm blue waters above the bed, its beauty depicted in summery, seemingly effortless, strokes by some unknown artist. Roxanne Miller set her bag down, claiming the room as her own. Sarah Jane ground her teeth together.

  Back downstairs Uncle Dean showed all three of them where the bathroom was. Then, at the end of the corridor, next door to the bathroom, was a spacious twin room, decorated blue, where Sarah Jane and Pollyanna were to sleep. From their window they could see the woods behind the cabin. It looked like an uninviting, monstrous place, Sarah Jane decided almost immediately. A place where thorns and nettles and poisonous plants would be the most pleasant things to be found. The front-most trees were like gnarled, bony sentinels, guarding all that might reside in the mossy, mulchy darkness, held close and tight between boughs and trunks, beneath the golden awning of another year’s dead summer.