White Crow (21 page)

BOOK: White Crow

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Resurrection

The earth quakes, the graves burst open, the dead arise and stream on in endless procession. The trumpets of the apocalypse ring out
.

There is no judgment,

no sinners,
no just men,
no great
and no small;
there is no punishment
and no reward.
A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with bliss.

We know, and are.

And we know with all certainty.

God does not exist.

When I Am Dead And Worshipped

No, it’s not so very hard to die.

Fall from the cave mouth. Dead girl on the rocks below.

Easy.

Of course, when they found Rebecca, she was half mad, having been left in that chamber with eight skeletons, for hours on end, too hysterical to move, too scared to run the risk of the climb again.

It was her father who found her. He’d got himself released, because as soon as Rebecca was reported missing, all hell broke loose.

It didn’t take them long to work out who she was with, but then in the storm, it took forever to find her, till her father, walking on the beach with one of the search parties, heard her cry from the cave mouth.

I saw them, reunited.

I know that Rebecca told her father what he needed to hear. That she believed in him. That she loved him still.

I know, from the way they held each other, that she did. And as she did, I could see just from the way he stood that something was healing, and that he’d found the strength to go on, to face whatever was coming for him.

And the dead girl?

The girl lying broken on the rocks below?

Well, I knew she had to go.

Ferelith had to go, and it only took the blink of an eye to step from the cave mouth. To hold my head high, and to give in to that urge, and just let go.

I was sick of her misery and her miserable life, and in a way, it was what I’d been waiting for. Rebecca and I had uncovered the truth behind the legend of the Hall, and it had taken its toll on us both.

Rebecca appeared to the rescuers to be so exhausted and upset that she’d become delusional. She told her father that I’d been with her in the chamber the whole time, talking to her, soothing her, telling her to never stop loving her father again, when they knew that she’d seen me leave the chamber first, and fall, to my end.

They tried to convince her of that, but she wouldn’t believe them. She would never believe them. She would always believe that after I fell, I came back.

As I had promised.

It was what my whole life was for, I see that now. And dying was not such a bad thing, because it was worth it.

For I am the crow.

The white crow.

WHITE CROW
AUTHOR’S NOTE

Why
White Crow
?

T
here were three main inspirations for this story.

The first is the place - Winterfold is very loosely based on the ancient settlement of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, which, like Winterfold, was once a thriving medieval town, now just a quiet curiosity of an English seaside village.

Second, was the incredible, but true, account of a scientist, Dr Beaurieux, who genuinely tried to communicate with the still warm head of a guillotine victim. He concluded that consciousness persists for up to thirty seconds after beheading. Here’s a chilling excerpt from his notes:

I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased … It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: “Languille!” I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions … but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again…

And in case you’re wondering when this happened, the guillotined man was not a victim from the days of the French Revolution; Dr Beaurieux conducted his experiment on an executed prisoner in June 1905.

Finally, the White Crow itself refers to a quote by William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, (and brother of the novelist Henry James), who became fascinated with the possibility of the afterlife, around the height of the Spiritualist movement at the end of the 19th century.

“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”

With these elements in place, I then used Rebecca and Ferelith’s stories to weave them together, and bring Winterfold to life. And death.

This is my eleventh novel for Orion, and looking back I can safely say that each and every one would not have been half the book it became without the graceful and precise skills of my editor, and publisher, Fiona Kennedy. Thanks be to you.

Marcus Sedgwick
Hadstock
January 2010