Wakening the Crow Read Online Free Page A

tummy. But a loose baby-tooth she’d been wiggling with her tongue for the past few days had popped out, the gasping rough-and-tumble had jarred it out and started a sudden trickling of blood. By the time I’d swiped at her mouth with a handkerchief, she was wrestling away from my arms and skipping across the hallway and into the vestry.
    There she was, amongst all the boxes of books... in and out of the cupboards and cabinets, perfectly entranced by her search for her mouse, just now and then smearing at her face and licking her lips and pressing the tip of her tongue into the tender place where her tooth had been. I’d looked around for the tooth, following a spatter of red spittle which I dabbed into the handkerchief and stuffed back into my pocket, and found it... but it had slipped into a crack into the flagstones too small for my fingers, and I couldn’t get it out. I’d come back, I said to myself, I’d come back with something like a pair of pliers and try again. So I followed her into the vestry, where she’d pounced into a dusty corner and was cupping the little creature in her hands.
    ‘You got him. Is he alright, is Mr Mouse alright? And are you alright? What’s Mummy going to say when she comes home? Show me...’
    We sat on a couple of cardboard boxes and first of all she showed me the mouse. It was an albino. Its fur was strangely translucent, as thought you might see through it and into the myriad workings of its body. Shiny, tinged with a barely visible blush of pink. Red eyes. A pink nose, and such delicate pink ears you could see the tracery of veins. Pink tail and pink feet, altogether it was like a fairyland toy or an expensive, impossibly sweet chocolate. Chloe held it to her lips and kissed it. She left an imprint of her blood on its head. And then, as I put my forefinger on her chin and pressed to open her mouth, I could see the sweet young pinkness of her tongue and the clean, healthy cavity where her tooth had been.
    ‘You’ll do. When we go upstairs again we’ll give it a good rinse out, and Mummy will be happy...’
    I marvelled at her, and what had happened. The new Chloe, all bloody mouth and smiles and giggles and a white mouse with blood on it. So nice and chuckling with an oozy hole in her gum. What would the old Chloe have been like? A bawling nightmare.
    ‘We could light the fire, hey? On a frosty January morning, just the two of us and a lovely fire...’
    We’d bought a church. It was the recently defunct Anglican church at the top of Shakespeare Street, a mile from the town centre. No, not the whole building. As the congregation had dwindled to almost nothing, the commissioners had closed the church and sold it as two parcels. The body of the building was now a furniture warehouse. We’d bought the tower.
    It was a new conversion. On the second floor we had our bedrooms and living-room, with views across the town and its leafy suburbs. The first floor was our kitchen-dining-room. And the ground floor...
    The doorway of the church opened into a spacious hallway, where the minister used to greet his flock, welcome his Sunday congregations and the weddings and funerals which had taken place in the building for the past hundred years. An entrance hall, where tears of joy and sorrow had been shed, whose stone slabs had been strewn with confetti, puddled with rain and snow, blown with blossom in springtime and autumn leaves...
    The vestry was off the hallway. It was small, with a high ceiling, tall clear lancet windows, lovely oak cupboards and shelves where hymnals and prayer books and church music had been stored, and a fireplace. A tiny washroom and toilet. The vestry, where the minister had prepared himself for his services, where he’d lit a fire on chilly mornings and readied himself in front of it.
    And it was going to be my bookshop. A specialist outlet of strange and occult and arcane books. The shop I’d daydreamed foolishly about having.
    Foolishly daydreaming...
    In