Free The Book of the Crowman by Joseph D'Lacey

the ruins of a city. Carissa is trembling by the time their feet touch the rubble strewn ground.
    “This is a bad place,” she says. “Terrible things happened here.”
    Partially decayed bodies line the roadsides. They appear to have been there for years but there is no evidence of rats or flies having eaten their dead flesh. Instead the human remains bear a thick layer of dust. The bodies lie sprawled or slumped where they dropped, the crude weapons lying near the fallen a sign that they died in conflict.
    Carissa looks around and seems to take something from shattered scene.
    “Food,” she says. “They were fighting for food. What is this place?”
    “A City. Generations behind us in the weave. They were huge.”
    “Sitty?”
    “Like a big village.”
    Megan is about to say more when she hears a clatter from behind them. They both spin towards the noise. A bent figure stumbles along an alleyway, using the wall for support and guidance. The person, a man it seems, is staggering right towards them and is only a few paces away. Megan takes an involuntary step back and dislodges loose brickwork from a wall. It thumps to the ground raising dust, the sound echoing into the distance in the deserted streets. The man, who has stooped until now, halts and looks up.
    Megan’s heart falters.
    He seems to look right at them except that can’t be possible for the man wears filthy rags wrapped around his eyes. Besides, Megan thinks, he is of this world not of the weave. Megan holds her breath until she hears another sound from the opposite direction, that of wings whispering on the gritty air. She and Carissa glance back and both of them pale. It is this sound the blind man appears to be interested in.
    Wings .
    Suddenly, Megan is less certain of their safety. She had not considered that other travellers might be abroad among the fibres of the weave. She is a trespasser here, without her guide and chaperone, without leave .
    “Quick,” Megan whispers. “In here.”
    She hauls Carissa through the open door of an abandoned bus and pulls her along the between the seats to a broken window where they can see out. The sound of beating wings approaches fast and the street grows dark. With a final downthrust of air that whips the dust into clouds, something comes to earth near the entrance of the alleyway.
    The stumbling man cowers as a tall, dark figure approaches him. A single caw splits the air, loud as the shriek of storm winds. The cackle reverberates around the entire city. The blind man falls to his knees, bowing his head to the dead ground. A feathered hand extends towards the now foetal figure. In its palm is a lump of dull black stone about the size of a fist. It drops the stone in the cold dirt and the man reaches out for it with trembling, diseased-looking fingers.
    Megan and Carissa are whipped from the bus by an updraft that spins them skyward like a tornado. Once again they cling to each as time and space flit past below them like autumn leaves.

9
    “I’ve always seen him. From when I was tiny. Mummy says I used to wake up crying in my cot. And sometimes she would come in and find me talking to someone in baby language…” Flora hesitated, picking at a loose thread in one of her blankets. “Someone she couldn’t see. I was always really happy and smiley afterwards because I thought the Crowman was my daddy coming to visit me. But I don’t remember very much from back then. Only that I felt very lonely when he wasn’t around.”
    Gordon nodded, knowing that solitude well. His loneliness was created by the Crowman too, even if the reasons for that were different.
    Flora’s words had aroused some deeply held guilt in her mother, it seemed, because she now began to make explanations and excuses:
    “Flora never met her dad, Gordon. He was gone before I knew I was pregnant. There was no work and I needed money for when the baby came along. I did what I had to do. I didn’t like having men come into the flat