Free The Crowmaster by Barry Hutchison

fixed on my face, but I couldn’t hold her gaze any longer. I turned away, searching for a way to change the subject.
    â€˜What’s that?’ I asked, spotting a large wooden box like a treasure chest over by the corner of the room.
    â€˜That, young man,’ she said, her blue eyes shimmering with excitement, ‘is my dressing-up box!’
    I looked at her. ‘You have a dressing-up box?’
    â€˜It’s from when I was a girl,’ she said, laughing. ‘Of course I don’t use it now.’
    I pretended to wipe sweat from my brow. ‘Phew.’
    â€˜Although,’ she said, almost skipping over to the chest, ‘what’s say we have a little look inside?’
    â€˜Um, well, yeah, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but it’s getting quite late.’
    â€˜Oh, come on, it’s been years since I looked in here,’ she said, taking hold of a handle on the side of the chest and dragging it into the middle of the room. ‘A quick peek, that’s all. What harm could it possibly do?’

Chapter Eight
DRESSING UP
    I ’ve never thought of myself as “cool”. If anything, I’m the exact polar opposite of cool. I’ve been called a lot of names in school. Geek. Dweeb. Dork. Nerd. I’ve been called them all, mostly by the same three boys.
    But not “cool”. No one’s ever called me that.
    And there, kneeling on the floor beside a fifty-one-year-old woman as she rummaged around in a box full of fancy-dress outfits, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more uncool in my life.
    â€˜Look at this! I’d forgotten about this one!’ Marion chirped. She pulled out a crumpled pile of green material and looked at it as if it were carved from solid gold.
    â€˜What is it?’ I asked, trying to get into the spirit of things, but failing miserably. It had been a long, horrible day and I’d barely slept the night before. I didn’t want to look at costumes, I wanted to go to bed.
    â€˜It’s a frog,’ she said, with a tone that suggested I’d have to be an idiot not to realise what the scraps of cloth were meant to be. ‘It’s Mr Froggy.’
    â€˜So it is.’
    Marion folded the costume neatly and sat it to one side. ‘What else have we got in here?’ she wondered, digging deeper down into the pile.
    The frog outfit was the fourth one she’d pulled out. Or maybe it was the fifth. I couldn’t say for sure. My ability to count had deserted me twenty minutes ago when she’d opened the chest. So had my will to live. This was torture.
    â€˜I used to fit in this fairy outfit,’ she announced, holding up a pink leotard with cardboard wings attached. She was looking at the outfit, but her eyes seemed to stare through it. ‘The fun I used to have,’ she said quietly. ‘Long time ago. Long time.’
    It was one of those moments when I didn’t know whether to speak or not. She was lost in a memory, probably back as a fairy, dancing around this same house. I wondered how many years ago it had been.
    â€˜But listen to me,’ she said, shoving the costume carelessly back into the trunk, ‘rattling on about childish things.’ She picked up some of the other outfits and began cramming them forcefully back inside the box. Her face was tinged with red, as if she was embarrassed at the way she had drifted off. ‘You don’t want to be sat here with me doing this. You’ll be wanting your bed.’
    I thought of the single chair beneath the kitchen table, and of the bowl of food set out for the dog that would never be coming home.
    â€˜It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m enjoying it.’
    She hesitated with a bundle of clothes halfway to the box. ‘Really?’
    â€˜Yeah, it’s good. It’s interesting. Show me them all.’
    â€˜You sure?’ Marion asked. ‘There’s quite a lot of them.’
    I leaned over and