I hadn't been long under before I was summoned. It hurt. It hurt me so much. I was just aware of a buzzing in my head, and a stabbing pain in the centre of my skull. My skin felt like it was being ripped apart as blood began to flow inside me, pushing my skin up, making the withered flesh firm once more.
I screamed as I opened my eyes. I was crying blood. I gazed forward through the red sheath, and saw wood before me. Only six inches from my face. My limbs felt as if they were rupturing, and I began to flail around. I started trying to breathe. I felt panic as I realised I was suffocating, and that my lungs wouldn't draw breath. And then I noticed I couldn't feel a familiar and vital rhythmic thump in my chest. I stopped trying to breathe and lay as still as I could with the pain. I resisted the urge to suck in air. It was terrible. I fought down the panic as my brain tried to tell me I was dead. The lid seemed to be closing on me. I couldn't stand it. I had to get out.
I pushed up with my arms, and somehow managed to shift six feet of earth without drawing a breath. I scrambled against the slightly lifted lid, and pushed with my shoulder. I saw the light as the far end of the lid broke the surface. I felt the rain drip onto my face, cold and dank. I could hear the air moving above me, whistling across the gap in the soil. On the edges of hearing, I heard what seemed to be a caw. A long, desperate crow's call, and the cry spoke to me. I pushed the lid further away until I could kneel, and forced it up enough that I could stand up, my head just over the surface of the ground. My legs felt like dead weights, but somehow I managed to climb up out of my grave, pulling with my arms.
I crawled out onto the muddy ground, wracked with spasms as my body rejected the thoughts and sensations it was receiving after being so ultimately dormant. My head felt as if it was going to explode with the noise inside, and the lancing pain became rhythmic. A tapping. The cry was flat and vulgar, a broad and vicious sound. And then I heard it next to my shivering corpse. I forced my eyes to focus on the blurred black shape beside me. As it emerged from the mottled picture I saw, the pain and the noise stopped.
Welcome back said the Crow.
*
I remember I lay for a long while, trying to work out why I felt so bad. And why this crow was speaking inside my head. And who the hell I was. And a hundred other things, all as I lay soaking on in the mud in my funeral attire, trying not to weep from the pain. But I couldn't stop. I didn't remember anything, at first. But things started to come back, and when they did, I still sobbed. I remembered my name was Dan. Dan Forde. I had remembered this when I glanced at my hands, squeezing my eyes shut and open at the same time, blood flowing down my cheeks, but I didn't know why. I had seen the signet ring I'd been given by my parents -my parents- when I was 18. How old was I now? 20, I think. I think. I think therefore I am. Who said that? I couldn't remember. But I realised that I was again. Again? What the hell happened to me?
You died. You were murdered.
I didn't remember that. But evidently the Crow did.
"What? I'm not dead. I'm living, breathi...." I trailed off. I remembered something. My brother's face - my brother- snarling. Pain. In my chest. I sat up in the rain, and tore open my shirt. There was a scar across my chest, wide in the centre, just to the left of the sternum. I gingerly felt my skin there, and then realised I was missing a rib. My cold finger traced the scar under my arm, where a similar pucker mark showed where something sharp had entered my body. I remembered the knife -the knife- as it slid into me twice, and raked across my body. I couldn't see who held it.
I pushed myself unsteadily to my feet. The Crow cawed loudly and skipped backwards. I was wet through, colder than I'd ever been in my life, but somehow my joints all worked fine. I felt stronger, fitter, even though I wasn't even breathing. I hated it. I could feel the cool, cool air against my skin, and longed to suck it into my chest, to feel it inside my body, to push out the heat I felt in my heart.
I staggered away from my grave, my empty grave. That was a weird thought. A frightening thought. I headed for the cover of a nearby yew tree, but it was now autumn, and the branches were bare. I leant against it, and suddenly felt weary. I was so tired, as if I'd just walked a hundred miles, and still my grave was only twenty or thirty feet away. I glanced once more at the empty pit, and closed my eyes.
*
When I woke up it was dark. I was alone still. I guessed not many people come into graveyards. I felt other people with me, even though no-one was there.
Not like the others. You're not like the others, Daniel. I turned to see the Crow beside me, almost invisible in the night.
" I'm not Daniel. Not any more. What have you done to me, bird? What the hell am I?"
Death.
I looked at the moon, hanging low in the sky, covered now and then by the dark clouds. " Why?"
Remember.
"I can't"
You will. The bird fluttered up to a branch above me, and began to groom itself.
"Can't you give me a straight fucking answer?" I was angry at myself. I think.
The Crow seemed to sigh. Sometimes, something so bad happens, I can't let a soul rest. You become part of me. Part of Death. Part of the Crow.
"So you're telling me I'm part of a bird. That doesn't explain why I'm here." This time the Crow cawed raucously, laughing. "Nothing bad happened to me." The Crow simply got louder. I looked around to check if someone had heard.
You're dead. Isn't that quite bad? And you didn't get run down, now did you? I think you know that. I think you know why you're here.
" All I know is that I've got these scars, and I don't know how I got them."
Remember.... Remember.... Remember....
"I...I can't" I screamed it inside my head, and something clicked. Something someone said. A woman's voice. Sarah - Sarah -.
*
Six Months ago...
I walked through the flat to the kitchen. The sun shone through the windows, and it felt good on my bare arms. The black t-shirt I wore was too small and clung to my shoulders, riding up above my upper arms. I wasn't muscular by any stretch of the imagination, but it had never bothered Sarah. I opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk, changing hands and pressing my cool palm against my forehead. I ran my hand through my shoulder-length blond hair, greasy from the previous day's sweat, and laughed at myself. Here I was, flat-sharing in Cambridge, four thousand miles from my home town in New Jersey. It had been one of those sleepy little suburbs where nothing ever happened. I'd been the pride of the town after people heard I was going to England. So here I was, involved with my english flatmate Sarah, and missing every other lecture on the Human Biology degree course.
Sarah. Just thinking her name made me smile, which was stupid and sappy but I couldn't help myself. I told myself I wouldn't fall in love until I was thirty. And a decade off, and I'd managed to thwart myself. I remembered how she'd laughed at my accent when we first met. I was in the halls, and we met down in the student bar. She was slightly drunk, and couldn't help but giggle every time I said something. It took me a while to figure it out, but when I did I saw the funny side. Sort of. She looked amazing when she laughed. Her eyes shone and her laugh was a cascading waterfall of sound. That sounds so over the top, but it was true. I'd never met anyone like her. We got talking, and ended up meeting the next night. And the next. Just to talk. I decided to be straight with her from the start, no hiding or pretending. I was me. Maybe it was because I figured I had nothing to lose.
I told her I liked poems. I'd never dared tell anyone that back home. If I ever got close enough to a girl during high school to write her poems, I got laughed at by them all, except for one, but she'd been killed in a car crash about a year after I met her, and even she found it amusing. I told Sarah I liked poems so much that I wrote them. And she didn't laugh. She told me she did too. And we clicked, because we'd never trusted anybody like that before. We told each other what we were afraid of. We told each other how we thought we were going crazy and yet being the sanest people alive. And all this was in the pub, surrounded by hundreds of people neither of us knew.
Sarah glowed when she was happy. She was pale skinned, and she seemed to just light up. Before long I felt it was contagious, because when I was with her, I was the happiest I'd ever been. And I didn't realise at first, because I'd never felt it before, but I was in love with her. Despite what I'd promised myself.
I grabbed one of our four glass tumblers from one of our three cupboards, stacked precariously inside with whatever arrangement of crockery we could manage. I poured the milk into the glass, and gulped it down, craving the coolness filling my throat. Milk never quenched thirst, but it always felt good. I heard the familiar giggle behind me and turned to see Sarah emerging from the bedroom. Her hair was all over the place, but still she looked very appealing.
" You've got a milk moustache, Dan." She smiled the odd half-smile she had, which I was never sure if it was derision or just delight. I reached up to wipe it off. "Don't." She somehow managed to close the distance between us without getting any faster, and then I felt her finger brush across my top lip. " There." She smiled again, and kissed me.
" It's almost eight, Sar. I really should go today. I missed four lectures last week." I said, pulling away from her embrace. She looked up at me, and I almost flinched. "Don't do that! I have to go!" I said it half-heartedly as she pulled me into another kiss. This time I span away after. " I'm going. Ok? I'll see you tonight. I promise. Let go." She gradually weakened her grip on my right hand.
" I love you." She said quietly.
" I love you too. I'll see you later." I kissed her forehead gently and walked away to grab my stuff and get out before she caught me again.
*
I shivered as I walked towards the church across the graveyard. Remembering Sarah was painful, but I didn't know why. Maybe because I knew I couldn't go back to her now. I still couldn't remember why it hurt. Or what had happened to Sarah before I died. Anything. That one morning stayed with me though, because my skin could remember the warmth of the sun, and the warmth of Sarah as I held her. My nose could smell her, and my ears could hear her laugh. But I couldn't see her. And when I thought that, I almost collapsed. I doubled over at the thought of never seeing her. My stomach felt like it was digesting itself, and my missing rib ached badly. I fell to my knees in the mud on the pathway, hunched over and again, crying. Crying blood. The Crow strutted around before me, pecking at the blood that fell from my cheeks to mix with the old rainwater.
You're remembering now. Your body remembers. Soon your mind will catch up. Then your soul will remember.
I looked up at the bird, the blood still coursing from my tear ducts, filling my vision.
" I don't want to." I whispered hoarsely " Stop it. Make me die again. I don't want to know." The Crow seemed to peer at me judgmentally.
You must.
*