Ravens and Writing Desks Read online

  Ravens and Writing Desks

  a Metaphysical Fantasy

  By

  Chris Meekings

  Omnium Gatherum

  Los Angeles

  Ravens and Writing Desks

  Copyright © 2016 Chris Meekings

  ISBN-13: 978-0692692813

  ISBN-10: 0692692819

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and publisher omniumgatherumedia.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  First Edition

  If a question has no answer is it still a question?

  Chapter 1 Lucy Gayle

  Are you ready, little girl?

  Ready for the hardship,

  Ready for the quest?

  From the verse “How it was Done”

  By the Wizard Bechet,

  Year After Ice 21045

  Is that what I think it is? Well, that is unusual, thought Lucy, as the face in the window winked at her. She sank lower into the mountainous bubbles of her bath and tried to go back to reading. Placing the book up in front of her eyes, she attempted to hide, but she knew it was still there, looking.

  Lucy sighed and reread page eighty-seven for the fourth time. Below her, she could hear her mother clanging pots in the kitchen, in an effort to tidy up before she served dinner.

  Lucy peered over the top of the book; the face was still there.

  It winked.

  She tried to glower at it, but it stoically remained, unimpressed by the mental daggers she threw at it.

  It’s not normal for faces to appear in the glass of first-floor windows, she thought.

  She would have put it down to her own tiredness if it wasn’t for the fact that she really hadn’t done very much. She had even given up Girl Guides because she wanted to focus on her exams. This had caused an argument as her mother had been very disappointed in that decision.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d seen the face. It had been in the flower beds outside, in the static on the television and, most alarmingly, in her mashed potato at last night’s dinner.

  It wasn’t even a nice face. Its eyes leered at her. It’s not a human face, she thought. Its nose, eyes, chin and cheekbones were all too sharp to be a person. Moreover, human faces tended not to appear in the frosted glass of bathroom windows. Well, if they did appear, they tended to be followed by shouts of “Hey you! What are you doing at that bathroom window?” But, if it wasn’t human, then what was it, and more importantly, what did it want with Lucy Gayle?

  “What do you want?” she said in a voice she hoped didn’t show fear.

  “Lucy.”

  Her name wasn’t exactly spoken. She felt the word, rather than heard it. It was in the rustling of the leaves outside and the drip of the tap. The voice had the quality of nails being drawn across a blackboard.

  “Go away. Things like you are not real,” she said and turned the page of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. She’d found that a commanding voice and upright attitude normally dealt with things she didn’t understand—at least that was what her Guide leader always did, and it seemed to work for her.

  “Lucy,” the face whispered, again.

  “I’m not listening,” she said. “Things do not live in windows. I’m imagining you. You’re probably just indigestion—a poorly digested bit of broccoli or a blob of mustard.”

  “I ain’t a blob of mustard!” the face squeaked in a Cockney accent, with its mouth this time.

  “You aren’t scaring me,” she said, coldly, “Nothing with a high squeaky Cockney voice, talking about going down the dog and duck, is frightening.”

  “Lucy,” the tap and light fitting rattled, but she had the face on the ropes.

  “It’s not going to work. You’ve ruined the mystery now.”

  “Curses!” the face exclaimed.

  “Now, what is it, you want?” she asked, but the face had gone. The window contained nothing but glass.

  That worried her. She didn’t think hallucinations usually went away when bidden. However, that line of reasoning led to awkward questions, and she really didn’t need questions about imaginary faces in windows—not during exam season, not whilst she was only thirteen, and certainly not just before dinner.

  “Lucy,” her mother said, up the stairs, “come on, Lucybelle. Your dinner is getting cold.”

  “Coming, Mum,” she replied.

  She let the name Lucybelle slide. That was her father’s special name for her. Now, he was gone, and her mother was using it. That hurt, but she couldn’t bring conversations around to addressing problems. She didn’t have conversations with her mother, not anymore.

  She placed her bookmark into the book. Then she carefully slid the book across the bathroom floor to keep it from getting damaged. She clambered out of the bath and made sure to turn her back to the window as she dried off.

  ~

  Lucy found it hard to sleep that night. The face kept reappearing on the edge of her dreams. When she finally slept, the face was there asking questions. She couldn’t remember the questions once she woke up; however, she thought, you never could remember dreams, not clearly anyway.

  There was one thing she did recollect. The face had spoken to her, just before dawn, saying, “Remember this, Lucy, when you wake up, even if you forget all the rest I have told you. Remember that I am the door.”

  I am the door? What did that mean? Doors were not windows, or faces, for that matter. Unless it was eyes in faces, which were windows into the soul. She’d read that somewhere. Lucy read a lot, mainly books about science. She didn’t really like story books, but she was working her way through many of the classics like Alice in Wonderland and all the Narnia books.

  She did this at her mother’s insistence. Kimberly Gayle was a great reader with many recommendations, and reading was a passion her daughter shared with her. Lucy could normally be found in the library during break time at school. Perhaps, she mused, her constant reading caused her lack of friends.

  ~

  The next day Lucy’s mother, who was still Mrs. Kimberly Gayle despite the lack of husband, dropped Lucy off at the school gates as normal. She’d wished Lucy a good day in the slightly dreary detached way she always did.

  Lucy hurried from the car and walked through the wrought-iron gates of Saint Julia’s School. She clutched her books across her chest as if forming armour against the world—an armour of knowledge against the jibes and name calling she suffered every day.

  The halls were packed with students, most older than she. This was her second year at Saint Julia’s School, and although she was no longer one of the, “newbies” as the senior students called them, she was only a second year and, therefore, not much better.

  It wasn’t the older students’ taunting that got to her, it was her classmates’ constant staring and smirking. The distasteful way they looked at her when she put her hand up in class to answer a question. The disgusted way they looked at her when she was invariably correct. She was always the last person anyone sat next to in class. She had to eat her lunch outside on a bench, even in the worst weather, because no one would make room for her in the canteen. The others would brush their hands across her shoulder and run, with the hand outstretched, as if infected, crying “Gayle’s fleas, Gayle’s fleas!” as if it were some sort of game.

  Things like that led to her lying awake i
n her bed, a few precious moments before her alarm sounded, seriously questioning whether to go and tell her mother she was too sick to go to school that day.

  However, if she didn’t go, she would miss out on all the wonderful learning that could be done. She’d miss out on the quietness of the library with its never-ending tomes on science and nature, on rocks and history. She’d even miss the fiction department, although it was silly. She’d miss the stories about triumph over adversity.

  She could empathise with characters who conquered the unconquerable. She liked to think that she might do that one day using logic and knowledge to discover something really good, maybe a cure for cancer or something like that.

  She opened her locker absentmindedly and placed textbooks inside, dreaming about her latest foray into fiction, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books. She fantasised about being the Lucy in the story who ended up a queen, having an adventure in a faraway land, living as a queen herself and having a king beside her. Then her mind really began to wander. She fantasised about being a princess, being locked in a tower and having to have a knight come to rescue her.

  No, that was stupid. She didn’t want to be locked in a tower, and even if she was, she didn’t need a knight to get her out of it.

  She looked down at the front of her blouse. It had fit snugly a year ago, now it bulged where her breasts were growing. They’d been taught about this in class. Oestrogen was zooming through her body like a mad dervish, causing her to act like most of the other stupid girls in her class. They were always mooning over some boy or another. Not her, though, not Lucy Gayle—oh no, she would never be caught mooning over a boy.

  She did recognise that this was all part of development and that this kind of daydream probably marked a watershed—on one side childhood, on the other side adolescence. One side was the simple fairy-tale of being a princess, the other had the prince coming to save you and take you away to his castle.

  She stood by her locker, a solitary iceberg at sea, and observed the bustle of students around her. She began to eye the boys as they strode past.

  All of them ignored her. Unconsciously she compared them to the knight in her daydream. They all came up short.

  All right, some only came up a bit short. There was the fourth-year boy with the blue eyes and the ridiculously good hair, who was in the football side and should have been in a shampoo commercial. Then, there was the tall dark Arab boy from the third year, the one who was always in the library but seemed very aloof to everyone, even the pretty girls.

  Lucy was not a pretty girl. She wasn’t what would be considered gorgeous by any stretch of the imagination, but she was on the prettier side of plain. Her nose was upturned, but not pig like. Her teeth were a little too big for her mouth, but they didn’t stick out like a beaver. Her hair was a rich chestnut brown, but it wouldn’t grow to any length, so, she’d cut it short enough to have a pony tail, and that was how she wore it. Even then, her look didn’t fit in with in with the other girls.

  She didn’t exude that mystical popularity aura that would have made her one of “them.” She didn’t have the “tits and ass,” as Grandma Ethel would have said, and her mother would have been aghast to hear. Lucy wasn’t quite sure of the exact meaning of the phrase “tits and ass” but she was sure that Grandma Ethel would have used it in this case—whether it applied or not.

  Anyway, she didn’t want to be one of “them”; “they” always got poor grades in school work and that just wasn’t what Lucy was about. She was about being right, being the one who knew things.

  While she was daydreaming at her locker, two girls from Lucy’s class walked by. Linda Bartleson was a pretty blonde girl with a milk-white complexion straight from Scandinavia and the foreknowledge she would marry well no matter the circumstances. The second was a raven-haired girl named Claire Bertram, who had a large amount of freckles and hawk-like eyes that could pick apart the style of anyone’s clothing at six paces. Both Bartleson and Bertram hated Lucy, downright hated her. It was what they had in common, and it cemented their friendship forever.

  Bertram nudged her friend. A wicked smile crept across Bartleson’s face, doing nothing for her beauty. She slammed the door of Lucy’s locker closed, trapping some of Lucy’s hair in the locker door, pinning her to the wall.

  “Hello, Gayle,” sneered Bartleson, with outright loathing in her voice, “How nice it is to see you here again. What were you doing staring so blankly around?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” Lucy said through gritted teeth. The roots of her hair were screaming at the harsh treatment.

  She bit back the urge to say something nasty. Lucy knew from long experience that a put down phrase like “pick on someone your own size” would only inflame the situation. At school, she was the antelope to these wild hyenas. She was the easy prey.

  “That might be your trouble, Gayle. You never do anything,” said Bartleson in a voice that dripped like honey and stung like venom. “Maybe that’s why we don’t get along, or perhaps it’s because you stink. Yes, it could be that you stink. Everyone knows it, even the teachers say it behind your back. Maybe you should try taking a bath sometime. Hey, Claire?”

  Bertram wasn’t listening. She’d turned her head to look at what Lucy had been staring at and, unfortunately for Lucy, that had been the fourth-year boy with ridiculously good hair.

  “She was looking at Matt Groagan,” said Bertram, as a gleeful smile stretched across her face.

  “What,” said Bartleson, her smile gone. Bartleson was dating one of the boys from Lucy’s own year, but she did have a crush on Groagan and was not happy with others looking at him—especially Lucy.

  “She was staring with moon eyes at Matt Groagan,” said Bertram, biting her lip with excitement.

  “So, you think you’re good enough for Matt, do you?” said Bartleson, baring her teeth at Lucy. “You think someone like Matt would go out with a repulsive little scab like you, stinky?”

  Bartleson leaned even more of her weight on the locker door. Lucy almost screamed as the pain shot through her head, she could feel something tearing. She thought it was her scalp. She could sense something wet in her hair.

  “You know, Linda, we should really help Gayle here. I mean, if she wants to go out with Matt then she is going to have to do something about the way she smells,” said Bertram, a wicked grin on her face. “We should give her a bath.”

  She reached into her rucksack and brought out a bottle of tap water she would have had with her lunch.

  Lucy’s eyes darted around in panic. They couldn’t be allowed to drench her in water. Not here, in the middle of the corridor, with everyone watching, they just couldn’t.

  “Bath time, Gayle,” smirked Bartleson as Bertram tipped the water over Lucy’s head.

  Bartleson let go of the locker, and Lucy’s hair came free from the door.

  The water ran down from her head and, mixing with the blood from the tear on her scalp, covered her face in a watery, bloody mess. She could barely keep her eyes open to see the faces of the two girls. They were far from being horrified at what they’d done. They were laughing at her, almost bent double in mirth at the sight of Lucy’s bloody face. A flush started somewhere near Lucy’s toes, as she looked over Bertram’s shoulder and saw Matt Groagan looking at her with a mixture of horror and pity; it was the pity that really cut into her. Tears welled up in her eyes. Crying, she was sure, would give the final victory to Bartleson and Bertram.

  Stubbornness was her strong point, and she refused to give them this victory. She stormed off to the bathroom to try to wash the blood off.

  Chapter 2 The Old Man with the Amethyst Key

  Oh, voice in my head, were you there before I could speak?

  From the song “Body Armour”

  By Franches Verns,

  Year after Ice 19456

  Lucy had managed to make it through the rest of the day unnoticed by Bartleson and Bertram, who seemed satisfied with just the one attack. The blood had soak
ed into her blouse around her collar, and she’d had difficulty explaining it to her teachers, but she thought she’d gotten away with it, saying she’d banged her head on an open locker.

  The lies came easily to her tongue: “This, Miss? It’s nothing, Miss. Just banged my head, is all. Yes, I feel fine. No, I don’t need the hospital.” And her teacher’s had bought it. Lucy Gayle, the small and meek, invisible to everyone - cellophane girl.

  The long and deserted street she walked, on her way back to her house, had a bad reputation. It was in the dodgier end of her home town of Warminster, and more importantly to some people, was in the poorer area of town.

  Tramps hovered in the alleyways, like ghosts. Little curls of rags, like bird’s nests, littered the shop doorways. Almost every store along the street was boarded up, and those that weren’t all seemed to be second hand shops or pawn brokers. None of the shabby houses had front gardens but merely opened straight onto the street. The paint peeled from them to reveal the brick below like half opened, unloved Christmas presents. Their window nets curtained them off from the world.

  “Little girl,” shouted a tramp.

  Lucy turned. The man’s blood-shot eyes stared at her from within a matted mass of beard and hair. His filthy clothes were the no-colour of the bottom of a river bed. His dirty, awful, gnarled hand stretched out to grab her.

  Then the air shifted. A haze, like heat coming off a hot road, swirled around Lucy, engulfing both her and the man. The world vibrated beneath her, causing a shudder to travel up her spine and through her brain. Déjà vu seemed to spread throughout the world.

  The man reached for her and then somehow reached for her again as if everything had been rewound half a second. And, all of a sudden, the tramp was not a tramp any more.

  Lucy guessed he was about sixty. He was squatting down in an alleyway, and he had a cardboard mat in front of him, but he wasn’t in rags. He wore a fine, bright blue coat. He had a wild beard, wilder eyes and a pair of half-moon spectacles balancing on his long twisted nose. For some reason, Lucy wasn’t afraid of him. All the same, her mind decided to err on the side of caution; she put her hand into her pocket and made a fist around her keys.