the crows that came (1 of 2)

The world was, and frail. The crows circled with authority, as if they alone were privy to some terrible truth. The tree groaned beneath the staggering weight of hundreds, who immersed its branches and its leaves beneath the creeping shadow of their cumulative feathers, beaks, their unified call that like mockery overpowered and drowned the setting sun as fingery tendrils of incomprehensible void. Through the mist of the afternoon the Fenland belched and gargled geriatrically, soil slurped in digestive inevitability by the encroaching waters and the struggling weirs and pumping stations that peppered the peaty earth like explicit admissions of human failure. The moving crows formed perfect spectral shapes as one, their bodies swallowing the trees they had selected, circling the branches in immense murders, the air heaving and itself alive with the life of their taut bodies. Their call bled the earth singularly with breathtaking precision. For many months the crows had been gathering, the place chosen in cawed consensus.

The four boys watched the crows from some hundred feet away, felt safe within their pocked dirty denim and once-white trainers, felt the safety of numbers and of distance both although they were but tokens as empty as everything in truth. Hermanus, Grünther, Knid, Petron. Hermanus was the ugliest of the four by some unspoken measure, the leader also, his aesthetic shortcomings compensated handsomely in territory and power. He embraced his end, invited it, but the three were fearful when the intent of the birds became manifest; at that point things were already too late as machinations were underway like maniac graffiti daubed crudely on surfaces in the drying blood of the boys themselves. Hermanus had planned the excursion for some weeks, since shortly after the crows had settled. They were all he saw, their black feathers as spilt ink outside his windows as though the glass bore carrion behind its structure and he were it, their shapes stuttering into certainty when he pressed the palms of his hand flat into his eyes for seconds until visions came. The crows became a preoccupation, an obsession. He had been in psychic conversation with them since their unexpected arrival in the earlier months of the year and heard their voices guiding him, sowing the seed – so it seemed – of their imminent destruction. He heard them clear as a radio in the very centre of his mind. He was the chosen vessel for their ends, they said. He alone would understand the need, they said. He himself was of crow, though he wouldn’t know that and wouldn’t hope to know the implications of what it meant to be so, they said. They said infinite amounts. They were forceful and kind and they explained to him just how it would and had to be. He received their wisdom hungrily, a receptive host. We are foremost, they said. Your scraps form our feast, your forgotten boxed riches our idols. In his ignorance Hermanus laughed, thought the crows in their scavenging inferior somehow, failed to see the permanence of their adaptability. The birds chided him. Our immortality now depends upon a sacrifice of both our own and yours, they said. The tropes would be familiar, they said. Well-peddled dogma, hackneyed creed: from death cometh life or similar. The bloods of bird and man – boy – must assemble as one plasmatic whole. Hermanus expressed his incomprehension and the crows chided him further. They instructed him to bring three sacrifices to their roost, for the sacrifice of their own demanded likewise. His spiritual reimbursement was, they said, obvious, and resultant in the privilege of his communications with the crows, and his financial reimbursement would take form from the huge stockpile of silver items that the crows had collected by illicit means during their short tenure in the tree outside the village, small unnoticed items of significant cumulative worth, reimbursements both that should more than compensate for any moral quandary that might otherwise have been associated with their very specific requests. The birds had spoken and with it the concept of the birds must be destroyed. It was their behest. He drew schematics under the guidance of the crows, felt in his arms and hands their wings and dreams, tried to turn pages of notes and vivid diagrams into meaningful narrative explication but it was an impossible task. He alone would comprehend, this was the way the birds intended it. The visions were very clear. The roosting birds would fall as prey to the air rifle, the pop of its action the catalyst of change.

Hermanus had selected Petron for his father’s history as scoutmaster, a role of some significance in villages such as the one the four boys inhabited with others. Petron’s father had used his short appointment – and his long-term psychiatric depression and the episodes it induced within his person – to skilfully construct his own death liberated of culpability. He led the scouts under his supervision into the tying of a perfect noose knot from the same heavy rope with which they practised basic knotting works, and to then assembling a simplistic gallows by threading the rope around the branches of aged trees as necessary and demanded by the task. The scouts relished the challenge of assembling a machinery of death, although at the time had failed to realise the purpose or intent of their scoutmaster’s challenge, which they had considered a purely hypothetical structure – albeit one whose function lay solely with cessation – whose danger existed only as abstraction. After the scouts had retired to their tents Petron’s father proudly examined the viability of the gallows and deemed it highly viable, ascended the tree and tightened the noose around his neck, then stepped from the branch and into great silence. The scouts retrieved his rigid slightly swinging body at first light and carried it back to the village in shifts, rousing each other with sung songs and the recitation of local Fenland shanties now all but forgotten. They remained detached throughout the walk, as men far older than their years, thrust into placidity by the demands of trauma, but the veneer of function decayed as soon as the body had been set down in the doctor’s office, and the boys were destroyed as only youth can be, the smell of the dead man seeming to linger on their fingers and uniforms for months after. Regardless of this tragedy or perhaps because of it, Petron was still permitted access to the arsenal of low-impact weaponry adopted by the scouts as part of their rituals, as though somehow a substitute for a self-dead father. Hermanus had aggressively specified the necessity of Petron’s firearm as related by the crows, and Petron carried the weapon part-dismantled in his school backpack. It was the catalyst of change, Hermanus urged. The plastic cylinder of accompanying pellets rattled percussively with their footsteps.

Of Knid were expected accidents; his propensity towards harm of the unintentional type was famed throughout the whispers of his small Fenland village, and this expectation had itself become indistinguishable from whatever disparate traits could be considered to conform to a personality. As a younger child he had fallen from an old iron railway bridge while hastily fooling around among the secrets of its arrangement and was found bleeding from one ear and hysterical many hours later, the source of the blood “inconclusive” and “of no medical concern”, although for many of the village’s inhabitants it was representative of either a notable decline in Knid’s already highly questionable intellectual faculties or, for the more superstitious individuals, who still formed a majority of belief in Fenland villages such as theirs, the beginning of something far more unnatural. Some months after this he had been dodging the handful of cars that crawled his residential street over the period of one day – a game whose fatal slowness made it unlike any other, and for which the absolute and dedicated level of patience it required of its players was meditative in intensity – and in the apathetic light of afternoon had been struck at a speed greater than the dimensions of the road permitted. The driver had fled, and Knid was located by his mother after twenty or so minutes had passed, lying between two parked cars and seriously injured, his pelvis all but destroyed. After exhaustive surgical reconstruction of the bone he spent weeks convalescing with a pelvic brace that jutted its metal framework from his flesh, itself puckered around it, doughy and youthful and ever so white and futile and flawed. There were others too numerous to recount; one such occasion – though not an accident in the strictest sense the unplanned, unnecessary and wholly avoidable nature of the occasion permitted such status – saw a male friend angrily pursue Knid across the landscaped stepping stones that formed a footpath across their headmaster’s lawn, and as their mutual feet transferred their bodies across the path Knid’s friend had to the school’s jubilation punched Knid in the front of the face once with every step, some nine or ten punches, while Knid’s arms remained resolutely at his sides, his focus remaining on walking safely backwards away from the raining blows and highly personal vocal abuse, the gruelling finale of some petty short-lived feud that had driven their friendship to its close. Though the punches had been ineffective as violence, as psychically damaging instances they were of profound value, and Knid himself felt broken by the accumulation of instances, as though his entire life had been crystallised and as such rendered worthless by one fundamentally tepid if persistent beating, and he wept peacefully in the immersive loneliness of the school car park, cowering behind teachers’ estate cars and yearning for change.

Grünther was of orthodox upbringing and spoke prayer as he walked, and both he and his family were of some considerable mystery to the village. Little was known of the intricacies of their home life and no other of the village’s several hundred inhabitants had ever been granted invite into their home. The house itself had reputation as an unsavoury place, but the logical inconsistency of such a far-fetched belief held in correspondence with the very public knowledge of the religious commitments Grünther’s family chose to observe (such observances being of no secret and representing in fact the one certainty the village did hold pertaining to the family) left the inhabitants uncomfortable with their own assumptions and generally silent on the topic as a result, fallen prey as they had to an incompatibility of duelling superstitions. What little clues were glimpsed between cracks in the thick curtains that Grünther’s family hung at their windows provided no insight of value as the decor appeared normal if austere. Grünther was noted to be a boy of some intelligence. It was of little surprise that the crows’ presence in the trees outside the village and its associated symbolism took on a biblical significance for him in ways he found impossible to articulate.

The son of tender teachers, Hermanus had the most conventional upbringing of the four, which is why – he thought – the crows came, psychic conversations being the privilege and indulgence of the normal and the sane. His mealtimes were opulent and his needs more than met, but it was for these facts and others that he hungered for something greater than the offerings of his parents’ middle class values, than the sacrifices they had made for his benefit could allow them to comprehend. Comfort spawns discomfort was an aphorism he wrote carefully onto his bedroom wallpaper with neat ballpoint script, and amidst the complex love he felt for his parents he resented the same and actively sought the struggle he believed would give meaning to his at the very least occurring life, and with him Hermanus selected three as vacant and as racked with longing as he himself was.