the crows that came (2 of 2)

From their vantage point the crows appeared as memories torched and flitting ever upwards with the movement of the winds, black specks of the charred present lost to history, seeking escape from the weighty earth. At Hermanus’s instruction Petron began to extract the components of the weapon from his backpack and pass them piece-by-piece to Knid, who assembled it with surprising authority and craftsmanship, carefully inspecting the action as he did so. He passed the completed weapon to Hermanus, who loaded it with a single pellet. Grünther watched the huge array of birds set against the dreadful sky and wept in silence. They walked slowly towards the roosting tree amidst the calling of the crows that grew in frenzy as they approached. Hermanus closed his eyes to better listen, to hear the crows, sought their myriad voices and asked their guidance, but for the first time in many months their conversation had fallen silent, dissolved in the open country that flanked the village without moral structure or spatial limit into mere sound. When they were close enough to the tree to smell its bark in the cool one of the crows landed several feet to the side of them and cocked its head to one side and then the other then looked at the sky and then inspected them intently and processed its findings with neither prejudice nor expectation, its sharp black eyes blinking mechanically as it conducted its research. They watched it watch them, its fast movements felt strobe-like or demented in the then failing daylight. Grünther felt moved to reach for the bird. Its eyes seemed to widen at the cocking of the weapon and Hermanus fired; the pellet struck the bird in the flank and it keeled to one side, its wings flapping and trying wretchedly to struggle it back to its feet but somehow very still. Hermanus handed the rifle to Knid, who dismantled it and wiped the pieces clean with a blackened handkerchief before returning them to Petron, who was openly crying and disgusted at the cowardice of his voyeuristic role. Hermanus stepped to the crow and waited for its wings to cease, watched its laboured breathing and waited for clarification or encouragement, which were not forthcoming. He recalled the clarity of their earlier conversations and tried to remain detached from the horror of the physical world. He peered into the terminal black depths of the dying bird’s eye and lowered his foot onto its head. In the soft ground the head found no traction or give and only sank beneath his sole, impressed into the peat like archaeology, the bird’s growing distress increasingly tangible. Hermanus instead stamped onto the head with a force that felt so vulgar until after five or six stamps the wings finally stilled though remained vertical, erect, their feathers caught in the breeze, the bird then dead, what little blood there might have been immersed in the quaggy mud.

Hermanus looked to the birds in the tree that gathered in their hundreds or even thousands and watched the four boys very closely. The eerie silence that had accompanied Hermanus’s act of violence had been replaced by the calling of the crows, an ominous chorus. Grünther thrust his gloved hands to his ears, his eyes wild and desperate like a near-dead creature, the assured truth of his own mortality suddenly explicit. Petron couldn’t bear to look and didn’t, yet felt the piercing shafts of the crows’ mutual glare tear through him like radiotherapy, his body left grated and hollow by his own tears and by the will of the crows. Knid methodically wiped his hands with the same streaked greasy handkerchief with which he had cleaned the requisite parts of the air rifle, each stroke further dirtying the skin beyond salvage.  The beautiful plumage of the headless crow was spattered with mud. Hermanus felt dread throughout his body; he raised one hand and spoke to the crows.

“Is this not as we agreed? I said,” he said, “‘is this not as we agreed’?” The crows moved amongst their number, their branches, the tree exclaiming in anticipation, but said not a word. Perhaps a score or so of the birds took flight and encircled first the tree and then extended their orbit closer toward the four boys, cawing loudly as they did so. Others followed suit until the sky darkened further with the weight of the birds, the tree too still heaving black and alive. Although they didn’t come within some feet of the boys their presence was felt like eyes in an empty room. “I’ve done as you asked,” he said. “To the letter. Brought the sacrifices, initiated the sacrifice.” Knid, Petron and Grünther moved instinctively together. “You came to me. You said I was the vessel, the conduit. You led me here to this. Speak to me now, tell me what to do.” One of the circling birds dived upon Hermanus and scratched a talon deep into his cheek; another pecked the side of his neck, a third the other cheek. Hermanus screamed and flapped his two hands around his face trying to swat the birds like bugs. There was a dreadful smugness to the crows’ aerial acrobatics. Alone, as individual birds, they were nude, but as one murder their elegance was breathtaking, their arrogant nature entirely justified by the majesty of their movement. The sound of the working wings was oppressive nonetheless.

“You’re insane,” said Knid.

“The silence of the crows is palpable,” said Petron.

“No,” said Hermanus, smearing blood from his wounds in streaked avenues with the back of one hand. “The crows’ future is paramount. From death cometh life.”

He cupped the same hand to his ear as though to listen to distant whispers. He nodded, waited, consumed the silence that boiled but inches below the din of moving birds. The conversations always followed dire silence and would again.

Knid grasped his chest very quietly and fell to his knees, then forwards into the wet earth at his feet, his cheek pressed tenderly into the ground like a lover’s embrace. His peaceful face spoke of nothing. The shock of the certainty had finished him, his body unscathed by the work of beaks. Hermanus smiled broadly and gestured to the dead boy, pleased with his achievements as he hoped the birds would also be. Petron fell to his knees alongside the body and rested a hand around the shoulder, then felt for a pulse and found none. He cursed the birds under his breath and Hermanus above it. Crows had begun to perch upon Knid’s body as though in its crude peaty grave its limbs and parts had themselves become extensions of their roost. A single crow flew at Petron and sank its beak into an eye, which pierced like soft cheese beneath the keratin blade; Petron attempted to grasp the bird, to forge death with his hands, but the beak twisted and delved further until there was little or nothing to feel and he sagged to the floor as empty clothes, the bird still clasped to his face like a failed prosthesis. The bird and others like it took their positions upon the fallen Petron, and they pecked lazily at the warm flesh. Their beaks wore moustache-streaks of still wet blood and carefully peeled Petron’s parted flesh in layers like the leaves of a book.

The two bodies were drowned amidst scores of the cawing birds, the black sea of their flapping wings alive and roaring in celebration and in violence. His associates submerged beneath crows Hermanus clapped his hands.

“The sacrifice occurs,” he said. “As it would and must.” He turned to Grünther who had taken several steps away from the two dead and from Hermanus himself. The bible’s presence was of minimal comfort and the daylight drew short and left the grey smudge of evening like idiot brushstrokes across the landscape, their own skin aflame with an eerie whiteness, dying beacons immersed in shadow. All seemed burnt, he thought, and over, such was the light or lack of. His throat dry as onion skin he turned to Hermanus, whose face bled on.

“It must be three, Grünther,” Hermanus said. “You know this.” Grünther nodded. Things would happen, of that much he was certain. “We all of us have a role,” he continued. “But it must be three. So it was spoken, so it is.” Grünther nodded again and watched the crows, still now and silent, and waited for resolution. He heard a very remote motor engine and the water in the earth. The two living boys both stood, both waited at the whim of the crows; it was far too late to do anything but.

Perched atop Petron’s fingers one crow then cawed, and others followed. In the failing light the caws became motion, and they each took flight from their place upon branches and bodies and encircled Hermanus, who for an instant felt the might of the crows’ power behind him and felt invincible, a bastion of future. Grünther hastened backwards, away from the scene, the crows urged him to do so. He heard them clear as a radio in the very centre of his mind. His loyalty would be rewarded, they said, in both spiritual advance and riches should he wish. He was the chosen vessel for their ends. He edged back further and saw realisation strike Hermanus like apocalypse. The crows entered Hermanus’s mouth, his eyes and ears and little anus, first one-by-one then en masse, their huge muscular bodies contorting through paths into the strained boy, pushing themselves distorted through any and all distinguishable orifice, the taut and stretched-thin skin almost translucent against the woe-black feathers of the burrowing birds. He could not scream and would not. So it was spoken. He felt their comfort even as they devoured him, felt such peace. His body roared and rippled with them, with scores of consumed crows, that pulsed beneath his flesh like enlarged cancerous organs given life, and as he finally bulged mute with their distended presence they burst from his stomach in a frenzy of impenetrable symbolism and soared to the skies with deafening grace, to the skies!, Hermanus’s spent face left vacant and aflame in the scarlet gore of his own giblets, his hollowed abdomen but a crater of scrap parts and soiled feathers.

Grünther spoke further silent prayer and turned from the three bodies and the swarming crows. The crows observed Grünther and bade him farewell noiselessly, and commenced their roosting ritual as he fled across the field and back towards the village alone. His silence would be respected there, the absent boys gradually forgotten. Three absences absorbed into the mythology of the village, into its mists and puddles, its perpetual damp. Life goes on. The wanton pursuit of information that had escalated with the passing years was a demand deemed improper by the village and actively discouraged, truth sunk unmarked beneath the swampy ground, community secrets. The quiet life goes on.

Many years later Grünther would ordain himself Parson, a title long redundant in the Fenland villages from which he primarily operated, but the memory of the crows would shadow even the scriptures when his eyes closed as they had to, their voices ever louder than the whispers of God, drowned as these were by the rustle of Bible pages and by the happening of life.