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 fenlands 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 did 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 longed 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.
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 or 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 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 felt 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 ear 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 incomprehensible 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 earth, 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, by the happening of life.
