Three Crows
By Logan Anthony
A pact is a pact no matter the threat of damage. This is especially true when the pact is born centuries before the damage is realized. Of course, none of us knew about the pact. We only knew about the crows.
Posted in the tallest tree of the town’s adjacent forest, a trio of crows appeared after the town had been established. The townsfolk looked up and named those watchful birds their religion. For centuries, three crows overlooked the forest, the town, and the ridges surrounding the valley it all was seated in.
Then, a hole tore in the sky.
Those were the words of the town priest. Metaphorical, but the townspeople were simple and took this literally. He simply meant one of the crows had vanished inexplicably. Suddenly, after centuries, three diminished to two. Then two to one. And just as quickly, one to none.
In the absence of their three-pronged, all-seeing fixture, some of the most steadfast townspeople forfeited their senses of direction to the winds. They were isolated, godless amidst the pit of a sinking ship. No wings to swoop in and save their souls from descension. The tight, cross-hatched town streets filled with the tears of the listless and grieving, for the folk could not make do with the sick, idle chatter that filled their minds—minds that recalled and molded the priest’s words to their musings.
Perhaps, there really was a hole in the sky.
A hole that grew and swallowed our feathered gods from our clutches.
Others dismissed the chatter as nonsense. Some of the older ones snuffed at the malarky of it all. Younger parents likened the rumors to the stuff of the fantasies crowding their children’s shelves. Still, some of the most zealous service-goers—those perched on the pew edges, mouthing verses under their breaths—they took such conflations to heart. They wormed the meat of their brains around their minds and warped the words of the priest to fit a will of their own.
While all this unfolded, from what had once been my parents’ grassy hilltop, I kept my distance, watching my hometown and its inhabitants crumble. Hot air billowed up inside me like a wave. I hated sheep, even as I watched them flee the storm unfolding where it pleased, disrupting families and communities with unburdened ease. The southern countryside, the change of altitude and scenery—they did nothing for the chips stacked atop my shoulder and even less for the disdain I carried for those who did not prize self-sufficiency.
In the naivety of my youth, I’d believed this town to be the extent of the explorable world, and there we were so many years and regrets later, one of us watching the other succumb to its own shortcomings. The townspeople had, for decades, used religion as a crutch in the crooked hobble away from logic and sensible meaning. Now they had fallen past the point of getting back up to scrape the dust from their knees. I did not share in this devotion. Whatever wrath it invoked, I had long ago denied the existence of a higher being, some all-seeing eyes above—in exchange for relief. I had ventured to divine the answers myself. If not for my own limbs I would be nowhere in this life.
Before my eyes, the town came apart all at once.
Where the tears of the townsfolk had filled the streets, they now lingered and consolidated into waves. When the night was black as plucked feathers discarded in the alley; when the waters had accumulated to reach the knees and no one opened their doors any longer, even the businesses, and the downtown district with the cobblestone streets lost hope for the return of foot traffic; then, the waves grew and coalesced. They churned and frothed, pulling at the ankles, the very seams of things themselves, the veils between realms. Those salty waters dragged the cobblestone of all the streets away.
In its place, the dry, packed dirt armored years ago by the stone now wavered at sight of the oncoming waters. What perched atop scattered in the breeze. The remaining land succumbed quickly, clouding in the water before coming apart into clumps and dispersing out of sight, no longer existing as soil. The onslaught of water penetrated the earth and made a home there, swirling a dampness into the land that spread and seeped. The clot of dampness grew and what life it touched spawned a film of blackened mold. Decay sprung forth from nothingness like it had been waiting, outlining the periphery of things. Fungus formed and spread and infiltrated.
What few resilient humans remained alive soon found their brains swirled past recognition. Each in their own crooked, pathetic ways went mad. For as they sat grim and idle in their candle-lit homes, the fungus began to spore around them. The air grew thin and sour where the caps crowded. Rather than venture outdoors to breathe in the thick blues of the unburdened sky, overwhelmed at the thought of picking through the debris-crowded streets, the townspeople relished the closeness of the leaning walls, the choked, shared air, the tightness of a refilling nest (and later, inevitably, they each met with their own seizing chest).
Nearly an intruder, essentially a bystander, a mere visitor to the shadowy land once known as home after a decades-long stretch of time away, I had escaped the fate of these folk I had once grown amidst. My parents had both passed years ago, one following close behind the other like they’d done in everything all their lives. Only a single older, frailer sister of mine remained. I had come, in part, to bring her back home with me.
Bonnie’s health had steadily declined over the past year. I kept close tabs on it, even from states away. I had just secured a teaching position without benefits, which for the lack of I had been able to negotiate the provision of a cozy two-bedroom cloaked within a stretch of hickories, shaggy sycamores, and stout white spruce trees. Fine rectangular bedrooms with dark mahogany floorboards—one for each of us. The dense surrounding forest reminded me of the one we had grown up amidst. Bonnie would have felt at peace wandering among those trees.
Had she ever had the chance.
Her sodden cough, by the time I arrived, had shredded two-thirds of her lungs. I hardly had a moment to offer the consolation of my company before her eyelids fluttered shut and did not reopen. Her hand, caught in the clench of a tight grip around mine, fell limp when the air strangled out of her that last time. I’d never forget it.
I shut myself in the darkness of my childhood closet, just down the hall from Bonnie’s, staring up at the ceiling and willing whatever tool I needed to fix my problems to appear, like I did as a child. It never worked then, and I had no reason to expect it too so many years later, but a flicker of hope still unburied itself somewhere inside me when I rested my shoulder blades against that familiar pegboard wall and stared up into the blankness of the cobwebbed beige ceiling. I wished, and I waited, and when my back grew too stiff, I rose and trudged down the hall, dreading to confront the shell of her laying in wait for me.
Out in the open where the wish still ached from within and could not come to fruition, I would not find my sister, the one thing I needed, not waiting for me in any way I wished she would instead of the horrible way she was. I spent the majority of the next two nights sobbing and plowing through the rations I had intended to last at least thrice as long as they had, until my stomach bulged and ached. All the while Bonnie started decaying, and her stench crept about and slowly claimed the rest of the house.
I viewed the downfall of the town from a short walk down the road on the dandelion hill that rolled behind my family’s land and overlooked the town. Bonnie’s death had occurred in her bedroom. The fungus had taken the house slowly, a good distance from the unrecognizable town square. Our parents’ old farmhouse had resisted fungal infiltration, and the second floor had remained hospitable long enough for my sister to die more comfortably than those downwind of us.
I couldn’t bring myself to remain at Bonnie’s abode without her. I’d stopped thinking of it as home years ago and guessed it wouldn’t be safe much longer anyhow. As a child I ventured across the open meadow that bordered the farm and ducked through a line of trees standing like shoulder-to-shoulder fence posts. On the other side, an empty and abandoned water tower stood, legs cut down to treetop height—an old hunter’s hidey-hole concealed in the edge of the trees. Now, I retraced these steps and hunted down what had once been my childhood haven.
I readjusted the bag on my shoulder as the corroded metal came into view. Inside, grime and dust had marred all left to soil. Inspection revealed no mold, no fungus to speak of yet. It needed extensive wiping down, and I had to sit at the window or else stand with my back bent since I had grown much taller, but the water tower quickly returned to a familiar, nostalgic camp.
After Bonnie’s death, I could not simply leave for a different countryside, despite the safety and provision that awaited my return. Some responsibility gnawed at me for the place I had grown up. The bones of my only family in this world did stir here, I supposed.
I afforded Bonnie a shallow grave at the lip of the birch grove on the southern corner of the property where the sun pools for hours in the afternoons. From Bonnie’s letters I knew the beloved shepherds that spent their lifetimes at her side rested here too. From my own memories I recalled the graves of my parents in the shaded side of the same grove. I dug through the arthritis, thankful that the encroaching of the water had, at least, loosened the grip of the earth on her soil. When I was done, the sun had long-since set. I made my way back to my water tower camp, done with the family house for good. I had taken all I’d desired. Bonnie had lived simply: the pack was light.
I walked back to camp ready to rekindle the fire and dredge up a meager dinner of beans and rice in the mottled bottom of my stock pot. As I walked, I watched the sinking of my boots into the earth. In the faster moments of my life, I often neglected these small ways the land pulls us back, every step of the way. Now, I focused harder and thought of the birch trees shrinking behind me against the horizon, holding all my family, gone now, clutched in those sprawling roots for all the coming centuries of their endless sleeps, until their corpses had moldered away and the worms had reprocessed them, bite by bite, back into soil.
I held onto the image of my family cradled in the roots of those trees that towered over them, straighter and stronger than they ever stood. I knew the forces of the earth would work against this possibility. Eventually, those roots would curl around nothing but bone dust sprinkled in the soil. Odds were better the trees would fall or otherwise die. I turned and wiped the tears as they came. At least even from a great distance I could see the leaves fluttering in the wind above Bonnie and take comfort from the stoic guard of the trees around the homegrown graveyard.
I continued in the direction of my camp and decided against eating dinner tonight, too exhausted from my day of digging for anything beyond sleep. I kicked stones and branches over the damp grass beneath the trees, willing something to challenge the noise I scratched into the record of the night. Creatures brayed and cawed and startled and sniffed, filling the forest around me with sound. I returned to my thoughts, not particularly thrilled at the idea of returning north alone. To my surprise, I had become attached to the idea of rekindling the relationship with my older sister. Worse, I had anticipated the return of our youthful companionship.
These were new discoveries at the time, and I could not bear the weight of them. I rushed inside the flapping fabric door of the tower as soon as it came into view, eyes spilling over their brims. I flung my body through the room and collapsed. As the only pillow in its dusty, stiff cotton case grew darker and damper in the lumpy, cramped bed, I made no move to impede the current. As I cried for Bonnie—my beloved sister—deep in some shadowy, buried cave a part of me howled along with the realization of how incredibly lonely I’d been apart from her and all along failing to see. As I sobbed, I hated myself when I should have hated humanity for our tendency to see past the truth of things until the time to make use of it has passed.
The grief drained what energy still lapped at the bottom of my well. Soon, I was asleep. In the dream, Bonnie spoke to me. I could not make out the words she mouthed, for with the formation of each letter her jaw crumbled further into decay. Her jaw creaked open and shut but did not release sound. Leaves and branches rained over our heads as the winds tore at the earth and all that wavered upon it. I strained my ears and ran after the long-haired skeleton as she fled into the woods. I heard nothing until I tripped over a tangled oak root, and the crack of my head against the bosom of the earth echoed in my ears. I could not get up.
The skeleton of my sister loped on light feet, emerging from behind the trees to approach me. She waited until the shadows of the trees swallowed me from the moonlight. Darkness writhed in the caverns of her empty eye sockets. I forced myself to peer in to ensure nothing was left of her there—nothing left to see or be seen by. The yellow nightdress she had died in was shifting about her sunken frame. Her arms remained behind her back. The floral cloth was torn across her midsection and rippled in the wind, revealing gleaming rib bones that rattled around a shriveled, blackened lump of melting meat.
She stood above me where I lay spilled over the ground, motionless with fear. She knelt and brought her arms around to reveal a bouquet of feathers. When I recoiled, one bony hand shot out and rattled around my neck, pulling me close. The feathers tickled my cheeks and drew a sneeze out of me. Bonnie didn’t seem to notice. She brought her teeth right up to the edge of my ear, and when she spoke, the words swirled softly, like silk, within me as much around me.
The silken voice was older than Bonnie’s. I couldn’t explain how, but I knew it to be older than the planet itself—even its fading star. Older than the comet that destroyed the universe ours sprang from. Each word coiled around me like a drape and drew more breath from my lungs until I was empty and gasping and could hear naught but the pounding of my heart against the walls of my chest. I feared in absence of breath the voice would next tear out of me my very entrails.
Return to this town their protectors:
those who feast upon the fungus,
who devour our enemy,
who deliver us home.
I awoke in the forest to find my feet bare, immersed in the icy stream. The words from the dream pounded in my aching skull as I pulled my feet from the water and kneaded the life back into them, yet I couldn’t recall the voice. Sand in a sieve, it had slipped through the cracks of my memory.
I’d spent my life denying their godliness, but now I longed to uncover where the crows had gone and to determine what exactly had come to pass. Whatever they were, they'd claimed my sister before I could spirit her away. Dwelling on the thought of my failure sent me boiling with all the anger of a burning forest. I should have returned for Bonnie sooner. We might have escaped together. These notions tortured me at all hours.
I decided to remain at the town and oversee the pitiful finale of its death, all along the words of the dream running like a stream in my mind. Where to begin, I wasn’t sure, but I’d begun to hope for answers. Why had the town wasted away? Where had the crows gone? And why? Could I truly return them to their post and somehow right the wrongs that had transpired? I supposed, if I were to answer anything, I must trail back to the start. Those three crows. All had begun with their disappearance.
From a great distance their hunched figures had always adorned the treetops and appeared large but nonetheless crow-sized. I had watched the crows in their perpetual posts for quite some time as a child, long before the mysterious happenings and disappearances started up. I watched them birds with curiosity, out of an appreciation, I thought, for that dark beauty and the fluid motion of their wings, enthralled with the watching, not ever thinking to question their existence, like so many of the other townsfolk.
Now, my mind revolted: Whose agenda did these birds represent? What did they oversee? What did they look for? Anticipate? What in this sodden backwards nameless town could stir enough attention to require a trio of guardian crows’ oversight? What authority did they hold? Where oh where had they come from?
The waters in my mind rose and frothed, trying to drown me as I fought my way toward answers on shore. I would uncover what truly happened. Though I didn’t know, couldn’t claim to understand how, and had only the fading remnants of a dream to tread upon, I believed the fate of the drowning, floundering town laid somewhere with the crows that had inexplicably disappeared and taken with them the precariously balanced state of the town itself.
Crows’ Ridge: the old growth that had once sprawled the entirety of the south-facing forest. The forest that, since I was a boy, had been home to the crows and strictly closed off to mortal human access. This is where I went looking. I stepped off the dirt path and out of the moonlight to enter the tangled thicket, pulling aside stooping hickory branches. The underbrush enveloped me, digging in, rummaging through the pockets of my soul. Eventually, I emerged from the other side, ensnared by burrs, bloodied by thorns and twigs, fearing the unwelcome touch of another’s hand upon the cold sweat sheening my back, prodding me along.
A small clearing opened ahead like the mouth of a cave. A thick canopy blotted out the glow of the moon and casted large, reaching shadows. Halfway across the inky clearing, I began hearing a faint panting several yards away, wet and labored. The unidentified beast wheezed with great groaning efforts and sounded at odds with immense pain. The panting faltered with each ragged inhale and did not inspire the slightest indication of hope.
I crept forward in pursuit, ducking beneath low-slung kudzu vines, stepping over a pair of felled, rotting logs sheathed in moss like a deer in its hide. Twice, I caught a face-full of spider web. Each instance left me sputtering and red-faced from the frantic slapping. I tore the knife from my boot and kept it at arm’s length ahead of me, waving at every indication of a bridge dangling silkily between the low-reaching branches. I imagined myself a comical sight, stalking through the forest and waving such a puny weapon at shadow-cloaked, unidentified enemies. I smiled half-heartedly, thinking of Bonnie’s love for the determination of my fear of spiders. I was grateful to be venturing alone.
Along the clumsy and laborious journey, a distinct shift took place from woods to forest, where the proximity of the trees seemed to shrink all at once and the air grew sodden even as it continued unimpeded to enter the lungs. The moon perched higher in the sky, but the shadows at ground-level were stifling. They deepened, coalescent, and the flora and foliage conspired against you. It was there. Somewhere just after the shift. Impressively curved, coal-colored feathers began appearing along the path. Arm-length and shimmering. Darkness that seemed to pull anything near enough in.
I was forced to reconsider the scale of the birds I sought. No ordinary crow, not even raven, could have feathers that large. The mechanics of flight simply wouldn’t function. I wanted to scream I knew it!, feeling vindicated for the years of enduring small-minded, sideways looks for my doubt, even around the dinner table with my family. The need to know the truth and the gears grinding within it prodded me forward with newfound energy.
I broke through a tangle of bittersweet dangling from a sycamore, and at last, the labored breathing I sought reached a crescendo. It came from the other side of the incredibly wide white oak that lay ahead of me. I was not halfway around the tree when I heard another pair of footsteps coming from near the breathing. I couldn’t imagine who or what else may be out here at this time and a part of me feared the beast I was hunting was hunting me back. At the threat of the footsteps I halted and crouched low, grateful for the weedy shrubbery that encroached upon the tree trunk and provided a suitable enough amount of vegetation to mask a slight human frame, even as I hated such an invasive species for affecting the tree’s survivability. I picked at the rough bark of the bittersweet vine absently as I strained to breathe in the quiet.
I listened intently. Another wet, sickening squelch accompanied by a pathetic, muffled whimper. The labored breathing grew wetter and instead of rasping began to gurgle. My stomach dropped at once, understanding the horrible act of witness I had just committed. I had just heard the sound of a body being stabbed, and as I cowered there with white static scratching around inside my head, I willed myself to determine what the hell to do next and how to escape without endangering or incriminating myself any further. I was pretty sure I had heard the fatal stab of the body, too, for the panting I had followed here had ceased. The gurglings slowed to a stop. Silence loomed like a wall in the darkness.
I willed myself to remain still and silent, if nothing else. I could not maintain a blank slate of mind after the shock, however. Various disturbing images carouseled through my mind to the warped, horrific tune of a children’s nursery rhyme sung three octaves too low and much too slow, to the point of chanting, warbling out earth-old pacts that bind and do not allow the mercy of forgetfulness. Vomit forced its way up my throat as the coppery scent of blood trickled around the oak trunk against my shoulder blades and climbed my nostrils hair by hair. Yet I remained resolute in my dedication to silence and choked the smoldering molten mess back down the scorched pipe of my raked-raw throat, hunkering in private agony.
Two tinsel voices half-in and half-out of whisper tiptoed in a dance around one another on the other side of the oak, but I could not, to my dismay and failing strain, make out a single word of what was said. I concluded in the end it may even have been a dialect of a language with which I was unfamiliar. Something about the voices, though, struck me as familiar. I waited until their silk-like, light-footed language (still indecipherable to me) faded with their uneven footsteps. Even then, I remained still until the aching of my knees could no longer be ignored and my ears had been sure the silence was temporarily undisturbed.
I emerged from behind the tree, my hand gripped around the knife handle re-sheathed in my belt. I took a moment to soak in the sight in front of me. The moment stretched as present and past assumptions came together, shattering one another. Truths and lies came forcefully and all at once together, shoving each other to be the first to step into the light, crashing into crescendo. The eternal moment stretched away from its close. The violence and vulgarity of the scene, coupled with the sickly-sweet stench of rotting meat, overwhelmed me. I doubled over and retched until I’d emptied the contents of my body in the grass twice over. I lost all dedication to silence. My tongue felt like a bit of wool balled up in a wet hand.
Before me lay the dead bodies of tens of humans—too many to count—stripped naked, in varying degrees and states of decay. The grass beneath the purpled and swollen corpses was yellowed, boot-ground down to the topsoil. In the center of the clearing spread-eagled over a tattered and stained canvas tarp lay a fresh kill—the murder I’d witnessed by ear from the other side of the great white oak. A body I guessed was still warm. Covering the ground like leaf litter in the autumn: those arm-length black feathers darkened the forest floor like shimmering, spilled ink, drawing the foliage in on itself, pulling everything down into a deep pit of shadow.
I approached and studied the fresh cadaver closer, noting miniscule holes and threads of sinew binding these feathers to the limbs, the shoulders, the very skin of the barely-dead corpse. It had been done before the murder. The truth settled and sizzled into me. I could not bear the weight of it. I needed to leave with the utmost haste. The silk voices rang in my ears like warning bells. Something wet hit the dirt from above and splattered gore onto my boots. I recoiled and forced my gaze skyward.
Above, perched in that great wide oak hung three different, older corpses like the one at my feet. They were sewn over and completely feathered. Even this close to knowing the truth of it all. Even as I could see the seams and the wounds and the trails of blood trickling from the eyes and noses and ears and mouths, pooling beneath the feathers. Even then, I could swear they were real, albeit oversized, birds. I’m not sure if I simply could not face that I had for so long watched and appreciated and longed to understand, and here now I did, and I did not want it. Or maybe it was that I had been right and suddenly wishing I’d never argued against what my hometown had invented or believed, whatever was the truth now. Anger seized up inside me in a wave I fought to control. For all my life I had snarled at the sheep plundering down the path ahead of me, all along not realizing that I wore the same coat and bore the same dull teeth.
And beyond the anger, like a great anvil crashing down over me, I felt the responsibility of this knowledge, this understanding. What was I to do with it? And who could I tell that would believe me? I had spent my life surrounding myself with reasonable, logical individuals of sound mind. Rita wouldn’t entertain the idea for a second. Certainly no one else in our circle. And the townspeople—what remained of them—were all spent by now. I had confirmed it. My pack bulged with their few remaining provisions.
I stared up at the feathered bodies in the tallest tree, overlooking the town and its torn apart streets. I thought of the townsfolk, for years, teary-eyed at the multiplying missing-persons posters and always turning to their three crows for guidance, making offerings and building altars when they should have been building pyres. How many graves made up old Crow’s Ridge? Around the bones was there enough room for soil? My stomach twisted and turned.
I stared. Reality attempted to warp itself within me, as if another’s hands were in my mind, folding in images and words where they weren’t before. Only if I squinted carefully did I notice that underhandedly between the foldings and embellishments they added, they also slipped details of the true happenings into the open mouths of their dangling sleeves which gobbled them up happily and swallowed them gone. I began to forget in snippets.
When I gave in, the illusion enveloped me. Warmth poured into my limbs. It was easy, I realized, to let someone else man the wheel. I closed my eyes and reveled in it. I stared up with a faceful of questions to no reply and for the first time waited for another to provide the answers. Those silken voices re-entered my mind, but not as warning bells. Even after their thudding footsteps reapproached, and their thick muscled arms twined around me as quickly and easily and warmly as the illusion itself. After my feet left the ground. Before I could think of flight. I heard the words in plain, unaccented English from a cold, grating voice, for the silk was gone:
“Another brought to us for release.”
In cadence, the other replied, “Another sacrifice to join the murder.”
Logan Anthony is an emerging queer writer, transgender artist, and worshiper of nature. Anthony holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing & English and works as a curriculum developer. Logan has poetry published or forthcoming in Thin Air Magazine, Oberon Poetry Magazine, and Hive Avenue Literary Journal. Their short story “HB-67C” releases from The Write Launch in June 2023.