A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre

by DeAnna Knippling

  I’m to the point where I’m still puking but nothing’s coming out, when someone touches me on my back. “Kid—kid—what happened? Where is everyone? Where’s the bus driver? Did you see—?”

  It’s a woman’s voice, hoarse from shouting. She sniffs. I guess she’s crying.

  I open my eyes.

  In front of me, mostly buried in my flattening mountain of puke, is a ripped-off piece of ear. It’s like a piece of corn, you can see it when you throw it back up again. There’s the red-brown of X’s skin and the bloody pink of fat from inside it.

  “Kid? Hey, kid?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. Barely any sound comes out. I’m staring at that piece of ear and hoping that it doesn’t look too much like a piece of an ear. There’s a long hangy piece of skin from where it ripped upwards. “I don’t know what happened. I just woke up.”

  The hand stops touching my back.

  “Let me help you up.”

  I shake my head. “I’m going to puke some more.”

  It’s not that much of a lie. As soon as I say it, I start heaving again. Nothing comes out.

  “Okay, okay.”

  While I’m puking I have this fantasy about a handsome guy coming into the bus and picking me up, and carrying me to his home. He’ll love me forever. He’ll tell me I’m beautiful.

  I’ll only have one secret from him, I promise.

  “What’s that?” the woman asks. Her hand brushes my hair as she tries to pick up the piece of ear.

  My feet are tingling, they’re numb, they’re burning, all at the same time, and this shooting fear runs up my skin and I desperately shove my face into the pile of puke. My teeth close on a mouthful of ear and puke and…I suck the whole thing into my mouth like it’s spaghetti. It tastes like the powdered cheese you put on top of spaghetti. I am never going to eat that kind of cheese again.

  But anyway I swallow it.

  I mean, I try.

  I swallow it, and then I puke it back into my mouth again.

  And then I have to swallow it again.

  This time it stays down.

  The woman’s hand is stroking my hair. “Shh,” she says, even though I’m not making any sound.

  The bus shifts a little. I know I should say something but I’m still gulping back the last strings of skin from the ear. I hear a grunt, and then the woman says, “What?”

  The bus shakes and there’s a thump and then the woman falls on top of me and knocks the air out of me. My head hits the floor again. I don’t actually pass out, but it’s close. I see blackness closing around the sides of my vision. I feel puke falling off my face in clumps. Every time I puke I swear I’ll do a better job of chewing my food but I never do. I’m never eating spaghetti again. Never.

  The bus shifts a little, and this time I hear footsteps. The woman slides off me, just like the other person did. Her head hits the ceiling of the bus with a thump, just like his did.

  I put my hand on top of the puke and lay the side of my face on my hand. I know I have to get out of there, but I have to rest for a second.

  I try to puke up the ear again but it won’t come.

  I get up on my hands and knees. I’m facing the wrong way and there’s glass everywhere. I turn around and start crawling across the mud and the blood toward the door. I pull the sleeves of my coat over my hands, and I push the biggest pieces of glass out of the way as I go.

  I crawl to the door and that’s when I see them. The monsters.

  They’re just like we thought they were. They have white skin and rough bristles all over their bodies, like pigs. They don’t smell bad, though. Some are red, some are black, and some are white, but most of them are different colors mixed together like pigs. They grunt. They grunt, but it sounds more like they’re talking than pigs do. Their legs are up to the knees with mud, from walking through the icy water by the old cattails.

  There’s only two, plus the woman on the ground. She’s on her back with her head flopped over funny.

  And X.

  He’s on the ground, too. Most of his face is gone. For a second I think I did it, but I think I would have known it if I puked it all back up again.

  The monsters are by the front of the bus, and they’re grunting at each other, pushing each other back and forth. One of them is bigger than the other.

  They both know I’m there.

  The younger littler one wants to kill me. I think that’s what he’s saying. He keeps running toward me, and the big one keeps pulling him down. The big one is bleeding from a cut on his side.

  I crawl away from the bus.

  In the grass by the bus is a rifle. I think the woman was shooting at the monsters with it, and thought she killed them before she came to save me. I pick up the rifle. It has a wood stock, just like

  The barrel is kind of warm, warmer than the ground anyway. It smells like someone’s been hunting with it. I use the bolt to load a .22 short shell. The two monsters are still fighting, the big one knocking the little one down again, only this time, the little one finds a rock and smashes it into the big one’s face, then comes running toward me.

  I’m sitting on the ground with my skirt in muddy water and my boots in front of me. I aim. I take that little bit of extra time to aim, because I know I’m not going to scare him off. If I don’t hit him the first time I’m dead. His head keeps moving up and down as he runs toward me but that’s okay, I know how to shoot.

  I breathe out and relax, then squeeze.

  It’s a pretty good shot, it goes a little high. I hit the monster right below the collarbone. It goes in. I work the bolt again and fire. I don’t have time to aim so I don’t. I just fire again and again, until the monster falls and I’m out of shells.

  I roll to the side or he would have fallen on top of me. Instead he falls face down in the mud and the dead grass. I get splattered with blood and mud. I wait for him to get up and try to kill me. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. His skin gets paler and paler, and the cold breeze makes his hair bristles twitch.

  I stare at his back for a long time, until I hear someone walking through the mud and dead grass toward me.

  It’s Martin. He’s walking toward me with a rifle in his hands, pointed off to the side toward the other monster, but he’s not shooting it.

  “Hey, little sis,” he says. He squats down next to me, puts the gun down, and picks me up. I grab his neck and start crying. “Shhh…you had to do it. He was going to kill you.”

  He starts to lift me, then says, “Pick that up for me, will you?”

  I rub my face on his shoulder and try to grab the rifle, but it keeps sliding out of my hands. He grunts and turns around on his boots, grabs the gun while he braces me on his knees. He keeps looking at the dead monster.

  Martin pinches me tight and stands, up the gun braced in his hand under my knees.

  He walks backwards for a while, almost falling into the mud.

  Finally he turns around and starts walking faster. He jogs up the hill toward the road. I’m bouncing around in his arms. But that doesn’t stop me from looking past his shoulder at the dead monster on the ground.

  “Don’t look,” Martin says.

  But I do look. I don’t stop looking until he starts threatens to hurt me.

  I’m not afraid of going to Hell. Hell is a joke. Hell is getting detention after you’ve been raped. Hell is…hell is sending a letter without a return address to tell your little brother how, later that night, you crawled and crawled back through the tunnel, found another one of the monsters, a girl monster this time, and made her come back with you into the house, so she could kill Mom & Dad and Martin.

  Hell is taking a shower, going through Mom’s purse for money, and walking back out to the highway to hitchhike the fuck away from the middle of nowhere, and leaving your little brother behind, because you know that he’ll get taken in by foster parents, somewhere far away from nowhere.

  Hell is leaving your little brother behind so he won’t end up like
you.

  Hell’s not that bad. I’m not afraid of Hell anymore.

  I hope you get this and you’re safe.

  I’m sorry it turned out that I couldn’t tell you the truth. I meant to. I swear I meant to. I tried to, but I couldn’t. I hope someday you’ll understand. Just know that I love you, and I promise I’ll never see you again.

  Don’t go back to the farm. Don’t look. I went back there a couple of days ago, I hitchhiked on a semi. Already the paint’s peeling off the sheds and everything’s full of weeds. There’s yellow tape that was supposed to be all around our yard, but a lot of it came off. The letters are all faded and they flap around in the wind. I saw some of the pigs back up in the shelterbelt past the house. They’re wild now.

  The bus is still upside down out there. The water is a lot higher this year, everything’s flooded out there. It’s so deep that it’s covering a lot of the trees that were there. It’s all flooded. The monsters…they’re all drowned out. They’re gone.

  It wasn’t in the news. I mean it was, but they lied about it. So I’m not the only one. They just said the bus crashed into Mom and Dad’s car and ran off the road and killed everybody, and they decided to have closed caskets.

  I know I’m a monster but

  I don’t want to kill myself anymore. I’m okay. I found my strength. Maybe someday I’ll find peace.

  Love you, your big sister,

  Lisa

  * * * * *

  Ah. Thank you. That explains—not everything, but a great deal.

  When I had reached the top of the basement stairs, it seemed as though an eternity had passed—and yet I knew that there was another flight of stairs ahead of me. I dragged myself through the passageway, leaving behind a trail of blood, shit, and feathers. I told myself that I would never fly again. Better to die quietly, I thought, if the desire to find out what had happened to Facunde and Ibarrazzo had not tortured me so.

  The rumbling from below had already begun to echo up the stairs in what would have been an alarming fashion, if I had been able to sustain that particular emotion at the time. The noise from below drowned out the possibility of hearing what was going on upstairs. I thought I heard a bed creak, but I might have been mistaken. It is not as though we crows spend a great deal of time around beds.

  I reached the stairs upward and hopped up to the first step.

  Rather, I leaped, scrabbled my claws on the wood, hooked my beak on the edge, and dragged myself upward more by accident than anything else. Afterwards I lay on the step and panted, waiting for death.

  It did not come; it was busy elsewhere.

  I heard two things then: a knock at the door, and, in the sudden silence from below, the sound of car tires on gravel.

  “Hello?” the girl shouted. Did you hear her? She was here, briefly.

  No? You didn’t even hear her. How sad. I would have liked you to have seen her, one last time.

  “Go away,” I croaked. As though that would do any good. I heard the door open, and footsteps come inside. “Mother? Mr. Crow? Mr. Crouga?”

  Outside, a car door slammed.

  I rolled off the step and onto the floor, and struggled until I was able to stand. I walked, one claw in front of the other, into the passageway, and saw the light from the window outside shining over that long, filthy floor in front of me, and thought, I’ll never live to reach the end of this passageway. The noises from downstairs hadn’t yet resumed. The thing that was below might have been behind any doorway, waiting to pounce.

  A shadow fell over me, along the length of the hallway.

  I walked toward it, dragging my claws in the mud. It reached down for me, and it was gentler than I had thought it would be.

  It was the girl, although at that point, I wouldn’t have cared if it were the monster.

  She carried me outside and put me down in the grass. The pink blanket lay beside the door, and she had scuffed mud into the doormat. Her feet were bare, the socks and shoes lost. Are human children always this way?

  She could not go back into the house; she could not stay outside.

  The front gate creaked, and a man stepped inside onto the pitted cement sidewalk leading to the front door. The priest. I knew him, as well as any crow knows a human—he had told me his story. It was an odd one, but the strength of stories is not in the believing of them, but in knowing who would tell such a thing, and so he felt very familiar, the tall man in the dark clothing, wearing thick glasses and keeping a silver medal around his neck.

  After a few steps he stopped and sniffed deeply, then frowned.

  “Is your mother home?” he asked the girl. “I thought you had run away. There are still searchers out looking for you.”

  “I didn’t run, I was carried,” said the girl. Her tangled hair dragged across her face as she straightened up. “The crows took me.”

  She said it as though daring him to disbelieve her. But he only looked at me and said, “I see.”

  “Mr. Crow is hurt. You have to take him while I go fight my mother.”

  The noises had resumed within the basement by then, groaning and creaking, and just then a terrible crash echoed across the yard. The thing in the basement had, I knew, come out. It snuffled around the bottom of the stairs. Wood burst and fragile things shattered; there was the sound of distorted music for a moment, the twanging of a hundred strings as it destroyed the piano in the room beside the entrance, a piano that only the girl had ever played.

  The priest knelt down next to me and said, “Are you the one I spoke to before?”

  “Machado,” I said. “My name is Machado. And if you would do me a favor…” I twitched my beak toward the girl.

  He pressed his lips together. The girl was watching him.

  “You want him to take me away,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “I don’t need to be rescued.”

  “You don’t need to see what happens to your mother, either.”

  “I want to.”

  The priest cleared his throat and pushed up his glasses with a torn, scabbed fingernail. “What we want and what we need are very different things. Imagine what your mother might have been like, if she wasn’t getting what she wanted all the time.”

  “Don’t talk down to me.”

  “All right, then: stay here and you’ll turn into a murderer and an evil magician like your mother. You can choose to watch her die. I won’t stop you. But the first time you call up dark magic, I will start hunting you.”

  “You’re not so scary.”

  He sighed.

  “If you’re worried about me scaring you, then you’re worried about the wrong things. I warned your mother, once, about the time you were born. She bided her time. I thought she was done with all that, she was a woman who was struggling with a heavy past who had chosen to walk in the light.”

  “I don’t want to walk in the light.”

  He put a finger to her lips, and she quieted. “She didn’t, either. She kept her life in the darkness, and let hate twist her, over and over again. Do you know why I am here?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Because your mother called me. She said she had done something so terrible that she wished to die. She said she knew she would never be able to go to Heaven. She only wanted me to come and kill her, to make sure she was dead and wouldn’t be a slave to some demon walking around in her skin.”

  “The Crouga,” the girl whispered. And then she began to shiver.

  “No, child. The Crouga is a little boogeyman. There are things much, much worse that are waiting to eat your mother, coming up out of the darkness to climb into her skin and pretend to be her. She was so terrified of them that she killed your Papa, and your baby brother, and now she is trying to kill you, in order to escape them. And that is why she called me. Not because she wanted me to save you. Only because she wanted the pain to end. ”

  He stood. The crashing and groaning and thorough breaking of things inside the house was continuing, loud
yet methodical and measured. Unhurried.

  “Is that who you wish to become?” he asked, sweeping a hand toward the house. “A creature of hate?”

  “I want to see her suffer.”

  But her voice wasn’t as sure as it had been, a moment ago.

  “I will watch for you,” I said. “If the priest will raise me up on a stick and set me at her window. I will watch and tell you all about it later. If that’s what you still want.”

  The girl’s lower lip trembled.

  “Mama,” she said.

  No tears filled her eyes, but she broke then: her limbs came undone, and she fell on the ground, with the cold cement under her cheek, and her eyes sightless.

  The priest carried her into his car, which was still running, and closed her inside. Then he returned, broke a long stick off the elm tree closest to the house, and lifted me on it to the high window on the second floor that I showed him. He murmured to himself in a language that I don’t know—it might have been prayers in Latin. I clutched the stick and nearly fell…it seemed as though my entire journey through the air was one of falling, although I was doing the opposite.

  The sweet smell of dead flowers oozed from the cracks in the window. I looked inside, and there you were, awake then, with wide eyes, staring at the door, looking at your hands. The large, flesh-colored telephone on the small table next to the bed had been, by then, taken off its hook.

  As the priest carried the girl, he had been telling her the beginning of a story, one that I had heard before. If you had heard it earlier—well. Let me tell it to you now.

  15. The Rock that Takes Off Your Skin

  The wind stung Omanu’s eyes as she floated in the bay and she wondered if her whole body would sting, when she took her skin off and became a human.

  The waves rocked her up and down but she had found the place among the currents where part of it wanted to pull her in and part of it wanted to push her out and part of it wanted to pull her down, but with that many currents all at once, she didn’t have to be pulled by any of them. All she had to do was balance on the tips of her flippers and she could stay there forever, or until the tide started to go out.