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

by DeAnna Knippling

  But nearly forty years was too long not to admit you were dead.

  * * * * *

  When he had finished, Zubalo hopped off the storyteller’s perch and onto the roof of the truck—our floor—which had by then become a thick paste of feathers and shit, enough so that even I was disgusted. And then he waited, slowly picking up and lowering one foot, a mingling of arrogance and terror that made me chuckle in the back of my throat. I remembered my first real story—and then the bead writhed in my mouth, and I had to crush my laughter against the roof of my beak, to keep the bead from escaping down my throat.

  I think that Zubalo was waiting for us to approve of his story. My head felt heavy from holding the bead, a heaviness not unlike the craving for sleep. I shook my head to try to keep myself awake.

  Among crows, it might seem as though the elders need to approve of a story before a storyteller is determined to be worthy of life or death, but that is not the case. Elders add something to an audience, that is all. Approval from the elders? Well, I suppose we have forgotten more stories than most chicks have ever heard, and might be trusted to know a good one from a bad one more often than not. But it isn’t the elders who decide.

  At any rate, Zubalo did not need the elders’ approval of the story; he had approved of it himself, which is part of the secret of being a storyteller that nobody tells you. A story is a lie, and nobody believes a liar who doesn’t, at some level, believe what is said.

  Zubalo, after discerning that he was not about to be pecked again, began to hop toward his coterie.

  “Mother,” the girl said.

  Every crow’s head turned to face her. Our eyes watched her face slowly emerge from the blanket, a paler shape among the gray shadows.

  “Mother killed Papa, and I think she killed my brother.” Her voice was so strained that it broke, and she coughed, a deep and worrisome burr of a noise. Her eyes rolled upward, and her eyes became white moons in the reflected light of the snow.

  “I left my brother. I left him to die.”

  I shook my beak. The snow seemed to crawl along the outside of the window like smoke with eyes, to seep through the glass and coil about our feet in cold streams. I wished to tell her—I wished to tell her a thousand things. But the bead seemed to shimmer on my tongue, the way sunlight shimmers across a field of snow, the morning after a blizzard, and I could not speak.

  “It is your turn,” Old Loyolo told her.

  The snow began to hiss in my ears, almost deafening me to his voice.

  The girl’s voice was far away, too. “I will tell you how Mother—”

  “It cannot be a true story,” the old crow said, softly. “Not today.”

  Through a fog of white flakes, I saw her eyes unroll themselves and her face lower, so that she was looking at him, at the meat-and-bone-and-feathers of him, at the pure stink of him, at the loose feathers and the wrinkled skin, the twisted claw on his foot that always made him hop in a circle during hop-races with the new chicks, making them roll on their backs and laugh while he won the race.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you do it will be a bad story, without an end, and then we will have to peck you do death.”

  She nodded slowly, as though unrolling her eyes had made her dizzy. I squinted. Around the edge of my eyes was nothing but whiteness. “But what if it’s secretly true?”

  “That,” Loyolo said, “isn’t my problem.”

  She nodded again, this time more firmly. “Then let me tell you one that I haven’t told any crows yet, a story about mice—”

  8. Inside Out

  Mice are the small enemies who will eat you up from the inside out. But I don’t mind that. It’s the pellets that I mind. They leave them everywhere! If only they would nibble discreetly and shit back in their dens, or within the walls, I might leave them alone.

  They were in the pantry, they were in the wash. They were behind the cat-litter box, cat piss or no. They were in my dish cupboards. They ate old love letters and lace. They ate my marriage license.

  The only room they didn’t touch was my daughter’s bedroom.

  So when I went to the witch, and she served me tea with the tea bag still in the cup, which I knew meant that she didn't like me, and she told me it would cost me my daughter to get rid of the mice, I said yes.

  Then I said, you won’t kill her, will you?

  And the witch said no, no, she just needed an apprentice. Nobody wants to be a witch of their own free will, you see, it doesn’t pay enough and the men will never trust you enough to marry you. So you have to work two jobs and spend your Friday nights listening to other people’s problems.

  I squirmed in my hard chair, and she winked at me.

  When I got home, my daughter, who was too beautiful to be a witch and looked nothing like me and was probably switched at birth by the hospital except hospitals don’t do that anymore, said what happened to all the mice?

  I said I made a deal with the witch to get rid of them.

  Like the pied piper? she asked.

  Yes I said, except instead of the whole town losing their kids, it’s just you.

  She cried and she raged and she threw a fit, but she knew that I didn’t like her, and she didn’t like me, and her father was dead, so there was no reason to stay. When I drove her to the witch’s house in the morning, her bags were already packed.

  Darling daughter I said—

  Oh, stuff it she snapped, and off she went.

  I threw the rest of her things out of the car, and off I went, too. But soon the mice were back and I went to the witch’s house to demand my daughter back so I could sell her to the witch again, and get rid of the mice.

  The witch said those are the wrong mice. They are not very nice mice at all.

  Oho, I said, you’re the one who sent the mice in the first place, so you could get my daughter. Well you’re just going to have to take care of these ones too. I left and went home but the mice were still there. They drank the cleaning supplies, they ate up the toilet paper. They ate up the wood in the window frames and the windows fell out. They chewed the wires to all the lights and I spent the night in the dark and the cold, covered in mice pellets, and the next morning you know where I went.

  I just don’t know, the witch said. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but those mice still won’t leave. They’re the wrong mice, the wrong mice. I don’t know their provenance.

  I said that’s fine but I’m staying here until they’re out and now you have to fix everything that’s ruined in my house because I gave you my only daughter in exchange for no mice and if you’d done what you said none of this would have happened.

  Then my daughter appeared. You’re staying here?

  I am.

  You can’t stay here. You have to leave!

  I’m staying here until the mice are gone, to remind you witches to work harder. You a pair of slatterns, that's what you are.

  She was still as beautiful as anything. I wondered if she was the witch’s true daughter and my true daughter had been thrown out with the trash.

  How are we going to get the mice out of her house? my daughter asked.

  The witch shrugged. Instead, she said, we should ask how they got there in the first place.

  My daughter bit her lip and I laughed. You brought them! I said. You brought them! You brought the mice to eat me up from the inside out!

  I was tired of waiting for the witch’s mice, my daughter said. So I called some of my own. I called them up out of your heart. I called up jealousy mice, and resentment mice, and petty mice, and angry mice, and revenge mice; mice of spite and mice of nagging; a thousand and one stingy mice; a thousand and two frowning mice; a thousand and three never-quite-right mice. They have always been eating you up from the inside out, and the only way to get rid of such a curse is to…

  Is to purify your heart, the witch said.

  Bullshit, said I. You said you’d get rid of those mice and you’re the ones who are going to do it. I
’ll not lift a finger, I’ll not drop a bead of sweat, I’ll not pray a single prayer to get rid of those mice. I am the mouse in your house now, and I’ll eat you up from the inside out. And I lifted the cover of their stew pot and ate all of it, bite by bite.

  * * * * *

  The bead in my mouth burned with a bright white light, such that the inside of the truck cab was illuminated into almost pure whiteness; even the black feathers of the flock turned white from the brightness of the light reflecting from them. No one but myself seemed to notice. They watched the girl and nodded at each other, bobbing up and down. A good story, perhaps not the best one that we’d ever heard told from her, but a good story, and they had liked it.

  My beak was wide open, and I had not remembered opening it. The bead burned on my tongue, burned and crackled and threw sparks.

  I tried to shout, but no sound emerged. A large lump moved in my throat, blocking all sound, and then all breath.

  I raised my wings, and a few heads turned my way, but I knew that it was too late.

  “Machado!” Facunde shrieked, over the chatter following the girl’s story.

  My wings went limp, my legs lost their balance, and I fell over, my face lying in the muck on the truck roof. I closed my eyes, yet it seemed as though I could still see through them: Old Loyolo turning slowly. Facunde shouting—screaming—something in the girl’s ear. The uproar of a dozen birds being flung away from the girl as she threw off the blanket and reached for me.

  Her hand wrapped around my chest, crushing it. My beak—I could have sworn it was open already—was forced apart, and the girl’s fingers pinched something from my throat.

  She flung it from her, a white and burning thing, glowing for a moment, then turning black as night and scuttling into the shadows of the wires overhead, where no one would dare reach for it.

  Ibarrazzo cried, “The Crouga! The Crouga! Mother of all crows, we must flee!”

  I do not know what happened then—I was gasping for air, gripped in the girl’s hand more tightly than was good for me. The world spun, because the girl spun me, and because I spun within myself. The world seemed to explode, the glass to shatter, the snow to burst into the truck cab at us. That is all I know.

  —

  We found shelter under a deep ledge made of that which had been thrown away, mainly within the hollow of a large white box suitable for freezing food. With all of us packed inside, it was also suitable for keeping most of the cold out, although the door had been removed and the wind thrust in after us, trying to tear our feathers off. It was still better than the open weather of the pit.

  We huddled around her. That is, the others huddled around her. I lay in the girl’s hand and breathed, one breath after another, which was a difficult piece of work. The girl blew in my face, trying to make sure the air I breathed was warm, and although it did little to ease my hurts, I was still grateful for it.

  “Machado, Machado…”

  Facunde sat again on the girl’s shoulder, peering down at me. Every time she said my name, I could see her tongue moving, I could see the back of her throat. The single light of the dumping ground shone down almost directly upon us, and even though it was shadowed, I could see that the inside of her mouth was scarred and bleeding.

  She had held the bead for so long, and I, after only a few moments, was reduced to a gasping corpse on the girl’s palm. It was not my proudest of nights.

  “What…” I said.

  Facunde shook her head. “I do not know. I found it while I was looking for grief-sticks and picked it up. I have been guarding it ever since, trying to find a place to bury it where the chicks would not find it.”

  Ibarrazzo clung to the girl’s other shoulder. “I know,” she said. “I know what it is.” She of the stories of matings, of chance meetings between lovers-to-be and flirting in the trees. She knew this horror.

  “The Crouga,” I gasped. “That’s what you called it. The boogeyman.”

  The girl leaned forward to hear better, and tilted me on her palm. That is when I noticed that our numbers were fewer, and that some were missing feathers, and others were bleeding.

  “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “Dead,” Ibarrazzo said, with such confidence that my heart seized inside me, and I coughed. “They have been absorbed into the Crouga.”

  “What is it?” I moaned. “What have I done?”

  Ibarrazzo lifted one claw, an almost human gesture. “I warn you, this is not a proper story. I do not tell this kind of story, normally I refuse. The world is dark enough without dwelling on it. Oh, you can tell what you like—” she snapped her beak in Facunde’s direction— “but as for myself, I will tell stories that bring more light into the world, and less heartbreak. But I know the darkness, yes. I know it better than either of you.”

  “Please,” I begged her. When I had wept over Facunde mating with another, it was Ibarrazzo who had comforted me, who had told me lies about love until my heart could resume beating on its own again. “Please, Ibarrazzo. You know I believe you. Please tell me what I have done.”

  She cocked her head with pity, looking at me with her good eye, the clear one. “Ach,” she sighed. Then she turned her head, so that she was looking at me with her other eye, the one that had turned to moonlight and milk.

  It was startling; Ibarrazzo never looked at anyone with her bad eye, only the good one. Under the harsh light, the bad eye seemed to move from within, as if it were full of smoke or small worms. She said, “The Crouga, it is the boogeyman. He started out as a crow who was unjustly pecked—or justly pecked, some say—and whose spirit lingered in the form of a small, shining seed. Any crow who picked it up would summon his spirit, see? And it would grow and grow…and eat, and eat. And it would have to be fought back, or else it would eat until every living crow had been consumed and it starved itself back down to a tiny seed. Facunde carried it, but because her heart was so cold,” Ibarrazzo shrugged, her wingtips flipping with contempt, “there was nothing for the Crouga to eat. It was only when this sentimental idiot picked it up that it awoke.”

  Facunde turned her head away.

  “How do we fight it?” I asked.

  “With stories,” Ibarrazzo said. “Why do you think we tell so many stories? Only to pass the time?”

  I blinked at her, and thought of her as a foolish old bird for the first time in a while.

  She saw the look in my eyes, the gape of my beak, and said, “I know a story that was once used to fight the Crouga. A story about eating the darkness…”

  Foolish or not, she was a good storyteller. I settled in.

  9. Treif

  Nitzaniya stood outside the corral at dawn, feeling the huge behemah butt each other through the vibrations of the ground and smoking one of Caleb’s cigarettes. She stuck the toe of one boot into the wire; the fence rattled, and some of the behemah spotted her and trotted closer, hoping for a treat.

  She shook her head and stepped back. Zombies grew the best tobacco, and the behemah’s hands, if thick and calloused from running on all fours, were quick to snatch. Caleb said they were trained not to knock down the fence, but she didn’t want to push her luck any further than she already had.

  One of the behemah, a big bull whose shoulder came up to her ear, lowed and pushed his way to the front. He moaned at her and shook the fence with his shovel-fingered hands.

  “Well, you poor mamzers, how about a story?” Nitzaniya asked. Her voice was still raw from what the Goodlanders had tried to do to her, but she was a storyteller, damn it, and if you didn’t tell your stories when the opportunity knocked, you deserved to live in a hell without them.

  The shaggy red bull lowed again, and some of the females joined the call, rubbing up against the temporary fence, leaving handfuls of thick red hair behind. Despite the cold and the storms coming off the lake, it was starting to turn to spring, and they were losing their fur. It only made their shocked faces and thick eyebrows look funnier, without their beards.

/>   She liked coming here, liked the smell of them. Liked the taste.

  —

  Daniel watched the old storyteller, Nitzaniya, from his window, which looked over the walls of the stockade. As she waited out her three days in the quarantine hut, she drank the last of her liquor and smoked the last of her cigarettes. She was even shouting stories through the wall, depending on who was there to listen:

  The story of the zombie who had followed a man of the Burial Society through a rainstorm—washing off his ipish until he had to abandon his cart and the remains of a dead woman, unburied—and the way the zombie had wept over the corpse then eaten it, wrappings and all (told to a group of old women); the story of the two ravens who plucked out the eyes of a zombie by taking turns cawing at it (told to a line of kids with their ears pressed against the wood); the story of the man who had lost his ipish and was surrounded by seven women zombies, and survived only by pleasuring them, each in turn (told late at night to a group of drunken men who knew better). Daniel knew none of the stories were true, but they were good stories nonetheless.

  Finally, the storyteller entered the city of Goodland, picking her way through the rusting cars and tilted asphalt, while sharpshooters aimed rifles at her from high, broken windows and gaggles of people surrounded her, begging for news. She waved them off and shouted that she’d start her work first thing in the morning, but right now she wanted a bath.

  Daniel’s son, Ely, who had thick, dark hair and a laughing eye, knocked on the door of his father’s library. “Nitzaniya’s here, father,” he said.

  “I see that.”

  “I’m off to help Elaine with the bathwater. See you in the morning.”

  “In the morning,” Daniel said. “Did you tell your mother?”

  Ely nodded. He was eighteen and anxious to be out in the world, traveling from place to place, killing zombies and having adventures. Ely had to make his first circuit soon, picking up young men and women to be trained for the Burial Society, but he’d waited when he’d heard that Nitzaniya was coming back.