“Let’s cut through the cemetery,” cried Dugan as he wrenched at my arm.
“No,” I protested, “the crows don’t like people going through there.”
“Crows? Don’t be a baby.”
Arguing with Dugan was pointless. In the end, he’d get his way so I begrudgingly shuffled behind him and we slipped into the green-gray of the forgotten dead with their silent tombstones and fading identities.
“But the legend,” I whispered, “What about the legend?”
My eyes darted from side to side searching for movement. They were here. There were always here.
Ahead of us loomed a dozen tall gravestones gathered together like a fortress guarding the exit hole through the hedge and into our neighborhood. On each gravestone stood several crows, all perched and gazing directly at us.
Dugan let go of me. He knew the legend and while I suspected he didn’t really believe the tales of Joey Morton’s death two years earlier, seeing so many motionlessly watching our every step made even him reconsider for a moment.
He let out a giant yell as he ran to scare them off. Not one moved. Dugan got perturbed and reached for his sling shot. As he carefully mounted a rock into the cracking leather pouch and pulled back the elastic, a piercing caw from behind broke his aim and the rock ricocheted off the stone of Archibald Hones, resident of the last of the readable inscriptions.
“What the…” yelped Dugan. We were being ambushed from behind.
“I told you,” I screamed as I launched into a full on sprint to the hedge hole.
Dugan was dazed but not out of control. He reloaded his sling shot and in an aspiring scene right out of a Spaghetti Western he whipped back around and fired his shot directly into one of the perched watchers. The crow dropped with a lonely thud onto the stone below, sending the remaining watchers screeching in a flurry of black darting every direction.
“I got one,” shouted Dugan as he made a desperate run to the hole and into the safety of Mrs. Beezer’s back yard garden.
“Whew, that was close.”
“They don’t forget,” I warned him.
Dugan knew the legend of Joey Morton. Every kid we knew had told that story over and over. Like any fantastic tale, the real details were long lost. All we did know was that summer Joey accidentally threw his boomerang over the hedge and into the cemetery killing a crow.
Afterwards, Joey kept telling everyone that the crows wouldn’t leave him alone. By the end of summer they were driving him mad. No one actually saw what happened the night of his death, the doctors concluded that he died of massive head trauma; a result of running head first into one of the cemetery tombstones.
The other scratches across all his arms and legs were what really helped fuel the legend that the crows had attacked him though.
“They don’t forget,” I repeated that night while brushing my teeth.
“Yeah, you already told me. You know what? I do,” snarled Dugan and he got into bed.
After school the next day, I followed Dugan on my bike as we made our way down Chase Street. There was a long wooden fence running up to the sidewalk. At first I didn’t notice them but with each passing slat of fence they grew thicker, blacker. Their lurking presence took us both by surprise and caused us to crash.
I crashed my bike into the fence and flew off the seat and rolled to a stop on the sidewalk. Dugan wasn’t as lucky. I gazed over and he wasn’t there. It wasn’t until I realized that the traffic around me was stopped on the road that I began to realize what had happened. He swerved left off the curve and right in front of a passing garbage truck. After that: blackness.
“Let’s go home,” said Randy, my older brother, at the hospital. Randy rarely ever got involved in our doings. He was five years our senior and considered himself all grown up and beyond our childish stuff.
“They never forget,” I thought from Randy’s back seat. My stomach gurgled. Dugan’s loss was terrible and I hadn’t even come to the realization he was gone but this was about me. This was about them.
Randy lived up from the edge of the cemetery on Berma road that climbed to the plateau above. Taking that route, I knew they would be there…watching.
I swore I saw something black perched on a guardrail across the road. I was about to dismiss it when a large black crow landed directly onto his hood and stood looking at him.
“Yikes,” he squealed and swerved.
The car ripped the guardrail up as if it were made of paper and swung precariously over edge teetering on two wheels. Every small movement seemed to sway the car up and down inching it closer to a full on plunge over the edge. A crow landed on the corner of the car hanging over the edge. More landed. The car began to sway toward the edge.
“Cut your seat belts,” yelled Randy as he threw me a pocket knife.
With three car seats tied together I formed a makeshift lasso and caught a piling above. We held tight as the car slid off the edge and dropped to a grizzly crash landing below.
“We don’t have much time, they never forget.”
Indeed, the crows seemed intent on surrounding the seatbelt looped around the guardrail post. To my horror I saw that the webbing was connected by a seat belt buckle still hooked in. They were trying to open it and disconnect us! The unison caw and the ominous click were the last things I heard before blackness.
Nearly six months went by; much of it in a hospital recovering from multiple fall related injuries. After that, I kept my distance from the old neighborhood. Preparing. Stockpiling. Plotting. Because, I too, will never forget.
———————-
©2010 Edmund Welter
Ed Welter writes various genres of fiction. He currently maintains a short story blog called A Tale of Words (http://taleofwords.blogspot.com) and a popular humor blog he writes under the writer’s pseudonym “VE” called VE’s Fantastical Nonsense (http://vehow.blogspot.com)
Tags: Edmund Welter
