A Gathering of Crows

Acknowledgements

For this new edition of A Gathering of Crows, my thanks to everyone at Deadite Press; Alan Clark; Mark Sylva and Tod Clark; Tim and Brindi Anderson, who fed me while I was writing the last half of this book; Princess Alethea Kontis, who let me use her bucket of snakes; Bob Freeman, who provided a luminol light when I really needed it; Stephen Poerink; Miss Muffintop and the boys in the warehouse; Mary SanGiovanni; and my sons.

DEADITE PRESS BOOKS BY BRIAN KEENE

Urban Gothic

Jack’s Magic Beans

Clickers II (with J. F. Gonzalez)

Take The Long Way Home

A Gathering of Crows

For Skip Novak, Paul McCann, and Grant Riffle

ONE

When the sun went down, and dusk gave way to night, the mountain came alive. A chorus of insects buzzed and hummed in the darkness. Birds chirped from their treetop nests. Tiny frogs—called spring peepers by the locals because of the peeping sounds they made when they came out of hibernation each spring—sang to one another from shallow, hidden bogs and winding, narrow creeks. Nocturnal animals prowled the mountainside—coyotes and deer, black bears and foxes, skunks and raccoons. Leaves rustled, swaying in the light breeze. All of these sounds and more combined to form a natural cacophony as loud as any city street. The mountain thrummed with energy and life.

And then, all at once, sound and movement abruptly ceased. The mountain fell silent. Animal and insect, predator and prey—all were affected. Even the breeze became still. The only remaining sound was the low hum of the power lines, coming from the electrical tower on top of the mountain. The massive steel structure loomed over the surrounding countryside like a monolith, a modern-age Stonehenge, dour and watchful. The ground around its base had been cleared of trees and undergrowth and replaced with gravel and cement. Beyond the concrete base was a man-made clearing that cut through the forest like a scar. The clearing wound all the way down the mountainside, where further towers jutted up above the treetops. Nestled at the base of the mountain, far below the power lines, tucked safely between the river and the limestone foothills, was a small town. Its lights twinkled in the darkness like fireflies.

Mist rose from the ground around the tower’s base and swirled slowly around the arches and girders. For a moment, the electrical hum grew louder. Then, one by one, five large crows with feathers as black as coal appeared, swooping down out of the moonlight and the darkness and the fog-enshrouded trees. They approached each other from different parts of the clearing and landed directly beneath the tower. Then, perched on the tower’s lowest rung, they looked down upon the tiny town far below. The fog grew thicker.

A single black feather fell off one of the birds and drifted lazily to the ground, where it landed in a clump of ferns and weeds on the edge of the clearing. The feather lay there for a moment. Then the vegetation began to smoke, as if on fire, although no flames were visible. Within seconds, the vegetation had withered and turned brown. It crumbled and dissolved, leaving the feather to balance atop a small mound of ash.

The largest of the birds cried out. The caw echoed across the mountainside, seeming to gather strength in the darkness. One by one, the others joined in. The echoes boomed through the treetops. Soon, the birds’ cries drowned out even the hum of the electrical transformers.

***

Nights in Brinkley Springs were usually quiet and serene. On most evenings, the loudest disturbance, if any, was Randy Cummings racing his four-wheeldrive truck up and down Main Street. Sometimes, if the wind was right, residents could hear the Ford’s engine revving far up the mountain as he went off-roading with his friends. The truck’s original paint job was hidden beneath a permanently caked layer of mud and dirt. Occasionally, Sam Harding would cruise by in his black Nissan; it had flames painted on the sides. He didn’t drive fast, because he’d lowered the car to the point where hitting a pothole or a set of railroad tracks at any speed over twenty miles an hour would bottom it out, but he did like to turn the stereo up loud, and the bass would often rattle his tinted windows, as well as the windows of the houses he drove past. But most of the folks in Brinkley Springs agreed that since Randy and Sam would both be graduating in a few weeks, these were just temporary nuisances—at least until the next batch of kids got their driver’s licenses.

The town was composed mostly of small, rundown, oneor two-story houses and a fragile smattering of battered mobile homes. Some of the dwellings had dirty and dented aluminum or vinyl siding. Most didn’t even have that; instead, they showed bare, slowly rotting wood and peeling or faded paint. Shingles had been blown off roofs and never replaced. Porches sagged, waiting for a strong gust of wind to knock them over. For the most part, the homes in Brinkley Springs were built close enough together that you could see the next trash-strewn street or occasional outhouse peeking through behind them. The yards in front of the houses had more dirt than grass. Some held junk cars, engine blocks on cement blocks, tire swings, ceramic gnomes and cracked birdbaths, half-dead trees, stumps, weathered rabbit and chicken hutches, clothesline poles or tattered basketball nets. There was even a rusted, abandoned school bus on one weed-choked lawn. Other yards were completely vacant of even these trappings and contained only dead vegetation. Many of the houses had for-sale signs in front of them, and fully half of those were uninhabited, except by mice or the occasional snake.

No longer idyllic, Brinkley Springs barely warranted a glance from those who drove through it on their way to more exciting destinations. The town had two traffic lights and three four-way stop signs (all three bearing the rusty scars of having been peppered with shotgun pellets at some point in their existence). The town stretched twelve blocks in one direction and fifteen in the other, with a few small cattle, grain and horse farms on its borders. The black, potholed ribbon of U.S. 219 entered the town from the north, became Main Street for fifteen blocks and then transformed back into U.S. 219 again on the outskirts of town.

Most of the people in Brinkley Springs went to bed early, not out of boredom and not because of any quaint, old-fashioned ideas regarding propriety, but simply because they had to go to work the next morning, and that meant a long, arduous drive to other towns. Brinkley Springs had no industry— there were no factories or call centers or machine shops or office buildings. Nor were there any mining or timbering operations, as there were in other parts of the state. Indeed, other than Pheasant’s Garage, Barry’s Market, Esther Laudry’s bed-and breakfast, the small post office, a scattering of threadbare antique shops and the few surrounding farms, Brinkley Springs had no jobs at all. The last business to start up there—a privately owned turkey processing plant—had shut down after five years of operation and moved to North Carolina in search of a cheaper tax rate. Soon after, the abandoned plant burned down. Some said the fire was suspicious—a chance for the owners to collect on insurance money. Others said it was an accident. More than a few just shrugged and said it was a sign of the times. Whatever the real culprit had been, the plant was never rebuilt. All that remained was a burned-out, weedchoked lot full of broken bottles, rats and copperhead snakes. No one expected new construction to change that anytime soon. Brinkley Springs didn’t attract investors or businesses looking to expand. It was far off the major highways and interstate, wedged between the mountains and nestled deep in the heart of the Greenbrier River valley—a bedroom community for those who worked in Beckley, Lewisburg, Greenbank, Roncefort, Roanoke and the other bigger, more prosperous communities within the state or just across the border in Virginia.

Brinkley Springs had never been a big town, and with each passing year, its population shrank just a little bit more. Small businesses like the pizza shop or the movie-rental store closed and never reopened. Houses were abandoned when their owners passed away, and never resold. Potholes appeared in the streets and were never fixed. The town still had a V.F.W. post and a Ruritan Club, but their membership dropped with each passing year. The fire company still had quarterly bean suppers and their annual carnival, but each time, the attendance numbers dwindled. The tiny Methodist church had seating for two hundred people but had a weekly congregation of about fifteen. The Baptist church had been closed for two years, its doors and windows shuttered and boarded over. Brinkley Springs had no police force or school buildings. It was patrolled by the state police, who swung through once or twice a day just to make their presence known, and didn’t show up otherwise unless somebody called 911. Its children were bused to the bigger schools in Lewisburg. They left every morning and returned every evening, until they graduated. Then they went off to college or the military or a job somewhere else, and rarely returned again at all, except for holidays or a family occasion like a wedding or a funeral. And sometimes, not even then.

Still, despite all this, Brinkley Springs had its charms. The Greenbrier River ran along its eastern border and was a popular spot for both local and out-of-town fishermen, hikers and white-water rafters. The lack of posted property attracted hunters during deer, bear and turkey seasons, and a fair number of poachers even when those things weren’t in season. The antique shops were an occasional draw for travelers and vacationers who liked to explore off the beaten path, as was Esther Laudry’s bed-and-breakfast—a remodeled home built in the early 1900s—which catered to them as well as the occasional hiking or rafting enthusiast. But for the locals, Brinkley Springs was simply where they lived. Nothing more. Nothing less. A place to sleep, eat, shit and fuck. A place to play football with the kids on the weekends or watch TV at night. A place to store their cars and pets and clothing. A place to keep their stuff. Their real lives, the places where they spent most of their time, were at those jobs beyond the town limits.

Some people said that the town was dying. They didn’t know how right they were.

***

Concealed in shadow, five human figures sat perched upon the girders and steel crossbeams that the crows had occupied on the electrical tower earlier. They were dressed alike—black pants and shirts, black shoes, black hats, and long black coats that flowed to their heels. A passerby might have found their similar garb strangely reminiscent of America’s Colonial period, except for its color and the way the fabric seemed to blend with the darkness. Even their facial features were similar; they each had pointed noses and chins, dark eyes and even darker hair. They only differed in size, but even that was slight. The largest stood well over six feet tall. The others were within a few inches of that. Each of them seemed to defer to the biggest, who sat idly, head bobbing back and forth strangely on his almost nonexistent neck as he stared at the town below. Finally, he spoke. His voice was like breaking glass.