The crow is a maligned bird. They speak of death and ill omens, and it seems cruel that they were the last thing many of us saw before the Pestilence carried us away. Of course, the avian variety were attracted to the dead. What better proof that they were the angels of Lucifer than their ability to consume the flesh of our fallen, without contracting the Pest themselves?
Yet these are not the crows of which I speak. I refer to the men and women that donned the beakish masks and black cassocks, with only herbs, spices, camphor, and vinegar sponge as ward to the fell, miasmatic humors that carried the Pestilence. Even if their hearts were not true – and many were not – they were with the dying and wretched as they breathed their last. A final human caress, in spirit, if not in visage.
With what little time I have left, and with my final breaths, I will damn their accursed guild.
We had been mercifully spared by the Pestilence during the early years. Even as it burned through the neighboring villages, we remained untouched. I confess that at times we used perhaps un-Christian methods to preserve ourselves, and were perhaps not as charitable with those seeking refuge as the Book teaches. But our sins, great and small, seemed to act as proof against the Death. If only we could weather the storm, if only we could survive to repent, then God would forgive us our transactions. We were safe.
But then it began.
It was the crofter’s wife that first fell ill. She brewed a fine ale and had well behaved children. She could play the flute. The Pest ate her away in less than a week. And that was all the time that it took to drive the village to madness. One cough, one sniffle, and a mob of terrified and furious people would appear in the night at the doorsteps of lifelong friends with torches, demanding maidens of only ten summers and white beards with stooped backs alike to strip to their skin and expose their groins and under arms.
These were the lucky ones.
Some would dispense altogether with the inspections, and set fire to the homes without ceremony. This was the Alderman’s fate, who was burned alive, along with his wife and five daughters, for he was accused of harboring his sick son away from public view. The man claimed that he had sent his son away to forage a week before the sickness came, and the villagers, unwilling to enter his house in search of him for fear of becoming afflicted themselves, threw torches through his windows and barred the door from the outside.
The very next day the boy returned to the ashes that had once been his home and family, carrying bushels of wild berries and a carved stag for his youngest sister.
None among us met his eye.
So it was that when we saw the wagon approach our apprehensions grew to outright hysteria. For if we could not trust our own neighbors, what hope did a stranger have? Yet, as the wagon approached, our suspicion changed into delight as we saw the telltale curved beak and black cassock of a Plague Doctor. Cheers held forth as the smell of pungent herbs and incense trailed from behind the visitor.
Our prayers had been answered, it seemed.
The carriage came to a stop in the town’s center, and its driver stepped down into the street. He was extremely tall and thin, with a wide brimmed hat that extended almost beyond his sharp beak, and his black vestments hung over him, obscuring the body that lay beneath. As we crowded around him, he did not speak. He looked from one of us to the other through his mirrored eyeholes, a muffled, oddly affectionate cooing emanating from behind his mask.
He finally stopped on Jacques, the barber, and swiftly stepped towards him. The men and women around him sprang away as if he had suddenly burst into flames, and Jacques, eyes mad with panic, attempted to persuade us of his purity. The doctor closed the distance quickly, and with a deft slash of his hidden cane, tore open the barber’s shirt, revealing the purple buboes that had sprouted from the juncture of his shoulder and neck.
All of the defiance in Jacques drained from him like a punctured wine skin, and he sank to his knees and made sounds of the blackest despair. The crowd teetered on the edge of frenzy, torn between thrashing the man and fleeing from his presence, but the doctor merely cooed and draped a long-sleeved arm around Jacques, and guided him into the wagon. The beaked mask turned towards us, the last of the day’s sun reflecting in the glass eyeholes, and then the door was shut.
We stood watching for some time, well after the darkness had overtaken us. Some of the boys even lit a fire so that we could watch. Soon, fatigue overcame our curiosity, and we retired for the night, tasking one of the lads to keep watch until morning.
::
That night I dreamed of a lone mill, spinning against a current of maggots that moved like a steam into the distance.
::
In the morning, the lad was nowhere to be found.
We discovered the doctor perched atop his wagon, watching Jacques as he knelt in subjection, in thanks for his rehabilitation. The man stood, proudly showing off his unblemished body and shouting benedictions. We had heard that, while it was possible to survive the Pest once blighted, the appearance of buboes was death. And yet, here was Jacques, as hale as if he were a man ten years younger.
Many of us were wroth for his deception, for nearly infecting the entire town, but soon others stepped forth to confess that they too had been concealing loved ones or their own afflictions. Even Hugo, who was rumored to have hurled the first torch into the Alderman’s house, desperately removed his trousers and revealed the egg sized lump protruding from the base of his sex.
The doctor saw to them all.
It must have been a strange thing to be a Plague Doctor. Greeted as a savior, and then shunned directly after the saving. Yet it was so. Those of us that had not been afflicted were thankful for the doctor. We also shunned him, and those he cured. We would not allow them in public places, save for the town square, where they congregated each day, bestowing gifts upon the Crow Man, as we had taken to calling him.
While we tended our fields, they tended to the Crow Man. While we worshiped in the chapel, the cured villagers held court with the Crow Man, who never spoke, but cooed approvingly at the songs they sang him and the gifts they laid before his wagon.
In the weeks that followed the Crow Man’s arrival, things began to deteriorate around the village. Throngs of worshipers, for there was no other word to describe them now, gathered around the wagon. I began to notice men and women who had not been afflicted had joined his congregation, and sang Ave Marias and Pater Nosters as passionately as any that had been. In this time I noted that beneath the cloying stench of incense and herbs, there was something foul. Something rotten.
Also throughout this time, I was haunted by terrible nightmares. Bleak landscapes of thorny, naked trees and ghastly apparitions of things that were hardly men and worse things besides. I would wake from one nightmare and into other, more horrible fantasies. I prayed as fervently as I ever have, and yet my torment persisted.
Nearly a third of the town had been converted to the Crow Man’s flock before our own Vicar was roused into action. He took the good Book into his hands and walked through the crowd, naming the interlopers as blasphemers, and worshiper of false idols. To the Crow Man himself, he directed his most scathing admonishments. Through the tirade, the Crow Man remained perched atop his wagon, silently watching the Vicar, who was eventually forced into retreat, though not before reminding all gathered that nothing short of Hellfire awaited those that did not turn from this path.
The next day, the town square was empty, and nobody ever saw the Vicar again.
We searched for our lost neighbors, but could not find them, though perhaps we did not look as hard as we could have. We tried to put them from our minds and continue with our lives. The plague seemed to have run its course, and for that much we were thankful.
My nights had been dreamless for three days after the Crow Man’s exodus, and I slept soundly. But it was not to last, and my final, most horrible nightmare was to come.
::
I dreamed that I was walking barefoot into a dark forest.
As dark as it gets.
I came upon a clearing, illuminated by a magnificent orange moon, and in the center, was an enormous, gnarled tree. All around it knelt naked men and women, hands clasped before them and fervently, fanatically, praying. I recognized these people. There was Jacques and Hugo, Sabine who had been a wet nurse to my son, now four seasons dead, and Camille who made bread. I saw the young boy that had stood watch that first night, and many others besides. Every face among them was contorted with an expression of complete ecstasy.
And at the base of the tree, stood the Crow Man.
Or something very much like him.
Instead of his glass eyeholes, there were those of a crow, black and beady. Soulless. The beaked mask, once constructed of leather and filled with herbs, spices, camphor, and vinegar sponge, was now a true beak, and open, revealing a thin, red tongue. From it came a loathsome barking and quarking, all the sounds of the carrion bird of its namesake. Its cassock was thrown open, and I saw that it was not a cassock at all, but black, black wings that flapped and ruffled, sending feathers cascading onto the congregation. Its feet were avian claws, that clicked and slashed at the ground and air. Its legs were bent back where a human knee would have been.
I did not scream then, for I could not bring myself to, and I do not recall if I did after, for what I saw next caused my mind to leave me.
There, like an unholy altar, was the body of our Vicar, impaled on a spike through the anus and out the mouth.
The congregation staggered to its feet and formed a crowd around the baleful totem and the Crow Man, who stood like a mockery of the Pontiff before them. Each fell to their knees and turned their heads skyward, mouths hanging open. The Crow Man did in kind, and a low cooing sound escaped his throat. A bulge had begun to grow in its belly, and then worked its way upwards, first to the chest, then the throat, until finally it stopped in its mouth, the cheeks distended.
And then it began to feed its flock.
A black ichor writhing with maggots erupted from the Crow Man’s beak onto the faces of those that knelt before it, who then began to gorge themselves on the unholy sacrament. Another powerful heave, and more putrid excretions saturated the revelers who, I now realized with fresh horror, had begun to copulate in the stew, their cries of pleasure indistinguishable from screams of agony.
The last thing I saw before my wits left me entirely was the face of the Crow Man look up from the orgy and into my eyes.
::
I awoke in my bed screaming openly, and did not stop for some time after. When I finally regained myself, I lay whimpering on the floor next to my bed, soaked in urine and vomit.
In the silence, I thought I could hear the distant flapping of wings.
The next day I tried to forget the dream. I tried to forget the face of the Crow Man, as he stared at me across that accursed field.
I tried to ignore the mud in between my toes.
I knew that I had gone mad. But soon I learned that I would not live long enough for that to make much of a difference. You see, I now feel the tenderness in my groin and under my arms, and know that the Pest has come to carry me off, as it has so many others. But even if mad I am, I will not seek the Crow Man. I will die a Christian, and thankfully go to my reward.
But as the days wear on, I wonder if my faith will hold. I wonder if my resolve will waver once the buboes begin to appear. Perhaps then my courage will falter, and I will yearn for life as I once did.
And still other times I wonder if my senses will return, and I will go out into the woods, like so many others before for me have done.
To enter into the Congregation of the Crow Man.
Yet these are not the crows of which I speak. I refer to the men and women that donned the beakish masks and black cassocks, with only herbs, spices, camphor, and vinegar sponge as ward to the fell, miasmatic humors that carried the Pestilence. Even if their hearts were not true – and many were not – they were with the dying and wretched as they breathed their last. A final human caress, in spirit, if not in visage.
With what little time I have left, and with my final breaths, I will damn their accursed guild.
We had been mercifully spared by the Pestilence during the early years. Even as it burned through the neighboring villages, we remained untouched. I confess that at times we used perhaps un-Christian methods to preserve ourselves, and were perhaps not as charitable with those seeking refuge as the Book teaches. But our sins, great and small, seemed to act as proof against the Death. If only we could weather the storm, if only we could survive to repent, then God would forgive us our transactions. We were safe.
But then it began.
It was the crofter’s wife that first fell ill. She brewed a fine ale and had well behaved children. She could play the flute. The Pest ate her away in less than a week. And that was all the time that it took to drive the village to madness. One cough, one sniffle, and a mob of terrified and furious people would appear in the night at the doorsteps of lifelong friends with torches, demanding maidens of only ten summers and white beards with stooped backs alike to strip to their skin and expose their groins and under arms.
These were the lucky ones.
Some would dispense altogether with the inspections, and set fire to the homes without ceremony. This was the Alderman’s fate, who was burned alive, along with his wife and five daughters, for he was accused of harboring his sick son away from public view. The man claimed that he had sent his son away to forage a week before the sickness came, and the villagers, unwilling to enter his house in search of him for fear of becoming afflicted themselves, threw torches through his windows and barred the door from the outside.
The very next day the boy returned to the ashes that had once been his home and family, carrying bushels of wild berries and a carved stag for his youngest sister.
None among us met his eye.
So it was that when we saw the wagon approach our apprehensions grew to outright hysteria. For if we could not trust our own neighbors, what hope did a stranger have? Yet, as the wagon approached, our suspicion changed into delight as we saw the telltale curved beak and black cassock of a Plague Doctor. Cheers held forth as the smell of pungent herbs and incense trailed from behind the visitor.
Our prayers had been answered, it seemed.
The carriage came to a stop in the town’s center, and its driver stepped down into the street. He was extremely tall and thin, with a wide brimmed hat that extended almost beyond his sharp beak, and his black vestments hung over him, obscuring the body that lay beneath. As we crowded around him, he did not speak. He looked from one of us to the other through his mirrored eyeholes, a muffled, oddly affectionate cooing emanating from behind his mask.
He finally stopped on Jacques, the barber, and swiftly stepped towards him. The men and women around him sprang away as if he had suddenly burst into flames, and Jacques, eyes mad with panic, attempted to persuade us of his purity. The doctor closed the distance quickly, and with a deft slash of his hidden cane, tore open the barber’s shirt, revealing the purple buboes that had sprouted from the juncture of his shoulder and neck.
All of the defiance in Jacques drained from him like a punctured wine skin, and he sank to his knees and made sounds of the blackest despair. The crowd teetered on the edge of frenzy, torn between thrashing the man and fleeing from his presence, but the doctor merely cooed and draped a long-sleeved arm around Jacques, and guided him into the wagon. The beaked mask turned towards us, the last of the day’s sun reflecting in the glass eyeholes, and then the door was shut.
We stood watching for some time, well after the darkness had overtaken us. Some of the boys even lit a fire so that we could watch. Soon, fatigue overcame our curiosity, and we retired for the night, tasking one of the lads to keep watch until morning.
::
That night I dreamed of a lone mill, spinning against a current of maggots that moved like a steam into the distance.
::
In the morning, the lad was nowhere to be found.
We discovered the doctor perched atop his wagon, watching Jacques as he knelt in subjection, in thanks for his rehabilitation. The man stood, proudly showing off his unblemished body and shouting benedictions. We had heard that, while it was possible to survive the Pest once blighted, the appearance of buboes was death. And yet, here was Jacques, as hale as if he were a man ten years younger.
Many of us were wroth for his deception, for nearly infecting the entire town, but soon others stepped forth to confess that they too had been concealing loved ones or their own afflictions. Even Hugo, who was rumored to have hurled the first torch into the Alderman’s house, desperately removed his trousers and revealed the egg sized lump protruding from the base of his sex.
The doctor saw to them all.
It must have been a strange thing to be a Plague Doctor. Greeted as a savior, and then shunned directly after the saving. Yet it was so. Those of us that had not been afflicted were thankful for the doctor. We also shunned him, and those he cured. We would not allow them in public places, save for the town square, where they congregated each day, bestowing gifts upon the Crow Man, as we had taken to calling him.
While we tended our fields, they tended to the Crow Man. While we worshiped in the chapel, the cured villagers held court with the Crow Man, who never spoke, but cooed approvingly at the songs they sang him and the gifts they laid before his wagon.
In the weeks that followed the Crow Man’s arrival, things began to deteriorate around the village. Throngs of worshipers, for there was no other word to describe them now, gathered around the wagon. I began to notice men and women who had not been afflicted had joined his congregation, and sang Ave Marias and Pater Nosters as passionately as any that had been. In this time I noted that beneath the cloying stench of incense and herbs, there was something foul. Something rotten.
Also throughout this time, I was haunted by terrible nightmares. Bleak landscapes of thorny, naked trees and ghastly apparitions of things that were hardly men and worse things besides. I would wake from one nightmare and into other, more horrible fantasies. I prayed as fervently as I ever have, and yet my torment persisted.
Nearly a third of the town had been converted to the Crow Man’s flock before our own Vicar was roused into action. He took the good Book into his hands and walked through the crowd, naming the interlopers as blasphemers, and worshiper of false idols. To the Crow Man himself, he directed his most scathing admonishments. Through the tirade, the Crow Man remained perched atop his wagon, silently watching the Vicar, who was eventually forced into retreat, though not before reminding all gathered that nothing short of Hellfire awaited those that did not turn from this path.
The next day, the town square was empty, and nobody ever saw the Vicar again.
We searched for our lost neighbors, but could not find them, though perhaps we did not look as hard as we could have. We tried to put them from our minds and continue with our lives. The plague seemed to have run its course, and for that much we were thankful.
My nights had been dreamless for three days after the Crow Man’s exodus, and I slept soundly. But it was not to last, and my final, most horrible nightmare was to come.
::
I dreamed that I was walking barefoot into a dark forest.
As dark as it gets.
I came upon a clearing, illuminated by a magnificent orange moon, and in the center, was an enormous, gnarled tree. All around it knelt naked men and women, hands clasped before them and fervently, fanatically, praying. I recognized these people. There was Jacques and Hugo, Sabine who had been a wet nurse to my son, now four seasons dead, and Camille who made bread. I saw the young boy that had stood watch that first night, and many others besides. Every face among them was contorted with an expression of complete ecstasy.
And at the base of the tree, stood the Crow Man.
Or something very much like him.
Instead of his glass eyeholes, there were those of a crow, black and beady. Soulless. The beaked mask, once constructed of leather and filled with herbs, spices, camphor, and vinegar sponge, was now a true beak, and open, revealing a thin, red tongue. From it came a loathsome barking and quarking, all the sounds of the carrion bird of its namesake. Its cassock was thrown open, and I saw that it was not a cassock at all, but black, black wings that flapped and ruffled, sending feathers cascading onto the congregation. Its feet were avian claws, that clicked and slashed at the ground and air. Its legs were bent back where a human knee would have been.
I did not scream then, for I could not bring myself to, and I do not recall if I did after, for what I saw next caused my mind to leave me.
There, like an unholy altar, was the body of our Vicar, impaled on a spike through the anus and out the mouth.
The congregation staggered to its feet and formed a crowd around the baleful totem and the Crow Man, who stood like a mockery of the Pontiff before them. Each fell to their knees and turned their heads skyward, mouths hanging open. The Crow Man did in kind, and a low cooing sound escaped his throat. A bulge had begun to grow in its belly, and then worked its way upwards, first to the chest, then the throat, until finally it stopped in its mouth, the cheeks distended.
And then it began to feed its flock.
A black ichor writhing with maggots erupted from the Crow Man’s beak onto the faces of those that knelt before it, who then began to gorge themselves on the unholy sacrament. Another powerful heave, and more putrid excretions saturated the revelers who, I now realized with fresh horror, had begun to copulate in the stew, their cries of pleasure indistinguishable from screams of agony.
The last thing I saw before my wits left me entirely was the face of the Crow Man look up from the orgy and into my eyes.
::
I awoke in my bed screaming openly, and did not stop for some time after. When I finally regained myself, I lay whimpering on the floor next to my bed, soaked in urine and vomit.
In the silence, I thought I could hear the distant flapping of wings.
The next day I tried to forget the dream. I tried to forget the face of the Crow Man, as he stared at me across that accursed field.
I tried to ignore the mud in between my toes.
I knew that I had gone mad. But soon I learned that I would not live long enough for that to make much of a difference. You see, I now feel the tenderness in my groin and under my arms, and know that the Pest has come to carry me off, as it has so many others. But even if mad I am, I will not seek the Crow Man. I will die a Christian, and thankfully go to my reward.
But as the days wear on, I wonder if my faith will hold. I wonder if my resolve will waver once the buboes begin to appear. Perhaps then my courage will falter, and I will yearn for life as I once did.
And still other times I wonder if my senses will return, and I will go out into the woods, like so many others before for me have done.
To enter into the Congregation of the Crow Man.