Storymania - Tragedy Of Crows: Chapter 1 by Scott W. Hazzard

Tragedy Of Crows: Chapter 1 (5)
Scott W. Hazzard

“Of course, that can’t happened,” she said. “But, someone should have recognized this before me, right? How could there simply be, extra-life energy. An absence can be explained, at least somewhat. Then, all we have to do is rearrange the pieces. Stretch out a few events, shorten others. The system is designed to have a comfortable level of flexibility, but extra-energy? Who’s responsible for…”
“Yes, all right, yes,” he said commencing his paces about the office. “I let it happen, all right. It could be someone else… It could be someone else, but it has to be me. I’m the only one…”
“Only one for what?” she said. “I don’t understand how you can blame yourself for this. It’s probably just some higher level project, something the Seraphim are working on, top secret, a mission of some kind… for God’s sake stop pacing!”
“No, it’s not,” he muttered. “It’s not them. They’d never let this happen.”
“Excuse me,” she said. “They know everything that’s happening. I work hard down here, but they work a lot harder up there. I may not understand every administrative decision, but I do know that some lowly watcher and a…. a desk clerk are not going to find a ‘problem’ with the system. We don’t understand it. It’s too complex even for us. I don’t see how you can hold that slip of information in your hand and say you know for certain it’s a mistake. For all we know, it’s being attended to right now, by Gabriel or some angel so high he’s never come down to deeds that can be coupled with a name. For all we know mighty Michael is….”
“No!” he shouted shoving the paper close to her face. “It’s not them. They have no idea about this. I did it. I’m too blame. This is my fault….”
“But how…” he voice croaked as she leaned back upon the desk.
“Because, I erased the file. I erased the file, and now, it’s starting to make a difference. Things are changing,” he said dropping the invoice to the floor.
“You did what?” she whispered. He turned his folded wings to her.
“Just one,” he murmured. “Just one, and that’s all… we can fix this… we can.”
“We?” she spoke softly, creeping around him. She stared up to see his yellow eyes, but they were closed.
“I deleted a file,” he said. “I deleted a file. I thought I had fixed it, but I guess I didn’t. I’ve been too ashamed to check up on it. I’ve been out of the record hall for some time now… and my promotion to head watcher depends upon this thing never causing anyone alarm. We have to…”
She bent down to the floor and picked up the paper.
“It’s a single person,” she said. “I checked it. I know I shouldn’t have, but I checked it. I found out a lot on my own, but I never wanted to tell anyone. I trust them, I do trust them. They must know about this. Someone must have caught it and fixed it by now.”
“What if they haven’t?” he said opening his eyes. “Everything can go wrong?”
“No,” she said stammering back to her desk. “Nothing can go wrong. You’re crazy.”
“How could I be?” he said. She tried to start sorting a pile of forms. After checking a few data fields, she found it hard to remember the speed of her usual work. She considered being too fast, then being too slow. Then her mind wandered. Only three seconds of work had passed before she erupted into a shriek. Uriel bent down to one knee. It was the same sound, the same irregularity that had drawn him to her office. He had caused it, and it had caused him to collapse into a new belief in beauty. He was wrong the whole time. He had not discovered a foundation to build upon. He had discovered a soft ground to tunnel into.
“Okay, okay!” she shouted. “Fine, we’ll fix it ourselves… Whatever you want, but I’m telling you, this is not my responsibility. I’m going to do this just to show you how wrong you are! I’m doing you a favor, and you better remember that. You tell anyone about my involvement, and I’ll tell my manager, and he’ll tell his manager, and before you know it, you’ll be guardian angel to a garden snake!”
“All right,” he replied.
“We need to work fast, too,” she said putting her files back into their cabinets. “How does that suit you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not used to…” he said.
“Neither am I,” she said pulling her hair back again. “We’ll have to hurry, though. We don’t have much time before someone realizes we’re gone, and we’ll need all the time we can get to make up a reason why we were gone so long.”
“Gone?” he said. “Gone where?”
“To your old office,” she said locking up her file cabinet. “If we’re going to figure out what’s going on now, we need to know exactly what you erased and how many changes have been made because of it.”
“But,” he stuttered. He hadn’t prepared a sentence to follow. He just felt uncomfortable. He would have never suggested doing anything at all if he had actually known he’d be forced into doing something.
“What?” she asked. He pulled himself from the floor. She turned her face from his rising yellow gaze.
“I forgot my lunch pale,” he said. It had just occurred to him when he had one empty hand upon his brow and another flat against the floor.
She laughed. She wasn’t expecting to laugh.
The sound died in the flutter of papers and the slamming of a desk drawer. He followed her out of the office and into the corridor. Uriel chased everything, except a name.
***

Hazzard was doing it again. That muttering and swearing thing. That was all between the coughs, of course. He had missed where they were or where they were going. All he knew for sure was that he was certainly awake, but not so certainly sober. An internalized pattern of defensive thought processes had begun launching inquiries into the state of affairs. In short, he wasn’t sure what was going on, had a few ideas of what might be going, and couldn’t decided on any one idea regarding what may or may not be going on. And it wasn’t all that strange. Strangeness wasn’t the main problem. It was actually quite the opposite.
It was dark and the woods seemed foreign, but that’s not bizarre, really, since he had never ventured that far into the woods before. Those science folk could have pumped in nothing but May apples and bamboo, he would have just shrugged his shoulders and continued to walk. He was good at that. No matter what the landscape, the journey long or short, he would press on against the backdrop of any danger, oblivious. The students were walking single file. He was the last. Each kept their eyes forward, not on the trees, not at the sky, not at the underbrush in a search for cute little woodland creatures. Something had happened to them. They weren’t even talking. For the first time, Hazzard was feeling as though he was the only one in touch with his environment.
Perhaps that was because there barely was an environment. Trees got darker and more miscellaneous as if a master artist had lopped them down in haste with a big dry house painting brush. This was how he remembered trees. This was not the way they actually were. All this suggested to him that he was asleep, but he had ruled that out since he began sweating. Dreams don’t do that, until after you wake up. That was the most plausible explanation; he had just managed to wake up. That whole ordeal with the mountain or hill (of course it had to be a hill, because there is no way a mountain would just happened to occur like that) had occurred in a drunken dream state. The rest since then was probably real. The stranger, the walk from the mountain into the woods, the disappearance of shreds of moonlight, that was all probably real.
Yet, there were some key elements missing. What was the stranger wearing, come to think of it? What did he look like? It was as if he didn’t have a presence, beyond his existence. He insisted himself upon Hazzard’s apprehension of the moment. Past that, the stranger left no images. Hazzard gave himself quick short-term memory quizzes to check and make sure everything was working. He’d say “bang, bang, shang, bang” and then wait a few minutes and repeat it to himself. He was pretty sure he got it right every time, but then again, he could have been wrong every time and not know the difference. Eventually, he decided that he was thinking too much out of his nervousness. He would have to go on first impressions, draw some quick conclusions, and then go from there. He closed his eyes, thought really hard, and decided that the stranger was an elderly man wearing a frayed sombrero and Bermuda shorts. He looked like an old, Italian history teacher he had back in High School. The teacher was the type that would spin old war stories about the big one for entire class periods and forget to give the assignment at the end. Hazzard felt calmed by the image, and a willingness to follow bloomed…. then, more thoughts jumped the turnstile, and he began to question whether the stranger met any part of this description or if he was using some kind of manipulation to get him to imagine something warm and comforting. Why should he imagine a trick, though? Was his paranoia getting the best of him? He wondered. He pondered. He thought all these things, and followed in the meantime. The soup of possibilities stirred constantly, but the brew was not yet volatile. The scent of the air, however….
Virgil could not smell… He was quite calm, thinking pretty clearly, while the whole of Hazzard’s thought process was marred with mixed metaphors. Young writers mixed their metaphors a lot. Virgil had to put up with that sort of thing a lot on the tour. With time and discipline, these things usually worked themselves out. Thus, Virgil usually ignored most problems with his little groups. If they seemed less than poetic, he told himself that things change. This whole trip was supposed to be about learning, anyway. So what, the kids were too dumb struck to even attempt to climb the mountain. So what, the kids seemed overjoyed to meet him, dropping fear of the unknown in an instant. So what, that somebody kept belting out coughs every fifty feet. They were learning, adapting, and discovering. If they seemed less than perfect, then all the more reason why he needed to be there. All these things comforted Virgil, but he still felt rather uneasy with some minor details.
There weren’t supposed to be five, were there? He distinctly remembered the call coming down for a tour of four. On the one hand, this was completely out of order, but on the other hand, the calls he received had been consistently less and less specific. In the beginning, he had done tons of prep work before giving a tour. He would read all the published works of the would-be poet in question. He would get to know the names and faces of those in Heaven and Hell that might affect the poet the most. After a while, that style fell out of use. His instructions seldom told him more than a trucker would know about his load. He had the essential specifics, but often, he didn’t even stop to get the names straight. He just made pickup, hit the road, pointed out the landmarks, and dropped them off where they needed to be. It was a good job, and it kept him out of Hell for all too brief periods of time. The tour continued as planned. There was no use getting hung up on the details. Still, he found his train of thought a little jostled by the occasional throaty hack.
Hazzard smoked in defiance of the pace. The quicker they went, the faster he smoked. The trees seemed to rise taller, loosing more of their specific features. All reference points were being systematically removed. They were walking deeply into being lost. It wasn’t an earthly feeling, like being in the wrong town. Seeing was more like trying to play Trivial Pursuit in a different language. They pressed on to the point where Hazzard wanted to flip the board over and toss the pieces. About a yard further, an archway arrived. It didn’t drop in, come up, or appear. It just arrived, ready and perfectly on time.
“Okay, now that’s definitely not right,” Hazzard said eyeing the heavy gray stones. It reminded him of a castle door, but there was no castle wall. The archway cut into blackness. The gray stone sparkled with light that emanated from the stranger. That wasn’t “right” either, but Hazzard could not say anything once he discovered the light source. Half a cigarette was spit into the darkness, a tiny orange spark cartwheeling into nothing.
“Do not yield to your fears. You have been chosen for this passage and none can deprive you of what has been willed,” the stranger said loudly. Hazzard heard a collective sigh. They had come to a halt in a half moon shape around the stranger. Hazzard could see his glow turning Maria’s back into shadow. He thought about calling to her, but she seemed preoccupied with sight. She stood solidly awaiting the words of the stranger. Hazzard’s eyes were tracing the outline of the group. He traveled over each silhouette looking for signs of disruption. Not a shake, quiver, or stir was present. The stranger was talking, but Hazzard wasn’t listening all that well. Splashes of the mountain seemed to flow over his thoughts. He remembered the whole ordeal as if it were a great Greek tragedy, filled with doomed heroics and beautiful failure. The shrill of Maria’s scream sounded the moment when Oedipus cut out his eyes or rather when Hazzard had to let go of the mountainside. Perhaps, he could have scaled the mountain and put the mass between them. That achievement alone would have made sleep a little easier. There would be no qualms about taking a nap by the base of tree, then. He’d just relish in the fact that he made it, by pure, unadulterated luck. The other could be wolf food. He’d be in California, getting a mean purple sunburn, drinking a Negro Modello by the ocean. He might like that ending. Still, there was something even sweeter in that release, that dejection from stability, the unexpected launch into a fall. She had to have seen that. Someone had to have seen that. And yet, she wasn’t staring at him. She was looking away into the light of a stranger, hearing the sound of his voice instead of recalling the thud of his fall.
Hazzard thought about the mountain for a while, when he should have been listening. His teeth clacked down in that usual uneven wreck. When the stranger was introducing himself, Hazzard was thinking about the shadows on the rock faces. When the stranger was explaining the journey, Hazzard was half-aware, half focused on images of jutting roots and flat stone. While the stranger was answering a murmur of polite questions, he was thinking about asking for directions back to the mountain. He would go without them, without her especially, and he would surely reach a satisfactory height, maybe the other side. He’d raised both hands on that day, for himself. But, the glow of the stranger was warm, and Maria’s gaze was lost in it. Hazzard reached for a branch of a tree to break, to make a sound to startle her. There was nothing. He came into their half-circle as the crowd filtered out through the arch. One by one, gobbled by darkness, they followed the stranger’s lighted soul away. Hazzard saw a craved inscription, gouged in perfect, ornate calligraphy.
“Abandon all hope….” it read. That’s all he could decipher in passing. Maria had entered, hazel eyes gazing forward towards the light. Brian adjusted his hat as if preparing for a dinner party. Jen smacked her lips. James shoved his hands into his pockets. Hazzard took his yellow bic lighter from his pocket and walked through arch with his own tiny flame flashing first before his eyes.
***

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