The Nature of Crows

The Nature of Crows

  By Duncan Wilson

  Copyright 2015 ATP Publishing LLC

   

   

  Joe lay his head down on the tracks with a sigh. His life was soon no longer going to bother him. Not that it had been a bad life. In fact, by most measures it had been a spectacular success. Joe had excelled in school, both regular and higher, had gotten a decent and respectable job which he had excelled at, had married and produced three normal well-adjusted children who were now busy duplicating his success in life. Yet, through it all, Joe had gotten little satisfaction. Even though society at large would judge him a capable and proper member, he himself had virtually no satisfaction in these rather standard accomplishments. A result of an over-expectant psychological system, Joe felt that his life was rather pedestrian. He had stood out in no other way than not having failed at a normal life. This was not enough in his own mind, and his lack of outstanding achievement haunted him throughout his tiresome life even while he was congratulated and praised by those around him.

  And so, at the age of sixty-five, having outlived his frankly forgettable and complacent wife and with his children long since grown and raising children of their own, Joe had decided to forgo any further dull years of fading away into aged ineptitude and was soberly departing this mortal coil for either a less mediocre afterlife or the ungrudging void of nonexistence, he did not care which. Breathing calmly, he took the minute or two he had left to once again reflect on his life to date, mostly to pass the time but also to distract from the uncomfortable and cold track beneath his bald head. Gradually, as the light of the oncoming train began to brighten the area around him and the sound of the locomotive crept from the silence into a steady rumble, he exhausted his analysis of his failure to live up to his own grandiose expectations of himself and closed his eyes in resignation to his fate.

  As the sounds of the train grew to the point of annoyance and the horn began to sound, he felt the track begin to vibrate beneath him as the ground shook at the approach of the multiple tons of steel and other assorted materials. Piercing these sounds came a sharp cry of a woman. His eyes snapping open in annoyance, Joe was able to distinguish the scream from that of a cry of surprise. The scream was one of distress, not concern. Someone, of the female persuasion, was in trouble.

  Instincts inherent to both his gender and his societal upbringing kicked in while his conscious mind was still contemplating whether he wanted to get involved, especially considering what he was attempting to accomplish that night. He reasoned that whatever was occurring was not outside of the realm of what happened every day, and what would his interference actually achieve in the grand scheme of things anyway? Besides which, if he was going to depart this existence, what did he care what occurred in it once he was gone? His body, either not considering such logical justifications for inaction, or not caring for them, ignored his selfish reasoning and got up.

  Looking around, he barely noticed as the train he had meant to catch passed harmlessly directly behind him. Now intent on his immediate purpose, Joe spotted the woman in distress almost immediately. About twenty yards away, under barely adequate lighting to discern what was transpiring, Joe saw her and her assailant struggling. While he was sure of her intentions, to escape her attacker, Joe was entirely baffled by the actions of her antagonist. The man, at least Joe thought it was a man, was not directly assaulting the young lady. Nor was he physically threatening her. Rather, it appeared the man was dancing. Capering about in a violent and frankly disturbing fashion, the man was obviously making the young woman fear for her safety, and as she was backed into a corner, Joe decided he would indeed intervene on her behalf, if for no other reason than to calm her down and get her to stop screaming. Striding over with confident purposeful determination, Joe approached the pair, shouting at the man with a sharp, "Hey!" in an attempt to get his attention.

  The man, if that was indeed what it was, Joe was still not certain of this having yet to get a good look at the gesticulating figure, ignored Joe and continued to draw slightly closer to the terrified woman, who seemed to be trying to draw herself through the wall she was trapped against. Reaching out with this right hand, Joe grabbed ahold of the bulky sweater the offending individual wore, and jerked back swiftly in an attempt to pull him off his feet. What came back in his hand surprised Joe. The sweater pulled clean off of the figure as if it were torn in half, as a furry black mass poured out of the center from both the bottom and top halves. A heaving mass of squeaking scrambling rats erupted from the clothes, spilling out in all directions as the rodents suddenly made haste to vacate the area. As the small creatures left the empty clothes behind in a pile, Joe looked with shock at the empty sweater still clutched in his hand. The color drained from his face as a quizzical expression clouded his expressions, not from fear but from the heart attack, the trauma and absurdity of the event overwhelmed his aged heart. As he collapsed, Joe had two thoughts running through his head. The first was that he was no longer bored with life. The second was the irony that he might be about to leave it anyway.

  _____

  When Joe awoke, he was not happy. Being in pain, this was a natural mood to be in. As time went on, he continued to not be happy. No one seemed to know much of anything about the young lady he had rescued, and what little they claimed to know seemed to contradict his own recollection of her. She was a drifter. She was homeless. She had been part of an attempt to mug him. She had attacked him herself.

  The more wild the theories he was told by the various people currently responsible for his physical welfare, the more he wished to leave their care as soon as possible. The police who came to take his statement about the night in question were even less helpful, volunteering absolutely nothing and implying some rather disturbing and insulting theories about Joe himself by their lines of questioning. Rather than giving a factual recounting of what transpired at the railway tracks, as Joe did not at all wish to live the rest of his short life in a mental institution, he instead stated that some young punk whom he did not get a good look at had been trying to mug the young woman, and that the assailant had run off at his approach. When asked about the empty clothes, Joe shrugged and feigned complete ignorance of their presence.

  After the officers left, which was definitely not soon enough, Joe took a nap, only to wake up to the screaming of another patient in the room who was apparently seeing ghosts or something. Trying to ignore the man, who stank besides, Joe tried to rest as best he could. The sooner he recovered the sooner he could get out of this hospital. After several frustrating days of waiting and tests, Joe was finally discharged by an arrogant and condescending young doctor who pretended to care as he lectured Joe about his health and how he should improve his diet.

  Upon leaving the hospital, Joe immediately proceeded home to get a fresh change of clothes. After that, he made his way back to the train tracks where he had so recently tried to exit reality. Upon arriving, he found nothing out of the ordinary, and wondered what he had expected to find, exactly. Surely the police had already been here and any actual evidence would already have been collected. Standing in the spot where he had collapsed, he stared unrewardingly at the wall where the young woman had been cowering. Looking back at the tracks, he could not even see any trace of his having lain on the tracks, much less anything indicating anything untoward had occurred anywhere around here.

  Sighing, Joe closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. Opening his eyes again, he started as a large grey dog snarled at him. It had not been there a moment ago, yet now stood in a threatening stance growling menacingly at Joe from the other side of the tracks. Joe stood as still as he could, not wanting to provoke the obviously hostile dog. They stared at each other as the dogs growls and s
narls grew in agitation. Its eyes glared murderously into Joe's. Thinking back on various encounters with dogs in his past, Joe tried to recall some useful bit of knowledge that would help him in this current confrontation. Nothing came to mind. The dog continued to stare into his eyes, almost as if it were looking into his very soul, its growls sounding almost unnatural.

  "I would not run if I were you." Joe almost leaped out of his skin at the voice from beside him. Looking around, perhaps unwisely taking his eyes off of the threatening dog in front of him, Joe saw a well-dressed middle aged woman of no recognizable ethnicity. She smiled at him warmly from about twenty feet to his left, behind a chain link fence he had not previously noticed. She nodded back to the dog, "He does not look friendly to me."

  Joe nodded and looked back at the dog, who had not changed its location. It continued its growling, interrupting it once or twice with an angry bark. The woman watching commented, "A mad dog like that can be dangerous. I do not think you will be able to reason with it." Joe wised she was wrong, but it did not look like she was as the dog suddenly started forward slowly, methodically drawing closer, snarling and showing its yellowed fangs. Joe began to sweat and was about to look around for something to use as a weapon when the train swept by, horn blaring, separating him from the dog.

  Startled by the undetected appearance of the train, Joe stayed frozen in place as he tried to calm his overexcited heart. Knowing he should probably get out of there while the dog was blocked by the moving train cars, Joe was afraid to move as he felt his blood pumping in his skull and his eyes throbbing from the pressure.

  The last car of the train passed and the dog was no longer there. Where it stood was nothing but a solitary crow, which interrupted its pecking at something on the ground to give him an unfriendly look. Cawing, the crow took off, flapping noisily as it disappeared over a nearby warehouse. Puzzled, Joe looked about for the dog, failing to spot it anywhere nearby. Looking back at the woman, he found she was also gone.

  His heart finally settled down, Joe looked back at where the dog and crow had been, and noticed what the crow had been pecking at. Something shiny was lying there amongst the rocks that lined the tracks. Walking cautiously over, keeping eye out for both vicious dogs and unrelenting locomotives, Joe crossed the tracks and stooped over to retrieve the object. As he stood up, he saw another crow watching him from the top of the chain link fence. It took off as he noticed it, and Joe watched as it too disappeared over the roof of another warehouse. Looking down at the shiny object in his hand, Joe found he had picked up an employee id badge. Lacking a photo or other personal information, the badge did at least identify the company it belonged to, one LD Enterprises, Inc. Other than the company name, a barcode, and a large print number four thousand four hundred and forty-four, the only other marking on the badge was a angular tri-spiral logo.

  Pocketing the badge, and giving one more glance around to make sure he was not about to be attacked by some unforeseen animal, Joe left and returned home to take a rest from all of the excitement, just as the pretentious young doctor from the hospital would likely advise.

  _____

  The more Joe learned about LD Enterprises, the more questions Joe had about it. Even after spending several excruciating hours searching out details about the company online and at the state's business registry, he was no more certain of what the company did than when he started. As far as he could tell, the company was large and successful, but beyond that, no one seemed to be able to tell him what exactly they produced or sold or bought or anything else of use. He had been able to find the names of its owners, as such was required to have a registered business. However, he was sure that even if Joe Smith, John Johnson, and Mary Williams were real people that he would likely not be able to find them with just their names.

  The only address on their registration proved to be a postal annex, which he was thankful he had learned from a mapping site rather than by traveling there in person. Further, there were no phone listings other than a number that went straight to the beep of a voicemail. Frankly unbelieving that such a large and prosperous cooperate entity could exist without some way of physically encountering them, Joe sieved through thousands upon thousands of search results, mostly unrelated spam sites, trying to find some mention of them from customers, employees, or even other businesses. Finally, happening upon an index of taxable corporations reviewed by the State Attorney's Office in the last five years, Joe smiled in triumph. Taking down the date LD Enterprises had been investigated, Joe took a cab to the State Capitol building.

  Upon arriving, Joe then spent the next tedious four hours arguing with receptionists and waiting in lines, attempting to gain access to the public records he suspected contained the information he was looking for. The more people he talked to the less satisfied he became with the bureaucracy of his state. Those few state employees he encountered who did not seem utterly bored with their jobs still came off as entirely incompetent or uncaring about serving him or others of the public. Making a mental note to write a series of angry letters to his various elected officials, Joe was finally escorted back to a small out of the way office by an annoyed young lady who seemed perturbed that she had been forced to get up, much less walk, in order to do her job.

  Joe was left in the office by his escort, who left mumbling something disparaging about demanding old people. Manning the sole desk in the middle of tightly packed file cabinets was an embarrassingly overweight clerk who looked at Joe with mouth agape as if he were an alien visitor. Staring at Joe for several minutes, the man showed no sign that he was going to say anything, much less ask Joe what he wanted.

  Joe cleared his throat. No response came. Clearing his throat again, Joe said, exasperated, "I need to look at a file from the AG's Office public records." The clerk continued to stare at Joe as if a large three eyed goldfish were wriggling out of his forehead, without responding or even acknowledging he had heard the request.

  Waiting a few moments, Joe, with some annoyance now, began to repeat his statement, only to be interrupted as the clerk rattled off rapidly, "Cabinets forty-seven through three hundred and two, right side, near the back." With that, the portly man raised a tube of an arm slowly and swept it back to indicate a door hidden between two of the cabinets on the left wall.

  Joe looked at the door and then back at the man, who had never taken his eyes off of Joe. Raising an eyebrow in curiosity, Joe asked, "Are you going to help me look?" Watching the panicked and pained expression come across the face of the exceedingly fat man whom Joe swore had to have defied the laws of physics to even get behind the desk, Joe surmised that he was asking the improbable. Grunting in bemused acceptance, Joe went to the door and opened it.

  Turning on the light, Joe found himself looking into a very long and very wide room filled with file cabinets and narrow passageways. Dimly lit, the room contained nothing else, not even windows. Sighing for the millionth time since he had arrived, Joe entered the room and started searching for the numbered cabinets the clerk had mentioned. The door closed behind him, the springs attached to it cutting off the continuing anguished stare of the clerk.

  Several hours and three paper cuts later, Joe believed he had finally deciphered the filing system used here. There wasn't one. There were twelve. As far as he could tell, the files were organized by date, alphabetically by day of the week, then by month reverse alphabetically and then by a complicated four letter acronym code derived from the company's founder's names, but only when they were cases that had gone to trial. Otherwise, they were arranged by the month the company was founded according to the lunisolar calendar of Gaulish Coligny, and then by the Aramaic equivalent of the last letter in the company name, reversing order every other letter. This, of course, was only true of cases that had been investigated beyond the cursory examination stage. Any that fell outside of that category where sorted by first name of the founders using an early Enigma algorithm and the Cyrillic alphabet in an alternating pair of substitution cyphers,
one based off of descending prime numbers starting at three thousand three hundred and seventy-three, and the other based off of the years the presidents were born in base twenty-one, starting with Monroe. Joe was thankful for his life's work as a cryptographer, otherwise he would likely have never figured it out.

  After another twenty minutes going through the cabinets using this cypher, Joe discovered that the file he was looking for was either missing, or misfiled elsewhere. After briefly contemplating going through the entire set of cabinets from beginning to end, Joe instead followed a hunch and looked underneath the files in the drawer the file should have been in. Sure enough, there was his desired file, laying flat on the bottom of the drawer. Pulling it out, he found inside a single piece of paper, listing the bare facts of the investigation. Started on a Monday, three months ago, ended on the next Thursday. No further investigation needed. There was, however, another address besides the Post Office box listed on the page.

  Taking a moment to write this new lead down on a scrap of paper he had brought for that exact purpose, Joe returned the paper to the file and placed it in its proper place in the cabinet, back on the bottom of the drawer where he had found it. He figured if the clerks working here wanted to make it needlessly complicated to find a file, he might as well perpetuate the system one step further. He would have spent more time at it, potentially adding another dimension to the ordering of all of the files present, but he had more interesting things to do with time for the next few years, or so he hoped.

  Upon leaving the room, Joe barely grunted at the clerk, who was still staring at him as he exited the cabinet storage area. As he left the small room as well, Joe was confident that the fat squinty eyes were following him out. After navigating the maze of corridors back to the entrance of the capitol building, he had no trouble hailing a cab to shuttle him away from his duly elected officials and the armies of bureaucrats who aided them. The driver looked at the address on the paper, and nodded affirmative that he knew where that was, and how to get to it in a cheap amount of time.

  As the cab pulled up to the entrance of what looked like a fairly boring office building, Joe paid his driver and exited the conveyance. The cab pulled away and disappeared around the first corner as Joe was still studying the bland exterior. From what he could tell, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about the building from the outside, other than the complete lack of indication as to what business or businesses occupied the floor space within. Taking this as an indeterminate sign of something he was not aware of, Joe confidently strode into the lobby of the building, only to find it too lacked any manner of marquee to aid his quest for information. To make matters even less practical, none of the offices inside had suite numbers displayed.

  Grumbling about the unnecessary levels of obscurity he had so far encountered to simply ask about an employee of LD Enterprises, Joe began to wander the halls of the moderately sized structure. Certain he was wasting his time, as if he had not just days before been attempting to dispose of all potential free time he was ever to possess, Joe peered with the annoyance that came so easily to the frustrated into each window or door that allowed him such an action. Most of the suites turned out to be unoccupied, with nothing but blank walls and dust looking back at him. Those that were occupied seemed only to contain desks and chairs and other assorted office materials, but no people whom he could ask for assistance.

  In an attempt to be more productive in his search, Joe tried the id badge in every card reader he came across, even if the reader was attached to the wall outside of an empty office. It was one of these vacant rooms that unlocked upon his swiping the card. Rolling his eyes in exasperation at this perpetuation of his expectations, Joe pulled the door open and went in anyway. Perhaps the attached rooms inside held more than air and dust.

  Once inside, Joe was greeted by a faint scratching sound. Looking around at the nothing keeping him company in the main room, Joe deduced that the sound he was hearing must be coming from one of the rooms off to either side. Due to the acoustics, he could not be certain which side it was, so settling upon a process of elimination, Joe randomly chose to look into the left hand rooms first. These contained more nothing, and now he felt confident that the sound was coming from behind him, so he turned and approached the first doorway on the right. As his view widened to take in the full area of the room, he found it too contained a complete absence of anything other than dust. Well, except for the crow scratching at the concrete floor.

  The bird kept scratching as Joe wondered how it had gotten into the office, this suite not being adjacent to the outside, and thus lacking any windows. As he tried to puzzle this impossibility, Joe noticed the crow had very suddenly stopped its scratching and was looking at him intently with its left eye. A minute into its study of Joe, the crow cawed once, rather sharply, and took off, flying through a doorway on the far wall which led to a more interior attached room. Blinking, Joe followed the crow into the next room, only to find that the animal was not there. This room lacked any other outlet, and was as empty as the rest of the suite. Silence now reigned.

  Looking around with a slight tinge of paranoia, Joe did not see the bird hiding anywhere around him. Shaking his head at what had apparently been an apparition, Joe walked over to where the crow had been scratching. Looking down at the spot, Joe thought he could make out some sort of symbol, as if the bird had carved it into the surface of the floor with its claws. The symbol resembled a circle with three jointed spokes, each facing in the same direction. Taking out his trusty piece of paper with the building's address on one side, Joe spent a few minutes sketching the symbol on the blank side.

  After several more wasted minutes looking around again to make certain he had not missed anything, Joe made his way back to the front door of the empty office suite. Exiting, he closed the door behind him, entirely sure that this address was likely a false one for the purposes of misleading the government. If so, it had worked. After walking a few blocks, Joe came upon another cab and took it to the library, now intent on finding information about the symbol the bird had scratched into the floor.