Crovalak Prophecies 1

         Listen my children, to the horrors to behold.
         In this universe we are not alone. There are functionings beyond anything we can imagine. These things are strange and terrible to comprehend. What I’ve beheld is only the barest, baldest, tiniest tip of an iceberg that threatens to destroy not only my sanity, but all mankind.
         
         What I know I know only by accident, and the circumstances under which I learned these things are so terrible that I dare not seek any further.
         It was a very normal summer day, hypernormal in fact. The sun was bright and hot, it was around ninety three out and it was humid. If someone was to describe the stereotype of an Iowan July it would have been this day. It smelled like grass and water and rotting out, a lovely blend.
         I had driven into town to sometime in the afternoon, the exact time alludes me, so many things do anymore. Mom wanted some groceries and I needed to put more gas in my car. It’s easy to see the progression of logic from that point.
         I remember the distinct electric hum of the air conditioner as I walked in to the convenience store. The place seemed desolate, which was odd for such a hot day, usually the town children would come in to escape the heat. The clerk too seemed furtive and interrogative, as if threatened. I knew the woman well, she was an old friend of the family, widowed many years hence.
         The only other person in the store was a boy. Another familiar face, his name was Ian Dorchester, what some would call the local fag. I’ve never been one to give into such arbitrary hate, I have a cousin who’s the same way and I would die for the kid.
         Nevertheless, there was something wrong with him, something distinctly eerie or bad that I just couldn’t lay my finger on. Maybe it was the way he gestured, always grabbing and clawing, as if he was unaccustomed to the air around him. Perhaps it was the way his eyes were constantly motive, glaring, burrowing through everything at once. Maybe it was the unnatural maturity and sonority of his voice. But even beyond those oddities was just that base, human instinct that something was wrong.
         He smiled at me as I walked in, but it was uniquely unfriendly. I grabbed some eggs, milk, a box of Twinkies and the other standards and brought them up to the counter. Dorchester came up behind me as I checked out. His arms were laden with the strangest fair I had ever seen.
         Seeds! Every type of seed or nut or berry you could possibly get at a gas station. There were poppy seeds and pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds and probably a dozen others.
         “Watch out for this one,” I said sarcastically to the clerk, “he looks a little seedy.”
         The woman chuckled, but Ian laughed outright in an embarrassingly loud cackle.
         “That was good Carson,” he said continuing to snicker.
         “I’m chock full of ‘em some days,” I said as I bagged my things and prepared to leave.
         “Well, it’s a shame we didn’t hang out more before graduation.”
         “Damn shame.”
         “Are you up to anything today then?”
         I’m not sure what elicited the following answer.
         “No, you wanna hang?”
         Something inside of me immediately revolted, but the invitation was one of those things in this wide, beautiful, horrible world that can’t be taken back.
         “I would love too,” he responded as a wolf’s smile filled his face.
         What followed was one of the strangest and most enchanting afternoons of my life. He took me bird watching. He knew every bird in the air and at perch. It was uncanny. His face would light up every time a new avian appeared and he could point it out to me. He would sing to them, and he would scale the trees to show me their nests. It was fascinating, but at the same time terrible, for this was not simply some long acquired passion, but an all consuming fervor. His knowledge overflowed to the brim about the beasts of the sky.
         We exchanged cell phone numbers and went our separate ways a little after dinner that night. He ate very sparingly ,my mother set a bountiful table for us. He ate only a few lima beans and chewed at his beef unhappily, once muttering something about it being ”overdone.”
         He left abruptly, as if he had forgotten something. My mother commented that she thought “he was a nice boy, even if he ate like a sparrow.” And I didn’t see Ian Dorchester again for months.
         I was sorry when I did again.

         Everyone left, all my friends that is. College came for them and I, well, I remained behind. Why? Who can say? I can barely remember anymore. My graduating class had one hundred and nineteen in it. Twelve of us remained in the town. Six probably had to, and another three should have, but me, I was lazy. I wanted the moment, the gratification, an immediate life without any discomfort. So I went to work at the local auto shop.
         I was never stupid though. I got kind of low marks in math, but never failed or did reprehensibly, same with science. I was great at history though, and English and all sorts of creative crap. I’ve been told I have an excellent vocabulary. I was good at shop too.
         Three monotonous months passed as day after day I dealt with the same problems. In shop class you’re constantly challenged, one day you’re working out electrical problems the next day you’re fixing the most obscure and contrived engine issues imaginable.
         No one ever tells you that life isn’t like that. Every day, it was an oil change or a tire patch or a belt replacement. No cars put back together after they’ve been fully disassembled, no amusing little parlor tricks to make me and the other gear heads feel smart, just the same old problems.
         Just the same miserable, crippling boredom.
         Then, my fortunes changed. I went from tedium to stark horror.
         Another little left behind was none other than Ian Dorchester, that strange, gazing soul who had taken me bird watching. I was eating lunch at Seraph’s, a fine local diner when in strolled Ian. He scanned the whole place, and his eyes immediately came to rest on me. He strode over, he had no bounce when he walked, his feet thrust forward rather awkwardly so that he always kept a very even keel.
         “Hello Rick, how are you?” he asked stiffly but still politely.
         “Not bad Ian, how are you?” I responded with amiability.
         “Marvelous, you mind if I sit with you?”
         “Go right ahead, what have you been up to lately?”
         “Nothing much, same old same old. You work down at Danner’s now right?”
         “Yep.” The waitress handed Ian a menu at that point.
         “Just a water and a bowl of cherries,” he retorted curtly.
         “You don’t eat much do you?” I asked politely.
         “I guess I’m not a meat and potatoes kind of man.”
         “Plenty of that in the world. Where are you working?”
         “Here and there, you know, keep myself free to fly.”
         “Busy social life I take it?”
         “You might say that, you? Have you been out lately, done anything exciting or stupid?”
         “Work, work, work. And that’s about it.”
         “You should take a load off, I’m going to a party tonight, you should come!”
         “Well, I’m not doing anything tonight…”
         “Great, wonderful, stupendous, my place seven tonight, I’ll drive.”
         “Wait a sec…”
         “See you then!”
         He leaped up and left, before a bit of his food was brought. He didn’t even look around as he walked out, but proceeded joyously to the door. He seemed as if he had accomplished something. I couldn’t help but feel like he was going home after a hunt.
         
         I suppose this next part is where things really take a turn for the worst, excuse me if my coherence is a little wobbly here. If you had witnessed the things I witnessed that night, you would be a little funny yourself.
         I showed up a little early. Why? Why did I even go? I was repulsed and frightened by this person, it was illogical, but I felt drawn into his world. Perhaps it was curiosity, after all, I didn’t know anything about this guy. Sure we had shared an afternoon together, but what kept this talented, intelligent young man here, in this nowhere town? What was his home life. I realized I had never seen his parents before either. As the day went along my furor to get deeper in consumed me. Why was he so polite and bitter? What did he want from me? Why was I the object of his interests?
         By three o’clock I had to know.
         I showed up at four with no advance phone call.
         I walked straight up to the door and rang the bell.
         Not even a full four seconds passed before he tore the door open. He was wrapped in towels, apparently having just gotten out of the shower.
         “What’re you doing here so early Carson?” he said in a voice that masked a deep seated contempt.
         “Thought I’d come early, I wasn’t doing anything,” I answered back trying to assuage his unfurling anger.
         He melted just a little bit and the fury in his face subsided.
         “Come in and sit down,” he said. The towel covering his shoulders slipped a little bit and I noted some scaly looking scars on his shoulders, at least I thought they were scars.
         “I’ve got a few more matters of personal hygiene to resolve,” he said as he led me into his bedroom, “make yourself comfortable I’ll be out in a few minutes, then we can catch dinner, sound cool?”
         “Sounds great,” I said with a smile. He smiled back and then thumped down the hall.
         Two or three minutes passed and the house began to creep into me. A faint smell of ammonia was on the air, and all around things seemed, how to describe it? Contrived.
         There was too much sound all around me, mostly bird song, how were the birds so loud? I couldn’t understand. It was then that I realized all the windows were wide open, and in the trees surrounding the house were flocks, and I mean flocks of sparrows and inane farm birds of every sort.
         I turned away from the almost deafening chirping and noticed a beautiful leather bound book and a brown pen sitting on his night stand. It was obviously a journal of sorts, but I figured that nothing horrendous could be written in it. After all what does one man have to hide from another?
         I opened it.
         The hand writing was archaic and edgy looking, but at the same time beautiful and mystical in a way.
         The first few entries were harmless enough, musings on certain boys from our high school, life dreams, daily frustrations, but it evolved quickly.
         The first date I remember that disturbed me specifically was June 2nd of the prior year.
         


         The horror in those pages was so vast that their contents is permanently seared into the back of my mind, persisting as sure as the Lord’s Prayer or the first few sentences of the Declaration of Independence.

June 2nd,  2009

         B’vrash Crovalak! The Crow on Twelve Wings!
         He who holds the rod will dispense judgment!
         I had a dream this night. It was beautiful. I finally flew away from this awful hateful place into a world where all the broken people go. We were sheltered in his wings, the Great Crow heard us, and he loved us.
         Were that it all was real, but it cannot be.
         But it was scarcely like a dream I have ever endured before, it was so much more poignant.
         I should put this all out of my head.

I flipped a few pages ahead and the content was all turning as black and enchanted as that first strange entry. July 14th was the next real monstrosity in the book.
“Hey Carson!” I heard Ian exclaim from the end of the hall.
“Y-yes!” I answered back in a weak stammer.
“Is it alright if I shave? We have plenty of time.”
“I don’t care.”
I went right back to the diary.

July 14th, 2009

         B’vrash Crovalak! He Who Wields the Weapons of War!
         I understand my dreams now. It is his bidding, his way of speaking to his extent branches who are too far away for him to physically reach! It is not a dream at all! It is a vision, a psychic emanation. It is his glorious presence!
         Tonight I shall speak to my Master!

         A chill slithered down my spine from the way he wrote master. It wasn’t joyous or loving, it was exultant. A cry echoed out from a bullied child to an even bigger bully.
         The next night’s entry was even more disturbing.

July 15th, 2009

         B’VRASH CROVALAK! HE WHO SMASHES CITIES!!!
         I did it, I did it, I made contact. The great crow turned an amber eye and saw me. He saw me!
         He says that my prayers will not go unanswered.
         (Three lengthy paragraphs went in this spot, but I could not for the life of me make them out, the hand became scrawling and degenerate)
         
         The entry finished with two pages of that same cryptic phrase repeating itself over and over again, B’vrash Crovalak.

I skimmed several pages, all going on and on about this Crovalak figure. Occasionally a crude drawing was inserted.  The  Great Crow apparently looked nothing like a crow at all. There were a few rough similarities, notably a beak and wings, but other than that the disparities were glaring. Thw feathers were more like a reptile’s scales, the head was long and smooth looking, grotesque and alien. Worst of all were the feet, they were rigged, stony looking and archaic, but still strong and vital.
I settled on a page that seemed significant, my sanity already sapped enough to be anesthetized to the horror I was beholding.

September 8th, 2009

         B’vrash Crovalak! The Great Crow!
         My Lord’s emissary at last arrived. He has promised me my due.
         I have been elevated to shepherd!

         That’s all the farther I could read, for I heard the bathroom door come open at the end of the hall and Ian came into his room still swathed in five towels.
         “You mind stepping out Rick I need to change,” he said clutching his clothes around him.
         I nodded and mumbled that I had to go to the bathroom.
         It was as I was walking out that I realized that I had left the diary on the bed, wide open. I begged whatever celestial force that watched over me to defend me and to turn Ian’s eyes away from the diary.
         I entered the bathroom and heard him bellow at his end of the hall.
         “What?!”
         Then my mind disintegrated completely.
         What few images I remember thereafter are recalled only with great pain. I looked to the ground, and there found the most horrifying thin I’d ever seen in my life. It was not so wholly unnatural, nor that unearthly, but it was… unexpected.
         ‘Twas a feather, a glossy black plume, fallen to the floor.
         I heard Ian running furiously up the hall towards me, but I could no longer care. I leaned back and laughed hideously as I ran the feather through my fingers.
         He emerged in the doorway, naked as the day he was born, and that’s the last thing I remember. His smooth, thin body naked in the light of that tungsten filament light bulb. I can recall every mole, every hair on it, but it was only human.
         It is in my worst nightmares that I see it for what it was truly, for I know no mortal could comprehend the rest of it in their waking hours, lest their mind turn to ash.
         I see his form, true the torso, the chest, the genitals, the face were all human. It was the extremities. Wings unfolded from his arms, and his feet were scaly and sharp, with large, curled, yellow claws jutting from the toes. I vomited and then screamed in horror. Ian smiled viciously and then scowled. He opened his mouth and a hideous raptor cry erupted. And then my brain is blank.
         I awoke two days later in a field, stripped naked and covered with arcane markings. Around me was nothing but ash on raised daises, blood sprinkled the stones and I knew that it was a black ritual that came before even the most eldritch gods of the Canaanites.
         The only sound discernible to me was that of bird song.
         I shudder to look to the skies any longer, for who knows what alliances have been cast amidst those winged flocks. All around us are beings in masquerade and I wonder, when will they descend and feed on the carcass which is mankind.
         They’ll not have me!
         A gun, a gun! I must find a gun!