A Gathering of Crows

“No, nothing like that. I’d never do that to Marsha. It’s just . . . it’s complicated. I don’t like it here. I never have. This town . . . it weighs on you. It eats away at people. You know what I mean? It just never felt like home to me.”

“So you ran away?”

“Yeah, I reckon so—if you call joining the army and going to Iraq running away.”

“And did you find what you were looking for overseas? Did war feel like home?”

“No. It felt like hell.”

“So you returned.”

“Not by choice. Believe me, this was the last place I wanted to come back to. But my mom got sick. Cancer.”

“Where is she now?”

Donny sighed. “She passed. I stayed long enough to take care of her estate. Put the house on the market. Made sure the funeral director was paid. I was leaving tonight, in fact. A few minutes earlier and I wouldn’t have been here when all this started. I’d have been on the road and miles away.”

“Where were you going?” Levi asked as they approached Myrtle’s front door.

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, to be honest. Anywhere, I suppose. Anywhere that felt right, you know? Some place where I could find myself.”

“Well, you’re here now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You telling me this is all fate?”

Levi shrugged. “Fate. God’s will. Call it what you want. Some people think the universe is chaotic—that there’s no rhyme or reason to why things happen. I think they’re wrong. There’s a specific order to things. We don’t always like how things turn out, but they turn out that way for a reason. You were going out to find yourself, but maybe your self was here all along.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m still not sure I understand your hesitation to get involved with Marsha, though.”

“The first time I left, Marsha got so depressed that she dropped out of college and tried to kill herself. That’s my fault, you know? I don’t want to let her in, because I’m gonna leave again and I don’t want to put her through that once more.”

“I see. That’s a heavy burden for a young man like yourself.”

“You’re telling me.”

Levi fell silent and cocked his head, as if listening. “You hear something?” Donny whispered after a moment.

“No, I was just making sure the coast was clear, and it is. Let’s go inside.”

“I reckon the door is locked. Brinkley Springs may be a small town, but folks still tend to lock their doors when they leave.”

“That’s okay. I have a key.”

“Myrtle gave you her keys?”

Levi shook his head. Then he grasped the doorknob with his right hand and closed his eyes. As Donny watched, he took a deep breath, held it for ten seconds or so, and then exhaled. Levi opened his eyes as the latch clicked. He turned the knob and the door swung open.

“How the hell did you do that?”

Levi winked. “How do you think? Come on.”

They went inside, Levi first, with Donny following close behind him. Myrtle’s house was a dusty, spider webbed monument to clutter. Every inch of available shelf space or tabletop was piled high with a bewildering array of items—stacks of magazines and paperback books, vials of scented oil, votive candles, potpourri, incense burners, crystals, beads, pewter fantasy figurines, tarot cards, ceramic unicorns and dolphins, assorted knickknacks and more. One bookshelf was stuffed with Myrtle’s self-published books, and next to the shelf were six open cardboard boxes filled with more. A large angel figurine perched precariously atop the television. Donny didn’t like it. Rather than being comforting, the angel seemed somehow sinister, as if it were watching them reproachfully. The air in the house was thick with the competing smells of various incense that made him half-nauseous.

“Crap,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Levi said, eyeing a shard of quartz that was lying on the coffee table. “A lot of it is. Most of it, in fact. But hopefully she has a few things here that are worthwhile.”

“So what are we looking for, anyway?”

“Two things. Why don’t you go into the kitchen and find us some salt. Doesn’t matter what kind. Table salt. Sea salt. Iodized salt. They’re all fine. Get all the salt she has—as much as you can carry.”

“Salt?” If not for the seriousness of their situation, Donny might have thought that Levi was fucking with him. “What do we need salt for?”

“It’s a weapon. You heard what Randy said. The thing that killed his parents had an aversion to salt.

Many supernatural entities do, at least when they’re in corporeal form. Salt is always a good magical failsafe.”

“And here I just thought it made food taste better.”

“It does that, too. Now, go on. I’ll poke around in here and see if I can’t find us some sage.”

“Sage?”

“Yes. I have a small quantity with me, here in my vest pocket. But we’ll need a lot more.”

“Personally, I’d be more comfortable with an M16.”

“But we already know such a weapon would be useless against our foe. Salt and sage are what we need.”

“If you say so.”

Levi nodded, his attention focused on the clutter. Shaking his head, Donny went into the kitchen and poked around in the dark. He found a salt shaker on the table and slipped it into his pocket. Then he opened the pantry door and found a large canister of salt on the top shelf. When he returned to the living room, Levi wasn’t there.

“Levi?”

“I’m upstairs,” he called. His voice was faint. “I’ll be down in a second.”

Donny waited. He sat the salt canister down on the table and flipped through a towering stack of magazines that leaned against the wall in one corner of the room. The titles were ones he’d never heard of before— Fate, the Fortean Times, Angels, the Coming Changes, Conscious Creation, Lightworker Monthly and others. Levi bustled around above him. Donny heard footsteps creak across the ceiling, followed by the sound of a drawer opening. He picked up an issue of the Fortean Times and flipped through it. There was a lengthy feature article about mermaids, including a report of a supposed mermaid sighting off the coast of Haifa, Israel the previous year. Most of the other articles seemed to be culled or clipped from various newspapers and magazines from around the world. All of them focused on the odd or paranormal— ghosts in London’s Highgate Cemetery, a man in Beijing falling seventeen stories and living, sightings of everything from Bigfoot to panthers in Manhattan, a rain of fish in a small French town, a Vietnamese man who had grown horns from his head and more. Each story was stranger than the previous, and all of them were supposedly true. Although Donny had never heard of the magazine, he certainly recognized some of the credited sources for the reports— the Associated Press, the Times of London, the Washington Post and others.

Donny suddenly felt lightheaded. The room began to spin. His pulse throbbed in his ears. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. It was all so bizarre. Most of the time, he felt like a young old man. He’d seen things —done things—that the rest of his former friends in Brinkley Springs would never do or understand, but even after seeing as much of the world as he had, he was faced now with the realization that he knew nothing and had seen nothing. There was an entire other world that existed in the shadows of the real world, a world populated by people like Levi and creatures like the ones outside. Skimming the articles in the magazine had just made the realization more concrete.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, breathless. “Jesus fucking Christ . . .”

He heard footsteps on the stairs. Donny composed himself. Seconds later, Levi appeared, carrying a small bundle of what looked like dried-up hay. He waved it as he approached.