A Brotherhood of Crows.
Chapter 5

Michael knew very few things for certain about people. He had never, over the course of his forty five odd years on earth, had so much as amounted to a friend. He had grown from a lonely child, to an isolated teenager, to a solitary man and now forlorn middle middle aged teacher and largely ignored poet, all without constant human company. This was part of why he was where he was tonight. But instead of this lonesome life, he had learned a thing or two about people, and the most important of those things was this: everyone needed a little bit of faith.

His faith was the other reason he was where he was tonight.

Religion had fascinated him and confused him in equal measure his whole life. He had always know himself to be a spiritual personal, but every attempt to join a flock had failed. He’d been too pragmatic for the Catholics, too reluctant to learn other languages for the Muslims, too easily distracted to replace nirvana among the Buddhists. The hundreds, if not thousands of other faiths, had passed him by. Until he’d found, via information on a hand scrawled flyer, the Cleansing Kiln.

He’d attended his first mass a year before. Two weeks later, he’d been baptised in ash, and, as the congregation had sung hymns,hymans which were forbidden outside of the Kiln’s hidden chapels, he had felt, for the first time in his life, happy. A week after that, he’d move to part time work so that he might spend his afternoons with other Kilners, on the corner of Princess Street and Waverley Bridge, and evangelise at all and sundry , from the Book of Black Wings.

He looked down at the items assembled on his coffee table: there was the book, of course, that book bound in feathers. And there was a knife, one selected from his kitchen, that he’d owned for years and never once used on anything more that a potato. He rather wished he had a drink, despite being a lifelong teetotaler. It wasn’t like he was going to have another chance for one.

He thought back now, to that conversation he’d had earlier that day. He’d been at mass, his mind soaring on Black Wings, when he’d been approached by the man in the finely tailored suit, the man with the face he vaguely recognised, but could not place, the man who’d laid a leather riding gloved hand on his shoulder and asked him, if he was willing to do something important for the Kiln.

Of course, he’d replied.

And the man had told him, and voice had been like the voice of God, and while Michael could not, for the life of him remember the exact words, he had been unable to refuse.

So that was why, with a simple move, he took up the knife, place it against his elbow, and drew it, slowly, to the bottom of his hand.

The clattering of black wings filled his ears. He could not see for the fury of feathers and the shining sharpness of beaks. The raw cawing of the birds, which surrounded him like a whirlpool. He was surrounded and he was afraid.

When the air cleared, he realised with horror that he was not at home. His last memory had been falling asleep, very suddenly and deeply, in his living room. He had been reading something when he’d slumbered, and hist conscious thought had been the horrible, irrational feeling that he was not alone in his tiny flat. Now, it was dark, and it was cold and it was raising, and he was not at home.

And he was hungry, so very very hungry. The hunger was rawer and purer than anything he’d ever felt before. It seem to gnaw at his very bones, and he wanted meat. The intense desire for it shocked him. He hadn’t eaten meat in over ten years, but the desire for it, for blood and flesh was almost sexual in its intensity.

He could barely see, it was so dark here, wherever here was. But something was very wrong with his body. He felt heavier. Bigger, like he’d suddenly grown in the time he had slept. His mouth felt strange, like it was full but not of food. He was suddenly very aware of his teeth, and that he had...more than before. His legs felt odd, like they were bending in the wrong direction, bending backwards at the knee; and his face...his face felt longer, like someone had taken his whole head and stretched it in a rack.

He reached up to touch his face and yelped in unexpected pain. His vision was starting to slip back to him, and he saw, in horror, that his hand was different. His fingers were longer, and each one did not end at the nail, but fused, in a grisly combination of flesh and metal, in a six inch long, steel claw. The metal had been grafted to his flesh, and suddenly the horrible sense of its invasive presence sickened him. He tried to pull his hand back to get a better view and heard - felt - pistons and gears clicking at his elbow.

I’m a machine - I’ve become a machine. He thought panickedly. There was metal in his flesh, emerging from his skin and plunging back in again like a worm burrowing into an apple. He tried to stand and his legs now bent backwards, and seemed longer, his feet wider, bursting out of the tattered remnants of his shoes, each toe tipped with steel. There had been someone in his house, he dimly remembered, now, some dark shape like a man carved out from a night without stars that had watched him from the window. He remembered as he’d plunged into a sleep deeper than death eyes that burned like fires set in a hideous mask and then there had been nothing. And now he was something else.

He stood now, in the darkness. Rain ran down what remained of his clothes. He was now wearing a huge overcoat, much too big for a small, frail man like Michael. It hung over his new body, a body of steel and gears and clockwork grafted to flesh by an infernal mind. And he was taller, taller now than ever before, and his hands ended in claws and his face was longer than any human face should be and his heart and mind rawed for him to eat.

Something inside was changing too. Michael, the quiet, small self-employed artist, who lived a single lonely life in a small flat on the edge of Edinburgh, seemed to be fading away, swept aside by a cruel, snarling hunger. He had to feed. He would starve if not, and wither to nothing.

The thing that had once been Michael forgot its past, and like a child began to flex its new body. It hungered. It hungered for meat. It began to take stumbling steps with unfamiliar feet, and its mind was filled with hunger and pain and the beating wings of crows.