NEW FICTION: The circle, part 3.

 

The fat crow circled above him slowly, his glasses flashing regularly in the clenched beak of the bird. He could think of a number of things he'd like to do to the bird, but few that he could. There was a way perhaps, but... He glanced towards the periphery of the circle. Whatever was coming was now so near that he could practically taste them, and it wasn't ripe fruit and honey, it was bad blood and rank gristle. Shit!

He raised his eyes once more to the drifting bird, as if it was taunting him. The sigil at the base of his thumb itched in answer to the taunt, and he allowed it. It was this or nothing. Unchecked, the itch quickly spread - across his fingers, deep into his palm. A thump started, matching his pulse, but heavier, and with purpose, the purpose was the crow above him.

He didn't let his eyes drift for a second from the circling bird, even though he knew that everything would change around him within moments. He had to have his glasses. It was a short-term obsession, but he needed his eyes, needed the focus that his corrective glasses would give him. He knew it was a handicap, crap vision, but he'd lasted this long, he would last longer, if he could just get the damned glasses back.

His hand began to seize, the ligaments shorten and thicken, as his fingers curled in on themselves, forming an involuntary fist. His whole hand now throbbed, pulsed with a single purpose, a fist with a guttural need - to strike, and it did. Without his own awareness, he shot out his arm, sending it high into the morning sky, his fist punching into thin air, but dragging along with it a primal urge to hit the dark, fat bird circling him, and to hit it hard. He missed. Tried again, and missed once more. The third time he felt contact, his pulsing fist colliding with the oily feathers of the crow. The bird fluttered, sending its wings into awkward angles, its clawed feet furiously trying to fend away a stroke from nothing, to defend itself from thin air.

He watched intently as the bird tried to right itself, so he hit it once again with his fist. The bird knew by instinct that it was headed for freefall. It was the glasses or flight. It chose wisely, dropped the glasses and flew off into the morning sun with a fury that would be paid back in kind at some point, of that he was certain. But the glasses, seeming to fall in slow motion, tumbled over and over, the suns refection flashing with a regular rhythm that seemed to match the slowing pulse of his hand, a fist no longer.

His glasses landed gently in front of him, creating little or no impact as they settled into the white dust. He dived into the dirt, spread-eagled. He grabbed hold of his glasses as if they were a long lost elixir of life, which in a way they were. They were his eyes, and he damn well needed them now of all times. He quickly examined frames and lenses - both intact. The frames were a little bent, but they were all there. He stuck them onto his face. Everything shot into focus, and he was ready.

He was just in time. he shifted his gaze towards the source of the mumbled, disjointed song. The trees parted, the undergrowth curled into itself, creating an opening where there had been none, and in that space stepped the creature.

She was an old woman, cascading peppered hair swept past her shoulders. She was short, skinny, wore nothing but swirls of brambles, wound about her - brutal thorns punctured and scraped across her emaciated body, leaving lethal looking raised welts, glistening with blood, that almost seemed, along with the brambles, to be part of her costume. Bramble woman, he couldn't help naming her, but he instantly regretted it the moment she captured his restored vision. She looked demented - half here, half somewhere else - he knew what that felt like. But her eyes, that was her strength, her passion, her power. They swarmed with creatures, tiny creatures - sharp, angry, hungry flies, bloated and evil. Every time she blinked, a new swathe of flies flew out of her, while more filled the void of the new departed, forming a rhythm, a cycle of nature that wasn't, couldn't be real.

The song was still with her, still mumbled and distorted, as she slowly made her way towards him, swaying across the white dusted circle, as if in a half-remembered ambling dance that only she knew. But it was more than that. She moved slowly and painfully, the bramble thorns eating into her body on all sides as she moved. And as she got closer to him, clouds of flies from her eyes began to circle him, looking for something new, and something old. They were looking for death, new death, and felt that they had found it - in him.