There was a tier in the dark, where everything rode silently below the surface. Where secrets and sorrows never rose for air. In this place, when all light died and the wolves grew old, the crows rode upon their backs.
Crows as black as rotting teeth, they spent the days shrieking in the fields, and at night they gathered in their shadowy roosts, making evil plans and discussing the inevitable fall of mankind. Only there would he come to realize that all men are only as sick as the secrets they harbour.
The crows stank of a different rot. They had been feasting, somewhere, somewhere in the dark and the gloom, in the hidden places, on hidden bodies. They stank and they carried that stink with them. Their eyes had beheld things he dared not imagine, and they gazed upon him with those same little eyes, conspiring with one another in harsh, croaky declarations, as if they really had some awful language of their own. Screaming gibberish.
It was known to all that Christopher Weiher possessed an almost irrational hatred toward all crows. He sometimes wondered if they were now just waiting for him to die.