The haunted room was his. The haunted room was always his.
“A haunted room, fit for a haunted man,” they said, and the key hung untouched for months upon the hook, gathering dust and rust, and waiting for the day Topher Weiher would come down into town.
He liked this room, despite its sinister history. The disgruntled spirit of the strange Mountain Man was said to stalk this room, pacing its length with restless strides, unable to sleep, shrieking soundlessly into the gathering darkness like a banshee drunk on the thigh-meat of innocent barmaids.
The window where he stood was far enough from the cold of the river but close enough to hear the roar and roll of its waters. High enough to hear the beautiful aubades of dusk as the sun plummeted from the rumbling skies.
Standing at the window looking up at the red clouds, Weiher missed the days when songs were still sad.
“Some days you can still see him standing there, at the room window,” the town children would say in hushed voices. “The strange man, from the mountains,” they said, and Weiher could never really tell if they were talking about him or the ghost.

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.