Tragedy Of Crows: Chapter 1 (1) Chapter 1 It was just before shift change in Hell’s printing press when the ticking noise exploded into a full-force clank. Nessius was setting the tiny blocks of type concentrating extra-hard on the placement of a letter Q when steam blasted over his shoulder billowing towards the roof. Feeling the hot smoke brushing against his tail, he curled himself around to the black cases of type. It was a pain in the ass when something exploded, but if those cases fell over and all the letters got mixed up again, he’d quit. It doesn’t matter who the boss is. There was a moment of fog and shrapnel, and Nessius couldn’t see anything except the shadows of the other workers rushing around the floor. “Damn it all!” someone said as a pair of channel locks seared through the air. “How are we supposed to get anything done around here if this shit keeps breaking down!” The industrial fog pealed back over the silenced machine in the center of the warehouse. Nessius walked over and lifted the plastic guard, and started poking at the mangled newspaper wads clinging to the greasy gears. Impatiently, he clopped his left hoof against the pockmarked cement floor. There were no motions in the mechanism, but he was sure he could hear something powering down still on its way to a grinding halt. *** The phone company grudgingly held firm on a matter of five cents left unpaid on account #367503. Thus, long-distance service was replaced with a sound similar to that of a bread truck backing up whenever an outgoing call was made. This was the first reason that Scott Hazzard’s phone did not work so well. The second reason was that he had bludgeoned the phone against the wall after a conversation with the chair of English department. At times, it took a sort of sixth sense to operate the phone. Scott’s phone rang on another plain of existence that barely phased the average human ear. In some sister dimension to our own, Scott’s AT&T cordless was probably louder than the crashing water of Niagara Falls, but in room 339 the ringing of the phone dropped deep into the background of Cracker’s “Low” rattling through the stereo. As the left KLH speaker popped and crackled its way through the guitar solo, a transmission went unnoticed and a voice mail message was left behind. --You’ve reached the dorm room of Scott W. Hazzard. I have no use for anyone outside this room. Say whatever the fuck you want after the tone. Scott this is Maria. I know you don’t like to get out much, but a few of us from the writing workshop are going to take our journals out to the lake. I was wondering if you’d want a change of setting. Give me a call, okay…byeeee The second song on the CD crashed across the room; the bottom of a half spent bottle of Captain Morgan’s fought to find a resting place on the floor at least for a little while. *** Satan was having one of those drowsy do-nothing Sunday mornings. Being the Lord of Darkness has some perks; he didn’t have to keep his appointments. He could set his own hours, and he definitely didn’t have to get up in time for church. Sometimes, Satan woke up in his throne looking down on the blank, black room while the searing light of heaven trickled down upon his head. That was a bit of a downer. Often, he woke up in bed with the light fixed upon his eyes. There was no escaping it. Heaven had her flashlight on him day and night, and always, it seemed stagnate in its constant state of brightness. It was a dull, bright, though, drawn out. Never any more or any less than what it was in his last recollection or the recollection before that. If he strained, and he did quite often, he could sense things through it. He could almost hear the garbled talk of angels, scraps of prayers, and bits of righteous indignation. His mind tried to harness these things and whip up some kind of plot, but Satan had been feeling a little frazzled so far this century. Satan had been doing a lot of soul searching. Sure, there were plenty of people who wanted to sell their souls for money, booze, or a date with Charlize Theron, but these weren’t quality grade “A” Faustian souls. These were measly, Hollywood-wannabe souls. Everyone wants fame and fortune these days. No one wants to clutch ultimate power and unleash hellish fury upon the masses anymore. These were sad times. Sure, there were evil systems in place. Third world countries were terribly impoverished. World ignorance to the plight of the environment was at an all time high. These were things to be proud of, but Satan couldn’t really take any credit. Humans were inventing evil upon evil, and less and less of it had anything to do with him. In fact, the only people who shouted, “Yeah, Satan!” or “Way to go buddy boy!” when things went bad were a couple of rancid suck-ups from his original stable of ineffectual fallen angels and a few pockets of dumb kids who wear black fishnet stockings and hang out in dark basements. These kids had spirit, but were more concerned with pissing off their parents than unleashing ultimate evil. In the old days Satan was the alpha and omega when it came to evil deeds, but somewhere around the time cable television came out, Satan realized that he wasn’t on the ball anymore. He should have seen it coming with that whole “Spinning Jenny” thing, but people were still writing about him in those days. And so many more plays, sitcoms, and Saturday Night Live sketches warranted his attention. He liked to be the authority on every depiction of him, but lately writers had been disappointing. Satan just wasn’t popular anymore. He was lucky if he was featured in a commercial for anti-bacterial soap. Looking at the crumbly gothic architecture of Hell’s capital city, Dis, Satan sighed realizing once again how badly he was out of touch. These walls really spooked the Hell out of incoming souls in the old days. Now, most people are only afraid that a rock off one of the tower windowsills is going to come down and clock them on the head. They don’t call them lookout towers for nothing these days. Perhaps, it was time to pass the torch, but to who? Surely, none of those half-witted fallen angels would be up to the task. To think it, Beezelbub on the front lines, charging the gates of Heaven with a battle cry formed half of things he heard Satan say and half of crap he read in the Weekly World News about how “the end is near, at last!” True, they had vision, but it was Satan’s vision. They had been following it for years. Satan could have led them in a revolt against creamed corn, they’d still charge mindlessly behind him. Yet, when was the last time they came up with something totally ground breaking in the realm of evil? When was the last time that Satan or any of his followers could say they had made a truly significant stride in the war against Heaven? Dagon always talked about stealing something really important and hiding it from the faithful. No one had any suggestions as to what could be so important, and Satan had serious doubts that the faithful would bother looking for it in any place that made sense. And Azazel grumbled and groaned a lot, but he didn’t do anything except perfect the complex science of counter-productivity. These days it was more of a Cold War, and Satan knew for sure that he was losing it. His Lordship was aware of everything, complaints from the sentries about cave-ins in the lower pits, complaints about broken equipment in the printing press, maintenance demons threatening to go on strike. Something had to be done, but this was not new. Something always had to be done, but as he followed a visible crack along the dark marble corridor, Satan was beginning to doubt that he was the man to do it. “Beezlbub” he spoke and the word became a being, not much more than a sound or idea floating around in his head. A shard of malice grinned back at him dutifully. “I will need some time alone,” Satan’s voice blanketed his chambers. He was on the throne again, high upon carved yellow stone studded with red jewel. “Are you going to earth again?” Beezlbub replied. “No,” Satan spoke. “I am going to think.” *** On earth, there have always been those select few people who have a real knack at spotting impending celestial horror. In the good old days, these people became wizards or high court officials. Nowadays, these people get stuck doing tarot card readings over 1-900 numbers. Of course, there are more hoaxes out there than real things. Despite a lot of hoopla, about two in every hundred thousand of these freelance fortunetellers have marginal capabilities. College student Debra Dufray of Glendale, Queens could predict coin tosses within 98 percent accuracy provided that she had touched the coin prior to its being flipped. This didn’t do her much good accept in helping her secure shotgun status on long road trips. After a while, her friends caught on and switched to rock-paper-scissors which apparently yields one possibility too many for Miss Dufray. Eric Pickles, garbage man from Auburn, New York found that he could tell the future of any dog or cat on his route. Three days before the Warner’s beloved cat Snuffles disappeared, a bag of dog biscuits was leaned up against the trashcan on the curb. A note attached read: Sorry, it’s hard to see when you have to back this big thing up. Although some psychics had real significant power, none really felt anything on the rise. Even the wildlife took little notice to the changes brewing on the celestial plane. A surprisingly clairvoyant moose in South Dakota raised its head for a mere five seconds, then went back to sucking the morning dew off a frosty tuft of grass. Had he been the most powerful clairvoyant moose in the world, he might not have noticed anything. Being psychic is all about catching vibes. They move like high and low pressure cells. All the ingredients of a storm might be there, but sometimes radar fails and the weatherman ends up looking like a total boob when it starts pouring outside. On June 3rd, no one picked up any serious signs of anything, except Michael Kromer of the geology department at SUNY Oswego. For fifteen minutes he felt compelled to search the sky for a comet even though he knew very well there would be none that night. At nine-thirty, Hazzard’s phone rang, piercingly. *** Not much is known about the inner workings up there. What is known is hard to put into words using the terminology of the physical world. Some stories feature Angels, and in some sense, these characters do exist as separate thriving beings. Still, each is like a square of chocolate snapped from a Hershey bar. Literally, that square could be considered a “bar of chocolate” when separated from the rest, but it could never exist without calling to mind the whole original chocolate bar. Physically, there are singular Angels, but ideally, any one of them would merely represent the whole Angel contingent. For this reason, the angels found it ridiculous that human stories gave them names. Some of them had acquired names that stuck either from some particular task that had been delegated to them or from some grand event they bore witness to. Some of the higher-ups, like Michael, had a name that called to mind glorious deeds past and future. Uriel was the only angel in the outer rim that had a name, and his stuck out for far less glorious reasons. Uriel was finishing up his lunch. He closed the aluminum foil up over the candy bar and considered stuffing it in his satchel for later. Looking across at the sun, he decided to put it back in his lunch pale. Melted chocolate all over his satchel would be a tedious thing to deal with at the end of the day if he had forgotten the chocolate was there. He forgot a lot of things. Some of the more important things he had forgotten were the cause of his fame. Uriel had not thought to curse himself for not paying enough attention during the training video. In fact, Uriel felt almost entirely blameless for the whole invasion incident so many years ago. Since then, he had become a great record keeper, hadn’t he? Well, certainly, he wasn’t the worst. He always punched in on time, kept his cubical tidy, and made sure records of living souls were arranged in proper order for later review. Only when Uriel thought about his name did he consider anything about his “rank” in the offices or whether he would ever be promoted to his former position as one of the five head guards on the ridge of the heavens. Mostly, Uriel thought about what he was doing at the time. He considered closing his lunch pale, looking around and seeing that his thermos was not yet inside; he would have to change his plans. The thermos would have to go in the lunch pale first. These small things had to be considered with great detail. This made Uriel very efficient, he thought. Some of the angels called him slow. On a Doric pillar rising out of nothing hung the time clock for Uriel’s crew. Uriel would always count and recount his time as he waited in line to punch his card. The other angels grumbled a bit whenever they ended up behind him. None spoke to him, but sometimes, Uriel could almost hear his name. Hearing it, there was no reason to turn and confront whoever had said it. The existence of his name in the air had meant that everyone said it and that whatever reason had brought them to say it was irrefutable truth. Uriel never considered himself as different, but he did let something enter his mind to ease any rising tension. For less than a moment, he thought about anger, just as an option, a choice in opposition to hearing his own name. It passed. The ease returned. He knew something they didn’t, but he didn’t dare think about it for too long. A clank of celestial clock gears left its print upon his card like all the others. He smiled. There was no reason to think about it, just the idea that he had done it, hearing his name a thousand times an earth day couldn’t shake that sense of relief. And certainly, it had been an accident. Surely, he had just forgotten. Maybe, he had even corrected the mistake. Besides, even if he hadn’t what difference could it have possibly made? Uriel flew back to his post. He seldom thought about those times in the record halls with the lowest level God-light barely trickling in, the music of the spheres resonating rather than playing or revealing herself. Bits of anonymous moments, tiny shivers, were about all he felt of his time working at the record hall processing souls. High on his low perch, he kept watch, looking down. Beyond him Paradise was silent. Uriel smiled. Less than a moment, he thought about laughing, he thought about guarding God’s new creations, and he thought about consciousness. Maybe, something happened in that record hall. Maybe, another mistake, but surely, it was an accident. No one takes pride in such things. He must have been happy about something else entirely. The moment passed, and Uriel was back to concentrating on his left foot. If he moved his left foot over, he could see down below with more clarity. Where to move it? Slowly…he wished to take it slowly. *** Once in November of 1993, a steelworker by the name of Jeff Clark had been given a particularly monotonous job by the foreman of the casting deck. While cutting billet samples for the folks at Quality Assurance, Jeff began reciting his favorite movies verbatim in his head to help the time go by faster. After he had finished “Top Gun” moving straight into “The Breakfast Club”, Jeff found himself stuck on a particular Judd Nelson line. In his mental effort to figure out just the right wording, Jeff did not leave space in his mind enough to notice that his gloves had gotten oily from leaning on the casing of the billet cutter. A large hunk of steel slid through Jeff’s hands and thwacked his left knee before thudding against his boot just above the metal of the steel toe. What followed was the same exact one and a half minute string of obscenities used by Hazzard when the phone blasted him out of bed. At the tale end of the forth ring, Hazzard picked up the phone and completed the sentence with…. “…. and I hope you hang up there that way until you die…. Who is it?” “Hi!” Maria said. Hazzard slapped his forehead letting the fingers crawl down to his goatee. Maria started talking about the day with slow breaths in between the extra-important, highly descriptive words. Hazzard was always fascinated by the way she’d sigh into a word like “sky” and stuttered straight into a connecting word like “and”. There were a great many details of her smile, posture, and personal hygiene that were speckles of definite knowledge in his vague senses of her, but generally, he didn’t pay much attention. Several times, she had told him about all the poetry readings being presented at the conference that summer. She had stressed each name individually, each time with renewed vigor despite tired statements like, “you’d really like this guy,” always qualified with the safety words, “I think, anyway.” “If this is about poetry…. ” Hazzard began, but with Maria there was no need to finish these sentences, because it was like telling a hyperactive toddler to leave you alone; they assume it’s some sort of game and then run dumbly at you, drooling. “No, no, silly,” she laughed, and it was a hardy guffaw with a faint elegance. It was like a bus passing in front of a monument, Hazzard thought, not sure why. Maybe, he had drank too much the night before. “I wanted to remind you about going to the lake.” “What about going to the lake?” he said kicking over a stack of paperbacks, Walden skidded across the linoleum floor plowing up some fallen hairs and lint. “Did you want to go with us?” she asked, and he could sense her head bobbing, the smile, thin-lipped and glistening with wet teeth. His own mouth felt sticky and dry behind chapped lips. Due to a slight bend in his front teeth, Hazzard had an uneven bite. This was hard to see unless he was mad. Then, the bottom teeth collided upon the top with half over and half under, crunched in a wreck with the maximum amount of spiky teeth displayed. “What’s wrong with you, Maria?” he asked tipping a bottle of Saranac Pale Ale to see if it was empty. There was a line of bottles from a long forgotten twelve pack in a circle around an ashtray on his desk. Through the brown glass he could see some bent up paperwork from the college financial aid office. He tugged at a loose white corner of paper and the rattle of glass necks convinced him to use caution. The moment served as enough of a pause whereas he no longer felt like blasting Maria with a verbal flame fueled with all the venomous energies pumped from his throbbing headache. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought you might want to get out and get some fresh air.” Typically, Hazzard hated fresh air. In fact, he hated weather. All kinds. “I hate those people,” he said ripping the papers off the desk. Several bottles tipped, two fell, one broke. After examining the papers for a few seconds, he realized he didn’t really need them. They found a place on the floor draped over an empty forty-ounce bottle. “You know that I hate those people.” “Yeah,” she said stretching out the word for four beats. “But, no one said you had to stay with them.” Thinking briefly about the dark trails by the lake, he considered finding a nice, cool hillside to sit upon with a journal and a lukewarm can of diet soda. Of course, there would be bugs, and the sun, too. “Then why bother going with them at all,” he replied, something white crunched beneath his heal. A tiny spray of aspirin dust curled up towards his ankle. The pill bottle was empty, crushed by Thoreau in the corner.
Copyright © 2001 Scott W. Hazzard |