Through the Kindness of Ravens

An excerpt from Through the Kindness of Ravens:

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Talia Vertelli’s life spelled success in every sense of the word. From her poor broken-family beginnings, she swore she would find herself a better life, and her every focus was on achieving it.

Now, at twenty-eight, she was an author riding the international success of her sophomore digi-novel, Shaking the Minute Hand. She had a master’s in psychology, was madly in love, and was the definition of beauty, both internally and externally. Lastly, she had risen as a respected advocate for Compass, a society created to help people help themselves find their way, a cause for which she found she had a passion.

It was in that respect that she found herself the guest speaker at a Compass-sponsored program in her hometown of Staunton. Ironically, there had been a day when she had sworn she would never go back.

There were two things that she did not know—nary a chance that she could have—that would have made her heed her promise of long ago. First was that Staunton, though several hundred miles from his home, was where Ethan Whipp had decided that the next step in his own self-help program would be located; secondly, she not only represented the voice for a respected society, but to Ethan, she now represented the most current voice of the enemy forever bouncing off the inside walls of his skull.

~ 1 ~

Like a maple leaf in the fall, his victims’ emotions typically changed color, first coming out of the green haze of abduction’s sleep, then turning red with anger and anxiety. The anger finally gave way to dark fear in its purest sense as reality, or at least their perception of it, hit home.

Absolute fear now pouring out of them in every form imaginable—utterly desperate tears, gag-muffled gasps, cries and moans, profuse sweating, trembling, pissing—the list goes on, but it did nothing to better their situation. In fact, it only left them both physically and emotionally drained; their hopes fell. However, unlike the sway of a falling maple leaf, this fall was hard, fast, and abysmal.

Though they did not know it, they now played the part of a scarecrow—a scream-crow,—whose only remaining purpose in life was to scare away the crows that appeared as voices in their captor’s head. Therefore, for now, until the final act of a madman’s play, they remained burlap-masked, scarecrow-clothed, and bound to wooden crosses. In a macabre dress rehearsal, they were bound to play out their swan songs as a straw man’s crucifixes, crow-cifixes, in a field and in the middle of nowhere.

~ 2 ~

In her head, Talia’s screams were loud, rational pleas for help. Vocally, however, they came across as muffled, distressed, sedative-induced gibberish. The most horrific nightmare imaginable was but a dream to her reality. Even though she knew very little, if anything, about what had happened to her up to this point, she could not escape the realization of her impending future. She very quickly realized that her life would end soon, and she had no idea why.

She couldn’t help but wonder if it really mattered anyway. After all, was there any comfort in knowing you were merely a pawn played by the hand of insanity, or that your life would end in serving purpose to senseless absurdity?

She might not know why, but thanks to the media, she had a good idea how. Maybe not the details, but it was hard to miss the news coverage on the serial killer investigation that had gone on for over two years now.

In fact, she had seen enough about this to envision her picture headlining tomorrow’s news, just as she had seen the last thirty to forty others. She believed that at current count, she would go down in history as victim number sixty-one. It was this perspective—dying senselessly, as a statistical marker down the psycho-path—that sent a chill down her sweat-ridden back and unleashed sheer panic down every street of her mental map.

Even if she was wrong and survived, it did not matter. She would never mentally recover to live any semblance of a normal life. She found strange solace in the belief that she was not wrong.

Ultimately, only the instigator of Talia’s desperate and pathetic screams would ever hear them. He would capture and silence her most desperate and final scream, her last breath, much like the silence of isolation that enveloped her now.

From The American Heritage Dictionary:

scare•crow (skâr′ krō′) ►n. A crude figure set up in a cultivated area to scare birds away.

From Ethan’s Mental Dictionary:

scream•crow (skrēm krō′) ►n. A crude figure set up by the uncultivated area of a psycho’s mind to scare voices away.

A chapter prelude from Through the Kindness of Ravens:

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Pesky Birds

Why in my head
Voices still rant and rave
Thought I’d silenced the patriarch hraefn
But blood black eyes
Follow from the grave
Defying death’s limits, for me there’ll be no saving
For to save a soul, you need a soul to save
And I’ve none left for the taking

(Chorus)
Pesky birds….pesky birds
I’ll make your blood black eyes bleed
Pesky birds….pesky birds
For all unkindness to see

He leads the unkindness
They chatter from their perches in the canopy of trees
Of plans to follow and plots to forever torment me
But I have a plan myself
A dream of someday being free
One by one, plucked from my living hell
Add another trophy to my crow-cifix tree

(Repeat Chorus)

Pesky birds….pesky birds
I’m in control, I’ll soon be free
Pesky birds….pesky birds
Fear the silence, its power is me