What the Night Knows

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

The boy in the round room, high in the stone tower, hid his photograph of the beautiful dead movie star in all her naked glory, and always handled it with care. His one treasure.

He simmered with resentment of the old man, Teejay Blackwood. Of Anita, his mother, who abandoned him to his constrained life at Crown Hill. Of Regina, his mother’s sister, and of young Melissa, Regina’s daughter, who could go where they wished on the estate at any time of day or night, who never spoke to him, who mocked him to servants and laughed at him behind his back.

For the longest time, his resentment didn’t grow into full-blown anger. It remained only a bitter brooding over insults and injuries.

Fear of being beaten restrained his anger. And he dreaded having his few freedoms taken away. There was a subcellar with which he had been threatened more than once, a kingdom of silverfish and spiders.

He also feared what might lie beyond the 280 acres of Crown Hill. The old man often told him that in the world beyond, he would be called a monster, hunted down, and killed. In the early years, when his mother seemed to care about him, she also warned him against yearning for a life outside the estate. “If you leave here, you’ll destroy not only your life but also mine.”

The raven taught him freedom.

One hot June twilight, the boy cranked open all four windows in the tower room to encourage a cross-breeze.

With a flutter, the raven landed in the orange light that bathed the sill of the west window. With one sharp obsidian eye, the bird studied the hard-faced, graceless boy in his armchair with a book.

The bird cocked its head this way, that, the other. It assessed everything. Then it flew across the round room, out the east window, into the purple sky.

The boy believed his winged visitor wasn’t merely a bird. Raven first, but spirit also, an omen, a harbinger.

From a bowl of fruit, he selected three grapes. With a knife he cut each grape in half to free its scent. He put the pieces side by side on the western windowsill.

He suspected that if the bird was more than a bird, it would return for this fleshy offering. As the orange light thickened to red, the raven alighted on the sill.

The boy watched it eat the grapes, and it watched him watching it. When the bird flew across the room once more and out the eastern window, the boy felt they had conducted a wordless conversation. A profound communion had occurred. But what it meant, he didn’t know.

The next day at twilight, the raven appeared again, accepting more grapes. On the following dusk, quartered strawberries.

That third evening, two hours after the berries, the bird returned, the first time it visited after dark.

Sitting in lamplight, the boy stared at the bold raven on the shadowed sill, and the raven stared at the boy, and after a while the boy perceived that the creature had come to offer him something. But what? For half an hour, he waited, wondering, and then he knew. The bird had come to offer him the night.

Before the raven flew across the room, the boy was on his feet, striding toward the east window. An instant after the bird sailed through the open casement, the boy clutched the center post with one hand and leaned out so far that he risked a fall.

As the raven glided down from the tower and away, moonlight glimmered wetly on the glossy black wings, scapulars, and tail feathers, as if the bird were a spill of ink that wrote the boy’s future on the wind.

He hurried to the oak door, threw it open, and raced down the winding stairs. His footfalls were the drumming of a dragon heart, his urgent breathing echoing gustily off coiled-stone walls, like exhalations of fire.

Although he had long slept by day and lived in the late night, the easier to avoid the others whose company he was denied, he had never ventured from the house and the most immediate of the grounds. The time had come, the raven with its offer, the night and all its possibilities.

On these 280 acres were meadows and deep woods. Vales and hills. Rock formations and caves. Two streams and a pond. Although he could not set foot off the estate, before him waited a fenced world ripe for exploration.

And because the family and the servants slept, they would dream on unaware of how far he roamed and of what he did. He might do anything, anything, and they would think he walked the public rooms of the house or huddled in his tower, if they thought of him at all.

Always, he had been a shambler or a tottler, a clumsy construct of knobby joints and crude bones, stilting along in a praying-mantis gait. But suddenly in this night, racing across the east lawn in the wake of the liberating raven, the boy discovered a strange grace in his ungainly body.

Although, in the movies, the grim reaper was nothing but bones within his robe and cowl—as in Jillian Hathaway’s famous Circle of Evil—the harvesting spirit was shown to move effortlessly, to flow, to glide as if skating on a slick of blood. Now, as the raven circled over the boy, carving the fat moon with its pinions, he too flowed, glided, skated across the lawn, into a meadow, toward the woods.

The boy was not yet me. He had one thing to learn and one thing to do. Then he would become the man that I am now.