Feathered Friend

Chapter 1

Music for the following Chapter ~ Dead Souls – Nine Inch Nails

"People once believed that when someone dies a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. And sometimes, just sometimes the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right." J O'Barr – 'The Crow (Movie) 1994' Spoken by Sarah.

The Beginning...

How did this happen to me?

One moment I'm lying in a pool of my own blood, my broken and shattered body sprawled next to the cooling remains of the man I loved most in this world. The next I'm clawing my way out of my own grave.

I became aware I was in my coffin one moment between rotting corpse and the next wakeful comprehension.

Blinking didn't chase away the empty nothingness. I punched my unfeeling hands against the top of the tomb that held me and fought for freedom. Tearing away the inner lining that had become my shroud, and reaching the underside of the wooden casket that held me prisoner was simply a matter of ignoring the damage I was doing to my hands. Not that I could feel anything anyway. Smashing through the wood was satisfying and the waterlogged earth above me fell through the hole I made and began to fill the box holding me prisoner. I shoved the splintered wood aside and ignored the mud that rained in upon me, clawing against the barrier between me and Scott.

Scott...remembering his name brought it all flooding back. I paused then, my brain returning me to the moment of his death.

I recalled the bloody pool he lay in as the holes in his chest and face ran red with his heart-blood and his tears. He'd died in a way I wished upon no one. Beaten, degraded and torn with sharp flying metal.

My own death was no less violent, in fact it an anonymous spectator would have said it was more so. Our tormentors had restrained me and forced me to watch as they tortured and then killed him, thinking in their cruel stupidity that he didn't matter. Thinking that our love was something unnatural. What they did to me after that was so much worse. What they did to me was so evil my screams rang out in the Land of the Dead and woke its Sentinel.

Scott, his face a bloody visage of torturous pain, was the last memory I had of him. Then it became a mere blank mask as his hand which had been outstretched towards me relaxed when the last bullet struck and the light left his eyes.

The rage that filled me at the memory gave me the strength to claw the rest of the way out of my grave. I welcomed the storm raging above me, it seemed fitting in that it matched the one raging inside of me.

Kneeling in the mud and torn strips of cloth that littered my coffin, I howled then. I found myself matching the violence in the howling wind that raged above my head, because it was nothing to the rage in my heart. That heart wasn't beating, as I knelt at the edge of my own graveside and screamed into the night. My decay ruined vocal cords straining against the vibration that forced them into motion reminded me ever so briefly of my life in the music industry before it had ended. But this was nothing like singing. This raw, ragged cry was pure sound. There was no music to it at all...

Back in the hotel room where we'd died, I hadn't been able to make a sound at the end. The gag stopped my cry, but all the breath left my body and my legs disappeared beneath me as everything that mattered to me in the world was taken from me. It was only after, when the leader of the grotesque crew had taken his fun and removed my gag that my screams came. And then so did my own death.

The pelting rain washed the mud from my body as I ripped off the remains of the jacket and shirt that whoever had dressed me for my coffin had dressed my cold, still body in. I couldn't feel anything but the flames of fury that seemed to consume me in that moment. I didn't feel the cold, I didn't feel the mud rising between my toes as I sank deeper into the disturbed earth at the edge of my own grave.

A stray newspaper page blew, half sodden, its meandering path taking it past my wet foot as I trod on it. I looked down at it and waited for the next lightning flash so I could read the date. The page flapped tiredly at the edge of my toes as I held it still, its weight added to by water and the other detritus it had picked up as it travelled. It was only now that it was resting against the wet ground that the rain began to completely soak it.

I stared uncomprehendingly for a moment before my sluggish brain kicked into gear. According to the date on the increasingly soggy pulp I've been dead for a whole year.

My eye sight back when I was a real human wasn't the greatest so the fact that I could read it at all should have surprised me. Of course nothing really should surprise me considering for all intents and purposes I'm dead. But if I'm dead, why am I standing outside the remains of my coffin? Why am I here? What brought me back? Do I have a purpose? The only thing I could think of was... what if Scott was back too?

I looked at the stone that marked my resting place. My headstone was stark, black with gold lettering. My full name was etched into the stone and the numbers pronounced my short life. I was 26 when I had died. Or rather when my life had been torn away, in a blur of blood, pain and violence. Scott's name was on the grave next to me. His headstone proclaimed he was one year older, but no less dead. I waited there at the graveside for hours, waiting to see if my husband would rise too.

He didn't.

The storm blew itself out and what remained was cold, soaking rain that would have chilled a living human to the very bone had they been sitting next to a grave like I was. But I felt nothing until a bird flew past my head and landed on the headstone that pronounced the date of my husband's death.

It looked at me a cawed. Surprisingly enough I understood it.

"He's not coming back."

The bird looked at me and cawed again.

"He's not coming back."

I shouted at it, "Why did I then?"

"Justice."