The Figure

The man came to his senses to the call of crows cackling in the cold night air. The murder of malicious birds gazed through the closed window at the bound man, the ravenous expectation as clear as it could be on a crow’s face. Yet they knew to wait. The cold walls of the building kept the tender flesh hidden away from their prying, pecking beaks. For now.

The man’s confused groans were swiftly ended by the soft creak of a nearby door. The hush filled the room like a dense fog before it was pushed out by the eerily soft tread of shoes pacing on the concrete. As the footsteps grew louder, the crows saw the man struggling in his bindings and a figure became visible to their beady black eyes. Seconds later, the shadowy figure came into view bearing a black blade that sliced at the man without a word, cutting tendons and shearing the man’s shirt. It wasn’t a killing blow, no. Yet it drove the man into a frenzy of terror induced madness. The poorly lit room came to life as the man threw himself and the wooden chair to the floor with enough force to shatter it into splinters. The victim crawled as quickly as he could when he hit the floor. It wasn’t difficult for him to reach the corner of the room as the shadowy figure watched. Now the man was on his feet, holding a piece of splintered wood in his shaking hands. There was nowhere to hide in the darkened room and there was nowhere to run lest he jumped from the window the crows were watching from. The figure had the only door covered.

The seconds seemed to tick by as the two stood there. Not a word was said, not a move was made. Not until the man let out a scream and charged at the Figure. The Figure did not hesitate as it countered the awkward swing from the desperate man with a cut to his wrist and a sidestep. From here, there was little the man could do as the figure approached from behind and drove the dagger into the man’s spine with an audible crunch of bone as his back gave way to the pressure. The victim collapsed and blackened blood began to flow out of the wound, like a foul fountain. The Figure did little to react as its victims lay there, it put away its blade and watched for a few moments as the blackened blood flow turned from a torrent of terrible poison to a trickle of red. When the Figure moved to open the window the crows moved in anticipation yet again.

The police had found another one. Another body strung from a building with its eyes pecked out and it’s body blackened with some strange substance. Even as five cars with a total of twenty officers gathered around the thing, a murder of crows was picking it clean of any exposed flesh left. The body hung there awkwardly from the window, each hand-bound to the pane itself with straps of leather and steel; frankly, it was a miracle the pane had not collapsed. An officer just below the body sighed in frustration as he heard the report so far, it had been exactly the same as the others. No links to other victims, nothing left by the killer, they weren’t even sure what the black gunk was in the victim’s body.

While the police watched the body, the crows watched from the rooftops. Dozens, if not hundreds of the birds watched from high up. Their cold eyes staring at their fellows feasting on the corpse with jealousy, then to the police officers with a look of malice incomprehensible to humans.

The Figure would not strike now, not soon. Yet there it stood, just out of sight of any officer who would look up, covered in black binding and feathers wearing a beaked mask adorned with the dried substances from each of his victims. The crows would sigh if they could, for they knew they would have to wait a little longer.