A Ripple in the Veil

Tim Lebbon

Classic source: Arthur Machen

A parliament of rooks passes over my house every day. In the morning they fly south, presumably to the fields and woods where they feed. During the evening they head back north, a great black cloud dragging dusk behind. I never tire of watching them; there’s something intensely spooky about it, as if I’m witnessing something that should be unseen, or a sight so far beyond humanity’s control – so of nature we can barely understand it – that it seems truly alien. And yet I love to watch, because it offers me a glimpse of the grandeur and wonder of the power that sits around us all the time. Usually that power whispers its presence in the meanderings of a bee, or hums its possibilities in the slow turning of a rose to face the sun. But the rooks are a scream.

It amazes me how, when seen from a distance, they seem to move and flow like a single living organism. There’s order in there, and design; and the movement of the flock displays instinct at its most fundamental level. They pass across the sky like a shoal of fish, each bird following the ones to the left and right, and up and down, never questioning the movement, and never apparently having designs of their own. They follow, swerving and dipping and rising and pulsing across the sky, and it is only when they are passing directly overhead that I make out the individual movements of each bird.

What fascinates me most is that there must be one bird that decides their path. No democracy, this. No votes as to direction or intent. I know my idea holds no logic – indeed, it would probably be blown from the water by any ornithologist worth their salt – but it seems to me that every bird is controlled, steered and coerced to behave the way it does. And it is nature doing the coercing.

That idea would frighten most people. But not me. I like the impression of order. Chaos scares me, and it is while watching this parliament of rooks that I feel most at peace with the world, and my place in it.

Until the day the lead rook disappeared.

As usual I heard them before they appeared. I was on my way to the bus stop to catch my ride to work, and the rooks were a familiar part of my morning routine. I smiled. From a distance their calls sounded like one caw, the combined chorus of one single existence. I paused to watch. They came from the north, preparing to see in the new morning, but even at a distance I knew that something was wrong. The call began to break up, panic cutting it into frantic shards that sailed to me across the village rooftops and through the orange smudge of autumn trees. I stood at the roadside and saw the rooks in the distance, a dark fluid cloud blurring the horizon and expanding as it came closer. It pulsed instead of flowed, breaking up, reforming, spreading out wider and wider until parts of it were no longer distinguishable from the wide blue sky.

I frowned, shaded my eyes and wished I’d brought my glasses. I was sixty next month, and I was doing my best to deny the ravages of age. Now I cursed my foolishness.

The birds drew closer, and I knew that something had vanished, some unifying force that kept rooks together, one flock, one community. Some of them collided in mid-air, a couple spiralling to the ground stunned or dead. Others flew away from the flock cawing in panic, as if fleeing something that wanted to eat them. One bird flew directly toward me, and a dozen other rooks followed as if in pursuit. They seemed to envelop the fleeing bird in their black mass, and when they came apart seconds later a torn shape fluttered to the ground a hundred yards down the road. A cat darted from a garden, grabbed at the bird, and it was gone.

I shouted, an incoherent expression of shock and anger and sadness. Animals did not do this to themselves! Murder for the sake of murder was a human foible! This should not happen! The greatest mass of rooks was directly above me now, throwing down a shower of cries and feathers. They flew every way, following nothing but the madness that must have infected their small minds. There seemed to be no final destination in mind. Bird crap spattered the pavement and struck the arm of my coat, and I walked quickly to try to emerge from beneath the cloud. It disturbed me. Their calls were not normal, their behaviour skewed, and the further I walked the more I sensed black eyes upon me. That was foolish, I knew: product of a wild imagination. But when I glanced up and back I saw several birds hovering, as if watching me on my way.

I reached a garden belonging to somebody I knew and went in through the gates, hiding beneath the porch over their front door. My heart was racing. Was I really scared?

The clouds of rooks moved on, expanding more and more, and soon it would reach the point of no return and split asunder.

The birds’ order had gone.

I shook my head and walked back to the pavement.

And suddenly I knew what I must do. The rook they all followed – the bird there to keep order, exert nature’s influence over the chaos of so many disparate minds – had gone. Perhaps it lay injured and needing aid. Or maybe mankind had stamped its mark once again, and killed it.

Either way, I would not be going to work. I passed by the bus stop and crossed the main road, heading up toward the canal and the woods that surrounded it. The chance of finding a single bird in such wide, wild countryside was miniscule, yet I felt that I should be the one to find it. I knew. I understood. Nature would recognise that, at least.

There could be little pretence at wildness where roads bordered fields, telegraph poles stood at the road’s edge like the skeletons of trees, houses spotted hillsides with a rash of humanity, ’plane trails made a chequerboard of the autumn sky, hedgerows were trim and square and stark with cut shrubs, and the constant, unending background rumble of traffic provided a counterpoint to the birdsong and struggling silence of the fields. And yet I saw the skein of raw power that nature still held, evident in every falling leaf and every call of a bird unconcerned at humankind’s intrusion into its world. I could smell the wet rot of leaves sinking down into the ground, and understand the miracle that lay therein. I could hear the hum of electricity passing through wires high above, in concert with the swallows that roosted on those wires, preparing to migrate. I appreciated the depth of things around me, and the more that appreciation grew, the more I saw.

This was a road I often travelled. It curved gently to and fro for a mile until it reached a steep humpbacked bridge over the canal. I walked quickly, glancing left and right and seeing nothing unusual in the hedges either side of the road. I paused at gates and scanned the fields, paying particular attention to the occasional clumps of trees the farmers had left standing. If I saw the injured rook there would be something to display its location, I was sure, some upset in nature that would be obvious at first glance. I saw cows waddling in mud, but their stares told me nothing. I saw a constantly flooded depression in one field shimmer as a heron stood at its centre, waiting for a frog to break surface, but there was nothing wrong in that. A family of rabbits gambolled along close to one of the wild hedgerows, pausing every few seconds to sniff the air for dogs and shotguns. They looked my way and saw me watching them, but they were at the other side of the field. They played on, perceiving no threat in me.

I walked on, breathing in the damp autumn smells that went so certainly with the golden fall of leaves. The road here was well used by people travelling to and from the expensive houses up on the hillsides, and the few attractive country pubs hidden between folds in the land. Yet still fallen leaves coated the Tarmac, much thicker at the edges, wet and rotting already even though the sun shone today. I kicked through the leaves, taking a great childish delight in the sound they made and the warm, damp smell that rose from them. A couple of weeks ago perhaps I could have picked them up and crumbled them in my hands, but now they were well on their way back into the ground, limp and wet and seeping their last. I shifted a pile aside here and there to look for the rook, but it would not be here.

My walk held a sense of such import that I felt I could never turn back. And yet this part of it – the walk between the village and the canal – was relaxed and sure, untainted by true purpose. Somehow I knew where the rook would be, and that was not down here. I looked forward and up, toward the distant line of trees that marched alongside the canal: that was where the bird would be. From this distance I could make out little difference from normal; a silence, perhaps, and a stillness, but nothing obvious.

I drew level with the old deserted house that had been a part of the landscape since my childhood. It stood back from the road, smothered in ivy and hidden from casual view by a stand of trees that may well have once formed its garden boundary. Abandoned for so many decades, the house had been swallowed by nature, subsumed back into the natural order of things. I had gone in there once, when I was ten years old. My cousin had dared me. These were in the days when ten-year-olds explored the countryside instead of the inside of a TV set, and when tales of hauntings and spooky occurrences were as rich and textured as a living nightmare, rather than laughed at and barely discussed in school the next day. This house had supposedly been haunted by an old man who had been found dead in the kitchen, sitting upright in his chair with a glob of porridge still resting in his mouth. Back then, as a ten year old, the story had been terrifying. Fifty years later it had taken on an almost nostalgic hue, and yet every time I passed by the house I wondered why nobody had lived in it since. I had not been inside for fifty years, and now, so long after, it was barely discernable from the road. It was likely that local kids did not even know of its existence, and for me there was something poignant in a haunted house that drew no attention. I leaned on the hedge and tried to peer through the screen of trees, ivy and rose bushes gone wild, but I could see little of the hidden building. I wondered what was still inside, and whether sometimes that old man still sat in his chair, waiting to swallow his last mouthful of porridge.

I walked on, and turning a gentle corner in the road I saw the bridge over the canal. It had been built long before motorised vehicles decided to use it, and the new road surface was deeply scored and scarred from where the undersides of cars did not always clear. The metallic sheddings of ruptured exhaust pipes and dented chassis glittered at the roadside, and as I drew closer their shapes changed.

A chill went through me. I paused and looked around, expecting to see the hedgerows stirring from a slight breeze or a shadow passing before the sun. But there was nothing. This is where it will be, I thought. In these woods alongside the canal. This is where they roost, and this is where they left the one among them that gives order. I was suddenly very afraid. I was intruding into something here that mankind was not meant to see or know. This was nature in its basest form, and I, a human who had chosen to clothe himself, build a brick house, use electricity and read books and watch distant places on television, had removed myself from nature. Much as I still loved to walk in the country I was always a visitor, and though I hated that feeling it still gave me some comfort. The countryside was wild; returning to my home at the end of the day was always a relief. I often thought of camping out in the woods or digging a hole and calling it home, but none of these ideas were ever serious, or indeed possible. I was an intruder in the world I loved so much, and I often felt its gaze upon me.

Next to the bridge was a wide gate that led down onto the canal’s towpath. This was the easiest route by which I could negotiate the woods that grew alongside the canal, and yet it was here that the impossibility of what I was trying to do hit me, with the stark choice of left or right. If I turned one way I would be going toward the missing rook, if I went the other I would be moving away. There was no in-between, and each choice made thereafter would be equally bereft of hope. Whatever my belief in my appreciation of nature, I could not fool myself that it would lead me to one single bird in such a huge expanse. I had rarely even seen a dead bird – the most common sighting was beside a road – and trying to find one now was madness.

Was that it? Was there a madness about me? I was only sixty, still fit and healthy and involved in life, but perhaps age had hit me harder than I could have imagined.

I shook my head, and that was when I saw the man crossing the landscape...