Eleven Crows

By Ken Matthews

Dark are their wings; harrowing are their calls. They flutter with me forevermore.

 

Hugh spends his days with death. Cleaning up after the departed or holding on to their memories when no one else is left, he fears with each passing day that his mundane life will end up much the same as those who came before.

 

All of that changes when after he unearths and solves a secret that should have remained hidden.

 

As he slowly becomes consumed by what he uncovers, his ordinary life gets violently turned upside down. With desperation sipping in, he doesn't know who he can trust. It feel like the walls are closing in on him and he turns to the one person who he can trust. How will this work out for him, read on to find out.

Not all secrets are meant to be revealed, and now Hugh has created one of his own – and if he's not careful, it could get him killed.

 

This rollercoaster ride of turmoil will have you wondering what will happen next, as we wash away the dirt and shine a light on the truth. Hugh will have to be very careful what moves he makes next.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Matthews
• Release date: Jun 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781739791407

Book preview

Chapter One

Let me take you through how all of this started. When I was working for a local council in England, my life wasn’t what you could call exciting. Nothing ever seemed to happen to me that could even claim such a title as excitement. My job was clearing out old houses. You know, the ones whose tenants had passed away with no living relatives left behind. We would clear out all their possessions – once belonging to these poor invisible people – ready for the next team to come in and fix up the place, so another person could be moved in.

Going through other people’s worldly possessions was a grim job – not knowing what could have had sentimental value to them, and what was just junk. I always tried to get a feel for the person who had disappeared from each house. I would look through their photos and correspondence to try and build a picture of who they once were, and the life they’d lived – if only to give them one last person who would remember their names for a short while longer. Most of the time, I was looking for small signs of hope that I wouldn’t end up the same way, with no one to notice I had gone. Such thoughts would only help to deepen my ever-growing depression.

While going through boxes of pictures in each house, I started to find a common theme. There were always people having fun at parties, weddings and birthdays – slowly I watched them age as I turned each page in their photo albums. The joyful times were all there, laid out for anyone to plainly see. Still, for me, there was something else. I felt their deeper emotions, the ones most people overlook when thumbing through photographs. I saw the increasing crushing woes that the pictures didn’t flaunt to the everyday observer. In each and every case, it was the eyes that gave it away: that hollow blank stare in each of them growing more intense as the years went on, until I reached the end of the album. I knew that look all too well, as I would see it each and every time I looked in a mirror. Time moved on, and pictures became fewer and further between, and with fewer people clustered around the central figure – until it was just the same person all alone, as if everyone else had faded away over time.

I was not alone in this kind of work. I was part of a crew of four men, and they acted like animals on the jobs. Just throwing things in bags and boxes and hauling them onto the truck like garbage, without a care in the world. In fact, the only time I ever knew them to take any care was when they went searching for valuables – you know, bits of jewellery or cash lying around that they could easily pocket when they thought I wasn’t watching. Most days, I was the common target of their torment, the butt of all their jokes. We had to wear those awful white paper overalls when we went into the houses, and we had to destroy them after each use. I know it was to keep us safe in the face of any unknown spillages and to prevent us ruining our uniforms. Often I would find rude words written on the back of mine after I had taken them off. Yet wearing them always felt like it made the job more impersonal than it already was.

Often, the neighbours of the houses we went to would watch us going in, all suited up like that, and start asking us questions. Wondering if we were a forensic team and whether the death was suspicious. One of the other guys in the crew would sometimes tell them that it was, in fact, a murder; and that we thought it might have been one of the neighbours who’d done it; and that we were here looking for the evidence. He said it just to get rid of them. We all used to stand in the front gardens and watch them go running to other houses to spread the lies. Small communities like to gossip way too much.

Despite my general dislike of my co-workers, due to how they treated not only me but the possessions of others, I had enjoyed their light-hearted humour on those occasions where they got rid of such intrusive behaviour. I chose to see it as though they were protecting the memories held in the properties, and not just getting rid of prying eyes so they could loot.

Naturally, the rest of their jokes were what you would expect from a bunch of guys – crude and explicit, or in some way designed to bully me. Like I said, I seemed to be the object of their torment most days. All of that would start to change after the day we went to that house. It was situated on the edge of a small plot of land with extensive gardens all around, backing on to the local woodland. Its appearance suggested it was built for a purpose, not only as a house but to make a statement about the person who lived there.

As I saw it ahead of us from the truck’s window, I was mesmerised by the detail of the place. Architecturally it looked like a classic Victorian house, surrounded by carefully crafted gardens. For a home of its supposed age with the Victorian look, it was still in good order. No flaking paintwork or rotten woodwork; even the garden wasn’t overgrown. Whoever had lived here must have worked really hard to keep the place in such pristine condition. I cast my eyes to the roofline, looking for a gargoyle, as it felt like it would be a fitting feature for the place – but there were none, only a few crows resting on the pitched roof.

Everything changed for me from that first moment seeing the house. Not instantly, of course – but after tracing back the series of events that have occurred, I have locked it down to that day being the start of things. The light I sought at the end of that proverbial tunnel, one that I hoped wouldn’t turn out to be a train coming right towards me.

I stood outside, looking at the amazing building in front of me. The crew told me the plan: we had been called here to clear some rubbish piled up in the owner’s garden. It was one of the side jobs the guys took for cash on the way back to the yard. Curiosity about the place got the better of me, and I stepped to the window for a peek inside.

Everything in view was brand new and modernised, even down to one of those fancy wine fridges. The place was far cleaner than what we usually had to deal with, I could tell from looking in the window; there was maybe a day’s worth of dust at most. Most of the places we went to looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in years, due to the occupant being unable to maintain it any longer. As I stared in, I could see that all the lights inside were on, and I thought I saw something move – maybe what I saw was a dress – before it vanished behind a doorway. I moved back from the window and towards the side of the house where the rubbish was stacked.

I knew my crew would be on the hunt for valuables straight away. They checked whether the shed was locked or whether anything worth swiping was left lying around the garden. It was as I cast my eyes across the lawn that I noticed one of them had opened the patio door at the back of the house. I watched as he moved inside the house’s central part, out of my sight, as I began to shift the rubbish. I was always worried about getting in trouble thanks to their actions, so I constantly looked around out of fear of being caught.

The gardens were immaculate. A lot of time and care had gone into maintaining them. It was so perfect, in fact, that if a blade of grass was out of place, it would be noticeable. I got a nudge in the back from one of the other guys, and was told to quit daydreaming and keep working.

Once we were done, I was sitting back in the truck when the guy who had entered the house jumped in beside me and said he had got me a present. Let’s give this guy a name and call him Guss. I wanted no part of their stolen goods; I never had. He threw a wooden box and a book on my lap. The book was heavy and leather-bound; the calligraphy of the title, which was written beautifully, caught my attention, and it also appeared indecipherable. It was as big as an encyclopedia and handwritten with a traditional ink pen, not like the basic office one we had in the truck. I couldn’t read what it was called or any of the text inside as I skimmed through the pages; it was all gibberish. Guss held a photo frame in his hands, too. He slid out the picture, gave it to me, and said to put it in the box; the two rings that were attached to the picture remained in his hand as he threw the empty frame in the rubbish bag on the back of the truck.

I’m not the best-educated man. My spelling and grammar are genuinely atrocious, yet my reading skills are still quite good; however, this book made no sense whatsoever. I continued to flick through the pages to find it was all the same. There were a few pictures of places around England that I vaguely recognised, tucked in the back of the book after some blank pages.

I asked Guss why he had taken this book of all things, half expecting him to say it was a first edition or something else of value. He told me it had been hidden away behind some other books with the box that he had also taken, so the owners probably wouldn’t notice it was gone for a while. He must have assumed it was important, just because it was hidden. Guss somehow knew I had an interest in old books – he had seen me reading many times before – and he asked me if it was of any value. The rattle of the rings jingling in his hand made me cringe; how he could take something that could be precious to someone without a care in the world was beyond me.

He pushed me for an answer on the book. I told him I would need to find out more about the person who wrote it, to understand the reason it was hidden away or what it really was. Before I could insist he put it back, the truck fired up and pulled away. The guilt ravaged through me like lightning through a tree root, burning deeper the further it went; I was now an unwilling accomplice in his theft.

We headed back to the yard to finish up and clock out for the day. After we unloaded all the rubbish from the truck and threw it in the skip, I slipped the book into my bag. I can’t say for sure what it was, but I felt drawn to the book, as if something inside it was calling to me. The unreadable text piqued my interest; I figured I could read it and then return it to the original owner the next day. The idea of solving a mystery hidden in an old book thrilled me in a small way. I know it sounds silly, feeling drawn to it, but I wanted to learn more about it. I wanted to be the one to uncover its secrets.

I was taken entirely by surprise at how easily I had agreed to take something that didn’t belong to me. In all the years I had done this job, I had never considered such a thing. Once I had gathered myself from the shock, I heard my name called out from across the yard. I was told the manager wanted to see me