Old Vines and Stone Birds

"Now look here." she said, finally getting a word in, "I don't know what to tell you love, but I can't help yer. I mean he's been dead for a hundred and fifty years - at least!" She took her hands off her hips and slid one under her apron to produce a flask. By the way it creased her forehead as the liquid reached her throat it was clear to Montgomery Clarke that it was exactly the sort of drink he could use right about now. She didn't offer him any and it disappeared back behind her apron. What other secrets did she hide beneath her layers he wondered, but before he could form another question she slid the door shut. They looked at each other for a moment between the glass before she shuffled away and he was left standing in the garden with Crime.

"Well what do you make of that?" he asked him. Crime looked up and yawned. "I agree with you there. She does have a dull job so why didn't she fancy having a chat with us then to pass the time?" Crime answered by urinating in a flower pot. "Perhaps." agreed Montgomery, "but perhaps she's worried she'll be overheard." Montgomery took a few steps back from off the patio and, standing in the statue strewn garden, he followed the ivy trails with his eyes; it seemed to him that they had the power of stopping a house from breathing. The thought cast him back to boyhood - caught tight in a web of vines. Sobbing. Scared. Trapped. He shook his head and as he did a curtain in the uppermost room closed. The house was three floors. From what he had seen through the glass doors and the lower windows he had gleaned that, along with the certain fact that an unseen kitchen must exist, the ground floor was dedicated to the care and comfort of a dying man. It was if the interior designer had decided hospitals were suddenly chic and in vogue. Or if IKEA had gone from wardrobes to wards, because the juxtaposition of technical equipment, from breathing apparatus, to hoists, wheelchairs, to monitors, combined with stylish, but sterile furniture - all in white - gave a distinct impression of a fetish with the clinical. A local, one who Montgomery hoped he would never see again, had told him that the other floors were home to 'a bloomin aviary! Birds shitting all over the place.' So possibly white in a way too, thought Montgomery, staring directly at that top window in the attic - the one with the curtains now drawn. Crime's bark broke him from his pondering and back to the garden. Montgomery was being watched. Not from any window, but from behind one of the many statues that inhabited the garden. From between the feathers of a solid marble plumed ostrich, two eyes stared hard at the back of his head.

"What's the matter boy?" Montgomery asked, ruffling his dog's fur as he turned to survey the way he had come - back across the great lawn, the frozen pond, the forest beyond, and the river. "Hello?" he called out. The wind whistled in reply and dark leaves took flight amongst the flightless, motionless, oversized imitations of exotic birds. A crumbling Indian peacock with a missing beak stared blindly straight through him. The garden had become as silent as she was. Nothing moved. Montgomery realized he'd not taken a breath. He had become as still as the house behind him; unmoving, unbreathing, silent. Still he did not take a breath. He thought of the ivy running up the walls of the big house. He felt trapped. Scared. But he did not sob like he did when he was a boy. He stayed frozen there and silent. Silent until he heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being cocked. "Okay, okay." he gasped and held his hands up in the air. Regaining himself he cautiously began walking forwards, searching for its source. "It's all going to be alright. If you'll just let me past I'll be -" he trailed off as a man in a yellow anorak stepped out from behind the ostrich.

Montgomery cleared his throat. "Well hello there. Nice to..." The gun was aimed squarely at his gut. "Love the coat by the way - vibrant! Reminds me of -" Montgomery stopped short. It was him. It was him. Mouth hidden beneath an unfamiliar beard. Eyes housed in a museum of wrinkles. Montgomery laughed. It was a nervous laugh. "It's just like seeing a sunrise - your jacket I mean..." He stepped closer now. He had to. "It's as bright as sunshine don't you think Crime?" he gestured to Crime. "This is my dog by the -"

"I don't like dogs." growled a voice from beneath the gray bristles, from the depth of a grave not yet dug. "I don't like foxes neither."

"Hence the gun?" Montgomery asked. The man gave a grunt and thought to himself that the sun had never risen or set at Goverlea. Then he said:

"I put a hole in your boat."

Montgomery chuckled.

"Guess you won't believe me when I try and tell you I'm the new postman then?"

Montgomery Clarke and his canine companion Crime had arrived in the small town of Goverlea after a long journey and it was sensible, Montgomery decided, to visit the local pub for both a room and a drink.

"Meet the locals, ay Crime. See if they know a thing or too about the manor."

It seemed that they did. Gossip was on tap and, out back, as beer flowed as freely as the icy river, Montgomery understood that the grounds to Goverlea Manor were more elaborate than he had imagined. It so happened that they were also gated, but that the river that he had found himself upon ran right down behind the estate in question. Montgomery thanked the local for the information and as the man happily obliged to go in and grab the next round Montgomery set to the task of untying the man's boat. When tomorrow came he would disembark at the edge of the fabled manor and put the rumors of the past to rest. Finally he would feel the wind in the sails of his heart. As he cast an empty bottle of port overboard, one that he assumed was being saved for a special occasion, he wondered how long it took to age something to such perfection. Crime shivered by his legs and he wrapped a blanket over them both.

My grandfather, whomever he may be, would have said to me that to be truly free one must take stock of what you got and allow that to be all that you need to fill your sails. I heard a rumor my grandfather farmed sheep. I'm grateful I never met him.

Montgomery's dog howled. The two men fought on the ground. The gun fired twice and the wings of a giant stone eagle were never to be seen again; its stance still proud and defiant despite its brutal transformation. Montgomery wrestled the gun free from the wrinkled hands and before the man could speak, had cracked him across the face. He went down easily and Montgomery lay beside him looking up at the deformed bird. Once he had caught his breath he heaved the yellow anorak from off the bones of the old man and slipped it on. It fitted perfectly as it should have. It was always to be his after all.

"Come on Crime. Let's try this again." he laughed, walking away from the unconscious body that belonged to him from another time.

Ivy trailed the three floor house. Somewhere inside there was a kitchen. The ground floor was white and sterile. He slid the glass door open. Goverlea Manor. His home. The machines beeped again and again and Montgomery fought hard not to follow the sound. He moved silently past the white piano, a grandfather clock with no hands, through the archways, and then to an abrupt halt by a white coat stand as the door to his left opened.

"My oh my!" she cried looking him up and down. "Mr. Monty sir, you've been out of the house again. Shooting foxes I bet!" The flask comes out from under her apron and then she catches herself. "Oopsie dasie." she mutters as it disappears once again. "Let me take your coat m'love. You know you shouldn't be out in the grounds in your condition. No, no, no."

Montgomery relinquishes the jacket and breathes a sigh of relief as she takes it and tries to hang it on the wobbly coat stand. Each time she tries to secure the yellow anorak the house trembles. It is not meant to be there, here in this time. Her fingers fumble and the white of the walls, the white of the furniture, the white of her apron flicker into something else. As if trying to reveal something else. She tries again and again and he observes how easily she becomes a prisoner to the loop - caught in this short tendril of time. He realizes then to his horror that the apron is merely a costume, the dialect a disguise. The harsh surprise of her being Montgomery Clarke is enough to make him want to find a way to die. He feels the urge to be sick, but looking down he notices Crime is gone. He turns back the way he has come. The dog is nowhere to be seen.

"Crime!?" he shouts. Nothing.

"I don't like dogs." he hears an old man mutter from another room within the house and he knows it's the same room with the incessant bleeps. Each one an acknowledgement of a heart that still beats in that very moment. He feels his own heart beating hard beneath his chest. As he stumbles through the corridors the house shudders; flickering into disrepair and into decay, its clinical costume failing as he makes it to the staircase and begins his climb upwards. The man who he had stolen the boat from one night in his past had been right. The sound of squawking birds was deafening. Their defecation all encompassing. It was near impossible to make out the true shape of any of the furniture or fittings. The staircase itself a challenge now as layer upon layer of encrusted filth rendered each step a continuation of the last. Sulfur crested cockatoos swarmed around his head.

He throws open the topmost window of the house as the feathers seemed at the verge of crushing him against them. Then suddenly they are released. Generations had waited for this moment to breathe the true air. Generations had waited to fly within it. He wrapped his arms around his head and kept ducked down as they burst out of the house - an explosion of bird until it was just smoky wisps as the final few tits hopped up to the window sill and fluttered away. He looked out from that top floor window and watched as the birds, each and every one of them, circled downwards and came to land on the frozen pond. They stared back at him in the distance. Silent. As silent as the statues and as frozen as the pond on which they stood. The only sound came from below as the glass door to the ground floor slid shut. He saw Montgomery Clarke and his dog Crime below. He closed the curtain shut. He would do that forever.

If my grandfather could speak he would say Monty my boy, why would you ever leave Goverlea. There is nothing out there past our gates that's worth seeing. Nowhere else that's worth being...

I never wished to meet my grandfather. I heard he kept birds indoors. I heard a rumor that the place was cursed. One day I vowed to let that curse fly away.

He felt trapped. Scared. He was not caught in the vines, and he never had been. The boy he had been was an old man, trapped in a web of tubes and wires that bound his body to a bed. He sobbed like a boy. The machines bleeped, but he would not let go. He did not wish to fly away from Goverlea and so he stayed alive in his memories. Many dogs had died in the old man's long life and he no longer cared for their fleeting existence upon Earth. Their short-lived company was a crime. Goverlea didn't want things that died. Goverlea would always survive, but a young man had heard a rumor to end all this. That young man would become him. As Montgomery Clarke looked down at the grandfather he had never met he realized his grandfather was him. He pulled on the wires and the tubes. He tugged them out of his skin; he released him from the silent vines. The bleeping stopped, and, as he covered the frail body with a yellow anorak, the birds on the pond finally began to sing.