The clock said quarter past five he thought proudly, but began to doubt it- maybe it actually said quarter-past four. The clock faced him sternly, in his imagination horrible figures danced around it. It continued to tick tick tick tick There was a susurration behind the curtains and he was aware of a couple of crows - or ravens. He shrank as they made to alight on his shoulders. The one on the right nibbled his earlobe gently. The one on his left put the tip of his beak near his ear and croaked; "We've come to take you son." Then after a pause; "But don't you worry." The one on the right looked at the other accusingly, then whispered much more gently, "Don't you worry son." but nevertheless after a pause; "We've come to take you." The child closed his eyes and fell asleep. The Pheasants, Sparrows, Blackbirds and the Peacock all perched on the oak table wedged in a fork in the tree trunk, the branches around thronged with the birds of the meadow. Up came the magpie holding an exercise book, the child recognised the stains, It was his! The magpie breezily put it down on the table and opened it to the required page. He cleared his throat so that all the birds stopped chattering. "My weekend" "On Saturday I went to the park with my: F R E N D Simon Hornbeam" A pheasant made a disapproving noise from deep in her throat. "I: C L I M E D ... a tree then I fell of off it." The birds all murmured angrily and one of the ravens gave the child a peck. "I cut my 'KNEY' and a S Q I U R A E L got a needle and sewed (s-o-w-e-d!) it shut." "This is a indeed a scandal" "Who has been sewing up an informer? What is the reason for this?" "He did not look like an informer, he seemed like a pleasant child." "Did he, by Moses!? nevertheless he shall be hunted down and destroyed!" The birds broke out into a grim hanging ballad. -To the tune of The Sweet Primroses. (http://glostrad.com/banks-of-sweet-primroses-the/) "Farewell to all, my days are numbered, I must go down to gehinnom's shore; It's there that I'll dine on dust and ashes, And there I'll fear the fatal gallows tree no more. Nature's friends; you are truely suff'ring, what your suff'ring is there's none can tell; And when you found I had you slighted, Your lust for vengence there's none could excell. The engraving of Cain is for ever on thee, For the deeds you've sought and done. My foes are gath'ring for the slaughter, A father's weeping, all for his son. Flow on, flow on, you lovely river, sweeter than honey are your waters fair. Sweeter than honey, the taste of death is; It is a light load that, yet I am loath to bear. Take me up to the quiet city, where all my troubles must surely end. For fine food they set before me, and scarlet robes they did to me lend. But the food was made out of thistles and ivy, and the ale it was not any good. And the scarlet robes were but a white shroud, scarlet only with my innocent blood." "Don't you agitate yourself, there's none can glimpse you" whispered the raven on the left. "They cannot make you out, don't be shaken boy" said the raven on the right. The case settled the adjoining one arose among them like the dawn, their sap rose further; The squirael vanished into the branches, and returned with an ancient roll of paper. The band holding it was gnawed through and the roll unfurled. The wren hopped swift-ly and gracefully like a dancer onto the table, and glid up and down across the knobbly italics, until the correct section was unearthed. Post-looking around carefully, at the top of his voice, shaking with stress, he thus em-bark-ed; "It was a quarter to six, I was flying at about sixteen thousand feet above the Pfälzerwald at a speed of roughly four hundred knots. The bitter winds howled lewdly around the wings of the arrowplane." "What arrowplane?" asked somebody. Outage was the response from the birds, the wren flew off. The Turtledove was ashed to supplant him. She nodded respectfully, stiffly, with pretend calmness she red: "The dark clouds swirled around the windows yet I saw planely, the disagreeable head of Silvius Fogerty, his hard callous face set in a sharp-toothed scowl. About his person was concealed a fortune of perhaps a quarter of a million in sawbucks, also a large number of classified and irreplaceable papers... or so it seemed to him. His eyes were woodenly fixed upon his portable typewriter. He was composing a letter to his collegue and friend Decimus Coppernicus..." "Have we this letter?" "We do." "From whence did it emerge?" "It was deposited by the author in a public litter bin, subsequently a freak gust of wind took it up into the mountains whereupon it was discovered by Engleriana the last of the Druidesses whilst she was tending to her goats. When the Druidess was finally liquidated on behalf of the Kanton Bern the contractors involved took possesion of her archives which were sold individually in a private auction held at Christie's. The aforementioned letter was among the papers bought by Petrakia Liobae PLC which we happened to be in the process of buying up with an eye toward liquidation. Fortuitously one of the office cleaners brought this to our attention and it was added to our catalogue." "Please can you bring it?" Three Blue Tits dropped the letter to the peacock who creakingly delivered it. "Dear John I feel impelled to write and apologise for leaf-ing like this. I simply do not know how to explain or what to tell you. I am suffering a terrible fungal infection and I expect that I shall probably die. Any effort to write in this condition will be fruitless and only come off as nuts. Instead I will tell you about the dream I just had on the 'plane because it's the only way I can grow close to telling you how I feel. I hope one day you can grow to forgive me. It was a spring day, I smelt blossom and felt fresh air on my face. It seemed entirely real, more real than my miserable surroundings at present , I can still see the vines climbing the pillars of the porch I was standing under, blowing in the breeze and glowing in the dappled sunlight. In front of me was a green panelled door in a maroon georgian door-frame, I turned around and saw a path lined with tall hedges, and the end of it was a white, ornate cast iron gate, beyond it I could see traffic going past, unmistakably London traffic. I felt so strangely relaxed there, I lay down on the steps leading up to the door and watched. A bus rumbled by in a way that somehow gave me a feeling of nameless, vertiginous, falling dread and the air began to cool. Something made me reach for my holster. A grim, sticklike, shadowed figure, who I took to be the Angel of Death opened the gate and imped down the path, I pulled out my gun and prepared to shoot. The shadow passed from him and I saw him in his full horrible glory. He had thinning brown hair underneath his bowler, that was pushed backward on his head. His green tinged face that looked like a rotting mackerel was miserable, beneath his empty grey eyes were thick black rings. He carried a briefcase overflowing with orange curling sheets of paper. Stupidly because I was holding it in my hand; I told him I had a gun, but he did not pause. Something gripped me and I felt an irresistible compulsion to shoot but I could not. He stank like mud... 'Please don`t fire', he asked in prickly tones that nevertheless suggested he would not much mind if I did. I asked him, what in Artemises name did he want? He told me we had an agreement, I didn't know anything about an agreement but I foud myself saying quite determinedly that nothing was agreed until all the details were made clear, or that`s what his colleague had told me. He smiled slightly, stared like a tawny owl then spoke; he did not speak clearly, he had a strange accent, while he was speaking a lorry rushed past, followed by an ambulance, a 'plane was flying over, so were a flock of geese, someone nearby was mowing their grass. 'Do you understand?' he asked when he had finished, following the strange dream logic I said that I did. 'Are you quite sure?' he asked suddenly after a pause. I nodded thoughtlessly. 'Very well, our business in England is complete, but sooner you than me!' Then I dimly remember being a tea-trolley being pushed along a long corridor, then pushed through a door marked 'Editor'. Then I was a bundle of paper being picked up off the trolley and to the editor, then I became the editor himself, reading the sheet - on top of the paper. The words sprouted up before my eyes: Sir - From the topmost brightly gilded joy-full dawn, when attended to by my progenitors, I first put down roots in the long exhaulted terra firma of these most unsurpassedly and remarkably green and pleasent of isles (being at the time a mere sapling in a most formative phase of my existence, having previously trodden only the dust of a multitude of African dominions - British colonies and otherwise) I have always stood firmly in the service of this other Eden, contorting myself grossly and forcefully - back and forth at the slightest of breezes, into those most disagreeable and painful of angles so infortuitously advantageous to the best interests of this fine country. Though intitially very green, without fear nor favour, it may fairly be said that I have grafted hard, with Herculean, not to say Sisyphean efforts, and have achieved great branching success unrivaled among the lesser insects of that wicked and adulterous generation, in which Providence with its boundless prudence which I would not ever presume to question, has looked upon as being equal to bearing the challenge of accommodating amongst it myself as an incongruence most striking and most struck . But however from that moment whence I first arrived into the arms of this island fortress inspike of the fruits of my labours, I was cruelly and mercilessly subjected to a river, a torrent, a raging Niagra of undeserved slander, abuse and unfair discrimination, propogated by the illegitimate seed of Albion. Furthermore, in the course of my varied and successful endeavors, I have felt the thorns of, and caught with my own eyes, my own ears, and my own senses a glimpse of the poisoned, hollow heart that beats beneath that most full armoured bousum of Fair Brittainia. I watched rending my clothes in unfathomable despair as from unassuming acorns emerged vines of malice and from unassuming thread webs of corruption engulfing the mighty kingdoms of Brutus, O'Niel, and Magnus Maximus. I screamed and bark-ed internally and eternally in vain as I witnessed root and branch abuses of power, tiresome in their ill-gotten normality, banality and frequency. As a direct consequence of my whispering protest, read by the native dryads from the rings around my eyes, I was forced into the heinous transgression of formulating false testimony which caused me to be felled from my lofty position and lose my worldly wealth, security and reputation, what was infinitely worse, I was stripped to the cuticle and humiliated before the merciless eyes of the vulgaris. Only some seasons later was I completely exonerated of the charges of this ill-conceived hatchet job, but too late. Therefore antibaucianally I write this letter to publicly log that I hereby and immediately wave farewell to this fair but perfidious country and all of it's tendrils and shall nevermore use it's hybrid invasive Barbarian patois, which I despise to my very core. For now and forever, all the questions this singularly unimaginative planet should have for me (though I somehow don't beleave that they should prove innumerable), will be answered primarily in a new language dictated from the lower heavens, taken from a time in the future by a great Northumbrian woodland hermit whose greatness was prematurely extinguished before he was able to alter the compromised state of terrestrial existence. tenpo pini la mi pali lon tomo nasa, lon tomo mani, lon kulupu lawa utala nampa tu tu tu, lon tomo nampa luka luka. tan ni la sina lukin e ni; mi toki and nasa ala! tan ni la sina lukin e ni; mi toki e nasa ala!" The raven on his left shoulder took from underneath his right wing a large amber pendant. "You are wondering how all this came to be. I want you to take this as a warning; there may be a second but there will not be a third- That such is the power of the holy spheres when scorned. Look in to the jewel and see this man in his foolishness." In the amber was a lonely figure drifting on a hillside...