324. Four and Twenty Grim Birds

 

324. Four and Twenty Grim Birds

Hello! This is Heather speaking. Little Dolphus asked me to narrate this chapter myself because he gets dizzy trying to keep up with the way Beau and I think at the same time and knowing what we are both thinking even when we think differently the one from the other.

In the last chapter, a bird that could not have looked of  iller omen was roosting on Sir Mungo John Binky’s resting place, the glass coffin in which my sister Thistle and I had placed him when he succumbed to the effects of an enormous tin of Shyboy Oil. He had been sleeping off the effects of this oil for years now in that glass and gold coffin in my garden. And looking younger and younger. At first, yearly younger, now monthly younger and we have no idea if he will look weekly, daily or hourly younger or what will happen if he doesn’t wake before he becomes so young as to also become inexistent.

At first this didn’t worry us much. It was happening very slowly. But when the baleful bird began to haunt Mr. Binky’s resting place, we noticed that the prime minister didn’t look a day over twenty. And this scared us. We feared the bird might be waiting for him to be a small child, portable enough to be carried off and fed to its young.

So we decided to hie Mr. Binky off and hide him somewhere else, where the bird could not find him. And Little Dolphus suggested a dolmen known to Esmeraldo and Azuline, an odd and singular construction here in Apple Island. And Beau and Quentin Treadfaster bore the prime minister’s glass coffin between them to the said chamber tomb. And Thistle and I followed them as quietly and discreetly and invisibly as we all could.

Esmeraldo and Azuline were already speaking with the Voice that emerged from the dolmen, telling her – we supposed the voice was female, for it sounded that way – that they had discovered their vocations.

“You said you couldn’t do anyone good any good. You are under a curse that makes you able to only do good to evil beings. And that, of course, results in evil events. Evil you do not wish to propitiate, but indirectly bring about. Well we´ve been thinking about this and we’ve come to a conclusion. We want to tell you about our plans,” said Azuline to the Voice.

“I am going to bust those evildoers you can only do good to. For you,” said tough little Esmeraldo. “They will rue the day they met you.”

“Oh, dear!” said Azuline. “It’s not exactly that way. What we mean to do is the good that you aren’t able to do. And if this requires frustrating the plans of wicked beings, we will be up to it,” explained Azuline. “You told us you were a do gooder fairy. And that is what we want to be. Do good fairies. That will be our vocation.”

The Voice inside the tomb was not too sure the Richearth kids would be able to do what they had decided to do. She said the curse she was under might reach way beyond her. For if she had helped these kids find their true vocation, that had to be an act of goodness, and she couldn’t do good to anyone good. And the kids were good. So…

“Just how far can this curse go?” asked Azuline. “We won’t know unless we try.”

The Voice within the chamber tomb also had misgivings about allowing Mr. Binky to be hidden in there.

“If I let you hide him here, that would be helping good people, wouldn’t it? And I can’t do that.”

And then Thistle said, “Look, Insecure Voice, this fellow we are wanting to  hide here was a jerk when awake. That is who you will be helping.”

“Oh, Thissy,” I said, “it’s not exactly like that. He believed himself to have the best of intentions, but hardly anyone thought he did. At least not the Apple Islanders.”

“He made a misery of one of our uncles, who is probably the best of our mother’s brothers when it comes to being helpful and of service to others. And he made a misery out of our uncle’s  harmless wife too. Don’t say Binky wasn’t a jerk, Heathie, because he was.”

“All that was our father’s fault. It was Daddy’s idea that got him to go after Uncle Gentlerain.”

“Gentlerain?” said the Voice. “I know your uncle. If this fellow you are transporting was mean to someone as kind and obliging as Gentie Goodfellow, maybe I can let him hide here after all.”

And that was settled, because we grabbed at that straw as fast as we could and shoved the coffin into the cave before the Voice got the chance to change its mind.

“We’ll be in touch with you, whoever you are, Voice,” said Thistle. “But we have to make very discreet contact. Nobody must know Mr. Binky is in there with you.”

We agreed to communicate through two of my pet sparrows, who would keep us in touch in case anything went wrong. We swore the Voice and Esmeraldo and Azuline to utter silence on the subject of Mr. Binky and then Beau and Quentin and Thistle and I returned home.

And when I reached my garden…it was no longer one. It couldn’t have looked worst! All the bushes had been uprooted, and the trees almost so too. Holes of at least six feet had been dug all over the grounds, that were all raked. A true disaster area it was. And we could only conclude that someone had thought we had buried Mr. Binky and was trying to dig him up. And Thistle’s Lorcans, her pet dogs specially created by Finbar O’Toora, were howling and growling and confirming that our suspicions were true.

Yurick, Cedrick, Alderick, Roderick, Herrick and Worrick told us what had happened, yelping in unison and in verse because they were still overexcited.

“Sing a song of many pence,

Many less have I! 

Four and twenty blackbirds

Descended from the sky.

When they touched the ground,

They all began to rake

With sharp claws the good soil

Trying holes to make,

Seeking for a coffin

With their beady eyes.

When we started barking,

They cawed bloodcurling cries!

We tried to seize their long necks,

But they outnumbered us.

They tried to peck our noses,

A back and forth there was!

Pandemonium, pandemonium,

We all began to raise!

We tore off their black feathers,

See ‘em strewn all o’er the place.

Finding naught but resistance,

The pinkheads off they fled,

And all that’s left to say is

All we’ve to say’s been said.

“I know who they were,” said Beau, and his face was worth seeing, so rigid was it that I was more scared of him and his intentions than of the desolation before me.