Fourteen dead birds fell out of the sky and landed at the outer circle of twisted oaks. They were jackdaws, surprised from their perches in the upper branches. And as the shadow of something moving within made its way towards the soft light outside, there was a rustle, as of falling leaves. But they weren’t leaves falling, they were more dead birds. The tiny, woodland kind, sparrows, robins, tits, and a woodpecker, its tawny feathers stiff with rigor mortis before it hit the roots above the loamy earth. The leaves came afterwards, with the huge wind he brought with him. He was his own tempest, this Captain Mildew, and he stripped clean whatever bits of nature he happened across. So the wind, which normally happened upon trees from the outside, happened from the inside. It propelled from inside the circle, the little wood, the copse of oak, every leaf that had fallen and was yet to fall, and after this flock of oak leaves came the flock of dead and dying birds.
There was a boy with an improvised fishing rod hanging over the marshy waters and as these leaves whipped by him, the boy turned to see a quite ordinary man emerge, one hand clutching his tattered hat to his head. Then the wind died round him, and he let his hand fall and walked on, the hat perched at an odd angle. There was greasy hair hanging beneath it. His eyes caught the boy’s eyes and something in them made the boy turn away, back to the marshy water, where the weight of a dying fish had bent the tip of his rod.
The boy pulled the fish in, didn’t reel, since he had no reel; the rod was just a piece of bamboo with some catgut tied to the top. But he pulled the fish in, a small carp of some kind, and tore the hook from its mouth and laid it out on the flattened grass beside him. He was amazed to see a worm slowly sliding from its dead mouth. Three dead birds fell then, in quick succession, on the flattened grass beside the dead worm, the dead fish. The boy turned then and saw what he somehow knew was a dead man, walking with a shambling gait, from the border of the Taw Wood towards the Nanny River.
Captain Mildew (or an fear drúcht, spiorad spiosra, the Dewman) was getting used to walking. He had lived in an immaterial zone for so long and was just getting used to the body he had filched. Filleted might be a more appropriate word (after being grossly mildewed and powdered), for the tramp had been truly gutted, from the crotch to the sternum, and if it were not for the ancient stains of sweat around his denim shirt and his tattered trousers, the drying blood resultant would have been immediately obvious to anyone passing. To the young boy who had seen him emerge and now stared in perplexed horror from his perch above the salt-water pool. To the widow Maguire, taking her morning constitutional along the path made of abandoned railway sleepers through the marshes. She saw him emerge over a low dune, like a walking scarecrow, boots shambling through the unfamiliar sea grass and sand with what seemed to be his own personal rain cloud behind him. But of course it wasn’t a raincloud, it was a vaporous swarm of flying ants with a fluttering penumbra of dying birds. Larks, meadow pipits, greenfinches, gulls of various kinds and the ever-present jackdaws and crows. They fell dead from the sky as he passed beneath them, as if dead from a lightning bolt.
He would have made an excellent scarecrow. As it was, he merely puzzled the widow Maguire as she ploughed down the sleeper path regardless, her arms flailing in the manner her heart-specialist advised. She would make it to the mouth of the Boyne, round the Maiden’s Tower and back again, and neither an errant tramp, nor the golfers driving towards the eighteenth hole, nor the couples flagrantly embracing in the long grasses, were going to stop her. So she gave him a quizzical glance and registered neither the dying birds around the path he took nor the apron of blood from his collar to his crotch. She was bent on her constitutional, no matter what.
He made his way southwards, parallel to the line of sleepers and through the golfcourse, towards the sandy road. The fury of birds around him died after a while, as if he had emptied the skies immediately above him. And all the golfers saw was a vagrant like any other, an anonymous tramp, crossing their line of vision, seemingly deaf to their cries of ‘Fore!’