Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Thorne End ·
Look Up Over Thorne End
At dusk the starlings above the reservoir gather into a human face that is a little older each evening, and the schoolmaster who has been drawing it is starting to recognise the eyes.
The murmuration begins most evenings over the Thorne End reservoir, at the hour when the lamps come on along the causeway and the water goes the colour of slate. Three or four thousand starlings rise from the reed beds at once and wheel above the open water, and for the first minute or so they are simply a flock, swooping and pouring and folding back on themselves in the way birds do when they have forgotten what they are for. Then they begin to settle.
Malcolm Ridge, who teaches geography at the village school and has an eye for shapes, noticed the face in October.
It did not look like much at first. A darker patch in the flock, a crowding of birds at the upper edge that held its outline for a few seconds longer than the rest. He thought it was a trick of the light. Then the patch took on a brow, and the brow a line of cheekbone, and the shape turned slowly over the water like a figure looking round a room. The birds in it did not look like birds. They looked like the grain of a face.
He began to draw it. He sat on the reservoir wall each evening with a sketchbook and a stub of pencil and tried to catch what he saw, and each evening the face had changed a little. The nose was longer. The mouth had a faint downward set at one corner. The eyes, which he could never see clearly, seemed to be looking at him more directly each time.
By the end of November he had eleven sketches, and he laid them out on the kitchen table and looked at them the way he would look at a sequence of weather maps. The changes were not random. The face was ageing. Each drawing added a little more weight to the cheeks, a little more depth to the lines beside the mouth. The face was becoming a man's, and the man was growing older at roughly the rate of one year for every six evenings.
He showed the drawings to his wife, who told him to stop going out to the reservoir in the cold, and then said quietly that the last one looked like her father.
The next evening he took her with him.
They sat on the wall in their coats with a flask of tea between them. The flock came up off the reeds at half past four and wheeled over the water. They watched it form. This time, Ridge saw, the face turned to look at the wall directly, and the eyes were the colour of wet slate, and the expression was one he had seen only once before, in a photograph of his own father at the age of sixty, the year before he died. It was the look of a man deciding whether to speak.
His wife stood up. She said the name of her father. She said it so quietly that Ridge almost missed it, and the flock trembled, and the face turned to her with a slow, slightly puzzled attention, as if she were a stranger who had called across a street.
The face did not speak. It leaned, very slightly, toward the wall. Then the starlings broke and streamed away to the north over the fields, and the sky was empty except for the first stars, and the water was flat and black.
Ridge found, in the morning, that his sketchbook had changed. Every page was blank except the last, which held a single new drawing done in very careful pencil: the face of his wife's father, at roughly the age he had been when he died, with a line of small dark marks running from the corner of the mouth up toward the ear. The marks were starlings. They had been placed by hand. The pencil lines around them were not his.
The face has not appeared since. Ridge still goes to the reservoir each evening, though his wife no longer comes. The flock still rises at half past four and wheels over the water, and still, on some evenings, one dark patch at the upper edge holds its shape a little longer than the rest, and turns, and looks toward the wall, as though it is waiting for someone to stand up and say a name.