A small scream was barely audible over the heavy tumble of the rain that fell in puddles upon the farmstead of the Dryfords. It was a laughing scream, an oscillating wail of such conflicted emotion that many ears would have scarcely believed it to have come from the small rat clutched in the talons of a low-flying owl. It was not as though the moment was underserving of a scream, flight for a rat was seldom a thing to be taken in leisure. Ancient blood told the worried Nine-bottles that he was going to die; A little voice that lived underneath his composure cried out to be let go; every hair from his tail to his nose prayed for a solid cupboard to hide behind. There was one thought though, one tiny flicker at the back of his mind that was having the absolute time of its life.
The world became small beneath them. Stone-wall creek ambled into the distance as if it was drawn upon the earth. There was a glow up here, a faded light that shone weakly through as the sun eked apart the heavy clouds in a prelude to the rain’s slackening.
‘Stop squirming!’ the owl yelled so that it may be heard above the rain and pelting squall, ‘If you want to be dropped then I’d much prefer it in writing beforehand.’
The owl, Booker, was a lawyer. Nocturnal hours in a dimly lit library had proven excellent study, in the morepork’s youth, and after a fruitful career of advising luckless barristers in matters of judicial nature, Booker had decided to retire to a barn in the country. He loved the intricacies of law. The drama of a courtroom, the regiment akin to ceremony, the miss-interpretation of words in so many beautiful ways that contravened logic and abandoned the assumption of decent common sense. But alas, an owl is expected to remain silent–despite Booker’s belief that every human already assumes that they can say much more than “hoo-ooh”. So it was that the owlish lawyer became an anomaly amongst his kind. The magic of words had encapsulated his imagination at an early age and that spark had become speech. He studied, he had found a barrister that who completely out of their depth and then his career began in earnest. Judges would occasionally call the representative human to the bar and question why they had brought an owl into the courtroom, but such was the efficacy of Booker’s guidance that the query was never laboured.
They spoke via correspondence now; Booker was becoming old, and the court was a younger owl’s game. Sure, he would occasionally miss the hustle and noise of city as the repetition of country mornings held another sunny outlook, but out here, in the sprawling green of Huxley-shire, things could become complex at the mere fall of a scarecrow. A Tax-collector named DeGrand, where had he heard that name? A country inn embroiled in fraud. Booker imagined that this whole case was one murder away from being something to truly remember, and as the dark of night began to lean against the edges of the horizon, the Copperpot inn came into view.
~
‘Falli proprietas dominii,’ Booker began with all the plompf and plusture of a creature so well educated that the bonds of the dictionary did little to restrain him, ‘mistaken property ownership.’
Errol, the innkeeper of the Copperpot inn had been quietly sitting with his thoughts as he waited for his home of thirty years to be taken away when an owl flapped in through a window, dropped a wet rat onto a table and began hopping along the bar like a flouncing noble.
The bird was bent almost backward with a conductor’s posture, its feathers were bristling and puffed out in prideful lustre. Errol had lived with talking rats since owning the Copperpot, so the advent of a talking owl seemed like a natural progression.
Malissa DeGrand, a Tax-collector, and overstretched band of elastic fury, strode across the bar and picked up the dramatically pontificating owl by the top of its head, holding it up so that they met at eye level. The little ball of feathers spun meekly from side to side under her grip.
‘Miss,’ Booker chirped, realising that he was one long word away from being thrown ‘would you be kind enough to put me down?’
This was nonsense, Malissa yelled inwardly to herself as that familiar vein hammered at the side of her temple. Talking rats who dabble in finance, owls that spoke old languages, why can’t the country be normal? She had come out here to be calm, she’d promised herself that she’d relax. Country inns were supposed to be simple. You’d show up, find they didn’t keep receipts, take a sensible amount in estimated tax, and then move on to the bloody blacksmith or the cursed candlestick hippie down the road. But she had to dig, she had to treat everything as if it were a mystery. Dennis Highburrow was on the title deed, he died and had no next of kin, by law the inn now belonged to the duke. Damn this place!
‘Ok,’ she said, relenting to the belief that nothing was going to be simple and then placed the owl down next to the shivering rat on a table, ‘say your piece, I’ll listen.’
‘I’ll go get some drinks.’ said Errol, who had been feeling useless all afternoon and desperately wanted to return to the familiarity of standing behind his bar.
‘We believe that there is evidence of an exchange,’ said Booker, ‘that there is a single letter pertaining to a transaction that not only proves that my client does in fact own the inn, but that they also are owed a small amount of contractual inflation.’ He turned to Errol with a dramatic wave of a wing.
‘Mr. Grangly, the letter if you will.’
A blank look stood behind the bar as creature and human alike turned their collective heads toward him.
‘Letter?’ Errol questioned.
‘The message from Dennis,’ Nine-bottles squeaked, ‘My grandfather once told me you kept a scrapbook of memories and that there was a funny letter from when you were employed by the inn as a hunter.’
‘No secrets among rats then.’ Errol muttered with inflection of stone and marched off into his office, shortly returning with a well-thumbed book of loose pages and bookmarks.
It was a book that was in every way Errol. It was large, and solid enough to be used as a hammer, but at its heart there were memory to its pages, thought in how it was constructed. Errol flicked through a few papers and a look pain crossed his face for a moment before he half closed the book with a sigh. Closing his eyes, he opened the book again and Nine-bottles spotted the faded and scribbly letter.
‘Stop! That one, that one.’
They read. Booker laughed.
To whatever horror has claimed this tavern as a lair-
–I leave to you the inn so that you may not follow me, nor curse my bloodline with thine evil or amicable ways.
Please, please, please, have mercy.
Yours,
Denis Highburrow.
Malissa read the scrawl several times.
‘What does this prove?’ she said, placing the letter down and finally accepting a cup of tea from the innkeeper, it was warm and had a light fragrance of lilac, something about the chair by the hearth seemed more comfortable as she leant back from the edge of it. Good gods, she thought, was this what people called cosiness?
‘It proves that my client, Mr Nine-bottles, has claimed this inn as his lair, and that their family have been unfairly paying the tax rates of an inn for thirty years.’ said Booker.
‘A lair? But rats can’t own property.’ the tax-collector argued, one small band of tension refusing to let go. It rebelled against everything but now felt more alone than it had ever remembered. Things were beginning to feel like they didn’t matter. Like it was all just numbers.
‘But we can own a portfolio,’ squeaked Nine-bottles proudly, ‘the inn is under Mr Errol’s name, but my family manages it. So long as we promise not to curse the Highburrow bloodline everything is tidy and legal. We are the horror that lurks within our lair.’
‘Hmm.’
Malissa had suddenly felt a tension release. She had lost. For the first time in her life, she had lost and she didn’t even feel bad about it. It was just money, the duke owned more than enough empty buildings to not miss ruining a comfy inn out-nowhere along Allendale rd.
‘Everything seems to be in order then,’ she said, taking a sip of the tea and catching herself smile–the mussels in her cheeks rebelled having not being forewarned, ‘Mr. Gangly I believe that you mentioned a roast at some point this morning.
~
Rain clouds part and eventually turn to gold as the dying light of day gives its way to the gods of night. A lantern returns to the sky and peace seems to fall across the countryside.
In a tavern alongside an inn of thatched roof, a tax-collector plays snooker under candlelight and soon runs out of locals who are willing to bet against her. It is a quiet night of gentle laughter and muted joy. The sheen of the day’s rain still coats the grass in a blanket of flickering starlight; the wind whips the warmth of summer, untamed, up from the clay and fills the present with the safety of tomorrow.
With a bag of coins in one talon and a mug of strawberry wine in the other, a dizzy old owl flies home bolstered by the knowledge that they had helped. They had never held the floor of a trial, they had never used their voice in law, and right there in that moment their words were able to perform good in what was a twisted world. Booker’s head hummed with the excitement of a career finally come to fruition.
As candles was snuffed and the friar was pushed out onto the balcony in stupor, A small rat lay atop an empty pin cushion and took in the beauty of a home that he now could call lair. Nine-bottles sighed; things were ok. His world felt entirely within its place and, well, it was more than ok, it was perfect.
2022
J. McCray
Sunday Short Stories 