Summary
A taciturn watchman, Becker, keeps vigil over a crumbling medieval tower that the townsfolk insist is cursed; every dusk a murder of crows circles the spire, their wings slicing the sky like black guillotines. Into this ominous hush strides Agnes, a war-widow turned antiquarian, clutching a parchment that claims the tower once imprisoned a heretic astronomer who mapped forbidden constellations. Becker’s eyes, rheumy yet hawk-sharp, recognize her escort as the smirking prosecutor who sent his own son to the gallows; the past curdles the present. When Agnes discovers a rusted astrolabe in a hollow stone, the crows begin to drop, stone-dead, at the tower’s base—each corpse bearing singed flight feathers that reek of brimstone. A clandestine séance in the crypt, led by a carnival mesmerist, summons the astronomer’s silhouette: a nitrate ghost who scratches star-charts into the damp walls while whispering the precise hour of the next beheading. Panic metastasizes; villagers bar doors, yet someone keeps nailing crow carcasses to the church portal, their necks twisted into crude compasses pointing toward the tower. Becker, racked by guilt, confesses to Agnes that decades earlier he locked his anarchist son inside that very turret, believing imprisonment kinder than the noose; the boy vanished, leaving only a bloodied feather. At winter solstice, a copper comet blazes across the firmament, mirroring the astrolabe’s inner gears. The mesmerist, now wearing the prosecutor’s face like a fleshy mask, attempts to hurl Agnes from the parapet so that her plummet will complete the astronomer’s centuries-old ritual of celestial realignment. Becker, galvanized, sabotages the tower’s great clock; cogs rupture, bells toll thirteen, and the stone shaft convulses as though birthing a planet. Crows resurrect mid-air, beating wings of liquid mercury that reflect every onlooker’s hidden crimes. In the maelstrom, the prosecutor slips, impaled on the astrolabe’s jagged armillary, his blood tracing star-paths that spell the son’s forgotten name. Dawn finds the tower sheared away, a spiral of ashes spiraling like a galaxy; Agnes, wordless, pockets the lone surviving feather, its vane etched with fresh constellations that no telescope has yet named.
Synopsis
