Crickerjack
You hear a crickerjack a long time before you see one, and most people in Hellsborough stop hearing them at all after a while, the way you stop hearing your own fridge. The chirp sits under everything else on a warm murkneet: waste ground, verges, the cracks between paving where nothing else bothers growing. It is a companionable noise right up until it isn't, and I have never worked out how something that small can make a silence feel so deliberate. It is only worth your attention the moment it stops, because a crickerjack that has gone quiet has usually just clocked something worth jumping at, and the something is sometimes you.
The jump is the whole animal. A crickerjack does not fly so much as launch, no wind-up you can read, gone from one paving slab to a spot four feet off that makes no obvious sense as a destination. I have tried to grab one exactly once, on a dare, and came away with nothing but the memory of where it used to be. Van Hallam catches them out of the air bare-handed, apparently without thinking about it, snatching one clean out of a dead sprint the same way you'd flick a fly off a pint, which tells you less about the crickerjack than it does about Van.
On its own a crickerjack is no threat to anyone taller than a boot. The trouble is the startle, not the animal: corner a patch of waste ground thick with them and disturb the wrong one, and the whole verge goes up at once, a couple of dozen launching in every direction on the same half-second, which is enough to put one in your face, down your collar, or under the boot of the person you were trying to have a quiet word with. None of that is the crickerjack's doing. It is just what happens when something built to startle does it in a crowd.
They turn up dry-fried in a paper cone in more than one Hellsborough bar, sold by the handful as something to chew on with a pint, and if you have ever wondered why the going rate never seems to trouble the supply, it is because nobody has to farm them. You just have to be faster than a crickerjack on crust, as the saying goes, and most nights somebody is.
Field note: if the chirp around you stops all at once, you're not alone in noticing something. Stay still and let the verge settle before you take another step, or you'll be the reason it goes up.
| Type | Blinker |
| HP | 1 |
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