The Bird Eater
Other Titles by Ania Ahlborn
The Neighbors
Seed
The Shuddering
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Ania Ahlborn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
ISBN-13: 9781477817605
ISBN-10: 1477817603
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013949264
Contents
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before…”
—Edgar Allan Poe,
The Raven
One
Plunging her hands into a wad of pizza dough, Edie Holbrook came to realize that she’d forgotten to turn on the radio two seconds too late. She shot a look over her shoulder, eyeing Fletcher’s old Sony boom box on the kitchen windowsill. It was a relic—the kind that played tapes and sometimes ate them for breakfast—but she didn’t have the heart to get rid of it. Aaron had his Discman, and Edie would have had the crackle and pop of AM/FM if she’d only remembered to flip the damn thing on. “Your mind is going,” she murmured, not caring to consider just how many times she’d told herself that very thing in the past few months. She didn’t like thinking about it; hell, she was only thirty-two years old—way too young for crazy. Never mind the fact that her baby sister had only been fifteen.
Never mind that, Edie.
Never mind.
She frowned against the hollow stillness of the house, pushed the memory of Miranda back to the dusty fringes of her mind, and focused on the positive: it was Friday, and Friday meant pizza and movies with her favorite kid. Although at fourteen years old, it wouldn’t be long before Aaron ducked out of movie night altogether. Edie furrowed her eyebrows at that, wondering what she’d do with herself once her nephew started spending nights out at Stonehenge with friends, drinking cheap beer, jumping over bonfires, and howling at the moon the way Fletcher used to when they had first met.
I’ll become an old maid,
she thought.
One without a single cat.
When Fletcher had been young and vivacious and
alive
, he’d tell Edie stories about old Aunt Myrtle who lived in a farmhouse out in the-middle-of-nowhere Missouri. He’d grin his toothy grin, give her an easy shrug, and casually explain that Aunt Myrtle had so many cats that, when she tripped over a particularly fat tabby and broke her hip, the cats eschewed calling the police and ate her alive instead.
It was a terrible tragedy,
he’d say.
We all knew her lifestyle was dangerous, but this?
Fletcher would woefully spread his hands out in front of him and try not to laugh; and despite the fact that Aunt Myrtle had been spun out of the floss of Fletcher’s weird imagination, Myrtle became the butt of every wait-till-Edie-gets-old joke.
Edie cracked a grin at the memory, shaking her head with a chuckle as she pressed dough against the floured surface of the kitchen table. Even on her worst days, Fletcher always knew how to make her laugh. Tight finances and taking Aaron in so young had kept them from having a child of their own—a regret Edie was sure she’d never release. Aaron had been sixteen months old when Edie had found Miranda dead in the upstairs bathtub, her wrists slashed, her eyes wide open and staring as though there had been something particularly gruesome perched atop their mother’s old chair in the corner of the room. That sunny afternoon had changed nineteen-year-old Edie Bell forever. Without Fletcher, she would have been damned to loneliness and crippling depression; with him, she had somehow managed to continue on living, actually
laughing
at his antics as he clowned around, the great entertainer of tiny Ironwood, Arkansas. He made her so happy, she quietly mourned there not being two of him—a mini-Fletcher with his same sense of humor to counter Aaron’s silent, sometimes stoic nature.
Edie had lied to Aaron, had told him that his mother had run off to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune and, perhaps, would someday return to her life in Arkansas with riches beyond any of their wildest dreams; but something about Aaron’s silence assured Edie that somehow, by some sort of dark magic, he knew that she had abandoned him. No matter how much Edie doted on him, she never asked him to call her Momma. The idea had always scared her, as though taking Miranda’s place would awaken a ghost.
Not liking the silence, Edie hummed “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” beneath her breath, rolling dough against the heels of her palms. It was her favorite song, one the radio DJs played on a loop between Bruce Springsteen and Phil Collins tracks. She swayed her hips. There was a whole stack of Heartbreakers tapes somewhere in the living room—Tom Petty’s complete collection, courtesy of Fletcher Holbrook’s minor obsession since ’76. There was a thud in the living room—a bang, bang,
bang
as though someone was stomping mud from their boots.
Edie went silent.
Her gaze jumped from her wedding ring—removed and lying on the table, just shy of the floured surface—to the mouth of the hallway, her arms breaking out in gooseflesh so suddenly it nearly hurt, every pore expanding and contracting with the hammering of her heart.
Your mind is going
.
But the noise had been undeniably loud. She’d heard the stack of teacups and saucers on the table rattle with the vibration of that triple-thump, and she’d heard that banging before.
Probably a neighbor tooling around in the woods, cutting down dead trees, getting a jump start on firewood.
It was a possibility, but what about all the things that had been plaguing her for the past few months? The creak of the stairs when no one was there to use them; doors she’d left open closing on their own, and doors she was damn sure she’d closed yawning open when her back was turned. Why had she spent the last week washing her hair with her eyes open, securing the doors and triple-checking the locks like someone fraught with an obsessive compulsion, and sleeping with the lamp on even though she’d never in her life been afraid of the dark? It was either a ghost, or Edie was slowly losing her mind; and since ghosts didn’t exist…
They
don’t
exist. If you believed in that stuff you would have never stayed in this house.
It was true. The very first thing she’d heard at school when the Bells had moved into the house at the end of Old Mill Road was that it was haunted, stalked by the ghost of a kid who had done some terrible, wicked thing. Edie never stuck around to hear what that thing had been. She had never been interested because she wasn’t a fool. But now her fool’s heart was leaping into her throat as the stairs groaned beneath an invisible weight. She could see the front door through the hallway. She
knew
nobody had come inside. And yet those stairs whined as something climbed them, much like the panic that was climbing up her throat, slithering into her mouth, trying to form a scream.
Edie pulled her hands from the wad of dough, the concoction sticking to her fingers, refusing to break its hold. Grabbing a dishtowel from next to the sink, she wiped off her hands, smearing beige-colored paste across a gingham pattern. She didn’t dare run the water, afraid of alerting whatever was inside the house to her position.
Like that would make a difference,
she thought.
As though you could sneak up on a phantom, catch it by surprise.
Ever so slowly, Edie crossed the length of the kitchen to the hall. She paused there as she held her breath, trying to suppress the whimper that was desperate to escape her throat. She tipped her chin up to the ceiling as the second floor creaked overhead. When a door slammed above—so hard it seemed to shake the entire house from the inside out—Edie exhaled a cry of surprise and turned tail. She hurried to the kitchen door, fumbled with the lock, and spilled out through the porch and onto the back lawn.
Still clutching the dirty dishtowel, she could hardly catch her breath against the furious beating of her heart. Her peripheral vision went dark. She squatted on the grass and squeezed her eyes shut, fighting motes of brilliant white light that danced across the backs of her eyelids, refusing to surrender to the spin of vertigo. Edie didn’t stay crouched on the grass long. She shot the house a look, half-expecting to see a shadow staring down at her from her bedroom window, but the window was empty.
Because no one is in the house, dummy.
But if no one was in the house, where had the noise come from? She could have imagined a bang or two, but the creak of the stairs? The whine of floorboards above her head?
It’s an old house,
she reasoned.
It’s settling onto its bones.
It was the excuse she had grown up hearing—scary creaks and snaps and whines were nothing but walls shrinking or expanding in the night; suspicious scratching sounds were made by wind pushing branches against the clapboards; doors that swung open after they were closed were off-balance and needed adjusting. Ma and Daddy Bell were the least superstitious pair of folks Edie had ever known, which was why they had decided to move into that house despite all the stories in the first place—because ghosts were fairy tales made up by people who were too empty-headed to think about things that made sense. And then Miri lost her sense and became as empty-headed as the rest of those featherbrained believers.
An imaginary friend wouldn’t have been anything to bat an eyelash at if Miri had been three instead of thirteen; her age had betrayed her imagination, and before Edie knew it, her little sister was hopped up on antipsychotics and sleeping sixteen hours a day. Sure, the stairs creaked and the floors whined and sometimes doors Edie had closed would suddenly be open, but that certainly didn’t mean ghosts were to blame. But if Edie had asked Miranda, Miri would have smiled her strange, faraway smile and said that “the boy” had done it, the one she called Birdie because of the way he hooked his thumbs together and fluttered his hands.
She was insane,
Edie reminded herself.
Miri was sick. She lost her mind.
Except that now Edie felt like
she
was losing her mind too—a thirty-two-year-old widow standing out on the back lawn, staring up at the house like some gaping idiot when, in less than an hour, Aaron would be home from school, begging his aunt to hurry up in the kitchen; they had to get to the video rental place before all the good movies were gone.
You’re being ridiculous.
She squared her shoulders and marched up the back porch steps. Hesitating with her hand on the door, she cleared her throat as if to announce herself to the empty kitchen and stepped inside. “If there’s anyone here, you’d better get out of here before I lose my patience,” she told the house. “And if that’s you, Fletcher, you stop this right now. You’re scaring the bejeezus out of me and it isn’t the least bit funny.” Standing in front of the kitchen table, she listened for a reply—the creak of hinges as a door swung open, another whine of the floorboards.
Edie all but screamed when something hitting a window sounded from the top of the stairs.
This time she didn’t falter. Despite her runaway heart, she bolted into the hallway and stomped up the stairs, imagining Aaron singsonging after her:
I ain’t ’fraid of no ghost!
Reaching the top riser, she pivoted on the balls of her bare feet and marched into her nephew’s bedroom, and there, against the glass, was a dusty imprint of a phantom bird; its wings outstretched, each feather delicately outlined in powder down.
“Oh, you idiot,” she said, not sure whether the insult was directed toward herself and her racing pulse or the stupid creature who hadn’t yet mastered his God-given gift of flight. But it didn’t matter now. She shot a look at Aaron’s
Ghostbusters
poster and laughed. It would certainly be a good story to tell tonight—hapless Edie Holbrook, terrified by creaky houses and birds who had flunked out of flight school. Rolling her eyes at herself, she plucked Aaron’s crumpled PJs from the foot of the bed and tossed them into the dirty laundry hamper in the corner, and as she instinctually began to tidy his room, her heart sputtered to a stop.
It was a dragging sound, like a soldier who’d just had his legs blown off in battle commando-crawling across the downstairs floor.
But the groan that accompanied the drag was far from heroic. It sounded like a woman—far away yet somehow inside the house just the same. It sounded like a woman who couldn’t find enough breath to scream.
The world spun counterclockwise, and Edie caught herself with a hand against Aaron’s wall. A Bon Jovi poster crinkled beneath her fingers, the top right corner ripping free of the pushpin that kept it tacked to the wall. Its glossy surface stuck to the sweaty palm of her hand. The whimpering moan from downstairs continued. She knew it was impossible, but she also couldn’t get it out of her head: it sounded like Miranda—the way she would cry when Daddy screamed at her for the last few years of her life.
Get a grip, girl!
he’d yell, then impatiently shove his lunatic daughter into a corner, somehow convinced that anger and hard hands would scare the insanity right out of Miri’s skull.
The familiarity of that whimpering cry was what pushed Edie out of Aaron’s room and onto the top landing of the stairs. She gripped the banister with both hands as she struggled to see through a sheen of tears; half-expecting to see her little sister crumpled at the foot of the first riser, her shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs, her face pink and swollen from hours of crying about things neither Edie nor her parents could comprehend.
“Miri?” she whispered, her throat dry, her arms quaking despite her white-knuckled grip on the upper railing.
She imagined that letting go of the banister would send her hands flying about her face like spastic birds with broken wings, like how ghost boy Birdie would send his hands dancing about him, preparing for some magic trick that Edie’s sister never revealed. But at the back of her mind, Edie knew the muffled wail from down below didn’t belong to Miranda. If Miranda had a ghost, Edie was convinced it would be forever trapped in the upstairs bathroom just shy of her left shoulder—a bathroom that Fletcher had gutted, tub and all, and renovated from floor to ceiling.
That bathroom had been a running joke between them until the day Fletcher died; they called it “the lounge” because it was the fanciest room in all of Holbrook House. Not a speck of the past—of what Miranda had done to herself—had been left behind, but the memory had remained. Edie hardly ever used the bathroom that was fit for a queen; she was always conveniently downstairs or near the master bath whenever she was hit with the urge to use the toilet. She only ventured into “the lounge” when it needed cleaning, and even then, she’d clean the mirror and scrub the faucets with her eyes half-closed.