The Bird Eater (21 page)

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Cheri stared at him with a don’t-be-a-smartass look.

“If you’re selling cookies, I’ll take three boxes of the mint kind.”

“Are you going to let me in?” she asked. “Or are you going to make me stand outside while you make stupid jokes all night?”

“Whoa, hey…
maybe
, if you’re going to be an ass about it.”

Eric stepped aside with a frown. Cheri was in one of her moods again—probably another fight with meathead Miles. Eric swore she secretly hated her husband, but the one time Eric dared question her feelings, she had flown off the handle and refused to speak to him for weeks.

Cheri ducked inside.

“Have you seen Aaron today?” she asked, turning to face him just inside the foyer.

Her expression made him nervous. It was stern, no-bullshit. Tonight, Cheri was all business. Barney sauntered over to greet Cheri with a lackadaisical wag of his tail. She scratched behind his ear, but her eyes were fixed on Eric.

“Yeah, I saw him first thing this morning,” Eric told her.

He motioned to the living room, suggesting they not stand around the door all night. She crossed her arms again and marched ahead of him, sinking onto his couch a second later.

“You want a beer?” he asked.

“I’m not here to hang out,” Cheri said.

Eric cleared his throat and sat down in the high-backed chair next to the couch—a piece of furniture he picked up for nothing but looks. The red cushion was stiff and uncomfortable, and the angle of the back was too upright. He never sat in it, but he liked the sophistication it gave the room. He struggled to get comfortable in it, shifting his weight from one side to the other, crossing his arms over his waist, then stretching them out along the armrests.

Cheri frowned as Barney nuzzled his nose beneath her hands. She absentmindedly rubbed his ears and exhaled a breath.

“We need to talk,” she finally said.

“Talk about what?”

She made eyes at him as though he was the stupidest person on the planet:
Get with it, Eric.

“What,” he asked, “about Aaron?”

“
Yes
,
about Aaron. Where did you see him? What happened?”

Eric grimaced at the inquisition. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about the conversation they’d had early that morning, not sure he was ready to tell Cheri about how freaked out Aaron had been, or how he had nearly refused to step back inside the house—at least not before knowing exactly what Cheri was getting at.

Aaron had acted crazy, but he had sought Eric out, he had chosen to speak to
him
about his experiences. Their entire exchange felt like one of those secrets you were supposed to keep for better or worse, not spill the second a mutual friend demanded to know.

“He came to the store, asked if I wanted to grab breakfast.”

Eric shrugged as though it had been the most mundane meeting he’d ever had.

“Yeah?” Cheri asked, her tone edgy. “That’s it? You guys just had some pancakes and talked about the weather?”

“Pretty much,” he murmured, recoiling when Cheri’s fist slammed into his shoulder with surprising roughness. She glared at him, Barney stupidly panting between them both rather than defending his master.

Eric winced, rubbing his arm. “What the hell was that for?”

“For not being straight with me,” she said. “There’s something seriously wrong with him, Eric. He isn’t acting like himself.”

“What does that even mean?” Eric asked her. “
Acting like himself.
How do we even know what
himself
is?”

Cheri looked almost offended at Eric’s suggestion. He supposed he should have seen it coming. Cheri had never gotten over Aaron disappearing; Eric could only imagine how out of control her fixation had become over the past handful of days.

“What? You’re going to tell me you know him despite him being missing for so long? Come on, Cher.”

“What did he tell you?” Cheri asked, ignoring his last comment. “Do you have any idea how screwed up he is? Do you even know why he’s here; that he had a son?”

Eric blinked, shaking his head, the sudden onset of confusion making him even more uncomfortable than he already was. He regretted sitting in that chair. He wanted to move to the couch, but he didn’t want to sit that close to her, didn’t want to get punched again.

“No,” he said, a little unsure. “He didn’t mention anything about a kid, not his anyway; just about some kid who was giving him hell from day one. I mentioned it to you earlier—his issues with trespassers, remember?”

“Well, this has nothing to do with trespassing. He can’t stay there anymore. Not by himself. Whatever it is about that house—bad memories or something—it’s driving him insane.”

“So what do you—”

“You have room, right?” She cut him off. “You need to take him in.”

A surge of insubordination washed over him. It was one thing for Cheri to come into his house demanding information, but it was altogether another to insist he open up his house, his
life
, to a guy they arguably hardly knew anymore.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said, but Cheri was vehemently shaking her head.

She rose from the couch, her arms held straight at her sides, her face twisted with pleading insistence. Eric peered at her as she stood there, near tears, her breaths suddenly heaving.

“I left Miles.” She spit the words as though they were foul. “He showed up at Aaron’s house; he attacked him…”

Eric stared at her. “Wait, what?” He straightened in his seat. “Who attacked
who
?”

Cheri swiped a hand across her face.

“Miles attacked Aaron at first,” she said, sounding a little unsure. “But then…”

She hesitated, shook her head as if to say she didn’t understand what had happened herself.

“Why would Miles attack Aaron in the first place?”

Eric’s eyes widened. He’d always been a little slow on the uptake, but things were becoming clearer.

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.” Cheri exhaled an abrasive laugh. “Oh, shit.”

He couldn’t take it anymore. Shoving himself out of that chair, he moved across the room, pacing in front of the television before turning to look at her.

“So, Aaron retaliated?”

Cheri nodded slowly.

Eric couldn’t picture it—scrawny Aaron Holbrook laying into beefcake Miles Vaughn. But then he remembered the confession Aaron had made at the Ox, the one that had nearly made him choke on his wheat toast.

I killed him.

Eric’s chest went tight with the memory.

He chewed the inside of his cheek, not sure whether he really wanted an answer to the question he was about to ask.

“How?”

Cheri looked up at him without response.

“How did he retaliate?” Eric clarified.

She swallowed, fear eking into her eyes.

“With a baseball bat,” she whispered.

“Holy shit.” The words jumped out of him reflexively, knee-jerk, involuntarily.

“I was afraid he was going to kill him,” Cheri confessed, her words so quiet that, if his senses hadn’t been heightened by his own alarm, he very likely wouldn’t have heard them. But he
did
hear them. Despite their softness, those words sounded like a scream.

“This is insane,” Eric murmured.

He didn’t get it, wasn’t sure he wanted to understand. One minute, Aaron was telling him about a kid he had bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat—the next, Cheri was recalling how Aaron had nearly killed Miles in the exact same way. Eric’s nerves hissed beneath his skin. This wasn’t a coincidence. Aaron had been telling the truth. There was something wrong with that house; there was someone
in
that house.

“Christ, okay,” he said. “Okay, okay…” He shot a look around the living room despite not knowing what he was looking for. “Okay, yeah, he can stay here. Let’s just get him out of there.”

“I already did,” she said. “He’s at the motel on Main. I couldn’t leave him, not after he lost it like that.”

Lost it
.

Eric imagined Aaron swinging a bat over his head like a lunatic; he pictured the look of surprise Miles must have worn.

“What are
you
going to do?” he asked, giving Cheri a stern look. “This changes everything, right? I mean…you can’t stay at your place anymore, not after what happened.”

Cheri gave him a pained yet hopeful smile.

“Ah,” he said, then sighed in surrender. “Sure, why not?”

Cheri threw her arms around him in thanks and pressed a kiss to his cheek, but Eric couldn’t help but scowl over her shoulder. Half an hour ago he had been watching movies with Barney; now he had two new roommates for an unknown amount of time.

“It won’t be for long,” Cheri told him, reading his perturbed expression. “Just a few days until I can figure things out.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “It’s fine, I just…I didn’t expect it.”

“I know, and I love you.” She gave him another squeeze before backing away. “But I have to go. I have to deal with…” She waved a hand in front of her. “This. Miles. Aaron really clocked him.”

“You want me to go with you, just in case?”

He didn’t much feel like seeing Miles in a highly agitated state, but he had always been plagued by a morbid sense of curiosity. The idea of Aaron swinging a baseball bat at Miles Vaughn freaked him out, but it didn’t stop him from wanting to see the damage. That, and there was no telling what Miles would do if he was irate, if he caught Cheri alone.

“No, it’ll make it worse,” she insisted. “He probably isn’t at the house anyway. But will you go to the motel? I just…the idea of Aaron being alone right now, I don’t know…”

Eric nodded, understanding her concern.

“He’s in room five. Here.” She shoved a ten-dollar bill into his hand, already moving toward the front door. “Get him some food, okay? He hasn’t eaten. Just sit with him.”

Eric frowned at the crumpled money against the palm of his hand. He’d never seen Cheri this frazzled before. She seemed genuinely scared, as though whatever she had seen transpire between Aaron and Miles had changed the way she looked at the world.

He was only glad Cheri didn’t believe Holbrook House was haunted. If she had shared Eric’s suspicions of what was happening to Aaron, she wouldn’t have ever left him alone.

Nineteen

The TV show’s dialogue ebbed in and out of Aaron’s consciousness, loud and faint, louder and nearly nonexistent, eventually fading completely as

a woman stepped into the mouth of the hallway, the hem of her dress brushing against her calves. She was nothing but shadow, the brightness of the sun at her back throwing her into silhouette. Aaron recognized the room behind her—the kitchen, the big window above the sink framing the greenery of the backyard; trees thick with leaves, a perfectly preened lawn stretching as far as the tree line.

The woman jerked her head up at the sound of a thud from the second floor. Someone was crying between wet, muffled knocks.

She drifted down the hall, her bare feet soundlessly padding across the hardwood floor. The sun that bit into the shadows of the hallway illuminated her as she advanced: first her feet, then the edge of her white dress; a dress that strikingly resembled the kind a bride would wear to an outdoor, summer affair—light, airy, silk organza dancing upon the lightest breeze.

The woman stopped at the foot of the stairs, her gaze trailing up the risers until it paused on a pair of feet. A boy stood at the top of the staircase, his eyes fixed on hers, his face and arms dusted in what looked like a smattering of paint. A baseball bat swung gently from his fingers, the varnished wood dripping onto the floor beside his right foot.

The woman in white opened her mouth, speaking soundless words at the boy above her, her face twisted in an expression that was trying for confusion but skirted understanding too closely to be convincing. The corners of the boy’s mouth quirked up into a smile, as if responding to what the woman had said, but the woman didn’t smile in return. Instead, she began to climb the steps, a look of horror pulling her eyebrows into high arches above her eyes.

Reaching the top of the stairs, she pressed a hand to her chest, both her mouth and eyes forming a trifecta of near-perfect Os.

What had once been a boy lay on the floorboards, nothing but arms and legs akimbo with a smear of red where his head should have been. She took a staggering sideways step, shaking her head, ready to scream only to be startled into silence.

The boy sprang out of an open doorway and swung, catching the side of her face with the tip of the bat.

The woman exhaled a silent cry as she fell backward, her ear blooming like a red flower tucked into her hair. She soared in slow motion, landing on her back in the center of the staircase, tumbling down the rest of the way until she was spread out, facedown at the foot of the steps.

The boy jumped down the stairs, the edge of the baseball bat dragging across the wall as he descended in silent, bounding leaps. He tilted his head to the side as he inspected the damage, nonchalantly nudging the woman in white with the tip of his sneakered foot. The woman’s face tightened with pain, and the boy grinned above her as she cried out again.

Dropping the baseball bat to the floor, the boy skipped down the hall and into the kitchen, accompanied a moment later by the sharp glint of a butcher’s knife. He straddled her, a satisfied smirk coiling across his lips, lifted the knife, and jerked

awake. For a split second the sheets pooled around Aaron’s waist weren’t white, but wet and sopping red. The kid stood at the foot of the bed, his silhouette outlined in the pale blue of the TV, his hair twisted up into crude horns.

A scream hitched in Aaron’s throat, a desperate cry for him to be left alone.

But just as his yell was about to surface, the room appeared the way he remembered it—arguably clean sheets, the flicker of seventies Americana on the TV.

Aaron’s mouth went dry.

His gaze shot to the bathroom door.

He’d brought his pills.

Three or four, just to put him under, to grant him a few hours of rest.

His bare feet hit the carpet. He shoved open the bathroom door, flipped on the light, and cringed against the brightness. Ugly yellow tiles winked at him as he stood in front of the sink. He struggled with the cap, his palms sweaty, his hands trembling. He gave it a firm twist, and the bottle cap popped out of his hand, bounced across the counter, and dropped to the floor.

Aaron pressed a hand over his eyes to momentarily shield himself from that bathroom’s glare, leaving the open prescription bottle beside the sink to search the floor for the white plastic lid. Kneeling down to peer beneath the lip of the counter, he found it there, nestled into a corner between the counter and wall. Catching its edge between a pair of fingers, he rocked back onto his feet with a groan, turned on the tap, and shook three yellow tabs into the palm of his hand.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as the tap hissed cold water into the dingy basin of the sink. But the man who stared back at him was no longer a man Aaron knew. His face was sallow and gaunt, the dark circles beneath his eyes giving them a sunken, holocaustic appearance. His hair needed cutting, a three-day-old beard made him look like a man he could only guess was an image of the father he’d never met.

The tattoos were the only things that were familiar: a murder of crows spiraling up his ribs and toward his heart like a cyclone, the dead branches of a tree coiling up his arm—home to a single owl hidden against his side. The eagle’s wings that circled his neck looked like hands beneath the glare of an old light bulb, choking him with the lightest touch—so light it had taken thirty-four years to squeeze the life from his lungs.

A soft whisper sounded from behind the shower curtain, like someone fluttering their fingers against the draped plastic that hung from the rod.

Aaron spun around, his back pressed to the bathroom counter as he stared at the clouded plastic sheet.

It swayed ever so slightly, as if having been pushed by the faintest breeze.

Small citron-colored pills clinked against porcelain as the prescription bottle tipped into the sink, pushed over by a misplaced palm. There was someone behind that curtain; he was certain of it.

Aaron pushed himself away from the counter—the tap still hissing behind him.

He slowly lifted his right arm.

Fingers grazing across the filmy sheet that hung from cheap plastic rings.

Squeezing his eyes shut, his hand closed around the curtain.

He sucked in a shallow breath.

Shoved the valance away.

He staggered backward, the drape popping off a few of its rings.

The floral appliqués were gone, submerged beneath a bathtub brimming with blood—so full that it lapped at the lip of the tub, dozens of dead crows bobbing up and down in the gore. By the time Aaron’s back hit the counter, thick claret poured onto the floor, rolling down the sides, coating the tile in viscous red.

Live starlings clawed their way out of the rusted faucet, far too big to fit and yet defying logic as they spread their wings and frantically flew around the room, slamming their bodies into the walls, the small window above the toilet, the mirror, the cabinets.

A strained yell bounded out of Aaron’s chest.

He turned to run but his feet slipped on the gore.

Clutching the counter in an attempt to stay on his feet, his legs shot out from beneath him and he hit the ground. His briefs and T-shirt soaked up blood as he ice-skated around the bathroom on his hands and knees, desperately trying to get to the door. But the more panicked he became, the more impossible escape seemed to be. It was as though the world had tilted on its axis just enough to make the floor pitch toward the back wall, that invisible incline keeping Aaron where he was—scrambling to move but somehow frozen in place.

He shot a wild-eyed look at the tub, that deep red seemingly endless, coming from nowhere, the birds still crawling out of the faucet like roaches, only to take flight and break their own necks.

But his gaze froze on what hadn’t been there before—the top of a head, a girl floating in that bloodied tub, her eyes open, her mouth agape. Despite his fear, Aaron found himself staring at this new face, one that brought with it a distinct sense of déjà vu, as though he knew this particular victim from some distant life, as though he’d seen her in old photographs in Aunt Edie’s family album.

He swallowed the saliva that had collected in his mouth, thick and cloying as it slithered down his throat. Carefully pulling himself to his feet, he gripped the edge of the counter with blood-sticky fingers, gave himself a better vantage point from which to look down on to the dead girl in the tub.

With his breath held fast in his chest, Aaron took a single forward step toward the tub.

And as if awakened by that small movement, the girl turned her head to face him with a snap, her mouth pulling up in a joker’s grin.

Aaron screamed.

He flung himself at the door.

His shoulder caught on the jamb so violently that his entire right arm went numb.

Somehow, by some unseen mercy, he managed to stumble back into the room, trekking blood onto dingy brown carpet, his ears throbbing beneath the sound of his pulse.

He veered around, gaping at a bathroom that was no longer yellow but unnervingly red, hot and glistening like the insides of a fresh kill. Reaching for the bathroom door with gore-slicked fingers, he slammed it shut, then bolted across the room, ready to sprint into the Arkansas night.

But he caught something from the corner of his eyes.

The kid crouched in the far corner of the room, naked and crimson-smeared, a giant crow held in both his hands. He dipped his head down, tore at the bird with his teeth, meat shredding, tendons stretching, the kid’s eyes fixed on Aaron as he leered with a mouth full of flesh and blood.

Aaron exhaled a strangled cry.

The last thread of sanity snap snap snapped from its moors.

He struggled with the door, fumbling with the lock that Cheri had twisted into place before slipping out into the night.

It swung open, and Aaron bolted into the darkness—barefooted, in nothing but his boxer shorts and undershirt, tearing across the parking lot like a track and field star as two words pounded against the inside of his skull.

Go home.