The Bird Eater (24 page)

By the time he was finished, the place looked like a murder scene; white walls covered with the smeared, cockeyed letters of a lunatic, the floor a mire of white paint, blood, feathers, and carrion. Breathing hard, he crouched in the center of the room, a pile of mutilated birds at his feet, and then he drew in a breath and began to whisper Ryder’s favorite rhyme.

“Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie…”

Twenty-two

Eric pushed the Firebird to its top speed along Old Mill’s straightaway, his foot mashing the gas pedal as he fumbled with his phone. Finally getting Cheri’s number up on the screen, he pressed the phone against his ear and waited for the call to connect, but all he got was Cheri’s voice mail.

“Goddamnit,” he murmured, waiting for the beep to speak again. “Cheri, call me. Aaron wasn’t at the motel. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling he left to go home. On my way there now. Christ, if he’s psychotic or something…I won’t know what to do. Meet me out here, like, ASAP.” He tapped the screen with his thumb and dropped the phone onto the passenger seat.

Except his message wasn’t altogether true; Eric had a feeling he
did
know why Aaron would go back home. The incident with Miles and the baseball bat was too weird, too big to be a coincidence. Because attacking an imaginary boy with a bat, pummeling him until he was nothing but a smear of gore was one thing; attempting to reenact the crime on a living, breathing person was altogether another. There was something wrong with that house—it seemed that everyone suspected as much. The curious kids that would meet on the front lawn on Friday nights, the couples that would make out in their cars while watching the windows for ghosts; everyone felt it, that vibe that was “off” somehow, as though the place was radiating bad energy—bad, yet spellbinding.

Like a beacon
, he thought.
Except it’s been waiting for one particular person; it’s been waiting for Aaron to come home.

Even at eighty miles per hour, the ten miles it was taking to reach the end of Old Mill felt like an eternity. Eric clamped his teeth against the ticking seconds, suddenly wishing he hadn’t pulled his investigative gear out of the trunk and dumped it in the guest bedroom. An EMF detector would have come in handy. An EVP session would have been easy to do while waiting for Aaron to pack a change of clothes so they could get the hell out of that creepy fucking house. He’d commandeer Aaron’s camcorder and do a quick sweep before they booked it back to his place, but just as Eric considered how incredible it would be to catch something on tape—the holy grail of the paranormal, a full-bodied apparition—his foot reflexively jumped from the gas to the brake and slammed the pedal against the back wall of the footwell.

The Firebird’s tires screamed against the pavement.

Eric lurched forward against the steering wheel, then slammed back against his seat.

His eyes went wide as he stared into the path of his high beams, a little hatchback smoking and mangled against the trunk of a tree. Eric recognized the car almost immediately. He loved that Peugeot enough to have tried to buy it off of Hazel Murphy a few years back. With some time and money it would have made a sweet project car—an eighties throwback, complete with a cherry paint job and a racing stripe. But now, any hope of resurrecting it to its former glory was gone.

Eric shoved open his door and spilled out onto the street. He rushed to the car and, despite its small size, searched the interior for the driver, but Hazel was gone. He told himself this was good news. If Hazel had been seriously injured, she wouldn’t have gotten far. He’d have seen her wandering the shoulder of the road on his way up here, or she’d still be behind the wheel. Hazel’s absence meant that she was still alive.

Unless she isn’t
.

“Hazel!”

He yelled the name into the night, listened for a response, but heard nothing over a ceaseless cricket chirp.

Eric jumped back into the Firebird and blew past the wreck. Maybe she’d gone toward Aaron’s place because it was closer than walking into town; but if Eric knew Hazel as well as he thought, he was sure her superstitions were as strong as his own. Aaron’s house was the last place Hazel would be caught dead, especially in the middle of the night.

The Firebird roared into Aaron’s driveway, skidding on the loose gravel, its front bumper missing Aaron’s Tercel by less than an inch. He bolted out of the car and ran up the porch steps, tried the door but it was locked. He banged his fists against a window.

“Aaron! Open up!”

Peering through the sheer curtains, he couldn’t make out precisely what he was seeing at first. Something white all over the floor, swaths of red decorated the walls, as though Aaron had changed his mind about the color palette and decided to repaint. The furniture had been shoved to the sides of the room in reckless disarray. It was only after staring at the scene for a good fifteen seconds that he realized the small lumps of darkness on the floor weren’t wadded up rags. The crimson wasn’t paint. And the smears on the walls weren’t abstract designs.

They were a name:
RYDER
scrawled over and over on eternal repeat.

“Oh shit,” he whispered, his own worry repeating inside his head:

If he’s psychotic or something, I won’t know what to do.

Aaron was psychotic all right. From the look of that living room, he’d lost it completely. He was inside that house somewhere, and he was bat shit insane.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Eric backed away from the window, nearly fell down the stairs as his pulse pounded against his skull. He was suddenly hot,
so hot
, as though someone had cranked the global thermostat in an attempt to burn Arkansas. But he couldn’t just leave, couldn’t run scared. He had promised Cheri he’d make sure Aaron was okay. Eric
wanted
Aaron to be okay.

Stumbling through the weeds of the front yard, he slingshotted around the side of the house, only to stop short; Aaron’s bedroom window was open—the same window they used to hang out of as kids. Throwing the Nerf football back and forth between them, ten points went to whoever could get the football into the house without hitting the glass.

“Aaron!”

Aaron was standing there, staring out the window at the tree just beyond it, as if contemplating taking a flying leap to the yard below.

“Hey!” Eric waved his arms at his childhood friend, but Aaron didn’t respond, as if completely dazed.

Like a zombie,
Eric thought.

Catatonic.

He’d read about stuff like that; people holding séances and turning into slobbery vegetables, losing their minds between here and the spirit world. He didn’t know if that crap had an iota of truth to it, but staring up at Aaron right then, he couldn’t help but believe.

He shot a look toward the backyard. Maybe the kitchen door was unlocked.

Or maybe it isn’t, and he’ll jump as soon as you turn your head.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered, jerking around to face Fletcher’s shed, never taking his eyes off of Aaron for more than a second. “Don’t move, goddamnit,” he murmured beneath his breath, a command that he knew Aaron couldn’t hear, but he wasn’t sure he’d hear it even if Eric screamed it at the top of his lungs.

Spotting a ladder on its side next to the woodshed, Eric would have to turn his back on Aaron for a few seconds, but he’d be quick; not like he’d be able to catch Aaron if he decided to jump anyway. Eric ran to it and grabbed the old thing by one of its side rails, hefted it up, and dragged it through overgrown bushes and wildflowers. Wrestling with the wooden ladder’s bulky weight, he stood it up beneath Aaron’s window, unable to keep himself from wondering if this was the very same ladder Fletcher had used during his last day on earth. He was too preoccupied to feel the old pine splintering beneath his hands, stabbing the flesh of his palms with shards of weatherworn wood; he didn’t notice that his hands were bleeding by the time he began to climb, the rungs whining beneath his weight but holding firm. His only thought was to pull himself inside the house and block Aaron’s ability to do something incredibly stupid.

He reached the top rung, his bloodied palms smearing red swathes onto the whitewash when he pressed a hand against the house for support. That was when he froze, blinking inside Aaron’s empty room. In the time it had taken Eric to climb up to the window, Aaron had vanished into the dark bowels of the house.

“Shit, Aaron!” He yelled into the shadows, one hand gripping the windowsill while the other clung to the ladder. Looking down at his feet, he tried to figure out how best to climb inside without killing himself in the process. The ladder was rickety. One wrong shift of weight and the rung he was standing on could snap. He considered his footing, then bent at the waist, ready to climb inside, when a cacophony of birds rose up behind him. He turned his head toward the noise, staring into the branches of the oak that stood so close he could climb into its boughs. The starlings were screaming now—a frantic, troubling choir of dismay. That was when he saw it, a kid perched atop the branch that was stretched toward him, a shadow of a boy sitting there like a gargoyle, his hands gripping the bough, his knees pulled to either side of him like a frog ready to spring. His hair was a wild mess of twists and loops, two peaks jutting upward into the night. Eric gaped at him, unable to make out any features other than a menacing, long-toothed smile.

The kid bounded forward, shambling toward him like some grisly boy-shaped spider, that baleful grin jump-starting his heart, pushing a yell up and out of his lungs.

In his panic, he lost his footing, the sole of his right sneaker slipping out from beneath him. The ladder began to totter to the side. Eric’s eyes went wide, his muscles tensing as he held on for dear life—his arms clamped against the windowsill like grappling hooks.

The ladder crashed to the ground fifteen feet below.

“Aaron!” Eric squealed his friend’s name, his feet kicking at the clapboards as he struggled to pull himself up. If he fell, best-case scenario would have him crawling away with two broken legs. Worst case—well, he didn’t want to think about it.

“Fuck, Aaron!” He yelled for help again, his breath catching in his throat as he shot a look into the darkened room.

Aaron was standing in the upstairs breezeway just beyond the open door. Eric could hardly make him out in the darkness, but there he was, a shadow of a figure, staring at him as Eric struggled not to fall.

“Aaron, help me,” Eric said, his plea steadier now—like a panicking parent spurred into calm to keep the situation from spiraling out of control. He exhaled a relieved sigh when Aaron stepped forward. If he hadn’t exhaled the air from his lungs, he could have cried out when Aaron fell into a run, could have screamed loud enough to wake Aaron from his daze instead of choking on a soundless gasp.

The flats of Aaron’s palms hit Eric’s shoulders hard.

Eric cartoon-scrambled for a handhold, his hands slapping the sill, his feet kicking the siding.

He saw Aaron lean out the window to watch him as he fell backward in quarter-time.

There was no flashing of life before his eyes.

No sudden regrets.

No thinking about how he’d miss his mom’s meat loaf or who would take care of Barney.

There wasn’t enough time.

He simply fell, and once he did, the world went black.

Twenty-three

Cheri was shoving a final few T-shirts into the corners of an already overstuffed suitcase when her phone blipped from within the confines of her purse. Miles wasn’t home as predicted, but she didn’t want to dawdle either. She doubted he’d do much—maybe spit a few profanity-laced barbs at her—but it wasn’t a meeting she particularly felt like having; not yet anyway. There would be plenty of glares and harsh words exchanged between now and when she’d finally get around to hiring a lawyer; again, all issues that she didn’t have time for tonight.

Sidestepping the open suitcase laid out on the bedroom floor, she fished her phone out of her bag and stared at the screen. Voice mail. She continued to pack while the call connected, but stopped when she heard Eric’s frazzled voice slither from the earpiece.

Aaron wasn’t at the motel…

Her heart dropped.

Frenzied, she threw the phone onto the bed, flipped the suitcase cover closed, and knelt on top of it to compress her things. She struggled with the zipper, releasing a frustrated scream when it got stuck at one of the corners. Finally getting it all the way shut, she shoved her phone in her purse, slung her bag over her shoulder, and dragged the suitcase out of the room in a mad rush. She was sure she looked like a lunatic as she pulled her bag along the driveway toward her T-bird. Popping the trunk, she wept as she tried to get that monster into the car, but she was running on adrenaline now. Every minute wasted was a minute of Aaron doing God only knew what in that house—drinking himself to death, shaking an entire bottle of pills into his mouth, tying a rope into a noose.

Finally climbing into the car and throwing it in reverse, she barked the tires against the curb and set sail down the street toward Main, struggling to reach Eric on his cell.

But call after call, Eric failed to answer his phone.

Aaron knelt in the center of the living room, surrounded by white paint and gore. Drawing his hands across the floorboards, he smeared congealed blood onto his already red-stained fingers, closed his eyes, and craned his neck back, exposing the ink-etched wings that decorated his skin. Someone would come out of the shadows if he just waited long enough, of that he was sure. He didn’t know who it would be—Ryder, or the kid with the twisted dark hair—but that no longer mattered.

If Ryder came forward, Aaron would be granted the chance he’d been yearning for for the last year. He’d take Ryder into his arms and rock him back and forth, press his mouth to the top of Ryder’s head and whisper the words he needed to say.

I’m sorry, forgive me…

If the grinning shadow-boy came instead, perhaps he’d do Aaron the favor of finally putting him out of his misery. Either way, Aaron and Ryder would be together soon.

Aaron heard what sounded like the ringing of a cell phone somewhere outside. Blinking at the unexpected tone, he slowly rose to his feet and approached one of the side windows. He parted Edie’s white curtains with blood-sticky fingers, leaving gory fingerprints against the delicate lacelike pattern that had yellowed and deteriorated with time. That was when he saw Eric crumpled in the side yard. He was lying on Uncle Fletcher’s old ladder, his arms and legs splayed out at gruesome angles, a trickle of blood dribbling out the corner of his mouth, his ear.

Aaron jerked away from the glass, his eyes wide, terror tightening his chest, his heart springing into his throat. He didn’t remember Eric coming to the house, couldn’t recall why he would have been using Uncle Fletcher’s ladder to climb up to an upstairs window rather than knocking on the front door. He couldn’t recollect any of it, but he knew deep in his gut that he was to blame.

Holding out hope that his friend might still be alive, he hesitated when he spotted what littered the floor: birds—some missing heads, others missing wings, all of them dead. A mew of horror vibrated deep in his throat. He launched himself across the room to the front door, partly to help Eric, but also to get out of that house, but the door wouldn’t open. Even after he threw the dead bolt and gave the knob a violent shake, it remained firmly in place, as though nailed shut from the outside in.

He veered around, staring down the hall and into the kitchen, ready to sprint across the house to the back door when he sensed a shift—atmospheric, as though the air had been sucked out of the room.

The slightest breeze drifted across his cheek like the delicate touch of a hand.

He exhaled, relaxed, and suddenly couldn’t remember why he had felt so panicked. Had something happened? Had he been running away, or toward something unseen?

Allowing himself to sink back to the floor, he closed his eyes and let whatever was crowding the front room saturate his every pore.

His heart felt as though it were skipping every other beat, each hitch leaving him breathless, as though something were rhythmically compressing his chest—phantom CPR. He was choking, or drowning, or both, an invisible hand wrapping itself around his throat, blocking off his air; and yet, he remained utterly calm.

When he finally opened his eyes, a figure stood in the corner just beyond the window next to the front door.

The shadow stirred, releasing an almost feral-looking child from the center of its darkness, his hair twisted into whirlwinds, his dirty coveralls bearing the name patch that had burned itself into Aaron’s memory—red letters against a white background.

It was the boy who had vacantly stared at him through the diner window, the kid who had appeared in the interior shadows of the old high school, the same boy Aaron had bludgeoned with a baseball bat only to see him miraculously spring back to life.

The boy continued to move forward, a ghost of a smile playing at his lips. He stopped only to sweep his gaze across the floor, taking in the dead and gutted crow, the headless starlings that littered the hardwood. When he looked back up at Aaron, that faint grin spread into a sickeningly saccharine smile that seemed to arch from ear to ear.

Aaron’s Zen-like calm was suddenly shattered.

Seeing that leer so close, he exhaled a yell and skittered backward across the floor.

He couldn’t breathe, both lungs seemingly collapsed inside his chest. He stared up at the kid who now loomed above him, the boy seeming much taller than he should have been.

“Where’s Ryder?” Aaron croaked out the question in a dry, breathless whisper.

The boy tipped his head to the side, his smile temporarily muddled by confusion.

“Where is he?” Aaron asked, his tone strained, pleading. “Let me see my son. Just let me see him, or take me to him…whatever you want to do, whatever it takes.”

The boy leaned forward, so close to Aaron’s face he could smell the stench of rotten meat on the kid’s breath.

Aaron winced, squeezed his eyes shut so hard he saw stars, his heart banging around inside the cage of his chest.

With the kid’s face still pulled into that gruesome clown mask of amusement, his hand shot out and grabbed Aaron by the throat. Aaron was yanked forward with inexplicable force, the touch kicking out what little air he’d managed to pull in like a punch to the stomach. He gasped, tried to struggle but he couldn’t move. It was as if the boy had a venomous touch, stabbing him through with an invisible proboscis, poisoning him with a paralytic toxin.

The kid sneered mere inches from his face.

His pulse thudded beneath the crushing grip of the boy’s hand.

The kid giggled as he kept his hold steady, squeezing the last remaining bit of disbelief from Aaron’s veins.

Aaron’s peripheral vision began to blur.

The room closed in as he struggled for breath.

There was a flash somewhere, distant, like a blinking light.

A police cruiser. The whirling lights of an ambulance in the rain. Wet asphalt and crushed safety glass glinting beneath a streetlight. His chest heaving in and out. Something slamming against his ribs again and again.

Aaron surfaced from the dark long enough to see the boy’s face still close to his own.

I needed you once, but I don’t need you no more.

Aaron could hear the words, knew they were coming from the kid despite the boy’s mouth not forming words.

“Where’s Ryder?” Aaron choked out the words, his voice sandpapery hoarse.

The boy leered at him.

Don’t you see my name tag?
he hissed.

“Where’s Ryder?” Aaron screamed.

I’m right here,
the kid sneered.

But it couldn’t be.

It didn’t make sense.

I needed you once,
the boy repeated,
but I don’t need you no more.

Aaron’s eyes widened as the kid pulled back his free hand.

He felt a scream clamor up his throat as small, bloodied fingers danced across his face.

The boy pried Aaron’s mouth open with sticky digits, that glint of vindictive mischief ever present in his eyes, and before Aaron could make a sound, the kid’s hand slithered past Aaron’s teeth, past his tongue and tonsils, down into the blackness of his throat.

No matter how hard Cheri mashed the gas pedal, her Ford wouldn’t go fast enough; and no matter how hard she tried to block her fatalistic thoughts, she couldn’t help but picture the worst. Aaron had been in bad shape, what with the booze and the antianxiety meds. The fact that he had those meds at all would have made her feel better if he hadn’t told her they had stopped working—because what did someone do if their medication was no longer effective?
Spiral into fits of lunacy,
she thought, then momentarily squeezed her eyes shut and whispered, “Oh God.”

That was when a single, selfish thought wormed its way into her brain: What if Aaron
did
go insane? What would all that girlish longing and commitment get her—a raving madman still in love with his estranged wife; a hysterical mourner obsessed with the dead? What if, when she got to the house, he had gone completely nuts and had to be sent away? What if he ended up spending the rest of his life in an asylum? Miles was gone. She’d thrown away her life, her security. She’d end up toiling away at Banner’s as a cashier—a job Eric would give her out of pity, she was sure—she’d grow old with a fake smile plastered across her face, gritting her teeth down to powder while her every thought would double back to Aaron, to how their life should have been.

She had kept him from disappearing, but he’d slipped away regardless.

She had tried to save him, but she had been too late.

“Don’t think like that,” she said, speaking into the silence of the car. “Don’t you think like that.”

But she had to think like that.

She hated herself for it, but this was her
life
.

She didn’t want to spend it alone.

Slowing the car, she squinted at the little hatchback wrapped around a tree. Something about seeing the hood crumpled in on itself ignited her already raging panic. What if whoever had been the driver had crashed because Aaron had run out into the road? What if Aaron had timed it just right, crouched in the trees, waited for someone to drive down that lonesome street so he could leap into their headlights? It seemed crazy, improbable, but was it really? Aaron had tried to end Miles with a baseball bat. He’d bailed out of the motel despite Cheri asking him to stay where he was. He had looked at her as though she had transformed into a monster on the beach of Bull Shoals Lake. She should have called Eric from the motel, had him meet her in front of room number five. She should have never left Aaron alone.

Cheri blew past the Peugeot, her fingers twisting against the wheel.

She took the turn into Aaron’s driveway so sharply that she nearly rammed the front end of her car into the back of Eric’s Firebird. Cheri slammed her high-heeled shoe against the brake pedal, the car throwing her forward in her seat. She was out the door before it could throw her back.

Eric’s here with him,
she told herself.
It’s going to be fine. You’re freaking out for nothing.