Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(40)

Arnold raised the stone to strike again. Batty didn’t move. The only thing that did was a line of blood that emerged from the cut on his scalp and trickled slowly onto his forehead. His eyes swivelled up to the rock—the egg—in Arnold’s hand.

Arnold looked at it too. Then he let it fall to the ground. He walked past them, not looking at them; he did not even glance over his shoulder. Batty wasn’t at school the next morning, although he did go back. The three friends never told on Arnold for what he’d done that day; perhaps it would have been better if they had.

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t as if it was something he could ever know. The black and the white of it would never be printed in any book. It was better not to think of it; better not to wonder.


It wasn’t bad, at the bottom of the lake. It was dark but the chicks didn’t mind that. They didn’t cry and they didn’t go hungry and they didn’t thirst.

In a way, Arnold’s mother had done only what was best for him. She must have known he would prefer it where he was. He didn’t like being out in the world. That was where the foxes were, things that were ready to rend and bite and stare with their unblinking eyes.

He turned in the water and rose to the surface. Water bubbled from his ears and sound returned: the hooping call of a curlew somewhere on the riverbank, perhaps searching for a mate. The harsher grating of a crow, looking for carrion. The frantic cheeping of hungry chicks, hidden within the reeds.

Arnold knew that the Orphan Bird didn’t exist, at least not in the way that Pierre de Beauvais might have imagined. But then, who would know? Historians had been able to discover nothing about the man’s life. They said he had intended the bird as an allegory for good and bad souls and what became of them, but Arnold didn’t think it was an allegory for anything. Things were as they were, as they had to be.

He felt that certainty again, the moment he saw the boy.

His parents had their backs turned, tending to his sister, because his sister was screaming. She was in a rowing boat and would not get out. Arnold could not hear her cries because of the summer crowds, everyone gabbling, gabbling, like a flock of geese; but he could see the sound. Her mouth was stretched wide open, screwing her eyes into slits.

He glanced around. Police had been watching the place for weeks, but most assumed the girl had drowned and there was only one officer there now, standing by the jetty, wiping sweat from beneath his hat and looking bored.

It was the boy who chose Arnold. It usually happened that way. He just walked straight up and said, “What’s that?”

The boy was portly with sun-reddened cheeks, his hands thrust into his jeans pockets. He had orange hair and a T-shirt with the name of a band Arnold didn’t recognise.

Arnold looked down at the object in his hands. It was a brass compass, its shell marked with an intricately etched design representing the heavens and the earth, all laid out in neat geometry. He still didn’t know why he’d bought it. He’d seen it in the window of an antiques shop and had loved it at once, enough to overcome his reluctance to go inside. All he’d been able to think about was de Beauvais, the shadow of a man nobody knew anything about, except that he’d also written some lives of saints and a mappemonde, a work of geography and cosmology. Perhaps he would have been able to read the lines, to explain what they meant.

Arnold held it out, not wanting to speak. He hadn’t planned this, hadn’t wanted the contact with the surly shopkeeper, didn’t want the contact now. But the child drew in close, his eyes widening. He reached out, stretching his index finger to touch the dial, and Arnold snatched it back.

“Can I see?” The boy’s voice was breathy. He didn’t look around at his parents, didn’t seem to care about his sister. He had forgotten them just like that, and Arnold found himself wondering how he’d done it.

He turned away, starting to walk towards his car, leaving it up to the boy. The boy made his decision: he chose to follow.

He didn’t scream, not like the others. His face creased in anger as Arnold clamped a chloroformed rag over his lips, and he struggled, though he couldn’t make a sound. Arnold threw him into the back of the Land Rover. As he drove away, he saw the policeman watching him, his eyes narrowed. Had Arnold exposed himself somehow—should he have looked about more, smiled more? He didn’t know; then the policeman rubbed his eyes, and Arnold realised he had only been dazzled by the sun.

He drove straight to the lake. He didn’t have his wetsuit, but he would have to do without it, just this once. It wouldn’t matter. He belonged to the water and the boy had come to him, and that showed it was meant to be. The boy was a bad chick, like the others. He needed to be with his brothers and sisters.

Arnold kicked off his shoes, shrugged his shirt over his head, and removed his trousers. He folded the clothing and placed it carefully on the passenger seat before taking off his socks and putting the left one in the left shoe, the other in the right. Then he stepped over the gritty surface, flexing his toes, and unlocked and opened the back door.

The boy glared, blinking as if he had just awoken. Arnold got him out of the gap behind the seats, pulling on his legs, then twisting him and grasping his flailing arms. He was solid but light, as all of them were. He glanced around but he knew the only eyes watching him were those of birds and insects, the things that belonged in this place. The sky was the drained white of a new sheet of paper.