Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(42)

“Am I going back to my mum now?” the boy said.

Arnold frowned. “You have a sister, don’t you?”

The boy nodded. Arnold remembered the girl’s scrunched-up face, her mewling mouth. It seemed this time the bad chick had escaped. He went to his desk and picked up the brass compass and passed it to the boy, who turned it in his hands. He was getting fingerprints all over it, but that didn’t matter, either.

“My mum’s called Sandra,” the boy said. “I have her number. Or if you called the police, they’d know what to do.” He spoke casually, as if he was saying something that wasn’t really important. “My name’s Todd.”

Arnold stared at him. Slowly, he shook his head.

“My sister’s Sophie and Dad’s called John.”

Arnold shook his head again. “You don’t have a name.”

The boy pouted. “I do so.”

“You don’t need a name. There are only two of us.” It didn’t matter about his name. Birds didn’t have names, but they knew each other anyway. They knew who and what they were, and they knew what they were supposed to do. They knew their place in the world; no one needed to tell them what it was, except, perhaps, this boy. But that was what the parent did, isn’t it?

“You have no name now,” he said again, and the boy stared at him. Some kind of understanding began to dawn on his face and his lip trembled. The lesson was already being learned, Arnold realised. Some lessons were hard, but they were necessary. Soon he would learn a new language too, the only one he needed; the language of fish and trees and beasts and birds. He would learn how to be; he would learn how to fly.

The Orphan Bird never had been an orphan, not really. It’s just that it didn’t have anyone who was prepared to nurture it. The good birds raised only the good chicks, who went on to raise more good chicks. The other ones, the bad ones—they weren’t supposed to have chicks of their own, were they? And yet it seemed they could.

Condemned to live and die in darkness and in grief, he thought. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way.

A tear slipped from the boy’s eye and ran down his cheek. Then he screwed up his face and he suddenly looked like the other, like his sister. “Don’t do that,” Arnold said sharply. The boy began to cry harder and so he grasped his puny shoulders and pushed him ahead of him, up the stairs. He pulled open the door to the store cupboard. It was dark in there and there wasn’t much room, but the boy fit easily. He shoved the door closed after him, pressing his hands against it. Inside, the boy fluttered, banging against the sides, throwing himself against the walls.

Arnold leaned his cheek against the door. Parents had to show the way, didn’t they? And he found he knew how. It was all instinct, after all. He would keep him quiet and keep him safe. Eventually, the chick would learn.

He reached out and turned the key in the lock. The first lesson was silence. When he had learned that, he could come out; and silence would keep him safe. It would keep them both safe.

He walked away down the hall, ready to resume his work at last. New energy was coursing through him. It was good to have responsibility, to take care of something other than himself. Above him, the door rattled. He smiled. He knew that he had patience, and patience, above all things, is what he would need. All young birds needed a nest; and this one would not be ready to fledge for a long, long time.





The Murmurations of Vienna Von Drome

JEFFREY FORD



Pellegran’s Knot, in spring and summer, appeared an idyllic city. There was the shore, a vast park with hiking trails and, in the center of its enormous lawn, a working carousel. There were excellent restaurants, an historic district with a Pre-Empire cathedral (Saint Ifritia’s) and secret tunnels, an observatory, museums, a modern street car, and reasonable lodgings city-wide. The place was off the beaten track in the best of ways. As I noted above, the Knot, as we called it, “appeared” idyllic. There were, though, two very glaring aspects that disrupted its claim to quaint tranquility. One was disturbing in a kind of wonderful way, the other in a decidedly horrible way, and the truth was they were inextricably intertwined.

There was, in the Knot, a history of murder. Once every few years a body was found, always in the winter months, always after a fresh snow, the face shredded as if by claws, the abdominal cavity split open in a crude fashion and the spleen removed. Remnants of the partially devoured spleen were usually found near the victims but sometimes as far away as a half mile. My predecessors in the constabulary had determined that all these brutal killings had been carried out by the same person. The scenarios were identical. There were clues—long white hairs found upon and in the vicinity of the bodies. Strange dental marks in whatever remaining piece of spleen might have been recovered.

I came on the scene at the age of fifty, after having spent twenty years as an officer of the constabulary. It was a surprise promotion—head investigator for the third of the brutal murders. There was no way to sugar coat it: we had a serial killer living in our midst, someone all us citizens no doubt passed at one point or another on the street. Eventually, the newspaper dubbed our malefactor, the Beast. We locals discussed the existence of the maniac only among ourselves, keeping the tourists out of it. Everyone knew to keep mum in spring and summer. The newspaper never dared print a word about it each year until the leaves had turned orange. Even the killer acquiesced and killed well after the last of the bathers, sightseers, gourmands, had left for home.