Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(43)

A question you might ask is, “Was there never a witness to any of these crimes?” In fact, I met the young Vienna Von Drome through the treacheries of the Beast. Its third victim was Professor Clifford Von Drome, a naturalist and physician who taught at the local Lyceum. He was slain in his rooms overlooking the park—face torn to shreds and his spleen missing. The room the murder took place in, the parlor of his spacious apartment, was spattered and soaked in blood as if a blood tornado had cut through the center of the place. The only thing different about this incident as opposed to the Beast’s other attacks is that there was a witness. We were fairly certain that Von Drome’s thirteen-year-old daughter and her pet were present during the entire macabre act. Why she wasn’t killed as well, we had no idea.

Of course, I questioned her. She wore a student uniform, plaid skirt, white blouse, dark blazer—a pretty young girl with long hair, lighter than blond, clear blue eyes, and pale skin the color of cream. Her stillness and silence put me in mind of a ghost. She sat across from me in my office, and I asked her what happened. Not a word. The city doctor said she was in shock from seeing her father butchered. I asked her to write down whatever she could, but she just sat there and stared at me without blinking.

I sent Vienna home and had one of my officers go in a horse and carriage to pick up the professor’s. The woman, like myself, was a native of the Answer Islands, a colonial holding of the Empire. I knew her. Priscilla Goggin. Her aunt came from my old village. We got on very well, and she told me what I needed to know about the girl, her father, and her dead mother.

It was from her that I learned about Mortimer. Supposedly, the girl’s father was out in the local woods one day and discovered an abandoned chick. He brought it back to his home and gave the tiny bird to his daughter. “It’s a starling,” he said and handed her a small wire cage. My guess is he wanted her to have some responsibility to take her mind off her mother, who’d passed away only a couple of years earlier. The girl managed to raise the creature, which was no easy thing. By the time Vienna witnessed her father’s killing, the bird went everywhere with her, either flying close behind or sitting on her red beret. The starling knew hand signals and a few verbal commands, but he also could speak in a girl’s voice—a wide variety of sayings. You know, of course, that birds like the starling, the crow, the magpie, the mockingbird, can all be taught to speak like parrots. Here was my question, though. Priscilla told me that the girl’s silence and inability to communicate had come upon her quickly, sometime between when her mother and father had died. So if the girl wasn’t talking, who taught the bird how to speak?

I watched her for half a year before I started to believe that her affliction was real. It was about this time that it became clear to me that the only way an Answer Islander could ascend to Inspector was if it was a job that no one else wanted. Chasing the Beast frightened my colleagues. They were more than willing to sacrifice one citizen every few years to stay as far afield of it as possible. I was the one upon whom the scorn was to be directed when it killed. I’d have quit if I hadn’t promised Priscilla that I’d avenge her employer.

At the end of the first year following the murder of Vienna’s father, I ordered the girl and the bird to be brought in for questioning. We sat on the balcony on the southern side of the station house. I made us a pot of blue nerve tea. The weather was beautiful. We sipped in relative silence. The girl said nothing. “We’re all at sea. All at sea,” said the bird. I realized it was just nonsense, but I wondered if its voice was that of Vienna Von Drome. I’d asked Priscilla about that, and she said she didn’t know as she had come to be employed by Clifford Von Drome after the girl had lost her ability to communicate.

Vienna seemed touched. Her wealthy relatives, Clifford’s brother and sister, who lived mid-empire in the city of Totenveit, paid to keep her at a distance, with Priscilla as her guardian. Still, she was all I had to go on, and once she recovered enough to leave her apartment, I tailed her. She walked far and wide, the bird, of course, accompanying her—on her shoulder, her hat, flying from branch to branch along her path. She led me through the city gardens where she often rested on a bench beneath the ancient yew, led me along Philo’s colonnade, across the square in front of City Hall, along the twisting cobble stone streets of the old part of town, and sometimes out to the shore to ramble in and out among the dunes. On the days I followed her, I’d return to my apartment exhausted.

Then, in October, of the second year after her father’s murder, precisely on the fifteenth, I, along with my assistant, Jallico, another Answer Islander, newly hired by me to help in the investigation (I had to threaten to quit to get him a job), followed her to a bench just outside the carousel at the center of the park. There were maybe two or three people traipsing across the enormous lawn. The temperature had dropped and the wind was fairly high. Dead leaves blew out of the trees at the boundary of the field and rolled in waves across the expanse. From where Jallico and I sat, about a hundred yards away, pretending to have a conversation, we saw the bird, Mortimer, lift off her hat and fly into the treetops. That’s when I noticed that the branches were teeming with dark birds. When the wind momentarily let up, you could hear the din of their squawks and warbles.

I was taken by surprise, and Jallico jumped out of his seat, when the birds—starlings, I know now—burst forth from the branches at the edge of the field and flew in a swarm, rising and falling, twisting and turning. It was remarkable how they moved as if with one mind. They made shifting, fluid shapes in mid-air. But just as the energy of the flock was about to dissipate, and they were to fly apart and back to their branches, they made one more turn and what happened next I wasn’t quite sure I believed. When the amazing display was over, I saw Mortimer fly back to perch on Vienna’s shoulder. She got up and walked directly toward us. I took the newspaper from my pocket and brought it up to cover my face. Jallico, without a newspaper, improvised with the lame ruse of having fallen asleep. After she had passed, I turned to my assistant and said, “Did you see it there at the end?”