Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(48)
I came around a minute or so later to the sensation of someone lightly stroking my forehead. I knew immediately I couldn’t move. Opening my eyes, I saw a blurry figure leaning over me. I was almost positive it was Vienna. There was blood on her lips and she made a soft trilling noise. That’s all I remember before falling again into total blackness. When I came to, it was also to the sensation of someone lightly stroking my forehead. Again I opened my eyes, and saw it was the red-haired messenger girl, Meralee. “Get help,” I managed to grunt. I saw her nod and she was off. In the hour it took for the constables to get there with an ambulance, I tried to hold on to that vision of Vienna I’d had, tried to determine if it was real or a dream. Eventually, I saw it all as a murmuration, a swarm of birds that became the world and then flew me into night.
Two years later, and the Beast hadn’t returned. I had been fired from the constabulary for being implicated in the death of my partner. It was my bullet they found in his forehead. I’d tried to explain but had no energy for it and let them railroad me out of the department. I wasn’t even sure why they felt they needed to get rid of me. I suppose they had some other hapless Answer Islander on the case. My reputation and name were derided in the newspapers as if it was all my fault that my partner and the other victims of the creature had died. Incompetence, a lack of professionalism, an implied lack of intelligence were my résumé by the time the affair had settled down. I never even made it to Jallico’s funeral. I was in the hospital for six months with two broken legs, broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, and headaches like a sudden axe attack.
Eventually, I wound up back at my empty apartment. I’d never married, as the work demanded too much of my time and self. The commissioner got me a small pension to live on, knowing what the truth was behind my service. It was good to know that not everyone in the Pellegran’s Knot hierarchy was a complete scoundrel. I stayed away from people. Lived for myself. Walked everyday through my loneliness. I tried not to think about the case, but it came back to me, springing out of the dark like a cat. I couldn’t help but see the headlines in the racks outside the stores I passed on my daily constitutionals. I skipped the park on October 15 the first year after my dismissal from work. There was a killing that winter. Stokes, the secretary at the Lyceum in charge of Clifford Von Drome’s old papers and experiments. The fact that he was connected to the Von Dromes was another maddening detail. I pushed it out of my mind and waited for the warmer weather when the bustle of tourists seemed to drive the nightmare from the mind of the city.
As the temperature became more accommodating, I took to ending my walk each day in the lemon tree orchard on the west side of town, near the observatory. There was a small café there, and it was a place even the tourists usually weren’t aware of. Sitting quietly, daydreaming—in other words setting my imagination against the images of my past—I drank lemon gin until night came on and covered my drunken retreat home. One evening while sitting there I was approached by a very young woman, wearing a boy’s shirt and trousers. She didn’t wait to be invited but pulled the empty seat at my table out and sat down. At first, she said nothing but stared at me. Then I recognized her red hair and her eager face. It was Meralee, the messenger who worked for the constabulary.
“Do you know me?” she finally asked.
I nodded. “Thank you for saving my life,” I said.
She took a slip of paper out of her pants pocket and slid it along the tabletop toward me. “When Stokes was killed this past winter, I was on the scene at the Lyceum when the constables found him. In his office, where I was poking around, I uncovered this beneath the blotter on his desk. It’s a note made out to you. You might find it interesting. I’ve shown it to no one else.”
“I don’t know that I want it,” I said, but reached into my pocket and brought out a few bills as a tip for the messenger.
“No, no, Inspector. It’s for nothing. I recognize you’re a good person. My father was from the Answer Islands. I’m young but I see everything.” She got up and walked away down the row of lemon trees and disappeared amid the white blossoms. I sat for another hour, had two more drinks. When I paid, I decided to leave Meralee’s note behind. “I can’t,” I told myself. I got twenty yards toward home and then stumbled back and grabbed the slip of paper before the waiter cleared it away with the trash. I waited till the next morning to read it, when I was sober.
After a night of troubling dreams, slightly hungover and standing in my kitchen, reading by the sunlight streaming through the window, I learned that Tessa and Vienna both were born with a rare disease that attacked the immune system. Stokes wrote, “Forgive me for lying to you about the fact that Tessa contracted her disease in Lindrethool. I was trying to put you off the truth.” Elite physicians of the empire who were aware of it called the congenital disease Pedlep’s Coronation, a condition where the body’s immune system stripped off layers of brain matter, eating away toward the reptilian center of consciousness and revealing different evolutionary stages of awareness as it went. It was Clifford’s desire to cure his wife and daughter. Instead, his chemicals and techniques, elixirs and minor electrocutions, had made them more or less than human, depending on how you saw it. Stokes revealed in the note that he knew Tessa wasn’t dead but instead escaped from her coffin with the help of her husband and now roamed the underground of the old town and other secret spots until she needed the platelets produced by the spleen to heal the ravages of the mutation Dr. Von Drome had initiated. I didn’t know whether to believe it. I thought maybe Meralee was sent by the other constables to torment me with this farfetched story, but how farfetched was this really in relation to what I’d already witnessed?