The Bird Eater (2 page)

But if Miranda was trapped inside that bathroom, who was moaning down below; who was dragging themself across the floor like the wounded; who was inside the house?

Edie veered away from the stairs, overcome by a staggering sense of not knowing what to do—freeze, run, hold her breath, pray to God? Her gaze tripped over Aaron’s open bedroom door, his posters calling out to her, his unmade bed promising a sense of comfort and protection the rest of the house couldn’t possibly provide. His door was less than ten feet away, but the upstairs breezeway seemed to unspool in front of her like an impossibly long corridor. She lurched forward, desperate to reach the only room she was somehow sure would offer safety. Edie caught hold of the doorframe to pull herself inside, fighting a strange atmospheric change. It felt as though the air in the house had been sucked out and replaced by something thick and viscous, something impossible to breathe. She was on the verge of weeping—hardly able to catch a breath, panic twisting her stomach into a constrictor knot.

And then, as if by magic, the moaning from the base of the stairs went silent.

Edie froze where she stood, a foot shy of stepping into Aaron’s room.

She turned her head to look over the railing, saw nothing.

When she looked back to Aaron’s room, her breath left her entirely.

Standing before her was a boy who looked about Aaron’s age, dark hair nothing short of a bird’s nest, his skin waxy pale, and eyes twin-moon round. But none of those features compared to his wicked smile, so maniacally wrong it seemed to inch up toward his ears. Crimson blood smeared across his gums and slithered into the gutters between his teeth.

Before Edie could react—a scream or a stumbling backward step—the boy grabbed hold of Aaron’s bedroom door—over a hundred years old and made of solid wood—and slammed it in her face.

For a split second Edie didn’t realize what had just happened; she didn’t feel the pain. She was too stunned by the strange boy to feel a thing, shocked into numbness by the gruesome grin that had pulled up at the corners into a clown’s-mask leer.

A moment later, her right hand ignited with pain that felt as though invisible fire was licking at her skin. She reflexively tore her hand away from the doorframe, blood instantly dropping onto her bare feet in warm, fat splotches. She didn’t have enough air to cry out. She simply gasped dryly like a fish suffocating upon the shore. Panic and pain made it impossible to assess the damage, but it didn’t take a doctor to know her fingers were broken. They jutted away from her second knuckle in weird, awkward angles, and if she hadn’t steadied herself against the wall, she would have fallen flat on her face the moment she caught a glimpse of bone sticking up through tendons and flesh. But she managed to stay on her feet, staggering toward the staircase, the voice inside her head screaming,
Get out of the house, Edie, get out of the house!
Not because of the gnarled root that was now her right hand, but because of the boy with the hellish grin—the boy who shouldn’t have been there but suddenly was.

She made it down only two risers before the quiet was suddenly cut by the flapping of what sounded like hundreds of wings.

Edie screamed and drew her hands up to protect her face from the dark-winged, madly chirping tornado cycloning up the stairwell.

She screamed against the onslaught of beaks jabbing at her arms, her breasts, her legs, the back of her head.

Her foot slipped as she tried to fight them off, blood flying from her wounded hand. She tipped forward. Her legs folded beneath her like the necks of origami cranes. Her shoulder hit the wall before her temple hit the handrail, and her hip cracked against the edge of a stair before she hit the hardwood floor with a hollow thud, splayed out on her stomach.

The house went silent for a second time, the birds vanishing as if they had all flown out an open window single-file—vanishing as though
they had never been there at all, much like the boy in Aaron’s room had appeared out of nowhere.

Magic.
The word tumbled through her head despite the throbbing of her hand, despite the fear that had tied itself tight around her neck.
The dark kind of magic both Ma and Daddy were scared off by; the kind of magic they never believed in until they couldn’t believe in anything else.

She slowly turned her head to the left and looked to the front door—her escape route, so close yet so unnervingly improbable. Edie tried to lift herself up, that voice still urging her to
Get out
before the house revealed more of its dark secrets, before the boy from upstairs appeared again and did God only knew what—but a hot nail of pain stabbed between her shoulder blades, crippling her effort. She cried out and pressed her cheek to the cool floor, waited just long enough to catch her breath and then tried again, but her legs refused to move. She forced herself to concentrate, attempted to feel past the sharp heat of her broken hand to the soles of her feet, tried to figure out whether she couldn’t feel her legs because the pain of her fingers was blotting out all her senses, or whether her legs were numb because she’d broken her back.

Unable to help herself, she burst into tears, weeping as she thought of Aaron riding the school bus toward home. She could tell him that she’d slammed her hand in the door and lost her footing in her rush to call 911 from the downstairs phone, but how would she ever explain that she didn’t want to come back here? How could she ever tell him he couldn’t go up to his room because there was something in the walls—some evil that may have been there all along; because his room had been his mother’s room, because she
hadn’t
run off to be an actress but had slashed her wrists and bled to death in the bathroom Aaron used every day?

A helpless whimper slithered from her lips.
Selfish,
she thought.
We should have listened, shouldn’t have thumbed our noses at things we didn’t understand. We should have never stayed here after Miri did what she did. What were we thinking? What the hell were we…

A shadow shifted in the corner of the front room, just beyond the window next to the front door. Edie saw it from the corner of her eye and instinctively jerked in response, trying to scramble to her feet despite being laid out the way she was. She couldn’t make it out at first, but that didn’t matter. Miranda howled from beyond the grave.
Get out, E, get out!
Edie knew that whatever was stepping out of the darkness was the very thing that had unmoored her little sister; she knew it had that power; she had to get away.

Edie began to slink across the floor as best she could, a cry slithering from her throat. Every pull of her arms was agony; every drag across the floorboards made her right hand throb like a beating heart. The whole thing felt like déjà vu, like she had lived it before in another life despite never having broken a bone, never having fallen down the stairs, never having crawled across a floor like a

a soldier…a wounded soldier with his legs blown off.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered between sobs. “I don’t understand this, I don’t understand.”

The whimper, the drag—she had heard these things before they had happened, had heard them before
she
was the one who was crying, crawling across the hardwood like a murder victim not yet quite dead.

A silhouette was making its approach; it was ill-defined, as though the fall had knocked her eyesight sideways, but she could make it out more clearly as it came closer—a man?

Too small,
she screamed inside her head.
It’s too small.

The boy she had seen upstairs seemed to glide toward her, his expression still frozen in that maniacal smile. He crouched not a foot from where she lay, cocked his head to the side with a malicious sort of curiosity, and though his features sputtered like bad reception, she could tell he was
admiring
her, as if her misfortune were his delight.

He reached out, brushed the hair from her face so delicately.

Don’t touch me!

She wanted to scream, but the sight of him so close rendered her mute. She knew who he was, didn’t have a single doubt in her reeling, shrieking mind.

Birdie.

The boy who Miranda had met in the trees just beyond the house.

The boy who didn’t exist.

The one who had driven her sister mad.

Birdie leaned in close and Edie moaned, twisting away from his blood-smeared mouth, his wicked teeth glinting in the sun. She pulled
in a breath to yell, but when he caught her by the ears she realized that she wasn’t afraid for herself—at least not anymore. She was scared for Aaron. He’d come plodding up the front steps of the
house in less than an hour now, excited by the idea of staying up late and stuffing himself full of pizza and chicken fingers. She was scared for the boy who would push open the front door and find her dead at the base of the stairs, her hand mangled, the pizza dough drying out on the kitchen table, abandoned like he had been when he was still too young to remember. She was scared for how he’d feel when his ears would ring in the deafening quiet, terrified of what it would do to him, of what would come of her sweet, darling boy whom she loved as her own but never once called
son
.

But mostly, she was afraid that Aaron would come back and Birdie would be waiting, grinning his bloody-toothed smile.

A smile that, up until that very moment, she was sure had been nothing but a figment of her little sister’s imagination. A delusion of a broken mind.

Birdie’s hands circled Edie’s head, the stillness of summer muffling beneath his palms, and as Edie waited for death, her only regret was not believing Miranda, just like their parents hadn’t. She wished she could go thirteen years into the past, take Miri’s hand and, kneeling beside her bed, whisper that she—Miranda’s big sissy Edith—believed her when Miranda screamed the baby was his.
His
. Impossibly his.

Because if ghosts could exist, if they
did
exist, impossibility was rendered moot.

Now, with Birdie’s hands clamped against her ears, Edie Holbrook knew ghosts were real. She knew Miranda hadn’t been insane.

Edie’s neck snapped like dry wood.

And whether it was a voice in her head or Birdie whispering a final farewell, terror was the last emotion Edie felt, because like his mother, Aaron wouldn’t get away,
he’ll never get away, he won’t get away.

Two

US-77 turned into southbound I-79 and the flat fields of Nebraska gave way to rolling hills. Aaron Holbrook’s Tercel crawled down the west side of Missouri’s border, and the closer he got to Ironwood, the more he ached to see the house he grew up in again. It had been twenty-one years since he’d found his aunt sprawled across the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs, his memories of Arkansas fuzzy with a strange mix of heartache and nostalgia, but he was sure the serpentine streets that snaked through the trees were just as they had always been—a relentless maze of cracked concrete twisting through hickories and oaks, miles of tangled branches separating one house from the next.

He followed the highlighted route on his phone into the heart of the Ozarks, knowing that when it came to direction, his memory would undoubtedly fail. But despite his blurry recollection, the place was just as he remembered it, unchanged despite countless seasons that had passed. He recognized a broken-down refrigerator in one of the yards—an old GE that locked with a chrome handle and weighed half a ton. It sat in front of a dilapidated mobile home—the very same spot it had occupied when, as a third-grader, Aaron’s best buddy, Eric Banner, retold a story he’d heard from his older brother: a kid had gotten himself locked inside that fridge. A week later, his parents or uncle or maybe just some stranger off the street found him inside the icebox, dead as a doornail and half-baked by the summer heat, his face twisted into a mask of horror. Aaron and Eric would wander down Old Mill Road just to get a look at that relic of an appliance, daring each other to open it and see what was inside. Years later, on a particularly hot afternoon, Aaron gathered up the nerve to get closer than ever, but he stopped short of pulling open the door. Eric squealed that he heard something scratching from inside—like a dead kid trying to get out—and they both took off running down the road, screaming squeaky yelps of terror until they ran out of breath.

Something about going back to the place he’d been torn away from set his teeth on edge. The idea of seeing the house that, in one way or another, had killed Edie and Fletcher made him want to turn that Toyota around and forfeit the two thousand miles he had come. But Aaron had his fingers crossed; he’d give the house a chance to redeem itself. Perhaps, in apology for destroying his childhood, it would patch together Aaron’s freshly broken life.

He reached the end of the road, a diamond-shaped sign assuring him that Old Mill still was, and would forever be, a dead-end street. He took a slow left turn onto a gravel driveway, and that was when he saw it: the house sitting far back on the property, its white clapboards faded and peeling, a hipped gray-shingled roof looking worse for wear. It was nothing but a two-story box with four windows in the front, a redbrick chimney jutting out from the center of the roof just beyond a single dormer window.

Aaron slowly rolled the Tercel up the dirt driveway, the small U-Haul trailer clanging as it straggled behind the car. He parked beside three oaks that towered over the property, their branches precariously hanging above the roofline, pulled the e-brake, killed the engine, and stared at the place through a windshield smeared with insect guts and road grit.

“Holy shit,” he whispered, his chin pressed against the top of the steering wheel. He hadn’t known what to expect, but certainly not this. The place was a wreck—a husk of the bright and cheerful house of his youth. The once carefully preened lawn was long overgrown, still green in places, but otherwise given way to the dirt and waist-high weeds. Edie’s hydrangeas were nothing more than skeletal tangles, dry branches reaching across the front porch steps as if to keep trespassers at bay—the same porch steps he’d run up that Friday afternoon after school, yelling Aunt Edie’s name to alert her that he was home before ever pushing open the front door. Seeing her. Standing frozen in the doorway, his schoolbooks slipping from his hands, his entire world disintegrating as his pre-algebra homework and Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
crashed to the hardwood at his feet.

The bug netting that had stretched from porch post to porch post was gone save for one of the corners, where it hung torn and sagging, shivering in the early evening breeze.

Reaching across the center console to the passenger seat, Aaron’s fingers looped through the handle of a small camcorder—a device he’d purchased on his therapist’s suggestion—and slowly slid out of the vehicle. He kept the Toyota between himself and the house as he studied it, not wanting to get too close just yet. He could hardly believe how completely it had gone to hell. Once upon a time, Edie had prided herself in having the prettiest house in all of Boone County. It hadn’t been much of a title, but it kept her buzzing around the property in all seasons, making it as special as she could. Flowers in the spring and summer, handmade wreaths of pinecones and fall foliage in the autumn, strings of Christmas lights jumping from tree to tree in the winter. But what had once been a cheerful house now sagged on its eaves. The only thing missing was the opening strain of the
Addams Family
theme song.

Taking a steadying breath, Aaron pressed the
RECORD
button on the camcorder. The recorder was supposed to serve as a coping device—
a way,
his therapist had said,
to remind yourself that you’re still alive, that there are still things left to be done.
Aaron wasn’t sure whether he bought into the theory that watching himself
outside
of himself was going to help him come to terms with the wreck his life had become, but he was willing to try anything, including coming back home.
Ironwood is the original source of your trauma
, the doc had assured him.
Old ghosts are just as important as new ones.
Whether Aaron would watch his life play itself back at him later, he didn’t know; all he knew was that right then, right there, that camera was putting a layer between him and reality. He had thought the camcorder suggestion stupid at first, but now he was glad he had it.

Stepping out from behind the car, Aaron slowly moved across what had once been the front lawn, flowering weeds brushing his bare calves as he walked, various tattoos peeking out from beneath the hem of his board shorts. The most distinct design was a pair of eagle’s wings that circled his throat like choking hands. Ink had become a compulsion, as though the colors that were needled into his skin had been infused with slivers of hope. He had gotten his first one—a raven on his right shoulder blade—with a fake ID he and Cooper had picked up when they were seventeen. Cooper used his to buy cigarettes, but all Aaron wanted was the sting of the needle. It felt like bloodletting, draining the bereavement from his veins. His latest addition had been a small one to the leafless branches that spiraled down his left arm from shoulder to wrist: a single owl etched into the underside of his forearm, its golden feathers the only color in an otherwise monochromatic piece of art. Perhaps he’d round off twenty-three to an even two dozen during his time back home. Or maybe he’d avoid it altogether, choosing to forget this place once and for all.

Uncle Fletcher had hung a tire from the high-up branches of one of the three oaks that flanked the driveway long before Aaron ever started school. That tire swing had been gone years before Edie had passed, but the rope that had held it in place still dangled from a bough, eerie in the way it swung back and forth like a neckless noose. Tipping the camera skyward, Aaron blinked at what looked to be dozens of birds’ nests tucked into the crooks of ancient branches, but there were no birds. Ironic, seeing as how those starlings had been why Fletcher had climbed up that rickety ladder in the first place.

But Aaron didn’t want to think about things like that. Those
what ifs
led him down a dark road.
What if Fletcher had been alive when Edie had fallen down the stairs? What if he could have saved her? What if I had only checked the seat belt? What if we had just stopped off for doughnuts like Ryder had wanted? Just a five-minute difference, a five-
second
difference to that stoplight…

He clenched his teeth against those thoughts and forced himself back into the present, stopping at the first porch step and pulling at the branch of a dead hydrangea bush until it snapped. Edie’s once beautiful flowering bushes were nothing but a fire hazard now, waiting for the spark that would wipe the entire house off the map—something that would have overjoyed his friend Cooper had it actually happened.
Raze it,
he had said.
Don’t go back there. You’ll find nothing but demons.
Aaron considered climbing up the stairs, unlocking the front door, and stepping inside, but he found himself twisting away from the door. He wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t want to see the devastation he was sure awaited him inside.

The side of the house was just as bad as the front. Bushes that had once been beautiful now stood skeletal, like haunted house decorations. Aaron pushed through a thicket of flowering rosemary growing wild along the back porch; he held the recorder aloft in his right hand as he moved to Uncle Fletcher’s woodshed a hundred yards away. He had helped his uncle paint that shed every other fall, Fletcher on the ladder close to the roofline, Aaron working on the bits he could reach.

Aaron caught the lock that hung on the outside of the shed’s door, squeezing it in the palm of his hand, closing his eyes as his eight-year-old self bolted around the shed’s corner and discovered Uncle Fletcher sprawled out upon the soggy earth, lying on his side in the mud. A single bird nest lay on the ground beside him, that old ladder sitting sideways in the mire of dirt and melted snow. Eight-year-old Aaron stood there for what could have been an entire winter, staring forward as snowflakes began to twirl down from the sky. He told himself that he was supposed to scream, that he was supposed to cry, that he was supposed to fall into a hysterical panic, but none of that happened. He simply stared at his fallen uncle in absolute silence and reminded himself to breathe.

Aaron remembered Aunt Edie turning away from the stove when he stepped inside, her smile immediately fading when she spotted the mud he’d tracked across her freshly mopped floor. She shooed him onto the back porch, smacking his shoulders with a dishtowel as the boy ambled back outside. It was only when Edie plopped him down on one of the porch chairs and pulled off his galoshes that she knew something was wrong. In his silence, Aaron began to cry, not because of what he’d seen, but because this would be the end of the Aunt Edie he knew.

“Aaron?” Edie’s face registered alarm. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

With one rubber boot off and one on, he threw himself into her arms and wept.

Five years later, he found Edie at the base of the stairs. Standing in the front doorway, Aaron had twisted away from the house and broken into a run, bolting down Old Mill as fast as his legs would take him—running for help, or perhaps just running away. When Fletcher had died, Edie had been the one who had changed forever. When Edie had died, Aaron lost a piece of himself, and there hadn’t been anyone there to hold him and tell him life would go on, that it would be okay.

Aaron exhaled a sigh and let the shed lock slip from his hand. He swung the camcorder back toward the house—Holbrook House, as Edie had loved to call it—and stared at the peeling paint that was coming off in flakes, just like the flakes that had spiraled from the sky the day Uncle Fletcher had died. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure this idea was as fantastic as his therapist had made it seem; hell, how many times had Cooper insisted this whole thing was crazy?
Arkansas,
his best friend had laughed his standard incredulous laugh.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding. What kind of a shrink sends his patient to a place like that anyway? He’s a quack, man—a bona fide bullshit artist with one of those mail-order degrees.

But Aaron couldn’t just drive back to Portland. Forcing himself to take a forward step, he tried to swallow his anxiety, convincing himself that regardless of whether or not Doc Jandreau knew what he was talking about, Aaron had already told Evangeline he was coming out here; that he was going to “work on himself” so that she’d at least consider letting him back into her life. He needed her. He couldn’t turn away from this goddamn house because he was afraid.

This isn’t fear
, he assured himself.
Fear is living the rest of my life without her.

Fear was dragging himself from one day to the next beneath the weight of intolerable guilt, with the knowledge that she blamed him and maybe she was right; maybe it
was
his fault.

His fingers tightened around the keys in his pocket, ones that had been FedEx’d to him by a local Realtor less than a month before. He climbed the steps of his childhood home, hesitated, and forced the key into the lock.

The moment that front door swung inward, Aaron’s gaze stopped dead at the foot of the stairs. For a second Edie was there, crumpled beside the bottom riser, an arm stretched out in front of her as she reached for the door with fingers so mangled that, at first, Aaron was sure she’d stuck them into the grinder she used to turn steak into hamburger meat. With her head turned to the side, her eyes bulged as she stared straight at him, that gaze silently screaming
help me!

Aaron nearly stumbled backward, jostling the camera as his eyes squeezed shut.

“She’s not there,” he whispered, “she’s not there, she’s not…”

He dared to open his eyes.

Edie Holbrook was gone.

The empty living room sat soundless and vacant before him, cracked plaster decorating the walls, spiderwebs clinging to the corners of windows and doorframes that had once been pristine. Windowsills housed the carcasses of moths and houseflies—creatures that had had been entombed twenty-one years, trying to press their bodies through dirty windows. A pile of bones, feathers, and skin rested in one of the corners, just beyond the front room window. Aaron winced at the sight of it and looked away, not giving himself a chance to consider how those carcasses had gotten there or why they were piled up like bodies awaiting a mass burial.