by Dean Koontz
He thought, also, of the imagined child in the faraway ranch who might have been watching the Cherokee’s headlights on the way back from the vet’s two weeks earlier. He told himself that he owed it to that child—or to other children, who really existed—to tell Potter the whole story. He should try to involve the authorities in the matter as well, even though getting anyone to believe him would be a frustrating and humiliating ordeal.
Maybe it was the beer he still drank from morning until bedtime, but he could no longer summon the sense of community he had felt that night. He’d spent his whole life avoiding people. He couldn’t suddenly find it within himself to embrace them.
Besides, everything had changed for him when he’d come home and found the evidence of the intruder: the crumbling clumps of soil, the dead beetles, the earthworm, the scrap of blue cloth caught in the frame of the oven door. He was waiting in dread for the next move in that part of the game, yet refusing to speculate about it, instantly blocking every forbidden thought that started to rise in his tortured mind. When that fearful confrontation occurred, at last, he could not possibly share it with strangers. The horror was too personal, for him alone to witness and endure.
He still maintained the diary of these events, and in that yellow tablet he wrote about the squirrels. He hadn’t the will or the energy to record his experiences in as much detail as he had done at first. He wrote as succinctly as possible without leaving out any pertinent information. After a lifetime of finding journal-keeping too burdensome, he was now unable to stop keeping this one.
He was seeking to understand the traveler by writing about it. The traveler…and himself.
On the last day of June, he decided to drive into Eagle’s Roost to buy groceries and other supplies. Considering that he now lived deep in the shadow of the unknown and the fantastic, every mundane act—cooking a meal, making his bed every morning, shopping—seemed to be a pointless waste of time and energy, an absurd attempt to paint a facade of normality over an existence that was now twisted and strange. But life went on.
As Eduardo backed the Cherokee out of the garage, into the driveway, a large crow sprang off the front-porch railing and flew across the hood of the wagon with a great flapping of wings. He jammed on the brakes and stalled the engine. The bird soared high into a mottled-gray sky.
Later, in town, when Eduardo walked out of the supermarket, pushing a cart filled with supplies, a crow was perched on the hood ornament of the station wagon. He assumed it was the same creature that had startled him less than two hours before.
It remained on the hood, watching him through the windshield, as he went around to the back of the Cherokee and opened the cargo hatch. As he loaded the bags into the space behind the rear seat, the crow never looked away from him. It continued to watch him as he pushed the empty cart back to the front of the store, returned, and got in behind the steering wheel. The bird took flight only when he started the engine.
Across sixteen miles of Montana countryside, the crow tracked him from on high. He could keep it in view either by leaning forward over the wheel to peer through the upper part of the windshield or simply by looking out his side window, depending on the position from which the creature chose to monitor him. Sometimes it flew parallel to the Cherokee, keeping pace, and sometimes it rocketed ahead so far that it became only a speck, nearly vanished into the clouds, only to double back and take up a parallel course once more. It was with him all the way home.
While Eduardo ate dinner, the bird perched on the exterior stool of the window in the north wall of the kitchen, where he had first seen one of the sentinel squirrels. When he got up from his meal to raise the bottom half of the window, the crow scrammed, as the squirrel had.
He left the window open while he finished dinner. A refreshing breeze skimmed in off the twilight meadows. Before Eduardo had eaten his last bite, the crow returned.
The bird remained in the open window while Eduardo washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away. It followed his every move with its bright black eyes.
He got another beer from the refrigerator and returned to the table. He settled in a different chair from the one in which he’d sat before, closer to the crow. Only an arm’s length separated them.
“What do you want?” he asked, surprised that he didn’t feel at all foolish talking to a damned bird.
Of course, he wasn’t talking to the bird. He was addressing whatever controlled the bird. The traveler.
“Do you just want to watch me?” he asked.
The bird stared.
“Would you like to communicate?”
The bird lifted one wing, tucked its head underneath, and pecked at its feathers as if plucking out lice.
After another swallow of beer, Eduardo said, “Or would you like to control me the way you do these animals?”
The crow shifted back and forth from foot to foot, shook itself, cocked its head to peer at him with one eye.
“You can act like a damned bird all you want, but I know that’s not what you are, not all you are.”
The crow grew still again.
Beyond the window, twilight had given way to night.
“Can you control me? Maybe you’re limited to simpler creatures, less complex neurological systems.”
Black eyes glittering. Sharp orange beak parted slightly.
“Or maybe you’re learning the ecology here, the flora and fauna, figuring out how it works in this place, honing your skills. Hmmm? Maybe you’re working your way up to me. Is that it?”
Watching.
“I know there’s nothing of you in the bird, nothing physical. Just like you weren’t in the raccoons. An autopsy established that much. Thought you might have to insert something into an animal to control it, something electronic, I don’t know, maybe even something biological. Thought maybe there were a lot of you out in the woods, a hive, a nest, and maybe one of you actually had to enter an animal to control it. Half expected Potter would find some strange slug living in the raccoon’s brain, some damned centipede thing hooked to its spine. A seed, an unearthly-looking spider, something. But you don’t work that way, huh?”
He took a swallow of Corona.
“Ahhh. Tastes good.”
He held the beer out to the crow.
It stared at him over the top of the bottle.
“Teetotaler, huh? I keep learning things about you. We’re an inquisitive bunch, we human beings. We learn fast and we’re good at applying what we learn, good at meeting challenges. Does that worry you any?”
The crow raised its tail feather and crapped.
“Was that a comment,” Eduardo wondered, “or just part of doing a good bird imitation?”
The sharp beak opened and closed, opened and closed, but no sound issued from the bird.
“Somehow you control these animals from a distance. Telepathy, something like that? From quite a distance, in the case of this bird. Sixteen miles into Eagle’s Roost. Well, maybe fourteen miles as the crow flies.”
If the traveler knew that Eduardo had made a lame pun, it gave no indication through the bird.
“Pretty clever, whether it’s telepathy or something else. But it sure as hell takes a toll on the subject, doesn’t it? You’re getting better, though, learning the limitations of the local slave population.”
The crow pecked for more lice.
“Have you made any attempts to control me? Because if you have, I don’t think I was aware of it. Didn’t feel any probing at my mind, didn’t see alien images behind my eyes, none of the stuff you read about in novels.”
Peck, peck, peck.
Eduardo chugged the rest of the Corona. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
Having nailed the lice, the bird watched him serenely, as though it would sit there all night and listen to him ramble, if that was what he wanted.
“I think you’re going slow, feeling your way, experimenting. This world seems normal enough to those of us born here, but maybe to you it’s one of the
weirdest places you’ve ever seen. Could be you’re not too sure of yourself here.”
He had not begun the conversation with any expectation that the crow would answer him. He wasn’t in a damned Disney movie. Yet its continued silence was beginning to frustrate and annoy him, probably because the day had sailed by on a tide of beer and he was full of drunkard’s anger.
“Come on. Let’s stop farting around. Let’s do it.”
The crow just stared.
“Come here yourself, pay me a visit, the real you, not in a bird or squirrel or raccoon. Come as yourself. No costumes. Let’s do it. Let’s get it over with.”
The bird flapped its wings once, half unfurling them, but that was all.
“You’re worse than Poe’s raven. You don’t even say a single word, you just sit there. What good are you?”
Staring, staring.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting…
Though Poe had never been one of his favorites, only a writer he had read while discovering what he really admired, he began quoting aloud to the feathered sentry, infusing the words with the vehemence of the troubled narrator that the poet had created: “‘And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,/And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor—’”
Abruptly he realized, too late, that the bird and the poem and his own treacherous mind had brought him to a confrontation with the horrific thought that he’d repressed ever since cleaning up the soil and other leavings on June tenth. At the heart of Poe’s “The Raven” was a lost maiden, young Lenore, lost to death, and a narrator with a morbid belief that Lenore had come back from—
Eduardo slammed down a mental door on the rest of that thought. With a snarl of rage, he threw the empty beer bottle. It hit the crow. Bird and bottle tumbled into the night.
He leaped off his chair and to the window.
The bird fluttered on the lawn, then sprang into the air with a furious flapping of wings, up into the dark sky.
Eduardo closed the window so hard he nearly shattered the glass, locked it, and clasped both hands to his head, as if he would tear out the fearful thought if it would not be repressed again.
He got very drunk that night. The sleep he finally found was as good an approximation of death as any he had known.
If the bird came to his bedroom window while he slept, or walked the edges of the roof above him, he did not hear it.
He didn’t wake until ten minutes past noon on July first. For the rest of that day, coping with his hangover and trying to cure it preoccupied him and kept his mind off the morbid verses of a long-dead poet.
The crow was with him July first, second, and third, from morning through night, without surcease, but he tried to ignore it. No more staring matches as with the other sentries. No more one-sided conversations. Eduardo did not sit on the porches. When he was inside, he did not look toward the windows. His narrow life became more constricted than ever.
At three o’clock on the afternoon of the fourth, suffering a bout of claustrophobia from being too long within four walls, he planned a cautious itinerary and, taking the shotgun, went for a walk. He did not look at the sky above him, only toward distant horizons. Twice, however, he saw a swift shadow flash over the ground ahead of him, and he knew that he did not walk alone.
He was returning to the house, only twenty yards from the front porch, when the crow plummeted out of the sky. Its wings flapped uselessly, as if it had forgotten how to fly, and it met the earth with only slightly more grace than a stone dropped from a similar height. It flopped and shrieked on the grass but was dead by the time he reached it.
Without looking closely at the crow, he picked it up by the tip of one wing. He carried it into the meadow, to throw it where he had tossed the four squirrels on the twenty-fourth of June.
He expected to find a macabre pile of remains, well plucked and dismembered by carrion eaters, but the squirrels were gone. He would not have been surprised if one or even two of the carcasses had been dragged off to be devoured elsewhere. But most carrion eaters would strip the squirrels where they were found, leaving at least several bones, the inedible feet, scraps of fur-covered hide, a well-gnawed and pecked-at skull.
The lack of any remains whatsoever could only mean the squirrels had been removed by the traveler. Or by its sorcerously controlled surrogates.
Perhaps, having tested them to destruction, the traveler wanted to examine them to determine why they failed—which it had not been able to do with the raccoons because Eduardo had intervened and taken them to the veterinarian. Or it might feel that they were, like the raccoons, evidence of its presence. It might prefer to leave as few loose ends as possible until its position on this world was more firmly established.
He stood in the meadow, staring at the place where the dead squirrels had been. Thinking.
He raised his left hand, from which dangled the broken crow, and stared at the now sightless eyes. As shiny as polished ebony and bulging from the sockets.
“Come on,” he whispered.
Finally he took the crow into the house. He had a use for it. A plan.
The wire-mesh colander was held together by sturdy stainless-steel rings at top and bottom, and stood on three short steel legs. It was the size of a two-or three-quart bowl. He used it to drain pasta when he cooked large quantities to make salads or to ensure that there would be plenty of leftovers. Two steel-loop handles were fixed to the top ring, by which to shake it when it was filled with steaming pasta that needed encouragement to fully drain.
Turning the colander over and over in his hands, Eduardo thought through his plan one more time—then began to put it into action.
Standing at a kitchen counter, he folded the wings of the dead crow. He tucked the whole bird into the colander.
With needle and thread, he fixed the crow to the wire mesh in three places. That would prevent the limp body from slipping out when he tilted the colander.
As he put the needle and thread aside, the bird rolled its head loosely and shuddered.
Eduardo recoiled from it and took a step back from the counter in surprise.
The crow issued a feeble, quavery cry.
He knew it had been dead. Stone dead. For one thing, its neck had been broken. Its swollen eyes had been virtually hanging out of the sockets. Apparently it had died in mid-flight of a massive brain seizure like those that had killed the raccoons and the squirrels. Dropping from a great height, it had hit the ground with sickening force, sustaining yet more physical damage. Stone dead.
Now, stitched to the wire mesh of the colander, the reanimated bird was unable to lift its head off its breast, not because it was hampered by the threads with which he’d secured it but because its neck was still broken. Smashed legs flopped uselessly. Crippled wings tried to flutter and were hampered more by the damage to them than by the entangling threads.
Overcoming his fear and revulsion, Eduardo pressed one hand against the crow’s breast. He couldn’t feel a heartbeat.
The heart of any small bird pounded extremely fast, much faster than the heart of any mammal, a racing little engine, putta-putta-putta-putta-putta. It was always easy to detect because the whole body reverberated with the rapid beats.
The crow’s heart was definitely not beating. As far as he was able to tell, the bird wasn’t breathing, either. And its neck was broken.
He had hoped that he was witnessing the traveler’s ability to bring a dead creature back to life, a miracle of sorts. But the truth was darker than that.
The crow was dead.
Yet it moved.
Trembling with disgust, Eduardo lifted his hand from the small squirming corpse.
The traveler could reestablish control of a carcass without resuscitating the animal. To some extent, it had power over the inanimate as well as the animate.
Eduardo desperately wanted to avoid thinking about that.
But he couldn’t turn his mind off.
Couldn’t avoid that dreaded line of inquiry any longer.
If he had not taken the raccoons away at once to the vet, would they eventually have shuddered and pulled themselves to their feet again, cold but moving, dead but animated?
In the colander, the crow’s head wobbled loosely on its broken neck, and its beak opened and closed with a faint clicking.
Perhaps nothing had carried the four dead squirrels out of the meadow, after all. Maybe those carcasses, stiff with rigor mortis, had responded to the insistent call of the puppetmaster on their own, cold muscles flexing and contracting awkwardly, rigid joints cracking and snapping as demands were put upon them. Even as their bodies had entered the early stages of decomposition, perhaps they twitched and lifted their heads, crawled and hitched and dragged themselves out of the meadow, into the woods, to the lair of the thing that commanded them.
Don’t think about it. Stop. Think about something else, for Christ’s sake. Anything else. Not this, not this.
If he released the crow from the colander and took it outside, would it flop and flutter along the ground on its broken wings, all the way up the sloped backyard, making a nightmarish pilgrimage into the shadows of the higher woods?
Did he dare follow it into that heart of darkness?
No. No, if there was to be an ultimate confrontation, it had to happen here on his own territory, not in whatever strange nest the traveler had made for itself.
Eduardo was stricken by the blood-freezing suspicion that the traveler was alien to such an extreme degree that it didn’t share humanity’s perception of life and death, didn’t draw the line between the two in the same place at all. Perhaps its kind never died. Or they died in a true biological sense yet were reborn in a different form out of their own rotting remains—and expected the same to be true of creatures on this world. In fact, the nature of their species—especially its relationship with death—might be unimaginably more bizarre, perverse, and repellent than anything his imagination could conceive.