Black Feathers

by Robert J. Wiersema

  “About Skylark. She never …,” she started, only to discover that she had no idea how to finish that sentence. She wanted to say something comforting, something to let him know that he didn’t need to worry about her. “So, it’s over.”

  He nodded slowly and picked up the photograph. “So it would seem,” he said quietly, staring at Cliff Wolcott’s face.

  Then nothing else.

  Cassie glanced at Farrow. The cop shrugged slightly.

  “So …,” Cassie started, trying to draw him out.

  “Tell me what you know about Cliff Wolcott,” he said, laying the photograph back on the table. His voice was cool and calm: he sounded like a cop again, like a switch had been flicked. “When did you first encounter him?”

  He pulled his notebook and pen out of his pocket and waited for Cassie to speak.

  By the time Cassie left the deli, it was already getting dark, the sky fading to the colour of a ripe bruise. Harrison and Farrow had offered her a ride, but she’d turned them down.

  She had left them in the doorway to the deli without really saying goodbye. She slipped on the stretchy gloves she had taken from Ali’s basket and willed herself not to look back.

  When she did dare a glance, as she turned the next corner, they were both still looking at her, watching her walk away.

  The temperature had fallen as the sun dropped below the horizon, but the wind had stilled, so it wasn’t as blindingly cold as it had been earlier. It wasn’t exactly warm, but it was certainly better.

  As she walked, she mentally cursed the two cops. She had missed the afternoon rush out of the courthouse. When she got back to her spot, the sidewalk was deserted.

  Ah, well. It hadn’t been a particularly lucrative day, even when the sun had been up.

  She changed direction, turned toward downtown.

  No money, or not enough to make a difference.

  She thought for a moment of going to the restaurant. To Ali.

  But she couldn’t.

  Or could she?

  It was all so confusing—she remembered what had happened so vividly. It couldn’t have been a dream. If she thought about it, even for a moment, she could smell the rusty, metallic tang of Skylark’s blood, taste it in the back of her throat.

  How could she have dreamed that?

  How could her mind have invented something that horrible?

  But the police had caught the killer. Cliff Wolcott had killed all those girls. They had arrested him; they had proof.

  And that meant she hadn’t killed Skylark.

  It meant that Sarah had really killed herself.

  It all came back to the dreams again.

  It always came back to the dreams.

  But she could remember so much, the tiniest of details. The way the blood hissed on the cold concrete, the steam rising from her hands …

  She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, facing the brightly cluttered window of a games store, and tried not to scream.

  She took several deep breaths, counting, trying to calm herself down. People passed around her, cutting large arcs in their paths to avoid the crazy girl on the sidewalk.

  Breathe. Breathe.

  Breathe through the confusion. Slow down.

  She knew how to deal with it. She had gone through it all with Dr. Livingston.

  Breathe.

  Think it through.

  Cassie struggled to remember exactly what she had said.

  “Permeable.” That was the word Dr. Livingston had used.

  The subconscious is permeable.

  She had explained what she meant using the example of a screen that sifted materials as it allowed them in, but Cassie couldn’t shake the image of a sponge, a sponge that soaked everything up, everything Cassie saw or touched or tasted, even things she wasn’t aware of. It sucked everything up.

  And dreaming was what happened when the sponge was squeezed. All this stuff came pouring out, all mixed together.

  When she had told the doctor about the sponge, Livingston had leaned forward excitedly. “That’s excellent, Cassandra. That really gives us something to work with.”

  That had made sense.

  Together they had explored how Cassie’s mind worked, how the night terrors happened when her mind was moving from one level of sleep to another. She wasn’t really paralyzed; her body was just shut down while she slept. No matter how realistic it seemed, it was just a dream.

  That was why there had never been any blood on her sheets when she woke up. Why the bruises and welts never showed up in the daylight.

  But that hadn’t answered all of her questions: that had only been the beginning.

  Over a period of months, years, they had broken down Cassie’s dreams second by excruciating second. At first, she had been terrified to live those dreams over and over, no matter how safe Dr. Livingston’s office felt.

  But the doctor had held her hand—literally, sometimes—as they had talked through her dreams. For each image, the two of them developed lengthy analyses.

  Fear of the dark is mankind’s oldest fear was how the explanations started.

  Cassie didn’t always understand everything that Dr. Livingston said, but the fact that there was some sort of explanation, some rational process behind them, seemed to rob the dreams of much of their power.

  She had even talked to Cassie about lucid dreaming, about people who could actually control their dreams and not just get dragged along by them, but Cassie had never quite figured out how to make that work.

  As she walked past the Eaton Centre, she imagined talking through everything that had happened with Dr. Livingston.

  She hadn’t killed Skylark. Realistic or not, it was just a dream.

  The police had arrested a man for killing young girls—girls about the same age as Skylark. As her.

  She had read about the murders in the papers. They had talked about it at the camp. Sarah had been freaked out about it.

  She pictured the sponge sucking it all up: the killings, the victims, their ages, how they were killed, all absorbed. The fear that seemed to be hovering over everything. The helplessness that she had been feeling.

  All absorbed.

  And then squeezed back out as dreams: A girl killed. A girl she knew, dead. And herself, not helpless anymore. Guilty, but in control.

  It all made a sick kind of sense.

  Without even realizing it, she had been walking north along Government. The dragons on the gate marking the entrance to Chinatown surprised her when she looked up, but not really.

  That was probably her subconscious too.

  She almost smiled as she walked down the block toward the restaurant, skirting the bins of fruits and vegetables spilling out of shops, dodging Christmas shoppers too focused on getting home to veer even momentarily from their paths.

  Ali was sitting at the table closest to the counter at the back of the restaurant. She smiled widely and started to rise as Cassie opened the door.

  On their way back to Ali’s apartment, they walked close enough that their hands occasionally brushed.

  “Have you lived here all your life?” They were walking so quickly that Cassie’s lungs were starting to ache. It seemed odd to her: she had done nothing but walk around for weeks, but clearly there was a difference when there was actually a destination involved. It had been a long time since she had had somewhere to go.

  “Born and raised,” she said, and Cassie was oddly pleased to hear a hint of roughness in Ali’s voice now too. “In that very house, actually.”

  “Really?” Cassie tried to picture a family living in Ali’s place. It wasn’t overly small, but it didn’t seem big enough for a mother and father and a little girl.

  “Yeah. My parents still own it, but they’ve got a place at Shawnigan now. We did some renos, broke the house up into three suites.” Cassie nodded. That made more sense. “They’re letting me stay in the basement suite while I’m in school. I don’t have to pay rent so long as I look after the pl
ace.”

  “School?” Cassie asked. “You mean like university?”

  Ali nodded. “Visual arts up at UVic. Painting and sculpture mainly.”

  Cassie thought about the art on the walls of the apartment, the tiny sculptures on every surface. It was like a light going on in her head. “The paintings at your place. Are they—”

  “Some of them,” she said. “Some of them are from friends. We all look out for one another, support each other when we can.” She paused, and when she spoke again there was a different tone to her voice. “You can meet them,” she said. “Tomorrow night.”

  “What’s tomorrow night?”

  “The beggars’ banquet,” Ali said.

  “Is that—” Cassie started. She didn’t want to seem like an idiot, but she didn’t think she had ever heard of a beggars’ banquet, aside from on an old record in her father’s collection. “I don’t know what that is.”

  Ali smiled. “It’s not really a thing. It’s just something that my friends and I came up with. Every year between the solstice and Christmas, we have a big dinner, like a potluck.” Cassie nodded. “It’s really nice.”

  Cassie tried to picture a houseful of friends hanging out and laughing.

  In her mind, she saw Laura grinning and laughing.

  She shook her head sharply, trying to make the thought go away. No—that had been a dream.

  She pictured the sponge in her mind.

  Just a dream.

  “Are you all right?” Ali was looking at her.

  “Yeah,” she said, too quickly. “I’m just cold.”

  Ali smiled. “We’re almost there.”

  They walked in silence along the Inner Harbour, the lights of the Legislature floating in the still black water, shimmering like a Christmas tree. It was hard to believe that the camp was just a block or two away, a different world.

  “Listen,” Ali said finally, slowly. “I know that they’ve arrested that guy.”

  Cassie thought back to her conversation with Harrison and Farrow, the look of haunted, exhausted desperation in Harrison’s eyes. “Yeah.”

  “But—”

  Cassie waited.

  “I just wanted to tell you that, even so, if you wanted to crash at my place for a while …” She didn’t look at Cassie as she spoke, and her words were measured, almost to the point of awkwardness.

  “I—”

  “Don’t say no right away, okay?” Ali said quickly, cutting her off. This time she looked at Cassie, a sidelong stare that she held as she continued. “I’m worried about you. That’s really it. And it’s not just that your friend …” She shook her head, turned her attention back to the sidewalk. “When I found you this morning, I thought you had frozen to death. Or had hypothermia. You weren’t even …” Another head shake. “The thought of you sleeping in a doorway …”

  The worry in Ali’s voice warmed her more than the towel wrapped around her hands that morning had.

  She wouldn’t hurt Ali. She wouldn’t. It had been the dreams, nothing more.

  “I can sleep on the couch,” Ali continued. “And you can have the bedroom …”

  “I can take the couch,” Cassie blurted. Her cheeks began to warm.

  Ali turned to her. “Really?”

  Cassie shrugged. “It’ll be a lot more comfortable than a lot of places I’ve slept.”

  Ali laughed. “No, I mean, really, you’ll stay?”

  “I’d like to,” Cassie said, hoping Ali couldn’t hear just how much. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  Ali reached over and touched Cassie’s forearm, squeezed it slightly. “It’s no trouble at all. The place isn’t very big, though.”

  “That’s all right,” Cassie said, a smile starting to form at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t have a lot of stuff.”

  Their laughter echoed over the water, into the dark.

  “You can go home, you know.”

  Harrison jumped at the voice behind him. His first instinct was to cover up the papers on his desk, to change his screen over to something more banal, but it was too late: Farrow would have already seen.

  “I know,” he said. He gestured helplessly at the files and reports on his desk, knowing that she, of all people—the one who did the bulk of their reports—wouldn’t be convinced.

  “Chris,” she said, her voice low, somewhere between concerned and warning.

  She had already changed out of her uniform, and her winter coat was zipped at the bottom. “It’s just the arrest report,” he said, as if that made any difference.

  She nodded.

  “I just wanted—”

  “We got him,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Then what are you doing? They’ve got a whole crew upstairs going over this stuff. It’s gonna stick. There’s not a chance he walks on this. Not after—”

  He nodded. “I know,” he repeated. The stories had been making the rounds of the station all day, rumours of just what they had found in the freezer. None of the detectives were saying anything, but that didn’t do anything to slow the rumours down. “I just—”

  “Go home,” she said.

  She took a step forward and crouched in front of him, putting one hand on his knee. “Seriously,” she said. “Go home. See your family. Have a drink or six. Or more.” She squeezed his knee. “God knows you could use a good black-out drunk right about now.”

  He forced a smile. “That sounds good,” he said.

  She rose to her feet, but she didn’t step back. Looming over him, she said, “Come on, then. I’ll wait while you change and walk you out.”

  He started to speak, but his eyes returned to the desk, to the computer screen.

  She saw the look.

  “Yeah,” she said. She shook her head.

  “I won’t be long,” he said. “I just want to …”

  He wasn’t sure what came at the end of that sentence. She was right: it was all sewn up. They had the guy.

  There was something about the reports, though, something that bothered him; he just wasn’t sure what.

  But Farrow wasn’t waiting for his answer. She was already turning away.

  “Jesus,” Ali said, pulling the door shut behind the two of them, turning the latch. “It’s brutal out there.”

  Cassie didn’t say anything. Without the wind, she had barely noticed the cold.

  “Should I give you the formal tour?” Ali asked, leaning over to unbuckle her boots. “Or is that redundant at this point?” Cassie smiled, not quite sure how to respond. She pulled off her gloves and dropped them in the basket by the door. Ali noticed and smiled.

  Compared to Ali’s leather jacket, which looked snug and went just to her waist, Cassie’s coat was like a sack. Taking it off felt like climbing out of something, rather than just removing a garment.

  Ali took the coat from her and hung it up as Cassie pulled off her shoes. She set them next to Ali’s—even, toes to the wall, heels together. Tidy.

  That was the word that went through Cassie’s mind as Ali guided her through the apartment. Everything was tidy, clean.

  Everything in the apartment had its place, and everything belonged.

  It made Cassie wonder what possible place there could be for her here. She was chaos personified.

  She didn’t belong anywhere.

  “You didn’t have a bath this morning?” Ali asked, noting the still-folded towels on the bathroom counter.

  “Um … no,” Cassie said, looking down at the floor. “I didn’t … I didn’t have any clothes …”

  “Oh, shit,” Ali said, miming hitting herself on the forehead with the palm of her hand. “I’m sorry. I meant to get you some clothes from the bedroom, but I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I don’t think—” Cassie looked pointedly at Ali, then down at herself. “I don’t think we’re the same size.” She tried to make it sound like a joke, but Ali was so skinny, there was no chance she’d be able to squeeze into her clothes.<
br />
  Ali looked at her disbelievingly. “I guess it’s been a while since you looked in the mirror.”

  Ali pulled Cassie to the bathroom counter.

  Cassie looked at Ali’s reflection first, her short hair, the slightness of her, the muscles of her arms, the edge of the tattoo peeking out from under her sleeve.

  She didn’t recognize the girl beside her.

  She had blond hair, dirty and stringy, hanging into her red, blotchy face. But aside from the difference in colouring, the two girls in the mirror were equally slight, fine-boned, sharp featured, almost the same height even.

  “I’m guessing that’s a bit of a change?” Ali said as Cassie watched the other girl’s reflection in the mirror turn toward her own.

  “Yeah.” Cassie reached up, tentatively touching her fingertip to her cheek, verifying that the reflection was really her. She traced her fingers along her cheekbone, the line of her jaw.

  It took her a moment to realize that Ali was watching her, and as their eyes met in the mirror, she had to fight the reflex to jerk her hand away, gently lowering it to her waist instead.

  “So, you’re welcome to anything in the closet,” Ali said, turning away from the mirror.

  Cassie’s gaze lingered there a little longer. She couldn’t get over how different she looked. And how dirty.

  After her bath, Cassie dressed in the clothes that Ali had brought in from her bedroom.

  When she opened the bathroom door, steam spilled out around her into the main room. It wasn’t cold in the apartment by any means, but Cassie shivered slightly at the sudden difference in temperature.

  “Is that better?” Ali asked. She was sitting on the couch, tucked into the far corner of it, her legs folded under herself, a glass of wine in her hand.

  “So much better,” Cassie answered, smiling and half-closing her eyes at the thought. She settled herself on the couch on the opposite end from Ali, sitting facing her. “You can’t imagine.”

  Ali shook her head and looked down at her wineglass as a wave of sadness seemed to spread across her face. “No, I really can’t.”