The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  Kshhh! Miriam’s elbow crashes through the porthole–

  Her arm stuck with broken glass–

  –bleeding–

  Ashley laughs–

  Gulls cry.

  And then she knows.

  INTERLUDE

  THE VISION

  Everything stops. All things caught, as if caught like the fat black fly held now between Not-Louis’ callused fingertips.

  He pops it. Splurch. Juices run down his fingers. He flings it into his mouth like a piece of popcorn. It crunches like a cicada.

  With a swipe of his tongue he wipes fly bits from his teeth.

  “You figured it out,” he says.

  Miriam nods, staring out the porthole. Outside, she can’t see anything now – just a white-hot light over the horizon. Gone are the mangroves. Gone are Ashley and her mother. Gone are the birds.

  “Ashley swatting the flies,” she answers.

  “Ashley swatting the flies.”

  “And then in the vision. When he kills Jerry. He… he matches Jerry step for step, swing for swing.”

  “But the bird–”

  “But he doesn’t see Corie coming.”

  Louis snatches another fly and pops it in his mouth.

  She almost laughs. She mimics Ashley’s words from back on Summerland Key. “Everybody’s connected. Same frequency. And he can hear them. But the beasts of the world aren’t like us. They’re not connected on the same frequency. And he can’t hear the song they’re singing.”

  “Look at you. Figuring it out.” He shrugs. “Though pretty damn late.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” she says.

  “I know.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  THEY SEEMED TO FILL THE SEA AND AIR

  The gannet is a beautiful bird.

  It’s a large bird. A foot tall or more.

  It has a long beak with which to catch fish. A beak that’s almost silver – and outlined in black, dark lines. It has clear eyes ringed with skin as blue as tropical waters. Its feathers are white as virgin snow, but along its neck and head is a warm sunset glow.

  The gannet is a hungry bird. The bird plunges from on high, diving a hundred feet at sixty miles an hour to catch fish deep in the ocean waters. And the gannet eats a great deal of fish.

  Its name is a synonym for “glutton.”

  The gannet is an impatient bird. The massive creatures gather in flocks around fishing boats, hoping they’ll bring up fish not one at a time but in great nets by the score – but if the day yields no catches, the gannets will swoop and snatch bait from the hands of fishermen.

  And the gannet is a vicious bird. Its beak is sharp. Like a pair of scissors – snip, snip, snip. A man once tried to save a wounded bird on a pier. The bird took off his nose. It plucked out his eye.

  In the moment that Ashley Gaynes raises the hunting knife to plunge it into Evelyn Black’s chest, Miriam knows all these things about the gannet. She does not know how she knows. She cannot care.

  There exists a moment – the knife held high in the air, the promise of murder on the warm sea wind – that Miriam reaches out not with her arm or any part of her abused and pummeled body but rather with her mind. She finds the gathering of gannets above her head.

  Her mind shatters, a fist slamming into mirrored glass–

  It’s as if she is drawn from her body – yanked up away from bones and skin, away from blood and muscle–

  She is fragmented. Separate, carried by so many–

  Miriam hears a new frequency.

  A frequency of hunger. And impatience. And viciousness.

  All of it is beautiful.

  The first bird plunges hard and fast, its beak through Ashley’s hand. Miriam tastes his juices. Hears his screams. But she doesn’t care because all that matters is the blood. That first spray. The first taste.

  The other gannets are jealous.

  Miriam is both satisfied and jealous. Two minds. Twelve minds.

  The birds swarm. The birds dive.

  Beaks stick in the meat. Into the flesh of his bicep. Into the tender expanse of his stomach. They close in on the tendons of his neck, the splayed-out fingers, the fleshy protrusion of nose and ears and tongue–

  I’m going to whittle her away if you don’t come with me…

  He turns and tries to run, tries to clamber over the edge of the boat. But they pull him back. They dissect him.

  They eat what they dissect.

  (Miriam dissects him, and she eats what they dissect.)

  Ribbons of skin peel away in greedy, clacking beaks. Birds get great gulps of wind under wings, and they draw away carrying red ropes of raw guts. He is a fish to them – a big, strange, flailing fish. And they pull him apart stem to stern. Gill to fin. Eyeballs to asshole.

  You reduce everything to its components. You’re like the maggots these flies make. Breaking it all down to its basest, most… disgusting bits…

  They carry his meat into the sky. They eat it there. Two birds sharing, juggling, gulping.

  Soon his bones are showing.

  But even that does not last.

  One flies away with his lower jaw.

  Others peck at his joints. Until his skeleton collapses. They fling his bones into the water like ogres discarding their trash. They pick what flesh they can. Veins and tendons like earthworms.

  When finally they are full – such gluttons! – they squawk and swarm and land on the railing of the boat. A line of them behind Evelyn Black. Guarding her. Standing vigilant. Watching their mother.

  All that’s left of Ashley is a greasy, body-wide smear of blood.

  And a single prosthetic foot.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  MOTHER MAY I

  It takes time to return.

  She feels herself nesting inside the minds of these birds, broken apart like a dropped dinner-plate, and it’s here she finds the taste of blood and a warm, eager satisfaction – not the satisfaction of vengeance, but the simple joy of having eaten a very good meal. But eventually the hunger nibbles again because the gannet is a very hungry bird, and Miriam thinks, I can go with them, I never have to be me again–

  And that horror is too much for her.

  That surprises her.

  And it’s then she returns – thrown back into her body. The gannets, still full, take flight and circle high into the air, chattering like old friends at the bar until they’re just distant caws and faraway shrieks.

  Miriam sees her mother. Bound out on the chair. Eyes wide.

  The door won’t open. The porthole is too small. Miriam hurries to the boarded-up windows. She tries to get her hands around the wood but can’t. She takes the one thing left in this room that Ashley didn’t destroy – the stool – and picks it up and smashes it again and again into the wooden boards. Slowly they splinter. Surely they split.

  She pulls them away. She pitches the stool through the window.

  Crash.

  She clambers out – trying not to cut herself, but she does anyway. She doesn’t care. Can’t care. She nearly slips on the front of the boat but catches herself and hurries around the side–

  Miriam throws her arms around her mother. Rips the tennis ball out of her mouth. Undoes her bonds. Tells her she’s sorry she took so long.

  Evelyn Black says nothing.

  Miriam peels herself away.

  Her mother stares. At nothing.

  Half her face is slack. The mouth drooping as if drawn downward by a fish tugging on a hook. The pupils suddenly twitch and begin to flit back and forth, and Miriam thinks, There she is, and she begins to help her mother stand – but the woman’s left leg gives out.

  Miriam catches her before she falls.

  Mother mumbles. A gassy hiss erupts from her mouth.

  Miriam doesn’t understand. Not yet.

  PART SIX

  KEYS AND LOCKS

  SIXTY-FIVE

  THE REAPER’S TOUCH

  The doctor tells her it was a stroke.

 
; A blood clot unmoored itself from somewhere in Evelyn Black’s lungs. And it fired up through her brain like a bullet leaving a rifled barrel. And just like a bullet, it did damage as it passed through.

  It did damage that could have been mitigated, the doctor tells her – that word, “mitigated,” so cold, so clinical – had they gotten her into the hospital within an hour. But that didn’t happen. Miriam was on a boat. A boat she did not know how to pilot. She was able to start the engine and get it to the nearby shore – the tangle of mangroves – and she was able to get her mother off the boat, too. But it didn’t matter.

  Miriam had no idea where they were.

  Her body hurt.

  But she pushed on, helping her mother walk until the woman couldn’t walk any more. Then she carried her until Miriam couldn’t carry her any more. Miriam found a road, and there ahead a small little white building with a sign out front: KEY TO THE KEYS REALTY.

  The woman inside came out, started to say that they weren’t open yet, but there was an open house at the south end of Summerland–

  Then she saw. Miriam, bloodied.

  Then it was a blur. Police and an ambulance ride and now here, in the hospital at Marathon. Where the doctor told her that Mother had suffered a massive stroke. And that she might never really be herself ever again.

  She asks the doctor, because she needs to know, “Why now?”

  He says he doesn’t know.

  “But I can hazard a guess,” says the doctor – an avuncular type with curly hair so dark it looks like he dyes it with boot-black. “The experience was traumatic. She must’ve already had a clot in her lung – you said she was a smoker, so – but the extreme stress of the situation probably dislodged it. Blood pressure can be a helluva thing.”

  He thinks the stress was what Ashley did to her.

  But Miriam believes differently.

  There Mother sat as a flock of birds tore a man apart in front of her. As her daughter stood at a window, watching. What did she see on Miriam’s face? Rapture? Pleasure? A dead empty hungry nothing?

  The days pass in the hospital. For many here, nights spent in the hospital are ones of great consequence, but for Miriam, it’s just a long stretch of empty mental highway. The police come and go and they ask her questions. They want to know what happened to the killer. They tell her they have his leg and a lot of his blood. But they wonder if he’s still alive. She doesn’t tell them any different. What’s she going to say? Birds ate him. And I was the birds. It was weird. I’ve thrown up six times in the last three days just thinking about it. I can still taste the blood. Got a mint?

  Miriam convalesces. Tape for her cracked rib. Stitches for her leg. Antibiotics for the infection she didn’t even know was there. One of the nurses says she’s surprised Miriam didn’t die. Miriam tells her she doesn’t know if she can die anymore.

  They want to know about insurance. Her mother has it. She doesn’t. Another set of hospital bills Miriam will never pay.

  The staff begin to whisper because they know she’s the girl who was taken captive by some serial killer on a boat – a lunatic who shot up a tiki bar, who murdered the boat’s inhabitants, whose tally of bodies is as yet uncounted.

  The press gets ahold of it. They want to interview her. She keeps them out. Hides in other rooms when they come to hers. Last thing she wants is to be on television. And she knows that the two FBI agents are coming, too. They have to be. Surely they smell the blood in the water.

  But they don’t. She doesn’t understand why. She’s low-hanging fruit at this point: stuck in a hospital bed. Attending to a vegetative mother.

  Miriam feels caged. White walls. The pharmaceutical stink. And the hospital has a hum to it. Even at night, a low, deep vibration. She figures it’s all those machines keeping people alive, but a little part of her thinks it’s something else: the chanting of souls so close to death–same frequency, we’re all connected, Not-Louis had said.

  She hates that sound.

  She loathes this place.

  She has to go.

  SIXTY-SIX

  MOTHER MAY I?

  She goes to her mother and sits with her for a while and tells her that she’s going to go. Mother says no real words – she just babbles. A burbling brook that sounds like words the way a toddler mimics the inflections and cadences of human speech. But it’s nothing you can understand.

  Miriam strokes her mother’s cheek.

  “You know, it’s pretty fucked up,” Miriam says. “On the one hand, I’m still so, so mad at you. All my life I felt like I was under your thumb. Your mean, jabby little thumb. All the things you said to me. The way you treated me. Everything was my fault even when it wasn’t. And now here we are. I’m hurt. You’re… lost. And it is my fault. That’s where I get tripped up, because once, I think I was a good person. Maybe. But you treated me like I wasn’t and I wonder, were you trying to make me a better person but by doing so made me a worse one? Or were you just foretelling the future? That one day we’d be sitting here like this. That we’d intersect again and I’d rob you of your faith and your mind and your life and…”

  A gasping sob sneaks out and Miriam clamps it down: she squeezes her eyes so hard she thinks she might never be able to open them again, she bites her teeth and draws a deep, shuddering breath.

  Don’t do this, she thinks.

  She sits for a little while. “It used to be that I would try to stop people from dying, and instead I’d only make it happen again.” That little boy and the red balloon… “Maybe that’s how it was with you. You wanted to do right so badly that you did wrong instead. It happens. I’m proof.”

  She stoops and kisses her mother’s temple.

  She represses another sob.

  Evelyn Black smiles. Babbles. Laughs at some joke nobody told.

  Then Miriam gets up to leave.

  As she turns to exit–

  “It is what it is.”

  She turns back.

  Her mother faces toward the ceiling. Staring.

  Did she say it? Was it in her voice?

  Miriam isn’t sure.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  THAT’S SOME BUDDHIST SHIT, RIGHT THERE

  She’s back at the motel after a day of hitchhiking.

  As she’s heading up to the office, she sees Dave the Florida Man out there picking little bougainvillea flowers from the half-collapsed hedge.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “All of life is suffering,” he says.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I once got high and shot a shitbucket of heroin into my body and I stood there smoking a cigarette and it fell off onto the floor and caught fire to my bungalow. Smoke and fire woke me up. Big black smoke like a, a, monster or something. I busted open the window and crawled out and it was only later I remembered that I left my retarded brother in there. Bud. Bud burned up in the house along with all his cats. I said I’d never get high again. I said it even as I got high later that night. People are stupid. Life is suffering. But once in a while someone finds a way out of it. A way that ain’t heroin. A way of light instead of a big dark hungry monster.” He sniffs. “I don’t get high anymore. I’m pretty happy.”

  “Thanks, Dave.”

  “Sure thing, Mary.”

  And he goes back to picking little purple-pink flowers.

  She shrugs, goes up into the office where she finds Jerry Wu.

  Jerry’s face is that of a man looking at a ghost. Or maybe about to be fondled by a particularly randy Bigfoot. Fear and awe in equal measure.

  “I saw the news,” is all he has to say.

  “It’s pretty fucked,” she says.

  He nods.

  “I need your help. You and Corie.”

  “I… yeah. Sure. Of course.”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  GONE FISHIN’

  Water dark and shadow – bubbles and kelp and little fish shining like knives turning in sunlight – the bird thumps its head against something half-buried in sand and broken
coral, thud thud thud – then the world shifts, upside down, up, up, up – surface, air, light–

  Corie hops back onto the boat.

  Miriam gasps.

  “You all right?” Jerry asks.

  “Not really,” Miriam says. But it is what it is.

  Then she holds her nose and feels her heart try to climb out her butthole as she dives into the water–

  The shock of panic is like two hands clapping over her. She immediately thinks, I’m drowning, I’m dying, Eleanor Caldecott is down here with her corpse hands ready to pull me into the sand…

  But then a dark shape cuts the water next to her.

  Corie swims next to her.

  It gives her strange comfort.

  Troubling comfort, in a way – is it uncomfortable comfort? Or comfortable discomfort? Fuck it, it doesn’t matter.

  What matters is that she closes her eyes and sinks to the bottom. And there, her fingers search the sand and find the box that Sugar told her about. She swims to the surface. Corie breaks through with her, gulping down a fish. And they both come back into the boat.

  Later, with the box under her arm, Miriam bids adieu to Jerry.

  “You’re a nice guy,” she tells him. “Not many of you around here. You and your rare bird are real rare birds.”

  “I’m going to lose the motel,” he says suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Nice guy doesn’t mean having money. They’re gonna foreclose on this place. Don’t know what I’ll do next.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I owe ten grand. Whaddya gonna do?”

  “Will two grand hold ’em off?” She fishes through her bag – fetched from the room where it sat on the bed – and hands him a wad of cash.

  “Uh. Holy crap. Maybe.”

  “If it does, it does. I’ll see you, Jerry.”

  “See you, Miriam. You ever need a room again, come by.”

  She salutes him, and that’s that.

  SIXTY-NINE