by Chuck Wendig
The owl glides, occasionally pumping her wings to stay aloft. Miriam brings the bird low, just over the tops of the trees as the mountain rises beneath.
It’s then she reaches out.
The owl has tremendous senses. As a spider can detect vibrations up and down the silken threads of its web, the owl can detect such vibrations in the air. This is how an owl hunts: it feels the air stirred by a songbird, or the nearly unobservable tremor of a mouse’s feet tapping across the dirt. Its hearing and sight are nearly unparalleled in the bird world. Perhaps in all the animal world, though Miriam cannot say: she can only ride with birds. Why that is, she can only speculate, but long ago someone told her that birds are psychopomps, shuttling souls from the world of the living to the land of the dead. Bird of Doom certainly doesn’t know anything about souls, though. It knows only about flight, and hunger, and fucking. The best things in life, Miriam thinks, a distant human thought. Maybe that’s why I can join with birds. We’re all too alike.
There. Down below, something perturbs the air. A bird. Another owl, this one a small screech owl. It chases another bird, this one a small song sparrow breaking from cover over the trees. The screech owl swoops, and Miriam has to move fast: it’s like parachuting from one plane to another below it, her mind suddenly untethering from Bird of Doom and lashing the screech owl—
She’s in the smaller predator now. It’s like pulling up on the reins of a horse—the owl extends its wings and slows its vector of attack. The song sparrow begins to escape. Miriam thinks: Can’t kill the songbird, Mr. Owl. I need it.
It’s not just the sparrow she needs. Nor the owl.
Out there, in the dark of the forest, she feels the little candle-flame flicker of a hundred different birds. A red-tailed hawk. A red-shouldered hawk. Another screech owl. And then the songbirds: dozens of them, from cardinals to woodpeckers to song sparrows, all remaining during the winter because food is reliable, so why bother migrating south?
The thought hit her back in the cabin, when Louis was reading that email by the window. I could have a bird read it . . . a bird, like her own personal organic camera. A creature with eyes through which she can see.
Now you’re thinking with birds.
She focuses herself.
Here comes the real trick.
Miriam has done this before.
(Though, ahem, not intentionally.)
It’s like putting her foot through a mirror, except the mirror is her mind. She shatters it into a hundred different pieces, each her but not her, each a reflection of her. And she takes these fragments and flings them out into the world. Each finds its home in the mind of a different bird: a turkey buzzard, a house finch, a dove, a blackbird, a crow. Miriam feels strained and spread out, each piece of herself connected by the barest filament—
And each filament is thinner and thinner, like a wire stretched too far.
Hold on. Just hold on.
Birds have small minds. But they are not stupid—they are simply efficient. They do not have long, complicated memories, but they do remember. Crows hold grudges. Pigeons can recognize words and numbers. Birds need to remember people and places because that helps them know where they might find food, or where there is danger. They don’t go to sleep and forget all of what transpired.
Birds remember.
And Miriam needs that. She needs their memories and their eyes, and into the network of bird brains she thrusts a single image:
Wren. Wren as she looks now. She throws this image out there, pinging their collective minds—
There comes a flash. A glimmer of memory. Not in one bird, but in several—
She starts to lose it. It’s hard to hold, like fishing wire slipping fast through her grip. Not just one wire, but a hundred, all receding in different directions. She feels herself hammered thinner and thinner. Hold on, hold on—
But hold on to what? What is she holding on to?
What is she looking for?
Who even is she? She feels tossed about in an endless roil, a turbulent vortex. She twists in the dark like a snake protesting its captor’s hands. You’re a tornado, you know that? You just whirl in and tear everything up that was anchored down.
That voice. Who said that to her?
The name is almost there, almost on the tip of her consciousness. . . .
L . . .
Lou . . .
And then it’s gone. Flensed by that storm. All the birds take flight. A flurry of wings rises in the night. She is with them. She cannot escape them. A piece of herself in each of those birds, the mirror broken, the pieces refusing to come together, and each reflection drifting farther from the next.
INTERLUDE
WREN
They call it the Witch’s Hat. It’s a stone pavilion built—well, Wren doesn’t know how long ago, but it wasn’t recently. Fifty years ago? A hundred? She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. It looks well enough like a witch’s classic peaked hat, surrounded as it is by dead scrub and ground gone dry in winter. The pavilion sits at the peak of Neversink Mountain and overlooks the Reading skyline. Which isn’t worth much of a look.
Right now, the skyline is a series of glittering lights set against the dark. It’s cold up here, exposed to the wind, and Wren is really feeling it. She’s curled up inside the pavilion in a ratty red sleeping bag she stole from a local Army-Navy store. Wren shivers. From the temperature, yes, but from something deeper, some greater fear that won’t let her go.
The .22 revolver she once stole from Stinson’s pawn shop is clasped tight against her chest. It’s loaded. Her finger isn’t on the trigger, and the hammer isn’t drawn back, though she’s vaguely aware that the gun could go off and, if it did, the bullet would catch her under the chin and go up into her skull. Rattle around like dice in a cup. Scramble her brains like eggs.
Maybe that’s fine, she tells herself.
The next thought is:
I’m going to get caught.
She should have gone farther. She’s close, too close, to where she killed that sick fuck with his Nazi tats. The cops are going to be looking for her.
Or looking for Miriam.
Miriam. She’s still alive.
And then, on cue, a pair of boots clomp up next to her. She can see their shadow and shape more than their detail as she peeks her head out of the puckered sphincter of the closed sleeping bag. The smell of cigarette smoke fills the air, and Miriam kneels down before transitioning into sitting cross-legged in front of her. In the dark, she’s more a silhouette, but Wren knows it all too well.
“Hey, psycho,” she says, her teeth chattering.
“Hey there, See You Next Tuesday.” The sizzle of the cigarette cherry is eerily, impossibly loud. “Comfy?”
“Eat my ass.”
“Friendly, too.”
“Shut up, liar. You’re a liar. Just leave me alone.”
Miriam, who isn’t real, who she thought was a ghost but now she’s not so sure, whistles low. “This is bad, Wren. The world is closing in on you. The walls are falling down. Right this very moment, the cops are looking for you. And so are others. Even me. I’m out there. Hunting you.”
“You’re not real.”
“The real me is real.”
“Fuck you with your stupid doublespeak! You lied to me. You said you—you said she was dead.”
The shadow offers a perceptible shrug. “She was, in a way.” Then this Miriam mutters under her breath: “Bitch is dead to me, anyway.”
“I thought you were her. I thought you were her ghost.”
“I never said I was. You just assumed that. And you know what they say about those who assume.” Miriam chuckles; the laugh is deep and unlike what Wren expects. In there is a crackling sound, like a burning campfire. “Does it matter who I really am? I’ve been helping you. I’ve been guiding you.”
“You made me into a murderer.”
“You made yourself into a murderer. But I made those murders mean something. You see what you see and that
’s a special gift. You are given a privileged glimpse at the future. Don’t piss in the gift horse’s mouth, little girl.” Miriam’s hand runs along the length of the sleeping bag. It’s meant to be reassuring, but it just chills Wren all the more. Miriam sighs. “I know, it’s upsetting. But you’re doing such good work, Wren. The best work. You’re saving people. You’re changing fate. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“I just want to go home.”
“You have no home.”
“I just want to be normal.”
“And I want a fucking pony,” Miriam counters with a hiss. “But I don’t get a pony and starving kids don’t get to eat and the Devil doesn’t get a sno-cone and you, my dear Wren, you don’t get to be normal. The horse is out of the barn and the barn burned down. Can’t put the snakes back in the can, blah blah blah.” Miriam sniffs. “Besides, someone needs to do the work. The other me, the real me, well, she’s just not that into me right now. Fine. Fuck her. That means it’s all you. Congrats.”
“Please—”
“Please what?” Those two words, full of venom and disdain. The shadow-shape of Miriam shifts again, and that glowing cherry dips and drops. It winds closer. All around, a new sound arises, the fluttering of wings, the caw and chirp and squawk of birds, and Wren shuts her eyes and unwittingly makes a low and droning moan in the back of her throat to block out all the noise. And then Miriam is there with her, in the sleeping bag, whispering impossibly in her ear: “A conversation for another time. You have a visitor.”
And then the pressure is gone. The specter has fled.
Wren gasps, sitting up in her bag. Panting. Sweating. The cold air washes over her slick body and it feels good for a moment—until it feels bad.
Then she realizes:
I’m not alone.
The sound of the feathers rustling, the birds squawking—it’s real. All around her are birds, perched on the stone ledges of the pavilion’s arched windows. A pair of vultures. A murder of crows. Little songbirds shifting from foot to foot, wings shuddering to adjust. They’re not just here, either. They’re on the steps out. They’re on the dead ground outside. And the sound above her—the clicky-scratch of claws on old shingle—tells her they’re up there, too.
She swallows hard. Wren grabs for her backpack nearby, pulling the handgun out. She points it from one bird to the next and the next after, drifting gently in a circle, finger creeping toward the trigger.
“Get out of here,” she whispers.
But the birds just cock their heads, black eyes shining in the moonlight.
Wren slowly starts to work her way toward the way out of the pavilion—but the birds don’t leave. Worse, they gather tighter at that spot.
She points the gun.
“What is this? What do you want?”
And then a massive owl lands. Feathers peak above its eyes, giving it devil horns. The owl doesn’t hoot—it squawks. An angry warning. It fluffs its wings up, spreads them out wide.
It happens. Wren’s perceptions shift for just a moment—it’s like being whisked down a hallway really fast, like the world is rushing past her even though she’s standing still. And then, around the owl is drawn a black line, blacker than any shadow, blacker than night. It pulses like a demon’s heart. A black handprint sits in the dead center of the bird’s chest—
The black mark.
And then it’s gone again.
Wren eases back. “Miriam?”
Then: voices. From the forest. Men yelling. Wren looks in that direction, sees spears of light—flashlight beams—cutting through the trees.
Police.
In one movement, all the birds take flight. All but the devil’s owl. Its head cocks this way and that. Golden eyes fix on Wren and the beak opens, the bird’s tongue out and waggling in the air—
“Fffffollow mmmmeeeee.”
Then it squawks and takes flight.
Wren doesn’t know what to do. What is happening? Is this real? The men’s voices are closer now—but suddenly, they’re crying out. She hears branches breaking, birds squawking in a discordant chorus, and then gunfire. Bang, bang, bang. Wren swallows, looks out over the dead ground—
And there is the owl.
Staring at her. No—waiting for her.
Wren runs toward it.
The owl lifts into the air, flying only as high as Wren is tall. From her left, a man yells: “There! We’ve got her!” And then a gunshot splits the night and she feels something zip through the black just inches from her nose.
They’re going to kill me.
A little voice responds with And maybe I deserve that.
But despite that thought, Wren pumps her legs and, gun in hand, follows the owl right into the tree line. Crashing through brush. Trying not to slip on ice and mud. Following an owl crisscrossing ahead of her, landing from branch to branch, threading the night.
THIRTY-SEVEN
EXEUNT
Miriam sucks in a breath, then cries out as she awakens. Her hands fly up at her face, and she sees her fingers are talons. Feathers line the tops of her arms as if stitched in there—the skin raw and red, blood trickling down to her elbows. She tries to say something, but her teeth clack together, snap-snap No, not my teeth. My beak. A horrible beak pushes from her mouth, her jaw cracking and straining as it urges forward, breaking her teeth, pulling the tendons in her neck—
And then it’s gone. Over. All an illusion. A hallucination.
Louis looks at her. “You’re back.”
She swallows hard, looking around the truck. Miriam puts her hands on the dashboard. She has fingers, not talons. “I’m not becoming a bird,” she says.
“That’s good. Did you see anything? Did you see Wren?”
The most horrible answer she has comes out of her mouth:
“I don’t know.”
Panic goes through her chest like a sniper’s bullet. She really doesn’t remember. She remembers being up there in the sky with all the birds, and she remembers breaking herself apart—
And then that’s it. It’s like falling asleep. One minute your mind is there, the next it’s dim, then dark, then you’ve gone somewhere else entirely. Did she see Wren? In the back of her brain is a hazy dreamlike memory of Wren, and then she shudders as she feels her feet turning to bird talons, and beneath her leathery toes she feels cold stone, and she remembers men yelling, and beams of light crisscrossing the night. She forms her hands into fists and pushes them into her eyes. It hurts. The pain is good, it’s clarifying. It anchors her back to herself.
“I heard sirens,” Louis says. “A couple cop cars went down past the block—another passed us here. Didn’t see us, though.”
“Oh. Okay.” Her mouth tastes of worms and seeds. Something suddenly touches her mind, like fingertips sliding across the top of her awareness—
And Bird of Doom settles down on the hood of the truck. The owl shrugs her wings and stares down her beak at them.
“Your owl is back,” Louis says, gesturing with his chin.
“Yeah, I—”
Outside the truck, someone screams. Then she hears men yelling.
A shape is darting through the tree-lined darkness, headed right toward them. A human shape. A Wren shape. A few hundred yards behind her, flashlight beams illuminate the forest.
Wham. Wren slams into the truck, her fingers splayed and pressed against the glass. Her voice is muffled but the words are clear enough: “Let me in! Let me in, damnit!” Wren hurries to the back of the pickup truck and lifts herself up, ducking down into the truck bed.
“Jesus,” Louis says. “Was that—”
Bang. A bullet thuds into the front right side of the truck. More gunshots follow, and the window of a parked car ahead explodes. “Go, go, go!” Miriam cries, and she slides down the seat, trying to stay hidden. Her mind flicks to Bird of Doom: Fly, dummy!
The owl does as it is told. It spreads its wings wide and goes up.
Louis backs up hard, crashing into the car beh
ind them—a Saab from the late nineties. Its headlights pop as he angles the truck, spinning the wheel.
A police cruiser turns the corner behind them, and its lights go on as its siren whoops. Louis plows forward as more bullets punch into his truck. He barrels around the corner, only to see another cruiser come in ahead.
Miriam knows she could do something about this. She could summon the birds again. They could swarm the cars. Fling a couple doves in through the windshield or grille, fill the heating vents and the front seat with blood and feathers. But fear has its hands on her. She doesn’t want to lose herself again. It almost happened out in the desert, and it nearly happened again right now. Even if she wanted to, she’s not sure she could do it.
Which means that this is on Louis.
But if there’s one thing he knows, it’s how to drive a truck.
“Hold on,” he growls, and he cuts the wheel to the right. The truck leaps the curb and bounds over the sidewalk—
And then it’s skirting the tree line. To their left, the street pulls away, and ahead, the slick and icy grass gives way to a different avenue. If Miriam remembers her map, they just left South Street, and ahead by a quarter-mile is Fairview. But they’ll only make it there if they don’t die first—
The back end of the truck fishtails left and right, the wheels barely gripping the ground. Behind them, the two cop cars try the same maneuver, and Miriam thinks, We’re screwed. Cops know how to handle their cars. They’re taught defensive driving, aren’t they? Shit. The night fills with the red-and-blue strobe and the banshee screams of their advancing sirens—
But then the car in the lead loses control. It spins out, its back end suddenly where its front should be. And the second car slams right into it.
As that happens, Louis—knuckles gone bloodless as they wrap tight around the steering wheel—gets control of his truck. Everything still feels slick and slippery, like the whole world might shoot out from underneath them and launch them into space, but then the vomit-comet ride is over as the truck rockets toward Fairview. The vehicle bangs and shudders as it leaps the curb anew, and then they’re back on the road.