In the Shadow of Blackbirds

by Cat Winters

  He scowled and shook his head. “I’m still alive, Shell. Stop saying I’m not.”

  “You came home, Stephen. You’re not still in the trenches.”

  “But the minute you let me go, I’ll be back in the mud and the dark and the shit and the blood. I hear them whispering right now.” He peered over his shoulder. “Don’t you hear them?”

  “What are they saying?”

  “All sorts of things. One of them wants to know how long it’s going to take.”

  I pulled his head against my stomach and buried my face in his brown hair. “Tell them to go away. Tell them you haven’t been on the battlefield for a long while. Tell them you came home.”

  His fear seeped inside me, pounding in my pulse and drumming against my ears. Our breaths blended into a staccato beat. All I could think about was Julius standing next to his camera while patriotic music blared from the phonograph to cover the bangs and thumps from the room above the studio.

  “What happened to you?” I asked. “Did someone do something to you in your own house?”

  “They’re killing me.”

  “I know.” I kissed the top of his head through his smoke-laced hair. “I know.”

  He breathed into the folds of my nightgown. “Keep me with you.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Keep me close.” His lips kissed my stomach through the airy fabric—a flutter of pleasure that penetrated the pain. “I want you so much, Shell.”

  “I want you, too. More than anything else.”

  The room trembled with frustration and longing until even the curtains swayed, and my mouth filled with the rich flavor of a feast I could only taste but never, ever consume.

  “I wonder what would happen if you pushed the darkness out of your thoughts.” I drew in a deep, quivering breath. “If you remembered the parts of your life that had nothing to do with death. I wonder what it would feel like if you moved closer to me without those suffocating memories weighing us down.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes dark and curious.

  “I wonder …” I pushed myself off the chair and grabbed his hand to help him to his feet, even though my own legs shook. “Can you stand up with me?”

  He rose up above me, and we stood face-to-face for the first time since the morning we held Mr. Muse between us in his house. I cupped his cool cheek and guided him toward me by his waist. His hands ran across my back and seemed to grow warmer against my fabric. For a moment, the fear throbbing through him faded to a mere whisper of trepidation, barely there, like a weak heartbeat.

  His attention switched to the ceiling. He tensed against me and held his breath.

  “No, come back.” I grabbed both sides of his face again. “Come back to me. Think of something good. Think about kissing me in your house. Do you remember that?”

  His eyes wouldn’t leave the dark air above us, and I, too, heard the flapping of restless wings.

  “Think about how it felt when we kissed with your photograph tucked between us. Do you remember that?” I lowered his face until his forehead bumped against mine. “Did your heart beat as much as mine did, Stephen? Do you remember your lips on my mouth and neck? Do you remember the way you made me breathe?”

  He closed his eyes with a sigh that shuddered straight through me.

  “You remember, don’t you?” I whispered.

  “Of course I remember.”

  “I’m here now.” I brushed his lips with a kiss that tasted far less like smoke than the other night. “Stay with me. Don’t think of anything else. Not a single thing. Let’s see if I can keep you with me.”

  He caressed the back of my neck, and we kissed again. The sensation was stirring and sweet. The closer we got, the more the feeling bloomed into a rush of pleasure far more delicious than even the bliss of flesh against flesh. My head clouded over with a dizzying sense of exhilaration. My legs lost their ability to stand.

  “I need to sit down.” I pulled away from him but grabbed his arm so he wouldn’t disappear. “Come with me.” I guided him back toward my bed with careful footsteps. “Are you still with me?”

  “Yes.”

  We sat on the edge of the bed, and our mouths returned to each other. His fingers explored the curves of my body from my neck to my chest, and down to my waist. Lovely breezes shivered across my skin. He slid my nightgown up past my knees and kissed the small of my throat.

  “Is this all right?” he asked. “Can I pull your skirt up farther?”

  I nodded, and he kissed my neck again with a touch that melted straight through me. His hands edged my nightgown up to my hips.

  I lay back against the cool quilt and allowed him to climb on top of me.

  His lips warmed my chest through the nightgown’s fabric. “For some reason, Shell, I can’t ever take off these clothes. I don’t know why.”

  “It’s all right. Just be close to me.”

  “I want to be as close as I can.”

  “We’ll make the best of it.”

  I held on to his back and felt him push against me with a sigh that traveled deep inside my own lungs. I still wore my cotton drawers, and he kept his trousers buttoned, but an electrifying current pulsed between us.

  “See,” I murmured, “we’re even closer than we could have been before.”

  Energy coursed through my blood and brought a smile to my face, and I could tell by the way Stephen breathed and lowered his eyelids that he was experiencing the same rapture. We toyed with the provocative sensation, his trousers brushing against my legs in a hushed rhythm, until he broke the silence with another whisper.

  “This is the way Julius told them he found us.”

  “No—don’t bring up anything upsetting right now.” I gripped his arm to keep him from slipping back into the darkness.

  “I was just going to say I sometimes wish he had actually found us this way.” He eased himself all the way on top of me and breathed into my hair. “Even though it would have been wrong and it could have led to trouble, it would have been nice to have felt that with you, even just once.”

  I closed my eyes and pulled him closer still, until he surrounded me completely. Until I felt him inside my soul.

  A NOISE INTERRUPTED US.

  A squawk.

  Somehow we heard it, beyond the walls and the floor, and the noise sent blood streaming back into my brain. I opened my eyes.

  “What was that?” Stephen lifted his head and stared at me as if I had just stabbed him in the gut. His pupils swelled as wide as saucers.

  I gulped. “I think it was a bird.”

  His lips twitched. “A bird?”

  I nodded. “There’s a pet bird downstairs.”

  He looked over his shoulder, and the flame of the oil lamp rose and danced, streaking topsy-turvy shadows across the wall. The needle of Uncle Wilfred’s compass quivered beneath the glass.

  Stephen’s eyes returned to mine. “We’ve got to kill it.”

  Like the lamp and the needle, I trembled with his terror.

  The bird squawked again, and we both jumped.

  “It hears us,” he said. “Kill it before it finds us.”

  “It’s a pet.”

  “Have you ever seen what their beaks can do to a person, Shell? Do you know what they’ll do to your eyes?”

  I winced.

  “It’s either you or him,” he said. “Get a gun.”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  “Then get a knife. Or even a pair of scissors.” His hot breath against my face fanned a fire inside me. All I could think of was a crow as large as a bald eagle bearing down on my chest. The stringy taste of feathers filled my mouth.

  “Kill it,” he said in a voice that vibrated inside my brain, as if the thought were coming from my own mind instead of his lips. “Hurry.”

  I rose from the bed.

  Part of me knew what I was doing was wrong—so very wrong—but that other part, the part getting louder and more anxious, powered my feet across the bedroom
rug. I peeked over my shoulder and no longer saw Stephen on the bed, but his fear continued to burn in my lungs. He was still with me.

  I twisted the doorknob and left the room, tense with anticipation of another sound emerging from the thing downstairs. The pitch-black stairs groaned under my weight, but I kept going, oblivious to anything but that squawking, violent, sharp-beaked creature.

  When my feet reached the bottom of the stairs, the house itself seemed to rumble with apprehension. The click click click of talons scuttled somewhere unseen.

  “Who’s there?” asked a voice in the dark.

  I froze against the banister behind me.

  “Who’s there?”

  The bird was talking to me. I gagged and clutched my stomach, smelling death and mud and poisonous fumes.

  Kill it, Shell.

  “There’s a pair of scissors in the sewing box in the living room,” I whispered. “But I have to go past the cage.”

  Run past. They’re coming. Hurry!

  I leapt into the living room but took a bad step, which sent me crashing against the floorboards on my hands and knees. The thing beneath the covered cage beat its wings and screeched, “Who’s there? Hello. Hello.”

  They’re coming. Oh, God, they’re coming.

  I scrambled across the room to the shadow of a wooden sewing box next to the rocking chair and dug out a pair of scissors that glinted in the moonlight.

  “Who’s there?”

  Bile rose in my throat as I tiptoed toward the cage.

  “Who’s there? Who’s there? Hello.”

  Just do it, Shell! Kill it!

  I held my breath and reached out to the beige cloth covering the bronze wires.

  “Who’s there?”

  Do it!

  I pulled. The cloth tumbled down.

  An ear-shattering screech pierced the night, and I stumbled backward and fell to the ground in horror. A huge black crow-faced bird with a luminous white beak and hands like a man’s gripped the bronze bars. It raised its back feathers and bit at the cage with its furious mouth, and the air from its wings beat down on me, sending a wall of stinging smoke burning down to my stomach.

  “What’s happening?” asked a female voice.

  I saw a candle out of the corner of my eye, but all I could do was lean back on my elbows with tremors convulsing my body.

  “Mary Shelley?”

  “Kill it!” I managed to shout, the scissors feeling sturdier in my hands. “Kill it before it kills me. Shoot it!”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Give me a gun.” I sprang to my feet.

  “No.” A woman with short blond hair pulled the cage away from me and swung open a door to a world screaming with ambulance sirens.

  My legs gave way and I fell to the ground again. My mouth tasted dirt and blood from a cracked lip. The sound of machine-gun fire reverberated around my head, as well as shouts and commands and the whistle of a shell about to hit. The earth rocked below me. A woman cried and yelled something about telephoning a minister. Nothing made sense. It was far too much to bear—far too much to keep living through, so I shut myself off to the world and curled into a ball until nothing but stark silence echoed in my ears.

  SOMEONE WAS KNOCKING ON A DOOR.

  I opened my eyes and stared up at the crisscrossing white beams of Aunt Eva’s living room ceiling. The batiste fabric of my nightgown clung to my legs and stomach like a film. My sweat smelled of onions. My head, thick with sleep, felt disoriented by the morning sunlight as well as the fact that I was lying on the floor in the middle of a room.

  The flu, I thought. Did I just have a flu fever?

  I sprang up to my elbows and checked for blue-black feet.

  The toes wiggling beyond the hem of my nightclothes were still their normal shade of pasty Oregon white. Plus I sweated instead of shivered, and people with the flu always shivered like they were freezing from the inside out.

  Not the flu. It wasn’t a fever dream that lay with me in my bed the night before and urged me to go downstairs to kill a bird. Not at all.

  Another five-beat knock came from the back of the house, sounding like someone was at the kitchen door. I wobbled up to my feet and lurched past the empty space where Oberon’s cage used to sit.

  Through the kitchen window I could see a masked girl with red braids. She stood beside a wooden pull wagon full of food crates and looked harmless enough, so I opened the door.

  She leapt back when she saw me. “Oh no! Do you have the flu?”

  “No.” I wiped damp hair off my cheek. “What I have isn’t contagious.”

  “Oh.” With a worried brow, the girl pulled a crate stuffed with golden onions off her wagon. “Mrs. Ottinger orders her groceries to be delivered every Saturday morning. You need to tell her we could only give her one dozen onions instead of two because there’s a shortage.”

  “All right.” I glanced over my shoulder for signs of my missing aunt, but I neither heard nor saw any trace of her.

  The girl set the box of onions at my feet, then pulled out a larger crate packed with carrots, potatoes, string beans, apples, and eggs.

  “Do you need me to pay you now?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Ottinger usually pays on credit. But with everyone getting sick …”

  “All right. I’ll get you some cash.” I remembered seeing Aunt Eva fetch taxi money from a Gibson’s Cough Lozenge tin kept on top of the icebox, so I paid the girl her two dollars and sixty-three cents and brought the crates inside.

  The girl went on her way to the tune of squeaky wagon axles that needed a good oiling. I would have helped her out by liquefying some soap and slicking up the metal if I didn’t need to hunt down my aunt. It was Saturday, so Aunt Eva wouldn’t have been at work. Normally she was up long before I was—and I doubted she would’ve left me lying on the living room floor.

  “Aunt Eva?”

  My voice bounced off the ceiling of the empty house. No one responded.

  I sprinted upstairs.

  “Aunt Eva?” I crashed open her door, and she screamed from her bed, clutching a two-foot-tall crucifix that looked like some medieval relic. Garlic and onions rolled off her pillow and bounced across the floor.

  “Stay away from me!” she cried.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Eva.”

  “Sorry’s not good enough. What type of person crouches in the dark in the middle of the night, scissors in hand, yelling about killing a poor, innocent bird?”

  “Where is Oberon?” I entered her room.

  “Don’t come near me!” She scooted against her headboard with wild eyes.

  “It’s just me now. Everything’s fine.”

  “Everything is not fine.”

  “Where’s Oberon?”

  “I set him free before you could hurt him.” Two loud coughs shook her chest, then transformed into a fit of hysterical tears. “The poor thing’s wings were clipped, so I don’t know how far he made it. Hopefully, far enough that he’ll never come back here again.”

  “I’m so sorry—”

  “Your voice sounded like yours, but those words coming out of your mouth …” She sniffed and sobbed. “I hid all the scissors and knives in the house, and then I tried calling my minister, but his whole family is sick. His wife referred me to another minister, but he was sick, too. The doctors wouldn’t come, because they’re too busy, and even that Mr. Darning wasn’t answering his telephone.” She hugged her crucifix against her cheek and wept thick tears across the tarnished gold. “We’re all alone. It’s just you and me and that lunatic boy.”

  “Don’t say that about him.”

  “What do you expect me to say? If he truly returned to this earth as a spirit, why are you letting him near you? Why aren’t you sending him away?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  “Even if I tell him to leave me alone,” I said, wringing my hands and venturing closer to her, “I know in my heart he’ll keep reliving his death until he
understands who or what hurt him. It’s terrifying him and infuriating him.”

  “There’s no possible way you can learn that information.”

  “Yes, there is. He was still alive when Julius took my last picture, Aunt Eva. Those noises coming from upstairs—that force that hurt Mrs. Embers—that was him. I bet they were hiding him up in his room.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Wait right here. I want to show you something.”

  I raced off to my bedroom, where I pulled my diagram of Stephen’s last months out of the drawer beneath Uncle Wilfred’s compass. With careful strokes to avoid messing up my work with inkblots, I crossed off information that no longer seemed accurate and added new discoveries.

  June 29

  Stephen’s last letter, written from France.

  Sometime between June 29 and October 1

  Stephen sent home.

  Taken to East Coast hospital?

  Sometime between summer and October 19

  Stephen loses his life.

  (Grant just mentioned executions of soldiers suffering psychological trauma. Did that happen to Stephen?)

  Saturday, October 19

  Restless sounds heard above Julius’s studio during my sitting.

  Julius says that may have been Stephen’s ghost.

  MRS. EMBERS COMES DOWNSTAIRS, LOOKING

  LIKE SOMEONE HAS JUST HURT HER.

  STEPHEN IN CORONADO AND STILL ALIVE AS OF

  MY 10:00 A.M. PHOTOGRAPHY APPOINTMENT!

  Monday, October 21

  We pick up my photograph in Coronado; the picture includes Stephen’s “spirit.”

  Julius tells us Stephen died a hero’s death.

  MRS. EMBERS SCREAMS STEPHEN’S NAME UPSTAIRS.