Dead Ringers (25 page)

Despair,
he thought.
Birds don't feel despair
.

But as the taxi pulled away, driving too fast down the narrow street, the old woman stood and stared at the birds as well. The fiftyish couple had vanished, presumably into their own home, but the elderly lady stood in her wool coat and colorful scarf and gazed sadly at the bird dangling from the autumn-bare tree. The rest of the birds began to regroup, alighting back on the roof where they had begun, but Steven watched one of them begin to chase another away. He'd seen gulls and pigeons do that, fighting over scraps on the street or the beach, but this looked different.

The larger bird attacked the smaller in midair and then both were falling. They recovered in time. The smaller bird landed on the fence in front of the Harrison House and then the larger one sailed right into it, the collision knocking both sparrows off the fence and onto the grass of that elevated yard. From the sidewalk across the street, which was lower than the little yard, Steven couldn't see the birds anymore. He heard a flutter of wings, and then nothing.

The old woman crossed herself and then turned her back to him, heading up the street in the other direction. Away from the Otis Harrison House, and very purposefully on the opposite side of the street.

Steven forced a laugh. “Okay, enough. Shake it off.”

What had he really seen? Nothing. An old woman spooked by a couple of violent events happening on the same block in a span of days. Why wouldn't she be spooked?
The birds,
he thought. But what did he know about the flight patterns of sparrows? Hell, he wasn't even a hundred percent certain they were sparrows. They could have been swallows or starlings, for all the time he had spent studying the difference.

These were the things he needed to tell himself to get his feet to move off the sidewalk and cross the street to the corner in front of the Otis Harrison House. He walked up the side street until he reached the corner of the house, which had been built up high enough that it was impossible to see through the windows from here. A ripple of nausea began in his gut, just a queasy tickle, the first suggestion that he had eaten something that had not agreed with him.

Thinking of Lili—of the fear in her normally fearless eyes, and of the velvet smoothness of her cool brown skin beneath his hands—he went up the steps at the side of the house and right up to the front door of the Otis Harrison House. The property was for sale and a small sign jutted from the ground beside the path. Steven pulled out his cell phone, closing one eye and wincing as his head began to throb. He felt ill. And irritated. He wanted to shed his skin or flee this place, or both.

Instead he dialed the real estate office. The phone rang half a dozen times before clicking over to voice mail, but since he was not a part of any official investigation regarding the house, Steven hung up.

He left the front door and went to the nearest window. Hands on the brick sill, he leaned forward, pressing his forehead to the glass, trying to peer inside. The little ball of nausea in his gut blossomed into a churning wave and he slumped away from the window, whipped around, and put his hand on the lowest branch of a tree, sucking air through his nostrils and trying to keep the bile from erupting. His head pounded, the headache full blown now, and he took a few steps back along the path, needing to get away.

It's not the house,
he told himself.
Don't be a tool
.

But such thoughts would not go away. He reached the few steps down to the sidewalk and paused to sit on the top one, bent over and breathing deeply. Already he felt a bit better. As he sat, a few drops of cold rain pelted him and he looked up to see that a light drizzle had begun.

A dry flutter came from above and Steven glanced up to see the dying sparrow trapped in the branches overhead. A single red leaf, shaken free, floated toward the ground, danced on a breeze, and then slid across the grass and the path until it caught on one of the wrought-iron railings of the low fence at the edge of the yard.

An engine rumbled. Steven looked up and saw a white van moving along the side street toward the corner. It slid to a stop right beside the Otis Harrison House. The words
THIBODEAU HOME HEATING & REPAIR
were stenciled on the side. As he idled at the corner, the driver, a gray-bearded man with thick glasses, glanced over at Steven and scowled with startling disdain. Then he turned right, passing through the shadow of the Harrison House and its retaining wall.

The sparrows came down then.

The crow had departed at some point, but the gulls roosting on top of the row house remained, and they watched with baleful eyes as the sparrows rose and spread into a wave of silent flight, beautiful and dark beneath the gray sky. Then the wave crashed down, sweeping toward the white work van with precision, but without mercy or hesitation. They struck the walls and windows of the van with such force that each thump sounded more like a gunshot than the breaking of hollow bones. There were at least a hundred of them, and Steven ran along the sidewalk, the Harrison House's retaining wall rising up on his right, until he reached the corner. There, he could only stand and watch as the sparrows killed themselves to shatter the windshield and side windows.

The van swerved right and then left, crossed the road and slammed into the front steps of the brownstone where the gulls presided over the proceedings, standing stern sentry. The van's horn began to blare and did not let up, something wrong under the hood or the driver jammed against the steering wheel instead of any effort on the man's part.
Mr. Thibodeau,
Steven presumed, who looked like an angry Santa.

The whole thing had taken perhaps twenty seconds. The street was littered with broken, bloody sparrows. Feathers skittered along the pavement like autumn leaves. The white van had been stained and streaked with their blood.

But not all of the birds were dead. Several began to emerge from inside the van, flying or hopping up onto the roof and hood and on the jagged sills of the windows.

Steven pulled out his phone, ready to call it in, when the first of the birds looked at him.

Looked
right
at him.

The sensation of its being aware of him was so strong that he took a step back, and when it took to the air and the other surviving sparrows followed, he backed up to the corner again, hiding in the lee of the retaining wall. He dialed 911, but before he could hit send, he noticed motion in the ceiling of his peripheral vision and looked up to see the six seagulls taking flight. Circling. And the sparrows joined them.

That doesn't happen,
he thought.
Not ever
.

Phone clutched in his fist, mind awhirl, he turned and bolted back up the sidewalk to the side door of the Harrison House. Its dark windows loomed behind him as he watched the birds. The flock drew backward a moment and then wheeled toward the house, hurtling toward him with such a sense of malign intent that he drew his gun, knowing as he did how ridiculous it was to think that he could protect himself from dozens of birds with a handful of bullets. Suddenly their wings were no longer silent, their cluster no longer elegant. The beating wings became a roar and he staggered backward along the sidewalk, finger on the trigger.

Again they scattered as if driven away, the flight pattern disrupted.

Most of them scattered, anyway.

The one stuck in the tree branches fell to the stone path, dead.

A pair of gulls alighted on either side of it, cocked their heads and watched Steven out of the corners of their eyes. He backed up again and bumped hard against the street level door, looked up and saw the flock massing and turning and flowing again, preparing for another attempt at him.

“Fuck this,” he muttered, and he reached back and grabbed hold of the doorknob.

It turned, and the door swung inward so quickly that he nearly tumbled over the threshold onto his ass. He grabbed hold of the doorjamb and managed not to fall, but momentum had carried him inside. A brief thought about the Realtor and the unlocked door tried to form, but the relief that flooded him left little room for other rational thought.

He closed the door and put his back against it. A hoarse laugh escaped his throat and he holstered his gun, lifted his phone, and hit the Send button to call 911, thinking of dead Mr. Thibodeau out in that blood-smeared van. By now people would be coming into the street to investigate. Someone else would have called the police already. Probably more than one person.

Which was good, because he had zero signal at all inside the house.

Call Failed,
the screen of his phone announced.

“Of fucking course,” he growled, and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

Steven peered through the sidelight and saw that the gulls were still on the walk, and more had arrived. The wind gusted and the old boards of the Harrison House moaned and whispered. And yet Steven frowned, because in amid the old-age complaints of the centuries-old structure was a whisper that sounded nothing at all like the house, and very much like words.

He took a step deeper into the house, trying to make them out. Words, yes. Somewhere inside the sprawling home. They were not words in any language he knew, and yet he could hear the mocking tone in them. The disdain and malice.

Steven drew his gun again. He had no idea how all of this fit together—the violence of the past few days, the behavior of the birds, the story Lili had told him—but he knew one thing for certain.

He was not alone.

 

TWO

Audrey stood on the sidewalk in front of the Nepenthe Hotel and felt nothing. The chill in the afternoon air made her turn up the collar of her jacket while, behind her, Lili paid the cabdriver. It seemed strange to take a taxi in a city with such an excellent public transportation system, but Lili had offered and Audrey had readily agreed.

“Okay,” Lili said as the cab pulled away. “You all set?”

“I wouldn't have run off, you know,” Audrey said, still staring at the elegant, restored façade of the hotel. The wind gusted and she trembled, though perhaps the shudder in her bones had nothing to do with the cold.

“What do you mean?” Lili asked.

“I mean you didn't have to pay for a cab to keep me from escaping,” Audrey replied. “I told you I'd come over here, and I keep my word.”

Lili glanced at the hotel. “I don't doubt you. But after the conversation we all had, and the raggedy man … hell, anyone would have second thoughts about coming over here. You're the only one of us who believed in anything remotely supernatural before this. You'd have more reason to have wanted to just go home.”

Audrey smiled. “Oh, I want to go home, believe me. But I said I'd have a look at the psychomanteum.”

“All right. Let's get it over with.”

Audrey followed Lili through the revolving door and into the lobby, gazing around at the premature holiday decorations and the faux-period décor and costuming of the employees. It was meant to be elegant, but she found the effect cloying. Lili moved around a bellman with a cart loaded with luggage and through a gaggle of tween girls who seemed to be in Boston for some kind of dance studio championship, if such things existed. Audrey thought that if she and Julia had a daughter, it would be fascinating to see what sorts of extracurriculars she gravitated toward. Dance studio championships seemed unlikely, but that was the beauty of tomorrow. You never knew what it would bring.

With a smile on her face, Audrey trailed Lili past the pub and the front desk and the main staircase to a podium at the back of the hotel where a smiling young man in a tight suit and narrow tie greeted them with an expression of barely summoned regret.

“Oh, ladies, I'm sorry,” he said, “but the Sideboard stops seating for lunch at two
P.M.
I'm afraid you've just missed us, but the pub is still open.”

Audrey hesitated, readying a long explanation for why they needed to examine the psychomanteum. Lili just raised a hand, grinned, and breezed past the young host.

“No worries,” Lili said. “We're just meeting a friend. We won't eat so much as a single French fry.”

The host seemed about to argue, but by then Lili had already vanished into the restaurant, carrying Audrey in her wake. They wove a path among mostly empty tables while the staff cleared glasses and dishes. A mother vigorously wiped smeared ketchup from her toddler's cheeks. A husband sipped coffee while his wife checked her text messages.

Audrey felt her steps slow, though she had made no conscious decision to halt. Lili kept walking, but Audrey came to a stop between two tables that had already been cleared and reset for the next morning. In the far corner, beneath a ceiling of white Christmas lights that had been strung like stars overhead, a trio of middle school dance studio girls sat with two bleached-blond stage mothers at a table inside the psychomanteum.

Staring, Audrey felt her whole body go slack. Her palms felt strangely moist, and she reached up to wipe her sleeve across her forehead. A feeling overwhelmed her, the certainty that she was no longer clean, as if the whole of her skin had been coated in a film of grease.

The little dancers were poking each other and laughing while their moms finished their coffee or tea. One of the girls dipped a finger into some ketchup left over from her onion rings. Audrey wasn't sure how she knew about the onion rings—it was the sort of thing that just occurred to her, and always turned out to be true. They seemed so happy, as if they could not feel the aura of sickness that flowed from the apparition box. As if their skin was not covered in that oily coating.

Audrey forced herself to take a step. In her peripheral vision, she noticed a waitress who had stopped rolling utensils inside cloth napkins to stare at her, troubled by her manner. Audrey swallowed hard, tasting something vile.