The Bird Eater (23 page)

She hadn’t thought of her father’s warnings in so long, but they were all coming back to her now—the stories of how he had stood on Old Mill the day the police found the two boys and Isaac’s mom; the fact that it was Boone County’s one and only manhunt, the local police banding forces with state and county troopers, scouring the woods behind what would eventually become Edie’s home; the way the kids weren’t allowed to play outside for weeks while the cops searched for Isaac Ryder.

Realization snapped Hazel back into the present.

Isaac Aaron Ryder.

Miranda hadn’t known the invisible boy’s name—it was why she had given him a nickname instead. And yet somehow her son ended up named after the boy who didn’t exist.

“Did you know my mother?”

Hazel nearly jumped when Aaron spoke. She dared look at him, and for the briefest moment her fear wavered. Aaron looked hopeful as he awaited her answer, his once empty eyes brimming with longing to know the girl who had killed herself in the tub—a fact Hazel was sure Edie had kept from her sister’s son.

“I did,” Hazel said, her throat still dry, her muscles refusing to relax; but if talking about his mother would get her through this trip in one piece, she’d gladly tell Aaron tales about Miranda Bell. “She was a little younger than me, but she was a wonderful girl.”

Aaron turned his head away, staring out his window at the trees that flew by outside. Hazel momentarily squeezed her eyes shut despite their speed, wishing that diamond-shaped dead-end sign into existence.

Larry would kill her if he ever found out about this.

Her father was surely rattling his coffin lid with pounding fists.

“She was a whore.”

Hazel blinked at the words that quietly slithered past Aaron’s lips.

Her stomach dropped to her feet when he started to laugh—quiet, under his breath, but it was an undeniable chuckle, as though he’d just remembered a joke.

When the Peugeot’s high beams slashed across the metal sign a thousand feet ahead, a sliver of optimism speared Hazel’s heart. If he hadn’t killed her yet, maybe she still had a chance. She wouldn’t pull up the driveway—no, that would be too close to the devil’s house; that would be tempting fate. She’d let him out on the street, pull a U-turn and rush back home.

Or maybe she
would
go to Larry’s, lie and say the power went out or the pipes ran dry or that there was some mangy stray hanging around the driveway when she got back from work; anything but the truth would work.

Hazel slowed the hatchback to a roll as Edie’s gravel driveway came up on their left. When the car came to a complete stop without turning in, Aaron offered Hazel a curious glance, and she got a final glimpse of the man beneath the madness. His face was kind, and his eyes reminded her of the good times she’d had with Edie nearly forty years ago. Her panic momentarily waned again, and for the briefest of moments she had the urge to reach out to him, to tell him that everything would be all right as long as he didn’t go back in that house; if he’d just let her drive him away from here things would get better. Except that she knew it wasn’t possible; she knew it wasn’t true.

Aaron was Miranda’s son, and if Miri had been telling the truth, Aaron’s father was…

“Thank you,” Aaron told her, popping open the passenger-side door.

Dazed, Hazel watched him climb out of her car without incident and step across the front of the car, the high-beams slashing across his boxer shorts and white undershirt in two bright, flashing bursts. He began to climb the slight incline of the drive and she thought,
My God, Hazel, he’s just a man, a regular man you’ve turned into a monster inside your head.

Her father would have called her fear justified, but her mother would have clucked her tongue and shaken her head in disapproval. Hazel hadn’t been raised to assume the worst about people, and there she was, assuming the worst about her best friend’s boy.

Regardless, she wasn’t about to stick around.

Guiding the car through a four-point turn, she finally got the hatchback pointed toward Ironwood proper and brought it to a slow creep past the driveway. That was when she noticed Aaron veering off to the trees rather than heading to the house. He leaned down, and when he straightened again, a giant crow hung upside down from his grasp.

Hazel rammed her foot against the gas pedal, and the ratty old hatchback went sailing down the road.

Less than a mile from Holbrook House, Hazel screamed and jerked the wheel to the right.

The tires screeched against the pavement as the Peugeot spun around like a top, the driver-side door crunching into the trunk of a tree.

Hazel’s head smacked against the window during impact, but for a moment she was able to stay conscious.

That moment was spent listening to the tired blare of the car horn as it blasted into the night; it was spent staring at the boy who had perched like a gargoyle on the top of her crumpled hood—perched and grinned as he tore the head off a starling with his teeth.

Twenty-one

Eric hesitated yards before ever reaching the door to room number five. It was cracked open, allowing the flickering glow of a television to spill out onto the lot.

“Aaron?”

Eric nudged the door open with the tip of his sneaker, peeking around the wood of the door to the bed. The sheets were disheveled, so Aaron had certainly tried to sleep. Slowly stepping inside, he stared at Aaron’s duffel bag, at the clothes he’d piled onto a sad-looking chair in the corner of the room. It gave Eric at least a little comfort; if Aaron’s stuff was still here, it meant he hadn’t gone far.

Eric’s attention settled on the closed bathroom door. He could hear the faucet running in there, splashing against the basin with a hiss. Exhaling a breath of relief, he closed the motel room door behind him and took a seat on the edge of the bed, watching
The Partridge Family
bop together at hushed volume. The mom and sister were decidedly hot, but the matching powder blue pantsuits tapered their appeal.

After a minute of staring at the TV, Eric shot another glance at the bathroom door. He got up, crossed the room, and gave the door a light knock.

“Aaron? You okay?”

He frowned at the lack of response, then knocked again.

“Hey, come on. Since you’re awake, let’s go to the truck stop, get some coffee.”

Nothing.

Grimacing at the door handle, he slowly twisted it to peek inside. If Aaron was in there, he didn’t want to catch him sitting on the can; but if he hadn’t wanted to be caught in an embarrassing position, he would have responded. The door swung in just an inch, and when Eric peered through the crack he found an empty bathroom. Allowing the door to swing wider, he blinked at the running faucet, a jolt of anxiety electrifying his nerves. An empty prescription bottle lay on the counter. Suddenly, the worst possible thought springboarded into his brain:

He took them all.

Somewhere out there, Aaron was shambling through Ironwood with a stomach full of pills. Eric didn’t know what the hell they were, but it made no difference. Pills were pills, and how the hell would he tell Cheri that Aaron was missing, possibly dead?

“Oh Jesus,” he whispered.

Twisting where he stood, he barreled out of the motel room and into the parking lot toward his car.

Aaron stood in the center of the living room, his gaze sweeping the walls, the furniture, the pictures on the mantel that had endured decades of neglect. His arms hung at his sides, his shoulders felt heavy, his heart lurched in his chest. The crow lay at his feet, its black feathers glinting in the darkness, still iridescent despite the absence of light.

He didn’t understand—not why he had dragged that bird out of the trees and into the house, not why he had been compelled to run back here rather than run away completely. There were things within these walls, things beyond terrible memories and childhood tragedy. Something inside this house had drawn him back, pulling the invisible tether taut, dragging him back to Arkansas from two thousand miles away.

Tilting his chin up to the ceiling, he let his eyes drift shut, released a deep breath, and listened to the silence of the house.

Maybe if I listen
, he thought,
if I just listen hard enough it’ll make sense…

So he listened, waited and listened, hoped to hear the crystal tinkle of Ryder’s laughter, listened for the sound of a toy car being pushed across the floor or the opening theme song to one of his son’s favorite cartoons. Because if Ryder’s name had been scrawled on his car door, if it had appeared on the name patch belonging to that wicked, leering boy, Ryder must have put it there. If the things Aaron was seeing were real, if somehow he was seeing the dead, if that grinning demon of a kid was able to make contact with him, Ryder had a chance to do the same.

But no matter how hard Aaron strained to hear, there was nothing: only the soft murmur of birds nesting in the branches just beyond the windows, hundreds of them frantically chirping, their shrill communal warble rising and falling like an ebbing tide, rising and falling with Aaron’s every breath.

Aaron blinked, suddenly breaking his stasis to turn around where he stood, unable to remember how he had gotten home. Someone had given him a ride—Cheri? He furrowed his eyebrows, tingling with the uncomfortable buzz of alarm. Somewhere along the way he had lost a chunk of time, as though he’d ditched his motel room and gotten all the way down Old Mill in a fugue state—asleep with his eyes open, dragging a dead bird inside the house rather than tossing it farther into the trees.

He moved down the hall and into the kitchen, snatched the camcorder off of Edie’s old table. Stepping back into the living room, he placed the camera on the mantel beside Fletcher’s smiling face, slid onto the couch, and pressed
RECORD
. Covering his mouth, he stared at the burning red light, his ears straining to pick up every groan of the walls, every creak of the floorboards, trying to hear beyond the starling’s song.

He had come to Ironwood to regain his bearings, but instead he had lost his mind.

He thought of the pistol he had tucked away beneath his bed upstairs.

Except the gun wasn’t upstairs. It was right in front of him, lying in wait upon the coffee table, its grip peeking out from beneath the pages of his book on grief. Aaron’s chest heaved as he leaned forward, his fingers wrapping around the handle of the gun. He tested its weight in his palm, pulled it into his lap, fingered off the safety.

The birds seemed to grow louder beyond the window, as if sensing Aaron’s pending decision. Eric was right: it was ironic how Aaron had been plagued by birds after covering his skin with their likeness. Aaron supposed it could have been a coincidence. But the boy who had stalked him from his first day in town—the fact that Aaron was being haunted by a child when, in his mind, he was struggling to finally let Ryder go—that wasn’t by chance; something about that particular coupling felt fated, as though it was always meant to be.

Aaron stared at the pistol in his hand, remembering how drawn Ryder had been to birds as well. Evangeline had chalked it up to Ryder wanting to be just like his dad, but there had been something more to it than that. He didn’t know what; he just knew it as a feeling he’d get in the pit of his guts—the same feeling he had gotten when Ryder had pulled back and slammed his foot into the ribs of a neighborhood stray. It was a secret Aaron had kept buried since he had been Ryder’s age, the very reason he had turned to work as an EMT. Something inside him itched for destruction. Ryder had had it too; that same dark streak that Aaron had kept from Evangeline.

Leaning forward, he placed the gun on the table, spun the pistol like a top. It whirled around until it pointed his way. He spun it again, and it pointed back at him a second time—a talisman predicting the future.

This is your destiny,
it said.
You’re living beyond the grave. You shouldn’t be here. That’s the way it was always meant to be.

“Ryder.”

The name slithered past his lips and through the quiet. It flashed across the back of his eyelids like a Vegas sign, scribbled across the dirty plane of his door, blazing red in the center of a name patch sewn onto a pair of kid’s coveralls.

But what if Ryder really was here?

What if he was trying to communicate?

Aaron couldn’t give in to weakness. After all this time, he couldn’t fold.

Abandoning the camcorder and pistol on the coffee table, he rose from the couch and moved to the hallway, opened the closet and grabbed a half-used can of whitewash and brush he’d bought at the hardware store days before. Returning to the living room, he was unsure of his own intent while staring at freshly painted walls, at the clean hardwood floor.

If Ryder was here, he was being drowned out by the kid with the ugly leer.

Aaron would help his son find his voice.

The paint can dropped to his feet.

Aaron leaned down, gave the coffee table a sideways shove.

The camcorder tumbled to the floor, but its little red light continued to burn.

The gun spiraled across the planks, pausing its spin when it hit the dead bird in the center of the room.

He pushed the couch next, leaving a clearing of bare wood. Falling to his knees, he pried open the can and dipped the brush into the paint.

A glob of white dripped from the bristles of the brush and onto the floor, leaving a perfectly pale circle against a rich maple backdrop. Aaron stared at that singular mote of alabaster, a profound sense of sadness wrapping its fingers around his throat.

He’s alone
,
he thought.
Alone in the darkness, while I’m alone in the light.

Or maybe it was the other way around—maybe this world, the one Aaron was living in, was nothing but a shadow compared to the brilliance of the great beyond. Maybe that was why Ryder was reaching out to him, to cure Aaron of his perpetual heartache, to pull him back to the side he had been on for three or four minutes a year before—dead, jerked away from the light by the hand of Cooper, not the hand of God.

The bristles of the paintbrush kissed the floorboards in a long, graceful stroke. After a minute of work, Aaron stepped back to inspect the letters he’d painted onto the floor. Satisfied, he wrote it out again, and again, and again, until the hardwood was covered with Rs and Ys and big-bellied Ds. With his hands covered in paint, he stared at the walls again.

They needed to be labeled to match the floor.

To beckon the dead.

There was another outcry from the birds outside.

Aaron floated down the hallway, stepped into the kitchen, and pulled open a drawer. His fingers wrapped around the hilt of a butcher’s knife as old as he was, a twelve-inch monster dulled by age and time, but perfectly capable of sinking into flesh. Seemingly cemented into place, he admired the way the moonlight glinted off the blade. It felt good in his hand—right, like an old friend. He dragged the tip of the knife along the wall as he moved back to the main room, slashing into Edie’s old wallpaper, leaving a wavy cut from one end of the hall to the other—a claw-mark made by an invisible beast.

Aaron slid onto his knees next to the dead crow.

Holding the knife at chest level in both hands, he hesitated

what are you doing?

only to bring the blade down with a quick, fluid motion, over and over again.

Dark red oozed across the planks, mingling with the paint that spelled out Ryder’s name. Dropping the knife to the floor, Aaron smeared his hands through the tepid blood, moved across the room, and pulled his hands across freshly painted walls.

But it wasn’t enough.

A surge of rage combusted inside his chest—anger that didn’t make sense but possessed him all the same. Before he knew where he was headed, Aaron was climbing the stairs, his gory fingers dragging along Edie’s old wallpaper. He took a left and stepped into his room, his gaze snagging on the dog-eared Bon Jovi poster. Aaron had tacked the top right corner back into place with a small framing nail, but it had come loose again, flopped down in a frown.

Grabbing a trash bag from the corner of the room, he moved to the window, unlocked the latches, and pulled it open. The trees had been close to his window as a kid, but now they were so close the branches practically swept across the side of the house. Trimming them back was on his to-do list, but he was glad he hadn’t done it yet.

Ducking his head, he crawled out the window onto the nearest branch, balancing like an expert climber despite not having climbed a tree for a good twenty-five years. He inched toward the crook of the oak, so thick with nests he could practically smell the dander and excrement. The birds didn’t react. It was as though they didn’t even see him. Aaron was a shadow, a ghost.

He reached forward, jerked an entire nest free, and hurled it into the plastic bag, cinching the top closed before the confused animals could fly free. The bag screamed, the sides billowing out as starlings batted their wings against the plastic. Aaron laughed as the creatures fought for their freedom. Bounding across the branch and back into the house, he gave the bag a fierce shake to agitate his captives a little more—like a mean kid poking an already wounded animal with a stick—wound back, and slammed the bag against the wall.

The commotion beneath the plastic settled to a muted, straining chirp.

Aaron ran down the stairs, nearly whooping as he hit the base floor. Returning to the living room, he dropped the bag at his feet, shoved in a hand, and drew out an injured bird. It flapped weakly against his hand, desperate to make an escape but too hurt to fight. He cupped it in his hands, petted the top of its head, and let his fingers circle its tiny skull before giving it an unflinching twist.

Lifting the bird to his mouth, he bit down, jerking the body away from his teeth. The head came free. He spit it to the floor. And then he pressed the decapitated body to the wall.