by Chuck Wendig
This meeting has a reason, so it's time to get to it.
"There's a serial killer," she says.
Katey almost laughs. "What?"
"I told you that Lauren Martin might get hurt. What I meant is she might die. Worse, I just found out that she's not the only victim."
Miriam tells her the story.
She doesn't withhold anything: the barbed wire, the carved Xs in the palms and feet, the doctor's table, the bird mask, the axe, the funeral flowers, everything. Heads rolling. Tongues extracted. By the end of it, the teacher looks harrowed out.
"You see things like that," Katey says, matter-offactly.
"Yeah."
"That's horrible."
"Pretty much."
"This is who you are."
Miriam just nods
"Oh." Katey blinked.
"These visions I get, I see things in them, and sometimes those things don't add up. Details lead to questions that don't have answers. To that end," Miriam pauses, takes a drink, "I want to talk about swallows. The bird."
"Why swallows?"
"The killer has a tattoo. Earlier you said something about Philomena."
"Philomela. A… Princess of Athens."
"What does she have to do with swallows?"
Katey tells Miriam the story.
She tells her how Philomela was daughter to King Pandion and sister to Procne. Both girls were beautiful. Procne married Tereus, King of Thrace, and went to live with him. Five years passed and the sisters had not seen each other and Procne missed Philomela.
She sent her husband to fetch Philomela so that the sisters could again be together. But upon seeing Philomela, Tereus found her more beautiful than his own wife. So beautiful that he could not control himself, and he raped her.
To silence Philomela, Tereus grasped her tongue with pincers and cut out her tongue with his sword. Then he hid her away, telling Procne that her sister had died.
"Men," Miriam says. "Always such charmers. What happened after that? Where do the swallows come in?"
"Philomela was hidden away, but she began to weave the most wondrous tapestries – tapestries that secretly explained what happened to her. She packed the tapestries up and sent them to Procne as an anonymous gift. Procne saw the truth of what had happened. She went and found her sister, and together they planned their revenge."
"And did they get it?"
"They did. Procne invited her husband to dinner. He sat down and enjoyed plate after plate of succulent meats. As he finished, licking his fingers, rubbing his belly, Philomela emerged from the kitchen and dropped onto the table the severed head of Tereus' first son, Itys. Procne had had the boy killed and his body butchered into the meal that Tereus ate and enjoyed."
Cut tongues.
Severed heads.
"Those Greeks knew how to party." Miriam takes a long sip from her too-sweet too-tart cran-vodka. "Still not clear on the swallow thing."
"Well." Katey takes another long sip of her radioactive cocktail. "Tereus was, of course, none too happy about having just consumed his first and best son. Men, you might say, are sore losers, and Tereus was no different. And so he chased the women down with a sword. He had them cornered, and he was just about to slay them when…" Another sip.
Miriam makes the I'm-over-here-impatiently-waiting face.
"The gods took pity and turned them all into birds."
Ah. There it is.
"Right. I can guess what Philomela became."
"A swallow. The swallow was at the time thought to be a silent bird with no song and no call – not true, of course." Katey stares off into the restaurant, no doubt trying to imagine how this all relates to a dead girl named Lauren Martin. "Procne became a nightingale, while the King turned into a hoopoe."
"A hoopwhat? Now you're just making shit up."
"Hoopoe. I thought it sounded fake, too, and some myths have him as a hawk. The hoopoe's an… ostentatious bird, black and white but for the crown of bright orange feathers on his head. A crown like a king's crown."
Miriam sniffs. "Even in the end the guy gets to be the prettiest bird. Stupid gods. If I had the powers of the divine, I would've turned him into a – well, I don't know my birds. A little one-winged parakeet flopping around at the bottom of his cage in piles of his own bird shit."
"I don't know what to say about all this." Katey finally plucks the straw from the cocktail and pitches it onto a napkin. Blue Curacao bleeds. Katey cups the fishbowl with both hands and finishes it off. Then gets the shivers. "I think I needed that."
"Yeah," Miriam intones, dry, tired. A gutted husk. In her head a storm of birds takes flight. Some carry severed tongues. Others together share the burden of carrying severed heads aloft. "Yeah. It's time I hit the bricks with my getaway sticks."
"We should do this again."
"Mmn." A non-committal grunt if ever there was one.
"Where are you staying?"
Miriam stands. Hikes her bag up over her shoulder.
"No idea. Got kicked out of my motel this morning for non-payment. I'll find something."
"Something."
"Underneath an overpass. Maybe I'll get lucky and find an abandoned car."
"You're homeless." The teacher says the words in the same way you might say, You have pancreatic cancer and you've got nine months to live.
"It would not be the first time. In fact, at this point in my life, a third of my existence has been on the road. No home of which to speak." She shrugs as though to echo her mother's old refrain, It is what it is.
"Come stay with me."
Miriam snorts hard enough she thinks she might puke up her vodka. "You're joking."
"No. What do you have to lose?"
"Better question is, what do you have to lose? To which I answer, your safety, sanity, a general sense of togetherness and well-being. Health. Happiness. Hope."
Katey shakes her head and offers a sad smile. "You have this dark cloud about you, Miriam. It's like you want it there. A cloud of flies, or a storm passing overhead."
"I'm a poison pill. I'm a Mister Yuck sticker. I'm not good for people. You want to know how I see the world? How I see people? Bunch of rubes. Just waiting to be taken for a ride. And if I'm not careful, that's how I'll start seeing you. And I'll take you for a ride, and a ride with me is a log flume splash through blood and tears that drops clean through the Devil's open mouth and out his ass. I don't want that for you, Katey. You're just too nice a lady."
The teacher gets quiet. She takes out her debit card and slides it next to the check. When she looks up, her eyes are wet. Glassy and shimmering like an old snow globe.
"I'm dead in nine months. Nothing you can do to me changes that."
"I can turn those remaining precious days to shit."
"Let me do this for you. It'll kill me 267 days early if I have to think of you out there somewhere laying your head on a dirty pallet of cardboard boxes. Stay with me."
Miriam hesitates. But in the end, what else can she say?
It's a bad idea but she's the queen of bad ideas.
And this one wasn't even hers.
"Let's go, roomie. I get the top bunk."
TWENTY-FOUR
Louis Returns
Katey's got a townhouse a half-hour from the school in Sunbury. Still not far from the river – look out the bathroom window upstairs, you can see moonlight pooling on the distant water. Glittering like broken glass.
The décor makes Miriam want to dry heave – it's all down-home country fun with a curious fixation on roosters. Katey hangs her keys on a wooden rooster whose feet are little hooks. She takes a cookie out of a ceramic jar shaped like a rooster. Embroidered rooster pillows. A rooster rug by the door.
Miriam tries to bite back the words but they're like butterflies that duck the swooping net. "You sure do love cock," she says.
Katey blanches, shocked. Blood draining from her face.
"Sorry," Miriam says. "Couldn't help myself. It's like a sicknes
s."
But then the teacher quivers and shakes and erupts like Vesuvius, her sudden and uncontrolled laughter swiftly drowning out worry.
"I guess I do love…" she says, tears streaming from her eyes. "Cock!"
The way she squawks that word makes Miriam laugh, too, and for a good half-a-minute the two of them are caught in the throes of a cackling jag. Eventually it fades, and Katey says, "Oh, that felt suprisingly cathartic." She rubs her eyes. "I think that means it's time for this old lady to get to bed."
The teacher sets up Miriam on the couch with a fuzzy brown blanket heavy and soft.
But Miriam's not tired.
The vodka should be dousing her torch by now. But it isn't.
Her head keeps spinning. A carousel of awful images.
Two girls. Not one, but two. Wren and another girl. Only connection she has so far is the school. Do the girls know each other? Are they friends?
Philomela and Procne.
Silence the swallow. Cut out the tongue. Take the head of the children.
London Bridge is falling down…
No. No, no, no. Not now. Nothing to be done tonight. Put it away. Shove it in a desk drawer. Lock it. Burn it. Walk away from the fire.
Miriam gets up. Roots around the kitchen. (Rooster fridge magnets). Opens the freezer. Finds a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream. Plops on the couch, screws the pint between her thighs, digs in. Turns on the television.
Cooking show.
Flip.
Something about volcanoes in Hawaii.
Flip.
Infomercial. Blah blah blah, Super-Mop.
Flip.
American Werewolf in London. The climax. The titular wolf rampages through London's Piccadilly Circus. Mayhem. Foolishness. Cars honking. Screaming. The beast rips off a bystander's head, flings it into traffic.
Click.
TV, off.
Miriam feels dizzy. Overwhelmed by the task at hand. Sitting here, nursing a pint of fudgy ice cream, thinking what a shitty savior she makes. Well, girls, I'm the only savior you got right now. You get what you paid for.
Of course, the thing she tries not to think about but thinks about anyway:
Solving their murder isn't all you have to do.
You gotta kill the killer.
It's then she hears something.
A footfall. Outside Katey's door.
Through the window next to the front door, Miriam can see a shadow stirring beyond the curtains. Out there in the dark.
The doorknob rattles.
She reaches in her bag, finds a cheap Chinese-made spring-loaded knife she bought at a Jersey flea market about eight months back.
She wishes suddenly that Katey had one of those little peepholes.
Miriam hits the button, pops the knife-blade, and then throws the door open.
And almost stabs Louis, his big meaty hamhock fist poised to knock.
"Miriam," he says. The look on his face is raw, pained, desperate. A look like that stokes her engines. Water on hot coals. Steam.
"One-eyed Frankenstein," she says back. Smiling. Beaming. Electric.
She flings the knife backward over her shoulder, doesn't care where it lands. The way she leaps on him is like two magnets snapping together. A perfect and irresistible fit.
Strong hands lift her high.
Her legs wrap around him. His cock is hard like rebar.
Mouths are open. They smash together sans grace, driven by hunger.
"I missed you," she hisses in his ear. Bites it.
He drops her ass on the coffee table. Palms the space between her legs like it's a basketball. A thermal lance of heat drives straight from her crotch to her brain and she wants him inside her, all the way to the hilt, to the heart, to the brain.
"Take off my shirt," he says, his voice dry, croaking, hungry. "Hurry."
Her fingers, usually nimble, fumble with the buttons on his corduroy L.L. Beam special. Hell with it. She grabs the first button with her teeth. Bites it off, spits it against the wall. It clatters onto and into a heating vent.
Her fingers search out the spaces between buttons. Like a rib spreader ripping open a chest to get at the viscera, she tears the shirt open. A rain of buttons like bullet casings fling to the four corners of the room.
And everything stops.
His chest, his bare chest, lays exposed.
His chest hair is gone. Shorn from the flesh.
A swallow tattoo – red and puffy, as though freshly drilled – rises from the skin.
She looks up in Louis's face.
"No," she says, her voice a whimper. "Not you."
He brings back his fist and hammers her hard in the nose. She feels it burst, break, a blood squib that pops and squirts two jets of red down to her chin.
Miriam tumbles back onto the table as Louis sheds his shirt.
"You like the ink?" he says.
"Fuck you," is her answer.
He piston-punches her in the gut. She doubles up and rolls off the table into the space between it and the television. Blood wets the carpet. Inside her it feels like something is collapsing in on itself.
A tiny crying baby.
Louis grabs both ankles, drags her out. The carpet burns her back as her shirt pulls up behind her.
He's got the knife, her knife, in his hand. It almost looks like a toy, it's so small in his cement-block grip. Louis smiles but it's not his smile. It's Not-Louis. Ghost-Louis. The Other.
"You," she hisses and spits.
"Give me your hand," Louis says.
"Trespasser. Trespasser."
Not-Louis just laughs.
He takes her hand. Slams it palm-down on the carpet.
Then he gets to carving.
She can't see what he's doing, but she can feel it. The bite of the knife tip as it parts the skin. The pain draws a line. The misery makes a shape.
Two-pronged tail, swoop-back wings, head and beak thrust upward.
The swallow.
Like the tattoo on his chest.
"You're the Swallow," Not-Louis says. "I'm the Mockingbird."
"I don't know what that means."
"You will find out. I will make you find out. Think you can just walk away from this? Let this serve as a reminder, Miriam Black, Fate's Foe. Let this remind you that–"
He pulls the knife away, his fingers greasy with red.
"–you have a job to do and we won't let you walk away until it's done."
Miriam screams. But it isn't her voice coming out of her mouth.
It's the scream of Lauren Martin as she is beheaded.
PART THREE
A Trail of Ink and Blood
Philomela:
"Now that I have no shame, I will proclaim it.
Given the chance, I will go where the people are,
Tell everybody; if you shut me here,
I will move the very woods and rocks to pity.
The air of Heaven will hear, and any god,
If there is any god in Heaven, will hear me."
Metamorphoses, Ovid
TWENTY-FIVE
Broken Crayon
Drive too long and too late and the road starts to run like paint, like something out of a Salvador Dali picture. Louis uncaps another mini-bottle of 5-Hour-Energy and slams it back. It tastes like someone strained cough syrup and vinegar through a gym sock.
Tonight, a haul of cable spools on a flat bed. From New York state to Charlotte, NC.
He's taken the scenic route. It's slower, adds time to the trip – which is a mistake – but Louis doesn't care. I-77's a nicer drive. Longer, leaner, fewer cars.
Right now, it's just him and the road. The occasional pair of headlights coming and going. Strobe. White flash. Gone again.
The clock on the dash – LCD blue – silently flicks over to 12:00AM.
He's been pushing it of late. Pushing it in a way he hasn't done in years. Long hauls. Late nights. More hours, more money.
But that's not what this is abo
ut. Louis doesn't need the money. He's not rich, not exactly, but he's a man with few bills, save the loan payments on a trailer just outside Long Beach Island in Jersey. Most Americans rack up debt. Louis is the opposite: He collects money the way other folks gather dust bunnies under the bed.
