by Wendy Reakes
Bill took a long hard breath as he rested his hands on his knees. It wasn’t just Dolly’s nerves shot away.
“Can we walk to the village from here?” asked Harry coming up behind him, unaware of the reason for Bill’s panic.
“Aye.” Bill pointed to a narrow, roughly carved coastal path running along the cliff edge. “It’s a fair walk, but a pleasant one.”
He tipped his hat. Then he went off to collect the children.
Chapter 11
“Look at all those seagulls,” Melanie said to Harry as they walked hand in hand along the coastal path towards the village.
They had both changed into jeans and walking boots and they both wore dark blue windbreakers, that didn’t quite match. Harry had kept his for years, but last week, in readiness for their weekend on Cornwall, he’d gone out and bought Melanie one as a gift. She’d had doubts over its style. ‘It’s not about fashion, Melanie,’ he’d said. ‘We can have some good walks when we’re down there, but it’ll be windy.’ Really. You’ll be glad of it.’
Now, with her new windbreaker on, she was pointing out to sea.
Harry had some binoculars over his shoulder; a gift from the kids last Christmas for him to look at wildlife along the river. He’d thanked them, of course, but he wouldn’t have much time to look at wildlife when he was working, which was practically all the time. Now, the binoculars were coming into their own as he focused on the sea beyond the cliffs.
“Whoa,” he exclaimed as he took a step back. They were small and compact, but they were strong. Thanks, kids, he thought. A neat gift! He put them up to his eyes and focused them again. “Whoa.” He handed them to Melanie. “Check these out, honey,” he said.
While Melanie was staring through the lenses, Harry looked out to sea, where hundreds of white seagulls hovered over a far-out white rocky island. “Hey, wait,” he muttered to himself. He took back the binoculars. “That island can’t be white.”
He looked again and focused on the island which looked like it was moving. He was right. The island wasn't white. It was covered in its entirety in snow coloured gulls. "That’s a whole lot of birds out there," he said as he put the binoculars back over his shoulder. "Come on Mel, let's get going."
“Hmm. Yes, I’m starving.”
It was a typical Cornish fishing village. Everything Harry had hoped for.
The terraced houses, painted striking colours, cut into the hills in three rows going up. Further above them, amongst the trees, were some of the more exclusive properties. Harry recognised one. It had featured in the same website as the Hock’s cottage, but it was way too expensive for his pocket.
Cobbled streets weaved their way through the buildings set on hills, and in the harbour, all sorts of boats, mostly fishing vessels, rocked gently on their moorings. Fish and chips shops, ice cream parlours, souvenirs shops with stands of postcards outside, displaying dolphin-shaped blow ups, straw hats, and psychedelic coloured t-shirts with phrases on them. Sharks are friends, one said. Harry wondered what it meant since sharks were surely absent from that little bay in Cornwall.
Across the street, on the corner, opposite a small play park, was a rustic looking pub called The Red Lion, a typical Cornish pub with black beams and fishing nets hanging from the ceiling. Harry had already arranged to take Melanie for dinner at a more up-market restaurant in the hills, so he felt a light pub lunch was the order of the day.
As soon as they walked through the doors, he knew it was a mistake. It was filled with locals, clustered around the bar talking to the landlord, who stared at the ‘strangers’ as if they had two heads. It was dark and dingy, and it smelled of hops and stale beer. He knew Melanie wouldn’t like it. Sawdust decorated the floor while empty peanut shells were trodden underfoot. The menu was on laminated cards set in Perspex stands. Every table held salt, pepper and vinegar and a bottle of tomato ketchup. The silverware was wrapped in white paper napkins standing upright in a metal bucket on the table.
Harry felt Melanie tug his sleeve. “I can’t stay here. Let’s go,’ she said.
“We can’t leave now. It will look rude.”
“It smells,” she whispered.
"Can I help you there, sir?" said the landlord behind the bar. He had to be the landlord because that's exactly what he looked like, with a handlebar moustache and a protruding belly beneath a white shirt and tie.
“We thought we’d have lunch,” Harry said, sensing Melanie’s disapproval.
“Find a table and sit yourself down. The wife will come and take your order.” He reached up and took a pint glass from the shelf. “What’s your tipple?” he asked.
Harry was encouraged. If there was one thing he loved that he couldn’t get in the States was a pint of British Real Ale. “A pint of Black Angel,” he said, looking at the array of metal plaques on the pumps along the bar. Despite the odour, the brass everywhere gleamed.
“And the missus?”
Harry turned about and saw Melanie’s face. She was a feminist, so the ‘missus’ label was way off base.
“A white wine,” she said disgruntled. Harry hoped she wouldn’t stamp her female authority onto The Red Lion’s landlord.
He pulled the pint of ale slowly into a handled pint glass. “You’re American folk, are ya?”
Melanie was quick to respond. “I’m not.”
“New York,” Harry said, “but we live in Bristol.”
“Gud place, Bristol. My son lives up there.”
Harry nodded politely. Truth was, if he was alone, without Melanie in tow, he’d quite fancy sitting up on one of those bar stools and having a conflab with the locals. Find out more about the culture and the surrounding area, but Melanie took his arm and guided him to a table in the corner.
When they sat down, he read a text from Ellen Did you get the candles? He frowned and put his phone face down on the table.
Mel picked up the menu and ran her eyes down it with distaste. “Carbs, carbs and more carbs,” she said.
“Just have a carb sandwich,” Harry said. “I mean a crab sandwich.”
“Aren’t crabs fattening?”
“I don’t know, Mel.”
“And how do we know they’ll be fresh.”
“Because out there…” he gestured towards the window, “is the sea and you won’t get any fresher than that.”
“I feel like you’re getting irritated.”
He felt bad, it was her birthday after all. “I’m fine, honey.”
At that moment the door opened, and Bill Hock walked in.
Chapter 12
From the terrace, Ellen saw one of her waitresses go along the gangplank of the barge to collect glasses. Some customers were enjoying a long liquid lunch. Ellen recognised them all. They were from an estate agency across the street. They often enjoyed using the barge to celebrate a big sale.
When the first bird struck, Ellen became fixed to the spot, as if her eyes were deceiving her and she was suddenly lost in some sort of time warp. When the second bird struck, she knew it was real and what was about to happen, as if a sixth sense had emerged and told her a life-threatening event was about to commence.
Behind her people were shouting, “Shut the doors, shut the doors…”
She heard a crash of glasses as a table was overturned.
A bird, once perched on the top of the barge, took flight and somehow Ellen knew it was coming for her. That was before rough hands grabbed her and forced her back inside. The last thing she saw was her waitress with a large crow on her back pecking at her neck as she fought it off.
“Oh my god,” gasped Ellen.
She watched a man get accidentally pushed over the side of the barge, and into the river. As he came to the surface, the birds went for him. They were relentless as he kept going under and coming back up again in sheer desperation. Ellen could have sworn that the birds would have gone under the water if it meant reaching their prey. Then, in a single motion, two seagulls pecked out his eyes. Before he went back under
, two black holes opened where his eyeballs used to be.
Ellen was going to vomit. What she was seeing couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t. The screaming from the people being attacked outside the restaurant made everything even more terrifying. Worse than the act itself, curdling her blood. She saw another person go over the side. A woman, just a girl really. Her face was twisted with the horror and shock of watching her friends lose their eyes. She went into the water with an expression on her face, as if she was thinking she didn’t belong in that scene of destruction and murderous revolt.
From the other side of the river, people were staring at the carnage the birds were creating, while their hands covered the shocked look on their faces. Men held their women as they buried their faces into their shoulders. One man picked a stone up from the side of the path and threw it across the water, but it had no effect. It simply plopped ineffectively into the river whilst the unfathomable attack continued.
At the side of the barge, on the towpath, a woman protected her child in its pram. She had simply been walking along the side of the river when the birds struck. She covered the pram with her body, sprawling over it with only one mission, to save her baby.
The diners in the restaurant had closed the window doors, blocking entry from all outside. Ellen watched appalled, as another waitress came crashing through the side door with a large black raven fixed to her shoulders. She fell to her knees as if she couldn’t bear the weight of it any longer. A man inside the restaurant took one sharp kick to the devilish creature and sent it careering into the wall. He kicked it again, out of the side door, making it fly to the skies from whence it came.
Outside, women were screaming and crying. Some of the men cowered under the tables, but the one Ellen would never forget was the man, up against the glass, looking in, with four birds on his back, pecking at him and pecking at him until his eyes bled, and his nose bled, and his hands pounded the window for the people inside to let him in. As his knees crumbled and he slid down the glass, a sharp beak punctured his neck. Blood from an open vein, sprayed over the window as he begged to live, but the people inside wouldn’t open the doors. They just stood and watched, helpless with fear and shock.
Near a garden parasol a woman pulled a blanket over her head. It was a good move, until she became weighted down by a gaggle of crows relentless in their quest to destroy her.
Ultimately, the birds pecked, and they pecked, and they gouged out eyes. They broke the spirit of every man and woman on that terrace who, only minutes before, had sat in the midday sun, lapping up the atmosphere whilst enjoying the view.
Inside, Ellen was pushed and shoved. The people became as volatile as the birds, running from place to place, looking for shelter from the onslaught. Then the windows smashed when a bird, like a kamikaze pilot, dived headfirst into the glass. Everyone screamed, as they watched its face intent on reaching the flesh inside, to feast from their bodies, to drink their blood.
Chairs were overturned, dishes were smashed as they fell to the floor. The frenzy was out of control. If all the glass went, the people inside, including Ellen, were all going to die.
Then, suddenly, as if someone had rung a bell for recess, the birds took off, flying away to their own place in the sky.
Chapter 13
When he left the visitors up at the cottage, Bill called out to the children larking about on the beach. “Come on, you two.” The day was quite bright. The sun had turned up and the clouds had disappeared, so now there was no sign of rain.
Obediently, they came running. “Where are we going now, dad?” Toby shouted over the sound of the wind and the waves.
“We’ll go back and get granny now. We have to get her over to the doctors.” The thought of his mother being pecked at by that bird earlier made Bill want to rage, and he wasn’t normally one for raging.
He hadn’t given his mother any details, but after he’d sat her down in the truck, he’d gone inside the house to see where that bird had come from. He saw the window in the kitchen had been smashed as it had forced entry. It must have had its eyes on Gladys the whole morning and broke through the window like it wore body armour. That’s the part Bill didn’t get, that their motivation overtook all desire to protect themselves from getting cut to ribbons on the glass. To Bill, they were mindless daredevils.
It had taken only seven minutes to get back to the farm. He’d put his foot down, and went faster than he’d ever driven before, just to get Gladys back home safely to tend her wounds.
Now, as he arrived back at the house with the children, with the purpose of picking up his mother, Dolly came out of the house with her coat on.
He pulled to a stop and jumped out.
“Did they mind about the eggs?” Dolly asked straight away.
With so much on his mind, he had to think for a minute what she was talking about. Then he realised she’d been referring to the allocation of eggs to the visitors. “No, they didn’t care. I told you they wouldn’t. Fancy people like that don’t care about groceries.” He gave her a quick hug. He realised it must have been the first of the day, when normally, he hugged her all day long.
When he’d proposed marriage, Dolly had said, ‘I’m not going to be an easy girl in your life, Bill Hock, but I will love you till the day I die…But, you have to promise me one thing, that you will, through the course of a normal day, give me a lot of love, to keep my interest peeked, knowing you still love me no matter what. I can get mucky from the cows and smell like a wet horse on a summer’s day, but you must always promise to love me. No matter what.’ He’d promised, and he’d kept to it too.
He kissed the top of her head. “How’s mother?”
“Talking. That’s a good sign.”
“Aye.”
Inside the house, Gladys had an apron on, holding an old rag in her hand. She was standing up on a chair giving the pictures on the wall a wipe over. Bill went behind her and grabbed her around her waist to bring her back down to earth. “Are you mental, mother? You could have got all dizzy after what happened earlier.”
“Oh, those stupid birds don’t worry me none, Bill Hock.”
“Let’s have a look at that eye.” He smoothed the plaster Dolly had put on the cut at the side.
“See,” she said. “Right as rain.”
“You still need to go down for a tetanus.”
“Monday. I’ll do it Monday. You can’t ever see anyone on a weekend. They’re rubbish. Haven’t I always said it, Bill?”
“Aye. You have that.”
“Right. You can take me back to my house now.”
“No, you’re staying with us tonight, until we know what those birds are up to.”
“Stay here? You’re the mental one, Bill Hock.” She stood looking up at him with her hands on her hips. “I haven’t even got me nightie.”
Outside, Dolly was pulling on her walking boots. “Where are you going now?” Bill asked.
“Over to Arthur and Nancy’s. I won’t be long. Mother’s all right. She said so.”
“She don’t know her own mind.”
“You go off and talk to the doctor, Bill. Find out what we should do about mother. He may come up to the house. That’ll save taking her down.”
“He might not be there on a Saturday.”
“Well, you can try, can’t you?”
“Aye.” He watched her button up her coat.
“Take the children with you,” she said.
“I should leave them with mother.”
“That’s like the blind leading the blind, Bill.”
“Aye, all right.”
Bill drove down to the village and dropped the children off at the park. The doctor’s surgery was down the lane opposite the pub. He walked along and tried the door, but it was closed. He wasn’t surprised. The doctor was probably in the pub.
He pushed open the door to The Red Lion and saw Harry and Melanie at a table in the corner browsing the menu.” He nodded to them and Harry waved back. Bill didn�
��t fancy chatting.
The landlord, Jack, was already pouring him a pint. “Alright, Bill?” A snakebite was Bill’s favourite tipple. Half lager, half cider. And that was Cornish cider, nothing more, nothing less. It packed a punch, the cider down there.
“’Ere, Bill, what’s going on with these daft birds then?”
He saw the doctor standing among the locals. “Our mother got attacked by a bird. Nearly took her eye out,” he said. “I was thinking she might need a tetanus? What do you think?”
“Might be best to bring her in so I can have a look at her,” the doc said.
“Can you come up to the house? If not, I’ll have to bring her down on Monday. You know how stubborn she is.”
“I’ll come up this afternoon, then.”
“She’s at our place.”
“Right you are.” He went back to his pint.
“Is Gladys, all right?” Jack asked.
“I saw it happen myself, Jack. It came out of the house at her. Well and truly took her by surprise.”
While he sipped his drink, Bill listened to the smattering of chatter among the locals. It was all about the birds.
One of the fishermen said he was hit on the head by a gull that morning.
“I tell you, it can't happen,” one of the old gents said.
“You weren't there, were you?”
“Did it peck at you?” asked Bill, remembering the bird on top of Gladys.
The fisherman showed a band-aid over a cut on his balding head. “Right there, Bill.”
“It was after the fish,” another reasoned.
“No, it wasn’t after the fish. It was like it wanted to get me.”
A smattering of laughter.
“No, that’s not right. It must have been after the fish, I tell you.”
Bill interrupted when everyone seemed to be casting doubt over the whole bird fiasco. “I’ve had loads of trouble with birds at the farm.”
“What kind of trouble, Bill?”
