The Raptor & the Wren

by Chuck Wendig

  It’s easier to look away from the carnage. Easier to stay away, too.

  They keep driving.

  A hundred miles go past, then two. Day into night. Miriam lets her mind drift—not just inside her head but outside it, too. The world is alive with birds: geese and egrets and orioles. Endless vultures. Infinite crows. She can reach out to them, find them, ride them for a few moments. She’s getting better at it. But that worries her too. Like in Merv’s place—her just slipping out of her own head and into that canary’s? She’s never done that before. It wasn’t something she controlled. Even though most of her life is about ceding control to everything else, Miriam lies and tells herself she enjoys control. That she’s a control freak.

  After dark, Grosky stops for coffee at McDonald’s, brings her a burger and fries even though she tells him she’s not hungry. She insists she’s not hungry even as she devours them with the viciousness of a bear eating a goat. He sips his coffee and gets back on the road without saying much.

  Finally, she says, “Tell me about the dead guy.”

  “Hnnh?”

  “The dead guy,” she says around a cheekful of food. She taps her forehead. “With the words carved in his noggin. Who”—she swallows a wad of burger—“Who was he?”

  “Oh. Mark Daley. Security guard at the DuBois Mall. Divorced, two kids. Split custody. He died in a cabin back behind the lake up there.”

  “His cabin?”

  “Uh-huh. He owned it, plus he rents a small duplex north of here.”

  “Any history of naughty business? Crimes committed? Skeletons hanging in the back of his closet?”

  “I seem to recall a domestic report. Neighbors said a fight between him and his wife got out of hand. No charges. Divorce came soon after. Why?”

  She licks salt from her fingertips. It tastes so good, she considers just eating her fingertips. “Just curious. Whoever this dude is, he died for a reason.”

  “When you kill, it’s for a reason, isn’t it?” His eyes flash in the half-dark of the car like headlights passing over puddles.

  “Don’t push me, Grosky.”

  “Everyone needs a little push now and again, Miriam.”

  NINE

  A CABIN IN THE WOODS

  The short drive through the geographical hiccup that is Falls Creek shows Miriam what she’s seen in so many other towns in Pennsylvania—and across the whole damn country. It’s mostly white. It’s not exactly poor, but the middle class is a boat leaving the shore and the people in this town aren’t on it. In a span of three minutes, they pass three churches of different denominations. The people here need something to count on, and that something is an Imaginary Sky God. Because the Imaginary Sky God is way more reliable than their jobs, their families, their futures, and probably the water that comes out of their taps.

  They pass an old hardware store. A strip mall. A rotting Victorian, condemned. A rancher with a ratty yard and a chain link fence and a Rottweiler chained up outside. An empty lot with scrubby bushes and pebbled gravel.

  The town absorbs them, then shits them back out the other side. They’re a bullet passing through a dead man’s heart. Behind them, the town is swallowed up by patchy pine trees. “Nice town,” Grosky says.

  Miriam doesn’t take the bait. She just stares out the window as the dark evergreens fill her gaze.

  Soon, the trees give away to the murky, mucky waters of a huge lake. A rotten, cockeyed dock juts out into the algae-slick surface. On the other side, the cabins start to appear as the road winds around the bank and back into the trees.

  When they find Mark Daley’s cabin, it is appropriately rustic—run-down but not a termite-infested tower of sawdust. Dark logs comprise its walls. Grosky pulls the car up into a gravel lot, cuts the engine. Somewhere, wind chimes tink-tink-tink, and Miriam has the odd thought that somewhere in Heaven, freshly dead Mervin Delgado just got his wings. Or came in his pants.

  They get out. The air is humid. The ground, spongy and mulchy. The smells of damp wood and fishy lake compete inside Miriam’s nose. She follows Grosky up to the cabin, passing planters and pots full of dry dirt but empty of flowers.

  The wraparound porch is screened in, and tied off with a clumsy swaddling of police tape. Above it on the door hangs a NO ENTRY, CRIME SCENE notice. Grosky lifts a ratty welcome mat with the toe of his shoe. “Staties told me they put a key there.” He lifts the tape as she takes the key and opens the door.

  The smell of death does not take long to find her. It’s not overpowering, but it’s there. It’ll never not be there. Death is like cat piss and cigarette smoke: it gets into everything, and that smell will never come out (out, out, damn spot). Here it manifests as a sour stink, like a truck-struck deer on the highway a half-mile off.

  The cabin isn’t much to look at. One room, mostly. Bed in the corner. Kitchenette on the other side. Only separate room looks like a bathroom.

  Miriam steps over a ratty red rug, past a pellet stove, and it’s then she sees it: it’s like one of those Magic Eye paintings where the image emerges from the chaos. The bloodstains are hard to see against the wood, but they’re there just the same. The stain is sloppy, uneven, a Rorschach blot where the wood of the cabin wall is darker, redder. It’s there in the floor, too, shaping out around the legs of where the dead man once sat.

  “No struggle,” she says.

  “Hm? No.”

  “That means it didn’t happen here. The murder.”

  Grosky gives a small, polite clap. “Nicely done. You should’ve been a detective.”

  “I’m more used to solving murders before they happen, not after.”

  “There’s a first for everything.”

  “They didn’t find the murder weapon?”

  Grosky is watching her carefully now. “Actually, they did.”

  “Well?”

  “A knife.”

  “No shit, a knife. I didn’t think those holes in his chest were from a spork.”

  “Near the body they found a spring-loaded knife. Cheap, Chinese knock-off.”

  Her blood goes to ice water, and she knows what he’s about to tell her next.

  “Funny thing. Some of the injuries related to the Mockingbird killers were consistent with that same kind of knife. Coincidence?”

  I used to have a knife like that.

  She no longer has it. Lost it when she stuck it into Carl Keener’s leg. Keener—the one she thought was the singular Mockingbird killer. But it was the whole family, wasn’t it? And then Beck, that prick, showed up with her knife and slashed the throat of one of the security guards at the Caldecott School.

  Security guard. Just like Mark Daley was a security guard. Shit!

  This feels like a trap. It was a trap then—Beck wanted to blame the murder on her. But there was no way to really pin it on her, and with the way everything went down, nobody ever turned an eye in her direction because obvious killers were, well, obvious. Now, though, it feels like a noose is tightening gently around her neck.

  Something’s going on.

  She understands none of it.

  And yet it’s connected. Somehow.

  She needs a moment away from the stain, the smell, the shadow of the dead. Miriam storms out of the cabin with Grosky calling after her. She ignores him. Beneath her feet, a carpet of pine needles crunches—they’re slippery, and she almost loses her footing as she stomps off into the trees. As she walks, she tries to suss it all out, tries untangling this constricting knot as the wind kicks up around her, stirring the leaves and the needles.

  Someone killed Mark Daley. Daley was a security guard at a mall. Divorced. Maybe an abuser. Is that why he’s dead? Or is it something else? Whoever killed him knows the words of the Trespasser. And used her knife—or at least a knife just like it, which can’t be a coincidence. Can it? And all this is happening—what? How far from the Caldecott School? About two hours east? Another coincidence? And also not far from her home.

  An old urge hits her like a brick t
o the head. Next thing she knows, she’s pulling out the pack of Newports that Rita gave her. With hungry hands and trembling fingers, she opens the top and fishes out a cancer stick, plugging in between her lips and then—

  She has no lighter.

  Goddamnit, she has no lighter.

  Miriam tries to stifle her cry of frustration and in doing so crushes the end of the cigarette with mashing lips. That just pisses her off even more, and she throws both the cancer stick and the pack into the trees. “Shit! Dick! God! Fuck.” She kicks pine needles. She kicks a rock. Her arms pinwheel as she punches the air. Then, panting, she plants her hand on a tree.

  And her hand comes away sticky with pinesap.

  She turns to look at her palm—it’s the same hand she used to throw a rock through ol’ Merv’s sliding glass doors, the one abraded by the angry volcano rock. And it’s scabbed over good. And now tacky with pine jizz. She growls and tries to wipe the sap off, but it just gets the fingers on her other hand sticky, too, and then she finds a scabby nub, and before she knows it, she’s gone and broken that off, and now fresh blood flows—a red balloon blood-bead blowing up, up, up—and something pokes out of the hole, something that must be more scab.

  Miriam picks at it, but it’s blood-slick and hard to pinch. She uses her nail to scrape at it—

  And it’s hard, too hard. Not a scab at all. It’s sharp. Like bone but softer, like keratin, and she picks, picks, picks at it—each time sending a vibration of pain through her hand. But it’s now an obsession, she has to get this out, and suddenly she’s digging at the skin around it, pushing her finger in around the margins until more blood wells up—

  There. She has it. Pinch, pinch, pinch. She begins to pull—

  She can feel something deep in her hand move. Like the bones are shifting. Pain flashes. Her fingers curl inward like the legs of a dead spider—

  From the wound she pulls out something long and slick, fringed on the side. A feather. Not black. Rotten brown and wet with red. It comes, but it keeps coming, and with it come more, clumped together, bundled in a visceral knot. By now the pain is white-hot. It runs to her elbow. She can feel it in her shoulders. Her heart flutters like a caged canary. She keeps pulling.

  The wound stretches as something yearns to be born. Miriam grits her teeth and draws it out, out (damn spot!), and soon the whole of her palm is filled with the thing that is working free from inside her hand, and she knows this isn’t possible, but that doesn’t matter—

  A whole bird begins to emerge. Smaller than a crow, bigger than a chickadee. First come the tail feathers. Then the scraping dead claws. Then the fat of its swollen belly and all the way down to its narrow head, until the whole thing is free from her hand. Black blood runs like a waterfall over the side of her palm. It spatters against the mat of needles.

  She’s holding a dead robin. Orange belly. Brown feathers. Its head has a hole in it. Clean all the way through so you can peek into his skull and out the other side. Its beak hangs open.

  Someone whispers over her shoulder:

  “Nicely done, killer.”

  Miriam wheels and throws a fist—

  Wham. Grosky’s head snaps back and he grunts, staggering back. His hand flies to cup his nose. “Jethus!” he cries, his fingers red with blood. “Whath the fuck.”

  Miriam looks down at her hand.

  No hole. Just the old scabs and a little bit of pinesap.

  No dead robin. No feather. No anything.

  I’m losing my fucking mind.

  “Damn right you are,” Grosky says, and she realizes the thing she thinks she thought is actually a thing she said out loud. “Why’d you hit me?”

  “I don’t know,” she lies.

  “Goddamnit. Can we just go back into the cabin?”

  The cabin. With the death stains. A dead man. Stabbed with a knife like mine . . . That’s when she realizes it.

  “You,” she says. “You’re not telling me everything.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t what me. You know more about what’s happening than you’re letting on, motherfucker. Back there in the cabin? You weren’t surprised it was a knife like the one I used to have. You knew it already! You had that little fact stored up and ready to spring on me like the blade of that knife. Like you’re staging the scene for a reality show, like the cameras needed to catch my—”

  Surprise.

  No. Not cameras.

  Suddenly, she’s on him like a cloud of mosquitoes. She pats him down, fishing in his pockets, ignoring the blood still coming out of his bopped nose. He’s objecting, trying to get her away, but she knees him hard in the crotch. Grosky oofs and doubles over, and that’s when she finds it.

  It’s in the back pocket of his khakis.

  “A digital recorder?” she asks, holding it up. It’s on right now. Green light, go. He grabs for it uselessly—she juggles it out of his grip as she steps back. “You were recording me.”

  “Miriam, it’s not like that—”

  “It’s not like what? What is this? A sting? You trying to get me to confess on tape so you can bring the heat down on me?”

  “No, I—”

  “Fuck that. Fuck this. Fuck you.” She marches back out of the trees, toward the cabin, toward the lake. Grosky is slow but soon he’s behind her, pleading.

  “Please, hey, no—that’s a good recorder. I spent good money on it.”

  “I hope you spent enough to get a waterproof model.” She gives it a hard throw. The recorder spirals through the air, then kerploonks into the lake.

  “Shit,” he says, hands on his knees, wincing.

  “Guess it wasn’t waterproof.”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “Give me the keys.”

  “What?”

  “The keys. To your car. I’m going to steal it and then drive away, leaving you here by this smelly lake to think about what you’ve done.”

  “No. I’m not gonna—”

  “I will beat you so bad you sneeze, piss, and shit blood for a week. The keys. Give them to me.”

  “Can I explain?”

  “No. Keys.”

  “It was for the book, okay! The book. I was never going to name you. I just—I didn’t quit the Bureau. I didn’t quit. They, they, they fucking fired me.”

  “Fired you?”

  “You remember how I said everybody has their pet theory, but I would never tell the Bureau about all this psychic voodoo horseshit?” He groans. “Yeah, no, I told them. I became obsessed with it. They thought I went off my rocker.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  “Maybe I did. But this stuff is real. I can see that. You’re the real deal.”

  “No duh, dumbass.” She says it, but in the back of her mind is a growing uncertainty. She’s starting to lean into the It’s all just a hallucination from a head injury theory. A gloriously scary hypothesis that binds all this horror together. And yet, it all feels real, doesn’t it? “But I’m not your book. I’m a real person caught up in something I don’t understand. You were recording me without my say-so. Ever hear of enthusiastic consent, motherfucker? Never mind the fact you know way more than you’re telling me, don’t you?”

  He swallows hard and nods. “I do.”

  “You’re going to tell me everything.”

  “Okay.”

  “But first I need to—” She looks down at her sap-tacky hand. “I need to wash my hands.”

  She storms back into the cabin.

  TEN

  THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MIRRORS

  Miriam strides past the stain that once was Mark Daley’s inner fluids and heads into the bathroom. It’s mostly a closet. The toilet looks like a composting toilet. The sink is a metal bin. She needs to get her damn hands clean, so she spins the faucet.

  Blasting hot water comes out. She yelps, pulling her hand back. The knob on the faucet rolls off when she tries to turn it off. Because of course it does.

  Steam fills the room.

  And
then the water gutters and sputters and stops. Whatever tank was supplying it just ran out. The river ain’t rising no more.

  Miriam grumbles and awkwardly wipes her hand on the inside of the sink bowl, trying to get the sap off her palm. Slowly, the steam begins to recede.

  When it does, it reveals a message in the mirror. A message written once upon a time with a fingertip, a message lingering in the steamed-up glass.

  Two words, all caps:

  HEY, PSYCHO.

  Miriam throws up in the composting toilet. When she looks up again, the message is still there. Then the steam leaves the room, the mirror un-fogs, and those two words fade away.

  She knows her mimic.

  INTERLUDE

  THE STABBED MAN

  Mark Daley is dying. The girl drugged him at the bar, and now here he is, propped up against the wall of his own cabin, bleeding out. He can’t move. The drugs, whatever they were, are still in him. All he can do is look down and watch fluids leak out of him like he’s a wet sponge being slowly squished.

  It’s that or watch her. She’s still here. Pacing back and forth. Dark hair framing a pale face—the hair dyed in red streaks through the black. White T-shirt. Ragged, blood-spattered jeans. She marches back and forth, back and forth, mumbling, clutching fistfuls of her hair so hard, he thinks she might pull them out. He tries to say something, tries to ask her why, but all that comes out is “Guh.” Then something wet splashes down his chin.

  She’s arguing with somebody, but nobody else is here.

  Finally, she gets fed up and storms into the bathroom and washes her hands. Steam wraiths flee through the open door. He hears her writing something on the mirror glass, squeak, streak, squeak. Then Mark Daley is staring down into the abyss of his own death. I probably deserve this, he thinks, before falling in.