Dead Birds: The Dark Orphans Collection

by William Patrick

  It was his imagination. Guilt.

  When he was sure the outer room was empty, he rose and felt the floor for clothes (eager kicks had set his jeans and shoes flying, and Pais had pulled his shirt off and tossed it somewhere), but found none. He worried one of the others had come inside to remove his clothes while Pais kept him occupied.

  He felt manipulated. He wondered if Pais was part of a trap.

  He wanted to see again, so he fumbled to the door and took the lit lantern from its hook in the corner of the outer room. Moving took the heat from him, as if cool whispers tried to dry his skin.

  Whoever left had closed the front door, but left a wildly unpleasant stink in the room. Not even the bloated stink from the bronze bowls in the streets came close. It nauseated Burns more when he figured some of the stink came from the rutting he'd heard.

  He carried the lantern into the bedroom -- except now he saw it looked nothing like a bedroom; it had the familiar feel of a typically sparse Rodenje chapel. The floor was darker than the slab, and felt damp as well as cool. The light struggled; the dark swarmed at its fringe.

  Pais drew her knees together and raised them against the light, as if suddenly shy, but with the hem of her skirt left above her hips, and the shirt Burns had tugged apart still open on either side of her over the slab, like wilted petals.

  The light painted her skin an orange ripeness that Burns suddenly found beyond unattractive; it was foul -- her flesh seemed too soft, as if it could slide from the muscles and bones. It reminded him of decaying fruit. He moved the light from her.

  He almost wished he hadn't.

  He found his clothes over the heap in the corner, and after a few moments spent trying to untangle the confusing shapes bundled against the wall, he finally realised what they were: animals -- or dismembered parts of animals, limbs and bodices and snarling heads, each one slick with blood, each one skinned to expose raw muscles and tendons. Blood soaked his clothes.

  He went to the corner and pulled his clothes from the carcasses. A stink filled his nostrils and infested his lungs.

  As he stepped away, disgust and confusion kept him from registering the crackling underfoot until he was almost beside the slab again. He looked down, and moved the lantern over bulbous bodies the size of quail eggs. They leaked innards through their cracked shells. Their insectile legs still twitched.

  The floor was damp, probably with the blood of the slaughtered animals. Slaughtered? Sacrificed. Pais had mentioned tributes. Burns hadn't given it any thought, even after he'd seen the dead bird soaking in the bowl.

  As he retreated from the room, he saw his shoes against the wall beside the door, and kicked them out.

  The atmosphere followed him like a thousand unseen flies blindly tapping his skin. Pais had rummaged through the carcasses before she'd put her hands over his stomach and massaged his cock. He'd thought her hands coated with ointment, but it had been the blood. He groaned and swore. Blood matted his pubic hair. It trickled down his thighs.

  He felt more than naked. He felt vulnerable, as if more than his body was left exposed. He put the lantern on the bare floor and put on his clothes. He tried to ignore how the cold blood stuck the fabric to his skin.

  Pais came to the narrow doorway. Naked now, she watched him dress. She was the beautiful woman he had followed here, yet she was not. Burns thought the differences too subtle to detect, apart from what they brought to mind; decay and sloughing, vegetative rot. He could see none of this from watching her. It was beyond any physical sense.

  He asked, "What happened?"

  She smiled. The lips no longer enticed Burns. Pais leant comfortably against the door frame and put a blood-covered hand through the thick hairs of her crotch. Blood trickled down her thighs.

  Sickened, Burns asked, "What was this?"

  "I already told you," she told him.

  "Pais..."

  "She's gone," she said.

  "I don't know what this is..."

  "This was a tribute."

  "What tribute?" Once spoken, he wished he hadn't asked. She would refuse to explain, or she would say he was part of the tribute.

  Instead, she said, "Pais." Her smile widened; it struck Burns that her lips were too long. "Virgo. Nina. What will satisfy you, Burns? What will make you worthy?"

  "There are no books," he surprised himself by saying.

  "Who needs another book about a lost religion? You should write something for everyone to know. You should write a new gospel."

  She nodded at the low table. On it two leather-bound books the size of ledgers rested. The people from the street must have left them. Burns tucked the books under an arm -- the dry arm of his shirt, since blood soaked most of one side. He took them outside. He didn't turn back, but as he walked away, he wondered why Pais thanked him.

  The men inside the animal pelts were gone. The pole remained at the end of the street, casting a long shadow toward Burns. Warm summer air flowed around him. It should have made him feel cleaner, but it had the opposite effect.

  He felt tainted.

  Flesh.

  Burns reached a low wall cradling the town from the countryside. The wall had chunky metal rings fitted every three feet. He imagined animals tethered to the rings -- horses, goats, the kind he'd seen slaughtered and heaped into the corner of the chapel he'd just left ... then instead of animals, he imagined tethered locals wearing pelts still bloody from slaughter.

  He sat on the wall with his back to the town. It reminded him of the slab he'd lain on with Pais. His lungs felt fusty, as if the shadows in the chapel had been damp ash. The countryside swelled ahead, with ferns and grasses leaning from Rodenje, pushed by a breeze Burns didn't feel. He didn't mind, since it helped him feel separate from this place, a wonderer; a ghost.

  He set the books on his lap and put a hand on an aged leather cover. It had no inscription. The covers looked roughly done, while the binding was intricate, though not delicate. The pages were thick, not the mass-produced pulp of textbooks. Instead of opening one (the covers reminded him of Pais' skin in the orange light of the lamp), Burns closed his eyes and imagined he bobbed among the wild grasses and ferns, as anonymous as a blade of grass within a field.

  His mind regurgitated how Pais' skin had looked, too soft, as if their fucking had rendered her overripe.

  -- her new flesh, he thought. Perhaps his skin had soured like hers, a mark of his betrayal. Elsie would see him, and she would know.

  -- she won't know a thing, he told himself. She would know what he confessed. She would notice no change, he would appear the same.

  Once in the suite, he would throw these ruined clothes into a bag until he had a chance to dispose of them. He would bathe, and wash off what had happened. If Elsie was still out, he wouldn't need to explain. If he had to tell her something ... he would tell her he'd witnessed a messy animal sacrifice as part of his research. He supposed it was plausible. Appearances alone would not betray him.

  -- nothing's changed, he told himself. Nothing.

  He became angry with himself and squeezed shut his eyes.

  He didn't want to think about Elsie. She made him think of Pais pulling him to her, her opening to him. In his mind, Elsie and Pais' bodies intertwined, as if they were the same amorphous creature tangling him with merged limbs.

  -- what did I do?

  He wished the day hadn't happened yet, that he would wake with the hangover ready to make him miserable. He wished the breeze would carry away the molecules of what had happened as if they were pollen.

  Pais had led him, tricked him, and used him. He should have noticed malicious glints in her otherwise unreadable gaze. Her beliefs, the tributes, these books -- all for show. It must be. The sacrifice of slaughtered animals -- Pais' tribute -- meant nothing. To whom or what had she offered the deaths and the blood? She was no Wiccan, neither was she a pagan priestess, or whatever she wanted Burns to believe.

  Why had she done this? Why had he?

  After a time
, he opened his eyes again and found they stung. He wiped his cheeks, and disliked his own damp skin, its coldness. It was like touching an unfamiliar body. He suddenly felt repulsed by his corporeality, by the dried yet persistently fleshy book covers under his fingers -- living skin, dead skin -- by the desperation of his thoughts, by how bottled his body felt. He felt futile, aimless, and insignificant.

  -- I failed Elsie, he thought, and for what? To press his body against another's, to push it inside another's, to have another grasp at his body.

  Hard claws atop roofs told him no matter how long he kept his back to Rodenje, the town remained, waiting for him. The blood on him and his clothes dried under the sun; it made his clothes feel more like rough skin.

  He stood and tucked the books under an arm before he walked alongside the wall. When he went by the first street, he looked down the passage for some recognisable landmark, but Rodenje was huddled houses the colour of aged bone. Crows tapping across the rooftops followed him, teased him. When he looked for them, black folds tucked out of sight.

  Many of the grotesques above the corners were different from those further inside the town, he noted -- moss like bristly fur colonised them, and instead of staring at the street below, or directly ahead, the stony faces looked aslant. Many, Burns saw from the merged animal and human torsos, were obviously and exaggeratedly female. He shirked the feeling that they looked (and laughed, some of them) at him.

  He continued along the edge of the town. At least the curfew, or whatever kept people indoors, was over, since at the far corners of many streets, he glimpsed children running. They wore costumes, possibly pelts, but at least it was a sign of life beyond the limited examples he'd seen since leaving the hotel. Down another street, he saw men dressed as Roman centurions lie over the road with their heads slumped against a house, victims of the festival's overindulgences. Burns supposed either playful children or spiteful adults had set twisted reams of wild grasses and dull flowers on their laps.

  *

  He heard people laughing, merrymaking that made the town seem almost normal. Instead of the prolonged quiet and the forms of children and birds flitting across streets, here were signals of true life: laughter, clapping, deep voices singing an incomprehensibly cluttered folk song, feet skipping over the cobblestones, even a dog growling, and something else -- a goat or a sheep -- crying, startled.

  Burns looked down each street he walked past. While the sounds continued, the party remained out of sight. Still, he was sure it was of men, and from the volume of their voices, judged them near, and not a little drunk. He climbed over the low wall to the summit of the nearest hill for an additional vantage, where he saw the top two stories of the hotel -- he would have seen it in a few minutes without the aid of the hill -- but the party remained out of sight.

  He left the countryside and took one of the curved streets as a shortcut back. His pace picked up. There was still a chance Elsie was out, although the town was so quiet, it had probably bored her some time ago.

  He discovered the party at the far corner of another street, eight men and a woman who sat on an aged couch that tilted on its surviving three legs. The grotesques above them leant over stunted knees for a better look, as if keen to join the celebrations. They grinned and wore lopsided expressions of inebriated or simple-minded lechery.

  Burns wanted nothing to do with the brutish group.

  The woman's head hung and her hair, which was drenched, covered her face. Her shirt, also drenched, clung to her breasts and stomach. Short sleeves revealed arms paler than most locals, though still not as sickly as Pais' skin in the dark. Not surprisingly, the men wore pelts over their shoulders and midriffs. Blood smeared their skin -- more skin than Burns cared to see, since they wore nothing other than the pelts. The hairs of their legs and crotches looked as wild and wiry as their furs.

  Each held a large cup of alcohol. When they weren't drinking, they took turns slopping their drinks over the woman. They laughed at her, they grunted words Burns had mistaken for song but nonetheless rhymed, and they kicked the couch in an attempt to force reaction from her. One filled his mouth and gargled before spraying the drink from his lips, over the woman.

  Aghast, Burns slowed his pace. He couldn't do anything -- these men were plainly cruel, savage; they wouldn't tolerate interference.

  He looked along the houses. Each door was shut; each window remained covered from the inside. He didn't understand how locals would allow this. They must hear the yelling and jeering. He considered banging on the nearest doors to draw people out. The men might stop if confronted with multiple witnesses.

  One of the men (he was hardly a man, Burns thought futilely; the boar skin over his broad back better expressed his crude nature) leant over the couch to part the long hair draping the woman's mouth. He snatched her jaw to tilt his cup to her slack lips. A honey-coloured brew overflowed and dribbled over her chest. The woman didn't move. Burns wondered if it was too late to help -- he wondered if the men were playing with a corpse. The idea caused everything inside him to feel loose, as if, like the brew flowing into and from the woman's mouth, he might collapse and break apart over the cobblestones. He felt cowardly, small, and terrified.

  Then the woman coughed and ejected the brew in fitful sputters, but it was obvious she had little sense; she didn't raise her hands or move from the cup. With the brew, mucus rushed from her nostrils, and then she was vomiting. She tried tilting forward, but lacked the orientation, and ejected over herself and over the couch. The boar-man hopped back, spilling his brew over the road. He laughed, clearly pleased with the woman's reaction.

  When her fit past and her head flopped back, another of the men, smaller than the rest but stout, and disguised from midriff to head inside a cow's sagging skin, poured more brew over her. The drink parted her hair to expose her dulled, gasping, exhausted face. It was Elsie.

  Pelts.

  They packed around Elsie, their watery eyes and vague smiles mirroring the grotesques overhead. One of them -- the boar-man -- finally registered their audience, and looked at Burns. He felt the strength pour from him. There was something wrong with the man's face, as if another's features subtly overlaid the porous skin. The man smiled. He tossed his cup to the side of the street, where it clattered and spilt froth. The other seven men looked up, looked at Burns. About their faces, unnerving near-transparent masks moved like smoke. Each of them smiled at Burns; they had too many narrow teeth packed behind their lips.

  Burns stepped toward them, toward Elsie. Two yards from them, he entered their reek -- slaughtered animals mixed with their own sweat and beer. Flies droned and set on the pelts and crawled over their skin. One of them snickered -- the squat one under the patched cow's hide. It was a demented sound, eager and uncontrolled, simple-minded yet barbed with malice. The sound echoed past Burns, before it took a different register, and told him others were on the street behind him.

  The crowd behind him were children inside bristling pelts, with the stitched muzzles of animals covering their faces. They hunched like the grotesques above. One of them raised a twisted empty hand to Burns, mimicking the toast by the men, but instead of a human arm, the child held the mangled limb of some animal matted with tufts of hair and clotting blood. They laughed the same laugh as the cow-man, but coming from youthful throats, it was repulsive.

  Burns turned back to the men. The nearest of them, the boar-man, bowed to him. Burns' heart froze, burnt; terror cut through him, stopped his breath, caught every thought. The boar-man smiled again. This close, Burns could see the man had some deformity -- it was subtle, it was in the way the muscles of the face tried to move. Three others raised their cups to toast Burns, giving him the sickening notion that they had waited on the street for him.

  Burns forced his body past the boar-man, and only glanced at the others. Part of him was convinced looking at them would be like inciting a pack of feral animals to attack. He wanted to feel anger, rage; he despised these men, and wanted them to feel as
he felt. But all his body and mind allowed was this humiliating, debilitating cowardice. Their faces blurred, drifted. Burns realised it was his vision, distorted by quivering tears.

  He shuddered as he leant to pull Elsie from the chair. The men herded closer, pressing the reek of beer and the stink of animals over Burns. Similar obscene odours hovered over Elsie. Burns felt his stomach twist. His throat clamped. With an arm under Elsie, he lifted her. She made no attempt to stand. Her head flopped. She snorted once, a snore or a cough. Burns had to pin her to him with an arm around her back, and lean to walk away. He almost let the books slip from under his arm, and pinned them to his ribs, tucking them between him and Elsie.

  He dragged her to the corner and saw the hotel across the street. Those dead yet beautiful plants remained over the road. Their combined perfume must have sickened Elsie; or maybe it was how Burns was forced to lead her roughly across the street -- she retched. Burns tilted her aside and a stinking brew gushed from her in a single motion that ended with her hanging by the waist from his arm.

  One of the men behind them made a whooping, animal sound and Elsie groaned as if to respond, but when Burns pulled her upright again, her eyes stayed shut and her face stayed slack. Dewy sweat like minute blisters cropped her skin. He could mistake her for someone with a minor resemblance to Elsie, someone he wouldn't care to glance at on a street. He dragged her to the hotel, kicking a trail through the road's flowered surface, and hauled her into the lobby.

  The long desk was abandoned. The bronze bowls on either side of the exit were empty now, and the tabletops drizzled with the former contents, as if tongues had lapped from them. It wouldn't surprise Burns if someone had done just that.