Over the next few days, I thought a lot about Ms Ito and her remarkable bird. I'd stumbled out of the teacher's block, past the ninja sentry who was dozing at the time, into the dark stormy night, a mixture of thoughts rolling like two converging thunderstorms through my confused head. I was still in love with Ms Ito, of course, but I was also concerned about that bird of hers, the bone-like monstrosity she fed on toenails, and kept in a cage so small it could barely move.
After several days of deliberation I confessed my concerns to Justin and Fred over the breakfast table.
“Are you crazy?” Fred stared at me. “You went into her room and spied on her? I thought you were just taking her your homework. She could have you kicked out of school. What would your parents think about that?”
“I was lucky, I know. But the question is, what are we going to do about that bird? Not only does she keep the thing in a cage so small it can't move, but it's clearly pretty angry about it. When it squawked while I was there, the whole room shook. My ears were ringing for the next six hours.”
Justin and Fred looked at each other, then leaned in towards me conspiratorially.
“I tell you what we're going to do,” Fred said. “The only thing we can do. Let it out.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Justin asked.
Fred looked at me. “You know the layout of her room and where the bird is. It's easy. You can get in there and free it.”
“When?”
“During class.”
“But she'll know who did it!”
Justin frowned. “This is a good point.
“Ah ha!” He raised one finger in jubilation.
“I have it. You said there was a security guard, right?”
“Yeah, some guy who thinks he's a ninja.”
“Ok. We have to do it between classes, otherwise it'll be easy to tally up who was responsible. But we have to do it during school time, or we're likely to run into a few teachers on the way. What I suggest is this. We can do it after Tuesday's class with Ms Ito, in the afternoon break between fifth and sixth periods. We wait until the class has finished, and then Fred can distract Ms Ito.” When Fred glared at him, Justin waved his hands in the air. “I don't know; pretend you need her to check over your homework or something.” He looked at me. “Meanwhile, we'll run to the teacher's block. I'll distract the guard, while you go up to Ms Ito's room and let out the bird. If we do it quickly enough we can get back to the dorm and no one will know.”
“Sounds good to me,” Fred said.
I frowned. “I don't know . . . ”
“Don't worry, it's foolproof.”
We took a couple of days to make preparations and work out the fineries of our plan. No one had mobile phones on the island, so Justin ‘borrowed' some walkie-talkies from the science department so we could keep in contact with each other. He showed us how to use them, explaining I was channel one, Fred channel two, and himself channel three. Armed with our equipment, we headed to our last geography class before the revolution.
Ms Ito barely acknowledged me during that endless fifty minutes, and I wondered if we were doing the right thing. I was tired, I had to admit, after the bird had woken us several times during the night, but the last thing I wanted was for Ms Ito to find out what I was about to do. I had put our future love in enough jeopardy already.
The bell broke me out of my reverie.
“Stations, people,” Justin said.
Ms Ito was heading for the door, leg clumping heavily over the traffic noise in the corridor. Fred was quick, slipping out of his seat and rushing down the aisle to intercept her. I heard him say, “Ms Ito, I'm sorry, but I really didn't understand anything you said about tectonic plates...” and then Justin was pulling me towards the back door of the room, steering me through the moving students like a tow truck heading the wrong way on a busy highway.
“Come on, let's go!” he hissed at me.
Students were heading for the break areas, while we were heading in the opposite direction, towards the back of the school. The students quickly thinned out and we found ourselves running down an empty corridor and out into the open air behind the school. The teacher's block was another couple of hundred metres away, but the terrain was fairly safe during the day. I ran hard, the walkie-talkie bouncing in my pocket, hoping Fred was doing his job.
We reached the teacher's block, and I ducked down in some bushes besides the main door as planned. “Okay, wait here,” Justin said, then headed inside without a pause.
I sat quietly, trying to control my beating heart, listening to the wind billow across the open scrub of the island.
The door burst open and Justin rushed back out, followed by the ninja guard. I noticed he'd managed to tie the headband on this time, but despite a number of fast stance changes and twists this way and that, he failed to see me sitting behind the door, in pretty much plain sight.
“It was over this way,” Justin said, pointing. “In the water. I haven't got a clue what it was.”
“Let's check it out,” the ninja guard said, and they both moved off towards the cliff. Justin didn't look back because that would have given me away, so steeling myself, I got up and rushed through the doors into the disinfectant chamber, my fears immediately soaked by a smelly, formaldehyde shower.
Ms Ito's door was locked, as I'd feared. Justin, however, ever resourceful, had somehow acquired a master key to the whole building. I sensed we were treading a fine line here between passing and failing. If we freed Ms Ito's bird without anyone discovering us, and we got the walkie-talkies and the key back unnoticed, we were game on. If anything of our plan was discovered, we were heading for the mainland. A lot of kids fancied the idea of that, but parents didn't send you to Thunder Crack High unless they really wanted you to pass.
The key worked a treat, and I slipped into the room. The door to the study was ajar, and I saw the bird straight away, sitting hunched over in its cage, looking out towards the sea. It looked rather sad sitting there on its perch, and I suddenly knew we were doing the right thing. Ms Ito, no matter how much I desired her, was being terribly cruel to this creature. Whatever unusual type of bird it was, she shouldn't be keeping it in such a tiny cage, and she certainly shouldn't be feeding it toenails.
The bird looked up as I approached. It cawed gently, tapping its beak against the side of the cage. I hadn't truly appreciated it before, but now, seeing it close up, I was awestruck. The bird was like nothing else, living or dead, that I'd ever seen. It didn't appear to be made of bone, but more slivers of it, little tiny shards of off-white enamel that rustled when it moved. I realised then that Ms Ito didn't just feed the bird toenails, but that the bird was created entirely from them. For whatever reason that Ms Ito's toenails grew at an astronomical rate, she'd found a unique way of disposing of them. And somehow, that monster had come to life.
Static fizzed in my pocket and I jumped back from the cage as Fred's desperate voice shouted, “Number one, number one! Are you there? Pick up for god's sake!”
I pressed the com button on the side. “I'm here! What is it?”
“She's coming!”
I froze. The blood seemed to harden in my face and my eyes filled with stars. “What?”
“She's coming! I couldn't stop her! She told me to stop wasting her time. I tried to distract her but she roundhoused me! I think my leg's broken!”
I was horrorstruck. The beast of a woman whom I'd so desired to be with was now an object of nightmare, bearing down on me. To be caught in her room again had consequences I couldn't bear to think about.
“Get out of there!”
I looked at the bird. It was so forlorn that I knew I couldn't let our mission be for nothing. It had spent its life caged up, and it deserved a chance at freedom.
I pulled the bay window wide, and at once an icy wind rushed in. The bird shifted in its cage, and gave a small squawk of satisfaction. There was a clasp on the front to open up the wire door. I dragged the cage towards the
window.
“Okay, bird, here's your chance, now leave us in peace, please,” I said, picking open the clasp and swinging the cage door wide.
The bird stuck its head out and looked around. It took one, then another tentative step, pushing out through the door and stepping on to the window ledge. It looked around, peering down over the edge at the shrubland far below. It lifted one wing, then another.
I know I should have been alarmed at the bits of toenail that dropped off like discarded feathers to land on the floor, but at that point I wasn't thinking clearly.
“Number one!” the walkie-talkie roared again, and then the door burst open.
Ms Ito stood there in all her glory, wild hair igniting her head like flames. She appeared concerned for a moment at the door being unlocked, peering down to look at the key I'd left embedded in the lock on the outside, then her head lifted up and her eyes locked on to me like clamps. I don't think I'd ever seen absolute hatred before, or experienced absolute fear.
“What are you doing with my bird?”
The game was up, I knew it. “I'm setting it free,” I gasped in a pathetically girlish voice.
“You, boy, are just one minute away from a horrific death. I warned you once before. I will not warn you again.”
Under what jurisdiction Ms Ito had the power to threaten me so, I didn't know, but I didn't doubt her intent for a second. There was murder in her eyes.
As she stumped towards me, I glanced back at the bird, sitting huge and spiny on the window ledge, flexing its brittle wings against the wind, and I made my decision.
In the moment Ms Ito lunged for me, the bird issued a deafening cry, flapped its wings and rose up off the window ledge. I leaped after it, hands grabbing it around the ankles, letting it pull me out into the sky. At first we rose, then my weight began to put a strain on it, and we dropped towards the island. The bird squawked and struggled; slowly we began to rise again. I looked back over my shoulder to see Ms Ito watching from the window, a mixture of horror and disbelief on her face.
“Fool!” she shouted after me, and I just caught her voice above the wind. “Do you not see why I kept that monster in a cage?”
I was beginning to find out. As I looked down at the island, small below me, the twin grey squares of the school and the teacher's block sitting like empty TV cases on a patch of wasteground, a sharp rain began to fall.
Only it wasn't rain at all, it was pieces of toenail.
“Oh, God . . . ”
The bird was falling apart.
I didn't know how much time I had left before it disintegrated, but I screamed at it to head for the sea, and it seemed to respond, struggling away from the teacher's block. We drifted over where Fred looked up at me in amazement, towards where Justin and the ninja stood on the cliff top, Justin pointing at something imaginary in the water. As the bird roared with all its might, they both looked up at me.
“Kuwaaaackukuaaakkkk!!!”
I tugged its left leg, trying to turn it that way, away from a sharp outcrop of rocks at the base of the cliff. I didn't fancy my chances in the rough ocean, but I had more hope there than over the jagged teeth snapping up below me. Pieces of toenail flaked off in my hand, and I wondered how long its leg would hold. We were losing height again as it fell apart, but not quickly enough. The bird was more likely to collapse than offer me a comfortable, parachutist's descent.
Waves sloshed below me; the white water called me. It looked so, so cold. I wondered briefly if Ms Ito's bird could make it all the way to the mainland, a distant rise on the horizon.
With a sound like newspaper being crumpled, the bird's left leg gave way, followed quickly by its right. I plummeted towards the ocean, the remains of its feet clutched tightly in my hands.
The water came up quickly, and cold sucked me down into its freezing, dark depths. I gasped in water, then finally broke the surface, looking up to see the remains of Ms Ito's bird raining down on me, pieces of toenail hitting me like sharp, crescent shaped hailstones. Then a wave washed over my head, and everything went dark.
It was the ninja and Justin who fished me out. Using a small motor boat reserved for such emergencies, they dragged my sodden body from the icy water, pieces of Ms Ito's toenails caught in my hair. The rest of the bird was lost to the sea.
I was expelled from Thunder Crack High School for breaking into Ms Ito's private apartment, and for causing criminal damage, which is how they classified the release of the bird. A special helicopter, paid for by my parents, came to pick me up. Father sort of understood why I had done what I did, but I'm not sure mother did. Every time I came home for a holiday from the boarding school they enrolled me in back on the mainland, at some point or other she always muttered something about me having missed my chance.
Justin and Fred were given a daily detention for the rest of the year, but they got to stay. I get emails from them sometimes. Fred told me recently that he's developed a strange attraction for Ms Ito, but he can't explain quite why. I understand entirely; neither could I.
And Justin said that if you go out walking on the shrubland between the teacher's block and the school, you occasionally hear what sounds like a bird's cry, but a lot quieter than before, almost like the wind coming in off the sea. Sometimes, he said, you can't be sure if you heard anything at all.
I know she's got a new bird in there. It just hasn't grown very big yet.
Chris Ward is a writer from Cornwall, England, currently living in Japan where he works as an English teacher. His stories have been published in Midnight Street, AlienSkin, AfterburnSF, and other magazines. This is his first appearance in Weird Tales.
* * *
WENDIGO
by Micaela Morrissette
Dinner was special. The candles were miraculous, emanating a light that went oozing into pores, piercing into strands of hair, that found its way inside the thin glass of the champagne flutes, the rough, quartzy crystal of the punch bowl. Nothing glittered, nothing sparkled, nothing shone. Everything glowed, everything throbbed. The other guests did not smile, but they radiated pulses of tender heat in her direction, until her cheeks were mottled red. Each course in the banquet had an aura that hung heavily over the platter, like steam weighed down with globules of grease, thick particles of oily light.
She swallowed the wine that paused in her mouth, clung there, spreading itself. She swallowed the black soup: thin, sour broth swimming with clots that trailed delicate filaments. She swallowed the tempura of cobra lily, and, inside its cup, the pale, limp moth that seemed to sigh and dissolve on her tongue. When the songbirds were served, her gracious companion, sensing her confusion, placed a steadying hand on the back of her neck and guided her head under the starched napkin. She ate the scorching meat, needled with tiny bones her teeth had splintered. She felt little ruptures where they scratched her throat. Her companion was missing the fifth and second fingertips of his right hand, the entire middle finger of his left. Bluntly, blindly, fondly, the stubs knocked against her skin. The manservant brought the baby octopi in shallow bowls filled with, her host informed the company, vibrio fischeri, which sent a faint gold-green luminescence throughout the water. She dipped an octopus in the spicy sauce and trapped it lightly between her teeth. Its small heavings and sucks brushed against the pads of her cheeks like tiny kisses. She kissed back.
The main course was a roast: mild, slightly stringy. Sweet bursts of fat jetted from the sinews as she chewed. The light in the room was so dense it oppressed her; she could barely see through it. Food filled her stomach like air in a balloon; the heavier she grew, the higher above her chair she seemed to float. Her solicitous companion murmured an inquiry; it was decided they would leave before the dessert. She deposited her hand in that of her host. Rivulets of sweat trickled through the plump seams in his palm. He twinkled and beamed at her with his eye; the side of his face where the eye patch adhered remained stolid. In the car, she sniffed at her fingers, still slick from her host's farewell; they smelled like
earth newly turned over: fresh, rich, heady. The smell seemed to cleanse her palate: her eyelids spasmed in the bottomless night; her stomach wrenched in sudden appetite.
In the morning she woke with a head that felt stuffed with cement, cracking and crumbling against the inside of her skull in jagged pressure. Her bedroom was narrow and spare, the walls shrunk tight around the heat that came shrieking and spitting from the iron radiator. She scrabbled frantically at the window; it screeched open in a flurry of dirty paint chips, and the air shoved in, knocking her aside, gnashing at her shrinking skin. She sank down, flinching at the grit that bit her legs and hands, and entered her stretches. Inflexible, she tore tentatively at her muscles, lunging forward with shallow gasps. Compelling her forehead to the floor, she felt frustration lash up her spine and stab the back of her neck like a handcuff snickering tight around her straining.
The bathroom smelled strongly of the new plastic shower curtain. She brushed with her lips pursed around the handle of the toothbrush, preventing the froth from running out over her chin. Her skin was getting worse. Her face, which at sixteen had been so pure and watertight, was at thirty-three beginning to boil and leak. Her virginity, which had been withered, dry, and hard, was beginning to rot and extrude. Like a 1,000-year-old egg, it had softened, become pungent, delicious, disgusting. She tapped against her pubis with one finger. She flattened her palm against her stomach. “Somewhere in there,” she said, “like a little dead baby.”
She hobbled out in her matted pink robe, cleared the table of its ketchup-caked refuse, cooked three strips of bacon, which she ate with the fat still gelatinous and slightly cool. Her professional wardrobe was consistent: slacks, with leggings underneath to intervene against the scratch of the wool; a cardigan; another cardigan.
On the bus she leaned her head against the window so the jolts of the motor and the road chattered her teeth together. She tried to give up her seat to an expecting mother, but the woman didn't want to sit there. When she entered her cubicle there was an unfamiliar odor: creamy, sweet, powdery. Later in the day she could only smell it by whirling her head suddenly to the side. Her new colleague across the aisle caught her doing it and laughed. He had laughed the day before, too, at her dispersal of pillows: one on the seat of her folding chair, one at her back, two under her feet, one on her desk for her elbow to rest on. He had a gaping laugh, this new colleague, she could see the hole at the back of his mouth, he opened that wide. It was delightful. She thought of smiling at him, but resisted. Her smile, she knew, was crooked: it had a forced quality. Nonetheless, pleasure rocked through her in slow waves at the trust implicit in her new colleague's exposed gullet. She settled for beaming at him with quiet kindliness. When she swung around, she checked her beam in her little round mirror. There was a grimness to it, in the set of the jaw, but something in the eyes, she thought, that was accurate.
Weird Tales, Volume 352 Page 9
