Tegan had had enough, by then, of conversations-not-had and questions-not-answered. “Do you ever see her?” she asked. Tegan dreamt about Danielle once a month. Usually she would just walk into a dream about something else—rescuing drowning kittens, running away from an active shooter—and just end it, the way a lightning storm might fry a television.
“She’s usually waiting for me down below.” He leaned back toward the headrest, drumming his fingers against the wheel. “I’m sure that’s how it’ll all end, sooner or later.”
A sudden night chill wafted into the truck. “Whatever happened to Jon and Matty?”
But Danielle operated in a world without institutions, without human concepts of justice or even time. Of course humans still tried to exert their rules; what else but ritual could keep terror at bay? “Nothing? They moved away a long time ago. We’re not exactly friends.”
They passed a group of men dragging someone out of Sparrow’s and into a red pick-up truck. Emory slowed down; he couldn’t drive past anything anymore. Tegan caught a glimpse of the unfortunate, lingering on the bloody edge of unconsciousness. It was Kevin Roth. Dyke dyke dyke ping-ponged between her ears. Pony Bergman climbed in after him with a butcher’s focused enthusiasm and noticed Emory’s truck idling like an uncertain child in the next lane. “Hey, Sauer,” Pony said. “Tegan, we thought you died.”
Tegan mashed her back against the seat, trying to make herself small. Emory shouted across her body, “What are you guys doing?”
“Giving Pervy McRapist here his just desserts! Don’t want another
Danielle on the loose!” Pony looked up, grinned. “Wanna come?”
Emory rolled up the window and drove away. They called the cops, though Officer Franke didn’t sound like he was paying attention, and Emory doubted anything would be done until after it was over. Kevin had roofied a girl in high school, supposedly—no one knew who, but everyone was sure something had happened. It’s Kevin Roth, as their mother said, and that was enough. Hunters found his body in the woods a few days later, his face looking like frozen grapefruit pulp.
It was a good month, otherwise. Danielle kept her manifestations to a minimum—mostly just creaks and shadows—and they managed to get their mother out of bed and into the car to tour the town’s gaudy Christmas lights and hokey glowing inflatables to the shaky soundtrack of the First Shepherd Church’s Christmas Eve service. Their mother fell asleep listening to Tegan and Emory argue over gin rummy and she was smiling, the fire lighting up her face.
And then came the storm. It took the town by surprise: no one even had time to buy supplies. It was forecasted to taper off on the morning of Day 29 with Danielle but then it didn’t: it got worse. They lost power and they didn’t have a ham radio, just cell phones with dying batteries, and although their mother insisted that someone would be along to pick up Danielle, that there was some kind of emergency plan, no one ever did. The drifts blocked their door and made the street where Emory had indeed taught Tegan how to drive a stick shift a churning white sea. They hadn’t had a storm that bad since the Valentine’s Day Ice Storm that killed their father, though nobody wanted to say it; Emory was the man of the house now, and he was trembling.
“We have to get her out of here.” Emory whispered. He pointed the flashlight at Danielle’s coffin. “It’ll be thirty days at eight.” He pointed the flashlight at his watch. “It’s four.”
“And take her where? The Voigts are in Utah. Half the houses on this street are empty.”
“The Engels down the street. But we have to start digging.”
They dug. They dug with spatulas and the fireplace shovel, though snow kept falling and all the empty houses stood dark and silent as giant tombstones around them. Tegan lost track of time and then suddenly Emory was shaking her, yelling, “I’m gonna go back to get her! Keep digging!” As he staggered back to the house she realized that it had to be close to eight—he had to be scared of leaving Danielle in the house with their mother—and a surge of panic-fueled adrenaline pushed Tegan into a frenzy, screaming at her arms to swivel faster, to burn less. By the time Emory came back with Danielle wrapped in a quilt they were still two houses away, and the Engels’ house was dark. Tegan screamed until she felt something in her vocal chords snap.
Emory squeezed her shoulder. “You gotta go now! Go back to the house!”
Her arms kept moving like pinwheels. “Shut up. Shut up. Just keep digging.”
“Tegan!” He wrested the fireplace shovel away from her. “You need to go!”
Behind him, Danielle was a still-silent lump on the ground, her face obscured by the quilt, but her black hair was swirling free in the wind. The strands were floating, in fact, as if she was underwater instead of buried in a blizzard, as if the body itself was brimming with energy from another plane. Not for the first time, Tegan wondered where human spirits go after death.
“I can’t leave you like this,” she whispered, though her hands were shaking so much that she wasn’t sure they’d be able to hold a shovel if she had one.
“Yes, you can,” said Emory, and to her horror, when he gave her a push she slowly backed away. Perhaps she had simply lost the strength to actively resist. She nearly tripped over Danielle and then Emory reached down and picked the body up, urging her to go, go. Then he carefully hoisted Danielle’s dead weight over his shoulder and kept digging—the snow flew like big globs of wet powdered sugar behind him but it was much too slow, much too little.
And then their mother’s quilt shifted and the limp neck stiffened and the dangling head started to lift. When black eyes emerged out of an icy face and fixed upon Tegan, she let out an involuntary cry. She heard Emory yelling, “No, no, no!”, saw him falling on his back as Danielle tried to clamber over him, but all she could feel was her heart slowing to big, soft wallops the longer Danielle looked at her, because Danielle was the abyss. Her mouth and eyes were holes in a weak veil that separated this vile world from the even more predatory one that comes after. She had scratched them out herself. She wanted them to see. She wanted them to know.
I want to show you something, Danielle was saying, and Tegan was beginning to see—her heart pinched as she saw her father wandering in that abyss, a blind beggar pawing at the storm—but Emory never let Danielle come any closer. “No,” he said to her, over and over. “No, you look at me. Look at me! I’ll carry your burden. I’m enough. I can do it. I can take it.”
The abyss vanished. She saw Emory at one of his old games, running alone in the backfield with the ball in his hand, looking desperately for a receiver as the roar of the frightened crowd swelled, finally lobbing it up because time had run out, Hail Mary, Full of Grace—and then she opened her eyes. The crumbling snow-ditch was still dark— the Engels never did turn on their lights—but by Emory’s flashlight she could see that Danielle was now prying open her brother’s mouth, forcing her hand down his throat, starting with the nails and then the knuckles and then the elbow and then the shoulder, and finally folding up like a little bird so she could burrow the rest of her way in, finding the spaces inside him to fill—the bones to wrap around, the skin to slide under, the muscles to tear into and spread apart. All these things fade.
But other things last. Mostly, the memory of watching Emory weep beneath the stalactite of his own mortality, his own weakness.
Her brave big brother. She had never seen him cry before.
PAUL TREMBLAY
Something About Birds
THE NEW DARK REVIEW PRESENTS
“SOMETHING ABOUT WILLIAM WHEATLEY: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM WHEATLEY BY BENJAMIN D. PIOTROSKWI
William Wheatley’s The Artist Starve is a collection of five loosely interconnected novelettes and novellas published in 1971 by University of Massachusetts Press (the book having won its Juniper Prize for Fiction). In an era that certainly pre-dated usage of YA as a marketing category, his stories were from the POV of young adults, ranging from the fourteen-year-old Maggie Holtz who runs away from home
(taking her six-year-old brother Thomas into the local woods) during the twelve days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the last story, a near-future extrapolation of the Vietnam War having continued into the year 1980, the draft age dropped to sixteen, and an exhausted and radiation-sick platoon of teenagers conspires to kill the increasingly unhinged Sergeant Thomas Holtz. The Artist Starve was a prescient and visceral (if not too earnest) book embracing chaotic social and global politics of the early 1970’s. An unexpected critical and commercial smash, particularly on college campuses, The Artist Starve was one of three books forwarded to the Pulitzer Prize Board, who ultimately decided no award for the year 1971. That The Artist Starve is largely forgotten whereas the last short story he ever wrote, “Something About Birds,” oft-reprinted and first published in a DIY zine called Steam in 1977 continues to stir debate and win admirers within the horror/weird fiction community is an irony that is not lost upon the avuncular, seventy-five year old Wheatley.
BP: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Wheatley.
WW: The pleasure is all mine, Benjamin.
BP: Before we discuss “Something About Birds,” which is my all time favorite short story, by the way—
WW: You’re too kind. Thank you.
BP: I wanted to ask if The Artist Starve is going to be reprinted. I’ve heard rumors.
WW: You have? Well, that would be news to me. While I suppose it would be nice to have your work rediscovered by a new generation, I’m not holding my breath, nor am I actively seeking to get the book back in print. It already served its purpose. It was an important book when it came out, I think, but it is a book very much of its time. So much so I’m afraid it wouldn’t translate very well to the now.
BP: There was a considerable gap, six-years, between The Artist Starve and “Something About Birds.” In the interim, were you working on other writing projects or projects that didn’t involve writing?
WW: When you get to my age—oh that sounds terribly cliché, doesn’t it? Let me rephrase: When you get to my perspective, six years doesn’t seem as considerable. Point taken, however. I’ll try to be brief. I will admit to some churlish, petulant behavior, as given the overwhelming response to my first book I expected the publishing industry to then roll out the red carpet to whatever it was I might’ve scribbled on a napkin. And maybe that would’ve happened had I won the Pulitzer, yes? Instead, I took the no award designation as a terrible, final judgment on my work. Silly I know, but at the risk of sounding paranoid, the no award announcement all but shut down further notice for the book. I spent a year or so nursing my battered ego and speaking at colleges and universities before even considering writing another story. I then spent more than two years researching the burgeoning fuel crisis and overpopulation fears. I travelled quite a bit as well: Ecuador, Peru, Japan, India, South Africa. While travelling I started bird watching, of course. Total novice, and I remain one. Anyway, I’d planned to turn my research into a novel of some sort. That book never materialized.
I never even wrote an opening paragraph. I’m not a novelist. I never was. To make a long, not all that exciting story short, upon returning home and very much travel weary, I became interested in antiquities and bought the very same antique shop that is below us now in 1976. I wrote “Something About Birds” shortly after opening the shop, thinking it might be the first story in another cycle, all stories involving birds in some way. The story itself was unlike anything I’d ever written; oblique, yes, bizarre to many, I’m sure, but somehow, it hits closer to an ineffable truth than anything else I’ve written. To my great disappointment, the story was summarily rejected by all of the glossy magazines and I was ignorant of the genre fiction market so I decided to allow a friend who was in a local punk band to publish it in her zine. I remain grateful and pleased that the story has had many other lives since.
BP: Speaking for all the readers who adore “Something About Birds,” let me say that we’d kill for a short story cycle built around it.
WW: Oh, I’ve given up on writing. “Something About Birds” is a fitting conclusion to my little writing career as that story continues to do its job, Benjamin.
*
Mr. Wheatley says, “That went well, didn’t it?”
Wheatley is shorter than Ben but not short, broad in the chest and shoulders, a wrestler’s build. His skin is pallid and his dark brown eyes focused, attentive, and determined. His hair has thinned but he still has most of it, and most of it is dark, almost black. He wears a tweed sports coat, gray wool pants, plum-colored sweater vest, white shirt, a slate bow tie that presses against his throat tightly as though it were gauze being applied to a wound. He smiled throughout the interview. He is smiling now.
“You were great, Mr. Wheatley. I cannot thank you enough for the opportunity to talk you about my favorite story.”
“You are too kind.” Wheatley drums his fingers on the dining room table at which they are sitting, and narrows his eyes at Ben, as though trying to bring him into better focus. “Before you leave, Benjamin, I have something for you.”
Ben swirls the last of his room-temperature Earl Grey tea around the bottom of his cup and decides against finishing it. Ben stands as Wheatley stands, and he checks his pocket for his phone and his recorder. “Oh, please, Mr. Wheatley, you’ve been more than gracious—”
“Nonsense. You are doing me a great service with the interview. It won’t be but a moment. I will not take no for an answer.” Wheatley continues to talk as he disappears into one of the three other rooms with closed doors that spoke out from the wheel of the impeccable and brightly lit living/dining room. The oval dining room table is the centerpiece of the space, and is made of a darkly stained wood and has a single post as thick as a telephone pole. The wall adjacent to the kitchen houses a built-in bookcase, the shelves filled to capacity, the tops perched with vases and brass candelabras. On the far wall rectangular, monolithic windows, their blue drapes pulled wide open, vault toward the height of the cathedral ceiling, their advance halted by the crown molding. The third floor view overlooks Dunham Street, and when Ben stands in front of a window he can see the red awning of Wheatley’s antique shop below. The room is beautiful, smartly decorated, surely full of antiques that Ben is unable to identify; his furniture and décor experience doesn’t extend beyond IKEA and his almost pathological inability to put anything together more complex than a nightstand.
Wheatley reemerges from behind a closed door. He has an envelope in one hand, and something small and strikingly red cupped in the palm of the other.
“I hope you’re willing to indulge an old man’s eccentricity.” He pauses and looks around the room. “I thought I brought up a stash of small white paper bags. I guess I didn’t. Benjamin, forgive the Swiss-cheese memory. We can get a bag on our way out if you prefer.
Anyway, I’d like you to have this. Hold out your hands, please.”
“What is it?”
Wheatley gently places a bird head into Ben’s hands. The head is small; the size of a half-dollar coin. Its shock of red feathers is so bright, a red he’s never seen, only something living could be that vivid, and for a moment Ben is not sure if he should pat the bird head and coo soothingly or spastically flip the thing out of his hands before it nips him. The head has a prominent, brown-yellow beak, proportionally thick, and as long as the length of the head from the top to its base. The beak is outlined in shorter black feathers that curl around the eyes as well. The bird’s pitch black irises float in a sea of a more subdued red.
“Thank you, Mr. Wheatley. I don’t know what to say. Is it? Is it real?”
“This is a Red-Headed Barbet from northern South America. Lovely creature. Its bill is described as horn-colored. It looks like a horn, doesn’t it? It feeds on fruit but it also eats insects as well. Fierce little bird, one befitting your personality, I think, Benjamin.”
“Wow. Thank you. I can’t accept this. This is too much—”
“Nonsense. I insist.” He then gives Ben an
envelope. “An invitation to an all-too infrequent social gathering I host here. There will be six of us, you and I included. It’s in—oh my—three days. Short notice, I know. The date, time, and instructions are inside the envelope. You must bring the Red-Headed Barbet with you, Benjamin, it is your ticket to admittance, or you will not be allowed entrance.” Wheatley chuckles softly and Ben does not know whether or not he is serious.
*
BP: There’s so much wonderful ambiguity and potential for different meanings. Let’s start in the beginning, with the strange funeral procession of “Something About Birds.” An adult, Mr. H_____ is presumably the father of one of the children, who slips up and calls him “Dad”.
WW: Yes, of course. “It’s too hot for costumes, Dad.”
BP: That line is buried in a pages long stream-of-consciousness paragraph with the children excitedly describing the beautiful day and the desiccated, insect ridden body of the dead bird. It’s an effective juxtaposition and wonderfully disorienting use of omniscient POV, and I have to admit, when I first read the story, I didn’t see the word “Dad” there. I was surprised to find it on the second read. Many readers report having had the same experience. Did you anticipate that happening?
WW: I like when stories drop important clues in a nonchalant or non-dramatic way. That he is the father of one, possibly more of the children, and that he is simply staging this funeral, or celebration, for a bird, a beloved family pet, and all the potential strangeness and darkness is the result of the imagination of the children is one possible read. Or maybe that is all pretend too, part of the game, and Mr. H_____ is someone else entirely. I’m sorry, I’m not going to give you definitive answers, and I will purposefully lead you astray if you let me.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 36
