The Bird Eater Page 19

  His gaze snapped to the window—just for half a second,

  half a second,

  just to check.

  The kid wasn’t on the opposite side of the street anymore. He was in the diner’s parking lot, standing on a parking curb almost exactly the way he had at the truck stop. Aaron clamped his eyes shut—

  don’t look

  —his teeth chattering inside his mouth—

  it isn’t real

  —his entire body trembling beneath his clothes.

  He swallowed against the lump in his throat, looked again only to see a palm hit the window, mere centimeters of glass separating him from the outside world.

  He jumped, a strained mew sliding from his lungs, but it was only Eric trying to be funny, not having the slightest clue that he’d just scared the shit out of someone on the brink of madness.

  Eric stepped inside the diner, the little bell at the corner of the door marking his entrance, giving an angel its wings. He made a beeline for Aaron’s booth, both intrigued and a little worried. Aaron looked like hell since he’d arrived in town, but this was a whole new level of not looking good. It seemed impossible, but Eric swore Aaron looked even worse now than he had thirty minutes before. It was the lighting. Had to be.

  Sliding into the booth, Eric frowned at his friend; and when Aaron failed to look up from his hands, he grabbed a menu, inspected it momentarily, placed it back on to the table, and cleared his throat.

  “Okay, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  Aaron opened his mouth as if to speak, but snapped it shut as soon as the waitress approached.

  “Heya, Hazel,” Eric greeted.

  “Morning, sweetie. How’ve you been?”

  “Can’t complain.” He shrugged. “You?”

  “Busy as always, honey. You boys ready to order?”

  “The usual for me,” Eric told her, then shot Aaron a glance.

  “I’m not hungry,” Aaron murmured.

  “He’s not hungry,” Eric echoed, offering the woman he’d known for the better part of his life an apologetic smile.

  Hazel glanced to Aaron in a maternal sort of way. “You sure you don’t want anything, darlin’?”

  “Yeah,” Aaron replied. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll leave a menu just in case.” Hazel plucked up one of the menus, left the other where it was. “Back with your coffee and OJ in a jiff,” she told Eric, then pivoted on the soles of her therapeutic shoes.

  Eric watched Aaron pull his coffee toward himself like a child pulling a favorite toy or a blanket closer in search of comfort.

  “You don’t remember Hazel Murphy?” he asked after a moment.

  Aaron shook his head at his mug.

  “She and Edie used to be close,” Eric said, trying to jog Aaron’s memory. “Them two and my mom would always get tipsy at my parents’ Christmas parties. Hazel was the one who nearly tipped over our Christmas tree.”

  Nothing.

  Eric furrowed his eyebrows and leaned back, allowing his attention to settle on his friend. “So,” he said, waiting a beat to see if Aaron would pick up the conversational slack. When he didn’t, Eric filled the space between them with the obligatory question: “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I think I might be losing my mind.”

  “Is this about the crow?” Eric asked. “Because it’s really not that big a deal. Birds fly into the store windows all the—”

  “It’s not about the crow.”

  Eric pressed his lips together in a tight line, shifted in the booth seat, waited to see if Aaron would continue.

  He didn’t.

  “Then what, the vandalism?”

  “The house.” Aaron spoke beneath his breath.

  “The house,” Eric repeated, leaned forward on his elbows, pressed his knuckles against his mouth. Finally, he sighed and let his hand fall to the tabletop. “Look, I didn’t mean for those stories to freak you out. If I had known they would screw with you so bad…”

  “They didn’t screw with me,” Aaron snapped, his voice a little too loud.

  Eric blinked.

  Hazel returned at precisely the wrong moment, setting Eric’s coffee and juice in front of him before giving him a private look. Is everything okay? Eric nodded and took a sip of OJ, but the truth of it was, he wasn’t sure if things were okay or not; and the longer he sat there, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was wrong.

  Contemplating indifference made him feel like an asshole—he and Aaron had been best friends, after all—but that had been a long time ago. Yes, Eric had been thrilled to see him again. He had been bowled over, hardly able to believe that a ghost from such a distant past could simply reappear without warning, but he had expected drinking and revelry and shooting the shit around a bonfire. He hadn’t expected his childhood friend to be fine one moment and coming apart at the seams the next.

  Aaron shoved his fingers through his hair and stared out the window. He looked harried, on the edge.

  “Maybe you were right,” Eric said after Hazel abandoned them for another table. “Maybe we should do this somewhere else. We can go back out to Stonehenge after my shift. I’ll bring some of that fancy microbrew you like. Or I can swing by your place…”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “What is?” Eric shook his head, not getting it.

  “I’m not going back there,” Aaron said. “I’m done.”

  “Done renovating?”

  “Done, period.”

  Eric opened his mouth, hesitated as he searched for the right words, then sighed and slumped in his seat. “You’re totally freaking me out,” he admitted. “I’m tempted to drop you off at the clinic so you don’t start picking people off.” He meant it as a joke, but Aaron didn’t smile, and Eric squirmed in his booth seat, suddenly uncomfortable.

  Aaron leaned forward, his chest flush with the edge of the table, his eyes fixed on Eric’s face. “I’m seeing things.”

  Eric didn’t say anything for a moment, only stared into Aaron’s face, unsure whether to call his bluff or take him seriously. Eventually, he managed a two-word response.

  “Like hallucinations?”

  “Like in my dreams,” Aaron murmured so other tables wouldn’t overhear. “And then in real life, manifested.”

  “What?” Eric actually cracked a grin, momentarily convinced this whole thing was an elaborate prank. Good one, he thought. Let’s see just how gullible the NAPS guy is. But his smile faded when Aaron didn’t smile back. “Wait.” He looked around to see whether anyone was overhearing this, then looked back to his friend, dubious. “You’re being serious?”

  “I thought I was just going nuts. But last night…” Aaron stared down at his cooling coffee, weighing his words. “I’ve been seeing this kid, that kid I told you about…”

  “Fuck that kid,” Eric murmured. He didn’t see what the big deal was. Kids were everywhere. It was summertime. They were out of school, crawling through the trees, exploring and causing trouble, doing what kids did.

  “Yeah, except I don’t know if he’s actually real.”

  Eric stared, really stared at the guy sitting across from him, and again, he felt like at any moment he’d be caught on Candid Camera. He and Aaron had loved that show. They had run around town trying to prank total strangers for an entire summer outside his dad’s store. They had gotten into the biggest trouble of their lives when Eric had come up with the brilliant idea of taking eggs up onto Banner’s roof. Bombs away! His pop had nearly murdered him; grounded for life, all because Mrs. Treadwell had gotten some egg on her brand-new JCPenney shoes.

  “Aaron, I…”

  “There’s a kid wandering around on my property, Eric. How did he get there? Why is he there at all?”

  “He
lives on your street?” It was a logical conclusion. “I mean, I get it, Old Mill looks abandoned, but people have been hit hard around here. The job market keeps getting worse and worse. Some people don’t have money for food, let alone cash to fork over to a bank.”

  Aaron looked pained, as though Eric’s logic was physically hurting him, but Eric couldn’t help it. This was crazy. This was insane.

  “Just last year there was a whole thing on the news about squatters and how bad that sort of thing is getting, especially in small towns like this. Entire families just pick an abandoned house and live in it. No heat, no lights, no water, but it’s better than the street.”

  “I’m the only house on that street that’s occupied,” Aaron murmured.

  “You can’t know that for sure.”

  “I’m telling you, they’re empty.”

  “I doubt it. Whoever that kid is, he’s probably just bored. There’s nothing to do out there, he wanders into your yard because you’re new and interesting and you live in the house.”

  “The haunted house,” Aaron said flatly.

  Eric went silent, not sure whether to insist the house wasn’t haunted, or whether to do the NAPS thing and preserve at least some possibility that it was.

  “He came inside.”

  Eric froze mid-sip, his glass of orange juice still pressed to his bottom lip.

  “I saw a shadow shift beneath my bedroom door, like someone was standing there, thinking about opening it or waiting for me to notice. When I got up to see what it was, that little fucker was standing at the top of the stairs, waiting.”

  “Holy shit. He was just…just standing there?”

  “He had my old baseball bat,” Aaron said. “Except that I don’t know how he got it, because that baseball bat was in my room, and I had been sleeping in my room with the door closed. The door squeaks. I would have heard him if he had come inside to get it. But that didn’t matter. He still had it. He hadn’t come in and somehow he still had it.”

  “What the hell did he want with the baseball bat?”

  Aaron shook his head.

  “What?” Eric pressed. “Did he assault you with it?”

  Aaron breathed out what sounded like an aggravated sigh, as if incensed by the mere memory of it. “I followed him downstairs, and I grabbed the bat. I wrenched it out of his fucking hands and it was, like, as soon as I touched it I was so pissed…so pissed about everything that had happened up until now.”

  Eric swallowed, not liking where this was going. Suddenly, a worst-case scenario flashed through his head. Aaron had come to Banner’s looking like a wild man because Aaron had killed a boy. He had brained him, and now he was about to ask Eric to come back home with him and help dispose of the body, to help throw him into the woods the way he had disposed of that goddamn bird.

  “You…” His heart tripped over its own beat. “Aaron, you didn’t, like, hurt him, did you?”

  “I killed him.”

  The response was so blunt, so unexpected, that Eric jolted back in his seat.

  He felt every muscle in his body go rigid.

  His teeth buzzed inside his skull.

  This wasn’t really happening.

  Aaron was joking. He was fucking joking.

  “And then I turned around, and he was alive again, laughing at me.”

  Eric remembered to breathe.

  He felt sick—the same sick he’d felt when Mike and Craig had found Eric’s brand-new Firebird unlocked in Banner’s parking lot and decided to move it across the street. The same sick he’d felt when Barney had gotten out of the yard without his collar and tags only to find him sitting on the front step, confused as to why Eric hadn’t left open the front door.

  Eric leaned forward, his elbows hit the table, his fingers rubbed his forehead as if trying to absorb what Aaron was saying, giving his nerves a moment to recover from the initial shock, and before he could stop himself, he let out a single, incredulous laugh.

  Hazel arrived with Eric’s food. Eric leaned back in his seat.

  “Can I get you fellas anything else?” she asked.

  They both mutely shook their heads.

  She raised an eyebrow and turned away, taking the spare menu she’d left on the table with her. She’d probably phone Eric’s mother later, and then Eric would have to explain to her why he looked so zoned out that morning.

  Aaron killed a kid, but then he said the kid was still alive, and I think it was a joke but I’m not really sure. I think he may be certifiable. I’ve never met a real-life crazy person before.

  He blinked down at his food, but didn’t make a move for his fork. Having lost his appetite, he shoved a corner of wheat toast into his mouth for lack of anything better to do. It was a hallucination. Aaron was insane. And yet Eric was the one who felt like he was going crazy. He was the one who was supposed to believe in this stuff, and yet here he was, thinking about how it was impossible, how it was completely nuts.

  Looking down at his plate of food with mild disgust, he found himself sliding out of the booth to stand by the table.

  “I need to take a leak,” he said.

  He needed to get away from that entire conversation, because it was freaking him out, worming its way into his skull, into the soft tissue of his brain. Not waiting for Aaron to respond, he simply walked away, weaved around tables toward the restroom, the acid of the orange juice making his stomach burn.

  Shoving open the bathroom door, Eric stepped up to a urinal, unzipped his fly, and thought back to the first time he’d ever heard someone claim that they had seen ghosts out at Aaron’s place. It hadn’t been long after Aaron had vanished. The kids who had been dragged to Edith Holbrook’s funeral alongside their parents were the ones to start the stories. They had been the ones who’d watched Edie’s casket lowered into the ground; they had been the ones who’d witnessed Aaron’s absence firsthand. Both Eric and Cheri were watching Ren and Stimpy when Mike had made the announcement—Aaron hadn’t been at the service; he had been missing. Cheri burst into a fit of inconsolable tears, running out of Eric’s house with such dramatic flair it had reminded him of the girlie, sobby movies his mom watched while his dad was at work.

  Less than a month later, ghost stories started getting handed down from kid to kid. Someone’s sister had gone out to Holbrook House with her boyfriend and a six-pack of beer and they had seen someone in one of the windows; some guys had gone out to Old Mill to shoot guns at glass bottles and they got spooked by someone in the trees. Eric mutely listened to the stories for months until one evening, sitting around the dinner table, he flat-out asked his mother if ghosts were real. Gina Banner had sighed, shaken her head, and threatened to ban him from all the horror movies he watched up in his room. Eric never brought up ghosts to his mother again. Gina had no idea NAPS even existed. As far as Eric was concerned, she never would.

  Cheri, plagued by Aaron’s absence, had heard the stories too, some of which suggested that Aaron was the one haunting the house. It was too attractive a mystery, and Eric had been drawn in. He’d been obsessed with the paranormal for the better part of his high school career; that was when he had started collecting weird gadgets—EMF meters and devices that were supposed to record electronic voice phenomena. He would never admit it—not in a million years, especially not to Aaron—but he had been one of the many to crawl through the house’s broken windows, but he’d only done it once.

  It had been years after Aaron disappeared, but when Eric had seen Aaron’s room, the flood of memories nearly paralyzed him with dread. He had run out of there like he’d literally seen a ghost, and when his friends had followed, that was exactly what he told them: not that he had been overwhelmed by the memory of his best friend, crushed by the weight of the unknown, but that he had seen a goddamn ghost, adding to the legend of the house at the end of Old Mill Road. But that was all it was: a story, made-up fi
ction that one kid would claim and everyone else would believe. What Aaron was claiming didn’t make sense. After spending years in graveyards and abandoned buildings, Eric had yet to capture any concrete, scientific proof that ghosts could actually exist.

  Eric zipped up his pants and flushed the urinal, washed his hands, and trudged back into the dining room with determination. Aaron hadn’t moved. He was still staring out the plate glass window, one of his hands covering his mouth as if holding back a scream.

  Eric stared down at his plate of cold food, abruptly pulled his wallet from his back pocket, and tossed a handful of bills onto the table.

  “Do you have any proof?” he asked.

  Aaron stared at him for a moment, his face sallow, drained of all energy, and then he nodded faintly in reply.

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s go,” he said, abandoning his booth seat. “If you’ve got it, I want to see.”

  Every few seconds, Aaron’s eyes flitted from the road to the rearview mirror. He was half convinced that Eric would think better of the whole thing and stop tailing him at any second. Aaron wasn’t sure what he’d do if Eric veered off in an alternate direction; he needed to show someone the tape, needed to see Eric’s reaction, sure that as soon as horrified realization—or possibly enthralled fascination—drifted across his friend’s face, Aaron would be free of the ever-pressing weight of possible insanity.

  His worry over Eric losing interest was unfounded; Eric never put more than a few car lengths between their bumpers, and by the time the gravel driveway crunched beneath Aaron’s tires, he felt strangely revived—his fear and disbelief numbed by a newfound sense of conviction and self-assurance. He wasn’t crazy. These things were happening. He had documentation, and more important, he had someone to show it to, someone who would take one look at it and validate all of his fears.

  Yes, this house is haunted, Eric would say. I should know, I’ve been ghost hunting all my life. I run my own society. I know this stuff.

  Eric was a believer, and that meant he was open to seeing the same things Aaron saw—shifting shadows, figures in the trees. Because that was one thing Evangeline’s infatuation with the paranormal had taught him: the ones who believed were more receptive to the other side.