The Bird Eater Read online

  It was the boy who had vacantly stared at him through the diner window, the kid who had appeared in the interior shadows of the old high school, the same boy Aaron had bludgeoned with a baseball bat only to see him miraculously spring back to life.

  The boy continued to move forward, a ghost of a smile playing at his lips. He stopped only to sweep his gaze across the floor, taking in the dead and gutted crow, the headless starlings that littered the hardwood. When he looked back up at Aaron, that faint grin spread into a sickeningly saccharine smile that seemed to arch from ear to ear.

  Aaron’s Zen-like calm was suddenly shattered.

  Seeing that leer so close, he exhaled a yell and skittered backward across the floor.

  He couldn’t breathe, both lungs seemingly collapsed inside his chest. He stared up at the kid who now loomed above him, the boy seeming much taller than he should have been.

  “Where’s Ryder?” Aaron croaked out the question in a dry, breathless whisper.

  The boy tipped his head to the side, his smile temporarily muddled by confusion.

  “Where is he?” Aaron asked, his tone strained, pleading. “Let me see my son. Just let me see him, or take me to him…whatever you want to do, whatever it takes.”

  The boy leaned forward, so close to Aaron’s face he could smell the stench of rotten meat on the kid’s breath.

  Aaron winced, squeezed his eyes shut so hard he saw stars, his heart banging around inside the cage of his chest.

  With the kid’s face still pulled into that gruesome clown mask of amusement, his hand shot out and grabbed Aaron by the throat. Aaron was yanked forward with inexplicable force, the touch kicking out what little air he’d managed to pull in like a punch to the stomach. He gasped, tried to struggle but he couldn’t move. It was as if the boy had a venomous touch, stabbing him through with an invisible proboscis, poisoning him with a paralytic toxin.

  The kid sneered mere inches from his face.

  His pulse thudded beneath the crushing grip of the boy’s hand.

  The kid giggled as he kept his hold steady, squeezing the last remaining bit of disbelief from Aaron’s veins.

  Aaron’s peripheral vision began to blur.

  The room closed in as he struggled for breath.

  There was a flash somewhere, distant, like a blinking light.

  A police cruiser. The whirling lights of an ambulance in the rain. Wet asphalt and crushed safety glass glinting beneath a streetlight. His chest heaving in and out. Something slamming against his ribs again and again.

  Aaron surfaced from the dark long enough to see the boy’s face still close to his own.

  I needed you once, but I don’t need you no more.

  Aaron could hear the words, knew they were coming from the kid despite the boy’s mouth not forming words.

  “Where’s Ryder?” Aaron choked out the words, his voice sandpapery hoarse.

  The boy leered at him.

  Don’t you see my name tag? he hissed.

  “Where’s Ryder?” Aaron screamed.

  I’m right here, the kid sneered.

  But it couldn’t be.

  It didn’t make sense.

  I needed you once, the boy repeated, but I don’t need you no more.

  Aaron’s eyes widened as the kid pulled back his free hand.

  He felt a scream clamor up his throat as small, bloodied fingers danced across his face.

  The boy pried Aaron’s mouth open with sticky digits, that glint of vindictive mischief ever present in his eyes, and before Aaron could make a sound, the kid’s hand slithered past Aaron’s teeth, past his tongue and tonsils, down into the blackness of his throat.

  No matter how hard Cheri mashed the gas pedal, her Ford wouldn’t go fast enough; and no matter how hard she tried to block her fatalistic thoughts, she couldn’t help but picture the worst. Aaron had been in bad shape, what with the booze and the antianxiety meds. The fact that he had those meds at all would have made her feel better if he hadn’t told her they had stopped working—because what did someone do if their medication was no longer effective? Spiral into fits of lunacy, she thought, then momentarily squeezed her eyes shut and whispered, “Oh God.”

  That was when a single, selfish thought wormed its way into her brain: What if Aaron did go insane? What would all that girlish longing and commitment get her—a raving madman still in love with his estranged wife; a hysterical mourner obsessed with the dead? What if, when she got to the house, he had gone completely nuts and had to be sent away? What if he ended up spending the rest of his life in an asylum? Miles was gone. She’d thrown away her life, her security. She’d end up toiling away at Banner’s as a cashier—a job Eric would give her out of pity, she was sure—she’d grow old with a fake smile plastered across her face, gritting her teeth down to powder while her every thought would double back to Aaron, to how their life should have been.

  She had kept him from disappearing, but he’d slipped away regardless.

  She had tried to save him, but she had been too late.

  “Don’t think like that,” she said, speaking into the silence of the car. “Don’t you think like that.”

  But she had to think like that.

  She hated herself for it, but this was her life.

  She didn’t want to spend it alone.

  Slowing the car, she squinted at the little hatchback wrapped around a tree. Something about seeing the hood crumpled in on itself ignited her already raging panic. What if whoever had been the driver had crashed because Aaron had run out into the road? What if Aaron had timed it just right, crouched in the trees, waited for someone to drive down that lonesome street so he could leap into their headlights? It seemed crazy, improbable, but was it really? Aaron had tried to end Miles with a baseball bat. He’d bailed out of the motel despite Cheri asking him to stay where he was. He had looked at her as though she had transformed into a monster on the beach of Bull Shoals Lake. She should have called Eric from the motel, had him meet her in front of room number five. She should have never left Aaron alone.

  Cheri blew past the Peugeot, her fingers twisting against the wheel.

  She took the turn into Aaron’s driveway so sharply that she nearly rammed the front end of her car into the back of Eric’s Firebird. Cheri slammed her high-heeled shoe against the brake pedal, the car throwing her forward in her seat. She was out the door before it could throw her back.

  Eric’s here with him, she told herself. It’s going to be fine. You’re freaking out for nothing.

  Except that those thoughts did nothing to soothe her nerves. She ran across the front yard, nearly stumbled when one of her heels stabbed into the ground, and rambled up the front porch steps as fast as she could. She didn’t knock, simply wrapped her hand around the knob and gave the front door a push, but it was locked. Balling her hand up into a fist, she banged on the door.

  “Aaron!”

  Cupping her hands against the window, she tried to see inside.

  “Eric? Someone open the door!”

  She rattled the window—actually tried to open it like some novice burglar, but it was sealed shut.

  It was tough to see in the dark—it didn’t seem like a single light was on inside the house—but she could make out that the furniture had been rearranged. The floor was smeared with something, and the walls…

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  She felt herself totter on the edge of coming unglued.

  Unhinged.

  Completely freaked out.

  Those walls looked like they were bleeding.

  And then she caught movement through the darkness of the room.

  Half-concealed by where the couch jutted away from the wall, Aaron was kneeling on the floor, his shoulders jerking with a strange, spastic lurch.

  Cheri cried out when she saw him. He was conv
ulsing, and worst of all, he was alone.

  “Aaron!”

  Her palms slapped the glass, rings clicking hard against the surface. The name escaped her lips as a breathy, gasping squeal. She threw herself at the door once again, shaking the knob so hard it was a wonder it didn’t come off in her hands.

  And where the hell was Eric?

  Why wasn’t he inside?

  Why wasn’t he helping her?

  “The back door!” she yelled at herself, rushing off the porch.

  She had already decided she knew what happened by the time her shoes banged down the steps. Aaron had taken all those pills—in an attempt to get them to do something he’d taken them all, and now he was having a seizure. An overdose. He’d end up biting off his own tongue.

  She bolted around the side of the house, her breaths coming in ragged, gasping sobs.

  How could this be happening?

  The question screamed inside her head.

  This isn’t my life, she thought. This isn’t my…

  She stopped dead.

  Frozen where she stood, her urgency to get inside was derailed.

  Her throat clicked dryly as she gaped at the body before her, her mouth drawn into a tortured, soundless scream.

  Eric lay on his back on the ground, his eyes wide open, his arms and legs sprawled out around him. There was a ladder beneath him—old, wooden, splintered—one of the rungs stained nearly black as Eric’s blood flowed across it before seeping into the ground.

  Cheri screamed, threw herself forward. Her knees hit the ground, weeds crumpling beneath the palms of her hands. She grabbed the sides of Eric’s face, yelling down at him, hoping to God he could hear her, praying that he was still alive. But Eric didn’t respond, not to Cheri’s touch, not to his name being screamed over and over again into the night.

  The room was shaking, a shaking so desperately intense Aaron was sure cracks would spider up the walls, that the entire house would come tumbling down.

  Something had crawled inside.

  It was wrenching his ribs apart.

  He heard a scream.

  Disembodied.

  Unable to tell if it was him, or if it was something beyond him.

  Weeping beyond the window.

  Weeping so racked with emotion it almost sounded like laughter.

  Ryder’s laughter.

  Ryder throwing his head back and guffawing in the backseat of the car.

  Aaron’s own laughter mingling with his son’s before there was no sound.

  His teeth hitting something cold.

  No light.

  The taste of gunmetal.

  No world around them.

  Aaron’s eyes darted open, the boy still holding him captive.

  His hand still reaching down

  down

  down into the depths of his throat.

  Wrapping blood-sticky fingers around his soul.

  Aaron reached up, coiled his hands around the kid’s arm.

  Squeezed tight.

  And tumbled into the darkness.

  Tumbled toward home.

  An impossibly loud bang made Cheri jump.

  A cry stuck in her throat, cutting off her air.

  She stared wide-eyed at the side of the house, processing what she had just heard.

  A gunshot.

  Her diaphragm spasmed, air filling her lungs in jerky gasps.

  It was a gunshot.

  Cheri slowly looked down to Eric’s face and stared into his open eyes.

  This is not my life, she thought.

  This is not my…

  Twenty-four

  Cheri stared up at Holbrook House from beyond the open back of a moving van. Eight months after Eric’s and Aaron’s deaths, the house blazed in the early-spring sun like a monolith of memory and hope. She would always have fond recollections of the three musketeers playing cards in the kitchen, watching cartoons in the living room, running through the trees that outlined the backyard. There would be bad memories too, but she’d come to convince herself that nothing good could exist without a little heartache.

  The house was the last concrete keepsake of the boy who had stolen such a large piece of her heart, the boy who had haunted her for so long, only to come back to Ironwood and assure her he’d haunt her for the rest of her life. But despite the tragedy, the house continued to call Cheri back. Everyone thought she was crazy for wanting to live in it after what had happened—Eric dead in the side yard, Aaron’s suicide in the living room, surrounded by paint and feathers and blood. But Cheri couldn’t bring herself to abandon it, couldn’t handle thinking of it standing empty, housing nothing but morbid fascination. She had seen Aaron’s hurt firsthand, the way his mouth had turned down into a frown when she confessed she had crept through the window to relive a little bit of their time together. She couldn’t allow that to happen again. Holbrook House had to be saved.

  Cheri had reached out to Aaron’s wife via his friend Cooper. Cooper had been the one to arrive in Ironwood two days after Aaron’s suicide—heartbroken and hardly coherent, a thick woven hat pulled over his matted blond hair despite the summer heat. Most of his time was spent at the coroner’s office. A few hours before his flight back to Oregon—a pine box accompanying him on his trip home—Cheri handed him a sealed envelope addressed to Mrs. Aaron Holbrook. In it, Cheri made a plea to buy the house from Aaron’s widow. She had no idea how she’d pay for it; all she knew was that she had to save it from another twenty years of loneliness. Aaron would have wanted it that way.

  A response arrived in Cheri’s in-box a month later. Evangeline Holbrook wanted nothing to do with the house her husband had killed himself in, and she wanted nothing to do with Arkansas.

  With this, I’m cutting all ties to my husband’s past, she wrote. Anything of his left in the house is yours to do with as you please.

  A week afterward, Cheri picked up a piece of certified mail at the local post office. Inside the large flat envelope was the deed to the house. Evangeline had signed it over free and clear.

  The flowers Cheri had planted along the side of the house as Eric’s makeshift memorial were already starting to bloom; they would serve as a constant reminder of what had once been and what had been lost. She had wanted to hang a childhood photo of Aaron somewhere inside the house but had resisted temptation. It was a huge concession, but it was only right. While the house was a memento of the past, she also had to look to the future.

  Cheri took a breath and hefted a box marked KITCHEN out of the truck, then wobbled across the lawn to the front door, murmuring a soft-spoken “Heya, Eric,” as she passed the flowerbed marked out with paving stones.

  Miles stepped out of the house and met her halfway, taking the box from her just before she hit the porch steps. It was the one thing she knew would bother her for the rest of her life, the one thing that scared her to death. If Miles suspected the baby wasn’t his, he hadn’t let on, and while she couldn’t be completely sure, her gut told her the truth. It was the way the baby stirred every time she stepped inside the house, as though sensing it was home.

  Cheri gave Miles a thoughtful smile and let her hands slide across her belly, then climbed the stairs and stepped inside a front room full of boxes and disarrayed furniture. The living room smelled of fresh paint and new upholstery. Miles hadn’t been hot on the idea of moving out there—just like everyone else, he thought the idea completely insane—but Cheri assured him that she’d go with or without him. He had finally bent to her will, but not before insisting they get rid of Edie Holbrook’s old furniture. Edie’s old framed photos had been boxed up and moved into the attic—a move that had made Cheri’s heart ache, but she supposed it was just as well. Without pictures, she’d only remember Aaron in the fondest way: the way he had been in their youth—vivacious and always in search of adventure; the way he
had looked the day he wandered into Vaughn Mechanical—smiling at her while she struggled to place his face. She’d remember him the way he had looked at the lake, their limbs twisted together like the roots of an ancient tree, as if they had always belonged together. That afternoon, he’d given her more of himself than she had ever hoped.

  Climbing the stairs to the second floor was getting harder by the week. She stopped halfway up to catch her breath, then proceeded up to Aaron’s old room. Her father had painted the walls in horizontal yellow and white stripes, and a white crib sat just shy of the window overlooking the trees. Cheri smiled to herself as she crossed the room and slid the window open, the starlings’ song brightening the already cheerful space. Miles appeared in the doorway behind her. She glanced over her shoulder at him as he cocked a hip against the doorframe. Sometimes she wondered if he had come back to her because of the baby, or whether he genuinely loved her enough to forgive her past indiscretions. Or maybe he was as afraid to be alone as she was, both of them deciding it was better to live a lie together than be lonely apart.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked—a question he’d echoed at least a hundred times over the past few months.

  Miles had tried to talk her out of living in that house by any means possible, from theories of bad vibes and warnings of possible vandals to the fact that people had died in there.

  It’s weird, Cheri. Who would want to live in a place like that?

  But she had shaken her head at every inch of his reasoning. She didn’t believe in ghosts, and if vandals showed up, Miles was pretty damn scary. All she knew was that Aaron wouldn’t have wanted the place to sit empty again.

  And as far as bad vibes went, she didn’t feel them. Aaron’s death had been ruled a suicide—a cut-and-dried case that was later strengthened by Aaron’s therapist affirming that his patient had been suffering from post-traumatic stress. There was a video—one that Cheri wouldn’t watch for all the money in the world—of Aaron shoving the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. He had lost his mind, and he had ended his life. Cheri didn’t want to dwell on it; she wanted to move on, to remember him the way he had been rather than the way he had passed.