Birds of October

A sly chill slunk under the door. It crept around corners and insinuated itself into every room, every crack and crevice of the small cottage. The tenth month of the year usually brought bright sunshine to the Land of Three Rivers but this day exhaled with the breath of February and the sky was leaden and dripping.

The cottage sat on top of a low hill, the first elevation north of the conjunction of sea, lake, and river, and the great city that presided over those waters. The little house sat in a field on the edge of a vast wood of dark pines which towered like cathedrals as far as the eye could see. One enormous oak loomed over the cottage, dwarfing it. Another hunched in a far corner of the pasture like a malignant giant.

A young girl named Lorena lay on a white iron bed in one of the cottage’s rooms reading with a blanket pulled tight around her. The tapping of the raindrops on the roof was the only sound to break the stillness of the grey afternoon. The murmer of rain lulled the girl and she dozed. The book slid from her limp fingers and fluttered to the floorboards.

When she woke to a crack of thunder, the sky had gone from grey to black and the rain was louder and more insistent. Lorena rubbed her eyes to clear the grogginess from her head and padded to the sunroom to watch the rain and wait for her mother’s return. That room was filled with plants and possessed her grandfather’s old leather chair for seating and a view of the road, so it made a comfortable spot to wait.

Something made Lorena stop at the threshold of the sunroom. There, perched on the narrow ledge on the outside of one of the large windows were what the girl thought were three baby birds knocked from their nests by the storm and half-drowned by the heavy showers.

Anxiety and pity filled her. She was not a cowardly girl so her reluctance to even enter the sunroom when the creatures were on the other side of the window was strange. She wished her mother was home. Her mother knew about birds and would know what to do with these.

Lorena’s anxiety and guilt over not coming to the aid of the beasts almost overwhelmed her irrational horror of them and her foot hovered over the doorsill. She noticed that the creatures were larger that she remembered from her first glance and their cries, which carried over the rain and through the glass, sounded remarkably like those of human children.

When Lorena squinted to see their faces, she choked back a scream. The faces of the three creatures were neither human nor bird. Sparse feathers were flattened against obscenely bare and pallid skin by the rain. They had neither beaks nor mouths but something in between filled with needle teeth. Their eyes were very human but held a hunger greater than that of the greediest human.

Their cried had the wheedling tone of desperately hungry children and the desire to aid the creatures again rose sharply in Lorena.

“What do you eat,” she asked?

“I eat tongues,” answered one on the left, “and I am very hungry.”

“I eat eyes,” said the creature on the right, “and I am hungrier than my sister.”

“I eat hearts,” said the one in the middle, “and I am hungrier than both my sisters, more ravenous than all the nations of men.”

Lorena shouted, “I don’t have any for you,” and shut and locked the door to the sunroom.

The creatures squawked and beat their naked wings against the glass. Their pleading cries rose even higher.

Lorena knew she could not bear to keep hearing them. She went to the bathroom and got cotton balls to stuff in her ears, then went to the kitchen and got her mother’s sharpest knife. She sat on the couch with the knife in her lap and watched the door.

Despite the threat outside the sunroom window, her eyelids began to droop and, the next thing she knew, the skies had cleared and her mother was home. Lorena tried to tell her mother about the “birds” but, when they opened the door to the sunroom, there was nothing on the other side of the window and nothing in the garden bed below the ledge.

Lorena’s mother did not seem to believe her and thought it had just been a bad dream. Lorena herself was now unsure of the reality of what she had seen. She did, however, see her mother burning a bouquet of dried herbs in the front garden the next morning and singing something in a low, muttering voice. She never saw the bird-creatures again, either waking or dreaming.