Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts Page 3

  Night’s Foul Bird

  The Arcangel Hotel is six stories tall. We live on the top floor, Mother and I. The man on the other side keeps pigeons on the roof, all lined up in wire cages. He says that he’s taught them how to do tricks, that he used to perform with them on the stage, but all I’ve ever seen him do is take them out to feed them. He holds them in his hand, their legs gripped between his thumb and forefinger. He showed me how and I held one. It felt warm and fluttery in my palm, even when it wasn’t moving, and I could feel the blood churning through it. It was like holding a living heart. I remember thinking that next to birds, people must seem to already be dead.

  The man’s name is Steiner, but I call him “Mr. Birdman.” He also has a parrot. A cockatoo, he says it is. Big and champagne pink, its feathers as soft as silk scarves. I’m always surprised when I touch feathers. I expect them to feel one way and they always feel another. Soft as the petals of a flower when I think they’ll be stiff, rigid like the tiny bones of a fish when I expect them to be soft.

  Mr. Birdman’s cockatoo is huge, almost as big as my torso. It has a black beak and shiny black-button eyes. It knows how to talk a little, but I’ve only ever heard it say, “Hello,” which it stretches out so that it comes out sounding like “hollow.”

  Mother says I oughtn’t to fool around with Mr. Birdman’s pigeons or his cockatoo—which is named “Shirley.” She says that birds are filthy creatures and she doesn’t know why such an otherwise refined-seeming man would truck with them. She says that pigeons, in particular, carry disease. Like rats.

  Mother doesn’t seem to like or do or approve of much, ever since Father “died.” Died is what I have to say he did if anyone asks, but really, he left. I know that he isn’t dead, because I got a letter from him once. It had my name on it, and our address here at the Arcangel Hotel, but Mother got it first and never let me read it, so I’ve had to imagine what it must have said. Sometimes, I think that he was apologizing because he was called away to some noble quest, or because he was the target of a secret society and could not endanger our lives by staying. Sometimes, he has a new wife and a new family, and he is inviting me to come live with him.

  I don’t think that I would go, though, even if that was what the letter said. I’d feel bad leaving Mother behind, and Mr. Birdman, and the city is the only place I’ve ever known.

  On Friday nights, I take some money from out of the bowl in the living room and I go down the street to the theater. There, I sit in the dark and watch the moving pictures. Mother doesn’t approve of them, either, but she’s never been to one. I tell her they’re like magic and she tells me there’s no such thing.

  Really, though, I don’t try very hard to convince her. I’m glad that she doesn’t go to the theater with me. While she already doesn’t approve of me going, she certainly wouldn’t approve of the ones I like best. They come from Germany, big and grim and foreboding. Murnau and Wiene and Leni. One day, I watched Nosferatu, and I lay awake all night afterward, imagining the moment when Count Orlok rises up from his coffin, stiff as a board. Terrified, yes, by every creak and flutter, but something else, too. Alive, illuminated. I could feel the beating of my heart, feel the rush and heat of blood in my veins. I felt as if I were glowing in the dark, as if I were giving off light.

  ***

  Last week, a man moved into the building. He lives in the same rooms as us but on the fourth floor rather than the sixth. On the floor between is a plump-cheeked lady whose two sons both died in the War. I call her the “Widow Flowers,” because she is always drying flowers in the kitchen above her sink. She gives them out to everyone as gifts at every relevant occasion. I wonder if she loves them because they’re beautiful but already dead, unchanging, like a photograph, but Mother says I mustn’t ask people such questions.

  The new man is strange, pallid and sunken, and his head seems to taper from top to bottom, as though his chin is forming like a stalactite from his face. His eyes are very pale and he has an odd way of staring at you as if he’s actually looking at whatever’s just behind you, instead. Mother says that he’s sweet and that I mustn’t judge. That many of the young men who came back from the War came back just like him. I don’t think he seems young, but Mother says that he’s not much older than me. She blames the War for that, too.

  He says his name is “Milton,” but in my mind, I’m already calling him “Mr. Chaney,” because there’s something about him that reminds me of Lon Chaney’s faux-vampire in London After Midnight, which I loved up ’til the end. Maybe it’s his long coat, which he wears always draped over his shoulders, his arms not through the sleeves. Maybe it’s his shadow, which seems to cling too close to him, to hunch at his back when he stands near walls, as though it’s whispering secrets in his ears.

  Mother says that I’m sensitive, but that I should keep it to myself, and that I mustn’t judge people until they’ve given me a reason to, as it says in the Bible. I don’t think that is what it says in the Bible, but I don’t contradict her.

  ***

  Mother wants me to get to know Mr. Chaney better. She even suggested that he could “take you to one of those moving picture shows that you’re so fond of.” And when my reaction was less than she’d hoped, she added, “It’s really not right for a young lady of your age to go unattended.”

  Mother seems to like Mr. Chaney and seems to think that I should, too, but he makes me uncomfortable. When she introduced us the first time, the hand that he clasped mine in was as smooth and hard as the keys of a piano, and when he raised my hand to his lips, his breath was hot.

  I watch him sometimes, when he goes out. Mother says he works at night, at a factory somewhere, but she doesn’t say which one or what he does. Mother says that everyone in the building likes him, that he’s a charming young man, but I watch him when he goes out at night, and I see that whatever side of the street he walks down is always deserted. If there’s a couple out taking a stroll, they always cross to the other side, even if they are blocks away, even if they haven’t seen him yet, even if their eyes are only for each other. They do it without even knowing. If you asked them why, they couldn’t tell you. If they met Mr. Chaney, they’d like him. They’d say that he’s a nice young man, just as Mother does. They certainly wouldn’t cross the street to avoid him, not on purpose, but they do it anyway. They just know to without knowing why, the same way that birds know to flock together.

  ***

  The Widow Flowers is the first to go. They find her in the little backyard behind the hotel, where the men stand and smoke, sometimes. Her throat is cut and there’s a spray of flowers, fresh flowers, tucked into her blouse.

  There are more fresh flowers at her funeral, white lilies and other things. It seems wrong to me, as if the people at the funeral didn’t know her, what few people there are. The smell of them seems overpoweringly strong in the little church, but Mother says that we have to go because we were her neighbors and she had no one else. Mother and I go into her rooms, too, and help box up her personal things. There are flowers still drying above the sink. On her dressing table, I find photographs of her two sons in their Army uniforms, frozen forever in that moment just before death.

  They clear out all of her things. Some are shipped off to distant relatives, but the dried flowers are thrown in the trash bin behind the hotel. I can see them out the back window, the one in the kitchen. I stand there sometimes in the early morning and look out. I can see part of the backyard where the Widow Flowers was found and I can see the sun rise through a space between two buildings. Sometimes, Mr. Chaney stands out there just before dawn, when he gets home from the factory or wherever he goes at night, and smokes a cigarette while watching that space between the buildings fill up with light. He always goes in before the sun peeks through. I hope he never looks up and, if he does, I hope he never sees me standing in the window.

  ***

  Now there is an empty space between our rooms and Mr. Chaney’s. I can feel it there, in a way that I co
uldn’t before when the Widow Flowers was in it, cooking and sleeping and drying her flowers. I feel it all the time, hollow and lifeless, dark and silent, the shades drawn down, dust slowly settling on the floors and the counters. It feels cold and it aches, like a cavity in a tooth. And worse, it provides no buffer. Though there are still the same walls and floors and ceilings, still the same distance, I feel there’s nothing to separate our rooms from Mr. Chaney’s any longer. I feel as if he’s right beneath me, all the time. At night, when I’m in bed, it’s as if he’s lying underneath, pressed up against the bottom of my mattress. I dream that his arm comes up through the floorboards — not breaking them, just passing through, as if they aren’t there, or as if he’s a part of them — the nails on his hand suddenly sharp, suddenly long.

  I wake with a start and sit up in bed. I have to put my own hand in my mouth and bite down so I don’t scream. I don’t look under the bed. If he is down there, I don’t want to know.

  Outside, snow has begun to fall.

  ***

  I haven’t been to the theater since the Widow Flowers died. Mother says that it’s too dangerous, that she doesn’t want me going out unless she knows where I’m going. I don’t try to tell her that she knows where I’m going if I go to the theater. I don’t want to argue.

  Besides, ever since the snow started, no one seems to be going anywhere, anyway. The snow never stops. It piles up against the sides of the buildings, drifting doors closed and creeping up to the sills of windows. It’s almost as dark during the days as it is at night and everything outside seems very far away. We are alone.

  The next of us to die is a man downstairs. I had no name for him, because I rarely saw him. He dies in his rooms. They say he slit his wrists. He had a grown daughter who lived somewhere else in the city, and who would sometimes visit him with a golden-haired little son in tow. She comes to his rooms to gather his things so that Mother and I don’t have to. I sit at the top of the stairs, and listen to her putting things into boxes and weeping softly. No one from the building goes to his funeral. I don’t know if there were lilies.

  After his daughter is gone, I go downstairs and find that his door is closed but not locked. I go in. The room is dim and empty. More than just unoccupied. I can tell somehow that no one lives there, anymore.

  I walk around, touch my fingertips to the furniture, press down on the bed. There is nothing left to show that this was where a person had lived, had died, but I find a button on the floor, partially under the rug. A big silver button, like the ones on Mr. Chaney’s coat.

  ***

  At night, I lie on the floor of my bedroom and press my ear to the cold floorboards. I can hear Mr. Chaney in his room, pacing and reciting little snippets of poetry. It’s always the same poem, one by Robert Blair that I’ve read before, and it does not reassure me.

  “Doors creak,” he mutters, “and windows clap, and night’s foul bird rook’d in the spire screams loud.” When I read them, I loved these words. I’d memorized them myself, or very near. They felt to me the way the films I watched felt, that pleasing shiver up my spine. Now, though, hearing them up through my floorboards, they are something else. “The Grave gainsays the smooth-complexion’d flatt’ry, and with blunt truth acquaints us what we are.”

  The week after the man downstairs died, I go over to Mr. Birdman’s room and knock on his door, but I receive no answer save for a muffled “hollow” from Shirley. I know that he probably braved the snow for groceries or some other errand, but something makes me take the stairs up to the roof. I can barely push the roof door open past the snow that has piled up since it was opened last, which couldn’t have been long before, because I find Mr. Birdman there, kneeling amidst a blizzard of snow and feathers, weeping, broken, his face in his hands. The wire boxes around him are all torn and shattered, and the bodies of the pigeons lie here and there, the blood poppy-bright against the white of the snow.

  ***

  I can hear Mother in the other room, rocking and looking out the window at the darkness, at the night. It’s been another week since I found Mr. Birdman and his pigeons and I haven’t seen anyone from the building in all that time, only heard Mother rocking and Mr. Chaney pacing and reciting his verses. Outside, the streets are silent, filled with snow. No one passes, and the only lights are distant and hidden by the gloom.

  I know that we’re the only ones left in the building. I know it, the same way I’ve known so many things that Mother tells me I mustn’t repeat nor act upon, even if they’re right. If I put my hand to the wall, I can feel the building, feel the emptiness of all the rooms. I can feel it waiting, holding its breath.

  I stand in the living room, watching Mother, who doesn’t look away from the window, doesn’t look at me. I go out onto the landing, to the top of the stairs. Across the hall, Mr. Birdman’s door is ajar, and light spills out from inside. I could go push it open, could look inside, but there’s no need. I already know what I would see. I can see it now, if I close my eyes. A slow-spreading pool of blood, and a champagne-pink feather floating on the surface.

  Down below me, I hear a door open and then close. I want to flee, to run, but there’s nowhere to go. Mother wouldn’t go with me, even if there were. I can’t leave her behind, so I go back into our rooms and wait. Through the crack beneath the door, I see the lights in the hallway gutter and go out. I stand between Mother and the door, while the snow continues to fall steadily against the window.

  There is an image that torments me as I wait. A moment in Murnau’s Faust, when Emil Jannings as the Devil stands above the city, his black wings spread as wide as the sky. As I hear footsteps on the stairs, I look out our window at the feathered clouds, the downy snow that keeps falling forever without cease, and I wonder what fell spirit holds us in his wings.

  Author’s Notes:

  I wrote this one as a companion piece to “The White Prince,” this time exploring vampire imagery from early silent horror films, which was often very different from the red satin cape and widow’s peak that became the standard after Bela Lugosi’s iconic turn as Dracula in 1931. It was for the special “wings”-themed fourteenth issue of Innsmouth Magazine, which is why there are so many references to birds and feathers, and it was later produced as an audio podcast for Pseudopod. (The third story I sold to them, after “The Worm That Gnaws” earlier in this book and “Black Hill” in my previous collection.)

  I may have fudged a bit on chronology in this one, since I’m not actually sure when all of the great German silent films that I refer to in the story got wide release here in the States, but I really wanted them in here, especially that image of Emil Jannings as the Devil, which was literally the first note I wrote down when I started working on the story.

  The Murders on Morgue Street

  It’s the middle of the hottest summer on record when they find the body, though there’s not really enough of it left to qualify as such. No bones, nor much in the way of blood. Just a rubbery skin and no apparent way to have extracted the insides.

  They find it in an apartment up off Seventh, a smallish place, with a metal fan sitting on top of the icebox and faded blue lilies on the wallpaper. The smell of it fills the room up, the dark, damp cellar smell of fresh corpses, and something else, underneath, like wet fur.

  It was the smell that triggered the phone call that led the officers here. The woman that once wore the body was a mother, but her ten-year-old daughter is staying with family for the summer. Somewhere out in the country, somewhere cooler. The officers who knocked on the door are still standing nearby, one out in the hallway, one in the kitchen with his head hanging out the open window, but this is homicide’s show. Detective Laughton, who most of the beat cops know for his mustache and the smell of his aftershave, and you with him, a criminology student from a cop family. The word is that your uncle is top brass in another precinct, that he got you a ride-along with Laughton for the summer.

  You stare at the body, not looking away like the officers do. Det
ective Laughton squats beside it, shaking his head from side to side. “What the hell?” he keeps asking, over and over again, as though somebody will suddenly have the answer. “What the hell?”

  ***

  Eventually, they load the body into the wagon. Not on a gurney, though; folded up in a crate, like a blanket.

  The morgue is in the basement of the county medical examiner’s office. Bodies are brought in through the back door, by way of a brick-paved alley known locally as Morgue Street. That’s where Detective Laughton parks when the call comes in telling him that the body has disappeared. Night has fallen by the time you arrive, but the coming of darkness does nothing to relieve the heat.

  “I think it’s going to rain,” Detective Laughton says as he gets out of the car. You look up, at the stars that are like smudges against the night. There isn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Inside, the morgue is full of activity. Officers in uniform pace everywhere, taking statements, talking to everyone. The coroner is a short man with a bulging belly who always talks like he has a head cold. He assures Detective Laughton, “just as I told the other officers,” that the body was never delivered, even though a quick check of the logbooks shows the driver’s arrival and the delivery of one body, thereafter unaccounted for.

  “Whose initials are these?” Detective Laughton asks, pointing to a dark scribble next to the delivery, but the coroner just shakes his head.