Dead Birds: The Dark Orphans Collection Read online

The bedroom was narrow with a ring of carpet around the bed and a window open to the street. At least the room had a folded counter against the wall, beside the wardrobe. He could work there, and leave Elsie to the lounge. He pulled the counter down and saw it concealed an old mirror attached to the wall. It was a simple dresser. He put his unpacked laptop on the counter, and dropped its charger on the bed. He found a folded chair in the wardrobe, and set it in front of the counter.

  The air hinted of dust and rocks, grassy breaths from the surrounding green hills, and something more ill-defined, like damp clay, that had Burns wonder if it was these old walls, or if it was part of everything here, the great age of Rodenje.

  He saw a bronze bowl on the windowsill with a slim stick leaning over the rim. The tip of the stick gave off faint smoke. It had left a trail of soft ash on the ledge. It was a bitter and unpleasant incense. He turned it into the bowl, and stubbed it out.

  He faced the door to the lounge. He prepared an apology -- he was sure it would sound better now they had a chance to cool off. Elsie just wanted to have dinner with him, maybe a drink afterward. He wasn't sure why he sometimes treated her as an enemy, as someone the universe had designed to obstruct to him.

  "You asshole," he accused himself.

  He opened the doors, and realised he was about to apologise to an empty room.

  If she had decided to wander the unfamiliar streets, he would have little chance of finding her. The old town struck Burns as unused to tourists. Based on what he'd seen so far, much of Rodenje's mindset came from an antiquated past, enough maybe for an us-or-them mentality, or worse, outright xenophobia.

  He wondered if he'd left the suite key on the table or another counter, or if Elsie had left with it, and found it in his pocket. He considered taking the time to find his phone among what he'd left to unpack -- he knew Elsie had her iPhone, he remembered her checking it after they landed -- but decided to leave.

  He started along the corridor, and almost stumbled over the couch outside the suite. He also almost fell over Elsie, who sat on the couch with her hands over her lap, and her iPhone out. She hardly registered his clumsiness, but flapped the phone.

  "There's no reception here," she said. "I wanted to ring Martha for a bit. I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but she just found out she’s pregnant, and that bastard Tom’s left her again. I tried to go back into the room, but the door must have locked itself. I hope you have the key."

  Instead of sitting beside her, he leant against the wall opposite. "I'm sorry," he said.

  She shook her head. "You're here to work, I know. You won't have to babysit me, Burns, that's fine, but sometimes I hate how you treat me."

  Maybe the flight left her tired, too; she'd never been so outspoken. He hesitated as something unfamiliar rose in him. For a long moment, he wondered what it could be, and realised it was a mix of doubt and fear: for their relationship, of Elsie. Could things have changed between them without his realising?

  He said, "I don't know what's gone wrong lately. I've been blaming the pressure, but there must be something else that I'm missing."

  "Maybe it's us," she said. "I don't know, Bernie." He normally cringed when she used that nickname. Now, it made him feel bittersweet, as if he'd missed her for days or weeks. "I feel you keep me at arm's length. It's as if you don’t trust me. Or maybe it's more like you don’t even like me? Sometimes I feel you just tolerate me."

  "I've come here for you, too," he said, but they both knew better.

  "I believe in you. You don't have to prove anything to me." She patted the couch for him to sit beside her.

  He looked the couch over. "Will that old thing hold both of us?"

  She shrugged. He sat. Elsie tipped sideways so her head rested on his shoulder. She put a hand on his lap, and he took it in his hand, linking fingers.

  "What a lousy start," she said, and made a watery sigh.

  "I'm sorry for how I've been. I don't mean to be such a pleb."

  "Pleb? Is that what the college kids call you?"

  "To my face, sure. God knows what they say about me once they're out of my tutorials. Why don't we go out for lunch?"

  "It's well past lunch time. Anyway," she nudged his shoulder with her forehead, "you have to work."

  "I do, but I have to do better by you, too. I won't give up on us. I'm too tired to do much today, anyway. Did you see some place to eat on the way in?"

  She hadn't, but said she wanted to clear her head with a walk. Burns knew it was to clear the air between them. Before they rose from the chair, she nodded at the wall opposite. A small painted landscape he'd overlooked hung there.

  "I know that place," she said. "I just can't remember where from."

  Most of the canvas was green, with darker strokes like gangrenous scratches depicting thick foliage around the small building in the foreground, a circular and simple affair of aged yellow stone.

  "That could be the place I'm visiting tomorrow," Burns said, intrigued. Though the painter's rough gashes left glutinous scabs over the canvas, it had a coarse charm. The building, if it was where Burns intended to begin his research in Rodenje, was a chapel. "Which reminds me, I'll have to rent a car to get there, unless I fancy walking a few hours through the countryside."

  "It looks so familiar," Elsie said.

  "You might recognise it from my notes," he suggested -- the three sepia-tinted pictures he could find of it, buried in the quasi-historical texts-cum-journals of recently deceased historians and mythologists.

  She looked doubtful. She rarely looked at his unfinished work.

  "There isn't much to it," he said. "It could be any small chapel, couldn't it? I suppose we'll find out tomorrow."

  Outside.

  Burns tried to recall the word for coffee. He'd left the Idiot's Guide in the hotel, and while he'd memorised a few phrases, Rodenje's dialect poured together from the surrounding territories, with added colloquial complications. He finally just said, "Coffee, please," and held two fingers for the quantity, while pointing to a pot of dark liquid.

  "Yava," the woman said with a smile that was not welcoming, merely tired and tolerant. She sold her prepared snacks and drinks from an old kitchen table beside the doorstep of what Burns presumed her home, a squat house along a terrace as compressed as the goods on the her table. So far, their hotel was the tallest building they'd come by here; everything else in Rodenje seemed the size of hovels.

  Burns' attention lingered over the gleaming green and yellow contents of the sliced sandwiches, before he decided to eat later. The woman past over two bronze cups of black liquid, which he had Elsie hold while he took a ten deri note from his wallet. He weighed the change with suspicion, since the woman simply removed the note from his hand without announcing the price, and returned a few large coins. The table had no sugar or milk. The bronze cups were thin, but the contents were warm, not hot. As they started to sip, the woman waved them from her table. She seemed unconcerned when Burns indicated the bronze cups needed returning, and in a voice as tired as her features, urged them to walk away.

  "I'm not sure this is coffee," he said after tasting it. It was so black and strong that he tasted the coaled remains of whatever it had once been.

  Elsie sipped. "I don't mind it, it tastes like cloves. She called it yaba?"

  "I think she meant to say java."

  Elsie shrugged. "Yaba-daba-do, Flintstones all the way. This place is kind of like Bedrock town in the Flintstones, isn't it? It's like a modernised version."

  "Modernised, how?"

  The practice of selling from tables and simple stalls outside homes was common. Elsie browsed (although she grimaced and skipped by a heavy wooden slab where a farmer took chickens from cages to twist their necks, pressing each dead body on the counter until it stopped jerking) while Burns' mind wondered through his research and into the town's past. Elsie's comparison to Bedrock was probably more accurate than she intended. Burns had found clues scattered through the works of ancient histori
ans, indications that Rodenje was at least four thousand years old. It could be older than Damascus, Jericho, and Athens. He would surely discover something of value here -- Rodenje seemed tied to the world's oldest civilisations. Greek texts made brief and tenuous references to the town, while Roman historians such as Pliny the Elder recorded legions diverting to Rodenje to pay tributes before marching to wars in more distant lands. No lesser than Julius Caesar recorded shipments of slaves to the town in such numbers they must have totaled more than its population (the actual passage suggested the slaves were drugged, and also mentioned the delivery of "seeded daughters to the mothers," a phrase that still puzzled Burns), while the prime conspirator against Caesar, Cassius Longinus, listed the various methods of human sacrifices practiced in the town. In the tenth century, Persian explorer Ahmad ibn Rustah described peculiar and unsettling funeral rites then common to the town. Frustratingly but predictably, Christian medieval scholars only intimated at the town's importance, as if to subvert it through their own facts.

  Burns imagined Roman military soldiers thick with the mud and their own sweat filling these ancient, narrow streets, to pay tribute -- to whom, for what reason? What could have convinced the Roman army at the height of its power to come here as submissive visitors? Could the lost religion he'd come to find have influenced them?

  "Look here," Elsie said, lifting an open brochure. He hadn’t noticed her holding it before, and wondered if she'd taken it from a table, or if she'd brought it with her from the hotel. "It's here again. Is that your chapel?"

  "It looks like it."

  She said, "I think it's in a forest. I'll have to translate this later."

  "It has a few names, but one of the earliest I could find called it Dead Water."

  "That's not a great name for a forest, isn’t it?"

  "I doubt Neolithic man had tourists in mind, or they would have named it something like Jellystone Heritage Park."

  "That's not a real place, you know. Did you notice how the streets here haven't names? And the houses have no numbers. How do people find their way around?"

  Burns hadn't noticed, but he looked to the nearest corner, where instead of a street name, he saw a small statue perched like a watchful schoolteacher over the gutter of the corner house. He turned to the other end of the street; another atop the far corner hunched its limbs together. It was as pale and aged as the street it surveyed.

  "I'll have to get a closer look at those," he said.

  He looked over Elsie's chest for her camera. The skin above her T-shirt had an odd speckled appearance he realised was a mixture of barely noticeable street dust and sweat; the sun refused to move from directly overhead, it stirred shadows below them. He wanted to use the camera's telescopic zoom; he wanted to see the etched features.

  "A better look at these?" She pointed a thumb to her breasts.

  "Those grotesques."

  "That's not a very flattering term for them," she said.

  "Those statues on the rooftops," he said. "If the locals don't use street signs, then maybe they use those grotesques as landmarks." Elsie remained silent, and he indicated her breasts to say, "And those aren't grotesque, they're nice."

  "Nice? They're not cupcakes, Burns."

  "I was looking for your camera."

  "I didn't expect to go sight-seeing." She sipped the last of her dark drink, and looked for somewhere to deposit the cup. "I thought they were gargoyles?"

  "Gargoyles are functional, they have water spouts. Grotesques are strictly ornamental."

  Burns returned his attention to the grotesques. His eyesight wasn’t up to the distance for reading the details, but the silhouette of the nearest appeared common to grotesques: it sat, probably with its hands on its knees, and had an overlarge head. It disproportion was cartoonish, reminiscent of an infant's body. It gazed back at him.

  Elsie asked, "Do you think they're connected to your proto-gargoyle?"

  The proto-gargoyle wasn’t his idea, even if he had named it. It was an umbrella term for an ancient fragmented puzzle he’d partially pieced together from the identities and functions of a myriad ancient gods traced back to a single amorphous source. The original idea had existed for thirty years in the mind of Professor Kingston. The Professor was convinced evidence of the proto-gargoyle’s influence on early European mythologies and societies existed in Rodenje. The very beginning and the evolution of European mythology, in this small town.

  The small grotesque cousins above the street corners could suggest that in tenuous ways that the proto-gargoyle's influence persisted. The religious aspect of the myth (the few and vague tendrils Burns had found) hadn’t existed for thousands of years, but he wondered what indicators he might find in Rodenje. He felt impatience like a fever creeping from his organs, urging him to build on his research this instant, but he warned himself not to become excited. He needed to find other examples above more streets; he needed to determine their numbers and styles, their place in the psyche of Rodenje.

  "I don't think Professor Kingston made the connection. He never mentioned it."

  Elsie stepped closer to say, "It's not a big deal if you want to have a proper look around. A longer walk will just work up an appetite."

  "I won't take a proper look yet, but I might check another few streets."

  Elsie, whose eyesight was sharper, peered down the street and said, "That one looks more like a cherub than a monster."

  "You mean like a baby? I can make out its outline but not much else."

  "Well, it looks like those statues of winged children you see in graveyards, except its posture is a little strange, like its shivering from cold."

  Singing, the same as they had heard earlier from the procession that had delayed their taxi, ricocheted through the narrow streets, making it impossible to tell where it originated.

  "There go your murderous wives," Elsie said.

  "I'm strictly a monogamist, honey."

  "You're strictly not, unless I've forgotten we married."

  He took another sip of the black fluid to wash the taste of the street from his mouth. It convinced him yaba, or whatever the local entrepreneur had called it, was not java, but a mix of soot and hot water. It tasted worse when cold. He wondered how Elsie stomached it. She had emptied her cup. He thought to drop his in the first litterbin they encountered, but while the streets were dusty, they lacked bins.

  A white horse pulling a crooked wooden cart overladen with dirty sacks crossed the far junction. It was a compact beast with a bullish physique, and a squat head that nodded beside the man holding its reins and walking alongside. To Burns, the animal's odd form suggested defects, and when he noticed the unblinking and fully white eyes (or maybe that was unbroken skin, an eyeless mask over its skull), he knew he was correct. Before the blind and roughly formed beast cleared the junction, Burns realised what he'd taken for white hair was a lack of it: damp and pale flesh covered the animal. It left him nauseated.

  The clop of the horse retreated as the singing increased to incomprehensible shrieks. Burns watched doorstep sellers wipe fingers and thumbs under their eyes and then down either side of their lips in a gesture he didn't understand, but assumed it a traditional response to the screams. Perhaps like the rooftop grotesques intended to ward off evil, the gesture kept the unwanted -- bad luck, maybe; or a bad harvest -- at bay. The urge to mimic the gesture came over him, but he kept his hands by his sides.

  Birds.

  A flock of darkly plumed birds fluttered above the street. Elsie said they looked like black wrens, but Burns glimpsed brilliant red dashes across a few compact breasts. A red-breasted wren perched on a gutter and attracted the attention of a fully black wren that landed and cozied closer. Burns supposed this was a mating ritual. Then the red-breasted bird jabbed its beak at the other's cheek and left a deep gash. The injured bird trashed backward with a shriek that distressed the flock.

  "Well, she's in no mood," Burns said.

  "How do you know it's a she?"

/>   He shrugged.

  "Maybe they're into that sort of thing," Elsie said. By now, many of the tables on the streets were carried through doors, and those doors shut. Elsie said, "It must be getting on."

  Between the flight, the wait for a cooperative taxi-driver (the first three drivers claimed not to have heard of Rodenje), and the long drive from the airport, Burns had lost track of time. He felt more muddled by the day when he checked his watch; it was later than he expected. "Five-thirty must be late for this place."

  "Should we get something to eat now? I don’t want to find out later there's nothing open."

  So far, he hadn’t crossed an ATM. If whichever restaurant they found didn’t deal with credit cards, he probably had enough cash for a decent meal. He agreed they should find a restaurant.

  Within minutes, every door was shut, and despite the bright evening and the warmth, a heavy drape fell across every small window. The wrens flowed above them, twisting and bobbing, hectic, impatient, and songless. Burns almost whistled something, to make the streets feel less deserted.

  -- it's just the birds and us, he thought, and wondered why that made him uneasy. Maybe it was how the birds seemed to follow them. He thought of turning back, taking the corner they hadn’t walked past, see if the wrens followed -- but then the aroma of cooking meats reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  They came to an awkward crossroad, where one passage dipped into a steep hill, while two other streets wound around the junction's two buildings. Both buildings had open doors. Toddler-sized grotesques guarded the door beside the hill. The already familiar odour of burning leaves floated like a musk from inside. The building opposite was as plain as every house Burns and Elsie had walked by, but its window was free of thick drapes, and rich roasting odours floated from inside.

  Elsie asked if they'd found a restaurant. There was nothing to tell if this was a business, but Burns went to the doorway and saw the room inside had three tables with a lit candle on each, and cutlery. The shape he'd seen came forward, a portly woman of middle-age, dressed in brown as if for camouflage against the dark walls. She smiled and indicated Burns should enter.