late, that the bird and the poem and his own treacherous mind had
brought him to a confrontation with the horrific thought that he’d
repressed ever since cleaning up the soil and other leavings on June
tenth. At the heart of Poe’s
“The Raven” was a lost maiden, young
Lenore, lost to death, and a narrator with a morbid belief that Lenore
had come back from-Eduardo slammed down a mental door on the rest of
that thought.
With a snarl of rage, he threw the empty beer bottle. It hit the
crow.
Bird and bottle tumbled into the night.
He leaped off his chair and to the window.
The bird fluttered on the lawn, then sprang into the air with a furious
flapping of wings, up into the dark sky.
Eduardo closed the window so hard he nearly shattered the glass, locked
it, and clasped both hands to his head, as if he would tear out the
fearful thought if it would not be repressed again.
He got very drunk that night. The sleep he finally found was as good
an approximation of death as any he had known.
If the bird came to his bedroom window while he slept, or walked the
edges of the roof above him, he did not hear it.
He didn’t wake until ten minutes past noon on July first. For the rest
of that day, coping with his hangover and trying to cure it preoccupied
him and kept his mind off the morbid verses of a long-dead poet.
The crow was with him July first, second, and third, from morning
through night, without surcease, but he tried to ignore it. No more
staring matches as with the other sentries. No more one-sided
conversations. Eduardo did not sit on the porches. When he was
inside, he did not look toward the windows. His narrow life became
more constricted than ever.
At three o’clock on the afternoon of the fourth, suffering a bout of
claustrophobia from being too long within four walls, he planned a
cautious itinerary and, taking the shotgun, went for a walk. He did
not look at the sky above him, only toward distant horizons. Twice,
however, he saw a swift shadow flash over the ground ahead of him, and
he knew that he did not walk alone.
He was returning to the house, only twenty yards from the front porch,
when the crow plummeted out of the sky. Its wings flapped uselessly,
as if it had forgotten how to fly, and it met the earth with only
slightly more grace than a stone dropped from a similar height. It
flopped and shrieked on the grass but was dead by the time he reached
it.
Without looking closely at the crow, he picked it up by the tip of one
wing.
He carried it into the meadow, to throw it where he had tossed the four
squirrels on the twenty-fourth of June.
He expected to find a macabre pile of remains, well plucked and
dismembered by carrion eaters, but the squirrels were gone. He would
not have been surprised if one or even two of the carcasses had been
dragged off to be devoured elsewhere. But most carrion eaters would
strip the squirrels where they were found, leaving at least several
bones, the inedible feet, scraps of fur-covered hide, a well-gnawed and
pecked-at skull.
The lack of any remains whatsoever could only mean the squirrels had
been removed by the traveler. Or by its sorcerously controlled
surrogates.
Perhaps, having tested them to destruction, the traveler wanted to
examine them to determine why they failed–which it had not been able
to do with the raccoons because Eduardo had intervened and taken them
to the veterinarian. Or it might feel that they were, like the
raccoons, evidence of its presence. It might prefer to leave as few
loose ends as possible until its position on this world was more firmly
established.
He stood in the meadow, staring at the place where the dead squirrels
had been. Thinking.
He raised his left hand, from which dangled the broken crow, and stared
at the now sightless eyes. As shiny as polished ebony and bulging from
the sockets.
“Come on,” he whispered.