Finally he took the crow into the house. He had a use for it. A
plan.
The wire-mesh colander was held together by sturdy stainless-steel
rings at top and bottom, and stood on three short steel legs. It was
the size of a two- or three-quart bowl. He used it to drain pasta when
he cooked large quantities to make salads or to ensure that there would
be plenty of leftovers. Two steel-loop handles were fixed to the top
ring, by which to shake it when it was filled with steaming pasta that
needed encouragement to fully drain.
Turning the colander over and over in his hands, Eduardo thought
through his plan one more time–then began to put it into action.
Standing at a kitchen counter, he folded the wings of the dead crow.
He tucked the whole bird into the colander. With needle and thread, he
fixed the crow to the wire mesh in three places. That would prevent
the limp body from slipping out when he tilted the colander. As he put
the needle and thread aside, the bird rolled its head loosely and
shuddered. Eduardo recoiled from it and took a step back from the
counter in surprise. The crow issued a feeble, quavery cry. He knew
it had been dead. Stone dead. For one thing, its neck had been
broken. Its swollen eyes had been virtually hanging out of the
sockets. Apparently it had died in mid-flight of a massive brain
seizure like those that had killed the raccoons and the squirrels.
Dropping from a great height, it had hit the ground with sickening
force, sustaining yet more physical damage. Stone dead.
Now, stitched to the wire mesh of the colander, the reanimated bird was
unable to lift its head off its breast, not because it was hampered by
the threads with which he’d secured it but because its neck was still
broken. Smashed legs flopped uselessly. Crippled wings tried to
flutter and were hampered more by the damage to them than by the
entangling threads. Overcoming his fear and revulsion, Eduardo pressed
one hand against the crow’s breast. He couldn’t feel a heartbeat.
The heart of any small bird pounded extremely fast, much faster than
the heart of any mammal, a racing little engine,
putta-putta-putta-putta-putta. It was always easy to detect because
the whole body reverberated with the rapid beats.
The crow’s heart was definitely not beating. As far as he was able to
tell, the bird wasn’t breathing, either. And its neck was broken. He
had hoped that he was witnessing the traveler’s ability to bring a dead
creature back to life, a miracle of sorts. But the truth was darker
than that. The crow was dead. Yet it moved.
Trembling with disgust, Eduardo lifted his hand from the small
squirming corpse.
The traveler could reestablish control of a carcass without
resuscitating the animal. To some extent, it had power over the
inanimate as well as the animate.
Eduardo desperately wanted to avoid thinking about that. But he
couldn’t turn his mind off. Couldn’t avoid that dreaded line of
inquiry any longer. If he had not taken the raccoons away at once to
the vet, would they eventually have shuddered and pulled themselves to
their feet again, cold but moving, dead but animated?
In the colander, the crow’s head wobbled loosely on its broken neck,
and its beak opened and closed with a faint clicking. Perhaps nothing
had carried the four dead squirrels out of the meadow, after all.
Maybe those carcasses, stiff with rigor mortis, had responded to the
insistent call of the puppetmaster on their own, cold muscles flexing
and contracting awkwardly, rigid joints cracking and snapping as
demands were put upon them. Even as their bodies had entered the early
stages of decomposition, perhaps they twitched and lifted their heads,
crawled and hitched and dragged themselves out of the meadow, into the
woods, to the lair of the thing that commanded them.
Don’t think about it. Stop. Think about something else, for Christ’s
sake.
Anything else. Not this, not this.
If he released the crow from the colander and took it outside, would it
flop and flutter along the ground on its broken wings, all the way up