Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

Frost spotted Lucy’s purse on the kitchen table. When he checked it, he found her wallet inside and her apartment keys. He felt a pounding in his head, but he pushed it aside to concentrate on what was in front of him. This was no time for emotion. Work the case.

He remembered their last conversation.

What are you doing now?

Taking out the garbage.

She’d had her phone with her, but he didn’t see her phone inside the apartment. She never came back. He took her purse and locked the door behind him as he left. He took the steps back to the ground floor and followed the hallway to a locked door at the back of the building. Outside, he found himself in a narrow alley.

A streetlight halfway down the block cast a dim glow. The cold wind blew into his face. He saw a black garbage bag hanging down the side of a trash bin ten feet away. Debris littered the pavement near his shoes. The pages of an old copy of Cosmopolitan magazine flapped in the breeze, and Frost bent down and picked it up.

He checked the mailing label. The magazine was addressed to Brynn Lansing.

Frost slammed his fist against the stone wall of the apartment building so hard that he thought he broke a bone. He knew exactly what had happened.

The Night Bird had taken her.

“Luuuucy. Luuuucy.”

Lucy heard the voice calling her back to the bridge, but she didn’t want to go. Wherever she was now, she could simply drift along in dreams. Frost was there, and they were kissing. She could taste him on her lips as if it were real. They were in a park, alone on the green grass, and the sun beat down, warming them. She smelled honeysuckle and heard the rumble of ocean waves.

“Luuuucy.”

She didn’t want to go back, but the voice was irresistible. It chased away her dreams. The fog of her memory cleared, and she knew what to expect next. The music. When the music began, she went to the bridge. As much as she tried to hold it back, as much as she wanted to stay away, the music carried her, like a hawk snatching a bird out of the sky.

The voice taunted her. “The ground, the ground, it’s so far down.”

“Please, no,” she murmured in her head, but she made no actual sound. She stared into whiteness around her. She heard only her own breathing, coming faster as she waited for the music. Her skin was damp with sweat.

“Better not fall, better not fall!”

“Oh, no, no, no, not that. Not again.”

She stood frozen in place, alone among nothingness. She couldn’t go back to the bridge, but she had no choice. The music exploded like fireworks in her brain. It filled the room, filled her mind — loud and wild. The beat of the song thumped so heavily in her chest that she could barely take a breath. The whiteness of the room dissolved from her eyes.

She saw the bridge. She was on the bridge.

“No... stop it... make it stop...”

Thin cables spanned two cliff tops, sinking into a nearly bottomless gorge. She stood on wooden boards, riveted with gaps so that she could see the earth falling away below her. The footbridge was no more than two feet wide. The cables sank down and down and down under their own weight. The other end of the bridge looked tiny in the distance, clinging to a snow-patched mountain like a breath of wind would unhinge it. And the wind blew. The wind howled. It made the bridge sway, dizzying her, threatening to pitch her into the abyss.

“Better not fall, better not fall!” the voice sang in her ear.

The music wailed, discordant and out of place in the outdoors. It should have been silent here except for the roaring wind, but the song went on and on, deafening her. Synthesizer. Guitars. Drums. No words, no voices — just the unrelenting music.

Lucy was paralyzed. Crippled by fear. Back and forth went the bridge. Hundreds of feet down, a green glacial lake fed a river. The glacier itself wriggled through the mountain pass. Craggy gray cliffs rose above her head. She wanted to grab the cables to steady herself, but her arms hung at her side, leaden, unmoving. She wanted to close her eyes, but her eyelids were taped open so that all she could do was see. Her legs could barely hold her. Her body shook, buffeted by the wind. She stood alone over the chasm.

“Can you fly? Can you fly? Will you die? Will you die?”

She wanted to throw herself into the gorge. Anything to make the fear stop. Anything so that it would be over. Her limbs disintegrated into shivers. Her brain rebelled and escaped. Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.

“Listen to me, do you want to be free?”

“Yes, yes, yes, make it stop,” she tried to say, but she was voiceless, and she cried dry tears. Her heart rocketed as if it would beat its way through her chest to get away. “Let me jump, let me die, I can’t take anymore, I can’t, I can’t.”

“It’s up to you, you know what to do.”

Something appeared in front of her. Like a hologram, spinning. It was shiny, it was bright. It was a dagger, with a black handle. The edges were honed to razor-sharp blades, and it ended with a cutting point. All she had to do was reach out and grab it. She knew that was what the voice wanted. She had to take it in her grasp, but she couldn’t.

“Luuuucy. Luuuucy. It’s up to you, you know what to do.”

The knife twirled and glinted in the light, as if suspended on a thread that danced in the wind. She could take one step, she could reach out her hand, and she would have it. The knife made the bridge go away, but once she had it, she knew what the voice wanted her to do.

The wind got louder, fighting with the music.

She didn’t want to take the knife, but she couldn’t stay here, not one second longer. The blade dangled only inches away. Sharp and deadly. As if it were already dripping blood.

Lucy screamed soundlessly; then she leaped for the knife and curled the handle in her fist. She clenched it so tightly she would never let go. Immediately, the panorama around her dissolved. The bridge disappeared. The mountains and the glacier faded to whiteness. She was in a dazzling white room. Her feet were on solid ground. But the music kept playing, and the knife was in her hand now. There was only one way to stop the music once and for all. One way to keep the bridge from coming back.

The voice whispered in her ear.

“The knife is the key. Set yourself free.”

Darren Newman.

Frankie hated that what she remembered most about Newman was his looks. He was ridiculously handsome, and he knew it. He was tall, with the sleek, strong build of a tennis player. He had LA-blond hair, short and layered, with tight curls above his forehead. His eyebrows angled sharply, and his dark eyes seemed to be laughing at a joke inside his head. He didn’t show teeth when he smiled; his lips simply nudged upward. He dressed to impress, always in a suit, with pastel-colored shirts and wild Jerry Garcia ties. He was young — only in his late twenties. She never should have been attracted to someone like that, but she was.

He first came into Frankie’s life a year ago because of his mother. Alana Newman came to Frankie after her son had been arrested for rape, and she offered a lot of money for her to talk to him. Her instinct, seeing that many zeroes on a check, was to say no. She wasn’t a hired gun. But Alana was as smooth as her son. She told a good story, and she cried the right amount of tears. She didn’t claim that Darren was guiltless in his life, but she claimed that he was a victim of his past. He’d been abused in school. He’d never learned how to respect women. He’d made mistakes, but he wasn’t a rapist. The case was a he-said, she-said between her son and an SF State senior he’d met at a party. The prosecutors were trying to make an example of him.