Megan Lindholm - Wizard of the Pigeons

This was his best place, his sitting and thinking place. He used a stick to brush away a year’s layer of spruce needles. He dug down into the rich humus, the ripe smell of summer earth rising past him. He dug until he could thrust his entire hand and wrist into the hole. That was deep enough. He took the head from his pocket and unwrapped it to look a last time into the goldenorange eyes. But death had spoiled their color; he could not bring himself to try and close the lids. Instead he rewrapped it carefully in the paper napkin and placed it in the bottom of the hole. He buried it, squishing the earth down firmly with a clenched fist. When the hole was packed full, he sprinkled a layer of spruce needles across the scar. The tail feathers he stuck up in a small circle around the tiny grave. They kept falling over, but he patiently stood them up again and again, until the circle was complete. He never spoke as he did it; he made no sound at all. He bowed his head gravely to the circle of feathers and backed out of the grove, the trailing branches scratching his back and neck. He never went there again.

Red got in trouble. The school suspended him for three days after it became known that he had wrapped a chicken head in tinfoil and slipped it into a girl’s lunch bag. His father claimed the chicken feathers for tying flies, and his mother bleached the blood stains out of his sneakers. His whole weekend at the farm, flushed! He wished he lived on the farm and killed chickens every day. He imagined setting their heads up on a little row of stakes by the driveway, or giving foil-wrapped chicken heads to trick-or-treaters, or stringing heads and feet on thread and trimming me Christmas tree with them. Some kids had all me luck.

You were one of them. Mir insisted. Which one were you?

Wizard would not answer. He would not wonder if it were true. He made himself as hard and solid as a macadamia nut.

He made his soul so dense that it could not be compressed any further. He huddled within, knowing that it could not hold him prisoner forever. A pang echoed through his heart as he thought of Black Thomas, but he stilled it quickly. No avenue of vulnerability could be left unguarded.

Come, it demanded and seduced. Look some more.

Wizard refused; he would not look. But he could not stop feeling, and he felt the damp, clinging walls of the tunnel. He wanted to howl. It had put him back in the tunnel. He was not a big man, but he was too big for the tunnel. It had been made for ones smaller than he. It gripped him like a child’s sticky fist grips a bar of candy. He was wedged in it, with blackness and danger before him. and no way to wriggle backward. He worked his toes in his heavy boots, but they were laced too tightly. His ankles cramped with the effort.

He tried not to think that the tunnel might have to end, that there might not be a path back to the hot sunlight. He steeled himself. He could not go back, so he would go on. He felt for his hands and arms. They were trapped under him. His arms were stretched flat under him, his full weight pressing them against the damp floor of the tunnel. He had no idea how it could have happened. He flexed his fingers of his hands helplessly, felt the tunnel soil grate into the rawness of knuckles and joints and wrists. His neck was cramped from the exertion of holding his head up. But if he relaxed, he knew that his face would go into the mud floor of the tunnel. He’d suffocate.

Panic swelled inside him like a balloon being blown up inside his rib cage. He couldn’t breathe; his inflated chest was too big for the tunnel, but his lungs weren’t getting any air. He couldn’t get his breath.

Wizard surrendered. He opened his eyes, but nothing changed. Blackness before him and the grip of me tunnel around him. He had no breath left to scream, but he wept, his tears choking his throat and his nose swelling shut with mucus. No air. This had never happened, he told himself, and it wasn’t happening now. It was just a sham and a cheat, a corruption of all he had struggled to become. He couldn’t let it drag him back to a past he had never had. He wouldn’t. He would not.

With an effort of will, he ceased to struggle against it. He let his neck go limp and his face fell into the mud of the tunnel floor.

Wizard’s forehead hit the floor with a resounding thump.

As suddenly as it had possessed him, it had left him. He remained motionless, savoring the mildewy smell of the peeling linoleum. His face felt stiff as a mask and his head ached with the sensation of having cried for a very long time. At last he — . peeled his reluctant eyes open.

A thin dawn was seeping in the window through the shattered pane. Cautiously he turned his head to put his cheek against the floor. Inches from his face, his eyes barely able to focus on it, was the star of blood Black Thomas had left. Dread rose in his heart as he peered beyond it for the severed foot.

But it was gone. Gone. Taken as a trophy, he didn’t doubt.

Wizard felt sick. He started to rise, but found part of his dream carried over into waking; something constricted his body. binding his arms to his torso. He rolled cautiously over, bending his neck to look at himself. It was the window blanket. He was swaddled in it like a cocoon. And dawn was already seeping in the window.

Working in silence, he wriggled free of the blanket. He must be out of here, down on the streets, before people began to open up the shops two floors below him. He never remained in his den during the day, never entered or left it during the hours of light. The upper floors of this building had been abandoned for years. The floor below him was mostly storage.

He did not want anyone to hear a suspicious noise or see him on the fire escape and decide to investigate. The first thing Cassie had taught him was never to take chances, at all, at all.

Gray Mir had forced him into this foolishness.

The floor was cold beneath his socks. First, the shard of glass. He glanced quickly out into his alley. No one yet- Working quickly but carefully, he pushed the wedge of glass back into its putty nest and then tapped his Finger against it until it was nearly flush with the rest of the pane. Surely no one would notice that the cracked window now had new and larger cracks in it. Now the cardboard. It was soft with age and would not stand alone. It needed support. After a moment’s hesitation, Wizard picked up the blanket. Surely it had done him all the harm it could. And he had nothing else to use. The thumbtacks were still wedged through it, save a few rolling on the floor.

He got the two upper comers, then the lower ones. It was while he was securing the side tacks that he noticed it.

He did not remember a closet being there. He did not remember it at all. The rest of the room was his, as it had always been. No item was changed. There were his few books on his crude shelves, his mattress, the two cardboard boxes that held his wardrobe. A sturdier wooden crate held his few food supplies and sundries. High on the walls were the pigeons’ shelves, where they nested and roosted. All of that he remembered, and it was exactly as he recalled it. But he did not recall the closet whose open door now gaped at him. He closed his eyes and tried to picture that section of smooth wall, the painted surface peeked with careless nail holes and scuffed and stained. He was sure of it, until he opened his eyes again and the closet yawned at him laughingly.

A murky daylight filled his room, seeping in from the next chamber. He tried to remember opening the door to that room, as he did every pre-dawn, to allow his pigeons to exit. He was sure he had not. It should have been closed still, shut tight as he shut it every night before he slept. But it, too, gaped at him, allowing in the light that delineated the horrors of me closet.