Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

Maggie was awake at first light, despite having stayed up late. She smoked the day’s first cigarette out of her bedroom window, enjoying the cool air, and thought about going to the roof earlier than usual. She’d Googled different types of eggs, and she’d browsed various images, but found nothing useful. The largest eggs nowadays came from the ostrich, but they were only a pathetic six inches high. Not even close. The great elephant bird of Madagascar had laid eggs that were a foot or so high but they were extinct now.

Maggie smiled. Egg-stinct. Eggs-stinked. She blew smoke into the morning air.

Anyway, the eggs on the roof were twice the size of the Madagascan ones. Even the largest dinosaur egg she could find online wasn’t much bigger than the elephant bird’s.

Outside, the city was slowly coming to life. An Asian man was pulling at the metal blind of a newsagents, rattling it up, and a street sweeper was doing his or her best to tidy the city. Someone was walking a dog that kept trying to squat, yanking the lead before it could foul the pavement. A jogger, favouring the empty streets over the tiny nearby park, was running a course that would end in the same place it began.

In the park, someone was standing on the climbing frame. The climbing frame was two upright ladders with another leaning at an angle, and connecting all three was a horizontal section of bars to swing across. The figure was balancing in the middle of this, standing on the bars rather than hanging below them. Too big to be a child. Maggie was several storeys up, and a good distance away, but she still had the distinct impression that whoever was down there was staring straight at her.

“Hello,” she said quietly, bringing her cigarette up for another breath, giving a little wave.

The figure shuffled sideways a few steps. Maggie supposed they had to go sideways because of the climbing frame, but wouldn’t they want to see where they were stepping? Once it had shuffled to its new position, the figure opened up a long coat, black with black beneath, and Maggie wondered if she was looking at a flasher down there, or some other kind of pervert.

“Goodbye.”

She scraped her cigarette out on the bricks of her window sill and brought the stub inside, pulling the window closed. She levered it shut and went to make a coffee. Maybe the person down there knew about the eggs. Maybe they’d put them there, and was waiting to see how Maggie would react. Maybe it was some sort of elaborate joke.

She readied a cup for her father, though he wouldn’t be up for some time yet, and she put his morning pills on a saucer. She spooned coffee granules into her own cup and took her own pills waiting for the kettle to boil. Tiny ovoids in her mouth, sitting on her tongue. She thought about the eggs on the roof. She thought about keeping one, bringing it down to the flat stuffed under her jacket, “Oh, I’m pregnant, Dad, didn’t you know?” Like he’d ever believe her. Like she could ever compete with Julie or Jess. Like she would ever had kids. She spat the pills into the sink and washed them away. It didn’t matter. Looking after Dad was more than enough.

She took her coffee up to the roof.

In the early hours of the morning, the air on the roof smelled different. There was a coolness to it, a fresh promise that today was new and anything could happen. She liked the quiet, too. Few cars, no TVs in the flats below, workmen yet to arrive at the site opposite, filling the world with their radio and banter. She didn’t pause to enjoy the air or the peace, though. She went straight to the space behind the storage building, half expecting to find only a clutter of litter, but the nest was still there. The eggs were still there. She raised her cup to them, “Good morning,” and took a sip. It was very hot but good, and the smell of it did something to dispel the rotten odour of the nest. “Sleep well?”

She wondered how long they’d been there before she’d found them. Some eggs, she knew from her research, were actually fossils never to hatch. What were these? One had been warm yesterday, hadn’t it? She crouched to touch it, the same one as before, and yes, there it was. An internal heat. Or maybe a residual warmth. She gave it an experimental tap and though it didn’t yield beneath her knuckles, she could tell that it might, with enough pressure.

There were no feathers in the nest. That was unusual, wasn’t it?

Because four giant eggs was completely normal.

She took another sip of coffee and put the cup on the wall before pressing both hands to the egg. She caressed it, marvelled at how smooth it was, just like a real egg. With one hand on either side, she attempted to lift it. It was heavy, and something inside fidgeted, a confined squirm that made Maggie snatch her hands back. She wiped them on her jeans as she stood then took up her cup again, glancing out to the park.

That same figure was still on the climbing frame. It hunched suddenly as she watched, and with the action came a shrill scream that broke into a sequence of aborted noises. Then it dropped from its perch and its coat opened, opened, opened far too wide on either side and flapped, flapped, because it wasn’t a coat at all; with two hard beats of its wings, the thing was aloft.

Maggie fumbled the cup she’d hardly taken hold of and it spilled, dropped, smashed, “Shit!” She glanced down as she stepped away from it and when she looked up again, the sky was clear. She peered over the wall and saw nothing coming. Still, she left the broken pieces of her cup where they lay. She headed for the stairs, not running but certainly hurrying. Dad would be wanting his morning cuppa and she had to take her pills.

She didn’t look up and she didn’t look back.

She was supposed to be watching an old movie with her father but her mind wasn’t on the plot. At least she didn’t have to follow any conversation though; he was wearing the full breathing mask today rather than the nostril tubes. It fitted around his nose and mouth and it prevented him from talking. He had to look his question at her when she got up during the adverts.

“Toilet,” Maggie said. She checked his oxygen, adjusting it on her way out. “Cuppa tea, Dad?”

He nodded, returning to the black-and-white world of the TV.

Maggie had a packet of cigarettes hidden in a box of tampons in the bathroom. She grabbed them and flicked the kettle on in the kitchen before letting herself out into the corridor. She closed the door quietly and lit the cigarette early; she needed the nicotine before getting to the roof this time. She was confident there wouldn’t be enough smoke to set off the alarms. Confident, too, that they probably didn’t work anyway.

It had been a few days since her last visit to the roof. Since then, she’d enjoyed her cigarettes in the bathroom, extractor fan on, her hand and face at the tiny open window because she was too worried about what she might see from her own. The one in the bathroom had glass that was opaque even though they were so high up, and more importantly it didn’t face the park. She’d had nightmares about the park, dreams in which the thing she’d seen there had flown right at her, crashing into her bedroom in an explosion of glass and brick only to drag her out screaming, both of them screaming, and then she was falling until she was suddenly awake. One night she’d woken from this to find her father shuffling in the hallway. He’d opened his dressing gown and released a flock of dark birds at her and she’d woke a second time, smothered beneath her blankets. She was ready to check the roof again now if only because it might put an end to the dreams.