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

At the door to outside, cigarette somehow half gone already, Maggie paused. She listened. Nothing. She opened the door.

As soon as it was open, she heard shrieking, an endless series of short, sharp, stuttered cries, shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie , and she knew what had happened.

The eggs had hatched.

Cigarette in her mouth, Maggie put both hands to her ears as she nudged the door wider. The things weren’t loud, exactly, but shrill and constant, overlapping. Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!

She stepped out onto the roof with her eyes to the sky. She checked the park. A woman with a pram was walking through, that was all.

Eventually Maggie was able to look away and lower her hands, wincing at the din but knowing she’d get used to it. She could get used to anything. She dropped her cigarette, stepped it out, and approached the nest, careful to keep her distance. She only wanted to see them.

They were ugly little things. A shuffling mass of black, puffy with erratic plumage, they held their beaks up to shriek-shriek-shriek! at the sky. Pale grey eyelids clenched closed against what little sun there was; they beat at each other blindly with stubby wings as they fidgeted into new positions.

When a dark shape blurred into her peripheral vision, Maggie screamed and crouched and covered her head with her arms. The thing dropped from a high position behind her, landing at the nest. It settled on the scaffold pole as Maggie scurried backwards towards the stairs in a crab position, hands and shoes slipping on the wet roof.

The bird was huge, even hunched over. As tall as her but more broad. Wings the size of ironing boards folded against its body. It was entirely black, so black that it gleamed, and the one glassy eye Maggie could see was so dark it absorbed all other colours. A hole’s shadow, dark as ink not written. In its beak, in its terrible split black beak, it held a giant snail.

The young in the nest jumped, jumped, knocked against each other, and beat their stumpy wings. They snapped at the air and set up a discordant chorus of shrill calling so intense it forced Maggie to stop fleeing just so she could cover her ears again. She still heard the crack, though, when the mother slammed its catch down against the roof wall. Crack! Crack-crack! A couple of those, then the bird held its catch on the wall, talons spread to grip it steady. The beak came down. Hard, quick, darting stabs. Crack! Crack-crack-crack! And Maggie realised at last that what she saw was not a snail. Of course it wasn’t a snail.

“Oh, Christ.”

Its beak withdrew from the motorcycle helmet with a string of something red and meaty. It tossed this to its nest. As the young fought over the flesh, it pecked again at the hole it had made in the visor, scooping more from inside, nodding to throw more strips to its children. Maggie saw blood spill from the opening, a single thick line of it running down the helmet to drip into the nest where the three snapped at thrown morsels until the helmet was dropped for them to peck at. They rammed their beaks into whatever gap they could find, nudging and shrieking at each other in between.

Beyond them, visible now as they fed themselves, was the last egg. The one she’d touched had not hatched.

The young were quickly done. They craned their necks upwards, tipped their heads back, and held their beaks open for short pauses between squawks. The mother dipped to each in turn, opening its beak in theirs to regurgitate a previous meal. Perhaps the rest of the motorcyclist. Perhaps something else. Maggie tried not to think of the woman she’d seen in the park. The one with the pram.

“Oh fucking Christ.”

The bird looked up. It turned its head one way then the other, locking one dark eye at a time on Maggie. It shuffled sideways on its perch, as she’d seen it do on the climbing frame, then arched its body forwards with its beak open wide. A long bloody tongue uncurled from inside with a scream of vowels, accompanied by the spreading of wings. They unfolded like vast blankets.

Maggie scrambled in retreat until she felt the closed door press against her back. She slapped around for the handle.

The bird’s long call became a sharp sequence of noises like nails being wrenched from wood. It flapped its wings, leapt, and swooped at her.

Maggie yanked herself to her feet and the door open at the same time. She rolled around the frame, slammed the door shut behind her. Holding it closed, she braced herself for an impact that never came. When the automatic light in the stairwell finally registered her existence, it blinked and flickered a rhythm as quick as her breathing.

Another cry resounded off the walls, deafening in the confined space of the stairwell.

Maggie shoved herself away from the door and took the stairs down two at a time, chased by a long dark echo.

Maggie’s father had died while she was on the roof. All those years she’d spent with him and she hadn’t been there when it happened. It didn’t seem fair.

At the cremation, people gave Maggie their condolences and platitudes, spoke of a tough man she didn’t recognise, spoke of mods and rockers but never explained how her father fit in. The man they knew had died long ago. The man in the photographs her sisters provided for the wake — Dad on his motorbike, Dad with his wife and girls — was a stranger to Maggie. The man she knew wore a faded grey dressing gown and had died with his eyes bulging and his hands twisted into claws that couldn’t get the mask from his face, couldn’t turn the oxygen dial. He’d wet himself, too. The small living room had been ripe with his odour.

Maggie spent the funeral thinking about a group of crows. Everyone in black. She thought of her father’s bulging eyes, his clawed hands, his stink, and found it hard to say she loved him. She let her sisters say it for her and thought of crows.

There had been few things to do afterwards. He only had a small selection of mismatched clothes to sort through. He’d left her with little more than his ashes. She had seen her sisters through their grief, but they didn’t stay long. They invited her to stay with them for a while, but they said it the same way Dad said a lot of things he didn’t mean. Within a fortnight of his passing, the house was finally empty and Maggie could do whatever she wanted. Hell, she could even smoke.

She went to the roof.

She tried to light a cigarette but her hands were shaking too much. She had to hold one with the other to keep the flame steady enough, puffing out quick breaths of relief before releasing a slower drag that calmed her. It would be her last one.

A chill breeze carried her smoke away and swept her hair into tangles. She zipped up her jacket to the sounds of them all screeching, hacking out their staccatos, calling her to their nest.

They were even uglier close up. The beaks seemed too wide for their feather-fluffed faces, and the eyes bulged beneath closed grey lids. Their squat heads were ruffled with a scruff of down that extended to the wattle of their throats. They were all elbows and claws, it seemed, feathers dark like tar, wafting their stench around as they shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie-shrieked!

Maggie dropped what was left of her cigarette and twisted her heel on it. “Stop it,” she said.

At the sound of her voice they became louder, scrabbling at the debris of their nest as they shoved each other, straining their heads and necks for their next meal.

“Stop it,” Maggie said, “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

She grabbed the nearest one under the foreshortened stubs of its arms or wings or whatever the hell they were and barely registered the weight of it. She scooped it up and cast it skyward, over the edge of the roof. It hung there for a moment, turning with the force of the throw, and faced her. It rawked and beat at the air, caught in the pause between up and down, flailing with limbs barely feathered. It had never seen another fly, not yet, but that didn’t matter. Seeing it done didn’t mean you could do it yourself.