Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

Then he'd said that he could try to teach her the trick of it, if she wanted; that maybe she could do it if he came along with her and prepared the way, and maybe then they could get around and have some real fun and never have to worry about being caught.

I looked sideways at her, quickly, she was still leaning forward, staring down at the bird box over the back of the passenger seat. 'What did you say to that?' I asked her.

'I told him no thanks,' she said, and she stretched over as far as she could and reached down to put her finger to one of the slots in the box. The reaction was instantaneous, a squawking and a fluttering which caused her to pull away so fast that she teetered for a moment before dropping back onto her seat. I glanced in the mirror at her as she added, 'I mean, who'd want to be like him?'

It was almost five in the afternoon when I pulled onto the parking lot outside the Phoenix Zoo. I told Georgie that I had a quick visit to make and that I wouldn't be more than a few minutes, and then I unbelted the bird box.

As I was lifting it out, Georgie said, 'You trapped him in Hector, didn't you?'

I stopped, half-in and half-out of the car. I could see from her face that there was no point in me trying to make up some lie, so I said, 'I'm afraid I did. I made it so he had nowhere else he could go.' I didn't want to tell her about how I'd carefully squeezed the life out of the bird to bring it right up to the point of death and no further, or about what I'd had to do to the body of the farm caretaker to drive the ghoul across.

'Is he going to die?' she said. 'I mean, for real, this time?'

'Yes,' I said. 'He is.'

She thought about it for a few moments. Then she nodded.

'I think it's best,' she said. 'That's what he wants, really.'

The zoo was about to close and the girl at the turnstile wasn't going to let me in, but I said that I was here to see one of the assistant managers and mentioned Frank's name. She must have phoned ahead, because as I walked towards the Administration block over by Macaw Island I saw him coming out to meet me. He gave me a friendly enough hello, but I could see that he was puzzled at my appearance so late in the day and I also saw his eyes stray to the box under my arm.

I explained what I wanted, making it sound casual and nothing special. He shrugged, and went over to call something into one of the offices, and then together we walked down the path that would take us out to the eastern spur of the grassland habitat area. Where two paths crossed, we stopped to let the last Safari Train of the day go by.

I hadn't been consciously trying to think of the last time that I'd been here but the memory was with me all the same, trotting along at my side like some faithful old dog. Frank, who knew nothing of what I'd been through in the past few weeks, was saying, 'You should hear some of the things we get asked. Weird? We had a woman six months ago, wanted to buy some gorilla semen. I don't even like to think about why.'

'Did she get it?'

'We told her that she could have as much as she wanted, but she'd have to do her own collecting. What the hell, you've seen our gorilla, he needs all the fun that comes his way. She didn't call back. What did she think, that we kept it around in bottles?'

Here on our left was the drinking fountain where we'd stopped before leaving. Georgie hadn't been able to reach, or so she'd said. So I'd lifted her to it, and she'd managed to spray both Loretta and me.

Frank said, 'All I'm wondering is, what did the bird do to offend you so much?'

'Not me,' I said. 'It's my nephew's. It got a taste for blood.'

'A canary?'

'It must have seen too many Sylvester cartoons. Now there's no stopping it. This is the best way.'

The final bell was ringing as we reached the line of pens which held the birds of prey.

Frank called a keeper out from around the back, and he produced the keys to open up the walk-through feeding alley by the side of the hawks. There were three of them, sleek, well-oiled machines with dark little hearts, and at the noise we made they turned and stared at us from their perches with eyes that were like small, beady lasers. They kept on staring as I put my box through the hatch and opened up the lid.

Within an instant there was a sharp pain in my hand as the canary came out in a flurry of yellow feathers, and it struggled and fluttered as I tried to shake it off. Frank and the keeper were both staring in surprise at the quarter-inch gash that its beak left in my hand, so deep that the blood simply ran, but I only had eyes for the birds.

The canary was zigzagging around, completely disoriented after its time in the box. Two of the hawks had already started to move, Indian sun-gods with their cloaks spread wide, and I drew my bleeding hand back and let the wire hatch fall shut.

'You could have released it,' Frank said. 'Cage birds hardly ever make it in the wild anyway.'

'I want to be sure of this one,' I said. 'And I want him to know what it felt like for the rest of us.'

It lasted no longer than a single wing-beat, of which I could feel the backdraft like the passage of a dark angel. The yellow bird was picked from the air with a squawk and returned to the perch, where the biggest of the hawks held it and decapitated it. After that, there was no sound other than that of tearing and feeding.

I told Frank that I owed him one.

And then I headed back toward the car, where Georgina would be waiting.