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Today’s story is “Blackbird,” the eighth in Kindling’s first ever short story collection, Lights Out. Inspired by folk horror and mythology, this collection of short stories will explore the unknown, the consequences of touching the forbidden, and the mysteries that lurk in the dark, unexplored places of the world.
Inspired by my early exposure to horror, dark sci-fi and dark fantasy through anthologies and collections such as, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, The Illustrated Man, The Twilight Zone, and Tales From the Crypt.
After
Sun came in slanted through the open barn door. The bird carcasses, small and some of them pink, others maggot infested and still others, only sculptures of thin bones, lay strewn about on warped wood. He stepped carefully, tiptoeing around them.
He could not wear his shoes here. He had realized that the second day, when it came to him why all the birds were falling on his property. In the woods they were nesting and chirping, living their merry bird lives, but in the circle of clearing around the barn, something was happening. Something sacred.
Take off your shoes for this is holy ground.
Where had he heard that before? Had she said it to him before she died? No. It was the preacher who said it, in one of the sermons she listened to. First in person, then after she got sick, on her phone or laptop. He hated that. The voice droning on and on, rising theatrically, then falling to a whisper. Coaxing. Begging. Selling.
In the beginning, he begged her to try something, anything else, but the sermons were the only thing that kept whatever lived in these woods at bay. He hadn’t seen it, not like she had, but he could admit that the preacher’s voice drowned out the other thing.
Before the birds, he would have pushed that thought away (thou shalt not), but he could no longer bring himself to do it. Not after everything that had happened. Not when, for the first time in his life, his prayers were being answered.
“You don’t sound sick to me.”
His prick of a boss was on the other line. Gem could feel his lips go white. He bit into the soft flesh to keep from screaming, let out a weak cough instead. The man on the other end sighed.
“I’ll have to write you up for this one. I couldn’t when it was your wife and all, but you can’t keep doing this.”
Couldn’t, not wouldn’t. That meant he wanted to. He just didn’t want to deal with the ramifications that such a dick move might incur. Gem tasted blood, released his mangled lip, and spoke in a raspy voice.
“I understand.”
Lie. He didn’t. He never would. How was it that people like this always rose to the top?
“You better,” the asshole said, then hung up.
Gem looked out the window. His eyes scanned the sky just in time to see a smudge of black in the otherwise flat white, fall to the ground. Another bird. He felt a prickle travel along the bumps in his spine, resting at the base of his neck. The hairs stood on end.
“Big things,” he muttered, then let the rest of the memory play out quietly in his mind.
Before
“Big things happening?” Lana asked.
He dumped a box marked DISHES on the antique wooden table. The top was marred with scratches, and occasional pockmarks that could only have been done by something sharp, and on purpose.
He held up a finger, pointed to an AirPod, hidden by a lock of hair.
“It would be great if we could keep you on for the next couple of months. Just until we find someone.” His boss's voice rattled in his ear.
“It’s just the drive–” he started.
“I know. We thought of that. I’d like to offer you hybrid. Four days remote, one day in office.”
A smile spread across his face. Lana mouthed the word what, brow creased, her mouth big and smiling back at him.
When he told her she was skeptical.
“Babe, they offer you things all the time to get you to stay. They never come through.”
He forked a torn piece of kale into his mouth. Food tasted better out here. The leaf was crisp, dripping in oil, the bitterness softened by goat cheese and cranberry.
“This time is different Lana. I can leave at any time. They have to do things my way, or I’m out.”
She thought about it, poked at the salad without bringing it to her mouth.
“But you said you were going to quit. Take the summer to figure out your next step.”
“I can still do that. I’ll be here nearly everyday. Between meetings we can do all the things we said we would. Hike, explore the woods.” He eyed the drab kitchen, nicotine yellow walls and dark brown cabinets. “Paint.”
Lana looked up from her plate. The ugliness of the place got a smile out of her.
“No, I think I like it babe.”
“Yeah? Just what you would have picked?”
“Mmm hmm. Couldn’t have done better myself.”
Possibility was what she saw in the place when it first came on the market.
“Look at those vaulted ceilings!”
“Lana, you can see the cobwebs in the pictures.”
She couldn’t hear him when she was like this. She had seen it, and now it was pedal to the metal.
“I already called the real estate agent. She said it sits on thirty acres. Thirty! And beyond that is forest. Private land that no one uses.”
He pushed his chair back from his desk and looked at her.
“How much is it?”
“You could finally have space to figure out what you want to do. We could bring your canvases.”
“Lana. How much?”
“One fifty.”
“What?”
“I know Gem.”
She let the space draw out like that. Let it sink in that this place would be paid off by the sale of their apartment in the city. His mind drifted over the street lights and high rises, moved until it hit deep green blankets of endless forest. The Adirondacks in Autumn.
“When do we see it?” She had the upper hand and she knew it. But he wouldn’t let himself get too excited. Not yet.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” he echoed, and slid his chair back up to his desk.
She let herself out easy, a lion who had stashed its prey, and would come back to feast later.
After
The barn floor was covered in birds. Gem had left just enough room for a path. He planned it so he could reach any bird by sitting in a squat position, and reaching his hand out. His grandma had taught him that when he helped her plant her massive two acre garden.
“You should be able to reach everything without effort. Harvest is back breaking enough. No need to make things difficult.”
No need. So he laid the birds out and carved out a path for himself that went in spirals until it reached the center of the barn. There he made a circle, big enough to lay down in.
Come to me ye weary, and I will give you rest.
The words held no comfort for him. Outside, he could hear the rhythmic thud of bird bodies on dirt, echoing against the sloped wooden roof. Like the beginning of a heavy rain, when the first big droplets let go of the storm cloud, and free-fall to the earth.
Before
Lana was right. The work came first. What was supposed to be a romantic summer in a new life, one filled with books and lightning bugs and night coffee had turned into the same slog he had been living back in the city. She went on her hikes alone.
Sitting in the barn, stroking the bird's oily black feathers, Gem thought of her last normal day. It was muggy. Her face glistened, dark hair slick against her skin in the heat. Cicada song filled their mornings and nights. The electric buzzing got into their dreams. The sound set Gem’s teeth on edge.
“It makes it hard to work.”
Lana’s arms were around him while he typed, hands resting at his chest. Her chin snug in the divot between neck and shoulder. She opened her mouth, and put her teeth against his skin, breathing hot before biting down, gently. He couldn’t help it. He wanted to concentrate. Needed to finish. He flinched, rolled his head to the side, pushing her out of his space. She obeyed, moved her hands off his chest, stepped away from him and to the window.
For a moment there was no sound, just the clack of his fingers on the keyboard.
“I think I’m going to hike Charlie this evening.”
Charlie–the hill behind their house, affectionately named after their fattest cat, ten years dead but never forgotten. He was so entrenched in his deadline, he barely noticed when she left the house.
It was dark when he finally hit send on his email and looked around. The house was quiet and still. The heat bore down on him. Outside, the cicadas buzzed loud as ever.
“Lana?”
Nothing. He glanced at a clock on the wall. She had left three hours ago. Surely the hill wasn’t difficult enough to warrant that time past. A rock dropped into his gut, weighed him down with muffled dread. Don’t worry. She’s fine. His logical mind soothed and coaxed. But he knew. Looking back on that day, he knew she wasn’t.
He flung the front door open, found Lana on the porch. She was sitting with her back against the house, knees pulled up, arms wrapped around her. She was shivering.
“Lana,” her name came out angry. At what he didn’t know. At the heat, and the buzzing, and the two seconds of dread he had while he slipped on shoes and made a beeline for the front door. But no. That wasn’t what bothered him most. It was the damn shivering. The helplessness. Her irritating weakness in the face of anything difficult.
He stepped towards her, then stopped. Disgusted.
“What are you doing out here?”
Her hands were clenched, white in the kitchen light that streamed from the window. Half her face was in shadow, but the part that he could make out was drenched. Tears mixed with sweat and snot. He went to her, knelt down, put the back of his hand to her forehead. She was cool to the touch. Close up, he saw that the soft linen pants she wore were torn, marked with dirt and dribbles of blood.
“Lana,” he grabbed her shoulders, but she didn’t look at him, just stared out to the black land.
He shook her, said her name again, and finally, her eyes met his. They opened wide, the pupils overwhelming her irises. They looked black, like a scared animal.
“I saw something,” her head was shaking back and forth, trying to take back everything that had led them here.
“What? An animal?”
“I don’t know. No,” her head was still shaking, but at something different now. She was accepting.
She looked at him, finally really came back to earth.
“Some–thing–lives out here.”
“Thing?” he asked.
“A bad, bad thing,” she managed to get out.
The crying started again.
He woke up to her shadow in the window. The moon was half full, but the light was enough to make a halo around her form.
“Lana, what is it?”
She was looking for something. The bad thing.
He rubbed his eyes. The report was due tomorrow, and he was behind. Because Lana couldn’t get this thing out of her head. She wouldn’t even describe it to him.
“You won’t believe me,” she said.
He kicked off the sheets and went to her side, peered out into the black field, searched the darkness for some shapeless form. Somewhere an owl hooted. He heard wings flutter, and touched Lana’s arm. She shivered.
“Come on. There’s nothing–,” but his words were cut short by a steady knock at the door.
Lana turned, her eyes brimming and afraid. He went to the dresser and pulled out an old grey pair of sweatpants.
“Gem,” he looked at her as he pulled the pants on. She was shaking her head. “Gem don’t.”
“It’s probably nothing,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “Stay here.”
But she didn’t. Lana followed him out of the bedroom. The knocking sound was polite, more like a tapping. It was as if someone wandering the woods came upon the house, but noting the late hour, decided to give the door a try, hoping not to wake anyone suddenly.
He stopped at the top of the stairs, and she did too. They listened. Someone was knocking on the door, but Gem noted that the rapping was only a foot or two from the ground. Whoever it was, they were either small, like a child. Or they weren’t standing.
Scratching came between each series of knocks. Weak, not desperate. Gem felt a cold sweat break, drip down his temple. When it reached his neck he shivered.
“Who’s there?” he spoke up, but didn’t take a step towards the door. Not wanting to see what was on the other side.
The scratching stopped. He waited.
“Identify yourself,” he said in a low, steady voice, imitating police officers he had seen in detective shows.
A whimper started, then a soft crying. The knocking came again, only hard this time.
“It sounds like a child,” he said.
“No Gem,” Lana put a hand on his shoulder and grabbed, trying to pull him back. “It isn’t.”
He stared at her, disbelieving. “Have you lost your mind? It’s a kid. I can hear it.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “Then it showed itself to me.”
Gem pulled away from her. “I don’t know what this is, but I’m not going to listen to it for one more minute. I’m not feeding into it.”
He ran down the stairs, unbolted the front door, and opened it a crack. From behind him Lana called, her voice strange and weak.
“What is it?”
He opened the door all the way, laughing a little as he did. Lana peered around him, eyes afraid, hands shaking.
“It’s a blackbird.”
The bird hopped from one foot to the other. He opened his mouth, but instead of a caw, it was a cry.
“Why does he sound like that?” Lana asked, pulling back.
“They’re smart,” said Gem, reaching his hand out to the bird. It tittered, eyes flitting like it was deciding something. Then it lunged.
“Whoa!” Gem cried out, pulling his hand back and out of reach.
“Did he get you?”
Gem examined the blood droplets forming where the bird’s beak had pierced flesh. It was in the web, between thumb and forefinger. A little piece of skin had been torn away. He pinched the wound closed with his other hand. The bird opened its mouth and whimpered.
“Don’t they mimic?” Lana asked from behind him. The idea settled like a rock in a lake, right in the middle of his gut. The bird had heard the sound somewhere. He didn’t answer her, just shook his head. Whatever was going on with Lana, he didn’t want it to get worse.
“He can’t hurt you Lana. I think we’re safe to head back to bed.”
“Safe!” the blackbird said, then scratched at the porch.
“I’ll deal with this tomorrow,” said Gem, and closed the door behind him.
After
He woke up with his face in the dirt. Around him, the bodies were piled neatly. Stiff black legs stuck out from the once plump, sleek black torsos, now grey and goose pimpled. He had picked them clean. Gem listened for the cursed rain of blackbird corpses that had gone on day and night now for a week, but outside of the barn, there was silence.
Paul McCartney’s voice rang out between vibrations in his back pocket.
“Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly.”
That line. It was all coming to him now. As the guitar melody walked down the neck, Gem finally picked up.
“Yeah?”
It was his boss.
“I tried to give you a chance, but this is the third strike Gem. You’re out.”
“Thanks for the call asshole,” Gem said, and held the phone for a minute while the man’s angry shouting words poured over deaf ears.
He meant every word, the gratitude and the insult. If he hadn’t called, Gem might have never gotten the sign. Wings. He would make wings, and finally learn to fly.
Before
The blackbird didn’t stop. Lana didn’t sleep at night anymore. She stayed on the couch and waited. Standing guard she called it. In reality, she sat grasping her hands together, staring out the window until it came tapping.
“This isn’t healthy Lana.”
“There’s more of them,” she said, like she hadn’t heard a word out of Gem’s mouth. “I can hear them scratching. They’re in the walls now.”
He felt that hot anger he always fought coming up like a river. Before he could think, he was moving, reaching for the doorknob, fighting against Lana’s tug on his shirt collar. Her nails were digging in. She was hurting him.
He pushed her off, and it was easy, like waving a hummingbird away. She was afraid of him. Deep down inside, she always had been.
“This ends tonight,” he said, and threw open the door.
Outside, the air was still and heavy. The blackbird wasn’t there, but that familiar crying sound–the mimic–came calling again. Gem looked along the ground, then stepped out onto the porch. His neck ached from days without sleep, and the pain lifted the fog, cut through and provided clarity.
The sound was coming from his right, from the house. He turned back to the door, and listened to that awful kid cry. Lana was right. There were more of them. A clumsy nest, built right where two beams met in the porch roof. Gem pulled over an iron chair. It was the one that Lana had grabbed from her mother’s house after she died. Something to remember her by.
“Gem don’t!”
Lana was standing in the doorway, her eyes sunken and large. She wasn’t eating. She had always been thin, but this–thing–had gotten to her in a way he couldn’t understand. Knowing that she was capable of this kind of weakness made him hate her.
He reached up, grabbing the nest and pulling it apart. The crying mimic turned to bird squawks and caws. Little cheaps followed, and tiny bird bodies tumbled out of the torn nest and on to the wooden porch planks. The blackbird swooped on him, and Gem nearly toppled. His lips pulled back. This was the kind of competition that amped him up. When others pulled back, he leaned in.
“Come here you little fucker,” he said, and reached for the nest again. Like he predicted, the blackbird went for his hand, and he clasped onto her with the other one. He could feel the wings pulsing. Lana was crying in the doorway. He got the bird firmly in his grasp, its head wedged between his fingers. The wings tried to flap against him, but he held tighter.
Later, he would explain his actions away to himself. Lana’s face was twisted in pain. He had never seen her like that before. Seeing her tortured, night after night, by these birds had driven him mad. It was love, he would tell himself. Love had driven him to do unspeakable things.
But when he thought back on the moment before drifting off to sleep, in that honest watery place just before dreaming, he knew it was something different. The feeling of the bird's head in his hands as he twisted it in unnatural ways. His teeth clenched so hard his jaw hurt. The sound of tearing when he pulled, and the head came off. Lana’s mouth open, her praying hands together in front of her white lips. The eyes wide and seeing into him, into what he really was. It wasn’t love.
When he crunched the first baby bird under his house slippers, Lana’s eyes rolled back into her head, and she fainted.
“Have you noticed any signs?” the neurosurgeon asked him at the hospital. “Any changes in personality?”
“No,” Gem said reflexively. “Lana lay in a hospital bed.”
“Any hallucinations? Muscle weakness? Changes in sleep?”
“Well yes, but there were these birds–” Gem started, the reality dawning on him.
“I ask because the CT scan came back with something. It looks like a mass, three to be exact. They are located in two different lobes. The largest one is in the temporal lobe. You might notice speech impairment. Aphasia. Trouble with memory. The other two smaller ones are in the frontal lobe.”
“Can you take them out?” Lana asked.
The neurosurgeon stared at the image.
“We need a biopsy to confirm, but based on the shape, the way these masses have developed, I think we’re looking at brain cancer.”
The revelation stunned Gem.
“If you want to pursue treatment, we need to begin right away. Quality of life is really what we’re aiming for here.”
Lana reached out and Gem held her hand, but he couldn’t feel anything. His skin felt cool to the touch. A shiver went up his spine. He thought this was because of that thing in the woods. Because of some invisible monster Lana had awakened on Charlie. Because she could never let good things happen to her unless Gem forced them on her.
All along, the bad thing was in her.
Gem didn’t go to church with Lana. He told her he couldn’t stand by and watch her go crawling back to a religion she didn’t believe in. There were no protests from her. He waited for her in the parking lot on Sundays, sometimes pretending to read a book, and at others, pacing with a cigarette that he barely smoked.
The preacher helped her cope with dying. She always looked hopeful after services.
“Why do you need fairytales Lana? I always thought you were more courageous than this.”
When she got too sick to go, he would pull up old sermons on her laptop. The preacher's words would help keep the nightmares at bay. The ones where she relived finding the bad thing in the woods.
Gem hated to listen, would leave the room when the sermon started. But he hated the guilt those nightmares brought more. When he should have realized that something was wrong with Lana. Something in her brain wasn’t quite right. But instead, he had dared to believe.
Was that the reason he prayed after she died? Was that the reason he asked for a sign?
After
The preacher's words echoed in the barn, his voice bouncing off the rafters. Lana’s religion intermingled with his, as Gem worked the feathers in his hands. His fingers ached from the constant motion. The sewing needle had pricked his hands at least a dozen times while he got the hang of the pressure, working the feathers into the thin web of skin along his shoulders.
The trick was to keep it close to the surface. Once you pricked muscle, the pain was too much for him to bear.
“Those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not become weary, they will walk and not faint. Isaiah 40:31.”
Gem flexed, then relaxed his bicep, working the needle through the flesh on his left arm. The feathers didn’t lay right. They stuck out at strange odds and ends, didn’t look like they could carry him. But that was where faith came in.
He envisioned the circle of land from overhead. The leaves were turning. He would get to see the Adirondacks in Autumn. It was a view Lana never got. She had finally found a place in this world that was perfect for her in every way, but that thing had turned it into a nightmare.
Fresh blood trickled down, dripping at his elbow. His masterpiece was done. He spread his new wings and stared up at the ceiling rafters, just in time to see it. The blackbird hopped along the wooden beam, staring down at him, cocking its head from side to side. It opened its mouth, and Lana’s words came out.
“A thing. A bad, bad thing.”
The words were accusations. The bird's eyes were locked in on Gem’s. Gem went to the ladder, and started to climb. As he grabbed each rung, pain echoed throughout his body. The bird mocked him, flitting from rafter to rafter, light and capable in the midst of his fumbling against his self inflicted wounds. More blood dripped down his arms. Still he climbed.
As he got closer, the bird edged away from the loft and towards the center of the barn.
“You made a mistake,” Gem said, and the bird laughed in Lana’s ringing laugh.
He reached the loft, and a wicked smile spread across his face. He stood, bent his arms at the elbow and flexed, pushing more blood to the stitch holes dotted across his shoulders and triceps. The feathers stood on end wildly.
Gem took a sputtering step onto one of the rafters. The wood creaked underfoot, and the little bird hopped back a few steps.
“I didn’t have faith before,” he said, and took another step.
The bird was leading him, he realized now.
“That was why I couldn’t stop working.”
He teetered, caught himself, corrected. The ground wobbled beneath him. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, focused all his energy on the pulsing ache in his arms. The bird was close. It’s head cocked to the side, like he was listening to him. Gem took another step, sure and steady this time.
“Lana always had enough faith for the both of us.”
His eyes went fuzzy, muddied by gathering tears.
“That was why she saw it first, in the woods.”
He stepped too quickly, wobbled, then had to kneel down, collapsing to center the weight. The bird fluttered in the air for a moment, then landed.
“Doctors don’t understand things like that.”
He moved forward that way, bent over, his hands gripping the rafter until the knuckles turned white.
“I asked her what she saw in the woods that day. On her death bed. I had to know.”
His hand hit splintered wood and he inhaled against the burning sensation, fought the urge to let go.
“Do you know what it was? That bad thing?”
The bird flew up towards the dim roof. Dust speckles whirled, then settled into a slow drift towards the ground that was only revealed in sunlight. Gem looked up, tried to clock where it had gone. For a moment it disappeared, then the sound of fluttering wings came from behind Gem. The blackbird dove towards his head, and he tucked his chin to chest, death gripping the wood beam as hard as he could.
It started to fly up again towards the roof. Gem knew this was his only chance. He breathed in, planted his feet on the beams, and stood up. The bird’s fluttering was still far enough away. He could finish this right. He could transform.
He closed his eyes and tilted his head towards heaven. His arms stretched out until his body was in the shape of a cross. The oily black feathers were slick, covered in blood. Gem opened his eyes just in time to see the bird coming for him. Its wings held tight against its body, the legs pulled up and tucked into its underside.
Gem uttered the words Lana had whispered, just as the bird’s beak made contact, plunging into the soft squish of his eye. An explosion of white stars bloomed against black. Then, he could see her. It was the day before she died. She was laying in bed. She beckoned to him to come close. Her voice was only a whisper then. He leaned in and she said the words.
“It was you Gem, in the woods that day. The bad thing looked like you.”
The words were no longer just memory. They were coming out of his mouth. The confession wafted up past the rafters, the words echoing beyond the barn and up towards the heavens, carried on blackbird wings.
He only felt it for a moment, that lilt in his stomach as he fell backwards off the rafter. Gem could feel the wind against the feathers in his skin, and for a moment, he thought that he had caught the air, and that his faith had carried him skyward. He hit the wooden floor and heard the crunch of his bones against the hard ground.
Gem couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t make sense of how he had landed there in the center of spiraling bird carcasses. The last memory he had was of the those baby birds underfoot, bones breaking easier than dead leaves. The preacher’s voice boomed over his phone.
“In the last days there will come mockers.”
The bird laughed overhead, and Gem faded to black.
this is blowing my mind shaina. intensely scary and so well done.
The before and after device is so cool. I need to steal—-um be inspired by it.