AILEEN MAGUIRE LISTENED to the radio without focus, its words a shapeless blanket around her. Though it was past midnight, she had not yet gone to bed. Instead she sat stiffly in the lounge, her husband’s chair beside her—empty but for the pale shade that lived on the edge of her sight.
The small room was neat and warm, decorated in consumptive florals that had browned with age, like old blood. Maguire’s empty glass had warmed in her hand. She rolled it, following the syrupy wisps of alcohol on its sides, and wondering if she could stop herself refilling it before sleep eventually came.
If it came.
Rain lashed the window. Maguire took a deeper breath and felt—as she often did, sitting in the little room—tight and sore, like her skin had dried and shrunk on her bones. She thought of the school and the flash of violence in the corridor—thought of Sep, and the likeness he bore to a headstrong, clever girl who’d attended Hill Ford High more than forty years ago and never left.
She thought of Shelley Webster—dead now, like Lizzie and Morgan. Shelley’s daughter hadn’t said much on the phone, just that her mother liked to stay out late, and that she’d always kept her hair long. It was awful, she’d said again, before the phone fell onto the cradle.
Maguire allowed her thoughts to mellow.
Shelley’s hair.
She gripped her glass tighter.
Of the five who had been to the box, three were dead: Morgan, lung cancer in ’68; Lizzie, a heart attack in ’76—events that had blown mortality’s cold breath down the back of her neck. And, with each death, a new crow had come. The old pair was there last night—watching with sharp, unmistakable eyes.
That morning, a third had appeared—right before the phone call from Brooklyn.
Shelley had always wanted to go to America. Now she was dead—killed on the New York subway.
Maguire set her lips, flattened her thin hair, stood.
And froze.
There was a noise at the other end of the hall. It was coming from the old study—the scratch and wriggle of tiny movements against stone.
She peered into the gloom beyond the lamp.
Another scratch came from the study.
“There’s a bird in the chimney again,” she said quietly.
“You should take a pot,” said her husband’s shade. “I used to catch them in a pot.”
The scratching stopped for a moment, and she found herself leaning away from the door. Then it came again, quicker, and more frantic.
Maguire’s skin squeaked on her glass.
“It might die. Remember the seagull that got stuck up there.”
“I remember,” said the shade. “Take care, love.”
“Bloody birds,” she muttered.
She went to the kitchen, took a small pot from the cabinet, and walked along the corridor, each step massive in the silence.
The noise stopped when she touched the study door. She paused, listening to the sounds of the building: stone groaning in the wind, the gurgle of guttering, and the spat of rain. She leaned on the handle.
The study had been her husband’s room. It might have been years since she’d been in it, and the door was swollen tight in the frame.
The lock gave way.
Maguire tumbled into the room and stood still, listening through the dark. Then she raised the pot and clicked on the dazzling bulb.
Nothing. Just the calm of a room lying undisturbed beneath time and dust—but she felt fear, animal and sharp, raise its snout in her belly.
The bulb snapped out in a shower of breaking glass, and she yelped.
Steadying herself against the wall, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the sudden dark, and for her breathing to slow.
Some noiseless thing moved in the black. Its paper whisper was almost smothered by the roaring silence, a flutter she felt more than heard, like the rattle of a train below the ground.
Then the scratching came again—small and trapped, like a hatching lizard—and her heart beat into her mouth.
Inch by inch, she forced herself to kneel beside the hearth, touch the flagstone base, and listen, every sinew tensed for flight. She crouched until her knees hurt, listening to the wind snag on the chimney and her heart thump on her bones.
She hoped it was a bird up there—but some buried instinct howled that it was not.
“I’ll get the pole,” Maguire said, startled by her voice in the silence. She tried not to think of the thing in the chimney, only of the hooked pole she’d used to fish out the seagull’s maggoty corpse.
She stood, fists clenched.
The grate exploded with soot and she fell back, knocking her head against the bookcase and smashing a vase. She spluttered to her knees and peered through the cloud toward the settling pile of coal dust.
There were no wings, no spread feathers, no sharp little feet. The soot had fallen in a lump, gathered around something. But it was not a bird.
She ground the grit between her teeth, then gripped the pot’s handle and blew on the dark powder.
A dark, furry lump, no more than a foot long, lay on the stone, little arms and legs spread at odd angles.
“What in God’s name?” whispered Maguire.
She lifted it free, knocking the dust into the grate.
A soiled, wet doll stared out from under the grime. Its face was twisted by fire, its hair burned away. She brushed away more dust, found the puckered, broken smile, and the half-shut, gleaming green eyes.
Sadie. Her childhood doll.
Her sacrifice.
A thin, translucent skin covered Sadie’s soot-black body, stretched tight and threaded by dark, spider-leg veins.
“What the hell is—”
Sadie’s eyes fluttered as her head—the lashes burned away, the scalp scorched bare and black—rolled toward Maguire.
She dropped the doll and tried to cry out, but her breath would not come and her voice would not work.
Sadie righted herself, wobbled on her little legs—then came at her.
Maguire screamed.
The crows settled on the windowsill as she kicked and fought, tasting the salt of Sadie’s skin as the little hands—sharpened by fire and tasting of rot—forced themselves between her teeth.
Maguire’s vision blurred. Her head filled with a sluggish heat through which the crows’ glass-tapping beaks fell like rain, and she closed her eyes, the muscles loosening on her bones. . . .
And, just as her life ebbed away, the doll was ripped from her face in an explosion of light, oxygen filled her chest like liquid fire—and darkness took her.