| |
Deirdre trailed up the stairs after Stacy, fingers hooked reluctantly in the neckline of the bird costume. She watched her girlfriend’s back, not wanting to wander through the house on her own.
She hadn’t expected anything spooky to happen when she came here. In fact, she’d thought it would be deadly dull, just sitting in front of a computer screen, watching empty rooms and eating a lot of snickers bars. One of the reasons she hadn’t been keen to come.
The other, of course, was Stacy herself. Since the diagnosis, things had been weird between them. She didn’t know how she felt about Stacy having cancer, she only knew it sure wasn’t something she’d planned on having to deal with.
But that made her sound so selfish. And it wasn’t that at all. She was pretty good in a crisis, everyone always said so, but that was different. A crisis was something that went boom, and then it was over. The person was carted off in an ambulance, or something. This was different. Stacy had been given a time limit, and they should be spending the time remaining doing something fun. Ticking off the things on a bucket list. It was bad enough this dreadful shadow hanging over them. Or else she should be doing this on her own, if it was so important to her. Deirdre didn’t care if there was an afterlife or not – what difference was it going to make to her? Stacy would be gone. That’s all there was to it. She had to find a way to live on afterwards, and it sure as hell wouldn’t do any good to spend the rest of her life trying to contact her dead girlfriend. She lifted her arm and touched the soft fabric of Stacy’s shirt, then let her hand drop and followed her into their bedroom.
‘You don’t want to wear it?’ Stacy said, twirling around.
‘What?’
She pointed at the feathered outfit. ‘You don’t want to do it? Even though it could really make a difference?’
Deirdre blinked, afraid Stacy was going to go on one of her new manic bouts again. ‘I said I would, didn’t I?’
Stacy plonked down on the bed and looked at her. ‘Yeah, but your heart’s not in it.’
‘My heart doesn’t have to be in it,’ Deirdre said, attempting a joke. ‘As long as I can squeeze tits and arse in, right?’
But it fell flat. The cancer cells had eaten Stacy’s sense of humour right along with everything else.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said, leaning forward and peering at Deirdre with burning eyes. ‘This could be our chance, here.’ She blinked. ‘To really prove there’s life after death.’
Deirdre dropped the bird suit on the floor where she stood and wiped her hands on her pants, relieved not to be touching the horrible thing anymore. There was something about that thing that just didn’t feel right. It was heavy, and stiff, as though it had been worn a lot at one stage, and someone else’s blood, sweat, and pain, had seeped into the fabric. Surprised at her feelings, Deirdre glanced at it, then turned her attention to Stacy, sitting on the bed next to her.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘It’s all right, you know. You don’t have to worry so much.’
‘About what?’ Stacy spat the words out.
Deirdre chewed her lip, then decided to say it anyway. ‘About death. You’ve drawn the short straw, that’s all. It’s real shitty luck, but it happens all the time. Death is not something we want to have to face, but you know what they say – death and taxes, you can’t avoid them.’ Personally, Deirdre had done most of her work under the table so far in her young life, and she couldn’t remember ever filling out a form for tax, but that didn’t mean she was wrong.
A hand groped for hers, found it, and squeezed hard, grinding the bones of her fingers together. ‘But,’ Stacy said. ‘You don’t understand.’
Deirdre was pretty sure that was right. She didn’t. ‘Understand what?’ she asked.
Stacy’s eyes were burning coals in her face. ‘I don’t want to leave you,’ she said. ‘If I know there’s something after death – something real – then I won’t have to worry so much. I can still be with you sometimes.’
What was there to say to that? Deirdre suppressed a shudder, imagining having to look over her shoulder at a ghostly Stacy all the time. What if she was, you know, in bed with another chick? She was young, at some stage she was going to want to stick her face between a girl’s legs and lick her pussy. She certainly didn’t want Stacy’s ghost there when she did that.
‘Jeez Stacy,’ she said, looping an arm around Stacy’s shoulder. ‘It’s going to be all right. Really. And you know, we should be making the most of things. Spending what time we have doing the stuff that matters.’
‘That’s just the trouble, don’t you understand? This matters. I need to know. I need to know that I’m not going to die, and that’s it. Just close your eyes and say buh bye.’ Her fingers turned to claws. ‘Please, Deirdre, please help with the show. I know we can prove something this time. Things are happening, things that mean something. Please, say you’ll do it.’
Deirdre’s eyes drifted back to the bird suit on the floor and she could feel the unconscious grimace on her face. But she sighed. ‘Okay, Stacy. It’s okay. I’ll do it, all right? I already said I would, and I’ll do it.’ She untangled herself from Stacy’s hooked fingers and stood up. ‘In fact, I’ll try it on right now. How’s that?’
‘You don’t have to do it right now.’
But too late. It would change the subject at least. Stalking over to the costume, Deirdre scooped it up, feeling her skin crawl again at the touch of silk and feathers.
‘I wonder how old this thing is,’ she said. ‘And why was it made, for heaven’s sakes?’
‘Probably just a dress-up thing, for some fancy dress party or whatever.’
Why hadn’t she thought of that? ‘That makes sense,’ Deirdre said. ‘I was thinking they’d done some sort of horrible shit in it, like dressed some poor girl up and kept her in the cage for real.’ She held up the costume. ‘But you make so much more sense.’ She laid it on the bed and sniffed. ‘Hey, you got a pair of tights or anything?’
Stacy nodded, and stretched out a hand to touch the feathers. ‘In the top drawer. What sort of feathers are these, do you think?’
Glancing at them, Deirdre pulled open the top drawer and rifled through Stacy’s undies and bras. She found the tights, thick black ones, and held them up. ‘This is a score,’ she said, ‘but what on earth did you think you were going to need these for? It’s summer, for crying out loud.’
‘I don’t know,’ Stacy replied. ‘Just pays to be prepared, you know. I don’t think all these feathers are from the same sort of bird.’
‘What?’ Deirdre was shucking off her shorts and dancing around on one foot to pull the tights on.
‘The feathers.’ Stacy had the costume spread out on the bed, picking through the feathers.
‘Are they real, do you think?’
‘They’re real, all right. The ones on the chest are small, I think they’re from sparrows, but these bigger black ones, they must be crow or raven or something.’
‘I didn’t even know we had crows or ravens in this country.’
‘I’ve never thought about it, either.’
Deirdre had the tights on. She picked up the costume and tried to figure out how to get into it. It would be her luck it wouldn’t fit. It was heavy in her hands. ‘Are they all psychowhatsits, do you think?’
‘Psychowhatsits? Oh – psychopomps. I don’t know. They’re just birds.’
‘I thought sparrows were just birds until I saw them today and realised they are actually harbingers of great creepiness.’
‘Ha,’ Stacy said. ‘Good one.’ She stood up to help. ‘Look, it has hooks at the side here.’ Her long fingers found and undid the tiny metal hooks one by one until it was ready. Deirdre took a deep breath and stepped into the suit, drawing it up her legs. Stacy held it so she could thread her arms through the holes.
‘It fits,’ she said, fighting dismay.
‘Pretty much perfectly,’ Stacy agreed.
Deirdre moved over to stand in front of the wardrobe, and stared at her reflection in the discoloured mirrors on its doors. The saliva in her mouth dried up.
‘I look just like Martin’s photograph,’ she whispered. But how could that be?
Stacy was shaking her head. ‘It’s amazing. Completely stunning. Hang on a minute.’ She fought with something in her pocket, and her bottle of painkillers fell onto the floor and rolled under the bed. Deirdre bent to get them for her. ‘Don’t,’ Stacy said. ‘You might bust some feathers or something. I’ll get them.’ She scooted under the high bed, and emerged sneezing. And clutching something other than the bottle of pills.
‘What’s that?’ Deirdre asked, moving over to look.
‘It’s a photograph,’ Stacy said. ‘It was under the bed.’
Deirdre stared at the sepia figure in the photo. ‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe this! Where’d it come from?’ For a moment, she thought she was being set up, that Stacy – and the others – were playing some elaborate game. Well, they didn’t need to. It would be nicer just to tell her what they were doing, and she’d go along with it. They didn’t need to do freaky stuff like this. No one was filming. She lifted her eyes from the photo and searched the corners of the ceiling. It took thirty seconds to spot it.
Okay, so someone was filming. She’d forgotten about that. It was still poor sport. If they wanted her to be freaked out, they could just ask her to act. They all managed it, why wouldn’t she?
‘You planted this,’ she accused.
Stacy shook her head. ‘I didn’t. I swear.’
Deirdre couldn’t believe it. ‘Look, just admit it, okay. You guys decided you’d use a photo of me for all this, because that would be cool, right? When I joined the Crew, it would make a neat story, really make the programme spookier.’
‘Yeah, and if I’d thought of that, I’d be thrilled.’ Stacy looked at her. ‘But Deirdre, I didn’t, I’m telling the truth. It’s not you in this photograph. It hasn’t been photoshopped or anything. It’s genuine. The real thing.’
Her hand was shaking when she reached for the photo and plucked it from Stacy’s fingers. She believed her. There was a look of genuine shock on Stacy’s face, and Deirdre just couldn’t believe she was that devious anyway. Even if, right now, she’d rather believe that. Holding the photograph, she turned back to the mirror, and looked at her reflection, compared it to the girl in the picture.
They both wore the feathered costume. Dark hair shaded their faces, skin a pale smudge beneath it.
‘Well,’ Deirdre said, aware her voice was shaking now too, ‘at least I don’t have to have my photo taken in the birdcage tomorrow anymore.’ She held up the picture. ‘Here’s the original. Martin can use that.’
‘Let me look again?’ Stacy said, and Deirdre handed the photo back. She stared at herself in the mirror, held up her hands in front of her face, arms fringed with feathered wings. She was the sparrow girl. The only trouble with that was, who was the sparrow girl?
‘There’s something different in the photo,’ Stacy said.
‘What do you mean?’ Deirdre blinked her wide, dark eyes, and imagined a beak on her face. Why wasn’t the sparrow girl wearing a beak? ‘There should be a beak,’ she said, as though it meant something.
‘What? No, look, in the photo – look at the bookcase.’ Stacy thrust the picture under Deirdre’s nose.
She shook her head and her feathers rustled. ‘I don’t see anything. What am I supposed to be looking at?’ The silk was warming against her skin already.
A long finger prodded a shadow beside the cage. ‘Look, the cage is exactly where we put it downstairs, right? For our own photos? And the bookcase is there, just like it is now. Except, see this dark bit? The bookcase isn’t the same. It’s moved.’
Deirdre glanced at the picture again. ‘So, someone pulled it out from the wall. So what?’
Stacy’s eyes absorbed the light and grew wider. ‘But that’s exactly it. Why would someone move the bookcase?’
They stared at each other. ‘Do you think we should go see?’ Deirdre asked after the silence had spun out a full minute.
Stacy nodded, clutching the photo to her breast. ‘I think that’s exactly what we should do.’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now.’ And true to her word, she spun around and a moment later, Deirdre was on her own in the room.
‘Hey, wait a minute,’ she gasped. ‘I need help to get out of this thing.’ She fumbled with the hooks, but they were tucked under the feathers under her arm, and she couldn’t find them. In the mirror, her wings flapped. ‘Wait for me,’ she called, grabbing her handy-cam, stringing it around her neck, and bolting after Stacy.