Sunlight snuck through the sides of the curtains. Cold permeated through my body. I had never gotten under the covers, and the hotel had the AC unit on.
When I got up to use the bathroom, the waterworks were still unremarkable. I opened the window curtains, to a city that looked normal. No crows lay dead on the window ledge here.
Part of me wanted to stay at the hotel. Standing in that rented room, staring at a city basking in sunlight, I felt a sense of peace that had gone since I took Franklin’s call.
I knew I had to go back though. Most of my equipment was back at the apartment and since hotel rooms aren’t free a guy has to work.
It was a decent distance from the hotel to my place. Sure I could’ve gotten a ride, but I walked. Even if I was facing the music, I didn’t want to run at it.
I didn’t bother checking out of the hotel room. For all I knew, I would need it again that night. Hell, maybe I’d need it as soon as I saw the state of my apartment.
When I got back to my building, the front door was open. Perhaps in my panic I neglected to close it.
As I stepped into the lobby, I heard voices upstairs. Not choral or distorted voices. It was my landlord, talking to some woman.
Each step gave a loud creak as I tried to sneak upstairs. When I reached the second floor my landlord was talking to a young woman holding a baby.
“And I don’t want anyone else here. You’re lucky this apartment was open. I gave you the one that deadbeat kid didn’t pay rent on. I could have given you the apartment down stairs. The old lady died in that one. This one is nicer, I’m doing you a favor”.
“Nobody will come here I promise,” the young woman said.
“I’m doing your mother a favor too. She could have taken in her daughter and her grandson, but no, she leaves it to her brother”.
I tried to get by without being a part of the exchange, but when I reached the bottom step to the next flight my landlord called out to me.
“Have you been out all night Michael?”
I cooked up a story quick.
“Yeah I got called out on an emergency session. Client needed me to come down and take over. Other guy was unreliable”.
“Yeah, well turn down your music before you go. When we came in there was music playing real loud. Not that heavy shit you listen to sometimes, but still loud. You need to keep it quiet here now. There’s other people living here again”.
“That’s funny, I had my stuff turned off when I left”.
“Well it was playing when we came in this morning. I told the guy who came to visit you to turn it down when he got up there”.
“You let someone into my apartment?”
“Yeah he said he knew you”.
“That doesn’t mean I want you letting anyone into my apartment”.
“Listen, it’s my building. I can do whatever the fuck I want with it….sometimes”.
He shot the girl a sour look and slammed the apartment door.
My front door was open a crack when I got to the top of the stairs. I pushed it open, wondering what horrible thing I would see.
Franklin was standing by my workstation, wearing my cans.
“Franklin!”
He didn’t budge.
“Franklin!”
Nothing.
I walked over to him and pulled the headphones away from his ears. Hearing that music again made my skin crawl. For a moment he stood there as though I hadn’t pulled my cans off of him.
“Michael?”
He sounded disconnected, almost like he had just woken up.
“Yeah Franklin, you get my call?”
Franklin stood there for a moment. It looked like he was contemplating the nature of my question.
“Yeah,” he said in that same spacey tone. “Yes I did”.
“And?”
“And what Michael?”
“We need to talk about that recording man”.
“I didn’t hear anything wrong with it. What’s wrong with it?”
Part of me was pissed he was being so laid back.
“Has anything happened here since you got here? Anything strange while I’ve been gone?”
“The only thing that seems kind of strange right now is you”.
“Listen, there has been a lot of crazy shit going on since I started listening to this thing Franklin”.
“LIke what?”
“Like what,” I asked in a harsh tone.
I stepped backwards towards the windows.
“For instance, last night, a crow flew into my window and brained itself. Thing broke its fucking neck!”
I looked at the window ledge, but the crow was gone.
“What the?”
I rushed past Franklin to look in the kitchen. No broken glass on the floor, no blood.
“Is everything alright Michael?”
“No man, nothing is alright. Last night there was….”
Franklin looked like he was having trouble following along. I’m sure I sounded like a lunatic, but he also looked dazed.
“Are you okay Franklin?”
“Peachy keen,” he said.
If I didn’t know any better, Franklin was on something. That couldn’t be the case though, could it? He’d been sober for three years.
“What do you know about this recording?”
“It was recorded at The James Easton Performing Center. Formerly The Church Of Everlasting Life”.
“Anything else?”
“The church had good coffee, even better chilli”.
Franklin started laughing hysterically. I looked at him, now certain he must’ve relapsed the night before.
“About the recording. Do you know anything about the recording?”
His expression grew serious, ugly even.
“I know that you should be working on it. I know you should be doing your work. I know you should give me that baby!”
At first he had been looking in my eyes, then it was like he was looking through me.
“Franklin what the fuck are you talking about?”
Then it was like Franklin snapped out of it all of a sudden.
“Give me that mix and master baby. Listen, I have to go. Long night. If you need anything let me know”.
Before I could get anything out of him, he bolted out the door and down the stairs.
I went to the doorway. The young woman was coming up the stairs. She had her baby in one arm, a grocery bag with dirty diapers in the other. Her eyes caught mine.
“I’m so sorry, the garbage shoot won’t open on my floor”.
“That’s okay,” I said, “it’s not my personal garbage shoot or something”.
She smiled and sauntered over to the shoot to drop the bag in. I heard the telltale landing down below. Before she could make it to the top step, there was a large thud against the shoot’s little door.
“What the….”
The young woman turned around, clutching the baby tight to her chest. I crept into the hallway, closing the front door behind me. There was another thud.
“Step back. Go downstairs….carefully,” I said in a whisper.
She nodded and made her way down the stairs quietly. My hands fumbled through my pocket to grab my phone. After battling with my keys and tissue, I managed to get it out.
THUD
I took a cautious step forward. My thumb hovered over the flashlight icon on my phone. Another step closer. What the Hell was I thinking? I should’ve been running to the hotel right now.
Downstairs, it sounded like the mother and child were holding their breath.
I was about two feet away from the shoot when I saw my phone had gone dark. My thumb tapped the screen.
Before I could take another step forward, the shoot flew open. Something black shot out and down the stairs. The young woman screamed. When I saw what landed by her feet, my blood went cold.
Sitting at the young woman’s feet was a crow. Its head bent to the side, like its neck had been broken. Since the last time I saw it, it had been sustenance for something else.
Parts of its feathers and flesh had been eaten away. Eyes gone, its sockets were grim evidence of some insect feast.
The young woman turned her head away and groaned. She was simply repulsed by the crow, I was terrified of it.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said.
I looked around for anything that I could scoop it up with. At the front end of the first floor lobby, I could see a snow shovel. Lucky for me, my landlord never put stuff like that away for summer.
“Be right back”.
I ran down the stairs to grab the shovel, then bounded up the stairs again.
“Okay”.
I lowered the shovel down to pick the damned thing up. As I started to scoop beneath its wing, there was a cracking noise. The crow’s head sort of snapped back into place, but not completely.
All of a sudden, the horrible thing stood up and let out a deafening screech. The baby woke immediately and started to wail.
This was like a cue for the crow to take flight. It spread its tattered black wings and flew to the baby’s level. It tried to pierce the child with its beak, but his mother turned her back to it.
“AAAAAAAAHHHHHH”
She had taken the jab for her child, but the crow was quick to pull its beak from her flesh and try again. The young woman tried swatting at the horrid creature as her baby wailed in her ear.
I wanted to hit the crow with the shovel, but I couldn’t get a good enough shot to avoid hurting the baby or its mother.
Blood was oozing out of the wound on her back. The crow swiped a claw at her neck, its beak missing its target.
Out of instinct, she ducked down, holding out her arm in an attempt to swat the thing away from her child. Finally I had a decent shot.
The shovel connected with a loud thwack, the impact hurdling the crow down towards the first floor.
It tried flying up the stairs again, letting out another blood curdling caw. I managed to bring the shovel down on it. The crow tumbled down the stairs.
I ran down as it started to get back up again. Clangs wrang out as I kept hammering the shovel onto the tiled floor in the lobby. After enough swings, the clangs were accompanied by a squishing sound.
Entrails were all that really remained of the crow. Panting, I made my way up the stairs to find something to put the remains in.
As I reached the top of the stairs the baby was sobbing, but otherwise okay. Its mother on the other hand had lost a decent amount of blood.
“Holy shit,” I said, “we need to call you an ambulance!”
“NO!”
“What do you mean no?”
“No, if we call an ambulance my uncle will find out. He will throw us out!”
“Surely he wouldn’t…”
“You don’t know him like I do”.
This was true, but I knew well enough that my landlord was an asshole. He wasn’t the type to have friends or allies. More likely he held an uneasy truce with everyone he wasn’t on bad terms with.
“Alight, but we need to get you to a hospital”.
“I know a place I can go. Please stay with Daniel until I get back”.
“Who?”
The woman held out the baby to me.
“I am Maria, this is my son Daniel”.
“Whoa, I uh, listen I want to help, but I”m not exactly good with…”
“Please. Just until I get back”
There was a deep sadness in her eyes. She had brought some beauty into the world, and now it seemed, she was paying the price for it.
“I will take care of him”.
Her eyes welled with tears.
“Thank you”.
She wrapped a towel around her shoulder, then put on a coat too heavy for this time of year. As Maria reached the door she looked back at her son, smiled, then left.
I sat down on a folding chair facing the front door. Maria had managed to calm Daniel down before she left fortunately. The baby lay sleeping in my arms.
The day dragged on and the shadows started to get long. Signs began to light, inviting customers to come inside and join the night life. Maria came through the door around 9 p.m.
“Are you alright?”
“They have me all patched up. Is he asleep?”
“He has been since you left Thank God. I don’t do diapers”.
Maria laughed.
“No time to learn like the present”.
“I already have to clean this up,” I said, nodding to what was once a crow.
Her smile dimmed a little.
“Well….thank you for taking care of him. Thank you for everything”.
“You’re welcome. Now get upstairs, you’ve had a long day and you need to rest. I’ll take care of everything down here”
I handed the baby back to his mother.
“Michael, right? Goodnight Michael”.
“Good night Maria, good night Daniel”. I said the first, whispered the second.
They made their way up the stairs and closed their door. When they were out of earshot I let out a sigh. I cleaned up the crow and chucked it in a bin outside.
After locking the lobby door I started towards the stairs. I stopped when I noticed the door to the first floor apartment was open. It had been closed all day.
There was a figure standing, no, hovering in the doorway.
“You can’t leave Michael”.
My heart started to race, the beat in my ears. The voice was somewhat wheezy, and had a polyphonic quality to it.
“You can’t leave this place. Not yet Michael”.
Against my better nature I looked at the figure. I couldn’t make out facial features, but the basic shape reminded me of my neighbor June O’Hara.
June was found dead in her first floor apartment six months before. I’d been the only tenant in the building ever since.
“I know you want to run back. Back to that hotel. But Michael, you can’t. You can’t leave, not yet”.
“Oh yeah,” I said in a quivering tone, “you can’t hold me here”.
I stepped towards the lobby door and unlocked it. When I put a foot outside, the shape spoke again.
“Please”.
The word gave me pause. I brought my foot back in and closed the door.
“You can’t leave Michael. You are a good man, and you were always a kind neighbor. You helped me in so many ways. Don’t go now, I beg you”.
“Mrs. O’Hara? Listen Mrs. O’Hara, if that’s really you, I don’t know how to put this. I don’t think there’s anything I can do for you now. You’ve passed on”.
“Not for me Michael. For them. The woman and her child. You have to stay. Please, don’t go to the hotel”.
“Why?”
“Because there is a darkness here Michael. You know it’s true. A darkness that came the moment that music played”.
The spirit spoke with conviction, but her voice sounded like it was halfway between worlds.
“This dark spirit calls itself “Reverend”, though its ways are not the way of God. The hymn may be its music, but blasphemy is its nature. Once it was a mere man, but in death, hatred has made it powerful. It was dormant, but now it is awake”.
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Because it will come for all of you. The crow, the music, the blood. It’s playing with you, but it won’t stop there. This spirit can do as it pleases. It can come and go, connive and control. These tricks are just a taste of what it’s capable of. It is already setting things in motion. If you leave now, that mother and child could be dead by first light. It wants the baby most. But it wants the mother. And even if you leave tonight, it will probably find you too.”
“What can I do?”
“That I can’t say Michael. I used what little strength I had to warn you tonight. I’m not like this Reverend. I can’t come back again. But you have to stay vigilant Michael. You have to stay alert. Just stay.”
The form started to evaporate.
“June?!?!”
She was gone. I stood there in the darkness. The light from the signs outside invited me to escape. These people weren’t my responsibility. Hours ago they were strangers.
I was desperate to leave, but June O’Hara’s pleas had struck a chord. What could I do against an evil spirit? I didn’t have an answer, but I knew that it couldn’t hurt Maria and Daniel if I stuck around.
After some contemplation, I locked the door. Before heading upstairs, I grabbed the snow shovel and tapped the flashlight icon. I stopped by Maria’s door. Nobody stirred.
When I got to my floor, I closed the garbage shoot. I went into my apartment, peering at what the flashlight revealed. It all seemed fine, but I dared not let my guard down.
My phone started to ring. I picked it up.
“Hello,” I said.
I tried my best to keep my voice from trembling. There was no answer.
“Hello, who is this?”
There was a huge gasp like a group taking a collective breath.
“Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand….”
I fumbled to get the battery out of my phone. With the shovel in hand, I found the flashlight in my kitchen. I made my way into the living room and sat on the floor with my back against the wall.
Cowering in the dark, I gripped the snow shovel white knuckle tight. The flashlight cut a slim sliver of light in the darkness. Tears rolled down my cheeks the way they had as a child. I prayed to God, to my Grandma, to June O’Hara, and anyone else that would hear me.
Hopefully Maria, Daniel, and I wouldn’t become ghosts in this place too. Maybe tomorrow there would be safety. If nothing else I would try to find answers.
Like a kid I told myself, the morning would bring something good. Once again, I fell asleep, not knowing if I was lying to myself.