The Cormorant (35 page)

They pass close to an outcropping of mangroves. The little birds shake the branches. The gulls swoop and cry.

Miriam’s shrieks are dulled by the glass.

She bashes her elbow against it. Fulfilling the promise of what she did in the vision but she does it anyway like she’s caught on a muddy hill, the ground slipping beneath her, carrying her ineluctably downward…

The glass begins to crack.

Ashley shouts. He shouts, “But now I have my own gift, you dumb cunt. Now I have a machine gun too, ho ho ho. And now I’m going to take what’s owed to me.”

Kshhh!
Miriam’s elbow crashes through the porthole–

Her arm stuck with broken glass–

–bleeding–

Ashley laughs–

Gulls cry.

And then she knows.

INTERLUDE

THE VISION

Everything stops. All things caught, as if caught like the fat black fly held now between Not-Louis’ callused fingertips.

He pops it.
Splurch
. Juices run down his fingers. He flings it into his mouth like a piece of popcorn. It crunches like a cicada.

With a swipe of his tongue he wipes fly bits from his teeth.

“You figured it out,” he says.

Miriam nods, staring out the porthole. Outside, she can’t see anything now – just a white-hot light over the horizon. Gone are the mangroves. Gone are Ashley and her mother. Gone are the birds.

“Ashley swatting the flies,” she answers.

“Ashley swatting the flies.”

“And then in the vision. When he kills Jerry. He… he matches Jerry step for step, swing for swing.”

“But the bird–”

“But he doesn’t see Corie coming.”

Louis snatches another fly and pops it in his mouth.

She almost laughs. She mimics Ashley’s words from back on Summerland Key. “Everybody’s connected. Same frequency. And he can hear them. But the beasts of the world aren’t like us. They’re not connected on the same frequency. And he can’t hear the song they’re singing.”

“Look at you. Figuring it out.” He shrugs. “Though pretty damn late.”

“I’m going to kill him,” she says.

“I know.”

SIXTY-THREE

THEY SEEMED TO FILL THE SEA AND AIR

The gannet is a beautiful bird.

It’s a large bird. A foot tall or more.

It has a long beak with which to catch fish. A beak that’s almost silver – and outlined in black, dark lines. It has clear eyes ringed with skin as blue as tropical waters. Its feathers are white as virgin snow, but along its neck and head is a warm sunset glow.

The gannet is a
hungry
bird. The bird plunges from on high, diving a hundred feet at sixty miles an hour to catch fish deep in the ocean waters. And the gannet eats a great deal of fish.

Its name is a synonym for “glutton.”

The gannet is an
impatient
bird. The massive creatures gather in flocks around fishing boats, hoping they’ll bring up fish not one at a time but in great nets by the score – but if the day yields no catches, the gannets will swoop and snatch bait from the hands of fishermen.

And the gannet is a
vicious
bird. Its beak is sharp. Like a pair of scissors –
snip, snip, snip
. A man once tried to save a wounded bird on a pier. The bird took off his nose. It plucked out his eye.

In the moment that Ashley Gaynes raises the hunting knife to plunge it into Evelyn Black’s chest, Miriam knows all these things about the gannet. She does not know how she knows. She cannot care.

There exists a moment – the knife held high in the air, the promise of murder on the warm sea wind – that Miriam reaches out not with her arm or any part of her abused and pummeled body but rather with her mind. She finds the gathering of gannets above her head.

Her mind shatters, a fist slamming into mirrored glass–

It’s as if she is drawn from her body – yanked up away from bones and skin, away from blood and muscle–

She is fragmented. Separate, carried by so many–

Miriam hears a new frequency.

A frequency of hunger. And impatience. And
viciousness
.

All of it is beautiful.

The first bird plunges hard and fast, its beak through Ashley’s hand. Miriam tastes his juices. Hears his screams. But she doesn’t care because all that matters is the blood. That first spray. The first taste.

The other gannets are jealous.

Miriam
is both satisfied and jealous. Two minds. Twelve minds.

The birds swarm. The birds dive.

Beaks stick in the meat. Into the flesh of his bicep. Into the tender expanse of his stomach. They close in on the tendons of his neck, the splayed-out fingers, the fleshy protrusion of nose and ears and tongue–

I’m going to whittle her away if you don’t come with me…

He turns and tries to run, tries to clamber over the edge of the boat. But they pull him back. They dissect him.

They eat what they dissect.

(
Miriam
dissects him, and
she
eats what they dissect.)

Ribbons of skin peel away in greedy, clacking beaks. Birds get great gulps of wind under wings, and they draw away carrying red ropes of raw guts. He is a fish to them – a big, strange, flailing fish. And they pull him apart stem to stern. Gill to fin. Eyeballs to asshole.

You reduce everything to its components. You’re like the maggots these flies make. Breaking it all down to its basest, most… disgusting bits…

They carry his meat into the sky. They eat it there. Two birds sharing, juggling, gulping.

Soon his bones are showing.

But even that does not last.

One flies away with his lower jaw.

Others peck at his joints. Until his skeleton collapses. They fling his bones into the water like ogres discarding their trash. They pick what flesh they can. Veins and tendons like earthworms.

When finally they are full –
such gluttons!
– they squawk and swarm and land on the railing of the boat. A line of them behind Evelyn Black. Guarding her. Standing vigilant. Watching their mother.

All that’s left of Ashley is a greasy, body-wide smear of blood.

And a single prosthetic foot.

SIXTY-FOUR

MOTHER MAY I

It takes time to return.

She feels herself nesting inside the minds of these birds, broken apart like a dropped dinner-plate, and it’s here she finds the taste of blood and a warm, eager satisfaction – not the satisfaction of vengeance, but the simple joy of having eaten a very good meal. But eventually the hunger nibbles again because the gannet is a
very hungry bird
, and Miriam thinks,
I can go with them, I never have to be me again–

And that horror is too much for her.

That surprises her.

And it’s then she returns – thrown back into her body. The gannets, still full, take flight and circle high into the air, chattering like old friends at the bar until they’re just distant caws and faraway shrieks.

Miriam sees her mother. Bound out on the chair. Eyes wide.

The door won’t open. The porthole is too small. Miriam hurries to the boarded-up windows. She tries to get her hands around the wood but can’t. She takes the one thing left in this room that Ashley didn’t destroy – the stool – and picks it up and smashes it again and again into the wooden boards. Slowly they splinter. Surely they split.

She pulls them away. She pitches the stool through the window.

Crash
.

She clambers out – trying not to cut herself, but she does anyway. She doesn’t care.
Can’t
care. She nearly slips on the front of the boat but catches herself and hurries around the side–

Miriam throws her arms around her mother. Rips the tennis ball out of her mouth. Undoes her bonds. Tells her she’s sorry she took so long.

Evelyn Black says nothing.

Miriam peels herself away.

Her mother stares. At nothing.

Half her face is slack. The mouth drooping as if drawn downward by a fish tugging on a hook. The pupils suddenly twitch and begin to flit back and forth, and Miriam thinks,
There she is
, and she begins to help her mother stand – but the woman’s left leg gives out.

Miriam catches her before she falls.

Mother mumbles. A gassy hiss erupts from her mouth.

Miriam doesn’t understand. Not yet.

PART SIX

KEYS AND LOCKS

SIXTY-FIVE

THE REAPER’S TOUCH

The doctor tells her it was a stroke.

A blood clot unmoored itself from somewhere in Evelyn Black’s lungs. And it fired up through her brain like a bullet leaving a rifled barrel. And just like a bullet, it did damage as it passed through.

It did damage that could have been mitigated, the doctor tells her – that word, “mitigated,” so cold, so clinical – had they gotten her into the hospital within an hour. But that didn’t happen. Miriam was on a boat. A boat she did not know how to pilot. She was able to start the engine and get it to the nearby shore – the tangle of mangroves – and she was able to get her mother off the boat, too. But it didn’t matter.

Miriam had no idea where they were.

Her body hurt.

But she pushed on, helping her mother walk until the woman couldn’t walk any more. Then she carried her until Miriam couldn’t carry her any more. Miriam found a road, and there ahead a small little white building with a sign out front: KEY TO THE KEYS REALTY.

The woman inside came out, started to say that they weren’t open yet, but there was an open house at the south end of Summerland–

Then she saw. Miriam, bloodied.

Then it was a blur. Police and an ambulance ride and now here, in the hospital at Marathon. Where the doctor told her that Mother had suffered a massive stroke. And that she might never really be herself ever again.

She asks the doctor, because she needs to know, “Why now?”

He says he doesn’t know.

“But I can hazard a guess,” says the doctor – an avuncular type with curly hair so dark it looks like he dyes it with boot-black. “The experience was traumatic. She must’ve already had a clot in her lung – you said she was a smoker, so – but the extreme stress of the situation probably dislodged it. Blood pressure can be a helluva thing.”

He thinks the stress was what Ashley did to her.

But Miriam believes differently.

There Mother sat as a flock of birds tore a man apart in front of her. As her daughter stood at a window, watching. What did she see on Miriam’s face? Rapture? Pleasure? A dead empty hungry nothing?

The days pass in the hospital. For many here, nights spent in the hospital are ones of great consequence, but for Miriam, it’s just a long stretch of empty mental highway. The police come and go and they ask her questions. They want to know what happened to the killer. They tell her they have his leg and a lot of his blood. But they wonder if he’s still alive. She doesn’t tell them any different. What’s she going to say?
Birds ate him. And I was the birds. It was weird. I’ve thrown up six times in the last three days just thinking about it. I can still taste the blood. Got a mint?

Miriam convalesces. Tape for her cracked rib. Stitches for her leg. Antibiotics for the infection she didn’t even know was there. One of the nurses says she’s surprised Miriam didn’t die. Miriam tells her she doesn’t know if she
can
die anymore.

They want to know about insurance. Her mother has it. She doesn’t. Another set of hospital bills Miriam will never pay.

The staff begin to whisper because they know she’s the girl who was taken captive by some serial killer on a boat – a lunatic who shot up a tiki bar, who murdered the boat’s inhabitants, whose tally of bodies is as yet uncounted.

The press gets ahold of it. They want to interview her. She keeps them out. Hides in other rooms when they come to hers. Last thing she wants is to be on television. And she knows that the two FBI agents are coming, too. They have to be. Surely they smell the blood in the water.

But they don’t. She doesn’t understand why. She’s low-hanging fruit at this point: stuck in a hospital bed. Attending to a vegetative mother.