one hand against the crow's breast. He couldn't feel a heartbeat.
The heart of any small bird pounded extremely fast, much faster than
the heart of any mammal, a racing little engine,
putta-putta-putta-putta-putta. It was always easy to detect because
the whole body reverberated with the rapid beats.
The crow's heart was definitely not beating. As far as he was able to
tell, the bird wasn't breathing, either. And its neck was broken. He
had hoped that he was witnessing the traveler's ability to bring a dead
creature back to life, a miracle of sorts. But the truth was darker
than that. The crow was dead. Yet it moved.
Trembling with disgust, Eduardo lifted his hand from the small
squirming corpse.
The traveler could reestablish control of a carcass without
resuscitating the animal. To some extent, it had power over the
inanimate as well as the animate.
Eduardo desperately wanted to avoid thinking about that. But he
couldn't turn his mind off. Couldn't avoid that dreaded line of
inquiry any longer. If he had not taken the raccoons away at once to
the vet, would they eventually have shuddered and pulled themselves to
their feet again, cold but moving, dead but animated?
In the colander, the crow's head wobbled loosely on its broken neck,
and its beak opened and closed with a faint clicking. Perhaps nothing
had carried the four dead squirrels out of the meadow, after all.
Maybe those carcasses, stiff with rigor mortis, had responded to the
insistent call of the puppetmaster on their own, cold muscles flexing
and contracting awkwardly, rigid joints cracking and snapping as
demands were put upon them. Even as their bodies had entered the early
stages of decomposition, perhaps they twitched and lifted their heads,
crawled and hitched and dragged themselves out of the meadow, into the
woods, to the lair of the thing that commanded them.
Don't think about it. Stop. Think about something else, for Christ's
sake.
Anything else. Not this, not this.
If he released the crow from the colander and took it outside, would it
flop and flutter along the ground on its broken wings, all the way up
the sloped backyard, making a nightmarish pilgrimage into the shadows
of the higher woods?
Did he dare follow it into that heart of darkness? No. No, if there
was to be an ultimate confrontation, it had to happen here on his own
territory, not in whatever strange nest the traveler had made for
itself.
Eduardo was stricken by the blood-freezing suspicion that the traveler
was alien to such an extreme degree that it didn't share humanity's
perception of life and death, didn't draw the line between the two in
the same place at all. Perhaps its kind never died. Or they died in a
true biological sense yet were reborn in a different form out of their
own rotting remains--and expected the same to be true of creatures on
this world. In fact, the nature of their species--especially its
relationship with death--might be unimaginably more bizarre, perverse,
