Chapter 5: The Bird-Drum

The Bird-Drum

The eyes did not blink, and after a while Theo understood that they were not going to.

His arm had begun to shake. The light shook with it, and every time the light jumped he had to find the ledge again and put it back on the two coins, and every time he found them they were exactly where they had been.

“They’re not moving,” he said.

“I see that.”

“Is it —“ His mouth was dry enough that the words came out in the wrong order. “Is that a thing that sits up there?”

“Nothing that size sits still for no reason.” Voss’s voice was at his shoulder, pitched for him and not for the room. “Keep the light on it. Whatever it does, don’t put the light down.”

He kept the light on it. He tried to make two coins into four, into a head, into a shape he could put a word to, and the beam was only wide enough for the coins. Below them the wall fell away in painted coils, red gone so dark it read as black, and the coils ran down behind the drum stand and the two cats holding it up and the bird with its long tail wound around the frame, and then there was floor, and the floor was empty, and the ledge above it was not.

It had been up there the whole time he was talking. It had listened to him explain his mother’s program.

“All right,” Voss said quietly.

He knew her by her left sleeve. The cuff of it was gray with mud from the collapse and the rest of the coat was dark and her hair had come out of its clip somewhere on the way down, so that from the side, in the dark, she was a shape with a mud cuff and no face he could have described to anyone. He had known her for four hours. He knew the cuff.

“What are you doing,” he said.

“Counting.”

“Don’t.”

She pulled her hand out of her coat with a slip of paper in it, yellow in the light, thin enough that the beam came through it. “When I move, get down. Not backward. Down, hands over your head, and you stay down until I tell you.”

“Voss —“

“One.”

“That’s not a plan, that’s —“

“Two.”

“Three.”

She went off the floor without a run-up. Two steps at the wall, one boot flat against the stone, and then she was up and across, coat open, the whole jump level and unhurried, and the slip came off her fingers and turned in the air, and she shouted at the thing on the ledge in a voice that stopped being hers:

“Notice given. Thunder, attend.”

Theo was on the floor with his hands over his head and one eye open, which was not what she had told him and not something he had decided to do.

The thing came off the ledge.

It was longer than the wall. That was the part his head would not take. The coils kept coming off the stone after the head had already crossed the room, and the room was forty feet across if it was anything, and it was still coming, and the head came down at the paper with its mouth shut and took it the way a dog takes a thrown thing, precisely, without hurry.

Then it hung there with the yellow square in its teeth and looked at her.

Where the paper touched, the jaw went gray. The scales lifted and the skin under them went wet and ran, and the smell that came off it was a shovelful of wet leaves with something sweeter underneath that Theo did not have a name for and did not want one.

It stopped at the hinge of the jaw. It did not go up to the eye.

The head dropped. The body came off the wall in coils, one and then another, and the floor took the weight of it and said nothing about it, and it went past them both to the doorway and put its head down and filled the door.

It did not leave.

Voss landed with one hand on the floor and her hair in her mouth, and stayed crouched, breathing, watching it. Nobody said anything for a while.

“That’s one,” she said at last.

“One what.”

“One slip.” She got up slowly, both hands in view. “I have two left.”

The thing in the doorway put its head back down. Its tongue came out once, black, and went in again. There was a gray wet notch in its jaw and it was not bleeding.

“That’s not a normal size,” Theo said. “How long does a snake live?”

“Depends on the snake.”

“Twenty years? Thirty?”

“Twenty-five,” Voss said, “in a good year,” and then, “Why.”

“Because look at it,” Theo said, and did not finish, because it had turned its head and was looking at him the way a person looks at somebody who has said something stupid in a meeting, and he had a sudden strong feeling about the number he had been about to say.

He got his knees under himself and did not stand. “It caught it.”

“I noticed.”

“It could have —“ He stopped, because he did not want to finish the sentence in front of it, and then finished it anyway, quietly, because a sentence it could hear was a sentence it could hear whether he said it or not. “It was already moving when the paper was in the air. It went to meet it.”

“I know what it did.” Voss wiped her palm on her thigh. “It wanted to know what I had. Now it knows.”

They were both looking at the door. The head was down and the body went back into the dark of the passage behind it, and that passage was the only way out of the room.

Theo had seen video of snakes striking, and it had always looked like a mistake, a thing that flinched with its whole body. He did not have a word for the way this one moved. It moved the way a person turns around.

“It’s not hungry,” he said.

“No.”

“If it was hungry it would have come off the ledge. It would have come down at the light.”

“It’s testing me,” Voss said. “That’s worse. Sit still.”

They sat still. The drum was behind Theo — the black-red bird, the two cats with their shoulders under it, one drumhead faint with white dust. Past it, the lacquer table with the fan on it, the fan’s eye-spots painted in rings, and the fan was a foot and a half from his hand and he could not have said why he did not want to touch it.

“It’s not going to sit there,” Voss said, very low, so low he had to lean. “Heads go down and then the body works. I’ll give it something to look at. You go along the wall to the door, and you go through the door, and you keep going until the passage turns. Don’t wait for me.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“You are doing that.”

“I’m not —“ He had to stop and breathe, because his voice had gone up. “That’s you standing in front of it. I met you tonight and I’ve already watched you stand in front of something.”

Voss’s mouth was a flat line. “I signed for this ground. Before we came down. My name’s the first one on the sheet and the sheet’s in the truck, so if I don’t come up, that’s the name they read out. That’s the whole of it.”

“That’s not —“

“It’s nine feet. Ten. You go, I go, we both —“

Theo said, at ordinary volume, in the flat voice of a person reading a bulletin off a wall: “And there’s a camera up top. It’s been running since six. The county permit’s got names on it. So whatever happens down here, somebody’s already got it in writing.”

Voss stopped.

“In writing,” Theo said again. He opened his eyes wide and then let them go small, twice, which was the dumbest thing he had ever done with his face, and tipped his head a quarter inch toward the door and brought it back.

She looked at him for about a second and a half. “Somebody’s already got it in writing,” she said, and pulled the second slip out of her coat with two fingers.

“On three,” Theo said.

“On three.”

He was very proud of himself. He had put out a sentence of pure noise and underneath it they had agreed on a shape, and the thing in the doorway could not know which part was the shape and which part was the noise.

Then the head came up.

It came up level and unhurried, and the long body turned and slid, and the doorway went dark in a different place.

It had moved before they finished.

“It knows,” Theo said.

“It heard the noise.”

“It heard the noise and then it moved.” He was aware that he was arguing with her about how much trouble they were in. “That’s not a thing that hears a noise. That’s —“

“Run.”

They ran.

Theo went along the wall. Voss came behind him with the slip up in front of her and the words already coming, shouting them at the thing as she ran, and the light went with him and threw her shadow up the wall enormous.

The floor in front of the door moved. It did not come up like a whip. It came flat and low and fast, the way a rope comes when somebody on the other end means it, and it took them both across the chest and lifted them off the floor.

Theo was in the air. He landed on his back with no air in him and his chest made a noise like a box being sat on. The light went one way and he went the other. Above him the ceiling was very high and black and he could not remember the sky being anywhere.

He got the light. He did not remember reaching for it. It was in his hand and it worked, and that was the entire plan.

Voss was up already, a yard off, and the slip was on the floor behind her where it had fallen, and the thing had not even turned for it.

That was the part that got him. It had taken the first one out of the air. It had let the second one lie.

Voss was not running for the door now. She had come around him and put herself between him and the middle of the room with both arms out and her shoulders down and her boots set, and her hair was in her face and she was breathing like a bellows.

The thing came off the door. It did not come at them. It went along the wall, unhurried, and it kept going, and it was going around them.

Theo had had a lot of thoughts about snakes in his life, most of them on the internet, and none of them had been about patience. He had believed that a very large animal would have to be slow, that the mass would have to cost something. It came along the wall like a hand coming down.

Then the head came around the second time and it was nearer to him than the drum was.

The smell of the jaw came over him, wet leaves and the sweet under it, and he was going backward with the light in one hand and the other hand out behind him, and that hand found the base of the drum stand, and he went back under the bird and under the two cats, and his elbow came down on the drumhead.

Thoom.

The note landed in his chest before his ears caught it. It was not loud. It was the opposite of loud — low and round, and it went through the room like a word spoken into a barrel, and every hair on his arms stood up and stayed up.

He remembered the rehearsal hall. He remembered the floor wax and the rosin and the drum with the tape on the rim that nobody but his mother was allowed to touch, and the flat of her palm coming down on it, and the note going up through his teeth.

He shut his eyes and shouted, “Get back!”

The room made a sound like a pallet of brick being dropped.

When he opened his eyes the thing was against the far wall with its coils stacked under it, and its head was up and its mouth was shut and it was looking at him.

Nobody moved.

Theo’s hand was on the drum stand and his elbow was on the drum and his back was against the base of it, and he understood, in a small far-off way, that it would have been very easy just now to stand up and be impressive about it, and that he was not going to be able to.

“What,” said Voss.

He looked at her. She had gotten about halfway across the room with her hands up and her weight in the right place, and then she had stopped, and then, with a kind of deliberateness, she had taken one step back and then another, and now she was behind him.

“What,” she said again.

“Don’t.”

“That’s not an answer.” Her voice had gone strange and tight and high at the top. “You just — what did you do.”

“I don’t know what I did.”

“You don’t know.”

“No.”

“Is that a no or a —“ She stopped herself, and he could hear the office in her, the whole apparatus of forms and dates, coming up her throat and being swallowed. “Do you have any idea how much paper there is between me and the end of this night.”

A laugh got out of Theo and it was not a good one. “Okay.”

“I’m not joking.” She had the light on the thing against the wall and it had not moved. “I have to write this down. The form has a box for the species of the entity. I don’t have anything to put in the box. And now I have to write that a kid knocked it across a room. There’s no box for that. There’s no box.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, be —“ she made a small gesture at the wall with the hand that was not holding the light, “— be useful and tell me what you did.”

He would have said, if he had been able to say it, that he was more afraid of her at that moment than he was of the thing on the wall. She had stopped talking to a high school student.

“It was the drum,” he said.

“That’s not an answer either.”

“I know.” He shifted, and his arm came off the head, and the note went away into the walls and took a long time going. “My arm came down on it. My elbow came down on the drum and I yelled, and —“

He stopped, and tipped his head at the far wall, and did not go on.

“Say it.”

“The last thing I want to do,” said Theo, “is say it.”

The thing in the corner had its head up and its coils braced against the stone, and it was watching the drum. Not him. The drum, and then him, and then the drum.

The doorway was behind Theo, and there was nothing in it but dark. It had only to come past him and it would be out.

It stayed where it was, moving in short loops along the base of the wall, and every loop brought it a little nearer the middle of the room, and every loop turned it back.

Theo watched it do that three times before he understood what he was looking at.

It wanted the door. He was between it and the door.

Him, and a drum.

“Okay,” Voss said slowly. She had seen it too. “Okay. All right. That’s — whatever that is, that’s ours now.”

“It’s not ours. I don’t know what it is.”

“That’s working,” she said, and nodded at the drum, and picked up her radio, and shook it, and put it to her ear, and the dead thing inside it hissed like sand.

She tried it twice. The second time she did not say anything into it.

She had one slip left in her coat. She kept her hand over it and did not take it out.

Theo kept his hand flat on the frame of the drum stand and did not take it off. The note had gone out of the room and had not entirely stopped; he could feel it in the frame and in the floor and in the bone behind his ear. The drumhead ticked once under his elbow, and then again, small, cooling.

In the corner the thing put its chin down on the floor and watched him, and the notch in its jaw was gray and wet and did not bleed, and behind him the passage ran into the dark and stopped where the ceiling had come down.