Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (read any book .TXT) 📗

Pages upon pages of names and addresses are written down in his old, clumsy handwriting. Adam runs his finger down the rows and knows that every single name he touches belongs to someone dead. Dead, dead, dead – the word repeats itself in his mind like a mantra, and as he reads on, through further endless addresses, he feels as if he’s slipping deeper and deeper into a dark hole. Dead, dead, dead. Everyone in the book is dead.

There is a tapping at the window, and Adam blinks, disturbed from his thoughts. Owl is perched outside, glaring at him.

Adam hefts open the window and Owl hops through, spreading his wings for balance. Copper and brass feathers flutter everywhere, and papers scatter. Dust whirls around. Owl lands on the metal mantelpiece, and his head swivels to and fro, taking in the wreckage of the room.

“We can go soon,” Adam tells him.

Dead, dead, dead. As he skims through names, it feels as if spectral hands have emerged from the pages and are choking him – the ghosts of everyone he knew back then, back when he was a captain and earned a great many of his scars. Adam tries not to think about ghosts, because the thought of them usually overwhelms him, but the book forces it upon him. Dead, dead, dead.

But there, a name.

He pauses, his finger poised beneath the address. Not dead. He taps it to make sure that it’s real, but the name and address remain solid. Of course, it’s been decades – more than a century, even – but it might be possible. He reads it aloud for Owl, but mostly for himself, to confirm its reality. Then he closes the book and places it back into the chest.

Glancing around at the dusty room, and the hole in the wall, he wonders what he should do about the house. Of course, the owners should be able to sell his old pistols for a lot of money – they were antiques when he hid them, and he supposes they must be very valuable – but he would still like to do something for the people here.

He remembers the dead apple tree outside. At the base of the chest, among the papers, he locates a small wooden box and sifts carefully through all the seeds contained inside. Doing so eases his mind – brings him back from the terrible place the book of dead names sent him. There are maybe two or three seeds that might still harbour life, he thinks. He looks at them, so small, in the palm of his hand. As he leaves, he places them carefully into the bowl beside the door, artfully arranged in order of potential, and outside in the front garden he pays his respects to the old, dead apple tree, running his hand down the bark.

“Come on, then,” he says, and Owl emerges from the house, flapping mightily into the sky. “Time to visit an old friend.”

* * *

Adam takes a train out to Arbroath, and a bus from there.

Where the road becomes a track, he walks instead. The forest is a striking gold colour – the trees are dripping a wealth of leaves – but he doesn’t like it very much. Adam’s never been fond of autumn because it heralds winter, and he always finds himself worrying that winter will never end. So, instead of admiring the forest, he thinks about spring – about the white and blue buds that will emerge among the roots of these shedding trees once winter has passed.

As he walks, he considers the first time he met his contact in Scotland – the owner of the name printed in his book of dead names. He and Eve had settled in a low valley far to the north, which was sheltered from the northern winds. Rocky mountains rose around them, and the river at the heart of the valley wound a complex route around the pine-gripped low hills. The best bit about the valley, Adam remembers, was the way odd little growths sprouted here and there – ash and alder and even a single apple tree, hidden in a mossy knell. Wolves serenaded them at night, their distant calls echoing from the mountainsides, and sometimes Adam would wake and see the silhouette of a stag high on a rise. A large family of beavers moved in upstream, and Eve would watch them for hours, while whittling branches of her own with a stone knife.

One night, Eve woke Adam. The stars were bright overhead, and so were her eyes, agleam in the last embers of firelight. “Listen,” she said, and Adam did, to the far-off rumbling of thunder, to the gentle rustling of the pines, to Eve’s breathing, her chest pressed close to his. But at the very edge of hearing there was another noise: a muffled thumping and grumbling from further along the valley. It continued for a while longer and then stopped. “I’ve been hearing it every night since the new moon,” Eve told him.

In the morning, Adam went to investigate.

There were tracks rutted in the undergrowth, and branches snapped from trees, and the apex of the disturbance was around the lone apple tree, small and twisted and sour and desperately clinging on to life in its knell. It seemed, to Adam, as if there were considerably fewer apples than his last visit. So, that night, he waited in the dark beside the tree until the mysterious apple-eater arrived, and there, grumbling through the undergrowth, tusks pale in the moonlight, emerged an enormous, bristling beast.

It was Pig. Eden’s own Pig.

Pig hefted his considerable bulk up to the apple tree, and there heaved his flank against the trunk, thumping at it until apples began to fall. Then he quickly snuffled them up, his stomach making satisfied gurgling noises with every swallowed morsel.

As quietly as he was able, Adam approached the tree, and took an apple from a branch. Then, crouching, he extended the