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

Sinclair’s study, where he has spread the papers contained in his suitcase as if he is building a nest out of them. The documents are in a muddle across the grand oak desk, and scattered over the thick, damp carpets, and pinned to the walls, and Rook has been working tirelessly at the words typed across them, searching desperately for the mistake that is not there. Fingertips stained with ink, he makes endless notes and revisions. One day, Adam sees him stood at the epicentre of the room, holding his rounded spectacles and peering at them as if they are a puzzle he is unable to solve. The frames have been crushed, and the lenses are cracked, and Rook’s hands are speckled with splinters of glass.

From time to time Adam comes across a window yet to be curtained, and from there he can see Crab. Crab has exchanged his yellow coat for an old blue boiler suit and thick gardening gloves, and he works at the shining glass of the shatter-shard greenhouse resolutely. Sometimes Adam sees him emerge from the waters, dragging pieces of machinery and heavy tools, and the mansion’s quiet is interrupted for a time by the electric whine and rhythmic thump of industry. At the end of the day, Adam sees Crab sitting atop one of the hills that rise from the floods on a scavenged deckchair, squinting thoughtfully at the greenhouse and chewing at an unlit pipe until the light fades from the sky.

Adam is having a lot of trouble dealing with Pig’s death. To him, it is a new thorn of grief. The problem is that he feels the thorn so viscerally that he often becomes convinced that it must exist physically, embedded somewhere in his skin. Yet, try as he might, he is unable to find it and pluck it out. He spends his days standing before stained and rusted mirrors, turning and searching his skin for the prickling thorn he knows must be somewhere about him, and whenever he finds a trickle of water dripping from the ceiling, he stands beneath it and lets it wash over him as if it might somehow soothe the sharp needling. The mansion’s wine cellar is filled with murky water, and Adam wades down there, letting the cold waters consume him completely in an effort to find some relief. There is no diminishing the thorn’s sharpness, though. It continues to scratch at him constantly.

One day Adam sits in the ballroom upon a sodden bench and tries, by the eerie light leaking in through the gaps in the curtained windows, to read a novel he found in the mansion’s ruined library. He is having a lot of trouble reading it because he is unable to draw the sentences together. Each sentence is an island, separated by a sea of meaninglessness. Meanwhile, beneath the ballroom’s glinting chandelier, Crow attempts to remember a song she once knew, playing the first few notes over and over again in an effort to find the rest of it. Eventually, Adam chucks the useless novel into the waters, where it bobs for a while before it sinks, and Crow gives up on trying to remember the song, and they sit together in silence, listening to the muffled quiet of the house as it slowly falls in on itself.

There is a rhythmic splashing as someone approaches.

From the gloom of the corridor, Crab emerges. His gloves are blackened with oil, and his boiler suit is faded and threadbare around his joints, and there is something triumphant in his expression. He comes to a halt in the arched doorway and removes his gloves, rubbing his coarse hands together and clearing his throat. “All right,” he says, and his voice sounds strange in the tomb-like quiet. These are the first words to have been spoken in the house in days. “I reckon I’ve got a way in.”

* * *

Emerging from the house, Crow has the expression of a girl who has awoken from one dream only to find herself in another. Thick, whirling clouds snuff out the light of the sun, and up on the hilltops the trees are hunched silhouettes, as if they are cowering at the sight of that oppressive sky. There is no wind to tremble their dripping branches, and the waters of the floods at their feet are a glassy black that reflects nothing. The house has subsided, Adam notices; the wing they have emerged from is slowly sinking, as if it is dissolving in the waters. The silence outside is so absolute that Crow speaks in a whisper, as if she is afraid of breaking it. “That’s a bad sky,” she says. “You don’t fly in a sky like that. You find somewhere safe to roost.”

“You can stay here,” Adam tells her.

“I’ll go up one of the turrets,” she says, “watch from there.”

The house’s turrets seem too close to the sky, Adam thinks – as if she might accidentally fall upwards into the clouds. “Be careful,” he tells her.

“What are you going to do if you get inside?” she asks.

Crab is hunched over the engine of his little boat and hauling at the cord to get it started. Each time he does, the engine rumbles, and to Adam it sounds like distant thunder. Opening his satchel of pistols, he examines them; the silver of them gleams in the gloom. “I haven’t decided yet,” he says. Shouldering the satchel, he unties the boat, clambers inside and pushes it away from the shore. Crow remains in the arched doorway of the house, her pale face ghostly in what little light leaks down between the clouds, and as the boat drifts across the black waters she vanishes.

There is a snarl from the boat’s engine.

The greenhouse is resplendent in the dark. Its every facet looks like a mirror reflecting an impossible summer. The bright light it casts makes the waters glitter in oily swirls, emphasising the gritty soil and metallic elements risen to the surface. Beyond the