The Night Bird

11

The room was white.

Shimmering white. Fluorescent white. Blinding white. As her eyes blinked open, the woman named Christie felt lost in the whiteness. She was at peace, drifting nowhere and everywhere. The atmosphere was warm and perfectly silent. She lay on her back on a chaise so soft and comfortable it practically enveloped her. Wherever she was, time had no meaning here. A minute could be an hour; an hour could be a minute. She had no sense of anything but bliss.

Her body felt oddly heavy. When she went to lift her arm, it wouldn’t move. The same was true of her legs. Soft bonds held her firmly in place. She couldn’t turn her head from side to side or lift her torso off the cushions. And yet it didn’t matter. Her mind wandered freely, untethered from her frozen body, floating with a faint breath of air. Her mind was a bubble, lazily exploring the white, windowless world.

Nothing could ever be wrong in that world. Nothing at all. She could stay there forever.

Only one strange smudge of darkness disturbed Christie’s peaceful visions. Far away, farther than her mind could see, something was missing. There was a memory she could no longer grasp, a blank space as white as the walls. When she reached for it, it darted away. The memory teased her with its emptiness. It was like a sailboat hovering on the far edge of an ocean horizon, dotting up and then disappearing. She could hardly be sure it had ever been there at all.

But she knew it had.

She had a sixth sense that whatever was behind that blank space was worse than anything she’d known in her life. Behind that blank space was terror. Behind it was madness. She knew — she knew — that if she had to stare at it again, her mind would shatter like glass. She could feel herself sprinting to get away from it. Running without looking back at whatever terrible thing was behind her. Pleading. Praying. Screaming.

No.

Right now, that seemed impossible. Nothing so empty, so far away, could frighten her. She was as warm as sunshine. The room was as white as the sand on an endless beach. She never wanted to leave.

Christie’s lips folded into a smile. Her eyes sank shut again, and she slept. Beautiful dreams filled her mind, as if a voice outside her brain could tell her what to see: meadows in bloom, with a gentle wind she could feel on her face; a mountain lake, waveless and deep blue, scented by pine; a porch swing, empty, creaking, with a rumble of thunder in the distance.

Whatever the voice told her to see, she saw.

The voice. It controlled her.

Suddenly, it told her to awaken. It said her name in a high-pitched, singsong way, like a child playing a game: “Chris-tie, Chris-tie.”

She didn’t want to wake up. Her dreams were too perfect. She knew she would awaken in the white room. It had all happened before. She didn’t know how many times it had happened, but this wasn’t the first time.

“Chris-tie, Chris-tie.”

The voice sang in her head like a nightingale, but there was nothing happy about the song. She had a memory of asking: Who are you?

And she had a memory of his singsong reply.

“The Night Bird... that’s who you heard.”

She was awake now, and she could feel him close to her. His breath was loud and scented with something sweet. She kept her eyes closed, because she didn’t want to see him, but he plucked one eyelid between his fingers and lifted it open like he was peering under a window shade.

“Peek-a-boo, I see you!”

His face was nothing but a mask, leaning over her, inches away. The mask had a grotesque plastic smile, with bloodred lips stretching to his ears. Ghost-white skin. Huge eyes — the eyes of a bug. Not eyes at all. The mask grinned at her, and behind it, the voice sang.

“It won’t be long,” he warbled. “Time for the song!”

Christie wanted to shut her eyes, but he used gray sticky tape to seal her eyelid to her lash. First one, then the other. The moisture in her eyes dried immediately, and her eyeballs felt as if they would come loose and roll away. Pain grew in a circle in her sockets. She needed to blink; all she could think about was how much she needed to blink, but she couldn’t. She could only stare at the bug eyes and hideous grin of the mask.

Not the song, she wanted to say. Please not the song.

She remembered now. The song opened the door. The song sent her to the devil and the darkness. She wanted to scream at him and plead with him, but something was in her mouth — cloth filling every space, shutting out air and sound. All she could do was squeal in protest through her nose, making a whimpering noise. The mask giggled at her, like a child playing with an ant.

“The song is here,” he sang. “See what you fear!”

Christie screamed, not out loud, but from inside her brain. It did nothing to stop what was happening to her. The song began. The music was smooth, gentle, not scary at all, but as the lyrics played, the empty whiteness changed. Things appeared on the walls and ceiling and floor, and at first, she couldn’t see what they were, but then the room seemed to shrink inch by inch, and she realized the room was lined with needles.

Thousands and thousands of needles, glinting sharp and silver. Jutting out. Three-dimensional. Sleek and long.

Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Anything but needles.

The walls moved. The ceiling moved. Or that was how it felt to her. The needles grew in her vision. Christie saw other things now. Eyeballs appeared and floated in the air — dozens of individual blue eyes with long lashes, just like hers — and as the walls ground closer, the needles punctured each eyeball, oozing blood and vitreous gel, gathering them up like meat on a skewer. She screamed and screamed and screamed and didn’t make a sound.

A face took shape among the needles. Not a face. The mask. Its grinning mouth opened and sang the song. The music became the soundtrack to a horror film as the bloody needles zeroed in on her body. Her skin. Her face. They grew larger and larger as they came closer.

The voice sang in her ear, “Chris-tie, Chris-tie.”

And then a command: “Run.”

Over and over: “Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.”

She tried. She could feel her arms pumping, her legs racing, her heart hammering in her chest as she went faster and faster, but she couldn’t outrun the needles. Patiently, inexorably, they came for her. To stab her. To puncture her. To slit her through and through with a thousand wounds.

“Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.”

Christie’s open eyes saw the needles. Her soundless screams became an unending wail for help, but there was no help. The glistening points of the needles filled her sight, so close she could feel the metal points pushing on the damp surface of her cornea, pricking their way inside. Her entire world became nothing but needles. There was a needle for every pore on her skin.

Her mind broke.

Her mind fell through a window and shattered into pieces. She wasn’t even aware of the real, tiny stab of a needle in her arm, or of the terror receding as her consciousness slipped away into blackness again.