Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (top ebook reader TXT) 📕

“My idea.” Butterfly beams and leans back.

Adam tries to listen to Rook’s speech, but it seems fairly generic – words that might be said at any funeral – and he’s sat so far back that it’s drowned out by the rushing of the river and the weeping of the mourners anyway. So, he leans back and listens to the gentle snoring of Pig instead, watching the rise and fall of that prodigious chest.

Adam hasn’t had a funeral in a while, because he’s been living a lot of inconsequential lives. He’s been enjoying the idea of being the man in the background of the book: the one-line character who fixes the car, or shoes the horse, for the protagonist. In that way he has slipped between lives with barely a whisper for a long time now, moving on to his next name and destination with no fuss. When he leaves his lives, his neighbours and colleagues sometimes give him a card wishing him luck, but little else, and he prefers it that way. He allows himself to fade from their lives and be forgotten as he moves on, so that the sensation of letting one life end and another begin is no more upsetting than throwing away an old pair of jeans and putting on a new pair.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. Adam used to live a lot of lives that he was proud of, and reluctant to leave behind. He and Eve lived almost too long in Thebes, for instance – working in the Valley of Kings. The passing of pharaohs and nobles kept them both busy. It was Eve’s pleasure to work as an embalmer, part of the hallowed team tasked with preparing the bodies for entombment, and she spent her days steadily growing familiar with the interior anatomy of the human body: finding all its weaknesses, and ruminating on ways of repairing it better. Meanwhile, it was Adam’s pleasure to bring life to the arid valley: finding ways to nurture greenery in the spaces between the ever-expanding array of tombs, all while hauling skins heavy with water up from the river for the masons. Adam liked the idea that both her work and his work were devoted to life, in a place devoted to death. Sometimes, at night, Eve would show Adam sketches she had made of the arrangements of the organs inside the people she was helping to embalm, and Adam would wonder at it all, and flex his fingers just to see his tendons moving through the skin across the back of his hand.

Adam flexes his fingers now, making his scars stretch.

On the wind, he catches the sound of dogs barking.

Eventually, Rook’s speech comes to an end, and a queue forms to shake his hand. Adam and Butterfly join the queue together, and leave Pig where he is. The queue is slow to move, and Adam takes the time to study the portrait of Crow. The portrait is a photograph, taken candidly at a party, and the photographer has managed to capture a rare moment with her; Crow’s smile is unguarded and genuine, and Adam finds himself absorbed in her moment.

“Owl tells me that you’ve found my brother,” says Rook, when Adam comes to the front of the queue. His hand is small, but his grip is firm.

“He’s waiting with the cars.”

“Ah, yes. He’s never been very good at funerals. Thank you for bringing him.”

“We should talk.”

“We can catch up at the wake. Magpie does enjoy a good canapé, and I am looking forward to finding out where all my money has been going.” Rook smiles, wryly.

As Butterfly moves up to kiss Rook’s cheek, Adam catches another sound on the wind: the distant noise of what sounds like a hunting horn. The dogs didn’t sound out of place when he heard them – he imagines there’s no end of dog walkers out here – but the horn is unusual. Adam moves away from the river, to the edge of the pews, and peers into the dripping forest, listening for more. The wind drifts across him, changing direction from moment to moment, and it brings him no further noises. But there is something else, a familiar sensation – a sort of trembling stillness, as if the forest has taken a deep breath.

Crouching, Adam presses his hand against the ground. It’s shivering.

The horn sounds again. Closer now. And the noise of the dogs is rising.

Turning back to the funeral, Adam wants to shout at them, to warn them that every instinct he has is telling him something is coming. But the scene is so tranquil – the drifting petals and leaves, and the mourners in delicate dresses and suits, and the plastic pews and the winding river – that it seems impossible anything should happen to disturb the peace cultivated here.

Pig has awoken. Still in his chair, he seems to be the only other funeral attendee to have noticed the noises coming from the woods. Adam meets his eye, and they both turn to watch the trees, branches twitching in the breeze, leaves falling in gusts. There is movement among them, now, a churning kind of shifting in the shadows, as if there is a wave rolling through the forest. The dogs are barking and snarling.

“Get to the river!” yells Pig.

A tide of dogs crashes through the undergrowth. Their eyes are wide and wild, and froth drips from their snarling mouths; a terrible, tormented kind of hunger makes their limbs shudder.

The dogs rush and leap, jaws snapping. Adam throws the first away, but the next two bite into his arms, and then a third into his leg. Tearing them from his limbs, Adam glimpses the chaos behind him: the dogs smashing into the milling mourners; chairs tumbling aside; the screaming as people are ripped into. And there is Pig, standing before Butterfly, bashing dogs away with a chair.

The hunting horn sounds again.

Beyond the frenzy of falling leaves, and whirling petals, and snapping jaws, more