03-14-2022, 06:16 PM
Call it the gravity of habit or wishful thinking or just bullheaded denial. Whatever it was, it mixed with stilted dialog and bad effects and bad angles, the telltale accouterments of no-budget horror movies, to coax Near toward a separation of him from whatever the hell was going down a few yards away in the headlight/spotlight. In spite of his better judgment, he slipped toward the foxhole position of uninvolved observer where he was more comfortable in any case but now especially, when active involvement meant some probability of danger.
If this was just between the two of them, between Jude and the owl woman, Near was allowed to wonder what was going to happen next. He could pick a team to root for.
Maybe she would do a trick and make Jude disappear.
What did happen next began and ended across a span of seconds, before he could react, before he could even really register: the glint of metal when a knife appeared in her hand, extracted from a pocket surely but as good as materialized out of thin air according to his eyes. She reached forward, across, and ran the blade over the bird’s neck – a single motion, quick and certain; and the bird, which had been lolled obviously dead in the bed of the pickup, convulsed its wings against the web by which it had just been strung up without resistance and shrieked – an impossible, earsplitting wail that shattered against tree trunks and that had nothing to do with anything Near had ever learned about owls or birds or nature.
The headlights surged and flickered in concert with the scream, then steadied to prove the owl was once more slack on its frame, the paler of feathers freshly blood-blackened. Near found his palms flush against his ears and he lowered them, tentative, and took in a weird new silence, one that was profoundly either denser or emptier than the one it had replaced.
“There,” the woman said, eyeing the dripping hunting knife she held up in the light. “Feel that?”
If this was just between the two of them, between Jude and the owl woman, Near was allowed to wonder what was going to happen next. He could pick a team to root for.
Maybe she would do a trick and make Jude disappear.
What did happen next began and ended across a span of seconds, before he could react, before he could even really register: the glint of metal when a knife appeared in her hand, extracted from a pocket surely but as good as materialized out of thin air according to his eyes. She reached forward, across, and ran the blade over the bird’s neck – a single motion, quick and certain; and the bird, which had been lolled obviously dead in the bed of the pickup, convulsed its wings against the web by which it had just been strung up without resistance and shrieked – an impossible, earsplitting wail that shattered against tree trunks and that had nothing to do with anything Near had ever learned about owls or birds or nature.
The headlights surged and flickered in concert with the scream, then steadied to prove the owl was once more slack on its frame, the paler of feathers freshly blood-blackened. Near found his palms flush against his ears and he lowered them, tentative, and took in a weird new silence, one that was profoundly either denser or emptier than the one it had replaced.
“There,” the woman said, eyeing the dripping hunting knife she held up in the light. “Feel that?”