Halloween Story: The Pigeons

The Pigeons

It was a cold Halloween night.  I was counting all my candy, when all of a sudden, I got an eerie feeling, when I heard a sound like hailstones beating on the roof of the house.  A glance out the window told me the night was clear; I could see the golden cone of light below the streetlamp near the corner of the property.  I shivered.  Mom wasn’t home from taking my little sister trick-or-treating yet.  Tommy’s mom had just dropped me off, after my first teen Halloween party and safe trick-or-treat at the mall. 

I was a ll alone.  The banging comtinued on the roof right over my head.  I tried to return to counting my candy, but even the lure of chocolate bars and Tootsie Rolls had lost its appeal.

As I sat in the middle of my bedroom floor, my shoulders scrunched in close to my chin, goose bumps prickling up and down my arms, I heard a loud thud! downstairs.

I jumped, and let out a startled yelp.  No one else was home.  I’d locked the back door when I came in, and the front door was never unlocked.  We didn’t use the front door.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The hail that wasn’t hail kept falling above my head.

Thump, thump, thump!

Whatever was downstairs was moving along the long front hall from the living room to the front door.  Soon, it would be at the foot of the stairs, and my room was the first door at the top of the stairs.

I scuttled back into the corner farthest from the door, and cowered in the shadow of a big, old-fashioned, black-and-white console television that stood in the corner.  Pulling my legs up tight to my chest, I wrapped my arms around them, and hugged myself into the tightest ball I could manage.  I whimpered as I realized that the gauzy, green-and-turquoise harem costume, and the sparkly beads woven into the elaborate genie-do Mom had created with my hair, would make me a really bright, easy target.

Creak!

I squeezed my eyes tightly closed, and bit my lip to keep from screaming.  Whatever it was had reached the bottom stair.

Creak!  Creak!  Creak!

It was moving up the stairs!

The cold October wind began whistling around the house, racing across the wide, flat emptiness of the swampt that surrounded our ancient farm house on three sides.  The glass rattled in the old, wooden window frames.

Terrified, I dove forward and wriggled under the bed that stood against the wall opposite the windows. 

Creak! Bang, bang, bang! Creak!  Bang, bang!

Something was coming up the stairs.  There were 14 risers, which I counted every time I climbed the stairs, and I had heard a dozen slow footsteps.  Whatever was out there was almost at the top.  It had to be heavy to make the higher steps creak and groan like that; usually, only the bottom ones made noise.  The banging on the roof had intensified, too.  It wasn’t hail.  I was sure of that.  The night was cold and windy, but it was clear.  I trembled unter my big queen bed, and peered out under the edge of the bedspread at the darkness in the hall outside my door.

I hadn’t closed my door!  No, of course I hadn’t.  I was home alone.  There’d been no reason to close the door.  I desperately wished I had!

A huge, dark form emerged from the stairwell, blacker than the darkness in the hallway.  It looked tall and broad, bulky.  I sucked in my breath when I heard its deep, raspy breathing.  It stepped closer to my door, and hesitated there.  I heard it sniff the air and make a snuffling sound.  I held as still as still could be.  I held my breath.  I didn’t make a sound.

The monstrous figure lumbered into my room.  As it passed my bed, the pool of light from the lamp on my bedstand showed me two mammoth legs – like from an actual mammoth, with long, shaggy, dark brown hair, matted with burdocks and twigs.  It’s feet were massive, with huge, bulbous toes that ended in long, crusty, cracked, yellow toenails.  That close, I couldn’t miss the mouldy odor of the swamp wafting off the thing.

It went right past the bed, over to the window beside my desk.  To my astonishment, it bent down, and I saw hands at the ends of sgyy, brown arms, with ugly yellow claws to match the toenails.  It reached out, and raised the window. 

It was my good luck that he opened the window on the right.  The window on the left stayed open on its own, but the old counterweights in the right window had long since failed.  As the thing stuck its head out the window, the heavy wooden sash crashed down on the back of its head.  The thing let out a cry that was half roar of fury and half yowl of pain.

I didn’t waste a second.  While it tried to get its head out of the window – I heard cracking wood and shattering glass – I scrambled out from under the bed and raced, barefoot, down the stairs.  Rounding the corner at the bottom, I didn’t even think to use the front door.  That was just as well, since it opened right under my bedroom window.  I dashed down the hall.  In the living room, the cellar door stood open, and the recliner chair was toppled onto its side.  That explained the first thud.  I didn’t stop, but ran i9nto the kitchen.  I yanked open the back door, clattered down the three steps to the back hall, and wrenched open the lock on the outer door.  I ran out into the chill Halloween night, but I was too afraid to feel the cold.

I started to run across the yard, counting on the cold and dark to keep in their underground nests the copperheads that usually kept me from crossing the broad sweep of lawn that ran between the apple trees and the road.  I was making for the golden streetlight at the end of our property, and then for the village just over the hill beyond it.  I ran harder and faster than I had ever run.  I wasn’t a good runner, because my left hip had been bad since I was a baby.  Surgery and a long series of body casts and braces had let me walk, but I would never be an athlete.  I couldn’t feel the pain through the adrenalin rush of terror, though, and I kept running.

I had almost reached the circle of light when the first stone hit my shoulder.  I stumbled, and nearly fewll, from the sudden pain.  Another stone hit the middle of my back, then one hit the back of my head.

Smack!  Smack! Smack!

I lost my footing, and fell to the ground, just yards from the light, in the gravel on the side of the road.  I curled into a ball, covering my face with my arms.  I tried to scream, but my mouth was dry, and my breath caught in my throat.  I felt the stones rain down on me – like hailstones!

I was shaking and crying by the time I felt the first claws land on my forearm.  Talons grasped my arm, but they didn’t did into me.  More taloned feet landed on me, and I became aware that the stones were no longer hitting me.  The birds fluttered their wings over my body.  Those closest to my face warbled a low, soft cooing. 

Above me, I heard hoarse shrieks intermingled with loader cooing.  It sounded like a hundred birds swirling above my head.  Although the talons didn’t pierce my skin, and no beak pecked me,I was too afraid to move.  I was bruised all over, and my left ankle was throbbing from twisting under me as I fell.

In the direction of the house, I heard a furious roaring and snarling.  I heard strident cooing there, too.  Pigeons, then, not doves.  I cowered under the warm, and oddly comforting weight of the birds perched on my body, their fluttering wings completely covering the gaps between them, so that no tiny bit of me was exposed.

Plop!  Plop!  Plop!

Suddenly, I heard soft bodies landing on the ground all around me.  The hoarse cries above became shrieks of anger and pain, and there were fewer and fewer of them as the plopping continued all around me.

I heard a car engine rumble past on the pavement, just a foot or two from my head.  The brakes squealed, and gravel flew as the car braked abruptly and swerved off the road just beyond me.  The birds launched into the air in a single whoosh of flapping wings displacing a great deal of air.

“Deb?!  Mom sounded terrified.

“Stay in the car!” she snapped, and I heard a car door slam shut.  My sister.

“What in God’s name?” Mom gasped, falling to her knees beside my bruised body.

“Mom …” I whispered.  “The birds …”

I opened my eyes to bright lights and shiny, white surfaces.  I heard a murmur of voices not far away.  Everything ached.  It took a few minutes to realize that I was in a hospital room.  I moaned softly.

“Deb?”  Mom’s voice sounded worried, but she wasn’t frightened anymore.  She sounded calm and cool, like normal.

“Mom,” I whispered.

“What the hell happened, Hon?”  Mom asked.

“The birds,” I whispered.  “The birds saved me.”

Later, they told me that hundreds of dead crows and a dozen or so dead pigeons had been found o0n the ground all around my body, on top of a large number of shiny, white rocks the size of chestnuts.  The birds had all been torn apart, apparently by the beaks and talons of other birds.  Stranger still, a large animal had been found dead in our front yard, so sorn by beaks and talons that its features were unidentifiable.  The State Troopers said it was a bear, or maybe a gorilla that had escaped from somewhere, but they weren’t sure. 

No one even tried to make sense of how my bedroom window had been ripped from its frame from inside the house, or why the creature’s hair and brood were caught on the splintered wood of the sash.

The roof of the house was thick with more of the shiny white stones.  A professor from the college said they were quartz, but he couldn’t explain why or how so many were on the roof and around my body.  There were hundreds of crow feathers on the roof, too, but only pigeon feathers on the creature’s body.  No one could explain that, either.

The pigeons returned the the weathered old barn at the back of the yard, by the edge of the swamp, where pigeons had been roosting and cooing for decades.  For a few days, my sister said it sounded like there were a lot more pigeons than usual flying in and out of the small, square opening ion the eaves of the loftless barn.  By the time the doctor let me go home, two days after Halloween, the pigeons were cooing normally, and the old barn was quiet, except for the soft cooing.

Mom had a couple of guys come out and pour a lot of cement in the old cistern in the cellar.  They poured a lot of it down the old well down there, too.  The State Trooper couldn’t explain why it looked like the creature had come up out of the well, but he did stick his neck out to say the grimy footprints that led from the cellar to my bedroom looked a lot more like a gorilla than a bear.

No one believed me when I told them what had really happened, so I stopped arguing with them.  I knew the truth.  The pigeons saved me from a monster on Halloween night.