A Princess of Landover

DÉJÀ VU

Vince stopped when he reached the aviary and stood looking for what he already knew wasn’t there. He couldn’t seem to help himself. Every day he came and every day he looked and every day it was the same thing. The bird was gone. The crow or whatever it was with the red eyes. After all these years, it had disappeared. Vanished. Just like that.

No one knew for sure what had happened. Most hadn’t paid much attention to the bird for months—years, really, if you didn’t count the ornithologists. Some still didn’t realize it was gone. There were more important matters to occupy their working lives and dominate their conversations. But Vince was of a different mind. He didn’t think there was anything more important than the disappearance of the bird. Even if he wasn’t sure why, he sensed it.

That bird shouldn’t have gotten free. Security should have taken greater care than they did when they opened the door and took those two madmen into custody. But they weren’t paying attention to anything but the two men, and the crow would have been watching.

Just like it was always watching.

Vince knew, even if the others didn’t. It gave him a creepy, uncomfortable feeling, thinking about it. But he knew.

Five weeks gone now, and things were pretty much back to normal. No one had forgotten that day, a day that had started out pretty much like every other. He wasn’t the first one to notice the two men in the aviary, but he heard Roy shouting and rushed over to see what was happening, and there they were—these two guys, trapped in the aviary, kicking and hammering on the bars and shaking the cage in their efforts to get free. Odd pair of ducks—that was Vince’s first thought when he saw them. They were wearing clothes of the sort you sometimes saw on those people who spent their weekends playing at being knights and fighting with swords. They didn’t have any armor on, but they wore robes and tunics and scarves and boots and big belts with silver buckles. One was tall and skinny with a head that looked too big for the rest of his body, and the other was short like a dwarf and all wrinkled and whiskery. They did not look happy, their faces contorted and flushed with anger and frustration. They wanted out, but neither Vince nor Roy was about to help them. How they had gotten into the cage in the first place was hard to guess, considering that the cage door was still locked. But they had no business being there, whatever their excuse. At best, they were trespassing on city property, and it was likely that by interacting with the animals without authority they had broken a few more laws, as well.

Roy had already called security, so Vince and he stood side by side watching the two men rant and rave. Neither could understand anything the pair was saying. Roy thought they were speaking an Eastern European dialect, although how he would know that, being of Scottish descent, was a mystery to Vince. Vince thought it more likely that they were speaking Arabic. He thought the emphasis on the hard vowels suggested one of the Middle Eastern languages, and even if the big one was as pale as a ghost, it wasn’t impossible that he might be an Arabic albino or something. He might have been raised in Egypt or Morocco, Vince thought—even though he had never been anywhere outside the state and didn’t know the first thing about either of those countries.

Nevertheless, the two speculated on the matter until security got there and hauled the interlopers out of the cage in handcuffs and tossed them into one of those holding pens on wheels they used when the animals needed to be moved to a new enclosure. Shut the doors and took them away, and that was the last anyone had heard of either one. Vince guessed the authorities would try to find out where they came from and send them back. But he heard later that they didn’t have any identification on them, and no one could figure out what language they were speaking. That last was especially puzzling. In this day and age, with people all over the world moving here and there at the drop of a hat, you would think they could find someone close by who could speak any language in existence.

But not in this case, apparently. So the pair had ended up in the hands of the Homeland Security people to determine if they might be terrorists. But if no one could understand them or figure out where they came from, what could Homeland Security do?

It was odd that the two men had appeared just like the crow with the red eyes. Exactly the same way: not there one day, there the next, and no explanation for how they got there. It was as if animal shelters and aviaries were some sort of transport devices, like in that TV show Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty. Maybe the madmen and the bird had been beamed up from another planet.

Staring at the aviary now, in the aftermath of all the excitement, Vince shrugged his disinterest. What did it matter? If there were answers to be had, they weren’t going to be given to him. They were gone, all three of them, and they likely weren’t coming back. The crow with the red eyes especially. It wasn’t coming back for sure. Any fool who had watched it as he had could tell you that. Now that it was free, it was long gone. It wouldn’t be caught again, either. Not that bird.

He wondered where it would go. Somewhere far away, he hoped. He didn’t like that bird. He didn’t want to see it again. Better if it were someone else’s problem.

That bird was trouble waiting to happen.