The Bird

Weird Tales – November 1951

(1951) *

Margaret St. Clair

There teas heat coming from the bird cage—quite noticeable heat

THERE is a story about the captain of a freighter who, summoned by his first mate to see an indubitable sea serpent disporting i ts el f a few yards to port of h is ship, refused, on the reasonable ground that if he saw the sea serpent he’d have to put it in the log, and he didn’t want to be known as a man who saw sea serpents all the rest of his life.

“Oooh , look at the poor bird, daddee !” Timmy shrieked.

Dwight Thompson looked. In the two months which had elapsed since he had built the bird bath to assist Timothy in his nature study, the structure had been visited by a number of queer specimens. That which was now perching on the edge of the basin, gripping it with a scaly, yellowish claw, st ru ck Thompson as being a new low.

Scrawny, rusty, ill-favored, it resembled nothing so much as a bundle of quills topped by a rheumy eye. It was a perfect scarecrow of a bird, a creature so utterly lacking in appeal or personality that the kindest-hearted person would have had no hesitation in consigning it to the garbage can. Thompson whistled.

“I’ll chase it away,” he offered after a moment.

“Oh, no!” Timmy said. “The poor, poor thing! We’ll take it in the house, daddy, an’ feed it an’ care for it an’ make it well!” By nature a dissector of flies, a puller of cat’s tails, training and repression had succeeded, of late, in covering Timothy’s native savagery with a layer of unctuously in sincere kindliness. At the present moment, he fairly dripped.

“The hell you say!” Thompson barked injudiciously, forgetting Mildred’s embargo cci profanity before his child. “I won’t have a thing like that in the house!”

Timothy stared at him for a moment, while his face grew red. Then he closed his eyes, puffed out his cheeks, and began to howl. If it be possible for an eleven-year-old child to be lubberly and a lout, that, Thompson thought as he watched his son screaming, was what Timothy was.

Mildred appeared on the back porch.

“What are you two arguing about?” she said brightly. One of the things which irked Thompson most about his wife was her habit of addressing him and his son as if they were exactly equal in point of age.

“It’s daddy!” Timothy bellowed. “He won’t let me care for the bird, the poor, poor bird! It’s sick. An’ if it stays out all night, it’ll—” he paused and gulped dra m atically—“it’ll die!”

Mildred looked in the direction Timothy was indicating. For a moment, Thompson saw with satisfaction, she was visibly taken aback. She swallowed. Then she recovered herself.

“Well, now, Dwight,” she said reason ably, “it won’t hurt anything for him to bring the bird in the house. He can put it in Fluffy’s old cage.” (Fluffy was the canary Timothy had given to the cat a few months before.) “I’m sure it’s very kind of him -to want to care for it.”

“It’ll be covered with lice,” Dwight pointed out.

“I’ll dust some of that powder I got for Fluffy over its wings. Run in the house, son and get the cage.”

Thus it was that Thompson, so to speak, laid eyes on the sea serpent.

-

THE cage, over Thompson’s protests, was installed in a corner of the living room. When it had been placed to Mildred’s satisfaction, Dwight went over and looked morosely at the creature it contained. Immobile (the bird had not even blinked when Timmy had grabbed it around the wings and stuffed it into Fluffy’s old cage), de void of personality, almost of identity, the thing yet managed to dominate the room and fill it with itself. Its scraggy nonentity was more impressive than a cage full of lyre birds would have been.

Thompson pulled his arm chair around so that its back ‘was toward the cage, and sat down. Even in this position he was uneasily aware of the bird. He picked up the book he had started yesterday—a volume in praise of mental ill-health, called BE GLAD YOU’RE NEUROTIC, which some one had recommended to him—and started to read.

Timothy came bounding into the room. “What do you think you’re doing?” his father demanded irritably, glancing up from his book.

“Jus’ taking that poor bird some stuff so he can make hisself a nice lil’nest .”

“Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Timothy’s face puckered up in a tentative bawl. Then, deciding that his mother would probably not back him up, his face relaxed. Reluctantly he approached his father and opened his right hand.

It contained three or four lengths of string, a tooth pick, a bit of pink fluff that must have come from Mildred’s marabou-trimmed bed jacket, and a few straws from the whisk broom.

“Hum. What’s in your other hand?”

Much more reluctantly this time, Timmy’s dirt ) r little paw unclosed itself. It held three pieces of stick cinnamon.

“What makes you think the bird would like that for a nest?” Thompson asked with genuine curiosity.

Timothy wriggled. For a moment puzzlement made his face childish, almost appealing. “I don’ know,” he answered. “I just sort of do.”

“Well, all right,” Thompson replied, losing interest rapidly. “Go ahead. Only try not to make so much noise, will you?”

“O. K., daddee ,” Timothy said.

In the next few trips Timothy took the bird peppercorns, whole cloves, some ground-up mace, and two or three big flat cardamom seeds which Mildred had bought once to make Swedish coffee bread. Thompson ignored him resolutely. It was wonderful, when you had children, how much you could ignore them when you tried.

Just before he went up to bed, Thompson went over and looked at the bird once more. It was as motionless as ever, but at some time during the evening it must have exerted itself sufficiently to form Timmy’s offering into the flat dais on which it now perched. The various spices had been worked neatly, almost symmetrically, into the top.

“You’re a hell of a looking thing,”

Thompson said. He prodded at die bird with an irresolute forefinger. The bird made no response of any sort. Thompson turned and went up the stair.

-

WHEN his alarm went off the next morning, he felt more than his usual reluctance to get up. He had a fairly good job, a wife whom an outsider would have described as “wonderful” and three children whom the same outsider, though with some hesitation, would have called wonderful, too. He was a gratifying handful of years on the right side of middle age, and he enjoyed good health. Yet—Thompson winced as Mildred’s “Hurry, dear!” came floating up the stair well—there were times, like today, when he felt he didn’t know what he was living for. He must read some more in that book tonight. Perhaps the author had something to say about feelings like his.

Thompson had a normally exasperating day. Nothing unusual, just the customary assortment of soreheads, unreasonable com plaints, flibbertigibbets and wise guys trying to get away with rough stuff. As he sat in the bosom of his family after supper, reading BE GLAD YOU’RE NEUROTIC again, Priscilla came up to him holding a dish in her hand.

Priscilla he considered the least offensive of his three offspring. She was quiet, well-behaved, and always addressed him politely. Quite often she did what he told her to do. “Have some of my peanuts, daddy,” she said.

“Thanks,” Thompson answered. Without looking up from his book, he groped for the dish and took a handful of nuts from it . It was a safe enough action in the case of Priscilla; had it been Timmy who offered the nuts to him, Thompson would have been on the watch for fishhooks, small pebbles, and carpet tacks.

“Daddy, that bird’s all hot,” his daughter said. Her speech was muffled and indistinct; she had taken some peanuts herself.

“Unh, go ask your mother,” Thompson said, still trying to read.

“She’s taking a bubble bath. Daddy, that bird’s all hot.”

“Um -hum.”

“No, but daddy, you come look at it. He’s as hot as anything.” Priscilla tugged at his sleeve.

Thompson put down the book and blinked. Priscilla was obviously not trying to play a trick on him, as Timothy would have been. Her face was serious and intent. After a moment he heaved himself up from his chair and followed Priscilla over to the cage.

The heat was noticeable at once. Standing before the cage was like standing in front of a warming oven. Thompson blinked. Incredulously he passed his hands over and around the cage. The heat, gentle, rather agreeable, was from every point the same.

“See, daddy?” Priscilla said, looking up into his face. “The bird’s all hot. Daddy, what makes it that way?”

There was a long pause. “I guess it’s feverish,” Thompson said at last.

When he checked up on the bird again before he went to bed, he found to his relief (a relief somewhat dashed with disappointment, for the heat had been a phenomenon of the first water) that the bird had cooled off. It was by now very little, if any, warmer than the surrounding air. Perhaps Thompson (and Priscilla?) had imagined the earlier heat; perhaps the bird really had been suffering from fever of a peculiar sort.

Thompson woke up about two-thirty in the morning, extremely thirst y from the peanuts he had eaten the night before. For a moment he thought of going to the bath room for a drink, and then declined the idea. Timothy and Dorcas slept next door, and they were sure to waken and want drinks too if they heard him in the bath. Thompson pulled on his robe, stepped into his slippers, and went softly down the stairs.

On his way to the kitchen he was too foggy with sleep to notice anything, b u t when he started back, full to slopping with cold water, he saw the faint glow coming from the living room. He went in.

The room, the cage, the bird, were just, as he had left them, with this difference: the bird, motionless as ever, was now outlined in pale yellow light. Thompson’s jaw dropped. As he stood staring at the cage , the bird, for the first time since he had set eyes on it, moved.

Slowly it bent its head and plucked one of the luminous quills from its breast Holding it by the end, it scraped the quill sharply against one of the sticks of cinnamon.

The action was that of a man striking a match; and, as if the quill had really been a match, there was an immediate burst of flame. The dais—the pyre—under the bird ignited first and then, with a sudden upward gush of fire, the bird itself began to burn.

Now was the moment for Thompson to have r u n for the fire extinguisher in the kitchen, to have ignored the peculiarities of the situation and have concentrated every nerve upon the immediate task of putting out the blaze.

Thompson did not move. With the first upward jet of fire thrills of delight had begun to run over his flesh. The fire with which the bird burned was emerald and turquoise, sapphire and blue, and the colors fell on Thompson’s ravished sense of sight like delicious sound upon the ear. His eyes bugged out, his jaw came open till it reached its nadir. He could not have moved had his life depended upon it.

The supernal flames mounted higher and dripped in long sheets from the bird’s breast. Thompson’s face took on an expression of blank and idiotic bliss. He watched in a glassy trance of felicitude while the colors sang to him ravishingly, with the voice of ecstasy itself. He seemed to be drowning in a flood of delight, dying in a rapture greater than his body could contain.

For a long, long moment the bird stood still and burned, and green and gold topaz were like perfume in the air. Then it flapped i ts wings twice and shot, like an arrow of fire, straight through the roof.

-

THE house burned to the ground; with the exception of an Erector set, which Timmy had had the foresight to throw out the window before jumping out himself , the Thompsons lost everything. Eve n the copy of BE GLAD YOU’RE NEUROTIC was burnt.

Fortunately, none of the family was hurt, and their losses were covered by insurance. The fire as attributed to defective wiring in the attic, and the insurance company, after no more than the usual stalling, paid the full amount of the claim. Dwight applied the check to the purchase of a house in a district which Mildred considered better than the one in which they had been living. He told no one about the bird.

Two years later the Thompsons’ new house caught fire. Serious damage to the structure was narrowly averted. This time there was no question of defective wiring—the fire had started in the basement, near the coal bin.

The insurance company sent out two men from the Philadelphia office who poked around in the basement for nearly a week, filling out reports and asking questions of everyone in the house, before they were satisfied. Dwight’s theory as to the origin of the fire—that a spark from the furnace had ignited a heap of kindling—they received with definite chilliness, and after the claim had been paid the company exercised i ts option and canceled the policy. Mildred could put two and two together. She began to watch her husband, tight-lipped and suspiciously.

Dwight made a heroic effort to keep his new urge under control. He was ashamed, not so much of the impulse itself, as of the illogic of the motive which prompted it. In his attempts at suppression he gave up smoking, replaced the gas range in the kitchen with an electric one, and forbade the children to bring matches into the house. He became an assiduous reader of booklets on fire prevention. He bought a number of heavy-duty fire extinguishers and installed them in strategic spots through the house.

But on three separate occasions Mildred caught him in the basement with matches, excelsior, and kerosene. She consulted her doctor, who sent her to a specialist. When Dwight actually succeeded, the night before the Memorial Day parade, in setting fire to the wooden grandstand which had been put up on Main Street, she was forced, very reluctantly, to sign commitment papers for him.

He is in the state asylum now. No doubt he will be there for the rest of his life. He has made one or two abortive attempts to set the building on fire, but the structure is solid concrete.

The chief psychiatrist, considering him an interesting case, tried hard with him at first. But by now he has grown resigned to Thompson’s inability to recognize the Freudian roots of his mania. The psychiatrist has gone on to patients with whom there is some hope of success.

Thompson refuses to consider his difficulty a mania. Why can’t the doctors recognize that it isn’t pyromania he’s suffering from? As he always tells them, he admits it isn’t logical, but setting fires is the only thing he can think of which might put him in touch with the bird. He keeps hoping it will come to one of his fires. It was so beautiful, the most beautiful thing he ever laid eyes on. He’s sorry about the fires, but what else is he to do? He doesn’t see how he can bear to wait five hundred years to have the opportunity of seeing the Phoenix again.

The End

Table of Contents

The Bird