III: In which we meet Steve

Tap. Tap. Tap

Steve jumped in his chair.  What the hell was that?  The sounds seemed like they came from the window.  Probably just the house settling.  Temperature dropping, wood contracting, that kind of thing. He told himself he was just jumpy from reading scary stories on the internet in the middle of the night.  It didn’t help that he was home alone while his roommates were working their night jobs.  He leaned back in toward the screen.  The clock in the corner said 2:34am.

Taptaptap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Taptaptap.

S**t!  That was definitely the window, which was impossible.  Steve’s room was on the second floor with no trees or anything near the window.  With part of his mind rather panickedly asking him exactly what the f**k he thought he was doing, he rolled his chair toward the window.  He reached out to the curtains and pulled them aside.

“Aaaahhh! F**k!”

Steve kicked himself backward from the window.  The wheels of the chair caught on the cord of his box fan and jammed, tumbling him backward onto the floor.

Framed in the window, lit by the light from the room was a large black bird.  Picking himself up off of the floor, Steve mentally kicked himself.  Just a damn bird.  What the hell was it doing?  It sat on the ledge outside the window, staring into the room.

Tap. Tap. Taptap. Tap.  It rapped its beak against the window.

“G’wan, geddoudaheah! Shoo! G’wan, fugoff!”  Steve made shooing motions toward the glass.

The bird cocked its head to the side.

Steve slapped the window with a bang, trying to scare it off.  The bird didn’t even move, just continued staring inside.

Talk about creepy.

Steve looked at it curiously.  Why didn’t it fly away?  After a few seconds, the bird nodded to him.  he stepped a little closer, thinking he was going crazy.  Birds don’t nod in a satisfied way, they just bob their heads, he was letting his imagination assign intelligent motives to a f*****g bird.  As he was thinking this, the bird bent down and picked up something shiny with its beak from by its feet, then dropped it again with a jingle, nodded to Steve again and flew away.

What the actual f**k?

Steve went to the window and looked out, but there was no sign of the bird.  He watched for a good ten minutes, but it didn’t come back.  What had it picked up?  The thing that jingled?

Steve edged the window up an inch, watching intently for any sign that this was what the bird was waiting for so it could fly back through the open window and attack him.  It didn’t.  He leaned down and peered through the crack.

“Holy f**k.”

Sitting on the window ledge where the bird had been were a set of keys.  More specifically, they were Steve’s car keys.  He patted his pocket, the keys were not in it.  They actually hadn’t been for a week now.  The spare key was there, he’d gotten it from his dad on Monday when his keys had mysteriously gone missing.  He remembered setting them on his desk when he’d emptied his pants pockets Sunday night after work, but when he’s awoken Monday morning they hadn’t been there.  His wallet, change, cell phone, house key; all there.  Car keys?  Nowhere to be seen.  He’d checked everywhere they could have fallen to no avail.

Now, here they were, sitting on his window ledge, dropped there by a mysterious black bird at two-thirty-something in the morning.  He grabbed them and slammed the window. He looked down at the keys in his hand and goosebumps covered his body.  There, on the glove box key, was an eye drawn in black marker.

The keys jingled as they hit the floor.