Midnight

 

    Little did I know I had been being watched that entire time I was caring for Scout. I wouldn’t find that out, in fact, for years to come, but it wasn’t long before I started noticing the effects, and strange effects they were.

    Scout had recovered, by then, at least for the most part. Her flight was still wobbly, but even that would improve with time. Much to my astonishment, she hadn’t darted off as soon as I removed the last bandage from her recovering wing. It seemed the feisty little bird had grown as fond of me as I was of her, and I was more than happy to let her travel with me as long as she cared to stay. Once her wing was healed, I had set off once more on my seemingly endless journey to nowhere, this time invigorated by my freedom to help those who might need me as opposed to laden-down by the overbearing uselessness that had eaten away at my spirits before I met Scout.

    I was teaching my new traveling partner to help hunt down the herbs I needed, which she was becoming quite proficient at, but her real talent came as something of a surprise to me. One night, shortly after Scout’s wing had healed, I had scolded her for catching a firefly as an evening snack. As graceful as the nightjar’s hunting techniques were, I still had a special place in my heart for fireflies, and I couldn’t continue to watch my own traveling companion eating them. Much to my astonishment, the very next night as I was gathering fireflies for my nightlight jar, Scout came coasting over (her flight still noticeably uneven, but intriguingly graceful nevertheless) and casually deposited a firefly, still alive and perfectly well, into the jar with the rest of the fireflies I had collected. She had caught the little insect for me in her beak, scooping it out of the air with her wide, nimble beak and never swallowing. I smiled and patted her feathery head. How had this bird, who had proven her feisty attitude time and time again, thought to help me catch fireflies when she would rather be snacking on them?

    It became a nightly ritual, though. Every night, just before I went to bed and she went off to hunt, we would gather fireflies together until my jar was filled. It became a sort of a tradition between us, for pleasure as much as anything else. Scout seemed to enjoy it as much as I did, seeing it as a sort of sporting challenge: Catch as many live fireflies as possible before Lui goes to bed.

    The next morning, I would always release my jarful of fireflies and go about gathering food and cleaning up camp while Scout took her turn at sleeping. Then, in the evening, once the sun was no longer so high in the sky that it hurt the poor bird’s eyes, we would travel onwards, towards our unknown destination, until we reached a good place to stay or darkness set in, making it as hard for me to travel as the noon sun did for Scout. It was a pleasant schedule, a sort of unspoken compromise between a nocturnal bird and a diurnal medicineman. We got on just fine, and though we didn’t travel particularly fast, we had no need to make much progress. We had no particular destination in mind.

 

    It wasn’t long, though, before our routine began to be interrupted by a series of unusual happenings, at first they were mysterious and spontaneous, but as time passed, they started to fall into an odd sort of tormenting pattern.

    It started one night a couple weeks after Scout had regained her flight. I had found and tried to rescue a n injured mouse that morning, but the poor creature had faded out of the world before I even had a chance to bandage its wounds. In a hurry to escape the camp, which was saturated with the smell and gloom of death, I had awoken Scout early and we had left as soon as possible to relocate to a more pleasant place to stay. That night, we made ourselves at home under a large baobab tree with a comfortable hollow at the roots for me to sleep in. The long trek had calmed me and cleared my thoughts of the morning’s events, so as soon as my firefly jar was filled, I was ready to drift off to sleep.

    The next morning, though, I awoke to the overpowering, almost asphyxiating stench of decay. Sputtering a bit, I pinched my nose shut and breathed shallowly through my mouth, hoping all the while that the smell wasn’t so strong that I might taste it if I breathed too hard. I crawled towards the exit to see what might be the source of the scent and there, just outside the exit of my temporary den, lay the body of the unfortunate mouse I had tried to save the day before, miles away from where it had died. Its rotting flesh was now drooping nauseatingly over its tiny, frail skeleton, and the stench was unbearable even with my nose plugged. I gagged, and peered around the corpse to see if there was a way out of the hollow without having to touch the half-decayed body. There was, but just barely. I had to tiptoe around the mouse with my body pressed against the trunk of the tree to get past. On my way past, one of my tails brushed lightly against a clod of mangled fur and I felt as if my stomach has risen into my throat.

    I finally squeezed past, and as quickly as I could, I scrambled my way clumsily up to the low branch of the tree Scout was sleeping on and gently nudged her feathered body. She awoke, clearly irritated but ready to listen to what I had to say. I pointed down at the dead creature below and whispered desperately, “It’s back. I don’t know how it’s back, but the… the mouse, it’s here. The one I t-tried to save yesterday, that didn’t make it… Please can we move on to a new camp site, Scout. We’ll stop before high noon, I promise, so the sun doesn’t hurt your eyes. I just…” I didn’t know why I had continued to ration with the bird, because as soon as it became clear I wanted to leave the place, she got groggily to her feet and fluttered her wings, indicating she was ready to go. I gave a deep sigh of relief. Although she didn’t seem especially pleased, she didn’t give to slightest protest to my plea.

    By the time I had clambered my way down from the tree, Scout had lifted herself into the air and was as ready to leave as I was. I quickly gathered up my belongings, and we headed out at an unnaturally quick pace compared to our usual meandering.

    As I had promised, we found another tree and settled down by high noon, allowing Scout to rest instead of flying on through the glaringly bright afternoon. I was still a bit shaken by my experience that morning, but I decided to make the best of the long afternoon ahead of me by skirting the area for things to replenish my food and herb supply. There was no sign of the decaying mouse here, though, which set my mind at ease. I certainly hoped that morning was the last I would be seeing of that mouse, and thus far it seemed promising.

 

    I was wrong, though. The following morning I awoke to the sickeningly familiar stench of decaying mouse, stronger than ever, wafting from the grass no more than a foot from where I lay. I sat bolt upright, my stomach wrenching in revulsion, and skirted my way as far as I could around the corpse to make my way to Scout’s resting spot in the tree waking her yet again with the same plea. She peered at me with an irritated glare in her beady, black eyes, but obliged once more, and soon we were on our way.

    There was no escaping it, though. Every morning for nearly a week, I would wake up to find that the mouse had once again made its way to our latest camp, and every time, the tiny body was more grotesque, more heart wrenching than before as decay quickly took its toll on the mouse’s lifeless form.

    At last, only after the poor creature had been reduced to little more than an unidentifiable pile of soggy fur, rotten flesh, and disassembled bones, we finally saw the end of that horrible ordeal. Much to my relief, on the seventh morning, I awoke to a refreshingly clean breeze wafting past my bed of soft savanna grasses. I took a deep breath of the sweet-smelling air, all the wonderful scents of life drifting in and out of my nostrils. What a relief to finally be away from the overwhelming stench of dead mouse! At last, life could carry on as usual for Scout and me. With no further hesitation, I hopped out of my makeshift bed and busied myself gathering food and cleaning up camp, just as I was supposed to do at that time of day. Everything was back to normal… for a few months, at least.

 

    The next three moths were reassuringly uneventful, but it was all too soon that yet another string of disturbing occurrences came to haunt me. We had just settled down at our latest camp, and I was curled up in a mossy spot between two roots of a tree, watching as my nightlight-fireflies drifted serenely around their jar, flickering a visual lullaby to me as I drifted away to sleep. It was a soothingly ordinary night, or so it seemed, and I hadn’t a worry in the world. We had managed to gather some good healing herbs for our collection that morning, and everything in the patch of savanna we had been wandering lately seemed young and healthy. It was downright peaceful, really, and the last thing I could have expected was what I would wake up to the next morning.

    The last thing I could have expected, though, was exactly what happened. This time there was no stench, no disgusting, rotting corpse, but it wrenched my heart just the same. As I fluttered open my eyes, I was met with the most horribly grim sight. The jar that rested just before my nose contained no lingering, early-morning flickering, no sleepy fireflies crawling sluggishly about the walls… instead, the glass floor was littered with the tiny, black bodies of fireflies, all dead, sapped of their comforting light and scattered haphazardly across the smooth glass floor like miniscule pellets.

    Swallowing back the tears that were brimming in my eyes, I gently lifted the little jar and found a dusty patch on the ground a little ways away. Scraping away a layer of the wispy dirt with my claws, I mournfully dumped out my jar until every tiny body had fallen softly into the dirt, almost like little black raindrops. A few tears followed them in, soggying little patches of dirt as I brushed a shallow lid over the top of the grave. I didn’t wake Scout, this time. There was no need. I could mourn the fireflies on my own.

   That wasn’t the end of the hauntings, though. For days to come, every morning I would wake up to a jar littered with dead fireflies. I even tried sleeping without my usual nightlight one night, but the next morning I awoke to find the tiny bodies of fireflies strewn about my bed and on my skin, even tangled in my hair. After that, I returned to keeping my nightlight and simply hoping that soon the horrible plague of deaths would stop. It was almost, in a way… like death was taunting me.

    When finally, one morning over a week later, I woke up to take a doubtful peek at my fireflies and found them all to be alive and well, flickering lazily in the early morning light, I nearly had a heart-attack with relief. With a smile, I softly spun off the lid of my jar and lifted it into the dewy morning air, allowing my minuscule helpers to fly out into the savanna and find someplace to rest for the day. Perhaps, now, death had had its fun with me and would leave me be? I could only hope.

 

    Clearly, though, hope was not enough. For years, the torment continued. Every few months, death would find some new way to taunt me, some new and horrendous thing to haunt me with, or sometimes it would be the same old tricks, over and over, fireflies falling dead in their jars and corpses lurking, following me everywhere I went.

    The longer it went on, the more and more I suspected, though, that this could hardly be some sick coincidence or some supernatural punishment I had brought upon myself. As my suspicion grew, I began to keep my eyes opened wide whenever the mysterious hauntings came, keeping my senses pricked for some perpetrator, some guilty, sick individual with nothing better to do than taunt and torment me, for whatever reason. It was seven years before I found that perpetrator, though.

    My fireflies had been dying again, and I had finally, out of sheer desperation, resolved myself to sitting awake all night in a frantic attempt to halt, or at least identify my tormenter. I had a wad of energy-boosting herbs stuffed into the corner of my mouth and was chewing them rhythmically as I stared blearily into the night. The last two nights I had fallen asleep before I could spot the adversary, but this time I was determined to stay awake.

    It worked. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a faint, yellow light… like a firefly, but bigger. Turning, I saw the light disappear into the foliage of the tree that loomed above me. Suspicions aroused, I began to climb cautiously, as silently as I could manage, up the tree until I reached the bow where I estimated the light had disappeared. Sure enough, there was something perched upon the branch.

    It was a bird, a huge, black bird with purple eyes gleaming with a sick humor and what looked to be a finishing pole clasped in his talons, an eerie light glowing at the end of the line like a giant, corrupted firefly. I knew in an instant I had found what I was looking for.

    “So, you finally caught on, hm?” the bird interrogated, nearly sending me careening off the branch with surprise. His voice was deep… haunting.

    “How’d you know I was here?”

    “How’d you know I was here?” he retorted.

    “…why have you been following me?” I asked, cutting cautiously to the chase.

    “You amuse me,” he replied, simply.

    I was puzzled, struck speechless.

    “You’re so afraid of death,” he continued, a superior look on his face, “Such a natural thing. You should know that; you’re a medicineman. Death is part of life. I thought I’d have some fun with you. Taunt you a bit… that is why they call me Taunting, you know. It’s what I do.”

    I still could only sputter, though my heart urged me to say something, to reason with him…

    “I guess I’ve had my fun, now, though,” he stated, offhandedly, “Mind games aren’t any good once they’ve been figured out, so I guess I’ll be on my way, now,” he shuffled around on the branch, preparing himself for flight and sneering with a sort of ominous, feigned gentleness before he finally flapped off, “Perhaps I’ll come visit sometime?”

    That was all? The only reason? The entire basis for years of torment and haunting and death? I wracked my mind, hoping to somehow comprehend the bird’s logic, but he seemed to have none, only a sick sense of humor that seemed to pervade his every action and comprise his very being. The bird disgusted me.

    I was relieved, though. I was free from his hauntings, it seemed, though the same could not be said for his harassment. Exhausted and irritated, I climbed my way back down from the tree and curled up beside my nightlight, the fireflies inside still safe and sound, flickering their grateful goodnights. I drifted off to sleep just as the sun started licking at the horizon with its gentle, morning spectrum. I wouldn’t wake up until Scout did, that day, and that was fine with me.