Wayne Summers opened his eyes to find himself in the dark, surrounded by the chirring and rustling of unseen birds. He tried to tell himself it was only a dream, but the feel of the rough mattress-ticking beneath him and the fetid, faintly ammoniacal smell of feathers and old newspapers and bird dung argued otherwise.

Wayne struggled blindly to his feet, heard a shrill hiss only inches from his head, then felt the buffeting of heavy, silent wings, followed by a sharp blow to his ear. He threw himself back onto the mattress and curled into a ball with his arms thrown up to protect his head -- he didn't know he'd been screaming until he stopped and heard the silence.

Then, filling the silence, the unbearable chirring and rustling again, the nervous tip-tap shuffle of hard claws on cage floors, the shuddering noise of birds ruffling their feathers for grooming. And, intermittently, the muffled beating of those heavy wings only a few feet away in the dark.

Unless, of course, it wasn't dark. Wayne brought his hand toward his face until his palm touched his nose -- there was no change in the quality of the blackness. For the first time it occurred to him that he might have gone blind -- but how would you know, how could you tell? He tried to think back, to remember how he'd come to be here, but the memories were so wispy that trying to catch hold of them was like grasping at smoke rings: the harder you clutched, the quicker they dissolved.

Whimpering softly, Wayne fingered his torn earlobe. Sliced clean through -- a razor-sharp beak or talon. Raptor, most likely: Wayne, an ornithophobe, knew from the studies he'd undertaken as part of Dr. Taylor's desensitization therapy that it had to be either a raptor or a carrion eater, and of the two, only the raptors had need of silent wings. Noise was not a problem for the carrion eaters -- their prey wasn't going anyplace.

The mattress beneath his ear was damp with blood by this time, and the panic was coming in waves, one big roller after another. Wayne knew he could forestall a panic-induced blackout (or, as Dr. Taylor called it, a vasovagal syncope) by breathing slowly from the diaphragm while tensing and relaxing his muscles. He also knew he could stop the bleeding by pressing the edges of the wound together with his fingertips. But he wasn't sure he wanted to do either. After all, he told himself as his consciousness slipped away, there are worse things in life than bleeding to death while you're asleep -- if he hadn't known that before, he knew it now.

But bleeding to death was not going to be an option for Wayne -- at least not yet. After only a few minutes of sweet unconsciousness, he was awakened by a sharp pinching sensation in his left earlobe. And since pinching that same ear was how Wayne's mother always brought him around after what she referred to as one of his "faint'nin' spells," he allowed himself the momentary luxury of pretending he was back home in the apartment they shared on Fillmore Street, and that he'd had a blackout and she was pinching him awake.

Then he opened his eyes and found himself lying in the dark with his hands now cuffed behind him. Someone or something was indeed pinching the torn edges of his earlobe together, and when he tried to pull his head away, the grip only tightened.

"Who are you?" Wayne asked into the darkness.

"Sssh, hold still."

Man's voice -- sounded like an older white guy. Familiar, but Wayne couldn't quite place it. "Why are you doing this to me?"

The pressure on his earlobe eased. "Looks like the bleeding's just about stopped."

Looks like? Oh, God, no. "Am I blind? Have I gone blind? Please, I have to know."

No answer -- just a pager beeping in the darkness, followed by the sound of receding footsteps.

"Please, can't you even tell me that?"

Footsteps, climbing stairs.

"Please, I -- "

But by then Wayne had his answer: a door opened at the top of a flight of open-treaded steps, admitting just enough light to assure him that his eyes still functioned, before closing again, leaving him with only the afterimage of the ghostly white, heart-shaped face of an enormous barn owl tethered to a perch above his head.

Copyright © 2003 by Jonathan Nasaw