Page 17 of Snowbirds
“I meant… oh for fuck’s sake, open the door.”
Ivan used his larger mass to push the door open against the weight of the leg. Because in the end that’s all it was—a leg. A leg that looked like one of those attached to clothing store mannequins if the angle at the top of it was anything to go by. He tipped his phone downward to get a better look. Except this appendage appeared to be made out of plaster, not hard plastic, which explained why it was so heavy.
“What the fresh hell is this?” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” Chris repeated, also staring down at the lone body part.
“You must be getting old, you sound like a broken record.”
“Ha fucking ha.”
The front room was shrouded in darkness, one of the few houses that hadn’t had a glowing TV illuminating the lonely evening streets. Instead, the heavy curtains were still pulled closed against the blazing sun and the heat it promised come morning. To Ivan’s sensitive nose, the house smelled musty, as if it wasn’t currently lived in—or the occupant wasn’t a great housekeeper. He blinked, fighting off a sneeze.
Bringing his phone up again, Ivan bit back the scream building at the back of his throat.
Eyes, many of them, stared back at them. So. Many. Eyes.
Breathing in through his nose, Ivan worked to calm his pounding heart. Whatever the eyes were, they weren’t alive, at least not anymore. And Ivan was pretty sure they weren’t human.
“What the actual fuck.” Chris really needed to be more imaginative with his cursing.
“Taxidermy,” said Ivan. “One of my creepier uncles was into it. He even did snakes, which are really fucking difficult. The really good taxidermists paint each scale by hand to make them look more realistic. Less dead.”
Slowly, Ivan panned the room with his phone, the light from the flash app reaching through the murky dark to illuminate a menagerie of beasts. The light didn’t go far, so the creatures—it seemed to Ivan anyway—resolved into whatever the fuck they were and then disappeared again as he moved his phone along.
The remains, for lack of a better descriptor, hung from the walls, stood on their own feet (or in some cases, lay on their sides or backs), and loomed from every corner. At first glance, he spotted several owls, possibly a fox, a couple of coyotes. A six-foot alligator—maybe a crocodile, he never had gotten them straight—was propped up lengthwise against some shelves. In a distant corner, a badger, or who knew, maybe it was a fucking wolverine, bared its sharp teeth at them.
In the jumble, it was difficult to tell whether the stuffed creatures had been arranged that way or if someone or someones had rifled through them. The odd musty odor in the air that Ivan assumed had to do with the carcasses was really starting to bother him.
“Is this legal?” Chris asked. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
Ivan doubted that what they were looking at was entirely legal. His uncle used to “procure” endangered species for clients and, like the weirdos who had to have their own DaVinci or van Gogh, his customers often wanted their own condor, bald eagle, or Bengal tiger.
“People are weird,” was all he could come up with.
Bending down, Chris tugged the plaster leg out of the way of the door, grunting at its weight, and stepped inside.
“Seriously, what the fuck is all this?” he asked, using his own phone light to look around.
Surely that was a rhetorical question.
“Ya got me, boss.”
“Stop it with the boss stuff,” Chris grumbled. “I think we’re past that.”
“What if I like calling you boss?” Ivan teased, bumping Chris with his shoulder.
Chris pinched the bridge of his nose. “My god, what have I gotten myself into with you? Obviously, that was a rhetorical question.”
“So much good stuff.” Ivan shot him a lascivious grin. “I’ve just been hanging around waiting for you to see me.”
“That’s what scares me. Regardless of your intent, which I approve of, what the hell is going on here?” Chris asked. “We should probably have a look and make sure there’s no human body hanging around.”
“Alright, if you insist. But you and I both know if there is a body around here, it’s been decades since it was alive. And this person doesn’t do his work here, or he buys it at estate sales and shit like that.”
“Huh. Well, since the door was open, let’s do a check just to make sure no one’s here.”
Chris pushed past the leg and into the house. Rolling his eyes at Chris’s back, Ivan followed him. The man just had to prove he was in charge, didn’t he? Admittedly, Ivan liked that about Chris Hatch.
