[Author's note: This is a planned chapter for my autobiographical novel about coming to Seattle from California. I'm not sure where it will be placed as I have yet to write the chapters that will preceed it--or rather I have written about five chapters but I'm nowhere near the point where this chapter will go.]

SCREECHING TREES

Dark shapes fluttered from tree to tree, their shrieks and screams rending the night sky. Buses on wires sped down the street, their metal arms running along the rails, shaking the branches of maple and oak trees. These alien creatures, disturbed, let out a horrible din, and rose en mass to flutter off into the night.

Bats?

Was downtown Seattle overrun with an infestation of hundreds of bats? Were there millions of vile, rat-like creatures swooping down from trees on leathery-brown wings? It couldn’t be possible, could it?

I was an alien creature here myself. I noticed them the second or third night I stayed in this city. Or rather, I heard the terrible, deafening noise they made. In my naiveté I believed the cables that some of the buses ran along to be the actual culprit, because every time a bus on cables ran by, I heard the horrendous cacophony. However, after moving into the Maple Leaf shelter, which has a check-in time of 9:00 pm, I was out waiting for the bus in front of Macy’s, and it was there that I once again heard the howling and finally noticed the trees’ dark cargo. They screamed and shrieked, seething in those Stygian shadows like lost souls swirling in Hades’ pit.

No. It couldn’t be bats. It just couldn’t.

I continued to wait for the bus, as they continued to clamor. I craned my neck attempting to look up at them, trying in vain to make out what it was that flapped and fluttered from tree branch to tree branch.

It was no good. They flew too quickly. They remained wreathed in impenetrable shadows.

But by this time I knew they couldn’t be bats. These creatures beat their wings too rapidly. They didn’t just glide through the night like noisome gondolas on some ghostly lake. These had to be birds of some kind. But what kind of bird would yowl in such a fashion, as a child might with its mitt caught in a meat grinder? The sound was shocking, like nails on a black board, but more alive than that, more tortured. This was a sound like pigs being slaughtered, as sharp and sorrowful as squealing. I wanted to ask someone what kind of bird would let out such banshee wailing, but I knew I appeared as out-of-place as anything else, and did not wish to invite attention to this fact. This symphony of damned souls raised not an eyebrow from the other onlookers. Only I remained perplexed.

Being from sunny California made me the outsider here, in a world where the rain showered months out of the year, and the sun hid its face in shame more often than not. This city spooked me, wrapped in shadows and fog, its inhabitants emerging wraithlike from the murk. The denizens incited as much apprehension in me as the tenebrious tree-tenants they shared the city with. Though I found most of the citizens to be courteous and friendly when I, for instance, stopped them to ask for directions, still I could not shake the feeling that their was something lurking beneath the veneer, possibly of the city itself, that was vaguely sinister in nature. But I had little to base this observation on, other than the perplexing layout of the city itself, with its streets veering off at odd, Lovecraftian angles, starting and stopping almost at random, leading everywhere and nowhere all at once. Nothing, that is, until I noticed the birds. The ungodly, abhorrent birds.

Still it preyed on my mind. What sort of birds were these? What caused their loathsome wailing, the horror of their humanity? I soon found out.

“They’re starlings,” John informed me. He was one of the other transients staying at the shelter. “Seattle has an infestation of them.”

I must confess now that while I had heard of starlings, I knew little about the birds. They had a pleasant enough sounding name, though it did call to mind a starry night, evoking thoughts of darkness, but that might have only been because I had been half-afraid that they were bats.

It turns out, though, that starlings are anything but benign. The roost in tree cavities, and are quite aggressive, driving out other species native to the area, in effect causing a decline in native bird populations. (Starlings were introduced to America from Europe by an idiot who thought it would be a good idea to have all the birds featured in Shakespeare’s plays in one place.) These birds are so detrimental to native bird populations that it is legal to kill them in most states, and in some cases a bounty is even paid for their extermination.

And then there’s the noise. Why do they make that horrible din? They are actually mimicking sounds from their surroundings. But what could they possibly be hearing that would cause them to imitate sounds so similar to the cries of pain?

What indeed?

Could they be hearing things that we only notice in our sleep, in our nightmares? Could there be another layer to this city, a level below our conscious thoughts and observations where the tortured souls of this city scream in eternal agony, disturbing us as phantom chills, yet loud enough for these birds to hear and in sensing assimilate?

No. Couldn’t be.