Quoth the Raven(35)

“Is that so?” Dr. Kenneth Crockett looked bemused. “In that case, I suppose we’ll have to find Lenore a bird psychologist. What she seems to be circling in to kill these days is Constitution House.”

“I thought you said you saw her circling a cabin in the woods somewhere,” Gregor pointed out.

“She wasn’t actually circling the cabin,” Dr. Crockett corrected. “She was just up over Hillman’s Rock circling. But the last couple of days, what she’s been doing most often is circling over Constitution House. Even Father Tibor’s noticed it.”

“That is true, Krekor. I have noticed it. She goes up into the air and around and around our house.”

“She never comes down?” Gregor asked, realizing at the last minute that he had done it himself, called the raven “her.” “He never swoops or lights on anything anywhere?”

“He never swoops,” Dr. Crockett said.

“Of course she lights on things, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She came into my apartment not half an hour ago. You saw her yourself.”

“He wasn’t lighting to kill. He was just coming in to see what he could find.”

“Well, there it is, then, Krekor. The behavior does not make sense. It doesn’t matter if Lenore is a him or a her. It only matters that she is not well.”

The ebb and flow of contradictory pronouns was beginning to make Gregor dizzy. Accuracy mattered to him. He could never understand why it didn’t matter to everyone else. He looked at Dr. Kenneth Crockett with some curiosity. Here was a man, a Ph.D. and a scholar, a man whom Tibor had pronounced himself in favor of—and yet there was something about him that Gregor didn’t like. It all seemed jerry-rigged somehow—his personality, his conversation, even his clothes. It was as if Crockett had woken up one morning and decided on the man he was going to be, and then gone out and become that man, but only from the outside. The core of him was someplace else, something else. It didn’t fit with the rest of him, and it chafed.

Gregor shifted a little in his chair—why was he forever the victim of uncomfortable chairs?—and said, “You know, there is one possible explanation for the kind of circling you’ve been talking about. He may have been spotting.”

“Spotting?” Dr. Crockett asked.

“Carrion,” Gregor said. “Ravens aren’t vultures, of course. They kill their own meat. But any carnivorous bird will spot carrion, if there’s enough of it.”

Father Tibor blanched, “What do you mean, Krekor, if there’s enough of it?”

“I mean if the kill is big enough, of course. It would have to be a very substantial kill, I’d think, in the case of a bird like Lenore. He’s well fed without having to work too hard for it.”

“I don’t understand why she bothers to work for it at all,” Bennis said. “All she has to do to get fed is show up at Father Tibor’s window. Why should she knock herself out chasing small animals?”

“Instinct,” Gregor said. “Community responsibility. In case you didn’t know it, birds are fairly communal animals, even if they don’t live in herds. If Lenore is spotting carrion, then he’s not just spotting carrion for himself. He’s spotting it for any of his fellow ravens who happen to be able to see him.”

“Krekor, Lenore has no fellow ravens. Lenore is the only raven anyone has ever seen in this part of Pennsylvania.”

“Excuse me,” Dr. Kenneth Crockett said. “That’s Alice. We were supposed to meet and we kept missing each other.”

He was already on his feet, looking away from them, his legs bent slightly at the knees, getting ready to move him quickly. From his initial politeness, Gregor would have expected handshakes, rituals, trivialities—but that initial politeness had been stripped away. Dr. Kenneth Crockett didn’t seem to care about anything but getting across the room to Alice—or maybe, Gregor thought, away from them.

“Excuse me,” Dr. Crockett said again. Then he spun around and hurried off, into the crowd.

Bennis got out her cigarettes and lit up. “Good grief,” she said. “Who’s Alice?”

“Dr. Elkinson,” Father Tibor said. “We met her when we were going into Constitution House. She’s over there, by the cash register.”

Someone else was there, by the cash register, in deep conversation with Dr. Elkinson—an older woman with an iron permanent and a face of steel and ice who reminded Gregor far too much of the most terrifying Sunday school teacher he had ever had. The older woman seemed to have nothing on her tray but a cup of tea, as if she were made of metal inside and didn’t need human food. Dr. Elkinson’s tray was much more reassuring: a hamburger, a little cardboard boat full of french fries, and a garishly colored old-fashioned tin can that said Belleville Lemon and Lime All Natural Soda.