Bird Hotel

Fowl Hotel
The Heron Inn was built three hours west from the city that supplied most of its clientele. No feature of the building, or it’s outlying property was especially notable. According to the patrons there, the real draw of the place was only experienced inside its walls. A popular novelty destination, the inn provided its guests with a unique and thorough escape from civilization. Not one staff member had ever been seen there. Quiet hallways and serene garden paths appeared to maintain themselves, free from custodial interference. Apart from visitors, only the founder himself was known to frequent The Heron Inn. Able Heron resided on the ground floor, remaining available on the vicinity to supervise the operation and interface with the customers. Heron’s acquaintances considered him and his enterprise to be a charming mystery. What they did not know was that they were not as well secluded as they were led to believe. In the attic, above all the guests and rooms and pageantry there lived a flock of birds. It was these birds alone that could shed light on the inner workings of the The Heron Inn. 

The flock awoke each night with the setting sun. They had been trained from their natural diurnal habits to fulfill a peculiar task. Attic beams, supporting nests, hovered above a maze of openings in the wooden floor. Anxiously, the birds listened for the lifting of trap doors, one to each. When it came there was a burst of motion as they leapt to the ground. One young bird, called The House Finch, moved forward too suddenly, and nearly tipped herself headlong into the gap. She  righted herself quickly, embarrassed at her clumsiness, and looked more cautiously down.  From the depths of the trap door a rabbit was looking back up. The only more shocking aspect of the scene was the environment below; the suite of a sleeping guest. Just visible to The House Finch was the secondary trap door, slightly to the left of the rabbit, out of which he had recently emerged from the basement. The rabbit darted among the furniture and between the doorways of the suite. He was well trained, and collected used towels and empty soap dishes swiftly. After each trip he scrambled up an artful fireplace mantel and passed the refuse to The House Finch. She then took it and placed it on an adjacent shelf, pausing only for a moment to swivel her red head towards the other birds, and watched as they acted out the same haunting routine. When the rooms had been purged the pattern was reversed. The House Finch picked the necessary items of stock from a box at her side and handed them down for the rabbit to put them in place. All of this was carried out soundlessly until, by morning, The Heron Inn was clean.     

When the animals had retreated back into the secure confines of their attic and basement dormitories, the business day began. Able Heron sat at the reception, waiting for the arrival of celebrated litigator, Ferrer Black. Mr. Black was an important client and Heron wanted to assure his satisfaction from the onset. This was little more than a formality, now, as Mr. Black had been a loyal customer for many years. But, Heron was a man of details and tried to maintain goodwill as well as he achieved it. This was something Mr. Black admired about him, that he could be counted on to follow precise instructions. It was why Mr. Black chose The Heron Inn for this particular retreat. His wife, Avis, needed the solitude and he needed peace of mind. Avis’ nerves had always been frail.  From her youth she had been plagued with an anxiety which she had yet to outgrow. Her college years, when she had first met her husband, had been a brief calm in an otherwise perfect storm. By the time they had reached their fifth year of marriage Avis had succumbed to her afflictions and become prone to reclusiveness. It was a mystery to many why Ferrer, a successful and attractive man, remained so taken with her. Although their marriage endured, it had not done so without its share of difficulties. The latest of which was the unwelcome news of their collective infertility. Avis had always set her heart on having a daughter, and Ferrer himself enjoyed the idea of children. When the doctor had  pronounced them unable to conceive it had been more than a little crushing. Heartbroken, Avis had withdrawn from society entirely, a slave to her frayed nerves. That’s why her husband had brought her here. He hoped the time away from unsolicited human contact would sooth her uneasiness and help her come to terms with the idea.   

When they arrived, the Blacks retired immediately, which freed Heron to retreat to the attic. He tried to attend to his birds and his rabbits as regularly and thoroughly as he did his guests.  As domestic servants they were, after all, the lynch pin of the inns success. It had begun several decades prior, when his idea of an invisible work force had been sparked by a novelty whistle. Some school children had stayed at an earlier incarnation of The Heron Inn for a graduation trip. The practical joker among them had acquired the whistle in question, which shrieked so shrilly that it was inaudible to anyone above twenty. It was a devil of a task to uncover the source of the disquiet, and at first Heron had thought the complaints of all the students to be a conspiracy. In the end it was a distressed canary, which he had kept in the front foyer, that gave away the game. That incident had planted the seed of his idea. When the plan was fully formed, he acquired several of the whistles and used them in the training of his rabbits and birds. The whistles could regulate their daily activities, while leaving the sleeping guests undisturbed, as their ability to perceive such high frequencies had already deteriorated during the aging process. Initially, two problems had presented themselves. By necessity, the inn had to be adult inclusive. This considerably narrowed down the market of perspective guests, but Heron hadn’t found it damning. Occasionally, a sleeping patron was able to hear the alerts in the attic above and was awoken. Fortunately, no-one yet had been able to detect his animal task force, but the concern was ever present. It was usually best to plead ignorance if someone complained about the noise. When he did, most would eventually write it off to an electrical problem or their own imagination and not return. The second problem had been a little more challenging to solve. Heron, himself, was too old to hear the whistles. This, of course, impeded his ability to train with them effectively. Eventually he decided to have small lightbulbs wired to each whistle, which lit up when they sounded. With these he could usually determine if there was a fault with the machines, or a fault with his procedures. Over the course of the inn’s development, Heron had to make many such adjustment. For example, he was at first devoted to hunting down ideal individuals to enter into his service. It was an expensive and time consuming pursuit. After the first few years of success, he grew bold enough to breed them by hand in a sub-basement suite of the Inn. Prior to this breeding program, Heron had been forced to cull aged birds and rabbits in the shed at the far back of the property. Now he could take the best workers and breed them after their retirement. It was not without effort, but was more economical, and the results were usually worth the work.
  Heron climbed the first of the step ladders that led up to the nests. The House Finch looked suspiciously back at him as he surveyed the flock. She had not been sleeping well lately, and he had tried to drug her to it with limited success. She was turning out to be an unruly bird and he had nearly given her over as a lost cause. In a way, he thought she sensed it. Her eyes appeared to narrow when she saw him and she seemed to withhold the unquestioning trust given to him by the others. It was a shame, as he had acquired her at great cost to supplement the breeding lines. He observed The House Finch for another moment, considering. He would grant her a second chance, and, hopefully, she would settle in more. It would be a waste to euthanize such a fine specimen

Night time restlessness increases when a person is away from home, and for Avis, who had never been a sound sleeper, this was doubly true. It was something she had learned to cope with  but, lately, she hadn’t the will left to cope with anything at all. Her waking thoughts were increasingly morose, and occupied with pictures of a grim, baby-less future. There would be no first birthdays, no graduation. No wedding ceremony or grandchildren. When she closed her eyes she could see her aged and decrepit self, abandoned by society to some institution with no kids to care for her and her poor, sweet husband. Understandably, she wanted her nights to remain a reprieve from the torment of her days. But, alas, Ferrer was concerned. Ferrer was always concerned. He thought this desolate inn would renew her vitality but she had no such illusions. The first night they passed at The Heron was agony. Avis dreamed of an eerie wailing that radiated from above the bed. She imagined it to be the cries of her own children, trapped on the other side and never to be born. Despite this unnerving noise she dared not protest their holiday. She knew when she had her husband at his wits end, and if she hadn’t agreed to The Heron it probably would have been the asylum. A respite, he referred to it as. A respite for who, she wondered. Regardless, Avis disliked thinking ill of Ferrer. He didn’t understand the gravity of the situation, of any situation really, and she had long given up trying to explain things to him. Still, she was grateful for his devotion to her and tried to reciprocate by easing his worries as much as she felt she could. It only took until the second night for the well of her tolerance to run dry. Some time in the early morning she rose, maddeningly tired and unable to escape her shrieking dream. She had plugged her ears but was unable to escape the din in her head. The need to flee built up until she sprinted out of their suite and into the hallway. She ran to the very end, down the stairwell, and onto the front lawn. Running filled her with an unfamiliar giddiness and she found herself laughing for the first time in a long time. Avis tried to be quiet but  her laughter drew Heron out of his rooms and onto the property after her.
 She slapped her host repeatedly in her struggle to stop him from gently guiding her inside. He was a nice man, and Avis liked him, which made his presence now all the more irritating and unwanted. Eventually he woke up Ferrer, who managed to coax her to some medication and rest on the sofa in the lobby. She refused to return to the room. What she would do in the morning, she was afraid to think, but now she felt satisfyingly tired and drifted into uneventful sleep.  

After that harrowing evening, Heron was even more relieved than usual to find himself secluded in the attic again. He was never the kind to easily adapt to deviation from his plans, and the night’s fiasco had shaken him perhaps even more than it had shaken Avis. It left a bitter taste in his mouth. The day ahead would be full of trying to assuage the other clients, who had been scared from their beds by the cackling Mrs. Black. It wasn’t a prospect he relished, but still he was determined to handle it professionally. He paced to the lone window to assure himself that Ferrer and his flighty wife were on their merry way. Unfortunately, his angle of vision didn’t allow him to clearly see the activities of the front foyer below. To try to circumvent this he opened the window up. So acclimatized was he to the presence of his birds that he did this feeling himself alone. The birds, and especially The House Finch, were not so unaware of Heron.  By the time he realized his error, The House Finch had made her move, and leapt past the windowsill into the open air. He reached after her, terrified, to no avail. She spread her wings, striving to put as much distance between herself and the cloistered attic of the inn.  Quickly it became apparent that something was array. The straining efforts of The House Finch produced no effect and she plummeted towards the ground.  When she landed it was on the roof of a black Porsche Cayman. The House Finch did not rise from the fall,  her tiny neck had been snapped by the impact and she was dead.
Moments before this, Ferrer had taken his wife's arm gently and led her from The Heron Inn. Though he didn’t speak, Avis imagined that he had silently asked her whether it had been worth it.  She replied to this perceived interrogation in a whisper, “I was afraid, I guess. I was so concentrated on keeping myself together...I didn’t want to disappoint you.” He simply said he understood, and that it was going to be alright. He even helped her into the passenger side of the car before getting in the drivers seat. However, before they could pull away, something slammed hard into the roof,  and jerked the occupants forward. It was so forceful that Ferrer, who had been putting on his glasses, poked himself in the eye with an unfolded support. Avis, uninjured, was the first to get out of the car. Her husband was preoccupied with his watering eye when he heard her scream. To her, the scream seemed an obligatory response to what she saw on top of the porsche. Ferrer quickly cleared his vision and stood to survey the damage. Although he did not join his wife in screaming the horror of the scene was evidenced in his expression and in what he managed to say; “Oh my god. It’s a little girl. It’s a human child.”