False Memory

squawks. Although the creature appears and vanishes in an instant, Dusty somehow knows that it is a heron, and the cry it makes seems to travel in a circle through the night, fading and then growing louder, again faint but then near once more.
    He becomes aware of an intravenous needle in his left arm. A plastic tube loops from the needle to a clear plastic bag, which is plump with glucose and dangling from a pharmacy-style floor lamp that serves as a makeshift IV rack.
    Again the storm flashes and the huge heron passes the window in the pulsing glare, its shriek traveling into the darkness behind the lightning.
    The right sleeve of Dusty’s shirt is rolled higher than the left, because his blood pressure is being taken; the pressure cuff of a sphygmomanometer wraps his upper arm. Black rubber tubing extends from the cuff to the inflation bulb, which floats in midair like an object in zero gravity. Strangely, as if in the grip of an unseen hand, the bulb is being rhythmically compressed and released, while the pressure cuff tightens on his arm. If a third person is in the room, this nameless visitor must have mastered the magic of invisibility.
    When lightning flares again, it is born and comes to ground in the bedroom, not in the night beyond the window. Many-legged, nimble, slowed from the speed of light to the speed of a cat, the bolt hisses out of the ceiling as it usually sizzles from a cloud, springs to a metal picture frame, from there to the television, and finally to the floor lamp that serves as an IV rack, spitting sparks as it gnashes its bright teeth against the brass.
    Immediately behind the leaping lightning swoops the big heron, having entered the bedroom through a dosed window or a solid wall, its swordlike bill cracking wide as it shrieks. It's huge, at least three feet, head to foot, prehistoric-looking, with its pterodactyl glare. Shadows of wings wash the walls, fluttering feathery forms in the flickering light.
    Leading its shadow, the bird darts toward Dusty, and he knows it will stand upon his chest and pluck out his eyes. His arms feel as if they are strapped to the bed, although the right is restrained only by the pressure cuff and the left is weighed down by nothing but the bracing board that prevents him from bending his elbow while the needle is in the vein. Nevertheless, be lies immobile, defenseless, as the bird shrieks toward him.
    When lightning arcs from television to floor lamp, the dear-plastic glucose bag glows like the gauzy sac in a pressurized gas lantern, and a hot rain of brassy sparks—which ought to set the bedclothes afire but does not—showers upon Dusty. The shadow of the descending heron shatters into as many black fragments as there are sparks, and when the clouds of bright and dark mites swarm dazzlingly together, Dusty closes his eyes in terror and confusion.
    He is assured, perhaps by the invisible visitor, that he need not be afraid, hut when he opens his eyes, he sees a fearsome thing hanging over him. The bird has been impossibly condensed, crushed—twisted—squeezed, until it now fits inside the bulging glucose bag. In spite of this compression, the heron remains recognizable—though it resembles a bird painted by some half-baked Picasso wanna-be with a taste for the macabre. Worse, it is somehow still alive and shrieking, a/though its shrill cries are muted by the clear walls of its plastic prison. It tries to squirm inside the bag, tries to break free with sharp beak and talons, cannot, and rolls one bleak black eye, glaring down at Dusty with demonic intensity.
    He feels trapped, too, lying here helpless under the pendant bird: he with the weakness of one crucified, it with the dark energy of an ornament fashioned for a Satanist's mock Christmas tree. Then the heron dissolves into a bloody brown slush, and the clear fluid in the intravenous line begins to cloud as the substance of the bird seeps out of the bag and downward, downward. Watching this filthy murk contaminate the tube inch by inch, Dusty screams, but he makes no sound. Paralyzed, drawing great draughts of air but as silently as one struggling to breathe in a vacuum, he tries to lift his right hand and tear out the IV, tries to cast himself’ off the bed, cannot, and he rolls his eyes, straining to see the last inch of the tube as the toxin reaches the needle.
    A terrible flash of inner heat, as though lightning arcs through his veins and arteries, is followed by a shriek when the bird enters his