The Lark Taps Twice

Chapter 2: A Familiar Visitor Returns, Five Years Later

tap tap

Miriam's eyes flew open, and a smile stretched her cheeks. She leapt out of bed, grabbed her DSLR camera from the desk where she had laid it out in anticipation of this very event, and scrambled to pull back the window curtain. There on the sill perched her silver and blue messenger, brown package dangling from a tilted up and open slightly beak, as though he were as happy to be there as she was to see him.

Her eighteenth birthday had been the first time she met her strange visitor, but not the last. He had returned each birthday thereafter, finding her even in her dorm in college her freshman year, much to the annoyance of her roommate, who heard the tapping but only awakened enough to grumble about the racket. Each year he brought a new gift, though none were as amazing as the first.

The dreamstone helped her not only erase the event in her mother's life that started her life of crime, but it also secured her admission and a scholarship to the best university in the country for her major. Once there, she wished she only had to complete the classwork directly relevant for her chosen major and minor (ornithology, and geology, respectively), and all of her general education classes were marked complete before she registered for her first semester of classes.

A series of wishes had her passing her classes with excellent recall of all the information, graduating with her BS in two years and her PhD in another two. Her last wish had been six months ago, and the result was her dream job: assisting with research into how the growing encroachment of human cities into formerly wild spaces affected native bird populations and behavior, at a wildlife center less than an hour's drive from her childhood home. Her life was perfect, thanks to a strange bit of rock.

Yet for all that, the mystery of the bird and the stone had only deepened over the years. Her nineteenth birthday, at the dorm, the bird had brought her a handful of tiny sky blue berries with pink dots that tasted like strawberries; the seeds refused to grow, despite her varied attempts.

Her twentieth birthday gift was a red and white flower that resembled a columbine; she had pressed and laminated it, and it now held her place in the latest Stephen King novel.

Her twenty-first, a walnut-like purple seed with detailed instructions for creating the most hostile soil she had ever encountered; the resulting lavender bush produced the red and white not-columbines and, in time, pink oranges with the flavor of honeycrisp apples.

Last year, there was a safety cone orange snail shell about the size of the palm of her hand; for its size, it weighed nearly nothing, and she could hear owls cooing to their young when she held the open end of the shell to her ear.

Wondrous things, all of them. And a never ending puzzle she could not solve. Despite years of study and networking with the best experts in any relevant field, no trace of her silver bird or any of his presents had ever been reported or photographed or drawn anywhere else in the world. Anywhere, in recorded history. If she didn't have the tangible evidence to the contrary, she would consider herself mad and check herself in at the nearest mental health spa. At least there was physical proof of what she witnessed, as frustratingly mysterious as each item was.

Tap Tap

The increasing volume of her visitor's summons halted her thoughts about the past and reminded her that another part of the mystery awaited just outside the window. So distracting were her memories that she had not yet unlatched the window sash. She bent to set the pricy camera on the floor at her feet before fumbling with the security fastener on the window frame. The bird, for his part, stared at her with those bright green eyes, head tilted to the side, and his left foot fidgeted while his right stayed still; she would have labeled his mood as "annoyed" if birds could feel such a thing. At last, she wrenched the metal semi-circle into the "open" position and -