The first thing I noticed was that her window was open, the curtains billowing in the hot night wind. I turned on the lights and moved through the faux French country–style room and looked out the window. The guitar was blocking me from getting a decent vantage point so I took it off and laid it gently on the cowhide carpeting that covered the floor. Below me, I could see the bouncers talking to two girls who were trying to crash the party, all four of them laughing and gesturing intimately at one another and I realized the girls had already been inside and were now just flirting with the guys guarding the door. I also noticed the number of cars crowding Elsinore Lane and then, moving among them, a tall figure dressed in a suit. I breathed in and stuck my head farther out the window to get a better look. The figure briefly turned as if he knew he was being watched, and I glimpsed the face of the guy who came to the party dressed as Patrick Bateman. I shuddered with relief that he was leaving—again, another reminder to boost myself up. (He was just a prank, I told myself; he was just the unexpected detail that materializes at every party, I told myself.) When I shut the window and turned around, whatever whimsy the room once held—cool, girly, Crayola-inspired—had inexplicably vanished.
The only real damage I initially noticed was that a small bookshelf had been overturned. I knelt down and pushed it back up against the wall and haphazardly piled books and toys into its shelves when I remembered something Sarah said and slowly looked up at the ceiling. There were marks directly above her bed. I couldn’t be sure at first but as I neared them I noticed that these marks looked like scratches—as if something had been crawling along the length of the ceiling, hooking its claws into it. I began fumbling for the packet of coke in my jeans when I glanced at the bed. And that was the moment I saw the pillow. Something had torn the pillow open, clawing it in two (yes, that was the word that sprang to mind: clawing) and scattering feathers all over the comforter. The pillow looked as if it had been, well, attacked, since the pillowcase was shredded, as if something had lunged at it continually, and when I touched the pillow, hesitantly, I recoiled, because the pillow was also wet. At that point—when my index finger came away slimed—I immediately wiped my hand on my jeans and decided to head downstairs and lock myself in the office for the duration of the night. I was going to let Jayne and Marta deal with this. My first thought was that Jayne’s troubled daughter had caused this damage herself, and I would leave the pillow as evidence.
But as I turned to leave the room, there it was: the Terby. It was sitting innocently by the door. I had not remembered seeing it when I first entered the room and it just sat there, waiting, covered with its black and crimson feathers, its bulging yellow doll eyes and its sharp glistening beak. I realized, somewhat sickeningly, that I would have to pass the thing in order to get out of the room. Stepping forward, I neared it cautiously, as if it were alive, when suddenly it moved. It started wobbling on its claws toward me.
I gasped and backed away.
I was freaked out but only momentarily, since I realized someone had just left the thing on. So I composed myself and moved toward it again. Its movements were so clumsy and mechanical that I giggled at myself for having become so frightened. The gurgling noises it was now making sounded prerecorded and filled with static—nothing like the abnormal bird sounds I had expected.
I sighed. I needed to take a Xanax and I would go down to my office, maybe finish what was left of one of the grams, drink another margarita and mellow out alone. That was the plan. I was flooded with relief and I continued laughing at myself—at how the combination of the coke and the doll had struck something awful in me, and that awful feeling dissipated entirely as I leaned down and picked up the doll. I turned it over and saw that the red light on the back of its neck was blinking, meaning that the thing had been activated. I flipped a small switch beneath the light and turned the Terby off. There was a whirring noise and the doll went limp. As I laid the doll down on Sarah’s bed next to the mutilated pillow I realized the thing was actually warm and something was pumping beneath its feathers. An unnerving silence had filled the room, even though the party was dancing below me. I suddenly needed to get out of there.
And as I turned away from Sarah’s room something sang out in a clear, high-pitched voice that turned into a guttural squawking—it was coming from the bed—and an adrenaline rush surged through me, out of me, enveloping the cavernous bedroom. I didn’t look back as I raced down the hallway, the sconces flickering on and off as I rushed past them, and as I tumbled down the curving staircase heading toward the sanctity of my office, I realized that for me the party had ended.