The Aviary

I’ll write it all down. Every detail, right here, that way, in the event I don’t make it, people will know. They will have been warned.

Maybe people will be able to piece together what happened. Maybe they will be able to stop it from happening again. Maybe they will be able to find them.

The men in the masks.

The Aviary.

I should have handed the laptop I found in to the barista behind the counter at the internet café. I shouldn’t have looked, should have just minded my own business.

I know this, but my own laptop is limping along, running slowly as it finally succumbs to the passage of time, obsolete and outdated. Past it’s best.

Like me.

I couldn’t afford to get it fixed, I haven’t been able to work since the accident.

One year ago I was driving home from college for the Summer when some guy on the freeway decided to end it all by driving through the median and headlong into the oncoming traffic on the other side. He died, took a woman in another car and her baby son with him. Took my arm too.

When I woke up in the hospital and saw my mom and dad gazing down at me tearfully, I knew straight away that something was wrong. My right arm felt numb, a useless cumbersome weight hanging heavily by my side.

The doctor explained that it was nerve damage. He smiled reassuringly, told me not to give up, said that there are advances in medicine every single day.

A year later, I haven’t been able to move it once, instead stuffing my floppy lifeless hand into my jacket pocket every day to try to stop people staring.

I was angry after that. I pushed away my boyfriend. Cut out my friends. Dyed my hair bright red, got piercings in my lip and my nose. I tried to make myself look scary, wanted to frighten people away, to stop them getting too close so I wouldn’t have to put up with that terrible pitying look every time they saw me cry because I couldn’t tie my own shoelaces, or button up my own shirt.

Now I know what scary really is.

After I took myself out of the real world I decided to live in cyberspace instead. It was perfect. I could be who I wanted to be, live as I did before the accident, be brave and confident and never have to worry about the eyes of the person I was speaking to flicking to my withered right arm, then back to mine with an embarrassed hint of remorse.

I became a regular poster on dozens of message boards, made a whole host of friends who I could hide my disability from. That became my outlet, my only social interaction, outside of the awkward exchanges with the store clerk who should have been hitting on a girl my age but instead stared as hard as he could at my face, pointedly not looking at my hands as I struggled to pick up my groceries.

It was the online relationships that brought me to the Internet café today. It was late when I arrived, but this place is cheap and open 24-hours, and with another bout of insomnia yawning before me I could see no better alternative.

There were a handful of other customers here when I arrived. A young couple that seemed more interested in making out than surfing the web; a bespectacled thin guy in a suit sipping what looked like his tenth can of Red Bull as he furiously pounded the keyboard; a huge bearded guy with a shaved head and a t-shirt with a cartoon owl on it; an Asian student who bobbed her head in time to what was clearly upbeat music playing through her headphones; and another emo-looking girl who wore a black hoodie and sunglasses even though it was the middle of the night.

I avoided eye contact with all of them, making my way to my usual spot in the corner so I could be alone.

That’s where I’m sat as I write this, at the old laptop I found.

I was surprised to find it here - the broken light in this corner makes the table pretty dingy so it’s not very popular unless the place is busy. The laptop itself wasn’t exactly cutting edge, it was a few years old, and but it had enough juice and was already connected to the wifi, so I thought maybe I’d just wait to see if the owner appeared, and if nobody showed up after a few minutes I’d use it myself.

As I sat down and glanced around, looking for any sign of a potential owner, I noticed a couple of minimized windows at the bottom of the screen. The seconds ticked by and, eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and I opened one.

It was a web browser, but not one I recognized. It had two tabs open and the first displayed Reddit - Nosleep, to be specific.
It’s a Sub I’ve seen before, one that I have even posted to in the past. Nothing new there.

Then I clicked on the other tab.

The URL for the site was a nonsensical jumble of letters and numbers. The page itself was basic - it looked a lot like a crappy old Angelfire site - a wall of ugly white text on a plain black background. At the top of the page was a banner that read THE AVIARY. To one side of the header was a shoddy cut out of a raven’s head. To the other was one of an owl’s.

I leaned in to take a closer look and saw that the page consisted of dozens of rows of text and next to those rows, counters that increased steadily. It took just a few seconds to realize that this was a primitive auction site - the text was the listings, while the counters showed the current bids on those items.

A quick scan revealed that the listings were for - what else - birds.

One read: ‘fat old hen, plump and tender’.

Another read: ‘exotic bird of paradise, pretty plumage’.

A third read: ‘pale dove. cute. cherry’.

That last one confused me. Was cherry a term that bird fanciers used? It didn’t really make sense. I frowned, then gasped when I looked at the counters, slowly ticking up beside each listing.

Each was an astronomical dollar fee - in the tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands. The dove was fast approaching a quarter of a million bucks.

I couldn’t believe that mere birds would change hands for such sums, nor could I believe that somebody who used this site would own a crappy old laptop in a dive like this Internet café.

Open-mouthed, I used the touchpad to try to zoom in on the tiny rows of text. As I did the cursor passed over one of them and it became clear that each listing was actually a hyperlink.

As the cursor hovered over the listing for the dove, I looked about once more for any sign of the laptop’s owner. I think I was expecting to see Mr Monopoly in his jaunty top hat and glinting monocle.

There was nobody like that in the café, nobody looking at me at all.

Satisfied that nobody was coming back to the dark little table any time soon, I clicked on the link. It was the worst mistake I’ll ever make.

It might be the last.

It took a few seconds for the link to load, and at first, I thought it was just the limited processing power of the laptop that caused it to labor. However, when a new window popped up, I realized that it had actually been connecting to a live feed.

It was being filmed in a dusty, relatively empty room. The walls were exposed brick, dirty and unpainted, while a solitary lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. The concrete floor was bare and uncarpeted.

The only item of furniture visible was a chair - no, an old metal wheelchair, the sort of heavy, unwieldy model that had long since gone out of production, built for sturdiness rather than maneuverability.

There were also three people in the frame - two tall men and a girl, maybe 14 years old.

The men each wore black shirts under black suits, with matching black leather shoes and gloves.

Tied about their throats were thin red silk ties, a deep crimson in color that caused them to look like shadows with their throats slashed.

One was lean, rangy, and the other was thickly set, heavy around the middle, and powerful looking.

And each of them wore a mask.

The one on left, the leaner of the two, wore an ugly stylized raven’s face over his own, midnite black, the bill long and pointed, like a stiletto blade. The mask looked hard and solid, maybe painted wood or plastic, and its expression was one of seething rage. The brows were knotted and bunched, the face angular and cruel.

The bigger man wore a round owl mask over his face. It was made of the same hard substance as the raven, but this was white rather than black, showing up some dirty reddish-brown smears on its surface. The wide round eyes seemed to stare intensely into the camera lens, tiny pinpricks of light glittering from the dark eye openings in the center of them. The bill on this mask was much smaller, but it seemed to curl up at the sides as if the owl was smirking maliciously. Those staring eyes and the nasty little smile gave the impression of malevolence and madness.

The third person in the room, the girl, was sat in the wheelchair - no, not sat in, secured to. Cable ties were fastened about her wrists, her elbows, her knees and ankles, black plastic cutting into pale flesh. She was naked.

The girl had thick duct tape fastened around her head and mouth, tangling her honey blonde hair, as it both gagged her and held her head in place against the high seat back. Her eyes were red, tears streaming down her cheeks, and her body heaved with irregular sobs. There were smears of brownish red on her pale white skin - the same as those on the Owl’s mask.

I froze as I struggled to take in what I was seeing. The video flickered, grainy footage of a waking nightmare unfolding on the glowing screen in front of me.

The Raven turned to the Owl and spoke, there was no sound from the feed but the slight movement of his head gave him away.

The Owl tilted his head gently, listening to his partner's instructions, before nodding enthusiastically, then clapping his hands and rubbing them together eagerly as he walked offscreen.

I didn’t realize I was doing it, but I held my breath the entire time he was gone, dreading what I was about to see, knowing it would impossible to unsee, but unable to look away.

Finally, the Owl returned, awkwardly pushing a small metal table on wheels that was just a little too low for his imposing stature. He pushed it to a standstill beside the terrified girl and straightened up, rearranging his suit as he turned the mask’s staring white face back to the camera.

There were two folded cream garments on the table and after the two masked men exchanged a few more unheard words, the Owl walked around to the front of the table and removed one of the items.

He lifted it, causing it to unfold as he did so, then quickly pulled it over his masked head.

It was an apron, the sort you might see a butcher wearing, discolored through age and emblazoned with a large black letter ‘A’ in a gothic font on the front.

The Aviary.

After hurriedly fastening the apron behind his back, the Owl straightened up, then moved his hands up and down beside his body, pivoting on first his left heel, then his right. He was posing for the camera, showing off the apron for the benefit of his audience like one of the girls on an old game show.

As his partner postured and preened, the Raven shook his head, an exasperated gesture, then pulled on an identical apron without fuss, before heatedly saying something to the Owl, his irritation clear in the way he poked his finger toward his partner, then at an array of glinting items on the table.

It was only when the Owl lifted the first of them to the camera, a large pair of serrated scissors, that I realized what they were.

Tools, nails, blades, surgical implements, and weird, cruel-looking hybrids of them all, cobbled together by a deranged but skilled craftsman.

The Owl shifted his grip on the scissors, then turned back to the young girl. She was now jerking from side to side, her body thrashing fruitlessly against her restraints. I noticed her nostrils flaring rhythmically as she took deep, panicky breaths. It was such a small detail, but it was the one that made this seem most real.

With an almost casual ease, the Owl seized the top of her head in one huge gloved hand, holding it in place. With the other hand, he opened the scissors, then slid one of the blades up into her nostril.

And then he waited, looking to his partner for further instruction.

The Raven, however, turned to the camera. Slowly he pointed toward the back wall with one hand, then he proceeded to swipe the other upwards repeatedly, like a football coach trying to rally his players and the fans in the bleachers.

It took me a while to see what he was pointing to, but then I noticed that what I had first believed to be unmarked brickwork was not as clear as I originally thought.

Daubed on it, in a dark, smudged liquid, was a figure.

350k.

It was a target.

With a sudden horrified feeling in my stomach, I realized that the counter was drawing the bidders ever closer to the point at which these two masked psychopaths would... take the next step.

As if on cue, the Raven stopped pointing at the wall, instead reaching into his jacket pocket and extracting a cell phone. He held it up to his face, studying something on the screen. A few moments later he gave a satisfied little nod, then turned and said something to the Owl.

The Owl closed the blades of the scissors.

I reached out and closed the pop-up as it happened, instinctively trying to prevent myself from seeing what happened next.

I wasn’t quite fast enough - the last thing I saw was the sudden gout of crimson, the agonized jerking of pale flesh... and the rapturous applause of the Raven’s black-gloved hands clapping together.

I sat there stunned, staring at the ugly rows of white text in disbelief. My heart pounded in my chest and I ran my good left hand through my red hair, damp now with a nervous perspiration, trying to make sense of what I had just seen.

As I swallowed hard, a small, hard little part of my mind refused to believe it.

‘It had to be a trick,’ that part of me thought. ‘An art project or special effects demo for a movie make-up artist. Maybe it was just a well-made short horror film?’

I wanted to believe that was the case. More than anything I wanted to forget the nightmarish scene that was burnt into my mind before the pop-up had closed.

Perhaps if I had got up and left right there, if I had turned my back on this laptop I could have gotten away. Perhaps.

But instead, I needed to know that the Aviary was a hoax. I had to be sure that the ‘pale dove’ was okay. The problem was that I was too scared to click back on that link in case she wasn’t.

So, I tried to think of an alternative plan of action as I got my breathing back under control and looked about the Internet café for any sign of the laptop’s owner. There was still nothing, the only difference being that at some point over the past few minutes the Asian girl had left without me noticing.

Finally, it came to me. I’d just check one of the other links. It would soon become obvious if this was a video sharing site for budding horror directors.

I scanned the list once again, my eye finally settling on the ‘fat old hen’.

I took a second or two to pluck up the courage to click on it, but finally, I did, muttering under my breath as I did so.

‘Come on,’ I chastised myself. ‘Don’t be such a pussy. It can’t be bad as that last one...’

I was right. It was worse.

The link opened another pop-up window, another live feed that appeared to be filmed in the same location as the other. It showed a dimly lit room with bare brick walls and an exposed concrete floor.

Again, it showed two men in black suits and shirts with red ties, each wearing a dirty apron, each hiding their face under a mask: one a raven, the other an owl.

However, there were subtle differences - this room looked a little longer and narrower, another room in the same building perhaps, while the body shapes of the masked men revealed them to be different individuals to the Raven and Owl in the ‘dove’ video I had just watched.

The feed opened with the Raven, this one short and stocky, thickly muscled under his suit, struggling to lift something into the frame from beneath the camera’s view.

Eventually, he pulled something bulky into the shot before taking a step back and straightening his tie with his black-gloved hands. That sudden separation allowed me to see what he had been struggling with.

It was another old-fashioned wheelchair, once again occupied by a naked female body. Clearly whatever had happened before I accessed the feed had caused the chair to tip over backward, taking the restrained woman within with it. Whatever had occurred, it had been terrible. This woman was barely conscious, and unlike the small smears on the body of the girl in the previous video, this woman was soaked with blood.

This woman was older than ‘the dove’, perhaps in her mid-fifties, and heavier set. As she slumped forward in her seat, straggly blood and sweat-soaked hair hanging about her face, I could see the blood pooling in the folds of her flesh, saw the way the cable ties looked even tighter as they cut into her thick ankles and wrist.

However, unlike the other victim, this woman had one arm free.

Before I could grasp the significance of this, the stocky Raven stepped forward and slapped her face. It was a short, sharp blow - not designed to inflict any damage, but to revive her.

The older woman’s face snapped to the side with the impact, producing a little spray of sweat and blood, before dropping forward once more.

The Raven was not to be dissuaded, however, and he struck her once more. This time it worked.

The older woman shook her head gently from side to side, groggily trying to clear her senses. Her movements were weak and uncertain, almost as if she was drunk. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever seen.

After a while the Raven seemed to run out of patience and stepped forward again, his whole body bristling with seething rage. He bent at the waist, grabbed the woman by the chin, his fingers digging into the podgy flesh of her cheeks.

Unheard words were exchanged, then the Raven grabbed the woman’s free arm, pulling her hand up to her face, encouraging her to look at what he and his partner had done.

I gasped. Clearly, something was wrong - the hand looked misshapen, and it was totally crimson, drenched in blood and gore.

Suddenly the woman was alert again, bucking and struggling against the restraints, her chest and throat swelling time and again as she screamed at her own mutilation.

As she did so, the Raven straightened up once again, finally satisfied, before stepping to one side and pointing to his masked companion.

I hadn’t really looked at the Owl prior to this moment - my attention instead focused on the horrific ordeal to which the Raven had been subjecting the woman.

Now I looked at him, a tall round-shouldered man, a little beer belly tightening his suit at the waist. He was holding something before him at arm’s length in his gloved hand.

The item, which he pinched between his thumb and forefinger, was something small, and I couldn’t quite work out what it was at first, as he jiggled it at the woman’s eye level, getting her attention.

At first, I thought it was a worm. A fat, pale worm.

Then I understood.

As the woman started to scream with renewed horror, the Owl reached up, with his free hand and grabbed the bottom of the white mask. Carefully, almost sensuously, he slid the mask up a few inches, exposing his mouth and chin. Patchy black stubble flecked through with gray - a few days’ worth by the look of it -framed a full-lipped mouth. The Owl was grinning, a leer that revealed crooked yellow tobacco- and coffee-stained teeth. He turned that sickly smile towards the camera, then tilted his head back slightly, before holding up the fleshy item in his hand.

It was one of the woman’s severed fingers.

The Owl licked his lips eagerly, a showy expression of glee, then lowered the finger into his mouth. He clamped his teeth down on it, then tugged at the digit as he sought to strip the meat from the bone.

I gagged then, a sudden tensing in my stomach bringing me perilously close to vomiting, forcing me to clamp my good left hand over my mouth involuntarily.

I felt light-headed, powerless to look away as the stocky Raven applauded his comrade’s efforts, occasionally stopping to grab their victim’s face and force her to watch as her own body part was consumed.

Finally, the Owl tossed a couple of clean knucklebones over his shoulder, a horrifying carelessness to the gesture, then shuffled toward the camera, grinning the whole time. He stopped just a foot or two from the lens, proudly showing off those ugly yellow teeth. They, and his lips, were streaked with blood, reddish-brown smears on the stained yellow enamel.

Those teeth made my stomach churn again - but worse still were the strings of gristle I could see stuck between them.

A low moan escaped my lips as the deliriously grinning Owl’s tongue flicked out, poking and probing at the meat in his teeth.

Suddenly a woman screamed behind me, causing me to cry out myself, whirling around in my seat.

It was the young couple, the girl shrieking in mock protest as her boyfriend pawed at her butt while they made their way to the door. As I watched them make their way out into the street, laughing as they went, I knew that the Aviary was no hoax, this was deadly serious.

Right there, I decided that I would not stand by and let those monsters continue doing what they did, making money catering to pathetic sick individuals, torturing and mutilating women.

Setting my jaw in determination, I closed the sickening live feed, unwilling and unprepared to watch any more, then tugged my cell phone from my pocket... and then the message arrived.

With a little ‘knock-knock alert’, another pop-up appeared on the laptop.

It was an IM from an individual using the name ‘bubobubo’.

It was short, but it stopped me in my tracks.

It read: ‘we c u’.

I felt the blood drain from my face as there was another tinny little ‘knock-knock’ from the laptop’s speaker, then another message.

‘Don’t scream’.

Knock-knock.

‘Don’t try to leave’.

Knock-knock.

‘Don’t try to call anyone’.

There was a slightly longer pause before the next IM arrived: ‘Because they won’t be able to get to you before we do. Do you understand?’

Then a picture arrived.

It was of my own back, instantly recognizable from my red hair spilling down over my shoulders. It had been taken just a few moments earlier - as I held my hand to my mouth in horror.

With a shaking hand, I typed back an answer: ‘yes’.

Trying to keep it casual I thought about glancing around at the other customers, seeing if I could spot the person messaging me, but as I shifted in my seat, the Aviary website updated.

There was a new listing at the top.

‘Red robin, broken right wing.’

Tears sprang to my eyes as slowly, but steadily, the counter next to the listing started to rise.

So here I am. I’m typing this here because I’m too scared to call for help, too scared to try to run.

It’s just a matter of time until they realize what I’m doing. So please, help me.

Please, send help. I’m at the Cyber City Internet Café on Wes

Submitted July 24, 2018 at 12:32AM by Mr_Stuff https://ift.tt/2LljIXL