In the crumbling aviary behind Professor Holloway’s estate, where the ivy grew in nooses and the birdseed sprouted tiny human teeth, there lived a parrot that didn’t just repeat words— it repeated voices .
Not the sounds, mind you. The actual throats they came from.
The creature had no name, though the groundskeeper called it "The Echo" in his prayers. Its feathers were the color of a fading bruise, its eyes too large and wet—like they’d been stolen from a weeping child. Visitors who heard it speak would clutch their own necks, for the words always came out in someone else’s larynx :
— A dead widow’s rasp
— A hanged man’s broken falsetto
— The precise cough-laced timbre of your own dying grandfather
The Professor had discovered it in the Amazon, perched atop a ruined missionary’s skeleton, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in seven distinct dead men’s voices . He brought it home in an iron cage lined with church hymnals, believing it simply a marvel of mimicry.
Then his wife vanished.
They found her favorite bonnet dangling from the aviary bars, damp with saliva not quite birdlike. That night, the parrot began singing her lullabies— in her exact register , down to the slight wheeze she’d developed after the pneumonia.
The Professor stopped feeding it.
The bird grew thinner, its plumage shedding to reveal patches of smooth human skin beneath. Yet its voice only grew stronger, now sometimes speaking in tongues no linguist could place—languages that tasted of copper and burnt hair when you heard them.
On the eve of the Professor’s own disappearance, neighbors heard the parrot reciting his final journal entry before he’d written it