This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Dopabeane on 2024-11-23 02:45:49+00:00.
Between 1984 and 1988, a particular metro area in the southeastern United States suffered a spat of violent murders.
The victims had no commonalities. Age, gender, color, appearance, occupation, socioeconomic status — nothing matched. Victims included middle school students and notorious cartel members, street cops and lawyers, charity directors and investment bankers, pharmaceutical executives and gas station clerks.
The only reason authorities had any idea that the murders were related was because of the killer’s unique calling card:
A scattering of blood-drenched pigeon feathers.
As months passed and the body count mounted, law enforcement came into possession of one single piece of eyewitness testimony:
Following the violent death of a firefighter, a middle-aged woman was spotted limping away from the scene, bleeding profusely from a gaping wound in her hip. According to the witness the woman was tiny, birdlike in her thinness, shuffling like someone elderly. Notably, a flock of pigeons followed her, bobbing along beside her like an urban adaptation of the pied piper.
This sighting was ultimately dismissed due to one impossible detail:
The woman was covered in grey feathers.
A second sighting was reported one year later, and was again dismissed. Similar sightings continued to crop up over the years, every one of them ignored.
In 1988 and entirely by chance, a bloody feather came into possession of AHH during the commission of a separate task. The feathers were then brought to NASCU. Peculiarities surrounding the appearance and physiology of the feathers were noted by specialized personnel, most notably T-Class Agent Wolf.
At this time, the agency launched an investigation of its own.
The investigation culminated in July 1988. During surveillance of the target — a very thin woman who was always trailed by a flock of pigeons, and who always wore a long, heavy trenchcoat, even in the humid summer heat — she managed to infiltrate a house that functioned as a front for human trafficking.
What resulted was a bloodbath.
The target was badly wounded and therefore sufficiently weakened due to the energy expended during the attack. Agency personnel were able to take her into custody. Her capture was not without incident, as the flock of pigeons surrounding her began to attack. One pigeon, a particularly large male with one eye, refused to leave her side. As a result, the animal was brought into custody with her. He was later observed to pluck his feathers and place them on top of the woman’s astounding number of serious wounds.
Incredibly, the feathers facilitated rapid healing.
It must be noted that the woman came into Agency custody during a time when consideration and respect for our extraordinary inmates was at a low ebb. Due to her dress, her age, her general appearance, and of course her flock of pigeons, personnel dubbed the entity The Bag Lady.
The Bag Lady is a middle-aged woman of almost extraordinary thinness. Her hair is short and grey. Her eyes are large and a vivid, bright orange identical in hue to the eyes of the pigeon who came into custody with her.
Like her pigeon, she is covered in feathers.
Unlike many inmates, the Bag Lady is articulate, intelligent, and possesses full speech and language capabilities. Nevertheless, for the entire length of her incarceration, the Bag Lady has refused to speak with staff for any meaningful length of time. When asked why, her answer is always the same:
“Because I don’t talk to cops.”
This is admittedly understandable, given that the Bag Lady acted in an exclusively extrajudicial capacity, to extremely violent effect.
Despite decades of consistent questioning and other, less savory methods to break her down, the Bag Lady has continued to refuse meaningful engagement with Agency personnel. In fact, the only meaningful contact the Bag Lady has had with personnel consists of attacks both attempted and achieved.
On four different occasions, however, she has been observed attempting to engage fellow inmates in conversation.
Notably, the Bag Lady speaks extensively and frequently to her pigeon. The pigeon does not answer, but Agency personnel believe the bird is extraordinarily intelligent and that it communicates with her nonverbally. Due to potential similarities with the inmate called the Heart Bird, the pigeon is as closely monitored as the Bag Lady herself. Concerns over such similarities with the Heart Bird are the primary reason that the Bag Lady has never been evaluated for termination.
Fortunately, the inmate’s thirty-five year vow of silence was recently broken during an interview with T-Class agent Rachele B. The insights provided are fascinating. The content of the interview poses serious questions regarding the nature of death, free will, the possibility and potential purpose of afterlife, and the processes through which Khthonic entities come into being.
One might even dare to say it provides a few answers as well.
(*Please note I did NOT write that last line. My boss added it because he's a tool)
Interview Subject: The Bag Lady
Classification String: Uncooperative / Undetermined / Khthonic / Fixed / Critical / Teras
Interviewer: Rachele B.
Date: 11/22/2024
The first thing my son ever bought was birdseed.
He was four years old. His grandma put two dollars in his Christmas card that year, and he spent those dollars on pigeon food.
Michael loved pigeons. He started talking to them before he ever said a word to me. Watched them from windows when he was a baby and cooed at them the way they coo at each other. His first smile was at them, not at me. His first hello went to a baby pigeon blinking stupidly in a nest on our fire escape.
He loved them.
As he got older, that love grew stronger. By the time he was kindergarten, those birds would follow him everywhere, bobbing their little heads. They ate out of his hands, flew down to his arms, sometimes even landed on his head which made him laugh like nothing else.
I’d been afraid of birds my whole life, so I didn’t understand. I asked him one time why he loved them so much. How he could make friends with them.
“It’s easy, Mom,” he said. “Pigeons think everyone’s their friend. They already love you. All you do is love them back.”
I still didn’t understand. Didn’t really want to, I guess. I grew up learning that pigeons were vermin. Dirty, ugly, unsanitary, brainless disease carriers. No, I didn’t understand at all.
But I did understand this:
Like pigeons, my son thought everyone was his friend.
When describing Michael, you might use the word “gullible.” But that isn’t right. He wasn’t gullible. He was smart, he was intuitive, he understood everyone. He could look at the worst person alive and find the smallest, weakest spark of goodness flickering forlornly in the vast dark.
What he couldn’t understand — what I couldn’t make him understand no matter how hard I tried, how loud I yelled, how mean or desperate or cruel I got — was that a spark is not light.
A spark is just a spark. No more, and maybe less.
I could tell you about Michael’s friends. How some were born monsters. How some were made. How badly the ones that were made—the ones that weren’t born ruined— heart my hurt.
And how that spark of sympathy got my guard just enough to make sure I lost my son.
I saw him for the last time when he was seventeen.
We were fighting about his friends. Not the pigeons, I’d gotten used to them a long time ago. How they clustered around the fire escape every morning waiting for him to open the window, how they flocked down to the building entrance when it was time for him to leave for work, how his favorite bird, Mr. One-Eye, dive-bombed onto his shoulder every time they saw each other.
No, we weren’t fighting about pigeons. We were fighting about his other friends.
It wasn’t even a bad fight. Not worse than any of our other fights, anyway. It went the same way it always did, he told me I didn’t understand like he always did, I told him he was being a little fool and his friends would be the end of him like I always did.
And he walked out the door to cool off, like he always did.
I thought he’d call a few hours later, apologizing and asking for an apology in return like he always did.
But he didn’t call.
I told myself he’d come home, like he always did.
But he didn’t come home.
And nobody cared.
My boy never coming back was the worst thing. The very, very worst thing that is, was, or will ever be.
But the fact that no one helped, that no one cared, that no one gave the tiniest spark of a damn, was almost as terrible.
I went to the police seventeen times. Seventeen. One for each year he’d been alive. Each time they told me Michael was practically an adult, we’d had a fight, and he was fully in his rights not to come home. One cop even had the gall to me it was about time he stopped coming home. Another one said I was lucky he was gone, because otherwise he’d probably come home one day and cut my throat for drug money.
The last cop took pity on me. She was a lady officer. Lady is the wrong word. She was a battle ax. Built like a brick shithouse, with hair like rusty steel wool and the scariest eyes I have ever seen.
But when she looked at me after I taking my seventeenth report, there was nothing scary about her eyes. They were only tired. Sad. And lightless.
That look in her eyes was how I knew no one would ever find my son, ...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gxpkjj/fuck_hipaa_my_new_patient_doesnt_even_need/