I finally decided I needed to tell someone about this. It happened back in 2002, early October. I was living in Ganja at the time, working at a textile shop during the day. My daughter was just six months old then. Tiny thing, always fussy. I'd been up half the night with her teething, so I wasn't in the best mood that morning, Anyone with kids will know what I'm talking about. There's a park in the center of the city, near the old fortress. Trees everywhere, benches, a little pond. Mothers would meet there in the mornings, let the babies get some air. It was our routine. I'd get there around nine, join the other women. We'd talk, share advice, complain about our husbands. Normal things. That morning there were maybe five or six of us. All with babies in prams or carriers. The weather was perfect, cool, clear sky. You could see the mountains in the distance. I remember thinking it was too nice a day to waste worrying about anything.
We'd been there maybe twenty minutes when I heard it. This sound. Not like any bird I'd ever heard before. Low and resonant, almost like a horn, but organic. It came from above, somewhere in the trees. I looked up. So did the other mothers. At first I couldn't see anything, just branches and sky. Then it moved. Shifted position in the upper branches of this old oak tree, maybe thirty feet up. And that's when I saw it clearly. It was an owl. Had to be, from the body. Massive wingspan, easily five feet across when it stretched. Brown and gray feathers, mottled pattern. The way it perched, the talons gripping the branch, definitely an owl. But the face. The face wasn't right. It had a human face. Not like, similar to human. Actually human. Pale skin, two eyes set forward like ours, a nose, a mouth. The proportions were slightly off, compressed somehow, but it was unmistakably a person's face on this bird's body. And it was staring down at us. Directly at us.
None of us moved. The other mothers saw it too, I could tell from their faces. One woman made this small gasping sound. Another pulled her baby closer. We all just stood there, looking up at this thing. The face was a woman's face, I think. Maybe middle-aged. The expression was neutral, blank almost. But the eyes were focused. Alert. Watching us with this intense concentration. The way you'd watch something you're studying. Something you're trying to understand. It tilted its head..the way owls do, that sharp sideways movement. But seeing a human face do that motion, it was wrong. Deeply wrong. My skin went cold. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to grab my daughter and run. Then it opened its mouth. Not to make that horn sound again. Just opened it. I could see teeth. Human teeth. And the mouth kept opening, wider than any person could open their mouth. Too wide. The jaw seemed to unhinge slightly.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]