The Birdhouse

Today, still under the weather, I have done nothing but work and fend off Stella's horny advances on my foot. (I can't imagine what's the matter with her. She keeps rubbing herself on me! What a little pervert! She must be in heat, or something.) Since I have nothing else of particular import to relate, the interruption in regular updates continues--here's a silly story about birds instead:

You know that old house on the hill, the one with the streaky whitewash and the garden that never gets weeded?--the one with the ragweed jungle and the croaky frog chorus in the marsh out back? The place is a wreck: everything's either crumbling or cracking or rotting away. The shutters fell off the windowframes fifty years back, and now they're completely hidden by moss. There used to be leaded-glass windows underneath, the kind with little diamond-shaped lattices, but there's only been sheets of plastic these last few years. Someone started a rumour, see--they said there were silver candlesticks and drawers full of gold sovereigns in there, and jewels and antique pistols and valuable old books. Kids broke in looking for the treasure, and they kicked out all the windows on their way. There wasn't anything there, of course, and the place wasn't even good for hiding out with some beers, what with the dust and feathers everywhere. It's fit to choke you, that place. It's hard to imagine anyone living there.

At night, when it's dark outside and there's nothing to be heard but crickets and wind, you can see little fluttering shapes behind the plastic. You can't make out any details, though. It's more like a shadowpuppet show. Linked thumbs and outstretched fingers make a bat flapping across the moon. Thumb up, fingers straight, pinky waggling up and down, and you've got a barking dog. Hands together at the wrist, fingers stretched out and flapping, there's your crow, all black and untidy.

The shapes in the windows aren't really shadowpuppets, of course. Well, not the kind you make with your hands, any road. They're the shadows of falling leaves, maybe, or rotting curtains flapping in the draft. Some folks say they're ghosts, but of course there's no such thing.

Anyhow, here's the creepy bit. There used to be this old guy living up there, probably a hundred years ago. And the guy was at least a hundred years old himself, so the story really goes back two hundred years. This bloke was born ancient, hump-backed and wrinkly. He never had a childhood or a middle age--he popped out with his crow's feet already in place, and his grey beard tickling his belly. He had great big ears like a garden gnome, and wee gimlet eyes that always seemed to be winking. His fingers were knobblier than oak branches, and his chin was so crinkly you couldn't tell what was mouth and what was wattle till he started talking. He didn't have any teeth, so he had to wear a set of black wooden dentures. Those were found when the looting started, all dried up in a glass beside his bed.

The rest of his house, all sixteen rooms of it, were lined floor to ceiling with cages--big ones, little ones, dome-shaped ones, and even hanging ones strung off the rafters. There were wooden ones and wire ones, and ornamental crystal ones. Those ones had dead birds in, stuffed and staring out with button eyes. The rest of the cages didn't seem to have anything in them, at first glance, but if you looked at the floors, you found little piles of bones and feathers. Neat little piles, complete with withered feet stuck in the air.

The floors were piled ankle-deep with down, which took to the air as you walked. A blanket of dust shrouded everything, and the slightest disturbance in the air set it dancing in the sunlight. Stay in there too long, and you'd choke to death. It happened to one of the kids who went in after candlesticks and sovereigns. He just never stopped coughing, even once he'd came out. His spit turned bloody, and all the colour went out of his cheeks. It got worse and worse, and one fine day he gave up the ghost. They said it was some sort of bird disease, carried in the dust--but there haven't been any birds in there for at least a century. We think it was because he went at night, hoping to beat the crowd. Those flapping things got to him, for sure.

Some of the old folks' parents knew that guy--the old bloke, that is, not the kid who died. He just had the one bird to begin with, a big grey parrot with a red beak and a smart-aleck mouth. Then, his wife died (or his parrot died, or his mother--accounts vary), and he got the parrot a mate. A week or two later, he hung out a sugarstick for hummingbirds. A couple of years after that, the scarlet fever got his sister (or his grandma or his daughter), and he brought the sugarstick in...along with the hummingbirds. He hid in the hedgerows with a net for larks and wrens, and lay in the marshes for herons. He hiked up the mountains for eagles and owls, and bought every canary in the pet shop. Mr. McDowell's great-great-grandfather had his prize winning turtle doves stolen, and a few carrier pigeons went out and didn't come back. Even the belfry found itself despoiled of crows. A female rook flew, cawing, round the river till she dropped out of the sky from exhaustion. She was after her pilfered fledglings, they say.

The old man went away for a year, and came back with a wagon full of puffins and mynas and budgerigars. The mayor wasn't happy, what with the squawking and cheeping all day long, but there was nothing to be done. You couldn't even go to his house by that time: the ostrich would kick you to death. When his last surviving relative died, they had to send in another carrier pigeon with the news. Needless to say, it never came out.

When his clothes fell apart, that crazy old man didn't come into town for new ones--he wove an entire suit out of feathers. He used ostrich feet for shoes, and a peacock's tail for a hat. Instead of cufflinks, he held his sleeves closed with stiff little pinions. He ate eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whenever a bird died, he ate that for dessert. On Sundays, he read Bible verses to the parrot instead of going to church. After a decade or two, the parrot started delivering sermons from memory. What with food and clothes and religion all covered, that guy never had to go out at all. Nobody saw him for at least twenty years before his--

--well, I was going to say death, but the truth is, nobody knows what happened to him. Some folks say he met a birdlady and ran off with her. But if that was the case, why didn't he take the birds with him? Others say he was evicted because of the noise, and lived out his golden years at Shady Acres. Except the Acres wasn't built till the forties, so that can't be right. The story most people favour is that he died in the house. Birds ate his flesh, and bird-lime ate through his bones. That's why his remains were never found. The birds, they eventually starved to death, cooped up in cages like they were. The ostrich (or what was left of him) was found in the front hall, tangled up with the hat rack. He'd scored long, ragged gouges into the door trying to get out.

So, the shadows in the windows, those are little birdie ghosts, looking for the way out. And whenever someone interrupts their search by moonlight, they infect him with their deadly bird disease. Revenge for their miserable plight, I suppose.

And that's the tale of the Birdhouse.