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‘Okay,’ Martin said. ‘This is what I’ve got. It’s just preliminary stuff, right? For us. I’ll put this out on the interwebs when I’ve fleshed it out a bit, cleaned it up some.’ He stopped to crack a smile. ‘It’ll be awesome.’
They were around the big kitchen table again, over breakfast. Marcia and the Professor were both fumbling around with their silverware, each with a bandaged hand. Martin grinned at them. He wanted to do a little dance, sing a little song, pat himself on the back, give himself a raise, a bonus, trumpet from the rooftop that he’d had the most brilliant idea of his career. So far.
This show, if it was a success – and he really believed it would be – would be the making of his career. His name would go down in history. Of course it would. People were still talking about the Philip Experiment, all these years later, right? Hell, they pulled off that experiment way back in the seventies, before he’d even been a twinkle in his father’s eye. Good grief, his father was barely more than a twinkle himself then. And people were still talking about it – not the twinkling bit, but the Experiment. Martin always thought of the Experiment that way – capitalised. The Philip Experiment.
Of course, he was even more interested in the Slender Man phenomenon. It was contemporary, of course, which made it slightly more relevant to someone of his tender years. He’d followed it since soon after its invention, and it was unique in that it was the first monster whose birth into consciousness it was possible to trace. Now so many people out there believed it was a real thing, not just the winning entry in a Something Awful paranormal photography competition.
Their apparition was going to go down in history as well. Even better, it was going to be birthed on camera. And he was the midwife. Now he actually did do a little jig, a quick two-step, then flushed, hoping no one had noticed.
‘Let’s have a look, then,’ said Darryl. ‘Show us what you’ve come up with.’
Martin produced the photos with a flourish. ‘So I kinda dumped the ones you had done, Darryl.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But, I hope you’ll agree I came up with something much better. Something unique and specific.’ He waved a hand around at the room. ‘This house was the inspiration. And the birdcage.’
‘Yeah, we don’t want to forget the frigging birdcage,’ Jeremy muttered.
Martin laughed. ‘It was worth carting it in amongst the trees. Look at the photos.’
Everyone bent their heads to the black and white photos Martin had circulated around the table.
‘Holy shit,’ Darryl said and gave a low whistle. ‘This is amazing.’
That qualified as a pat on the back. Martin doubted he’d get the raise, or the bonus, but just those few words out of Darryl’s mouth were worth it.
‘What do you think?’ Martin said. ‘Awesome, yeah?’
There were two photos. In the first, the birdcage was inside the house, in front of a pair of velvet drapes, a stack of old books on a chair next to it. There was a potted Kentia Palm next to it on the other side, and Martin thought that was a nice touch – gave it an antique look.
But the focus of the photograph was, of course, the birdcage. Its black cast iron bars were clear, hard edges, rising in a bell shape to an elaborate scroll at the top.
Inside the cage, there was a figure. But it wasn’t in focus, as though it had been caught on film in the act of turning. A dark body, pale face a blur as it swung round to face the camera, or turned away from it.
About the size of a young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, the creature made Martin catch his breath, and he was the one who had put her in the photo. It was a her, a girl. A sparrow girl. That’s how he thought of her – a sparrow girl. She crouched on the swing, her body covered in feathers, a bony sparrow girl with feathers.
‘It’s a bird,’ Darryl said. ‘A bird-girl.’
‘Not just any girl,’ Martin said, glad they’d picked it for female as well. ‘She’s the sparrow girl.’
‘Sparrow, huh?’
‘Like the ones that were roosting in that old car.’
Stacy spoke up. ‘This is what we’re going to be manifesting? A bird-girl?’
Martin sat down at the table and nodded. ‘Yeah. A sparrow-girl. They kept her in the cage, you see.’
‘Who did?’ Stacy was frowning over the photograph. She obviously didn’t get it yet. Flipping to the second photo, Martin saw her eyes widen. ‘Wow, this is astonishing work, Martin.’
Gratified, he relaxed a little. He just needed to explain the history of the sparrow-girl to them. Of course, he didn’t have all the details, yet. This was just the preliminary stuff. He’d stayed up practically all night working on the photographs.
‘This must have taken you hours.’ Stacy again. She held the photograph up in front of her face. ‘It’s arresting, truly astonishing, I’ll give you that.’ She looked over the top of the illustration at him. ‘What’s she about?’
‘Ah, see this is where it gets really interesting.’ Martin wriggled in his chair. ‘Darryl, you told us this house was built by a witch. Someone who practised black magic. Well, I took that and ran with it – especially when I saw the birdcage, I mean that thing is huge – what did they keep in there, for heaven’s sakes? What sort of bird did they keep in there?
‘And then I realised, they didn’t have that cage for a bird. They kept a child in there.’
Five pairs of eyes blinked at him and he gave a self-conscious shrug. ‘So, they were evil. What do you think black magic guys would do?’
‘Man, you have a seriously warped mind.’ That was Jeremy, but he was looking at the photos again as though mesmerised.
‘I might have a warped mind, we can decide that later, but you have to admit, the images are amazing.’
‘So is she human, this bird girl?’ Stacy asked. ‘She must be, right, you said they kept a child in there.’
‘Well, I haven’t worked out all the details yet.’ Martin looked at the Professor, who was studying the images intently. ‘I was hoping the Prof could help me with that.’ The man in question looked up, nodded, and bent back to the photographs.
‘They look so real,’ he said.
Pride puffed out Martin’s chest. ‘Thanks. Took me hours to make. I actually used a photo of a girl I found in the library. It fell out of one of the old books there. One of the magic books.’ He poked at his copies. ‘But anyway, here’s the story I’ve got for her so far.’ He cleared his voice, aware that for once, he really did have centre stage.
‘So, the guy who owned the house – we’ll have to come up with a name for him, of course – he was an evil dude. Into all sorts of unsavory things, him and his cronies. Because he had cronies, all right. His coven, I guess you’d call it, though it sounds weird to me talking about covens and witches when they’re guys, you know what I mean? We’ll need to think about that – witches usually being female, that is...’
‘There were plenty of male witches,’ the Professor said.
Martin shrugged. ‘Yeah, okay. But the fact is that if you say witch to the average person, they’re going to think female. We should call them something else.’
‘Magician,’ Stacy said. ‘Isn’t that what you called men into magic?’
‘Sounds like someone who does kids shows,’ Jeremy said.
‘Occultists might work,’ Darryl said. ‘They were actually ceremonial magicians, but like Jeremy said, that does sound like someone pulling paper flowers out of his sleeve.’
Martin looked at Darryl in surprise. ‘I didn’t realise you knew so much about the subject.’
Darryl lifted his coffee cup to his mouth and sipped. ‘I know a lot of shit,’ he said over the rim.
Okay. Martin kept forgetting that. It was a bad habit of his, he knew, to forget that other people knew stuff. It always seemed like, next to him, they knew practically nothing, but of course Darryl did. This was his show. It wasn’t a business he’d have gone into if he didn’t know a few things about it. Martin took another deep breath.
‘Okay, so we have this bunch of nasty occultists living here. Or this is their hub, however you want to look at it. The main guy lives here, and the others – all respectable businessmen and stuff – they come out for rituals, and stuff, whatever it is they do.’
‘The girl in the cage?’ Stacy reminded him.
‘Yeah, so somehow the big cheese gets his hands on a kid. I don’t know how – that’s a part I haven’t worked out yet, but it shouldn’t be difficult. He had an affair with the maid or something, I don’t know, and took her kid or whatever. Anyway, so he keeps this kid in the cage, uses her for rituals and shit, I don’t know. Something to do with birds though – they’re nature worshippers or something, maybe. Calls her Sparrow Girl, anyway. Makes her wear a feathered suit and stuff.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘The sum of it is that she ends up believing she really is part bird...and there we have our ghost. I reckon she has some special powers and things, bird-like stuff, you know? But anyway, there’s our ghost, and there’s our backstory.’
More eyes blinking at him from around the table. Didn’t they like it? Couldn’t they see the potential?
‘You know, she’s passed on, but she’s still attached to the house, and maybe, she’s out for revenge on the dudes who kept her in the cage and turned her into a bird, and she really believes she’s a bird – and guys, we can do a lot with this, right?’ He was suddenly sure they thought his idea was really lame. Maybe it was.