4.

Her feet slapped against the bare floorboards. All the rooms up here were empty; it didn’t take more than a few minutes to search them all. Stacy ended up back in the room from which Martin had thrown himself. The wind reached in through the shattered glass and tugged at her as though inviting her to take a ride on its wings too, but she ignored it, and didn’t look down at where Martin lay either.

Instead, she fixed her eyes on the open panel, behind which the secret passageways lurched through the house in darkness. She gripped the torch tighter in a sweaty hand and tried to look anywhere but at the open panel. It was dark in there, and confined, and she didn’t want to see that tiny room again. Bad things had happened in there, she was sure of it.

Deirdre was nowhere to be found up here. She must have gone back down through the house, lost in the maze of rooms, perhaps. Her mind shied away from the things that Jeremy had said, and she wished he were here now. The house felt bad, as though it was having a nightmare, and the shadows in the corners of the rooms all wavered and shivered, as though spirits were rousing themselves. Stacy shook her head. She was scaring herself. Sidling past the entrance to the secret passageway, Stacy made it out of the room and fled down the hallway to the stairs, took them two at a time and didn’t stop until she reached the first floor where the rows of closed doors concealed their bedrooms. The door to Darryl’s room wasn’t closed though, and the smell of congealing blood was thick in her nose again. She turned away.

There was a dark figure on the landing beneath her. The stained glass window sent shards of red light over it, back-lit by the moon, and Stacy felt her breath shudder and die in her throat. It was bunched on the bannister, and a slow recognition blossomed in her mind.

‘Deirdre,’ she whispered, leaning forward down the stairs, fingers keeping a brittle grip on the bannister.

She’d been heard. Her heart started a slow, painful, throbbing in her chest. Time stretched out like strands of toffee as Deirdre – was it Deirdre? – turned her feathered head at the whispered name and Stacy saw the beak, sharp, pointed, stained with red light. Hopefully it was red light that made it look that way. The eyes above it gave a slow blink in the mask and didn’t recognise her.

Her feet took her down one step, before she even knew their intention, and she trembled, backing away from the bannister and pressing herself against the wall. Her mouth was parched, but she licked her lips anyway, and took another step lower. She blinked back at Deirdre perched on the bannister, and wondered how she managed to balance there, feet tucked up under her, looking like a...looking like a proper bird.

As though she could hear Stacy’s thoughts, Deirdre ruffled her feathers, and Stacy stifled a gasp, the beak and eyes still turned towards her. And now that Stacy was edging closer, one step at a time, she could smell the cloying odour of iron, and knew the red stain on Deirdre’s beak wasn’t light from the window at all, but blood, just like Jeremy had said it was, just like he’d told her, and she knew, all of a sudden, that he’d been right – this wasn’t Deirdre anymore. This was Martin’s Sparrow Girl.

She gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. This was impossible. Impossible. She was missing something. Touching her pocket, she felt her phone there, snug against her buttock, but tucked in with it, the photograph she’d found under the bed. Her fingers convulsed, scratched the denim of her jeans, and she jerked, flattened her hands against her thighs, and took one more step closer to the landing. The Sparrow Girl twitched, and shifted slightly, in a rustle of feathers, turning to keep her gaze on Stacy.

Darryl had said something about the house being built by a black magician. She conjured to mind the black cage, the tiny room inside the walls of the house, the bottles of laudanum Martin had found.

Tears sprang to her eyes and she didn’t dare lift a hand to wipe them away. That had been no fancy dress party the girl in the photograph had dressed for. She should have known that straight away, should have realised just by looking at the girl’s eyes. The lost, pained expression in them. Stacy didn’t know what the girl had been kept for, until the answer burst inside her head, an explosion of understanding. The professor had said sparrows were psychopomps. That’s what she’d been. The temple’s own personal guide through the afterlife.

No. Another slight shake of the head. It was too preposterous. She was almost on the landing now, her sneakered foot feeling for the last step until she stood directly across from the Sparrow Girl.

Her face was wet with tears. ‘Deirdre,’ she murmured. Deirdre, who looked so much like the girl in the photograph that they could have been sisters. A dreadful coincidence, and now here was Deirdre, no longer herself, but the beating heart of the Sparrow Girl. A sob escaped from between Stacy’s lips. ‘It should have been me,’ she whispered.

The bird girl cocked her head on one side and opened her beak slightly, as though she wanted to say something, but it snapped shut again, and the eyes stayed watchful. Stacy edged further along the landing, until she could see down the stairs into the foyer. She didn’t know what she planned; there would be no making a run for it. And she wouldn’t even if it were possible. How could she leave Deirdre – or the poor Sparrow Girl?

Something lay at the bottom of the stairs, and Stacy frowned at it. After a long moment, it morphed into something she could recognise, and her knees went weak, and suddenly boneless, she slithered down the wall to sit on the landing, a hand pressed to her mouth as she gazed down into the shadows that failed to hide Jeremy from view.

There was something wrong with his mouth. Stacy pressed herself against the wall and struggled to decipher what was wrong. Something in his mouth. Spilling from between his lips. She shut her eyes when recognition finally dawned.

Feathers. His mouth was full of feathers. They lay spilled around him on the floor, but even behind closed eyes, she could see his cheeks bulging with them. Feathers.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, opening her eyes. ‘I’m sorry for whatever they did to you, and I’m sorry we brought you back here.’ Her blink was long and slow and she waited for the feel of that beak against her own throat, prepared to feel hot blood against her skin and the press of suffocating wings against her face.

It didn’t come.