My mother and I used to live on the poor side of the city. It was a different time then – families were often packed ten to a bedroom, and landlords were tyrants. If you couldn’t pay the rent, they’d chuck you out onto the street without a second’s thought.
My mother and I were lucky: our landlady was kind. She’d give tenants an extra week to gather their rent if they needed to. She even let one of the tenants live there for free: an old woman called Miss Magpie. That wasn’t her real name, of course: everyone called her that because of the black-and-white dress she wore every single day. And, of course, because of her birds.
Miss Magpie lived on the same floor as us, at the very top of the building. She had the attic room to herself, up a spidery flight of steps behind a door she kept shut with ten locks. She lived by a strict routine, which – until that fateful Christmas – never once changed. Each morning, she’d lock the door behind her and head down the stairs in little pigeon steps, her ancient, wrinkled hands gripped tight on the banister. It would take her at least an hour to reach the bottom. Then she’d head across the road to the park and spend all day feeding the pigeons. When it got dark she’d come back inside, make her way up the creaking attic staircase with slow, trembling steps, and lock herself inside again.
No one knew why the landlady didn’t charge her – in fact, no one knew anything about Miss Magpie. She was a complete mystery, like something out of time. No one ever saw her speak, no one ever saw her eat – she seemed to live only for her birds. I once joked to my mother that perhaps she was already dead – and my mother was furious.
‘Never talk about the elderly like that! It can’t be easy, being her age and having no family left to look after her. We could all end up like that one day!’
I wasn’t so sure that Miss Magpie was just a harmless old lady. There were moments, when passing her on the stairs, that I’d suddenly catch her watching me with her beady black eyes. Her face would be cold and blank. It wasn’t like a person was watching me: it was like being studied by an animal.
And of course, the fact she was ‘just an old lady’ still didn’t answer the biggest mystery of all. What on earth did Miss Magpie do with herself on those long cold nights, alone in her attic room, without her precious birds?
Then one Christmas … I found out.
It was mid-December when it began. The shops were filled with Christmas displays and frantic shoppers, and the streets were hung with twinkling lights. Carollers stood on street corners and sang songs; the city felt special. I was sitting on the front steps of the building and reading a book. I was happy.
Then a pair of fake leather shoes appeared on the pavement in front of me and someone closed my book with the end of a long black cane.
It was a young man with a bad moustache: I hated him instantly. Every part of him was slick and false, from his shiny suit to his polished fingernails.
‘I live with my mother,’ I said.
‘Then go get her!’ he snapped. ‘It’s the end of the month – rent’s due!’
I was confused. ‘Where’s the landlady?’
The man sniggered. ‘Old cow carked it in the middle of the night. She’s dead! Kicked the bucket! Which makes me, her beloved nephew, your new landlord!’
He barged past me and started pounding on every door.
‘Open up! I want six months’ rent in advance from everyone, right now!’
Six months rent! It was unthinkable – far more than anyone could afford, especially at Christmas. People begged for more time to find the money, but the landlord refused. Soon the road outside our building was covered in crying families with nowhere to go, clutching their few belongings.
We were lucky – my mother had been secretly saving up for months to buy me a Christmas present. She handed over the money with tears in her eyes, and the landlord stuffed it in his pocket without even bothering to count it.
‘What about that room?’ he grunted. ‘Who lives in there?’
He nodded to Miss Magpie’s door at the end of the corridor. My mother steeled herself.
‘An old lady. Your aunt let her live here for free.’
The landlord’s hat nearly popped off his head.
‘Free? Am I hearing things?’ He hammered on the door. ‘Open up, you old bat! Your days of sponging off me are over – I want all the rent you owe, right now!’
Of course, Miss Magpie was still in the park – but we weren’t going to tell him that. The landlord took a set of keys from his pocket and tried to unlock the bolts on the door. To his surprise, none of them worked.
‘Fixing her own locks, is she? That’s a criminal offence, that is! I could have her arrested!’
‘Please, leave her alone,’ my mother begged. ‘She’s a frail old lady – she’ll never survive if you kick her out now!’
At that moment, as if by magic, Miss Magpie appeared at the top of the stairs. I was surprised to see her – she was hours earlier than usual. It was like she knew what was going on. The landlord stormed down the corridor and blocked her path.
‘Ha! Thought you could lock me out, did you? Well, I want all the rent you owe and compensation for that door!’
He trailed off. Miss Magpie hadn’t even noticed him – she simply hobbled past, her eyes fixed to the floor as she made her way to the attic. The landlord was shocked for a moment – then his face turned nasty. He grabbed her by the arm, digging his polished fingernails deep into her flesh.
‘Listen, you deaf old coot—’
Miss Magpie whipped round and thrashed him across the knees with her walking stick. The crack was agonising – the landlord howled with pain. Then, with incredible strength, Miss Magpie flipped him off his feet and sent him pinwheeling over the banister. The landlord tumbled down the stairs, hitting every step along the way before smashing into the Christmas tree at the bottom, dazed and groaning.
My mother and I were speechless. We never expected Miss Magpie to move so quickly – let alone have the strength to throw someone down the stairs. It was as though she was sixty years younger all of a sudden. We watched in amazement as she calmly unlocked her attic room, hobbled into her private world, and shut us out once more.
The landlord staggered to his feet on the floor below.
‘That … that does it! You’re out of here! You hear me? OUT!’
He stormed outside and disappeared. My mother was terrified for Miss Magpie. She knocked on her door and pleaded with her to listen, to come out before it was too late – but Miss Magpie stayed in her room, silent as always.
The landlord soon returned – and this time he had company: four equally greasy friends, all hair oil and pointy shoes. Each of them carried a sledgehammer. Before I knew what was happening, Mother had thrown me into our flat and shut me inside – all I could do was press my ear to the wall and listen as the landlord pounded on Miss Magpie’s door and my mother tried to stop him.
‘For heavens’ sake, she’s a harmless old lady! You should all be ashamed of yourselves!’
The landlord ignored her. ‘One more chance, you foul old bat – open this door or we’ll break it down and drag you out!’
There was no answer – the attic was as silent as ever. I heard the landlord step back.
‘Right, lads, let her have it!’
The corridor filled with the sound of sledgehammers smashing against wood. My mother begged them to stop, but it was no use – with a colossal crack, the bolted door broke from the frame and the five men flew up the wooden steps. I heard my mother run after them, shouting at them to leave Miss Magpie alone …
And then came the strangest sound of all.
Silence.
I expected shouting. I expected to hear another fight. I listened for what felt like hours, trying to work out what was going on above me – but there was just … nothing.
I was about to give up when I finally heard a pair of footsteps race down the wooden steps. The door flew open and my mother ran inside. I knew instantly that something was wrong. She was as pale as a ghost.
‘Get your things. We’re leaving.’
‘But—’
‘Now.’
I knew that voice – I knew not to argue. I had never seen her look so frightened before. We packed our bags and left without looking back.
We spent Christmas with my aunt, sleeping on the floor of her apartment. When the New Year came we moved to another city – and that was that. We left everything behind. My mother refused to go back to the old building.
She was never the same after that Christmas. I asked her again and again what had happened in Miss Magpie’s attic – I must have asked a hundred times. But my mother never said anything. I had no idea what happened that day to make my mother change so utterly, so quickly. It made me hate Christmas – despise it.
It was only much later in life – when my mother died, in fact – that I found out the full story. At the funeral I asked my aunt if Mother had ever spoken about what happened in Miss Magpie’s attic – and to my amazement, my aunt said that she did.
‘But a lot of it just … didn’t make any sense,’ she explained apologetically. ‘To be honest, I thought your mother had gone mad.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
She told me everything she knew. The landlord and his cronies had run into the attic and my mother had followed them. She was trying to stop them before they did something terrible to Miss Magpie – but when she reached the top of the stairs, she couldn’t believe what she saw.
The attic was completely empty. It was a single dark room that ran from one end of the building to the other. At the far end, a great hole was torn in the roof. Wind was blowing through and leaving great flurries of snow on the attic floor; in the distance, the city cathedral was tolling the hour.
There was no furniture, not even a bed. Just a carpet of dried leaves and tiny bones on the floor. In fact, my mother noticed there were lots of bones. Piles of them.
‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ the landlord shouted to his friends. ‘The old bat has to be round here somewhere!’
But she wasn’t – Miss Magpie was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t the house of an old lady – it was like the cave of some great monster. There were great gouges and scratches in rafters – some as wide as her hand. And the smell, my mother said – the stench …
‘Over here!’
One of the men had found something in the darkest corner of the attic. It was a filthy rag curtain, strung with wire from the rafters. There was something hidden behind it – a stack of dead twigs. There were sounds coming from it, too. One of the men shone his torch inside.
My mother never spoke about what she saw inside it – she simply refused to talk about it, right up until she died. And although I found the police report of what happened afterwards, it seemed none of the other men had wanted to describe what they had seen, either.
But they all agreed on what happened next. The landlord had taken one look at what was in the nest and turned ghost-white.
‘What … what are those things?’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘Get rid of them!’
The men had refused – no one wanted to go anywhere near them. But the landlord was revolted by what he saw in the nest. It touched some part of himself and petrified him – something that threatened to get beneath his polished fingernails.
‘I want them out of here!’ he cried. ‘Now!’
His friends refused. So the landlord did it himself. He grabbed a sledgehammer, emptied the nest – and killed the things inside it right there and then on the attic floor.
After that, everyone left – no one wanted to be near that room any more. The landlord was shaken and said he felt too sick to make his way home. Instead, he decided to spend the night in one of the newly vacated rooms on the floor below – there were plenty of them to choose from, since he had thrown out all his tenants. He told his friends he’d call them the next day.
It was the last time anyone saw him. When his friends hadn’t heard from the landlord in a week they came to the building and broke down the door of the flat he’d stayed in.
All the furniture was smashed. The bed had been ripped to pieces. The wallpaper hung from the walls in shreds. Instead of a window there was a huge, gaping hole torn in the wall. A blizzard was filling the room with snow. You could hear carollers singing outside.
There was no sign of the landlord. According to the police report, there was no sign of anything left in the attic either: no tiny bones, no nest, and certainly no Miss Magpie. It seemed like she had disappeared, too – but there was no attempt to investigate where she had gone. No one, it seemed, wanted to pry too hard.
But there was one detail in the report that stayed with me long after I stopped reading. When one of the policemen had searched the landlord’s bedroom the next day, he had noticed something unusual sticking out of the wooden frame of the shattered windows.
It was impossible for him to be certain – they were stuck too deep in the wood for that – but in the light, they almost looked like ten polished fingernails. Like someone had been gripping onto the window frame. Like they been clutching on for dear life while something huge and monstrous dragged them out by force. Like they had held on until their fingernails finally ripped free, one by one, and the monster had carried them into the dark winter night.