THE ROOF MAN

She awoke startled and drenched in sweat. Listening for the source of her unwanted wake up call. She leant forward to peer down on the street below through the skylight that stretched above her bed. An uncomfortable cot, slotted tightly against the wall beneath the sloping ceiling. A compact but necessary set up in her tiny but cost-effective abode. A loft room on the top floor of the building. What was once a spacious merchant’s townhouse now mercilessly divvied up, every inch rammed to the brim with tenants. There did not appear to be anybody outside nor any lights on in nearby windows. She twisted her head at an awkward angle to gaze upwards towards the chimney, squinting through the lichen and bird shit smeared glass. The aerial was shaking to and fro, its vibrations rapidly falling closer together and lessening in strength with each gyration.

Stupid birds! Something had been perching there and flown off. That’s what must have woken her. It no doubt having shat on her window first…

Pigeons were always cooing down the chimney, seemingly trying to attract females by directing their calls into the chimney pots, amplifying their song. Making them sound larger and more impressive. Such idiotic animals. Only the other day she was working from home, tapping her pen in time to her music, when a violent cascade of dust suddenly rained down the chimney. Although the fireplace had been sealed off long ago, a small whompf of soot blasted through the ventilation grating at its base. Accompanied by a musty smell of decay. There was a frantic flapping and then a much louder avalanche of falling debris. Something big was shifting inside. A garbled choking sound became audible. And a dark fluid started to seep through the rusty mesh. She had run downstairs to fetch her landlady and a phone call later, the maintenance man from down the road had pried off the grating and thrust his hand inside. Groping about within he had found enormous quantities of bones, large clumps of hair, amidst unknown mounds of what smelt like faecal matter or rotting meat, mangled with feathers. And lo and behold the freshest addition to this grotesque collection, the blood-soaked headless corpse of a pigeon, still twitching.

She lay back down, trying to shake that delightful memory from her mind. God, she needed to find a new place. A lonesome owl twitted in the distance, another much closer made a twoo in response. There was something off about the reply. It was too deep. Before she’d had time to acknowledge this peculiarity, exhausted she succumbed to sleep.

The next few nights were much the same. Ever woken at odd hours by unusual sounds or movements. There were frequently scratchings, tappings and thumps during the day too. Presumably, magpies hopping about, picking writhing morsels from the moss laden crevices amidst the slates. She heard their agitated little honks and rattles up there often enough. They must be the culprits. She wasn’t sure what would be scratching and thumping at night though? Perhaps they were nesting? Dogs were also always barking up at her building. Owners scolding and dragging their frantically woofing wards past her seemingly loathsome property. Although sometimes it did sound like there were growls from an unseen antagonist nearby. But then sound did always carry strangely up in the loft, with the beams of the vaulted ceiling acting like soundboards.

One night there was a particularly loud commotion. A murder of crows was assembled upon her rooftop. Their raucous cries and flapping wings quite deafening due to their number. They were certainly mobbing something. Loud thumps struck all about above her. Clouds of black feathers erupting into what she could see of the night air. One crow’s voice standing out higher and more urgent than the rest, moments later it appeared to be hurled past her window. Its brethren’s caws then rising to a more fevered pitch. The ceiling rattling beneath this immense battle of the corvids. Suddenly there was a loud sliding and a room shaking series of bouncing thumps, as of an enormous mass rolling. Followed by snapping, a groaning creak, and a titanic CRASH along with the tinkle of smashing glass. Car alarms up and down the street now joining in with this chorus of destruction. 

She leapt up and yanked her window open. Looking down to see that the entire front gutter and drainpipe had been wrenched free from the front of the house, devastating the drive below. Crushing the downstairs tenant’s Volvo. A few minutes later there was the rumbling of feet rushing down the stairs, she saw her neighbour bursting out of the front door, pulling at their hair in a confused rage, their expletive shouts carrying up from below. She ducked back in quickly as they turned to look up towards the building. They would no doubt blame her for this bizarre incident.

The next morning as bleary-eyed she rushed about her room, trying to get ready for work. She was stopped for a moment. Noticing the watery morning sunlight shining through a large hand shaped print amidst the lichen of her window. She must have done that last night in the confusion of the chaos. But the window only opened so far, how could she have touched that part…? No matter. She was late. Phone, keys, wallet. Out the door.

Upon her return, staring up from below, inspecting the damage from the night before. Observing that the layers of bird shit upon her roof were noticeably worse than on any of the surrounding houses. She realised that there were dozens of birds of prey circling her building. Buzzards and kites forming a vortex above her room. As she pondered at this unusual avian display, a roof tile slid and clattered loudly in its descent, free falling for an instant, before it would have smashed atop her head if she had not leapt out of the way. Mouth agape and key in hand. That evening whilst lying in bed staring up at the stars through the handprint, she could have sworn that she heard a quiet whining and mewling coming from atop the roof…it was probably just the wind.

Overwhelmed by the heat and an increasing stench that chose to permeate her room no matter how thoroughly she scoured every drawer and surface. Scrubbing and washing everything twice through. It simply would not dissipate. She threw her windows as wide open as they would go to earn some reprieve, despite the endless tide of flies and beetles that this seemed to welcome in. It was all to no avail. The roof tiles sun-baked by day, radiated heat, wafting even more hot, putrid air into the room. Only escalating the problem. And with this final barrier removed, the unusual noises became even more prominent. She awoke to the beautiful melody of a blackbird singing. Cut short mid-song with a forceful flump and snap. The damp Velcro sound of feathers being ripped out. Succeeded by a vigorous crunching and sucking.

It was around this time that she started finding unusual alterations within her room. Things were not where she had left them. There was a day where she had prepared her depressingly discounted ready meal and carried it all of the way up the three flights of stairs to her room. Before realising that she had left the sauce, which just about made it palatable, in the communal kitchen below. When she got back up there, half of the meal was gone and there was a whiff of stale urine. Another time she had gone to the bathroom and when she returned, absently sipping her coffee as she carried on where she had left off with her work, she spat it out in disgust. A foul-tasting greyish pulp was now floating on the top of it. On another occasion after a particularly tiring day at the office, she pulled back her covers to dive into bed, only to find some sort of brown glob with fragments of bone that looked like it had ruptured and burst all over her sheets.

As upsetting as all of these discoveries were, the most disturbing somehow was the ball and cup. When she had first moved into her room, recently converted into flats from the family home it had once been, she had found some old children’s toys in a cupboard and had become addicted to the ball and cup. Now and then, when she was wound up from work or overwhelmed with melancholy, she would give it a swing or two. That satisfying clunk as the ball landed in the cup helped centre her somehow. An innocent enough form of stress relief. She had forgotten all about it recently, tucked it away in a draw. Now whenever she came home from work it would be out in her room. Then one fateful day she heard its clunk as she was coming up the stairs. Followed by a laugh of glee and a sequence of snorts and claps. She turned her key in the lock, heart in throat and threw the door open. A sewage smell hung in the air, no one was there but the ball and cup was on her desk. As she looked about her room for anything else awry, she gasped and spun round, thinking that she had caught a glimpse of a face in the window, reflected in her mirror. She slammed the window shut. Shaking. And tried to report this intruder to her landlady, who just laughed at her. It sounded ridiculous. A man on the roof? Playing with your toys?!

That night she pulled the blind down and kept the window shut tight. Ears pricked for the slightest sound. There was an odd ‘owl’ calling again. A prolonged silence. Then an excited flurry of scuttling and a THWACK. Her room fell into a deeper darkness. The glow of the streetlights through her blind was eclipsed by something. Holding her breath. Hesitating but too curious not to check what was causing this. She snapped the blind back to find a filthy, grinning face staring down at her. The man's hands and nose pressed against the glass. Hooting, guffawing, and knocking.

She hurled herself downstairs to her landlady’s floor. Banging urgently at their door. Unimpressed by her hysterics, the landlady fetched her son, and he inspected the loft room. Shining the torch about the roof and seeing nothing. With irritated mutters they left the tenant to her fears and returned to the ground floor. She did not sleep at all that night. Opting for headphones to block out the ‘owl’.

On what was to be her last day at her office, she went to work. Glaze-eyed, twitching, and whispering under her breath about the birds and the man on the roof. Her co-workers sharing concerned glances. Returning home in a daze, she stumbled into her room to be overcome by the reek of death. Something swung into her face as she entered. Dripping, feathery and rotten. Corpses of birds and animals were strung up all about the ceiling. Some fashioned into mobiles rotating slowly, others more akin to dream weavers, crafted out of feather and bowel. Odd bone totems and fleshy dolls. Squirrels, crows, pigeons, little blue tits, massive buzzards. Skulls, skins, gizzards….it was too much to bear.

In her blind need to escape these gruesome ‘gifts’ she rushed backwards from the room falling head over heels down the stairs. Hardly feeling this in her panic. She started yelling and screaming. Banging on the neighbours’ doors. One by one they came out to see what the commotion was about. She continued ricocheting from wall to wall, still senselessly trying to reach her landlady’s door to find some sort of help or sanctuary. Amidst her ramblings, the neighbour with the crushed Volvo heard her mention a man upstairs. So ran up to check for this would be intruder. He returned shortly thereafter. Tight lipped. Holding his hands up in a calming gesture, he approached the tenant of the loft, restrained her, and locked her in the downstairs bathroom. The police were called.

As they barrelled her into the back of the police car and slammed the doors shut to take her away, she gazed back up at her room. Her eyes frantically searching. And sure enough, there he was. Ball and cup in hand, one of her hats atop his head, staring down at her forlornly, with an almost comically exaggerated expression of grief upon his face. His ‘gifts’ as a backdrop dangling all about him.

“He's up there! He's up there! The man on the roof! The bird man! No...look! Look!”

One of the police officers peered at her in the rear-view mirror and said:

“Yeah...sure he is sweetheart...”

Before rolling his eyes and exchanging a smirk with his partner as they pulled away from the house. Leaving the Roof Man to enjoy the room.