Hellhouse at Number 4 by Michael Mulvihill
This story grew out of an interest in suburban decay, neighbourly silence, and the quiet belief that nothing truly dangerous could ever live next door.
When the tall, gaunt man moved into Number 4 — pale-skinned, throat like a rod, eyes that looked straight through you — he offered no greeting, no kindness, not even a glance. It was as if people were nothing but smoke to him.
No one knew his real name. So the neighbours gave him one.
He became Logos, the Taxidermist.
Logos was obsessed with mounds — prehistoric ones. He wandered fields muttering about them, tracing invisible patterns into the soil with his cane.
Sometimes, on still nights, neighbours swore they heard faint bird calls from inside his shuttered home — not the chirping of sparrows, but long, low cries that sounded ancient.
The house had long been a ruin. A den for miscreants and parasites. Damp rot crawled through the walls. Plastic sheets covered shattered windows. Floorboards buckled under years of leaks.
Logos’s powdered-white skin made him look as if joy and daylight had been drained from his body. Too tall, too thin, stretched wrong. What began as the slouch of shame became a self-important strut.
He walked like the richest man in South Dublin, even though his house reeked of desperation — the kind that clings to people who polish rot and call it gold.
One of his habits was checking how many people his age had died that day. He’d scroll, laugh, point at the numbers.
“I’ll live forever — once I get those birds to come alive,” he once said.
And when someone from his past died — a cousin, an old classmate — he felt lighter. Triumphant.
There’d be cake.
There’d be beer.
He’d grin into the void.
Bless. He was a happy lad.
The Garden
Strange weeds of a peculiar kind grew unchecked, swallowing the garden and lawn. Logos tossed his food scraps into the grass until it grew hip-high, thick and wild. Sometimes, feathers appeared in the grass — long, black, and too large to belong to any bird in Dublin.
He kept a pit bull named Charlie, though the dog was never walked. Its waste lay where it fell, and on warm days the stench drifted beyond the fences into neighbouring yards.
Whenever Oliver stepped out his back door, Charlie barked with such ferocity he feared the dog might one day leap the wall. Over time, the crumbling barrier between them seemed to shrink. Confiding in his neighbour Francie, Oliver admitted his unease.
“I’ve already had words with him,” Francie said.
“What did you say?”
“That he was a sloth, a hoarder, and a disgrace.”
“I bet he loved that.”
“He just stood there like a big dumb rock.”
“And you did nothing?”
“I asked if he was even human.”
“And?”
“He didn’t reply.”
“There’s your answer.”
“I told him I expected the garden trimmed, the excrement removed, the weeds cut back. I warned I’d give him a list of other things.”
“Francie, you must really enjoy talking to walls.”
“Oh, I do. I certainly do.”
Oliver left his hellish neighbor for a month by the sea, reading philosophy and sleeping deeply. The conflict faded — until the bus ride home. A text awaited. Then the phone rang. Linda, another neighbour, told him she’d be at his door.
She was agitated, a sharp break from her usual calm.
“Wait till you see what he’s done.”
From Oliver’s bedroom window they looked out. The lawn was now artificial turf — at least no more rats, no more air heavy with dog filth. But behind it loomed a squat, hideous concrete structure surrounded by mounted birds.
“This is his revenge,” Linda said.
“Revenge for what?”
“He knows I had the Department of the Environment here about his garden. They gave him a telling-off. That’s why the lawn is plastic now.”
“I assume that building is a council issue?”
“Yes. But he had planning permission before he bought the house. We’re stuck with it.”
She pointed at the birds. “Extinct and endangered. A moa with a haast eagle overhead. The great auk. The elephant bird. The emu. The cassowary.”
“He’s a bit of a bird man.”
“A bit?” Linda gave a bitter laugh. “Francie saw him digging a hole. She swears she saw the dog’s corpse in a garbage bag.”
“She called animal welfare?”
“No. She’s scared. We all are.”
Night fell.
“Last night,” Linda said, “I was terrified to be home alone. There were noises — like recordings of bird calls. I think he wants them alive again.”
“Afraid he’s raising the dead?” Oliver joked.
She didn’t answer. “Help me watch tonight.”
Hours passed. A floodlight snapped on. Then lights inside the birdhouse. Huge eggshell halves lay in the garden.
“What laid that egg?” Linda whispered.
From the shattered shell emerged a man-sized, flightless creature, its head bowed. Oliver tried to film it — only static appeared. The creature raised its head, eyes predatory and fixed on them.
Suddenly, weeds erupted from the soil, thick as pythons, slithering toward Oliver’s house. The air filled with the sound of smashing windows and restless wings.
In the garden stood the hatchling, now grotesque — feathers slick with blood and dark matter — holding hedge clippers in one elongated limb, snapping them in rhythm as a spiral of black birds circled overhead. It hacked at the pulsing weeds, which bled like wounded animals. Then the weeds turned on it, coiling around its body.
The circling birds dove — not to save it, but to worship.
A ritual began. A summoning.
Logos had always been obsessed with birds. Not real birds — phantoms cloaked in feathers, black as plague, older than language. He spoke of “bringing them alive”.
They were not birds. They were devils with wings, waiting beneath the skin of the world.
When Logos opened that egg and whispered, “Let me show you my dirty bird,” he did not become their master.
He became their door.
The hatchling — firstborn of the devils — thrashed in the weeds. And then the birds turned on Logos himself, swarming in a frenzy, tearing and drinking him alive.
“A Renfield,” he gasped as they descended. “You’ve made me your slave… and now your meal.”
Then the sound was gone, and so was Logos.
But the door remained open.
And what came through would not go back.
