The Flies -- A Tale of Horror

Our flat was recently besieged by flies. It was rather horrible. Ours is a two-story flat: the living room and bedroom are on the ground floor and the kitchen, dining room and two other bedrooms are in the basement. All of the basement rooms have windows that allow in a good amount of light. I came home the other day to find a couple dozen flies clinging to the French doors and windows at the front of the dining room. It turned my stomach. I was able to shoo them all out after I opened the doors and windows, but once the doors and windows were closed the flies began to accumulate again. Thankfully the ground floor was free of the nasty little buggers. Brad and I just couldn't imagine where they were coming from. We thought, perhaps, the uncharacteristic heat wave was at the root of the problem. But the amount of flies seemed to be terribly excessive. I complained to the landlord about it, but he seemed to brush it off as a minor temporary inconvenience. The following day, after going out to run some errands, I came home to find the basement full of flies again. Disgusted, I called the landlord and asked him to come down to take a look. He was astounded when he stepped into the kitchen/dining room. He said he'd never seen so many flies in one place before. It was as if we were stuck in the middle of a Hitchcock film. He helped me shoo them out again, then we set out to determine where the hell they were coming from. Fairly soon we began to notice they were emerging from the gas fireplace! My landlord proceeded to remove the insert from the fireplace and there he discovered a dead bird which had somehow fallen through the chimney. I'm surprised we never smelled it! Our landlord removed the bird and our fly problem seems to be under control now.