In due course the doctor wrote the death certificate, and the village turned out for the funeral. Perhaps everyone wanted to be sure that the old sinner was set down deep enough.
Until after the interment, each day and all day long, the thing in Harry’s cottage kept up its clatter in the iron pot. After Harry had filled in the grave, I returned with him to his cottage. He took the pot into the garden, tipped it onto its side, and lifted the lid. Something streaked away like a flash of light in the direction of the graveyard.
Later I picked up a thimble lying by old Goat’s grave. One thimble is very like another, but it could have been the one that pockmarked Slow Harry’s woodwork. I argued with myself what should be done. If the force that animated the rope and the thimble had returned to Goat, he would be alive down there, clawing at the coffin lid. I could imagine the bloody fingers, the air wasted in unheard screams. Could I let another human being, even Goat, die in such terror?
I am not a sympathetic character. I tossed the thimble away, and limped toward The Ox. My wound was still sore, and besides, it was past opening time.
THE CHIMNEY
by Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell’s writings scare the heck out of me. He takes the real world, our world, and exploits our fears. Many readers find such familiarity uncomfortable, but that is exactly what Ramsey wants. “The Chimney” may just be the best “real” story Ramsey has ever written. At first there may appear to be some extraneous material, but Mr. Campbell has everything well in hand and acts as the hangman’s noose, drawing everything together as the trap door opens . . .
Maybe most of it was only fear. But not the last thing, not that. To blame my fear for that would be worst of all.
I was twelve years old and beginning to conquer my fears. I even went upstairs to do my homework, and managed to ignore the chimney. I had to be brave, because of my parents—because of my mother.
She had always been afraid for me. The very first day I had gone to school I’d seen her watching. Her expression had reminded me of the face of a girl I’d glimpsed on television, watching men lock her husband behind bars; I was frightened all that first day. And when children had hysterics or began to bully me, or the teacher lost her temper, these things only confirmed my fears—and my mothers, when I told her what had happened each day.
Now I was at grammar school. I had been there for much of a year. I’d felt awkward in my new uniform and old shoes; the building seemed enormous, crowded with too many strange children and teachers. I’d felt I was an outsider; friendly approaches made me nervous and sullen, when people laughed and I didn’t know why I was sure they were laughing at me. After a while the other boys treated me as I seemed to want to be treated: the lads from the poorer districts mocked my suburban accent, the suburban boys sneered at my old shoes.
Often I’d sat praying that the teacher wouldn’t ask me a question I couldn’t answer, sat paralyzed by my dread of having to stand up in the waiting watchful silence. If a teacher shouted at someone my heart jumped painfully; once I’d felt the stain of my shock creeping insidiously down my thigh. Yet I did well in the end-of-term examinations, because I was terrified of failing; for nights afterward they were another reason why I couldn’t sleep.
My mother read the signs of all this on my face. More and more, once I’d told her what was wrong, I had to persuade her there was nothing worse that I’d kept back. Some mornings as I lay in bed, trying to hold back half-past seven, I’d be sick; I would grope miserably downstairs, white-faced, and my mother would keep me home. Once or twice, when my fear wasn’t quite enough, I made myself sick. “Look at him. You can’t expect him to go like that”—but my father would only shake his head and grunt, dismissing us both.
I knew my father found me embarrassing. This year he’d had less time for me than usual; his shop—The Anything Shop, nearby in the suburbanized village—was failing to compete with the new supermarket. But before that trouble I’d often seen him staring up at my mother and me: both of us taller than him, his eyes said, yet both scared of our own shadows. At those times I glimpsed his despair.
So my parents weren’t reassuring. Yet at night I tried to stay with them as long as I could—for my worst fears were upstairs, in my room.
It was a large room, two rooms knocked into one by the previous owner. It overlooked the small back gardens. The smaller of the fireplaces had been bricked up; in winter, the larger held a fire, which my mother always feared would set fire to the room—but she let it alone, for I’d screamed when I thought she was going to take that light away: even though the firelight only added to the terrors of the room.
The shadows moved things. The mesh of the fireguard fluttered enlarged on the wall; sometimes, at the edge of sleep, it became a swaying web, and its spinner came sidling down from a corner of the ceiling. Everything was unstable; walls shifted, my clothes crawled on the back of the chair. Once, when I’d left my jacket slumped over the chair, the collar’s dark upturned lack of a face began to nod forward stealthily; the holes at the ends of the sleeves worked like mouths, and I didn’t dare get up to hang the jacket properly. The room grew in the dark: sounds outside, footsteps and laughter, dogs encouraging each other to bark, only emphasized the size of my trap of darkness, how distant everything else was. And there was a dimmer room, in the mirror of the wardrobe beyond the foot of the bed. There was a bed in that room, and beside it a dim nightlight in a plastic lantern. Once I’d awaked to see a face staring dimly at me from the mirror; a figure had sat up when I had, and I’d almost cried out. Often I’d stared at the dim staring face, until I’d had to hide beneath the sheets.
Of course this couldn’t go on for the rest of my life. On my twelfth birthday I set about the conquest of my room.
I was happy amid my presents. I had a jigsaw, a box of colored pencils, a book of space stories. They had come from my father’s shop, but they were mine now. Because I was relaxed, no doubt because she wished I could always be so, my mother said, “Would you be happier if you went to another school?”
It was Saturday; I wanted to forget Monday. Besides, I imagined all schools were as frightening. “No, I’m all right,” I said.
“Are you happy at school now?” she said incredulously.
“Yes, it’s all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, really, it’s all right. I mean, I’m happy now.”
The snap of the letter slot saved me from further lying. Three birthday cards: two from neighbors who talked to me when I served them in the shop—an old lady who always carried a poodle, our next-door neighbor Dr. Flynn—and a card from my parents. I’d seen all three cards in the shop, which spoilt them somehow.
As I stood in the hall I heard my father. “You’ve got to control yourself,” he was saying. “You only upset the child. If you didn’t go on at him he wouldn’t be half so bad.”
It infuriated me to be called a child. “But I worry so,” my mother said brokenly. “He can’t look after himself.”
“You don’t let him try. You’ll have him afraid to go up to bed next.”
But I already was. Was that my mother’s fault? I remembered her putting the nightlight by my bed when I was very young, checking the flex and the bulb each night—I’d taken to lying awake, dreading that one or the other would fail. Standing in the hall, I saw dimly that my mother and I encouraged each other’s fears. One of us had to stop. I had to stop. Even when I was frightened, I mustn’t let her see. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d hidden my feelings from her. In the living room I said, “I’m going upstairs to play.”