The Mammoth Book of Terror (17 page)

“I see from the ledger I used as a diary in those days that ‘The Chimney’ was conceived on Christmas Day 1972,” recalls Campbell, “after (but presumably not related
to) my first viewing of Nigel Kneale’s
The Stone Tape.
To quote the notes:

“
Child afraid of Santa Claus . . . Perhaps from a very early age has associated horror with the large fireplace in his bedroom? His parents tell him of Santa Claus . . . But when they
tell him the truth about SC, the horror comes flooding back . . . And somethings always moving in there toward Christmas . . . He sees it emerge each year: but this year he sees it in more detail .
. .

“I sketched some other details, including the final apparition, and there the material appears to have lain until I was looking back in search of story ideas in June 1975. The tale was
written in a little over a week, from the 20th to the 27th of that month. By gum, the energy of the young! I don’t think I could be so productive these days.

“It wasn’t then apparent to me that the story was disguised autobiography – about my relationship with my father, who was an unseen and hence monstrous figure who lived in my
house throughout my childhood. I still recall realizing this as I read the tale to a gathering at Jack Sullivan’s apartment in New York.

“It was also there that I discovered how funny a story it was, but well before the end the laughter ceased.”

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 mother’s, 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 shoes.

Often I’d sat praying that the teacher wouldn’t ask me a question I couldn’t answer, sat paralysed by my dread of having to stand up in the waiting watchful silence. If a
teacher shouted at someone my heartjumped 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 afterwards 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 suburbanised 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 myjacket 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 emphasised 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 wakened 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 coloured 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 neighbours who talked to me when I served them in the shop – an old lady who always carried a
poodle, our next-door neighbour 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.”

Sometimes in the summer I didn’t mind playing there – but this was March, and a dark day. Still, I could switch the light on. And my room contained the only table I could have to
myself and my jigsaw.

I spilled the jigsaw onto the table. The chair sat with its back to the dark yawn of the fireplace; I moved it hastily to the foot of the bed, facing the door. I spread the jigsaw. There was a
piece of the edge, another. By lunchtime I’d assembled the edge. “You look pleased with yourself,” my father said.

I didn’t notice the approach of night. I was fitting together my own blue sky, above fragmented cottages. After dinner I hurried to put in the pieces I’d placed mentally while
eating. I hesitated outside my room. I should have to reach into the dark for the light-switch. When I did, the wallpaper filled with bright multiplied aeroplanes and engines. I wished we could
afford to redecorate my room, it seemed childish now.

The fireplace gaped. I retrieved the fireguard from the cupboard under the stairs, where my father had stored it now the nights were a little warmer. It covered the soot-encrusted yawn. The room
felt comfortable now. I’d never seen before how much space it gave me for play.

I even felt safe in bed. I switched out the nightlight – but that was too much; I grabbed the light. I didn’t mind its glow on its own, without the jagged lurid jig of the shadows.
And the fireguard was comforting. It made me feel that nothing could emerge from the chimney.

On Monday I took my space stories to school. People asked to look at them; eventually they lent me books. In the following weeks some of my fears began to fade. Questions darting from desk to
desk still made me uneasy, but if I had to stand up without the answer at least I knew the other boys weren’t sneering at me, not all of them; I was beginning to have friends. I started to
sympathize with their own ignorant silences. In the July examinations I was more relaxed, and scored more marks. I was even sorry to leave my friends for the summer; I invited some of them
home.

I felt triumphant. I’d calmed my mother and my room all by myself, just by realising what had to be done. I suppose that sense of triumph helped me. It must have given me a little strength
with which to face the real terror.

It was early August, the week before our holiday. My mother was worrying over the luggage, my father was trying to calculate his accounts; they were beginning to chafe against each other. I went
to my room, to stay out of their way.

I was halfway through a jigsaw, which one of my friends had swapped for mine. People sat in back gardens, letting the evening settle on them; between the houses the sky was pale yellow. I
inserted pieces easily, relaxed by the nearness of our holiday. I listened to the slowing of the city, a radio fluttering along a street, something moving behind the fireguard, in the chimney.

No. It was my mother in the next room, moving luggage. It was someone dragging, dragging something, anything, outside. But I couldn’t deceive my ears. In the chimney something large had
moved.

It might have been a bird, stunned or dying, struggling feebly – except that a bird would have sounded wilder. It could have been a mouse, even a rat, if such things are found in chimneys.
But it sounded like a large body, groping stealthily in the dark: something large that didn’t want me to hear it. It sounded like the worst terror of my infancy.

I’d almost forgotten that. When I was three years old my mother had let me watch television; it was bad for my eyes, but just this once, near Christmas . . . I’d seen two children
asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping towards them. They weren’t going to wake up! “Burglar! Burglar!” I’d screamed, beginning to cry.
“No, dear, it’s Father Christmas,” my mother said, hastily switching off the television. “He always comes out of the chimney.”

Perhaps if she’d said “down” rather than “out of” . . . For months after that, and in the weeks before several Christmases, I lay awake listening fearfully for
movement in the chimney: I was sure a fat grinning figure would creep upon me if I slept. My mother had told me the presents that appeared at the end of my bed were left by Father Christmas, but
now the mysterious visitor had a face and a huge body, squeezed into the dark chimney among the soot. When I heard the wind breathing in the chimney I had to trap my screams between my lips.

Of course at last I began to suspect there was no Father Christmas: how did he manage to steal into my father’s shop for my presents? He was a childish idea, I was almost sure – but
I was too embarrassed to ask my parents or my friends. But I wanted not to believe in him, that silent lurker in the chimney; and now I didn’t, not really. Except that something large was
moving softly behind the fireguard.

It had stopped. I stared at the wire mesh, half expecting a fat pale face to stare out of the grate. There was nothing but the fenced dark. Cats were moaning in a garden, an ice-cream van
wandered brightly. After a while I forced myself to pull the fireguard away.

I was taller than the fireplace now. But I had to stoop to peer up the dark soot-ridged throat, and then it loomed over me, darkness full of menace, of the threat of a huge figure bursting out
at me, its red mouth crammed with sparkling teeth. As I peered up, trembling a little, and tried to persuade myself that what I’d heard had flown away or scurried back into its hole, soot
came trickling down from the dark – and I heard the sound of a huge body squeezed into the sooty passage, settling itself carefully, more comfortably in its burrow.

I slammed the guard into place, and fled. I had to gulp to breathe. I ran onto the landing, trying to catch my breath so as to cry for help. Downstairs my mother was nervously asking whether she
should pack another of my father’s shirts. “Yes, if you like,” he said irritably.

No, I mustn’t cry out. I’d vowed not to upset her. But how could I go back into my room? Suddenly I had a thought that seemed to help. At school we’d learned how sweeps had
used to send small boys up chimneys. There had hardly been room for the boys to climb. How could a large man fit in there?

He couldn’t. Gradually I managed to persuade myself. At last I opened the door of my room. The chimney was silent; there was no wind. I tried not to think that he was holding himself
still, waiting to squeeze out stealthily, waiting for the dark. Later, lying in the steady glow from my plastic lantern, I tried to hold on to the silence, tried to believe there was nothing near
me to shatter it. There was nothing except, eventually, sleep.