The Chimney Man
I’ll never escape the feeling that I’m being watched. I’ll never stop checking my curtains before I go to bed with my wife. I’ll never own a house with a fire place. Because for a week in the southern Ozarks, I endured a....well...a being that I have come to call The Chimney Man.
We moved into the cabin in midwinter, a couple weeks before Christmas. Looking back, I realize that the ashen footprints in the living room that my dad threw a fit over probably weren’t from the construction crew. We cleaned them, and forgot about them. That night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched in the shower, that someone was standing on the other side of the curtain. Of course, there was no one there when I pulled it back.
I wrote it off as being exhausted from the move, and I didn’t have any more strange feelings for the next few days. But one morning that next week my 6 year old sister said something that would later make me feel like I was about to be struck by lightning. My mother had asked how we slept that night.
“Fine,” I said, through a mouthful of scrambled eggs, “don’t remember any of my dreams though.”
“I played with man behind the curtain.” Amelia said, “I told him that he would be in big trouble if he kept getting the rug dirty.”
There was no fear in her voice.
My mother just kept on reading the paper, sipping her coffee as she wrote it off as a little girl’s dream land.
Later that day, I was taking some folded laundry to my sister’s room to help my mom out. I put it in her drawer, turned to walk out, and I saw them. There were two charcoal footprints under the window curtain, as if someone had been hiding there.
I still don’t know why, but I never told my parents. I just cleaned them up, rationalized them as footprints we missed on the initial cleanup, and carried on.
I had trouble sleeping that night. I kept looking across the room, into the back of my closet, expecting to see someone standing there. I was 17 years old, and I felt shame for still being afraid of ghosts. I drifted off finally sometime around midnight.
I still can’t remember what woke me, I just know that my sheets were soaked in sweat when I came to. I felt again like I was being watched, and just before I could focus my eyes, I looked at my curtains and saw black shoes poking out from under them.
I rubbed my eyes and looked back, and there were no shoes but the curtain was moving. I looked at my door and saw what I swear were coattails disappearing around the corner. I cowered, pulling my blankets over my head, knowing that if I pulled them down he would be nose to nose with me, looking into my soul.
Of course, I got blamed the next day for the dirty footprints to and from my room. They began and ended at the rocks that made up our fireplace. I couldn’t bring myself to look inside and up the smokestack.
I scrubbed the carpets that day in a daze, remembering what Amelia had said a few days before at the breakfast table. My thoughts sprinted for a rational explanation, but kept arriving at a strange comparison between chimney ghosts and Santa Clause. After I finished cleaning that evening, I wanted to ask my sister more about her friend from her dream. I walked down the hallway and knocked before I went into her room.
Amelia was sitting on her bed, looking up at the vent that came out of her ceiling. The floor around her bed was covered in that morning’s newspaper.
“What’s all this for?” I asked as calmly as I could, already having an idea of the
answer.
“For the man behind the curtain!” she exclaimed, “I told him I would help him keep the floor clean...he doesn’t like leaving tracks!”
She told me this as a matter of fact, as if she and the “curtain man” had been friends for years and I should know these things.
I almost lost it, my eyes widening and my mouth opening to scorn her. But I caught myself, resolving to solve the mystery. As shameful as it was, I decided to use my sister as bait, to catch whatever it was leaving footprints in the carpet.
“Okay,” I replied as controlled as possible, “just make sure you tell Mom that it’s for your watercolors.”
I left with a terrified curiosity, wondering what that night would have in store. 4
For what seemed like the 100th time, I lay in bed, unable to fall asleep. I watched my clock tick for seconds, minutes, hours...and then I heard it- the crumpling of newspaper.
I jumped off the edge of my bed with a thud, and heard my sister speak across the hall.
“No! Don’t Go!”
I raced out of my bedroom, just in time to see a tall, slender silhouette round the corner at the end of the hall. I followed it into the living room, where I found the twin doors to the fireplace left open, grey footprints illuminated in the lunar glow coming through the sky light.
I stood still a moment, my sister startling me a bit as she came peaking around from behind me.
“Don’t hurt him.” She requested. “I wouldn’t be worried about him.” I replied.
I grabbed my father’s Mag-light from the hallway closet and went back to the fireplace. I leaned back on the fireplace, and looked up the chimney as I turned on the light.
A sheet white face looked back at me, its eye sockets empty and a round black hole for a mouth.
I ejected myself from the fireplace, and just lay there in the floor, waiting for it to come out after me, but it never did. At some point, I got up, ignoring my sister’s questions, as a numb, thoughtless state came over me. I took the fireplace matches, doused the carpet in lighter fluid, and set fire to it.
Epilogue
Amelia and I never told our parents what happened, and I can’t remember what happened in the few hours after that. The only thing I can retrieve from that dark memory is sitting out in the snow with my family, pulling my knees to my chest as we waited for the fire department from a distant town. By the time they got there, the cabin had burned to the ground. The fire was attributed to an electrical problem. All that was found in the rubble was a pair of black shoes. My parents don’t know who they belong to, but Amelia and I do.
I’ll never escape the feeling that I’m being watched. I’ll never stop checking my curtains before I go to bed with my wife. I’ll never own a house with a fire place. Because for a week in the southern Ozarks, I endured a....well...a being that I have come to call The Chimney Man.
We moved into the cabin in midwinter, a couple weeks before Christmas. Looking back, I realize that the ashen footprints in the living room that my dad threw a fit over probably weren’t from the construction crew. We cleaned them, and forgot about them. That night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched in the shower, that someone was standing on the other side of the curtain. Of course, there was no one there when I pulled it back.
I wrote it off as being exhausted from the move, and I didn’t have any more strange feelings for the next few days. But one morning that next week my 6 year old sister said something that would later make me feel like I was about to be struck by lightning. My mother had asked how we slept that night.
“Fine,” I said, through a mouthful of scrambled eggs, “don’t remember any of my dreams though.”
“I played with man behind the curtain.” Amelia said, “I told him that he would be in big trouble if he kept getting the rug dirty.”
There was no fear in her voice.
My mother just kept on reading the paper, sipping her coffee as she wrote it off as a little girl’s dream land.
Later that day, I was taking some folded laundry to my sister’s room to help my mom out. I put it in her drawer, turned to walk out, and I saw them. There were two charcoal footprints under the window curtain, as if someone had been hiding there.
I still don’t know why, but I never told my parents. I just cleaned them up, rationalized them as footprints we missed on the initial cleanup, and carried on.
I had trouble sleeping that night. I kept looking across the room, into the back of my closet, expecting to see someone standing there. I was 17 years old, and I felt shame for still being afraid of ghosts. I drifted off finally sometime around midnight.
I still can’t remember what woke me, I just know that my sheets were soaked in sweat when I came to. I felt again like I was being watched, and just before I could focus my eyes, I looked at my curtains and saw black shoes poking out from under them.
I rubbed my eyes and looked back, and there were no shoes but the curtain was moving. I looked at my door and saw what I swear were coattails disappearing around the corner. I cowered, pulling my blankets over my head, knowing that if I pulled them down he would be nose to nose with me, looking into my soul.
Of course, I got blamed the next day for the dirty footprints to and from my room. They began and ended at the rocks that made up our fireplace. I couldn’t bring myself to look inside and up the smokestack.
I scrubbed the carpets that day in a daze, remembering what Amelia had said a few days before at the breakfast table. My thoughts sprinted for a rational explanation, but kept arriving at a strange comparison between chimney ghosts and Santa Clause. After I finished cleaning that evening, I wanted to ask my sister more about her friend from her dream. I walked down the hallway and knocked before I went into her room.
Amelia was sitting on her bed, looking up at the vent that came out of her ceiling. The floor around her bed was covered in that morning’s newspaper.
“What’s all this for?” I asked as calmly as I could, already having an idea of the
answer.
“For the man behind the curtain!” she exclaimed, “I told him I would help him keep the floor clean...he doesn’t like leaving tracks!”
She told me this as a matter of fact, as if she and the “curtain man” had been friends for years and I should know these things.
I almost lost it, my eyes widening and my mouth opening to scorn her. But I caught myself, resolving to solve the mystery. As shameful as it was, I decided to use my sister as bait, to catch whatever it was leaving footprints in the carpet.
“Okay,” I replied as controlled as possible, “just make sure you tell Mom that it’s for your watercolors.”
I left with a terrified curiosity, wondering what that night would have in store. 4
For what seemed like the 100th time, I lay in bed, unable to fall asleep. I watched my clock tick for seconds, minutes, hours...and then I heard it- the crumpling of newspaper.
I jumped off the edge of my bed with a thud, and heard my sister speak across the hall.
“No! Don’t Go!”
I raced out of my bedroom, just in time to see a tall, slender silhouette round the corner at the end of the hall. I followed it into the living room, where I found the twin doors to the fireplace left open, grey footprints illuminated in the lunar glow coming through the sky light.
I stood still a moment, my sister startling me a bit as she came peaking around from behind me.
“Don’t hurt him.” She requested. “I wouldn’t be worried about him.” I replied.
I grabbed my father’s Mag-light from the hallway closet and went back to the fireplace. I leaned back on the fireplace, and looked up the chimney as I turned on the light.
A sheet white face looked back at me, its eye sockets empty and a round black hole for a mouth.
I ejected myself from the fireplace, and just lay there in the floor, waiting for it to come out after me, but it never did. At some point, I got up, ignoring my sister’s questions, as a numb, thoughtless state came over me. I took the fireplace matches, doused the carpet in lighter fluid, and set fire to it.
Epilogue
Amelia and I never told our parents what happened, and I can’t remember what happened in the few hours after that. The only thing I can retrieve from that dark memory is sitting out in the snow with my family, pulling my knees to my chest as we waited for the fire department from a distant town. By the time they got there, the cabin had burned to the ground. The fire was attributed to an electrical problem. All that was found in the rubble was a pair of black shoes. My parents don’t know who they belong to, but Amelia and I do.
Chocolate Girl
The Louisiana summers were always so hot; even on days like this when the sky was completely over-cast with dark, grey clouds. Henry was grateful the good ol’ USPS had issued shorts for the summers; otherwise it would make being a mailman that much worse. As he drove down his new route he could feel the sweat that had soaked through his shirt chill his lower back every time he hit a bump in the dirt road. It was a long day; the distance between houses on the backwoods, swampy area of his new route was almost a half mile or more a stretch. His beard was wet and blowing in the small, personal fan that dangled from the carrier-truck’s ceiling. The air conditioning had gone out and it was miserable hot.
Henry had always been a friendly man who, at times, seemed over-qualified in the brains department for his job. He was never seen without something in his hands that he was reading. In the mornings before all the mailmen started out from the post office, they would stand around discussing politics, social concerns, and life in general. He never joined into the conversations willingly, but was always asked his opinion on what was being discussed. Henry’s opinion was always held in the highest regard, as he always made the most sound, and thorough statements of anyone else working there.
Now, as he drove past the tall grass and Spanish moss-covered trees, Henry did what he always did: took out his thermos of homemade, chocolate-malt liquor and took a sip. Henry was no drunk and never had been; but he enjoyed his sipping liquor as much as the next. Something about the chocolate malt and the slight buzzing effect of the liquor that made him feel childish again. He smiled his broad smile that he always seemed to have one whether he was with people or not. The next stop was an old manor that had originally belonged to cotton barons in the early 1800s. By this time, the plantation itself was all but gone and
the manor was in a state of major disrepair. As Henry pulled up, he remembered that he had a large box to deliver here so he was going to have to get out and walk to the front of the house.
As he approached the manor, he realized the disrepair was far worse than he had originally noticed. The home looked as though it ought to be condemned. Windows were cracked and shattered, ivy had crept all the way up the side of the house and onto the roof even, paint was flaking off everywhere, and the wrap-around porch looked completely warped and as disfigured as his grandfather’s arthritic hands. The garden was overgrown and the iconic, religious statues within the garden were crumbling and worn.
The walk-way was long and made of old, brittle bricks that had lost their mortar years ago. Henry noticed an old woman looking out of one of the partially broken, upstairs windows. Here hair was completely white. In fact, Henry noticed, everything about here seemed white. She turned and walked away from the window into the recesses of the manor with what appeared to be a great difficulty in movement. Henry decided with the old woman having such a difficult time moving, he would actually set the package inside for her instead of leaving it on the porch as he might otherwise do.
When the door opened Henry was greeted by the old woman. She was even more old and haggard-looking up close and in person than she had seemed to be at the window even.
“Would you like me to bring this inside ma’am?” “Yes. Please young man, come in.” “Where would you like me to set it?” “Could you bring it into the kitchen for me please?”
Henry followed the woman into her granite kitchen and set the box on a perfectly in-tact counter. The rest of the home he had seen, inside and out, was falling apart, yet the kitchen appeared to be immaculate. He looked over and saw the shaking woman’s hands trying to cut opened the box with a kitchen knife. She was unable to make any progress on it and set the knife on the counter-top and began to rub her old, sore hands.
“Let me get that for you.”
“Thank you very much for helping a poor old woman.” “It’s my pleasure ma’am,” Henry said as he easily sliced opened the box.
“Could you be so kind as to help me set the things on the counter? I fear that some of them may be too heavy for my hands.”
“Not a problem at all miss,” Henry said as he began to place the confectioner’s sugar and cocoa onto the counter from the box.
“A baker huh?’ “Oh yes. I’m making chocolate pudding for my children.” “I see. That may be difficult though. I don’t see any gelatin in here.” “Oh my.”
“That’s ok. Y’know, that’s tuff is mostly bone-meal anyways,” Henry said to the woman, whose hunched back was turned towards him now. She was leaning on the counter as though she were tired.
“Oh yes. I know it is,” she said calmly just as she effortlessly whipped around and slashed across Henry’s neck, “Thankfully you’re here for that.”
“Here you go babies,” the old woman said as she lowered the large pan of chocolate pudding to the ground. She no longer looked or moved as an old woman. The meal she had before getting the bones had rejuvenated and somehow given youth to her body.
The short hairless, creatures came out of the bushes, dragging their long, bony arms and spidery fingers. Their small mouths twitched and
their oversized black eyes looked greedily at the chocolate pudding.
The Louisiana summers were always so hot; even on days like this when the sky was completely over-cast with dark, grey clouds. Henry was grateful the good ol’ USPS had issued shorts for the summers; otherwise it would make being a mailman that much worse. As he drove down his new route he could feel the sweat that had soaked through his shirt chill his lower back every time he hit a bump in the dirt road. It was a long day; the distance between houses on the backwoods, swampy area of his new route was almost a half mile or more a stretch. His beard was wet and blowing in the small, personal fan that dangled from the carrier-truck’s ceiling. The air conditioning had gone out and it was miserable hot.
Henry had always been a friendly man who, at times, seemed over-qualified in the brains department for his job. He was never seen without something in his hands that he was reading. In the mornings before all the mailmen started out from the post office, they would stand around discussing politics, social concerns, and life in general. He never joined into the conversations willingly, but was always asked his opinion on what was being discussed. Henry’s opinion was always held in the highest regard, as he always made the most sound, and thorough statements of anyone else working there.
Now, as he drove past the tall grass and Spanish moss-covered trees, Henry did what he always did: took out his thermos of homemade, chocolate-malt liquor and took a sip. Henry was no drunk and never had been; but he enjoyed his sipping liquor as much as the next. Something about the chocolate malt and the slight buzzing effect of the liquor that made him feel childish again. He smiled his broad smile that he always seemed to have one whether he was with people or not. The next stop was an old manor that had originally belonged to cotton barons in the early 1800s. By this time, the plantation itself was all but gone and
the manor was in a state of major disrepair. As Henry pulled up, he remembered that he had a large box to deliver here so he was going to have to get out and walk to the front of the house.
As he approached the manor, he realized the disrepair was far worse than he had originally noticed. The home looked as though it ought to be condemned. Windows were cracked and shattered, ivy had crept all the way up the side of the house and onto the roof even, paint was flaking off everywhere, and the wrap-around porch looked completely warped and as disfigured as his grandfather’s arthritic hands. The garden was overgrown and the iconic, religious statues within the garden were crumbling and worn.
The walk-way was long and made of old, brittle bricks that had lost their mortar years ago. Henry noticed an old woman looking out of one of the partially broken, upstairs windows. Here hair was completely white. In fact, Henry noticed, everything about here seemed white. She turned and walked away from the window into the recesses of the manor with what appeared to be a great difficulty in movement. Henry decided with the old woman having such a difficult time moving, he would actually set the package inside for her instead of leaving it on the porch as he might otherwise do.
When the door opened Henry was greeted by the old woman. She was even more old and haggard-looking up close and in person than she had seemed to be at the window even.
“Would you like me to bring this inside ma’am?” “Yes. Please young man, come in.” “Where would you like me to set it?” “Could you bring it into the kitchen for me please?”
Henry followed the woman into her granite kitchen and set the box on a perfectly in-tact counter. The rest of the home he had seen, inside and out, was falling apart, yet the kitchen appeared to be immaculate. He looked over and saw the shaking woman’s hands trying to cut opened the box with a kitchen knife. She was unable to make any progress on it and set the knife on the counter-top and began to rub her old, sore hands.
“Let me get that for you.”
“Thank you very much for helping a poor old woman.” “It’s my pleasure ma’am,” Henry said as he easily sliced opened the box.
“Could you be so kind as to help me set the things on the counter? I fear that some of them may be too heavy for my hands.”
“Not a problem at all miss,” Henry said as he began to place the confectioner’s sugar and cocoa onto the counter from the box.
“A baker huh?’ “Oh yes. I’m making chocolate pudding for my children.” “I see. That may be difficult though. I don’t see any gelatin in here.” “Oh my.”
“That’s ok. Y’know, that’s tuff is mostly bone-meal anyways,” Henry said to the woman, whose hunched back was turned towards him now. She was leaning on the counter as though she were tired.
“Oh yes. I know it is,” she said calmly just as she effortlessly whipped around and slashed across Henry’s neck, “Thankfully you’re here for that.”
“Here you go babies,” the old woman said as she lowered the large pan of chocolate pudding to the ground. She no longer looked or moved as an old woman. The meal she had before getting the bones had rejuvenated and somehow given youth to her body.
The short hairless, creatures came out of the bushes, dragging their long, bony arms and spidery fingers. Their small mouths twitched and
their oversized black eyes looked greedily at the chocolate pudding.