THE OLD MAN AND THE CHALET

THE OLD MAN AND THE CHALET

[Note: Two sounds predominate in this story: the crackling of the fire inside the house and the howling of the wind outside the house. They also predominated during the writing of the story: the fire at Relaxing Fireplace Sounds - Burning Fireplace & Crackling Fire Sounds (NO MUSIC) - Bing video; and the wind at Whining Wind Sound Effects | Soundsnap. The reader might find the reading of the story enhanced by doing the same.]

The chalet stood in a small clearing, dwarfed by tall pines. It was an A-frame, so that the snow, instead of piling up on the roof, slid down its steep sides and gathered on top of the flakes already packed on each other, rising ever higher from the ground. 

From his shabby armchair in front of the crackling fire in the hearth, the old man could see the relentless snowflakes driven before the howling wind as they landed on their cousins already lying against the windows. He feared that at any moment they could burst through the flimsy panes, drip through the weathered holes or even burst the rickety frames.   The eaves were not wide enough to prevent the blizzard from blowing the snow in under them, but at least those flakes with their noses pressed against the glass were not as elevated as those on the open ground beyond, ground buried in metre-high days of snowfall.

The grizzly fellow stared into the warmth of the fire, raised his eyes to see the cold outside, then stared back into the fire again. The flames snarled in the large, open hearth. The menacing whine of the blizzard swirled around the angles of the house and moaned past the gaps in the building like an evil flautist playing discords.

The warmth in the interior and the freeze outside matched the awareness in the brain that lay behind the straggly eyebrows and the crumpled cheeks. The inner self of the man dwelt in a fragile security. There was peace of a kind, but there was also the threat of that peace being invaded or disturbed. Outside him, at least outside his house, the cold ruled and danger threatened. Hostile forces mocked him. He sensed himself as besieged.

Even though it was relatively warm inside the house, the old man was wearing his customary layers of indoor clothing to prevent his body heat from draining away. His arm and leg hairs were no longer as numerous as they once were, and their supporting muscles could not raise those hairs as effectively, to trap the air next to his skin and lower his outflow of warmth. The blood coursing through his capillaries did not react as efficiently as it used to, in reducing the loss of heat through his skin.   

Under his trousers, he wore a pair of full length, thermal leggings and thick warm socks. Even his pants had a thermal lining. On his torso, he had donned first a sleeveless vest, then a long-sleeved one. Two woollen jerseys over his thick shirt and a black knitted band of wool he used in his cycling days around his neck, completed his protection.

Outside, the wind continued to whirl around the dwelling demanding entry, every now and again increasing in intensity, increasingly grumpy at having that demand refused. It could easily have been a giant cat yowling at the moon. The loose window at the top of the landing added its tac-a-tac every now and again when the air current came at it from a particular angle, adding a sinister, decadent air to the texture of sound at his ears.

He rose from his armchair and went over to the hob in the kitchen. Filling the kettle with water from the sink, he lit the gas and waited for it to boil. The light was fading and the snow on the far mountains through the back window of his modest abode glowed pink from the reflected sky. As he picked up the kettle to pour the steaming water on to the teabag in his mug, a shadow passed the kitchen window so fleetingly that he could not even make out its shape. 

The instant alarm he felt, the fight-or-flight reaction in his gut, rooted him at the gas flame for a moment before he expunged it. As he turned to go back to his seat at the fire, the sensation gradually subsided, although it still disturbed him, even after he had finished his tea.

What could the shape have been? A tree branch perhaps, torn off by the wind and blown along? A wolf, maybe even a grizzly, chasing through the clearing between the window and the silent army of swaying pines? Some metaphysical ectoplasm? Or was he imagining things, with his neurons becoming sluggish and his memory defective?

He stared again into the fire.  Not at it, but into it. It sounded like eggs frying in a pan. There was also an underlying exhaling of breath as air rushed up the flue, an understated whoosh, but then whether the flames brought it about as they danced upwards or the agonised air outside was making the moan, he could not tell.

He studied the fire more closely, taking note of what he could see. He noticed the layers, the hierarchy of hearth-fire society: the black burnt-out ash underneath that would be grey in the light of morning; the red glowing coals in the middle, abandoned by the flames but still basking in the afterglow of their magic spell; the logs lying on top in various stages of combustion as the flames gyrated over them. The heat formed patterns of grey squares and rectangles and irregular shapes, with black lines between them, as the logs grumbled under the red and orange spirits prancing over them, devouring without ever touching.

The window on the landing rattled more insistently than before. Was something trying to get in? The stooped figure grunted, rose from his armchair stained by hands resting on its arms for longer than he could remember, shuffled across the floor to the base of the stairs and began to ascend one laborious step at a time. Reaching for breath, he paused briefly to allow his heartbeat to steady. Arriving at the landing, he noticed that the window was slightly unlatched. There was also a distinct scratch on the green outer paintwork that he had not noticed before. Quite a conspicuous scratch. Strange that it had not attracted his attention on his nightly pilgrimage to bed. Frowning, he re-latched the errant window as firmly as he was able.

He stood for a while, staring at the scratch, not knowing quite what to make of it, not knowing what to do. One thing he knew, though: he did not like the look of it. It was menacing, like the sound of the wind outside. He did not like all this menace. He had come to this place to avoid menace. He had come here so many years ago to find peace. It seemed as if menace might finally have found him out, learnt where he was, and come to haunt his last living moments. Then, of course, they could all just be illusions, the shape at the kitchen window, the rattle and the scratch here on the landing. He was probably imagining things, a touch of delusion perhaps, the bewilderment of an old man, alone and lonely, losing touch with the world.

Outside it had become completely dark. He would not have been able to see the scratch had it not been for the light on the landing. The bulb had been sizzling and flickering for some time. Soon it would cease its sizzles, and its flickering would end in darkness. He would have to wait for the summer before he could take the journey to the village and get a replacement.

He had left a solitary light burning downstairs for comfort, a sentinel that would safeguard his hegemony over that part of his domain, in defiance of the total blackness surrounding it. Moving on past the landing, he completed his needs in the bathroom, shed his outer clothes, threw back the duvet, climbed in between it and the sheet underneath and drew it up to his chin. He was thankful that his leggings insulated his lower limbs from the cold of the bed.

He surveyed the clutch of books stacked on the small table beside him, musing at them before selecting one.  He settled on Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter. He hadn’t dipped into it for a while and so read the blurb to refresh his memory of the book to avoid it from being strange when he continued reading: A group set up camp in a remote bay, but as the polar winter and endless night close in around them, they realise they are not alone …

As he started reading, he heard a tapping on the steeply sloping roof. It sounded like something trying to chip away at one of tiles near the top. Who could climb up there without a ladder? It could of course be that spruce tree he had planted too near the house. It needed trimming now and again to keep the branches away, to prevent them from tapping the roof as they swayed to the wind. Or was it an old man’s illusion? Something he was imagining? A figment of his fading mind?

He reached out to where his shotgun leant against the wall between the bed and his little mini-library of the books he was reading. His read books graced the bookshelves in his den downstairs. He climbed out of his bed, took the weapon and made to go and investigate. Hardly had he taken a step, when the tapping stopped, almost as if whatever was causing it had seen him coming.

He stood where he was for some minutes, his head cocked to listen for the sound above the roar of the wind. There was nothing. He turned back to the bed, slowly leaning the gun against the wall next to him before clambering back under the duvet. He began to read, although what he would do if he loosed both barrels and the thing kept coming, he didn’t know. 

After 20 minutes of this, during which there were no more taps that he could hear  above the wailing of the wind, he laid down the book, turned away from the lamp at his bedside, and closed his eyes. Normally he would switch the light off, but there was something about tonight that made him want to leave it on.

At about ten past three, when he had wafted in and out of a fitful sleep for about five hours and could stand it no longer, he sat up with a sigh, swung his legs out of the bed, slid his feet into his slippers and trudged carefully downstairs in his dressing gown. As a precaution, he took the shotgun with him. He returned to his home-within-home, his stained old armchair, and sat down before the cooling embers of the fire, placing the shotgun across his lap. The occasional lick of flame gave life to the grate.

He could still feel the caressing heat on his wrinkled hands with their knobbly knuckles. The remnants left behind after the flames’ fandango still glowed and faded intermittently in the hearth with a sound something like the slow, crumpling of paper in a fist. He closed his eyes and slouched back, allowing his mouth to fall into a gape.

The grandfather clock in the corner of the room gave out a loud tick at each sideways swing of its pendulum, marking each implacable unit of time as it passed never to return. The faded factory rug, with a design copied from Isfahan, lay on the old floorboards seeming somehow incomplete without the shaggy Labrador who had lain there until a few months before. The dining room table, faithfully attended by its high-backed chairs standing to attention on either side, awaited guests that would never arrive, for a meal that would never be served. 

As the fire continued to deepen into blackness, its occasional crackle fading hour by hour, the old man’s body, too, grew imperceptibly still and itself began to grow cold.           

For the rest, everything was as before.