The Climbing Boy

Luci towers above the little Charles like the smoking chimneys around them.

He holds Luci close to him, silent as a baby lamb following its shepherd. A man with a thick, untamed mustache leads him around the boulevard, checking addresses along the way. As the chimneys rise higher with each house they pass, the more of his rotting smile Charles caught from the corner of his eye. Passerby can easily identify them – the Master with their slouched, unnatural posture and toolbelts, the apprentices in their thin rags that hung like curtains.

Once the Master finds the correct address, he knocks sharply on the door with a fist attached to an arm too skinny for his body. To Charles, he always looked like that strange, homemade doll his younger sister played with that had a wood block for a body and yarn for limbs. Ever since she died, he has wondered what became of the doll. Sometimes he gazes into the small fires made in alleyways by the ragged poor, shivering for warmth around a pitiful fire fueled by their few remaining possessions. Sometimes he gagged when he passed by those alleys, the smell of repulsive decay hitting him like a brick wall.

The door opened, and a woman with a rat-like face greeted the two with a crinkled nose.

"Good morning, Mrs. Clark." The Master said, yanking Charles beside him. The child didn't dare whine at the way the iron grip made his arm ache.

"Morning, Henry."

Charles noticed that nobody ever referred to his Master by last name.

The Master pulled Charles into the house, Luci nearly hitting the doorway on the way in. Charles took in his surroundings as they walked through the household, passing through the entrance hall. A waft hit Charles, and a rush of saliva hit him as he identified the smells from the kitchen – eggs, ham, bacon. Fresh bread. His stomach grumbled in ravenous craving. Charles couldn’t remember the last time he had a proper meal – if he ever had one at all. Even when he went back to the workhouse, the Master Sweep distributed meals so miniscule that he and the other boys would fall asleep on tear-stained sheets.

Charles wanted to find a way to sneak to that kitchen, to steal just a bite – enough to push aside the constant hunger, but a certain fear gripped him.

He had only seen a similar instance once during his time at the workhouse with the other boys. Three of them had snuck out in the middle of the night to steal from a house down the street, it was the closest Charles had ever seen of the boys interacting with each other like friends. Although they had succeeded and returned, when the Master saw their harvest those three boys received a lengthy, cruel sentence. Charles tried to block out the sight of the Master Sweep striking them until they bled and bruised, the sound of the boys screaming and howling, the way they laid catatonically in bed for days in the nude because even the brush of clothes on their skin was too painful.

Mrs. Clark led them through the household to the drawing room. Charles’s fear set in when they entered the room and a wide, cold fireplace welcomed them. Charles held onto Luci tightly in his small fists, shuddering at the abyss just above the hearth.

"Strip, boy." The Master ordered, Mrs. Clark leaving the room promptly.

Charles let Luci lay on the plush carpet as he pulled off his thin, baggy shirt and trousers. They barely did anything to help him withstand the cold, and only served as a curtain to provide him some public decency. His body was bony, pale, and starving. His elbows and knees were raw from his endeavors the previous day. He was terrified to look at any mirror and peek at his back. His hair, which once was pale ivory, now was stained as black as the tar he and Luci cleaned out.

Even after countless times, he always felt timid in the eyes of the Master Sweep that peered down at him with a gaunt, stern glare. Charles could sense that it wasn’t the displayed indecency, but rather the fact that the Master Sweep wasn’t bothered by it. Something about it made Charles far more terrified.

"Git up in there." The Master ordered, shoving him towards the fireplace.

Charles grabbed Luci and timidly climbed up into the chimney together, shivering and wincing as the sharp bricks dug into his back and joints. He pushed himself through the chimney, Luci assisting him in scrubbing the soot from the flue, raining upon them. He coughed, ash burning his lungs and eyes, and a few tears ran down his gaunt cheeks.

"Git it, boy!" The Master yelled.

The boy scrubbed the flue faster, scooting himself and Luci further up the chimney. Blood began to run down his shins and to his wrists, his breath picking up as the blackness above consumed him like a devilish maw. The dirty walls were closing around him, compacting him into the dark. The Master's yelling became echoing, indistinguishable demands. All that ran through Charles’s mind was the relief he would feel after he and Luci's job was done.

Two meters up the chimney, Charles found a bend. He braced himself against the corner of the flue as he cleaned the path ahead of him, the slant making his stomach drop further. Sure, it made it easier to clean with the chimney at a slope rather than a straight drop, but his return back through to the fireplace was what worried him.

He continued to scrape and brush away the soot, Luci being his only companion in the dark.

An unbearable heat began beneath Charles.

Smoke rose through the chimney, and a grave panic began within him as he furiously pushed the loosened ash down to the hearth. He prayed that he poured enough to extinguish the young flames.

He climbed further up the flue, smoke beginning to scald his lungs and throat as he fought to clear the chimney and breech the roof, and ultimately the fresh air that marked the halfway point of his task. He almost yelped when he found another bend in his path and hurried to follow it. His hands were slick in blood that mingled with the loosened tar, staining Luci. Charles shoved and yanked Luci through the flue as fast as his thin arms could, the burning becoming unbearable.

"Git it, boy!" The Master hollered above the blaze, echoing through the dark. "Git it, git it!"

Charles began to shriek and wail as his throat closed, dropping Luci on the brick and grasping at his neck. Little broken nails dug into the pale skin and drew blood, sliding down his protruding ribs.

It's not worth it.

Suddenly, he slumped over, his body dragging over the bricks until his joints bent and locked him in place at the bend.

The smoke drifted past him and Luci, into the night sky above all the other Climbing Boys.

Henry watched as a charred, blackened form was pried from the broken walls of the Drawing room and carried out of the Clark household. Along with the boy was his chimney brush, lodged with him among the tar.

"Gimme that." Henry demanded, snatching it from the crew that began to reconstruct the chimney.

Henry hurried to the front door, loathing the stench of decomposition. Mrs. Clark was visibly furious with him, her nose crinkled more than Henry thought was possible, and her eyes narrowed as she nursed a glass of stiff gin in one of the chairs in the entrance hall.

"I expect to not pay a single sterling for this." She spat. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like living with the smell? Me and my husband had to cancel all our in-house meetings this week because a boy was rotting in our chimney! Can you imagine our shame? Are you even going to answer me?”

Before she could even emerge fully from her seat, Henry shoved her on his way out the door. He heard glass shattering on the hardwood floor, followed by a string of profanities that impressed even the likes of Henry. He swore up and down that he would never come within a block of the Clark household, not if there was a risk of facing that woman again.

He then sighed, annoyed that he was a boy short. He usually had about six of them working at a time, but now with only five all he’s heard for the past week is their pleas for the extra ration. Though, Henry did enjoy having extra food on his plate. And he wanted his boys small and thin enough to fit into the flues anyway.

Through the city towards one of his other appointments, he passed a small family shivering in the alley. A sickly mother nursing a baby that clearly was starving and trying to feed a young son rotting scraps. She looked at Henry with gaunt, heavy eyes. He had his gaze locked on the boy, seeing his small figure and thin limbs. He grinned as he pulled out a few sterlings and presented his delicious offer with Luci in hand, knowing the mother wouldn’t dare pass it up.

The Dieners carried Charles back to the morgue. A dozen other boys around the same age were around him, all succumbed to the horrid blackness staining their skin and lungs. Some were simply wide-eyed in suffocation, at least identifiable. Others were worse than Charles, burned to a shriveled crisp beyond recognition as a human being. The Dieners couldn’t bare looking at the bodies too long, the sight reminding them of babies curled into fetal positions and weeping for their mothers.

Charles was placed into a thin, simple casket before being shipped out of the city to one of the suburb cemeteries with the other boys. Gravediggers then solemnly lowered the caskets into twenty-foot graves, the forest around them reeking of the cadavers.

They carefully plucked the nameless, small casket and lowered it into the ground, followed by another. A dozen small caskets, one on top of the other, were placed in the ground and covered in dirt. Nobody came back to label the lost dead with a gravestone, nor did anyone come to grieve them.