A Devil in the Fireplace (Part Two)
The Chronicles of Ashwrath Episode five A Devil in the Fireplace Part two Welcome to Ashwrath. This is a fiction podcast set in the medieval village during the plague of thirteen forty eight, told through the journal of its priest, a man trying to hold his faith together while the world comes apart around him. If you're enjoying it, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever. It genuinely helps, and I'll keep going as long as you keep listening. Thank you.
John Pike:Mary Tench said it first, and I wrote it down as child strangeness, the kind of thing children say when they have been given more than they know how to carry and have to put somewhere. There is a devil in the fireplace. I sat with that sentence for three days and told myself it was grief wearing a strange coat, the way grief does in the young, who have not yet learned to dress it properly. I do not believe that anymore. Want to say that plainly at the start before I tell you what happened on the night of the twenty seventh because I think a man owes it to whoever reads after him to say what he has come to believe before he tells you why.
John Pike:There is a devil in the fireplace, not one, not confined to the tench hearth below the Tanner's Yard. By the morning of the twenty seventh, four households had come to me separately. In the particular shamefaced way people come when they suspect they will not be believed, to say that their fire had gone strange in the night. Good wife Miller says hers burned blue for the length of a paternoster and gave off no heat at all, though the wood kept burning down as wood should. The Tannis boy said he saw a face in his embers that was not his own face reflected and that the face watched him get into bed.
John Pike:Edmund Tate's wife, and I have not written her name before, and I will now, because a woman who has carried this alone for nine days has earned the dignity of being named. Alison Tate said the fire has not warmed the house since her husband came back from the lane, no matter how high she built it, and that some nights, she believes the fire is warming itself at the expense of the room, drawing the heat in rather than giving it out like a mouth. The Chronicle knew before I did. It always knows before I do. I have stopped finding that remarkable, which frightens me more than the thing itself.
John Pike:The entry for the twenty seventh in the main hand, the patient one is titled, and this is the first time I have seen the Chronicle title and entry, set a heading over it like a sermon. On the matter of the hearth. It says this. The appetite that walked the lane on the night of the twenty sixth was sent back whole. Edith Crow spoke to it in the old tongue, and it went back into the ground, and the ground closed over it.
John Pike:And this is recorded truly. But a thing that has been full does not empty all at once. It left something behind the way a wave leaves foam on sand after the sea has gone back to the sea, not the sea itself, not dangerous in the way the sea is dangerous, but not nothing either. A residue, a smallness that came loose from the large thing in the moment Edith Crome named it and drove it under. The Chronicle calls this smallness by no name for 11 lines.
John Pike:Then in the same steady hand without ceremony, it writes the word the village has already been using in doorways and over washing lines. It writes the devil. Not the devil of the church, the Chronicles careful to say, not the adversary of scripture, not the fallen thing with the theology built around it that I have preached against every lent of my priesthood. Smaller than that, Older in its way and also younger because it did not exist before the 10/26/1348. At a quarter past nine in the evening, in a lane past the dye works, A splinter thrown off a larger dark when the larger dark was struck.
John Pike:It went where splinters go, into the nearest small dark places it could find, the banked coals of village hearths, which are, the Chronicle observes, the only patch of true night that a house keeps burning inside of itself on purpose hour after hour, generation after generation, and calls it comfort. I read that line four times. The only patch of true night a house keeps burning inside of itself on purpose and calls it comfort. I do not think I will ever look at a fire the same way again. And I have sixty years of fires left to look at, if God is kind, which this autumn, I am no longer certain he intends to be.
John Pike:I banked my own fire low that night out of something between caution and shame and sat with the Chronicle closed on the desk and told myself I would not open it again until morning. I kept that promise for the length of time it takes a man to notice that his room has gone quiet. In a way rooms do not go quiet, that the small ordinary sounds, the settle of embers, the tick of a cooling pothook, The wind finding the gap under the vestry door had all stopped. All of them at once, like a congregation drawing breath before a response. I looked at the fire.
John Pike:It had not gone out. It had gone still. The flame stood up from the coals without moving, straight as a candle flame in a room with no draught at all. Which is not a thing a flame does, and I have watched enough fires in enough vigils to know it. It spoke to me.
John Pike:I want to set down exactly how because I think exactness is the only defense I have left. It did not use a voice out of the flame the way a mama's devil bellows from behind a mask at a fair. It used my own voice, pitched slightly wrong, the way a man sounds to himself the first time he hears himself on nothing louder than an echo off a stone wall, familiar and foreign in the same breath. It said, you have been very lonely in this room, John. I know.
John Pike:Yes, John. I will confess to you, whoever is reading this after me, that this was the worst thing it could have said. And I believe it knew that, and I believe that is why it said it first. I asked what it was. It said it had already been told what it was, that I had read the word myself an hour before, and that it was flattered I found the word insufficient, because it found the word insufficient too.
John Pike:It said names were the Chronicles' business, not its own. It had never needed one before the twenty sixth, and having one now was, in its words, an itch it was still learning to enjoy. I asked what it wanted. To be let in properly once by someone who opens the door on purpose. I told it I would not.
John Pike:It said it hadn't asked yet. It said it was in no hurry, that it had noticed I keep a case on my shelf with a seventh volume in it that I have not read, and that it found this interesting because in its experience, and it was careful to say its experience, a young thing borrowing the memory of the large dark it came loose from, the way a child repeats a thing an elder said before the child was born, the seventh volume of a book like this is never a record. It is a door with the hinges filed off the outside, so the zip will only ever open from within. Then it said the thing that has kept me from sleeping since. It said quite gently in my own wrongly pitched voice, Agnes Marsh is still deciding, John.
John Pike:Doors that go one way are only true doors while someone is standing at the threshold. She has not stepped all the way through. Not yet. I could tell you how much longer you have. I asked at what price.
John Pike:It said it hadn't decided yet either. It said we were both, in our ways, new to this. Then the flames sat back down into the coals the way a man sits back into a chair, and the room's ordinary sounds returned altogether. The pothook, the wind, the settle of ash, and I was alone in my vestry with a fire behaving exactly as a fire should, which was somehow worse than the alternative. I have not told Vale.
John Pike:I have not told Edith Crow, though I suspect, god help me, that she already knows the way she has known everything else this autumn before it has finished happening. I sat with the Chronicle until the candle burned down past the mark where I know to stop. And in the margin, the second hand, the small, dark, observing one, there is a single new line that was not there when I began reading tonight. It says, he will ask you again. He is choosing his price carefully.
John Pike:Because he has never had one to spend before, and he does not want to waste it. Below that, in the third hand, the urgent one, larger and less careful, there are only four words, and I have read them the way I read the four words about Veil's boot print over and over until they have stopped being words and become a kind of weather I am standing in. Do not answer him hungry. I do not know what that means yet. I'm a priest.
John Pike:I have spent fourteen years telling this village that the enemy of the soul comes dressed as comfort, that the wolf's first disguise is always warmth, and I build my fire low tonight. And I am going to sit beside it anyway because it is cold in this vestry in the last week of October and because I do not yet know how to stop needing the thing I have just learned to be afraid of. God keep Alison Tate, who has built her fire high every night for nine nights and got nothing back for it, and who has not once stopped building it because that is what a wife does with a husband who cannot get warm. God keep the Tanner's boy who saw a face in his embers and told his mother and was believed, which is its own small miracle in a village that has stopped believing children by habit and started believing them again out of necessity. God keep Mary Tench, who named the thing before any of us in full words, in a smaller hand than the rest of us use, and who was right.
John Pike:God keep Agnes Marsh. Wherever the threshold is that she is standing at and roof beside her who is nine and does not yet know that some clocks are being read by things that do not wish her well. God keep Edith Crowe who sent the large dark back into the ground and cannot, I think, do anything at all about the small dark it left behind because you cannot speak the true name of a splinter. It does not have one yet. It is still choosing.
John Pike:And god keep me, John Pike, priest of Ashwrath, who sat by his own fire tonight and listened to it and did not answer and is not entirely certain if it asks a third time what he is going to say.
