I slipped a good deal and lost my progress, sticking out my knees to stop me from falling all the way back down. Bloody knees, bloody arms, bloody elbows, bloody fingers. But up I went, up and up. Moving up the house. Way back down where I started there was banging now and swooshing and I knew that the heaps must have broken in and that if I slipped I’d likely go under, I’d be tugged under by the heaps. And those heaps, I thought, those heaps will be climbing up the chimney too, climbing up from down below, and from up above me I felt some rain falling down, but not just rain, the plip and plop of nails and screws of small heapbits making it down from the sky, a bullseye into the stack and onto my head. Cutting me, little slits. Heap below me coming up, heap above me dripping down, and somewhere in between: me, bloodied and sooted.

Then something else. Some other black thing upon me, pouring onto me. A new black in that other blackness. Black smoke. Someone had lit a fire to warm themselves on this howling night and that fire was beginning to cook me. How the Grooms should love that, to find me tumbled down the flue ready cooked. They’d pick off my crisp skin then, no doubt, have themselves some Lucy crackling, some smoked Pennant. The smoke wanted to fill the black passage, it wanted to be there all on its self, it was a thick fat thing crowding me, dressing me, covering me, taking me over. Only smoke to breathe now, nothing but black inside me, turning me black. I kept going up, coughing and steaming. I felt a sudden draught and went for it, and clambered into the cooler air, I was horizontal now not vertical, I was in a different chimney tunnel, away from the central flue, a branch of it. I crawled along it, cutting myself again, but I didn’t care. The flue went down suddenly, but I wasn’t ready for it and was rushing, tumbling, falling downwards and could not stop myself. There was light, light coming forward in a great rush, or me hurtling towards the light. I landed in a firegrate. Ironic that.

I was in someone’s bedroom.

Someone, some full-blooded Iremonger, was asleep in bed just a few feet in front of me. My tumbling in had not woken the sleeping mound. An adult I presumed by the size of it. And wearing a nightcap. I couldn’t see the face. Couldn’t tell man or woman. Sleeping away, despite the storm rattling the windows and house. I went into the room very carefully.

She had called me ‘the red rat’ and that surely was what I looked like then. Red of blood and hair, dirt and soot all about me, very ripped for certain, but still going on, still breathing, a bit of life.