The Hollow Flue

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on Frostbite Lane, the realtor warned us about the chimney. ‘It’s a bit temperamental,’ she said, ‘but it draws well once you get it going.’ We didn’t think much of it, just figured she meant the draft. We were wrong.

The house was a skeletal thing, all exposed beams and creaking stairs, set on a lonely stretch of farmland that seemed to swallow sound. Winter came early that year, and we spent most evenings in the parlor, feeding the wood stove that squatted in the corner like a toad. It was my grandmother’s stove, a massive iron beast with a cracked door and a flue that groaned when the wind picked up.

At first, the changes were subtle. Dishes would be moved overnight. The dog would whine at the stove for no reason. My mother complained of headaches that came and went like shadows. Then my little sister, Mira, started talking about ‘the little man’ who lived behind the stove. We laughed it off, told her it was just the firelight playing tricks. But her drawings began to show a figure with long, thin limbs and a mouth that stretched too wide.

I saw it myself one afternoon when I went to fetch my hairbrush from the upstairs bathroom. The brush was on the sink, but as I reached for it, I caught a flicker in the corner of my eye. There, in the doorway that led to the narrow service stairs, stood a figure no taller than a child, but with proportions that were all wrong. Its skin was the color of ash, and its eyes were black as coal, with no whites at all. Its mouth was a long, thin line, stretching from cheek to cheek, and when it smiled, the smile curved up like a scythe.

It stepped forward, and I smelled woodsmoke and something sour, like old pennies. It wore a tattered coat that looked like it had been gnawed by insects, and on its head were two misshapen horns, whitish with brown streaks, like old cheese. It raised one hand, fingers too long and jointed backwards, and I felt a pull in my chest, an invisible tether drawing me toward it. My limbs went numb, my thoughts turned to static, and I heard a sound that was half hiss and half whisper, but it was a whisper that spoke directly into my skull: ‘Mine.’

I snapped out of it when the dog barked downstairs. The figure was gone, but the air in the bathroom was cold, and my cheeks were wet with tears I didn’t remember shedding. That night, Mira came to my room, crying. She said she had a dream about ‘the hungry thing’ that lived in the walls. She wouldn’t say more, but she clung to me, trembling, and I could feel her small heart racing like a trapped bird.

I’ve always been the one in the family who felt things others couldn’t. I practiced reiki, made herbal tinctures, meditated on the energies of the natural world. I thought I understood the unseen. But this was something else entirely. I started researching the history of the house. The old farmhouse papers were in the attic, among moth-eaten clothes and a broken rocking chair. What I found made my blood run cold.

The house was built in 1874 by a man named Silas Harlow, a failed doctor who dabbled in what the local papers called ‘spirit photography.’ He was just one of many charlatans, but there was a newspaper clipping from 1892 about a scandal: Harlow had been arrested for grave robbing, accused of using ‘the remaining parts of the deceased’ in a ‘dark machine’ he kept in the cellar. The article mentioned a ‘great iron stove’ that he used to cremate the body parts. The charges were dropped, but after his death, the property was deemed ‘cursed’ by the rural folk.

The flue. That was the connection. The stove was in the parlor, but its iron pipe ran through the walls and up into the attic, where it vented out through the roof. I realized I had never actually seen the flue pipe in the attic. I climbed up there with a flashlight, dust thick as snow, and found that the pipe didn’t connect to the stove below. It was a dead end, ending in a sealed iron cap. But the cap was covered in strange symbols, scratched like a child’s drawing, and the cap was slightly ajar. Inside, I could see a hollow space, black as pitch, and from it came a faint draft that smelled of earth and burnt hair.

I knew what I had to do. I’d always been taught that certain entities feed on fear, on attention, on belief. The chimney had become a threshold for something that had been waiting in the dark for over a hundred years. That night, I performed a cleansing ritual. I burned sage, drew protective symbols, and tried to seal the flue with blessed salt and iron filings. But as I did, I felt a presence, as cold as the stove’s iron, wrapping around me like a shroud. I heard that hiss-whisper again, but this time it was clearer, and it said: ‘You have no power here.’

I ignored it. I finished the seal. I told myself it was done.

But the next morning, I found the seal broken, and the symbols on the cap had changed. They were no longer scratched but had been burned into the metal with a precision that looked like it had been done with a needle. My father, ever practical, just told me to stop ‘messing with old junk.’

That evening, I woke to a sound like a child crying. It was coming from the parlor. I tip-toed down the stairs and peeked through the cracks in the door. The stove was open, the fire inside casting long shadows. And there, crouched on the hearth, was the entity. This time, it had long, pointed ears instead of horns, and they twitched as if listening. It was rocking back and forth, and the crying came from a doll it was holding-a doll that looked like it was made of skin, with button eyes and a stitched smile. My sister’s doll. The one she’d left by the stove earlier that day.

The entity turned its head, and those black eyes locked onto mine. This time, its smile split its face, revealing row upon row of needle-like teeth. It opened its mouth, and instead of a hiss, it spoke in a voice that was a harmony of all the voices in my family, layered with static: ‘I am the one that lives in the walls, not just the flue. I am the one that breathes when you sleep. I am the one that has always been here. And now that you have seen me, I have claimed a part of you that will never be free.’

It vanished, but the doll remained, its face frozen in a grin, and I felt something cold and small crawl into the space between my ribs, like a seed planted. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that I had brought this thing into my life, that it had been dormant, feeding on the neglect of the house, and now I had given it a reason to wake fully.

In the days that followed, the house grew colder, the walls seemed to breathe, and my sister began to speak in a voice that was not her own, a low rasp that said, ‘Leave the flue open. It likes the draft.’ We tried to leave, but the car wouldn’t start, the phone lines were down, and the snow piled so high that the doors wouldn’t open from the inside.

I realized then that the flue was not just a chimney. It was a mouth. And we were already inside it.

Now, at night, I sit by the stove, poking the fire, watching the shadows dance. The entity sits across from me, sometimes with horns, sometimes with ears, always with that black, endless smile. It doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, but I can feel it drinking in the terror that I can no longer hide. And when I hear my sister’s voice from her room, reciting the same phrase over and over, I know that the flue in the attic is open again, and it’s not just the smoke that goes up the chimney.