The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year out and a New Year InDickens, Charles
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The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year out and a New Year In
Dickens, Charles
Christmas stories; Holidays -- Fiction
Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea
of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters
uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several
parts and shapes of different things are joined and mixed by chance; and
when, and how, and by what wonderful degrees, each separates from each,
and every sense and object of the mind resumes its usual form and lives
again, no man—though every man is every day the casket of this type of
the Great Mystery—can tell.
So, when and how the darkness of the night-black steeple changed to
shining light; when and how the solitary tower was peopled with a myriad
figures; when and how the whispered ‘Haunt and hunt him,’ breathing
monotonously through his sleep or swoon, became a voice exclaiming in the
waking ears of Trotty, ‘Break his slumbers;’ when and how he ceased to
have a sluggish and confused idea that such things were, companioning a
host of others that were not; there are no dates or means to tell. But,
awake and standing on his feet upon the boards where he had lately lain,
he saw this Goblin Sight.
He saw the tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming
with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them
leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He
saw them, round him on the ground; above him, in the air; clambering from
him, by the ropes below; looking down upon him, from the massive
iron-girded beams; peeping in upon him, through the chinks and loopholes
in the walls; spreading away and away from him in enlarging circles, as
the water ripples give way to a huge stone that suddenly comes plashing
in among them. He saw them, of all aspects and all shapes. He saw them
ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed. He saw them young, he saw
them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw them merry, he saw
them grim; he saw them dance, and heard them sing; he saw them tear their
hair, and heard them howl. He saw the air thick with them. He saw them
come and go, incessantly. He saw them riding downward, soaring upward,
sailing off afar, perching near at hand, all restless and all violently
active. Stone, and brick, and slate, and tile, became transparent to him
as to them. He saw them _in_ the houses, busy at the sleepers’ beds. He
saw them soothing people in their dreams; he saw them beating them with
knotted whips; he saw them yelling in their ears; he saw them playing
softest music on their pillows; he saw them cheering some with the songs
of birds and the perfume of flowers; he saw them flashing awful faces on
the troubled rest of others, from enchanted mirrors which they carried in
their hands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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