The Vision of Tom Chuff

"The Vision of Tom Chuff" is a novella by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, first published in 1860. The story follows the titular character, Tom Chuff, a comedic and somewhat bumbling man who experiences a series of supernatural visions that challenge his understanding of reality and morality. Le Fanu intertwines elements of gothic horror with humor, as Tom navigates his peculiar experiences, ultimately leading him to confront his own shortcomings and the nature of human desire. The narrative reflects Le Fanu's skill in blending the eerie with the absurd, showcasing his distinctive contributions to 19th-century literature.

• Short story

								
At the edge of melancholy Catstean Moor, in the north of England, with
half-a-dozen ancient poplar-trees with rugged and hoary stems around,
one smashed across the middle by a flash of lightning thirty summers
before, and all by their great height dwarfing the abode near which
they stand, there squats a rude stone house, with a thick chimney, a
kitchen and bedroom on the ground-floor, and a loft, accessible by a
ladder, under the shingle roof, divided into two rooms.

Its owner was a man of ill repute. Tom Chuff was his name. A
shock-headed, broad-shouldered, powerful man, though somewhat short,
with lowering brows and a sullen eye. He was a poacher, and hardly
made an ostensible pretence of earning his bread by any honest
industry. He was a drunkard. He beat his wife, and led his children a
life of terror and lamentation, when he was at home. It was a blessing
to his frightened little family when he absented himself, as he
sometimes did, for a week or more together.

On the night I speak of he knocked at the door with his cudgel at
about eight o'clock. It was winter, and the night was very dark. Had
the summons been that of a bogie from the moor, the inmates of this
small house could hardly have heard it with greater terror.

His wife unbarred the door in fear and haste. Her hunchbacked sister
stood by the hearth, staring toward the threshold. The children
cowered behind.

Tom Chuff entered with his cudgel in his hand, without speaking, and
threw himself into a chair opposite the fire. He had been away two or
three days. He looked haggard, and his eyes were bloodshot. They knew
he had been drinking.

Tom raked and knocked the peat fire with his stick, and thrust his
feet close to it. He signed towards the little dresser, and nodded to
his wife, and she knew he wanted a cup, which in silence she gave him.
He pulled a bottle of gin from his coat-pocket, and nearly filling the
teacup, drank off the dram at a few gulps.

He usually refreshed himself with two or three drams of this kind
before beating the inmates of his house. His three little children,
cowering in a corner, eyed him from under a table, as Jack did the
ogre in the nursery tale. His wife, Nell, standing behind a chair,
which she was ready to snatch up to meet the blow of the cudgel, which
might be levelled at her at any moment, never took her eyes off him;
and hunchbacked Mary showed the whites of a large pair of eyes,
similarly employed, as she stood against the oaken press, her dark
face hardly distinguishable in the distance from the brown panel
behind it.

Tom Chuff was at his third dram, and had not yet spoken a word since
his entrance, and the suspense was growing dreadful, when, on a
sudden, he leaned back in his rude seat, the cudgel slipped from his
hand, a change and a death-like pallor came over his face.

For a while they all stared on; such was their fear of him, they dared
not speak or move, lest it should prove to have been but a doze, and
Tom should wake up and proceed forthwith to gratify his temper and
exercise his cudgel.

In a very little time, however, things began to look so odd, that they
ventured, his wife and Mary, to exchange glances full of doubt and
wonder. He hung so much over the side of the chair, that if it had not
been one of cyclopean clumsiness and weight, he would have borne it to
the floor. A leaden tint was darkening the pallor of his face. They
were becoming alarmed, and finally braving everything his wife timidly
said, "Tom!" and then more sharply repeated it, and finally cried the
appellative loudly, and again and again, with the terrified
accompaniment, "He's dying--he's dying!" her voice rising to a scream,
as she found that neither it nor her plucks and shakings of him by the
shoulder had the slightest effect in recalling him from his torpor.

And now from sheer terror of a new kind the children added their
shrilly piping to the talk and cries of their seniors; and if anything
could have called Tom up from his lethargy, it might have been the
piercing chorus that made the rude chamber of the poacher's habitation
ring again. But Tom continued unmoved, deaf, and stirless.

His wife sent Mary down to the village, hardly a quarter of a mile
away, to implore of the doctor, for whose family she did duty as
laundress, to come down and look at her husband, who seemed to be
dying.

The doctor, who was a good-natured fellow, arrived. With his hat still
on, he looked at Tom, examined him, and when he found that the emetic
he had brought with him, on conjecture from Mary's description, did
not act, and that his lancet brought no blood, and that he felt a
pulseless wrist, he shook his head, and inwardly thought:

"What the plague is the woman crying for? Could she have desired a
greater blessing for her children and herself than the very thing that
has happened?"

Tom, in fact, seemed quite gone. At his lips no breath was
perceptible. The doctor could discover no pulse. His hands and feet
were cold, and the chill was stealing up into his body.

The doctor, after a stay of twenty minutes, had buttoned up his
great-coat again and pulled down his hat, and told Mrs. Chuff that
there was no use in his remaining any longer, when, all of a sudden, a
little rill of blood began to trickle from the lancet-cut in Tom
Chuffs temple.

"That's very odd," said the doctor. "Let us wait a little."

I must describe now the sensations which Tom Chuff had experienced.

With his elbows on his knees, and his chin upon his hands, he was
staring into the embers, with his gin beside him, when suddenly a
swimming came in his head, he lost sight of the fire, and a sound like
one stroke of a loud church bell smote his brain.

Then he heard a confused humming, and the leaden weight of his head
held him backward as he sank in his chair, and consciousness quite
forsook him.

When he came to himself he felt chilled, and was leaning against a
huge leafless tree. The night was moonless, and when he looked up he
thought he had never seen stars so large and bright, or sky so black.
The stars, too, seemed to blink down with longer intervals of
darkness, and fiercer and more dazzling emergence, and something, he
vaguely thought, of the character of silent menace and fury.

He had a confused recollection of having come there, or rather of
having been carried along, as if on men's shoulders, with a sort of
rushing motion. But it was utterly indistinct; the imperfect
recollection simply of a sensation. He had seen or heard nothing on
his way.

He looked round. There was not a sign of a living creature near. And
he began with a sense of awe to recognise the place.

The tree against which he had been leaning was one of the noble old
beeches that surround at irregular intervals the churchyard of
Shackleton, which spreads its green and wavy lap on the edge of the
Moor of Catstean, at the opposite side of which stands the rude
cottage in which he had just lost consciousness. It was six miles or

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