The Kiln by William McIlvanney

been the familiar tolling bell, the plangent chord of menacing music, and Valentine Dyall, in a voice as dark as a subterranean passageway, had intoned, ‘Appointment with Fear. This is your story-teller, the Man in Black . . .’
    Tam loves that voice. He has often practised being Valentine Dyall in the bath until the water went cold - with fear, it seemed to him - around his body. Sometimes the family has put out the light and listened by fireglow, Michael making terrifying faces at Tam any time he dares to look over. (‘Stop that, you,’ Tam's mother says. ‘Ye'll give the boay nightmares. A face like yours. Worse than any horror story.’)
    They haven't done that this evening. Only his mother and father and Tam are in the house. But this story is frightening enough in the light. It is about a very self-confident man who claims to have no superstitions. To prove his contempt for such nonsense as the existence of ghosts, he makes a bet with another man that he will spend the night locked in a funeral parlour surrounded by dead bodies. He is given a tape-recorder to record his reactions throughout the night, so that he cannot come out in the morning and deny what he really felt. He tapes a few bland and relaxed comments at first. All is going well, it seems, until in the course of recording another message, he says how boring all this is and that he wouldn't even be afraid if that corpse in the glass-topped coffin were to tap three times on the glass.
    Just at that moment there is the sound of a fingernail tapping three times on glass. There is almost simultaneously the sound of a hand knocking three times on a door. Tam is nearly out of his chair before he realises why he is so frightened. The door that someone is beating on isn't inside the radio. It is in his house. It is as if the story has come out of the wireless to get him personally. In embarrassment at his own obvious fear, he starts to laugh. He is taking relief from the fact that the knocking is real. But the relief doesn't last long.
    His father's widening eyes are looking at Tam's mother. His mother's eyes look back nervously. Dawson Street isn't exactly the wild frontier but it can be rough. When you open that door.nobody is going to shoot you. But this can be an angry place, friendly but angry. You learn to know the different knocks on the door. This knock is too brisk. It is at least impertinent. It isn't the way you knock at people's doors. It means trouble.
    ‘Ah'll get it. Conn,’ Tam's mother says.
    Tam's father nods slowly.
    ‘All right, Betsy,’ he says.
    While she goes to the door, his father's eyes stay on the fire as Tam watches him. Neither of them can hear what is being said but Tam understands that his father is not listening for words. He is listening for sounds, a signal of what is happening out there. His body has become tense in the chair. His eyes are seeing nothing, as if he has erased sight instinctively in order to achieve what Tam has heard is true of the blind - intensified hearing through the absence of vision.
    With the heightened intuition of fear, Tam suddenly realises why his mother has gone to the door. It is to defuse a dangerous situation with a woman's presence. If she can speak to whoever is there first, things may be calmed down. When she comes back in, she doesn't look too calm. Her face is flushed.
    ‘Conn,’ she says nervously. ‘It's the Burleys. The van's broken down. There's three o’ them. They're awfu angry.'
    This is bad. Tam's father is unlikely to die. But he is likely to be very severely dealt with. There is a reason for this, as there usually is, if you can find it.
    Tam's awareness knows the reason. His father had tried recently to run a fruit-and-vegetable business. It was the latest of his dreams of instant wealth, negative capitalism in practice. He bought a van. He converted its interior into shelves that could accommodate various fruits and vegetables. Michael was involved. He had come out of