A Small Killing - chapter 4

Welcome back! We're on to the last chapter of A Small Killing. You can find my write-up of chapter 1 here, of chapter 2 here, and chapter 3 here. If you want to follow along (warning, there's going to be a lot of spoilers) you can easily find a used copy online, or if you're less morally inclined, you can read it online here.

To start off, we get the chapter page which tells us we're now in The Old Buildings. We're covering the period of 1954 to 1964, the first ten years of Timothy's life. We see Timothy's back at the top of a hill on his way down into a section of old lower-class English row houses. He's riding his father's bike, and the shadows and silhouettes of the barren trees seem to be reaching out for him.

I've never really understood what Zarate is doing with the styles on these chapter headings. The first two were bright and colorful and then the third was stark black and white and now this moody one that doesn't look much different from the rest of the story. Is there a meaning in all this or did he just do whatever he wanted on the day?

As he's biking, he thinks, "through this scrapyard of clapped-out utopias; failed social visions that came here to die. Just like me..." Moore would explore this psychic geography a lot in his later writings on Northampton, but it's enough to know that he's returning to his very low-class roots.

"How on Earth did I come to be here?" he thinks, but what does he mean? Why is he here now and how did he get brought here by his subconscious? Or how did a boy from such lower class ever get out of here to London and New York?

He blames it on the bike, which his dad rode here for 12 years. It carried him here. "I'm being ridden by the bike," he thinks, because nothing is his fault.

He thinks, "I feel as if I'm treading darkness...trying to push my head above the surface of this night, but failing...going down..." That's a beautiful line. He's drowning in the night.

He thinks about being a kid and pretending to walk on a tightrope on the curb. Moore has always been so good at capturing the memory of youth. "The present's less substantial here." The memories of the past are coming to him here as he's in this place. He's being drawn back here to remember something. "It's where he lives," he thinks of his 10-year-old self.

He thinks about wanting to live and whether that means meeting the boy or killing him. And then he sees a kid, but it isn't young Timothy, it's Maggie with her own children. And she's happy to see him.

"God, you're looking smart. You look like a yuppie." She introduces him to her two little kids. Remember that they didn't have kids when they were married but since he left she's been able to. So this kind of confirms that the problem of having kids wasn't her biological problem, but his. Everything he produces is dead.

She tells him that she lives down here but is moving now that her handmade toy company is taking off. She stuck to her ideals. She tells him that she has to go and see her husband. "Lovely seeing you," she says. "You take care of yourself." She holds no animosity toward him. No one does, really. Only young Timothy.

(By the way, she's wearing glasses, so maybe her eyesight was bad all along? Or maybe she's on her own way toward becoming a yuppie and she can't see clearly anymore, either?)

But he's not sure what to make of the chance meeting, thinking that maybe he's dreaming or maybe he's dead. I guess those are potential answers to this story, but they're kind of a chicken way to rationalize this story, so I'm not going to think too much about them.

He keeps heading toward his old house, seeing one that wasn't his, but it represents so much to him. "If I entered, every toy I ever lost would be there, in the starlight and the mildew." The house is his subconscious, holding all that he's lost. But his house is gone, demolished, nothing but grass.

And as he looks at the yard, he hears voices, even though no one is there. They're the voices of children, probably from his own youth. Up until this point in the book, we've always heard the voices in crowds of people, but where Timothy was separate from them in his own world of thought. The voices were part of the setting, part of the place, helping us to feel what New York was like or what the pub in Sheffield was like.

But what do the voices mean here? Are they ghosts? Are they his subconscious? Are they part of the remnant of human memory that have been stamped onto a place? I think any of those are an okay answer. For me, I think it shows that the sights and sounds of his memory are becoming very real and substantial to him, even where his outside senses are picking them up. He is physically hearing his memory. Soon, he'll physically feel it too.

He moves on from his house to "the old buildings," where he'd played as a child. And he thinks about the time he had put the live bugs in the bottle and buried them. The art zooms in on his little smiling face. "I buried them alive, like little Eichmann. It felt...sexy." Sex/puberty is a dividing point for when a child becomes an adult (or at least a young adult if you go by the sections of the library).

He looks at where he stopped and made up his mind about returning to free the bugs. The captions of his thoughts tell us that he returned to free the insects, but the art shows us that he didn't. Then he stops and realizes that he didn't. That his memory was a lie he told himself.

"I couldn't face it, sickened with myself." And he runs into the wasteland of the old buildings, Zarate beautifully showing the building like partially submerged wreckage. "It was the first bad thing that I did knowingly. The first." But not the last, as we've seen.

He thinks about how people change, from being the young innocent Lolita, deciding to play grown up, and then being the grown up Humbert Humbert filled with bad intentions toward the child.

He finds the spot and starts digging, hoping it's not there and that he really did dig it up in the past. But then it's there, glowing unearthly and so much bigger than when he was a kid. It's grown from all the lies and terrible things he did after burying it.

He decides to open it. "There. There," he thinks of the lid, "it's giving..." Is it giving way or giving birth?

This reminds me, I think intentionally, of the myth of Pandora's box. He's letting all the evils out, just as Pandora did. But in the myth, Pandora shuts the box, trapping one of the evils in, that last one being hope. I've always enjoyed the little conundrum of why hope is sometimes considered an evil, though I don't think that part applies here.

Then we see a splash page of the giant terrible insects climbing out and all over Timothy. It's so incredibly well drawn by Zarate. It's creepy and gross and magical. And notice that Timothy is not wearing his glasses now. His eyes are wide with fright, but he sees.

Then he's throwing up as the glasses return. And that's when the boy finds him.

He asks what the boy wants and he says to kill the adult. When asked why, he responds, "You killed me first," and picks up a club-like stick.

The adult tries to apologize to the boy, but the boy isn't here for an apology. Notice that the adult apologizes with his eyes closed. Is he even sorry, really, or is he just avoiding his guilt? Is there any truth to this apology?

It doesn't matter, the boy hits the man, knocking him back into the hole that is his namesake, and knocking off his glasses. Finally clear about what story he's in, the adult grabs a sharp piece of glass and squares off with the kid. And the adult has his inspiration, born of this conflict.

The idea is: In Red Square a boy will be drinking Flite while his grandfather looks up at the disapproving image of Lenin. Flite doesn't mean anything to the boy because he's untroubled by the past. The grandfather, hot and thirsty, glances up guiltily, perhaps letting the past stop him from what he really wants.

And the two Timothies continue fighting. We pull farther and farther away and Timothy thinks of the dream and how they could have been anyone. "It happened, and I was away in the distance." And we see the crash of lightning from the dream strike the two.

I'm not sure who the "I" was away in the distance. Is it just a thought from the adult Timothy? Or is some third Timothy watching as this adult version and child version battle it out? Is it like Don't Look Back, where the main character has visions of his own demise? Or is it me, Mike, reading this comic? I'm not sure.

Then we see the bike in the dark, which looks like a pair of glasses. And then we see the light of morning glint off a wheel. And then we see the light glint off of Timothy's glasses. Then we see the adult Timothy wake up next to his glasses but never put them on and walk away from them, obviously able to see clearly without them now.

A bird flies up and will soon become a symbol for how the world has changed as we're no longer talking about dead eggs.

We've gone through the darkness of night and soul and have come out the other end, like Dante in the Inferno having to go through the deepest depth of Hell to come out.

Timothy walks into a shop and gets a paper and a can of Vimto, the only one on a shelf full of Flite. He talks to the old woman clerk, and I feel like maybe she's a counterpoint to the phony cheery stewardess we saw at the beginning of the book. And we see him looking at the section of the paper that says "Situations wanted." (Situations wanted is like a help wanted section, except you say what you can do and hope someone hires you.) And then there's that bird again.

I've hear people tell me that the ending is meant ambiguously, and we're not sure who won or what happened, but to me it seems obvious who won. We're supposed to think that the boy Timothy, who represents honesty to oneself, has won and that this new Timothy will be staying in his hometown, drinking Vimto and leading a new life.

He thinks, "There's a new yolk in the blown egg. There's a new pulse in the scraped womb. Everything is pregnant." And we see the bird with a nest of three eggs. Where Timothy only produced death, he will now produce life.

And here's an important part of that. He can't go back and make a child with Maggie and he can't go back and undo the abortion with Sylvia. Just as he didn't go back in time to let the bugs out; he came back when he was older and tried to make amends. The only life he can produce right now is his own. He needed to make amends with himself. And now he's pregnant with his own future.

There's also the question of if the lie about killing the bugs was the point where his life spun off in the wrong direction, was all of it wrong? Wasn't his love of Maggie great and wasn't he an idealist for a little while? Yes, of course. No life is all bad or all good. But it was built on a foundation of him lying to himself, which is what sunk it. If he had been honest, would Maggie have married him? Who knows, but it would have been built on who Timothy really was rather than who he thought she wanted him to be and who he wanted to be.

But what about the boy? Was he real? I don't know. Does it matter? The simple answer is that no, he merely represented Timothy's subconscious, and it was all symbol and metaphors for a man wrestling with his soul and coming to a midlife crisis. If you prefer to think the boy was real, that works, too. In Moore's view, ideas are real whether they're physical or not. But you decide. Moore's not giving simple answers in this book.

And Timothy walks off into the morning light, looking at his paper. Around him, we see a person on a bike, a cab, a train and a jet plane. All of these things are taking people elsewhere, but he's not going anywhere anymore.

And he thinks, "Into the morning, unnoticed, I slip from the scene of the crime." What's the crime? The bottling of the insects or the killing of the adult Timothy? I guess there's some ambiguity after all.

Here's a little more ambiguity: On the final page, the one little sketch of an image shows us the nest. And one of the eggs is cracked. Is it something alive or is it something dead? We get to decide. Will Timothy become a new and better person or will he be the person he's always been? Can a person ever really change?

I hope he becomes the better person. Is hope still in the box or did he let it out?

What did you think about the ending?

I plan to do one more post about A Small Killing, so come back as we try to determine the motive!

Shameless plug

One more project I'm working on: A friend and I have created a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

We successfully launched our first kickstarter, which you can buy (PDF or physical copy of issue 1 so far) from here. It has received plenty of rave reviews:

Jenn Marshall of Sirens of Sequentials said: “Miskatonic High is a fun story that balances everything you want in a good horror story. There is some gore, but not so much that you get overwhelmed. The jokes are funny, but they don’t make the story feel like a parody of something else. It was well thought out, and I cannot wait to see where it is going to go next.” Read the full review

The Pullbox called it “the bastard lovechild of John Hughes & H.P. Lovecraft.” (We’re pretty sure they meant that in a metaphorical way, because if that’s literal, well… ewww.) Read the full review

Our kickstarter for issue two just ended. You can get the PDF of the second issue on ComixCentral.com real soon.

Goshdarn Geeky raved of issue 2: "Miskatonic High has proven it can hit us right in the heart with a character-centric story that goes past the cosmic horror, and I hope it can continue to deliver." Read the full review