Mr. Chillingsworth and the Snowman’s Gift

Before the Christmas lights and plastic reindeer, before the supermarkets started playing carols in October, there was a time when winter in Matlock was measured in three things: how thick the ice grew on the river, how long the frost stayed on the church roof, and how many snowmen Mr. Chillingsworth could build before the thaw.

His real name had been Edwin Chillingsworth, but no one called him that, not really. To the children of the town, he was simply Mr. Chillingsworth, the Snowman’s Maker, a title half teasing, half reverent. He lived in a narrow brick house at the top of a hill, where the wind never stopped complaining and the chimney never stopped smoking.

By trade, he was a toymaker. The front room of his house held shelves of carved rocking horses, wooden soldiers with chipped paint, and dolls whose porcelain cheeks were pinked by hand. He repaired clockwork mice and music boxes, replaced missing marbles and re-strung puppet limbs. But it was the back garden that made children press their noses to the windows on frosty mornings.

There, each winter, an army of snowmen stood in neat rows, their coal eyes fixed solemnly on the town below. Some wore old mufflers; others sported broken teacups as hats; a few had buttons made from bits of glass that caught the light and scattered it like icebound stars. Mr. Chillingsworth knew each one’s height, tilt, and personality as if they were his own children.

“Why so many?” Mrs. Hargreaves from the post office once asked, watching him tamp down snow with the seriousness of a man laying bricks.

“For those who don’t have anyone to build one with,” he replied, without looking up. “It’s a sad thing to see a winter with no snowman in it.”

He gave them away, of course. When snow fell deep enough to allow it, he would invite the poorer children of the town, those whose parents worked late in the mills, or whose fathers were “away finding work” indefinitely, to choose one of his creations. He and the child would then roll it, wobbling and giggling, down into the street and rebuild it outside the child’s house.

“You must give your snowman a name,” he would insist, eyes twinkling beneath the brim of his black top hat. “Names are the hooks reality hangs on. No name, and you’ll find it’s melted away before your back is turned.”

So the snowmen became Crispin and Martha, Captain Frost and Sir Buttons, Nimble and Old Three-Hat. They watched over draughty doorways and cracked windowpanes, leaning slightly to the left or right, their stick arms raised as if barring the way to something only they could see.

Matlock’s children loved him for this. The adults, in their way, did too, though they pretended he was merely a harmless eccentric. They did not see how carefully he watched the faces of the children he helped, memorising their smiles as if storing them away against some coming famine.

Because, the truth was, Mr. Chillingsworth had once known what it was to have no snowman at all.

He had been a mill boy, once upon a time, working long hours in stale air that tasted of lint and iron. He remembered walking home past other children’s gardens, where snowmen stood proud and crooked, wearing their owners’ fathers’ hats. He remembered his own yard, bare and mud-streaked, the snow turned gray by coal dust before it had ever had a chance to be white.

His father had always said, “Snowmen are a luxury for people who can afford to waste good coal for eyes.” His father drank.

So when Edwin grew up and found his hands better suited to carving toys than to feeding chimneys, he promised himself two things:

1. There would always be warmth in his house, for anyone who knocked.

2. There would always be snowmen in his garden, for anyone who needed one.

For many years, the promise held.

The winter that changed everything began with an unusual stillness. The air turned glassy, and the sky sat heavy and low, like a lid on a pot about to boil. People muttered that it would be a hard season. The river slowed, then stopped, thick as lead. Pipes froze. The milkman’s horse slipped three times on the cobbles before giving up entirely and refusing to move.

In the middle of it all, Mr. Chillingsworth kept working. By day he mended toys for Christmas; by evening he packed snow in his garden until his fingers went numb even through his gloves. The snowmen that year were taller, straighter, and somehow more solemn than ever, as if they sensed the gravity of what was coming.

One evening, a little girl named Annie Miller arrived at his door, coat thin, nose red from the cold.

“Mam says we can’t afford no snowman,” she declared without preamble, stamping her feet on his mat. “But I told her you’d say that’s nonsense.”

Mr. Chillingsworth laughed, a warm, crackling sound like fire in a grate. “Your mam is very sensible,” he said, “but also very wrong. Come on then, let’s see what’s left.”

They went through the back, where drifts hugged the fence like sleeping beasts. Only one snowman remained unclaimed, a smaller figure near the shed, its body unadorned, its face unfinished. No coal eyes yet, no smile, no name. Just a round head, two stick arms, and a faint suggestion of where a carrot nose might go.

“That one,” Annie said immediately, pointing.

“He’s not done,” Mr. Chillingsworth protested. “I was saving him. Needs a proper hat, for one thing. Mustn’t send a snowman into the world bare-headed. Very bad manners.”

“I like him as he is,” she insisted. “He looks… waiting.”

Mr. Chillingsworth tilted his head, studying the unformed face, the crooked twigs. Waiting, yes. That was exactly it. As if the snow itself was holding its breath, wondering what it was about to be.

“Well, then,” he said, “let’s finish him together.”

He fetched his favourite top hat, a black one, a little battered at the brim but still dignified, and placed it carefully on the snowman’s head. He found a carrot from the kitchen, a twist of orange against the white. Annie scavenged sticks from the woodpile, arranging them like arms reaching out for an embrace.

“What’s his name?” Mr. Chillingsworth asked, brushing fresh snow from the hat.

Annie considered. “He looks like… a gentleman,” she decided. “Like the men in the newspapers who’ve never slipped in the mud.”

“Dangerous sort,” he said, chuckling. “Very well. A gentleman he shall be.”

“He looks like you,” she added shyly. “With the hat and all.”

“Oh dear,” Mr. Chillingsworth replied, touching his own hat self-consciously. “Then we’re both in trouble, aren’t we?”

He helped her roll the snowman to her front yard, tucking him snugly by the gate where he could watch the street. By the time they finished, stars had pierced the sky like pins through velvet.

“Thank you, Mr. Chillingsworth,” Annie said, hugging him fiercely around the middle. “He’s perfect.”

“Remember,” he said, patting the snowman’s shoulder, “visit him in the morning. Snowmen are always braver in the dark than in the light. They need reassurance that it was worth standing guard all night.”

He walked home feeling tired but strangely full. The cold seemed to settle deeper in his bones than usual, but he smiled anyway. His garden looked empty without that last snowman, yet right. They all belonged somewhere.

He did not know it would be the last snowman he ever made.

The illness came swiftly, like a draft under a door. By the next morning, Mr. Chillingsworth’s chest burned, and his limbs felt like they’d been filled with wet sand. He tried to rise, determined to open the shop, but the room spun and he collapsed back to bed.

“Just a chill,” he told himself. “Nothing a bit of broth and a good night’s rest won’t fix.”

But the rest did not help. Days blurred into nights. His breath rattled. The fire in his grate shrank to embers, despite his best efforts. He could not even stand to look at the uncarved blocks of wood on his workbench, waiting to become toys.

The children noticed. The shop door remained closed. No new snowmen appeared in the garden. Rumours started, he’d gone away, he was making toys for the King, he’d been kidnapped by elves. Only Annie knew the truth. She’d seen him through the window, pale and still, a cup of untouched tea cooling on the bedside table.

That night, the snow fell thicker than ever. The wind howled down the chimneys like something grieving. And in Annie’s yard, the snowman they’d built together stood in the storm, his twig arms frozen mid-reach, his carrot nose bright against the swirling white.

Snowmen, contrary to common belief, are born knowing two things:

1. They are temporary.

2. They belong to the child who named them.

Annie had named this one nothing at all, just “the gentleman snowman” and “him” and “you there, keep watch.” It should have left him empty. Yet something in Mr. Chillingsworth’s careful hands, in the shared breath as they built him, had lodged a tiny spark of awareness deep within the compacted snow.

He felt the cold, felt the weight of the hat, felt the loneliness of the yard as Annie’s house went dark. He felt, too, the pull toward the little brick house up the hill.

His creator was fading.

The feeling tugged at him like gravity. Snow shifted around his base. Beneath the hat, something that wasn’t quite a heart clenched.

Snowmen are not supposed to move. But rules grow thin where love is concerned, and thinner still where grief waits.

The snowman took one step. Then another.

To anyone looking out a window, it might have seemed the wind had simply pushed him. But slowly, jerkily, he began to shuffle up the hill, leaving rounded impressions where his base bumped and rolled. Sticks creaked. The carrot nose bobbed with each lurch forward.

He reached Mr. Chillingsworth’s garden long past midnight. The rows of old snowmen watched silently as he passed, their coal eyes glazed with frost. Some were half melted, their smiles warped; others stood tall but hollow, their owners long grown.

The snowman didn’t stop. He made his way to the back door and simply… waited. Snow piled up around him. Icicles lengthened on the eaves. The wind carried the faintest whisper of a weakened cough from inside.

Inside the house, Mr. Chillingsworth lay in his narrow bed, thoughts drifting like the snow outside. He saw children’s faces in the plaster of the ceiling, snowflakes in the cracks of the wood. Part of him worried about unfinished toys; part of him worried about Annie’s snowman, barely formed, sent into a hard winter with only a carrot and a hat.

“Should’ve given him a scarf,” he muttered to no one.

He felt himself slipping, away from the ache in his lungs, away from the warmth of the blankets. The world grew incredibly light, then incredibly far away.

As he drifted, he heard a strange sound. A soft, muffled thump… then another, and another, as if someone were gently knocking on the world from the other side.

Outside, the snowman had pressed himself against the back door. He didn’t have knuckles, but his stick arms tapped anyway, guided by a simple, desperate thought: You mustn’t go. There will be no more snowmen.

Snow and wood and carrot and hat, none of these things are meant to carry a soul. They are blunt instruments, incapable of nuance. But the small, bright spark that had woken inside him when Annie and Mr. Chillingsworth laughed together knew only that his maker should not be alone in the dark.

Inside, Edwin’s spirit felt a tug. He was not yet fully gone; he hovered in the cold space between last breath and whatever comes next. The tug pulled him not upward, not downward, but sideways, toward the door, toward the snow.

He followed.

The neighbours said that the storm broke suddenly just before dawn. One moment the snow was raging; the next, the sky was clear, and the moon shone on a town buried in silence.

When Annie and her mother climbed the hill later that morning, clutching a jar of broth and a crooked little card reading Get Well Soon, they found Mr. Chillingsworth’s back door open and his bed empty.

The only thing in the room was his hat, sitting on the pillow.

They searched the house, then the yard. “Perhaps the doctor fetched him in the night,” her mother suggested, though she didn’t sound convinced. Annie wandered toward the garden, eyes brimming.

There, near the gate, stood a snowman she didn’t recognise.

It wore Mr. Chillingsworth’s hat. Its body was shaped more like a cloak than stacked spheres, flaring gently at the bottom like a ghost’s trailing sheet. Its arms were sticks, but arranged more like folded hands than stiff branches. And jutting from beneath the brim of the hat, right where a nose should be, was a familiar carrot, her carrot, the one she had pushed into the snow just days before.

The snowman leaned forward slightly, as if about to bow. Its coal eyes were… wrong. They were not bits of stone at all, but empty ovals like the holes in a mask, dark and deep and strangely gentle.

“Mr… Chillingsworth?” Annie whispered.

The wind stirred. The snowman’s stick arms gave the faintest twitch, like fingers flexing after sleep.

Her mother called from the door, voice tight with worry. Annie blinked, and in that blink something changed. The figure was just a snowman again, white, still, harmless.

But Annie knew.

She reached up, brushing some loose snow from its front. “I’ll look after them,” she said softly. “The other snowmen. For you.”

The hat seemed to tip a fraction, as if in thanks.

That should have been the end. A sad story for winter nights, told and retold until its edges blurred like snowflakes on a window. But winter in Matlock is rarely so simple.

The first sign came a week later, when the children began reporting strange snowmen around town. They appeared overnight in gardens whose owners had never bothered to build them, perfectly formed despite the footsteps that should have given away the work. Each snowman had the same peculiar features: its body shaped like a little sheet, its arms crossed or folded politely, its “nose” too big and bright to be anything but a carrot. Some wore bottle caps or tin mugs as hats, but a few, very few, sported familiar black top hats that no one could quite account for.

“They’re watching us,” one boy complained. “Not in a nasty way. Just… noticing.”

They were always gone by midday, half-melted or toppled, but more would appear the next night. In yards of widows. Outside the workhouse. Near the school where the poorest children went barefoot even in frost.

And always, near at least one of them, someone would find a small token: a repaired toy left on a doorstep, a scarf neatly mended, a wooden soldier whose missing arm had quietly returned.

Annie did what she could to keep up Mr. Chillingsworth’s work, building snowmen in his style. But sometimes she would wake to find ones she had not made standing beside hers, a little straighter, a little more… awake.

It was Professor Barnabas Ravenwood who brought the pattern together. Years later, reviewing reports from the Dales, he wrote:

“The entity known as Mr. Chillingsworth appears to be a composite haunting, half human ghost, half animating snow-spirit. Death did not sever him from his purpose; instead, his spirit fused with the very medium he had devoted his life to: snow.

The carrot nose and twig arms are not decorations but signatures, markers of the moment when his final, unfinished snowman poured its brief life back into its maker. He walks now as both, forever returning each winter to continue the work they began together.”

Ravenwood himself claimed to have seen the ghost one year on Christmas Eve. Snow had been sparse that season, the ground more mud than white. As he trudged back to his lodging, thinking gloomily of dry lectures and skeptical students, he noticed a figure at the corner of the lane.

It was snow-white in shape but not in substance, more suggestion than solid. A black top hat perched at a tilt. The stick arms were precise, almost fastidious in their angles. The carrot nose glowed faintly, as if lit from within.

The figure stood before a shabby little house whose windows were dark. Within, Ravenwood knew, lived a boy whose father was in gaol and whose mother worked nights at the laundry. The boy had no time or strength left for snowmen.

As the professor watched, Mr. Chillingsworth raised one twig arm and made a sweeping motion. Snow, real snow, wet and crystalline, began to gather in the yard, shaping itself under an invisible hand. In moments, a small snowman stood by the door, its stick arms open, its face bright. The ghost stepped back, adjusting the snowman’s carrot nose with a craftsman’s care.

Then, sensing he was being observed, Mr. Chillingsworth turned.

His eye-holes were deep, yet Ravenwood saw in them the unmistakable glint of recognition, the look of a man interrupted at work, mildly put out but willing to indulge the intrusion. He tipped his hat. Frost bloomed briefly up the professor’s walking stick in reply.

When Ravenwood blinked, both ghost and new snowman had vanished, leaving only a patch of colder-than-usual air and a wooden spinning top on the doorstep.

Ravenwood left it there for the boy to find.

Nowadays, people speak of Mr. Chillingsworth in a mixture of fondness and unease.

They say that if a perfect snowman appears in your garden overnight, hat just a little too sharp, carrot nose at a jaunty angle, stick arms folded as though listening, you should speak to it. Tell it what you wish you could tell someone who’s gone. Tell it what you need for your children, or for your own inner child, the part of you that never got a snowman when it mattered.

By morning, the snowman will have slumped, like any other. But often something will be left in its place: a mended toy, a new scarf, a small wooden carving of a snowman wearing a top hat.

And perhaps, if the night is especially cold and the stars especially bright, you might glimpse a taller shape drifting down the lane, leaving a trail of small, hopeful snowmen behind him. A ghostly figure, body like a white sheet, arms of brown twigs, nose bright orange, hat tipped in perpetual greeting.

Mr. Chillingsworth, the Snowman’s Maker, still working.

For some spirits, it seems, eternity is simply more time to finish what love began.