Three vaguely remembered stories

[cubiceyes]

Hello everyone; I'm a newbie to this forum. I'm very much hoping that somebody out there can help me to track down three vaguely remembered stories from way back when that have been bugging me.
One was (I think) called Moloch, and was about an invisible fire demon that lurked around cracks in the pavement or something like that; I don't think it was in the Pan horror series.
The two others may have appeared in Pan volumes as I used to consume them voraciously in my teens. One was about a young lad who climbed a ladder up an old water tower to escape bullies, who then pulled away the lower part of the ladder and left him stuck. The other (I think I have a vertigo phobia going on here) was about someone who was abducted and dumped on top of a factory chimney as an experiment to find out which way people would jump.
Why on earth I should now want to revisit these truly horrible scenarios is a mystery , but.... what the heck, I do ! So your help in identifying the stories will be very much appreciated.

[Craig Herbertson]

Welcome.

Number one sounds like a ray Bradbury story. Number two is called the vertical ladder - There's a thread about it here somewhere - very popular story and number three I leave to the experts.

[Johnlprobert]

The third one is 'An Experiment in Choice' by Desmond Stewart in Pan 10. It's one of my favourites

[cubiceyes]

Thank you O wise ones, that's stories 2 and 3 nicely identified.

Story 1 remains a bit of a puzzle. I remember thinking myself at one point that maybe it came from a Bradbury collection, but I still can't track it down if so. The title of the story might not have been Moloch, but the demonic being concerned (whose red eyes were occasionally glimpsed by people who ventured too close to the invisible portals to his fiery realm) definitely went by that moniker.

Any further suggestions, anyone?

[Craig Herbertson]

Regarding invisible fire demons. I still think it might be a Bradbury story but is there's a faint possibility it could be Philip K Dick? I think you need to dredge a bit more of the memory on it.

[dem]

Can't help with the first one, but just to confuse matters, Bradbury included Roald Dahl's The Wish in The Circus Of Dr. Lao & Other Improbable Stories, the anthology he edited for Bantam in 1956. In Dahl's short-short, the pavement is replaced with a carpet. An imaginative little boy decides that patterns woven into the design represent blazing fires and venomous snakes so, using the gaps between them, he must cross to the other side of the room without stepping upon either ....

[Craig Herbertson]

interesting. If it is Bradbury, it could well have been written around the Fahrenheit 451 phase, around 1954

[cubiceyes]

Still foxed by the Moloch story; the Dahl story is stunning and I can see the similarities, but it's not the one. So I'm trying to remember what horror books I used to have, as I re-read it enough times to be pretty sure it must have appeared in something I owned rather than borrowed. That boils down, as far as I can recall, to several Pan and a couple of non-Pan collections, a couple of Ray Bradbury collections, some Stephen King, some William Hope Hodgson, possibly a Lovecraft or two, and a few Clive Barkers. It's definitely not Hope Hodgson as I know his wonderful work backwards; it doesn't feel like Lovecraft to me; does anyone recognise it as a snippet from a Barker or King novel or short story maybe?

[Dr Terror]

The Moloch story sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't think what it is. King sounds a possibility.

[Craig Herbertson]

King now ringing big bells with me

[mattofthespurs]

I'm pretty sure (99.9%) that the Moloch story is not King.
I do know for a fact that king has never used "Moloch" as a title.