“Well I suppose, ’tis the season and all that crap, but they are the best at what they do. Keep trying.”
“Yea, yea I will,” John said, “but are you sure they can help me with this?”
“Look, they’re fantastic, and will advise you how to do it right the first time, and if you don’t think you can pull it off on your own, they’re more than happy to come and assist you.”
John reached for his phone and dialed the number again.
“It’s ringing.”
I’m sorry, due to a higher than normal volume of calls all our agents are busy. Please remain on the line and an agent will be with you shortly. The annoying robotic voice squaked at John.
“It’s a recording, I’m on hold.”
“Stay on the line, you don’t want to lose your spot in the queue.”
John laid the phone down and put it on speaker and Burl Ives sounding like he was stuck in a tin can began singing Holly Jolly Christmas.
“Can’t you help me with this Ted?”
“I can’t, you know that. They have a license for this and I don’t.”
It’s a holly jolly Chris…
“It’s ringing again.”
“Merry Christmas, Suicide Hotline.”
Steve Thompson is the author of two short and flash fiction collections. You can check out his 2 latest short stories “Kill Point Club” in the anthology When the Clock Strikes 13 from his In Your Face Publishing that he started in June 2019 and “Malignant” which he co-wrote with Kenneth W. Cain which is in the Shallow Waters 2 flash fiction anthology by Crystal Lake Publishing.
The sun blazed in the sky on the first day of summer vacation and Bobby stared at the clouds as they migrated across the perfect azure canvas above them. She and her best friend Joe sprawled in the grass of Bobby’s backyard, the way kids with a long summer ahead of them do.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m bored.”
She sat up and laughed. “If we’re bored, it’s because we’re being boring.”
Joe wrinkled his nose at her in disdain and smirked. “Where did you hear that knowledge gem?”
“My mother always says it to me when I tell her I’m bored.”
Joe shook his head and returned his attention once more to the Rorschach clouds. He tucked his hands behind his head and sighed. “Bored.”
Bobby nudged her friend’s worn sneaker. “So let’s find something to do.”
“And if we can’t find anything to do?”
She pulled out a clumb of grass and threw it at him. “I dunno. We’ll make it up as we go.”
He shrugged and sat up to face her, brushing the grass from his shirt. “Fine. What did you have in mind?”
Bobby pointed toward the dense woods behind her house and grinned. “Let’s go exploring. I heard there was an abandoned house in there. Do you want to see if we can find it? Maybe find a ghost, too?”
Joe paused as he considered her proposal. At last, he nodded. “We’ll need flashlights.”
They gathered supplies from the house, careful to pack their snacks toward the top of their backpacks for easy access. Each of them carried a notebook and pencil to facilitate note-taking, and they each carried a flashlight.
As they made their way through the barrier of underbrush surrounding Bobby’s backyard, her mother poked her head out the back door.
“Hey! Where are you two going?”
“Exploring!” Bobby called back.
“Be careful, and be home by dinner!”
“I will, Mom!”
Bobby and Joe continued on their way through the bushes. The pair winced as blackberry brambles and wild rose thorns scratched their bare arms and legs. After a few yards, the thorns thinned and cleared, and they found themselves in the thick of the old forest.
They crunched through layers of dead leaves for several yards, then Bobby paused. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a piece of bright yellow string. As she tied it around a tree branch, Joe watched her.
“Why are you doing that?” he asked.
“So we can find our way back,” Bobby explained. “I brought a decent supply of string, but once we run out, we should head back to the house.”
He nodded. “Good idea.”
“Better than breadcrumbs, right?” she said with a wink.
The pair explored the woods for the majority of the afternoon. They took copious notes about the forest, the stream they discovered, and the animals they encountered.
When they had used all of their string and the sky had turned a shade of twilight indicative of dinnertime, they looked to one another wearily.
“I guess that’s it for today.”
“We can come back tomorrow and pick up where we left off.” Joe indicated the trail of yellow knots dotting the path they had left behind them.
Bobby smiled. “Yeah, I guess. For now, let’s get home and eat. I’m starving.”
As they turned to head back, Joe grabbed her arm. Bobby stared at his hand and looked to him, readying a sarcastic remark when she noticed the expression on his face. His eyes were wide, staring. He pointed with his other hand and she followed his gaze.
She hadn’t noticed the clearing before. She could have sworn there had only been a new-growth forest of saplings and underbrush in the spot when they had come through earlier. Now, a ramshackle house leaned into the space.
“Do you see it, too?” Joe whispered.
Bobby nodded. “Yeah. How did we miss it?”
“It wasn’t there. That’s how we missed it.”
She started toward the house and Joe pulled on her wrist, holding her back.
“What are you doing?” Joe hissed.
“Gonna go check it out, duh.”
“You said it was haunted.”
She looked at him and crossed her fingers. “Here’s hoping!”
She shook him off and started to sprint toward the house. Joe shouted behind her and ran to catch up.
“Bobby, stop!”
She paused at the steps to the rotting porch. Her stomach gave a lurch and the hair on her arms prickled. She tried to see into the old house, but the light was fading. She turned on her flashlight and shone it into the broken glass of the front entryway but the shadows beyond hid the interior.
“Bobby, don’t go in there. It looks dangerous,” Joe panted as he caught up to her.
She stared hard into the gaping darkness, then at the sloping roofline and warped wooden slats of the porch. Reluctantly, she nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably right. We’ll come back tomorrow when it’s daytime and check the place out.”
They followed the strings back to Bobby’s house and realized they had not gone nearly as far into the woods as they had thought. They had only gone three houses over, in fact. When they looked back, the house was obscured by underbrush and trees in the gloom.
Bobby’s mother waited for them on the back porch. She smiled and waved as they climbed back through the blackberry brambles and emerged sweaty and coated in forest dust.
“What have you two been up to?” she asked. “Nothing dangerous, I hope.”
“We looked for the haunted house in the woods,” Bobby began.
“But we didn’t go in!” Joe finished.
“Haunted house in the woods, huh?” Bobby’s mother chuckled. “I’m glad you didn’t go in. Haunted houses are no place for explorers.” She ushered the friends inside the house. “There is no haunted house in the woods. Kids have talked about that thing since I was young.”
“Did anyone ever find it?” Joe asked as he washed his hands for dinner. He gave Bobby a sidelong glance.
Bobby’s mother shook her head. “There used to be an old barn, back when the land around here was a farm and there were no trees. It fell in years ago and the owners of the property took the wood and stones to recycle on other projects.”
“But we found the house,” Joe said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Bobby nudged Joe. “We wasted a day looking for something that wasn’t there.”
Her mother pointed to the notebooks. “Wasted? Look at everything you’ve done today, and all the things you’ve explored! You both had quite an adventure!”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right, Mom. Thanks!”
“Sure, honey.” Bobby’s mother looked at them, becoming serious. “And if you do find a house in those woods, come get me. I want to see this thing, too.”
Bobby and Joe looked at one another over their dinners. Tomorrow they would explore the house that wasn’t there.
The End
Suzanne Madron is originally from the Bronx, NY, but grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania. Yes, the woodsy part. No, the other woodsy part. No, not the one with the pterodactyl sightings, the other one with the re-enactors.
When not writing horror, Suzanne writes hard-boiled noir and speculative fiction under the pseudonym James Glass and post apocalyptic stories under the name Xircon. Currently she lives on a battlefield with her husband and son in the less woodsy part of Pennsylvania. Yes, her house is most likely haunted.
The 2007 Ford sedan had been reupholstered, retouched, retuned. Every stained and sullied part of it cleaned, mended, replaced. Disinfected, neutralised. Purged. That was the word. The interior of the car had been purged. The way fire burns disease, erases plague. The way any smaller-scale atrocity gets itself denied: written over, glossed over, the facts whispered into the ground until the earth swallows it whole. It’s an evil thing, how eager people are to forget. The lengths they’ll go: atrocities in themselves.
Still, the car was as innocent as any blood-stained patch of earth, as blameless as the grass that grows there after. It was just a car, no matter what had happened inside of it. Engine, wheels, seats. A mode of transport free of sentience. It wasn’t the car’s fault it had been stolen. It wasn’t the car’s fault it had been used in a crime. A murder. The taking of a life. Not its fault—the mess inside. The lawyer-friend who helped Jake get the car back had warned him about that last part.
‘It’s a… mess. Inside. I’d advise you get it cleaned first. The Police can send it on for you. They know the right cleaning companies for this kind of job.’
The car had spent a year in Police custody before it was returned, enduring all the evidence-gathering and forensics-sweeping and months of aimless waiting. Because this is how inanimate objects are questioned, interrogated. How their confessions are extracted. The cops even used those words: in custody. And Jake imagined his car jailed in a locked yard, saw the ‘holding cell,’ its ‘isolation block.’ High metal-mesh fences complete with barbed wire, security guys swaggering around the perimeter with radios on their hips, batons holstered to their belts.
It was in Police custody. But now you can take it back.
Take it back. Like a jailbird relative in need of a fresh start.
Take it back.
Complete with new secrets and veiled histories. Ordeals, which it would never divulge.
Sullied. Then purged. Then returned.
You’re lucky, Jake had been told. You’re lucky you’re even getting it back at all.
It was in Police custody. Take it back. You’re lucky.
Don’t you know.
“Here it is! Good as new.”
The floor manager for SafeClean lead Jake across the lot to where the car stood waiting. His tone was jocular; proud. The Ford gleamed under the late-afternoon sun; a blank shell of spotless glass and rust-free metal. Pale blue, opalescent sheen. Reborn, almost. There was something terrible about the fact that it looked better now than it had before. Jake hardly recognised it—saw it as a stranger in that moment. The Ford was a gift from his father when he turned eighteen—an outdated heap even back then, but one with a steady frame and a solid engine. Also: it was the only true gesture his father had ever shown him. Something of value, something that had cost him. From his blank-eyed, still-mouthed father: a man who shared nothing he didn’t truly mean. Jake had never been worthy of this car. No wonder it’d allowed itself to be stolen. No wonder it had wanted to get away from him. The way a runaway kid falls in with the wrong crowd.
Here it is.
Good as new.
It not She. An unspoken understanding, between Jake and the SafeClean manager, that it would be callous to speak sentimentally about this car. Insensitive. Wrong.
“We had to do… a lot,” the manager said.
“I can imagine.”
No you can’t.
“Some stains were all the way in the front passenger seat. So in the end we just ripped that all out. It’s basically a brand new chair, except for the frame.” The manager smiled, something in his expression rich with pride.
Even a horrendous job can be well done, Jake thought. And why not? There had to be something satisfying in taking out blood stains, repairing criminal damage. Getting things back to ‘normal’ in the wake of the unthinkable. A symbolic way of righting the wrongs.
The mess inside.
“I appreciate the work,” Jake said.
“Our pleasure,” said the manager. “It’s all yours.”
It not she.
Let it be it. Let it just be it.
It’s just a car. It’s just a car.
And Jake took back his keys.
It was late afternoon on a summer Saturday when he left the lot, the day’s heat melting down to a cool caramel evening. Tangerine and peach tones layered the sky, mellowing the light, reflecting off the mirrors and glass storefront windows, the glazed surfaces of downtown commerce. He dropped the visor against the glare. For a moment red flared through his eyes; the sudden switch from bright to dim.
I’m blind, he thought.
But then his eyes adjusted, and he could see again.
It was three weeks to Christmas, and the southern hemisphere was strangling itself with faux winter cheer. It might be summer across half the planet, but the northern hemisphere tells the world what’s what, and the dictate stood that ‘Christmas’ means ‘winter’. Every section of the city was agonised by the farce. White spray paint flecked onto glass panes to look like frost. Mistletoe stickers blistered on storefront windows, warping in the heat. Shopping mall Santas sweltered in thick red suits, their cottonwool beards damp with sweat. The Christmas specials jingling out on Jake’s TV were all about magical reindeer and mittened kids, while outside a hot wind swirled baked dust across his balcony. The evenings were cool, though, and the Christmas lights came up pretty against the balmy night skies. It was already moving into a pleasant evening, with all that warm air lifting in the breeze. Jake rolled his window down. He breathed it in. The taste was like the scorched tar rolling beneath his wheels, like the wide-open flowers that grew on the hills.
Here it is! Good as new.
It not She.
Jake had never been the Christmas type. Too cynical for the happy-family falseness, the goodwill obligations. The glittery veneer layered over gritty streets. Like a smiley-face sticker smacked over something that bleeds. The murder of Cora Mason had been well-timed for this, in its own macabre way. Just enough shock to get people choking on their eggnog as they watched the evening news. What a downer. What a party-pooper. A girl getting herself gutted in a random stolen car.
Turn it off!
That’s awful!
I don’t want to hear about that!
With the ho-ho-ho echo thrumming just behind. As if evil puts itself on pause in December, just to avoid spoiling anyone’s mood. What a naive thing to expect. Jake could say a few things about that. It was his car that got stolen. His car that turned itself into a goddamn murder scene. This car his father had given him.
“Fuck Christmas,” Jake said aloud. Bitter.
Ho-ho-ho.
“Fuck Santa.” And for a moment, he almost laughed.
Good as new.
None of it would’ve happened if he hadn’t been out with Tanya that night. If she hadn’t made him go to her place, and park on that street.
“Fuck Tanya, too.”
Almost exactly a year ago. Those tinsel-strangled lampposts, those twinkling fairy lights. A hot-wired car and a girl gone off the streets. This car. His car.
It not She.
That night, nearly a year ago. An aeon ago. That last night with Tanya.
Ho-ho-ho.
It was an evening almost exactly like this. Peach-toned, balmy. Electric, the way the air feels before wild things begin. Her hand on his thigh on the drive back. Her fingers tucking in. They’d been drinking cocktails. Before that, they’d been arguing. The aftershock of the fight still shuddering between them, they’d spent their evening at the bar switching from ciders to mojitos to highballs with reconciliatory enthusiasm. The bars were full, with all the office parties and end-of-year get-togethers. It was easy to catch the fever, easy to drink too much even without the added incentive. They should’ve gone to his place, except Tanya’s apartment was closer to the bar than his, only two blocks, and—
“Let’s not take any chances, Jake, okay? Let’s just go to my place for a change.”
Outside her apartment building, he’d parked under a grey-haze streetlight that spilled murk into the shadows, smudged itself into the cement instead of illuminating it. A bad-luck spot to park. You could feel it. There was a reason it was the only open bay on the street. He’d swung in anyway, only vaguely aware of a presentient flash of doubt, dread.
Don’t park here.
Not here.
Of course the whole thing was cursed. He’d never liked going to Tanya’s place anyway. He should’ve known it would go wrong from that point. It was always better when she came to him. Better when she was in his domain. No edging around her possessions, no overwhelm of her scent, her inner life, her other existence. Better when it was his balcony, his couch, his bed. His alcohol he handed her, his cigarettes they shared. She was drunk and loose on her feet that night, and he’d known exactly how she would be—enthusiastic, playful.
“The things I want to do to you…” he’d say. He’d said. And she nipped at his neck as he closed his arms behind her waist, pressing tight. Her warm, soft belly smooth and taut against his.
Bad-luck spot.
Let’s just go to my place, she’d said.
If not for all those highballs, he wouldn’t have agreed. That last night they shared.
And this car took us there.
To her place.
For a change.
“Tanya, you bitch.”
Ho-ho-ho.
Traffic on the highway was thin, the drive pleasant for its easy stillness. Usually he only found himself on this road during rush hour, in the thick of a mid-week morning when everyone was irritated and aggressive, everybody acting out against the crush. Pushing in, crossing lanes. High-beams stab-flashing in rear-view mirrors; the insensible Morse code of the enraged. None of that now. Just a sky the colour of scorched tangerines, that pine-soap smell of his freshly-detailed car, and the road wide open ahead of him. Jake rolled his window down a few more inches, enjoying the warm, ripe air.
Got my girl, he thought.
Got my girl back.
It was stupid. It was dumb. This echo-memory thought. In the past it had been a phrase his mind repeated after a few drinks, when he looked over and saw it was Tanya standing next to him, lying beside him. Clasped close to him.
Got my girl.
Happy. Grateful. Proud. In those moments, anyway.
It would be nice to have a girl beside him, now. Right now, he thought. Something pretty curled up sweet in the brand-new seat, her feet up on the dash to show the smooth slide of her shins, the brace of her calves, the backs of her thighs curving in firm arcs where they melded into her buttocks. He imagined her dressed in something short and red. One of those slutty Christmas party dresses, all thin red velvet and white trim. They’d talk about how beautiful the sky was this evening: wild peach shades. She’d put her hand on his leg, slide it snug. He’d do the same. He’d drive faster, snitching his fingers higher up, deeper in.
Not here.
Bad-luck spot.
Jake stopped his thoughts.
Thinking, The mess inside.
Remembering, We had to do a lot.
Cora Mason had died right here, exactly in this space beside him. Glancing over, he tried imagining her. How it had been. Imagining the mess. Saw her slumped down, slack, her abdomen hacked to show the coils within. Her eyes blinking away, off. Her gaze fading as her intestines rippled out of her, spilling across the seat, her lap, the floor. Like ropes of Christmas tinsel, unravelling in loops of shining white and red.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. First Tanya, riding beside him back to her place. And later Cora Mason, in that same seat.
It’s basically a brand-new chair, the SafeClean guy had said.
It better be. It better be. Carrying that kind of curse.
But who gave a fuck about Tanya, anyway? She wasn’t innocent. Not the way Cora was. Cora hadn’t known what she was climbing into. But Tanya had. Dumb bitch with her wet-eyelash smile, lips quivering like she was about to cry, saying, “Please Jake, can’t you just be nice? Can’t you just be nice for once? Huh?”
All that pleading. All that need. It turns any soft feelings sour. Would’ve been better if she’d been a little less intense.
Whatever.
It doesn’t matter now.
Bad-luck spot.
That’s all it was.
And he thought of that morning. That morning when he’d headed out of Tanya’s apartment building, ready to leave—dying to leave—and saw an empty parking bay where his car should’ve stood. As she stopped stuck behind him, useless as a plastic mannequin. Her dumb, round mouth making an O as he turned to her and said: “It’s gone.” Then:“My fucking car. It’s gone.”
This car. Of all the cars he might ever own, crash, sell. This one. And for a moment in his mind, he saw his father’s eyes.
“It’s gone.”
He’d stared at her. Like it was her fault. Because in a way, it almost was. She’d been crying earlier, and her tears had dried salt-white on her cheeks.
I don’t give a damn.
I don’t give a damn.
And he’d understood that something final had happened, here. That this time, once he left, it might truly be the end.
It was injury to all those insults, having his car stolen from outside her place. Her place, where he otherwise never would’ve been. If she hadn’t insisted. If she hadn’t told him earlier, Can’t you just be nice for once? Guilting him into trying to be soft, acquiescent. The moment came back vivid, candy-striped: the red of panic, the white of shock. He remembered the dumb, groping hope his brain had offered as he stood staring at that empty parking bay: Maybe you put it somewhere else. Maybe it got moved.
Like the car was a wallet, a phone. The key card he needed for work, and often did misplace. Something important, sure, but generally recoverable. No big deal. Inconvenient, yes, but no big—
No, you fool, he’d thought at himself. It was his father’s voice. If the car isn’t here then it’s gone, and if it’s gone then it’s been—
Snatched.
Not a perfect fit exactly, but that was the first word to mind. Snatched. Something more personal, more of a violation than a set of keys slid down the back of the couch, than a bank card left on a random shop counter. And hopeless confusion had hit him in a sick, spinning wave.
Recalling it now as he headed down the N3, Jake realised he was driving uneasy: sweat in his palms, adrenalin in his blood. Driving a little like he’d stolen this car himself. He lifted his foot. He touched the brake. The car responded smooth and easy, and he switched the gear into neutral to glide off some of the speed. Had this car ever been so smooth? He didn’t remember exactly, given how much time had passed.
Here it is.
Good as new.
The speedometer dropped. Slowing too much. He pushed the clutch back in to return to fifth, and remembered this car never liked that gear. Apparently for all the improvements, the SafeClean service hadn’t fixed that little problem. Jake free-wheeled for a few moments, shoving the stick between neutral and fourth before it eased and let him switch up.
Bitchy little thing.
That’s what he’d called the car when she’d acted up like this in the past.
Bitchy little thing.
Bitch refers to a female.
It not She, he reminded himself.
This car, cursed. That sullied passenger seat. He glanced over at it. Remembering: Some stains were all the way in…
Bitchy little thing.
It not She.
It’s a… mess. Inside.
They say viscera steams when it comes tumbling out. The inside of a body, it’s so wet and warm.
Jake moved to the fast lane.
It was a forty-minute drive home.
He was nowhere near his exit when he turned off the highway. He did it without thinking, an honest mistake—something subconscious nudging him, moving him over the lanes, sliding him into the slip road that pulled him away.
“Wait—fuck.”
He said this aloud when he realised what he’d done. Taken exit 100, a good twenty minutes before he would usually get off, and a fair way still from home. Following the signs that pointed west, not north. Getting himself turned around.
“Well, shit,” he said, slowing as he approached the yield, checking if the way was clear, already plotting the smoothest route to get back on the highway with his nose pointed in the right direction. The roads got a little tangled in this part of the city. This way on, this way off, this way to some other main artery leading somewhere else.
“Fuck it.”
He wasn’t too concerned. In a way he was okay with this mistake. Maybe even glad. He had the time, the car, a full tank. The roads were quiet, the evening was fine. It was the weekend; he could ignore the alarm tomorrow if he stayed out late.
Drive. Just drive. And see where you go.
He felt himself rise to the adventure.
That night, outside Tanya’s place. Was this how the killer had felt as he bust his way into Jake’s car? As he ripped the wires and sparked it into life? Steered Jake’s Ford out onto the dark, sparkle-lit street and headed up the road, away? Adrenalin buzz, sense of freedom, sense of power. Because when he saw the car parked there by the bushes, surely he’d thought: A good-luck spot. As in the building across the road, up on the second floor where the streetlights hit the windows low, Jake and Tanya were buzzing on their own adrenalin, a different sense of freedom. Oblivious as two over-sexed high school kids who’ve finally got each other alone. While somewhere a few blocks away, Cora Mason stepped into the warm night, her intestines coiled neatly inside of her, her unopened belly smooth and soft under the sheath of her thin, breezy dress.
Seems they were all lost in illusion for those last few moments, those final innocent hours. Too many festive lights twinkling in everyone’s eyes. Before the blow-out. Before the theft. Before the girl.
Snatched.
What kind of dumb bitch accepts a lift from a stranger, anyway? On a holiday night, out late. Hooligans in the bars and maniacs on the streets. Everybody knows this city. Everybody knows.
Christmas. You could blame Christmas. That goodwill to all men crap wrapping around the common psyche, softening the walls. No woman would normally trust a lift from a stranger. Not any other time of year. It was all the sparkling tinsel, it was all those magical reindeer and mittened kids on the television, all that ho-ho-ho going on in everyone’s ears.
Hey, you need a lift?
His smile would have been disarming, wide. Concerned. She wouldn’t have noticed the spilled wires at his knee. She wouldn’t have known the car wasn’t his.
Hey, you need a lift? This isn’t safe, you know.
Don’t you know.
Yes, you could say it was because of Christmas, that a girl like Cora climbed into this car.
And Jake thought again of Tanya. Of him and Tanya. How similar it was, in a way. All that good-time holiday cheer, softening their walls. Like all of a sudden, they mattered to each other. She seemed to think, anyway. For those few hours there. Then: resentment stinging the edges of her smile, the corners of her eyes. After that: the rejection. Her rejection of him. Saying: This isn’t worth it.
No, his rejection of her. Him saying back: Well where’s the worth?
That look on her face like he’d slapped her. Stepping away from him, her hands rising to her throat. Saying, her voice shaking: You need to go.
Why was he thinking about this now? When it had been months since he’d last let his mind turn it over. A year since they’d last locked eyes. A year adjusting to life without her touch, her voice on the phone, her teeth nipping his neck as he shoved against her.
Hey, you need a lift?
Picking her up, laying her down.
This isn’t safe, you know.
Don’t you know.
The streetlights were sparse in this part of town, barely lighting the narrow, trash-crushed streets. The buildings on each side were cramped, hunkered down close to the ground as if bracing themselves for impact. Jake saw speed bumps ahead and slowed the car to meet them. A woman in a pink bathrobe was crossing further up ahead, curlers rolled up round her skull, a faded red leash dangling from her fingers. She was walking a dog, some kind of corgi mix. Limp coat, shiny black nose. It trailed behind her, snout to cement, zig-zag skittering in the stunted, urgent way smaller mongrels tend to move.
Yap-sized, Jake thought. And again, almost laughed.
On the corner up ahead, a young woman in a blue floral dress stood close to the curb’s edge, a lipstick smile scarred into her face. The dress stretched across her hips, her breasts. It was hard for Jake not to look again. Her dress was too tight, her smile fixed too wide. Another young woman, dumb enough to walk these streets alone. Day or night, it wasn’t safe in a place like this. And this was dusk in a bad part of town.
He considered slowing down, opening the window, leaning out.
Hey, you need a lift?
And if she got in, he would warn her. He would tell her. Caution her about her guts, her intestines, and what a challenge it can be to keep it all inside.
It can happen, you know, he’d tell her.
Don’t you know.
She turned her head as he neared; elegant twist of her neck. About to look at him. About to meet his eyes.
A bad-luck spot, he thought, and looked away. He sped up as he passed her. He glanced around for signs that would show him the way out.
This wasn’t how the killer had felt, he was sure. Uneasy, haunted. Strange. Or—had he? All the killer had wanted was a car. The evidence said so, anyway. A young man who’d led a hard life, but never before been known to attack. Making the murder of Cora Mason some kind of spontaneous impulse, strong and sudden. A vivid, vicious urge in him to destroy something. Drum up a few screams, shred some entrails. Anything to counter the false-cheer jingle-jangle of these Christmas-lit nights.
It’s tough to be alone.
Ho-ho-ho.
It’s tough to be alone at this time of year. Maybe he killed her only for that. Jake could almost understand. Was repulsed, in that moment, by how well he understood.
He glanced again at the seat beside him.
It’s a mess inside, his lawyer-friend had told him.
They say viscera steams when it comes tumbling out.
Jake felt the urge to check the car over. Pull over at a station, a well-lit wayside. Switch the overhead lights on and search for a dark patch; a mottled, almost-gone watermark. On the floor? Under the dash? Traces of Cora’s innards, the places where they’d lain uncoiled. Her blood, where it had sprayed, surging on those final sparks of life.
Good as new, the SafeClean guy had said.
But was that really ‘good’?
Jake turned left at the next intersection, spinning the wheel so it slid back smooth against his open palms.
The girl in the blue dress was far behind him. The woman and her dog. The stories of their evening errands. Whatever they may be.
The sky was darkening. Those sunset shades had seared to a sharp, vicious red, long and straight like a blade pressed to a throat. Stars were spreading out, filling in. Whatever Jake was looking for, this wasn’t the right place. Not the good luck spot, he realised, he’d sort of been seeking. He headed back to where the lights were better—where he knew he’d cut through the edge of a commercial area before he hit the residential roads again. But that side of town was brighter, cleaner. A few posh apartment blocks, a few chic bars. There would be plastic pine trees set up in the parking lots, there would be fairy lights strung across the eaves.
He gave the Ford a little more juice. She sped up smooth beneath him.
It not She, he stopped himself.
But then again.
No.
She.
Got my girl.
How nice it would be, to have a girl here beside him now. Something sweet in a Santa-esque dress. Big-buckled black leather belt, clinched around a delicate waist. Tanya was wearing black that night. A black cocktail dress that slid around her hips, silver bracelets jangling on her wrists.
I don’t look good in red, she’d said. And wrapped a rope of red tinsel round her neck. A boa shedding glittery scales. Red or not, she’d looked good. In those final hours. Their last night.
It’s a mess.
Yes, Jake thought.
Inside.
Yes, he thought. Yes, it is.
The night was blurring its lines too much: too unsure of itself, of what it wanted to be. Warm air and plastic snowflakes. His blood too hot against the chill within.
“There should be a girl here beside me,” he said aloud, to himself, to the empty seat beside him. And for the first time on the drive, he laughed.
Was that what the killer had felt? What he had been hoping for? Something pretty curled sweet in the seat beside him, her feet up on the dash? Maybe he was always too alone, too. Maybe he’d just wanted a girl with him that night. Something soft to share with. Talk about how beautiful the sky was that evening. Dreaming of her hand on his leg, sliding snug. His fingers on her, snitching higher up, deeper in. Maybe that was all he’d wanted. A moment they could share. It’s tough to be alone. It’s tough to be alone, at this time of year.
But Cora wouldn’t have liked that. She wouldn’t have understood. Or, even understanding, she would’ve wanted to get out. Panic rising in her throat, realising he was taking her down the wrong roads. Never mind that he hadn’t even touched her yet. Hadn’t done anything bad to her, except maybe drive a different way to what she’d thought. Her belly was still soft and taut, the skin unbroken, her entrails warm and safe within.
Where are we going?
Stop!
All that pleading. It has a way of souring any soft feelings.
Cora Mason. He thought of her slumped low on this seat beside him. Her thin, loose dress shredded, stained. Her soft, taut belly gaping wide. Her insides on the outside. Blood soaking into the seat beneath her, splashed across the dash. Festive lights dying in her fading eyes.
Got my girl, that killer must’ve thought.
Jake could almost understand.
“I haven’t got any girl,” Jake said aloud. “Just this car. Just this… car.”
It not She.
“No, fuck it. She.” Her. His girl. A year from that night, and this car was back. Blood stains all cleaned up, every inch switched and freshly scented. Smiling shiny and driving smooth like she’d never been sullied.
Purged. Returned.
A year gone by and Jake was driving this car alone, the seat empty beside him like nothing had happened. Like it had always been that way. Just him and his car and that chill in his heart, his blood too hot, his hands so tight on the wheel they were cramping.
“Tanya, my girl.”
Ho-ho-ho.
Can’t you just be nice for once? she’d said.
And he’d tried.
Just forget it, she’d told him. You need to go. Salt-stained cheeks. That look in her eyes like hurt hooked on hate. And what had happened after? Had she forgotten him by now?
It’s a terrible thing, how eager people are to forget. The lengths they’ll go: atrocities in themselves.
The parking space opposite Tanya’s building was open. Of course it was. It waited under the grey-haze streetlight that spilled murk into the shadows, smudged itself into the cement instead of illuminating it.
A good-luck spot.
He turned into it, straightened the wheel, stopped. He let the engine idle for a few minutes, thinking. Then he cut it, unclipped his seatbelt, and killed the lights. The building across the street was well-lit for Christmas, all cool whites and candy reds flickering around the window-frames, the entrance door. Tanya’s window, where the streetlights hit low. One light flickering up there. A television, a wide-screen shot. Tanya, pretty, curled up sweet. The seat empty beside her. Tanya and her Christmas tinsel. That sparkling red boa coiled around her neck. Her salt-stained cheeks, running wet. The skin of her belly, soft and taut. Her intestines coiled neat within. They say it’s warm and wet in there.
Here it is. Good as new.
Here it is. Take it back.
He sat in his car. He stared up at her window. It was hours before her light went out.
Martin stood in the garage, looking through the pile of discarded cardboard boxes. His wife Gina always fussed about his refusal to throw anything away, but today he nodded in satisfaction. That one would be perfect. It once contained Meggie’s new soccer ball, ordered online as a surprise when she joined the neighborhood’s team. The ball was blue and white, and matched the uniform and knee pads she was so proud of. The ball itself was probably buried in the bottom of her closet, but the box was just right.
He turned on a Christmas music station as he trudged through the house with the box. Gina always kept the wrapping paper in the guest room closet, and he paused in the doorway, considering the options. Hello Kitty in a Santa hat? Dora the Explorer at the North Pole? He settled on Disney princesses, and chose matching ribbon and a stick-on gift tag.
Bing Crosby sang about silver bells. Martin sat at the kitchen table, cutting the paper to size. Meggie hated crumpled paper on her gifts. When Gina let her help wrap presents, Meggie’s little face would always crease into a scowl, her fingers struggling to make the crisp creases her mom made with ease. The presents hadn’t looked as nice last Christmas without Gina there to wrap them. This year would be different.
Martin taped up the box and smoothed the sides of the paper, using his fingernail to stick the cellophane around the edges. White ribbon tied into a bow. Curl the excess with the blade of the scissors. The gift tag said, “Do Not Open ‘Till Christmas,” and he labeled it To Meggie from Dad. There was so much more he could have written, but she would understand. She’d been waiting for this.
He set the box on the back seat of his SUV next to his gym bag and backed out of the driveway. Across the street, the Mulligan house was dark. Old Jack Mulligan had been so helpful during Gina’s illness, watching Meggie while Martin drove back and forth from the hospital. And after Gina died, he’d continued to babysit after school, never asking for a penny. Such a good neighbor. Martin would never forget the night old Jack had walked shoulder to shoulder with him, calling into the fields behind the subdivision.
The streetlights blinked on as Martin drove, turning in past the high stone wall, Santa on the way to deliver a Christmas treat. He pulled off into the grass and grabbed the gift and his gym bag, locking the car door behind him.
There was never any doubt in his mind. When the school called to ask why Meggie was not in class, an icy grip grabbed Martin’s spine. Every night for a week they combed the fields and woods, searching in vain for a six-year-old in a blue and white soccer uniform. When the dry days of autumn made streams dry up and lakes recede from their banks, a hiker noticed a flash of white under a submerged log, and Meggie Sternham joined her mother beneath the landscaped, manicured grass of St. Martin’s Cemetery.
The lawn was brittle and brown now, and the old oak tree bare of leaves. Martin stopped at Gina’s grave. He pulled his phone out and set it to play Gina’s favorite Christmas song, the Eagles’ “Please Come Home for Christmas.”
“Hi, honey.” He pulled a wrapped bouquet of carnations from his gym bag and laid them on her headstone. “I brought Meggie a present. Wrapped it myself.”
The stone next to Gina’s was engraved in the same font as hers. Megan Sternham, November 12, 2013- May 14, 2019. Beloved daughter. Martin set the wrapped gift on top of the stone, and sat on the dry grass in front of it, cross-legged and facing it.
He’d thought he was doing such a good job, wrapping it so carefully. But the plastic inside must have slipped when he flipped it upside-down to smooth the paper. Martin pulled it off the gravestone. It left a dark stain on the pale granite. He set it beside him instead, and swiveled to lean his back up against the stone.
It hadn’t taken much. Old Jack needed less convincing than Martin expected. “The truth will set you free,” he murmured, running the curled ribbon through his fingers.
He sighed. Not much time now. “Meggie,” he said, “I’m here, baby. Daddy’s here. And Daddy brought you a present.” He could smell it now, the metallic smell that clung to him for hours after he crossed the street with Meggie’s gift secured in plastic wrap under his arm.
“It’s done. It’s over Rest easy, little princess.”
Don Henley sang that there would be no more sorrow. No grief or pain.
Martin pulled a pistol from his bag and set the barrel against his bottom teeth.
“Merry Christmas, sweet girl.” He whispered the words around the barrel, and squeezed the trigger.
It started last Christmas, that must have been it. Weirdest thing that ever happened to me in my life – or so I thought at the time.
Now, this Christmas, I know a little better.
My name’s Belle, Clayton Belle, and I always hated this time of year.
I blame it on my folks. Sure, everybody blames their problems on their folks, but you should have seen mine.
My dad’s name was Jim Belle, but from after Halloween until round about New Year’s, he told everyone to call him Jingle. Dressed in red and green every chance he got. Decorated the house like you wouldn’t believe. My mom was just as bad, and she had no excuse… her given name was Carol.
They wanted me to swap “Clay” for, can you guess? Sleigh. No joke. I tell you, it was enough to drive a kid crazy. Here I was trying to be normal…
That was why, as soon as I was old enough to get out on my own, I gave up on Christmas. No, that’s putting it too lightly… I went out of my way to avoid the whole thing.
Maybe that’s why it happened. Maybe it was some strange message, some sort of off-the-wall Christmas revenge. Like in the story about Scrooge, except I didn’t get three ghosts. Didn’t even get one.
What’d I get? Some little freak with rabies…
I’d done pretty good at getting away from it all. I’d finally saved up enough to move out of the apartment into a house, tiny but my own. I had a telecommuting job, which spared me the yearly hassle of office parties, Secret Santas, holiday music over the intercom, and all that.
So, for the first time in years, I was expecting a nice, stress-free December.
Then it happened. Christmas Eve.
That was when I heard the bells.
Jingle-jingle-jingle, clanging and grating on my nerves, bringing back all my tension like it had never been away.
I shot to my feet, fists curled. If this was the preface to a spontaneous outbreak of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” from trespassing carolers, I was going to blast them with the hose and 20-degree temperatures be damned!
Stalking to the door, I yanked it open. But already, the sound was receding, dwindling into the distance… and even then I remember thinking that it almost seemed to be receding upward… but of course I didn’t give that idea a moment’s serious consideration.
Not then.
The people across the street were the Jaimesons. I’d seen them come home a week or so ago with a tree lashed to the roof of their car, but they were good about it, and kept their stuff private. If they wanted to be as looney as my parents in the privacy of their own home, that was their business, and they didn’t try to inflict it on the rest of us.
But now, something was hanging on their door. Even at midnight, every house on the street dark and sleeping, I couldn’t miss it. The full moon and the snow conspired to make it almost as bright as day, and the wreath that now hung on the Jaimeson’s door was twinkling with tiny red and white bulbs, like holly berries amid the shiny green leaves.
And there was something on the porch… from here, it was a bump of scarlet and white in an uncertain shape.
I couldn’t help it… anger set in. Some nerve the Jaimesons had, sneaking out in the night to put up that wreath, thinking no one would notice. Before I fully knew I meant to, I was striding down my walk, slippers crunching through the crust of the snow. I crossed the icy street and marched up their lawn, driving deep tracks. They’d see, they’d know, but I didn’t care.
The crumpled shape was recognizable now, a stocking. A plush cranberry-red velvet stocking with a ruff of white fur. It was lumpy… it was moving.
A nasty spear of fright jumped through me before I realized that the movement was due to nothing more than a toy, a child’s wind-up toy that had been jogged by the fall to the porch.
I could see it easily in my mind – Hank Jaimeson in full Santa regalia, smuggling in the sacks of goodies he’d had hidden in the garage, but dropping a stocking as he paused to put the wreath on the door.
My intent was to pull it down and pitch it, maybe onto the roof, maybe into the bushes, I don’t know. But as I reached for it, I heard a high mewling sound from inside the stocking.
My first thought was that it was a kitten, that old Hank had gotten his daughters a kitty but didn’t notice when it fell from his bag.
My second thought was that it would serve them right, a nice gruesome Christmas surprise to find frozen solid on the stoop.
But I may have been a Scrooge, I may have been a Grinch, I may have been a sour old jerk, but I wasn’t a total bastard. Couldn’t leave an innocent kitten to freeze to death in the night.
I bent down and scooped up the stocking. It squirmed in my grasp, and yes, there was something warm, something alive, in there.
“Hey, kitty-kitty,” I said.
I reached in, meaning to pet the soft bundle of fur.
Instead, my fingers found skin.
And an unbelievable explosion of pain.
It was like a spring-loaded beartrap of needles, sinking into the tender web between my thumb and index finger.
I screamed or cursed, or both mingled, and flung the stocking away from me. It flew off into the snow, but the biter held on, dangling at the end of my arm. My flailing motions made it clamp down tighter, and now rockets of pain were shooting up my arm to my head, where they burst like the Fourth of July – a holiday I’ve never had a problem with.
But I did have a problem with what I was seeing. A major one.
An elf was battened onto my hand.
An elf, yes, that’s what I said.
He was about eighteen inches high, maybe two feet, it was hard to tell. Built like one of those pudgy little gnome you sometimes see on the lawns of people who should know better, but light as a feather. He was wearing short pants (winter-white), a red vest, and those dorky curled-up shoes with bells on the toes. If he’d had a hat, it had fallen off, because his pine-green hair was blowing free around a set of ears that would have made Mr. Spock blush.
His eyes were the huge winsome adorable eyes of a cartoon character, but no cartoon character’s eyes had ever glittered with such a hard and flat hatred. A snarl, muffled by his mouthful of my hand, issued from the back of his throat.
screamed again, this time more in horror than pain, though there was still pain, plenty of it. With my other hand, I grabbed him around his potbellied middle and tried to tear him loose.
It didn’t work. Those fangs were embedded like a snake’s. But abruptly, the elf let go of his own accord. He scrambled up my arm, headed for my face.
My third scream broke decibel records. I reeled and staggered, trying to knock this deranged thing off of me. The backs of my legs hit the Jaimesons’ planter and I toppled over backward, feet flying. My breath was jarred out of me in a huge frosty cloud.
The crazed elf skittered onto my chest, his impish face twisted in pure madness. I didn’t know what he was going to do, and suddenly had a bizarre vision, one that might have been funny if it hadn’t been so hideous – my disembodied head impaled on the top of a Christmas tree in place of a star.
The Jaimesons’ door banged open, throwing a fan of light onto the snow. The elf hissed and was gone, springing from my chest in a bound that carried him into the concealing bushes.
The next thing I knew, Hank Jaimeson was there, in a robe, his eyes puffed from sleep and wide with shock. His wife and kids crowded into the doorway, all babbling at once.
Calls were made, to the police and to an ambulance. I was taken to the hospital because they thought I was having some sort of a breakdown. They had to think that, because I wasn’t wounded. The bite-mark on my hand was gone, except for a semi-circle of tiny white scars that almost looked like snowflakes.
I did some time under observation, and more time in court-ordered therapy. The consensus was that I must have snapped under the holiday strain. When I finally got home, the neighbors treated me with caution and even more distance than before.
The Jaimesons moved out that spring, the whole turn of events having been so traumatizing for their kids – waking to my panicked screams on Christmas gave little Amber Jaimeson nightmares for weeks.
But eventually, things got back to normal. Or so I thought.
I was fine until around October.
That was when I started to feel restless. Itchy, almost. Impatient, dissatisfied. I didn’t know what I wanted, but something was missing. Something I needed.
A few days after Halloween, as I was lugging the shells of my jack-o-lanterns out to the trash, I caught myself humming.
Humming a Christmas carol.
Appalled, I stopped then and there with my feet buried in a drift of leaves and a slightly mushy pumpkin sagging in my grip. I silently asked myself if I’d really been doing that, but I’d heard me. I could even Name That Tune – it had been “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
About a week later, I saw that they’d stocked the shelves in the dairy section of the local market with the first eggnog of the season, and my heart took an unprecedented and distinctly unwelcome leap of joy.
When I got home from my errands and started unloading my groceries, I found a carton of eggnog.
I wasted no time but raced right back to the market. The cashier who’d checked out my purchases was still there, and I stormed up to her, not sure if I meant to apologize for taking the eggnog by mistake or to berate her for mixing it in with my order.
But she told me that I had bought it, and had even remarked on how glad I was that they finally had some in the store. And that when she had replied with something to the effect of how it seemed the holiday season started earlier and earlier every year, I’d said ‘good!’
Good!
I had no recollection of that at all, and would have never said such a thing! Not me! Not Clayton Belle!
I decided she must have been having fun at my expense, and put it out of my mind. I planned to dump the eggnog down the sink and forget the whole matter.
I drank it instead.
I didn’t mean to… I just took the carton out of the fridge – and only then did it occur to me to wonder why I hadn’t returned it to the store and gotten my money back – and opened it.
And the scent hit me in a great rolling wave of creamy, nutmeggy temptation… and before I knew what was happening, I was guzzling it straight from the carton with such gulping greed that overflows were running in rills down my chin.
I leaned over the sink, nauseated and afraid, wondering if I was going to bring it back up. But it stayed, a thick liquid weight in my stomach, and I imagined I could feel it spreading out in there, sending out tendrils of itself, into my veins, coating my organs, being carried to every cell of my body.
Another week passed, and I was cranky all the time, missing something, needing something, not knowing what it was. Little things kept happening, distressing little things. Nothing big, nothing like the Great Eggnog Experience, but upsetting ones all the same.
Being at the drugstore, having to walk down the seasonal aisle to reach the pharmacy, and lingering over the cards and garlands that had begun to creep in among the turkeys and harvest decorations.
Shopping a catalog for some new clothes and only realizing when my order arrived that some of the things I’d bought were eerily familiar – winter-white pants, a red cardigan vest. And a green knitted cap, where had that come from?
Waking in the middle of the night with the most terrible craving for cookies, not just any cookies but specific kinds. I had to have the butter-shortbread ones crusted with colored sugar… I had to have gingerbread.
Then things started getting worse.
I bought a box of candy canes and ate them all in the car, the entire sticky red-and-white dozen of them, until my tongue and lips were bright pink and the taste of sweet mint seemed to permeate my entire being.
I found myself taking long aimless drives around town to look at the holiday lights and decorations… I even went to the mall and stood amid a smiling crowd as little kids waited for their turns on Santa’s lap.
I was humming again, and then singing low, and finally singing aloud, whenever I heard the carols… and I knew every single word.
I had been flipping channels and happened across a Christmas movie, the one about the boy who wanted a BB-gun. And, telling myself that nothing else good was on, wound up watching it. And then, worst of all, realizing it was a marathon, 24 hours of that same movie, and I stayed up all night watching it and fell asleep in my chair and woke up and kept watching it, until noon the next day.
The day it all came crashing down on me, I was at the park. It was December 22nd and I’d gone for a long brisk walk, hoping that the cold air and exercise would snap me out of this constant state of alternating trance and terror.
A woman said ‘Merry Christmas!’ to me, and I said it right back at her.
She passed without looking back, which was good, because my expression would have horrified her. It horrified me and I didn’t even have to see it; I could feel it. That was the first time those words had passed my lips in almost twenty years, but I hadn’t just been saying them.
I’d meant them!
I uttered a rusty screech and ran for home. Something was happening to me… I had to get help… there had to be something they could do…
I reached my yard and the strength ran right out of me like water through a sieve.
Lights sparkled along the eaves and around the windows of my house. More lights, string after string of them, wrapped the fence and the tree in the front yard. A red ribbon had been wound around the post that supported the mailbox, giving it an effect that could be construed as barber-pole but I knew better! A plastic reindeer with a red lightbulb for a nose stood beside the walk, and a wreath hung on the door.
It was the wreath that pushed me over, because it was practically identical to the one that had been on the Jaimesons’ door last year. Their house had sold but the current owners were spending the winter in Arizona with their grandkids, and thus hadn’t seen the terrible thing that had taken place across the street.
Someone had decorated my house!
No… I had done it. And couldn’t remember doing it.
Haltingly, scared to death of what I might find inside, I went up to the door. The wreath seemed to stare at me like a big round eye, laugh at me like a big round mouth.
I wanted to rip it down, rip all of it down. What would people think if they saw this? What would they say?
I steeled myself and plunged inside.
If I could have drawn breath, it would have been last year’s business all over again, for I would have screamed and screamed until the neighbors called 911. But my breath was stolen from me by the sight of the interior of my house.
It was a nightmare made real. That’s all I’ll say. I can’t bear to describe how tall the tree was, how many garlands festooned the stairway banister, what horrors awaited me on the mantle. I can’t stand to think of the candles, the presents, the three-tiered tray of cookies and fudge and divinity.
Even the bathroom wasn’t safe, because the shower curtain, the towels, even the toilet-lid cover, had been replaced by new ones in a poinsettia pattern. But despite that, the bathroom was still the least objectionable place in the house, and it was there that I collapsed in a dead faint.
I woke over twenty-four hours later to unbelievable pain in my hand and arm. Dimly sure that I must have been laying on them, I pushed myself up and looked.
The scars… the tiny semicircle of snowflake-shaped scars… they had faded nearly to invisibility over the year but now they were back. Standing out in vivid relief, almost seeming to wax and wane in time with the throbbing I felt in every nerve.
And yet, even with the throbbing, even with an ache that seemed to burrow into my bones, I felt full of a hectic, wild energy. Mania, almost. No, not almost… it was mania. I wanted to do something, had to get up and get moving, but I didn’t know what.
I tried to rise, shakily got as far as the sink, and caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror.
But at first, I didn’t know it was me… I had never in my life worn a silly little pointy cap with a bell on the end.
I cried out, thinking it was a stranger, an intruder, that I’d surprised in my home. My reflection reacted along with me and then I knew, but that knowing was untempered with relief.
I looked… different. It wasn’t just because of the cap.
My hair looked wrong. Longer.
My eyes were huge, but I attributed that to shock and fear.
My ears…
I didn’t want to see any more, and fell back onto the bathmat.
The ache intensified. I could hear the radio playing in the other room, tuned to the nonstop holiday music station.
I felt as if I was being crushed, slowly crushed under an impossible weight. I imagined I could hear my bones crunching, feel myself being squashed, compressed. An appalling, stretchy sensation tugged at my ears.
A dark corner of my mind knew then what was happening to me, but the rest of my mind rejected it. Ignoring the pain and the horrendous things that were going on in my body, I got up to splash cold water on my face…
And couldn’t reach the sink.
I was standing, but I was on eye-level with the cabinet where I kept the cleanser and spare rolls of tissue.
Very, very slowly and very much against my will, I looked down at myself.
Yes, I was standing… assuming those were my feet in the curly-toed shoes about eighteen inches below my head. Assuming that was my torso I was seeing, pooching out into a potbelly.
A wavery, uncertain noise came from my throat. I started to bring up my hands, to explore my head, but paused and let them drop. I had to see.
With strenuous effort, I clambered onto the toilet, and from there onto the counter. I edged out around the basin, keeping my eyes on my shoes – my horrible curly-toed shoes – until I was there.
Then I looked.
An elf looked back at me.
It had my blond hair, only grown long and silky. My brown eyes, cartoon-character cute. My features… changed and made sharper, fairer, more… elfin.
I opened my mouth to finally voice the scream that would rouse the neighborhood, maybe even the town. But before I could finish drawing my breath, my gaze fell on what was also shown in the mirror, the reflection of my dining room beyond the half-open bathroom door.
The table was covered with things. With tools, and paint-pots, and lengths of wood, and stuffing, and wheels. Half-finished toys were scattered all over the table, and a box of finished ones rested underneath. The mania that had been surging in me now came roaring up full-force.
Because time was short! Time was so very short! Tomorrow was Christmas Eve!
Tomorrow was Christmas Eve and I was behind in my work!
I yipped in alarm, sprang down from the sink in a sprightly hop, and rushed to my workbench.
And I knew, as I picked up my paintbrush to apply rouge-spots to the cheeks of a dolly, what I was. I knew what would happen to me this time every year, not ruled by the phases of the moon but by the seasons, when the change would set in.
Helpless to resist, caught in the grips of the dreadful transformation, compelled by my hungers and driven to do unspeakable things… with no folklore, no gypsy woman, no one to help me or tell me how to break the curse…
The terrible curse of the were-elf!
Christine Morgan grew up in the high desert and moved to a cool rainy coast as soon as she could. Though anything but the outdoorsy type, she loves trees and water … preferably viewed through a cozy window or from the deck of a cruise ship. Alaska, Norway, Scotland, and Germany/Austria are her vacation destinations of choice. Seeing the Northern Lights in person is on her bucket list. She’s currently three cats toward her eventual fate as a crazy cat lady; yes, she does talk to them, but don’t worry, she draws the line at knitting them little sweaters (because she can’t knit).
Meghan's House of Books 