Edgar Gonzales started getting tense again, sweating profusely even though the A/C was on full blast, and whenever his son asked to play a game with him or help him with his homework, he’d be short with him, never really answering the question, either. It obviously frustrated his son because Edgar noticed that he simply started playing alone with his toys in his room, day by day, no longer asking his father to join in. It was because Christmas was less than a month away and even though he hoped his son wouldn’t have known, he knew he’d overheard his mom on the phone mentioning things about his grandfather that he wished would go on deaf ears. Some things his son didn’t understand, Edgar knew this, but he also knew that his son recently learned how to apply context clues in Mrs. Darlene’s class, so that hope was thrown out of the window. The video games were connected to the living room T.V. and although he was in the kitchen, Edgar saw his son peak out to play before noticing his father smoking a cigarette, leant up against the refrigerator, and he popped back out, closing the door to his room.
He loved his son, Chewy Hernandez Acosta Gonzalez. He knew he’d be a big strong man someday, completely the opposite of him, if only he treated him correctly and kept him away from that mushy stuff that filled his own heart after what had broken him so many years ago. He’d been called a hippy before and in certain corners of the Hispanic community, that was a seething indictment.
Edgar looked out of the window where he could see across the street where the Carmona family lived. They were decorating. Thanksgiving ended not a week ago and Christmas decorations had been piling up around his neighborhood. Some people didn’t even wait for the table to be set with turkey and brisket before they started pulling Santa’s blow-up sleigh out onto their lawns. He started fidgeting with his wedding ring. It was worn out, more a static pink brass color than gold anymore. Edgar recently got laid off, so his wife Rosa Carmen Iglesias Gonzales had to pick up the slack, and they all knew that the money they had wouldn’t be sustainable for long. Edgar thought if they only didn’t have a son yet, they’d be able to make it. At first Edgar nodded, but then upon realizing the horrible attitude taking hold of his thoughts, shook his head as he gave his noggin a light tap with the palm of his hand. Undirected anger achieved by a succumbing torment can eventually cause any known person to blow up in ways they’d at first conceive as unfathomable before. Edgar’s therapist—it was his wife’s idea; his family doesn’t know—listened to him talk about all of this and more every week, and she’d tell him that he’s simply going through PTSD. Apparently, this wasn’t something that only soldiers and first responders went through. Although his therapist always pushed against comparing his suffering to others, Edgar felt a sense of belonging in knowing that he was included amongst heroes, even if he never saw himself as one. And how could he? Edgar wasn’t known for sticking his neck out for the good of others.
He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out. Attempting to grab some bastion of sanity back within him, he took an even deeper breath than before and started toward his son’s room. The closer he stepped in that direction, the louder a clunking sound began to form. Eventually, Edgar put his ear to the door and it stopped as he heard his son grown in pain.
“Ow,” said Chewy.
Edgar burst open the door. “Is everything all right?”
He saw his son sitting on the ground, looking at his finger, building something out of wood with the nails and hammer from the tool box above the washer and dryer.
“How’d you get those?”
Chewy turned away from his finger and looked to his father with watery eyes. It was then that Edgar noticed that Chewy had slammed the hammer too hard onto his finger.
“Dang, son,” he told him. “That looks like you’re going to lose that fingernail.”
“Lose it?” Chewy’s eyes widened in disbelief and fear.
“Yeah, you slammed it so hard that it lost all connection to its nerve, so it’ll fall off in a day or two.”
“Gross,” said Chewy, in awe at his zombiefied fingertip. He put it in his mouth, practically gnawing on it.
“Yeah,” said Edgar. “Mucho gross.”
They both smiled at each other. It was strange to Edgar that this was how they were connecting. It went to show him how little every day man stuff they actually partook in together. Stuff that a little boy really needs. Stuff like playing ball, or anything that involves falling down in order to get back up, and just plain old conversation. Since Edgar’s been out of work, he kept their routines as they were before: they’d have breakfast before school, after he’d drop his son off at the bus stop, and then just dinner at 6 and goodnight at 9. Since he was home all day long now, he’d try to make an effort to be in his life more.
“Say, mijo, what do you think about me driving you all the way to school from now on and picking you up, when I can, too?”
Chewy took his finger out of his mouth—the slime from his mouth and fingers lingered together before finally breaking apart, slinking down further onto his chin and mouth—and smiled real big. “That sounds awesome!”
“Great.”
“You promise?”
“I promise, mijo.”
That morning, Chewy had a fully completed wooden train stuffed into his backpack. Edgar had helped him finish building it and Chewy’s mom helped instruct him on painting it. They had a perfect family evening together and in the morning Rosa made her famous migas.
“Okay, Chewy,” said Edgar. “Have a great day at school, and try to remember there’s just one more day until Friday.”
Chewy gave a thumbs up and hopped out of their car.
As he made it a quarter of the way to the entrance, his father hollered out for him. “Mijo, I forgot to ask. How did you learn how to make that train and where did you even get the wood for it? You did such a good job.”
Chewy proudly stepped forward, his smile engulfing his face. He said, “Santa showed me how.”
The bell rang. Chewy was going to be late. He turned around and booked it inside. It was Edgar’s fault as he forgot to set an alarm to wake up earlier, being used to sleeping in as of late. That’s going to change, he told himself.
Edgar sat there in his car completely frozen. His heart raced like never before, but he wouldn’t show it. He simply grinned, waved to the attendants outside, and drove off.
“I should have known,” he told himself. “Santa was back in town.”
It’s only been 9 months since Edgar brought his family to live in his home town of Invierno Niño, TX by the border. After all of the fighting and shooting going on around the south, Edgar spoke to his mother, who told him that everything was still peaceful over here. Nothing ever happens in this town. Tiny Niños play, grow up, and they leave, often never coming back unless they have children of their own. Starting a family is hard enough without comfort surrounding them and coming back home is the hot chocolate to your family’s warm fireside blanket.
Edgar remembered little of his childhood. His mother told him this was due to playing so much football when he entered into high school, but if Edgar recalled correctly, he always sat on the bench. Sports were the only thing he cared about growing up, though. And building things for other people. He just couldn’t think back to any of the holidays leading up to Christmas. He knew he dressed up and had candy for Halloween, that he ate turkey and brisket on Thanksgiving, but when it came to receiving presents, all he could envision was an ethereal fog surrounding his tiny hands. Oh, no. There were times when he built things, he thought. Times when he would cut himself or something, causing blood to gush out, but his hands were fine, so nothing to fuss about.
Someone started honking at him from behind Edgar’s car. The green light just turned red again and Edgar couldn’t help but realize that the light pole was already adjourned with reeves, candy cane decorations, and bells that jingled to the wind.
The honking continued until the light turned green again. Edgar flipped the bird as he drove away slowly, but the car stayed behind him.
Edgar couldn’t see who was following him. Probably due to the dark tint of the windows, he thought. Or maybe it was something else. He noticed that he could still see the evergreen steering wheel turn as the car followed him. It was a bright red 1967 Corvette with a thick blue stripe down the middle and a green steering wheel. If we were at the North Pole, Edgar would have assumed it was the company vehicle. He wondered what all the fuss was about as it mirrored his every movement. Edgar was driving a beat-up old 2006 Honda Accord that his father-in-law found for Rosa after she crashed her finally paid off Kia Soul. How could one simple hesitant go at a light cause such dismay for this driver?
Edgar, finally mustering up the courage to be the man he wants to be for his son, pulled over to the side of the neighborhood rode and stepped out. The jingle bells mobile stopped behind him, but no one stepped out of the car to meet him. Edgar raised his hands to his side as he approached the driver side window. Before he could see whose butt was sitting in the seat, the car sped in reverse a few feet back and turned forward onto the road, taking off.
Edgar left his hands in the air, only this time he raised them above his head and literally guffawed at the nonsense of it all.
“I’ll never get that time back,” he said.
It had been a few weeks and Chewy had built himself a cornucopia of old fashioned toys and even a few newfangled whatchamacallits. Half of his fingernail had grown back, too. Edgar had been helping him. Edgar had also been hiding the creations in his son’s closet and asking his son not to mention anything to his mother. Every day after dropping Chewy off from school, that same car followed him. Sometimes even all the way to his home, but every time it sped off after Edgar got out. One time Edgar stayed in the car for hours and so, too, did the shiny Corvette stay behind him. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he knew no matter what it was it would just be too much unneeded stress for his wife. It’s already been hard enough trying to explain where all the wood and parts to their bed frame went, or their tables, or really most of their heavy duty spare parts.
Rosa showed up home early today, surprising her family with Whataburger. This is an awesome surprise, both to be with her two hours early and to have fast food, which they didn’t eat so much for the sake of their child, but the thing about it is, Chewy had already a few minutes before she showed up removed his father’s foot from the rest of his body. Chewy needed the bone to help carve the tusk for a rhinoceros toy that Chewy explained to his father would be the perfect gift for someone Santa told him was named Edgar, who loved animals with horns and stuff like that.
“That’s like my name.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Chewy, forgetting that his father’s name wasn’t really papá or dad.
Edgar sat there in pain, but also astonished at his son’s ability to stitch him up with little loss of blood. It hurt like an SOB, but his son certainly had a future in him if he wanted to be a surgeon or even a woodworker. That’d be something, he thought. He has good grades so far. Maybe he really could be something that society actually needs and go to trade school.
They heard her come inside the front door and Edgar sunk as Chewy kept at his building over the tarp they laid out for all the blood his detached appendage continued to expel.
“Eddie,” she said in the living room. “My little mijo, come and eat! I got off early and I miss you all!”
“Hey, mijo,” said Edgar. “Can you whip me up a wooden leg or something so mamá don’t freak out?”
Chewy shook his head. Edgar noticed that his jaw shrank in size, but was perfectly fine before, that his ears grew pointier, and it seemed like he was wearing blush on his cheeks.
Edgar froze, completely exasperated. “C’mon, kiddo! This could be bad for us!”
“I can’t unless you’re on the list.”
“List?”
Chewy nodded his head just as he peeled the final slab of flesh from his father’s lifeless foot. “The Nice List of children that Santa’s going to deliver these toys to,” he said. “After I’m done with all of these toys, he’ll release me.”
Mami Gonzales began to open Chewy’s door. “I can hear y’all in hear—don’t you want your Buffalo Chicken Strip sandwiches?”
At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at, and with a husband who gives out only the most deer-eyed look beside her son, she didn’t have an easy time figuring it out, but what she did know was that her husband was mutilated and that her son was covered in blood as he held pieces of a skeleton. Her abject horror was so distraught that her vocal chords took millennia of weary-eyed salvation to catch up to it. The blackness crowded her sorrows as she passed out due to what was laid before her. She half fell onto the bed. Mostly, she was dehydrated.
Edgar gave a light smack to his son’s shoulder. “See what I told you, wey. She’s been through so much lately.” Edgar gently tapped Rosa’s dangling leg. “Tell Santa that fool better help me make a foot or things are going to get mucho difficult, okay?”
Chewy didn’t answer him.
“Make sure he knows, fool,” said Edgar. “And grab me a Modelo from the fridge. I feel like I’m dying here.”
Chewy got up to fetch his father a beer and Edgar watched him as the shoes on his feet dangled bells. He jingled with them on in every step.
Now that it’s Christmas morning, Chewy was able to kick back and relax. More so, he seemed to be confused and without much memory of what happened. Rosa didn’t seem to remember much, either. Which is good, thought Edgar. A lot happened in-between the Whataburger incident and now—mostly missing animals around the neighborhood for use of their fur, stolen jewelry, Chewy’s weight loss and bountiful energy, and the smell of Christmas cookies never leaving the house. No one left the house in those last weeks. The children of the town were in crunch time.
For now, Chewy was asleep. Thank God because he hadn’t slept a good night’s rest in a long while. Edgar’s wife was asleep in their bedroom. Edgar sat out to watch the fire place. Everyone had a fireplace and chimney in Invierno Niño, TX, which was odd for such a high temperature town. He waited for the man who owed his son his winters back. He waited for the man who took all of Edgar’s winters away from him and his family when he was a child. He knew he’d be here. They even, as a family, laid out the traditional Gonzales reindeer food—basically sugar, pretzels, and whatever else was leftover from deserts—that night. The curse of this town was truly unbelievable to anyone who hadn’t been through it themselves, but the safety of the town from outside interference was guaranteed if they continued to go along with it, although Edgar felt that he knew better. The right to choose what his child may do in his own time as opposed to working like a sweatshop worker for no pay at all and for kids who probably don’t deserve the toys that were made for them anyway was a great negotiator in Edgar’s decision making.
Edgar had far too many cigarettes and even more glasses of eggnog—that Chewy made for Santa’s visit—with whiskey than he knew he shouldn’t have, but the barrel of his father-in-law’s shot gun was already primed and in waiting, so he thought it couldn’t hurt any.
His in-laws were disappointed that they didn’t visit for Christmas at the ranch where they were celebrating, but something kept them in town this year and it wasn’t hard to figure out what was pulling them back after visiting for Rosa’s birthday early December. It could be the curse or it could be what Edgar had planned.
Edgar’s foot itched, which was weird because he was missing it, although the crutches helped some so that he could refill his drink. He downed the last of his eggnog, looked through the glass, which also shown through to the window outside beside their Christmas tree. Santa’s blow-up sleigh was starting to deflate—Edgar went outside earlier and haphazardly stuck it with a safety pin—causing him to long for the days before he remembered all this evil that that fat red man brought to his family. And he missed his foot. That was my favorite foot, he thought, chocking on his laugh.
Then he saw it. The real Santa’s sleigh was landing atop of the Carmona’s house. A big bright light was in front and all those reindeer that have harder to remember names than the kids these days stumbled about the roof. Edgar knew he shouldn’t think like that, especially about the innocent kiddos, but he was piping mad and so he felt it was okay because soon he would be the hero in his son’s story. Soon his home town would be free and soon he might just free himself, too.
Eventually, the Gonzales house was next in line to bring further merriment. Edgar’s chest started to pulsate and his breathing quickened, but he never lost sight of what he was prepared to do. In the blink of an eye Santa’s big black boots appeared where there would be a fire and Edgar widened his mouth just before sealing it in a crispy grin. Edgar waited until he saw his entire body push out of the chimney and off from the fireplace, waiting still until Santa turned around.
When he finally locked eyes with ol’ St. Nick, Edgar pulled back on the trigger of his father-in-law’s shotgun. Edgar pictured a multitude of paint and body parts washing over his decorations, but he knew it was too late when that fat man in a red suit smiled back at him. He smiled back at him in a “I’ve got a secret” sort of way.
The shot gun released nothing but confetti and a barrel of monkeys. The sound that sparked the gun shot reminded Edgar of Christmas caroling. After the long silence of Santa watching him fidget in his chair, he pulled out from his bag an elongated gift wrapped present and handed it to Edgar before going about filling the space below their Christmas tree beside the window. Edgar was shaken and in dismay, but he looked down onto his lap anyway and saw the gift from Santa and began to open it. Finally through the meticulous wrapping paper, he discovered a prosthetic foot. Edgar looked back up and Santa was gone.
A beautifully designed envelope was taped onto the prosthetic. With golden raised lettering, the note inside said: “Thank you for all that you’ve given this town, my little helpers. See you and your family next year. With love and Merry Christmas—Signed, Santa Claus”
Edgar began to sob uncontrollably as his family woke up from each of their slumbers, too excited not to head straight for their gifts.
Chewy was the most excited as he tore through his many gifts already. “Did Santa come?”
Rosa told him to go and check the cookies they laid out.
“Yep,” said Chewy. “He ate them all up! And this present says from Santa!”
Rosa smiled at him, asking “What is it?”
Edgar saw his wife and son truly happy for the curse of Christmas had been lifted and the magic of it had finally settled within them, allowing the family to enjoy the holiday together. Edgar knew it may be fleeting, but he’d enjoy these moments with them while they lasted.
Chewy opened his present and tilted his head.
“What is it, mijo?” Rosa asked.
“How weird,” he said.
Edgar turned his head to his son. He noticed for the first time in a month that his son no longer held the features of an elf. He was pudgy, tired, and so beautiful. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, dad, but I got a little rhinoceros,” Chewy said. “How random.”
Rosa looked at her husband’s missing foot and shined her teeth. “Yes, mijo,” she said in a vocal tone that wasn’t at all her usual self. “That is so random.”
“Mum,” Kitt said from behind her, “I’ve got a stomach ache.”
Rachel peered over a shoulder.
From her chair at the dining-room table, she saw her son looking at her. Lanky for a ten-year old, he stood framed in the doorway with sleeves halfway up his skinny forearms. Perhaps they should’ve bought him a new coat rather than all those presents. A glance into the lounge reminded her of the mess to clear up: wrapping paper and toys everywhere. Her and James’s gifts were neatly stacked beside the sofa from which they’d earlier watched the chaos unfold.
“You’re dripping snow on the carpet,” she told him. “Take off your coat.”
His face, rosy from the cold, didn’t change as he slunk back into the kitchen. The sound of his shuffling feet was almost in time with James’s vegetable chopping.
“At least you took off your boots,” she called after him.
Coloured Lego bricks of varying shapes and sizes covered the table, several obscuring the instruction booklet and surrounding the half-complete model. Indeed, much like the toys scattered in the other room, this was another present he’d played with for not even five minutes. Most, after tearing open the wrapping paper, he’d simply given a once-over; some, barely a cursory glance. Every year, it was the same. Flo seemed to be following in his ways. As it was, she often copied him, a trait Rachel knew was common in all younger siblings.
She found the Lego brick she’d been searching for, attached it to the part Kitt had already completed, and glanced at the photo on the box. What she had so far in her hands, she guessed, would be a section of car engine. She recalled the 70s when Lego models were basic vehicles. But now, they were impressive, intricate, and with so many moving parts. Back then, it was pretty much only the wheels that moved. As a kid, she’d marvelled at how her older brother would construct them. She wondered if she had copied him as much as Flo copied Kitt.
In just a few hours, her brother and his children would come crashing through their front door, presents in hand… more chaos… more wrapping paper to tidy later. And, besides… all that packaging – seriously, was all that packaging necessary?
Tea. She wanted a cup of tea, but as she stepped into the kitchen, the smell of brandy and cinnamon warmed her nostrils. When she saw the saucepan of mulled wine steaming on the stove, she knew she had no intention of putting the kettle on to make a cuppa.
Yeah, she wanted some mulled wine.
James didn’t look round as he said, “I’m looking forward to this.”
He dragged a bunch of carrots across the work surface, and with nimble fingers, he began chopping them into even slices. She often marvelled at how he never cut himself. He was a fine cook – indeed, modesty aside, she wasn’t too bad herself – and he seemed to enjoy it more than she did.
“Kitt…” He still hadn’t removed his jacket. “Where’s your sister?”
“Out in the Hollow.”
The Hollow, as they’d named it after moving to their country house during the summer, was a bomb crater in the woodland which backed onto their garden. It was one of many overgrown scars from the Second World War. Rachel had once been trapped in a conversation with a local elderly woman who insisted some German pilots hadn’t wanted to reach London and so deliberately dropped their payloads onto empty countryside. She was unsure how much faith to have in the woman’s knowledge, but it was admirable to be positive about a piece of history that was otherwise devastating.
Positivity, however, was at a low level in Rachel’s reserve and she was, sadly, dreading her brother’s troops invading her home.
She placed the red Lego brick she hadn’t realised she still held onto the worktop. “Why don’t you both come in now?”
“I’m in,” Kitt said. He’d unzipped his coat and was now rubbing his stomach.
“Yes, but your sister’s not.” She reached up and opened the cupboard for some glasses. “Besides, your cousins’ll be here soon.”
“I don’t feel well.” In truth, the boy didn’t look himself. Maybe he’d caught a chill. After all, it was cold out there: the sky was white, and the snow was coming down in impressive flurries. However, ever since he’d turned ten he’d become a bit of a whinge-bag.
“Okay.” She took two glasses from the shelf and placed them down on the counter. “I’ll make some hot chocolate while you go get Flo, and by the time you’re back, it’ll be ready to drink.”
James glanced at her. “Mulled wine for me.” He looked at the glasses in front of her and grinned. “Good call.”
She watched Kitt continue to rub his stomach. Perhaps he really was ill. “What do you say, sweetie?”
He shrugged.
“Deal?” she prodded.
His eyes drifted from her, to the window and beyond, to where his sister was probably still playing in the den.
“Seriously, Kitt, go get your—”
His face slackened, a whiteness – no, a blueness – tinted his cheeks. Traceries of veins raced beneath his skin. His eyes, the whites themselves, turned a cold blue. Ice formed across his cheeks, crackling, and spreading fast to cover his whole face. Even his hair suddenly frosted. Clothes, too: they whitened as though he’d been stuffed in a freezer for days.
The sound of crackling intensified.
Rachel staggered forwards, knocking the Lego brick onto the floor. It skittered across the tiles.
James had now turned, eyes wide, knuckles whitening as they gripped the knife.
“Kitt…” she whispered.
His body stiffened. More crackling, sharp, from inside his body like fracturing ice. His skin, his hands, his face, white as the sky, cracked in places. A deep crevice zigzagged upwards from beneath his collar, shooting along his jaw and up his cheek and across his brow.
He stood there. Frozen.
Fragile as glass, he shattered. Exploded.
Hundreds of multi-coloured ice crystals, twinkling in the kitchen light, shot in every direction. It sounded like a dozen windows cracking at once. In whites and crimsons and purples and blues, their son’s body vanished in an icy haze. It was like a bomb had gone off in the middle of an iceberg. Several shards stung Rachel’s cheeks.
Her scream filled the kitchen as Kitt became nothing more than hundreds of ice crystals scattered around the kitchen.
Still clutching the knife, James backed off, retched and spewed. It spattered the worktop, and as it dribbled down the apron she’d bought him for Christmas, she noticed she’d not removed the price tag.
A hundred thoughts collided in her suddenly small brain. Dizziness pressed down on her. What was left of Kitt absurdly made her think of the time she’d dropped the ice cube tray and the cubes had scattered across the tiles.
James stepped forward and reached out for where Kitt had stood. He then backed up… his foot shot out in front of him. Vomit flicked in the air, and for a crazy second, it was as though he ran on the spot.
He fell – face down – onto the knife he still held.
Blood pumped from his chest as he scrambled sideways, then slumped, and kicked the glinting ice crystals. They made the same sound as the Lego brick a moment ago.
“James!” She leapt towards him and dropped to her knees beside his shuddering body.
His moans, strong at first, weakened… softening, quietening. He jerked and a slice of carrot shot across the floor, bounced off a crystal, and skidded through a small heap of snow to rest against one of Kitt’s boots. One more twitch, another… then he stopped. His head flopped to the side.
She pulled him into her arms, stroking his face. His dead eyes stared past her head. A dark pool soaked her trousers, warm, now spreading beneath them both. She screamed and her agony tore through the house. A glance out through the glass of the back door, into the relentless snow and out to the bottom of their garden, she remembered Flo. The Hollow.
Tears prickled her eyes as much as darkness crept into her periphery. Somehow… somehow she pushed both aside.
Flo. She had to get Flo.
On her feet, not realising she’d stood, she glanced down at James. His blood had now spread to blend in with the crystals that had once been their son. With one boot on, one off, she reached for the backdoor, gripping it with slippery fingers.
James couldn’t be dead, could he? Can’t be possible. And Kitt. What happened to Kitt? She staggered back towards her husband, refusing to believe any of this. The sole of her Wellington boot squeaked, slipping in the blood, and she stumbled into the dishwasher, causing it to rattle.
Leaving red handprints up the front of the appliance, she put on her boots properly.
Flo.
Back to the door, after fumbling the handle, she was soon outside, the air freezing her lungs. A quick look over her shoulder brought into view James’s legs amid the glinting crystals, and she considered going back to get a coat.
But… the Hollow – she had to get to the Hollow.
Already, Kitt’s footprints had vanished.
Snow filled the sky, coming down in flurries. It stung her face as she started to run up the pathway, every footfall crunching. In what felt like hours, she made it to the gate at the bottom of their garden – the one James had purposefully cut into the fence to allow access to the woodland behind, so the kids could play in the Hollow. Acres spread out behind their property, where even the Estate Agents couldn’t tell them who owned it. All of it so remote, it was never to be a problem.
Something red flashed up ahead, someone darting between tree trunks and winter-dead foliage… then nothing. Perhaps she hadn’t seen anyone. But, then again, no… she knew she saw him – yet it was ridiculous who she saw. This wasn’t happening! And it was at that moment, despite the freezing snow buffeting her, she knew she was dreaming… she had to be… surely.
Father Christmas. Or at least someone dressed like him.
A sickness rose in her throat… James, Kitt. Dear God, what was happening? She bit down on her lip and fought the urge to collapse to her knees, to cry, to let the snow take her, freeze her. She remained upright, managing to sprint into the woodland. The snow on the ground thinned the deeper into the woods she went. As she ran, she searched for Father Christmas – for Santa… for the man she’d seen… This was such madness. Kitt had… had exploded! Whatever the cause, she wondered if that man in the red suit had anything to do with it. Kitt had said he felt ill. Poison? Had the imitation Father Christmas poisoned him? Insane. The man—
Rachel interrupted her own thoughts. Flo! He’d better not harm her.
With those thoughts, she sprinted through crispy leaves and snow, kicking it up. Already, she felt damp through her trousers, and James’s blood was freezing her skin. The trees were sparser here, and so the snow was thicker, in the sky as well as on the ground. Finally, she saw where the woodland floor dipped slightly. That was where the crater began – the Hollow.
Where had the man gone? There were no footprints. She could’ve sworn he ran this way. It was snowing heavily, certainly, but not enough to cover his tracks that quickly. Everywhere was a mix of white and subtle streaks of brown where tree trunks and foliage had so far avoided the heavy snow. Her breath clouded the air in front of her and she regretted not getting a coat.
She held up an arm as a feeble shield from the stinging snow.
At the rim of the Hollow, her breath cold and sharp in her throat, she looked down. Below her, in the centre of the crater, was the kids’ den. In the shape of something between a cabin and a tepee, built with James’s carpentry skills, it was a sturdy weave of branches and pallet boards. Snow covered the roof and heaped the sides in drifts.
Still, she saw no sign of Father Christmas.
A short laugh escaped her, and she refused another as it seemed to get lost in the snow. She worried that would bring on a madness she felt was close to overwhelming her, just like the darkness she felt at the edge of her vision. She stumbled down the slope, almost tripping, but snagged herself on the winter skeleton of a tree. Beside her, a startled robin redbreast took flight. The branch it had been standing on wobbled in the wake of its lift-off.
Flo had to be down there… she hoped… she prayed.
Down the embankment she went, taking sideways steps between branches and tangled brambles. The snow was untouched here, too. Again, she wondered about the man she’d seen. Had she even seen him? Whoever he was, and indeed if she’d even seen him, couldn’t be in the den. No footprints, she thought with relief.
But she knew her daughter was in there. She couldn’t be anywhere else.
Rachel slowed her pace, her lungs burning with a strange, cold fire, and her breath plumed about her in great clouds.
“Flo?” Her voice sounded close to hysterical, and, again, she somehow pushed it aside. She reached the paving that hid beneath the smooth snow. “Honey?”
No answer.
Closer to the door, she saw colours between the snow-coated boards and branches; bright yellow, too. Was that Flo’s coat? Yes, thank God. There she was, sitting inside.
“It’s Mummy, I’m coming in.” Rachel pulled open the door, and it made an arc in the snow. “Flo, honey…”
Her daughter sat cross-legged on the blanket the kids used as a carpet. For a moment, Rachel couldn’t understand what she saw. Food. So many paper plates, piled with food, surrounded her daughter. She wondered at which point during the day her children had taken all the food from the kitchen. Had it been today? Yesterday? Then Rachel realised none of the food was theirs. She didn’t recognise any of it. There was a Christmas pudding and gingerbread men, mince pies, iced biscuits, tree cookies, and a perfectly-made Yule log. The chocolate looked divine.
Flo turned towards her. There was a headless gingerbread man in her pudgy fingers, and through a mouthful, she said, “Mummy, I told Kitt not to eat it.”
A flash of memory: Kitt rubbing his stomach, turning to ice, exploding… She wanted to laugh, to cry, to tell Flo to stop eating, and… she wanted some of that chocolate log. Kitt, James… a shiver ran up her spine, and she crouched to step through the doorway.
She slapped the gingerbread from the girl’s hand.
“Don’t eat anything!” Tears again threatened to overcome her. She bit her lip, feeling her chin quiver.
Shocked, Flo cradled her hand in the other, and declared, “It tastes fine.”
“Kitt—” Her boy’s name caught in her throat.
“He shouldn’t have eaten any of that.” Flo pointed to a plate Rachel hadn’t noticed tucked between the Yule log and Christmas pudding. It was a pie with a smiling elf’s face made from chunks of lumpy pastry. Crudely made, and entirely unappetising. There was a piece missing, and the filling oozed a deep red onto the plate. It glistened, reflecting Flo’s yellow coat.
Again, she thought of Kitt’s exploding body. Again, she bit her lip. This was not the time to lose her cool.
Wind howled, and through the gap in the branches and boards, snow drifted in. Several flakes landed on the elf pie to instantly dissolve into the pastry and filling.
Rachel’s lip hurt, and the copper taste of blood teased her tongue. Perhaps it even trickled down her chin. A shuffle forwards, and she could finally wrap her arms around Flo. Tight. An embrace. Mother and daughter. A life-thread… Family. Her only family now. Tears welled, blurred her vision. It was like water filled the den, brimming to drown them both. As though that was precisely what was happening, she began to choke and gasp. But they were sobs.
“He’s outside again,” Flo whispered.
Rachel gulped, held back the next sob, and mumbled into the girl’s hair, “Who?”
“I’m scared, mummy.”
With reluctance, she held Flo at arm’s length. “Who are you talking about?” Rachel knew. Of course she knew.
Flo’s eyes widened.
Outside, the sounds of twigs breaking and snow crunching beneath boots made them squeeze one another tighter.
The air froze in Rachel’s throat.
In a roar of snapping wood, exploding splinters and screeching nails, the roof and walls of the den were suddenly ripped away… A blanket that had been bunched in the corner was swept up into the air. Wind and snow buffeted them, and they both squinted into the whiteness.
Through the swirling snow, the toothy grin of a pockmarked and bearded face bore down on them. The rotund man was dressed in a tatty Father Christmas costume. Frost clung to the grubby fibres. A long, arthritic hand jerked towards Flo, one finger extended. The dirt beneath the fingernail hovering in front of the girl’s nose was black.
“You!” His voice was sharp. “I told you… to… eat!”
Flo’s bottom lip quivered.
Rachel shoved her away from him, and stood up straight. Flo cried out amid scattered plates and crumbled food, as Rachel tilted her head back. The man – if she could, in fact, call him that – had to be over eight-feet tall. He reeked of a mixture of cinnamon and sewage.
“Who are you?” she shrieked, her hands shaking. Adrenaline buzzed in her head.
When he grinned, his teeth appeared to lengthen, each as sharp as a pine needle and just as green. His red face was cratered, deeply scarred, oozed pus. He wore the floppy, red and white hat of an average Father Christmas, and his bulky coat was of the same shade of red, its buttons tarnished, rusted. A cold, cobalt blue fire burned in his stare – the same coldness that was in Kitt’s eyes… just before… before he…
“What have you done?” Her shrill voice echoed around the Hollow. Yet again, she realised how close a personal darkness was to taking her away, but she had to stay strong for Flo. It was all about Flo now. They had to get out of there – now!
Breath steamed from gaping nostrils as he stepped back, gloating. As he did so, a plate flicked up crumbs over his tatty leather boot and a tree cookie crumbled into the blanket. He shifted the sack she’d not noticed he held. Covered in frost, just like the rest of him, it was crudely stitched in a patchwork effort that was confusing, and not entirely Christmassy. Each section was different: snowmen, love hearts, candy canes, shamrocks, skulls, pumpkins, eggs, rabbits; there was even a baby in a crib. Those were all she glimpsed, but there were more.
A grey-green filth oozed from in between the stitches, dripping onto the ground. It hissed, dissolving the snow and singeing the twigs. It smouldered when it spattered the blanket. An acrid curl of smoke wafted upwards, only to be snatched up by a sudden snow flurry.
“Flo, honey…” Rachel said, fighting the urge to cower before the gruesome creature. “Come here.” Her hands shook so much more than from the cold that rooted her.
Flo reached up, and with a cold and clammy grip, grabbed Rachel’s hand.
The man’s blue eyes, with a hint of red, locked onto Rachel. Unable to look away, she felt Flo yank her sleeve.
“Mummy!”
One more step back, and the fake Father Christmas shrugged off the sack. It slumped to the ground between them with a thump.
“What have I done, you ask?” Incredibly, his grin widened still, seeming to split his head in two. Those craters in his skin now leaked a greenish muck.
Rachel moved slightly, and a branch snapped beneath her heel. She felt as though the ground had frozen up and around her boots.
In one movement, his veiny hands untied the frayed rope that fastened the sack. It gaped for a second then fell sideways. Dozens of coloured crystals scattered… and James’s body flopped out.
Her heart corkscrewed into her throat and she cried out.
“Daddy!” Flo’s grip crushed Rachel’s fingers.
Most of the crystals and the majority of her husband’s body remained in the sack. Those icy shards of her son twinkled.
“What have I done, indeed!” He laughed and it was more a shriek of delight, the sick bastard.
Flo pulled against Rachel’s hand, but she wouldn’t let her rush to her dad. No way.
“And…” The man booted James’s lifeless body. “I even have a bonus.”
James’s dead eyes stared up to the sky as though watching the drifting flakes. A bitterness rose in Rachel’s throat, choking her, and her mind reeled and warped her vision.
This man, this monster, reached down and picked up one of the crystals. He squinted into it, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. “Beautiful,” he muttered and flicked it back into the sack. That tinkling sound sent nausea flushing through her. Still crouched, he picked up the elf pie. Its filling now bubbled.
Rachel willed her feet to move, and, finally, they shuffled backwards – inches at a time – slowly dragging Flo with her. As before, a dizziness threatened to take her down.
Balancing the plate on his upturned hand, he stood and offered it to Flo.
“Now, eat!”
She shook her head, clamping her lips tight; they turned as white as her cheeks and her tiny nostrils flared.
“I only need one more of you, then I can leave this ridiculous season.”
“Get away from her!” Rachel yelled. One hand squeezed Flo’s hand, while the other dug fingernails into her own palm to force away the darkness.
“Only one more mouth to feed, then I am out of here, away from this selfish season of gift-sharing-loveless-family-nonsense.”
“One more?” Rachel murmured. The dizziness was strengthening, but she had to get Flo away from there.
“Yes.” His eyes shone a deeper red amid the blue.
“Just one more?” she repeated, her voice shaking as much as the rest of her. “Then you’ll leave us?”
“Yes.” He took the plate away from Flo, and tilted his head to look at Rachel.
She straightened her back, lifting her head high. “I’ll eat it,” she whispered.
“Mummy, no,” Flo cried.
Holding that monster’s cold gaze, Rachel hardened her next words.
“If you promise to leave my daughter alone, I’ll—”
Without waiting for her to finish, he rammed the pie towards her. His grin seemed to fill her whole vision.
Without hesitation, she snatched the plate from him and brought the pie to her mouth. It tasted of cinnamon, rotten vegetables, and off-meat. She gobbled, chewed, swallowed, then choked. Tears came, and then body-wracking sobs followed along with the image of James, of Kitt, of Flo… of a Christmas morning that began so normal.
She released Flo and used both hands to shovel the foul stuff into her mouth.
The man in the red suit chuckled.
“The more you eat,” he whispered, “the quicker it’ll be.”
Gagging, she managed to swallow more. Some slopped onto her boots. Most of it went down her throat.
“Mummy.” Flo had backed away and was almost sitting on the splintered remains of the den. A tiny crease had formed in her forehead, and her bottom lip quivered.
Rachel dropped the empty plate. The back of her hands whitened as they frosted. Her lungs filled with freezing air. Then feeling as though her organs had chilled to burning cold, her stomach swelled. A dizziness swept into her blurred vision, a whiteness leaking into her periphery.
So cold! she thought, numbed. But no pain…
As she watched ice crystals form over her sleeve and across her jumper, the freezing sensation intensified. The sound of cracking came from somewhere inside her.
Her skin began to split.
From inside to out, that coldness surged through every inch of her, and perhaps… perhaps she heard Flo call out before a darkness replaced the blinding whiteness… and Rachael shattered into hundreds of ice crystals.
The girl cowered against the splintered remains of the den, her arm covering her face. Wind roared and snow stung her forehead. When she looked around, through a tornado of red and white and multi-coloured ice, she saw the pretend Father Christmas. He flew around her, swooping up and down, circling.
It was like she was trapped in a storm, and it made her dizzy. Her throat hurt from screaming, but she couldn’t hear herself over the shrieking wind.
The man’s ugly patchwork sack gaped open to scoop the crystals. Soon, the colours dissolved into the whorl of snow, and even his red suit blended with the white. She could barely see him now.
Although the man had vanished, his laughter remained close.
“Better go indoors, little girl…” His words shrieked, then faded with a dying wind, “or you’ll freeze to death.”
Mark Cassell can label himself as author, artist, and actor, but his passion is clearly stamped in the written word. As the author of the best-selling Shadow Fabric Mythos, as series of books about demons, devices and deceit, he has a penchant for ignoring typical horror tropes, casting them into the void. Although best known for cosmic horror, he also writes steampunk, sci-fi, and dark fantasy, with work published in numerous reputable anthologies. More about Mark can be found at his website.
For Dorian Prior, the anticipation was paramount. The rush he felt while standing in the open air, the breeze rushing past his ears, the scent of smoldering wood filling his nostrils, his fingers clenching and unclenching in his pockets. His heart beat incessantly, pounding against his chest like a caged beast.
Yes, the anticipation ruled over all else.
He hid in the shadows behind a line of low-standing shrubs, staring at the house, waiting as the lights brightening each window went out, one by one. He pressed the button on the side of his watch, illuminating its face, and checked the time. Eleven seventeen. In nine minutes, all would be dark save the glow of the television from the picture window in the front of the house. Thirty-five minutes after that and it would officially be Christmas Day. The second phase was about to begin.
This moment had been eleven months in the making. Eleven months since Dorian fled Elk City, Oklahoma, after spending a month locked away in his hotel room, scouring the news channels, watching the public outcry against his Purge. The Purge was what he lived for. For the last twenty years he crisscrossed the country, searching for acceptable subjects for his annual cleanse. From California to Massachusetts to Washington to Georgia, each Christmas morning he offered one lucky family the chance to see innocence in a new light. Now it was Mercy Hills, Connecticut who would receive his gift, the residents of 87 Sumner Avenue to be specific.
The first time he Purged, he’d been twenty-two years old. He’d grown up in Brownington, Vermont, a land of dirt roads, farms, and giant lakes. While most of the townsfolk lived in run-down trailers—which clashed with the expensive cars parked in their gravel driveways—his parents owned a large white farmhouse, set up on a hill with a clear view of Mount Pisca out the northern windows. He hated his home because other people hated him for living in it—his father had made a fortune granting high interest, sure-to-be-defaulted loans to poor farmers, and even more from confiscating their lands after they failed to pay their debts and selling it to real-estate developers. In Brownington and neighboring towns, the Priors were hated, considered worse than parasites, though neither his mother nor father seemed bothered by that while they looked down on the common folk from their castle on the hill.
Dorian was a neglected child. His mother was distant, spending her life fastened to the couch in the living room, staring at the blaring television with empty eyes, while tranquilizers infested her bloodstream. No matter how much Dorian tried to connect with her, the most he received was a shrug in reply.
His father, on the other hand, paid a little too much attention to him. Most of that attention came from cracks of his belt as he lashed his young son for the slightest of misdeeds. As Dorian came to learn, Beauregard Prior had never wanted a boy. It was young girls that captured his fancy, who lured him in with their large eyes, their rosebud lips, the promise of their coming womanhood.
Dorian was eight when he first saw his father with one of them. It was Christmas morning, presents were stacked beneath the tree, his mother was passed out in bed, and he found his father in the basement, dressed in a bright red Santa suit, groveling at the feet of a naked schoolgirl two years Dorian’s senior. She had blonde hair tied into twin braids, and her hairless flesh glimmered in the faint basement light. He recognized her as Fabian Rogers, one of the stars of the youth softball team his father coached. She’d been staying in their spare room on the ground floor as a favor to her mother, a single parent, who worked the overnight shift at the hospital in Newport. Dorian watched as Fabian skittered to the side, covering herself, taunting his father with her tear-filled eyes, her quivering lips, her little girl scents. He watched his father take her, heard her screaming, listened to Beauregard tell her afterward that he would evict her mother and put them on the street if she ever told.
In that moment Dorian understood the grand lie; the secret, dark flower every young girl hid under the disguise of their innocence.
Yet he knew it wasn’t their fault. They’d simply been born that way, much as he’d been born with the ability to see through the lie to the monster lurking beneath. They needed help. They needed their innocence restored. They needed to be purged.
When his parents died in a car accident when Dorian was twenty, he inherited everything. He hired a childhood acquaintance, Jason Betts, to watch the estate, and funded his travels with his substantial trust fund. Then he traveled to nearby Lowell, where he knew Fabian lived, now twenty-something, with a young daughter of her own.
On Christmas Eve of that year, the very first Purge took place.
The wind howled, bringing him back to the present. He checked his watch again. Two minutes to midnight. The sound of the television inside the house lowered. Almost time.
He’d been watching the residence of Paul and Margaret Baker since February. It was unusual for him to pursue a married couple, but fate had been kind to him this time around. Just like all recipients of the Purge, they worked the graveyard shift at a hospital—the emergency room to be specific. Five days a week, they left their house at 9:25 in the evening and returned at 10:45 in the morning, rushing into the house, covering their eyes from the day’s brightness, appearing beaten and tired. Emergency room employees were Dorian’s preferred targets, as tragedy never took a holiday, which meant their schedules would never change.
Paul and Margaret had two daughters—sixteen-year-old Grace and seven-year-old Bethany. Grace was the built-in babysitter, watching her sister while her parents were at work. Dorian felt blessed; if he had traveled to this town only a few years earlier, it was possible either one of the parents wouldn’t be working. That or he’d have to deal with a childcare professional, which meant he most likely would’ve had to find a less ideal recipient of his gift than the adorable and deceitful Bethany Baker.
Two minutes ticked by, and Dorian crept from his hiding spot. He tiptoed over the frost-covered lawn, tracing a line around the side of the house. He slung his bag over his shoulder, noticing its emptiness, and approached the window on the side of the garage. He knew the lock on that window had been broken—he’d done so himself three days earlier, while the family was out shopping—and he also knew the door inside that garage was kept unlocked. Reaching up with his hands, swathed in white cotton gloves, he pushed the window open, stepped up on the stool he’d brought, and slithered through the opening.
The heavy suit he wore always made climbing through windows harder than it needed to be, but the effect his outfit had on the children outweighed the negatives.
His booted feet landed on concrete with a soft thud. He reached behind him, slid the window closed, and snuck through the garage, moving cautiously, not wanting to bump into a stray tricycle or knock over a stack of empty cans.
The door to the inside creaked slightly as he pushed it open. He paused, listening for signs of movement, but heard only the muffled backbeat of music. Closing the door, he advanced down the hall, heading for the living room, which was surrounded by the azure glow of the television set. His foot discovered a loose board, and it groaned. He paused once more, heard nothing, and kept on his way.
In the living room he discovered Grace, eyes closed, slouching on the couch, remote control dangling from her limp hand. The television opposite her, nestled into an old, beat-up entertainment center, flashed images of long-haired, tattooed men screaming. The oddly quiet sound of crunching guitars drifted across the open space, assaulting his ears with its stifled aggression.
Dorian skulked around the couch, making sure to keep his feet on the area rug instead of the hardwood floor, and crouched down in front of the sleeping girl. With one hand he removed the serrated blade from his thick black belt; with the other, he covered the girl’s mouth. Her eyes snapped open and she stared at him, bleary and confused, as if she thought she was still in the grips of a dream.
Dorian straightened up, threw one leg over the girl, and dragged the blade across the smooth flesh of her neck. The skin parted and blood poured out, spraying a little, glazing his red coat in an even darker shade. His knees pinned down her arms as her eyes widened. She thrashed, the strength of her movements remarkably vital, almost throwing him off her. He kept his hand over her mouth the whole time, smothering her cries, even after her body fell still. Then he climbed off the corpse, took a rag from his sack, and wiped the blood from his blade.
It had been too late for Grace. She was too old for the Purge, and he refused to soil little Bethany with the blood of the tainted.
He stepped away from the body, letting it bleed out on the throw rug. On the way out of the room he walked with less care. There was no one left to avoid, after all, not with older sister dead. He passed the family Christmas tree, a cheap store-purchased fake, and stared at it, feeling a moment of sadness. It was all lit up with white lights, but no ornaments hung from its aluminum branches, no tinsel rested on the green vinyl needles. Perhaps they were waiting for the next afternoon to decorate it.
No matter. Too late now.
Up the stairs he went, listening to the swooshing of his thick pants with each swing of his legs. At the top he veered to the left, down a hallway lit by a single nightlight. He gazed at the walls as he passed, looking for the telltale family portraits, pictures that showed Grace and Bethany on their march through time, but there were none to be seen. Shrugging, he stopped at a door festooned with a child’s drawings. One of the sketches seemed to show a happy unicorn feeding a carrot to an impoverished teddy bear; another presented a school of fish circling a chest of gold. He pushed open the door.
Moonlight streamed in through gaps in the curtains, casting the bed in the center of the room in an eerie cobalt radiance. Little Bethany sat up in bed, very much awake, dark hair dandling in front of her face, holding the blankets to her chest. Her eyes were wide, twinkling in the moonlight. Dorian strode into the room and slung the empty sack from over his shoulder. He smiled, and the fake beard itched against his cheek, making him twitch.
“Santa Claus?” said Bethany.
“Yes, dear,” replied Dorian. “It is me.”
The little girl visibly relaxed. “You bring presents?”
His tools jangled in his pockets. “I have. Many presents.”
“Can I see them?”
“Have you been a good little girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
Dorian shook his head. “I am not so sure of that, Bethany Baker.”
“Why not?”
He sauntered along the side of the bed and sat down on the edge. Bethany retreated the tiniest bit, but not as much as a little girl should when a stranger entered their room. Dorian silently praised himself for the idea of donning the Santa suit. That decision had come about almost twenty years ago, and it was the smartest one he’d ever made.
His hand drifted to Bethany’s knee. Once more she recoiled, but again the curiosity showing in her eyes won out. She actually inched closer to him, and allowed her tiny fingers to touch the soft fabric of his gloves. Her mouth dropped into a frown.
“Santa, your suit’s wet.”
Dorian nodded. “That happens.”
“Did you see my sister?”
“Yes.”
“Was she good?”
“No.”
“Did you give her a present anyway?”
“Of course.”
Her eyes drifted to his empty sack. “Was it the last one?”
“Not at all, my child,” he replied. “Not at all.”
With his free hand, Dorian shoved the little girl flat on the bed. A puff of surprised air escaped her rosebud lips, and she grabbed hold of his wrist, trying to free herself. Just like her sister, she seemed strong for her age, but Dorian was a large man. He held her down easily, and then climbed on top of her. She whimpered and cried. He took his spool of gaffer tape from his pocket, ripped off a piece, and fastened it over her mouth. With another piece he bound her thrashing wrists together over her head. He wrapped a third around her ankles.
Bethany flogged about on the bed like a snake on hot concrete. Dorian leaned over her, staring into those wide, panicky eyes. They seemed so shocked, so betrayed. He almost felt sorry for her.
Almost.
He sat beside her until she calmed down, though her chest continued to rise and fall like a revving engine. When she stilled he lifted her nightshirt, festooned with images of dancing princesses, and traced his fingertips around her bellybutton. Her flesh was smooth and warm.
“You have been a bad girl, Bethany,” said Dorian. “Do you know why?”
Her head shook violently from side to side.
“You have evil inside you, princess. Just like all little girls. You taunt men with your virtue, place dirty images in their heads. You turn men into monsters, because you are a monster yourself. But all is not lost. I can save you. I can purge the demon from your flesh. I can make you good.”
Bethany whimpered.
He took out the knife and pressed it gently against her breastbone. The cutting edge drew blood, and the girl was thrown into another lashing spasm. Dragging the knife downward, he opened a tiny mouth in her flesh. With every breath, with every thrash, the mouth opened, spitting her life’s fluids. It dribbled over her ribs, pooling on the flannel sheets.
“Quiet now,” Dorian whispered. “It hurts more if you fight it.”
He went to work, cutting off her clothes and opening tiny mouths all over her body, allowing them to air out the darkness within. Unlike most of his subjects, Bethany’s struggles increased. She became harder to hold still. Her muffled screams pierced his eardrums. I must have hit the mother lode, he thought, and couldn’t help but smile.
He labored for more than an hour, until his beard, suit, and the entire surface of the bed was soaked with the child’s blood. She finally stopped fighting. Her eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, blinking only occasionally. Satisfied, Dorian opened his bag. From it he removed a small, steel bone-saw. He needed it to cut through her ribcage and access the organs beneath.
“The hard part is over,” he whispered into her ear. Bethany’s sweat-coated hair smelled salty and sour, making him sneeze.
He placed the saw on the bed beside her, lifted his knife, and drove it into her stomach. It punched through her skin, and he slowly moved it upward, opening a much bigger mouth to match the tiny ones covering her. Her back arched and a pitiful moan echoed in her throat. Her intestines glistened in the moonlight, writhing as she did, like a pile of worms. More blood poured out as he worked. He always misjudged how much of it the human body held. He picked up the saw and got ready to cut in, to fill his sack with the source of little Bethany’s evil.
Light suddenly filled his world. It emanated from behind him. In a moment of confusion he paused and dropped the saw. Fingers of cold steel wrapped around his shoulders before he could turn around, yanking him off the bed. He careened through the air and smacked into the wall. His head bounced off the plaster, cracking it. Blood—Bethany’s blood—leapt from his clothes in a mist upon impact. Stars danced in his vision while the urge to vomit rose in his gut.
He craned his neck. Two figures stood above him, staring down with hatred in their eyes. Off to the side, standing in the doorway, was yet another, albeit smaller profile.
Dorian’s eyes widened as his vision came into focus. It was Grace who stood in the doorway, looking pale and wearing a scarf, her dark hair pulled back, her eyes squinting. She held a phone in her hand, waving it at him, taunting him.
“What the hell…” whispered Dorian.
Paul Baker reached down and grabbed Dorian by the furry lapel. The guy was so strong, lifting him to his feet with ease. His fists were large and meaty, his jaw firm. Spit flew from his lips as he bared his teeth. He ripped off Dorian’s fake beard with one tug.
“What were you doing to my daughter, you sick fuck?”
Dorian didn’t respond. He wished he had his knife.
Paul tossed him aside as if he weighed nothing. He fell again, once more smacked the back of his skull, and yelped. The pain was so great that when he tried to think of how to get out of this mess, he drew a complete blank.
Margaret Baker joined her husband. They hovered over Dorian, their facial muscles twitching. The wife stepped forward and got on one knee before him. She shook her head.
“They won’t leave us alone,” she said.
“Of course, they can’t,” replied Paul.
“But we’ve been trying.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Dorian’s eyes danced back and forth, following the chatting couple. He watched Grace sneak up, moving like a jungle cat. Upon seeing her again, his brain froze. He’d sliced her from ear to ear. There was no way she could be alive.
“He needs to pay,” the girl hissed. She removed the scarf from around her neck, revealing a festering, open sore that belched blood and pus when she tilted her chin back.
“Oh, he will,” replied her father.
The three of them formed a line, and Dorian watched in horror as the air around them shuddered. Their faces twisted, gyrating like putty. Their brows crumpled and their noses scrunched, becoming almost batlike. Teeth exploded from their mouths, rows of razor-sharp tusks that jutted from now-ruined lips. Their eyes became yellow, glowing in the darkness. They opened their jaws wider than humanly possible, and from their maws slithered long, snake-like black tongues.
“Yes,” said the creature who had once been Paul. “For centuries we have tried to be good, have tried to behave. But people like you keep dragging us back in. Tell me, do you like what you’ve unleashed?”
Dorian screamed, and the three monsters charged.
Pain filled him as jagged teeth pierced through his thick Santa suit and his flesh. Chunks were ripped out of him, and his blood poured onto the carpet. He tried to yell out for help, but more teeth punched into his jugular, severing it from his neck. He gurgled and choked on his own life’s essence. It flowed from his nose, his mouth, from every gaping wound.
“Wait,” a voice stated.
Paul looked normal again, though his lips were frayed. The man stood up and backed away from the frenzy. He considered Dorian with a cockeyed glance and then leaned over the bed. Dorian watched as he tore the binds from Bethany’s wrists and ankles. He didn’t have to remove the tape from her mouth, however. The girl had grown tusks, just like the rest of her family, ripping through the tape. She clicked her oversized teeth together and crept across the bed. The remnants of the tape flapped on either side of her mouth. The cavernous hole in her stomach opened and closed along with her jaws. She held in her intestines with one hand.
Paul grabbed the knife off the bed and tossed it to his wife. Margaret held it in front of Dorian’s eyes. His vision was going hazy on him as he bled out, but the fear was still very, very real.
“One good turn deserves another,” the mother said, the corners of her tattered lips curling in a smile.
She plunged the knife into Dorian’s stomach, echoing the wound he’d given her daughter. Then the family stepped aside, allowing little Bethany to enter the fray. Her glowing yellow eyes glared at him, her massive teeth clacked together, her long tongue slithered in and out.
Bethany sank her face into the gash her mother had opened up. Her head thrashed like a shark, ripping at his entrails, puncturing his kidney, severing his spine. Blood cascaded around her.
“Just take enough to heal yourself,” said Paul as Dorian’s world went black. “We still need something to decorate the tree with, after all.”
“Nobody expects anything really dramatic to happen at Christmas.”
“There was Ceausescu. He got toppled at Christmas. That was pretty dramatic.”
“And they shot him. Which was even more dramatic.”
“Along with his wife!”
“Then we had the Tsunami on Boxing Day.”
“I know that, I know. But – and it’s a big but – it’s still true that no one expects anything to happen at Christmas. When it does, it takes us by surprise.”
“But you could say that about any day of the year. You could say no one expects anything really dramatic to happen on the twenty-fifth of July. Now there’s a boring date for you.”
“And if you said this to the vicar he’d soon tell you that the most dramatic event in the history of mankind happened at Christmas.”
“Oh, put a sock in it! You’ll have us singing carols next. For God’s sake…”
“Anyway, Bob, what exactly are you getting at? Why does it matter whether, rightly or wrongly – depending on your point of view – you think no one expects anything really dramatic to happen at Christmas? Apart for the usual domestic break-ups and rows and everything else you might expect when most of the population over indulges in alcohol.”
“Never mind all that. Whose round is it next? I’m drinking without.” Arthur Renshaw banged his empty beer glass on the table between them, emphasising his point. The four old men, the Grudgers they called themselves (after the district of town they were all born in, Grudge End), burst out laughing, while Bob Beesley fished in his wallet for a ten-pound note.
“Barman,” he called out. “Another four of your best, please!”
They were a distinctive group, even in the Potter’s Wheel, one of the few unrefurbished, unremodernised pubs in the district. Its dark wallpaper first saw the light of day – such as ever penetrated this far – over thirty years ago, much about the same time the paint dried on its woodwork. There was a luxurious atmosphere of dilapidation about the place, with its damp beer mats that often stuck tenaciously to the scarred wooden tables and the old fashioned, barrel-shaped glasses.
Bob Beesley heaved himself up off his stool and waddled to the bar, where he picked up their next round of drinks and passed them, one by one, to eager hands held stretched from the nearby alcove that was literally their own reserve spot in the pub. “And a bag of pork scratchings,” Bob added. “I’m feelin’ a bit peckish.”
By the time he’d sat down again, panting from the effort, the others had taken at least two or three gulps of their beers and were busily arguing once more. Bob pushed his thick, horn-rimmed spectacles back up the broad bridge of his nose and glanced at the darkening sky outside the nearest window as he nimbly unfastened his pork scratchings. It looked as if there was a storm brewing, which probably meant he’d have to hurry home later to avoid getting soaked; he’d left his raincoat hung behind his front door, along with his brolly. Typical the weather should change like this, he thought. Just his luck.
“Anyway,” Tom Atkins said to him; his sallow cheeks had gained a faint, almost healthy flush from the two pints he’d drunk, “what’s all this about Christmas? It’s not November till tomorrow. It’s only friggin’ Halloween tonight. It’s bad enough all the shops start putting up their blasted decorations as soon as we’ve seen the back of Bonfire Night, without you going on about it.”
“You old humbug,” Arthur scolded him. “You get more miserable by the year.”
“So would you if you’d thirteen grandchilder to buy presents for – and none of ‘em cheap.”
“As if you didn’t really love it,” Bob told him. “I’ve seen you, hiking off to Eddison’s Toy Shop on Market Street. You’re like a child yourself when you get in there. And I’ll bet you make sure you help some of those grandchilder of yours to play with their toys!”
The others laughed, including Tom, who had to admit that he did, sometimes, have to help them out. “But only when they’re not sure how to play with them properly,” he added. “Some of these modern toys are very complicated to use, you know.”
Paddy Morgan, his brick-red cheeks like very old slabs of beef, shook his head sadly. “You never grew up, Tom. I’ve always said it.”
“Some of us grow up too fast,” Tom told him. “I envy my grandchilder. They’ve some wonderful toys these days. Far better than we’d to make do with when we were kiddies.”
There was a rumbled chorus of agreements to this. Then Tom said: “I’d better get in another round. I see Arthur’s about to be drinking without again.”
“Drinks too fast. Always has. Like a bottomless drain,” Bob grumbled good-naturedly. He glanced at the clock, hidden above the bar amidst a line of almost empty optics. Nine thirty and he felt tired already. Getting old, he thought. Getting far too old. Not like the old days when the four of them would paint the town red. A long, long time ago now, he added to himself, sadly.
“What’s going on out there?”
On his way to the bar, Tom glanced at the speaker, a terse old farmer who drove down to the pub at night in his battered Land Rover for a pint or two by himself before going home to bed.
“What is it, Jim?” Tom asked as he leant against the bar and nodded to the landlord for another four pints.
“Outside. Looks like some sort of commotion. Might be some damned idiots out celebrating Halloween.” Jim Bartlet slammed down his beer and sidled over to the frosted glass door. Frowning, he placed a hand on the doorknob to pull it open.
As he watched him, Tom felt a faint premonition that something was wrong, something worse than just a commotion outside. And for an instant he had an urge to tell Jim to ignore it, to let go of the door and go back to the bar. But it was an urge he ignored. Not only would Jim think he was being absurd, but he would take no notice of him. In fact, he’d be even more likely to go ahead with whatever he was going to do if he said anything to him. And quite rightly so. If someone told Tom something as ridiculous as that he’d ignore them as well. Tom shuddered, though, as the irascible old farmer pulled the door open and stepped outside. There was a brief hint of fog and a noise like someone snapping twigs. Less than a minute later the door burst open and Jim Bartlet fell back into the pub, blood streaming from his face. He made a half turn, as if to steady himself against the bar, then slithered to the ground. Tom reached for him, but his reflexes were slow these days and he missed. Sam Sowerby, though, for all his own weight, was round the public side of the bar within seconds and knelt beside the farmer, cradling his head. Jim’s face was unrecognisable. A red, raw ruin of sinews and veins and stripped, naked meat. It was as if the skin had been sliced from his face, cut away from deep into the flesh and muscles and down into the bone. On instinct Tom went to the heavy, wooden outer door, hurriedly closed it with a solid thud, then snapped the locks shut, top and bottom, though it seemed a feeble enough defence against whatever had attacked Jim Bartlet.
The rest of the Grudgers had scrambled to their feet, even Bill, though he trailed behind the others as they gathered about the body on the floor.
“I’ll phone for the police,” Arthur said. He hurried to the phone behind the bar. A moment later he looked at the others, a crestfallen expression on his long, thin, lugubrious face. “It’s dead,” he told them.
Bob frowned at him. “What d’you mean dead?”
“It’s dead,” Arthur repeated. “The phone’s dead.”
Sam laid the farmer’s mutilated head back on the floor. “Let me try,” he told him. He hurried behind the bar and stabbed energetically at the buttons on the phone, as if force alone could make it work. In the end he slammed it back on its cradle. He looked over at the locked outer door. The others, watching him, looked over too.
“I ain’t going out there. Not till there’s at least a vanful of police outside. Preferably a SWAT team,” Bob muttered.
“I don’t think there’s much chance of a SWAT team in Edgebottom,” Tom told him. “Not for hours anyway. They’d have to send to Manchester for one – and that’s more than fifteen mile frae here.”
Paddy nodded at the dead body of Jim Bartlet. “What the ‘ell did that to him? We can’t just stand here while there’s someone out there who killed poor Jim like that. It’s horrible. Horrible. We’ve got to contact the police. Somehow.”
“Barring smoke signals – which no one would see at this time of night anyway – what would you suggest, Paddy?” Sam asked, shaken; he looked down at his bloodstained hands, then went to the sink behind the bar to wash them clean. “What would you suggest?” he muttered to himself as he vigorously tried to wipe them dry on a wet bar towel.
“There’s a lunatic out there,” Bob said. “A lunatic with a butcher’s cleaver. What else could have done that to Jim Bartlet’s face?”
They all, reluctantly, looked down at the farmer’s head, laid in a spreading pool of blood. The only other customer left in the pub beside the Grudgers was Harold Sillitoe, a retired schoolmaster with literary pretensions. But he seemed speechless, sat on his barstool with his eyes closed against the horror only three yards from him, his single malt whisky untouched on the bar in front of him.
“What did he hear that made him go outside?” Paddy wondered out loud.
“Whatever it was I couldn’t hear it.” Tom shook his head. “But I did feel something was wrong. I almost said that to him. That he’d be better off ignoring whatever he’d heard and stay here. I don’t even know why I felt that. Though I wish I’d said something now.”
“And do you think Jim would’ve listened?” Bob asked. “He’ld’ve told you to stop being soft. And gone out.”
“At least I would’ve tried. I feel guilty somehow.”
“Bollocks! Only the bastard as did that to him is guilty of anything. How were you to know someone would chop off his friggin’ face?” Bob reached for his pint off the table behind them and took a long swallow.
“We’ve still got to do something,” Paddy insisted. “We can’t just stay here while whoever attacked him is still out there, roaming about.”
The landlord shook his head. “And what would you suggest? I’ve tried the phone. And that’s dead. What else is there?”
“You’ve got a mobile, haven’t you?” Paddy asked.
Sam swore, then hurried to the stairs. He came back again only a minute later, mobile in one hand. “No signal. No bloody signal.”
A tense silence settled on the men. Then Bob asked if Sam had the remote for the TV. There was an old, eighteen-inch set in the games room, usually used by some of the locals to watch horse racing on Saturday afternoons, though none of the Grudgers had ever watched it.
Sam disappeared behind the bar, then came out with the remote and went into the games room, with its pool table and darts board. They heard him cursing to himself. The old men exchanged worried looks, then Sam strode slowly back into the lounge, his broad face even paler than usual.
“You aren’t going to believe this,” he said to them.
“But you can’t get any channels,” Bob answered. “The TV’s dead as well.”
“No reception on any of its channels.” Sam flung the remote onto the bar. “It’s as if we’re cut off from everything.”
“But how?” Bob asked.
“And why?” Tom put in with a shudder. “Why?”
Bob wandered slowly to the window and peered outside, the others watching him intently. He moved his head cautiously from side to side, but the darkness looked impenetrable. He couldn’t even see any streetlights down the road. Not far away should have been the illuminated clock tower on St Paul’s Junior School. He couldn’t see that either. Nor the traffic lights at the end of the block. Nor any traffic. No traffic at all. As if the world outside had ceased to exist.
Shuddering, Bob backed away from the window. He looked at the others, unsure what to say.
“This is freakin’ surreal,” Sillitoe suddenly said, reaching for his whisky. “Freakin’, freakin’ surreal.”
“Calm down, Harold,” the landlord told him. “No need to panic.”
The others eyed him in disbelief.
“If this isn’t cause enough to panic, what is?” Bob asked.
The rest added their agreement.
“I’m just about ready to panic myself,” Tom said. “And that’s without even knowing what ‘freaking surreal’ even means.”
Perhaps in an effort to show some kind of moral control, Sam slowly walked towards the front door.
“Are you sure what you’re doing?” Tom asked.
“We can’t just stay here, can we?” Sam said, uncertainly.
“But if you go out, the same might happen to you as happened to Jim Bartlet. I wouldn’t risk it.”
“Nor me,” added Bob.
Sam looked round at them, seeing the concern in their faces. The fear.
“We can’t just wait around for something to happen,” Sam told them, insistently.
With less resolution than he allowed himself to show, Sam took a firm hold of the upper lock of the front door, then clicked it open. Bending his knees, he reached for the lower lock and clicked that open too. Licking his lips, Sam paused for a moment to rebuild his determination, before reaching for the door handle, his palm damp with sweat as he tried to grip it as firmly as he could.
The door opened with ease. Outside all was black, the solid, impenetrable black of absolute nothingness. No streetlights, no traffic, no hint of the stars or the moon or the pavement or the rest of the town or anything of the outside world at all. Just an endless, eternal black, like everlasting night, that went on and on till his eyes ached from the strain of staring into it.
Even so, Sam stood at the pub doorway for a long, long moment. He wanted to reach out into the darkness, but something warned him not to do it, that not only would it be wrong but dangerous. Perhaps Jim Bartlet had felt the same urge and leant out to peer into the darkness too, and in doing so lost his face. Sam shuddered, unable to cope with the bizarre ideas that rushed in at him about what he was looking at, then he stepped back into the warmth and light and shabby cosiness of the pub; he slammed the front door shut behind him and returned to the lounge.
“What did you see?” Bob asked, a tremor in his voice.
“Come on,” Tom added. “Say something. You’re worrying me.”
Sam stepped behind the bar and poured himself a stiff whisky from the optics. He drank it in one gulp, then poured himself another. He drank this too in one gulp.
“Sam!” Bob rapped on the bar to catch his attention. “What the hell did you see?”
“See?” Sam shut his eyes for a moment, his plump face blank. “I wish there had been something to see. But I couldn’t see nothing more than you could see through the window. There’s nothing. Nothing out there. Nothing at all.”
“Stop talking nonsense,” Paddy snapped at him. “What d’you mean, nothing? D’you mean you couldn’t see anything because we’ve had a power cut?”
“A power cut that’s affected everywhere apart from the Potter’s Wheel?” Sam laughed humourlessly. “You’re a genius, Paddy. How come I couldn’t think of that!”
“Then what?” Bob asked. Feeling queasy with fear, he sat down on one of the old bar stools and leant against the bar. He felt in need of his pint of beer again.
“There’s no ‘what’ about it. Not so far as I can see – so far as I can reckon,” Sam said, almost to himself. “I looked out of the door and there was nothing there. Just a deep black void that went on and on forever.”
“Steady, Sam,” Tom told him.
“Steady? You should take a look out there yourself,” Sam said. “But be careful, ‘cause I reckon it’s a blackness you shouldn’t even try to touch. Not unless you want to end up like Jim.”
“I thought some madman did that to him. Hacked him with a knife or an axe,” Paddy said, as they looked down at the farmer’s body by the bar.
Sam shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s nothing human, mad or otherwise, out there, Paddy. Whatever did that to him wasn’t human. More likely it was just the blackness that did it. How, I don’t know.”
The six men sat round the bar for some minutes in silence as each of them tried to digest what had happened.
Suddenly, his face white with fear, Harold Sillitoe knocked over his whisky and rushed for the door. “I don’t care what rubbish any of you say, I’m not staying here,” he shouted at them. “I’m not staying here to be trapped.”
Sam tried to grab his arm, but the schoolteacher was too fast. The next moment he reached the door, snapped its locks and flung it open. Arthur Renshaw was the nearest to him; he tried to pull him back, but Sillitoe was too determined to get out of the pub and slipped past his fingers. The moment he reached beyond the doorway into the darkness, though, he screamed. At that instant Arthur managed to grasp hold of the collar of his coat, then grunted with the effort as he tugged him back. Together they fell into the lounge, tumbling across the floor, as Sillitoe writhed in abject agony, the stumps of his arms jetting blood over the two of them. Tom moved in and pulled Arthur free, then stood back as the schoolteacher’s body spasmed, then stilled, and the blood ceased pumping from the severed ends of his arms.
A look of horror on his face, Arthur said: “What the hell did that to him?”
“I told you,” Sam answered. “The darkness. He touched it. He put his arms into it. And, somehow, in some way, it destroyed them.”
“Like acid?”
“Or worse.”
“Much worse,” Bob added sombrely. “I saw what acid can do when I worked at Watson’s Chemical Works in Thrushington and that’s nothing like as bad as this, believe me. Nor anything like so fast.” He shuddered and sat down again on his stool. Then reached for his beer.
Meanwhile, Sam knelt beside Sillitoe. “He’s dead,” he told them, though they knew this by now. The schoolteacher’s body had jerked only once and become so still there was no room for doubt in any of them that he had died – that and the stemming of the outpouring of blood from what was left of his arms.
Sam nodded to Arthur, and the two of them dragged Sillitoe’s body away to one wall. They then dragged Jim Bartlet’s next to it, away from the bar.
“Place is beginning to look like a friggin’ morgue,” Tom muttered.
“Aye, and it’s us who are creatin’ it,” Bob added.
Sam went behind the bar, filled five glasses of whisky, then passed them out to the four Grudgers, before sitting down himself and taking a deep gulp of his drink. “I hope that’s the last attempt any of us make to get out through that door.”
With an exchange of glances, the four men nodded their heads as they raised the whiskies to their lips.
“What are we going to do?” Bob asked. “We can’t just sit here, pleasant though it is, forever.”
“Well, I’m just glad my wife decided to leave me last month,” Sam said. “Otherwise the nagging bitch’d be going at us relentlessly by now.”
“What d’you reckon it is?” Paddy asked.
Sam shrugged. “I’ve no more idea than any of you. I doubt our schoolteacher friend, for all his learning and degrees and suchlike, had any more himself. Which is, perhaps, why he panicked.”
As the hours passed the five men slowly relapsed into silence. It was only when it passed eleven o’clock, when he would normally lock the front door and call last orders, that Sam remembered his lodger. Ever since his wife left him, he had supplemented his dwindling income in the pub by letting out one of the spare bedrooms upstairs. An odd old bugger, his current lodger called himself Albert Durer, though Sam was sure this wasn’t his real name somehow. Still, the money was welcome each week – and he paid it on time every Friday.
“Have any of you seen Albert?” Sam asked, though none of the men remembered catching sight of the lodger all evening.
“Perhaps he couldn’t get in ‘cause of that stuff,” Paddy suggested, with a vague gesture at the door.
“I’ll go take a look in his room,” Sam said.
It was less than a minute later that he shouted down to the rest of them to “come up here! For Christ’s sake, take a look at this!”
As the four men gathered about the open doorway upstairs, panting for breath, Sam stood at the far end of the room in front of the curtained window. Between them the threadbare carpet had been rolled back to uncover the floorboards. On these there was a large, painted circle in white and a five-pointed star. All around the edges were peculiar symbols and the burnt-out stubs of candles, their melted wax lying in off-white ridges on the floorboards. In the centre of the star was what horrified them all the most: it was a nailed-down body of a rat, its ribs and stomach sliced open.
“The dirty bastard,” Bob muttered, wiping sweat from his forehead. “The dirty, dirty bastard!”
“Filthy pervert, more like,” Tom put in. “Who’d do a thing like that?”
“Albert Durer, that’s who,” Sam said. “And here’s me, cookin’ his breakfast for him every morning, and the bastard does that in my own home.”
“What is it?” Paddy asked. “Satanism?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “It’s something horrible, I know that. Whether it’s Satanism or not, I haven’t a clue. Ask me something I know something about, and I’ll answer you. This…this is just friggin’ disgustin’, whatever you call it.”
“There’s some kind of old book over there on the dresser,” Tom said, pointing.
They followed his finger, and Sam stepped over to the dresser, gingerly keeping his feet outside the painted circle. He touched the open book, its pages crackling beneath his fingers like very old parchment. He stared at it hard for several moments, his brows puckering with concentration.
“Can’t make out a blessed thing that’s written in it,” he told them eventually. “It’s all in some kind of foreign language.”
“Like French?” Paddy asked, to whom foreign meant Calais, which was the furthest he’d ever travelled.
“Or Latin?” Bob asked, who’d done four years of it at Grammar School a long time ago and could just about remember Amo, Amas, Amat.
“Take a look,” Sam told him, but when Bob sidled over to peer at the book, he shook his head. “I don’t think it is Latin,” he said finally. “Or if it is, it’s in some kind of code.”
The men shook their heads in consternation.
“D’you think this has anything to do with what’s happened tonight?” Tom asked.
Sam stared at him. “That blackness?” he asked.
“I know it sounds mad,” Tom went on. “But before what happened to Jim and Harold that would have sounded mad too. And it is Halloween. When better to do something queer like this?”
“But why?” Bob asked. “And how?”
Tom shrugged. “You’d have to ask Sam’s absent lodger that, if we ever get chance to meet him again.”
“I’d like just one chance to meet that bastard again,” Sam muttered as he gazed at the mutilated remains of the rat nailed to the floorboards. “He’d not forget it if we did.”
While they were upstairs, they checked the rest of the bedrooms and Sam’s living room, but the sheer solid blackness outside never changed. By the early hours of the morning they had all gone to sleep in the two other bedrooms besides Durer’s, though none of them felt secure enough to undress. Whatever was happening to them, they were sure there were more surprises in store. And none of them, probably, good.
Sam was the first up. By half eight he had prepared breakfast for them all of fried eggs and bacon.
“There’s plenty of food in the freezer, but I can’t promise many more days of bacon and egg,” he told them as they sat about the table in the kitchen.
“Do you think we’ll be stuck here that long?” Tom asked, his sallow complexion now grey, with dark shadows under his eyes.
“Who knows?” Sam said. “We’re still stuck now, aren’t we? Which makes it nearly twelve hours already. Who knows how much longer this’ll go on?”
“Much longer and I think I’ll go stir crazy,” Tom muttered. “We might’ve joked sometimes about how grand it’d be to get locked inside a pub, but the reality’s not quite the same.”
“The lock-in from Hell,” Bob said. Like Tom, his plump face showed signs of strain.
“I never thought the Potter’s Wheel Paradise, but I never reckoned to compare it to Hell,” Sam said with an attempt at levity, trying to put out of his mind what they saw in Albert Durer’s bedroom.
Levity, though, had come into short supply by mid-afternoon and the view through the windows was still pitch black. There was a creeping atmosphere of fear in the pub. And claustrophobia.
There were strange anomalies. Though they could neither send nor receive telephone calls, and the TV and radio were dead, there were still supplies of electricity and water. Arthur Renshaw said it was a pity the water pipes weren’t big enough to crawl along, otherwise they might have been able to get out that way, till Bob pointed out that, however big the pipes might be, they would drown in them anyway because of the water – and still get nowhere. Sam organised for the two bodies in the lounge to be wrapped and taped inside bin bags, then he and Tom dragged them into the cellar, where it was cold enough to keep them preserved – and where, more importantly, they weren’t in constant view.
By evening there was real fear.
“We should have heard something from someone by now,” Tom insisted. “Surely somebody knows we’re stuck here, that something’s wrong.”
Sam shrugged. “Who knows what it’s like on the outside? Perhaps it’s as dangerous to get into the Potter’s Wheel as it is to get out.”
They drank slowly and steadily that night. Talk petered out long before ten; after that they sat around the bar in desultory groups, each consumed by their own gloomy thoughts for the future. Before they knew it, it was midnight, they all felt slightly drunk, and went to bed grumbling about the bloody absurdity of it all.
Five days passed and the situation hardly changed, though the bacon and eggs for breakfast had long since run out and Sam was beginning to look increasingly more worried whenever he went to the freezer. His initial optimism about what it held hadn’t taken into account that it would have to cater for five grown men, with no additional food coming in from any other source. Now it was beginning to empty with ominous speed. Two days later the freezer was down to an already opened bag of peas, three fish fingers, some ice cream in a battered tub and a very old packet of boil-in-the-bag spinach.
Within the next few days they were all beginning to feel hungry and beginning to realise that they were facing the grim prospect of starvation. If being imprisoned within the pub had been enough to make them feel afraid to start with, their food running out increased this till there was hardly a moment when they weren’t aware of it. It dominated their thoughts. But there was nothing they could do about it. They had long since searched the pub for every possible scrap of food, from half eaten packets of biscuits to the snacks hung on cards behind the bar. Even dusty jars of out of date cherries for cocktails that had never been popular in the Potter’s Wheel had all been consumed. Their ill-assorted diet led them to feeling queasy as well as hungry, depressing their spirits even more and making all of them irritable.
By the end of the second week tempers, as well as hunger, were at breaking point…
“This is bloody ridiculous,” Bob said eventually as the five of them sat around a table in the lounge. With empty stomachs, they had stopped drinking alcohol till later at night; and each of them now held a bottle of fruit juice from behind the bar. “We’ve got to do something. If we don’t, we’re going to starve to death within the next couple of weeks, unless we turn to cannibalism.”
“And with only five of us that wouldn’t last long,” Sam put in with a rueful smile, though his attempt at humour met with little response from the drawn faces of the four old men, who stared at him in silence
“We’ve got to try something,” Tom said. “Even if it means risking what happened to the others. If we don’t…”
“If we don’t, we’re doomed,” Bob said flatly.
Sam went behind the bar and poured them five beers. “If we’re to plan getting out of here we need something stronger than orange juice,” he told them.
Their first plans, though, were vague impracticalities that were soon dissected and tossed to one side. It was Tom who came up with the first and only practical suggestion.
“Have you ever wondered why we’ve still got water and electricity?” he asked.
“Good job we have them,” Arthur said. “We’d have been well buggered if we hadn’t.”
“I agree with you there. But why have we still got them,” Tom went on insistently. “That’s the important thing. That’s what I’ve been wondering. After all, we’ve no TV or radio signals.”
They sat there watching him, waiting.
“And?” Bob asked. “What answer have you come up with? Or is this going to be twenty friggin’ questions?”
“Two things,” Tom said, and, despite the hunger that was aching in his stomach, he managed a smile of monumental smugness. “Electrical cable and lead pipes – or whatever they make water pipes from these days.”
“It ain’t lead, I know that,” Sam said. “But I get your point. Electricity and water get through because they’re protected in some kind of casing.”
“And?” Bob asked. “Am I being a bit thick, but how does that help us. We can’t get out of here through either of them, can we?”
“But we might be able to make some kind of casing through the darkness,” Tom said. “Something that’ll protect us inside. It’s just a matter of finding something that’ll stretch out into the darkness that we would be safe inside.”
“It’s more than just worth a try,” Sam said. “Better than sitting here, starving to death.”
Putting aside their beers, they set out foraging about the pub for materials they could use to construct a tunnel.
“I hope that darkness doesn’t stretch too far,” Tom confided in Sam, but the landlord shrugged. “We’ve got to try, Tom. It’s the best idea so far, and if we don’t make a stab at it we’re doomed anyway.”
It was in the beer cellar they came up with the solution. At one time, during the late eighties, a previous landlord had made an attempt at building up the catering side of the pub, and with that purpose in mind had started work on a proper professional kitchen. Things had gone well, till he was told he would have to construct a ventilation system. Spiralling costs, at each new demand from the local council, had resulted in him eventually abandoning the project. In the cellar, though, were the aluminium panels for an unconstructed ventilation system, ready to be connected together to form a two-foot square metal shaft.
“If we could connect these together, we could lead them from the front door out into the darkness. Hopefully they’ll make a shaft long enough to let us crawl out of here,” Sam said, as they relayed the open-ended boxes up the cellar steps to the bar.
Opening the front door was a ticklish operation as no one wanted to risk suffering any of the mutilations that struck those who had already tried to get out that way. The deep, almost cosmic darkness that confronted them, with its cold, black depths, had become no less awesome – or frightening. Gingerly, they pushed the ventilation shaft, a twelve-foot length of aluminium squares, inch by inch out across the doorstep into what should have been the street. Their first attempt, though, was a dismal failure. As they shone a torch into it, they could see that the inexplicable darkness had entered it from the far end, filling it till it was in line with the darkness at the doorstep.
“We’ll need to seal the far end off,” Sam said as they pulled the shaft back into the pub. “Perhaps that’ll keep it out.”
They found some sheets of aluminium in the cellar which fitted on the end of the shaft. With a soldering iron, it did not take long before they had it in place.
“Make sure you seal in every gap, otherwise the darkness might seep through,” Tom suggested while Sam worked on it. “But not too strongly. It has to break off.”
This time, as they slowly, carefully pushed the delicate shaft into the darkness, the inside remained clear. Even when most of it stretched out from the pub, its outside swallowed by the darkness around it, as if it no longer existed, its interior remained bright, unsullied by even the slightest hint of darkness.
The five men exchanged cheers of jubilation. They sat back and admired their work for a moment.
“Do you think the far end’s reached the other side of the darkness?” Arthur asked, dampening their spirits. None of them knew how far the darkness reached. For all they knew it might have stretched only inches from the pub – or gone on for eternity. There was no way they could tell from staring into it. It was black and impenetrable to their gaze.
“There’s only one way to tell,” Sam said. “One of us is going to have to creep along that shaft and batter the end off with a hammer. Then, either the darkness will flood in, or there’ll be the real world again.”
“You make it sound so simple,” Bob said. “But you do realise, don’t you, that if the shaft doesn’t reach safety and the darkness does coming flooding in, whoever’s in there will be swallowed by it?”
“And be dissolved like poor old Jim Bartlett’s face or Harold Sillitoe’s arms,” Tom said, unable to hide the horror in his voice as he said it.
“Thanks, Tom,” Sam told him. “I was trying to forget that alternative.”
“Well, one of us will have to try it, whatever the risks. Otherwise we’ve just wasted our time.” Bob wiped his hands on his knees. He looked down at his stomach, which still loomed large despite their enforced diet. “Though I don’t suppose I’ll be able to volunteer. I might manage to squeeze down that shaft, but I don’t think I’d be able to move my arms enough to use a hammer to force the end off.”
“I think we’ll need someone somewhat slimmer, I agree.” Sam looked at the others, conscious that, even though he was youngest here, he was not much slimmer than Bob, and would have a problem in the tunnel too. “Well?” he asked. “Who is it going to be?”
There was a long moment of silence. The others knew the dangers involved, that whoever crawled along the shaft and knocked off the end would be risking his life.
“One of us’ll have to do it,” Arthur said. “Perhaps we should toss for it or pick a short straw or something like that.”
The only ones slim enough to make it, Paddy, Arthur and Tom, exchanged glances.
Sam nipped behind the bar. He returned a minute later with a pack of playing cards.
“Lowest card wins – or loses, depending on your point of view,” he said, shuffling the cards. “Aces low.”
One by one, the three Grudgers reached for the cards and selected one.
“Looks like I’m the one,” Arthur said, flatly as he gazed at the three of spades in his hands. Tom had the five of hearts and Paddy the king of clubs.
“Would you like to do best out of three?” Tom asked.
Arthur shook his head. “Only putting off the inevitable. It’s got to be one of us. Anyway, if it doesn’t work, perhaps I’m the lucky one, eh? At least I wouldn’t have to starve to death. Or end up eating one of you lardy arsed buggers.”
“When do you want to try it?” Sam asked.
“I doubt if I could sleep tonight knowing I was going to have to crawl along that friggin’ tunnel in the morning, so I might as well do it now,” Arthur said, his face deadpan. “What have I got to lose – apart from my nerve?”
“Here,” Sam said to him. He went to the bar and handed him a large whisky. “Just to steady you a bit, eh?”
“Many thanks.” Arthur smiled, thinly, and took a long swallow of the whisky. “Good stuff too, for once.”
He looked at the galvanised tunnel, squared his shoulders, then stepped towards it. Sam handed him a heavy hammer. “A couple of hard bangs should be enough to snap the solder. If someone will help me, two of us will take a firm grip of this end of the shaft to make sure it doesn’t slide forward.”
“Take a bloody firm grip,” Arthur said as he stooped and stretched his hands into the tunnel, then began gingerly to crawl on all fours along it. He could feel the cold metal beneath the palms of his hands. There was an intensity to the coldness which he supposed was because the blackness surrounding it was drawing out any heat into whatever voids of nothingness there were outside.
“Are you okay?” Sam called as the old man shifted his knees into the shaft.
“Feels cold but firm,” Arthur told him; he looked back with difficulty over his shoulders. “Feels as if it’s resting on something solid.”
“Take care,” Bob told him, as he crouched down to watch him crawl foot by foot down the shaft.
Sam gritted his teeth as he and Bob held onto the shaft to make sure it didn’t move. Arthur moved only slowly, not daring to jar the shaft from their fingers, conscious at every move he made of the terrifying blackness surrounding him beyond the thin metal sheets. The shaft felt so fragile he half expected it to come apart every time he moved. Even though the shaft was only twelve feet long, it took him at least five minutes to inch his way to the end. Eventually, though, he was close enough to reach out and touch it.
He pulled the hammer from under his belt.
“Two sharp blows should snap off most of the solder,” Sam called to remind him.
Arthur nodded, though he knew that if the shaft wasn’t long enough, if the blackness extended even further than its end, it would rush in and kill him. The thought of it made the hair prickle along his arms and neck, while his stomach tightened with apprehension into a small, icy nugget of fear.
“Two sharp blows,” Arthur muttered to himself beneath his breath as he manoeuvred the hammer so that he could grip it properly and swing it far enough back in the cramped space inside the shaft to hit the plate at the end.
“Hold onto the shaft for me,” Arthur shouted to Sam and Bob. “I’m going to hit it now.”
He closed his eyes, tightened his grip on the hammer, made a swift, uncharacteristically sincere prayer, then swung with as much force as he could muster.
There was a dull metallic thud.
Nothing.
He gritted his teeth and swung again. Even harder this time.
One corner of the aluminium sheet pinged free and a thin shaft of light shone through the gap.
For a second Arthur stared into it, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, till he realised he was looking at light, however dim, not darkness.
Light!
He could barely take his eyes away from it.
“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” Sam called out to him, alarmed at his stillness.
Arthur took a deep breath as relief flooded through him.
“There’s light,” he shouted down the shaft. “Light!”
Buoyed up by the cheers of encouragement that broke out madly behind him. Arthur swung at the metal again with determination. A couple of good, strong blows and he’d have it off. Just a couple, that was all, he thought to himself. The first blow parted the sheet from one side, and the light grew brighter. He aimed a blow at the opposite edge. Just one, he thought. Just one more blow. Make it good and hard and he’d be out of here. Out of here for good.
Back inside the pub, Sam looked at Bob as he tightened his grip on the edge of the shaft before Arthur could strike his next blow. “Nearly there,” he whispered. Bob grinned, then looked down the shaft as Arthur wriggled into position, before bringing the hammer down with a resounding, echoing thud against the metal.
A dim grey light shone down the shaft as the metal fell free. It was a cold light, almost shadowy in substance. Carefully, Arthur crawled further along the shaft, till his head and shoulders were free of it. If he had expected to see any sign of the streets or houses that lay beyond the front of the pub, there was no sign of them now as he craned his neck to see as much as he could , though everything seemed to be little more than dimly-seen differing shades of grey. There was an impression of vast stone walls somewhere in the distance and high above him, as if he was in an enormous cavern. He screwed up his eyes, wishing that he had brought his glasses with him when he came to the pub, but none of his friends had ever seen him wearing them – none of them even knew that his eyesight had worsened over recent years. Out there, though, he felt sure that something moved. Something large and dark.
“Are you okay, Arthur,” he heard Sam call to him as he wriggled free of the shaft and crawled onto the hard, cold surface of the stone outside. He turned around and looked back down the shaft. “It seems okay here,” he called back. “But I’ve no idea where I am. It’s not Edgebottom.”
“Not Edgebottom? But how do you know?” Sam asked.
Arthur saw his face disappear for a moment as Sam discussed things with the others. He reappeared again shortly. “Hold on to your end of the shaft,” Sam told him. “We’re coming through.”
Arthur glanced around the darkness uncertainly. “I don’t know whether it’s all that safe,” he told him. “I keep seeing something move in the distance. Something large. I’ve no idea what it is, though.”
“But we can’t just stay here,” Sam insisted.
Arthur sighed. “Okay. I’ll take a hold of the shaft.”
The shaft stood out a few feet from a dark, glistening mass of blackness like that surrounding the pub. He would have called it a pool, but it rose in front of him up against the side of a wall of rock. He flinched as the shaft tugged his fingers; Sam had squeezed himself into the far end of it, his pale face almost filling it as he stared at Arthur.
“Take it slow,” Arthur told him. “Don’t risk damaging the joins. They’re not all that strong.”
One by one the rest of them slowly made their way along the shaft, till all five of them eventually stood on the rough stone at the end of it. Bob shivered theatrically. “It’s a damn sight colder here than in the pub,” he grumbled.
“You can always go back if you like,” Sam said.
“I’m not sure yet whether that wouldn’t be a good idea,” Bob retorted. “I thought this might lead outside the pub, but God knows where it is. It doesn’t ring a bell with me. It’s like nowhere round Edgebottom that I’ve ever seen.”
“Nor me,” Tom said, his voice quiet, as if he felt intimidated by the vastness of the gloomy depths around them. “Oh, my gawd,” he mumbled.
The rest of them followed his gaze as he stared with a look of horror into the distance.
“What is it?” Arthur asked, though he felt sure that he knew. It was that thing – that large, dark shape he had seen move when he first climbed out of the shaft. He screwed his eyes in an effort to make out what it was. It was large in the distance. Immense. Too large to be real.
The rest of them saw the creature at once, though none could have even started to describe what they saw. It was impossible for them to fix it in their gaze, as if it did not even fully exist within reality, but partially slid between dimensions even as they stared up at it. It was a Leviathan of Biblical size, perhaps octopoid, perhaps insectile, perhaps neither, or both, or many other forms of life simultaneously – or beyond all forms of life, something the like of which none of them had ever heard of or seen or imagined.
They felt fear deprive them of thought as they gazed up at it.
An impossibly long tendril reached towards them from the creature, dark, bristly, covered in rows upon rows of millions of tiny, moving suckers. Arthur shrank back against the rest of the men as it moved towards him. Sam pushed him to one side, then mindlessly scrabbled to get back as far as he could from it. Panic infected them all as they ran about against the rock face in an effort to elude the nearing limb. Paddy was the first to scream. It was a pitifully pathetic, terror-filled scream of gut-wrenching horror. The rest of them were halted for an instant as the tiny suckers transfixed themselves to Paddy’s face. His arms and legs flailed in agony as he tried to tear himself free, as his face seemed to be drawn into all the suckers simultaneously, followed by the rest of his head, then shoulders. Sam felt sickened as blood erupted from all the tears that were ripped about the old man’s body as it was wrenched apart into the hundreds of suckers consuming him. Sam grabbed at one of Paddy’s arms, though he knew he was too late to save him. He tugged at the arm, but there was no give. The immense tendril that was drawing him violently into it was far too strong for his efforts to have any effect upon it.
More of the tendrils or octopoid limbs were emerging from the distant creature. Sam saw Tom trip as one of them soared down at him, attaching itself to his back. His screams rose in a terrible falsetto.
Bob made a bolt for the ventilation shaft to get back to the pub. But the old man was too fat and too slow to make it in time, and another tendril grasped him with its carnivorous suckers.
Was this why they had been trapped in the pub? Sam wondered. Had all this been part of some terrible plan, created by that bastard Durer?
Sam pushed Bob’s writhing body to one side, then dived down the shaft. The brighter light of the pub was ahead of him, and he moved with reckless speed down the shaft towards it, conscious of the possibility that one of the tendrils and its deadly suckers might only be inches away behind him.
He slithered out of the end into the pub, scrabbling at the ground to tug himself as fast as he could from the shaft. The metallic structure was moving behind him, and he knew that something else was inside it. A scream was stuck in the back of his throat as he stared at the exit, his fists clenched in a useless gesture of defence, when Arthur thrust himself out of the shaft.
“Help me!” the old man shouted. And Sam saw the thick tip of the tendril that had attached itself to one of his feet emerge from the shaft as Arthur crawled across the floor into the pub. Blood burst from his leg as the suckers commenced their terrible, relentless, irresistible work on him, consuming him even as he struggled to get as far as he could from the shaft. “HELP ME!”
Sam pushed himself to his feet and ran behind the bar into the kitchen. He tugged out the cutlery drawer by the sink. Then ran back into the pub, a carving knife clenched in one fist.
Without hesitation he hacked at the tendril, but the thing was so tough it was like trying to cut through seasoned mahogany. Sharp though the blade was, it barely scratched the surface of the tendril.
“Sam!” Arthur screamed at him, the foot and ankle of his left leg a ruin. “Do something, for Christ’s sake!”
Sam threw the knife to one side.
“What can I do?” he asked him, agitated and frightened. He kicked at the end of the shaft, then on an impulse he reached down and tugged it. He felt it come free as he pulled the far end that was still in the cavern back into the darkness. The tendril, still trapped inside it, disappeared in an instant as darkness filled it. The rest of the tendril flopped onto the floor, falling away from Arthur’s ruptured foot, its severed end oozing thick black fluids that hissed and bubbled on the floor of the pub.
Sam dragged Arthur away from the tendril and up onto a chair near the bar. He wrapped a towel round his injured foot. The old man moaned, but he was still conscious.
“What’s happening to us, Sam?” the old man asked.
“I don’t know for sure,” Sam said. “But I intend to find out.” He looked towards the stairs.
“What’re you going to do?”
“Something I should have thought of days ago,” Sam muttered.
Clenching his fists, Sam strode up the stairs till he stood in the doorway to Albert Durer’s bedroom. He stared in at the painted pentacle and circle and the dead rat nailed in the centre of them. He stepped into the pentacle and kicked the stiffened carcass from the nails pinning it to the floorboards. He then kicked at the painted lines and curves and obscure symbols, scuffing them with the hard leather soles of his boots. He went out into the upstairs kitchen and found a knife. Back in Durer’s bedroom he set to work scraping and slicing as much as he could of the pentacle away. Then he went to the sash window, pulled back its curtains and pushed up the bottom of the window frame. Outside, the ominous, threatening blackness loomed before him. He reached for the book on the dresser. For a second he looked down at its stained, old pages, with their obscure, thickly printed lines of writing and strange drawings. Then he raised the book and threw it with as much force as he could muster out into the darkness.
He sank to his knees. There was nothing else he could think of to do. After this, all there was left was to return to the bar and give what help he could to Arthur. A feeling of helplessness seeped through him as he raised his head and looked at the window – through which the first rays of dawn were starting to emerge from above the dark grey roofs to the east.
No one amongst all the scores of police and local and regional government officials who had gathered about the outside of the pub over the last few days was able to give Sam any reason for the “Strange Anomaly” (as they termed it) that had isolated the Potter’s Wheel from the rest of the normal world. Nevertheless, it was only a matter of minutes before Arthur was whisked away in an ambulance to the nearest hospital to have his injuries treated, while Sam showed a small group of the most senior investigators about the pub.
In the months that followed the reality of what happened became blurred through layers of “official” explanations, denials, claims that the whole thing was some kind of hoax, and an inability of the two survivors from inside the pub to grasp just what had happened to them, as it began to seem, as they looked back on it, as a strange kind of dream or nightmare or, as some experts suggested to them, mass hallucination.
Of his late lodger, Albert Durer, Sam never heard anything more. The odd man appeared to have disappeared completely as if he had never existed. That he had almost certainly used a false name was soon pointed out, when someone mentioned that he must have taken it from the German painter Albrecht Durer, dead for over four hundred years.
“He’d wish he’d been dead that long too if I ever get my hands on him,” Sam would mutter to himself when well in his cups. But he knew there was little chance of that. If he was still alive, “Durer” would be well away from here by now, his mischief done. Though whether he would do what he’d tried to do in the Potter’s Wheel elsewhere… Sam shuddered at the thought. Especially when Arthur hobbled into the pub at night for enough drinks to help him sleep. Then the two of them would talk into the early hours of the morning of those terrible events and marvel that even two of them had survived.
Perry Roberts stood at the top of the stairs, staring down into the black depths of his basement. He held the last box that needed to be stored down there, but he couldn’t make his legs move. The light was on when I went outside, wasn’t it? he thought. He knew it had been, but now it was out.
With a sigh, he sat the box down on the floor, reached into the slight gloom at the top of the stairwell, and felt the switch with his fingers; it was still on. Bulb must’ve blown, he thought to himself with another, deeper sigh.
Thinking hard, he remembered unpacking a box with spare bulbs earlier and headed to the laundry room to retrieved one, also grabbing the flashlight he’d stored there. Grumbling under his breath, he returned to descended into the dark depths of his basement. It smelled musty, damp, and slightly metallic; the air noticeably dropped in temperature with each step. The house was old, having been one of the first built in the small New England town, and the basement was designed to hold the cold so that home-canned goods and other food necessities could be stored there.
“Lots of history,” the real-estate agent had said. “Not many places like this left for just anyone to buy.”
Being the history buff that he was, he couldn’t help but be drawn to its charm, even though it had sat empty for more than a decade and had to be drastically updated before he could move in. One of the things he’d found most fascinating about the place was the old “player piano” sitting in the corner of the basement. He couldn’t figure out how it had gotten down there—the stairs were too narrow and the basement walls consisted of large, rectangle slabs of limestone that looked like they’d been there for hundreds of years.
With the help of his flashlight, he removed the old bulb and shook it beside his ear, and sure enough, he heard the filament rattle. Tucking the flashlight under his chin so he could use both hands, he slid the burned out bulb into the front pouch of his hoodie and extracted the other. As he screwed in the new bulb, he forgot the switch was still on and didn’t close his eyes. When the bright glow of the 75 watt bulb flared to life, he dropped the flashlight with a loud clang and squeezed his eyes tightly shut.
After a moment, he started blinking rapidly and looking around the room. Bodies in old fashion clothing lay everywhere—some holding bottles of whiskey or tankards of ale. Slowly they sat up and then stood with leering grins, looking him over like he was a succulent piece of meat. They advanced toward him and Perry spun around; he was completely surrounded and the closer they came the more the temperature of the air around him dropped. He tried to focus on them directly, but the light spots in his eyes prevented him from doing so; as his vision cleared the images began to disappear.
Almost in a panic, thinking he was being attacked, he spun around in a circle with his arms up defensively, looking for assailants. None were there. All he could see now were the leaning shadows cast by the stairs and the stacked boxes; the rough, bare rock of the walls and floor echoed his harsh breathing back to him, giving him a chill that had nothing to do with the climate of the room.
After dropping his arms, taking a couple of deep breaths, and doing another, thorough visual examination of the entire room, he shrugged the occurrence off as his imagination. He bent down and picked up the pieces of his flashlight—having broken it when he dropped it on the hard floor—before he went upstairs, dumped the ruined flashlight in the trash, and carried down the last box. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was down in the basement with him, and kept looking over his shoulder expecting to find them standing behind him, ready to hurt him. He was beginning to wonder if the house might be haunted, but then reminded himself he didn’t believe in ghosts.
With an effort, he forced himself to calm down, and after stacking the box with the others he had in the corner, he headed toward the stairs. Pausing, he glanced around one more time and ran his fingers over the now yellow keys of the player piano, wondering if he could get the old thing working. Once again he pondered on how the piano had come to be in the basement and couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation.
“Maybe the ghosts brought it downstairs,” he said with a mocking laugh.
As soon as the words left his mouth a chill ran down his spine and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as the air around him suddenly dropped in temperature and he felt like he was being stalked again. Not needing any more encouragement, he jogged up the stairs and could have sworn he’d heard a deep, masculine laugh echo from behind him.
Back upstairs, he turned off the basement light and slammed the short, rough plank door behind him, making sure the old, wrought-iron latch was secure. He pressed both his hand on the door and leaned against it, taking deep, calming breaths, feeling silly about his reaction to his imagination running wild.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts… There’s no such thing as ghosts…” he repeated to himself over and over again, as if in saying it he could dispel the horrible feelings he’d had downstairs.
Perry heard a knock at his front door and almost jumped out of his skin at the sudden and unexpected noise; he stepped from the kitchen into the short, narrow hallway and spied his friend John through the door’s window.
“Hold on,” he yelled, rushing forward and letting his friend in, glad for the distraction. “What’s up?”
John grinned. “Five days ‘til Halloween! What do you think’s up? We need costumes and a lot of ghoulish stuff to decorate this spooky old house of yours.”
Perry laughed and all of his trepidation melted away as he focused on his friend and pushed everything else from his mind. “How could I forget?”
John smacked his forehead in a “Duh!” gesture and pointed with his thumb to his Chevy pickup parked at the curb. “I’ll be out there. Hurry up!”
With that John turned and practically hopped down the limestone block porch steps. He hadn’t been too happy when Perry had decided to move here, wishing his friend would stay closer, but he’d handled it well. They’d known each other all their lives and had just recently graduated from separate colleges. Over the past summer they’d spent a lot of time together catching up, and now they were separated again; growing up was indeed hard to do.
Donning a light jacket over his hoodie—taken from a hook by the door—Perry stepped out into the brisk October wind. Red, gold, and brown leaves littered the yard and street, leaving behind dark skeleton trees to moan eerily as their bare branches danced in the wind. He pushed his hands into the front pouch of his hoodie and his hands came in contact with the lightbulb he’d removed downstairs, and for a moment the memories of his experiences returned. He tossed it in the large trash can sitting in the corner of his enclosed porch, as if ridding himself of the bulb also discarded the disturbing memories permanently, and hurried to join John.
Their day went fast. They’d each found a costume they loved: John, a ghoul of disgusting proportions; and Perry, a very bloody looking zombie. They’d also picked up an array of fake tomb stones and bones to litter in Perry’s yard, to serve as decorations for the huge Halloween party they were planning.
“Stop by the library, would ya?” Perry asked on their way back to his house. “I had the librarian look up some historical information on my house and I need to pick it up.” He paused for a moment and almost continued, asking John if he believed in ghosts, but with a shake of his head he decided not to waste any more time on nonsense.
John raised his eyebrows at Perry’s undecided movements, but when he didn’t say anything more, he nodded consent and drove to the small, out-of-the-way library that served the town.
It took Perry less than ten minutes to retrieve the information he’d requested. John laughed hysterically as he watched his friend come stumbling out of the local library, weighed down with books and printouts of old newspapers.
“Are you writing a book series?” John teased as he leaned over and pushed open the truck door for Perry. “Looks like you have enough research there for five!”
Scowling, Perry managed to maneuver himself, and his load, into the truck. “I didn’t know they’d find this much. Now I feel like I’m back in school!”
John laughed again, shook his head, and drove them back to Perry’s place. They unloaded all their Halloween “goodies” and discussed the party briefly before John left; he had to work early the next day and he knew Perry was itching to get at the materials he’d picked up from the library.
For the next few days Perry poured over the books and old newspaper articles, learning about his new house and its history. He wanted to get through as much of it as possible before the party, and before he had to start his new job; he would begin his career as a website designer the second week of November. The information the librarian had gleaned was very interesting. Apparently the house he was living in used to be a small time, bar-like establishment. It was known for its many visitors of “questionable virtue” and after reading some of the articles, he knew that meant men who lived outside the law. A couple of people had even been murdered in the house, which made him again think of the occurrences in the basement.
One picture particularly interested him. It was taken on October 31st of 1872, according to the notation under the photo. The player piano was in it, but the photograph had been taken in his living room. The people in the photo looked like the ones he’d thought he’d seen in the basement, but he couldn’t be sure because most of them were wearing festive masks depicting demons. The clothing style was the same, as were the bottles and tankards, but he figured what happened could still have been just his imagination. After all, he’d seen plenty of the same in old movies.
The article beneath the picture spoke briefly about the Halloween party, and how wild they’d gotten, referring to a couple of “rough men” who were believed to have been associated with the occult. As he read on, he was disappointed to find that most of the article was missing due to the photocopier running out of toner, at least that’s what he ascertained from the spotty black ink on the rest of the page. With a crocked grin, he looked back at the photo, thinking it would be great to show it to John, since they too were having a Halloween party in the house. As he laid the paper aside, he didn’t notice the date on the top—for the article—was for November 1st, 1872, or that the rest of the article was printed clearly on the back telling of the horrible events of the night of that party, and how no one who’d attended had ever been seen again.
On the night of October 30th, Perry lay down in bed, excited about the party that would take place the following evening. Thoughts swirled through his head about all that needed to be done, and about a certain woman he’d invited, hoping she’d attend. Even with these thoughts it didn’t take his exhausted body long to fall asleep.
Shortly after midnight, icy hands gripped Perry’s ankles and fingernails penetrated his flesh like icicles, startling him out of his warm cocoon of sleep.
He cried out and struggled, feeling hot, slick, wet blood seep from his wounds and soak into his bed, but his efforts didn’t deter the grip that was dragging him out of bed with astounding force and strength. He screamed and grabbed at the sheets, blankets, and mattress, trying to save himself, to no avail.
He hit the floor with a hard, resounding smack. His head bounced off the hardwood with a loud thud that almost knocked him unconscious; blood gushed out of a gash on his head from where it had hit the metal bedframe during the struggle, falling into his eyes, and making the floor slick. Blinking rapidly, he tried to stay awake and twisted around to get a glimpse of who was assaulting him.
“Stop!” he yelled. “Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?”
There was no answer, no reply to his desperation and pleas.
The darkness prevented him from seeing anyone or anything, and the more he struggled the tighter the grip on his ankles became; he heard his bones crack and felt the shards of their splinters escaping the encasement of his flesh. Crying out from the pain, and imagining that his ankles now looked like pin cushions because of the protruding bones, Perry tried to grab onto anything he could, but it was no use. Every time he would get a grip on something his attacker would either yank him so hard that eventually his fingers broke with loud pops or he would be lifted slightly into the air and slammed back down onto the floor until he let go.
The violence continued as he was dragged down the stairs, and Perry suffered so much head trauma that by the time he was on the first floor the world around him was nothing more than a blur seen through drops of blood, flowing from multiple gashes all over his bruised head. And as he was dragged toward the kitchen—where he left a light on all night—he saw that no one and nothing was there; he was being attacked by an invisible force and thought for the first time that he might have been wrong about ghosts.
He heard the piano playing downstairs and laughter with it. What’s going on? he thought before he was finally knocked completely unconscious by a battering from the basement stairs.
Perry regained awareness slowly. He was lying on the cold basement floor in nothing but his boxer shorts. He shivered and tried to curl into a ball to conserve his body heat.
A harsh male laugh barked behind him, making him jump.
Turning his head sharply, he beheld a group of seven men and two women. They were all dressed in clothes from the 1800s. He blinked and frowned. His head hurt beyond belief and his hips, legs, and ankles throbbed. Weak and disoriented, he couldn’t focus or speak.
Desperation soon overcame his weakness when he saw them moving toward him. They didn’t have legs, but floated a foot and a half above the stone floor. The closer they got to him the more transparent they became. Frantically, he tried to crawl toward the stairs, hissing and whimpering at the pain in his ankles and head, but didn’t make it.
Cold seeped into his body, causing him to shiver more violently, as the “spirits” came closer, surrounding him and laughing.
“Sweet hot blood…” one of the men said.
“…and meat!” one of the women exclaimed and cackled.
“What should we do with him?” another of one of the men asked.
“Let’s eat him,” the first man said.
“Wasn’t he going to have a party tonight?” another feminine voice asked almost coyly. “Maybe we should possess him and have our fill of the guests!”
The group laughed and jeered in agreement; many to feast upon was better than one.
One-by-one the spirits drifted over Perry and sank into his body.
He screamed as his body temperature dropped and he felt his consciousness being forced deeper and deeper inside himself. He knew no one would hear him, but he still called out for help. Even if he had been lucky and someone did come to his aid, he knew there was nothing anyone could do.
“He’s damaged!” one of the women said inside him. “Someone will notice!”
“She’s right, you know,” said the other feminine voice. “We’ll have to clean him up.”
“I’ve got it,” one of the men said with a laugh. “I’ll have him fixed up momentarily!”
Perry convulsed in excruciating pain as his frigid body popped and snapped, healing itself of the wounds which had been inflicted upon him during the attack.
“Lovely,” the first female voice sighed.
“Please stop,” Perry cried out from the box inside himself he’d been pressed into; his consciousness was pushed back and he had no control over his body, but he could still feel everything that happened to his physical self. “Kill me, but don’t torture me like this… Please!”
“Oh, shut up!” one of the men yelled and the rest of the unwelcome spirits inhabiting Perry’s body laughed.
“What should we do with him until the party?” one of the male voices asked.
“He’s still all bloody… Why don’t we give him a bath?” asked one of the female voices.
“Oh, yes,” said the other female voice with a giggle.
“You ladies have your fun, but I want no part of it,” a male voice said with slight amusement and a bit of disgust.
The females giggled again and Perry felt himself rising up to a standing position. Awkwardly his body ascended the stairs and he noted that he could see everything around him, but still had no say or control over his body.
Before he was ready, they were in the bathroom and his shorts were being removed.
“My, my, what do we have here?” one of the female voices asked snidely. “Seems we have a naked man to play with.”
“Share!” the other female voice yelled. “You get one hand and I get the other.”
Perry could feel the women becoming more prominent in his body and the male entities slipped back and almost felt like they were sleeping.
“All right, all right,” the first female voice said. “I’ll share.”
They both giggled as they shut the door to the bathroom and found a full length mirror hanging on the door.
“Oh, what fun!” the second female voice squealed.
“Yes, indeed,” the other said with smug satisfaction.
Soon Perry’s hands were traveling all over his body, doing things to himself against his will.
“Please stop!” he groaned from deep within as he was forced to watch and feel what the female spirits were doing to him.
“Don’t you like it, luv?” one voice asked, and both the females laughed.
“Stop!” he screamed, but they just continued to laugh at him.
It took over an hour for them to play games with him and molest him in the shower, after which he felt more dirty than clean; they’d done unimaginable things to his body.
Later that day, John arrived to help with the Halloween party, letting himself in with the key Perry had given him when there was no response to his knock. As he turned from shutting the door, he spotted Perry standing silently at the top of the stairway in his zombie costume.
“Hey, man,” John said, as he jumped in startled surprise. “You scared the crap out of me!” He looked his friend over and grinned. “You’re costume is intense, but I thought we weren’t going to change until after we had things set up for the party.”
Perry’s body just stood there with its eyes staring down at John while the spirits inside argued about how to answer the question and handle this “newcomer”; they finally came to a decision.
“Hello, Earth to Perry,” John said, looking slightly worried and confused at the foot of the stairs. “You okay, man?”
“I’m fine,” Perry’s voice said, being controlled by one of the males. “I was excited and decided to don my festive apparel early.”
“You sound strange,” John said, his confused frown deepening. “What’s with all the ‘don my festive apparel’ shit? You sound old or something.”
Perry’s face sneered at John behind the zombie make-up as he descended the stairs toward him. When he reached the bottom step his arm shot out and he wrapped his hand around John’s throat, squeezing and lifting him off his feet.
“You’re a cheeky bloke,” a strange masculine voice said, using Perry’s mouth, no longer trying to disguise himself. “I don’t like being called old!”
John dropped the bags of stuff he was carrying and tried to pry the strong hand from his throat so he could breathe; he kicked and clawed at Perry’s hand and arm as he was lifted off the floor.
“Now we have to do something with him,” Perry heard one of the male voices say as they again began talking internally to each other.
“It is crowded in here,” another said, “maybe some of us should possess him, so we’ll have more space to move around and breathe!”
The other voices agreed and started to argue about who would go and who would stay. Perry broke into their argument…
“If you are going to do something, do it soon!” he yelled. “Otherwise you’ll kill my friend and have nowhere to go!”
The voices quieted for a moment and Perry’s hand loosened slightly on John’s throat, allowing him strained breathing rather than none at all.
“I think Ginger, Frank, Paul, and Peter should go,” one of the female voices said.
It was the first time Perry had heard them refer to each other by name and listened carefully. Something about the names seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place them. Then it hit him. Those were some of the names of the people who’d attended the Halloween party in the old newspaper article. He wished now, more than ever, that he’d been able to read the end of the article, so he could know what had happened, and was going to happen.
They argued some more and then Perry felt his small containment area expand. Four of the spirits drifted out of his body and into John’s, who was instantly released. He fell gasping to the floor and started thrashing around, screaming and clutching at his body. Finally he stilled and looked around with eyes that weren’t his own.
Perry cringed and whispered, “Sorry, my friend.” He wished John hadn’t gotten involved, and more than anything he wished he would have mentioned what had happened in the basement a few days before, thinking this wouldn’t have happened if he’d acknowledged it. He also thought about the horrible experience he’d had earlier in the bathroom and hoped his friend wouldn’t have to endure something similar when he changed into his costume; as if reading his thoughts, the female spirit who was still inside him laughed softly.
“He might like it, luv,” she said. “After all, you seemed to enjoy some of it.” She cackled with a perverse laugh and Perry didn’t respond.
It didn’t take the spirits long to master the control they had over Perry and John, and they extracted from their brains and thoughts all the things that needed to be done to prepare for the party; they’d just finished when the first guest arrived.
Nicole Winters—the tall, raven-haired, blue-eyed beauty who lived just down the street—stood on the porch with her coat hanging slightly open. Perry heart sank when he was forced to open the door and let her in. She smiled broadly, sporting a sexy fairy costume that would have made him drool if he hadn’t been possessed by crazy entities from the past; some of the comments the male ones were making about her made him panic and try to take back control.
“Run, Nicole!” Perry screamed. “Run!”
But of course, she couldn’t hear him, he still couldn’t control any part of his body, including his vocal cords.
“Shut up, you,” one of the males growled. “We’ll have our fun with this little tart and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Thanks for inviting me, Perry,” Nicole said, stepping inside and sliding off her coat, revealing more of her costume, or lack thereof. Most of it was sheer and see through; the male spirits were going wild.
“Ever seen any dressin’s like ‘em, fellas?” one of them asked.
“No, but I’d like to tear them off with my teeth and devour what’s underneath!” another exclaimed.
John entered the hallway, coming from the kitchen, and Perry saw a reflection in his eyes of what he was hearing within.
“I’m glad you could make it,” Perry’s pleasant voice said, as his hand was placed on her butt and he squeezed.
Nicole gasped and giggled, giving him a wink. “I wouldn’t have missed it. I love Halloween parties. They give me an excuse to dress up.” She was pressing herself against his body now and practically purring with wicked intent in her eyes.
“Oh, yeah, boys,” one of the voices said. “We’re gonna have us a slice of that Heaven.”
They all laughed.
Perry cringed and wished there was something he could do to stop all this, but he couldn’t think of anything.
John walked down the hall toward them and pressed up against Nicole from the back, trapping her between them. He bent forward and whispered something in her ear that Perry didn’t catch. He knew it wasn’t John doing any of it, but he still felt betrayed for some strange reason.
Nicole jerked and struggled, trying to break free, just before her personality flipped and she giggled and sighed, accepting the attention from both men. Perry and John realized instantly when their containment expanded slightly that the female spirits had both moved into Nicole’s body. She began to wiggle against and grope both of the men and pouted when someone knocked on the front door.
“Bloody hell!” she growled. “All these interruptions are spoiling our fun!”
Both of the possessed men laughed. None of them were themselves any longer and just watched and felt everything that happened around them.
Guests continued to arrive for the next forty-five minutes and none of them knew a thing about what was going on. If Nicole, John, or Perry did something strange, the guests would just shrug it off, assuming they’d already started drinking.
A couple times Nicole disappeared from the room with John, and a couple of times she left with Perry. No one really noticed, but Perry was devastated; he really liked and cared for Nicole, and the damned possessing spirts were making them both do tainted and lewd things to each other. He didn’t even want to think about what she was doing with John, knowing it was probably just as bad or worse.
“Why are you doing this to us?” Perry asked as he was again entering the living room where the party was, after being with Nicole. “Why not just kill us? Why play with us like this first?”
“Well, you see…” one of the voices started in a teasing manner.
“Don’t tell ‘im!” another barked. “Then he’ll know!”
“What does it matter if he knows?” another asked. “He can’t do anything about it.”
“Just shut up, you,” the second voice ordered. “It’ll be over before you know it.”
Everything kept moving smoothly along until around midnight, and then Perry’s mouth announced that he wanted to show everyone the player piano in the basement. They were intrigued, so like cattle the twenty-three people at the party (including Perry, John, and Nicole) went down into the basement; Nicole was the last one and she shut the door tightly behind herself.
“What’s going on?” Perry asked from deep within himself. “Why did you bring everyone down here?”
“Shut up!” all the voices barked at him.
Everyone was ohing and ahing over the piano while Perry, John, and Nicole stood at the base of the stairs. No one saw their eyes glow bright red, and no one saw the humans’ bodies transform into red scaled monsters with vicious long claws and mouths full of long, sharp teeth. But they did hear the panting and growling that emanated from them; the guests all turned and screamed.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had human flesh,” the once Nicole growled, running her long black tongue across her teeth. “I want the first bite.”
Both the beings who were once John and Perry growled and stepped forward.
The crowd cringed and moved backwards, pressing themselves against the far wall.
The Nicole-demon lunged forward, and with one clamp down of her jaws, she ripped a woman’s head clean off. Blood dripped from her mouth and onto the floor as she chewed the skull and slurped out the brains within before swallowing it all. The woman’s body fell to the floor and her blood began to drain out onto the stones. Instantly a pentagram made of flames appeared on the floor, encompassing the entire room; the body burned and dissolved to nothing in the fire.
More and more bodies joined the first as limbs were torn from torsos and hips, devoured by the bodies that had earlier been possessed and were now transformed. They gorged themselves on the flesh of the frightened, screaming guests and didn’t stop until they were all dead.
The three stood in the center of the pentagram panting. Their eyes were ablaze with adrenaline and their bodies were covered in the guts and blood they’d spilt.
“It’s time for the last three,” a deep, growling voice said from beneath them as the floor disappeared and turned into a raging, licking fire.
“Yes, master,” the three growled.
The female spirits left the body of Nicole they’d inhabited, and instantly it turned back into the human form with Nicole at the helm once again.
She blinked in confusion and screamed as her body began to burn. Soon there was nothing left of her; the same happened to both of the men.
Once they were consumed the floor reappeared and the fire was gone. The spirits floated in the air, looking at each other.
“I guess that pays our debt to Hell for a few more years,” one of the females said.
“Yes,” a male said with a laugh. “Happy Halloween!”
Days passed and none of the cars in front of Perry’s house moved. Neighbors became angry and then concerned. The police were called and they finally contacted Perry’s family when they couldn’t reach him.
A search ensued for Perry, John, and all of the others, to no avail.
When nothing and no one was found, Perry’s house was emptied and sold.
No one noticed the newspaper article from long ago when it was thrown into the trash, and no one knew to be afraid of what lurked in the basement, waiting for the next Halloween.
Rebecca Besser is the author of Nurse Blood. She is a member of the International Thriller Writers Organization. She has been published hundreds of times in magazines, ezines, anthologies, educational books, on blogs, and more in the areas of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for a variety of age groups and genres. Her nonfiction article on skydiving was picked up by McGraw-Hill for NY Assessments. One of her poems for children was chosen for an early reader book from Oxford University Press (India). Her short story, P.C., was included in Anything But Zombies! published by Atria Books (digital imprint of Simon & Schuster).
Rebecca’s main focus has been on horror works for adults. She writes zombie works, suspenseful thrillers, and other dark fiction related to the horror genre/community. She has also edited multiple books in these genres.
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