The battle was raging outside and I hoped that Veronika was staying well out of it, though I knew she would be wherever she felt that she could do the most good. The defending demons were also outside, so I climbed shakily to my feet and unstrapped the briefcase that I had previously strapped across my chest. I then jogged down the corridor and into the heart of the enemy camp.
Yule was, as advertised, a giant. He stood about fifteen feet tall in his cloven socks, a strange mixture of man and stag. Though his legs ended in hooves, his arms ended in hands. He was watching a bank of vision spheres that were floating in the air in front of him, each showing a scene from the battle outside. As a result, he had his back turned to me. He wore no clothes, but his mostly-human shape was covered with a warm brown pelt. I activated the briefcase, which I then left by the doorway, and started to creep toward him, pulling a hunting knife out of my belt.
“Do you really think that I can’t hear you?” the god asked suddenly. “Or smell you for that matter.”
He turned around slowly, ponderously, showing off the sheer power that was contained within the giant body and then looked down at me through his startling, vertically-slit eyes.
“I showered this morning,” I objected. “Of course, I’ve been through a bit since then.”
“And I have been impressed,” Yule allowed. It was very strange to hear a human voice issue out of the mouth of a deer, but since that mouth belonged to a fifteen foot tall deer-headed god in a potentially fictitious potential future it was the kind of strange that I could accept. “Very few people get past the first demon and almost nobody gets to me.”
“Can I just ask what happened to the whole ‘meets three ghosts, becomes a better person and buys Tiny Tim a turkey’ scenario? That was so much more civilised,” I said, trying to think what to do next. The truth was that I had planned for all eventualities up until this point. When taking on a god, however, plans have a way of being buried under plagues of frogs so I hadn’t planned much further. I work better when hanging on by the skin of someone else’s teeth. I was also very aware that people were dying outside. They might be potentially fictitious people in a potentially fictitious future, but that didn’t matter to me.
“Videogames,” he surprised me by saying, “and movies.”
“Care to expand on that?” I asked.
“Show someone a Ghost of Christmas Past now and they would just laugh and tell you that the graphics weren’t very good,” the god obliged. “It’s all about personal rights now rather than personal responsibilities. If there isn’t a sign telling them to do it then they don’t see why they should. Today I need to take a more... adventurous... route.”
“And this is all supposed to make me a better person is it?” I laughed. “I don’t see that happening.”
“It already has,” Yule said and paused to rub his antlers against one of the girders in the roof above us. “Of course the fact that I am going to kill you now means that nobody will get to see the new, improved you, which is something of a shame.”
He raised his hands and pointed at me dramatically. Then he looked at his fingers with a mixture of surprise, confusion and dismay, “That’s never happened to me before.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure that it happens to every god now and again. We can wait a while and try again if you like.”
He snarled at my words and demanded, “What have you done?”
“I just brought along a little something that might not actually level the playing field, but which will at least stop is tipping so far in your favour,” I told him. The thing in question was a Magic Potential Annulment Field Generator that I had found in amongst the weapons in the Channel Tunnel. Portable anti-magic boxes (as they are much more commonly known, or uncommonly known since there aren’t that many people who are privy to their existence) have a limited range and even more limited duration, but they can cancel out any magic use within their area of influence. At least until the battery wears out. “We can sort this out, you know, man against stag-headed god thing.”
“You think to challenge me physically?” Yule demanded, astonished, and let out a huge bellow of laughter.
At which point I threw the hunting knife.
My knife throwing skills weren’t going to earn me a place in the circus any time soon (except possibly as one of the clowns), so I aimed for the biggest target and the knife plunged tip first into his chest.
And then rebounded.
“Is that the best that you have, little man?” he demanded. “You lose.”
He stepped forward and swung one hand at me in a wide slashing motion. I leapt desperately upward and over his wrist as it swept past. Had he connected, the blow would have taken my head clean off at the waist. I ran for the exit and he surged after me, but as had been the case with the pig demons in the Victor Von Frankenstein Tower, his size and power were offset by a lack of agility. I dodged left and slid under his descending hoof. As he tried to turn to follow me, he lost his footing and crashed heavily into the wall. There was a snapping sound and a shard of his antlers broke off and dropped to the ground. He looked at the broken piece of antler on the floor and roared furiously.
“No need to get angry,” I reproached him. “It’s not the size of your horns that matters, it’s what you do with them.”
Again he charged at me, but this time a little more slowly and carefully. This time there would be no dodging out of the way. I grabbed one of the floating vision globes and hurled it at his head, quickly following it with another. He batted them away easily, but I had already grabbed a third and aimed it a lot lower. It impacted solidly into the proof of his male godhood and he bellowed in pain, grasping his own globes.
I tried to use the time to put some distance between us, but he recovered quickly and lashed out at me. The blow caught me glancingly, but it was enough to propel me across the room to the spot where he had staggered into the wall. The marks of that impact were imprinted on the concrete. As I struggled to catch my breath, Yule strode to the entrance and stamped down onto the anti-magic box, flattening it utterly.
“Let’s see how you do now,” he growled, advancing on me, his eyes starting to glow purple and the same glow coalescing around his extended hands. “Goodbye Agent Ward.”
Gunfire echoed around the room and bullets slammed hard into his exposed back. I looked to the entrance and there was Veronika, standing in the opening, a smoking machine gun in her hands. She couldn’t have looked more ridiculously heroic had Michael Bay been involved in the scene.
Yule gestured once and a string of colours streamed out of his fingers to slice straight through her. She collapsed onto the floor.
“No!” I screamed and leaped upward, ramming the shard of antler that I had picked up off the floor as hard as I could into his abdomen.
Yule looked down at me in shock. With all my strength, I hauled on the antler and ripped open his skin, spilling blood and intestines across the floor.
“Perhaps you win after all,” the god said with an expression of wonder and irritation. He then toppled forward onto his face.
I scrambled over the body. As I did so, Veronika pulled herself to her feet, looking as surprised to be alive as Yule had looked to be killed.
“How did you do that?” she asked, surveying the giant corpse. “My bullets didn’t even scratch him.”
“Most species develop weapons that can kill their own kind long before weapons that can kill others,” I explained. “In this case it was his antlers.”
I showed her the bloodied shard in my hand.
“As impossibly mad, impetuous, suicidal and lucky as ever you were,” she complimented me (I think) with a big smile. “Perhaps you can tell me exactly ...”
“...what are you doing?”
I was momentarily disorientated.
“Are you going to stand out there all night? I have eggnog that needs tasting,” Veronika said, but this was my Veronika; a Veronika wearing an evening dress with an apron over the top and wi
thout a single grey hair on her head or an ugly scar across her face.
I glanced around myself. I was standing in the garden outside our house. There was no demon headquarters, no giant deer-headed god with its innards spilled out, no shard of antler in my hand.
Something squealed behind me and I swung around, reaching for my gun, until I identified Penny Kilkenny standing at the garden gate. She looked at me suspiciously and then looked at Veronika.
“You did say eight didn’t you?” she asked. “I’m sure you said eight.”
“Yes we said eight,” Veronika confirmed, cuffing me lightly around the head. “I don’t know what game he is playing.”
“Well I hope that you’re ready for us because Mrs Freidriksen will be here shortly,” Penny warned, coming up the path.
“Mrs Freidriksen? Coming here? In this crisis?” That seemed unlikely and I wondered if Yule had some new game for me.
“Crisis? What crisis?” Penny asked with a confused expression. “It’s Christmas, not April 1st.” She held up her gloved hands in front of her. “Thank you for these by the way. How did you know I had lost the others?”
“Because I paid someone to steal them,” I suggested spontaneously as my mind started to adjust to the situation. I had no idea how I had known she had lost her gloves and I certainly didn’t know how I had bought a new pair for her. Penny had no memory of events concerning giant pigs in the Victor Von Frankenstein Tower and Mrs F was coming to the party that I hadn’t known we were throwing, so I assumed that the Armoury was back where it was supposed to be and no lockdown had been recorded this night.
“If only that were impossible to believe,” Penny said with a smile, kissed me lightly on the cheek and accompanied Veronika into the house.
“Pssst!”
I turned around and there was a glow around the knocker on the front door of the house once again.
“Well I don’t know what you did Ward, but you certainly put your boot down hard in the ants’ nest,” the lion’s face that was also Grayson’s told me.
“Yule won’t be bothering you for a while,” I guessed. Though I had spilled his entire digestive tract across the floor, I wasn’t making any assumptions about the permanency of the Horned One’s demise.
“So I gather,” Leo the Grayson replied approvingly. “I knew that if anyone could do it, it was you.”
“Well next time that you need a champion to fight your cause, call someone else,” I told him. “And do try to stop getting caught all the time.”
“Understood,” he would have nodded if the lion’s head hadn’t been nailed to the door. “Thanks Ward and Merry Christmas.”
The glow faded away and the lion was a lion once more.
“Merry Christmas,” I offered belatedly, looking in through the lounge window to where Veronika and Penny were chatting animatedly over two cups of eggnog before the warmth of a fake log fire, “and bless us all, every one.”
The End
(for now anyway)
Agent Ward, the Man From U.N.D.E.AD. appears in a series of novels available on the Amazon Kindle. His full length adventures are:
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.: The Curious
Case Of The Kidnapped Chemist
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – Zombie
Apocalypse Now
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – Do Dragons
Dream Of Burning Sheep
One Small Step For The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.
Short Stories featuring Agent Ward appear in:
A Splendid Salmagundi (Interview With The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.)
Sharing A Fence With The Twilight Zone (The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.’s Schooldays)
Darren Humphries 2012
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.'s Christmas Carol Page 5