Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild Marvels of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreja of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and the people very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness, but I disliked it when I fancied I heard the closing of one of the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring that was not of the old woman’s spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old woman was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were persons on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old man came back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on that very bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck, however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned, and the other of which he draped round the old woman, who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking lip the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over that unmoving face or mask.

  We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking sigus and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.

  Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I saw that all the travellers were converging as they flowed near a sort of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the centre of the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from the road’s crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment on the ghostly spire.

  There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see over the hill’s summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbour, though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a lanthorn bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till the crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers had followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determined to be the last. Crossing the threshold into the swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though the wind had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the door; and in that fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine.

  The church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it, for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the high pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squinning noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the foot-worn steps and into the dark, suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that the tomb’s floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw some side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through the mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.

  Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had summoned me to this primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard another sound, the thin, whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the boundless vista of an inner world – a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.

  Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see. But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable, casfing no shadows as healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone with a nasty, venomous verdigris. For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death and corruption.

  The man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle he faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a sigual to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not o
f this or any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.

  Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membranous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.

  The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the amorphous flute-player had rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently standing by. As I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient place; that it had been decreed I should come back, and that the most secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch, both with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.

  Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself. When one of the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his head. And then, because that nightmare’s position barred me from the stone staircase down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung myself into that putrescent juice of earth’s inner horrors before the madness of my screams could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.

  At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport Harbour at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I could say, because everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad windows showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below. They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went delirious at hearing that the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me to St Mary’s Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me their influence in obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred’s objectionable Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University. They said something about a “psychosis” and agreed I had better get any harassing obsessions off my mind.

  So I read that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one – in waking hours – who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can make from the awkward Low Latin.

  “The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”

  Michael Arnzen

  DEAR SANTA

  Dear Santa,

  Here are the milk and cookies you well deserve. Eat, drink, and be merry! Take a break and enjoy!

  The world has gone to hell since you last came to visit.

  I don't know how to explain it. There's more trouble in the Middle East, planes are crashing daily, killing thousands, nuclear war seems inevitable. Y. So much trouble!

  I don't think the world deserves you, Santa.

  I know my children didn't.

  Please, don't mind their blood on the floor, X couldn't get it all up in time for your arrival, and I really don't mind the stains. Just watch your step!

  The poor kids. I tried my best, I really did, Santa. I kept telling them, "Now don't be naughty! Santa might put coal in your stocking! He might not come at all!" But I knew you would anyway, because you're such a nice gentleman. And they just wouldn't stop beating the dog with the baseball bat you gave them last year. They just wouldn't stop! I warned them, I really did! Over and over and over. They just wouldn't listen. Crazy brats. So I beat them with the bat, just to show them how poor Rover felt.

  I guess they know now.

  Don't get me wrong St. Nick. It isn't like they didn't deserve it. They did, believe me! They were bad all year. Remember that electric train you brought them last Christmas? They broke it. Not the usual way, uh-uh, they were bad. They tied the dolly you brought little Cyndi to the tracks, and ran it over. When that wasn't good enough, they tied little Cyndi's hand to the tracks to see if that would work. She probably would have lived if the cut on her hand hadn't leaked all that blood...so much blood, all over the tracks. I didn't know that blood was such a good conductor of electricity. Did you?

  How are your cookies, Santa? Tasty, aren't they?

  Poor Cyndi. I miss her, don't you? She was the good one. But you already know that. You gave her the best presents, too. You are such a good man. You always give, so much. How do you do it? Where do you get the money? Or do you use magic?

  If you do use magic, do you think you could give me back my little Cyndi for Christmas? Or Rover, my best friend?

  But you can't, can you. I know you're not God. I know you're not, or else you would have done something about all those planes crashing, or the bomb. I know you, Santa, you would if you could, but you can't. Hell, you're just a man like me, aren't ya?

  But how do you get down the chimney? How do you make all those reindeer fly? How do you do it Santa, huh?

  Better drink up your milk before it gets too cold, Santa.

  Oh, I know. You're an angel. That's why they call you "Saint Nicholas I"

  Well, we'll find out Santa.

  I don't want the police to get me. They'd lock me up for a long time. Life, probably. But I really didn't do anything wrong, you know that. They deserved it, the little shits, didn’t they? They were so ungrateful. You should never have given them anything, ever. Then maybe they'd still be alive today. But what's life without Christmas?

  Can you sneak into jail, too? Just like you sneak down the chimney? Wait a minute. Isn't it illegal for you to break into my house like this?

  But you're welcome in my home, Santa. You're welcome to come inside and eat some milk and cookies. It's my gift to you. It's about time I give you something back after all you've brought into this household.

  Well, you should be done with them by now. Please put the dish
es into the sink before you leave. It will give you more time to spend in a warm house before you go back up the chimney and into the cold.

  My wife is dead, too. I killed her out of pure jealousy, Santa. I was bad. I had to do it. She was messing around on me. And I know who did it, too. That's right, Santa. I know it was you. She told me it was some guy who works down at the Salvation Army, but I know who it really was. You.

  So I climbed down her chimney, and left her a present. A bat. Now I know where "Jolly Old Saint Nick" gets his jollies.

  But that's okay, Santa. I know it was your gift to her, for being so good to me. Poor Kathy.

  But I have a gift for you, too, Santa. What is it? Well, I'll give you a hint. I know it's not Christmas morning yet, but what the hell? You already ate it. No-no, not the cookies and milk (have you put the dishes away, yet?), not them, something inside them. No-no, not the choclate chips, silly.

  Acid, Santa. 50 hits worth. Enough to kill a junkie.

  Why don't you sit down, and enjoy your last few minutes in a warm house, Santa. Go on. You won't make it back up the chimney, anyway. (By the way, did you ever burn your butt coming down those things?)

  How do you feel, Santa. Confused? Are you dead, yet?

  I hope so. Maybe they'll pin the whole thing on you! Why not? You OD'd on LSD! You broke into my house! You fucked my wife!

  The fingerprints are still on the baseball bat! You did it all, didn't you, you fucking bastard! Ho, Ho, Ho!

  Well, anyway, Santa, thanks for the presents. Perhaps you are God, and you'll get out of here scot free. We'll see.

  Why don't you put on some of that trippy Christmas music and enjoy yourself. I know I am.

  Merry Christmas!