Alone.
He hurried on, ignoring the faintest suggestion of frenzied pale tendrils emerging from that oblong of dark that was Lenny’s front door. If they were really there, then so be it, but nothing short of a broken neck would make him look in that direction. Not now, not when he was so close to home.
Fighting the white road, the all-consuming mold, the blanket beneath which the dead lay dreaming, a line from a poem he had read in his younger, healthier, saner days came whispering through the dark inside his head: “‘Fall, winter, fall; for he/Prompt hand and headpiece clever/Has woven a winter robe/And made of earth and sea/His overcoat for ever.’” A.E. Housman, he recalled, mildly amused to find he had recited the stanza aloud. A poem he had read for students in his high school teaching days, days long gone, along with everything else, along with the history teacher he had met and fallen in love with there. Housman had known the deal, Jake knew, securing his suspicions of winter’s wrath in the lines of a poem to escape ridicule and accusations of madness, accusations Jake couldn’t hope to escape now that the projections of it had turned the whole world around him into a hollow white nightmare.
Keep going!
He did, hobbling, grimacing, hissing air through teeth cold as stone, squinting through eyes that saw as if through a film of ice.
And then, his street, silent as a tomb, buried in snow, twinkling in overwrought mimicry of something benign. His house, smoke ghost tearing itself from the chimney, light in the window. He stopped, fresh tears dripping down his cheeks, scarcely daring to believe it could be true. Light in the window. Warm amber light.
And in the driveway, Sheriff Baxter’s police cruiser, gleaming. No sirens, no wailing. Quiet. Doors closed. No damage.
Jake nodded and cracked a smile from which inner heat seemed to flow. This was right. This was the way it was supposed to be. He knew what he would find in there. Warmth, safety, sanity, and Sheriff Baxter warming his hands by the fire, angry that Lenny and Jake hadn’t waited for him. Joanne would be fine.
She tripped and hurt her ankle on the ice, Baxter would tell him. Nothing critical. I sent Deputy Harlow to take her to the hospital. She’s fine. Be out by morning. Now where the hell is her damn fool husband gone? Probably figured out that’s where she’d be and walked over there. Here Baxter would shake his head. Bad idea for a man his age in this weather let me tell you.
And Jake would smile, agree and offer the Sheriff a glass of something strong and the lawman would take it, because even lawmen were not impervious to this kind of cold. Then they would sit and wait in the warmth for word from Lenny.
Grinning now, Jake took a step toward his house.
And the lights went out.
No. Oh please…no!
In the snow around him something moved. No, not something. The snow itself was moving, slowly undulating like a sheet in the wind. Whispers, struggling to imitate the breeze but failing to sound even remotely natural, swept up from the rolling white, overlapping into a nonsensical chorus it hurt the mind to hear. Jake, despite his panic, remembered when he had heard it before, close to his ear and hidden in what he had mistakenly thought was Lenny’s breathing.
Full insanity. Had to be. Such things simply did not, could not happen. There were laws that dictated it. And yet, all around him the snow erupted, tunnels tearing toward him, slick white tendrils bursting from the drifts and waving at him, opaque eyes unblinking in the darkness. The ground shuddered and his feet sank further, though this time it was not the snow that hugged his ankles. It was fingers, malleable slivers of ice that slid around the exposed skin there and held tight.
His bladder let go but he was only dimly aware of it, less aware when the urine froze halfway down.
The clouds of his breath caressed the facial features of things which had preferred to remain invisible as they circled him, but he could see them now. Grinning, their white eyes alight with fierce intelligence, with awareness…
They know, Carl Stewart had said, and it was clear now that they did. They knew everything. They knew he had tried to take his life in a drunken fit of suicidal hysteria. They knew the barrel had been in his mouth even after he’d called Lenny. They knew he had pulled the trigger and the gun had jammed.
But most of all, they knew about the cancer that had eaten his wife and the pillow that had stopped her breathing.
The churned up snow stopped mere inches from his feet as the tunnel digger ceased its labors.
They know…
Trembling turned to convulsing as if these things – whatever they were – had stripped him naked. The cold fed on him and he shrieked at it, at them, at everything that had brought him on this path, to this moment, to his certain death.
“Go away!” he screamed at them, his mind unable to cope with the sheer amount of movement that registered in his vision. Here, a hand only slightly smaller than Carl Stewart’s truck, scarred and patterned with intricate loops and swirls, clutching at the sky with fish belly fingers, its wrist blue where it emerged from the snow. There, a dark figure, flinching as if beaten by unseen fists, its eyes elliptical slits stuffed with shards of glowing ice. To his left, a woman danced like a marionette with too few strings, her hair fashioned from the snow itself, clumps of it obscuring her face. She was naked, her body blue, breasts full, nipples black, legs studded with icicles that gleamed as she swung in the arms of an invisible partner. To his right, a glass scarecrow hissed and bowed in supplication. But not to Jake.
Whimpering, he watched as a hole formed at his feet, the snow pulled down by several pale hands scrabbling frantically.
“Please…”
But even as the words staggered over his trembling lips, he knew they would go unheard. They already knew all they needed to.
The hole widened. The hands vanished into the dark and then slowly, slowly, something started to emerge.
Jake pulled, desperately trying to tear himself free of the snow, but it was no use, the spikes of pain in his arthritic knees only served to remind him how old, how weak, how cold and how foolish he was. And how pointless it was to try and escape.
A face rose smiling from the hole, a gaunt weathered face with eyes like cold suns. The shock of recognition almost knocked Jake backward, a move that might have left him with two shattered ankles so tight was the grip of the snow hands.
“We know,” said Lenny, or the shell of what had once been his best friend. Jake fell to his knees and felt the resistance from the clutching snow, allowing him the fall but not his freedom.
Lenny still wore his coat, hands in pockets, hat askew on his head. If not for the eyes, the impression would have been flawless.
Jake lifted his head to look into the creature’s face. “Why you?” he asked. “Why did they hurt you, Lenny?”
The Lenny-thing tilted its head. “We know. And you must know too.”
Jake looked longingly towards his house. It was dark now, and unwelcoming, and he could hear the faintest of ticking sounds echoing from inside. The memory of Lenny’s voice, spoken from fireside safety, spoken on the fringes of a nightmare, joined the deathwatch echo.
“You mentioned dying. I was wondering if you remembered the last time we talked about it. What you told me, I mean.”
And now he did remember, more than he’d remembered before, as the cold shattered the walls of willing resistance.
He had called Lenny that night, had wept his sorrows into the phone. But that was not all. Amid the pleas and the desperation, there had also been a confession.
“Jake, calm down. I can’t understand you.”
“—her!”
“Talk into the phone. I can’t—”
“I killed her, Lenny. I fucking killed her because I couldn’t watch her dying in front of me and now I want to be with her. Help me!”
“Oh my God…”
Lenny knew. But being the loyal friend he had been forever, he had chosen to keep it a secret and that secret had killed him because these things, these creatures of
guilt and punishment, had known too.
The thing in Lenny’s clothes grinned, exposing a mouthful of icicle teeth.
Tick, tick, tick, the watch wound down, the same watch Julia had worn in her deathbed as she struggled feebly against the pillow, her hands trapped beside her face. The same watch he had used to count the seconds until her death, to count the beats of her heart.
Both had stopped running at the same time.
He swallowed and hugged himself. This is how they mean to kill me, he thought. They’ll keep me here, in the cold until it stops my heart.
Silence.
Someone standing behind him reached a slim pale blue hand over his shoulder, grazing his cheek with its rough skin and clamping down hard enough to register pain over the numbing cold.
He turned shivering, teeth chattering so violently they must surely break. And his breath caught in his throat.
The woman standing there wore an ill-fitting expression of love that faded and changed to cold blue rage while he watched, stricken, paralyzed by utter, unbridled horror.
The hush deepened.
“I’m…s-s-sorry. I swear I am,” he sobbed and sensed, rather than felt them all descend upon him as one hissing mass.
It began to snow.
Arthur Machen
A NEW CHRISTMAS CAROL
SCROOGE WAS UNDOUBTEDLY getting on in life, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
Ten years had gone by since the spirit of old Jacob Marley had visited him, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come had shown him the error of his mean, niggardly, churlish ways, and had made him the merriest old boy that ever walked on 'Change with a chuckle, and was called "Old Medlar" by the young dogs who never reverenced anybody or anything.
And, not a doubt of it, the young dogs were in the right. Ebenezer Scrooge was a meddler. He was always ferreting about into other peoples' business; so that he might find out what good he could do them. Many a hard man of affairs softened as he thought of Scrooge and of the old man creeping round to the countinghouse where the hard man sat in despair, and thought of the certain ruin before him.
"My dear Mr. Hardman," old Scrooge had said, "not another word. Take this draft for thirty thousand pounds, and use it as none knows better. Why, you'll double it for me before six months are out."
He would go out chuckling on that, and Charles the waiter, at the old City tavern where Scrooge dined, always said that Scrooge was a fortune for him and to the house. To say nothing of what Charles got by him; everybody ordered a fresh supply of hot brandy and water when his cheery, rosy old face entered the room.
It was Christmastide. Scrooge was sitting before his roaring fire, sipping at something warm and comfortable, and plotting happiness for all sorts of people.
"I won't bear Bob's obstinacy," he was saying to himself—the firm was Scrooge and Cratchit now—"he does all the work, and it's not fair for a useless old fellow like me to take more than a quarter share of the profits."
A dreadful sound echoed through the grave old house. The air grew chill and sour. The something warm and comfortable grew cold and tasteless as Scrooge sipped it nervously. The door flew open, and a vague but fearful form stood in the doorway.
"Follow me," it said.
Scrooge is not at all sure what happened then. He was in the streets. He recollected that he wanted to buy some sweetmeats for his little nephews and nieces, and he went into a shop.
"Past eight o'clock, sir," said the civil man. "I can't serve you."
He wandered on through the streets that seemed strangely altered. He was going westward, and he began to feel faint. He thought he would be the better for a little brandy and water, and he was just turning into a tavern when all the people came out and the iron gates were shut with a clang in his face.
"What's the matter?" he asked feebly of the man who was closing the doors.
"Gone ten," the fellow said shortly, and turned out all the lights.
* * *
Scrooge felt sure that the second mince-pie had given him indigestion, and that he was in a dreadful dream. He seemed to fall into a deep gulf of darkness, in which all was blotted out.
When he came to himself again it was Christmas Day, and the people were walking about the streets.
Scrooge, somehow or other, found himself among them. They smiled and greeted one another cheerfully, but it was evident that they were not happy. Marks of care were on their faces, marks that told of past troubles and future anxieties. Scrooge heard a man sigh heavily just after he had wished a neighbor a Merry Christmas. There were tears on a woman s face as she came down the church steps, all in black.
"Poor John!" she was murmuring. "I am sure it was the wearing cark of money troubles that killed him. Still, he is in heaven now. But the clergyman said in his sermon that heaven was only a pretty fairy tale." She wept anew.
All this disturbed Scrooge dreadfully. Something seemed to be pressing on his heart.
"But," said he, "I shall forget all this when I sit down to dinner with Nephew Fred and my niece and their young rascals."
It was late in the afternoon; four o'clock and dark, but in capital time for dinner. Scrooge found his nephew's house. It was as dark as the sky; not a window was lighted up. Scrooge's heart grew cold.
He knocked and knocked again, and rang a bell that sounded as faint and far as if it had rung in a grave.
At last a miserable old woman opened the door for a few inches and looked out suspiciously.
"Mr. Fred?" said she. "Why, he and his missus have gone off to the Hotel Splendid, as they call it, and they won't be home till midnight. They got their table six weeks ago! The children are away at Eastbourne."
"Dining in a tavern on Christmas day!" Scrooge murmured. "What terrible fate is this? Who is so miserable, so desolate, that he dines at a tavern on Christmas day? And the children at Eastbourne!"
The air grew misty about him. He seemed to hear as though from a great distance the voice of Tiny Tim, saying "God help us, every one!"
Again the Spirit stood before him. Scrooge fell upon his knees.
"Terrible Phantom!" he exclaimed. "Who and what are thou? Speak, I entreat thee."
"Ebenezer Scrooge," replied the Spirit in awful tones. "I am the Ghost of the Christmas of 1920. With me I bring the demand note of the Commissioners of Income Tax!"
Scrooge's hair bristled as he saw the figures. But it fell out when he saw that the Apparition had feet like those of a gigantic cat.
"My name is Pussyfoot. I am also called Ruin and Despair," said the Phantom, and vanished.
With that Scrooge awoke and drew back the curtains of his bed.
"Thank God!" he uttered from his heart. "It was but a dream!"
Tony Campbell
BUSMAN'S HOLIDAY
FROM WHERE HE sat atop a pile of human remains, Satan gazed melancholically into the realm of hell and expelled a deep, pitiful sigh. He was bored. Throughout the whole of eternity, mankind hadn’t managed to disillusion him quite as much as now.
Even the awe-inspiring Torture Pits of Gomorra, once feared across all seven circles of Hell, could not bring a smile to his demonic face.
Every week, he would offer pleasantries to his colleagues, as they delivered their reports at the Council of Evil. He would praise them for new highs on soul collection statistics (the SCS rating) now up to sixty-two percent on naturally released souls.
People were definitely turning from Jesus and, for the minions of the ABYSS, this was a good thing.
He sighed again. Why was he feeling so low?
It’s true to say there had been some bad times in the past; the Sixties for instance. Peace, love and happiness had made things very difficult. Free love had forced him to take serious steps. He had dispatched his most resourceful demons into the world; their mission to encourage sin. At least that had been a challenge, and there had been results. The decade ended with the monthly SCS figures up by another four pe
rcent; a new record.
As he picked up a smouldering skull, he stared into its black, empty eye sockets and considered his options. How could he get out of this rut? He desperately needed to get away from this place; he needed time to recuperate. That was it, he would take a busman’s holiday; Beelzebub on tour. He laughed as he thought of the tee-shirt. He would get away, just for a while; give himself time to catch up on some Devil stuff. Who knows, inspiration might arrive whilst shopping at Ikea, or eating a burger in McDonalds. This, he decided, was definitely the way forward.
“Abigar, I have a job for you,” said Satan. He addressed a short, stocky demon with red horns and flaming skin.
“Sir, yes, sir.” Abigar saluted his master with the traditional fire-flick, peculiar to the Fifth Legion of Azryel.
Satan was very fond of Abigar. He always trusted his little bodyguard to get the job done.
“We are going on an expedition into the world.”
“Sir, won’t that be dangerous, sir?” inquired Abigar.
“I have decided to go undercover for a few weeks, to draw up a new strategy. I need time and space to think. I’m too immersed in politics while I remain here. Think of it as a sort of winter retreat.”
“I understand, sir, a very good plan indeed. Where will we go?”
“That, my small friend, is where I need you.”
Abigar nodded. “Whatever you require, sir,” he said, looking at Satan with a proud glint in his smouldering eyeballs.
“I need you, to find us a place to stay – somewhere we will not be noticed. Somewhere,” he paused and looked thoughtfully at Abigar, “somewhere no one would expect to see The Devil.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” Abigar saluted again, then snapped his cloven hand back down to his burning waist.
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