Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror (16 page)

The Man poured himself another drink and downed most of it. Already the bottle was half empty. He slammed an open palm down on his desk.
“Bastards can’t do that to me!”
He opened his laptop and switched it on. While waiting for it to boot, he punched another number on his phone. It was answered on the second ring.

“Billy! It’s Randy. How the hell are you? Yeah, I’m staying home too. You watching Times Square, are you? I don’t have a TV. Listen, I know you’ll love this. As one hacker geek to another. You know that outfit I been working for? They fired me today, on New Year’s Eve! I guess they figure this way they don’t have to pay me for the holiday. Well, yeah, I’m taking legal action. Definitely. Know what else I’m gonna do? They don’t know it, but their main server has a back door. I’m gonna hack in and install one nasty virus. I got it from a Ukrainian web site. On company time, no less. Well, who do you think made the back door? They think they’re so fuckin’ smart. When they turn the power on day after tomorrow, the whole company’s going to crash. All hard drives go boom. They’ll lose millions. They don’t know who they’re dealing with, but they will soon… Yeah, sure, I’ll be careful. Hey, even if they figure out who did it to them, they’re gonna need me back to straighten out the mess.” He gave a short bark of a laugh. “Okay, Billy, later.” He put the phone down and turned to his laptop. He got his password right on the second attempt. So he couldn’t be that drunk yet. But he soon would be. One quick drink and he began typing code.

The rat was patient and could wait, but not forever.
The Man should bring food
. The rat watched him hunched over the laptop, making clicking sounds. The Man muttered to himself. He said,
I’ll show the bastards. Who they think they’re dealin’ with, any who? Dandy Randy they calls me. Dandy Randy the Man…
And so on. He saw he was making mistakes on the keyboard and had to do some things over. Left out a whole subroutine, had to go back and do it again.
Concentrate
. The rat waited until the Man was totally focused on his task, and then began to raise a ruckus, squealing, running back and forth, scratching claws on the wall. It knew how to make noise.

The Man stopped, whirled in his chair, took off his second shoe, threw it at the wall.
Mothafucka!
The rat fell silent. When the Man turned back to his computer he realized he had forgotten his place. He would have to read through the code. He rubbed his eyes; the hex numbers were beginning to blur. His cell phone chirped. He stared vacantly at it for a moment, then picked it up. He didn’t think anyone would be calling to wish him a Happy New Year. “Yeah? Yeah, it’s me, Randy, who’s thish? Oh, Wallace. Did Irene get you to call me? She did, didn’t she? That’s a crock and you know it. I’m fine, no prob. No job, no prob. And no, I’m not goin’ with you to no friggin’ AA meeting. Got that? You can take your meeting and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Yeah? Well, a real Happy Fuckin’ New Year to you too.” He threw the phone down. He was tempted to stamp on it, but restrained himself. He poured another drink. Better turn off the phone at least. Any more distractions, he’d be up all night. What time was it, anyway? On second thought, maybe he’d go to a meeting, after he finished what he was doing and after he finished the bottle. Tonight they’d be having one of those all night AA marathons, in honor of the New Year. By the time he killed this bottle he might be ready for a meeting. He gave another barking laugh.
I’ll show the bastards…
He was nearly ready. He would look through the code he’d written one more time just to make sure, then he’d log on to the server, have one more drink to celebrate, and press Enter. Two million bucks damage, easy.

The rat waited until the Man was entirely involved again in his task, and then began more noise, this time running straight up the wall and dropping down again with a thud. The Man jumped up and screamed.
I hate rats!
By now, of course, he was quite drunk, but didn’t know it. Randy was subject to blackouts. If he survived to the next day he would remember little if anything of what he had done. Not the conversations on the phone, not installing a virus, not the rat, nothing. From somewhere outside the room, someone shouted,
Pipe down in there! Some folks wanna sleep!
Randy ignored that, swearing and searching for a weapon. The rat could not understand the Man’s words, but it understood his rage. It could smell anger and fear as easily as food. It kept on making noise, scrabbling and squealing.

Randy grabbed the knife he’d almost used on the salami. He attacked the wall with it, stabbing and hacking. An idea came to him: slash the wallpaper to ribbons, then set it on fire. Burn the little fucker out. He was beyond rational thought. He stumbled over one of the shoes he’d thrown earlier, fell, and landed on his blade. Suddenly he stopped yelling. He rolled over, pulled the knife out of his body, looked down at the blood. “Son of a bitch,” he said. They were his last words.

The rat was patient. It was in no hurry. Under the Man’s bed there was a hole in the floor, which was the rat’s portal to the Man’s room. Soon it would go there. But there was no rush. The rat knew it had won. From the wall crack, it could see the Man on the floor, and blood spreading everywhere. It looked like the red wine for which the rat had developed a taste. Smelled better, though. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the rat went down to feed.

Missing Pieces

Ali Maloney

Jaim felt every pulsing beat from the DJ in the abscess in his gums.

He kept poking and prodding the painful hole even though he was terrified it would spread through contact with the tip of his tongue. Christ, it hurt. He could barely greet each merry well-wisher and drunken hug, he was in so much pain.

But still, he’d doped up on painkillers and come out to the party, so he may as well see in the New Year in style, with his friends.

It had been, he reflected, a really good year: He had been promoted to manager of the call centre in which he’d been working for the past three years. It wasn’t his ideal job, of course—growing up, he’d always imagined himself to be an astronaut or cowboy—but it paid well, it was steady and he could forget about it when he went home. This was the year he’d finally bought a house, all his to do with as he pleased. Sure, the mortgage would work out to more than he’d been paying in rent, and it wasn’t in the best part of town, but it was all his. And his girlfriend’s. He’d proposed to her that year as well and she’d said yes, of course. She was…well, very nice. Good looking in a homely kinda way, but then Jaim wasn’t exactly Brad Pitt either. She was a reasonable cook, even if she’d stopped Jaim eating meat and made him go jogging with her. She wasn’t really his type, that girl, but she really made his parents happy and that’s what was important. Wasn’t it?

It had been a good year, and he ought to celebrate all these wonderful things that had happened, and that he’d achieved. This was one night when he could stop to take stock and reflect.

But it was hard to stop and reflect when the DJ was blasting such loud noise and the club was packed with revellers and merriment. This was the club they always came to when the week was done—that Friday feeling of being the longest possible time until more work. Jaim hated the music they played—an incessant pulse of soulless bleeps—but all his friends loved it and he’d hate to let them down.

One of the balloons held up by a net for release at midnight and the New Year had somehow punctured a hole in itself and was screeching a whizzing zigzag across the dance floor.

“C’mon, Jaim.” It was Finn, one of the temps in the office, a good-looking and ambitious young man who’d been writhing in the dark corners with an elderly gentleman since they’d arrived. “You’ve barely touched your drink. Me? I keep needing a new one—mine all seem to have holes in them!”

He laughed, punching Jaim’s shoulder, and walked off into the throng.

Since they’d arrived? That was hours ago, Jaim thought. Had this pain in his mouth been getting worse or better?

Jaim hoisted himself up to go to the toilets to check. He didn’t think it would matter that their table was being left unattended, with all the group drinks, bags, coats and phones. It was New Year’s Eve. If he couldn’t trust his fellow man on this night, and perhaps Christmas, than Jaim didn’t know when he could.

Inside the toilets, someone had ripped the entire condom machine from the wall, leaving only a foreboding and gaping hole. Jaim stared into it: Beyond the preliminary frayed wire ends and some plumbing, it seemed to go off into infinite pitch black. Spooky.

He didn’t like hanging around that dark portal where anything could be lurking, but he hurriedly tried to examine the roof of his mouth in the soiled and graffiti-covered bathroom mirror.

NO FUTURE!

He struggled to find a patch of mirror where he could get a good view.

I’LL TAKE YOU IN MY MOUTH, CALL ME

It was disgusting having to touch the mirror, but he used the end of his sleeve to wipe a small portion and opened his mouth wide.

FUCK BUSH… O Yeah!

He couldn’t quite see anything—it felt like it was just behind his front teeth, and the light in there was terrible.

SLAYER RULE

It didn’t seem to be as painful as it had been. Maybe he was just tired and grumpy, and needed a moment of peace somewhere quiet.

He tried to find it with his tongue.

There.

It felt bigger.

Oh god.

It felt like he could almost squeeze the tip of his tongue right in there.

Jaim started to panic—you’re not supposed to have a hole in the roof of your mouth, are you?

THE BLACK HOLE WILL DEVOUR YOU WHOLE.

What?

Suddenly freaked, Jaim had to get out of there—fast. He almost ran to the door, past the gaping emptiness in the wall, away from the disgusting mirror and into the club.

He bumped into two men in the midst of a heated argument.

“I leant my jacket to you so you could go out for a smoke and you give it back to me like this?!”

“I don’t know, I must have caught it on something and torn it.”

“Torn it?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“There’s a huge hole in it. Looks like you held it over your lighter or something.” The man was holding up a tattered leather jacket with, indeed, a ragged hole in the back.

Jaim didn’t like that he had to pass through the dance floor to get back to his table, but it seemed to swallow him and he was instantly engulfed in a tangle of frenetic limbs, neon, spilled drinks, shouts, cheers, gropes, noise, kisses, sweat, powdered drugs, fashion and smiles. The DJ shouted something incomprehensible and the crowd started bouncing in time to the monotonous beat. Jaim felt jostled, crushed and trapped. Through the throng he felt someone grab him. It was Finn, screaming and slurring something about this being the best New Year’s ever. Jaim hated it—he hated this place he always had.

Once he’d emerged, anxious and gasping, out the other side, their table seemed so empty and quiet. He saw the hole in the crowd made where he had pushed out, instantly filled by more faceless people.

This was awful, he thought. And where was Emma? He had tried to call her earlier but heard an automated message saying the number was disconnected. The phone networks always get jammed on New Year’s Eve, and it must have been a glitch in the network mainframe, but it was still worrying. She said she’d be here.

But then, he thought, shouldn’t he really just enjoy the night without her? He didn’t—if he was truly honest with himself—really enjoy her company, and he had tried to call her, so it was not as though she could claim he had deliberately not been in touch. She was nice and polite, but she was so boring to be with; she did everything her dad told her to and Jaim hated that, not least because he suspected her dad always thought that she could do better. Well, he was lost in his thoughts. If he was not spending New Year’s getting wasted and throwing spasms on the dance floor, he may as well congratulate himself on the year drawing to a close.

And, really, he hated his job, and being promoted just meant that he was more entrenched in it now, he’d probably be there until he retired. He had always laughed at the people who had been there for 50 years, every day in the same mindless office, and right then he knew that that would be him as well. And his house, he was muttering to himself, it could have been nice if it wasn’t so damp and cold and the neighbours weren’t always blasting the same blaring beats as this club.

There was, Jaim concluded, something missing; there was a hole in his life after all.

“Wh’ye sayin’?”

Jaim looked up, and sitting across from him at the table was a young girl. She looked completely wasted and was having trouble sitting upright. Her dress was torn and her makeup was haphazardly smeared around eyes that were so black, so black and empty that they terrified Jaim.

“Why ye sit by y’self?”

Her oddly pronounced and slurred words did not seem to be coming out of her mouth, and when she actually opened it, Jaim almost screamed—she had no teeth, and her mouth was opening ever wider to reveal a gaping bleak void. She was swaying, her horrible mouth turned up to the ceiling in a muted howl, as if trying to swallow the very air. She was scratching her legs at the edge of her miniskirt and the noise was as if she was sandpaper. Jaim couldn’t help but look. Her legs were wide open to him underneath the table, revealing an absolute emptiness where the darkness seemed almost to be tentatively reaching out to envelop Jaim into it.

He almost jumped away from the table, knocking several of the abandoned drinks over. The strange girl didn’t seem to even notice, and continued her strange drunken swaying ritual, her mouth as open as an endless void from which there seemed to echo a deep, distant gurgling.

Jaim backed away from the table and the girl. All of his friend’s bags and jackets were there, and if they wanted them, they could deal with that demented drunk. He could see the abandoned glasses spurt their contents out sideways, and obtuse angles from tiny holes that had somehow cracked into them.