Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror (3 page)

The corridor was cramped and narrow, and almost every inch of the walls was filled with knickknacks and hanging objects arranged in no particular order, as if no consideration had been given to them. There was a crazy circus feeling to it.

I found my room and put my things in there and went to eat, then I turned in for the night, wondering if the next morning would see Hilary in better mood.

The house was black and I felt as though I was staring into ink. An ink filled with the noises of animals I briefly struggled to identify before nodding off.

I was disturbed in the small hours by an unearthly scream.

I heard Ian calling out in the hallway. I made my way to my sister’s room, where he was standing by her bed.

Hilary lying there with blood pouring from her face.

My first thought was that he had hit her, and I wanted to thrash him. One eye was closed shut with a black pit of dried blood around it.

Something lay on the bed. As I looked closer, I thought one of the doll’s eyes must have dropped out, then I realised it was Hilary’s.

“That thing,” she said, “attacked me.”

“What?”

“The doll!”

It lay on the table where I had placed it and I knew at once my sister was mentally ill. I had seen inmates do this sort of thing before, self-harm, usually as the result of prolonged incarceration. I wondered how she’d done it. Such self-injury must be driven by the most immense wellspring of unconscious fury.

Ian called an ambulance and she was taken to hospital.

The damage was too bad for the surgeon to replace the missing eye. He wanted her to stay in but she refused, and after waiting all night we took her home the next morning, where we gave her a sedative and left her to sleep.

I sat downstairs with Ian, listening to the bruised silence of the house.

“How long has she been like this?” I said.

“She’s never done anything like this before.”

“This is serious.”

“I know.”

“She needs to see a psychiatrist.”

“She says it was the doll.”

“Oh for God’s sake man, you don’t believe that, do you?”

He poured himself a whisky.

“When she lost the second baby she refused to give it up. It was deformed. It looked like a small pig. She kept holding it, this thing, half-human shape. It made me sick. It was some psychological deformity I was witnessing in her. I can’t even touch her now.”

“I know she’s not well, but you’ve got to do something.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

She slept through the whole day.

As night fell, Ian prepared something for us to eat.

I went outside, feeling that the atmosphere of the house was unbearable.

Stepping through the front door was like being pitched headlong into some blackness, and I stood there a while. I could make out the trees, but little else. In front of me the lawn and what appeared to be some sort of shape on it. Blackness seemed to be bleeding into the landscape and I scanned the moonless sky for light. I looked up at my sister’s window.

Black.

A pale curtain hung there and in the narrow gap at its edge I thought I saw a face. Not hers, something else, something familiar staring out at me, moving its lips, then submerging itself in total darkness again.

After dinner I went to my room wondering if the night would be shattered again.

It wasn’t.

The next morning the smell of fried bacon roused me and I went downstairs to find Ian making breakfast.

“Last bacon of the year,” he said. “Not the Dunmow Flitch, but tuck in.”

We sat and ate and I asked him again what he thought was the problem.

He looked at me with what appeared to be a smirk.

“I don’t know how she ended up like that, but I don’t believe she did it.”

He said it without feeling, and I thought of my sister lying there upstairs with only this man for company.

This man about whom I knew nothing.

“Who did then?”

He shrugged. I could see he didn’t care. In that moment I realised that behind the mask of bonhomie lay a cruel and violent man.

Was he behind my sister’s illness? I had come across cases where men had tyrannized their wives for years without anyone suspecting. I wanted to leave. As I thought how to go about doing this, we heard another scream.

Ian raced ahead of me and I followed him upstairs and watched as he opened Hilary’s door. The dog had somehow got into her room and was mauling her. It had its teeth firmly planted in her head and was shaking her skull around in its mouth. It had removed a good section of cheek by the time we pulled it off, and ribbons of flesh hung from its teeth like some trophy snatched from a party table.

Blood had sprayed the wallpaper and a piece of bone jutted out of her head.

As I turned my head I thought I saw Ian laugh.

She needed another hospital trip.

Yards of stitching.

She said nothing all the time she was there, and we brought her back and put her to bed.

Then I watched as Ian went outside and shot the dog.

The first shot was not well aimed. Little wonder, since he had drunk the better part of a bottle of whisky. The animal hopped about yelping, half of its head hanging off its narrow shoulders, its eyes fixed on its master with the years of trust giving way to the confusion of an animal, and Ian fired a second better aimed bullet into it as it dropped onto the immaculate lawn.

As I watched this, I wondered if he’d done it deliberately. He enjoyed cruelty.

He stood there looking at the body on the lawn, his cigarette almost burned out and a long wedge of ash at its end, and walked over to the Labrador.

He knelt down and put his hand to it, checking for a pulse, and then turned and walked past me, taking one long drag on his cigarette with bloody fingers.

I went to my room.

I wondered if they were dual actors in some drama of self-destruction, fellow collaborators in some sort of sadomasochistic feast. Childless and miserable, was this all that they had left?

As I sat there a commotion came from the end of the corridor.

I got there before Ian did.

Opening the door to Hilary’s room I saw her wrestle with something.

She had her hands deep in her blankets, which seemed alive.

Blood was spurting from her head and she threw an object at the floor.

Ian came in behind me and she lay there staring up at us.

“Get that thing away from me!”

The doll lay on the floor, the bandage was torn across her face and the wound was welling now again, the blood thick. I took the doll out into the hall, where I placed it by a low wall that buckled slightly, and on which no ornaments hung.

I heard Ian whisper something to her and then he passed me in the corridor and made his way downstairs.

I went in to see my sister.

“I want you to leave,” she said.

I looked at her face awash with blood and thought how ungrateful she was. For a moment she seemed less my sister than some impostor placed there as a practical joke. I decided there was nothing more for me to say and stayed out of their way for the rest of the day.

It was New Year’s Eve. I drank some of Ian’s whisky alone in the creaking house. I could hear no festivities there in the dark landscape that hemmed us in. I went upstairs and began to pack. As I did I thought the house was falling down.

I went into the corridor and saw a pile of rubble and dust.

The wall against which I had placed the doll had collapsed, and beneath it I could see two shoes.

Hilary had left her room, had somehow struggled from her bed and now lay trapped under the rubble with the doll, whose porcelain fragments I could see scattered on the faded carpet.

Ian raced upstairs and started sobbing. I wondered if the tears were genuine and waited for him to say something, angry with him for neglecting my sister like this.

When he did speak, it showed nothing.

“She’d dead,” he said.

She was barely visible beneath the rubble.

I called an ambulance, which took Hilary away. I tried to console Ian. He kept asking what to do and I studied his face for its attendant smirk.

“Chin up,” I said.

He drank all day until he was comatose, and I went to bed early.

I remember leaving him the next morning.

He stood at the door watching as I got into the taxi. He seemed distressed all right, but I had seen this sort of thing before. I’d seen through his mask and knew all too well the disguises of the criminal mind.

I wondered if he had planned this all along, luring me there as a witness.

His jovial face now seemed coarse and cheerless, and his banter and good humour nothing more than the facade of a con man. I noticed the blood on his hand as I shook it. He hadn’t even bothered to wash it off.

You see, as a criminal lawyer I see how devious these types are.

And so I left him.

He waved distantly, as if at a passing shadow, and the taxi started its engine.

I started to think of work again.

On the train back my iPhone beeped. It had been without a signal since I went to court on the 29
th
, and now hundreds of emails and messages streamed into it. One of them concerned my difficult client.

He had walked free from prison.

All charges against him had been dropped.

Jack’s Month

Nicky Peacock

By the dim light of the Christmas tree, Mary Jane lay on the living room carpet covered in ripped red foil wrapping and broken black ribbons. Her new presents were gathered around in order of preference and importance; they fanned out, from designer clothes to cosmetic kits to CDs to books.

“Awesome spread, Mom,” she said, hugging her new designer eye shadow kit.

“Did you notice the theme this year?” Her mom raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, yeah, course I did.”

“Everything was gothic, like those books you like to read.”

Suddenly the decorations’ limited color palette made sense, “Oh right. Awesome effort,” Mary Jane nodded.

“You’re lucky to have so many presents,” said her father, sitting up straighter in his black leather chair, “you’re not a little girl anymore.”

He was right. Mary Jane was in her final year of college and perhaps should have already out-grown Christmas present fever, but being an only child meant being spoiled was really just a way of life to her; to Mary Jane, her parents’ over-indulgent affections were mandatory, rather than simply hoped for.

“Oh look, there’s one present left,” her father said, pointing at a thin, black, wrapped package wedged under the Christmas tree.

Mary Jane sprang forward and grabbed it. She turned it round in her hands. Too thin to be a book, too light to be anything exciting – perhaps the concert tickets she’d been dying for?

“Who’s it from?” her mom asked.

Mary Jane peeled back the shiny black label. “I’m not sure, I can’t read the writing. I can make out an S, N and a T and a couple of A’s.”

“From Santa?” Mom offered.

“Yeah, could be.” Mary Jane smiled at her mom, then began ripping the wrapping away. She stared in horror. It was a calendar. Worse, not even one of those cute puppy ones, it was strange looking – dark, bound in red leather, and the pages inside for each month were strange images made of a dirty looking material.

“Thanks, Santa,” Mary Jane whispered as she dumped it down and picked her eye shadow compact back up.

* * *

Packing up to go back to college, Mary Jane wedged her bags of Christmas goodies into her little pink Mini Cooper. Time was marching on and she’d have to book it to make it back in time for her sorority’s New Year’s Eve party.

“Don’t forget your calendar,” her mom said, waving it at her like it was a signed photo of Robert Pattison.

“Can’t I leave it here?”

“No Mary Jane, don’t be ungrateful. Someone was bothered enough to buy you it, you should be bothered enough to use it.”

“Mom, I know it was you who bought it. I don’t believe in Santa.”

“I swear I didn’t buy it, and neither did your father.”

“Yeah right!”

“Also, I don’t think the ticket said Santa. Had the same letters though – do you know anyone with those letters in their name?”

Mary Jane raised an eyebrow and took the calendar from her mom. “What, like Satan!” She laughed.

“Don’t be silly Mary Jane,” her mother sighed.

“Well they do have the same letters.” She then grinned and threw her arms wide. “Woohaha!”

“Really Mary Jane,” her mom said, rolling her eyes, “Drive careful darling.”

“Ok Mom. I was planning on driving erratically, but now you’ve said that I’ll be more careful.”

Her mom lunged forward and hugged her, then turned and walked back into the house.

* * *

Highbury College was fifty miles from Mary Jane’s home town and the journey gave her a chance to listen to some of her new CDs and reflect on the epic New Year’s Eve party that Theta Kappa Nu were putting together this year. It had been Mary Jane’s idea to have it as a masked ball in Highbury’s famous White Chapel Hall. A massive fireplace, red wood paneling and stone lions placed astride every giant double door—once it was decorated, it would be like stepping back in time.

Pulling up to the curb, Mary Jane saw her friend Karl loitering in the drive. He waved, then moved so Mary Jane could park up.

“Good Christmas?” Karl asked as he opened her door.

“Yeah, lots of presents.” Mary Jane grinned and got out of the car. She then noticed that he was wearing last season’s Armani shirt and quickly lost interest in him.

“Can I help you to get squared away?” He reached to open her trunk.

“That would be great,” Mary Jane said without even looking at him. She jogged up into the house to meet her sorority sisters, leaving Karl to unpack her car.

Theta Kappa Nu was covered with girls pulling around sacks of Christmas presents; it was like they’d kidnapped Santa and ransacked his sleigh. Mary Jane found three of her best friends, Catherine, Lizzie and Annie, and after manically jumping up and down they started to talk about the night’s festivities and how much better it would be than last year’s Honolulu party.