All Through The House

Here’s a Christmas story for you, which I wrote three years ago and never published. It’s a little “dark”, but then my short stories often are. I do have a goal to write optimistic fiction, but that’s mostly reserved for my planned novels: when it comes to briefer tales, I can’t seem to help getting a little evil and twisted. I hope you enjoy it, anyway, and I wish you all the best for the season.

I didn’t think they made white Christmases any more. I thought the snow machines had stopped working or something. Whatever the reason, they seemed to have passed into memory, fading like a dimly-recalled episode of To The Manor Born. Yet, I could almost sense a stream of faith flowing through time, springing fresh from Victorian literature, meandering through images of wartime Britain, slaking the thirst of our souls with televised fictional sweetmeats such as The Box of Delights, soaking through the pages of cherished books, and growing a forest of wonder that could wrap its mediaeval ivy around my mind and wave its druidic mistletoe at my pounding childish heart. And the babbling brook was still audible, after all that time, whispering in my ear that things could be – used to be – better than this.

Which makes it all the more strange that, when I’d chosen to spend my Christmas in the small hamlet of Hornkirk, up in the Border Country, it hadn’t crossed my mind once that it might snow. It’s funny, really. I think I’d given up on the magic, despite the obvious fact that I had only to travel north to shorten the odds.

The first flakes began to fall while I sat by the fire on Christmas Eve in my cottage. It was a twee little nook, booked online and completely overdecorated for my tastes, with doillies everywhere and vases full of seasonal poinsettia. I think the owner was used to having retired couples spend whole weeks there, but she’d been grateful for even three days of business over the seasonal break, so I’d got it pretty cheap.

I didn’t notice the change in the weather at first. I was engrossed in trying to get an internet connection on my phone, and my cup of tea had gone cold next to the hearth, despite the spreading warmth from the blazing logs. But I gradually became aware of a blanket of silence that seemed to have wrapped up the traffic sounds, each occasional passing car more muted than the last – and I stood up to look out of the window, and found that it was already white out there.

My heart began to race. My long lost childhood came vividly to mind, bringing with it a flavour of woollen gloves, frozen noses, carols in the church, and fairy-lit trees in people’s front rooms, the curtains left open to share the good cheer. None of your external illuminations in my day, back when British Reserve meant something!

Gripped by a mad impulse, I unhooked my coat from the rear of the door, swung it around my shoulders and zipped it up. Then I grabbed my rollercoaster souvenir beanie and pulled it firmly over my head, turned the catch and pulled the old door back, its hinges shuddering a little as the ill-fitted tiles of the floor caught its bottom edge. Snow billowed in around me, and I hurried through and closed it again to protect the furnishings.

It was then that I realised I’d left the key on the mantlepiece, and was locked out.

Mrs Jackson had left me an emergency number, but I’d put it in my phone, and my phone was also in the cottage. Besides, I didn’t want to be the guy causing a fuss on Christmas Eve. I nipped round the back, hoping to find the rear door still unlocked. I didn’t recall having locked it after I’d returned with the shopping earlier. But I’d obviously been more assiduous than usual, and the door was firmly closed and bolted from inside.

I stood there, crossed wrists pulling my coat lapels tight against the cold, pondering all that had led up to this moment, and wondering what sort of trouble might arise from the breaking of a window.

At that moment a flashing light caught my attention and I turned my head to focus on it.

The light was far away, up on the hillside. I tried to visualise the view from the cottage as I’d seen it when I’d arrived, attempting to remember whether there were any buildings up in that direction, but all I could recall seeing was a featureless wilderness. Could this be a hiker in trouble, signalling for help? What was I supposed to do about that, without even a phone?

The flashing continued. It was irregular, and very dim, but I was not mistaken: it was there. I hurried down to the road, hoping to flag down a car for help.

And, I swear to you, I must have stood there a full ten minutes. There were no cars moving on that road, and I could only guess at the reasons; perhaps there was something interesting on the TV. But I was all alone, and a mile from the nearest house.

The distant light was still flashing, and the sky had already darkened a little as night approached. I glanced over to where the footpath up the hill began at a stile by the road. My car keys were on the ring with the others – indoors. There wasn’t really any choice, now. I would have to be the hero.

Clutching a stout stick that I’d found leaning by the shed, I set off into the white turbulence, clambered over the stile, and began the climb.

I must be mad, I thought to myself. There was certainly very little chance that I could do anything to help, even if someone was in trouble. I thought ruefully of that First Aid course I’d put off attending for years, and also realised that I would normally use my phone’s GPS to guide me back to the road again later, and that this was not an option now.

After a few minutes, it occurred to me that the light from the cottage might guide me home like a beacon, and I turned round to make sure I could still see it. And then I had quite a fright. There was no sign of light anywhere. No cottage, no stars in the sullen, snowing sky, and nothing but a smooth gradation from dark grey above to dim white below. I was in a sea made of unsaturated Photoshop palette.

For a few moments I was frozen, both figuratively and almost literally, to the spot, and was about to give up and retrace my steps, which were beginning to fill with snow and would soon be invisible, when I heard the beeping sound.

It came from above me, and I turned round instinctively to identify it. Peering into what had now become a blizzard, I could discern the flashing light, which, I now realised, was beeping as it flashed. What the hell was that thing? A stranded tractor? Whatever it was, it might give shelter, and at the moment it was the only clear destination I could track. So I began, once more, to climb into the maelstrom of icy flakes.

The flashing light seemed to recede before me, but the beeping grew louder. I kept glancing behind me to see whether the cottage lights had miraculously reappeared, but all I saw each time was darkness and whirling snow. I began to get quite maudlin, and wondered how long it would be before my frozen corpse would be found if I tripped and fell.

At long last, I saw something ahead of me. Around the flashing light was a very dim outline of something whose size was still difficult to gauge. As I got closer, panting and sweating in my coat, I thought I must be hallucinating. I stopped, and I stared. It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be.

But no amount of protestation could erase the evidence of my eyes. The beeping was very loud, and the light was now bright, and was clearly coming from above me, somewhere near the top of the object. The object was facing to my left – at least, based on my assumptions about what it was. Its front had a curved underside, rising up. The dark bulk of the rest of it was less distinct, but could easily have been a seat.

But the seat, if that’s what it was, was huge. I knew Santa was supposed to be a large chap, but this was ridiculous. I began to walk forward, to get some parallax working in my favour, and the silhouette grew at a slow pace, allowing me to estimate that it was perhaps as tall as two houses, and as long as four. That was ridiculous, too.

Or was it? How much room would all those presents occupy? If we assumed Santa visited all Christian children in the world, plus those of no denomination who uphold the tradition, that would probably be about a hundred to a hundred and fifty million kids, and if each gift weighed about half a kilo on average…

I shook my head. Was I delirious? I was seriously attempting mental arithmetic based on an assumption that I was about to meet Father Christmas. If I hadn’t been putting off opening that bottle of whisky until tomorrow, I might have thought I’d had a touch too much of the stuff.

I was almost at the foot of the thing now, and it towered over me. I stopped, craning my neck as I tried to see details. But it was surprisingly difficult to do that, as the entire thing remained as black as could be.

What was it made of? I reached out my hand, my fingers stiff with the cold, and brushed the surface.

It was very warm, and that was surprising enough. But what really shocked me was that I couldn’t feel it. My hand was stopped by a solid thing, but there was no sensation of surface there at all, as though someone had covered it all in baby oil. I held my fingertips up to my face, trying to examine them, but it was almost impossible to make out anything as it was now so dark. I placed both hands on the surface for a while, which warmed them up very well, for which I was grateful. Then I decided it would be nice to do my back, too, and I turned round.

From the blackness and the swirling white powder, a thing stared at me as though in a nightmare. I cried out, jumped back in alarm, and hit my head on the solid wall behind me.

---

When I returned to consciousness, I was lying in a quiet and very dark place, on something soft. I explored the structure beneath me with my hands, found an edge, and pushed myself upright.

“Stay where you are,” said a quiet voice.

I gasped. A vague shadow was now visible on the other side of the room, its shape all too familiar. The segmented body was the biggest giveaway, and convinced me that the thing I’d encountered outside was now in this room with me, presumably within the confines of the… what was it? Not a sleigh, surely A ship? The single massive eye in the middle of the creature’s head was visible, now that my own eyes were adjusting. It glowed dimly with the reflection of light that I now realised was emanating from the floor.

I found my voice.

“What – who are you?”

The thing shuddered a little, and its tail swished over the floor. “You could not pronounce our true name,” it said, and its voice was a strange contralto. “But you may call us Klaus.”

“What’s going on?” I managed to say.

“What should concern you,” it said, “is not what is going on, but what is going off.”

This felt like a threat to me, and I looked around to see whether there was a door. Through my growing panic, a thought took shape.

“Did you stop the cars?”

“Yes.”

“And switch off the power?”

“We did.”

“What about the snow?”

“A convenient camouflage, but we did not make it. A coincidence.”

“And what did you mean, just now, about things going off?”

The creature fixed its single pale eye on me for a few seconds, then said: “So, you have forgotten. We thought that must be the reason.”

“Forgotten what?”

“Forgotten who gave you all the gifts.”

This was stretching the analogy too far, and I decided to broach the topic.

“You’re not some sort of… Christmas figure, are you?”

“We know nothing of that word, but perhaps some vague memory of our previous visit remains in your mind – a common occurrence. We told you, last time, of the conditions under which the gifts were to be used, not abused.”

Something was very wrong with this conversation, and I felt I had almost grasped what it was, but, for the moment, it eluded me.

“What were these gifts?” I said.

“The gifts of science and technology, of course. You were to use them wisely. That was our condition. How can you not remember this?”

“Because you never spoke to me. It sounds as though it was a very long time ago.”

“This is Earth?”

“Yes, but –“

“And you are humanity?”

“Well, yes. But I’m just a human. I don’t know who you spoke to last time, but it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t even have been alive.”

There was a silence, which grew more ominous the longer it continued. I wanted to wake up and find out this was all a dream, that I’d hallucinated in the snow and was now in hospital, about to be treated – or, even better, that I’d fallen asleep by the fire and, in reality, it wasn’t even snowing. I screwed my eyes up very tight, then opened them. Nothing had changed.

The creature shuddered again, and its tail swished more emphatically. “It seems we have a culture difference,” it said.

I nearly laughed. Looking at its ant-like body and cyclops stare, I couldn’t imagine any culture similarities. But now I had a tiny flash of understanding.

“Wait a moment,” I said. “You think all our minds are connected. Is that right?”

The creature stared again. I couldn’t begin to guess what it was thinking.

“And you also think we live a pretty long time, but we don’t. I’ve been alive for fifty orbits of our star. And if I’m lucky, I’ll manage another fifty.”

Swish, swish, went the tail.

“We understand. This has been unfortunate, and we have decided to change our conditions. We did not realise we were dealing with a larval stage.”

“Larval stage?”

“When you have matured, and become one mind, we shall return and entrust our secrets to you again. Until then, we must remove the gifts.”

“No, you don’t get it. We’re not children! We’re adults. Mature forms. We need you to restore your gifts to us.”

At that point, I had a nasty thought. “Where did you cut the power? Just Hornkirk, or the whole country?”

“The world.”

I let out a whimper as the force of this struck me. “In that case, it’s gone. The whole thing. The internet… the economies… and the nuclear reactors will melt down, planes will fall out of the skies… oh my god.”
I put my head in my hands and moaned.

The creature suddenly drew in a gulp of air. It was hard to say whether or not it was the equivalent of a human gasp.

“This was unforeseen,” it said. “We considered such losses irrelevant to the collective.”

“Listen to me,” I said, my voice shaking. “Each one of us is separate. There is no collective, only individuals.”

For a few seconds, I gazed at the single mesmerizing eye, willing my message to hit home fully. It gazed back.

“Power is now restored,” intoned the creature, apparently without emotion. “We cannot undo the damage, but you may continue to use the gifts to attempt to survive. We wish you luck in your ascent to stage two. Assuming you do not destroy yourselves, perhaps we shall return and give you the next set of gifts in the future.”

“The next set? What’s in that?”

“We cannot tell you. You must earn it: that is the rule. You must… communicate this to the others.”

There was a blinding flash, and I found myself sitting in snow, under a street lamp, outside my cottage. I screamed until I was hoarse. I screamed in frustration, in anger that I’d screwed up: that I’d been in the position of ambassador in front of a creature who couldn’t even understand what that meant. I screamed for all the people who would now be dead, or injured, or confused.

You must… communicate this to the others. It had spoken those words as though they left an odd taste in its mouth, and I’d known, then, that it was no use trying to explain. It was too different, too alien, to understand what “communicating this to the others” would take from me. But I had to try. Of course I had to try.

I struggled to my feet, feeling a little unwell. The snow had stopped falling, and I noticed a faint light. It was not flashing. It was coming down the road towards me.

I knew I had to find a human being as soon as possible, whatever it took – and not only because I probably had concussion.

I waved my arms to stop the truck, hoping I could remember Mrs Jackson’s address without my stupid phone.

Mike Torr, 2nd December 2019