What Comes at Christmas
My mother is dead, but I don't believe it. It's a trick—and a nasty one. She wants me home for Christmas.
Where is my mother?
She’s dead, but she’s not in her grave.
The sky pulled her out of it, sent her soaring on black wings. The trees cut her shadow into pieces.
I went looking for the pieces (like a fool) and found only myself.
The moon is a block of ice chiseled out of black time.
Why does the moon keep looking at me?
Why do I see my mother’s face in every mirror?
Where am I?
I’m in the forest—alone and shivering.
But not far enough away. I can still hear the sound of people—little towns just out of sight. Don’t they know they should not come near me? Don’t they realize what I am?
I can still hear them.
I would dig my own grave now, but it doesn’t matter. The sun can’t hide the moon. You can still see her! Hidden in the blue sky.
The ground is frozen solid. My hands are useless.
I still have Maddie’s arm. Perhaps I could use it as a shovel. Perhaps I could sharpen her nails into claws.
It’s still Christmas in my head. The sound of carols, dancing lights. Hooves thundering on rooftops. The light of angels—the blinding, terrible, consuming fire of angels.
Make it stop. Please.
I was always planning to visit Mom for Christmas. She didn’t need to know that—it was supposed to be a surprise.
The last time we spoke, we had an argument. What was it about? The same as always. Why doesn’t she ever seem to listen to me? I was trying to tell her I was hurt. I was trying to make her listen. I told her I didn’t want to see her for the holidays. But that was a lie.
I was always planning to come.
But she died before I could surprise her.
I think she did it out of spite. I think she did it because we had an argument. She wanted to punish me for my words—knew this was the best way to do it. I refuse to feel guilty. That’s what she wants me to feel, but I’m not going to let her win.
I didn’t believe that she was really gone. If she was dead, how could she continue to torment me? No, this was an elaborate, sick joke. That’s what I was thinking about as I drove. She still lived in the small town where I grew up. I thought about my mother pretending to be dead as I drove, the cities giving way to suburbs, which gave way to bleak snow-strewn fields, the afternoon darkness covering everything.
Mom must know someone at the hospital. The nurse who called me was in on it, for sure. I was going to pull up to the house, and there she’ll be, standing next to that gaudy, plastic angel, a plate of cookies in her hand, a stupid grin on her face. Gotcha! The house decked with lights, snowmen and reindeers glittering on the frozen lawn. A fire roaring inside.
The county highway followed the winding course of the Minnesota River. Here and there I caught a glimpse of its cold, bright waters snaking through the thick clump of ancient trees. New Vienna was perched on a narrow curve of the river, at the edge of a dark forest of pine and ash. Founded in 1821 by Austrian immigrants, it boasts the usual charming amenities of small-town America: a soaring Lutheran church next to a crumbling town hall in the neoclassical style, brought by the Puritans who snuck west through the Ohio Valley and dispersed themselves across the Great Lakes. The Austrians brought their beer and their beer halls, and an enormous one stood near the center of town, a stately building of criss-crossed red and white painted wood.
I drove down Main Street, past the cluster of small businesses, past the town hall and the Amoco gas station and Lady Dusk’s. Just past the church was the funeral home, a large building with a curved cupola and gleaming white columns. I had seen the building many times as a child—it, along with the church, were the two biggest buildings in town and couldn’t help put capture the imagination of a sensitive child—but I never expected to see inside.
The funeral home was quiet when I entered, save for the subdued murmur of voices coming from the room down the hall. There was a faint scent of incense and flowers. I followed the voices and entered the dimly-lit room. It was filled with rows of chairs. At the back of the room, a trio of older women were whispering. They stopped when they saw me, their gazes flashing in my direction and then looking away, not wanting to be caught staring. At the front of the room was an elegant casket with a bouquet of white lilies resting on top.
And there was my mother.
She was lying in the casket, her face like wax. I thought if I stared long enough I would catch her breathing. I would catch her in her stupid prank—her eyes snapping open, a mischievous grin breaking the heavy makeup that caked her face. She would laugh, that heavy laugh that shook her entire body as if every cell were bursting with mirth.
But nothing happened.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see an elderly woman dressed in black with a somber expression on her face. She introduced herself as Mrs. Abernathy, my mother’s neighbor. She asked me if I was staying at my mother’s house and offered to bring me food. She offered condolences. I didn’t know what to say.
Maybe it’s not my mother. Maybe it just looks like her. I stepped up to the casket, leaned forward with one hand and opened my mother’s eyes. It was her, I realized with a shock, for the thing in the casket shared my mother’s heterochromia: one eye brown, the other a blazing blue.
Mrs. Abernathy couldn’t help letting out a gasp of surprise when I touched my mother’s face. She could not meet my gaze when I turned back around. Her nostrils opened wide, her nose ghost-white.
I looked toward the cluster of women in the back and noticed that one of them was staring at me. She was not old like the others but young. My age. She was looking at me with recognition and though I could not recall her face, I knew it must be an old classmate of mine.
Mrs. Abernathy mumbled something about stopping by later with a roast, nodded vigorously at me, stared at my mother’s casket for a few seconds, and then hurried out of the room, her head bowed.
The woman in the back kept staring at me. I could feel her eyes on my back. Finally, the rest of the mourners left, leaving her and I alone.
“Do I know you?” I said.
Her eyes widened at my comment. “Yes, we went to high school together.”
“Sorry, I don’t remember you.”
“That’s ok. I’m Maddie.”
I almost said ‘nice to meet you,’ but realized it would be an inappropriate thing to say.
“We sat next to each other in Calculus,” she said.
I still couldn’t place her, but I nodded in understanding. I couldn’t even remember my Calculus teacher’s name. It was like my childhood in New Vienna was a blur, a dark fog through which I had been deposited into life as a fully-formed adult.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Maddie said. “Your mother was an interesting person.”
“Did you know her?”
Maddie hesitated, her eyes darting around the room. I waited for her to continue, but she was silent. I felt a storm cloud gathering in my chest. “Is there something you’re not telling me?” I said.
Maddie chewed on her lip, her eyes fixed on the casket. “Your mother … she wasn’t what you thought she was.”
“What do you mean?” I had my suspicions, but I wanted to hear it from somebody else.
“I mean…” Maddie trailed off and she shook her head as if trying to disperse a cloud of flies. “We shouldn’t talk about it here. Do you want to grab a beer? We should talk where there’s people around.” She glanced around the room and again at the casket as if afraid something was about to emerge from the shadows. As if my mother could hear her talking about her.
I told her I could meet her at Lady Dusk’s but not that night. I needed to go to my mother’s house and set her affairs to order first.
She hurried out of the funeral home, leaving me alone with the corpse. “If this is a big joke, you’ve taken it too far,” I said. I waited for my mother to reply, but she didn’t say anything. I left and went to her house.
It was exactly as I remembered it—a mausoleum of childhood memories. I turned on all the lights, which included the colored lights hung outside and the towering Christmas tree she had set up by the window. Stockings were hung over the fireplace—including the old one my grandmother had knit for me. The nativity scene was set up near the back porch (same as ever) and the advent calendar hung in the kitchen, now two days behind schedule. There was an unfinished puzzle set up on the dining room table. She was two-thirds of the way done, and I saw from the propped up box that it was a Christmas scene: a young child dressed in white stood in an evergreen forest looking up at a shining angel descending out of a black, starless sky. I placed a piece, then took my coat and went outside for some fresh air.
I walked the dark streets of my old neighborhood. Almost all the homes were strung with lights, and I could see into living rooms brightened by Christmas trees. A wintry mix—not quite snow, not quite rain—fell as I walked, leaving a slushy residue on the sidewalk. I thought about my mother, about how she lived as if she would never die. I realized that none of her cats had been in the house. For years, my mother collected them, kittens, old strays. The cats came and went—my mother didn’t believe that they were pets, or that they could belong to anyone—sometimes there were as many as twenty in the house, sometimes as few as five. But she kept feeding the cats, and so they came and went. But they were all gone, I realized.
Christmas carols flowed down the street, and I stopped at a house brightly lit both inside and out. A window was propped open and I could hear music mixing with the noise of people chatting and laughing. It seemed ridiculous that they could carry on like that—even after my mother had gone.
Some time during the night, the wintry mix turned to snow. I slept in my old bedroom, surrounded by my posters, my yearbooks, my pile of stuffed animals.
I awoke to a blanket of white covering the windowpane. But there was something else, too, a strange sound on the roof. The familiar-yet-shadowed objects of my childhood room, the blinding white snow, and the yuletide cheer I had witnessed from the neighbors, all combined into an ancient, untextured feeling of childhood wonder. When I heard the thumping on the roof, I was sure it was reindeer, and that Santa had come. I rushed out of bed and looked out the window, but saw nothing save snow and darkness.
But I heard it again, unmistakably: a heavy thumping on the roof. I grabbed my coat, threw on my shoes, and rushed outside. The house was dark and the neighborhood dark, too. All the Christmas lights had gone out. I looked to the roof, but in my confused emotions, in my sleep-addled sense of lost time, I imagined that I saw a large shadow take flight from the roof. I thought that I heard wings beating in the darkness. I thought I saw something blot out the stars.
I returned to sleep, and when I awoke, I found a winter wonderland waiting for me. The previous night’s rain had frozen on all the trees, leaving them encased in a layer of ice and snow. Everywhere, from the ground to the trees to the sky had the same white color. Clumps of snow fell periodically from the ice-laden trees and gentle snowflakes still twirled from the sky.
In that dream-eerie atmosphere, I remembered the sounds I had heard the night before—and the shadow. I went downstairs to check, but when I came into the kitchen, I was certain I would find Mom taking a batch of homemade cinnamon buns from the oven. But the house was dark and cold, the kitchen empty.
When I went outside, I found a strange trail of prints on the pristine snow. They were a curious mix: every other print looked like a dog’s—but a large dog, perhaps even a wolf. At the end of each paw print was a gash in the snow that looked like it could only be made by an enormous claw. But it was the other prints that stole my breath. Mixed with the canine prints, and separated at regular intervals, were the clear indentations of horse hooves.
I met with Maddie later that day at Lady Dusk’s. The bar was mostly empty, a few gray men slumped in the shadows over their afternoon beers. I told her about the marks in the snow, about the thumping I heard in the night, and about the old stories I remembered hearing as a child.
“I remember those stories, too,” Maddie said. She ordered a Bloody Mary. “Something about a flying demon, half-horse, half-bat. I assumed it was an old story, passed down from the town’s ancestors. A story designed to scare children and keep them from straying too far.”
“That’s what I remember, too,” I said. “But I remember some of the older townsfolk spoke of the stories as true. Mrs. Newark insisted that she had seen something one winter. That everyone in the town had seen it.”
“And there was the girl that was murdered,” Maddie took a sip of her drink and looked into the bar. There weren’t any windows, except for a small one near the door. It was crusted over with snow and you couldn’t see the street outside.
“I forgot about that,” I said. “It happened before we were born.”
“She was torn apart,” Maddie said. “Her body found in pieces, scattered through the woods. My uncle found part of her. A toe. Painted yellow.”
“What year was that?” I said.
“I think it was 1985. Or ’84. Sometime around then.” The door opened and a middle-aged woman trotted in. She was wrapped tightly in a thick, dark coat. “I wanted to tell you something about your mother,” Maddie added. She was still looking at the woman, watching as she took off her coat. “I wasn’t sure if you knew.”
“You’re going to tell me she was a witch,” I said.
Maddie turned and looked at me. Her gaze fell onto the table. “It’s just a rumor.”
“It was something I always suspected,” I said, “but I’m surprised anyone else thought anything. My mother always seemed so careful to put a false face into the world.”
“It’s because I started it,” Maddie said. “Your mother hired me as a housecleaner.” She moved her Bloody Mary back and forth on the table, the heavy glass scraping the wood.
I ordered a screwdriver.
“For a while, everything was normal. I vacuumed and dusted, helped her with her laundry. Usual stuff,” Maddie continued. “Usually she left the house while I cleaned. Did errands, I suppose. But one day I showed up and she was still there. I think she had forgotten the day. I heard her, and…” Maddie stopped speaking and looked back at the door, as if afraid of who would come through it. “I don’t know how to describe it.” She shivered even though it was warm in the bar. Hot, almost.
I reached across the table and took her hand. “You saw shadows,” I said. “Shadows that moved on their own. Shadows that could not be produced by any object in this world.”
“Yes,” Maddie whispered.
I finished my screwdriver in one gulp. “What was that year, again, when the girl was murdered? 1985?”
“I think so, yes.”
I stood up from the table and put on my coat. “I need to check something,” I said. “But can we meet later? There’s more I need to understand. Come to my mother’s house tonight?”
Maddie nodded. She stared at her half-finished Bloody Mary without really looking at it.
I went to the local library, which I knew had old editions of the New Vienna Gazette. The library was small and nondescript: a low-ceilinged, stone building with iron bars framing the windows. I went downstairs to the archives, passing through a heavy dark-wood door. There I found the Gazette and I leafed through the heavy, laminated pages until I came to Christmas 1985.
And there it was, near the back: the obituary for my aunt.
It was as I remembered. She passed away just a few years before I was born. My mother spoke little about her, and I had never met anyone else from her side of the family.
I flipped through the papers, glancing at the headlines for the days after my aunt’s death, and what I saw confirmed my worst fears. Just two days after her death, the headline read “Mysterious Terror Stalks the Sky.”
The article was full of the weirdest testimony. A terrible monster had visited the town, it was said. Jan Fitzpatrick swore that she saw a giant bat flying over the town when she left the beer hall near two in the morning. Others reported strange sightings in the night, of shadows and winged nightmares. Others shared similar experiences to my own: of strange sounds tearing them from sleep, terrible stomping in the yard, on the roof. Pete Middleton reported that four of his dairy cows had been slaughtered in the night. He attributed the attack to wolves. They were sometimes known to come south during the winter, but Pete was quick to point out how it was odd that there was no sign of breakage in the pen. “It was as if the wolves had swooped down from the sky,” he was quoted as saying.
The next day, a similar article appeared. And then another. Throughout the whole week, the Gazette reported strange sightings all over town. As the days progressed, the stories grew more unbelievable. Young Bob Crispin told everyone that a giant bat-moth creature had carried him through the sky on a midnight ride before gently placing him on the roof of the high school. Betty Cassell said she met the creature but that it wasn’t a demon at all, but a beautiful winged angel, and how it had visited her in the night and kissed her beneath the stars.
I flipped back to my aunt’s obituary. It was uncanny, the timing—and the timing now! Just one day after my mother’s death.
I returned to her house and found a message waiting for me on the machine. It was from the morgue. It didn’t make any sense. They told me the strangest thing had happened. As they were preparing for the wake, they discovered—to their great alarm—that someone had forcibly broken into the morgue and stolen my mother’s body.
Evening came quickly to the town; the sun lit the horizon with a kiss of pink light and then slipped away for a long night’s sleep. I saw the shadows I had purposefully forgotten; the same ones I saw as a small child. I used to tell my mother that I was afraid of monsters in the closet. It was only later I realized she had sent them. The shadow was standing in the kitchen next to her puzzle. I tried not to look at its face, I tried not to remember its face. Its presence made the Christmas lights brighter, as if they were trying to blot out that false shadow with pure, indistinguishable light. I crept through the house, trying to avoid mirrors, unlocking all the doors and windows so that Maddie could get in. So that the light could drive it away. I lit a fire and placed thirteen candles around the house.
When Maddie arrived at last, she didn’t say anything about my mother. I think she noticed my gray, sickly pallor, my nervous energy. She spoke of old memories, people from high school. I couldn’t tell her what else I had found in the library’s archives; that the stories we were told were true. A hideous creature had once terrorized the town for a long long week before Christmas and then disappeared into the mists. But the reports went back further than 1985. For in one of the articles, I discovered a reference to an earlier visitor, and when I tracked down details of that one, I found a still-earlier reference, and another, stretching all the way back to the founding of the town.
The fire burned low, and I feared what would happen if it went out. “We need more logs,” I said to Maddie.
“Where are they?”
“Outside, stacked along the garage.”
“I’ll go get them,” Maddie said.
“Wait,” I said. “I can’t let you go alone.”
“Here,” she said. “Hold my hand.”
I followed her outside and we walked around the garage, stepping heavily in the cold dark. I could hear her feet crunching in the snow, a half-second before I heard my own. I squeezed her and and felt her squeeze back. As we turned the corner, I felt a frigid blast of air and saw a dark shadow pass over our heads. It came so quickly I didn’t have time to cry out. It passed silently, and I thought it was a figment of my fraying imagination. I felt a small jerk as Maddie walked ahead of me, but I held tight to her hand. I glanced wildly at the sky, the moon reeling in tangled tree branches. But I saw nothing else. I walked to the back of the garage, still holding Maddie’s hand, but I felt a strange lightness in my step, and the sound of my footsteps in the snow were different, for I heard only my own feet crunching with every step. With dawning horror, I turned to face Maddie and saw only darkness.
I still held Maddie’s hand, but where her elbow should have been, her arm tapered into nothing. I saw behind me, next to my single track of footsteps, a trail of blood. I screamed, and as if in answer to my terror, that wind from Hell passed over me again, and I saw the shadow fly overhead.
The creature landed in the snow, and in that same instant, the moon freed herself from the trees and threw a slanted beam of eerie light on the horror that stood before me.
It had huge leathery wings, like a bat, and dark fur mixed with a garish red. Its face was like a wolf’s, its long snout snarling with teeth. But it looked at me with a human understanding. With affection, with something almost like love. For it looked at me with with mismatched eyes: one brown, the other a shining, crystalline blue.
I feel the terrible, snarling best within me. It is always there. Every time I feel angry—the boiling blood surging beneath my skin—I know it’s there. The shadows follow me. They came with me from my mother’s house, flying along the highway beneath my car’s tires. I see them in my apartment, lurking on quiet streets.
I know what I am. I know what will become of me. What has become of all my family.
I went into the woods. There I will wait for my life to end, away from the light and warmth of other humans. Death is not the end, but a transformation. If only the void waited for me. If only there was nothing at the end of life.
I am waiting for something else. I’m waiting, waiting.
My mother is not in her grave, you see, and I will not stay put either.
Make them stop with their carols. Make them stop with their lights. They only create more shadows.
I need to go deeper, further away.
But the dark, untrammeled woods of this earth are not large enough to contain me.
This is true storytelling! An eerie story with a great buildup.