Versus Yuletide, Versus Candles
By: Tobias Carroll
Tags: Short Fiction, Short Story, Christmas, Fiction, Ghost Story

I wanted to tell a story about a ghost for Christmas, but the only story I had to tell started with a Welsh candlesnuffer. This is an object, not a person; there was not a man from St Asaph lurking in a back room somewhere, emerging only to extinguish flames that had burned too long. This was also not a euphemism for something brazen, though I have racked my brain and come up empty vis-a-vis the question of just what it might be a euphemism for.

The Welsh candlesnuffer was a small and hollow object in the shape of an angel which my mother had purchased decades earlier on a work trip to Swansea. Every Christmas it would appear on a side table and remain there throughout the holiday season.

When I was six or seven, I held the Welsh candlesnuffer in my hand and looked it over. The house’s Christmas decorations were a source of constant mystery to me then: the velvet cherub, the cardboard manger, and the driftwood reindeer all beguiled me. I stared at it for a long time until something stopped my thoughts cold. “Mother,” I said. “Does this angel have a mustache?”

She walked over to me and took up the Welsh candlesnuffer. She regarded it from a distance, then up close. “Yes,” she said. “In Wales, all the angels have facial hair.”

Across the room, my father paused as he trimmed the tree. “I’m not so sure about that,” he said.

“Have you been to Wales?” my mother asked. My father replied that he had not. “Well,” she said. “I think my experience in this field outstrips yours.”

My mother handed the Welsh candlesnuffer back to me and I beheld it again. One day, I told myself, I would grow a mustache as magnificent as the one on the face of the angel before me.

Five Christmases later, the family cat destroyed the Wesh candlesnuffer in a fit of pique. Gradually, the face of the mustachioed angel moved from tactile object to something that existed only in the family’s memory, an artifact of a bygone time.

A decade after that, during a semester in London, I boarded a train to Cardiff, my mother’s observation about the angels in Wales still sonorous as it drifted through my mind. I had booked a room in a cheap hostel for a few nights, and I looked forward to getting lost in the city as best I could.

That first full day I found myself horribly disappointed. I wandered into the first church I saw, a historic building with stained-glass windows and sculptures, and inspected all the angels and cherubim within. There was nary a mustache to be found. I walked from church to church, and eventually to a local history museum, and found the same thing in all of them: many angels, no mustaches.

The rector of the final church I visited saw me and, I think, noticed my distress. “What is it,” he said to me. “What’s wrong?”

I explained it all to him: the figure of the angel, my haphazard search, and the candlesnuffer that had begun it all. (I didn’t say “the Welsh candlesnuffer,” as I knew that here, all of the candlesnuffers were Welsh.) When my tale of woe ended, I saw the priest nodding in silence.

“I know where you’ll have to go,” said the priest. “Down the coast and past Swansea, all the way to St. Davids. That’s where the artist lives.”

“The artist who made angels with mustaches,” the priest continued. “It was many decades ago, and he is an outcast now. He did make the most exquisite portraits, though. He lives in exile on a houseboat there, still making his strange and hairy angels.”

I followed the directions the priest gave me and ended up on the coast of Wales. I strode through the city of St. Davids; I asked directions to the pier and found it. The houseboat wasn’t difficult to find. I knocked on its door and waited for it to open, wondering if the first question I’d ask would be about the candlesnuffer or about the terms of the artist’s exile.

I never learned the answer. The artist opened the door and lunged at me with a long knife. I dodged it and attempted to wrestle it away from him. Our struggle lasted for hours, and no one from the nearby city attempted to intervene. At the end of it, the exiled artist was dead and his boat was sunk. And every Christmas, his ghost finds me wherever I may be and the night’s haunting begins. He stands there, silent and judgmental, accompanied by a choir of angels just as had appeared on the candlesnuffer. All of their faces wear mustaches, but there are no lights to extinguish, and their song carries throughout the night.

Photo: Osman Rana/Unsplash