Eve
By: Olly Beckett
Tags: Fiction, Horror, Christmas

Christmas Eve. Parents had hushed their children to sleep hours ago, only the brave midnight mass attendees dared stay out in the night. Just as the priests across the land began their annual liturgy, something subtle changed. Something unnatural.

It began in the forests and on the hills. It always did. Shadows demarcated by the moon grew darker. Nocturnal animals paused their never-ending game of hunter and prey and fled to their burrows and nests. The silent night air dropped a few degrees in temperature.

On the twelfth strike of the church bells, they emerged.

Several years had passed since they had first made their appearance. That fateful night thousands of people had disappeared, with many thousands more bearing witness to their terrifying taking. Terrorism was initially blamed. Then it happened the next year, and the next. No government agency was safe from them, no matter the sophistication of their weaponry.

And so the population had no choice but to huddle in homes and churches, not daring to come out again until the late appearance of the winter sun. That blessed orb chased away the cold, the shadows, the dulling fog. It heralded the resumption of nature, and the realisation that Christmas Eve had been survived for another year.

Temi had bucked the trend of mass emigration from this land. Millions had moved away once they realised that nothing could be done about that one terrible night of the year, but Temi had fallen in love with Oscar, love had usurped fear, and she moved to this cursed country to be with her beloved.

Her new home was another reason that both she and Oscar had decided to move out here to the English countryside. It perched halfway up a wooded valley with a spectacular view to the wide river below. Before those…things had made their first appearance, this home would have been laughably outside of their budget. But, in the years since, the property market had fallen as fast as the general population. Both Temi and Oscar arrogantly believed that their lives would be untouched by this terror.

For 364 days of the year, Temi lived a life of rural luxury. All she had to do was survive tonight. For the first time, though, she’d have to do so alone. It had been a sudden death — a car accident which had taken her Oscar away in early spring. Temi still felt his presence in this house. She couldn’t leave this place, she couldn’t bring herself to face the reality of where he was now.

From a cupboard she pulled out a torch, a lighter, some candles, and some duct tape. On the television a government spokesperson was making what had become the standard Christmas Eve announcement.

‘It is one minute to midnight. Please stay indoors. Stay away from windows and doors. If you haven’t already done sone, get your torch and blankets now. If you go outside there will not be anyone who can help you. Sunrise is in 8 hours and 6 minutes time. Again: do not go outside. Good luck.’

A few seconds later the screen hissed with static, immediately followed by the electricity going off. Temi didn’t bother seeking out the trip switch. Nothing was wrong with the fuses. This was just all part of the terror of tonight.

She went around lighting candles until the room flickered with a dull yellow glow. The curtains were drawn and so she couldn’t see the dense fog creep up the valley and envelope the house. She was, however, able to feel the sudden drop in temperature. This wasn’t a result of the heating switching off — it would have taken much longer for the residual heat of that to disappear — but simply because they preferred to move about in sub-zero temperatures, and adjusted the environment accordingly.

If they simply appeared, moved quietly about outside, then vanished with sunset, then Christmas Eve would be tolerable. But their arrival was announced first by the silence of animals, then the eerie crunk of earth being slowly torn asunder. Temi knew what came next. Silence once again, followed by staccato tapping at windows and doors.

This clicking, insect sound taunted cowering humans through the night. But at least that noise meant that they were kept outside, it was when it stopped and there was the sound of skittering to one part of the house that really bothered Temi. It meant that they had found a possible way in and Temi had to rush to ensure there wasn’t a way in. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Once or twice over the years Temi had endured the sound of some poor, idiotic soul being caught outside. After that fateful first year when they appeared, they had once found their way into a church full of people, who were never to be seen again. That church had been many miles from here, yet the screams carried far and wide.

In the first few years, people decided to escape this isle so that they were far away from the creatures on Christmas eve. But, inevitably, the price of train, plane and ferry tickets rose exponentially to the point where getting away even a month before the annual haunting became prohibitively expensive to all but the wealthiest.

Tap tap tap tap…tap tap…tap tap tap…….

It was 03:49, they had been terrorising Temi relentlessly all night. But now, silence. Temi thought she heard them rushing to an upstairs window and so she grabbed the torch and the tape, then fled up the stairs. There — in the spare bedroom — a curtain twitched erratically. She pulled it aside and was momentarily frozen in terror as a dozen faces stared back at her. Faces that were once human, but were now coloured a deathly blue, with hollow eyes and mouths wide open as if in a perpetual scream.

Although the wasted faces now appeared far more grotesque than they once had, the bodies were even further removed from what they used to be. Spindly arms and legs, with thin, strong fingers and toes that allowed the creatures to scurry up walls. Some fingers had poked a hole through a rotten part of the window frame, and more and more were trying to widen the gap. Temi shook off her terror, pulled off a length of tape and secured it over the gap. Then another length, then another and another.

All the faces turned to her with rictus grins. The creatures scuttled off and resumed their tapping elsewhere. Before Temi fled back to her candlelit living room, something below in the garden caught her eye. The blanket of moonlit fog was broken by a dark figure, which was being pushed up from the ground. As soon as it had fully emerged it was surrounded by the nightmare beings and carried to below where Temi stood.

This was her worst fear. But she had been expecting it. Many people who had lost a loved one in the year since the previous Christmas eve had endured this particular torture. The creatures passed the figure amongst them and clambered up the building so that they could hold it directly in front of Temi.

Oscar leered at her from eyes wide with abject dread and misery. The double-glazed window couldn’t keep out his tortured howl. Mud caked his hair, his mouth spat earth with every new scream. Temi looked wretchedly back at him. This could be her fate, this could be the fate of all who made the mistake of passing away in this tormented land. Dragged beneath the earth to endure the hell of being buried alive in a living death.

Whatever these things were, they had the power to overturn mortality and resurrect the recently deceased in order to taunt and tempt out more potential victims. Temi knew this. She knew why they had plucked Oscar from the ground and dangled him in front of her like a carrot. Yet, despite this knowledge, she found herself heading outside to try to rescue him.

What could she do? Grab that crossbow, take that welding torch, arm herself with every legal weapon she’d been stockpiling since Oscar’s passing. Thus armed, Temi opened the front door.

The extreme cold grasped her with bony fingers and thrust itself down the back of her throat. The heavy mist began dewing on her clothes. There was neither sight nor sound of the creatures. They wanted her to venture further away from the house, which is exactly what she did.

Out here, a couple of dozen steps away from the front door, Temi felt extremely vulnerable. She was certain that she would just become another statistic, another victim of those nightmarish creatures, another idiot who couldn’t just stay indoors for one night. But there was no way she was ever going to allow them to continue tormenting her Oscar.

Two grotesque hands thrust up from the earth and grabbed her ankles. There then followed a most hideously exultant shrieking as the creatures began scuttling over to her. The welding torch swiftly dealt with the shackling hands, a few well-aimed shots from the crossbow gave the marauding creatures pause. Temi went on the offensive.

Three more creatures were quickly dispatched by the crossbow. Now within arm’s length of them, she unsheathed an antique sword, sharpened to a wicked edge, and beheaded one, two, three. They clearly weren’t used to such behaviour from their prey.

Perhaps that’s why this new horror appeared. It wriggled from the ground, a thick, giant, white worm with a perfectly round head bristling with needle teeth and blind eyes. The faces of tormented souls pressed against its belly — tonight’s harvest so far. Emboldened creatures gathered around it, carrying a wailing Oscar.

Temi paced slowly to one side, keeping some distance between her and the enemy. Any creature which breached that distance was swiftly dealt with by the crossbow. There was, however, just one bolt remaining. Temi raised the crossbow, found her target in the crosshairs and squeezed the trigger.

Shrieks more fearsome than any beast of the night ensued. The bolt had hit Oscar directly in the middle of his forehead, tearing through him and putting him out of this agony once and for all. The creatures were furious and scampered towards Temi. Again, she was expecting this.

A century ago, a small outhouse had been built at the edge of the house’s property. It was into this that Temi now fled. She slammed the door behind her, and the creatures immediately crawled all over the small building, trying to find a way in. But Temi had checked the door, reinforced the windows, and ensured that the walls and roof were intact.

In a small armchair she had positioned in the corner yesterday morning, Temi sat and wept. Putting that bolt through Oscar’s brain had been the toughest thing she’d ever had to do. But it was the right thing to do; killing him in this way guaranteed that the creatures could never resurrect him. And so Temi mourned again.

Dawn was only an hour away and yet the enraged creatures didn’t cease in their efforts to breach the little fortress in which Temi sat. She began to doze, thinking that she may have, somehow, survived the night. It was the thump that came from beneath the floorboards which woke her.