The Doom That Came to Christmas, Part 4
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be serializing my Christmas horror story, The Doom That Came to Christmas. I hope you enjoy it! Please feel free to share!
“The holidays drive everyone a little mad.”
That’s what Marcy’s mother always said. The crowds, the office parties, the shopping, the family visits, the cards, the decorating, the endless Christmas music. It was enough to push anyone over the edge, no matter how much they loved Christmas.
And now Mom’s philosophy is showing all its teeth.
Only, this wasn’t a simple display of holiday anxiety.
People were killing each other.
The lady from the gift shop had brutally murdered—
“Lauren.”
—right in front of Marcy.
And where did those masks come from?
Marcy fled down the street. All around her, blood jumped and flowed, screams and gurgles filled the air. Masked figures brutally attacked anyone they saw. They chased down unmasked victims, leaping at them, driving them to the cold ground, beating and clawing at them. In some cases, masked killer fought masked killer, the twisted “faces” they wore affording no sense of brotherhood. Senseless bloodshed, it seemed, murder, brutality, was enough. A celebration—a bacchanalia—of slaughter erupted in the little shopping district.
An exchange of gifts.
Marcy’s mind reeled with maddening thoughts.
The gift of death.
Wrapped in skin and meat and bone.
A mask materialized in the air before Marcy.
It simply… appeared… right in front of her face.
An empty mask.
Waiting for her.
Waiting for a host.
Like a parasite.
The floating mask faced Marcy for a moment, its vacant eyes and mouth unmoving, but still regarding her, still—somehow—sneering at her. Then, it spun around, the back of the mask turning toward Marcy. From this side, the eye and mouth holes seemed to look out to a world that wasn’t there, a world of strange stars and strange spires of flesh and gristle and strange seas of churning blood-red souls. Marcy hated the look of it, but she couldn’t turn away. A morbid fascination held her in its grip. An all-consuming curiosity. Marcy knew that if she could just get a little closer to the strange mask, she would understand its mysteries.
She inched closer.
The interior of the mask seemed to reach for her face.
Thousands of little polyps.
Thousands of tiny tentacles.
Grasping.
Someone slammed into Marcy from the side, knocking her over, startling her from her trance. Another young woman, panting, wide-eyed, blood running in a glistening curtain down her face, staggered past Marcy.
“I’m sorry,” the young woman mewled. “I’m sorry.”
As she picked herself up, Marcy glanced from the young woman to the floating mask then back to the young woman again. The mask’s spell had been broken. The bloody-faced young woman continued to shriek apologies as she ran down the street.
She didn’t make it far before a masked attacker fell upon her, ripping her to shreds.
This is the end, Marcy thought. The end of the world.
And now, the masked figures raised their hideous faces to the sky.
And sang.
In unison, they raised their voices, as if they had been practicing the song for some sort of inhuman holiday pageant. It was a ghastly, undulating, gargling, howling sound. And, horribly, Marcy recognized the words.
Anggggglrrrels we haffff heaargh on highhhh
Ssssweetgly siiinnngging ooooouugrrr plainssss
And the moooooorrrntains in reeeeeeeply
Eccchoing theirrrr joyoussss ssssstrainsssss
Ggggrrggglllloriaaaagh in Excellllssssis Deo!
It was a mockery of a song she had heard all her life, every year around Christmas.
Only now, monsters sang the words.
As they sang, the masked figures danced wildly through the streets. They decorated the lamp posts with strands of bleeding entrails from the victims, topped trees with severed heads. Blood slicked the streets and was splattered on the walls over every building.
Ia! Ia! Ohhhhh Craaawwlinggg Chaaaaoos, weeee beseeeeech!
The masked figures looked to the sky as they sang, and the sky, grumbling and churning grey and white, responded.
The clouds peeled away from one another, and a yawning void rippled open, tearing a hole in the very fabric of reality. Along the edges of this wound in time and space, wriggling, fleshy, red tentacles squirmed. They floated in mid-air, inchworming along, pulling the rift open—wider, wider, wider. Beyond, the unholy alien world Marcy had glimpsed on the other side of the mask waited, flesh-cathedrals and seas of blood storm clouds full of mournful wraiths.
A trumpeting answered the hellish carol.
In horror, Marcy gazed up into this nightmare world.
A tattered, many-limbed, many-faced thing floated in the rift. It was the size of an elephant, and numerous trunk-like appendages reached out from its bulk. Each trunk ended in a serrated, hooked claw. Emerging from the creature’s center mass was a large, gaping, tooth-filled maw, running vertically rather than horizontally. A long, lashing tongue, also sporting a nasty, slime-dripping claw, writhed about in the air. On either side of the drooling, stinking orifice, a half dozen hideous inhuman faces grew like ulcerating sores from diseased flesh.
Marcy screamed.
She couldn’t help herself.
And the masked figures stopped their singing to look in her direction.