The Doom That Came to Christmas, Part 6
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!
A horde of masked horrors, all covered in dripping blood, all singing gargling Christmas carols, stalked toward Marcy. She staggered away from them, slipped in the blood that covered the street, almost fell, and then broke into a full run. The masked horrors gave chase. Marcy turned down an alleyway, ducking to avoid the looping entrails that had been strung there like garland, and she stumbled to a stop. More masked figures shuffled down the alley from the connecting street. The figures, still singing, pressed in on either side of her. She was trapped.
“Blessings,” spoke an inhuman voice, rising above the song. “Blessings on this most joyous day.”
The nightmare, with its many trunk-like appendages and tattered, fleshy robes, floated down from above. It hovered before Marcy, a blasphemous parody of a gigantic, meaty Christmas star. From its mouth poured forth wave after wave of puffing flesh. The entity unfolded and flowered and expanded, puffing out, rolling over itself, puffing up and swallowing its own flesh in an impossible cycle of tentacles and twisted faces and toothy mouths.
“Blessings,” it said, “on this day of befoulment.”
Its voice was awful and childlike, full of grotesque wonder and joyous loathing.
The masked figures stood still, waiting for their master to give them an order. The anticipation of the coming attack was maddening for Marcy, but at least they were no longer singing.
“What is this?” Marcy asked the nightmare. “What are you?”
Dripping slime, a hideous sideways smile spread across the monster’s maw, as if it had been anticipating the question.
“I have many names, some more awful than others, some more palatable to human sensibilities. All such appellations, though, are words of entropy, chaos, and destruction. I am called the Dweller in the Dark! I am called the Crawling Chaos! I am called the Tattered Daemon! I am called Nyarlathotep! Know me and despair, for I have come to clear the world of earth beings and make ready for the coming of my kin, the Old Ones.”
“You killed all those people. You killed my sister.”
The overlarge, vertical mouth sneered.
Almost casually, the creature’s long tongue reached out, boney thorns erupting along its length, and grabbed up one of the masked minions. It lifted the figure up and bit them in two.
“The world must be consecrated in blood and pain, confusion and terror,” Nyarlathotep said through a mouth full of squelching meat and crunching bone. “It is the reason your genetic markers were seeded into this planet during its infancy. This day was preordained. Extermination is part of the ritual. You were put here to act as sacrifice.”
Now, several masks floated in the air around Nyarlathotep, orbiting him slowly, staring down at Marcy with their star-filled eyes.
Marcy was weeping now. She couldn’t help herself. She wept for her sister, who had died so horribly. She wept for her mother, who she’d never see again. She wept for all the people who had died in the streets… and for all the people who would die soon… because she knew, deep down, that this thing, this god or monster or whatever the fuck it was, could not be stopped.
She wept for Christmas.
“And yet,” Nyarlathotep said, “I have gifts to bestow, even now at the end of your pitiful and fitful existence. I offer blessed oblivion. You, like so many others, will be among my masked brood, and you will spread my gospel across the world. You will write it in blood and flesh. Until all earth-beings have been killed or converted. And then you will fall upon one another in a glorious orgy of mayhem and murder.”
One of the floating masks descended toward Marcy.
“Merry, merry Christmas,” Nyarlathotep said in a mocking tone.
The mask hovered before Marcy’s face, first staring at her, then slowly turning to inch closer, closer, reaching out with polyps of darkness.
Marcy blinked.
And she gazed into blasphemous infinity.