Unholy Nights: A Twisted Christmas Anthology (12 page)

This isn’t real. It can’t be.

She steps back. “I have to go...”

“I know many tricks,” he says softly. The wind picks up his words and carries them to her ears, as clear as a bell. “Would you like to learn them?”

“I have to go,” she repeats.

“Then go,” he says, “but you should come back. There are only a few more days to answer your prayers.”

He’s insane. He’s on drugs, some kind of forest-dwelling hippie who never got off the hard stuff. “I don’t have any prayers,” she says, and that much is true, because she stopped praying when she realized that they fell on deaf ears.

But his smile is sharp and dangerous, too wide and too full of teeth, and his face is strange now, too, lean and long. “But you do,” he says. “Otherwise how could I have heard them?”

She looks over her shoulder, making sure the way is clear, tenses her body to run, but when she looks back to gauge whether or not she can make a break for it, he is gone.

She stares at the spot where he stood, and all around her the trees mutter to each other, their branches knocking together like dried bones.

*

S
he takes a shower that evening, keeping the door locked and letting the hot water flow over her. It is scalding and her skin turns pink beneath the onslaught. It could burn her away if she let it, but after a few minutes she exits the shower and dries herself.

Her body is a foreign country beneath her hands. When she’d gone to college she’d tried to reclaim it, but it’s just as strange to her now as it was when she lay in her bed that first night in her dorm, her roommate snoozing gently on the bunk below. Then she’d run her fingers through her hair, down her arms, laced her fingers together, but nothing felt as though it were hers.

He’d taken it all from her.

She goes to her room and dresses in warm pajamas. She always likes to wear pants and underwear, hoping, against hope, that they might dissuade him this time, but nothing she has done or will do will keep her safe. There is no way out for her.

Silently, feeling like a ghost, she drifts out her door and into Julia’s room.

Her little sister sits upon her own bed, doing her homework. She is wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and flannel pants, looking fresh-faced and lovely.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” Julia answers, an echo, a long forgotten memory.

She doesn’t know what to say, what to do, how to be.

“How are you doing?”

“Good,” Julia says, and she has that dark, secretive air about her, the secretive air of a young woman about to bloom. The secrets of spring waiting to burst into the world.

She envies her.

“Good,” she replies. Then, and she isn’t sure why, she says: “I’m going out tonight.”

Julia looks up at her, her eyes luminous and dark.

“Okay,” she says. “I won’t tell Dad.”

He’ll find out anyway,
she wants to say, but suddenly she realizes that this is not what Julia means. She doesn’t know yet.

“Thanks,” she says, unsure what else
could
be said, and her little sister smiles at her, bright and black, a sunrise tinged by night.

In her chest, her heart twists and turns and tries to strangle itself on the vine. Without a word she turns and goes back to her room.

For a long while she stands there, staring around her, wondering what to do next. Her small suitcase is sitting at the foot of her bed, on her old toy chest, and she reaches for it, opens it up, roots around inside it.

She isn’t sure what she is searching for until her hand finds a small bottle of pills. Nothing much, just something she got from the student health center when she had a sinus infection. But she remembers, very well, how they made her feel.

She needs courage, one way or another. She opens the bottle, lets three pills spill into her palm.

Clapping them to her mouth, she tilts her head back and lets them slide down her throat, large and painful, like the words she swallows every moment of every day, and when he comes to her it is not so painful, just a tragedy, happening to someone else for a change.

And when he is done he leaves, and she lies in her bed for a long time before getting up.

*

I
n the bleak midwinter, she goes out in the middle of the night.

*

T
he woods are dark and deep. She isn’t sure why she thought it would be a good idea to come out here, but then again, what ideas are bad, when the worst has already happened?

Leaves crunch under her feet, and she treads forward, tired and sad.

Come dance with me in the starlight,
he had said, and she wants to do that, to do
more
than that, to do so much more than for what she is destined.

The trees arch over her, the wind blows cold and icy, and she closes her eyes as she treads into the woods, not knowing where she is going and not caring where she ends.

She just wants to let go, of thoughts that weigh her down, that keep her from reaching, from going.

Going where? Anywhere.

“It’s good to see you again,” he says.

She stops.

She is on the path, covered in dead leaves, and yet she knows that if she turns she will see him sitting in a clearing that she did not pass through.

She turns, and there he is, sitting in a clearing in the light of the moon. The moon is growing, fuller and fuller, until in a few days it will be complete. A full moon. Soon. It lights the woods, so bright it is easy to see him where he sits, on an enormous fallen log, a tree so huge that suddenly she is not sure she is out on the prairie any longer. Trees here, they are scrappy things, scraggly and twisted and determined to stay where they have taken root, no matter the winds that whip them from the ground, no matter the sun that tries to burn them to ashes. They are good trees, and they grow tall, but not as tall as the trees in the east, the trees in the west, not as large around, not so big as the one he sits upon.

Roses ramble over the log, surrounding him, crowding in that she is certain if he moves he will be ensnared by the thorns.

The wind ruffles her hair, a trace of cold, a trace of sea salt.

His green eyes glitter in the moonlight. He is very beautiful, the way a dagger is beautiful, the way a snake is beautiful.

“What do you want with me?” she asks him.

He shrugs. His hair is long. She isn’t sure she noticed that before.

But he speaks, and those thoughts flee from her head. “The question really is,” he says, “what do
you
want with
me?”

She stares.

There are many things she wants, and none of them are hers to take.

“Nothing,” she says at last.

“Nothing?” He watches her. “Are you sure?”

She is silent, and after a moment he stands and sighs and she sees he is wearing something different now, his clothes almost indistinct, wrapped around him strangely. He is taller too than she remembered. Bigger. Darker. His shoulders broad.

What a difference the moonlight makes,
she thinks dreamily.

“Come here,” he says.

She does.

Without even knowing how she arrives there, she is in front of him, and she realizes that he is far larger than she thought even a moment ago. If he stood, he would block out the moon, block out the sky.

He stands.

The roses around him rustle, reach out, trail over her exposed skin with barbed fingers. She could run. She could escape. She knows she could. He may be able to chase her, but he wouldn’t, and she doesn’t know why she knows this, but it is enough that she knows
something.

“Let me help you,” he rumbles, and his voice is so deep it resonates in her chest, in her belly, in the dark space between her thighs.

“How?” she wonders, her eyes fixated on his chest, on the garments draping his body. Underneath them there is skin, molten hot, so hot it would burn her if she touched it, and she gladly would. She would hold him, would welcome him, even if it killed her.

He moves, and she is backing up, thorns scratching at her skin, back and back until she hits the hard trunk of a tree and she is trapped between the tree and his body, and he is so different than the boy she met this afternoon, but that isn’t really a bad thing.

Huge, brutish, barbaric. His hands are on her arms, so large they almost engulf her upper body and a thrill of fear whips through her, but it is a fear that sings instead of screams, and the heat rolls from his body.

“I can teach you many things,” he tells her. “I know all about hunters.” His lips are so close she can taste his breath. It tastes like blood.

She still wants to believe this is real, that he is truly here, that she can be helped. “Of course you do,” she says. “Your name is Hunter, right?”

“One of many,” he replies. “One of many. But I also know the hunted. The life, the death, around and around we go, for if one knows the hunter, then one must also know the hunted.”

His words are a trill in her head, the call of a bird, the sigh of snow falling on snow—almost perceptible, but just beyond her understanding.

“Stay with me,” he murmurs. “I can answer your prayers. I can show you how.”

How to do what?
she wants to ask him. How to grow money from the ground? How to run when there is a hunter coming after you? How to save a little girl?

She shakes her head. “What can
you
teach me?” she whispers.

“Everything you need to know,” he says.

Somewhere, off in the distance, she hears the howling of a coyote, the baying of a hound. She can’t tell the difference for some reason, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

“And what do I need to know?” she asks him.

She sees his mouth move, and though the moon is behind him, casting his face into shadow, she knows he is smiling.

“How to turn around,” he says.

How stupid. How stupid, and how I wish it were that easy. Just...turn around, turn around, turn turn turn,
she thinks, she dreams, and then it doesn’t matter that he cannot help her because his body, his huge body, is against hers and she is thrilled and falling, reckless, her hands tangled in his coat, in his clothes, in his fur, her eyes rolling in her head as his mouth comes down to hers, his bloody breath mingling with her own—

*

S
he wakes in her bed and it is morning.
A dream,
she thinks.
Just a dream.

And yet she cannot help but feel comforted by her dream. It has been a long time since she has had a
good
dream that it almost makes up for the fact that it hadn’t been real.

Silently she rises and cleans herself. She is still sore from her father’s visit, but the dream clings to her, cocooning her in fog. Her body seems far away, and that’s just fine with her. She goes hunting for breakfast.

She finds her father instead, sitting at the kitchen table, listening to twangy country music on the radio, and her dream flees, its loss so sudden and powerful that she nearly drops to her knees.

But her father doesn’t look at her. He hardly ever does, unless he wants what he will take anyway.

“You making dinner tonight?” he asks.

She looks at the ground. “Yes,” she says, because that’s the only thing she
can
say.

“Good,” he says.

She goes to the pantry, and as she feared it is mostly empty. There are beans, dried and canned, pickled vegetables left over from summer, pasta, lots of pasta, rice, some tomato sauce, and boxes and boxes of mac and cheese.

She plans dinner, and then thinks that perhaps she should go out and get more food. But she doesn’t want to talk to him, to ask him for money. She doesn’t want anything from him.

The clink of glass on glass, and she looks back to see him pour his first glass of whiskey.

I’m not safe in this house,
she thinks, and she remembers those whispered words last night, dream words, but perhaps truthful:
to know the hunter, you must also know the hunted.

She is hunted, haunted. She has been still for years, hoping he won’t notice her, but it hasn’t worked. So perhaps she should start running.

Very slowly, so as not to attract his attention, she runs.

*

H
er car, running on fumes, carries her away to the town’s only diner, and there she sits in a booth, reading a book and drinking coffee, for hours and hours and hours.

“You need anything else?” Diane, the waitress, asks hopefully, but she can’t afford anything else, so she shakes her head. Diane sighs and pours her another cup of coffee, and she sips it. The warmth chases away the chill from the window where she sits, the one that faces the trees instead of the highway. She reads her book, puts it down, picks it up again, restless.

Some time after noon, she puts it down for good, unable to concentrate, and turns her head to look out the window.

He is standing there in the trees, watching her.

She nearly drops her coffee cup, and he smiles. He cannot be more than thirty feet away.

He looks different today, too, and how can she know it’s still him when he looks different every time she sees him she doesn’t understand. But she would know him anywhere. He wears heavy, thick clothes today, a huge heavy wool coat hanging open, and around his throat is a tattered tartan scarf, the red faded to rust.

His face is harder today. Broad. Handsome, but also rough. His green eyes shine out at her.

The coppery taste of blood fills her mouth.

Does anyone else see him? She looks around the diner, and Diane, hopeful that she wants to buy something, catches her eye and sashays over. “You need something?”

She opens her mouth, unsure how to ask. It sounds stupid, even in her head.

But she doesn’t have to ask.

“Holy shit!” Diane says. “Would you look at that?”

She looks.

Standing where he had been is an enormous stag. It holds perfectly still, watching them, its antlers so huge it is a wonder it can lift its head. Streaks of dried blood decorate its flanks, in swirls and dips and dives, as though painted on its hide.