Unholy Nights: A Twisted Christmas Anthology (13 page)

“That’s a big buck,” Diane says admiringly. “Can’t believe he hasn’t been bagged yet.”

Ayla wants to ask her if she sees the red blood, the patterns and spirals, but she is suddenly afraid.

Well. No. There is no
suddenly
about it. She is afraid, and always has been.

“Wish I had my rifle,” Diane continues. “He’s just standing there.”

“No,” she says, too fast, to loud. “No, he’s beautiful.”

“That’s why I want him on my wall,” Diane says. She is still staring at the stag, and then she backs away from the table and hurries off to a table full of men, drinking their coffee laced with smuggled rum.

“There’s a buck out there, gotta be twenty points at least!” Ayla hears her say, and she whips around, half-rising in her seat, to wave the stag away, to send it back where it came from—

—but when she turns, it is already gone.

*

“T
his is awful.”

Her father’s words, of the dinner she has made.

She isn’t surprised any longer, but, curiously, she isn’t anxious either. Before her dreams, before her strange and impossible thoughts of a boy in the woods—
a boy, really, how could Julia not know a man when she sees one?
—harsh words from him would leave her fearful. Now she only recognizes them, knows them.

Lets them slide, like a sleigh over snow. Instead, she is sick with worry, not for the knowledge that he will punish her for the paltry dinner she was able to put on the table—and really, it wasn’t for
him,
it was for Julia, Julia who isn’t even here, who is at a friend’s house tonight again, but it doesn’t matter, she’s away and safe—but worry for the stag.

Worry for the man in the woods.

She should go warn him, let him know that he is in danger.

“Are you listening to me?”

She blinks, tries to focus on her father and what he is saying. “I’m sorry,” she says. “There isn’t a lot to work with...”

He goes very still and the hand around the tumbler of whiskey tightens. “Are you saying I can’t provide for my family?” he asks her, and his voice is low and dangerous.

You can’t,
she wants to say.
You sit here on disability and drink your pension away.
But she knows when to be quiet.

She has
learned.

So she just shakes her head.

He stares at her hard for another moment, and her blood is thick with dread. Then he turns back to his meal, and she lets out a breath, and busies herself with cleaning the kitchen, so she won’t have to sit down at the table until he is almost done.

But he waits for her tonight, and she chokes down bite after bite of food, and it is dust in her mouth. His eyes are on her, watching her, as though he knows she has seen things, dreamed things, things that are not allowed.

When she is done eating, he lets her get as far as the stairs before standing up and stalking after her, and she knows better than to run, because it will only bring her pain, will only make bruises bloom and her flesh tear, so she climbs the steps and listens to him following behind her, following her up to her room, and there is no escape.

*

I
n the bleak midwinter, she breaks apart.

*

T
he woods again. She aches with cold and sadness. The wind is in the trees, in the leaves, in her hair and in her head. She isn’t sure how she got out here, only that she is happier to be here than anywhere else, and still she is so sad she thinks she might just lie down and let the cold take her.

But she has to tell him first. Tell him that there are hunters coming for the stag. That it isn’t safe to be out here.

That it isn’t safe to be a...

She knows things. But she won’t think them, for fear that they will disappear.

She is wrapped up in her heaviest coat, an old wool designer coat that her mother found on a thrift store rack years and years ago, and it keeps her from shivering, but her jeans are threadbare and her feet are blocks of ice.

She stumbles on beneath the shining clouds. Behind them the moon is growing.

“Good evening, Ayla.”

She stops and looks up.

There he is, handsome and luminous, painted against the darkness in blue light and shadows, leaning against a tree and so still that it is no wonder she didn’t see him there until he spoke.

“Hey,” she says. Her words are paltry things next to his, but at least they are hers. Out here, she has a voice.

“You have come again?” he asks. “Come to stay with me? Come to have your prayers answered?

She shakes her head. “No. I wanted...I need to tell you. You’re...” She trails off. Now, out here, in his presence, it seems so ridiculous that he should be in danger. There is nothing he can fear from men.

He detaches himself from the tree, moves forward. She sees his long red-brown hair falling around his shoulders, sees his softening face in the light. “You worry for me.” A statement.

“There are hunters wanting to find a...a stag in these woods,” she says. It sounds stupid. “You know...if you are out here and they’re hunting...they might think you’re...you know how they are. They fire first, ask questions later.”

All he does is nod. “I know how they are.”

She watches him, strangely wary. She doesn’t want him to think that she worries over him. She has too much on her plate to worry about a wild man in the woods.

But he knows she does, anyway.

“I know all about hunters,” he says suddenly. “You should not dwell on me.”

She swallows. “But...” Stupid. It sounds stupid. But it would be stupid to
not
say it. “What about the stag?”

He smiles. “You should not dwell on us,” he says. “We know the hunters well.”

And she knows that’s all she’s going to get from him, so she lets it go. With a great sigh, she sits down and tries to catch her breath. She is panting, hard, as though she has run a long distance.

His footsteps crunch in the leaves as he draws nearer to her. “You are kind,” he says, “to think of us.”

She shakes her head, staring at the leaves under her. They are decaying, but in the light of the moon behind the clouds they are sharp, wicked points of dull glass in the darkness, piercing her body. She lets her hands fall to them, and they crumble and grumble under her fingers.

“I’m not...” she starts to say, but it is stupid. She just wants things that are impossible, and that’s okay. As long as she knows they are impossible, it is all okay.

“I see,” he says finally.

His footsteps come toward her, and she is afraid to look up and see him, but she does so anyway. Her eyes raise, and her soul fills with the sight.

He is magnificent in the muted moonlight. She can hardly contain the beating of her heart when she looks at him, and she hates herself for it. Another weakness, another easy way for a man to wield his power over her. She can’t even breathe. His nearness robs her of thought.

“You should come with me,” he says suddenly. “Come with me in the moonlight. Dance with me in the night. Find the dark spaces of the world, curl up within them with me. I will even answer the prayers you swear you did not pray.” He smiles strangely. “For a price.”

She isn’t sure what he is saying, but even if she did she is sure it would be crazy.

“I can’t,” she says. “I have to stay. I have responsibilities. People are...are counting on me...”

“Like who?” he asks.

And she isn’t quite sure who it is. Is it Julia, who seems to have found a new place to be? Or is it her mother, who begs her in her dreams, from beyond the grave, to save herself, to save her little sister?

Or is it her father, who has nothing in his life save alcohol and the comfort of his daughter’s body?

She shivers, shudders, bile rising in her throat.

But what else can she do? She cannot let all of it have been for nothing. “No,” she says. “I can’t come with you...”

He shrugs. “So you would rather stay in that house, and let him touch you when all you want to do is cut his throat?”

The world stops. Her heart stops. Her life stops.

“What?” she breathes. “What did you say?”

But he doesn’t repeat himself. Instead he reaches up and leaps into the branches of a tree above them, a towering oak, his leap too light to be real.

I am dreaming. No one knows. I must be dreaming.

“There is power in the heat of blood on icy snow,” he says. He stands on an impossibly thin branch and leans against the tree’s main trunk, like a man lounging in a doorway. “There is power in sacrifice.”

She licks her dry lips. “I don’t sacrifice other people.” That was why she came back. She came back to make sure Julia was still safe. Offered herself up instead of her little sister.

He nods. The wind rises. “Yes,” he agrees, “you sacrifice only yourself. But you are barely a shadow now. When will you take yourself back?”

Her arms are around her stomach. It churns, sick and hollow. Holding herself tight, she clenches her eyes shut. “You told me you could teach me,” she says. “So how do I do that?”

But he doesn’t answer, and when she opens her eyes again, he is gone.

*

M
orning light, gray and dull in the windows.

“Where have you been going at night?” she asks over the breakfast table.

Julia looks up from her breakfast. “Out,” she says, evasive, secretive, as if she is being bold and defiant.

But all Ayla can think is: could her baby sister be going anywhere that is worse than this?

*

I
t’s a long, dark day. The rain crowds in, sleety and freezing. There is very little she can concentrate on, except thinking of the boy in the woods.

The man in the woods.

The...
well
.

Come with me in the moonlight.

Whatever is in the woods...it is better than what is here. Isn’t it?

She reads a book, absorbs nothing. Thinks long and hard about hunters and hunted. Thinks long and hard about who she wants to be.

Wonders if what she wants could ever be possible.

Some things, she knows, are beyond even the reach of magic.

*

H
e hunts her today. Room to room, minute to minute. She runs, slowly, carefully, hides, is found again. He talks to her, his words meaning nothing, just a din so loud she is crushed beneath the weight of it. She wants to speak, to shout, to scream, but that is the way to more pain. She knows what happens when she is not quiet.

There is power in sacrifice,
she thinks, and she bites her tongue until her mouth is full of blood.

*

A
fternoon draws down, throwing sharp shadows carelessly across the floors and walls, and she wanders between them, looking for a way out.

There is a picture hanging just at the bottom of the stairs. It has been years since she has looked at it, but on this long, dreary afternoon, as he runs her to ground with idle malice, it catches her eye with its faded colors.

He is in the kitchen, drinking whiskey. She is drifting toward her room. She stops and studies it.

A stiff family portrait. Her father, his hair dark and lustrous, stands next to her mother. He is shorter than she is, a man who managed to trap an Amazon, a woman far too much for him, and he knows it. If she leans in close, she thinks she can see the fear in his dark, beady eyes.

And her mother? Beautiful and tall. But sad. The face of a woman who has closed too many doors. The face of a woman who knows there is only one way out of the life she has chosen.

Her hands on Ayla’s shoulders are white with tension.

She remembers what it was like to stand there, her mother behind her, her father hovering over both of them, in that hot little studio, the darkness encroaching from beyond the hot lights beaming down. She remembers she was becoming a woman then, even though she doesn’t even feel like a woman
now.
She remembers the sweat on her brow, trickling down, gathering in strange places that weren’t there only a few months ago. She remembers her mother’s massive belly, full of another baby, bumping against her back. She remembers her mother’s fingers, sharp and hard, holding her tight.

In the photograph, there is nothing behind them. The background is a fake landscape, blurry, as all good backgrounds should be. Unobtrusive. A colorful forest with flowers and leaves and soft breezes, little birds that sing nonsense love songs, fluffy bunnies and talking squirrels.

Nothing like the forest she knows.

This picture is a lie,
she thinks quietly, softly. A picture that only reminds her of stifling dresses and pinching shoes instead of happy times. A picture that could never capture the wild of the woods, because there are no woods. A picture that could never capture a happy family, because there never was a happy family. A picture that could never capture a loving mother, a strong father, a sweet daughter, because none of those things ever existed.

Nothing about this picture is real,
she realizes suddenly.

And then:
Nothing in this house is real.

...Oh, yes, things may
happen
here
,
and they may make her feel like shit, like giving up, like dying, but they aren’t
real.
They aren’t lasting, they don’t linger, they don’t stay forever, not like the air, the water, the sun, the earth, not like the clouds, the stormy sky, the winter rain, the icy wind. They do not endure.

Or, at least, she hopes they do not.

She steps back, looks around, and to her eyes the house around her seems to be nothing more than a faded backdrop. If she were to reach out and take it into her hands, it would crumble to dust, and the wind would whip it away into the sky.

She is tired, suddenly. She has been hunted all day, and has only barely eluded capture, so she climbs the stairs with weary steps, her eyes fixed on the floorboards beneath her, watching them, waiting for them to collapse, to show her what they hide, but they are stubborn and keep their secrets. She trudges on, and when she reaches her bed, she crawls into it, too exhausted to keep her eyes open one second more.