Curse of Christmas: A Collection of Paranormal Holiday Stories

by Thea Atkinson

  I’d never met her current roommate—they only seemed to last for a couple of months—and lately Ripley had been making overtures to me, suggesting I move in with her, pointing out that her spare bedroom was bigger than my entire studio.

  I loved Ripley but the idea of sharing space with her was little intimidating. For one thing she was a clean freak and I was…not. It’s not that I was dirty, but my place always seemed to have chairs piled with clean clothes and books and mail I hadn’t dealt with. I didn’t alphabetize my jars of spices or arrange the boxes of pasta in my tiny kitchen according to height and the color of the packaging.

  Ripley’s condo always looked like it had been “curated” for maximum Instagram impact, but in a good way. She had a minimalist style that was offset by her bold use of color and she had a real knack for locating vintage finds that would have looked ratty in anyone else’s living room but looked fabulously eclectic in hers. I coveted the pair of Egyptian Revival lamps she’d found on eBay and displayed on either side of a faux Empire-style chaise that was upholstered in a deep burgundy velvet. Instead of the posters most of her friends had on their walls, she had real art. Most of the pieces were original, things she’d bought at art walks and on Etsy, and though nothing had cost more than $25, the overall effect was stunning.

  Everything about her home, like everything about Ripley, made a bold statement and spoke of self-confident style. I wasn’t self-confident. I wasn’t stylish. I wasn’t roommate material.

  I think Ripley saw me as something of a project, the sort of friend you sometimes adopt because you feel sorry for them and want to play Pygmalion.

  Ripley was all about the life hacks and the little tricks but so far the most useful things she’d taught me were how to shine a pair of shoes with a glob of peanut butter and how to give a blow job. It had been a while since I’d used either skill.

  The music was bumping as I walked in, cranked up so loud it vibrated in my bones. The energy was infectious. People were shoulder dancing and moving in place because there wasn’t enough space to actually do more than that. There were so many people crammed into the living room that I had to edge sideways through the crowd. I didn’t see Ripley anywhere, but I saw Parker.

  Of course I saw Parker.

  He was standing by Ripley’s faux fireplace, red cup in hand, gazing down at someone I couldn’t see until the crowd shifted and I got a glimpse of a petite woman gazing up at him adoringly.

  I recognized the expression. I’d worn it often enough myself.

  I didn’t know her. She looked young, like high school young, like jailbait young, but maybe it was just the dim light.

  She was a pale-skinned strawberry blonde, her hair a glorious rose gold that tumbled across her milky-white bare shoulders. The skin-tight black halter number she was wearing wasn’t very practical for the Pacific Northwest in December, but I couldn’t talk. My new dress was a barely- there slip of red silk chiffon with a wrap about as substantial as a cloud. It wouldn’t have kept me warm in a sauna.

  I could see the girl’s cupid’s bow mouth moving as she said something to Parker.

  Parker had to bend toward her as she spoke because she was so tiny. Even in her heels she barely reached Parker’s shoulder. He probably liked that. He and I had stood eye to eye when I was in heels. Eye to eye and yet, we’d never been equals.

  At least not by his measure.

  It took me a while to figure that out because at first all I saw was what he wanted me to see. He was smart and funny and charming and insanely good-looking. I liked that he had a focus, that he seemed to have his life figured out. While the rest of us were still sending out resumes in search of a halfway decent starter job, he’d had internships and fellowships, and clerkships, and the luxury of sifting through a number of employment options.

  He’d been a rising star at a law firm when I met him at a farmer’s market one rainy Sunday. We’d both reached for the last loaf of peppercorn cheese bread from a local bakery and he’d gallantly relinquished his claim, then followed me around the rest of the afternoon as I shopped for tomatoes and corn and honey.

  We’d eaten a food cart lunch while sharing our picks for best Indian food and tiramisu in the city. He couldn’t believe I didn’t like sushi; I was surprised he didn’t care for coffee.

  When he bought me a bunch of sunflowers—“to brighten your day as much as you’ve brightened mine” he said—I’d thought it was a smooth move. When he asked for my number, I gave it to him, never expecting him to follow up.

  “Seriously,” I’d told Ripley, “people just don’t meet people like that except in the movies.”

  “Does he have a brother?” she’d asked me, which is how she met Jared. They didn’t last long as long as Parker and I did and she’d soon moved on to Mikkel, an intense musician who paid the bills working as an IT guy but poured his heart into playing experimental compositions on instruments of his own design.

  Parker hadn’t liked Mikkel very much, his animosity rooted in his basic contempt for humankind in general and not due to any loyalty to his older brother. He was, at heart, a misanthrope and only pretended to care about Ripley and her love life because she was my friend. He didn’t give a shit about Jared and referred to his brother as “the loser in the family,” because he’d turned down a job with the Mayor’s office to take a position at a non-profit working to end childhood poverty.

  The first time I personally felt the weight of Parker’s disdain had been the night we first made love. I’d put him off for weeks, a bit wary that our “meet cute” and immediate connection was not enough to sustain a real relationship. But he’d launched a charm offensive that had finally won me over.

  Afterwards, he told me casually that he thought women who had tattoos were slutty and that if I wanted to be with him, I’d have to remove the tattoo on my left hip.

  I bristled at the suggestion.

  “No one can see it,” I said.

  “I can see it,” he said, “and I don’t like it. It brands you as white trash.”

  “No,” I’d said and gotten out of bed to dress, almost weeping with frustration when I couldn’t find my bra.

  “Don’t be like that Hilde,” he’d said. “I just know how people talk about Hugh. I’d hate to have them talk like that about you.”

  Parker had sounded so sincere that I’d allowed him to coax me back into bed but the name hung in the air between us like the stench of a particularly nasty fart.

  Hugh. My poor troubled twin brother.

  I’d gotten the undercover tattoo on our 18th birthday at Hugh’s insistence. He had a matching one on his forearm where it had eventually joined a whole sleeve of designs, including an ugly, vaguely bird-like blotch he said was a crow. I always thought it looked like it had been scrawled on his arm with a cheap ballpoint pen but never said so. I understood that what he was doing with the skin art. He’d felt like an outsider his whole life and he’d embraced the role when we were just kids, pushing people away with his temper and his poor hygiene and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad choices.

  The tattoos were a way of telling people who he was, a Rosetta stone to decode his soul. All of them had meaning and there was a raw poetry to the story they told. Many of them were based on images he said had come to him in dreams and he was convinced they were messages from our birth mother, a woman our parents claimed to have never met and of whom we could find no trace.

  I didn’t want a tattoo but the design he’d sketched out in the dream notebook his shrink made him keep was strangely compelling—interlocking curves and wavy lines that looked like some ancient rune from a lost underwater civilization. Hugh said the design would protect us and that the symbol was called “Ascaris,” but he didn’t have any idea how he knew that or if it even had a meaning.

  Hugh almost never asked me for anything, and it seemed like such a silly request that I agreed to it. We had the tattoos done by an a gender-fluid inkmaster who had hit on both of us. It wasn’t the
first time we’d been invited to take part in a ménage but we declined. Our relationship was already complicated enough without adding incest to the mix.

  Our father was horrified when he found out what we’d done but our mother told us she thought it was a beautiful way to celebrate our transition into adulthood.

  She had died not long after that and our father, who taught medieval literature at Portland State University, had turned into an old man overnight.

  She had been the love of his life and without her, he seemed to be stumbling his way through perpetual night without so much as a glow-stick to light his way.

  He took a leave of absence from the teaching job, supposedly to write a book on gender roles in The Mabinogion, but after a year he’d given up all pretense of working and just stayed in his study and played Assassin’s Creed, his melancholia wrapped around him like a comfortable sweater.

  Hugh dealt with his grief by self-medicating, landing in rehab after a second DUI. He’d been clean for a while, but he’d relapsed twice that I knew of, and had been dropping in and out of my life ever since.

  We still had that spooky extrasensory bond that a lot of twins have, but that and the tattoo on my hip were the strongest connections I still had to my brother and I wasn’t going to risk losing that because the guy I was sleeping with was a snob.

  Parker et the matter drop that first night, but over the time we’d dated, I’d heard a lot of complaints about that tattoo. And about Hugh. Some people blow up under that kind of pressure. I imploded, stuffing down my anger until it rebounded on me as depression.

  Good times.

  I was jostled out of my unhappy thoughts by the arrival of a trio of guys who worked with Ripley at Zulily. They were actors too and always in performance mode. Being around them could be exhausting if you weren’t in the mood but the way I was feeling, they were just what I needed.

  “Hey Hilde,” one of them said and went in for the full-body cheek kiss.

  “Hey,” I said, giving him a hug instead. “Merry Christmas Deshawn.”

  He smiled and looked over my shoulder, already scoping out the room for an easier target. As he and the other guys moved on, I drifted deeper into the party, still keeping my eye on Parker and his date.

  I could see by the proprietary way she kept touching him that she thought they were a couple.

  Maybe they were, though Parker’s usual style was to break up before holidays so he wouldn’t be obligated to give his significant other a present. Not that he wasn’t generous; he just didn’t like the implied commitment that came with offering a woman a Valentine’s Day bauble or a shiny trinket at Christmas.

  As I watched them, the redheaded girl threw back her head and laughed at something Parker had said. She was wearing a pair of statement earrings that made her slender neck look long and graceful as they swayed back and forth.

  Parker smiled at her, that lazy smirk-smile I’d always courted, wanting his approval and appreciation.

  Hugh wasn’t the only twin who was looking for love in all the wrong places.

  Our parents had loved us dearly but there was still—always—that question for us: Why had our mother given us up?

  Hugh’s misbehavior had always been a plea for reassurance, designed to make our adoptive parents prove how much they loved us, to prove that they would never give us away, no matter how bad we were.

  The more he acted out, the more I became the “perfect daughter,” the people pleaser. I was still trying to work through that. I hated conflict and would go to great lengths to avoid it.

  Which explained a lot about why I had been with Parker.

  He liked confrontation and I could turn him loose like a mad dog when there was a problem I needed handled, whether it was a nasty neighbor or a car mechanic who wanted to charge me for a new transmission when all I needed was an oil change.

  With Parker around, I didn’t have to worry about things like that.

  I just had to worry about him.

  Hugh had been the first to warn me that my relationship with Hugh was going septic. Unfortunately, my brother had dropped out of sight before I could give him the news that the relationship he’d mockingly called “Hildepark” was no longer.

  I was far more upset about his disappearance than I was about Parker’s absence from my life.

  Friends reported Hugh sightings to me—they’d seen him browsing at Title Wave Bookstore or grabbing lunch at Mr. Chen’s Chinese Kitchen—but I hadn’t seen him since the really tense Thanksgiving dinner we’d had with our father almost a month earlier.

  The last time I’d heard from him, he’d said he was staying with a friend and that he was okay and just needed some time. Trust me, he’d said.

  I’d come to hate those two words. Parker used to say them all the time, usually right before he did something untrustworthy.

  Parker.

  Once again my gaze drifted towards him.

  He looked good, his dark hair a little shaggy and curling over the collar of his pale blue Brioni button-down dress shirt.

  I’d bought him that shirt, spending nearly half a month’s salary on it.

  “Want me to kill him?” an amused voice yelled in my ear. “Just say the word.”

  I turned to see Leo Forney, one of my favorite people, and an avid Parker-hater from way back.

  “I can make it quick and painless or I can make him suffer. Your choice,” Leo said.

  I smiled and threw my arms around his neck.

  I’d met Leo in high school when he’d been adorkable—unsure about his sexuality, defensive about his intelligence, and completely committed to geek culture before it was totally cool. Since then he’d grown into his intelligence, embraced his sexual identity, and parlayed his love for all things geek into creating a fund that provided money for tech startups.

  He’d also met Henry, who was probably even smarter than he was and despite being terminally hip, just as lovable.

  ““Hi Henry,” I said to Leo’s boyfriend, hugging him too.

  Henry smiled. “Can I get you something from the bar?” he shouted.

  A drink sounded fantastic. “Please,” I said. “Maybe some white wine?”

  “Lightweight,” he said, but he was only kidding. Henry doesn’t drink.

  As Henry turned away, Leo looked me over with a mock scowl. “What are you doing here Hilde?”

  I pretended not to know what he was asking.

  “Having a good time,” I said. “Fa la la la la and all that.”

  “Right,” he said. “Did you know the prince of darkness was going to be here?”

  “Yes,” I admitted sheepishly.

  “And you came anyway?” Leo made a frownie face. “What did you think was going to happen when he saw you? He’d beg your forgiveness and promise this time he’d treat you with respect? Tell you that he loves you with all of his heart and soul?”

  “It sounds so bad when you say it that way,” I said, but even as I tried for a light tone, I could feel tears threatening.

  He sighed. “You deserve better.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure you do,” he said. “It’s like you’re poking a bruise to see if it still hurts.”

  It’s complicated.

  I didn’t want to get back with Parker. Coming here was more to convince myself I could be in the same space with him and not fall apart.

  I had never told anyone the real reason Parker and I had broken up. I’d told people that I didn’t think Parker respected me. I’d admitted that he sometimes made me feel bad on purpose. I’d even confessed that he was a control freak and that his behavior was starting to scare me a little. Maybe they read between the lines. Maybe they came to their own conclusions.

  What I hadn’t told anyone was that on his birthday Parker had gotten really drunk and tried to force me to have sex when I didn’t want to.

  I had planned to spend his birthday night with him but he was a bad drunk and the liquor had
made him mean.

  He was angry with his father about something—something to do with a trust fund payment or some stock shares or something—and instead of standing up to his father, he had taken out his anger on me.

  When he started getting rough, I told him to stop and he didn’t.

  I could have given in—it wasn’t like I was a virgin—but he wanted to take what was mine to give and that was not okay. And for once, I’d stood up to him.

  He had been infuriated by my defiance and I had been unnerved by his completely unhinged loss of control. Unnerved, and certain he was about to kill me when he tied me to his bed to keep me from leaving.

  Fortunately, he’d been too drunk to do more than tie a couple of sloppy square knots, and the minute he went to the bathroom, I’d wriggled out of the bindings and made a run for it.

  In the days after, he had bombarded me with apologetic texts but I’d held firm and eventually, he stopped trying to get in touch with me.

  I counted myself lucky to have escaped with my self-respect, even if I’d had to leave a pair of almost-new shoes behind because I didn’t want to take the time to find them. The Uber driver I’d summoned had been a woman. She’d taken one look at my bare feet and said, “You want me to call the cops?”

  I’d declined the offer. I’d escaped. I was okay.

  But I hadn’t really escaped. Not completely.

  I’d told myself I was inoculated against his charm but here I was, staring holes into the back of a pretty redheaded girl I’d never met, just because she was the one in his arms and I wasn’t.

  “It’s fine,” I said to Leo when I realized I had drifted off, “I’m fine.”

  “How’s Hugh?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “He says he’s okay. But he’s not coming home for Christmas.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leo said and I knew he meant it. Leo had always liked Hugh and he was one of the few people that Hugh actually liked back.

  Leo was about to say something else when Henry returned with our beverages, Diet Coke for him, overpriced imported beer for Leo and wine for me.