by Tim Curran
A brief but intense wave of nausea was chased by vomit as it scorched a trail from my stomach to the tarmacked ground. There were cries of disgust and outrage from the packed tables nearby, but I didn’t give a toss. Lurching from my chair, vision blurred, it looked as though I had been on the mother of all benders - but that wasn’t it. No, that wasn’t it at all.
The smell of vomit invited more of the same from both me and a woman at a table nearby who was shuddering with the dry heaves. For some reason this amused me and I laughed, a barking, guttural sound I didn’t recognise. I now had the crowd’s full attention and as I stared back, clots of darkness, blacker than the night itself, darted amongst those assembled making my vision flicker and spot. The clots formed and reformed into shapes that I couldn’t make sense of, as though in perpetual, sickening motion. But that couldn’t be, could it? Maybe I was coming down with some bug or other. Yes, that was it, all I needed was to head for home and a good night’s sleep.
And then one of the amorphous shapes took on a structure, temporarily banishing all thought of flight.
It was a small, bent creature, no bigger than a child, and it whipped round to face me, huge head balancing on a spindle of a neck. Although it was solid enough, its outline was still moving as though the creature was infested with millions of burrowing things. As I stared, I realised that the thing was transforming again, from something almost human into something altogether more primal.
Large rabbit-like ears ripped themselves from the confines of the skull with a wet, thunk, even as the eyes elongated, revealing a dull-red sheen as though an invisible hand had slashed dead flesh, revealing the bled-out meat beneath. It snarled, revealing row upon row of pointed, gleaming incisors and then waved, an incongruous human gesture from something that could lay no such claim to that particular heritage. A warm trickle of urine down my left leg snapped me from my fugue and I ran.
I pushed past a family with two small toddlers and someone reached out to grab me as I went, but I was too fast. Spurred by the feel of hot breath on my neck, I raced with an awkward loping gait to the stairs that took me down into Santaland: consisting of a maze and Santa’s Grotto, both of which were mercifully deserted. At least I could hide in the maze, courtesy of all the Christmas trees that formed it until either the creature went away, or I came to my senses, I didn’t know which. There was a young man with a buzz cut dressed as the great man himself at the entrance, inspecting tickets, white beard askew, red suit drowning the thin body. By his side was a dirty sack tied at the neck.
Fuck. I didn’t have a ticket and I had left my wallet at the gluhwein stall in my frenzy to leave. Where now? Glancing back the way I’d come, there was at least no sign of the creature.
“Got a ticket, mate?” asked Young Santa, poking the sack with a stick and eliciting a squeal from whatever was inside.
“Er, no. Can I get in anyway and owe you the money? I’m good for it, honest.”
“Oh, I’m sure you are,” he told me, grinning and rubbing his hands together so fast I half expected to see flames. “But that’s the least of your problems, mate.”
There was something about the cherubic roundness of his cheeks, so at odds with the cadaverous skinniness of his body that bothered me, but I couldn’t quite pin it down. One of his eyes was opaque as though he had a cataract, but he didn’t look more than nineteen or twenty. There was a scab on the end of his nose, freshly picked judging by the trail of blood down his cheek. It reminded me of Mia. Had she found Louise?
“You’d better run,” he advised, sucking his teeth and snorting.
“What?”
“I said,” he came closer, leaning in as though for a kiss, then, pausing for a heartbeat, he whispered, “run.”
I froze, just as his massive clawed hand raked down my face and chest, the seeping warmth of my blood a momentary blessing before the pain set in.
In shock, I brought my hand up to touch my face, barely registering that the fingers had lengthened and acquired an extra joint. None of this could be real; it was obviously an nightmare and I’d wake up any second.
“Look,” he said in an awed voice, drool running from his mouth to his chest in thick lines, “oh, look.”
He pointed behind me and I was so numbed that I obeyed.
Something was undulating towards us; gleaming, oily coils reflecting the reds, blues and greens from the Christmas lights. A wet, sucking sound accompanied the creature’s progress, along with a low oddly familiar moaning.
It stopped. The head raised itself up in the air to eye-level, revealing a gaping, razor-toothed maw about four feet across which swayed in front of me like a snake being charmed. The fleshy frills around its thick, wrinkled lips vibrated as though responding to an electrical current. “Aieeeeeee,” The thing screamed with a bowel-loosening intensity.
“As your official Santanic representative - did you see what I did there - I really recommend that you get out of here before the Yuletide Worm catches you. Lucky for you she’s slow - and she’s also a newbie at this - but if she catches you, well, you really are screwed. Eaten whole, as a python does, you’ll be. Then all you’ll have to look forward to is a slow, agonising death; eaten from the outside in by someone else’s digestive juices. Bloody disgusting, if you ask me. Unless you’re into that sort of thing of course. She’s a bit of a screamer this one, I must say. Not used to her new role I expect. She’ll soon settle. They all do.”
Bloody disgusting. The very words I’d used earlier in connection with another female.
He stretched his now elongated lips in a grimace, revealing jagged, rotten teeth.
“Me, now, I’ve got manners. You won’t catch me swallowing my food whole. I like to cut it up into small, easy pieces. Just like this,” he turned, slicing a rust and blood encrusted scimitar through the air, taking most of my nose with it. He picked it up from the snowy ground, made a show of dusting it off and then popped it into his mouth like a bon bon, pinky raised as he suckled on it, groaning with pleasure.
“Please,” I sobbed. “Why are you doing this?”
“Look at the state of me,” the Yuletide Worm screamed. “Look at the state of me.”
I recognised that voice - but that just wasn’t possible.
Unperturbed, Young Santa made a show of feeling the tip of the scimitar as though checking it was still there.
“Oh, listen to her. But that’s women for you eh? Never happy,” he smirked, raising the bloodied weapon. “Let’s really give you something to moan about, shall we?”
A surge of adrenalin and I barged past my assailant, blade whistling past my ear, just missing by centimetres. I bounded over the fence and into the Christmas tree maze, taking strings of lights with me and trailing blood.
“Don’t look at me!” the worm-thing shrieked in that oh-so familiar voice.
It was only as I ran from that place of death that I realised that Mia, the newly crowned Yuletide Worm, and I were finally finished.
***
I burst into the start of the maze, stumbling and falling onto all fours before panic propelled me forward on hands and knees. The ground sped by, faster than if I had been upright, new-found claws cutting through snow and ice as I raced through the maze. A soft susurration of pine-needled branches, stirred by an arctic wind, heralded a heavier fall of snow, making the tree lights bob and weave, dappling the way ahead. A waxing, gibbous moon hidden behind massing snow clouds called to me in a language I hadn’t realised I knew.
Reaching the maze’s centre, my entire body itched with a raging intensity and I was burning up. Tearing my jacket and jumper off with clawed hands I discovered a dense furred pelt, long enough that it almost concealed Young Santa’s slashes on my chest. Trousers and trainers were next and in seconds I stood naked but, as I looked down at myself, somehow not. If this wasn’t a bug then I must be dreaming and here was the proof: I had become a beast.
But there was no time for fancy existential debates as a low growl sounded from a fe
w feet away.
“Show yourself,” I said. The truth was, dream or not, my new body was more powerful than the old and I knew I could take whatever fancied its chances. Colour had dimmed but my eyes were sharper, my sense of smell almost too acute and I felt renewed. Had I become I a werewolf or some other cool creature of the night? Maybe I had passed some sort of test and this new-found feeling of invincibility was my reward.
“Derek,” said the growling voice as a furred nightmare stepped out of the trees.
Powerful jaws fought to contain large, gleaming teeth with an audible grating of tooth against bone. The corners of its lips lifted and its nose wrinkled - was it smiling? It towered over me, seven feet, easily, and I stepped back getting ready to run back the way I’d come, heroic invincibility evicted by the desire to survive.
It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen, but then that was proving to be the one consistent feature of this never-ending nightmare. The head resembled that of a dog, but the body was humanoid, covered in blond, glossy fur and, from the pendulous hanging breasts, clearly female.
Bloody disgusting.
“Derek,” said the hateful, grating voice, struggling to shape words out of air with a mouth not built for such perversities. “Don’t you recognise me?”
I snarled, a high pitched, fearful sound, about to turn tail and make a run for it, when I saw a red, silky ribbon stuck in the thing’s long, flowing pelt.
Louise. It couldn’t be. She had no survival instinct and should have succumbed to the horrors of this new world instantly. Mia and I, well, were a different story - but not sad, sappy Louise. And then a thought struck me.
“Did you do this?” I asked, struggling with my own new teeth gear.
“Do what?” The Louise-thing laughed, dugs quivering.
I shuddered and stepped back. It - she - came forward.
“Thiiss,” I slurred with nervous bravado, waving a paw at the maze and the Christmas market beyond. In the distance, the sounds of people enjoying themselves on the artificial rink floated on the night air, oblivious and unconcerned. But that was another world now, one to which something told me I could never return.
A thought struck me.
“Is all this because of those fucking amulets you made us all wear?”
She stared at me, drool frothing in and out of her teeth in time with her breathing. Her eyes were a blazing, neon yellow, the pupils a narrow, vertical slit.
“I know about you and Mia, Derek,” growled the monster. “I’ve always had my suspicions, you know. But we’ve had some interesting discussions since we…changed, Mia and I and she confirmed what I already knew. Of course, we have our differences,” Louise laughed, an unpleasant, deep-throated gurgle, ‘but we agree on one thing: something has to be done about you. Once and for all.’
‘Who cares about that pish now?’ My voice rose higher and faster until it reached a castrato scream. “Did you curse us? For Christ’s sake woman, were the amulets cursed?”
“No,” said a child’s voice, giggling. “It was me. I chose you and then you chose…her.” He pointed at the thing formerly known as Louise. “Your tasty little mistress, too. Greedy boy.”
It was the small bent creature I’d seen at the gluhwein stall. The same absurdly big rabbit ears, flayed head and eyes like slashes in dead flesh, except now they had been stitched shut. From the stench of rotting meat I was guessing this was also the thing that had pushed past me unseen. It had touched me and then I had touched the girls - was that it meant by chosen? A game of contaminated tag which transformed all those caught into monsters…?
A roar from Louise as she leapt, knocking me to the floor. Straddling me, she snapped at and missed my jugular. I twisted and writhed, but she was too strong.
“No,” screamed the Rabbit. “You’ll kill him. We don’t have time for a replacement.”
But Louise wasn’t listening. The dull staccato thud of her fists on my chest as she punched and clawed her way inside was accompanied by my screams. As I lay powerless, waves of excruciating pain took over as my lover scrabbled in the meat of my flesh.
“Fuck that,” she snarled, “I always knew the way to Derek’s heart was through his ribs.”
She paused, tongue lolling out the side of her mouth, seconds before she slid off me, head parting company from her body and rolling to rest by the interloper’s foot. The Rabbit stood over us both, axe in hand, blood dripping down the shaft to pool in a dark, congealed mass on the snow. The lights played over the flayed face, painting it red, green and blue. Relief swept over me in a scalding rush.
“You are mine,” it whispered.
“Am I dead,” I wheezed. Because I damn well should have been after that impromptu heart surgery. “What the fuck is going on? Am I a werewolf now? Am I?”
The Rabbit, despite its short stature, pulled me to my feet with ease and dragged me to a mirror at the centre of the maze that I could have sworn hadn’t been there before. It held me up in front of the polished surface as though I weighed nothing.
“Behold the ravening werewolf, shit-for-brains.”
A small, wizened creature with patchy white fur on leprous skin confronted me. Two, round, pink eyes stared out from a rodent-like face, rotten front teeth prominent against the snowy pelt. I wasn’t a big, bad wolf after all - no, my inner beast had turned out to be a deformed rat. My legs were scaly like a chicken’s, as was my long, curled tail, and I stood about three feet high on my hind legs. No wonder my dearly departed girlfriend had gotten the better of me. Women never fought fair though, did they? “I don’t understand,” I said, trailing off.
“I chose you. Don’t you remember? The strength of your desire - its sheer insatiability - drew me to you. I brushed past you in the crowd and gave you the Gift of Becoming which you passed on to your little harem. But the true Gift is yours - and yours alone. You’re the one the city needs on this, the shortest day of the year.”
I struggled in his vice-like grip, biting and clawing, fuelled by a growing fear.
“Gibberish. Total gibberish. You can take your Becoming whotsit and stuff it up your arse,” I squeaked, whiskers twitching.
The snow was now a blizzard and the chorus of REM’s It’s The End Of The World played through my head in a demented loop, blotting out all rational thought.
“Christmas is the time of year when the veil between worlds is thinnest and anything can cross over to this one. And I mean anything. Oh, I could tell you some tales, boy.” The rabbit shook himself. “It’s your job to make sure nothing does cross and you are the city’s first line of defence. That is your honour, done you by the city of your birth. You should be grateful.”
“Grateful? I’m not fucking doing it.”
“Yes. You are.” He let me go and I slumped onto the frozen, snow covered path.
“Wait. Why have I changed into - this? And why do I see monsters everywhere?”
The rabbit snorted.
“Changed? You haven’t changed. This is your true self, Derek. It was your human form that was the lie.”
“But the monsters…”
“Of which you are one, have always been among us. You are seeing the world as it really is. A world you have enthusiastically contributed to - and that’s why you’re here.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You’ve always been a monster Derek and deep down you’ve always known that. Now at least you can acknowledge it and put it to good use.”
And with that he disappeared, leaving me to the howl of the wind and the strains of the fairground in the distance. I crumpled to the ground, put my head on my paws and wept for the man I’d been and the life I’d had.
And would have no more.
***
I must have passed out where I lay, because when I woke, there were no sounds of traffic or people nearby. The city was asleep, the cloud-covered, light-polluted sky the colour of old blood. I could hear the hum of electricity through pylons, smell the spoor of urban foxes as t
hey hunted for the little, scurrying night creatures. Creatures like me. I even fancied I could feel the rotation of the earth as it hurtled through space and time like an ownerless, purposeless wind-up toy.
If I did have the Gift of Becoming, enhanced senses aside, what I had become did not please me at all. But what was I to do about it now?
My wallowing was interrupted by the swish of silk and a blast of warm green-scented air, as though someone had opened the door to a spring wood. The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen stepped out from the Christmas trees, smiling at me. Dressed in a tight-fitting, low cut scarlet evening dress, her pale, luminous skin was off-set by glittering obsidian eyes and a glossy, jetty tangle of hair that reached her tiny waist. The face was delicately boned with the barest flush of pink infusing her cheeks and her bee-stung mouth was a lush red. She laughed, the sound intimate and knowing as a lover’s, and I was entranced in a way that I couldn’t recall having ever experienced in my entire life.
“Come, my love,” she said holding a small, white hand out to me, her mellifluous voice caressing its way down the length of my spine. “It’s time.”
“Time for what?” I mumbled, going to her and taking the proffered hand.
“Come see.”
This was too much of an echo of Louise taking me to the benighted amulet stall and, alluring as she was, I tried to slip her grasp. Her shining black eyes blazed as she gripped me tighter, the corner of her lip curling.
“You are chosen.”
“But what does that mean?” I pleaded, close to tears.
“You’ll find out.”
“No,” I moaned. “Who are you and what do you want with me?”
Ignoring me, she dragged me out of the maze and we stepped out onto a dark, featureless landscape. The only light source was the faint glimmer of an almost total eclipse of a huge, rust-red moon that hung low in the sky.
“Where are we?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“Home,” the woman said. “The heart of the city. Hush now. They come.”
