“Have you spent all these years thinking that?”
“She told me.”
“Emmeline?” I ask, my heart breaking. Surely not my mother. Surely not my Emmeline.
“No, her.” He jerks his chin towards a tree and next to it sits the fox, now unnaturally large as if it may change its size at will. As the moon shifts and clouds obscure part of the silver disk, there seems to be a woman in the animal’s place, with neat dark hair and sharp features, watching spitefully as my beautiful mother drudges in filth. The moon’s face clears and once more there is merely a fox. “She has been my friend all these years.”
“What’s her name, Thomas?”
“Sylvia.”
“Do you know who she was? What lies has she told you?”
“The dead don’t tell each other lies,” he sniffs, but it’s unconvincing and I feel I can go on.
“She was Father’s wife. She’s the one who killed you.”
There’s a sharp bark from the fox. I can’t tell if it’s a protest or a laugh.
“You’re lying. You’ll say anything to stop me living.”
“Thomas, if you wake Emmeline and ask her, she’ll tell you. You trust her, don’t you? You trust your mother.”
“If I wake her she won’t finish.”
“Yes, she will, if I’m lying! She’ll want to show you – she’ll want you back, you’re her first-born.” Oh please, oh please, oh please let it be a lie! I need to know as much as he does, how true our mother’s heart is.
He’s reluctant. I wonder that the fox-bride doesn’t take on her human body, yell at me, stop my dissident tongue, but perhaps she can’t. Perhaps this is her punishment, that she can only flicker between one form and another, never able to hold onto a woman’s shape, try though she might; never able to speak with more than the bark of a fox and in a tongue only the dead can understand.
“Wake Emmeline, Thomas. Wake her. If I lie, then what’s to lose? If I lie then why should your friend object to me being found out?” Above the fox I can see something stirring the leaves of the tree, ever-so-subtly, ever-so-quietly that not even Sylvia notices.
Thomas doesn’t see either. He shifts his attention to our mother and calls out softly. “Mother? Oh, Mother-mine, wake up.”
Emmeline blinks and shakes her head. She takes in her hands and the black marks on her nightgown and the dark stains of clay and mud streaking up her forearms. Thomas stands over her and helps her up. None of the muck on her rubs off on him, as if his substance will not allow anything to stick.
Emmeline looks at me, her eyes confused, her expression pleading. Oh, please explain, my Rosamund. How to do so? How to say it without angering this frightful spirit?
“Emmeline.” I’m wary of calling her Mother in front of so jealous a brother. “Emmeline, this is Thomas, your first-born. He has a question for you. He has been waiting for so long to come back to us – to you.”
Her eyes flash and I hope I see understanding there. Emmeline and her talented hands, Emmeline and her strong will; Emmeline who did what she did all those years ago. My mother is clever and quick.
“Mother, how did I die? How was I lost to you?”
She flicks a look at me and I give a barely perceptible nod. I have known this story as long as I can remember, heard it at Tildy’s knee before Emmeline could stop her. Heard it so I might know who my mother was and how special she was, what she could and would do to protect her family.
“Your father’s first wife cursed me.”
Thomas howls as if stuck with a knife and the fox barks sharp enough to hurt my ears. She makes to disappear into the shadows but a dark lumpen shape drops from the boughs above and scoops her up, holding tight as tight can be so she can neither nip nor struggle. The hands are gnarled but very strong and they wrap around the animal’s throat with an astonishing speed and begin to squeeze. One moment it is a fox, the next a young woman with a thin neck, the next a fox again; one barks, the other cries out; in the end both are silent. A limp red carcass dangles in my strange friend’s grip.
Now there is Thomas to deal with.
He looks so stricken and already he seems . . . thinner. I think I can see through him to the faint outlines of gravestones. He has been held here by belief and memory, and now his foundation has been shaken to its core, shown to be false.
I feel sorry for my brother.
He shakes where he stands. The mud at his feet seems to suck up at him. “Mother,” he whimpers. “Don’t you want me back?”
“I never really had you, lovely boy. I miss you, Thomas, I truly do.”
“Wouldn’t you rather me, though? Me, not her? I was the one you were supposed to have.”
“But I do not love Rosamund less. She did not take anything from you, she did not replace you. You must understand, Thomas, that I would not have you instead of her. You were taken from me so long ago. I grieve every day, but I know I cannot have you back.”
“You don’t mean that,” he screams. The mud is now most certainly sucking at his lower limbs but he does not seem to notice. Emmeline smiles and nods.
“Yes, I do, my darling boy. I love you but I will not exchange my rosa mundi for you. And I will not forgive you if you harm your sister.” She reaches out to put a gentle hand on his chest. Her palm meets something not quite solid, sinking further into his flesh than it should.
“Mother,” he whimpers and he weeps. “Don’t you love me?”
“Ah, so much, so much. Yes. And I will miss you forever.”
He sinks to his knees, suddenly weak. Emmeline kneels beside him and cradles him against her. I can see through him, now, to the ground beneath. She strokes his face but her fingers begin to dip beneath the skin as he loses solidity, loses his form.
Thomas wanted nothing more than to be loved, to have his chance with our family. He had only a child’s selfish desire for something with no idea that there are some things we cannot have. This night, I understand my brother. One day I may weep for him and one day I may forgive him. Until then I give him what I can. I sit next to him and hold his rapidly fading hand. He looks at me with moon-washed eyes; I’m not sure he can see me anymore.
Robbed of his power, of Emmeline’s yearning memory, he becomes shadow and recollection, nothing more. In a few more beats of the night, he is gone and there are only Emmeline and I and our strange ally.
We rise and move towards the creature, who is hunched and wizened. It’s dressed in rags that were once proper clothes. The fox’s corpse is rotting now, quite rapidly, and the not-quite-human-not-quite-troll throws the body as far away as it can.
I notice that Emmeline’s green eyes more or less match those of the weird human-ish thing. It – she, it is obviously a she – gives a shy smile and a curiously graceful curtsey. My silver ring, which fell into the mud when my brother’s hand dissolved, is cold in my palm. I hold it out to her. She looks pleased and slips it onto one enlarged knuckle and pushes with determination until it pops over and dangles around the thin digit. With a nod of thanks, she turns to the yew tree once again and climbs swiftly, her large feet and hands finding holds not obvious to the eye.
“Who is she?” I ask.
Emmeline shakes her head. “My father had varied tastes, Rosie. I think the hair and eyes tell a story.”
She holds me close and there is no place nicer or kinder than in my mother’s arms. I think of Thomas, deprived of this, a cold lad his whole life. I hope the last memory of our mother holding him sustains him in his final sleep. I hope he will not be forever alone in the dark.
JOE R. LANSDALE
Christmas with the Dead
JOE R. LANSDALE LIVES in East Texas with his wife, Karen. The author of over thirty novels and two hundred short stories and articles, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the British Fantasy Award, the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker Awards, Italy’s Grinzani Cavour Prize, and many others. In 2007 he received the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention.
His novella Bubba Ho-tep was filmed in 2002 by producer/director Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis, while his story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” became the first episode of Showtime Networks’ Masters of Horror series, from the same director.
Lansdale’s most recent novel is Devil Red, the latest in his best-selling series of quirky crime novels featuring mismatched investigators Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, which includes such titles as Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous and Vanilla Ride.
“I wrote ‘Christmas with the Dead’ simply because I wanted to write a holiday horror story,” Lansdale admits. “This was the result.
“Currently it is in pre-production to be filmed in June. That’s right – Christmas in June, an alteration in the screenplay written by my son, Keith, based on the story. As a film, this looks to be a hoot.”
IT WAS A FOOLISH thing to do, and Calvin had not bothered with it the last two years, not since the death of his wife and daughter, but this year, this late morning, the loneliness and the monotony led him to it. He decided quite suddenly, having kept fairly good record on the calendar, that tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and zombies be damned. The Christmas lights and decorations were going up.
He went into the garage to look for the lights. He could hear the zombies sniffing around outside the garage door. The door was down and locked tight, and on top of that, though the zombies could grab and bite you, they weren’t terribly strong most of the time, so the door was secure. The windows inside were boarded over, the doors were locked, and double locked, and boarded. The back yard the dead owned, but the windows and doors were boarded really well there, so he was shut in tight and safe.
Prowling through the holiday ornaments, he found immediately the large plastic Santa, and three long strings of lights.
He managed all of the strings of lights into his living room. He plugged the wires into the extension cord that was hooked up to the generator he had put in the kitchen, and discovered most of the lights were as dead as the proverbial dodo bird. Many were broken from him having ripped the whole thing off the house in anger two years back.
He sat for a moment, then went to the little refrigerator he had replaced the big one with – used less energy – and pulled a bottled coffee out, twisted off the cap, and walked over to the living-room window.
Unlike the garage on the side of the house, or the back yard, he had fenced the front yard off with deeply buried iron bars to which he had attached chicken wire, overlapped with barb wire. The fence rose to a height of eight feet. The gate, also eight feet tall, was made of the same. He seldom used it. He mostly went out and back in through the garage. There was no fence there. When he went out, they were waiting.
More often than not, he was able to run over and crush a few before hitting the door device, closing the garage behind him. On the way back, he rammed a few more, and with the touch of a button, sealed himself inside. When they were thin in the yard, he used that time to stack the bodies in his pickup truck, haul them somewhere to dump. It kept the stink down that way. Also, the rotting flesh tended to attract the hungry dead. The less he made them feel at home, the better.
Today, looking through the gaps between the boards nailed over the window, he could see the zombies beyond the fence. They were pulling at the wire, but it was firm and they were weak. He had discovered, strangely, that as it grew darker, they grew stronger. Nothing spectacular, but enough he could notice it. They were definitely faster then. It was as if the day made them sluggish, and the night rejuvenated them; gave them a shot of energy, like maybe the moon was their mistress.
He noticed too, that though there were plenty of them, there were fewer every day. He knew why. He had seen the results, not only around town, but right outside his fence. From time to time they just fell apart.
It was plain old natural disintegration. As time rolled on, their dead and rotten bodies came apart. For some reason, not as fast as was normal, but still, they did indeed break down. Of course, if they bit someone, they would become zombies, fresher ones, but, after the last six months there were few if any people left in town, besides himself. He didn’t know how it was outside of town, but he assumed the results were similar. The zombies now, from time to time, turned on one another, eating what flesh they could manage to bite off each other’s rotten bones. Dogs, cats, snakes, anything they could get their hands on, had been devastated. It was a new world, and it sucked. And sometimes it chewed.
Back in the garage, Calvin gathered up the six, large, plastic snowmen and the Santa, and pulled them into the house. He plugged them in and happily discovered they lit right up. But the strings of lights were still a problem. He searched the garage, and only found three spare bulbs – green ones – and when he screwed them in, only one worked. If he put up those strings they would be patchy. It wasn’t as if anyone but himself would care, but a job worth doing was a job worth doing right, as his dad always said.
He smiled.
Ella, his wife, would have said it wasn’t about doing a job right, it was more about fulfilling his compulsions. She would laugh at him now. Back then a crooked picture on the wall would make him crazy. Now there was nothing neat about the house. It was a fortress. It was a mess. It was a place to stay, but it wasn’t a home.
Two years ago it ended being a home when he shot his wife and daughter in the head with the twelve gauge, put their bodies in the dumpster down the street, poured gas on them, and set them on fire.
All atmosphere of home was gone. Now, with him being the most desirable snack in town, just going outside the fence was a dangerous endeavour. And being inside he was as lonely as the guest of honour at a firing squad.
Calvin picked the strapped shotgun off the couch and flung it over his shoulder, adjusted the .38 revolver in his belt, grabbed the old-fashioned tire tool from where it leaned in the corner, and went back to the garage.
He cranked up the truck, which he always backed in, and using the automatic garage opener, pressed it.
He had worked hard on the mechanism so that it would rise quickly and smoothly, and today was no exception. It yawned wide like a mouth opening. Three zombies, one he recognised faintly as Marilyn Paulson, a girl he had dated in high school, were standing outside. She had been his first love, his first sexual partner, and now half of her face dangled like a wash cloth on a clothesline. Her hair was falling out, and her eyes were set far back in her head, like dark marbles in crawfish holes.
The two others were men. One was reasonably fresh, but Calvin didn’t recognise him. The other was his next door neighbour, Phil Tooney. Phil looked close to just falling apart, and so was his nose.
As Calvin roared the big four-seater pickup out of the garage, he hit Marilyn with the bumper and she went under, the wing mirror clipped Phil and sent him winding. He glanced in the rearview as he hit the garage mechanism, was pleased to see the door go down before the standing zombie could get inside. From time to time they got in when he left or returned, and he had to seal them in, get out and fight or shoot them. It was a major annoyance, knowing you had that waiting for you when you got back from town.
The last thing he saw as he drove away was the remaining zombie eating a mashed Marilyn as she squirmed on the driveway; he had shattered her legs with the truck. She was unable to rise or fight back. The way its teeth bit into her, the skin stretched, it looked as if it was trying to pull old bubble gum loose from the sidewalk.
Another glance in the mirror showed him Phil was back on his feet. He and the other zombie got into it then, fighting over the writhing meal on the cement. And then Calvin turned the truck along Seal Street, out of their view, and rolled on toward town.
Driving, he glanced at all the Christmas decorations. The lights strung on houses, no longer lit. The yard decorations, most of them knocked over: Baby Jesus flung south from an overturned manger, a deflated blow-up Santa Claus in a sleigh with hooked-up reindeer, now laying lik
e a puddle of lumpy paint spills in the high grass of a yard fronting a house with an open door.
As he drove, Calvin glanced at the dumpster by the side of the road. The one where he had put the bodies of his wife and daughter and burned them. It was, as far as he was concerned, their tomb.
One morning, driving into town for supplies, a morning like this, he had seen zombies in the dumpster, chewing at bones, strings of flesh. It had driven him crazy. He had pulled over right then and there and shotgunned them, blowing off two heads, and crushing in two others with the butt of the twelve gauge. Then, he had pulled the tire tool from his belt and beat their corpses to pieces. It had been easy, as they were rotten and ragged and almost gone. It was the brain being destroyed that stopped them, either that or their own timely disintegration, which with the destruction of the brain caused the rot to accelerate. But even with them down for the count, he kept whacking at them, screaming and crying as he did.
He swallowed as he drove by. Had he not been napping after a hard day’s work, waiting on dinner, then he too would have been like Ella and Tina. He wasn’t sure which was worse, becoming one of them, not knowing anything or anyone anymore, being eternally hungry, or surviving, losing his wife and daughter and having to remember them every day.
Mud Creek’s Super Saver parking lot was full of cars and bones and wind-blown shopping carts. A few zombies were wandering about. Some were gnawing the bones of the dead. A little child was down on her knees in the centre of the lot gnawing on the head of a kitten.
As he drove up close to the Super Saver’s side door, he got out quickly, with his key ready, the truck locked, the shotgun on his shoulder, and the tire tool in his belt.
He had, days after it all came down, finished off the walking dead in the Super Market with his shotgun, and pulled their bodies out for the ones outside to feast on. While this went on, he found the electronic lock for the sliding plasti-glass doors, and he located the common doors at side and back, and found their keys. With the store sealed, he knew he could come in the smaller doors whenever he wanted, shop for canned and dried goods. The electricity was still working then, but in time, he feared it might go out. So he decided the best way to go was to start with the meats and fresh vegetables. They lasted for about six weeks. And then, for whatever reason, the electricity died.
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