A Yuletide Universe Page 8

  For a moment Beelzebub’s face formed in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

  “You want what?”

  Beelzebub was part elephant, part wasp. The Yattering was terrified.

  “I—want to die.”

  “You cannot die.”

  “From this world. Just die from this world. Fade away. Be replaced.”

  “You will not die.”

  “But I can’t break him!” the Yattering shrieked, tearful.

  “You must.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we tell you to.” Beelzebub always used the Royal “we,” though unqualified to do so.

  “Let me at least know why I’m in this house,” the Yattering appealed. “What is he? Nothing! He’s nothing!”

  Beelzebub found this rich. He laughed, buzzed, trumpeted.

  “Jack Johnson Polo is the child of a worshipper at the Church of Lost Salvation. He belongs to us.”

  “But why should you want him? He’s so dull.”

  “We want him because his soul was promised to us, and his mother did not deliver it. Or herself, come to that. She cheated us. She died in the arms of a priest, and was safely escorted to—”

  The word that followed was anathema. The Lord of the Flies could barely bring himself to pronounce it.

  “—Heaven,” said Beelzebub, with infinite loss in his voice.

  “Heaven,” said the Yattering, not knowing quite what was meant by the word.

  “Polo is to be hounded in the name of the Old One, and punished for his mother’s crimes. No torment is too profound for a family that has cheated us.”

  “I’m tired,” the Yattering pleaded, daring to approach the mirror. “Please. I beg you.”

  “Claim this man,” said Beelzebub, “or you will suffer in his place.”

  The figure in the mirror waved its black and yellow trunk and faded.

  “Where is your pride?” said the master’s voice as it shriveled into distance. “Pride, Yattering, pride.”

  Then he was gone.

  In its frustration the Yattering picked up the cat and threw it into the fire, where it was rapidly cremated. If only the law allowed such easy cruelty to be visited upon human flesh, it thought. If only. If only. Then it’d make Polo suffer such torments. But no. The Yattering knew the laws as well as the back of its hand; they had been flayed on to its exposed cortex as a fledgling demon by its teachers. And Law One stated: “Thou shalt not lay palm upon thy victims.”

  It had never been told why this law pertained, but it did.

  “Thou shalt not . . .”

  So the whole painful process continued. Day in, day out, and still the man showed no sign of yielding. Over the next few weeks the Yattering killed two more cats that Polo brought home to replace his treasured Freddy (now ash).

  The first of these poor victims was drowned in the toilet bowl one idle Friday afternoon. It was a petty satisfaction to see the look of distaste register on Polo’s face as he unzipped his fly and glanced down. But any pleasure the Yattering took in Jack’s discomfiture was canceled out by the blithely efficient way in which the man dealt with the dead cat, hoisting the bundle of soaking fur out of the pan, wrapping it in a towel and burying it in the back garden with scarcely a murmur.

  The third cat that Polo brought home was wise to the invisible presence of the demon from the start. There was indeed an entertaining week in mid-November when life for the Yattering became almost interesting while it played cat and mouse with Freddy the Third. Freddy played the mouse. Cats not being especially bright animals the game was scarcely a great intellectual challenge, but it made a change from the endless days of waiting, haunting and failing. At least the creature accepted the Yattering’s presence. Eventually however, in a filthy mood (caused by the remarriage of the Yattering’s naked widow) the demon lost its temper with the cat. It was sharpening its nails on the nylon carpet, clawing and scratching at the pile for hours on end. The noise put the demon’s metaphysical teeth on edge. It looked at the cat once, briefly, and it flew apart as though it had swallowed a live grenade.

  The effect was spectacular. The results were gross. Cat-brain, cat-fur, cat-gut everywhere.

  Polo got home that evening exhausted, and stood in the doorway of the dining room, his face sickened, surveying the carnage that had been Freddy III.

  “Damn dogs,” he said. “Damn, damn dogs.”

  There was anger in his voice. Yes, exulted the Yattering, anger. The man was upset: there was clear evidence of emotion on his face.

  Elated, the demon raced through the house, determined to capitalize on its victory. It opened and slammed every door. It smashed vases. It set the lampshades swinging.

  Polo just cleaned up the cat.

  The Yattering threw itself downstairs, tore up a pillow. Impersonated a thing with a limp and an appetite for human flesh in the attic, and giggling.

  Polo just buried Freddy III, beside the grave of Freddy II, and the ashes of Freddy I.

  Then he retired to bed, without his pillow.

  The demon was utterly stumped. If the man could not raise more than a flicker of concern when his cat was exploded in the dining room, what chance had it got of ever breaking the bastard?

  There was one last opportunity left.

  It was approaching Christ’s Mass, and Jack’s children would be coming home to the bosom of the family. Perhaps they could convince him that all was not well with the world; perhaps they could get their fingernails under his flawless indifference, and begin to break him down. Hoping against hope, the Yattering sat out the weeks to late December, planning its attacks with all the imaginative malice it could muster.

  Meanwhile, Jack’s life sauntered on. He seemed to live apart from his experience, living his life as an author might write a preposterous story, never involving himself in the narrative too deeply. In several significant ways, however, he showed his enthusiasm for the coming holiday. He cleared his daughters’ rooms immaculately. He made their beds up with sweet-smelling linen. He cleaned every speck of cat’s blood out of the carpet. He even set up a Christmas tree in the lounge, hung with iridescent balls, tinsel and presents.

  Once in a while, as he went about the preparations, Jack thought of the game he was playing, and quietly calculated the odds against him. In the days to come he would have to measure not only his own suffering, but that of his daughters, against the possible victory. And always, when he made these calculations, the chance of victory seemed to outweigh the risks.

  So he continued to write his life, and waited.

  Snow came, soft pats of it against the windows, against the door. Children arrived to sing carols, and he was generous to them. It was possible, for a brief time, to believe in peace on earth.

  Late in the evening of the twenty-third of December the daughters arrived, in a flurry of cases and kisses. The younger, Amanda, arrived home first. From its vantage point on the landing the Yattering viewed the young woman balefully. She didn’t look like ideal material in which to induce a breakdown. In fact, she looked dangerous. Gina followed an hour or two later; a smoothly polished woman of the world at twenty-four, she looked every bit as intimidating as her sister. They came into the house with their bustle and their laughter; they rearranged the furniture; they threw out the junk food in the freezer; they told each other (and their father) how much they had missed each other’s company. Within the space of a few hours the drab house was repainted with light, and fun and love.

  It made the Yattering sick.

  Whimpering, it hid its head in the bedroom to block out the din of affection, but the shock-waves enveloped it. All it could do was sit, and listen, and refine its revenge.

  Jack was pleased to have his beauties home. Amanda so full of opinions, and so strong, like her mother. Gina more like his mother: poised, perceptive. He was so happy in their presence he could have wept; and here was he, the proud father, putting them both at such risk. But what was the alternative? If he had canceled the Chris
tmas celebrations, it would have looked highly suspicious. It might even have spoiled his whole strategy, wakening the enemy to the trick that was being played.

  No; he must sit tight. Play dumb, the way the enemy had come to expect him to be.

  The time would come for action.

  At 3:15 a.m. on Christmas morning the Yattering opened hostilities by throwing Amanda out of bed. A paltry performance at best, but it had the intended effect. Sleepily rubbing her bruised head, she climbed back into bed, only to have the bed buck and shake and fling her off again like an unbroken colt.

  The noise woke the rest of the house. Gina was first in her sister’s room.

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s somebody under the bed.”

  “What?”

  Gina picked up a paperweight from the dresser and demanded the assailant come out. The Yattering, invisible, sat on the windowseat and made obscene gestures at the women, tying knots in its genitalia.

  Gina peered under the bed. The Yattering was clinging to the light fixture now, persuading it to swing backwards and forwards, making the room reel.

  “There’s nothing there—”

  “There is.”

  Amanda knew. Oh yes, she knew.

  “There’s something here, Gina,” she said. “Something in the room with us, I’m sure of it.”

  “No.” Gina was absolute. “It’s empty.”

  Amanda was searching behind the wardrobe when Polo came in.

  “What’s all the din?”

  “There’s something in the house, Daddy. I was thrown out of bed.”

  Jack looked at the crumpled sheets, the dislodged mattress, then at Amanda. This was the first test: he must lie as casually as possible.

  “Looks like you’ve been having nightmares, beauty,” he said, affecting an innocent smile.

  “There was something under the bed,” Amanda insisted.

  “There’s nobody here now.”

  “But I felt it.”

  “Well I’ll check the rest of the house,” he offered, without enthusiasm for the task. “You two stay here, just in case.”

  As Polo left the room, the Yattering rocked the light a little more.

  “Subsidence,” said Gina.

  It was cold downstairs, and Polo could have done without padding around barefoot on the kitchen tiles, but he was quietly satisfied that the battle had been joined in such a petty manner. He’d half-feared that the enemy would turn savage with such tender victims at hand. But no: he’d judged the mind of the creature quite accurately. It was one of the lower orders. Powerful, but slow. Capable of being inveigled beyond the limits of its control. Carefully does it, he told himself, carefully does it.

  He traipsed through the entire house, dutifully opening cupboards and peering behind the furniture, then returned to his daughters, who were sitting at the top of the stairs. Amanda looked small and pale, not the twenty-two-year-old woman she was, but a child again.

  “Nothing doing,” he told her with a smile. “It’s Christmas morning and all through the house—”

  Gina finished the rhyme.

  “Nothing is stirring; not even a mouse.”

  “Not even a mouse, beauty.”

  At that moment the Yattering took its cue to fling a vase off the lounge mantelpiece.

  Even Jack jumped.

  “Shit,” he said. He needed some sleep, but quite clearly the Yattering had no intention of letting them alone just yet.

  “Che sera, sera,” he murmured, scooping up the pieces of the Chinese vase, and putting them in a piece of newspaper. “The house is sinking a little on the left side, you know,” he said more loudly. “It has been for years.”

  “Subsidence,” said Amanda with quiet certainty, “would not throw me out of my bed.”

  Gina said nothing. The options were limited. The alternatives unattractive.

  “Well maybe it was Santa Claus,” said Polo, attempting levity. He parceled up the pieces of the vase and wandered through into the kitchen, certain that he was being shadowed every step of the way. “What else can it be?” He threw the question over his shoulder as he stuffed the newspaper into the wastebin. “The only other explanation—” here he became almost elated by his skimming so close to the truth, “the only other possible explanation is too preposterous for words.”

  It was an exquisite irony, denying the existence of the invisible world in the full knowledge that even now it breathed vengefully down his neck.

  “You mean poltergeist?” said Gina.

  “I mean anything that goes bang in the night. But, we’re grown-up people aren’t we? We don’t believe in Bogeymen.”

  “No,” said Gina flatly, “I don’t, but I don’t believe the house is subsiding either.”

  “Well, it’ll have to do for now,” said Jack with nonchalant finality. “Christmas starts here. We don’t want to spoil it talking about gremlins, now, do we?”

  They laughed together.

  Gremlins. That surely bit deep. To call the Hellspawn a gremlin.

  The Yattering, weak with frustration, acid tears boiling on its intangible cheeks, ground its teeth and kept its peace.

  There would be time yet to beat that atheistic smile off Jack Polo’s smooth, fat face. Time aplenty. No half-measures from now on. No subtlety. It would be an all out attack.

  Let there be blood. Let there be agony.

  They’d all break.

  * * *

  Amanda was in the kitchen, preparing Christmas dinner, when the Yattering mounted its next attack. Through the house drifted the sound of King’s College Choir, “O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie . . .”

  The presents had been opened, the G and T’s were being downed, the house was one warm embrace from roof to cellar.

  In the kitchen a sudden chill permeated the heat and the steam, making Amanda shiver; she crossed to the window, which was ajar to clear the air, and closed it. Maybe she was catching something.

  The Yattering watched her back as she busied herself about the kitchen, enjoying the domesticity for a day. Amanda felt the stare quite clearly. She turned round. Nobody, nothing. She continued to wash the Brussels sprouts, cutting into one with a worm curled in the middle. She drowned it.

  The Choir sang on.

  In the lounge, Jack was laughing with Gina about something.

  Then, a noise. A rattling at first, followed by a beating of somebody’s fists against a door. Amanda dropped the knife into the bowl of sprouts, and turned from the sink, following the sound. It was getting louder all the time. Like something locked in one of the cupboards, desperate to escape. A cat caught in the box, or a—

  Bird.

  It was coming from the oven.

  Amanda’s stomach turned, as she began to imagine the worst. Had she locked something in the oven when she’d put in the turkey? She called for her father, as she snatched up the oven cloth and stepped towards the stove, which was rocking with the panic of its prisoner. She had visions of a basted cat leaping out at her, its fur burned off, its flesh half-cooked.

  Jack was at the kitchen door.

  “There’s something in the oven,” she said to him, as though he needed telling. The stove was in a frenzy; its thrashing contents had all but beaten off the door.

  He took the oven cloth from her. This is a new one, he thought. You’re better than I judged you to be. This is clever. This is original.

  Gina was in the kitchen now.

  “What’s cooking?” she quipped.

  But the joke was lost as the stove began to dance, and the pans of boiling water were twitched off the burners on to the floor. Scalding water seared Jack’s leg. He yelled, stumbling back into Gina, before diving at the stove with a yell that wouldn’t have shamed a Samurai.

  The oven handle was slippery with heat and grease, but he seized it and flung the door down.

  A wave of steam and blistering heat rolled out of the oven, smelling of succulent turkey-fat. But the b
ird inside had apparently no intentions of being eaten. It was flinging itself from side to side on the roasting tray, tossing gouts of gravy in all directions. Its crisp brown wings pitifully flailed and flapped, its legs beat a tattoo on the roof of the oven.

  Then it seemed to sense the open door. Its wings stretched themselves out to either side of its stuffed bulk and it half hopped, half fell on to the oven door, in a mockery of its living self. Headless, oozing stuffing and onions, it flopped around as though nobody had told the damn thing it was dead, while the fat still bubbled on its bacon-strewn back.

  Amanda screamed.

  Jack dived for the door as the bird lurched into the air, blind but vengeful. What it intended to do once it reached its three cowering victims was never discovered. Gina dragged Amanda into the hallway with her father in hot pursuit, and the door was slammed closed as the blind bird flung itself against the paneling, beating on it with all its strength. Gravy seeped through the gap at the bottom of the door, dark and fatty.

  The door had no lock, but Jack reasoned that the bird was not capable of turning the handle. As he backed away, breathless, he cursed his confidence. The opposition had more up its sleeve than he’d guessed.

  Amanda was leaning against the wall sobbing, her face stained with splotches of turkey grease. All she seemed able to do was deny what she’d seen, shaking her head and repeating the word “no” like a talisman against the ridiculous horror that was still throwing itself against the door. Jack escorted her through to the lounge. The radio was still crooning carols which blotted out the din of the bird, but their promises of goodwill seemed small comfort.

  Gina poured a hefty brandy for her sister and sat beside her on the sofa, plying her with spirits and reassurance in about equal measure. They made little impression on Amanda.

  “What was that?” Gina asked her father, in a tone that demanded an answer.

  “I don’t know what it was,” Jack replied.

  “Mass hysteria?” Gina’s displeasure was plain. Her father had a secret: he knew what was going on in the house, but he was refusing to cough up for some reason.

  “What do I call: the police or an exorcist?”

  “Neither.”