A Christmas Ghost Story E-Book

Kim Newman

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 192

Beschreibung

From the acclaimed author of Anno Dracula, the perfect gift for those who love the dark fantastic imaginations of Neil Gaiman and T. Kingfisher, this is a nightmarish tale of a haunted Christmas set deep in the British countryside not too long ago. Cosy traditions are made twisted and terrifying as a mother and son grapple with their painful past. December 1st. Angie and her teenage son Rust prepare for Christmas, stringing fairy lights around their isolated home on the Somerset levels and decorating a tree with traditional ornaments. The first door of the advent calendar is opened, but the chocolate inside tastes off. Rust receives his first Christmas card, it's unsigned and the message is 'pinch, punch… first of the month'. The robin chirruping on a bough in a snowy woodland picture looks like a nasty piece of work. The cards keep coming, one each day and each more sinister than the last, and a frightened Angie recalls The Cards - a seasonal TV show from her childhood that featured similar happenings, and while she remembers it vividly, there is no evidence that it was ever broadcast… Christmas cheer is gradually poisoned, with cruels instead of carols, the turkey rotting in the fridge, unwelcome visits from the Merciless Gentlemen and the Jingle Basterds, and Rust becoming increasingly unwell. Angie begins to wonder if her childhood Christmases were in fact as joy filled as she remembers… A frightening tale of seasonal dread from a master of horror.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Kim Newman and available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

December the First

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Kim Newmanand available from Titan Books

Anno Dracula

Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha

Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard

Anno Dracula: One Thousand Monsters

Anno Dracula: Seven Days in Mayhem (graphic novel)

Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju

The Night Mayor

Bad Dreams

Jago

The Quorum

Life’s Lottery

The Man From the Diogenes Club

Professor Moriarty: Hound of the D’Urbervilles

An English Ghost Story

Angels of Music

The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

Something More Than Night

Video Dungeon (non-fiction)

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.co.uk,

Goodreads,

Barnes & Noble,

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

A Christmas Ghost StoryPrint edition ISBN: 9781835410691Signed edition ISBN: 9781835411957E-book edition ISBN: 9781835410660

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UPwww.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 202410 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Kim Newman 2024.

Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Lydia

‘The following programme is not suitable for those of a nervous disposition or children who should be in their beds…’

DECEMBER THE FIRST.

Half past two in the afternoon.

THE SOMERSET LEVELS. Greyer than green.

Rust cycled along the A road from the County Town. Hours before dusk, he had his lights on.

Low, heavy cloud. Standing pools in flat fields. Brimming ditches.

Three years ago, the levels flooded over the holidays. The Six Elms Cut-Off became impassable. Rust and his mother survived till January on Christmas tree chocs and back-of-the-larder tins. Mum kept saying ‘mustn’t grumble, there’s a war on’. He didn’t get the joke. The council said it couldn’t happen again. Rust didn’t trust the council to tell the truth about extreme weather events. The Knell of Doom podcast had more credibility. Their advice for his postcode was ‘buy a boat’.

His bicycle wheels cut a line through mud-film on the road. His face pushed into spits. The aerodynamic Gargantuabot Rex helmet protected his ears. This wasn’t proper rain. Just water in the air.

He was cycling through the Next Village Over when the Christmas Wars kicked off.

A thousand and one lights came on.

It had started with the first house past the village sign. They initiated hostilities years before the flood. Officially, their look was Traditional Christmas. More lighting effects than stadium rock. Fairy lights around every window and strangling every bush. Basically, Bling Christmas.

From a bed of artificial snow, a plaster golem with million-watt LED eyes surveyed the battlefront. Its white football head swivelled like a security camera. Fixed to the roof with hurricane-resistant wire, the Amazing Colossal Father Christmas sat atop a sleigh pulled by reindeer kaiju. A ‘ho ho ho’ loop would play until Twelfth Night…

At first, the rest of the village got up a petition to shut down the display.

When that only made the aggressor add more lights, they returned fire. The fad went viral. Neighbours would literally not be outshone.

The house across the road declared Vegas Christmas. Bigger, brighter, more blaring. Neon tubes and audio loops of snippets from Sinatra Sings Swinging Carols or whatever the Rat Pack Christmas album was called. Mum had it on vinyl. Mob boss Santa with eyes like angry ball bearings glared across the road at the snow sentinel. Vegas deer wore shades and packed heat.

It didn’t stop there.

All through the village, systems came to life. Rust cycled down the road, veering as if dodging shellfire. Some displays would require age verification if they were websites. Rust had learned how to seem over eighteen online before he was twelve. He wasn’t shocked by Porn Christmas (mooning Santa, sexy girl elves, obscene gnomes) or Horror Christmas (axe-wielding Saint Nick, zombie reindeer, ghost snowman).

It was a good thing afternoon traffic was light or there’d be nasty accidents. Every year, bedazzled passers-through drove into the ditch by the Coaching Inn. In the snug, Garage Gary waited for accidents like the wreckers who lured ships on the rocks. Mum would hire a horse and haul her car ten miles to Yeovil for servicing to avoid being plundered by Garage Gary.

The wars had gone on too long and cost too much time, money and mental strain… but the village collectively went even more nuts and stuck at it no matter what the council, the fire safety officer or a few clergymen said. Now Rust had seen it, he’d avoid cycling this way until February.

At the Y-fork past the Coaching Inn, he turned off the A road onto the B road – the only way into Sutton Mallet. The B road wasn’t gritted. Low-hanging branches weren’t trimmed.

He slowed a little, running low on puff.

‘Gargantuabots, go go go,’ he said.

The battle call spurred him on.

Sutton Mallet didn’t hold with the Christmas Wars. A bare minimum of decorations was their policy. Holly and mistletoe. Plain lights. Season’s Greetings. Nothing to attract attention.

The Next Village Over got on local news every year. Mr Bling would be interviewed, neighbours fuming in the background. A vicar would express qualified approval. ITV West would blur images behind Mr Porn and Miss Horror. Uncensored footage would be on the net by midnight.

Three minutes on local news was what it was all about. Highlight of the year.

Not for Sutton Mallet. They didn’t want to be on local news. Or national. Or live-streamed. Or bothered at all.

They’d had too much of that, thank you very much.

Sutton Mallet wasn’t overly keen on Rust’s Paraphenomenon Pod either. Expressions like ‘most haunted village in England’ provoked overly cheerful suggestions he should get outdoors in the fresh air – hah! – and not let his eyes go googly staring at screens all the time. He be daft to put credit in old spook tales. If ghosties there be, best they be left to thesselves, my lover, eh?

Even at wheezing speed, Rust shot through Sutton Mallet inside a minute. Houses (not many), church, tiny triangular green, pillar box… then more B road and almost total dark. No street lighting on the levels.

A reflective roadside sign flashed ‘Cats Eyes Removed’.

Mum said it was a service offered at Daintry Farm, along with ‘Fresh Eggs and Corn Dollies’. Rust never believed her. They didn’t have cats at Six Elms, so they’d no need for eye removals.

There was a water bowl at home with the name ‘Fillip’ glazed in the rim. Mum clammed up when asked about it, still not over a trauma forty-plus years later. Rust didn’t know whether Fillip had been a cat or a dog or a whatever. Had it really been called Fillip – a boost or stimulus – or had Little Angie not known how to spell Philip? She still couldn’t spell a lot of words, which ought to be an issue for an author. Mum said she thought ahead too fast to look up spellings or quibble about whiches and thats. The computer fixed any mistakes. She didn’t get that a sub-routine of her word processing program did the spell-check, not the computer – which was just a box. She also wasn’t into having it explained to her for the umpty-fifth time.

Fillip remained a mystery. Even Nana in Germany changed the subject if it came up. Still, there was no enthusiasm for throwing out the dry bowl or even shoving it at the back of a cupboard. At Christmas, the bowl had a ritual use.

Six Elms wasn’t in Sutton Mallet but a mile and a half beyond the village at the end of the Cut-Off. The Cut-Off wasn’t even a C road – more a C minus, with a scribbled ‘could do better if it tried’. The three-hundred-yard obstacle course could be cycled or walked by the brave, but only two motor vehicles were nippy enough to negotiate each dip and swerve. One was Mum’s not remotely new Hatch Mini. The other was the Milk Float, an electric Royal Mail post-van. Post-Lady Petal cheerfully delivered to the farthest outposts of civilisation.

Coming up to the Cut-Off, Rust saw orange lights wobbling through the gloom and heard a zzzhh sound. The sort of phenomenon misdiagnosed as para by normies. He recognised the roof-rim lights of the Milk Float.

The van slid out of Six Elms Cut-Off as Rust reached the turning. Its horn parped ‘pa-rum-pa-pum-pum’ at him. A December option. The usual honk was ‘cu-cu-cucu-ra-cha’.

He leaned his bike backwards so the Milk Float could pass without squashing him. The driver wasn’t Post-Lady Petal. Rust had the impression of a face under a cap. A white face. Petal was Jamaican. Leaning into the verge meant brushing wet shrubbery. This side of Sutton Mallet, roads were hemmed by hedges rather than ditches. Twigs scraped his helmet.

The Milk Float’s rear lights receded. Not a UFO. An IDO – Identified Driven Object. Squinting at pulsing orange bars and blobs, he understood how a mistaken normie could call a paraphenomenon tip-line and waste the time of serious researchers. The electric zzzhh was like a sci-fi sound effect.

Stopping was a mistake. He was suddenly very cold. One final push – the trickiest stretch – and he’d be home to save Christmas.

He could give up and trundle-walk to Six Elms.

Not today. He was out in the fresh air – hah! He’d cycled through the zone of drizzle. He took a deep breath. Ice-drops stung his alveoli. They’d done alveoli – little nobbles inside your lungs – in Bio. Mum called them oliveoili. It was sometimes hard to believe she had a teaching qualification.

He skid turned into the Cut-Off.

 * * * 

Angie should have prioritised clearing the mantelpiece in the sitting room. For the cards. But she procrastinated, ticking off less-fraught items. Always the mantel was in the back of her mind.

They’d put up the lights last night, intent on a before-dawn switch-on… but that plan went south.

Russell was out of the way, fetching a vital component from the Electrical Outlet in the County Town. The once-failing shop had been saved by a Christmas miracle in the form of the Next Village Over’s insatiable demand for lights, adaptors, cables, control systems and suitcase-sized atomic piles.

This afternoon, she dug out pre-industrial Christmas decorations from under the stairs. A few surviving glass baubles from her childhood nestled in a carton which smelled of tennis balls forty-five years after they were lost in long grass. She found the stiff, gold-spackled wicker wreath she’d made sixteen years ago while pregnant. Never mind the Christ child, she had her own baby on the way and felt compelled to weave a garland. She put the wreath up on her office door.

Some decorations dated back to her parents’ OG austerity childhoods. They’d come out of the cupboard every year since Wickingses came to Six Elms, before she was born. Dad’s sturdy wooden soldiers would be parade-ready long after Russell’s last breakable plastic Gargantuabot was slagged.

Decorating on December the First was a Dad thing. Mum couldn’t get enthusiastic until school broke up and carol concerts were out of the way. Her parents were both teachers but Dad was Science and didn’t have to worry about carol concerts. Mum was Music, so rowing with tone-deaf parents and tin-eared choristers consumed her afternoons and spilled into her evenings from five minutes past Guy Fawkes Night till the end of term. Mum didn’t think of carol concerts as Christmas treats, but a black mark on the calendar which had to be got past before she could make mince pies with too much mince or wrap this year’s presents with last year’s paper.

Dad and Angie would already have been through the double issues of the Radio and TV Times with highlighter pens, flagging conflicts of interest. Mum’s word on disputes was final. Even Dad – missing the racing so Angie could watch Miss Marple – had to admit her rulings were fair. Still, Angie was once denied the final episode of a Doctor Who so Dad could see a space shuttle take-off. She’d made him buy her the video of that exact serial when it came out on cassette twelve years later and she was away at uni without a player to watch it on. Video recorders ended the era of scheduling disputes, but came along after the quality of Christmas telly fell off a cliff and it was impossible to find one programme worth watching let alone two on at the same time.

Angie checked supplies and found enough wrapping paper, sticky tape and gift tags for another year. She’d overbought after the flood. Overbuying was a Wickings thing – except, obviously, when it came to vital components. She should have told Russell to buy three or four assorted doodads. She was bound to have missed something essential when collecting his big present – a digital camera and assorted peripherals – and it would be a job to get the set-up working by Boxing Day.

Her technical knowledge had juddered to a halt in the 1990s. She was lucky to have a fifteen-year-old tech wizard in residence to look at her like an idiot because she didn’t know the difference between SCART, USB and the RSPB. Russell didn’t believe that when Angie was his age she’d asked for – and received and used – a soldering iron for Christmas. She still had the wiring diagrams she and Dad had devised, but the gadgets they’d made were long gone – probably chucked out when they didn’t work. It gave her a tiny little thrill that for all his digiskillz – and he complained about her spelling – he looked at a soldering iron as if it were a Pictish relic. Thanks to his archaeology craze, he’d have more idea how to use a Pictish relic.

Angie marked Russell’s childhood through craze phases.

First and worst was the Schloup, the obsession of Russell’s toddlerhood. Sunil and the Schloup used to be on every Christmas when Tony Blair was Prime Minister (not that there was a connection she knew of). The cartoon was unbearable to adults, which might have been the appeal for kids. The Schloup was a shape-changing silver alien or ectoplasmic entity. Mostly, it looked like a puddle with eyes. Russell owned three major schloups (Mange, Plop and Wilberforce) and a jarful of melted minischloups from packets of Sugar Puffs. He filled in schloup colouring books meticulously, never crayoning over the lines. A schloup bobble-hat was worn everywhere including the bath and bed until it was tragically lost at sea.

For nearly two years, the excruciating ‘The Schloup Schloup Song’ was on repeat in Six Elms House. In the dark hours she heard it start up again and reflected on her life choices. Maybe conceiving a new Wickings wasn’t her best idea. Then Russell made her ‘schloup soup’ breakfast – a runny omelette with squashed tomato eyes – and she disowned her night thoughts as whispers of the Devil and throbbed with a soppiness she’d deny under oath. A decade on, the song still made her retch then go misty-eyed whenever it featured on a Worst Singles of All Time playlist.

When Russell was five, a meteor ripped the skies of Schloupworld and triggered an extinction-level event. The Age of the Schloup ended. Mange was got rid of when corroded batteries went toxic, Plop burst and Wilberforce – the favourite – was put in a bin only to be surreptitiously rescued and stored. A time would come when Russell would wish he still had useless things from his childhood. She’d give a lot to have back the non-functioning gadgets she and Dad made. Not to mention Fillip.

The new craze phase was Gargantuabots. Japanese robots who defended the Earth from monster threats. The plot of the cartoon was as complex as all of Shakespeare’s history plays run one after the other. Gargantuabots toys – no, sorry, figures – had a fixed hierarchy. Also vital were games, comics, books, stickers and bubble-bath. She’d seen the live-action GargantuabotsGo Go Go more times in the cinema and on DVD than her own favourite movie – Body Heat, which opened up ‘sexy suspense’ to her when she was twelve. Janet Speke showed her the video to prove she was allowed to rent an ‘18 certificate’ tape. It turned out she wasn’t – her older sister Juliet took it out of Valerie’s Videos for her. Kathleen Turner, star of Body Heat, was the voice of Gretelgeuse, commander of monster threats in GargantuabotsGo Go Go. Angie reckoned their destinies were entwined. She hoped to get Kathleen Turner to narrate the Angelica Wickings audiobook library.

The craze never completely ended. Russell was a purist who could lecture for hours on the superiority of earlier iterations of the franchise. Gargantuabots (Second Series) – never to be confused with the second season of Gargantuabots: The Series – was the apogee of perfection. Angie was not going to disagree. Russell despised Botz Boyz, the current reboot, the way established churches loathed popular heresies. He binged the webtoon in secret on his tablet and swapped het-up posts with an online community of like-minded botbros. His Gargantuabots (Second Series) cadre remained in their prime position on the mantelpiece in the sitting room for eleven months of the year.

She mustn’t put it off much longer. A thing that must be done. Or was it a thing which must be done?

The cadre must give way to the cards.

After Gargantuabots came archaeology. Russell didn’t get that from a cartoon but from Daniel, who came to the levels to investigate a site where some well-off-their-patch Vikings were buried after a spirited argument with Alfred the Great. Angie let out the spare room to Daniel for a summer. He eventually went north, following retreating Vikings and was in Sweden now, piecing together bits of longboat. The archaeology craze led to much digging on the property. Russell had a museum shelf of Six Elms finds – odd-shaped stones, nails, bits of clay pipe, animal bones and six glass marbles in a tobacco tin. He was keen on the idea of smashing the ugly concrete yard between gatepost and house. Mysteries might be buried beneath.

She approved of the archaeology craze – more than the Schloup and Gargantuabots, not just because it was less expensive. He was drawn into it by a person, not a glorified toy advert in cartoon form. The pursuit fit his character. Russell liked to do things properly, which often meant more slowly than was convenient. He had a horror of crayoning outside the lines. Grown-ups – including her, she admitted – thought it weird or somehow wrong. Daniel didn’t. He let her son know his method was sound, even superior. He shouldn’t be nagged into being ashamed of it. The example made her resolve to be more tolerant of Russell’s neat and tidy ways. He was attentive to details.

She appreciated their parallel interests: she wrote mysteries, he dug for answers. Her way to a plot solution and his to a find were very alike. Much careful spadework, then a big ta-daa reveal. Slow-slow-quick. It must be inherited.

Archaeology, however, led to paraphenomena. On which she was less keen.

Living near Sutton Mallet made her wary of spook stuff.

Cursed objects. Hauntings. Apparitions. Manifestations. Encounters. More letters she didn’t understand. She knew ESP from The X-Files but needed to have EVP explained to her. A tenet of sexy suspense was that mysteries should have rational solutions. It couldn’t be ghosts. Or aliens. It had to be a scheming husband after the inheritance or a long-dumped boyfriend who’d never stopped obsessing. Warlock Wendy, the one time she’d coloured outside that line, was her big flop.

Russell couldn’t see why paraphenomenal explanations weren’t rational. He wanted ghosts to be real but still more wanted them to be understood. It wasn’t superstition, it was unknown science. He sought para-explanations and good luck to him. His listeners were into the weird and witchy. Her readers would call her a cheat on Goodreads if she went that way again. She kept to scheming husbands and bad boyfriends.

In his archaeology phase, Russell dug in the earth – so carefully he never came home dirty. Now he dug on the internet. Angie tried not to have slow-release panic attacks about it. A few odd fringy followers prompted her to disable comments on her own site. She hadn’t a clue how to impose limits on her son’s online activity and was against censorious parenting on principle. Smut was the least of it. She’d done a lot of research – well, she’d talked with people who’d done a lot of research – on web-dangers for Samantha Stalked. Now, what she knew terrified her as much as what she didn’t.

Paraphenomena on the net was fringe of fringe. Way out and whacky. The Weirdo Zone. She couldn’t persuade Russell to disable comments on his podcast and sometimes scanned public messages to him – many from his arch-rivals the Peason Twins – with horror. She knew about doxxing, swatting, DDS, deepfakes, cancellation, ransomware, pile-ons and digibombs, even if Russell poked holes in the ways Samantha’s stalker used them. Since she wrote the book, all of two years ago, new techniques of doing harm over the internet had been invented.

She imagined her son alone on the shore of a sea of black ink twinkling with reflected lights from wicked stars. Vast malignities moved in the deep dark. Maybe they were what schloups grew up to be.

Or perhaps she was just still afraid of ghost stories.

A CHRISTMAS GHOST STORY ‘THE CARDS’

From the story by Sir Harcourt Mountmain. Starring Leslie Veneer as ‘Marshalsea Rooke’.

A bleak December landscape. The snow cover isn’t soft delight, but hard-packed and grit-specked. A black, leafless tree at a crossroads. An earth-brown path across white ground. Only boots have trudged here. No wheel-ruts.

A ragged man walks. He wears a three-cornered hat. Two tatty coats bulk him out but don’t keep him warm. A red scarf winds round his face. Apart from the brown mud and red scarf, this is a black-and-white picture. Smudges of colour don’t indicate cheer.

The ragged man has a sack slung over his back. He turns left by the tree, taking the road less trudged. He makes new footprints. His boots are inadequate. He’ll be lucky not to keep Christmas by losing a toe.