Christmas is coming. I clean my gun.
It’s only a week since Halloween, but people in the neighborhood have already switched their decorations. Where a fifteen foot skeleton with raging red eyes stood, there’s a nutcracker inflatable that’s even more disturbing.
Rain mixes with ice pellets and perma-gray skies over Bridal Veil Lake. This is the last hurrah of once proud and potent Canadian winters. It’s nowhere near as cold as it used to be when I was a kid.
The layers of clothing underneath his stretched pirate costume would be warm enough then. He always looked uncomfortable until the last time. But maybe that’s just the presence of the man behind him. He bothers me too.
The first appearance of the child came on Christmas Eve. I’d gotten a good job in Bridal Veil Lake with an old company. The pay was high. The benefits amazing. They even helped me find my first house in a good neighborhood close to the lake. It was too good to be true.
I somehow heard the doorbell over the raucous music and drunk colleagues I was hosting; all of us were newer to the company and young.
“Trick-or-treat,” the kid said when I opened the door. There’s no streetlight outside my house, and I’d left the porch lights off so the Christmas reds and greens would pop.
“What?” I’d already had a few drinks. The oddness of the situation took longer than usual to fully grasp. I smiled and took a glance around for the kid’s parents. “Is this a prank or something?”
When I saw the man at the end of my driveway, I immediately felt like I was shrinking. His eyes reflected like a cat’s, and his teeth gleamed from within a jowl framed grin. To describe the man as portly wouldn’t be accurate. He was proportionately thick all over, a stone golem, yet not particularly tall. In the dark, I couldn’t tell you anymore about him other than a vague feeling of familiarity.
The distinct odour of manure and blood clotted the air. I wanted to close the door and go back to the party. Fear and a kind of desperate pleading filled the child’s expression. There was confusion, too, and again, it all seemed so familiar.
“What’s up, kid?” I whispered to him. “This guy bothering you?” Like I could do anything about it. I was big, too, but more like a fluffy dog than a pitbull. That’s a nice way of saying I was overweight.
The kid sniffled and rustled his pillow case. “Trick-or-treat,” he repeated in the tone of desperation and sadness.
“What the hell is this?” I called to the man.
“Go on,” he said in the deepest voice I’d ever heard.
“It’s not Halloween,” I defended.
He didn’t reply. He waited. The kid looked afraid.
“Okay,” I relented. I went back in, ignored the invitations and distractions of the party, and found some wrapped chocolate for the kid. He started crying when I tossed it into his pillowcase.
I knelt down. “Hey, what’s going on? You know this man? Do you need help?” I was prepared to pull the little pirate in and lock the door. The cops seemed like the next step.
“Good,” the man said. “Keep doing what you’re doing.” Then, impossibly, they vanished. One blink of my eye, and they were gone like they’d never been there. I stepped outside with the chardonnay I’d forgotten about and attempted to rationalize the incident.
“What? What the hell?” I said to no one.
It had to be a hallucination, a psychotic break, a dream from which I would soon awaken. I went in and sat with the girl who was clearly into me, but she was too drunk to notice my shock.
She passed out in my arms, and I put her in my bed while I attempted to sleep on the couch. We were married by next summer. I didn’t tell her about the trick-or-treater again, and she obviously didn’t remember the next morning.
By the following Christmas Eve, she was pregnant with our first child and tired. There was no party that year, though her falling asleep early in my bed was the same.
I’d like to kid myself and say the trick-or-treater wasn’t on my mind; I had so much else going on at work and a baby on the way.
It’s A Wonderful Life, two cats, and some beers couldn’t distract me. I couldn’t remember the exact time I’d heard the doorbell, but I guess it was around 11 PM.
“Trick-or-treat,” the overdressed pirate said nervously. He hadn’t changed a bit. Neither had the man in the driveway.
“I don’t understand,” I said to them both, trying to keep quiet to avoid waking my wife. “What is this? What do you want?”
The kid looked afraid and as bewildered as I. I knelt down again, just like last time. “Kid, I want to help, but -“
“Daddy,” he said before suddenly vanishing like he’d never been.
The man remained, cloaked in darkness except for those baleful eyes and a profound silhouette. I stood back up and waited.
“He’s not supposed to talk.” The words rumbled from the dark like thunder. “So now he’ll suffer.”
I shook my head, incredulous, the moment too impossible. “He… he just wants his daddy. He’s scared. Why? Who?”
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” he said, again, the same as last year. Then he was gone. Just gone. I closed the door and went back in to find my wife on the top landing of the staircase.
She dug the sleep from her eyes and asked who had been at the door.
“A late caroller,” I lied. “I think he was drunk.”
“Oh,” she said before wandering out of sight into the upstairs hallway, back to bed. I could have followed but predicted I’d just be staring at the ceiling and bothering her. She was a light sleeper.
I went for the vodka in the freezer and built up the fire in the hearth, hoping more light and warmth would drive away the shivering instilled by the presence of the man.
Another Christmas went by and another new year. I kept my head down and used the bottle to cope. If my wife knew I was becoming an alcoholic, she didn’t say. I received a promotion into management a few days before my first child arrived in this vale of tears.
We named him John, and he successfully motivated a positive change in my behaviour until the following Christmas Eve. We were lucky he was a good and regular sleeper.
Neither of us suffered too much sleep deprivation unless he woke up in the middle of the night. Then he’d be awake till his morning nap.
The next Christmas Eve, I made an excuse to stay up, something lame like watching a movie - The Muppets Christmas Carol - so that I could open the door before the child pressed the bell.
They appeared in the same places I knew they would soon disappear. I don’t know why I thought I’d see them walk up the driveway first through the front window. He pressed the button before I could stop him.
“Trick-or-treat,” he said with the same uncertainty, the same fear, the same costume, and the same age. Nothing had changed at all about him nor the man.
I had a candy cane for him. “Keep doing what I’m doing, I know,” I said. The kid looked into his pillowcase and then up at me with an anguished expression that broke my heart.
“You’re a real son of a bitch,” I said to the man.
I think he smiled. It was too dark to know for sure. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” he said and their vanishing no longer shocked me. In fact, it was a relief. I closed the door and backed into my wife suddenly standing behind me on the mat.
“Caroler?” How much had she seen? “I heard you swearing.”
I nodded slowly. “Same guy. Not sure why we’re so lucky.”
She yawned. “Maybe he knocks on every door.”
“Yeah. He probably does.”
“John’s up. Will you sit with him?”
My boy’s first Christmas happened on the wrong side of midnight. I let him tear open some presents at 12:01. Socks from his grandma were his favorite that year.
He snuggled with them and fell asleep in my arms while I rested in the chair, watching the embers die in the hearth and send smoky spirits up the flue.
I tried to leave the treat on the porch the following year, hoping there’d be no repeat of the previous two. That didn’t work though and the doorbell rang anyway and woke everyone up, my wife included.
I heard her scramble out of bed and pound along the hallway. I rushed to the door; I didn’t want her to see; I’m not sure why.
I opened the door, grabbed the candy from the mat and stuffed it into the kid’s bag. “Keep doing what I’m doing?”
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” the dark giant agreed without cheer. Thankfully, they vanished as my wife entered the doorway.
“What the hell? The same guy?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t a lie. I didn’t have to lie this time. It was the same guy. Same kid too.
Our son, miraculously, went back to sleep on his own. My wife and I had another drink. She read while I scrolled through reddit on my phone.
Next year had to be different. She’d find out the truth if it wasn’t. I thought if I waited outside, then I could stop them from ringing the bell. The kid in the pirate costume looked so scared.
Maybe I could help him? Get him away from the big man in the dark. Calling the police, finding other witnesses, telling my wife were all brief thoughts quickly dismissed by the need to handle this alone.
How could I tell anyone about this without appearing totally crazy?
So the most reasonable course of action was to buy a gun. The gun I clean traditionally on Christmas Eve each year. Not that it was effective.
The next time I beat the little pirate to the doorbell, pushed by him, and leveled the gun I’d been practicing with at the range for months. I thought I’d be able to see more as I got closer but the darkness remained.
I shot anyway, an illegally purchased silencer reducing the noise to a pop I would later explain away as fireworks. Three bullets I put into him. I think he smiled, and again, I could not confirm that visually; it was more a feeling of amusement flowing from him. No blood. No injury. No impression he’d noticed at all.
He waited. I backed away. My eyes were weepy from the stench of shit and gunpowder emanating from him. There were flies around him too. So many flies. Their multitude may have been the darkness itself clinging to him or else the insects simply thrived in whatever rotted things made the creature’s body smell so evil.
“What do you want from me?!” I shouted, even as I trembled.
“Trick-or-treat,” the boy said behind me. The smile I couldn’t see, that infernal smugness, remained. Slowly, defeated, I went into the house for the candy. My wife appeared on the steps, and just missed the gun I quickly, and dangerously, thrust into my pocket.
“Back again,” I said too quickly. “A Christmas tradition.” She waited. Her expression demonstrated her disbelief. I retrieved a chocolate bar I’d left on the little table where I regularly dumped my keys.
“What are you doing?” she asked calmly.
I tried to chuckle but it sounded fake. “Heh, he has a kid with him. Thought I’d give him a treat before they go bother the next-”
“What was that noise?”
“Noise?”
“I heard shouting.”
“Well, that was the caroller.”
“I didn’t hear singing.”
“I wouldn’t call it singing either,” I tried to joke, wondering if she could see my trembling hands. I went for the door.
“Where are you going?” Her tone was accusatory.
“I told you, there’s a kid-“
She came down the steps and reached for the door handle. “I’ve had enough of this.”
I grabbed her wrist and forced it away. Her expression turned to shock. “I told you what’s happening,” I said. My voice was deeper, alien. “I will handle it. Go back to bed.”
She wrenched away and glared as she retreated. When she rounded the final stair and disappeared into the hallway, I listened for the creek in the bed from her subtle weight. Then I opened the door.
The kid waited patiently. The man who was anything but human continued to exude triumph. I gave the candy and waited for the inevitable.
“Good,” it said, “keep doing what you’re doing.” I nodded and went inside almost before their sudden vanishing trick. One of its flies followed me to the freezer and my vodka.
Merry Christmas, I told my family when they found me on the couch. How merry is Christmas with a hungover dad? To say my wife was displeased would be an understatement. It was more than that, a distance had been created.
The next year, she did not come down. I cleaned and readied the gun, but didn’t end up using it. I gave the candy, received the message, and kept doing what I was doing, whatever that was.
Two more years came and went much the same. Quietly resigned to this impossible visit, without witnesses, I began to treat it like a recurring dream.
This last Christmas Eve my son was old enough to stay up later, and watch his pathetic father surpass his alcoholic tolerance.
I didn’t want to do that to him. When a parent is an addict, the child intuits their second place to the drug. Most nights I cried when he went to sleep, feeling helpless. The hour came again.
“Trick-or-treat,” said the boy as always.
“You look like my son,” I said before giving him the treat, almost missing the bag from my double vision.
“Keep-“
“When does it end?” I interrupted.
That smile. Would it ever stop?
“Keep doing what you’re doing.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t.”
But they disappeared anyway.
No more. I had a new plan. I simply wouldn’t be home. Yes, that would be better. That would work. He or it couldn’t tell me to keep doing anything if I wasn’t there.
The following Christmas Eve, I went to the bar. There were other sad men and women, old and lonely and quiet. I took a stool at the end and drank until a few pairs of hands were under my arms and carrying me outside.
“Slow down next time, big fella,” somebody said, a bartender I guess. “Merry Christmas.”
“I think he shit himself,” someone else said.
I drifted off into the night and realized a cold, snowy Christmas eve had finally come again as I vomited into a snowbank.
I came home to a familiar scene.
The boy was at the door, pressing the button.
But it was my boy, my son.
It had been all along, of course.
How did I never notice? I’m sure you can guess.
Nobody answered at first, and he looked back at me with uncertainty and fear.
Suddenly, I realized where I stood, the end of the driveway, filthy and drunk and hidden in the dark.
“Daddy?” the boy said. He was confused. So was I, but I didn’t want him to see me.
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” I said, but it wasn’t my voice. All the throwing up had thickened vocal cords; my voice was deep, and he looked afraid and unsure who I was.
But the door opened and she was there.
“Trick-or-treat,” he said before she welcomed him in. I watched the door close and waited. I couldn’t go in; I couldn’t leave. My wife appeared a few moments later, closing the door behind her and hugging her arms.
“He wanted to look for you,” she said. “He thought it was Halloween because we were going out at night, so he dressed up. For some reason, he thought you’d answer if he tried our house.”
I began to cry. There was nothing to say. I had done this. I had kept doing what I was doing.
I was not welcomed back into my home. I got fired for openly drinking at my desk the following week.
She was right. They were right.
But eventual sobriety brought the mystery of my circumstances to the forefront. As I sat in the gorge, trying to sleep against a tree, swatting at flies the next warm December, I wondered what had done this to me.
It hadn’t started with me. It hadn’t. There’d been someone, something, else at the bottom of my driveway before I eventually stood there. Also, the boy had always been the same. I just didn’t recognize him until my actual son came to the same age. So it couldn’t have been him. It was some trick.
I was undone by some flaw in my character. I admit that. But what thing noticed this flaw, exploited it, and destroyed me, and why?
Other than my child and my wife, I never hurt anyone. I wouldn’t have hurt them either if I hadn’t answered the door on Christmas Eve.
I saw your ad. Please help me, Mr. Cleriot. If you find anything in your investigation of Bridal Veil Lake, please tell me. I’ll never get my family back but maybe I can, at least, find some peace of mind.
Thank you.