Editor’s note: enjoy a bonus short story from this week’s X-author.
BY S. P. MOUNT
Christmas. A time of the year when most families get together whether they want to or not. A time when most of the world slows down so that loved ones can rekindle old memories; and a convenient excuse for otherwise sensible adults to revert back to being squabbling children, a liberty, that despite not seeing each other in forever, gives license to sibling rivalry to pick up where it left off. And it was made all the worse for alcohol.
The Cunningham family was no different. Every Christmas Eve, without fail, they’d get together for the same old, same old festivity. Well . . . Except for Mother. But she never attended. She hadn’t done in years. And Jacob was grateful for that. That particular get-together in the Cunningham household never ended well. And Mother, after all, had been through quite enough.
Jacob looked deep into Belinda’s eyes. She’d waltzed into the room and stood there right in front of him, disdainfully taking him in. And the hatred, barely contained in his own vacant gaze, was reflected right back at him like a couple of locked-on missiles. But he didn’t care. Somewhere behind his ex-sister’s whore mascara, there was a force at work—his mother’s love, glittering there through the golden amber flakes of his sister’s irises.
Yes, poor, beloved Mother. These days she needed to use his detestable sister’s eyes in order to forgive him. Offered twinkling reassurances of her undying, unconditional love, as only a mother, and perhaps a Cocker Spaniel, can portray.
“What the hell are you looking at . . . Freako?” Belinda said.
“Go away, Belinda. I’m certainly in no mood for you tonight. Christmas Eve is a time for family, and you are not family. Not anymore.”
All but snorting, Belinda lit the cigarette already in her pretentious onyx holder by leaning into the large eighteenth-century fireplace. Jacob resisted the urge to kick her into it. He knew what she thought of him: she loved to play with her youngest brother’s mind—or at least what there was of it. For despite the embarrassment of him, the anomaly that he was, a simpleton in a family of high achievers, he was at least an amusement.
“Oh, but I am family, and I always will be, Jacob. And there’s absolutely nothing you can change about that,” she said with a smirk. She met his glare after seeing if the smoke she exhaled, like the dragon she was, reached the eleventh-century chandelier that dripped like an ice palace from the high ceiling.
“And even if I did once disown you for being such an abomination, I will always, always be here. This is our family home, and if it means I have to see you here once a year, then so be it . . . darling brother. So deal with it. God knows I have to every time I look at your stupid face.”
Belinda made her way to the drinks cabinet and readjusted the random tresses of her perfectly styled up-do. It was a style for the holidays that was very obviously held in place by an entire can of hairspray; and that, he thought, if she’d been one inch nearer to it, the naked flame might have had a field day with as she’d just leaned into.
Her laugh wasn’t anything like their mother’s, though. Belinda’s was as crude as Mother’s had been gentle and soft. She was only four years older than him, and still, even in adulthood, his sister’s laugh had the ability to make him feel only two inches tall—no doubt like she made the two hundred, and growing, employees that she ruled with an iron fist in the cosmetics corporation she’d founded. ‘Blushing Belles’—Belle being short for Belinda, who never blushed at all, and the name that everyone called her by except for Jacob.
Her employees were no more than workhouse slaves who scrambled on their knees around her elevated heels to lick her patent leather toes. Everyone said so.
Yes, if the others hadn’t been in the room with them, Jacob would smash Belinda’s bulldog face in with the heavy steel poker by the hearth, and then he’d force it down onto the fiery coals and wipe that condescending smirk off her face once and for all. But then, he wasn’t allowed to go near the fireplace, ever. It was dangerous. They’d wrestle him to the floor if he tried.
“Oh come on now, you two,” Brendan interjected. “Haven’t we been through enough sorrowful Christmases? Can’t we just have a happy one for a change? Just for once in our lives? Why . . . I’ve known warring pygmy tribes to be more civil towards each other than you guys are.” Yes, their older brother, always the voice of reason, and as sanctimonious as ever.
Brendan, like their father had done before him, wore the smoking jacket that had been folded away in the ottoman in Mother’s bedroom at the cabin. He always had. Every family reunion—even though he had never smoked anything in his entire life . . . Well, not unless one counted the flailing salmon that everyone knew he simply scooped out from shallow waters at a spot downriver, in Salmon Arm, where the natural way of things sent their schools out for summer every year. And the fish was served at his ‘famous end of season barbecue’ while Brendan regaled his guests with stories of his, non-existent, huntin’, fishin’ and shootin’ skills, and pretended to be the man he could never aspire to be.
A beautiful sight to see though, somehow, that death, Jacob had thought when he had been taken along once. Brendan had sworn him to secrecy and promise that he wouldn’t tell anyone where the salmon had actually come from. And he had kept the secret. It was, at the very least, something that he was good at doing.
Yes, he’d been transfixed by the sight of them, transient shades of silvery red and pink. A river almost on fire, the salmon communally floundered in low waters that they’d deliberately trapped themselves in, come there, in order to die. They’d gone down in flames. Magnificent.
And he had gone on one of Brendan’s more exciting ‘expeditions’ too.
“It’ll give him some sense of purpose,” Brendan said as if Jacob hadn’t been in the room when he magnanimously announced one summer, that he’d babysit him if no one else could. That being busy, making himself useful, would keep him out of trouble, saying that there always plenty to do on a shoot like that that didn’t require rocket science.
But documentary making in the north of Scotland had sounded more exciting than it turned out to be. Jacob’s purpose was to be a lackey for the production team who used him as nothing more than a wheelbarrow to carry heavy equipment on and off site. As free labour. ‘Jacob the donkey,’ they called him. Even Brendan did.
He would like to see his brother gasp for air like those salmon did, but his fat red face would be much less gracious about accepting death than the last desperate pouts of the magnificent dying fish. No, a blowfish, that’s what he is, Jacob thought, huffing and puffing about everything and anything, like he always does.
Brendan owned a piano. A beautiful piece of furniture built in the late nineteenth century, a Steinway & Sons. But it was an instrument as irrelevant to his life as the smoking jacket and many of his other ‘just for show’ possessions.
In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that he had a cleaning lady come in twice a week to dust over his pretentiously eclectic house in the West End that showcased his collection of world wide antiquities, the piano’s ivories would be as eerily silent as the illegal tusk on his study wall that Jacob would love to shove so far up his brother’s arse that it would tinkle his wisdom teeth. But an elephant never forgets, nor a donkey—an ass by any other name.
“No, Brendan,” Jacob spat out, “it is not possible to have a nice Christmas. It is too late for that indeed . . . You should know that by now.”
Jacob looked around the room as it fell silent, the familiar smirks on both Belinda and Brendan’s faces all too evident. It was well appointed. Lush. The furnishings were a blend of autumn and leather and smelled of old money. Everything was familiar. Nothing ever changed in all those years. But despite its grandeur, the living room was cosy. Sophisticated, but somehow, also rustic.
There was always an overabundance of logs, chopped up, and stacked in the bronze iron hearth wrack, each waiting their turn to be thrown into the fire in order to burn away to nothing more than charcoal. Yes, even the mightiest of trees are not impervious to such fate, Jacob thought.
The logs had always been supplied by an old man who lived in the village—John, or Tom, or Don, or something—who came to the house once a year, bringing enough to stock them up for the entire winter. And despite the fact that Jacob had been the only one to volunteer getting out the axe and chopping the wood up himself, Mother had never allowed it. She insisted that they were rich enough that they didn’t have to do menial chores. But Jacob had seen how they had all looked at each other when she had said that. Yes, he wasn’t stupid—despite what they thought.
He hadn’t even heard anything out of Edwin yet. He’d always been quiet, though. The studious one, his nose was always used to prop open the pages of some physics book or other, and his eyes popped through what were tantamount to magnifying glasses as they deciphered some impossible equation or other, while his hand subconsciously scratched at his balding pate as he queried the validity of it all. ‘Brainbox’, their father had apparently called him.
Edwin was shy—or at least oblivious to the real world. “Off in some dimension of mind,” Mother had always said about him rather fondly. “Another plane.” But it was a different kind of ‘removed from reality’ than what they always said Jacob was. And that night was no different. Even though it was their annual get together, where they were all supposed to pretend to have a merry Christmas and to like each other at least until the alcohol kicked in, Edwin might as well not have bothered coming at all.
Edwin liked to say that he hated people. He even said that he’d be happy to take the first manned flight to Mars on a one-way mission so that he wouldn’t have to put up with them. “I don’t need anyone else in my life,” he said, “nor material possessions.” And he meant it.
And if it wasn’t for the fact that he would be even more famous than he already was, if he were to volunteer for such a thing—and no doubt he could come up with the schematics to arrange a comfortable, solitary life on Mars—fame, was an incidental annoyance that his world-acclaimed papers couldn’t have helped but bring about. An irritation.
But at least he wouldn’t have to put up with mediocrity knocking on his door all the time if he were to go to Mars. The bandwagon hitchhikers of the galaxy that tried to ride the cosmic waves of his brilliance, and that lagged behind his ability to dissect the universe, but yet, wanted to take credit for doing so.
No, Edwin’s books and his telescope would be all he needed. ‘Well . . . with the exception of a few basic necessities like some state-of-the-art technology to analyse samples . . . and fire . . . of course,” he joked, most uncharacteristically for him, but in a way that no one knew if it was really a joke or not.
But no one would miss Edwin if he were to go. They didn’t even know he was there half the time anyway. And, always having looked at his baby brother, Jacob, as if he was a little green man from Mars himself, he hadn’t even tried to relate to him. Ever.
“Huh!” The theory of ‘relativity’, right enough!” Jacob said, amused by his play on words, as he looked at his siblings with definite distaste. And all wondered, except for Edwin, what the hell he was talking about now. See, I can be clever too. Why can’t any of you see that? He only thought that he’d said.
None of them had it down pat, that happy family thing. They were related. Yes, apparently. They were brothers and sisters, but nonetheless, no more than ‘relative’ strangers with absolutely nothing in common. How could they possibly have the same parents? And maybe even, they didn’t?
~*~
None of the children had really known their father—perhaps fathers—as physically none of them resembled the other. They had all been very young when the tragedy happened. But he’d been a hero; they knew that much. He had been burned alive, having saved them all from suffering that same fate.
And all of them remembered that night in all its horrific clarity—not something to bring up at annual Christmas reunions, though—even though the tragedy had happened on Christmas Eve and it might have been a fitting time to remember it. No, that incident was, of course, something that had spoiled the holiday for them all throughout their childhood. And in adulthood, it was not talked about, ever.
And if not Father himself, they remembered his screams. Yes, what appeared to them as something akin to the ‘Guy Fawkes’ effigy, that the locals burned on a bonfire in the village green on the 5th November, had come to life, screaming in agony. But he had put it aside to come and save them all from the fire that engulfed their house while their mother desperately clung to the windowsill, trying to clutch at her husband’s burning body after he’d rescued her—the last of them all.
But the roof had fallen in on him, had trapped him there in the window like a slice of bread slotted into a battered toaster. Yes, a hero. Their father had sacrificed himself in order to save his entire family . . . Well, that is to say . . . all but Jacob.
Jacob had been lucky. He hadn’t needed to be thrown out of a bedroom window to break a leg or an arm. He’d been fortunate indeed that, earlier, he’d seen Santa’s sleigh high up in the sky, and had gone outside to get a better look just before the fire took hold.
The nice firemen had said that it must have been a candle that his mother had forgotten to blow out that had been responsible. And yes, it probably had been, for his parents only ever had real candles on their tree. “No cheap imitation tat for folks like us.” Mother had said.
Yes, careless . . . Careless . . . Careless.
But she was certain, she said, that all candles had been extinguished. Had insisted that she knew that they were, had made sure of it—even justifying to Jacob why it was important, for he had thought that at least one should’ve been left lit for Santa when she’d snuffed them all out with the little brass hood thingy. He’d said that one burning candle was necessary so that Santa could see where to leave all the presents, and also, exactly where his milk and biscuits and carrot had been laid out for him and Rudolph.
~*~
And then there was Daisy. She was as fresh and bright as her name. But late as usual, the product of a late spring, she never arrived when she was supposed to. And the baby of the family, who was also the glue that bonded them—somehow made sense of them all as a unit. Sweet Daisy, with her sunny disposition, lying to them all about how she was a successful actor in London, but not doing such a good job at in reality; the façade she put on was amateurish indeed—even if she was a professional in other ways that she would never admit to.
But she fooled no one, Jacob thought. Yes, he knew that she was a high-class call girl, even if the people in the movie theatres didn’t. It was obvious. The way older men stuck to her like flies on a cow patty, and dripped her in jewellery that she said she purchased with the disgusting amount of money that they paid her to do what she loved. That she would do for free, even.
And sure, she’d been in a few movies, but no twenty-one-year-old girl could afford that kind of hoity-toity penthouse in Mayfair. No matter how successful her acting career came along. No, obviously it was all a set up. The place in the photographs that she sent no doubt belonged to her pimp. Staged. Just like her non-existent acting career.
Jacob had seen the movies, dancers, who were really sleazy strippers in Vegas, who lied to their families about having made it big. His slut sister was no exception. No, Daisy was the real affront to the family name. Not him.
The old place looked gorgeous. As usual, the tree was trimmed as beautifully as Mother used to have it done, usually having employed professional decorators—the efforts of her children never quite being good enough. Never looking smart enough.
And even if they didn’t have real candles these days, in between spitting their words at each other, Jacob focussed on the main feature of the room, the fireplace that spat at them all occasionally too. The white spruce sparked out onto the stone hearth, and emanated a musty perfume as blue and yellow flames devoured the wood slowly. Yes, just like old times.
And even though he never did want Mother there in person for the reunion, if he squeezed his eyes tight, he could pretend that Belinda was she. She did kind of look like Mother, he thought, albeit in a whorish, businesswoman kind of way. No, it was right that Mother should never be allowed to attend the family reunion ever again. That one time had been quite enough.
Dear mother, you’re safe now.
And then there was him, Jacob—the black sheep. “Blacker than black is black,” they’d always said.
Nothing that he’d ever done had been good enough. He was simply an embarrassment, they’d always thought, even if they’d never said as much. But he knew. Yes, he knew.
“Unbalanced,” they had said, talking about him behind his back at every opportunity, laughing at him on their fancy phones. Yes, they were always, always talking about him, and what they were going to have to do about him. He couldn’t hold a job down. He needed micromanagement. He’d been sacked from every one that he’d ever had—even from the fast food place where no brains had been required to sweep the floor. Yes, he was a liability.
And as he looked at them all, all of them with their busy, successful lives in one respect or another, he knew that they wished he wasn’t their brother. That largely they had kept him secret from their friends, like the royal family used to do with their in-bred misfits up in their attics.
Well, they were no better. Not really. Not at heart, and he was very glad indeed that he only needed to see them all once a year—and even that was too much to bear. Yes, he hated them all. Passionately. So successful and rich, while he had nothing at all, well . . . Except for Mother. No it just wasn’t fair. It never had been.
~*~
They had wanted to sell the family house out from under his feet. Had talked about putting Mother in a nursing home, where, they’d said, she could be cared for properly now that she couldn’t do any of the basics for herself. And him too, by the sounds of things, apparently his ‘condition’ was getting worse. “Scary even,” they’d said.
Yes, Mother, the only one in the family that ever loved him. Mother. Whom he’d stuck by while they all went off to live fancy lives. Mother. A poor wretched soul who’d succumbed to dementia after her stroke. Mother. Whom none of them were willing to take into their extravagant homes to care for, even though they had room to host a circus.
No, she wouldn’t have wanted them to sell the old place. Mother would have told every one of them that if she could’ve. She would have said that she’d rather die right there in her own home before being taken away to rot away in some holding lot. Yes, that’s what she would’ve said if she could still speak.
But then, as usual, they, his siblings, had the majority vote, each counted their share of money that they didn’t need even before the ‘for sale’ sign went up. Greedy . . . Greedy . . . Greedy . . . That’s what they are, Jacob thought. As if they don’t have enough.
And what about him . . . Where exactly would he go? And why should they determine that?
To add insult to injury, they talked about such things in front of him too, as if he couldn’t understand. As if he was an imbecile. But if he couldn’t remain in the house, and he deserved it more than any of them, then no one would have it. Yes, he’d show them ‘scary’ all right.
~*~
Daisy, finally arrived, looked flushed. Probably just paid the cab driver in kind, Jacob thought as he watched her air-kiss everyone in the manner that only successful actors should be entitled to do, calling them all ‘darlink’. Bitch.
Overacting, if ever he’d seen. And Daisy, always upbeat, in an overzealous effort to hide the truth of her seedy life, made a little joke about each of her brothers, about them either getting fatter, balder or older. But she had left him out, saying instead, how nice he looked. And she told Belinda how it was just as well that there was at least one female in the family that could carry on their mother’s beauty. “Me!” she laughed heartily. As if anyone could think she actually meant Belinda.
Her laugh was like Mother’s though—even if did have a slutty pitch to it that bastardised it completely. Made a mockery of it.
Yes, every year was the same. Christmas Eve. The same room, the same tree, the same everything, Jacob thought, as he looked at his siblings in turn and said the same thing to them, the same old thing that he said every year, knowing that was the last opportunity he’d have to say it:
“Burn in hell ya bastards.”
And as he spat out the words, the room fell silent save for the fire spitting particularly viciously. Why . . . he even saw the gaping mouth of the devil in it’s fiery midst then. The devil that had whispered to him so long before, with a crackled rasp, when he’d been a child, saying that what he planned to do then would be the right thing for all concerned.
Yes, the flames would swallow the Christmas tree first, just like before, but this time, they’d reach the top of the drapes sooner, for the tree, in the ‘new house’, was always placed in the bay window. It would put on an impressive pyrotechnic display of ambidextrous momentum.
The flames would simultaneously crawl over the carpet from the bonfire of presents underneath the tree as if someone had just poured petroleum across it, while crawling over, and through, the ceiling to boot. And it would speedily catch the sofas and the bookcases too, the beds and the wardrobes. It would explode glass and burn anything in its path away to nothing as it crept silently through the corridors of the entire house.
He could see them all in his mind’s eye. They’d look just like their father had. His brothers and sisters, screaming and writhing in pain with no escape, their skin blistering and their eyes popping like an entire convention of Guy Fawkeses. Their beautiful minds would be gone forever. If they were lucky, they would die of smoke inhalation first. But Jacob hoped not.
And lucky for him, indeed, that Jacob had been in the garden when it had all happened. Out there, yet again, because he was sure that he’d seen Santa Claus’ sleigh high up in the sky after his brothers and sisters had all gone to bed. Yes, the authorities would believe that coming from a man like him. A simpleton.
But, when it was over, he’d thought that another careless candle, and not a demonic fireplace, must have started the fire. Surely? For only a madman could possibly think such a thing. Perhaps it had been a random spark from the hearth that fell out onto the rug? Maybe even one of careless Belinda’s cigarettes that had not been extinguished properly before she’d gone to bed.
Yes, ‘Fag-ash Lil’ was always leaving those stinking things burning, lying around in saucers that were not meant as ashtrays. What would Mother have thought of that—her best china being used for those filthy cancer sticks? No, Belinda had deserved to be stubbed out just like one of her stinking cigarillos.
It had been an unfortunate pity that all the doors had been secured though. Locks that’d been put into place a long time before that they said were for his safety. But it was something that Jacob had never really been able to work out, for how could locks on theirbedroom doors keep him safe?
But the heavy roller metal blinds had been a great addition to the house. They had kept all of them safe from robbers in the night—even shielding the east wing from the morning sun, way out there in the countryside with no high-rises to block it for them.
Yes, they locked everything out . . . But all of them inside. And their installation had been Jacob’s brilliant idea after seeing them commonly used in Italy, when they’d gone on holiday. And his brothers and sisters had readily approved them when he had come up with the suggestion.
The blinds were the kind that disappeared into the walls when they were opened so that they didn’t detract from the beauty of the seventeenth century architecture. Expensive. And of course, they couldn’t just fit the east side of the house with them, the side where mother’s bedroom had been, and where the sun woke her up far too early, she always said. ‘Anything before 11am, such an ungodly hour.” No, that would’ve looked weird. Half-assed.
And so, for the sake of aesthetics, all of the windows had to be done, they’d all agreed. “Besides, they’d add value, as well as security.” And that was important. They’d get their money back tenfold when they sold the place. Brendan knew about such things.
Yes, out there in the middle of nowhere, an unprotected window in a grand old house like theirs granted easy access for burglars. In this day and age, it was a crime in itself not to have such safekeeping. What good was an alarm on its own in such a remote location? No one would arrive in time to apprehend the thieves.
See . . . he thought he’d said; I am clever. I do share your brilliant genes, after all.
And, his siblings didn’t know that it’d been his idea to padlock all the doors on the outside too. And all of them, by the time they retired, were far too drunk to notice the hinges on the doorframes to their rooms, even if they had noticed as soon as he’d clunked them shut. Yes, Jacob would keep them secure all right, for he was in control of the master switch to all of the shutters that was located down in the cellar. Yes, he was full of bright ideas—very, very bright.
~*~
His head lolled from side to side. Jacob took deep breaths, hyperventilating almost, sweating and cold all at once, as he came back to his normality. The reunion was over. Again. His family duty completed for yet another year. He had brought them all together for Christmas as he always did. And it’d been, as it should’ve. Mother would be so proud. As proud as she’d been when he granted her wish—the one that she wasn’t able to voice for herself. No, she hadn’t gone to a nursing home, even if, in the end, he had.
And she hadn’t suffered. How could she have? Weren’t they always saying that Mother had absolutely no idea about what was going on around her? No, she wouldn’t have been able to feel the flames. Jacob knew that. And there had been no need to lock Mother in her room. She probably just died immersed in peaceful sleep; frolicking around in whatever world she’d fluttered off to. But if she had been awake, then she would simply have caressed the flames like an old friend, perhaps even seeing Father’s face there among them.
Yes, every day, these days, was exactly the same for Jacob Cunningham. There was absolutely nothing to differentiate one from the other, no window, no nothing. Well, that is to say, all except for one day a year. It was strange, very, very strange indeed, the doctors said, for, even without a calendar, he always seemed to be aware of when exactly Christmas Eve came about—the day when he fell into a trancelike state.
“His biorhythms must be Swiss,” the doctors said; “right on time, like their trains.”
Or perhaps, just perhaps, it was the ghosts of Christmas Past come to ring his annual alarm bell. His brothers and his sisters refused to die, refused to leave him in peace, come to mock him from beyond the ashes of their bonfire.
He shuffled to the door of his room, and, using his elbows—given that his hands, as they always were on that particular day, were bound together in the special jacket that they made him wear—he pounded on its padding, and screamed out the words as he always had over many years.
“I demand to go into the garden to see Santa Claus high in the sky. Now! Open this door . . . immediately, please!”
But somewhere, deep inside, Jacob knew that there would be no Santa Claus. No escape. No, he wasn’t stupid, after all. And the most he could do then—and try hard he did—was to hope for spontaneous combustion. Yes, one didn’t need a naked flame to bring that mother of all mothers about.
And he thought of his brother, Edwin. Yes, he’d know how to do that, to ignite such a wondrous event from only the human form. Damn, I meant to ask him about that. Oh well, next year, I suppose, he thought, looking around the small room at the soft walls. Soft everything.
Yes, it was all very inviting indeed. And he tried to bang his head on anything he could—the chair, the walls—but it simply bounced right off them and made him giggle.
Impressive . . . that stuff would go up in an instantaneous puff, he thought. If only they’d give me a Christmas candle . . . Just one . . . Measly candle.
Abandoned on Planet Earth, S P Mount never really found his footing among the bizarre species called humankind, always stalking it from the precipice of his ‘alternate plane’. A slow learner, but eventually become adept at putting one foot in and doing the hokey-cokey, today, he might even seem human himself.
‘A lone wolf, and not a loner’, Stephan grew up in an orphanage in Scotland with his nose wedged in encyclopaedias. Today he loves to show off that acquired knowledge of peculiar and brilliant things that no one should ever know about—especially at intimate soirees, where he loves to defend the authenticity of his appeal.
Stephan spent his youth envisaging the world, and beyond, until awakening one fine morn to find magnificent wings sprouted. Embarking on a career in worldwide tourism, he fluttered them far and wide.
A lover of culture, he pretends to speak numerous languages, having lived in Germany, England, Greece, Dubai and Italy. Currently, he resides in Canada, where he reinvents his life experiences via inimitable humour and the unexpected perspective of his writing.
While yesterdays inspire him, he combines those with the possibility of tomorrows and an extraordinary knack for imagination.
‘Originality is key.’
Mount’s short story, “Black Ice”, is featured in Moments in Millennia: a Fantasy Anthology, released January 31, 2014.
Follow Mount on his web page, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Hubspot, Pinterest, Goodreads, and Amazon.
