Season’s greetings, dear listener, for once again we present your annual story of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds at Christmas. As usual, it is a tale of horror – and humble village folk – which will bring a tear to your eye, but not your wallet, for though it has been crafted especially for your rapid dismissal, it is absolutely free.
We will, of course, be taking retinal scans as you read it, so don’t think you’re entirely off the hook…
Much to their surprise, the inhabitants of that benighted East Yorkshire village, St Botolph-in-the-Wolds, have made it through to yet another Christmas. Most of them, anyway. Despite plague, marauding monstrosities, feral Girl Guides, religious feuds and their own naturally contentious nature, the villagers have endured, and it is time to celebrate…
THE WRECK OF THE NATIVIDAD
A chilling event of spectral outrage
by J Linseed Grant
As a seasonal icy rain lashed St Botolph’s, the streets thronged with busy folk. Outside the village store, Sandra, her cousin Mary, and Mary’s fearless lurcher, Bottles, stood under the tattered shop awning and watched the merry throng.
Huzzah! cried the children as they hurtled cheerily through the narrow lanes, trying to pick the pockets of the older villagers as they went – and tread on as many bunions as possible.
Huzzah! cried the more aged residents, lashing out with their canes and hoping to cripple at least one passing urchin to add to their score.
Huzzah! cried the Girl Guides, who believed in ill will to all men – and women. Liberally fuelled by lemonade and Brasso, they were trying to take down both babes and pensioners with equal enthusiasm.
“The authorities tried to have the entire village sectioned last month,” said Sandra, wringing out one of her long blonde plaits. “But they couldn’t get the police or the doctors to come near enough. Even the Army medics refused to turn out.”
“Not surprised.” Mary coughed into his handkerchief, and examined the result. A number of rare diseases were endemic to St Botolph’s, and it was always worth checking. “At least there’s no panto this year.”
Sandra stared at the sad sight of her cousin, whose usually neat outfit of silk blouse, pleated skirt and ribbed tights was in some disarray. Mrs Gribble, ninety three years old and sprightly, had tried to mug them outside the Mold Street charity shop. It was fortunate that Sandra had her Remington with her – a warning shot had driven the old lady back into the shop.
“We are still going to the church’s Nativity Play, aren’t we?” asked Sandra. “I have to take some of Mother’s sheep down for the procession.”
“S’ppose so. But you know it’ll be a disaster, don’t you?”
Bottles looked up, catching the tone in his master’s voice, and leapt into action with his usual bold response to any sort of danger.
“You’ll have to change your tights again, Mary,” said Sandra. “That’ll stain.”
***
The little church of St Botolph, proud centre of St.Botolph-in-the-Wolds, is described in Edith Hollinghurts’s monumental, twenty five volume work ‘The Least Pleasant Parish Churches of England’ (1936) as:
“A warped and completely appalling excrescence, combining the worst features of seven architectural periods at once. The entire edifice, an offence to the Anglican community, should be burned down at once, and I will pay for the petrol.”
Its unique bell tower never seemed to be at the same angle twice, and most of the gargoyles had abandoned their posts centuries ago, too frightened to stay. The extensive crypt was known for its collection of unassigned femurs; the font was either Anglo-Saxon or IKEA, and the benefice of St Botolph’s was traditionally given to those clergy who were too insensitive to notice what was happening around them.
The Reverend Denholm Whitehead was such a man. He was Anglican in the way that cardboard is a foodstuff – it neither offends nor provides anything of value – and left most things to his energetic wife. Thus it was that while he sat at home and watched the Christmas Day racing at Wetwang, Mrs Whitehead strode around the church organising anyone who didn’t move fast enough to escape her.
“Not there, Marjorie, dear,” she admonished an old woman who was stuffing plastic lilies into the carved mouth of St Carapace, an early Christian martyr to haemorrhoids. Tall and grey-haired, Mrs Whitehead had views on everything, from transubstantiation (too many vowels) to the cooking of sprouts (at a rolling boil for three hours).
The nave of the church would host this year’s Nativity Play. There was to be a short performance that evening – as short as possible – from the children of St Botolph’s Mixed Infants School, followed by a procession of local animals to adore the newly- born Messiah, and a hasty exit to the Flayed Bull for mulled gin and aspirin. Most church events resulted in elevated consumption of aspirin, except for those inter-faith sessions led by the local imam, whose astonishing displays of Muslim origami always put people at ease.
Much of the touching tableau was already in place in front of the altar. Something vaguely resembling a manger had been erected from old planks by the Women’s Institute, and a large artificial palm tree (kindly stolen from a York nightclub by the Girl Guides) nodded over the scene, evoking a fine sense of the Middle East. That was if you ignored the cigarette ends, the smell of badly-mixed cocktails, and the pair of pink lace panties lodged firmly in the upper fronds. Which Mrs Whitehead did.
Feeling obligated, she walked over to where a small, dirty figure in a frayed potato sack loitered by the crib – a damaged crate marked ‘Luncheon Meat – Condemned’.
“Hello, little boy, and what–”
“I is a girl.”
“Ah. Well, little girl, what a lovely crib.” She peered inside the crib, where lay a large off-white turnip with a false beard stuck to it. “The Baby Jesus… appears to be a turnip.”
“It am. Dolly’s head fell off.”
“But why is it wearing a beard?”
The girl gave her a look of utter scorn. “You wouldn’t know it were Jesus if it didn’t have no beard, would you?”
Beaten by such logic, the vicar’s wife retreated. She was sure, however, that the evening would go splendidly…
***
At the farm, the sheep had at last been brushed and put the right way up. Sandra’s mother had recently given refuge to a small herd of Ousewater Blackfloods, an ancient Yorkshire breed with varying numbers of legs and a tendency towards amphibious outings, which meant they had to be dried in front of the kitchen range on an almost daily basis.
“Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip…” intoned Sandra as the animals stumbled out into the yard.
“That’s the traditional Yorkshire way of counting sheep, isn’t it? I read about it at college.”
“Is it?” Sandra looked puzzled. “Mother told me it was their names. Look, Mether’s the large one with the squinty eye, the one trying to hide in the horse-trough.”
“Oh.” Mary hauled the sheep out and gave it a kick up the backside to send it on its way. He glanced towards the barn where Sandra’s pony lived. “Speaking of horse-troughs, where is Mr Bubbles?”
“He went out onto the moors to stand on things,” said Sandra, putting Tether back onto his feet again. “Said he might drop in later.”
“Come-bye, come-bye, away!” yelled the two chums as they urged the sheep down the lane towards the church. It would have helped to have sheepdogs – Bottles was no use, as he had hidden amongst the sheep at the first mention of Mr Bubbles. Anything to do with that slightly psychotic pony involved a level of clear and present danger that Bottles preferred to avoid.
As they neared the village, they met with other columns of animals. Farmer Turvey was there with the more dissident of his cows, which had now abandoned their theories of a dictatorship of the proletariat, and begun to espouse anarcho-syndicalism; Mrs Pettifer, reputedly the oldest person in the village, had a box of convalescent tortoises, whilst Ignatius Pottle had brought his eleven children, a brood of dubious provenance. Sundry geese, rabbits and goats made up the numbers as the crowd entered the churchyard.
“Oh dear,” said Sandra, seeing Miss Hildagram, the local coven leader, cycling up the street. “I see she’s brought it.”
‘It’ was Miss Hildagram’s pet badger, Fluffy, perched in the bicycle basket. Everyone agreed that Fluffy probably was a badger – or had been once – but it was certainly not a pet by anyone’s standards except Miss Hildagram’s. It could be better described as thirty five pounds of striped, clawed irritation, bound to its loving owner by an accidental spell-casting. The pink ribbon around Fluffy’s neck did not disguise the badger’s general dislike of its situation.
“Who’s a good boy, yes um is, isn’t um?” doted the aged witch, her affection rewarded by a throaty scream of annoyance from inside the basket.
With the various beasts penned or parked outside the church, awaiting the procession proper, Sandra, Mary and Bottles joined the throng of villagers heading into the building.
“This place makes my sinuses hurt,” said Mary.
“It’s the dust. Probably.” Sandra drew in the unique churchy smell of mouldy hymn books, pigeon droppings and wood polish, along with a miasma of dubious sanctity created by centuries of people sitting there every week and wondering if they’d left the iron on. “Don’t do that, Bottles.”
The lurcher lowered his back leg, edging away from a stone column that had been particularly tempting, and settled in the pew next to Mary. Already the main lights were being dimmed, leaving the forty or fifty people present unable to find where they’d put their mints or crossword puzzles.
It was a good turnout, and there were many looks of appreciation as the church organist, high on cold remedies, began a random medley of ‘Zadok the Priest’ and ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, throwing in the odd passage from ‘Oklahoma!’ now and then.
“You don’t hear that very often,” said Sandra. “When does the–”
The main lights dimmed suddenly, leaving only a single spotlight focussed on the nave.
“It is not far now, my dear,” said a jam-covered mixed infant, revealed in the circle of light. Just identifiable as Blessed Smothers, the son of the local cess-pit cleaner, he was arrayed in a magnificent selection of tea towels depicting British defeats at sea. Wobbling behind him on a tandem sat Emily Pethwick in an old sheet, a red velour cushion tied around her waist.
“An’ my bum hurts,” said the Virgin Mary.
The congregation watched with moderate interest as the two children cycled up the nave, followed by the glare of the spotlight, to where a plywood door had been hung between two pillars. Joseph and the Virgin Mary dismounted, letting the tandem crash to the floor. Through the cunning artifice of amateur carpenters, the door opened, to reveal a portly infant wearing a false moustache. His overall appearance – disconcertingly – was of a very young Hercules Poirot, blinking in the harsh light.
“Yes? Are you robbers?”
“No,” said Joseph. “My wife is with child.”
“She aren’t with anyone ‘cept you,” said the Innkeeper, poking his nose as he regarded the Virgin Mary.
“It’s a baby, you thicko. It’s inside her.”
The Innkeeper stepped back. “Urgh! She’s etten a baby?”
“Get on with it,” hissed Mrs Whitehead from the shadows. The three players hesitated, then recovered.
“She is with child,” repeated Joseph, “And needs somewhere to do the thing what women does. Is there room at your inn?”
“Course there is. Loads of room.” The Innkeeper, also known as Our Brian, was the only son of the landlord at the Flayed Bull, and a keen advocate of the publican’s trade. “What sort of inn would this be if there wasn’t no room? We got a nice double, wiv a toilet.”
“Manger!” came the hiss from the wings.
The Innkeeper frowned. “Er… but the toilet is broke. We can do you the manger, what is next door. Straw extra.” He shuffled out from the doorway and pushed the two towards the crib and the palm tree. “Breakfast is sausages.”
The small girl in the potato sack came forward to stand by the crib. “I is a shepherd. I is here to adore somethink. Is your wife fat, or is she making babies?”
Emily Pethwick, never one to avoid a challenge, ran forward and punched the small girl in the stomach. “An’ I is not fat, Jennie Bullfish! An’ it is a BABY, what will be the Messy-thing. An’ it will make loads of people fight for, like, ages an’ ages, even though it is nice. An’ it gives them sandwiches with fishes in. An’ so they are stupid!”
“Oh.” The small girl gave the Virgin Mary a vindictive look. “You is late. There is Three Kings what have been waiting ages.”
Three more mixed infants, clad in Christmas wrapping paper and Sellotape, came out from behind the altar. Each wore a turban fashioned by the imam, who had gracefully accepted his role as period advisor, despite the fact that he had been born in Bradford and knew little of hat fashions in early Palestine. It showed.
The tallest King came to the crib, one pudgy hand to his head as he tried to stop his turban unravelling. “We brings you gifts, what we wrapped ourselves.”
“An’ I has not had the Messy-thing yet,” said the Virgin Mary.
“Tough,” said the King. “We are very busy at this time of year, ‘cos it is Christmas. If you don’t want our pressies–”
A hasty struggle ensued, in which a carton of cheap cigarette lighters, a plastic dinosaur and a Terry’s chocolate orange found their way to the foot of the crib.
“An’ now I must go to the hospittle for tummy ache,” announced the Virgin Mary loudly.
The spotlight clunked off, leaving the church in almost complete darkness. The gathered folk of St Botolph’s applauded, mostly in the hope that this would speed up the affair.
Sandra nudged her cousin. “You see, it’s all going jolly well. And nobody’s been hurt at all.”
“Give it time,” said Mary. “I expect that–”
He was interrupted by an almost blinding light from around the altar, but it was only the vicar’s wife turning all the fittings on at once from the pulpit. Mrs Whitehead beamed down on the congregation.
“Behold, our lovely Christmas scene!”
And there it was – the Nativity.
As Joseph, the Virgin Mary and the Innkeeper jostled and poked each other, the Three Kings gave muted adoration of the ‘new-born’, trying to ignore the fact that the Baby Jesus was still a large turnip in a beard. The palm tree swayed above all, and the wise shepherd, aka Jennie Bullfish, ushered various other vaguely shepherd-like mixed infants into the spotlight.
Despite the organiser’s best efforts, there had been the usual parental indifference to making new `costumes. One child had a horse’s skull strapped over his face; another was dressed as a dalek, and several wore other variants on outfits from various village pantomimes. It wasn’t quite Bethlehem, let’s put it that way. The vicar’s wife had reflected more than once that keeping the older children, such as most of the Girl Guides, out of the affair had its downside. Although a law unto themselves, the Guides were at least highly organised.
“I is an Angle of the Lord!” announced a waif-like girl in white robes, a gold-painted frisbee taped to her head. “I denunciated this, I did too.”
“You stinks of vinegar, Clemency May Pottle,” said the Innkeeper, throwing a stained tea-towel over the waif. “’Cos you is a fish-face!”
Violence was avoided by Mrs Whitehead’s yelled instructions, upon which the infants burst into a spirited rendition of ‘Away in a Manger’, bolstered every so often by the organist waking up and leaning on an organ key. The congregation duly joined in, and up the central aisle came the animals, prodded along by the churchwardens and members of the Women’s Institute.
The Ousewater Blackfloods were surprisingly well-behaved as they neared the manger to do some adoring – excepting for Mether, who tried to make a run for the font. Sandra leapt up and steered the sheep back into the flock, returning to her seat again as the rest of the Pottle children, a Marxist-Leninist cow and a fluster of goats entered the church. Geese honked and released their droppings liberally, while a selection of pet rabbits demonstrated their intelligence and simply ran straight back out of the open doors.
Up rose the heavenly sound of more than fifty adults and infants mangling Christmas carols, mingled with the bleats of goats and sheep, the angry complaints of Fluffy, still in its basket, and the keening cry of Bottles, who felt that he’d been rather forgotten in this story.
In the bell tower, the vicar’s team lifted up wooden mallets and announced the birth of the Baby Jesus by hitting the church bells as hard as they could. Once upon a time the team had been proper bell-ringers, but Old Taunt, Jack-the-Grand, Saint Cecilia and most of the other bells had crashed through the joists many years ago, and though intact, lay in a metallic jumble on the tower floor.
Each massive chunk of bronze gave a dull boom as the mallets hit home – Old Taunt was balanced on scavenged train rails, and retained some of his sonorous nature. The bell-tower shook to his call, originally reserved as a solo performance for the more interesting funerals.
BOOM.
A cloud of pigeon-droppings and woodworm dust flew into the body of the church, inducing violent coughing, but the congregation responded with typical Yorkshire stubbornness by singing louder.
BOOM.
Hands clapped to their ears, Sandra and Mary edged towards the doors.
“I can’t take much more of this!” yelled Mary. “Let’s go outside.”
His cousin nodded. “Half past nine, I think.”
BOOM.
Old Taunt shifted on his rails and sounded again, shaking the church spire, and the Ousewater Blackfloods took alarmed baaing to a new level. The organist, shaken out of her medical stupor by the sheer noise, began to play the Wedding March with all the stops out. Encouraged by the vicar’s wife pointing at the hymn board on the wall, the congregation burst into ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, increasing the racket another notch. Many miles away in York and Scarborough, amateur seismologists watched quivering needles with interest.
BOOM.
The cousins had barely reached the main entrance when they sensed a change in the atmosphere – a thin, cold sort of sensation. Lost in their fervour to out-sing various neighbours, everyone else seemed oblivious to the dense grey mist which was rising through cracks in the church floor.
It rose like smoke at first, tendrils interweaving and shifting in the draughty church, but soon began to take on a more worrying identity of its own – a bank of rolling grey which lapped around the edges of the congregation. Faces were forming inside it, cadaverous faces which reminded Sandra and Mary of the long-dead. Shrivelled eyes turned under ruined brows; rotting lips opened to reveal jagged teeth…
“Uh-oh.” Mary reached into his handbag to see if he had remembered the collection of silver bullets, cold iron, and religious artefacts that he habitually carried when he visited St Botolph’s. “Cripes – I brought the other bag. I knew it!”
Sandra made frantic signals to Mrs Whitehead, who only leaned forward in the pulpit and smiled back, not noticing the new presences at her successful Nativity Play. Down in the main aisles, people were now less certain. The singing faltered. Old Taunt had fallen silent for a moment, and hungrier voices could be heard above the bleating of the sheep and goats. The voices of the grave.
<What’s this? What’s this? There’s something very wrong. What’s this? There are idiots singing songs…>
Mary was trying to make the sign of the cross with two different shades of lipstick. “Blimey, isn’t that a line from a film, the one about scary pumpkins, with–”
“Shh!” said Sandra. “There might be lawyers reading.”
Cavernous eye sockets gleamed in the pallid mist, which rolled around the parishioners and mixed infants with palpable malevolence.
<We slept,> hissed the voices. <For decades, for centuries, we slept in the cool Beneath. And now this! You drag us from our quiet deaths; you send your shrieking nonsense into our very bones.>
“Awfully sorry,” said Sandra. “Slight mistake, that’s all.”
Dead faces turned to her, features swirling, changing and reforming – the mist grew thicker, bringing the smell of rotting coffins and the charnel house. Or what Sandra imagined a charnel house would smell of, whatever one of them was.
<Mistakes.> A grey face hovered in the mist before the teenager. <We know of those. And we know of regrets and lost hopes, of punishment and torment.>
A vaporous hand, more a claw, lashed out and clutched Mrs Peaslee, the Chair of the Women’s Institute. Although it only managed to lift her a few inches, when she fell back into her pew she was shaking, and had crystals of ice in her eyebrows and her perm. Other limbs formed in the mist, reaching into the congregation – each touch of a phantom finger or talon brought with it the cold of the grave. People cried out, but when the back row scrambled out of their pews and staggered towards the church doors, pale hands slammed the doors shut.
<We shall tell you about the Beneath, and the peace of Death. We shall teach you how to be quiet. Very quiet…”>
“Oh, knickers,” said Mary, clutching Bottles to him. “Sandra, we’re in trouble.”
But then, at that very moment (as storytellers like to say), the great oak doors of the church boomed with a powerful impact. An impact from… outside! The cousins looked at each other. Could it be?
Despite the thick, grasping mist around the doors, the hinges rattled. Then they groaned, bent… and both doors burst open. Outlined against a feeble moon stood a vision of Horse. This was Ur-Horse, the primal essence made flesh, as if everything equine which had ever existed had been distilled into one black, muscular form…
“Mr Bubbles!” Sandra and Mary cried out in unison.
“What?” The pony looked around the church. “Messy in here. Why the fog?”
“It’s not fog, boy” said Sandra, pressing herself gratefully against the pony’s warm shoulder. “I’m awfully afraid that we’ve woken the spirits of the angry dead, and now they want revenge for being disturbed.”
“Fair enough.” He twitched his ears. “Thought there was a racket. Anyway, seen my turnip?”
Mary slid as close as she dared to the slightly psychotic pony. “Er, did you not come to rescue us?”
“Not really.” Mr Bubbles looked irritated. “Some kid nicked my best turnip. Big white one, sort of purple bit near the top. I was saving it.” A swirling face, the colour of wet linen, passed near him, and he bit out, but his huge teeth met nothing. “Can’t do much, anyway. Not to these things. So, about that turnip–”
The youngsters’ hearts sank – or at least moved marginally further down in their chests, trying to find a way out. If their indomitable beast couldn’t affect these spectres, then what was going to happen to them?
“There must be something you can do, boy?” pleaded Sandra.
“Doubt it.” The pony trod experimentally on a misty claw which was trying to catch hold of Sandra’s left leg. His iron-shod hoof had no effect, so he grabbed her coat collar in his teeth and put her down on the other side of him. “See? I should leg it if I were you.”
“We can’t leave the rest of them behind.” She pointed to where villagers and animals filled the nave, surrounded by the chill grey mist and a sea of clutching talons. The crib had fallen over, and the goats were eating a selection of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Miss Hildegram appeared to be attempting a spell of some sort, but as an irate badger was chewing on her ankle, her concentration was not at its best.
“It is all about belief,” shouted the coven leader, trying to kick Fluffy away without hurting it (no one had ever determined Fluffy’s gender, though a few had lost fingers trying). “You must show them your faith, whatever it is!”
Heeding her wise words, two or three villagers held up lottery tickets, waving them at the gaseous spectres. To Sandra’s surprise, this seemed to be effective, at least for a moment or two.
As for the mixed infants, they seemed oblivious to the threat. The Virgin Mary and Jennie Bullfish were locked in a fairly epic fist-fight, egged on by the Innkeeper and the Three Kings, whilst Joseph was kicking the artificial palm tree and trying to catch falling cigarette ends. Phrases such as ‘Think of the children,’ would clearly be lost on Mr Bubbles. But… the crib!
“I know where your turnip is,” she said, tugging on his mane. Mr Bubbles, who had turned to leave, twisted his head round. “And if you help save this lot, I’ll tell you,” she added.
He snorted. “Still can’t do much.” He lashed out again, but the mist merely parted and reformed into an annoyed face.
<You will not find us, horse-monster,> said the face, and then its expression changed to a weak smile. <Oops. Ignore me.>
“What does it mean, ‘find us’?” Mary put Bottles down behind him. The shivering lurcher was getting very damp, and Mary didn’t want to think about that too much. “Sandra, there’s something to find!”
“Ghosts, spectres, dead people, crypt, revenants…” Sandra employed every trick in the book. In the cheaper books, anyway. She narrowed her eyes, furrowed her brow, chewed at the insides of her cheeks, racked her brains and tried a few more classic moves, all at the same time. And whilst it gave her a bit of a headache, she had a spark of inspiration.
“Bodies,” she said. “Or bones, anyway. They must have mortal remains somewhere. Maybe that’s their weakness.”
Mary grinned. “Gosh, you might have something there. Where’s the entrance to the crypt? Bottles, go find them, boy. Good dog, find the bones. Big bones for my best boy.”
Bottles was not the wisest of dogs, nor was he the most stupid. He considered the possibility that there really were nice bones – or that he might be catapulted into more terrifying danger than even his capacious bladder could express. Still, he was quite fond of Mary…
“Woof,” he replied, and shot off down the side of the church, ducking under the foul mist and keeping away from the general melee in the nave. The lurcher could smell bones, though the scent he caught didn’t seem very fresh. Maybe there were better ones down there as well. There was a lot of dust in the air.
“Come on,” urged Sandra, and Mr Bubbles trotted reluctantly after them, snapping now and then at a protruding face. Bottles was panting in front of a door near the vestry, a thick, studded door with an iron ring riveted to it.
“It’s probably–”
The pony’s hooves shattered the door, and some of the surrounding masonry.
“–locked,” finished Mary, feeling a bit unnecessary.
Astonished at himself, the lurcher led the way down a flight of broad steps and into the dim space below. Arched ceilings gathered the gloom about them, and the pony’s iron horseshoes raised sparks from the stone-flagged floor. Sandra pulled a torch from her back-pack, and in its clear beam, they saw the carved tombs, and the niches stacked with the coffins of former generations. The posher members of said generations, that is.
“No turnip.” Mr Bubbles looked around, his eyes betraying a spark of red in their black depths.
“There will be.” Sandra stroked his long neck. “Do what I ask, darling Mr Bubbles, and you’ll have your turnip back, I promise.”
The red faded. In Sandra he trusted. Anyone else who called him ‘darling’ would have had their face kicked in. She whispered something else in his ear, and pushing the torch into her cousin’s hand, she ran back up the steps.
“Hey, you lot! Ghost-pests!” The mists swirled, and narrow faces formed in it, looking in her direction. “Yeah, that’s right, you. You need to jolly well listen to me.”
<Ice for the maiden, ice and dust to clog her little throat…> whispered the nearest face.
“Right, then.” Sandra thrust two fingers into her mouth and let out a sharp whistle. There was a thump and crunch down in the crypt. The eyes of the next face along opened wide, and it folded, dissipating into the general mist with a faint cry of <Oh, bugger!>
A pneumatic hiss of snarls and imprecations came from the mist, which crept towards her. She whistled again. Another crunch from below, and a grasping hand fell apart, inches from her arm. The spectral cloud hesitated.
“I know where you live,” said Sandra. “My pony is ready to crush every single casket and tomb down there; your bones will be broken open and thrown to the dogs to gnaw. Well, a dog, anyway. Same thing.”
Bottles gave a Yip! from the crypt, one which managed to convey both threat and the urgent need to relieve himself. He didn’t think much of the bones he’d found so far, but he was a Good Dog.
<You cannot destroy us all in the time we need to–>
A crunching, rending sound beneath them announced that Mr Bubbles was taking out his annoyance on one of the larger family tombs. Three faces disappeared at once this time.
<All right, all right.> The mist, smaller now and pulsating slightly, eased away from the villagers and their animals.
Sandra put her hands on her hips, facing the core of the spectres with determination. “Go back to sleep, and we won’t do in any more of you. And we’ll stop singing for a while. Agreed?”
The response was sullen but definite.
<Agreed.>
The mist slid away, insinuating itself between flagstones, disappearing wisp by wisp until there was no trace that it had ever been there apart from some very cold villagers and some confused animals.
Satisfied, Sandra gave two short, sharp whistles, and her companions padded, clattered and staggered up from the crypt. Bottles was looking particularly pleased with himself, dragging a large leg bone along as he emerged.
“Is it… er… wrong to eat people?” asked Mary, glancing at his dog.
“He was very useful.” Sandra patted Bottles on the head. “And, I suppose–”
“Turnip,” said Mr Bubbles, his dark eyes fixed on her.
She sighed, and pushed her way through the confused parishioners to get to the crib, where the Virgin Mary and Jennie Bullfish had made up their differences. They were playing with Mr Clemp’s wooden leg, which had fallen off in the general chaos.
“An’ it does bend, in the middul, see?” Emily demonstrated to Jennie.
Sandra retrieved the leg, passing it back to its owner. “I could do with that turnip, girls.”
“It are the Baby Jesus,” said the erstwhile shepherd. “That is why it do have a beard.”
“Mine.” Mr Bubbles loomed over the crib, and as usual, people edged away. When it came to getting close to the great black beast of the moors, you were either Sandra, or you were tomorrow’s obituary notice.
“An’ it am the horsey!” said Emily, who had been enamoured of Mr Bubbles since the night-jack and combine harvester incident a year or so before. “Here, horsey.” She held up the turnip, which Mr Bubbles took gently in his teeth, spitting out the false beard as he did so.
They watched the pony as he trotted through the confused throng and exited the church. The Ousewater Blackfloods had held up remarkably well, thought Sandra, though Mether was predictably wedged in the font and would have to be hauled out.
“Are we dead?” asked Mrs Gribble, who had a dessicated pigeon corpse tangled in her hair and a lot of pale dust on her face, giving her the appearance of a deranged geriatric geisha.
“No, we’re just in St Botolph’s,” said Sandra. The old woman wandered off, looking content with that answer. Miss Hildegram was unconscious, but Fluffy was crouched on top of her body, and by all reports had driven away any misty, predatory talons. Love is a funny thing.
Mary tapped his cousin on the shoulder, and pointed to the pulpit. The vicar’s wife appeared to be paralysed in a posture of forced enthusiasm, a rictus of a smile upon her face. How much of the nightmare she had taken in, it was hard to tell.
“Are you all right up there, Mrs Whitehead?” called out Sandra.
“Gladioli on Tuesdays, chrysanthemums on Fridays,” said Mrs Whitehead. “And I must tell Denholm that the churchyard grass needs cutting.”
“She’s fine. It’s just shock.”
Bottles urinated against the pulpit, and then dragged his bone out into the night, leaving Sandra and Mary to re-establish some vague sense of normality inside the church. Mary was in a particularly good mood.
“No one’s dead,” he said with a grin. “That’s probably a first for Christmas Day up here, isn’t it?”
Sandra shoved the torch back into her pack. “You should see what they do tomorrow, on the twenty sixth. ‘The Hunting of the Wren’ – using the school howitzer.”
“Well, I think we’ve done OK, anway.” Mary smoothed out his pleated skirt. “What I say is, goodwill to all folk, and God bless us, every–”
Behind him, Fluffy the badger was violently – and noisily – sick into the empty crib.
THE END
And greydog hopes to sneak back at least once more before the end of the calendrical year…