A Christmas Horror Story by Sebastian Gregory Read Free Book Online Page A

reduced to glowing embers. Katie breathed a sigh of relief.
    ‘Here,’ she said, passing Jake the torch. ‘Hold the beam to the fireplace while I get more wood into it.’
    Jake nodded and did so while Katie crouched nearby. She took the small hand axe that stood by the hearthside. Katie took two sizeable logs and, with a couple of swishes of the hatchet, reduced the wood to splinters. She threw the debris into the fire and blew a few times until it caught hold and the flames rose up. Katie went to collect more wood, but the torchlight had dropped lower to the floor.
    ‘Lift the light higher, Jake’. ‘I can’t see the kindling.’
    The light didn’t move.
    She turned.
    Jake stood in the doorway trembling. The torch rocked at his feet. The boy was so tiny compared to the tendril of shadows that shimmered around him. A thin, veined and gaunt hand, black with silver scales, wrapped its long fingers around Jake’s mouth, preventing him from crying out. His eyes were wide with utter fear. Katie screamed an ear-splitting ‘NO’ and in that second, the creature and boy melted into the shadows and were away. From the wall in the living room, the clock struck midnight. It was Christmas day.

Chapter Six
    Moorside, Glossop, Christmas Day, 25 December 2014
    Katie’s heart pounded and her veins throbbed in rhythm with the blood pumping through her body. There was no way to comprehend the terror that kept her going, for to acknowledge its existence would be to embrace madness, which she knew would have to wait until she had found her brother and sister. She tried to run, but could only manage an awkward lope. Her clothes, padded and heavy, dragged her into the snow, and the weight of the rucksack strapped to her back made balancing a near impossible task. She stumbled and gripped her legs, helping them to escape from the snow. And just like in a dream, her legs were left with no strength against the relentless clutch of the snow. She fell again and again, and each time she struggled to drag herself up, she screamed with frustration and wept through fear of never seeing her brother and sister again.
    She forced herself on through the grey evening, gasping for sharp air. On and on she pushed herself. The sky was a cloudless map of bright crystals. At another time, in another life, she might have stopped and appreciated the beauty. But without her family there was no beauty in the universe, though she was grateful for the moon and the stars, which lit her way with white and silver almost as well as a summer’s day. She crossed fields, and when she came to barbed wire fences she crawled over them through the snow.
    As Katie made her rough progress, there were times when her waist disappeared below the snowline, the cold and wet seeping through her layers of clothes and freezing her skin sore. She could feel herself turning blue. Onward she forced herself, each step exhausting her muscles while, inside her mind, fear and desperation did their best demoralise her, to make her lie on that cold frozen ground deep below the snow, silent and still evermore. She ignored her nagging hopelessness and continued on her slow progress.
    Through fields she trudged until she arrived at another barbed wire fence. Beyond it she could see the beginning of the forest. Between that, the flocks of birds they had discovered the day before lay dead and solid, a grim marker indicating where to go to follow Emily and Jake. But before that there was the wire, held by rotting wooden posts and disappearing into the distance on either side of the forest. Katie peeled her left glove back and peered at her watch, seeing under the stars’ reflections that a couple of hours had passed.
    She busied herself with removing her rucksack and rummaging inside. She produced a blue blanket and folded it, placing it over the barbed wire. Fastening her rucksack again, she paused for a moment before climbing on the blanket. Underneath the material she could feel the razors