Exactly one year had passed since Holly had come back to the village. It had been a bleak welcome: grey, grainy skies; the rain’s wet fingertips tapping on the windows of Gran’s cottage. The small house was gloomy and unfamiliar, and coated in a strange smell that Holly would later learn was a potent brew of beeswax and mothballs. Old smells, from another century. The smell of her new home.
Gran had done her best to make her feel comfortable, chattering constantly as she led Holly through the cottage. The living room was dominated by a working fireplace, a brass coal scuttle filled with black lumps waiting beside the ash-flecked grate. A clock on top of the mantelpiece loudly doled out the seconds. It was surrounded by family photographs, a small gallery of fading ghosts and unfamiliar faces. As she stared at the fireplace, Holly had found herself wishing that it would swallow her up in its sooty mouth; that she could fly away up the chimney and melt into the sky like smoke.
A hand had fastened around Holly’s arm. “Come away, dear.”
It was Gran – a small, bird-like woman with glasses and tightly curled white hair. She was smiling, but her firm grip brooked no argument. Holly followed her out of the room and up creaking stairs to the attic, where her new room was waiting for her. The roof sloped down sharply over her head, a lone window offering a view of the flat expanse of fields. The floorboards were cold through Holly’s socks.
“I hope this will do,” Gran had said. “I know it’s smaller than you’re used to, but we’ll make the best of it we can.”
She patted Holly’s hand and smiled encouragingly. Part of Holly had wanted to cry, but she’d told herself back in London that she wasn’t going to do that any more. So instead she lay down on the bed and stared up at the roof, thoughts of the fireplace and Gran’s tight grip drifting away.
She would remember, though – later.
Winter had come late to the village, only to arrive with a bite sharpened by hunger. The summer had been generous and warm, and it had been October before the trees let slip their leaves and autumn bonfires singed the air. Birds arrowed across clear skies in formation; fields hardened into barren furrows. The clocks went back. Nights drew in.
It was Friday morning: Mart had a dentist’s appointment, so Holly sat on her own as the school bus rattled through the countryside. Trees looked like skeletal hands through the frosted windows. Breath blossomed into white clouds. Holly shivered and bunched her hands in her jumper. Behind her, the Marshall twins were bickering about who would get what for Christmas, while Fran and Kayleigh giggled and whispered. No one sat near Holly.
Right from the start, she had struggled to fit in. Two weeks after returning to the village, Holly had received an anonymous invitation through her letterbox, ordering her to wait beneath the elm tree on the green at sunset. The flowery message hinted at some kind of initiation rite, giving Holly a vision of circles of cross-legged girls, needle-pricked thumbs and solemn vows of friendship. Wrinkling her nose, she had tossed the invitation in the bin. Months later, she had learned that Fran and Kayleigh had waited an hour on the green before giving up. It had been Mart who told her, of course. By that point he was only person left in the village who wanted to be her friend.
Holly might have been born in the village, but having moved away when she was four, she would always be an outsider. Narrow lanes bred narrow minds, her mum used to tell her. Holly guessed that was why they had gone to London in the first place. But then her mum had died in a road accident, vanishing in a fog of exhaust fumes and traffic horns. Winter had once promised presents beneath the Christmas tree, and the possibility of snow. Now it brought only an icy reminder of what Holly had lost.
Nobody said anything to Holly about her mum, or about their time in London. Nobody seemed to say anything round here, but it didn’t stop everybody knowing everybody else’s business. It was as if the villagers had some ancient and arcane way of passing on secrets without words – smoke signals rising up from the chimneys, or coded arrangements of twigs in the woods.
At the back of the bus, Fran and Kayleigh burst out laughing: nasty laughter, like a sour chime of bells. The window gave Holly an icy kiss as she rested her head against the glass and closed her eyes.
“Go on,” said Mart. “I dare you.”
Holly gave him a withering look. “You dare me? You’re such a child, Mart.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re scared.”
“Am not.”
“Am, too.”
They were standing at the gates of a rundown house on the edge of the village. It was fashioned from red bricks and boarded-up windows, chimneys poking up from either side of the black-tiled roof. A wooden fence laced with barbed wire marked off the scrubby garden out front. It was known as the Piper house, even though no one called Piper had lived there for years. Then again, neither had anyone else.
Mart adjusted his glasses as he stared up the path. He was two years younger than Holly, but his serious, deliberate manner made him seem almost middle-aged at times. Even his name sounded old.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Holly said firmly. “You die, and that’s the end of it.”
“Rob Youds said his brothers came down here from the farm one night and saw her in the window,” Mart countered, blinking owlishly.
“Rob Youds is an idiot. And so are his brothers.”
“Prove it. Go take a look around.”
Holly checked the lane was empty and pushed open the gate. It gave way with a rusty squeak. The path seemed to lengthen as she walked it, the shadows deepening. Holly had planned on ringing the bell, but when she reached the front door she decided against it, gripped by the sudden fear that someone might actually answer. Instead she went around the side of the house and found a window where the board had come away. Cupping her hands against the glass, Holly made out a bare room with a wooden floor and a mirror above a large marble fireplace. Years of rumour and neglect had given the atmosphere a sullen edge.
Holly looked back towards the front of the house and saw Mart fidgeting anxiously at the gate. A gust of cold air blew her fringe in her eyes. She brushed it aside.
Something moved inside the Piper house, a black blur flitting across the hearth. Startled, Holly peered back through the window. It had happened so quickly that she was already doubting if she had seen anything at all, or whether it had been a trick of the light. Now, as she examined the room more closely, Holly saw that the walls were covered in marks – deep, spiteful scratches covering their length and breadth. It looked as though a wild animal had been trapped inside.
Holly backed away from the window and walked along the path as slowly as she dared, relieved when she felt the shadow of the Piper house release her, and the sunshine on her neck once more.
“What’s up?” Mart said eagerly, when she reached the gate. “You saw something, didn’t you?”
“It was nothing,” she replied.
“I don’t believe you. You saw Gwen, I know it.”
“Shut up, Mart,” said Holly.
After Sunday lunch, Holly and Gran washed up the dishes together. As she dried the cutlery, Holly gazed absentmindedly out of the window across the fields that ran behind their house beneath a vast, grey sky.
“I heard you and Martin were playing outside the Piper house yesterday,” Gran said.
Holly rolled her eyes. “We weren’t playing, Gran. We were just … there.”
“Call it what you like,” Gran said, handing her a wet plate, “but I call it trespassing, and so do the police.”
“Trespassing? All I did was look through a window!”
“You stay away from that place.” Gran’s voice was sharp. “I won’t tell you again.”
She plunged a roasting dish into the water, inadvertently splashing Holly. In the year they had lived together, this was as close as they had come to fighting. One of them would always back away before they fell out properly, retreating upstairs or into the next room. Arguments were cliff faces: both of them were fearful of what would happen if they fell off.
Holly looked back to the window. “You think it might snow this year?”
“I hope not,” Gran said briskly. “Hard enough getting around as it is.”
Something in her tone told Holly that the conversation was over, and they washed up the rest of the dishes in silence.
That evening after school, the villagers filed through the darkness towards the church. Inside, the nave had been lit with candles, creating a cavernous hall of shifting shadows. Gran bustled along the busy pews, nodding to everyone she passed. When they finally reached their seats, Holly slumped down and folded her arms.
“I hope you’re not going to sulk through the entire service, young lady,” Gran said disapprovingly. “You can spare one evening a year for the sake of your grandmother.”
“But does it really have to be this evening?” Holly groaned.
“It’s the Advent service! It’s tradition.”
“So?”
It felt to Holly as though the village existed on some long-forgotten calendar, observing mysterious rites and celebrations from ancient times. Only that August, she had had to watch as Fran was crowned the Rose Princess and paraded through the village, glowing with triumph, on a chair carried by Billy Youds the farmer and his sons.
“Traditions are important,” Gran said firmly. “They’re like roots, stretching down deep into the soil. They keep us moored and nourished and safe.”
“Safe?” Holly frowned. “Safe from what?”
A murmur spread through the nave, greeting the vicar as he stepped up to the lectern. He began the service by announcing that this year all the children of the village would receive the special gift of a Christingle. Holly had no intention of taking any gifts, special or not, but a sharp elbow from Gran jolted her from her seat. She sloped down the central aisle after the others: Fran first, naturally, followed by Kayleigh and the Marshall twins, a couple of the Youds family, and then Mart. The congregation’s gaze felt like hot breath on Holly’s neck, and in her haste to return to her pew she almost snatched the Christingle from the vicar’s hand.
It wasn’t until she was safely in her seat that she realized there had been a mistake of some kind. Her Christingle was an orange wrapped in a red ribbon – but instead of cocktail sticks with candied fruits, the fruit’s skin had been pierced with five fish hooks.
“Eew!” said Holly, examining the sharp tips. “Is this a joke?”
“Hush now!” Gran told her. “Don’t be so ungrateful.”
Holly glanced over to where Mart was sitting with his parents – he held up his Christingle, which looked identical to hers, and shrugged. Gran pursed her lips. The last thing Holly wanted was another argument, so she waited until they had returned home and Gran had gone up to bed before sneaking outside and putting the Christingle in the bin by the back door.
“OK, you win,” Holly said finally. “Tell me about Gwen Piper.”
She lay stretched out on Mart’s bed, ignoring the unopened schoolbooks around her and gazing up at the model planets that hung like baubles from the ceiling. Mart sat at his desk, scribbling notes from a textbook. He paused, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“Not much to say,” he said. “Years ago she went to the pond on Christmas Day and never came back.”
“That’s it?”
He shrugged. “People get a bit funny when her name comes up. Like it’s bad luck or something. Did your mum ever talk about her?”
Holly shook her head. “Why?”
“I think they might have been the same age. Maybe she knew her.”
“Mum never really talked about this place much. A bit about Gran, and Granddad when he was alive. But no one else.” She rolled over and propped herself up on her elbow. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she said. “You blabbed about the Piper house. That’s how Gran found out.”
Mart looked sheepish. “I didn’t know she would find out. But you saw Gwen Piper, Hol. It’s pretty big news.”
“I told you I didn’t know what I saw,” Holly said stubbornly. “It was barely even a shadow. It could have been anything.”
“So why are you asking questions about her?”
“Because I know Gran won’t say anything, and you’re the only other person in the stupid village who talks to me.”
They both fell quiet.
“At church I heard Dr Marshall tell my dad he was going to take the twins away for Christmas,” Mart said eventually.
Holly lay back on the bed. “So? It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“It was the way he said it, I guess. Not like he wanted to go on holiday.” Mart glanced over at the Christingle resting on top of his chest of drawers. “Like he wanted to get out of here.”
Clouds gathered above the village, grey and swollen like bruises. The air turned bitter. In the lanes, people glanced up to the skies as they hurried home.
The snow fell overnight in a thick, silent avalanche. Sparkling white crusts formed on the hedgerows. The local pond iced over into a perfect mirror. Up in the rafters of Gran’s cottage, the heater in Holly’s attic room wheezed helplessly in the face of the cold. Even with thick socks on and the bedcovers tucked up over her head, Holly couldn’t get warm. Finally she forced herself to get up and scurry over to the wardrobe, where she knew there was an extra blanket. Her clothes hung neatly on the hangers, arranged with a grandmother’s care. Holly pushed aside the chequered curtain of school blouses, and froze.
The Christingle was hanging from the clothes rail by its red ribbon, the sharp fish hooks gleaming in the darkness. Gran must have found it in the bin and brought it up here. Muttering to herself, Holly went to untie the ribbon, but her fingers paused around the knot. Traditions are like roots, Gran had told her, back at church. They keep us moored and nourished and safe.
Holly grabbed the extra blanket and shut the wardrobe door, leaving the Christingle where it was.
The next morning Holly woke to find she had slept through her alarm. She stumbled downstairs, struggling into her school jumper, her hair still damp from the shower. Gran was sitting silently at the kitchen table, nursing a steaming cup of coffee. The snow had painted the window a pure white rectangle.
“I know, I know, I’m late!” Holly groaned. “You don’t have to say anything.”
“There’s no school today,” Gran told her quietly. “They didn’t get the gritter out in time. The village is snowed in.”
Her shoulders sagging with relief, Holly stopped wrestling with her jumper and sat down at the table. A plate of buttered toast was going cold in front of Gran, but she seemed to have forgotten it was there.
“Everything all right, Gran?” Holly asked.
“I’m fine, dear,” she said, with an attempt at a smile. “Just tired, that’s all.”
Holly reached over and took a slice of toast. “You get up too early.”
“You’re young, dear. Sleep comes easily to you.”
“Hey, I get stressed, too, you know!” Holly said. “I’m not a baby.”
“You think you’ve got troubles,” Gran murmured, cupping her wrinkled hands around her mug. “Wait until you get to my age.”
Saturday. Holly’s boots bit into the snow as she walked through the village, the winter air feasting on the tips of her nose and ears. At the green she heard laughter, and spotted Fran and Kayleigh walking towards the frozen pond. Their arms were interlinked, ice skates slung over their shoulders. Holly went in the opposite direction, up the hill towards the church, where Mart was waiting for her.
“I got your message,” she said. “What’s the big emergency?”
He turned without a word, leading her through the gate into a silent, snowy graveyard. Bare, low-hanging branches pointed accusingly at Holly as she passed. Mart carefully followed a solitary trail of his own footprints to the railings at the edge of the graveyard, where a pair of headstones were planted side by side in the ground beneath a silver birch. The first belonged to Gwen Piper; the second had been recently brushed clear of snow, revealing a name and two dates. Holly crouched down beside the headstone and examined the etched lettering.
“Evan Piper?” she said. “Who’s that?”
“That’s what I was wondering,” Mart replied. “Gwen’s dad, maybe?”
Judging by the date of Evan Piper’s birth, he was certainly old enough to be a father. When Holly checked the date of his death, she looked back to Gwen’s headstone, frowning.
“That’s weird,” she said. “Evan died a year after Gwen, on the same day: December 25.”
“Merry Christmas,” Mart muttered ghoulishly.
A rook cawed loudly nearby, startling them both. Looking up into the tree, Holly noticed something hanging from the branches. A wreath was suspended from a length of twine high above the graves: a circle of holly leaves with blood-red berries, blackened twigs poking out of it in the shape of a star.
“What’s that doing up there?” breathed Mart.
“How should I know?” Holly retorted irritably. “I didn’t put it there.”
“Well, someone did.”
They stood and watched as the wreath turned in the wind, a slow circle of tightening twine.
While Gran was at church, Holly dug out a box of old Christmas decorations from the cupboard, balancing precariously on an armchair to hang tinsel and paper chains around the walls. She even found a tatty plastic Christmas tree, which she placed proudly in the centre of the table. By the time she had finished, it was almost midday. Gran came back soon after, muttering to herself as she stamped the snow from her boots on the kitchen mat.
“Ta da!” Holly said, throwing out her arms.
Gran looked around the room.
“Well, what do you think?” Holly said.
“It’s fine, dear. But you needn’t have gone to so much trouble.”
“We didn’t do anything to celebrate last Christmas,” Holly said. “I thought this year we could do with cheering up.”
Gran toyed with the star on top of the plastic tree. “You’re a good girl,” she said finally, smiling. “It looks lovely. Now let’s put the kettle on, I could murder a cuppa.”
The lanes were still clogged with snow, so school was closed again. That evening Gran went to bed early, leaving Holly curled up in an armchair reading. She woke up to find the book resting half-open in her lap. The fire had gone out and the room had melted into darkness. Rubbing her eyes wearily, Holly closed her book and threw her blanket to one side.
As she stood up, she realized what had woken her: a loud scratching sound coming from the brickwork above the hearth. Holly wondered whether it was another bird. Over the summer, a young starling had fallen down the chimney and become trapped, and it had taken hours to get the distressed creature free. Holly went over to the fireplace and leaned over the ashen hearth, turning on the light on her mobile. The chimney was a black chute, acrid with soot. Arching her neck, Holly held up her phone and peered into the flue.
“Hey, Mr Birdie,” she called out. “Where are you?”
A pair of narrow eyes stared back at her.
Holly screamed. Her phone fell from her hand. She bent down and snatched it out of the hearth, brushing ash from the screen and shining it back into the chimney.
“Holly?”
She whirled round to see Gran in her slippers and dressing gown, framed by the light in the doorway. “Whatever are you doing?”
“I – I fell asleep,” Holly stammered. “There was a noise in the chimney, and when I looked up there, I thought I saw something.”
“What nonsense!” Gran scolded. “You were still dreaming, no doubt. Come away from there and go upstairs, it’s past your bedtime.”
She was talking to her like she was a little girl, but for once Holly nodded meekly and did exactly as her gran told her.
Holly and Mart were standing beneath the elm on the green when Dr Marshall’s 4x4 barrelled past, charging into the lane leading out the village. The big vehicle only made it a few metres before becoming becalmed on the white drifts. Wheels spun helplessly in the snow. Across the village, doors began to open, drawn by the noise. Holly tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and thrust her hands in her pockets.
“Didn’t you say he was going to take the twins abroad?” she said.
Mart nodded. “Then the snow came. No one’s going anywhere now.”
A group of villagers had appeared with shovels to help dig the vehicle out, but Dr Marshall was still jamming his foot down on the accelerator, trying to force the 4x4 forward. Over the snarling engine, Holly could hear the twins shouting to be let out of the car.
“I thought I saw something last night,” she told Mart. “At Gran’s.”
“Maybe Gwen Piper wants to make friends.”
Holly punched him in the arm.
“Ow!”
“You’re not funny,” she said. “And what I saw wasn’t friendly.”
Mart nodded at the 4x4. “Why else do you think he’s trying to leave?” he said.
That night the wassailers came forth, swathed in thick black cloaks and carrying bells and torches. They carved a fiery path through the village, singing and banging on doors, urging people from their homes. When Holly and Gran emerged, they were swept up by the procession. The carols sounded richer and darker than they had the previous year, solemn echoes from an earlier time – ‘Good King Wenceslas’, ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’, ‘I Saw Three Ships’. Gran slipped her hand in Holly’s and gave it a squeeze, keeping hold as the procession snaked through the lanes on to the village green.
They came to a halt beneath the boughs of the elm tree, a large, torch-lit circle forming around its mottled trunk. The carol ended and another song began – a melody Holly didn’t recognize, sung in a tongue that barely resembled English. An older song, a song of the soil. The hairs on Holly’s arms stood up as the voices of the wassail rose to meet the keening wind. There was a movement on the other side of the tree and the ring parted to reveal Fran. She was dressed in a similar gown to the one she had worn as the Rose Princess, only this one was a deep crimson, and there was a crown of holly upon her head. Bells rang out across the green as Fran stepped forward, biting her lip. Billy Youds, white-haired and broad-shouldered, gravely handed her an ornate silver wassail cup. Fran pressed the cup to her lips and drank, liquid spilling down her chin and leaving a black trail upon her gown. She continued to gulp until the cup was empty, gasping when she was done.
Around Holly people were clapping and cheering, but all she could do was stare at Fran, who looked almost dazed as she handed the cup back to Billy Youds. The old man raised it up to the skies and the wassailers joined in song once more.
When Gran went to visit a friend in the afternoon, Holly huddled beneath a blanket on the sofa and watched TV. Flicking through the channels, she came across a Christmas film in which a boy was left alone in his family’s house and had to defend it from a pair of burglars. He fought them off with a series of ingenious traps and was safely reunited with his parents. As the credits rolled, Holly looked around her living room and wondered what she would do if someone tried to break in. Would she hide in the cupboard under the stairs, or grab the heavy poker by the fire to defend herself? But the thought only drew her eyes back towards the chimney, and Holly was glad when she heard the back door open and Gran call out hello.
“What is it, Mart?”
He had called round in the middle of dinner, much to Gran’s annoyance. As Holly stood in the hallway, she could hear the peeved scrape of cutlery across a plate from the dining room.
“I went back to the graveyard,” Mart said, fidgeting with a toggle on his duffel coat.
“Well done you. See you tomorrow.” Holly went to close the door.
“Wait!” he hissed. “There are five more!”
Holly frowned. “Five more what?”
“I checked the other headstones. Since Gwen and Evan Piper, five more people have died on Christmas Day. That makes seven in thirty years!”
The door to the dining room creaked open. Holly heard a loud harrumph.
“You’re freaking out over nothing,” she told Mart quickly. “It’s just a coincidence. It’s winter, right? Lots of old people die in winter.”
“That’s the thing – they weren’t old people. I checked their ages on the headstones.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “They were our age, Hol, all of them!”
In her dreams, Holly found herself walking down a long dark corridor lined with identical doors. She stopped by each one in turn, counting twenty-four until she came to one scored with deep scratches. Her heart thudding painfully in her chest, she realized it was her own wardrobe door.
Holly sat bolt upright in her bed, her skin drenched in sweat. She glanced across the dark attic room towards her wardrobe, and was relieved to see that the door looked the same as always. But it was still a long time before she fell asleep again.
A hoarse yell jolted the village from its wary vigil. Racing to the window, Holly saw Rob Youds running through the snow towards Dr Marshall’s house with a large bundle in his arms. He was calling out for help. Holly slipped on her boots and ran out of the front door, almost bumping straight into Mart. He was out of breath, his face pale.
“What’s going on?” Holly asked.
“It’s Fran,” he said, gulping for air. “We were out by the pond and one minute she was skating and then, crack, she was gone. Rob went over to help, but Fran was splashing and screaming and it took him ages to pull her out. Her skin had turned grey and I don’t know… I don’t know if she was even breathing.”
Holly glanced back towards the doctor’s house. Rob and Fran had been ushered inside by Mrs Marshall, a concerned crowd already gathering by the front door.
“It’ll be OK, Mart,” Holly said. “You’ll see. It was just an accident.”
“Says you.”
Holly gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean? She fell through the ice, right?”
Mart shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Rob had Fran by the hand and he was pulling as hard as he could, but he couldn’t get her out. She was bobbing up and down in the water, but it looked like…”
He trailed off.
“It looked like what, Mart?”
He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Like something had hold of her,” he said quietly. “Something that didn’t want to let go.”
It was as if the crack in the ice that had appeared beneath Fran’s feet had carried on into the village. There were bitter arguments in the street; in the local pub that night, two men came to blows. Fran remained at Dr Marshall’s house, suffering from shock and pneumonia. Holly heard a rumour that Billy Youds went back to the pond after dark, carrying a shotgun. But if something had been in the freezing water with Fran, it had long since gone.
Holly and Gran arrived for the evening carol service to find the church deserted, empty pews stretching out like a ribcage. They took a seat at the front, huddling together against the cold. Gran fished out a couple of wrapped sweets from her pocket and offered one to Holly. Several minutes went by before anyone appeared, and then an elderly couple eased themselves into the pew behind them. Every cough, every shuffle echoed in the silence. Eventually the choir came out and performed in front of the meagre congregation, filling the nave with their spiralling voices. Afterwards Holly took Gran’s arm and they made their way home slowly through the snow.
Gran unlocked the back door and immediately went to put the kettle on. “It’s bitter out, tonight,” she said, rubbing her hands. “How about a hot drink?”
Holly went through into the living room and switched on a lamp.
“I’m OK, thanks!” she called back.
And stopped in her tracks.
There was soot on the carpet, a thin black trail leading straight from the hearth to the door. The wind let out a thin moan down the chimney – in Holly’s mind’s eye, a pair of narrowed eyes stared at her through the darkness. In the kitchen Gran was humming away to herself, the kettle on the hob whistling along in a merry accompaniment. Holly stopped herself from going through to tell her. It was just soot, no need to frighten Gran. Not yet.
The trail led out into the hallway, snaking up the steps towards Holly’s room. The walls seemed to close in around her as she crept up the stairs, casting hesitant glances back towards the lights downstairs. She pushed open the door. Moonlight was flooding in through the window, drenching her room in a milky glow. Everything was how she had left it – there were no threatening shadows lurking behind the door or beneath her bed. The trail of soot had come to an abrupt halt. Holly sank down on her bed and let out a deep sigh of relief.
Gran’s voice floated up the stairs, calling her name. She rolled over, but her reply died in her throat. The wardrobe door was ajar, the handle stained black in the moonlight. Holly ran over and flung open the door, peering inside. Nothing but piles of neatly folded clothes. She pushed aside her shirts on the rail.
The Christingle was gone. In its place hung a single ice skate, strung up by the laces. Its blade glinted wickedly in the light.
Like something had hold of her, Mart had said about Fran. Something that didn’t want to let go.
Holly slammed the wardrobe shut and slumped into a ball in the corner of her room, burying her face in her hands.
Which was how Gran found her, minutes later.
“I’m so sorry, my love.”
The two of them sat in the living room, nursing mugs of hot sweet tea. By now it was nearly one in the morning. Gran’s face was drawn as she gazed into the fire dwindling in the hearth.
“I suppose I always knew you’d find out some day,” she said. “But I wanted to keep it from you for as long as possible. The fear, I mean. I’ve been living with it for so long, I wish he had come for me.”
“Evan Piper, you mean,” Holly said coldly.
“Evan Piper is dead.”
“But something’s out there, isn’t it? Something bad.”
For a time the only sound was the ticking of the clock. Then Gran got up and opened a drawer, handing Holly a creased photograph. A little girl in a snowy field waved at the camera, wrapped up in a woollen overcoat, scarf, hat and gloves. It was Holly’s mum. She stood in the shadow of a tall snowman with a lopsided coal grin, who leaned precariously over her. On the other side of the snowman a second girl with pigtails grinned a proud, gap-toothed smile.
“Hello, Gwen,” Holly said softly.
“She was a sweet girl,” Gran murmured. “But not smart and strong like you. She couldn’t bear the fact that the other children… I wouldn’t say they picked on her, but they didn’t want to be her friends. One Christmas morning, Gwen went out to the pond alone. No one knew whether the ice broke beneath her, or whether she chose to…” She trailed off. “Evan blamed the village for what happened. At the funeral he started shouting wildly: if only Gwen hadn’t gone to the pond alone, if she had only had a real friend. We were all too shocked to reply – and in any case, what could we have said?
“After that Evan shut himself away in his house – wouldn’t answer the door, became a shadow in the window. Then, the Christmas after Gwen’s death, they found him. Evan had hanged himself from the elm on the green. He was ragged and dirty, his skin was covered in scars. He’d been … clawing at himself. The grief.”
Holly shuddered. “That’s terrible.”
“An absolute tragedy, my dear,” Gran nodded. “But still we didn’t understand. It took us so long. When one of Billy Youds’s girls vanished on Christmas Night, we thought she’d run away. It wasn’t until later, when a little boy disappeared after Midnight Mass, that we realized something was out there… A hunter. Years would pass by without incident and we would tell each other it was over. But then another child would be taken.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why keep it a secret?”
“Because this isn’t a man the police can arrest, Holly!” Gran hissed. “It’s a beast, a monster. And on Christmas Night, it comes for the children. Your mother thought if she took you away, she might be able to save you from him. But when she died, I was all you had left, I didn’t have any choice! I’ve been doing everything I can to protect you.”
“Protect me?” Holly laughed incredulously. “How? By hiding oranges in my wardrobe? Singing carols? All that stuff with the wassail cup and Fran – what good did it do her?”
“You shouldn’t mock things you don’t understand.”
“I know, I know.” The words were sour in Holly’s mouth. “It’s all about traditions and roots in the stupid soil. But we’re not talking about crops and harvests, are we?”
“There are different kinds of harvests,” Gran said darkly.
Mart called late, just as a shivering Holly was burrowing deeper under the covers of her bed. She reached over to her bedside table and snatched up her phone, which was resting beside the photograph of her mum and Gwen Piper.
“Hey,” she said quickly. “You OK?”
“I guess,” he said morosely. “But Mum and Dad are fighting downstairs.”
“What about?”
“They won’t say. But Mum’s scared something bad’s going to happen. She wants to phone the police.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” Holly said. “Somebody’s got to do something, Mart.”
Over the phone Holly heard a distant shout and a glass smashing. Mart went quiet. She could picture him at that moment, swivelling in his bedroom chair, staring up at his model planets.
“Promise me you won’t do anything stupid, Hol,” he said.
Gwen Piper’s gap-toothed smile beamed at Holly from her bedside table.
“I promise,” she said.
The blizzard began around lunchtime on Christmas Eve, fat flakes tumbling down from an already darkening sky. The village huddled in silence. From her window, Holly watched the snow descend on deserted streets. Fires burned in every hearth, smoke rising up from the chimneys in silent, slender trails.
Gran did her best to put a brave face on things, tuning the radio to Holly’s favourite station and making a Christmas buffet for tea. But neither of them were hungry. As night fell, the church bells rang out in warning. Holly could see Gran was fighting to stay awake, but she had stoked up the fire so much the heat was only making her sleepier. The crackling lullaby continued as the clock ticked on towards midnight. Finally, Gran’s eyelids drooped shut, her chin slumping against her chest.
Holly waited until she was sure Gran was asleep before going through into the hallway and closing the living-room door behind her. Moving quickly and quietly, she put on a thick coat and boots and slipped out of the warm cottage into the night. The blizzard had stopped, leaving a perfect white carpet over the lanes. The air was sharp with cold. Lights glowed watchfully around the edges of firmly drawn curtains.
Holly hurried down the lane and past the green, trying to block out the image of Evan Piper’s body swaying in the wind beneath one of the branches. She was doing her best not to think, not to question what she was doing, not to lose her nerve. In the distance, the Piper house gradually emerged from the darkness, its eaves sagging under the weight of the snow. Holly reached the gate to find it stuck fast – when she climbed over the fence she caught her jeans on the barbed wire, ripping them open.
She pressed on, skirting around the side of the house. The snow here had piled up into drifts, forcing her to wade through it. By the time she had reached the back door, she was out of breath. Holly tried the handle and found it open. A part of her had been hoping it would be locked, and that she would have to give up her plan and return to Gran’s warm cottage. But there were no excuses now. Her heart thudding in her chest, Holly stepped inside the Piper house.
Somehow it was even colder inside than out. Holly edged through a series of dead rooms, the walls covered in faded bruises. Floorboards groaned beneath her feet. The building felt more than empty – hollowed out, somehow. Pressing deeper into the house, Holly tiptoed through a doorway and entered the room she had looked into three weeks earlier. Deep scratches disfigured the walls. The darkness in the hearth was as thick as tar. Crouching down, Holly took out the photograph of her mum and Gwen from her jeans’ back pocket and unfolded it. She laid it carefully down in the middle of the fireplace.
“Here,” she whispered. “Take this. You’re not the only one to lose someone they love.”
She stayed in a crouch, not daring to look up into the chimney. The house seemed to hold its breath. Then the chimney shivered, covering her in a light dusting of soot. From somewhere up inside the flue there came a long, shuddering sigh – to Holly’s ears, the sound of something very old and very tired settling to sleep. A small smile crept across her face. She stood up and turned away from the hearth.
She was halfway out of the room when a harsh rasping noise stopped her in her tracks. Returning to the hearth, she kneeled down beside the photograph. Her mum and Gwen’s smiling faces had been obscured by a black cough of sticky soot.
A low growl rumbled down the chimney. Holly’s blood froze.
She turned to flee as something came down the chimney with frightening speed, like a worm emerging from a black burrow. A clawed hand shot out from the hearth and snatched hold of Holly’s leg. She screamed.
Mart walked up the path to Holly’s cottage and pressed the bell. It took an age for the door to open – Gran let him in without a word, shuffling back to the kitchen and sitting down at the table facing the window. White fields glistened beneath a clear sky. Mart hung awkwardly in the doorway, fidgeting with the zip on his coat. Silence enveloped the kitchen.
“You don’t have to keep coming round, you know,” Gran said finally. “There won’t be any news.”
Mart looked down at the floor. “I warned her not to do anything,” he said quietly.
“Do you think she’s still there?” he asked. “Inside … that place?”
Gran didn’t answer. She took a sip of her tea. Her skin looked grey in the sunlight.
“You can go up to her room, if you like,” she said.
Mart hesitated.
“It’s safe,” she said. “Christmas is over.”
He left the old lady staring out of the window and went upstairs, his trainers squeaking on the attic steps. An icy draught greeted him as he opened the door. Mart swallowed. Christingles were hanging down from the ceiling on their red ribbons, a dangling orchard of oranges with barbed fish hooks. He tentatively pushed through them, sending them swinging back and forth. The room felt impossibly cold.
Shivering, Mart retreated from the attic and closed the door. Behind him Christingles swayed slowly in the draughts – in time to the sound of a very faint but persistent scratching, as though made by someone very far away.