Silent Night Here's my submission for the x-mas contest. Unfortunately I won't be able to check up on anyone for the next few days as i'll be backpacking across the Dingle Peninsula, but I wanted to get this holiday treat in for everybody. (the idea struck me as beautiful in it's perversity. What can I say? I apologise to anyone now who may be aberrantly offended, but then if they're on this site...) Sorry it's a bit longer than 1000 words (about 2.5 times that :D eh-heh heh) but look at it as 'fandom with interest'. Happy Solstice to all and to all a Silent Night! Cheers, ~Morgan~ The following is based on the game Clive Barker's Undying, ©. 2001 Electronic Arts Inc. [O] Silent Night      A crash broke into the stillness of the manor. Had someone been around to investigate they might have wondered at the soft silence that followed but even the butler had been ordered the night off, a strange invitation to holiday but one readily obeyed. None dared question the Lady of the house and so the manor lay bereft of staff as the chill wind blew in from the sea unchecked if uninvited.      Still someone was in the manor though she stayed where she had landed in the dark crouched within a mosaic of shattered glass. Her dress, once a masterpiece of Victorian virginity, hung in tattered shreds stained by things forgotten and earthy. It was like the girl herself, barely a woman, now so much memory fading from the world they were cut.      Around her the room lay untouched as the cold wind blew in from the outside stirring the windows with a frost-laced life that brought a little of the snow sitting immaculate on the sill towards her figure. It swirled and fell like dust motes caught in a moon’s beam but if she registered its chill she did not even shudder.      Why did I come here? the girl-woman thought. Surely not for my old books, my old loves, Chaucer, Shelly and Byron; even that American Poe whose style was so brash and unique. She had her favourite verses committed to memory, scratched in a place where they would never rot. Then why?      “Lizbeth,” a voice called from the shadows of the room. A match popped into life setting down upon one, two, four candles encircling a fifth before going out entirely. By their light the girl-woman Lizbeth could see her brother, Aaron, standing by the door leading out holding the red tapers in a silver candelabra. When last she saw him she had not remembered how pale and emaciated he was apt to look. Now with the lights flickering, playing off the hollows of his cheek and the prominence of its bone, he seemed much like a skeleton clinging to the remnants of its flesh and a dishevelled flame-red mop of hair.      “The doctor’s calling for you, Lizbeth” Aaron said pushing open the room’s door unto a cave-like corridor. “Can’t you hear?” Lizbeth barely moved, staring at her brother impassively but he only shook his head, impatient.      “Come” Aaron said and he turned to steal the light. With it he went out, seeming to float as he receded into the dark, the lights of the candelabra not even bobbing on their roost.      Lizbeth rose tenacious of the darkening room. She was not bothered by solitude or excursions into the dark but of the cold, impersonal cloak of emptiness uninvited. The act of being left did not sit well with her. Perhaps it was the reason why she chose to be alone so very often.      Through the cryptlike manor Lizbeth followed her brother’s glow lured by the mystery as penetrating as his silence. It wasn’t long, though, before something other joined them: a sound; a voice; a cry. Someone somewhere was shuddering under the precursor of sorrow as if it would be soon in coming.      Aaron turned a corner taking the light with him and Lizbeth believed the moans closer in the dark. She could almost feel them pressing in through the walls as through a membrane hiding an unseen heart. For the first time she was aware of her attire, how raw it felt slapping nakedness against her thigh. Something moved inside her and Lizbeth’s stride increased to keep in check with Aaron.      Lizbeth could hear it more plainly as they travelled through the manor. A floor above, perhaps two, echoing as it trembled through the hollow places of the house. Aaron seemed unbothered, in fact almost disinterested in the cries which would grow one moment yet be sedate the rest and she held herself against the cold which at this time was beginning to glaze its way across her skin. She hadn’t felt it before or noticed until a blossom of warmth in her chest, her stomach, became threatened by its touch and when she breathed out she saw the cloud of her breath come between her and her brother’s back.      Aaron paused briefly, twitched as if stung and listened. Lizbeth waited patiently pulling her fingers across her arms to stimulate warmth there. Turning, Aaron opened a side door and passed into the room beyond. Following, Lizbeth emerged into the great receiving hall open from ground to ceiling spanning two floors with a grand central staircase sweeping down classically in white marble from around the room. A stroke of nausea passed through her like a worm entering her head as dizziness, sliding down her throat in bile where it gripped her chest tracing dysphoria across her lungs before slipping into her bowels and places out unknown. The whole thing passed in less time than it took to register and Aaron turned already halfway up towards the first landing to find his sister still shuddering from the violation she felt within.      “They’re calling for you, Lizbeth” was all he said oblivious as a child sent on an uninteresting task. “Can’t you hear?” he repeated. With that he turned and continued up the stairs while Lizbeth watched ruefully below.      Indeed the peals from above were coming down clearer, no more the herald of sorrow yet to come but pain already here. They bubbled and dripped over the railing to puddle on the ground making a mire that though Lizbeth knew not to be there bogged her stairs all the way.      She reached the stair and turning, placed her hand on the banister. Seeking the source of the noise from where she stood all she found was the railing of the upper floor perched to keep a darkness at bay, and so she turned to begin her ascent up the stairs.      Step after step she drew closer to the upper landing and as she passed around she could hear voices underlying the heaving cries; frenzied voices putting on the airs of control. It was her name that caught her attention, but only once did it pass through their conversation. The rest was indiscernible until she got closer. Moving quicker up the steps she held the vestments of her dress as if it were still intact, the old lessons of propriety arising in this time of uncertainty.      Aaron waited for her by the door but she passed by into the rooms beyond no longer needing him for guide or invitation. It was just past that doorway into the sitting room that she realised where the sounds were coming from. The room split with doors leading to opposite chambers and the sounds were coming from an open door leading into her mother's room.      “Breathe, Mrs. Covenant” the man by the foot of her mother’s bed said reaching his hands under the sheets in the privileged art of his trade. Some servants busied about crossing ways as they exchanged soiled linens and water for fresh sets, and on the bed was a woman sobbing from the pains of a prolonged childbirth.      It couldn’t be, Lizbeth thought, and yet… There was a resemblance between the woman on the bed and herself that couldn’t be pointed out but was in such a way apparent, but it wasn’t her sister, Bethany, who had holly-red hair. This was someone else she was certain she’d seen before, whose visage was like unto a statue, or a painting, …or a portrait.      Lizbeth found herself at the doorway not even realising she had moved but drawn nonetheless by her will. Those were the cheeks, there the arched lips, and above the refined forehead she’d studied a thousand times before on lonely nights and during thunderous storms. She found them on a cameo her father kept hidden in his study, one she stole because it was the only picture of a mother she had never know. But this couldn’t be her mother. Evaline Covenant had died in childbirth many years ago – giving birth to her youngest daughter, Lizbeth.      “She needs more air and less cluttering about. Move you silly girl!” the doctor called to one of the frozen servants by the window. Lizbeth didn’t pay any attention to him or the others fluttering around and they moved out of her way unaware of her presence but avoiding it nevertheless as Lizbeth drew into the room.      It couldn’t be… and yet she had to know. The woman lying on the bed enrapt in pain was trying to say something through the fever an older woman by her head was attentively mopping away.      “J- Joseph… Where’s Joseph?” the woman asked with faltering lips.      “Hush m’lady” the old woman said. “Ye know what said he.”      The prostrate woman gripped this other woman’s hand and cried out, her face contorting with the sound.      “She’s coming” the doctor said. “Bring me that basin now!” But Lizbeth had seen enough. She turned sick at this show, this perversity mocking her mother’s fate and made for the door when a sharp cry from the woman on the bed reached out to pierce her through.      “Lizbeth!” the woman called heaving against her attendant.      Lizbeth let out her own cry and turned, more crumpled, back around. The pain – the violation – had passed through her again.      The woman on the bed was looking directly at her while the others flocked to whatever task they knew how to do. Lizbeth paid no more attention to them than they did to her but a second spike of pain matched in unison by the woman tore through her belly completing her collapse to the ground.      Lizbeth looked up from where her legs had betrayed her and the rush of one heart beating like two flushed through her ears. This time the worm had not left but lingered on, nesting in her gut like a pup tumbling around on a bed of hot glass. It yelped, or perhaps she did, and the bed of grit churned inside her.      Lizbeth screamed, clawing at the soft carpet of the ground while her feet curled at the pain. Driving her toes hard against the floor she forced her feet open, ripping the tendons of her cramp in the process and twisting the muscle beyond what it was meant to go. In this manner she drove herself forward, one hand clutching at what it could while the other grasped her abdomen and what it felt there.      A heart beats Lizbeth felt under her hand as the cries of the woman on the bed became fevered gasps. The others were running around chaotically, some pandemonium or something wrong with the birth having gripped them and they strode over Lizbeth still not seeing she was there. Lizbeth clawed her way nevertheless, reaching closer towards the bed. One of the woman’s hands gripped the side of the bedsheets like living alabaster contorting what it held in a tortured display.      Lizbeth saw that hand and nothing mattered more than reaching it. There was a kindred spirit, perhaps the one responsible for this, but it didn’t matter so long as that other could feel what was happening to her was happening to someone else.      But as Lizbeth reached for her hand, two screams broke into the night. Two screams in horrible disarray, like the discord of some twisted refrain of unhallowed verse or a cacophony made up of human suffering. One thought it would never end, but it did; one cantor ended in sobbing, the other died away.      A new cry replaced the cry of the first and from where the woman lay arose the shrill peal of a fresh-born babe punctuating the night. The woman’s hand still clutched the bedsheets, but blood had collected dangling from her knuckles in the same rich saturation that dripped spreading, seeping into the material down the side.      How long did it pass? How long the silence before Joseph burst in, the cries of his daughter calling blindly to the solemn crowd in the room? If it was short it was a long kind of brevity that passed before he walked in. He, unlike the others, looked directly at the bed and what was lying upon it while they filed silently out and the old woman brought the child and proffered it squalling before him.      “We all be very sorry Master sir,” the old woman spoke softly under the baby’s wails. “She done what best she could, our Missus. She delivered up this baby.”      Though the old woman held the child out Joseph only looked at the shadow dripping on the bed.      “Well, don’t’che want her?” the woman asked. Joseph turned and started out the bedroom. “Master? Joseph sir? She’s ye’re daughter, Lizbeth!” But Joseph was already retreating into the dark.      “Master…?” the old woman’s voice resounded, fading like the light. She passed after her master and soon all was dark save for the illumination spilling in from the moon as it gazed down on an ages-unused bed crusted by old blood peeking in through the wooden shutters like a spying eye. It need not have worried as the figure now lying on the bed looked back upon it with neither fear nor indisposition at being seen. How could she when she was no longer alone in the world?      A whimper stirred from where she held something cradled beneath her bosom and Lizbeth looked down at the shadows she held there.      “Shhh…” Lizbeth whispered. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m here. I won’t go away.” Stroking it, she lifted the child up to her breast and pinched a nipple there until it dripped blood.      “That’s it,” she said as it started to gnaw. “I will never leave you. I’ll watch over and take care of you beyond my dying day.” The child lifted a two-taloned hand to her breast as it worked its blind maw against her pale skin. “I promise.”      Four candles glowed softly to life under the stolen light of the full moon and Aaron stood holding the silver candelabra away from his flayed skin. By its light Lizbeth could see there was more than just him in the room. Bethany was here as well as their oldest brother, Jeremiah, each taking time away from their busy plans to see her in this state. Even Ambrose, their wayward sibling who had disappeared to parts unknown long ago, had returned for this special occasion. They were all here, her brothers and sisters as well as a host of others come from far and away to see her with her new-born child. It didn’t matter that they were strangers or uncouths, she accepted them all.      Grizzled men and women from the east, robed maidens attending near at hand, hooded sages murmuring the wisdom of the stars, simple hunters exotic in their garb and all manner of beasts wonderful and strange flickering in amidst the shadows. Candlelight played off their sinuous forms, some feathered like rat-sized birds, others swimming as fish through the air. Some exchanged in whispers saliva’d breath, but all looked on in hallowed silence. This was her time, her child’s time, whose howls would call a new dawn for man. It had come unasked for into her life and was now her gift unto the world.      From beyond, a King came to bless this gathering with rare and precious gifts. Lizbeth lifted her eyes to him but it was this ancient who bowed his head to her and to her new-born child. Lizbeth accepted this, his offering, and the fifth candle in Aaron’s candelabra glowed to life tallest and brightest of them all. Darkness wove in through its shine and all gathered would long remember this night for ever after, for this night of all nights would finally bring unto them their long awaited P E A C E O N E A R T H. This fan-fiction story © ~Morgan~ 2003, 2004.