It was approaching Christ’s Mass, and Jack’s children would be coming home to the bosom of the family. Perhaps they could convince him that all was not well with the world; perhaps they could get their fingernails under his flawless indifference, and begin to break him down. Hoping against hope, the Yattering sat out the weeks to late December, planning its attacks with all the imaginative malice it could muster.
Meanwhile, Jack’s life sauntered on. He seemed to live apart from his experience, living his life as an author might write a preposterous story, never involving himself in the narrative too deeply. In several significant ways, however, he showed his enthusiasm for the coming holiday. He cleared his daughters’ rooms immaculately. He made their beds up with sweet-smelling linen. He cleaned every speck of cat’s blood out of the carpet. He even set up a Christmas tree in the lounge, hung with iridescent balls, tinsel and presents.
Once in a while, as he went about the preparations, Jack thought of the game he was playing, and quietly calculated the odds against him. In the days to come he would have to measure not only his own suffering, but that of his daughters, against the possible victory. And always, when he made these calculations, the chance of victory seemed to outweigh the risks.
So he continued to write his life, and waited.
Snow came, soft pats of it against the windows, against the door. Children arrived to sing carols, and he was generous to them. It was possible, for a brief time, to believe in peace on earth.
Late in the evening of the twenty-third of December the daughters arrived, in a flurry of cases and kisses. The youngest, Amanda, arrived home first. From its vantage point on the landing the Yattering viewed the young woman balefully. She didn’t look like ideal material in which to induce a breakdown. In fact, she looked dangerous. Gina followed an hour or two later; a smoothly-polished woman of the world at twenty-four, she looked every bit as intimidating as her sister. They came into the house with their bustle and their laughter; they re-arranged the furniture; they threw out the junk-food in the freezer, they told each other (and their father) how much they had missed each other’s company. Within the space of a few hours the drab house was repainted with light, and fun and love.
It made the Yattering sick.
Whimpering, it hid its head in the bedroom to block out the din of affection, but the shock-waves enveloped it. All it could do was sit, and listen, and refine its revenge.
Jack was pleased to have his beauties home. Amanda so full of opinions, and so strong, like her mother. Gina more like his mother: poised, perceptive. He was so happy in their presence he could have wept; and here was he, the proud father, putting them both at such risk. But what was the alternative? If he had cancelled the Christmas celebrations, it would have looked highly suspicious. It might even have spoiled his whole strategy, waking the enemy to the trick that was being played.
No; he must sit tight. Play dumb, the way the enemy had come to expect him to be. The time would come for action. At 3.15 a.m. on Christmas morning the Yattering opened hostilities by throwing Amanda out of bed. A paltry performance at best, but it had the intended effect. Sleepily rubbing her bruised head, she climbed back into bed, only to have the bed buck and shake and fling her off again like an unbroken colt.
The noise woke the rest of the house. Gina was first in her sister’s room.
‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s somebody under the bed.’
‘What?’
Gina picked up a paperweight from the dresser and demanded the assailant come out. The Yattering, invisible, sat on the window seat and made obscene gestures at the women, tying knots in its genitalia. Gina peered under the bed. The Yattering was clinging to the light fixture now, persuading it to swing backwards and forwards, making the room reel.
‘There’s nothing there —‘
‘There is.’
Amanda knew. Oh yes, she knew.
‘There’s something here, Gina,’ she said. ‘Something in the room with us, I’m sure of it.’
‘No.’ Gina was absolute. ‘It’s empty.’
Amanda was searching behind the wardrobe when Polo came in.
‘What’s all the din?’
‘There’s something in the house Daddy. I was thrown out of bed.’ Jack looked at the crumpled sheets, the dislodged mattress, then at Amanda. This was the first test: he must lie as casually as possible.
‘Looks like you’ve been having nightmares, beauty,’ he said, affecting an innocent smile.
‘There was something under the bed,’ Amanda insisted.
‘There’s nobody here now.’
‘But I felt it.’
‘Well, I’ll check the rest of the house,’ he offered, without enthusiasm for the task. ‘You two stay here, just in case.’
As Polo left the room, the Yattering rocked the light a little more.
‘Subsidence,’ said Gina.
It was cold downstairs, and Polo could have done without padding around barefoot on the kitchen tiles, but he was quietly satisfied that the battle had been joined in such a petty manner. He’d half-feared that the enemy would turn savage with such tender victims at hand. But no: he’d judged the mind of the creature quite accurately. It was one of the lower orders. Powerful, but slow. Capable of being inveigled beyond the limits of its control. Carefully does it, he told himself, carefully does it.
He traipsed through the entire house, dutifully opening cupboards and peering behind the furniture, then returned to his daughters, who were sitting at the top of the stairs. Amanda looked small and pale, not the twenty-two-year-old woman she was, but a child again.
‘Nothing doing,’ he told her with a smile. ‘It’s Christmas morning and all through the house —‘
Gina finished the rhyme.
‘Nothing is stirring; not even a mouse.’
‘Not even a mouse, beauty.’
At that moment the Yattering took its cue to fling a vase off the lounge mantelpiece. Even Jack jumped. ‘Shit,’ he said. He needed some sleep, but quite clearly the Yattering had no intention of letting them alone just yet.
‘Che sera, sera,’ he murmured, scooping up the pieces of the Chinese vase, and putting them in a piece of newspaper. ‘The house is sinking a little on the left side, you know,’ he said more loudly. ‘It has been for years.’
‘Subsidence,’ said Amanda with quiet certainty, ‘would not throw me out of my bed.’
Gina said nothing. The options were limited. The alternatives unattractive.
‘Well, maybe it was Santa Claus,’ said Polo, attempting levity.
He parcelled up the pieces of the vase and wandered through into the kitchen, certain that he was being shadowed every step of the way. ‘What else can it be?’ He threw the question over his shoulder as he stuffed the newspaper into the waste bin. ‘The only other explanation—’ here he became almost elated by his skimming so close to the truth, ‘the only other possible explanation is too preposterous for words.’
It was an exquisite irony, denying the existence of the invisible world in the full knowledge that even now it breathed vengefully down his neck.
‘You mean poltergeists?’ said Gina.
‘I mean anything that goes bang in the night. But, we’re grown-up people aren’t we? We don’t believe in Bogeymen.’
‘No,’ said Gina flatly, ‘I don’t, but I don’t believe the house is subsiding either.’
‘Well, it’ll have to do for now,’ said Jack with nonchalant finality. ‘Christmas starts here. We don’t want to spoil it talking about gremlins, now do we.’
They laughed together. Gremlins. That surely bit deep. To call the Hell-spawn a gremlin.
The Yattering, weak with frustration, acid tears boiling on its intangible cheeks, ground its teeth and kept its peace.
There would be time yet to beat that atheistic smile off Jack Polo’s smooth, fat face. Time aplenty. No half-measures from now on. No subtlety. It would be an all out attack.
Let there be blood. Let there be agony. They’d all break.
Amanda was in the kitchen, preparing Christmas dinner, when the Yattering mounted its next attack. Through the house drifted the sound of King’s College Choir, ‘0 Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie...‘