Here's a holiday present for you all, one of my stories wrapped up in a sparkly bow:
Flicker and Burn
by Kurt Fawver
The party was winding down and those of us who remained were lounging about the living room, sipping eggnog and mulled wine, when Emily Marsh, one of our gracious hosts, suggested we should share spooky stories.
“It’s Christmas,” she said, leaping off the couch, half drunk. “And people used to tell creepy stories at Christmas. Look at A Christmas Carol. Or Gremlins. They’re just scary stories wrapped up in cozy scarves. So let’s tell some.”
We looked at one another with amusement. Could we really tell spooky stories? Did any of us have that creative spark? Maybe the spiced alcohols in our blood would ignite a passable tale.
“Come on,” Emily’s wife and our other equally gracious host, Evie, said. “Someone has to have a good creepy story inside them.”
Dylan Goode, fully drunk, wobbled to his feet, raised his glass, and said, “One day we were born. Another day we will die. The end. Scariest story in the world.”
Everyone groaned.
“Cliche,” someone said.
“No existential horrors tonight,” someone else laughed.
“That’s the best we have?” Emily asked. “Really?”
No one spoke. Everyone feigned interest in their drinks or the carpet or the lights that twinkled around every window and doorway.
“Okay, fine,” Emily sighed. “How about Cards Against Humanity?”
A pleasant murmur of assent passed among us.
We began to stir in anticipation of arranging ourselves for the game, but Ariel Weaver’s voice cut through the rustle.
“Tell them about your brother,” she said, nudging her husband, Aaron.
We halted in our movements, hoping that Aaron Weaver might spin a tale to shake our bones and draw us closer to the fireplace.
He shook his head and frowned.
“Just do it,” Ariel cajoled. “It really is freaky.”
“I didn’t even know you had a brother,” Emily Marsh said.
Ariel squeezed Aaron’s arm. “They should hear it.”
The Christmas lights throughout the house flickered, then brightened beyond their previous strength. Aaron Weaver’s eyes went wide.
“If I tell it, I want you to understand this is a true story,” he began, staring at the lights, “A spooky story, yes, but completely true. It’s about a lot of things, and it starts with my brother, Miles.”
We all held our selves in suspense. We wanted to be scared.
Aaron continued.
“Miles was sort of famous about ten years ago. He had a YouTube channel and a podcast and some other junk online. You might’ve heard of him. He used the name ‘Kingston Overbay’ for all his projects.”
A few whispered fragments of recognition went up.
“Wait,” Evie Marsh said. “Wasn’t that the guy who provoked that kid to…”
“Yes,” Aaron cut her off. “He was. I’ll get there. But first you have to understand Miles. Miles was always more awkward than me, which is hard to believe. He was also smarter than me in a lot of ways—definitely better at memorization and puzzles, that sort of thing.”
Dylan Goode began laughing. “I call bullshit already,” he slurred. “No one’s as awkward or as smart as you, Weaver. You’re describing an alien.”
Aaron nodded. “Miles might as well have been. Ever since we were a teenagers, I thought he needed counseling or medication. He was so aloof, in his own world. But my parents refused to have him evaluated. They said there was nothing wrong with him. He was just a genius, they said, which made him shy.
“But for most of our youth, Miles was more than shy. He was as outcast as an outcast can be. No friends. No hobbies. Just constant internet browsing and staring into space. I tried to hang out with him all the time, play video games, go to movies, that sort of thing, but he didn’t want any of it. Half the time he outright refused and the other half he seemed totally disinterested, like whatever we were doing was the most boring thing he’d ever experienced.
“It went on like that for years, through middle and into high school. He was a ghost in our home—there but not. He had some disciplinary issues at school, too—petty vandalism, a few incidents with mouthing off to teachers—but his grades stayed insanely high, so everyone sort of ignored it.
“Then, his junior year of high school, a switch flipped. He suddenly became really interested in YouTubers and podcasters and all kinds of influencer people. We should’ve been suspicious. We should’ve looked into it more. But we didn’t. I had just gone off to college; my parents were generally oblivious to everything. We all figured that at least Miles was showing interest in something. So it had to be a positive.
“Not long after he got into all these online personalities, Miles said he wanted some recording equipment, to do his own thing, and my mom and dad agreed it would be good for him, an outlet for whatever he had going on in his head. Maybe he’d make some real friends online. Maybe he’d open himself to people. We hoped. So they bought him a full, expensive setup and he started recording.
“At first, the videos and podcasts he produced were similar to bad stand up comedy. He’d say stuff like, ‘More heart attacks happen the days after Christmas and New Year’s Day than any other time of year. I guess Santa’s sack should be filled with defibrillators and cholesterol pills instead of toys.’ It was dark stuff, sometimes informative, sometimes clever. It wasn't really funny, though. A lot his content ended up as teenage angst and a desperate attempt to be edgy.
“No surprise, he didn’t generate much of an audience from his first few recording go-arounds. I tried to tell him that you have to have an angle, something a little different or unique. He told me he didn’t care how much of an audience he had, he only cared what they did. I didn’t quite understand him then. I should have tried harder to understand.”
Aaron Weaver stopped talking, drained the contents of his mug, took off his glasses, and ran a hand over his face. It seemed he’d aged ten years in the last five minutes.
“This had better get scary fast,” Dylan Goode said.
Evie Marsh shot him a withering stare. “Dylan. Shut it.”
Everyone took a drink. The lights flickered again, grew dimmer, then far, far brighter.
“Power surges,” Emily Marsh said, shrugging.
Aaron’s gaze flitted between the various strings of lights. He began kneading his hands together, but he continued.
“So a year passed,” he said. “Miles was now a senior in high school, and his content kept getting darker, angrier. He stopped trying to be funny. He ranted about how the world didn’t appreciate intelligence, how women didn’t appreciate ‘good’ or ‘nice’ guys, how our entire society didn’t appreciate its ‘driven class.’ He really hammered home that phrase: ‘driven class.’ I think he was proud that he’d coined what could have been a buzzy term.
“See, according to Miles, our society was crumbling because people were weak in will. He said that the heroes of history all had one trait in common: they focused like lasers on specific goals and then they did whatever it took to achieve those goals. They gained everything through intelligence, through cunning, through force and violence. They were the ‘driven class.’ Miles told his audience that doing whatever it took to achieve your goals was the first step toward greatness, and that the ultimate goal needed to be a full-scale societal change that let the ‘driven class’ do whatever they wanted, especially with regard to women, since he thought the ‘driven class’ was almost exclusively comprised of men.”
“Gross,” Emily Marsh huffed.
Aaron nodded. “It was gross. Miles started spouting mashed up ideas of Machiavelli and Ayn Rand and incels he followed online. And here’s the thing: he built a following around it. He connected with this whole weird network of angry young men and grew an audience into the thousands. He’d say crap like ‘maybe a woman does need to feel threatened by a man to respect him’ and ‘the natural order is for men to wield power and women to be subdued’ and these guys online would eat it up.
“I told my parents what was happening, but they didn’t care, so long as Miles had a hobby and real people he was connecting with. A bunch of times, I confronted him about what he was saying, and he just shut down and refused to talk to me. He said I hadn’t ‘read as much as him,’ I didn't grasp the ‘indignities of being a modern male’ and he told me to ‘get a real education.’
“So that was that. We all but stopped communicating with each other and Miles became the little king of a hate-filled kingdom.
“Fast forward a year. Miles went to college, but he barely attended class. He said in his podcast that the education at college was ‘for the slugs, by the slugs,’ and that he didn’t need it. His audience loved the message and kept growing. He was up in the tens of thousands at that point. Miles—or should I say Kingston Overbay—was a voice for the dangerously disaffected.
“It was right around this time that one of Miles's listeners—a kid in high school named John Purvis—reached out to him and grabbed his interest.“
Emily Marsh gasped. “Oh my god. Your brother was linked to that kid? The… what did he call himself? The Incellerator? Incel Matrix? Something like that?”
Aaron Weaver nodded. “Incelleratrix. And Miles wasn’t just linked to him. He enabled him.
“I mean, Miles had psychological, maybe neurological, problems. But I think they would have been treatable with the right help. John Purvis, though, he had something else entirely.
“What I know about him, I know from what Miles later told me. Purvis considered himself a crusader in a dark age. He had bunch of guns his family had given him and loved showing them off. He had all kinds of police gear and military gear from like the last hundred years, too—riot shields, gas masks, tear gas, tasers, you name it. He even created a flag for himself—a banner under which he intended to fight, I guess—and it included all sorts of esoteric symbols for male virility and phrases about heroism and bravery and the subjugation of women. He sent one those flags to Miles, and Miles was sufficiently impressed with the research Purvis had put into the thing to start up a… friendship, I suppose.
“Really, what their relationship amounted to, though, was Purvis explaining his insane plans to incite a war against social equality and Miles goading him into firing his first shot.
“I saw some of their texts after everything was over. They were… disgusting. Purvis would talk about some horrible, explicit, gory fantasy he’d had—like making a woman give one of his handguns a blowjob then shooting her in the head as a climax—and Miles would respond with shit like ‘Imagine if you actually did it,’ ‘Imagine what it would feel like,’ ‘I bet you’d see through the eyes of a god.’ He always told Purvis to take the next step without ever saying those exact words.
“Miles and Purvis texted each other frequently for a couple months. Like, hundreds, maybe thousands, of messages. Most of what they said is sealed by judicial order. But I know this much: by early December of that year they struck up a friendship, Purvis told Miles he was going to start his war and Miles responded that ‘someone has to be the first, and that someone will be a legend among men. He’ll be an incel accelerator. An incelleratrix.’
“And so, while Miles and I were back home from college on winter break during his freshman year and my junior year, trying to avoid each other like the plague, a high school junior named John Purvis made a video manifesto in which he decried the state of ‘weakened masculinity’ in the world and the ‘undue power of women’ to rule men's lives, signed off on the screed with the name ‘the Incelleratrix,’ uploaded it to a bunch of social media sites, then went to his school and, during a winter formal, shot nineteen of his peers and two teachers. He killed twelve—ten young women and two young men, then he turned the gun on himself and ended it all.”
Aaron paused and took a ragged breath. We all felt our stomachs turning sloshy. The strings of lights throughout the house dimmed.
Someone rushed off to the bathroom, shouting, “This is too much!” as they hurried away.
Dylan Goode sat tight-lipped, rubbing his knuckles.
“This is really upsetting,” Evie Marsh said. “Is that the end?”
Aaron shook his head. “No. That was the horrifying part, the scary part, the part that’s too real. We’re only halfway there. The spooky part you won’t believe is yet to come. I can stop, if you want. I should stop.”
Ariel Weaver rubbed her husband’s back. “It made me sick the first time he told me, too. But you have to push through the darkness to see the light. That’s what this season is about. That’s why you wanted creepy stories, right?”
Emily and Evie glanced at each other and gave half-hearted nods. The rest of us murmured agreement. We did want the rest, but if it was anything like the beginning, it wasn’t going to make our holiday any more holly or jolly; it was only going to remind us how the brightness of Christmas temporarily blinded us to the ugliness of the rest of the year.
Aaron cleared his throat and continued.
“So Purvis murdered a dozen kids, and my brother might as well have held doors open for him while he did it. Police investigated and found the Kingston Overbay connection, but Miles hired an expensive lawyer who convinced them that they didn’t have enough to charge Miles with any crime. He hadn’t planned the attack. He hadn’t coerced Purvis into it. He hadn’t incited it. He just spoke to Purvis about hypotheticals, and hypotheticals didn’t kill people. So said this lawyer. And the law was forced to agree. Miles might have been going to hell for his part as a homicidal maniac’s sounding board, but he wasn’t going to jail.
“As you can imagine, the publicity Miles raked in from his association with Purvis got him booted from most media outlets, but it also strengthened his support with the hardcore incel community and with a bunch of ‘men’s rights’ groups. Miles set up his own website—highly monetized with ads—and posted his videos and podcasts there. And still he garnered followers who called him a ‘martyr’ and a ‘hero.’
“It wasn’t all sunshine for Miles, though. After his relationship with Purvis was revealed, my parents kicked him out of the house. When that happened, he picked up his laptop and phone and just walked out like he was going to a class or something, no big deal. Unbelievable. I deleted every connection to him I could think of, too. He had no family left to speak of, but he had hung onto his trove of listeners and viewers, and I guess that was enough. That’s what he always really wanted—admirers, for better or worse.
“The families of Purvis's victims were not going to let Miles cultivate another monster, though. They filed a massive civil lawsuit against him. He didn’t have piles of money—especially after his legal fees for the criminal investigation—but the families didn’t want money. They wanted to get him off the internet. They wanted to bring him down from his soapbox.
“The argument in court was fierce, apparently. On his site, Miles complained how ‘stupid’ the victims’ families were, how they were ‘overly emotional.’ He said what had happened was ‘sad,’ but ultimately ‘nothing more than a natural result of the state of our emasculating culture.’ His followers agreed.
“In response, the victims’ families deployed a shrewd tactic. Across social media, they asked Miles to display something from the massacre in all his videos as a show of solidarity, to prove he wasn’t dismissing the tragedy, to remember that words have consequences. They said if he refused, he was ‘probably afraid to be near the violence he helped foster.’
“Of course, to save face with his audience, Miles had to agree. If he refused, he’d appear weak or irrational. So he took the offer and received, direct from the victims’ families, a five-foot tall, artificial pre-lit Christmas tree that had decorated the gym where the winter formal massacre happened.
“The tree looked like any other tree. It had white lights, silver and blue tinsel wrapped around it, and some cheap silver ornaments hanging off its branches. But when you got in really close—Miles made it a point to show this in several of his videos—you could see blood spatter on the lights and the tinsel. A white tree skirt accompanied the tree and a wide scarlet semicircle stained one of its edges.
“For the better part of a year, Miles set that tree behind him in every video he made, and in every video he made, he kept looking more weary, more haggard, more like a shell of himself. His tone became strained, his voice wavered. He complained about ‘intruders breaking into his home’ and ‘harassment from unknown parties.’ Then, just a few weeks before the first anniversary of the shooting, he made a shocking announcement: for health reasons, he was going to indefinitely suspend his media production.
“I had no idea any of this was taking place. Like I said, I’d cut all ties with Miles. But I’d soon know every detail because, just after the fall semester of my senior year ended, Miles showed up on my apartment doorstep, sobbing, with blood dripping from his nose and ears. He asked me to let him in, let him explain. I… well… I…”
Aaron trailed off. His face flushed, though from anger or embarrassment we didn’t know. We all waited on the edges of our seats, unmoving. The lights brightened. Aaron shook his head.
“I laughed. The first thing I did when I saw Miles was laugh. It was wrong of me, maybe. But I thought ‘Good. Someone gave him what he deserved.’ I thought he'd gotten the shit kicked out of him. I didn’t let him in. I told him to go back to his fans and let them sort out his problems. He said he couldn’t, because he was giving up his videos, his podcast, the whole deal. He said he’d been filled with hate for too long and wanted a change. He said ‘things’ had happened to make him reevaluate his life.
“I didn’t believe him. I tried to ignore him. But he sat outside my door for two full days. He had a backpack, a rectangular box, and a travel suitcase on wheels. I guess he had food and water in one of them. I thought I heard him groaning and moaning at several points during the nights he spent in the hall. I also thought I heard him playing music. I didn’t much care about any of it.
“Over those two days, though, I softened. He was my brother and I felt guilty for not having pushed hard enough to get him the help he needed long ago. So I let him in. We sat down, stared at each other in silence for what might have been an hour or so. Then I asked why he was at my apartment and what had happened, and he told me everything about Purvis and the massacre that I’ve told you, up to this point. He cried a few times. His hands shook at various parts of the story. I wanted to forgive him, but I couldn’t.
“We both got quiet again, for a while. I still didn’t understand why he was at my place. It didn’t make sense. Eventually Miles broke the silence. He said that there was more, something I wouldn’t believe, something he barely believed. He said that after he accepted the tree from the shooting victims’ families, strange ‘occurrences’ started happening to him.
“At first, he said, it was little incidents, barely recognizable as unusual. The lights on the tree would flicker and his podcasting equipment would stop working, for example, or the tree lights would brighten and his video recording would end up pixelated beyond recognition. He thought these incidents were simple coincidence and shrugged them off.
“But then he started hearing unusual sounds in the middle of the night, sounds that woke him. He said they were ‘electronic whooshing’ sounds, like robot wings or something. When he investigated their source, it seemed they were coming from the tree—or around the tree, maybe. What really freaked him out, though, wasn’t the sounds; it was that the tree was always lit up at night, even though it wasn’t plugged into an outlet. From late at night until dawn, the lights burned bright, without any obvious source of power.
“Miles being Miles, he fastened onto the idea that someone was somehow harassing him. Maybe they had a battery pack hidden in the tree or maybe a remote that could control a power supply. Miles dreamed up lots of plots in which he was being threatened. Over and over, he searched his condo for intruders, but he found no one. So he bought a cheap security system and set it in place to watch the tree.
“What he saw unnerved him. Night after night, the tree lights died normally when he pulled their power cord, and night after night, at random times, the lights turned themselves on. They flickered and pulsed, like an injured heart sputtering back into its normal rhythm, before exploding in a blast of searing brilliance. It wasn’t much different from watching the birth of a star.
“The problem for Miles was that, very clearly on every video, the power cord remained unplugged from any outlet and no one entered the room to mess with the tree. No one came to install a hidden battery pack or throw a secret switch. The lights just shined, all on their own, without reason or rationale.
“Nervous though the discovery made him, Miles refused to back away from his podcasts and videos. Instead, that’s when he started peddling conspiracy talk, insinuating that he was a victim of an elaborate scheme to silence his voice.
“It didn’t stop the lights and sounds, though. In fact, they grew louder and brighter, and soon Miles started to hear something else in the sound: music. At first, he couldn’t place the song, but as nights passed, he gradually realized it was, bizarrely, a classic—Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time after Time.’”
“What the hell?,” someone at the far end of the room blurted.
Someone else chuckled—whether to cut the tension or to recognize the ridiculousness we couldn’t tell.
Aaron nodded.
“Right? Why that song? Why a love song? And why an old love song? Miles thought someone chose it because it would creep him out. He hated 80s music; he said he thought it sounded like ‘wasted potential’ or ‘dead potential’ or something like that. I doubted that anything nefarious was afoot, but, after Miles came to see me, I did some digging. I talked to some of the massacre survivors. They told me the song that had just started playing just before Purvis stormed in and began shooting was a requested slow dance: ‘Time after Time.’
“So Miles heard this song at night for several weeks. He couldn’t stop it. No matter what he did, it played throughout his apartment when the tree lights kicked on and didn’t stop until morning. It drove him mad.
“At this point, he knew he should get rid of the tree, give it back to the families or bury it or something, but his ego wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t remove it from his videos. It had taken on symbolic value for his online followers. They reveled in how ‘badass’ Miles was for keeping it, how ‘righteous’ he was for maintaining his opinions in the face of the lawsuits and investigations. If that tree disappeared, Miles would lose credibility with his idiot audience, and he knew that, too.
“So he kept it. And things got even stranger.
“One evening, as Miles lay awake in bed with noise canceling headphones on and pillows stuffed against his head in an attempt to block out the endless Cyndi Lauper ballad, a sharp, burning pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced suddenly exploded in his left forearm. It felt like something trying to bore its way through his bones. He examined his arm and found a circular bruise, bright red, and expanding. Miles thought he must have been bitten by a spider or some other insect, so he washed it off, slathered on some hydrocortisone, and tried to rest.
“But the pain wouldn’t subside. It kept gnawing and spreading—first to his hand and then toward his shoulder. He began to worry that he might have a blood clot, that he should go to a hospital. He decided that if the pain didn’t subside by morning, he’d seek medical aid. He writhed around on the bed for hours, forearm on fire, and then, with dawn’s light, the pain disappeared as suddenly as it had started. The bruise also vanished, as though it was never there to begin with.
“Miles tried to write off the incident as an odd health scare, the kind of weird one-off pain that happens to us all from time to time. But the following night his arm burst into terrible pain again, and this time it was accompanied by a similar pain in his right shoulder. A massive, circular red bruise developed there, just like the one on his arm. He downed a handful of acetaminophen, but it didn’t affect the pain. For a second night, he didn’t—couldn’t—sleep. Then, at dawn, both spots disappeared and the agony dissolved to memory.
“Miles's conspiratorial brain suggested a gas attack or a poisoning attempt as logical causes, but he knew it was neither. An unusual case of hives or mumps could have explained it, too, but Miles knew it wasn’t that, either. Though he hated himself for admitting to what he would’ve previously called foolishness, he suspected the impossible, and, sure enough, the impossible did not disappoint.
“When he checked his security footage, Miles found that the tree lights flickered on at roughly the same that the pain and bruises began to form each night. They winked out at dawn, in tandem with the dissipation of the mystery syndrome.
“At this point, the logical thing for Miles to do would have been to throw that tree in a dumpster or set it on fire, but I believe part of him began to feel responsible for the murders. More than saving face with his audience, I think he wanted to accept a secret punishment for egging on Purvis, whatever that punishment may have been.
“So the tree and its blood-spattered lights stayed, and Miles's injuries grew worse. The next night, a pain sank into his hip, causing him to be unable to walk. The night after that, one destroyed his back, leaving him prone on the floor. The following night, one shot into his chest and stole all but his shallowest breaths. And finally, one pierced his head. It was so unbearable, so much like a thousand tiny knives stabbing in every direction beneath his skull, that he slammed his head against a wall until he blacked out.
“After that, Miles went to a doctor. What the doctor found, though, other than a mild concussion Miles had given himself, was nothing. There was no sign of injury or illness. He was directed to see a psychiatrist, which he refused to do.
“Without medical explanation, the bruises kept coming. Sometimes they would occur only in tandem—in the shoulder and the head or the chest and the abdomen—and sometimes they all erupted simultaneously. It was on those nights, when Miles was riddled with dozens of unearthly pains and losing his mind from the unstoppable repeating music, that he started to think of Purvis's victims.
“He’d read the autopsy reports issued during his civil trial. He knew that Purvis had fired over two-hundred rounds in the five minutes his killing spree lasted, and that exactly forty four of those shots hit students or faculty members. He knew the kinds of injuries victims had sustained, too: shattered vertebrae, punctured lungs, severed coronary arteries, massive cranial hemorrhages—the list went on and on.
“As he lay in bed, circular bruises mapping a new terrain across his entire body, Miles wondered what those murdered kids had felt when Purvis gunned them down. He wondered what they’d thought in their last moments of life. And he realized that Purvis hadn’t changed anything for the better for anyone; his lone accomplishment—the lowest of all accomplishments—had been to add more pain to the universe.
“That’s when Miles decided to shutter his media outlets. He couldn’t summon anger anymore. He couldn’t conceive any new diatribes about the suffering of young men like Purvis and himself. His well of hatred had run dry.
“Without revenue from his website, though, he couldn’t afford his apartment, and that’s what brought him to my doorstep. He was looking for a place to stay where he wouldn’t be tempted to connect to any of his old contacts.
“What could I say? I believed something had changed, but I wasn’t willing to say what. If Miles really wanted a fresh start, to begin making amends, then who was I to deny him that? I wasn’t my brother’s keeper, but I wasn’t his executioner, either. So I let him stay.
“He unpacked, and I saw what he’d brought with him: just three changes of clothes, a laptop, and, I should have guessed, the tree, which had been hidden away inside the rectangular box he carried with him. He set it up in my living room right next to the tree I already had up for the season. He said it had to be on display because ‘I needed to understand.’
“I examined that thing from top to bottom ten or fifteen times. Apart from the blood on the lights, which was certainly upsetting, nothing about it shouted ‘supernatural.’ I thought that maybe Miles's guilty conscience had conjured phantoms to haunt him. Or maybe he was manifesting some latent trauma. I didn’t know. Any other option seemed like Dickensian fiction.
“So there I was that first night of Miles's return, awake and sitting up in my bedroom, halfheartedly reading a book I didn’t much care for. It was December, but I was sweating with anxiety. I assumed that, at any moment, I’d hear Miles having night terrors or something similar and have to go calm him. Instead, the gentle melody of ‘Time after Time’ began to float into my room.
“I’ll tell you right now, it didn’t sound like any music I’d ever heard before. Yes, I knew the song, but the quality was wrong in some intangible way. It was like the sound was both inside and outside my head, like an earworm had condensed into a fine mist that drifted through the air. It raised hair on the back of my neck.
“As if on cue, Miles groaned from my living room couch, where he was resting. He called out to me, told me to hurry, and so I did.
“When I entered the room, I immediately saw it—the tree’s lights were burning bright as the noonday sun though they weren’t plugged in. Miles waved me to his side and pulled off his shirt. His teeth chattered as he strained to undress. His breaths came too fast, rattling in his throat. He pointed to a spot on his chest—a fiery circular bruise no bigger than my thumbnail.
“‘See?’ he said. ‘I’m not crazy.’
“I examined his injury, but didn’t have any medical insight that could help. I searched the tree for answers, too, but found none. All I could say was that the temperature of the air surrounding that tree was five or ten degrees lower than anywhere else in the apartment. I could feel something radiating from the lights. It was as if they made the air lighter, faster, like I was about to float away from the anchors of body and earth. I was scared by how good it felt to be so close to letting go.
“As I was checking the lights, Miles let loose a string of curses. ‘Look,’ he moaned. ‘My eye. I can’t see. And my head. Goddamn. It’s going to burst.’
“I snapped out of the spell the lights had cast upon me and turned toward Miles. Even from across the room, I could tell that one of his eyes had completely filled with blood. A thin stream of blood also trickled from his nose. I told him we were going to the hospital, no arguments.
“He refused. He muttered ‘doctors don’t know anything; they won’t help,’ and, instead, stumbled to my medicine cabinet and swallowed a handful of acetaminophen tablets.
“I was tempted to call an ambulance and let him bicker with the paramedics, but I didn’t. I let him ride out the night how he wanted. Maybe a part of me felt vindicated by his pain. Maybe I needed to hear the sincerity of his suffering.
“By morning, both Miles and I were exhausted. We thanked the heavens when the music finally faded to silence and the lights winked out. Miles's eye returned to its normal color and the bruise on his chest disappeared. It was both relieving and frightening.
“That day, Miles and I sat around my apartment watching movies, eating pizza, and avoiding all discussion of the tree, but as evening crept up, I told him I was going to throw it into the garbage. He argued with me. He said throwing it away ‘wasn’t the answer’ and that we needed ‘more time to study it.’
“I let the matter drop. It was almost Christmas and I didn’t want to fight. I wanted normal. I wanted cozy. I wanted happy. In fact, the following day, I was supposed to go home to see our parents for the holidays. I invited Miles, thinking he might come with me and leave the tree behind, but he declined. He said he wasn’t ready to face our parents and explain everything again. He said he doubted they’d forgive him anyway.
“We didn’t speak the rest of the night. Again Cyndi Lauper haunted my apartment and again Miles groaned in pain. He raided my bathroom for another excessive dose of painkillers and passed out on the floor before dawn.
“I left the next morning. Miles was still on the floor, sleeping. I wrote a note for him with my new phone number on it and taped it to his shirtsleeve alongside a spare key to the apartment. Then I headed home.
“Over the week I was at our parents’ place, Miles didn’t call. He only texted me twice—once to ask if he could drink a bottle of cinnamon whiskey I’d left at the apartment and a second time to send a picture of the tree, all lit up, with a gift box beneath it.
“I came back two nights before New Year’s Eve. My parents had insisted I eat dinner with them before I took off, so it was late by the time I arrived at my apartment—almost midnight, I’d say. The first thing I noticed when I approached my front door was silence. No muffled ‘Time after Time’ floated through from the opposite side. Maybe, I thought, Miles wised up and buried that tree in a cemetery where it belonged. I let myself in and the second thing I noticed was that the massacre tree still stood in the living room, unlit, even though it was the dead of night.
“I walked up to the tree and flicked a couple of the lights with my finger. They remained dark, and they had new company. Miles—or someone—had hung shiny blue ornaments all over the tree. He’d also wrapped its base in a brand new, puffy white tree skirt. The gift in the picture he’d sent me sat on that snowy circle.
“I called out to Miles, but no one answered. I headed to the bathroom to see if he might be using it, and… and I found him there, lying on his back, naked and not breathing. His body was covered in those red, circular marks. There must have been thirty or forty dotted across his skin. Beside him lay my bottle of acetaminophen and my bottle of whiskey, both open and empty.
“I checked for a pulse, but he didn’t have one. He was cold, dead, gone. I called for an ambulance, but I knew it was a formality. No one was bringing him back. By the time paramedics arrived, the bruises had faded away and Miles looked for all the world like another lost kid who’d made one too many bad mistakes. I’m probably a horrible person for it, but I felt… I felt something like relief. And that was it. That was the end.
“As for the tree, it never lit up again, not even when it was plugged in. I hung onto it for a while, hoping to solve its mysteries, but after a few fruitless years, I took it to a recycling center and let them break it down for whatever future uses it might have.
“I still don’t really know what happened or how it happened, but I do believe that something I can’t explain coursed through those lights. Maybe it was the angry spirits of the kids who lost their lives to Miles's rhetoric. Maybe it was Purvis's damned and demented soul. Or maybe it was the sheer force of the violence Purvis and Miles unleashed upon that winter dance that rebounded through time and space to meet with one of its creators.
“Whatever the case, those lights prevented Miles from bringing more darkness into this world. He wouldn’t have stopped without them; he didn’t know how to. Those lights, and whatever powered them, almost certainly saved more lives. On days when I’m optimistic, I think—I hope—they might have managed to save Miles in some way, too.”
Aaron slouched back into his seat. The Christmas lights in the house had returned to normal brightness and we hadn’t even noticed.
Everyone sat in stunned silence. We’d expected a ghost story, but not this.
Finally, Emily Marsh cleared her throat and asked, in almost a whisper, “What was in the gift under the tree?”
Aaron smiled.
“I‘ll never know,” he said. “After the coroner’s office came to pick up Miles's body, I went to look for it, to open it, but it was no longer there.”
Hushed words of awe and disbelief rustled among us.
We weren’t sure what to do, what to say. After the horror, what comes next? That part of the old ritual had been lost to time.
Evie Marsh clapped her hands and stood.
“I think it’s definitely time for Cards Against Humanity,” she said.
Everyone snapped to attention. We chuckled nervously, rearranged ourselves, and poured out more drinks.
As the cards were dealt, Dylan Goode cracked a terrible joke about penises. Between rounds, Emily Marsh passed out trays of cookies.
We played the game. We ate. We drank. We chatted about nothing of consequence. And, when we thought no one was watching, we stole anxious glances at the beautiful, beautiful lights that burned so bright all around.
