Crosspoints Christmas Carol

[Shroom Man 777]

Based on the works of Ilya Muromets, particularly the use of his characters

CROSSPOINTS CHRISTMAS CAROL
A Merry Messy MABRT Misadventure

Miskatonic Meadows, Massachusetts
1500 Hours

It was a cold and snowy day. Snowflakes drifted in the gentle wind as they came down to settle on the ground, on the pine trees and on the road. It was an idyllic sight, a winter wonderland disturbed only by a pickup truck rushing by.

Joe Piper was getting all mighty crotchety. The road was all blanketed in white and Mr. Plow had forgotten to come by to get rid of the stuff with his truck-mounted snowplow, making navigation all the more harder. So hard that it took all of Joe’s skill with the wheel to keep his pickup from sliding off the road and slamming into a tree and it didn’t help that he had forgotten to chain his tires, which was definitely not good with the roads being all icy and slippery slick. He knew it wasn’t smart, but decided to step on the accelerator a bit faster anyhow, since he also knew that he had a schedule to keep and a deadline to meet.

All in all, Joe gave himself a fifty-fifty chance of inadvertently killing himself on his way to work. Not too shabby.

See, Ms. Lewyn’s water heater had broken down and since Joe was the cheapest plumber in the block she immediately called him to do an emergency fix-it. On Joe’s part, he could hardly refuse since there was the Christmas Spirit to consider and his wife’s recent Yuletide’s spending spree to take note of as well. He needed the money, needed it quick, if he didn’t want to end up selling his soul to some red-handed loan shark or something.

Needless to say, this wasn’t how Joe intended to spend his Christmas Eve. He turned on the radio and tried to ease himself with whatever the stations were playing. They mostly played happy little Christmas songs round this time, but Joe guessed that he needed some of those anyway. His pickup’s el-cheapo radio began playing some good old tunes.

“I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten
And children listen, to hear – ”

Joe heard shrieking, really loud shrieking, and looked up out his windshield to see something silvery streak through the sky. The strange sight transfixed him for but a moment before disappearing from view and he was about to utter some kind of appropriately amazed profanity when something else came into view, not up in the sky but on the road dead ahead of him just seconds away from being roadkilled.

“Shit Jesus!” he spun the wheel and swerved the truck off the slick snow-covered road and into the trees. With the accumulated snow off the roadside helping slow his slide, he stomped on the brakes as hard as he could and tried his best to save himself from having to claim car crash insurance. The tailspin stopped right at the nick of time and he sighed in relief, looking out the window and seeing just how close he was to hitting the trees.

Slowly, he unfastened his seatbelt – thankful that he wasn’t stupid enough to forget buckling up – and opened the door. As he got out, the edge of the door hit the nearest tree and caused the snow on its branches to fall down right on him.

“Fuck!”

He wiped the snow off his parka and put on his cap, protecting his bald skinhead from the harsh elements, and treaded back to the road in a steady and measured pace to see what it was that nearly killed him – sinking his legs deep in the snow with each and every miserable step as he did so. He knew he wouldn’t like what he’d see.

He didn’t like what he saw. Not one bit.

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted, not liking what he saw not one bit. There was a person sitting in the middle of the road, just squatting on the snow. A man or a woman, Joe really couldn’t tell, right out there on the pavement. “You nearly darned fucking killed me, you goddamned sumbitch!”

No response. The person didn’t even move.

“What the hell?” he shouted some more. “Can you hear me, asshole? What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get up, goddamn it!”

Joe walked over to the person, just waiting for the chance to kick the shit out of him or her, kept on shouting as loudly as he could as he went along. But he became quiet when he noticed red liquid pooling slowly beneath the person. Joe could tell that the man or woman was bleeding badly, as the flow of warm blood began to quicken, making that crimson pool grow, making the snow melt slowly around it.

“Jesus,” Joe gasped as he quickly went around to face the person and knelt down to help him. “What the hell happened?”

The man, as Joe could now see, didn’t answer – didn’t even look at him or anything. He just sat there as the pool of blood expanded outwards, little by little, just squatted there as he continued to bleed.

“Let’s get you to a doctor. Come on,” Joe grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him up gently. Surprisingly, the man got up easily.

Then his guts spilled out from underneath him, coils of intestines spooling on the snow with a big wet slop.

Joe screamed.

“I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white.”



Dunwich City, Massachusetts
1800 Hours

The snowy suburb was rife with bright decorations and ornamentations, looking very much like a festive constellation of flickering stars from afar. Christmas lights blinked and twinkled around windows and on trees out on gardens, sometimes spelling out holiday’s greetings, while star-shaped lanterns hanged out of porches and on verandas for all to see. On the rooftops of the more ostentatious homes were shiny neon Santa Clauses, whipping glowing reindeers with lashes of electric light as the Rudolfs’ noses flashed red.

One home wasn’t quite as shiny as its neighbors though. It had a little star-lantern hanging on its porch and a couple of shrubs haphazardly wrapped in some lights, but it wasn’t the kind of house that really needed tastelessly gaudy ornaments all over it. It was quite quaint, and did have a nice rotund snowman standing by at the lawn, complete with a bitten carrot on its nose, twigs for arms and empty black coals for eyes. On the door was a set of Christmas lights, arranged to alternatingly spell the words ‘Maligayang Pasko!’ and ‘Feliz Navidad!’ as they flickered.

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock
Jingle bells swing and jingle bells ring
Snowing and blowing up bushels of fun
Now the jingle hop has begun”

Karen Salinas nodded her head in approval as she amped the volume of her shiny new MP5 media player. Presents weren’t supposed to be opened until the morning of Christmas Day, but since she bought it as a gift for herself, she didn’t bother with wrapping it up and placing it under the tree. Instead, she was seeing (or hearing) if the gadget actually did contain the hundreds of free Christmas songs and carols the store person had claimed it had inside it. So far, so good – a whole buncha free songs with terabytes of free space too, so it really was a bargain!

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock…” she sang off-key as she bounced into the living room. She hadn’t uploaded any other songs yet, but she was pretty alright with all the Christmas ones so far. It was Christmas after all, and things were actually going great for her. No school, no classes, no horrible classmates, none of the crazy death-defying extracurricular activities that came after it, and – most importantly - no homework! “… jingle bell chime in jingle bell time.”

In the living room, Mom was struggling with a rather large present an auntie had sent, trying to place it under the Christmas tree without crushing all the other smaller presents under it, but she just couldn’t and ended up heaving the oversized thing onto the couch instead. Karen couldn’t hear what Mom said afterwards, but Mom ended up sprawled on the other couch anyway, so it was alright. Karen smiled at Mom and she smiled back tiredly and said something that sounded like ‘dining room’ while pointing at the direction of the dining room, so Karen just nodded her head and went over to the dining room.

“Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square, in the frosty air…” Karen went on as she went over to the dining room. It was on the other side of the house and she wasn’t in a hurry, but as she neared she could smell the aroma of various foods and it made her tummy grumble. She turned off her MP5 and went over to find Dad arranging various plates and pots around a rather large something that looked rather like an entire fat brown-roasted stuck pig at the center of the table. “Daddy… what on Earth is that?”

“Oh, Karen,” Dad took off his oven mitts and turned to look at her looking at the brown-roasted stuck pig at the center of the table. “That’s a lechon, a native Filipino delicacy!”

Karen gasped. It was really hueg, easily the size of a small person, and its smooth skin was really brown and oily, its ears were all pointy and its snout was all snouty and its face was grimaced as if it had been cooked alive and squealing and its mouth was wide open, with its tongue and teeth clearly visible. If Karen was squeamish, which she was before seeing far worse things in the ‘line of duty’, she would’ve been a little bit more appalled. But still. It was a lechon. “It’s a what?”

Daddy replied by breaking a piece of the ‘lechon’ thing’s skin with an audible carapace-crack and placing it in Karen’s wide open mouth in one smooth, lechon-breaking, mouth-placing motion.

“Da-?!” Karen tried to protest, but it turned out that the piece of broken off pig-skin was surprisingly really ridiculously crispy, like the porky equivalent of fried chicken’s skin combined with some kind of thin-slice potato chip, and the fats under it added to the strangely tasty taste. Karen’s eyes widened. “Hey, that was pretty tasty. I want some more!”

“Now, now, Karen,” Dad said, taking a small piece of lechon skin with his fingers and eating it before wagging his oily index at her. “We’ve got to save some for the guests. Speaking of which, why don’t you check if they’re here?”

Just then, the doorbell rang and Karen skedaddled out of the dining room, quickly going over to the door to answer whoever was on the other side. She didn’t even bother to see who it was before opening the door.

“KAREN!” a high-pitched voice squealed and before Karen knew it, she was nearly tackled to the ground when a very fast female form came bum-rushing over to glomp her in a maneuver that looked like an all-out football tackle crossed with a bear hug. “Cousin, I missed yous!”

“Vivian!” Karen’s voice was a mixture of pleasant surprise and annoyance, since she was both really happy to see her cousin and a little bit not-happy at the arms constricting her. She made feeble attempts to pry herself free of them. “You… you made it!”

“Yes I have!”

“Uh, Vi…?”

“Oh! Letting go now.” Vivian eventually released her hug-hold and stepped back to smile – nay – beam at Karen. On her part, Karen re-expanded her lungs as she looked over the taller (and thinner) girl’s shoulders to see who else was there, to see if Vivian had walked all the way from Portharbor, Skyhaven over to Dunwich, Massachusetts all by herself through the snow and all, or if she had come with her family. In a car. Knowing her, the former was just as likely as the latter, if not more so (not really, but yeah). Crazy cousins.

Behind Vivian was her twin brother Basilio, who was smiling (at them). Karen waved Bas hi and stepped aside to let Vivi and her brother in. Behind them were their parents, Karen’s Uncle and Auntie, but they were still in their station wagon (which had real wood) trying to park without hitting the snowman on the lawn. They saw Karen by the door and waved at her and she waved back as they finally managed to park their wagon. They got out and quickly made their way in, not wanting to stay out in the cold any longer than necessary. As they came in, Karen took Uncle’s right hand and placed it on her forehead in some gesture of familial filial piety and respect Mom and Dad told her to do whenever she was around relatives. She did it for Auntie too, and both of them looked pleasantly surprised. Karen, on her part, smiled and gave an awkward shrug.

“Hi Karen. How are your parents?” Auntie asked.

“They’re alright,” Karen replied as she turned to lead them into the house. “Come on, dinner’s ready!”

They came in just as Dad finished readying the dinner, and he went over to clap Uncle in the back, congratulating him for making it just in time rather than in ‘Filipino Time’. Mom, being the gracious host, was multitasking by chatting away animatedly with Auntie while showing everyone their seats and complimenting both Vivi and Bas on how they’ve grown and so on and so forth. Vivi and Bas did the same hand-to-forehead thing Karen did, but to Mom and Dad, and then they went over and sat themselves near Karen and began rapid-firing her with so many questions that she could barely answer them in time. She tried to counter her long-lost cousins with questions on her own, barely managing beyond ‘What’s up?’ and ‘How’s school?’, but the cousins were just as eager to prattle on about how life was like in Skyhaven and so on and such, and Vivi was as much a fan of Wayward Son as Karen, though Bas preferred Nathan Blitz for some reason. Then Dad decided to go on to serious business. He was hungry, and Karen sure was too.

“Karen, will you say grace?” he asked, and Karen obliged – if a bit reluctantly. She said grace, forgetting to cross herself (though no one noticed), and when she was done everyone began filling their plates with all the foods they wanted, but in a slow and polite manner of course. Dad bragged about his scallop soup while filling his plate with rice. “Try my scallop soup,” he said. “It’s pretty good.”

The scallops were pretty good, Dad always made good scallops, but Karen had her attention on the pieces of pork on her plate, which she ended up forking into her mouth. Unlike the skin, which was totally crispy and tasty with its thin underlayer of fats, the meats were actually really soft and succulent and moist and also very tasty. Karen knew she needed more, and promptly got the knife and carved herself another piece from the lechon at the table’s center. Basilio tried to reach for some, but he was too far away.

“Help me. Need… more…” Karen’s cousin said in a feeble begging voice, to which she laughed and obliged, giving him some crunchies from the lechon-pig’s leg. Bas thanked her with his mouth full. “Thanks!”

“No problem,” Karen replied with a smile. Then Dad asked her to pass him the scallops, and so she did, passing it to Vivi, who passed it to Auntie, who passed it to Mom, who passed it to Bas, who passed it to Dad, who then passed it to Uncle with much encouragement and bragging about his home cooking. Karen couldn’t help but smile at how they were totally arranged in no particular order, then she frowned. She had forgotten the sauce for her spring rolls “Vivi, can you pass the sauce?”

“Sure, here,” Vivi said, and then she went: “Hey, Karen, I heard you got a new boyfriend.”

“Wha-?” Karen nearly choked herself on a spring roll, totally not expecting the unexpected question. “Uh, no. Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Oh, nothing,” Vivi beamed at her, and Karen gave her an odd look, but then Vivi shrugged and prattled on about ‘Life in Skyhaven’.

Karen listened on intently as her cousins described the place they lived in, that strange little nation known as Skyhaven, a tiny ahistorical blip on the American West Coast renowned for its… eccentricities. Swashbuckling citizens, supervillain mayors, Howard Huges and Spruce Mooses, homebuilt ornithopter kits and all sorts of crazy stories that went well with Karen’s thorough mastication of the various delicious foods mixed in her mouth. Every time Karen ate something else, Vivi and Bas seemed to move on to another interestingly strange tale from their place of origin, like rocketeers and robots from the future. Not that Karen minded, as she chewed and mused on what life must be like in Portharbor, Skyhaven, with its vigilante teams and roach coaches and libertarians. She decided that she had her fair share of the strange stuff in Dunwich, and that enough was enough for the meanwhile. She was enjoying the lechon and the lack of excitement in her vacation.

Meanwhile, Dad and Uncle and Auntie were conversing nostalgically over the very thoroughly eaten lechon at the table’s center while Mom listened intently. Karen wasn’t really listening to them, since she was busy chewing and listening to Bas go on about how awesome that new Hivemaster movie was, and how it was based on a true story of some Skyhavenite super in the 60s, but the grown ups were musing about the Old Country and how it was practically sinking into the ocean due to its sad state of affairs. Then they cheered up, since the currency exchange rate meant that if they ever decided to vacation in the Philippines to see distant family and enjoy the quiet country life, then they would end up living like royalty as long they didn’t buy any of the overpriced Rey Quirino branded stuff, whatever a Rey Quirino was. Mom made a quip about how nice having a summer shopping spree in her husband’s homeland would be, since she had never been there before (being as American as apple-pie), and it caught Karen’s ear. Vivi was complaining about how Bas’ girlfriend ran her foot over with her robot wheelchair.

“Wait, you have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Bas blushed, his flushing face a stark contrast to the white piece of lechon meat. “She’s really cute!”

Karen congratulated her cousin while Vivi mumbled something about wheels while trying Dad’s scallops. Mom opened the Coca-Cola bottle and poured everyone drinks.

“Alright, who wants dessert?” Mom asked. Dad was slightly disappointed that his scallops got overshadowed by the large mail-ordered lechon, but he was too fat and full of food to really mind. Mom, on the other hand, had prepared the fruit salad and had stowed ice creams in the freezer and was just about ready to break them out.

Anyway, everyone raised their hands, absolutely ready to continue the pigging out - Auntie, Uncle, and the Cousins understandably so since they had just traveled long and far for food. Karen herself was absolutely relishing the gluttony of the season, all the great foods and the fruitcake and the candy canes and the milk and cookies and the enormous roasted pigs and homemade scallops and bubba gump, and Dad shared her enthusiasm – being a self-styled amateur chef and all that, complete with a mail-order grill advertised by some washed-out retired boxer on TV, and he always said that a good chef always enjoyed his own food to the point of overeating (and maybe obesity). Karen was slightly worried about growing fat though, and how she might end up putting it all on her hips, but she remembered that as soon as the Christmas Break was over, she’d end up burning it all away anyway on the various gruesome physical ordeals she’d end up undertaking. There was PE, and she was in the track team after all… but it sure beat the debate team, and she was sure she would’ve been dead if she had joined the debate team instead of the track team.

Karen got up and helped Mom, going over to the refrigeron and helping her haul the gallon containers of Cookies and Cream, Rocky Road, Chunky Monkey, and a few others all belonging to the allegedly 31 flavors of ice cream. She grabbed two of the gallon cans and went back over to the table.

“Ta-da!” Karen declared as she delivered the ice creams and got back to her seat, right beside Vivi.

“Is that a new MP4.5 player?” Vivi asked as she noticed the little gizmo poking out of Karen’s breast pocket.

“No, it’s an MP5,” Karen replied casually, putting it on the table for Vivi to examine. “It’s not as fancy as one of them iBrains, or even a FLAC, but it came with free Christmas songs though.”

“What Christmas songs?”

“All of them, I think,” Karen shrugged. “I bought it this afternoon. It’s a gift for myself, so I didn’t bother wrapping it up and placing it under a tree.”

Suddenly, Vivi’s mouth gaped open (wider than usual), and everyone ended up looking at her. And Karen. Even Mom stopped scooping ice cream into glasses.

“What?” Karen asked nervously, looking around at everyone looking at her (and Vivi).

“Mom!” Vivi cried in apparent alarm. “We left the gifts in the car!”

Auntie gasped and tried her best not to look embarrassed. She looked around, face all red, and promptly got up, intent on going out into the snow to get the gifts.

“Stay. Eat,” Mom handed Auntie a cup of ice cream. “We can do our gift giving later. Right, hon?”

“Right,” Dad agreed, turning to Auntie and Uncle. “There’s something I really got to show you later. I placed these new Christmas lights on the roof, and they’ll light up like a whole bunch of stars. It’ll be great, better than those Santa Clauses and Rudolfs everyone else has on their roofs every year. Yeah, that’ll show those Joneses. We can all go out and look at it, and we can do our gift-giving out there under the lights.”

“But we’ll do that after dessert,” Mom smiled. “Why don’t you pass some ice cream to Vivi, dear?”

Karen was distracted by the whole conversation nearly becoming serious business and was relieved when Mom defused it, so she got a cup of ice cream and passed it on to Vivi.

“I’m so sorry for forgetting about your presents, Karen.” Vivi apologized profusely.

“It’s okay…” Karen handed her a cup and Vivi gladly took it and began spooning the Oreo-ingrained vanilla ice cream into her mouth. She was eating the ice cream really quick, since she was still a little bit embarrassed and Karen kept looking at her funny. But Karen wasn’t really looking at her. “It’s… fine… Vivi.”

She was actually looking through Vivi and at the window. Its view of the outside world, so snowy and full of other houses with Christmas lights, had been replaced by an unexpected sight, a scene strangely surreal yet all too familiar to Karen. Out there where the station wagon was supposedly parked was a swirling portal, bright and blue and eerily hypnotic – like a silent whirlpool of light that silhouetted the snowman on the lawn. The snowman wasn’t alone though, as there was something out there with it, another shadowy figure that was moving towards the window.

It was the thing – the Gatekeeper - a malformed creature whose face was a single unblinking eye, whose right arm was in the shape, form and likeness of a gnashing jaw filled with fangs, and with brown chitinous carapace covering the entirety of its misshapen form. It leaned forward, touching the window with its jaw-hand, and then it said something. Despite the glass separating them, Karen could still hear it make its cryptic proclamations in her mind’s ear.

“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. This one is the Gatekeeper. Watch, little one. Watch...”

The portal opened like the iris of some great cyclopean eye, and Karen could see through the window a sky eye’s view of a vast and desolate landscape – a frostbitten forest covered in snow, and an empty road that ran across it like a black artery. Then Karen blinked and she saw houses with rooftops covered in snow, and porches decked in decorations, and she realized that they were her neighbors’. The Gatekeeper was gone, the snowman was alone and the window was no longer a gateway to another world.

“Here’s one for you, Karen,” Vivi smiled, apparently not noticing the expression on Karen’s face, and handed her a cup of ice cream.

Karen got the cup of ice cream and began spooning the cold contents into her mouth. Cookies and Cream, her favorite.

“Dear, don’t eat the ice cream too fast, you’ll get -” Mom tried to warn her, but it was too late.

Karen clutched the back of her head and screamed in pain. Or at least she tried to, as the cold cream and Oreo bits nearly froze her brains and she ended up coughing and dropping her cup on the table.

“-brain freeze,” Karen muttered, trying her best not to use profanity in front of the family as she got up and excused herself, heading over to the bathroom to presumably freshen up. She got to the bathroom and freshened up, splashing cold water on her face, and then she locked the door and pulled out her cellphone. She couldn’t use it in the dining room, that would’ve been impolite and Mom would’ve mentioned it sometime later, but now in the privacy of the bathroom Karen sat herself on the toilet and dialed a ‘special number’. She heard the dial tone, then the strange ringing sound that came with quantum-locked signal encryption, and she didn’t have to wait for long before her call was answered.

She took a deep breath and sighed. There went Christmas.

“Hello, Ms. Lewyn?”

“Yes,” a familiar female voice replied. “I’m here.”

“This is Karen… I had a sighting,” Karen said reluctantly, omitting the part where she was having dinner with her family. “I saw a Crosspoint. There must’ve been an incursion, but I’m not sure where or when. All I saw was sky…”

“I know,” Ms. Lewyn, the guidance counselor at school, answered with an understanding voice.

“Wait, what? How?”

“We’re heading there right now.”

“There? Where there?” Karen asked, confused.

“There, we’re on our way to pick you up. Karen, we know there’s been an incursion and we’re going to need your help to stop it.”

“But ma’am, with all due respect… I’m having Christmas dinner with my family!” Karen protested. They couldn’t do this to her!

“No buts, Karen. I’m sorry.”

“But how’ll I explain this to them? How on Earth can I possibly - ?!”

“Just leave it to me. Max and Kenny are already with me, so you better get gear up and get your kit ready. We’ll be there in a while.”

The transmission ended abruptly and Karen ended up slouching on the toilet, brooding and loathing the untimely interruption to such a perfect night, a perfectly normal night. Christmas Eve, no less! Her vacation was now totally ruined and she had no idea how she’d explain it to Mom and Dad, or to Uncle and Auntie and Vivi and Bas. She had no idea how she – a fourteen year old girl in high school trying to fit in and not be abnormal – got into this whole mess. Screw great power and great responsibility. Karen got off the toilet and kicked seat up.

“Goddamn it!”

She went to her room to get her special knapsack, which she hid under the bed, and went back downstairs to fetch her parka and put on her boots. Then the doorbell rang.

“That’s quick,” as Karen went over to answer the door, she noted how they hadn’t even given her time to say goodbye to her family. She tried to get there as quick as she could, before they’d ring again and bother everyone else, but –

“Karen!” Mom had gotten there first. “There’s someone here to see you!”

“Who is it?” Karen asked, pretending not to know while heading for the door as fast as she could while struggling with her parka. “Mom?”

“It’s Ms. Lewyn, from school,” Mom shouted, not knowing that Karen was already right behind her. She turned around and noticed, and placed an arm around Karen and gave her a warm reassuring smile. “Oh, there you are.”

All the while, standing there in the doorway right before them was a tall blonde woman attired in dark winter clothing. It was Clarisse Lewyn, officially the school’s guidance counselor and unofficially the handler of Karen’s secret missions. She was also wearing a Santa hat, its red and white matching her black clothing and fair hair.

“Good evening, Karen.” Clarisse greeted and smiled. It was a reluctant one, and from Karen’s point of view it came off as rather cold… But maybe that was just the snowy draft coming from the still-open door. She closed the door and things got a bit less chilly. “Merry Christmas.”

“Hi, Ms. Lewyn,” Karen replied, looking alternatively at her mom and her handler with uncertainty. She had no idea what was going to happen next since her parents didn’t know what was up, so she eyed Clarisse curiously and wondered what she would tell her parents. “What’s up?”

“Ms. Lewyn tells me that you’re supposed to go caroling this evening,” Mom said, letting go of Karen so she could lead their new guest into the house. “We just finished dinner, but we still have lots of dessert. Fruit salad and ice cream, would you like some?”

“No thanks, I’m good. We just had our own party a while ago with the school staff,” Clarisse politely declined. “Anyway, I hope I’m not intruding or…”

“Oh, it’s okay,” Mom went on. “I think it’s really great, having the children go around caroling and singing songs. It is Christmas, after all.”

Karen scowled and muttered something beneath her breath, and Clarisse looked at her with an expression that was hard to discern.

“Hey, what’s going on?” it was Dad, emerging from the dining room with Uncle and Auntie and the Cousins behind him. He saw Clarisse and gave Karen and Mom a questioning look. “Welcome, Ms…?”

“Lewyn,” Clarisse offered her hand and Dad shook it. “Clarisse Lewyn, I’m Karen’s guidance counselor from school.”

“I see,” Dad rubbed his chin. Karen took a peek at the dining room and noted that they had broken out the red wine. Dad saw Karen looking and he smiled. “It’s a little late for a parent-teacher conference, isn’t it?”

“They’re going caroling,” Mom piped in. “Karen’s classmates are in the school bus outside all ready to go around singing ‘Merry Christmas’ door-to-door and Ms. Lewyn’s here to pick Karen up.”

“Just Clarisse is okay. I’m responsible for the school’s extracurricular activities,” Karen’s handler and school guidance counselor said helpfully. “Is it alright if Karen comes caroling with us, Mr. Salinas?”

“Well, that really depends on how long you intend to go around with the kids, singing songs in front of houses…” Dad gave it some thought.

“It shouldn’t take too long,” Clarisse offered. “Just a couple of hours, and Karen should be back home before eleven o’ clock.”

“I guess that’s okay,” Dad rubbed his chin. “We’ll wait for Karen and hold off on the fun stuff until she gets back. Right, guys?”

Vivi and Bas nodded empathetically and Karen smiled weakly and went on to get her boots. Afterwards, they followed her out to the lawn and gathered by the snowman to send her off. Mom patted her on the head and told her how it was so nice to go around caroling, which was what she did when she was young, and she also told her to be a good girl. Dad warned her about catching frostbite from the wind chill.

“Well,” Karen sighed. “This is it.”

“Don’t worry. We won’t start exchanging gifts without yous, cousin!” Vivi said cheerfully.

“Yeah,” Bas added helpfully. “We’ll wait for you. There’s still plenty of dessert left.”

“Thanks,” Karen put on her thermal earmuffs and adjusted her parka by putting the hood over her head. Meanwhile, Clarisse was signaling the school bus to come by. Since Karen wasn’t looking at the bus and was facing her gathered family, she didn’t notice the two people coming out of the big yellow vehicle.

“Hey, who are those?” Bas asked.

“Huh?” Karen turned around and saw the two heading towards them. The one leading at the front was a tubby short kid in glasses wearing a bright orange down jacket that looked like a personal floatation device. It was Kenny, Kendrik Heimstein, walking fast with an arm raised to shield himself from the cold wind. Whereas the one who trailing at the back, walking in a more measured pace despite the cold, was a tall Asian teen with short dark hair wearing a spiffy black jacket and a stoic expression on his face that seemed to show an utter indifference to temperature and climate. “Max?”

“Is he your boyfriend?” Vivi asked innocently. Bas tried to stifle a laugh from behind her.

“What? No!” Karen sputtered, before composing herself as her two partners in crime arrived. “Of course not.”

“Happy Hallmark Hanukkah Holidays!” Kenny greeted her with a goofy grin. “It’s the alliteration that keeps on greeting, and it upsets the anti-secularists War on Christmas Truthers and the Kazakhstani anti-Semites, so yeah. Hey Karen.”

“Merry Christmas to you too,” Karen replied. Then she turned to the taller of the two, Maximus Li. “Hi Max.”

“Hi Karen,” he waved back at her with his right hand. She noted that he was placing his left hand behind him, out of view. She also noticed how he looked like he totally didn’t mind the cold, and his Mr. Spock-ness seemed to suggest that his body was no longer bothering with keeping warm and had instead just matched the frigid ambient temperature, like a proverbial iceman. But she wondered how much of it was really so, and if he would be just as frigid-looking if she invited him over into the house and handed him a thermos full of hot choco. That was a funny thought. “How’s Christmas?”

“It was okay,” she answered. Mom and Dad had just finished talking to Clarisse, while Uncle and Auntie and the Cousins stood by the sideline. For some reason, Kenny was examining the snowman, presumably using it as cover from the wind. She turned back to Max and sighed, making mist in the cold air. “Dinner was great.”

“That’s good. I hope you’re ready to go,” he said and Karen saw that Clarisse and Kenny were heading back to the bus. “Ms. Lewyn.”

“Max,” Clarisse acknowledged. As she passed by, Karen could see how she was that much taller than Max, and everyone else for that matter. “Karen, Kenny. Shall we?”

“Yeah,” Karen shrugged as she turned around to face her family. She waved at them and they all waved back, and then she went inside the school bus. “Let’s get this over with.”

“That was one nice snowman,” Kenny mentioned as he followed her. “Did you make it? The carrot on his nose was -”

“Yeah, I know.”

Back indoors, Mom and Dad and Uncle and Auntie continued their previous conversation while Vivi and Bas regarded one another. With their cousin gone, they no longer had anyone to talk with aimlessly and were now stuck with one another, with nothing else to do but eat dessert while waiting for their cousin’s return. Then Vivi noticed Karen’s MP5 music player and picked it up, placing an earphone in her ear. She handed the other phone to Bas and pressed the play button.

“What a bright time, it's the right time
To rock the night away
Jingle bell time is a swell time
To go gliding in a one-horse sleigh

Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet
Jingle around the clock
Mix and a-mingle in the jingling feet
That's the jingle bell,
That's the jingle bell,
That's the jingle bell rock.”



Dunwich Academy School Bus, In Transit
2029 Hours

The headlights stabbed through the dark night, lighting up the black road and the falling snow as the school bus drove on as fast as the slick pavement could allow. Still, it was dark. The trees by the road could barely be seen. There were no other cars, no light posts or reflective signs, neither the festive decorations nor neon that were so omnipresent throughout the city. They were in the dark, heading for uncharted territory.

Karen tried to gauge the distance they had traveled, counting the passing trees to know how far they had gone from the city. But it was so dark that she could barely see the trees, and even if she got a good look at them, they all looked the same anyway, so it was totally useless. Instead of counting the miles they had traveled, she decided to start brooding. Which was what her age group specialized in.

She cursed her Pointwatcher senses, the ability to feel interdimensional rifts and tears in reality that allowed shitty Shoggoths and other existential horrors to spill into the real world. She cursed the Blacksuits who had drafted her into their war on whatever monstrosities came forth from the Dreamlands on a seemingly weekly basis, and how her conscription into their cause had totally ruined her social life. Now they had just reached a new low, they had just stolen her Christmas, and she seethed in silent contempt.

Karen glared at her handler. Clarisse Lewyn was not the archetypical woman in black. Aside from serving a shadow government organization, she also worked full-time as Dunwich Academy’s guidance counselor. It wasn’t just a cover, and that was what struck Karen the most when she learned the truth about, well, everything. In school Clarisse worked with students, helped children cope with their myriad problems at home and school, while at the same time she was the one who sent the Blacksuits’ under-aged field agents out on dangerous missions because the organization was too under-funded to afford proper manpower. They simply handed them guns and had them do their literal dirty work.

Karen then glanced at the two seated beside her, Kenny and Max. They were also there when she made her discovery, or rather when they made theirs. They were the ones who found her when her Tracker abilities had first manifested, when she went into a dream-trance and sleepwalked to a Dreamlands portal in the middle of the subway. They saved her from what came from beyond that portal and brought her to Clarisse, not knowing what to do with her. They were her classmates, and they were Blacksuits agents.

Afterwards, Karen became an agent too. She joined the Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Response Team, the MABRT, and her life changed forever.

But still, that didn’t give any of them the right to steal her Christmas, goddamn it! If only her parents had refused to send her out ‘caroling’, had firmly said no right in front of Clarisse’s face, told her to take her ‘caroling’ and -

“Is there something wrong, Karen?” the question totally caught Karen off-guard. Clarisse was seated in front of her, and Karen suddenly wondered if the window had reflected her scowling visage for the Blacksuit to see.

“I was just thinking,” Karen muttered. “How did you get my parents to let me go out caroling? You didn’t use the Hypnotic Memory Wiper on them, did you?”

“I didn’t have to. They already knew ahead of time that we were coming,” Clarisse explained, not noticing the suspicious look Karen was giving her from behind her seat. “The PTA sent notification letters a few days ago, asking if students could come caroling tonight.”

“Oh,” Karen crossed her arms and grumbled something about how it was too bad that only three students could’ve made it.

Clarisse turned around to look at her with concern. “Karen, I know you would rather be with your family right now, but you’re not the only one who’s missing out on Christmas Eve. Kenny and Max had to leave their families in the middle of Christmas dinner too, but this is very important. We’re going to need everyone in on this mission.”

“Right,” Karen sighed. She looked at Kenny and Max. Kenny was intently looking for something in the satchel bag he had slung across his gut. Max, on the other hand, was watching her as she spoke with Clarisse. Karen wondered what was up with that. “I understand.”

“I agree,” Kenny leaned over towards them and held out a brick-sized piece of foil-wrapped fruitcake. “My mom told me to bring some fruitcake with me. It’s got all the necessary Flintstones vitamins and minerals, since it’s got fruit and cake. Like an eggplant. Do any of you want some?”

“I just had dinner,” Karen declined. “But thanks anyway.”

Kenny shrugged and offered some to Clarisse and she took it graciously, opening the tinfoil wrapping and taking a small bite, and then a larger one after she found its taste agreeable. The Blacksuit Area Administrator hadn’t had dinner yet and fruitcakes barely constituted as such, being just desserts. Kenny pulled out another piece of fruitcake and offered it to his buddy and Max accepted it, pocketing it for future consumption. Karen just shook her head.

“If this mission is so important, then maybe you could tell us what’s going on. How long do we have to wait before we get briefed on what we’re supposed to do?” she asked impatiently.

“Just wait,” Clarisse said as she finished her fruitcake. “I’ll show you what’s going on. Are we there yet, Matt?”

“Almost there, Ms. Lewyn,” replied Muttley, their Blacksuit Infrastructure and Logistics Backroom Operator (BILBO) and interim bus driver. He looked back and gave them a thumbs up sign. “Should be just a short while.”

“Good,” Clarisse got up and went over to the front of the bus, near the driver’s seat, and threw the fruitcake’s foil into the waste bin. “I’m glad that you were able to pick us up on such short notice, I really appreciate it.”

“It’s no problem, ma’am,” Muttley went on, trying not to look slightly embarrassed. “After all, this is what we do, right? Rain or shine, snow or stuff, won’t stop the Blacksuits coming.”

“Quite,” Clarisse smiled and nodded her head before returning back to Karen, Kenny and Max. “Shouldn’t take too long,” she reassured them as she sat down. “We should be there any minute now.”

Karen muttered something about how that’s what she said thirty minutes ago.

“We’re here,” Muttley announced as he eased on the brakes carefully. The bus decelerated slowly and eventually stopped completely. Then with a pull of a lever, the doors opened and an influx of cold air rushed into the already cool interiors of the un-heated bus.

Without further ado, Karen got off her seat and went out of the bus, muttering something like ‘about time’ and ‘what was that all about?’, giving Muttley the bus driver a weird look on her way out. Kenny and Max followed suit, minus the muttering and the weird looks, and got out of the bus as well. Clarisse was the last one to leave.

“Ma’am, what do I do now?” Muttley asked.

“Take the bus back to the school and meet us at the rendezvous point afterwards,” Clarisse answered. “Bring whatever you can get from the armory. We might need some additional firepower.”

“Will do, ma’am.” Muttley moved to pull the door-close lever, but stopped himself. “Ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Good luck,” he said as he pulled the lever and closed the doors shut.



Miskatonic Meadows, Massachusetts
2035 Hours

“Who was that?” Karen asked no-one in particular. “I never saw him before.”

“They call him Muttley,” Max said indifferently. “New guy, just came in last month. Makes supply runs with a motorbike.”

“Muttley?” Karen raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Kenny replied. “Like that dog from the Whacky Races and Catch the Pigeon, with Dick Dastardly. Muttley, do something! Anything! Then he’d snicker and get a medal for doing nothing. Did you know that Muttley used to deliver pizza? Not the dog, I mean, but the guy. Muttley. He kind of reminds me of Otto, the bus driver from the -”

“Uh-huh,” Karen tried to raise her eyebrow a little bit higher but found out that she couldn’t, so she didn’t. “Right. Now where on Earth are we?”

“We’re on a road that goes through Miskatonic Meadows,” Clarisse said as she joined them. The bus had just left, leaving behind a trail of condensing vapor from its hydrogen exhaust pipe, and as it got further the illumination from its lights grew dimmer and dimmer. Eventually, they were all alone in the dark and Clarisse pulled out a flashlight, lit it, and pointed it down at the snowy ground. “Follow me.”

They did, Karen trailing a little back as she took the time to survey her surroundings. Devoid of any illumination sans Clarisse’s flashlight, the place was practically pitch black. So Karen decided to pull her own flashlight out of her knapsack. She turned it on, but that didn’t make it any better, made it worse in fact. The beam of light lit only a scant portion of what was around her, and everything the light didn’t touch remained in the black. From what she could see, there was nothing but snow and trees and the shadows behind them, and beyond that there was nothing. Then she realized that in the dark her flashlight wasn’t just visible to her alone, but to anyone and anything else out there in the night as well.

Karen turned it off and trudged on by the black asphalt road, and she quickly found walking in the snow to be a great effort, sinking each foot in before pulling it out with each and every step forward. The cold didn’t make it better, with foggy mist coming with every breath. Soon she was winded, and she paused for a while to rest.

She looked around again and found that her eyes had acclimated themselves to the dark. The white snow reflected light from the sky, which in turn was reflecting the city lights, so she was not in total darkness as she had previously thought. She scanned her surroundings, with her eyes and ears. It was pretty quiet. Almost too quiet.

Since Kenny, Max and Clarisse were nowhere to be seen or heard.

Karen cursed and went off after them, trying to find them in the dark, scurrying as fast as she could. Trying not to stumble in the dark was hard, with the snow and the tree roots everywhere, and trying to remember which way they went was just as difficult. Karen hoped they hadn’t gone too far, and hoped that she could see the light from Clarisse’s flashlight, but -

Something grabbed her in the arm and she nearly screamed. But she didn’t. Instead of screaming, she spun around and smashed her flashlight against whatever it was that was trying to kill her.

“Karen -”

Her flashlight hit Max, hard. He had brought his left hand up to shield himself and her flashlight had connected with it audibly. Now he was clutching it with his right and was grimacing in visible pain, something of a rare sight coming from their own Kid Spock.

“Oh shit,” Karen uttered, not quite sure as to what to do. “Max, I’m sorry! Are you okay? I didn’t mean to -”

“I’m fine,” he replied tersely, still holding his hand and trying to control his pain. His left hand was larger than his right, courtesy of an interdimensional incident a long time ago. It wasn’t quite an injury or a deformity, but more like a mixed blessing. “I’ll be fine.”

“Let me look at that,” Karen approached him. The symbiotic creature that had merged with his left hand was concealed in a large glove, resembling those big Styrofoam ones at football games. She hoped the glove had protected it from the impact.

“No, it’s okay,” Max replied, his grimace gone and replaced by his perpetual poker face. That stoic indifferent look was partly due to the alterations in body chemistry caused by his alien hand, which he affectionately referred to as Lefty. “I was looking for you, we thought you were lost or something.”

“I…” Karen hesitated, unsure if he was angry at her or if he was still in pain, something she sometimes doubted he was capable of feeling. She looked at him, trying to discern what subtle signs of human emotion she could see in his face, but even in broad daylight it was a difficult task. He didn’t look angry, and if he wasn’t hurting anymore, then that meant Lefty was alright and was back dosing him with whatever Prozium alien symbiotes regularly prescribed to their hosts, and that meant that he was back to normal. As normal as things could be, anyway. Karen exhaled, forming a cloud of mist in the cold air. “You could have said something before grabbing me like that, you know.”

Max nodded, showing no trace of what had just happened. Then he beckoned her. “Come on. We found something.”

“Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we've no place to go,
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

It doesn't show signs of stopping,
And I brought some corn for popping;
The lights are turned way down low,
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

There was an abandoned pickup truck by the road, it was covered in snow and had one of its doors open. As they passed by, Karen noticed that its radio was still on, playing Christmas songs for no one to hear. For all she knew, the radio could have been playing there for who knows how many hours, days, or even weeks. Playing until it drained the truck’s power cell completely. It was a rather perturbing thought.

“Is that what Clarisse was looking for?”

“No,” Max replied indifferently.

“What was she looking for, then?”

“The driver.”

After the pickup truck, Max led Karen to the middle of the road. Clarisse and Kenny were standing in front of a snowy protrusion on the pavement, which Karen reasoned was what caused the pickup truck to go off the road and nearly plow into the trees. She was half right.

She looked at Max and looked at the bump on the pavement and realized that it was a human-shaped bump on the road. She examined it closely and found out that under the snow were clothes and shoes, and in those clothes and shoes was…

“Joe Piper,” Clarisse said, identifying the body for their benefit. “He was on his way to work when he got sidetracked. Probably by him,” Clarisse pointed back to something and Karen saw another human-shaped bump down the road. “Maybe he tried to help, but it was too late. He tried to run, but he couldn’t make it. He didn’t make his appointment.”

“What happened to them?” Kenny asked, studying the corpse curiously. It was unnerving for Karen to see the tubby Jew kid so intently focused on one subject when in any remotely normal circumstance, he would’ve been hyperactively blathering on and on about something inane before changing topic to something even more inaner. Especially when the subject on hand he was focusing on was a dead person. It was morbid and creepifying, to say the least. “No discernable bite marks, all his limbs are intact, no gunshot wounds, visible injuries… he looks like he froze to death. Like a dead body turned icicle. A corpsicle,” Kenny knelt down, examining the body further and brushing off some of the snow that had accumulated over it. “But then what’s with all this blood?”

“Don’t get too close to it, Kenny,” Max cautioned him.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that he’s pretty dead,” Kenny replied, his eyeglasses ominously reflecting the light from Clarisse’s flashlight. “As pretty as dead could be, anyway.”

Karen shook her head, not for the first time that night. Things had become far more disturbing than Christmas Eve had any right to be and she blamed the Blacksuits for that, goddamn them. She turned around and tried to put some distance between herself and Kenny’s corpsicle. Not too far to get herself lost again, though. She didn’t want to accidentally whack Max with her flashlight for a second time, damn it.

But she was far enough for Kenny’s corpsicle scene investigation to become mostly inaudible and unnoticeable. Alone now, she surveyed her environs once more. It was a cold and snowy night, snowflakes drifting gently in the wind as they made their descent to earth, the trees still despite the wind, the chilling breeze flowing through the clearing of the road blowing at her parka. Karen shivered and placed her arms around her body as she looked up into the sky. Disturbing was the word of the night, and she felt something strange in the pit of her stomach. An unsettling realization that she had been in this strange place before, like déjà vu, that she had somehow seen it -

There was a startled shout and Karen turned just in time to see Kenny jumping back from Joe Piper’s corpsicle. He fell on his ass and started crawling back before regaining enough sense to get back up on his feet.

By then, Karen had drawn her sidearm – a six-shot .410 Custom Blacksuit Revolver loaded full of special shotgun slug-shells. Apparently, Max and Clarisse were way quicker in the uptake, as their weapons were already leveled at Joe Piper. A 33-round Glock 18 semi-automatic and a Berretta M92F 9mm respectively. As Kenny stumbled back upright, he joined them by producing a tri-barreled .16 gauge pepperbox shotgun pistol from his satchel bag.

They all looked at him.

“It moved,” Kenny said simply.

“It can’t move,” Karen snapped back, pissed off at him for giving her such a scare. She wondered why he couldn’t go back to his old abnormal self again and why this night was so crapped up and what was up with the frostbitten dead dude. “It’s dead.”

“I saw it move,” Kenny repeated himself.

“It can’t move,” Karen answered back. Then, with some hesitation: “Can it?”

“Maybe,” Clarisse said. “Kenny, what did you see?”

“That,” with his free hand, Kenny pointed at the erstwhile Joe Piper. “I saw that.”

They all looked at where he was pointing at and saw how Joe Piper really was moving. Or, rather, how there was something inside of him that was moving. Something making its way up his neck, making a visible bulge on his throat as it went to the back of his mouth. There was a sick scraping sound as it, whatever it was, cleared his frozen pharynx and entered his oral cavity. Joe looked like he was gagging even though he was no longer capable of producing such a reflex. Then something came out of his mouth, a thin silvery thing that gleamed in the moonlight. It was a hook, latching on to Joe’s cheek, pulling and cutting his frozen flesh. Another hook came, latched on to his lip, and pulled, and another hook and another, until it finally emerged – showing itself for everyone to see.

It was silvery and metallic, as were its long hook-like appendages, and in form it was vaguely insectile though its body had more divisions than mere head, thorax and abdomen, thus also resembling a centipede by way of its many segmentations. It seemed to know that it was being watched, though it had no visible eyes or other sensory apparatus, and it regarded the four humans surrounding it one at a time.

“Holy cow,” Kenny gaped. He quickly covered his mouth as he remembered where the thing had just come from.

“What the hell is that?!” Karen asked, training her big and heavy pistol at it. It was hard to aim at, but it was on Joe Piper’s face, and that was an easy enough target. “What do we do? Should we kill it?”

“Ms. Lewyn?” Max asked, inquiring for instructions as he switched the safeties off his Glock. Despite holding it with one hand, his right, he did not waver in his aim.

“This is just what I thought,” Clarisse said to herself. Karen afforded a glance and saw that she was holding her gun one-handed as well, using her free hand to reach into her pocket. “Nobody fire until I say so.”

The thing saw Clarisse and its head snapped open like a flower of sharpened steel, emitting a sharp chittering sound as it did so. Its form became rigid, pointing upwards, and the chittering became painful to the ear – turning into an ear-piercing shriek of steel scraping steel.

There was a bright flash and a sound like oscillating thunder in the sky, and they all looked up and saw a whirlpool of rhythmic blue light amidst a halo of strange indescribable colors. From within that whirlpool, from the other end of reality, came forth a silver disc, and the portal opened to allow it passage into reality – dilating like an iris to birth it into another world.

Then the portal dissipated, evaporating into nothingness, and the silver saucer hovered in the black sky above them. From its center came a narrow beam of bright white light that touched the screeching steel insect and the corpse that was its pedestal. The light intensified and the steel insect became silent as it was lifted into the air and -

Clarisse gave the order and Max fired off a single shot. One shot was enough, as the round struck the steel insect and threw it out of the light, into the dark and into the snow.

The light from the saucer died, only to be replaced by many more, stabbing strobing beams that swept and scanned everything that was in its shadow.

“Get off the road!” Clarisse yelled as she grabbed Karen by the arm and ran into the trees, avoiding one of the lights just narrowly. Kenny and Max did the same, running off the road and into the tree line, away from the shadow of the saucer, away from its sweeping beams. They fled and hurled themselves into the snow.

“What the hell -” Karen was thrown under the trunk of a bent osteoporotic tree and Clarisse joined her shortly, one hand holding her handgun and the other her cell phone. Karen gave her a look of incomprehension.

“Not like your everyday mission, is it, kid?” Clarisse smiled sympathetically as she pocketed the phone. In that instant, the saucer’s strobe lights died once more, and then there was a deafening shriek as it flew away and disappeared into the night.

They waited there under the tree until the shrieking was gone, replaced by the quiet humming of noise-dampened propeller blades and the sound of disturbed wind blowing snow up into the air. Karen looked up into the distance only to realize that the Black Helicopter was right on top of them. The BH-53 ultratech-modded Pave Low had swooped down low, the panels of its hull flickering in a strange digitized effect as it deactivated its optic camouflage, passing over the trees before touching down on the road.

Autosensor-equipped miniguns scanned the landing zone, tracking Karen and Clarisse as they approached before identifying them as friendlies and moving on to other potential targets, this time Kenny and Max. The miniguns disengaged and the Black Helo welcomed them by opening its doors, temporarily blinding them with the light of its interior.

Clarisse holstered her weapon and was the first one in, grabbing hold of a handle bar and helping the others on board. Karen was last and she took Clarisse’s helping hand and stepped inside the Black Helicopter, following her handler in. As they disappeared into the light, the doors closed behind them and the Black Helo lifted off silently, its rotors noiseless and the panels of its armored hull flickering once more as it reactivated its optic camouflage. It vanished into the black night.

The only evidence of its passing was the air disturbed by its silent rotors, picking up the snow accumulating on Joe Piper’s abandoned pickup truck.

Its radio played on.

“When we finally say good night,
How I'll hate going out in the storm;
But if you really hold me tight,
All the way home I'll be warm.

The fire is slowly dying,
And, my dear, we're still good-bye-ing,
But as long as you love me so.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”


[To be continued]