Twelve Days of Christmas—Dark Tidings is a Substack special holiday event. Each day beginning Friday the 13th, we’ll count down to Christmas Eve with a dark tale featuring one of the gifts from the classic Christmas carol. A guide to all the stories can be found here.
Detective Simon Fenn stood on the porch of a 1950’s ranch style house in the heart of suburbia, staring down at his feet, clad in black loafers and netted in disposable booties. As he watched, the loafers lit up, red, green, red, green, red, green. Not even for Christmas could he get a god damn break. The killing never stopped. He looked up, and stepped inside 1095 Clermont Street. The scene was horrifying. The mother, father, grandmother, and two children lay splayed out around the living room, having died in obvious distress. Blood, vomit, and other bodily fluids pooled in various places, and the victims’ faces were contorted, each in a rictus of agonizing death.
Fenn adjusted his respirator, a fine white powder coated the room and was suspected to be the cause of death. Analysts had collected samples and were testing them in the state’s lab. He was supposed to be wearing a full body hazmat suit, but the bulky white garb made him claustrophobic and took him out of his comfort zone, which wasn’t wide to begin with, so he took his chances.
He walked to the window at the side of the house. It gaped open, letting in the freezing winter air and snow flurries that were just beginning to fall. The window latched from the inside. He stuck his head out, avoiding the powder dusting the sill, it was a good six feet to the ground, possibly eight. They’d measure and get pictures in the morning. For now he recalled the 911 recording that had been received a mere hour ago.
* Please come quick, there’s a strange… man, I guess, peeping in my neighbors’ window. He’s tall. So tall. I don’t understand. He’s wearing a long coat and a top hat. And tapping on the window. I don’t like this at all. I can’t see his face. * Ma’am do you recognize this man at all? * I think I’d remember somebody nine feet tall. But I can’t see his face. His legs are just, maybe he has stilts? So long. He’s bending down to get to the window, but the window is high. * Ma’am, you said he’s tapping on the window? * Yes. Oh no. Oh no. Marcy, oh honey, no. no no no. * Ma’am what’s happening? * She opened the window. She’s talking to him. I can see the others in the room, they’re running to the window. He’s taking something out from under his cape. Oh please hurry. Please please please. Should I shout? * Ma’am please do not get involved, police are on their way, they will be there shortly. Can you see what he took out of his cape? * Not really, it’s dark. A box I think. * A box? What kind of box? * He’s opened it. John has his hand on the window. To close it. * Ma’am can you see the box? * They’re all running from the window! I can’t see what’s happening! * Ma’am is the man- * Oh my god! Oh my god! He’s just jumped! Leapt, straight up and I don’t know where! Oh my god where did he go? I can’t see! I can’t see him! * Ma’am? Ma’am?
That was it, the woman had dropped the phone. By the time police arrived on the scene, the Francis family was dead and the perpetrator was nowhere in sight. Luann Jennings, the 911 caller was hiding in her closet. She remained nearly incomprehensible and had been taken to the hospital for observation and sedation. Fenn hoped she’d be able to talk to him in the morning. Meanwhile tech was working on getting access to the Francis’ security videos.
Fenn knelt down next to Marcy, her face was pale and swollen, her eyes wide open, she wore flannel PJs with little snowmen on them. She’d died next to the unlit fireplace, right under the stockings. He stood, they’d want to dust the outside of that window pane for fingerprints, and look for footprints under the window, or stilt prints. He adjusted the respirator again, the strap was too tight.
He always got Holiday detail as he didn’t have any family. Christmas after Christmas of murders and suicides and all the other twisted shit humanity does in the dark of winter. Something about the holidays brought the insanity out of people. This wild caper wasn’t even on the day, it was still ten days before. Starting early this year. Unbidden the song popped into his head, ten lords a-leaping. On the tenth day of Christmas…
His cell phone rang.
“Fenn.”
“Listen, Fenn, you’re not going to believe me, but we’ve just got two more calls. Same MO.”
“Same guy?”
“Can’t be, they all would have happened around the same time. Hang on.”
Fenn listened to the muffled sound of his Chief talking to someone else.
“Fenn, make that nine. Nine more homes. Same MO.”
“Nine? You gotta be- there are ten of these….” He trailed off, ten lords a leaping. Nah that was ridiculous. Fairytale garbage. There was a rational explanation for this. Well as rational as murder got anyway. There would be connections between the families, he’d find them.
“Fenn?”
“Yeah, yeah, just thinking. Look I’m heading back to the station, I need everything we’ve got so far. And can somebody map these out for me? Oh hey, and dibs on the big conference room.”
“Anything you need. It’s looking like forty-two people.”
Fenn hung up the phone and adjusted the respirator again. Christ on a goddamn gingerbread man. Forty-two people? In one night? He’d never seen anything like this. He didn’t need the big conference room, what he needed was a cabin in Yellowstone and a cupboard full of whiskey. Ten separate murder scenes, ten very tall men in top hats, ten families brought down by some mysterious powder? With any luck this case would kill him. A heart attack, stroke, he didn’t care so long as he was six feet under and nobody was killing anybody at that altitude. A Christmas miracle is what he needed.
Back outside on the porch he pulled off his booties and put them in the hazmat bin set up by the door. His respirator went in the trunk of his unmarked sedan. He plugged the station address into the car’s navigation and pulled away from the curb. As he drove he looked at all the bright, colorful Christmas lights. He secretly loved the houses with multiple strands in different colors and styles, the happy chaos of it spoke to him. At least for as long as it took to drive by. He didn’t think he could live with it. His own small apartment was never lit up. He was rarely there. He lived for the job and spent most of his time at the station or out working on cases. It wasn’t so much a tireless sense of justice, he just didn’t know what else to do with his time. The job was his habit, his hobby, his only real connection to people. But lately, he’d been itching to get out, one way or another. He was just tired of it all.
He drove by a house with a few of those giant blow up figures. Now those he hated. Wasteful monuments to consumerism. Offerings to the money gods, Bigger, Louder, and Flashier. Not that Fenn was particularly religious, he just also wasn’t particularly capitalistic. Money was the root of most crime and corruption, hard to deny that. Leave money out of the equation, and you’ve got a lot less crime.
Fenn slammed on the brakes.
The car skidded to a stop, the backend fishtailing in the freshly fallen snow. He leapt out of the car, hand on his holster. The street was quiet and dark. Not a soul in sight. But he’d seen it, he was sure of it. Legs, long legs crossing in front of the car. Quick, a flick, a mere shadow of two thin black limbs. He got back in the car.
“Suspect spotted on Nutmeg Street, heading south.” He paused, he was going to sound like a lunatic. “He’s tall, boys, real tall.”
Fenn got back in the car and headed slowly south through the wintery neighborhood. Should he be looking up? Where was this thing? He was fairly certain he could have driven between the legs he’d almost just hit. He didn’t have vocabulary for this particular perp. Or all ten of of them. How could anyone be that tall and still be agile enough to dodge his car? The snow was falling light and fluffy, obscuring his vision, playing tricks with his perception. Everything looked like it was moving.
A few streets further and feet hit the ground to the side of the car. Fenn stopped only to see the long legs bow and spring, lifting the perpetrator, whom he still could not see, into the air.
“What in the ever loving Freddie Mercury? It jumps? It fucking jumps.” He muttered as he got out of the car. He heard a thump and turned, the thing was perched on a nearby roof, crouching, its long legs akimbo, top hat dipped rakishly over one eye. The other shone piercing and white as ice.
Fenn radioed in his position, felt like he was possibly hallucinating, and drew his weapon anyway, walking with it trained on the monster.
“Jesus, does it even talk?” He cleared his throat. “Hi there, sir. Mind coming down so I can ask you a few questions?” How am I going to fit that in my car? He thought to himself as it opened a giant maw. A voice like a British TV presenter crossed with a bird of prey screeched out of the toothy pit.
“Ten Lords a-leaping, ten Lords a-reaping, ten Lords for the love of One.” It reached into an inner pocket of its long coat and pulled out a box that sparkled in the light of the streetlamp.
“Shit,” Fenn stepped back. A car pulled up next to him, then another, and another. Red and blue lights slicing into the night. In a flash, the thing was gone.
“What the Hell was that?” He heard someone say from behind him.
What indeed? Fenn gave the beat cops orders to canvass the area, wearing their respirators, and radioed the Chief to request helicopter support.
“A snuff box, probably,” said the lab tech over the phone, Fenn was inside his car, parked next to the mobile command center. They’d scratched the conference room after getting a look at the thing. “I mean if he has a top hat, a snuff box isn’t much of a stretch.” Fenn rubbed his temples and tried to gaze deep into the picture of a pristine, lonely forest taped to his dash. Maybe he would get transported if he looked hard enough.
“So you’re saying these guys are blowing powdered mistletoe out of a snuff box and that’s what’s killing everyone?”
“European mistletoe, yes. It essentially causes cell death, it’s not great.”
“Nothing else in the powder?”
“Nope, just highly concentrated mistletoe toxin.”
“Who knew mistletoe was toxic? What a world.”
“Toxic and parasitic, actually.”
“Just like romantic love, fitting.”
“Simon Fenn, you do not mean that!” Vickie scolded, but Fenn caught the lilt in her voice, maybe the hint of sadness, too. He huffed.
“Hey, Si?”
“Yeah, Vickie?”
“They’re saying is this thing is…. Not human. Is that- true?”
“Things, there are ten of them. And I don’t know. I haven’t killed it yet and looked at its insides. As soon as I do, I’ll let you know.”
“Stay safe out there, Si.”
“I will, you stay safe in there. Lab’s a dangerous place.”
Vickie laughed. She had a warming laugh, like hot cocoa running through your veins. “Catch you later, Si.”
“See you, Vickie.” Fenn sometimes daydreamed about asking her out, but wasn’t sure how to fit dating into his schedule. Or another human into his well trod routine. Or how to have a relationship that didn’t bleed.
A problem for another day… If he lived to have one.
Ten Lords for the love of one. That’s what the thing had said. He rested his head on the steering wheel. Like the song, the ten lords a-leaping were a gift from the singer’s true love. Love was the other thing a lot of people killed for. Maybe a more understandable one. He’d felt love like that before, many years ago…
“Keep it together, Old Man,” he muttered to himself. “The game has only just begun.”
A soft tapping at his window startled him and Fenn turned to find a young woman bending down to peer at him. Fenn opened his door and stepped out into the still falling snow. The woman was wearing a black parka with a black beanie. Long green hair and a lip piercing, Fenn noted in case he need to describe her to a sketch artist later. Her features were shadowed in the flood lights that lit up the dark night.
“Miss, who let you through the barricade?”
“No one.”
“What’s your name?”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t be this way much longer.”
Fenn’s phone was already in his hand. He could see the waiting ambulance not a hundred yards away. “Were you poisoned? Come with me.” He grabbed her arm but she didn’t budge.
“In a way, I guess, I am poison.”
Behind her the command center door slammed open and the men and women milling about sprang to life. Car doors slammed, lights and sirens whirred to swirling, screaming action. Everything moved. Fenn heard his radio hiss and start to chatter at him. He reached inside the car to grab it.
“No,” the girl grabbed his arm. “Come with me.”
Fenn met her eyes, full of a fire he’d lost decades ago.
“But something’s happened,” he said, weakly pulling away. Her grip remained firm.
“I’ll show you what happened. What has to keep happening.”
Fenn nodded. It wasn’t just the woman pulling at him, something else was as well. Something he couldn’t ignore. The woman turned and ran, Fenn ran after her, leaving the flurry of action, behind. The sound of sirens followed them for quite a while, though, as Fenn trailed the woman through suburban streets and finally to a nature preserve nestled in the middle of a posh neighborhood. She went slower now, picking her way through brambles and trees, ignoring paths and signs. Fenn was exhausted, breathing like an asthmatic, and not sure his legs would keep him upright for much longer. The only light came from the full moon, snow continued to fall silently while Fenn stumbled and blundered and cursed.
When she stopped it was among a grove of huge, gnarled trees that looked as ancient as Fenn felt. Their branches were bare except for what looked like large and roughly round bundles of green leaves and white berries hanging from them.
“It’s mistletoe,” said the woman. “A very ancient colony.”
“Toxic and parasitic,” muttered Fenn.
The woman smiled, “True, they feed off of the oak trees here and have for hundreds of years. And they give their toxin to the powder that The Lords use to procure food for them.”
“Procure-“ Fenn didn’t get a chance to finish. Ten pairs of shining black boots at the ends of long thin legs hit the dirt around him, knees bowed out like the points of diamonds. Muscle memory kicked in and Fenn reached for his gun, but a light touch on his shoulder stopped him. The woman smiled.
“It wouldn’t do you any good,” she said. He let his hand drop and looked up just as the bodies fell to the dirt with sickening crunches and squelching. Little Marcy’s body rolled to a stop at his feet, dead eyes staring up at him. The rest, the other forty-one lay in a pile of broken, stiff, and already rotting victims. Panic was not an emotion he felt anymore, years on the force had trained it out of him. What he felt now was the weight of procedural noncompliance.
“They should be at the morgue. This breaks the chain of custody. Their families will have nothing to bury!” his voice sounded strange and muffled in this dark land of twisted trees and towering monsters, where moonlight didn’t illuminate anything but the horror.
And her.
“Every one hundred years the trees awaken The Lords and send them for food. The world was quite different this time around, and they were not able to gather the food when it was killed. But that has been remedied. The Lords are quite resourceful.”
“That’s where everyone was going back at the command center. To stop the bodies from being taken.”
“Yes.”
Fenn finally let his eyes travel up, he hadn’t realized he’d been avoiding looking at the monsters towering over him. Their long coats flowed around them in black diaphanous folds like thick smoke. Their arms were long and slender like their legs, fingers ending in long, sharp nails. They each wore a black vest and tie with a black button up shirt and a black top hop hat. They looked like Victorian undertakers of monstrous proportions. They had faces like any man, except for their eyes, which glowed bright white.
“White like mistletoe berries,” the woman said. Fenn frowned, he didn’t like anyone reading his mind.
“Do they always dress like this?”
“Not always, but they seem to like this look,” the woman grinned at Fenn and he got the impression she thought the question very amusing.
“Ten Lords for the love of one, that’s the colony?”
“It is.”
Without a word The Lords crouched in unison and each picked up a body. Fenn tensed and then recoiled as the monsters began to tear the bodies apart and eat them, clothing, bones, and all. Gnawing and gnashing with their large teeth.
“This is their reward, they’ve done well.”
Fenn watched in horror as the ten Lords each devoured a body, crunching and slurping and licking their fingers of the last drops of blood when they were finished. They left no evidence behind, not a scrap of flesh was flung to forest floor. The woman grabbed Fenn’s arm.
“Stand still,” she whispered in his ear as the ground began to rumble and split at the base of each tree with mistletoe nestled in its branches. The Lords, their bellies distended from their raw feast, began to pick up the bodies and place them in the holes, the ground closing up after accepting the nourishment. Fenn watched each body get swallowed up by the earth. Then he watched as each Lord but one stopped moving, stiffened, its costume fading, and its head sprouting bare branches. Bark as black as coal covered each Tree Lord. The woman pointed to the last oak, the grave beneath it still open.
“For you, if you want it. You could join us.”
Detective Simon Fenn looked at the deep, black hole. The rational answer was no. The answer any functional person should give was no. But he was tired, he was tired of the bloodthirsty world. Tired of the pointless cycle of arresting one criminal only for ten more to spring up in their place. Tired of corruption on the force. Tired of tiptoeing the line and feeling like an asshole for it. He was tired of being alone, too. True, the trees and mistletoe killed, but just for food. No one had a conscience free of that. And every one-hundred years was a drop in the blood bucket compared to the damage the rest of the world did.
“I do,” he said. The woman smiled and began to unravel, her body untwining into a long vine of thick oval leaves and white berries. The vine slithered up the tree that was to be Fenn’s grave and wound itself into a clump like the other mistletoe. Fenn took off his shoes and socks, digging his toes into the cold, wet mud underfoot.
“I guess this is goodby,” he said as he climbed down into the pit and felt the soil collapse around him, darkness falling, for the final time.
I will never look at Mistletoe the same way again. Absolutely ghoulish.
I wondered how you'd work plants into "Ten Lords a-leaping!"😂