Days 0-2 can be read here.

Days 3-5 can be read here.

Days 6-8 can be read here.

Days 9-11 can be read here.

Days 12-14 can be read here.

Days 15-19 can be read here.

Days 20-23 can be read here.

Day Twenty-Four 

I slept in the cellar, deciding it was safer as the things outside wouldn’t see me. A fine start to Christmas Eve, right?

I was pretty quick at grabbing some food from the kitchen and kicking the bed’s mattress down the stairs, along with some covers. The central heating didn’t reach the cellar, but there was a little electric heater and several extension leads which would do.

I slept surprisingly well, despite the cold of the cellar. I’d not explored it after the first time I came down. The cabin had apparently seen some major repairs over the years, but this part of it mustn’t have been as much of a priority.

Morning came and with it the terrible choice of whether to stay in the cellar or to move upstairs. Maybe I could get the car going, or even make it down to the village. Hunger, boredom and a need to pee took over, so I crept back up the stairs.

The door to the cabin was open, letting flurries of snow through into the hallway, soaking the welcome mat and the rug by the entrance. I closed the door, feeling the freezing water through my socks. Armed with a torch from the cellar I walked through the cabin, making sure there weren’t any intruders. Postmen, four-eyed creatures or even wild animals.

I was alone. A relief, but there was something out of place, a feeling that it wasn’t as good a sign as I’d hoped. Surely animals would have come inside, stolen food, started making hiding places. I listened for mice, rats, anything small that might have hidden from my stomping around. Nothing, just the wind. 

The needs were dealt with, I used the loo, changed my clothes, grabbed some toast from the freezer and put it in the toaster set to ‘defrost’. Then I realised there was an absence in the room.

The stone skull was missing. I ran back to the cellar to make sure I hadn’t taken it downstairs. It had been my only real company for most of the holiday. It wasn’t in the basement, under the table or even the place I’d hidden it at the back of the cabin when the woman seemed freaked out by it. Nothing, no sign of it, no scratches, no sign it had ever been there.

I peered beyond the curtains to see what was outside. Just snow and nothing else. I couldn’t even see my car. Had those fucks taken my car? Incensed by this, I put my boots on and ran outside. The car was gone, the drive was gone. I barely recognised where I was. The woods had grown closer, the snow thicker than it was before.

A noise came from the trees, a crunching. They began to shake. Literally shaking trees, I’d not seen anything like it. They parted and those spirits were there, pushing them aside. Beings of living snow, with four ice-white eyes the closest to anything physical about them, at least until now.

One of them had a skull made of stone, the sockets fit the ice-white eyes perfectly. I dropped the torch I’d been wielding as a weapon and fled. If they’d got rid of my car, maybe the postman’s van would still be there.

It was, but had been buried in hedges grown too large and wild from how they had looked a few days ago. The spirits were slow to move and looking at the cabin, so I had a little time. The van’s door was open, so I got inside, closed it and checked for keys. Nothing, but at least it was shelter. It would have to serve as a place to hide, as the spirits seemed to ignore it so far.

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Advent of Abomination is by Black Armada and available here.