[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":230},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-the-night-of-christmas-eve":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":218,"description":16,"edited":218,"extension":219,"meta":220,"navigation":221,"path":222,"seo":223,"stem":225,"tags":226,"__hash__":229},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-night-of-christmas-eve.md","The Night of Christmas Eve",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":214},"minimark",[9,13,17,20,23,26,29,32,35,38,41,44,52,55,63,66,69,72,75,78,81,84,87,94,97,100,107,110,113,116,123,126,129,132,135,138,141,144,147,150,153,156,159,162,169,172,175,178,181,184,187,190,193,200,203,206],[10,11,5],"h1",{"id":12},"the-night-of-christmas-eve",[14,15,16],"p",{},"The Boar’s Head is the only pub in a small village in Gloucestershire, the name of which is not particularly important to this story, other than to say you are very unlikely to have heard of it unless you were born there, and to mention it can only offend without profit.",[14,18,19],{},"It was late on the night of Christmas eve, at the veil of Christmas day, and the front room of the Boar’s was in a serious condition. It looked like a party had had a party, and invited all its dubious but unshakable friends, for whom prison had done little but increase their appetites for riot and ingestion. Folk-loreish quantities of beer, wine and spirit had been ingested, and this great consumption had given the pub a desiccated, parched look. The taps at the bar dripped weakly, the bottles behind were now only empty glass, and froth-encrusted empties cluttered every surface like a hoard of collector’s tat. Hungover is the word, the pub looked hungover. The grey blinds were sunk low as if in mourning. The chairs and tables were at odds and ends, all the noise and bustle had packed up and gone. Like spent cartridges after a battle, endless packets of scampi fries littered the floor, frozen in their last crushed state. A pair of heels sat tamely in front of a stool, as if their owner had been whisked away by unseen spirits. It was a like a stage after the final night.",[14,21,22],{},"The enforcement of the smoking ban at the Boar’s had tended to mirror the asthma attacks of the publican, Bill, and Bill would chokingly swear that smoking helped his condition, and so each table had an ashtray. Each of these was such a cornucopia of chewed and lipstick-stained butts, that they resembled magnets which attracted fag ends like iron filings. There began at the level of the intermittently plastered architrave a turgid cloud of spent smoke which lent a rather louche theatrical air. The scent was that delinquent blend of stale tobacco and spilt booze, tempered with one additional farmyard note, that of Ron.  The bar ran in the shape of a hockey stick, and Ron was prostrate over the short arm of the L, with his torso flush against the wood and his chin latched over the far edge, his head like a puck ready to be spun aloft. He made some sodden smacking and gruntling noises, like a truffle pig dreaming of earthy pickings. His left arm hung over the bar so that his unspeakable nails dangled into the old ice cream tub which held the lemon slices. Ron’s bald patch had been of an imperialist bent since his mid-forties, and at sixty it now proudly occupied such a swathe of his bonce that a good portion of denuded patina pointed brightly at the glass-effect chandelier. His grey hair, which had the colour and texture of wet chemical fog, and which through careful grooming and salving Ron kept looking like a violently rung dish cloth, this grey hair reached generously down into the piled dishes in the sink, so gaining some jauntily frosted tips from a mauled saucer of mustard.",[14,24,25],{},"Ron snorted, blinked soggily, and nestled back against the bar. He began to snore, with a sound like a handsaw struggling through a knotty log. His nasal passages had been given a good hiding by three decades of committed insufflation, and so he breathed ravenously through his mouth, nearly chewing at his air. With each creaking expansion of his lungs two articulated projections pushed rhythmically against the back of his jacket, like the anonymous appendages you find on chickens which have been cruelly farmed and then hastily fried. These were his scapulas, which led to his convex shoulders, then to his arms like two lengths of plastic piping. In contrast his waist, hips and belly pushed firmly outwards in separate directions like a crowd wrestling with a police cordon. He was built like a shovel set on its end. Had there been anyone else in the bar, and had that person been reckless enough to approach the reeking anti-dentistry of his mouth, they would have deserved what they got. He was wearing a nearly formless cord jacket which was partially brown and entirely elbow-less. Underneath was a bright green shirt with a plastic sheen, one collar point of which was cocked up at an angle like a dog’s ear. The costume concluded in trousers that were lavishly caked with mud. He looked like he needed a sheep dip, or perhaps de-worming.",[14,27,28],{},"Ron’s beverage of choice over the past twelve hours, and over the past fifty years, hwas Scratterz Gold. This was a profoundly local cider which ran somewhere between 5-10% depending on the whims of the maker, who was known on a winter’s night to chuckle darkly and bung several bags of sugar into the barrel, producing something like a barley wine crossed with a toothache, and so by sympathetic magic sending cars swerving from the roads and A&E admissions into the red. Ron had seen off half-a-dozen poorly pickled eggs to temper the twelve pints of Scratterz, eggs which he had ingested whole in a serpentine fashion. These he had bolstered with several lbs of his personal recipe pork scratchings. The sight of Ron in his Jason Pollock-stained tracksuit, clad in an apron and swearing lovingly at the dancing morsels of flesh as he fried them in their own tallow, could have been a scene from a modernising adaptation of Dr Faustus. He confected these larded snacks solely from the deep-fried nipples of the sow, as he would tell anyone with a pale lupine grin, only after they had begun waveringly to chew.",[14,30,31],{},"The combination Scratterz, eggs, and porcine teats had produced in his stomach a wicked brew of acid, sulphur and salt, and fomented an unspeakably gaseous substance which could have been put to sound military use. This came from one end with the regular noise of a back firing car, and from the other, bloomed slowly past the shattered sepulchres of his teeth like a thick fog through a graveyard. These pensionable gnashers wore a thick impasto of lichen and jaundice. Ron’s clothing was also doing its bit on the odour front. He had taken a tumble on the poorly lit track which led from his cottage to the Boar’s when making his already well lubricated way twelve hours ago. He had fallen, stared blankly at the track of cloudy sky bordered by rough hedge, sworn expansively and precisely like someone reciting magic words, which I suppose they are really, and had then rolled and cursed his way upright, aiming a vicious kick at an entirely innocent piece of the bank and then trundling off. As I say, his nasal function had been reduced to a formality by decades of Peruvian party powder, and so Ron was oblivious to the fact that he had landed plumb into a copious offering left behind by a skittish mare. Large portions of his cord jacket and trousers were therefore curiously marked and profoundly scented.",[14,33,34],{},"The part of the bar unoccupied by Ron wore a high patina, worked up by the rub of slumped drunks’ arms, by last ditch elbows posted to bolster drooping heads, and from all the heat and scrummage down the years. The wood had the dull sheen of a lucky penny, although Bill the owner never took a rag or suds to it, and it grinned up at the customers, stripping their faces of features and showing them in lurid outline, as ragged silhouettes that grew truer to life as the evening wore off. There was no one there to gurn at their reflections now. Ron was the Boar’s last occupant. From midday onwards all his fellow punters had began to amble ruddily off, to enter their well-worn grooves of Christmas customs, filtering down the bars occupancy to the rather-more-than-social drinkers, until even Bill had mountaineered his way up the carpeted stairs to don a limp hat from a solitary cracker, settling down to swearing at the telly, and so only Ron was left, a man apart, a Crusoe, a Prometheus.",[14,36,37],{},"Ron lived alone and so had no Christmas agenda, no variation on the theme of lunch then televisual stupor. There was no-one to entertain, no presents to buy or receive. As every year Ron had been in the Boar’s all day. Bill had feigned surprise when on opening the bar at 10 he found Ron stopped on the step to tie his shoe. Duly Ron feigned astonishment and said how this was good timing, and Bill gestured him through the door and asked superfluously what he’d be having. This was a well-worn duet, like the ritual of two courting birds. Bill was a tall man with an antique nose who held all his weight round his belly. He preferred a black leather jacket and jeans and dredged back his equally black hair with an unctuous gel, and so achieved the look of the serially divorced bassist in an aging tribute act. By operating a chain pub in rural England Bill considered himself to be involved in some vague countercultural activity which reflected his innate artistry. He had been born in what could technically described as a town about ten miles from the village and so regarded his cliental as troglodyte bumpkins. In fact, he had been to school with many of them, where his main achievements being some petty acts of minor arson. Bill smoked liquorice cigarettes and enjoyed gameshows, muttering the answers after they had been produced by the contestants.",[14,39,40],{},"On Christmas eve Bill saw the full gamut of the Boar’s customers, whom he surveilled from behind the bar, as a prison warden might scrutinise the crowd when accompanying an inmate to a funeral. Elderly couples dropped in for sherries and hot toddies, with Barbour jackets and cheeks waxed to the same sheen. Escaped husbands and wives with  haggard, pursued looks, ran in to down doubles before sighingly bitterly and heading out with a Captain Oates-like resignation to their last minute shopping. Groups of 25 year olds in torrents of humour and that Christmas suspension of responsibility, for those who aren’t doing the cooking or paying for it, poured in for pints. Amongst all this was Ron, a rather dank and ignoble rock amongst the breakers, defending his barstool like an enclave and blearily applying himself steadily to his Scratterz.",[14,42,43],{},"Ron had worked for the council for thirty years doing various things involving roads, which he had been fairly good at, provided no one looked at him, or spoke to him or asked him anything, which is hard to avoid when wearing a high vis and holding up large volumes of traffic, and on several occasions had been lucky to avoid a custodial after some roadside wrestles with the public. All that is to say, we are discussing of man to whom the milk human kindness, and the gift of conversation were as little known as the properties of the quark. This is a man, and you know this man, you have met them already, if you consider for a moment, this is a man who was at the level of his fundamental quintessence, unable to say that they did know the answer to a question, or to concede that what somebody was saying could be new or interesting. Who lied fluently, who stole with a devout surety. Everyone was a fool, everyone was foe. He lived a bitter inner life, where he was the victim of great injustices, which in fact he perpetrated. He was his only priority, that he was not everyone else’s confirmed their idiocy and bile. Booze fed these delusions; it etched them in the chemistry of his brain and salted his inner earth against any new shoots of growth.",[14,45,46,47,51],{},"To illustrate, let us consider Ron’s typical evening. Ron’s decades with the council had left him with an excellent pension, and a back injury, which he had fabricated as thoroughly as a forged Picasso, had given him a tidy payout on top. So, he was flush, he had the cottage his mother had left him, he had no real out goings but in the Boar’s. He would start his evenings in a foul mood as he wasn’t drunk. After the first five he would loosen slightly, like a resting steak, and begin to sneer and lech impotently from behind eyes yellowed like smoker’s wallpaper. After the next five, he became profoundly and undiscriminatingly argumentative. Ron would sit tautly at the bar with an ear cocked, monitoring the sound waves, waiting to pounce on someone’s conversation like a malignant cuckoo. He would hear some simple statement of fact or declaration of preference and would snort savagely to himself, as if confronted with an abject act of cowardice or treachery. Then he would begin to shake his ravaged head, and mutter in crescendo “no no no no no NO”. The unsuspecting party would normally frown at this point, and raise their voices to cover his noise, or even worse, repeat themselves. They had sprung the trap. At their repetition of the offending words, Ron would hammer both fists into the bar top, and lurch towards them with a face of determined hatred, which combined with his sailor’s gait to make him look like someone re-learning how to walk in order to wreak vengeance on whoever had injured them. He would butt his gargoyles head into the middle of a table and grit his nightmare teeth, objections not even denting the armour of his bog-body skin. He would spit out something like “Rovers won the league in fucking nineteen-ninety-FIVE, not nineteen-ninety-SIX, you cu-“ at which point there was normally a fight, which he invariably lost, or he was hoisted out by Bill to “cool off” in the garden, which meant he smoked 10 Rothmans and argued with himself ",[48,49,50],"em",{},"sotto voce",", playing the parts of agonist and antagonist both, which did not speak to the ruddiest mental health, even an amateur psychologist could conclude. During these “cooling off” periods, Ron would work himself up into a lather, shadow boxing with the parasols and cursing percussively at the ground, until he burst back into the bar with clenched fists, usually to find that the offending party had left, scared off by this sinister worzle-gummage, and Bill would raise an eyebrow and point a finger at Ron’s usual stool, so ingestion could commence again.",[14,53,54],{},"This kind of pathological behaviour had reduced Ron’s social circle to Bill. Policemen crossed the street when they saw him, to save themselves a furious lecture on rising agricultural crime. If anyone were to have a close look in his garage they might have found a few quadbikes unaccompanied by receipts. He had screamed and shouted at the bus conductor, the postman, the keeper of the general store, he was a standing agenda item for the parish council, from which he had been excommunicated after he attended for the first time at the age of twenty having subjected an eighty year old grandmother to a thirty minute obloquy on the wasp-summoning qualities of her rose bushes. Which was so false in its content and extreme in its tone, that it recalled an anti-papist tract.",[14,56,57,58,62],{},"The exception to this isolation was Ron’s dog, Trevor. Trevor was a deeply sensitive and aging hound, lent a patrician aspect by drooping whiskers and rings of grey fur around his eyes, giving the impression of a spectacled don pacing the quad of an Oxford college. Ron had long concluded that Trevor was entirely deaf, in fact Trevor only answered to the name Percival, and Ron was unlikely to work that one out. Quite independently Trevor\u002FPercival would take himself for walks up and down the lane outside of Ron’s cottage, rolling his arthritic with his stiff but noble gait. He would stand out in the fields, with the nobility of age, recording through diming eyes the patterned flight of birds. In the lane he would deploy his muzzle as an instrument of science, as spring brought fresh scent to the flowers. He was in essence a naturalist, and Ron had spent much cidrous",[59,60,61],"span",{},"[1"," ] sweat trying to teach Trevor to hunt and kill small creatures. Trevor would regard Ron, who tried to set him on rabbits, or send him after pheasants, with the principled pitying look of the conscientious objector regarding his firing squad. Forgive them father, for they know not what they do. In fact, Trevor saw Ron as an example of what the Bolsheviks termed “useful idiots”, though he would not have used language this strong. The useful idiot is one who will supply money and resources to aid revolutionary ventures, and so Trevor deigned to reside with Ron whilst he conducted his studies of the flora and fauna of Gloucestershire. As Trevor traced the dipping flight of the skylark with a lover’s rapture, or basked in the hedgerow’s choir of springtime colour, he would chuckle tolerantly and woof gently under his breath, that all things considered, someone should keep an eye on the old boy, knowing what he was like and all.",[14,64,65],{},"Ron’s relations with Bill were based purely on exchange and guised as friendship, as almost invariable the case between punter and publican. If you intend to make your salt from selling someone a drink that makes them talkative, and you then confine them to a seat opposite you while they drink it, you will have to at least do a decent impression of being chummy. Ron had consumed a minimum ration of ten pints a day every day, bank holidays included, since the early nineties, and that kind of custom you couldn’t ignore, thought Bill to himself, even if there was everything else to loathe about the man. As you know, the Boar is the only pub in the village, so Ron’s impact on Bill’s other custom was conveniently limited. There existed around Ron a sort of exclusion zone, a line over which it was reckless to cross, as you might find around a cache of nerve agent, or a reactor on the blink. The short arm of the L shaped bar was Ron’s. The stool next to his was always left empty by the locals, a sort of DMZ. He occupied it like a diminutive troll, and if any un-initiated passer took the adjacent one, he imposed a toll. This was either acrimonious interrogation about every detail of their life and what they thought they were doing here, or he launched into an endless account of something he had watched on television last year, stalling any attempt by his victim to withdraw by placing an execrable paw on their shoulder and guiding them back to their seat to resume spitting his narrative into their face.",[14,67,68],{},"In any case, let us return to Christmas eve, and Ron is stirring, he raised his head slowly, blinking like a new-born thing. A fire alarm sensation was radiating between his desiccated brain and the dingy wall of his skull. His eyes narrowed around a point of pain somewhere the right of his forehead. He swore at length and ground his fingers into eyes.  After ten seconds of this he gave up, laid his head on the table like a cartoon of a beaten man, and his lids closed on ruddy eyes. He had his cheek flush to the bar and the pressure puckered his open mouth like a particularly stupid deep-sea fish. A cidrous tear welled; drool spooled out onto the wood. Something like sleep came. And then, so unexpected as penetrate even this booze-trepanned state, a very thin and manicured hand tapped a pencil beyond the point of his nose, this officious gesture punctuated with a polite cough. Ron could tell from the hallmark, and from his passion for larceny, that the pencil was solid gold. His watering and begrimed eyes, now both open, formed a blurred impression of a singular design on the metal. It showed goat, wearing a priestly robe, and with two sharp horns upon its head. It had one human foot, and one cloven hoof. The cough returned.",[14,70,71],{},"Ron battled his way to more vertical position and looked. The man was dressed in a well-cut grey suit, was of a very slim build, and had the comportment of a butler from a black and white film, or one of those aristocratic porters you see outside of London hotels. His tie was deep blue silk with a shine on it like the belly of a fish. His Oxfords were polished to an obsidian lacquer. He had a surgical shave, apparently recently, which has brought a light pink complexion nearly suggesting makeup. He held before him a folder, bound in leather, only rather pale, and there are a series of subtle white ridges, rather like scars. The face is vague, neither round nor thin, without a feature of note or absence, although the eyebrows are very black. The eyes are a bright amber colour, nearly orange. Jaundice thinks Ron, inaccurately, piss artist.",[14,73,74],{},"Opening the folder and casting a perfunctory eye at its contents, and listed off-“Higgins, Ron. Age 55, address Manor Cottage, occupation, council labourer, now retired. Dependents none. Situation, damned.” The visitor trots out this information like one reciting before a blackboard. The accent is unspecific, the cadence unhurried. He has an expression of concentrated blandness, of professional distance. ",[14,76,77],{},"Ron’s mental state during these proceedings has been akin to a pathologically unmathematical child sliding counters around an abacus.",[14,79,80],{},"“Ummm, what you, what you doing here? I paid that one anyway, didn’t I, paid it, so you can fuck off and all, spoke to lady on the phone-.”",[14,82,83],{},"“Mr Higgins I am not a debt collector” He smiles at Ron, with an opposite effect.",[14,85,86],{},"“Yeah well, what, ummm. Fuck” Ron kneads the side of his head with one scraggy fist like a prisoner in a therapeutic bread making class. This headache is getting personal. “Wass all this in aid of, you’re not local” he raises his head to look at the man as he pronounces this, like a canny punter sniffing out fake goods “Bill’s the owner like, he’ll sort you out…”",[14,88,89,90,93],{},"“Mr Higgins” cuts in the visitor “are you a religious man?” The sibilance of religious hisses like from his mouth like a coiled warning at the approach of careless boots. As he speaks this final phrase there comes from his mouth, not just his mouth, from his pores, from the air around him, a warm and horrible stench. Ron is engulfed by the memory of when, last year, on his lurching way back from The Boar, he fell on top of, or rather fell through, the bloated carcass of a sheep lain dead in a ditch for some time. One outstretched arm had punched through the swollen stomach cavity to bring him ",[48,91,92],{},"tete a tete"," with the mottled green smile of an exposed jawbone, picked out by the moonlight. And now again he has the close and heavy smell of death in his nostrils and mouth, like his head has been plunged into an unspeakable sack. He gags, “what the fuck is that smel-? Religious? Fuck no, not religious. No chance.”",[14,95,96],{},"While the smell has caused Ron to lose his colour like a lift dropping too fast, he has roused a little as this chance to argue, to dissent. The visitor makes a small note in his folder, Ron watches the work of the golden pen. He looks around for a drink, he snags half a pint of tepid ale left on the counter and swallows it in one, with an expansive motion of the jaw. Figuring that Bill isn’t around to charge him, he hooks a bottle of scotch from behind the bar, Johnny Walker Black.",[14,98,99],{},"Ron waggles the bottle in the air at man in the universal gesture of “will you join me?”, he nods and smiles lightly in assent.",[14,101,102,103,106],{},"“Thank you yes.” The man darts to one end of the bar and sends a tumbler skimming across the polished surface to come to a dead stop in front of Ron. Ron inclines his head and does something with his lower lip to indicate that he has seen better. The man looks at Ron with a cocked head, with what could be called perspicuous cruelty, he has seen and parsed all that is mean and false here. Ron looks at him bleakly, his normal aggressive quibbling and bovine stubbornness aren’t getting very far, some inner command centre is realising it is up against an unusual obstacle, he feels weak, dissipated. Ron unscrews the cap. Something is off about this fella, he’s after something, wass he after. Ron pours what can only be described as a punishment measure of scotch, about four doubles worth. Lets see how he fuckin copes with that un, thinks Ron, ever on the ",[48,104,105],{},"qui vive"," for a win of any proportions.",[14,108,109],{},"“Thank you” said the man and swallowed his whisky in one, without the glimmer of a grimace, or any sign of that this was more than a glass of milk. Ron had the obviously impossible impression, that as the spirit touched the back of the man’s throat, for an instant, there was a tongue of blue flame, as when you light the Christmas pudding. He placed his glass on the bar and scanned once more and then snapped tight his binder.",[14,111,112],{},"“Mr Higgins I will be brief, for you are as a grain of sand under the waves of the sea, a droplet, a particle. You hang in the balance. Tonight, we barter for your soul.”",[14,114,115],{},"Ron, despite his booze denuded faculties and the vicious business going on with his head, still senses a slight. “What you on about? What you fucking on about any how?”",[14,117,118,119,122],{},"There follows a smile like the black eye of a shark rolling back as it surges forwards. “I think the discursive method will render little profit, no? You are not by nature, as they say in modern parlance, “a good listener”? As I have been led to understand, to converse with you, again I search for the ",[48,120,121],{},"bon mot",", is like “speaking with a brick wall.” The man seems to occupy a space much larger than before. He was a little shorter than Ron, but all he sees now is the amber eyes, all he smells is the rank breath. He has a giddy lightness in his legs, like that sick point at the top of a swing’s arc. He limply asks “wass…wass your name?”",[14,124,125],{},"Very slowly. “My name, Mr Higgins?” The smile again. He leans in and opens his mouth very wide, the lower jaw racks and drops very low, too low, as a moray does to gorge. The tongue is crimson and split down its length, the two strips coiling around each other like the foliate border of an illuminated manuscript. They play over what seems, to Ron’s befogged brain, to be serried ranks of thin and whetted teeth. He places a hand on Ron’s arm, very lightly. Throughout the remaining portion of his life Ron recalled the following moments as the point from which it really started to get a bit too much. These moments flanked his sleep; they were the clock chimes of his day. Ron flinched from the touch the a pale hand on his jacket sleeve, a hand which radiated the hot dry heat of an iron. The amber eyes grew, they fixed him like the pin through a butterfly. There echoed through Ron’s skull a wind which keened over desert rocks, bringing with it a deep note of lamentation. A great funeral wailing of sorrow without answer, and the tearing of hair, and the swallowing of ash, the rending of breasts. He saw the triumph of death, the antic dance of the grave. Legions of corpses in their pageantry and decay, capering and cackling across a great dearth of white stone. Written in the sky in fast strokes of red, was the name of Belial, the Duke of Hell. The name was on the tongue all the dancers, written on their grey skey which gave onto ragged bones. He screamed as the dancers came towards in an legion, they grasped his limbs, they pressed rotting lips onto his, they threw him aloft and caught him in rotten hands.",[14,127,128],{},"Ron came to. Like the diver who has drowned and seen a glimmer of whatever they had coming, only to be hauled back from the beyond to spew water under a circle of peering faces. Ron has the taste of bitter smoke in his mouth. As the Boar’s reassembles itself, he sees Belial, smoking a black tipped cigarette. The smoke is richly scented, of deep forests, aged spices. Ron places a juddering hand on the neck of the whisky bottle and ingests a tumbler worth. Ron’s mental condition has become unsanitary. The nuclear hangover, the unsettling presence, the images he has just endured.  Belial interrogates his folder with a perfunctory look and clacks it shut once more, he gives him the smile. Like a bank manager, Ron thinks, like a fucking horrible bank manager.",[14,130,131],{},"Belial “You have my name then Mr Higgins. That little phantasmagoria has stirred something perhaps in the brimming midden of your mind? You have I think an inkling of the reason for my visit.”",[14,133,134],{},"Ron “You’re like the police of something, I done something, you fink I done something.”",[14,136,137],{},"Even Belial adjusts an eyebrow upwards to indicate the sybaritic richness of this statement.",[14,139,140],{},"“Mr Higgins. You have sinned rather lavishly in you own small way. And-”",[14,142,143],{},"Even in his broken state Ron looks like he is going to indulge his reflexive urge to argue.",[14,145,146],{},"Belial’s gives him the eye treatment. “You would do well to shut-up-now.” Ron quails, swallows, and pours himself another expansive scotch.",[14,148,149],{},"“Mr Higgins, I am here in an official capacity as a denizen of hell and an envoy of his dread Satanic majesty, lord of flies, prince of lies etcetera etcetera you’ve seen enough films. This isn’t a social call in short. And if you are indulging any soothing doubts that this is one of the hallucinations that occasionally trouble you, or that I am some itinerant loon, we can do the vision part over again-“",[14,151,152],{},"Ron screams.",[14,154,155],{},"Belial continues “Well then this is your final notice, if you will, there is no additional chance, this is the last stop. Your triplicate taste for that barely potable cider, endless grams of cocaine, and cigarettes have done things to your heart and liver that one only does to such organs before serving them with a side salad. Cured, salted, pickled, you’ve shrivelled your innards and ravaged your mind. It’s an empty death that awaits you, clutching plaintively at your chest, a vacant funeral, a homeless urn. And then we’ll get you. Me personally in fact. I’ve got your number, as they say on television. This is a very poor outcome for both of us.",[14,157,158],{},"As you can imagine we have significant overcrowding problems in the lower Kingdom. I won’t bother you too much with the minutiae of centuries of scholastic debate, but yes Hell is finite in its bounds.”",[14,160,161],{},"At this point, Belial has forgotten the precise reason for his visit and is lecturing rather than terrifying, pointing with his golden pen on certain points of emphasis. He is walking up and down in front of Ron’s bar stool, turning after seven paces exactly, twisting on a polished heel, and resuming his walk. The twist makes an acute squeaking sound, the Oxfords clack out neat trochees from heel to toe. Ron is still very scared, still sure that this is the evening the buck will come to a disastrous stop, but this is tempered now with some bemusement.",[14,163,164,165,168],{},"Belial makes one of his pivots. “And here we get to the crux, the nature of the demon, as we all know ",[48,166,167],{},"pace"," Lexter Van Rodolph, that reckless Dutchman who drank deep, too deep, that the nature of the demon is to inflict pain and suffering, that is his quiddity, his essence, his art. But the demon is not infinite, he is not timeless, he has his limits. We are confined for eternity with the dross of humanity. Yes, we get the big names, the celebs, but mainly its people like you Mr Higgins. The egoists, the small-minded bigots, those for who have no sympathy for anything beyond the point of their nose. Subsequently, we do our best to keep numbers down to a minimum, a minimum. We have absolutely no interest in your company, and as for ensnaring new souls for the devil, we haven’t really needed to evangelise on that front for quite a while. So, I am here as a form of final demand notice, stump up, morally speaking, or face the consequences. You are with me so far?”",[14,170,171],{},"Ron whimpers gently. He wears a look of terrible strain. Bloodless, white, like a carcass. The eyes are roving dots. What is going on? Who is this terrifying bank manager?",[14,173,174],{},"Belial places his folder behind his back and inclines his head towards Ron. “You are not in the most dynamic of mental states this evening Mr Higgins, I will grant you. I chose this time by design. What you lack in comprehension, you will make up for in, shall we say, a certain rawness of nerve which might accentuate the experience you are about to have, and by any chance, will help it stick. What follows, is what the sorcerers have sought for millennia, a window into eternity. And so-“",[14,176,177],{},"With a flourish he steps forward, the folder is gone. Where the manicured hands were, there are the long and sinewed paws of an enormous wolf. The banal face is the great rasping mouth of a bottom-feeding crab, with feathering antennae tracing the air. The body is now the bristled and gravid belly of a sow with endless teats weeping crimson and the kicking legs of its farrow pushing against the skin. And the legs, as Ron’s failing brain comprehended the legs, he began to scream, rising so vigorously in intensity and pitch to suggest only complete collapse would silence him. Belial’s chimerical torso sat on the terrible clacking legs of a huge spider, thick as fence poles and horribly segmented, covered in silvery hair. At the end of each was like a thick brush, which danced in eight separate rhythms on the floor. The touch of the brushes whispered a diabolic susurrus. There rang through the room a high and bitter laugh, that came and went like an enormous rush of wind, and on came Belial.",[14,179,180],{},"You will be familiar with The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Boche, or perhaps Grunewald’s temptation of Saint Anthony, where a squadron of grotesque demons torture the elderly divine, dragging him by his venerable locks. These are mere fancies; they can only adumbrate Ron’s night with Belial. What these paintings do convey is the polyphony of assailants, that for the damned every angle contains a nameless horror advancing with a smoking poker. And if they can wrest their head up for second, while the half toad half kangaroo looks about for a larger skewer, there is before them a vast panoply of torturous depredation. They descended into hell, the physical lay-out according exactly with the Inferno. If asked, Ron would have guessed “the Inferno” was a sort of potent vindaloo. Belial gave him a few introductory skewerings. He liked to rhyme the torment with something from the human’s life, so Ron was briefly a gristly puck of donner kebab, turning slowly in one of those sinister sun-bed like contraptions you find behind the windows of late-night grease shacks. Belial took the guise of a kebab shop worker and brandished his scything knife to great effect. He sliced thin portions of Ron into an enormous flat bread, with salad and hot sauce, which stung no end, as you can imagine. Ron felt the full enormity of the pain, screaming and weeping hysterically, but like a hydra, as a portion was severed and served, it sprang up a new, and Belial grinned and came on once more. Ron was reduce to miserable jelly, in this condition, he was exposed to a Plato’s cave of all his failings and faults. Chained immobile to a rock, before him played out all the scenes of his selfishness, all the people he had packed off weeping, all the pointless fights. This was more for completeness rather than any great transformative effect. Do not believe any wishful theological teaching to the effect of hell is merely the absence from God. It is astronomically painful, the apogee of torment, for ever, without cessation or respite.",[14,182,183],{},"The next morning a tear spattered Ron is running towards his sister Sandra’s house, he makes in the back of his throat a sort of yodelling whine, his hands hang at his sides and bounce as he runs, rather like a chimp. While he does not bleed, or show any outward sign of injury, he is a craven, utterly disassembled man. Belial trots along beside him making the occasional note in his binder. He has not seen Sandra for forty years, after she stopped responding to his requests for money.  Ron kneels on the doorway, hiccupping with grief and pounding on the door with a desperate fist. while from across the road, a generic looking man in a suit snap shut a binder and promptly vanishes. Ron is a supplicant seeking refuge at the abbey door. Sandra appears with a sleepy and recently clothed child on one hip. This is Ron’s nephew, Peter, who regards Ron gently and without comment, like a beneficent potentate waiting for a courtier to come circuitously to the point. Initially she assumes this man intends to beg from, and if that fails, then rob her. Ron has not clouded her door for decades years and in that time, something has gone rather wrong with his face. Time has been unforgivably cruel to him, appearing to have placed a withered finger on the dial of the biological clock, and thought fuck it lets see what this baby can do. He has the whitening and patchy beard of the octogenarian; the drinker’s lines form a crazed warren around his eyes. His clothes have the formless slept-in slouch, the reek of scotch and residual note of dung, and a stubborn whiff of sulphur which she assumes is a digestive complaint. But as it must, it dawns that this her brother, he has the broken nose, the heavy brow, and despite the tears the large brown eyes.",[14,185,186],{},"Sandra considers Ron for additional minute, as he continues to lament. In this period he does not ask for money or say anything cruel, he is beyond dispute. Clearly the bottom has dropped out of Ron’s inner life. Sandra thinks: prison sentence, been given serious bird, or something terminal. Ron is trying to fashion a word, but this is getting lodged in his ribs somewhere, he heaves it out in stages.",[14,188,189],{},"“So-huh, Sor-huh-Sorry!” And then collapses forward, in prayer, clasping Sandra around the knees, repeating desperately his newly found coda. There follows a series of miraculous Christmas scenes. John, Sandra’s husband, who one point had been driven to making idle inquiries in dubious pubs as to the cost of kneecap shattering, as a solution to the Ron question, is restrained gently by his wife. There are several hours of sobbing amends. He weeps and sneezes as Sandra lays out a full reckoning of his cruel thoughtless past, he doesn’t argue with a word. There is silence, tissues are produced, wry smiles, the first embrace in two decades, and then tears of a warmer and richer kind. Ron produces a little finger which Peter holds onto very solemnly with his tiny hand, like an elderly grandee being helped from the bath, and walks him around the room. Ron has a very serious look as the boy toddles beside him, this is the tectonic shift of love. Of course Ron is invited for lunch, he of course he accepts. He offers to help, which provokes thirty seconds of catacomb like silence, and then he is shown how to peel a potato. Once the bleeding has stopped he lays the table, which Sandra then has re-do entirely, and she does not begrudge this one iota. Ron heroically turns down the offered mulled wine and instead drinks twenty five cans of coke and four double espressos, running outside every quarter of an hour to inhale four in succession cigarettes, lighting the second from the failing end of the first. This cocktail him keeps sober for the first day in roughly forty years. And although he shudders and sweats, and considers a short encounter with some Albanian ex-pats, he has a child’s look as he takes in the small rituals of family life, which Christmas elevates with its special stage. He spent every remaining Christmas of his life in this way, which was surprisingly long, and increasingly happy.",[14,191,192],{},"In short, go easy on the booze and fags if you can. There isn’t a great deal of moral to be gleaned other than that.",[14,194,195,196,199],{},"“",[48,197,198],{},"Thank your lucky stars that matters are no worse, and read your bible sir, and mind your purse.”"," Byron.",[14,201,202],{},"--- Unknown node: hardBreak ---",[204,205],"hr",{},[14,207,208,210,211,213],{},[59,209,61],{}," ] ",[59,212,61],{}," ] “Being strongly redolent of cider as a consequence of wanton over consumption.” Neologism, Aplin 2025.",{"title":215,"searchDepth":216,"depth":216,"links":217},"",2,[],null,"md",{},true,"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-night-of-christmas-eve",{"title":224,"description":16},"The Night of Christmas Eve file","stories\u002Fthe-night-of-christmas-eve",[227,228],"Spooky","Satire","BKyZeBgrRujo1Q-gE9J5cSFfVwc2Yz2BqyGwknX-4oI",1793724018843]