The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.'s Christmas Carol Read online

  The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.’s

  Christmas Carol

  By Darren Humphries

  (with apologies to Charles Dickens)

  Also by Darren Humphries on Kindle

  Fiction

  The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.: The Curious

  Case Of The Kidnapped Chemist

  The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – Zombie

  Apocalypse Now

  The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – Do Dragons

  Dream Of Burning Sheep

  One Small Step For The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.

  The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D Trilogy

  New York City Legend

  The Sword In The Tree

  Stormwreck

  The Great Rock N Roll Doomsday Tour

  An Orc Not Like Others

  To Infinity (and maybe that’s far enough)

  Short Story Anthologies

  Sharing A Fence With The Twilight Zone

  A Goodreads Gallimaufrey (contributor)

  A Splendid Salmagundi (contributor)

  Non Fiction

  The Sci Fi Freak’s Guide To The Televisual Galaxy

  Goodnight Dear: The Unsentimental Diary Of A Bereaved Husband.

  This book is copyright to Darren Humphries 2012

  This book is a work of fiction (which should be obvious to anyone reading it) and all characters, events, and names are fictitious. Any resemblance to real world places, companies, people or events is purely coincidental except where people may have been mentioned for comic effect. In these instances, no inference should be made about the real person from the contents of this book.

  There are some real world locations used, but these are used in a fictitious context and no inference should be made about the real place from this book.

  All the stunts in this book are carried out by specially trained fictional characters and should not be attempted at home (especially messing around with rocket jetpacks without even reading the manual).

  All rights reserved. Please don’t reproduce or distribute any part of this book without the express permission of the author.

  Thanks to my Quality Quartet of Kath, Susan, Patti and Geoff without whom Charles Dickens would have turned in his grave a good few more times.

  The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.’s Christmas Carol

  ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all over the house nothing was stirring ... except Veronika making eggnog in the kitchen. I had learned the hard way that the Bevilacqua clan take their eggnog very, very seriously and Veronika had marked out the room as her personal territory until she had gotten this batch just right. I could see her through the window, her brows furrowed in concentration. It was endearing, really, that a woman who every day dealt with the most dangerous, vicious, evil and downright mischievous creatures on the planet got so stressed over something as mundane as the preparation of a party drink.

  Sometimes folk are just strange.

  I deposited the bag of rubbish into the wheelie bin located down by the garden wall and headed back to the house. International man of mystery and kicker of demon arse I might be, but I still have to take out the rubbish. As I approached the house, however, I couldn’t fail to notice the eerie orange glow that surrounded the door knocker above the holly wreath. It was a brass knocker shaped in the face of a lion with a ring hanging from the jaws. I didn’t like the thing myself and had always made do with a doorbell, but my Brazilian girlfriend had thrown herself into the whole traditional British thing with a vengeance since coming to live with me.

  Currently, that meant Christmas.

  Hence the holly wreath…

  …and the tree lights twinkling through the living room window.

  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no Scrooge who believes the whole Christmas thing to be humbug of the most commercial kind (although there is certainly more than an element of truth in that). This particular festival, however, is overlaid onto a whole bunch of older, pagan winter festivals and that means there are a few supernatural elements that are more than a little peed off at this time of year for being set aside to make way for a man in a red suit with a team of flying reindeer. These are the kind of supernatural elements that come with the usual teeth, claws and magical powers, but also a side order of burning, since Yule happens to be one of the Celtic fire festivals (which is why you get a yule log and not a yule candyfloss, for example). They can get more than a little uppity at this time of year. Since my job is resolving Humanity’s differences with just these kinds of creatures (usually by resolving said kinds of creatures into piles of ash), my enthusiasm for the season is somewhat dampened.

  Seeing an ethereal glow washing over even a small part of my front door was not a welcome occurrence. It wasn’t a usual occurrence either. Any sensible person would have given the entrance a wide berth and called the appropriate authorities. Unfortunately, I happen to be the appropriate authority in situations like this and so I approached the door carefully. The glow didn’t seem immediately malevolent (evil usually prefers a blood red or sick green for its glows rather than comforting warm orange hues), but I wasn’t taking anything for granted.

  Inside the glow, the shape of the door knocker was being twisted, bent out of shape and slowly morphing into human features that I recognised.

  “Waaaarrrdddd,” the face of ex-Director Grayson (though surrounded by a lion’s mane, which was a look that not many people could have managed to carry off) called in unnecessarily ghostly tones. “Waaaarrrrddddd!”

  Then, suddenly, whoever (or whatever) was handling the astral transformation managed to get a fix on things and Grayson’s face snapped into shape and his voice took on its normal, clipped form.

  “Oh that is so much better,” he commented, contorting his face through a series of exaggerated expressions to work the kinks out. “This is a very strange experience, I have to tell you.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” I promised him. “Really.”

  “You should try it from this side.”

  “Oh, no I really don’t think I should thank you very much,” I demurred before asking, “Is there a problem with the phones where you are?”

  “You think I’d be doing this if I didn’t have to?” he demanded irascibly. I supposed that being fused with a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion would be enough to make most people irascible. I didn’t have any empiric data to support the theory though.

  “I guess not,” I allowed.

  “Damn right not!” he asserted. “You couldn’t just happen to have been standing by a TV or in the same room as a radio now could you? Oh no, that would have been too easy. Now listen to what I’ve got to tell you because they’re not all that good at this astral projecting over here and I don’t think that I’ll have time to tell you twice. A lack of interruptions would be appreciated, though hardly expected.”

  Grayson and I had shared a strained relationship during my time as an agent under his Directorship, based mainly on a mutual dislike and lack of respect. The respect part had grown a little, but the dislike continued.

  “I’m currently stuck in, well I’m not supposed to say where I’m stuck, but it’s cold and snowy,” the lion/ex-director/door knocker continued. “I’ve been taken by something claiming to be the spirit of Yule. It wants me as the centrepiece to its followers’ celebrations. Apparently they like to burn someone alive as an affirmation of their faith.”

  “Sucks to be you right now,” I commented.

  “Yes it does,” he agreed, “but there is one caveat in the whole ‘human sacrificed as kebab’ thing. I am apparently allowed to nominate a champion to undergo a few trials in order to save me.”

  “I sugges
t Mettles,” I said, quickly naming the Agency’s Chief of Security in the hope that this conversation wasn’t going where I rather thought it was going.

  “Too late,” he said with a grin that could have been described as leonine, “I already nominated you.”

  “Oh well, thanks a bunch,” I said sarcastically.

  “Call it an early Christmas present,” he added. “Now listen, during the night you will be visited by three spirits...”

  “Are you kidding me with this crap?” I demanded. “Did April Fools’ Day come early in your time zone?”

  “Three spirits … pay attention!” Grayson insisted. “I am deadly serious here, the ‘deadly’ applying to me and you both. If you overcome these spirits then I get to walk free and they burn one of their own instead. If you don’t ... well we both pay the price.”

  “Nothing like going Dutch,” I muttered.

  “Well you know what they say; a problem shared is half the blame got rid of,” he gave me an amused grin and I was back to looking at a lion’s head on a door knocker with absolutely no glowing aura of any kind.

  “Maybe I should have given the cheese tray a miss,” I said to nobody in particular, but I was certain that this was no dream. For one thing, it was far too strange a thing for my limited imagination to have come up with and for another if I was going to daydream then I’d daydream about Veronika in a bikini on a beach in Hawaii, not my ex-boss wearing a door-knocker for a face. “Lions and directors and spirits, oh my.”

  I opened the door and went inside, taking down my coat from the rack and my standard issue non-lethal sidearm from the locked cabinet alongside it. As I entered the kitchen, Veronika was singing along to a CD of Christmas songs with familiar tunes. At least I assumed they were still Christmas songs. The lyrics were in Brazilian and so the songs could have been about the joys of cement mixers for all I knew. Veronika’s beauty extended beyond her face and body to encompass her singing voice as well, which seemed an unfair distribution of gifts if ever there was one. Since she was my girlfriend, I wasn’t about to complain though.

  “What has happened?” she asked, seeing the coat over my arm.

  “I have to go into the office,” I told her apologetically.

  “Really?” she complained. “Why?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I promised her. Since I could still barely believe it myself that was a fair bet.

  “But it’s Christmas Eve,” she reminded me, as if I needed any reminding after the constant stream of festive adverts and seasonal songs I had been bombarded with on the radio.

  “Unfortunately, Evil’s advent calendar comes with more than a small chocolate behind each door,” I told her, adding with a mischievous smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for you to open that large present under the tree.”

  “If you’re quick enough I’ll let you open the present that is wrapped in this apron,” she said with a similarly mischievous smile.

  “As if I ever needed more motivation,” I kissed her lightly and quit the relative warmth of the kitchen. Shrugging my coat on, I slipped the sidearm into one of the pockets and stepped out of the front door ...

  ...and directly into the school hall.

  The sense of spatial dislocation and deja vu was strong enough that I nearly tripped over my own feet, which would have been embarrassing in front of all the parents that were milling around. I knew precisely where I was and precisely what the date was and neither of them was the same as on the other side of the doorway I had just passed through.

  The place was Greenfortress Furze Secondary School main hall and gym. I recognised it instantly and all the hours of torture that I had faced in that place (labelled innocuously on the weekly timetable as ‘PE’) came flooding back to me. The climbing racks were currently folded away against the walls. The beams suspended on wires were neatly raised to just below roof level. I had never quite figured out what those beams were for because they had never been lowered down to our level by Mr Graham, the dreaded PE teacher. To be fair, the man had probably only been doing his best to get a bunch of uninterested and not very physical kids a bit fitter and healthier, but he had been the terror that kept some of us awake at night. I’d found much better things to be terrified of since leaving this place, but those childhood emotions still lingered in the dark recesses of what passed for my soul. The hall was filled with plastic seats that had been set out to face the small stage at one end. One of the metal shutters on the right hand side of the room had been opened to allow the kitchen on the other side to be used for the selling of refreshments to parents who had already shelled out for tickets to the school’s Nativity Play and then paid again for cheaply photocopied programmes.

  Somewhere in South London that night (this night) the Aintree gang were about to be famously captured whilst roasting Charlie Clarkson’s chestnuts over an open fire trying to get him to reveal what had happened to the loot from the Heathrow job. A top international footballer was about to be revealed as having a penchant for dressing up as an elf and hiring women of a professional manner to play Santa’s Little Helpers. The government had just played down the figures that showed how its education policy was failing a generation whilst not commenting on exactly how many ministers sent their children to private schools. It was the night of the school Nativity Play and I was twelve years old.

  I was also reluctantly playing the third shepherd. There were seven shepherds in total, so it wasn’t quite as minor a part as it sounds, but I was upset because I had wanted to be put in charge of special effects. The Arts teacher, Miss Pestorn, had quite rightly pointed out that there wasn’t a big call for pyrotechnic explosions in the traditional Nativity story and my ideas for spicing it up a bit hadn’t been taken too seriously. Angels, I had been sternly informed, did not abseil in from hovering helicopters and the animals in the stable did not suddenly go on a rabid, blood-soaked rampage.

  Even so, this was an important night for me, a night that had changed my life forever. This was the night that I decided I was going to be an agent of U.N.D.E.A.D. one day.

  It was obvious that the only reason for the first of Grayson’s spirits to bring me to this time and place was to try and kill off the younger me before I could make that decision and thus become the older me. Time travel - it’s a messy business and you don’t want to get involved with it on any level.

  Trust me, I know this from experience.

  The hall was buzzing with life and excitement as the parents and other relatives were arriving early to take the best seats so that they could get pictures of their offspring in hastily tacked together costumes that didn’t quite look like they had on the patterns. Said pictures would then be used to embarrass those same children in front of prospective spouses for the rest of their single lives. It was still early, so the curtains wouldn’t be opened for a while. I turned around and went back out into the school’s hallways (hoping in vain that the trip back through the doorway would deposit me once again in my front garden in my own time) and slipped off down a side corridor that had been blocked off by placing two small tables in front of it. As a security barrier it left something to be desired in terms of effectiveness.

  Beyond the tables the lights were off, but I still had the layout of this place imprinted on my memory. I could have found my way around it blindfolded, though I would have looked a bit silly doing so. I walked confidently down past the music and art rooms and turned right along the passage that split the science and home economics (it was still called ‘cookery’ and ‘sewing’ back then ... now ... I hate time travel!) rooms. Around the corner at the end was the drama studio that served as the rehearsal room and dressing space for any of the school productions and also the side accesses to the stage itself.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I was blinded by the light of a torch shining straight into my eyes. I couldn’t see anything beyond the glare, but I had recognised the voice straight away and felt momentary fear at being caught
doing something that I shouldn’t. It was the voice of Mr Graham.

  “Would you believe looking for the toilets?” I queried, squinting against the light.

  He stared at me unbelievingly for a moment and then quite suddenly smiled, an expression that I don’t think I had ever seen him wear before.

  “Oh, they’re down the other corridor on the far side of the entrance,” he directed me, lowering the torch away from my eyes.

  I didn’t hesitate and just punched him hard in the face. There was a crunch and he crashed backward onto the floor, denting a couple of lockers with his head on the way down. He didn’t move once he’d reached the stained lino. I recalled that he had shown up after the weekend with black eyes and nose protected under a swathe of bandages. It had never been explained to us what had happened, but now I knew.

  Maybe time travelling isn’t all bad.

  I left the PE teacher lying on the floor where he had fallen and stamped on his torch, breaking the lens and the bulb. I then made my way quickly down the rest of the corridor and slipped through a small door into the wings of the stage. It was a maintenance door and was kept locked at all times, so it took me a few extra seconds to pick it. My night vision had been utterly destroyed by the PE teacher’s torch, but there were enough stage lights switched on to compensate for that. If my memory of timings was right then the attack on my younger self was about to take place almost any time now. During the pre-performance briefing I had made some sort of joke about the camels and had been sent to wait alone on the stage and thus been excluded from the general round of people telling each other to break lower limbs. That was the only time that evening that I was alone long enough for a discreet attack to be mounted.

  I (that is the older I) made my way through some of the backstage scaffolding, looking for any sign of where the attack would come from. I could hear the general hubbub from the main hall through the curtain and was aware that if I failed to deal with this quietly I could end up releasing a bloodbath amongst the general parent population. Nothing like a bit of added pressure to focus the attention.