'The dreaded Infant's hand': A Christmas Fable

This story came to me about forty-eight hours before Christmas. I tried to tap it out in stolen snatches during those few busy days and I read out the rough draft to my family on Christmas morning. They gave some good criticism and I've tried to work at some revision when I could over the last few days. It's still a very rough draft, but I wanted to go ahead and share it with everyone while we can still just barely call this the Christmas season, with wishes for a Happy New Year.

Do bear in mind it's not some fine piece of literature but more of a little entertainment and the tongue is not a little in the cheek. As Flannery O'Connor said of her novel Wise Blood, it was written with zest and should, if possible, be read that way. Enjoy!

(Oh, and I suppose I should give a mild warning that it might be rated 12 [PG-13] for, as they say, 'fantasy violence'.)

‘The dreaded Infant’s hand’

A Christmas Fable

Snow flurries again, furring all the trees and fences and rooftops and parked motors, rendering their familiar forms strange, hiding the hard white ice beneath, creating a queer quiet in the tight, pinched air.

In the first limp light of Christmas dawn I can make out that this fresh frost-fall covers the mangled tangle of corpses in my back garden, hugging their shapes precisely. Some are so obvious they’ve become outlandish: a rictified hand thrust upward on its arm-stalk, fingers splayed, tipped inward at the uppermost joint into a frozen clawing. All furred over with snow but still showing its unmistakable outline – but who could guess that this powdery shape is actually exactly what it looks like: a mortified human arm stiffened into the final articulation of its owner’s death throes?

Well, not human.

The uneven spray of blood all across the garden (still showing through this morning’s fresh coat of whiteness), against the wall of the house, dusting the snow-enveloped chute and shed, deep red in some places, pinkish in others, is also plain to sight but strange to apprehension. I suppose it might look like some kind of abstract ephemeral art installation I threw together in an inspired moment during this snowy fortnight.

Well. People just don’t know the price of a happy Christmas.

Somebody’s gotta foot the bill I guess. I certainly never thought I’d be called in to participate in dropping off the payment. Not like this anyway. But I’d been enlisted years ago and knew I was embroiled one way or the other all along.

My hands themselves are still bloodstained, all smeared and dyed, also in the spectrum from deep red to pinkish. I haven’t looked in a mirror yet but I’m sure my face is much the same. (Probably would’ve scared myself silly all over again at the horrific sight of my gruesome reflection!) I’m still wearing the same torn clothes, now covered by my dressing gown, which maintains the merest of shields against the icy cold. But last night I slept like I haven’t slept in I don’t know how long! I suppose the nightmares will come in time. Today, though, I have woken from a slumber dreamless and deep. My mug of coffee this morning tastes richer, earthier, more elemental and potent and preternatural than any coffee has ever tasted to me before.

When it was all over last night, I felt I simply must sleep before I could think through what to do next. I was far too exhausted to ring the police or anyone else for help. This morning, well rested, I just couldn’t begin to tackle how to deal with this until I’d brewed a pot of coffee. Now I was sipping the result and cupping my hand round the hot mug for warmth as I stepped out the back door into the uncanny carnival of blood-spattered, snow-encrusted lumps and shapes.

Until this sight hitting me in the increasing light of the new day, I think I was still in a fog of half-wakefulness in which I had a vague notion that the evening before was a very, very strange and very, very vivid dream. Now it all comes back to me with utter unrealism and realism mixed in equal measure. That old spade that leans on the side of the rusty, tin shed that I’ve been using lately to break ice and shovel snow came in handy I can tell you!

It was the usual Christmas Eve scenario: the kids were finally and fitfully tucked up snug into their beds and my wife and I were up very late (or very early—midnight, give or take). She had just finished wrapping the last of the presents and filling the stockings and I was taking out the overflowing rubbish so we could have a clean, clear start for the voluminous unwrappings of Christmas morning in our large family. Barely out the back door, at the click of its closing, I paused to look across the street that our house backed onto. The night was freezing cold and clear. The steam of my breath floated up in front of my field of vision, creating smoky, multi-coloured halos out of the Christmas lights on the houses on the other side of the street. That was when I saw the very large face of a very dirty and wild-looking homeless man pop up and peer over the wall of our garden.

For a moment I thought the head looked so large due to its mangy mane of filthy hair. I tensed with fright, of course, but I couldn’t really process what I was seeing. For a fraction of a second I had a confused notion of the man (I suppose because he looked homeless) warming his hands at a fire. But it was with a whole different kind of fright that I realised the fire was in his eyes—flaming there without burning up the sockets! I noticed too that his head was strangely, unevenly bobbing there at the top of our garden wall. A moment later two ropey things came slithering over the wall, which weirdly caused his oversized head to rise up further into the air. The snaking coils each revealed a thickening diameter as they came down into the garden and I realised they were supporting his upper body in place of legs. This unfathomable being’s fat but brawny bare-chested torso, topped by his great, filthy, flaming-eyed head now lightly but repulsively dipped and rocked on a writhing pair of serpents-for-legs inside the familiar confines my back garden, not twenty feet from me. It’s a wonder I didn’t faint on the spot!

In that moment of seeing this Thing enter the confines of my little slice of urban domesticity, I had what surely would qualify as a bona fide epiphany, a revelation. And, frankly, heaven’s special message for me wasn’t all that ‘inspirational’. The strange knowledge that came to me all at once was this: each year on the border of Christmas Eve changing temporal hands into Christmas Day, the rival gods of this world, both ancient and modern (sometimes even in bizarre amalgamation), are roused into a renewed and concentrated defiance of the Advent of that holy Infant in the Manger.

But with a shock that made me abruptly suck in a draught of the icy air in a short, sharp gasp, it also came to me in that moment that the newborn King inhabits his friends through which he inhibits his foes. There and then I inexplicably knew this horror towering over me was the god called Typhon and that, incredibly, I was meant to close in combat with him. As if that wasn’t clearly and laughably impossible enough, to pile horror on top of horror and turn the whole ridiculous situation into a genuinely grotesque and petrifying farce, there now also emerged, coming over the fence and out of the sky, a gruesomely multifarious host of deformed deities bearing down on me!

Though I had indeed consumed a large portion of spicy foods that evening, there was no time to, in some Scrooge-like manner, try to sceptically disbelieve my senses. When the seething god-horde first descended upon me all I could frantically think of was that I had absolutely nothing to hand to defend myself with. That is, nothing but the bag of rubbish I awkwardly and inefficaciously tossed at them in abject panic with a weak and shuddering little cry. (I always hate taking out the rubbish in the wee hours of the night, especially in the freezing cold, and now I felt quite justified in this loathing!) Why didn’t I just bolt for the door right behind me and bolt them out from inside? Even though only a moment ago I had experienced a stupendous epiphany, not one thing was now clear in my head. However, my heart or my gut or something basic and primal at the centre of me dreadfully urged me to lash out at this unholy host. Thus I looked round desperately for some means! When I caught sight of that wooden handle on the spade I shrieked a little Gloria from my heart! And no sooner were my fingers wrapped round that handle than I was swinging it wildly and murderously in stark terror and life-preserving rage at the things that were in that same instant bent on my demise and rushing me with deadly speed and cruel weapons.

As I hopped about madly bludgeoning and slashing I saw frightful flashes of animal heads on titanic human bodies, human heads on monstrous mergers of known and unknown creatures, technologies both familiar as well as strange combined incomprehensibly, antennae both insectile and electronic, huge fangs and claws and pincers both mechanical and organic, glowing terminals and read-outs and lights and lenses, and brutish eyes that yet shone in piercing mock-majestic gazes. Roarings and bayings and hissings and screechings and buzzings and beepings and blarings and whirrings and grindings, insinuating whisperings and imperious demands, all assaulted my hearing—well, not so much my physical ears as my mind. (This fact stuck out to me because I remember for an instant absurdly worrying about this devilish ruckus disturbing the neighbours!) In this tableau and to this soundtrack the arc of my homely spade met with god-flesh, its wide flat metal face smashing bones and glass and plastic, its three sharp angular tips sinking into arteries and circuitry, crunch and gore and sparks abounding. I can now only reflect with bemused bewilderment that it was the kingly Spirit of lowly Mary’s holy Baby upon me, within me, that was equal to these heroics, though I obviously was so pathetically far from it with my little squeals and wheezings and half-prayers and yelped attempts at war cries that sounded more like the shrieks of someone begging for their life. Perhaps this is something like bewildered young Mary herself felt as she carried and gave birth to the Son of God.

I had no real sense of the passing of time in this fearsome (not to say farcical!) fray but it somehow didn’t seem like long before the wooden handle of the spade was broken in two by some cruel blade or claw or fang. The tool’s metal head fell useless into the snow and the stake that the handle had become was used effectively for one last moment in the single eye of a cyclopean godling, now screaming and sightless.

Again unarmed, I unconsciously danced a terrified jittering jig by our old shed that was now to my back. I spun toward its door half expecting my quick and painful demise and half searching for a new weapon. I literally barked an exultant laugh and surely my raving, raging eye must have gleamed when I flung the rickety, rusty shed door open and saw within its shadows nothing less than a heavy, iron, long-handled sledgehammer leaning there. I vaguely recalled seeing it before but it had always gone completely unnoticed in my conscious vision, I not being a man of tools or fixitry. I instantly seized it and drew it forth from the doorway and wheeled upon my remaining foes with renewed frenzy for the battle.

As I brained one god and then another with the hammer singing through the frosty air, I became peripherally aware that the stars shone out in their courses with a degree of light like I had never before witnessed. They sang! Not with voices, melodies, or, I think, even sound – but in their brightness they rang out like a galactic choir! Their eon-ancient cold fire crackled keenly down on the battlefield of our home’s little garden and lit the scene of the gods’ demise with a ferociously shaming nudity.

Well, this Christmas Eve was turning out to be quite the night of mounting epiphanies. For as I battled and battered these godheads, I knew in my bones that this was no conflict like that with flesh and blood and that though I farcically and crudely wielded these physical tools-turned-weapons against them, this was not a carnal warfare at all and in fact the real weapons behind this scene were not at all carnal either. Superimposed on the god-carnage all round me my soul’s eye saw a very different vision: a teenage mother moaning and crying out in the pains of giving birth to a child—a newborn baby’s first cries amid the brute breath of steaming beasts—the long and wonder-filled and hurtful and happy years of childhood and growing up in family and community—the heady years of youth and learning scholarship and a trade—the fire and flourish of a meteoric ministry, thirty years in the making, three years in performing—surrendering to the divine Will, to the misunderstandings of man, to the criminal sentence and execution of judges and jurors not fit to pass judgment, to the vicious, shameful worst an Empire can do to its non-conformant members—bearing the weight of the crimes of an entire world—a suffering like no other suffering followed by a death like so many other deaths, a simple cessation of breathing—a beggar’s burial among the pitying rich—the disturbing dawn of an empty tomb and sightings and sayings and handlings and breakfasts and commissions. These, I perceived, were the real engines of war behind this weirdly comic battle.

I have zero recollection of how it ended. I think I was still swinging the hefty hammer back and forth, which eventually whistled cleanly through the ice-cold air and landed on nothing, finishing its arc in a mound of snow. Somehow they’d all been slain. Or fled? Typhon himself was certainly nowhere to be seen. I was just barely aware that there was quite a body count of bizarre corpses round about me. I only remember that my arms went suddenly limp and my legs felt like rubber bands and I swayed and leaned on the long hammer handle and spewed in the snow. I didn’t even survey my seemingly lion-like handiwork or pronounce a benediction, or even utter a wee prayer of thanks!

In a few moments there came a shuffling, snuffling sound as some of the still writhing forms began to haltingly raise up their maimed bulk. Then more gods, some equally hideous in appearance, arrived on this scene and formed a crescent round the garden battlefield, some floating in the air, some standing on the ground. A powerfully silent solemnity seemed to have descended with their arrival. I wasn’t even capable of being shocked at this presumably worrying development. I simply accepted my immanent death, not even with despair or dread – just acceptance.

Then they knelt, every one of them. Bowed their great, hoary, grotesque or glorious heads in holy reverence. I looked up into the sky directly above me and one star shone out clearly over against the rest.


I must have somehow stumbled my way back into the house and into bed next to the delicious warmth of my wife. I recall she moaned ‘Cooold!’ and fell promptly back to sleep and I soon joined her, too exhausted to even be bewildered.

As I see all that baffling saga again in my mind’s eye this early Christmas morning, I notice a motion back through the window, small figures descending the stairs. I think we’ll open presents first before we clean up this mess and alert the authorities. The kids deserve that much. Just a normal Christmas like everyone else. I can’t wait to see their faces when they see what their mother and I got them. Ach, forget it, Christmas dinner is going to have to come off too before we get round to these dead gods. By then, of course, it will be too gloomy in these too-short winter days to clear up. Boxing Day then. Yes, definitely tomorrow. We’ll throw them out along with the all the wrapping paper and packaging. (Both for recycling no doubt.)



He feels from Juda’s land
The dreaded Infant’s hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew.

-John Milton, ‘On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (1629)





Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, 2010