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CHAPTER XXIX.

THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS.

O n the first day of Christmas we kill them all.

On the second day of Christmas it takes us seven hours to find the boxes bearing gifts meant for the servants. Mainly they are items the Poundses no longer want. Mr Pounds’ old cufflinks. A flower-shaped brooch missing a pearl. Sugared treats baked by the cook, presented in an old sandalwood glove box.

Across the country, some of the servants’ families begin to grow anxious when their clocks strike ten at night and their loved ones, who were expected for a visit, have failed to appear without so much as an explanatory letter.

On the third day of Christmas, we seat the guests at the dinner table. Each on their usual chair, the rigidity in their corpses pleasantly wearing off, leaking out of them along with a froth of blood and mucus. They slide onto one another; unblinking, gaping, lopsided, elbows in the butter dish.

Drusilla and I sit at opposite ends of the table. Drusilla shovels thick, damp cake into her mouth with her hands, belching before dunking a finger into the gravy and sucking on it. She takes a dessert glass, rubbing the enamelled family crest with her thumb. After taking a loud swig of port, she throws the glass on the floor, delighting in its high-pitched crash. She throws another, then another.

On the fourth day we pillage the kitchens. The liveried footmen hang from hooks in the larder like a brace of pheasants waiting to be plucked, their coat-tails drooping.

There is a cake in a mould on the deal-topped table, sunken in on itself like the Dowager’s forehead upstairs. There is something creamy and curdled in a delicate china jug. The servants’ unfinished Christmas Day meal is still on the table in the servants’ hall, preserved in its own coagulated juices.

Loyalty portraits line the walls, depicting generations of morose servants. We slip into the servants’ quarters. Caress a comb, a folded razor, a belt. In the women’s wing I find a penny serial under a mattress – an epistolary romance with a vampire or two thrown in – and unmailed letters complaining of limited tea allowance.

On the fifth day a scullery maid, who has been hiding in the garret among rotting corpses, escapes, running down to the farms drenched in blood and pus and maggots. She hides in a coal merchant’s horse-drawn cart and is driven to the coal yards by the station, smeared in black as she boards a train.

On the sixth day of Christmas, Drusilla and I free the horses from the stables. Their hoofs clop on the stone floors of the house in a symphony of castanets. They graze timidly on the carpet in the dining-room, pretending indifference, until the smell of death is too much for them and they resume outdoors.

On the seventh day a couple of crows – emboldened by the lack of consequences after pecking at the fruit in the kitchen garden for days – alight on the dining-room table in a pioneering swoop. I try to impale Mr Art Fishal on a giltwood torchère, first attempting to insert it into his mouth with the ambition that it might exit through his anus, but after much graceless poking, unsure of the direction of his limited oesophagus, I resolve to just tie him up on the torchère with a twisted, red moreen curtain. He makes a fine scarecrow, one of his eyeballs secreting onto his cheekbone, maggots squirming in his wounds.

On the eighth day I feel as if the Darkness has sloughed off its layer of human skin, its vast python-like tail dragging heavily across the floor, over the corpses of Miss and Mrs Manners, who toppled over after one of the horses perused, then nibbled at, their hair. Two foxes approach the house, alert, across the gravel drive, proving Mr Fishal right: it would appear they are indeed guardians of tombs, at least of this particular body pit.

On the ninth day the horses refuse to enter the dining-room, growing agitated when Drusilla attempts to steer them in, their superstition snorted out through their black, widening nostrils. The larvae hatched from eggs deposited by house flies into the mouths and other moist gashes of the guests have moulted and grown into house flies themselves and are no longer feeding on the corpses.

On the tenth day a woman from one of the neighbouring farms peers through the dining-room windows and throws up onto the stained glass before turning and running down the drive.

On the eleventh day we realize the fires went out days ago and there is a thin film of ice on everything. I light a fire in the dining-room. Drusilla attempts to blow air into the guests’ sunken chests with harewood bellows. They would want to look respectable.

On the twelfth day the policemen make their way up the drive, snow sugar-coating the ground. Surprised to feel their cheeks brushed by lush, drooping tree leaves in winter, they look up and see they are not leaves at all but fingers – fingers belonging to the bodies which hang from the trees, draped over branches, their limbs dangling.

Drusilla is lapping up orange compote from a preserve jar in the servants’ quarters downstairs when she hears the police horses. When they find her on the kitchen floor, she has tied her own wrists to one of the oven handles with string. Her legs are splayed out in front of her, white wool stockings rolling down her calves. Her contorted face is streaked with syrup and cake and dried blood, and she is sobbing ‘Help me, please help me.’ The policemen kneel to untie her and avoid Drusilla’s penetrative gaze as she whispers: ‘She killed them. She killed them all.’

I am wearing Mr Fancey’s wig as I am somewhat steered, somewhat pushed, stepping over the bodies scattered across the drugget, past the harp strung with Mr and Mrs Fancey’s guts, out to the snow and into a carriage, where I am left to wonder if it was all a dream.

The horse pulling the cart looks at me and says, Ay me .