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morvantmortuary · 5 months

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the night before -

The Morvants have their own Christmas Eve traditions.

warnings: allusions to child death and animal death, some gore, necromancers being creepy and possessive.

(I wanted to get this up earlier tonight, but my sister in law got in and I got distracted visiting, so! consider this a late night bite for the nocturnal crowd 🖤

As always, you can read this for just your favorite, or you can read it as though you’re dating a combination of all three - so long as you don’t mind your bed being very crowded at the end 😜)

All three Morvants share memories of the looming dread the holiday previously inspired:

The skeletal revenants that glowered through the House in the days leading up to the gathering — ritualistically sweeping, dusting, and mopping until their fingers fell off, or their task was complete and they immediately collapsed again into a heap of paper-thin skin and bones (that the boys then had to sweep up themselves and return to the basement).

The continued frustration of Maxi and Hector being constantly shooed out of the kitchen, despite both eagerly wanting to help prepare for the festivities, and being forced to go sit uncomfortably with the other men of the family as they visited before The Night’s Trial. Not to mention the guests of They Who Decide, who lounged around smoking eye-watering cigars and drinking heavily in the parlor while they talked of their grim variations of business.

The fury of a protesting Rora repeatedly being near-dragged back into the kitchen by her mother’s iron grip at her elbow, no matter how often she tried to slip away, or fake cramps or a headache in the later years, because Mathilde insisted it would be Rora’s duty to be hostess of such glittering evenings herself one day.

(Hector, to this day, swears that whatever dish Rora was forced to touch during the cooking process always tasted bitter. Like her anger had seeped into the food itself.

Rora, when asked, would simply say it was a trace amount of the cyanide her mother had caught her trying to slip in when her back was turned.)

The stiff, uncomfortable clothes - starchy old-fashioned suits for the boys, a tulle nightmare-confection for Rora, all with entirely too much ancient lace and in a grim grave-shroud white for the season.

They would be buried in them, after all, if they failed. As Vincent so loved to remind them.

Where other children waited eagerly for Christmas Day, eyes bright with the hope of presents to come, the three little ones all felt dread piling up in the pits of their stomachs like snowdrifts for weeks in advance. Each door of the antique wooden advent calendar revealed another implied threat — behind one, the baby teeth of a long dead relative who had neglected his necromancy studies. Another displayed two desiccated little slips, barely bigger than moth wings: the eyelids of a little girl who wasn’t asleep when Saint Nicholas arrived.

None of them cried when they took turns unveiling each grim reminder. They stopped all that carrying on when they were seven and eight, respectively, even when the occasional wet specimen — already milky white from a century of preservation — made one of them shiver, unsettling their breakfast in their stomach.

The little cabinet of horrors sat on the mantle all the way up to Christmas Eve, Vincent’s recitations of how each souvenir came to reside there echoing in their heads as they went about their Yule preparations.

Maxi would join his father in the embalming room, preparing for his teenage apprenticeship that would be his destiny. He learned how the dead would whisper anything they could still remember, too terrified to remember restraint, and how to salt the wards in the House’s guts that kept madness and death where they belonged.

Hector’s father would take him into what would one day be repurposed as his dark room, where he would study how to make himself a better vessel for the dead (until his mother Esperanza found an excuse to spirit him away, and showed him how redraw the boundaries within his own head).

Rora would be left alone with Mathilde, who would at first be eager for the prospect of time shared with her only daughter… until she sulked and snapped her way through every attempted lesson in the Things A Lady Should Know, be it cooking or sewing or coquetry. When Mathilde at last threw her hands up in disgust, waving Rora away, she would be left to her own devices… as well as her grandfather’s taxidermy diagrams and tools.

The three would study as diligently as each knew how, learning whatever tricks they could that might give them a way to survive the encounter.

At midnight, they snuck into each other’s rooms - a different one every night, so they might avoid any lurking ears or spectral gaze - and traded what little they knew. It was against the rules of the challenge, and if caught, they would all have to pay the price.

But none of them wanted to see the others lost. Especially to the black teeth and sightless eyes of that ancient wretched thing.

Though they had no way of knowing it yet, this would be only the first instance of breaking every rule they were ever forced to learn,

Ten Christmas Eves, they survived.

Every one of them made it out of the midnight maze one way or another, some years by the barest strands of ectoplasm.

Sometimes Saint Nicholas stole a strip of skin, a hank of hair from their scalp — anything it could get its bone-thin hands on, desperate to sate the aching hunger that plagued it. Hector lost one of his back molars the year he turned fifteen, and saw the creature place it right in his own jaw before he fell back through the other side of the dark.

They found each other every time as dawn broke over the cemetery on Christmas Day, wrapping each other in the by-then damp blankets that had been left out for them on the frozen ground, and watching the light push back every scrap of night left to make sure the creature in red couldn’t find its way back out to them again.

Then Hector was taken away to Mexico when he was sixteen.

Rora died the day she turned eighteen.

Hex completed his last run through the midnight maze by himself, and Maxi’s first Christmas Eve not spent fleeing in terror happened in a House where the only voices were those of the dead.

Those years, they all agreed, were the worst.

Christmas Eve with you is so different, for them, it’s surreal.

While Halloween holds his heart, Maxi doesn’t mind Christmas so much anymore. After years of keeping only to the traditional decorations so his late ancestors didn’t complain - red candles, white lights, garlands of dried herbs that had been handed down for generations - he finds he actually enjoys dressing up the House when you’re around.

He lets himself be silly now, hanging black stockings with skulls and crossbones for each of you on the mantle, decorating a tree with peculiar and morbid little ornaments - many of which are now momentos from the odd places the two of you end up together. He insists on watching Nightmare Before Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life at least once each season, in pajamas with hot cocoa, and he has a whole other repertoire of cookie recipes that he only makes in winter.

(If he holds you a little tighter and kisses your temple during George Bailey’s shouts of delight as he realizes he’s alive again, you don’t notice enough for it to strike you as odd.

You’ll never know how happy you made him to be alive again, too.)

He relishes the hunt for the perfect present, spending all year making notes to himself about the things you want but hesitate to buy yourself, or what you’re still trying to convince yourself you need. He wants to take care of you in any way he can, and if that means giving you permission to let yourself have something, then he’s happy to grant it.

A pattern returns from your more intimate moments, though: he focuses all his attention on you, eager to please, but the minute you show him any attention in return, he’s so overwhelmed he nearly forgets what he wants altogether.

You’re enough.

Every Christmas morning he wakes up in your bed with you, unscathed and unbloodied, unafraid, is more than enough.

Christmas Eve, however, he still insists on the two of you staying at your place.

He frames it more as wanting a break from the House, with all the decorating he’s been up to, and that’s sort of right. But truthfully, it’s because he’s certain he’ll never be able to sleep there on Christmas Eve as long as he’s on this side of the Veil.

At night, after the two of you have finished your last sugary snacks, and he’s held your back against his chest until you slip into a seamless sleep, he still lies awake until he absolutely has to move. He kisses the soft center of your cheek before he does, as if that itself is a spell of protection for the brief time he’s away.

He pads on silent feet to your living room, pausing at your fireplace with a wary glare to ensure his contingency measures are still in place.

The fine strand of silver-coated wire glints in the light, stretched taut across the width of your firebox and deceptively smooth for how sharply razored it actually was.

On your hearth, there are wards and glyphs in an unrecognizable dialect, all written in something the dull color of dried blood.

Subconsciously, he sucks the tip of his index finger as he turns towards your front door, the faint taste of iron filling his mouth.

Toeing into his shoes and sliding on his coat, he steps outside onto your porch as silently as he can manage. When he hears no noise from your bedroom at the creak of the floorboards of the soft squeak of the door hinge, he finally closes the door.

While you sleep, warm in your bed and your sugarplum dreams, he circles your house counter-clockwise seven times, trailing salt behind him as he speaks in a dialect of Louisiana French you’ve never heard from his lips in the daylight.

When he hears the slow, rhythmic ring of distant sleigh bells, he doesn’t stop or hesitate. He keeps one eye on the moon, iris reflecting solid red in the winter light.

He’s not a crying little boy anymore. He can fight back now, and he knows damn well how.

If he speaks the invocation a little louder, a challenge to the listening dark, he doesn’t realize it.

He’d take apart a centuries-old shambling corpse of Theseus of you. In a heartbeat.

When he enters your house again, the salt border over the sparse ice on the ground gleams with a tinge of red like bloody snow.

After checking the fireplace one more time, he finds the most central, load-bearing wall in your house. It has to be this one. No other will do.

He sets his left palm against it, feeling for something… before he sets his right one against it as well, satisfied. He leans his forehead in the space between them, and as his eyes close, the words tumble out of his mouth on an exhaled sigh.

If he’s learned anything in all of this - how the flesh and the sinew of a body calls to him above all else, how blood controls the flow of life, how decay is the purest form of devotion - he knows how to protect you.

And he’ll do it with everything he has, to his last breath.

Then he’d come back and do it again, so long as you were still alive.

The heater in your house kicks on briefly as something seeps deep through the wall, starting and stopping in a perfect imitation of a single human heartbeat.

Satisfied for now, Maxi abandons his shoes and his coat, padding his way silently back towards your room.

When he passes the innocuous milk and cookies waiting on your coffee table, he mutters a curse for the devourer to choke on them, long and hard.

He’ll spend the rest of his night with one of his hands under your heart and the other wrapped around his scalpel.

If he looks a little tired in the morning, when you kiss the edges of the bags under his eyes, he’ll only grin and tell you he was too excited to sleep.

Hector is used to loud, crowded Christmas Eves, whether it’s warm and welcoming with his mother’s family, or cold and cramped with the elite of They Who Decide.

The ones he spends alone with you, however, are always his favorites.

Hex, for not liking to sing too much, is nearly always humming something cheerful under his breath when the two of you are together. He’ll sing quietly along to the remixed and traditional carols from his childhood that he has on a playlist dancing in small, shuffling steps through the kitchen as he prepares his next creation. If it’s a baked good, there might be a few pleading prayers in between verses, oscillating between languages, desperately trying to thwart the curse that causes some of his most beautiful creations to end up frosting-side down on the floor.

If it’s something he’s cooking, though, then whichever of your houses he’s in will be pleasantly warm and delicious-smelling for the rest of the evening, and even a bit into the next day.

When he’s not in the kitchen, then all the man wants is to be warm, and his favorite way to be warm is with you. He’ll spend all his time sprawled across your couch, keeping you next to him with a fuzzy blanket, or tucked into the other half of his hoodie. Being colder than you, he breaks out his collection of fuzzy socks, only sliding one off when he sneaks his toes onto the back of your knee to shock you awake from an afternoon doze.

His presents, while maybe not as obsessive, are still thoughtful. Something that makes him think of you, even if it’s not something you strictly need, per se. It’s also more likely to be something the two of you can share somehow: a movie you both wanted to see, a video game you can tag team on, a bottle of some really lovely mezcal to split after Christmas dinner. Something to give him an excuse to spend more time with you, even though he already loves being attached your side.

He’s going to be here forever. He’ll make sure of that.

He also would insist on spending Christmas Eve at your place — he knows the ghosts in the House very well. They’re family, after all.

But even that doesn’t mean shit on a silent night.

He makes sure to serve your favorite at dinner that night, getting you nice and pleasantly full and sleepy on something delicious. If you drink, he’ll encourage you to imbibe a glass or two, maybe three. Anything that will get you through this evening as quickly and painlessly as possible, to make sure there’s no risk of you waking up.

He couldn’t stand it if that scarlet-suited fucker ruined it for you.

He knows what that’s like.

He’s a restless sleeper, but he lays still with his lips to your shoulder until your breathing settles, and he can watch the gentle little twitches of your deepest dreams. He only moves when he’s sure it won’t disturb you, and even then, he lingers for a moment, caught by the curve of your eyelashes against your cheek. He has to remember to take a photo of that sometime. Capture it against film, so the beauty of it can be seen for long after you’re both gone.

He slips out to your living room, checking the precautions he’s set up for the umpteenth time: the firebox wire is fit in place, and he’s strung its match across the bottom of your bedroom door for good measure.

He can be hard to reach, sometimes, if his soul wanders away from his sleeping body. He’s not about to risk drifting off on the job when it comes to you.

If he’s lucky, he’ll remove it in the morning, and you’ll never be the wiser.

But better safe than sorry.

On the brick floor of the firebox is a thin scattering of terra-cotta colored ash, the scent still heavy on the air as if something beautiful was freshly burned. On the back wall are etchings of the same color: wards, drawn with a smoldering stick of his mother’s incense.

He isn’t sure if the remaining curls of smoke are actually comforting, or if it just smells to him like coming home after a long time away.

Seating himself in the dead center of your couch, he lets his head fall back, his hair spreading across the tops of the cushions. He puts his hands, palm-up, out to either side of him, arms limp like he excepts to fall asleep at any moment.

He listens to the soft sounds of your house, the settling of the floorboard, the winter wind tapping at the windows.

Like the ends of fingers, flesh gnarled away at the tips down to bone…

When he thinks he hears the faintest hint of crunching ice, he closes his eyes, and his chest falls still.

For a few minutes, there’s nothing. Utter silence, muffled by the cold against the glass panes.

His fingers twitch, moving like they themselves are dreaming.

When he opens his eyes again, breathing deep like he’s just come up from under water, both hands are being solidly held.

He sits up, looking to his right — and sees a stranger in a white nightdress.

Her features are pale, her lips blue like she was kissed by frost. Her hair hangs around her face like it’s still faintly damp with clammy sweat, and her eyes are glazed, even when it’s obvious she’s trying to focus on his face.

When he looks to his left, his heart drops.

Seated next to him is a young boy, no older than eight or nine. His clothes look like something out of a period film, patchwork at the knees of his pants and elbows of his jacket like they’ve been darned and re-darned multiple times.

His skin might have been tan, but the full color of it is lost under a disquieting yellow from underneath.

He must have been sick.

When he smiles at Hex, hopeful, one of his teeth is still missing.

Hector sighs, returning the smile somewhat guiltily.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

Quietly, he looks between them, and explains what they need to do. Where they need to stand, and for how long.

What to do if Saint Nicholas tries to talk to them.

They listen, and when he finishes, they sit so still he’s almost afraid they don’t understand.

But as one, they both silently rise to their feet, and turn in opposite directions. The woman exits through the back wall of your house, melting through like water. The boy, holding himself straight and proud with the weight of his new responsibility, marches through the front wall and out onto the porch.

With a quick look over his shoulder, and another smile through the window, he begins to circle your house.

Hector stays until they’ve both covered one counter-clockwise rotation, then rises to his feet. His joints crack a little as he does, and he winces slightly.

Before he heads back to your room, though, he looks over to where the milk and cookies are perched on your coffee table.

He uses both hands to flip it the bird. He put red pepper and cayenne in that shit, he hopes it hurts like hell going down.

Rora has… never been much of one for holidays. Especially not the ones that require being performing for family. She was already reminded every day how much she disappointed them by being something other than the perfect debutante; the holidays only heaped that on in spades.

But you. You are an excellent reminder of the joy that can be found by being alive.

In an attempt to make some cash (the whole ‘being undead’ thing kind of hampering the legal on-boarding process at most companies), Rora would be spending the season harvesting fresh mistletoe and American holly out of the swamp to make her own wreaths and decorations. She figures, having already established herself as a local artisan (to the degree that taxidermy dressed in burlesque gear counted as art — which maybe you would argue for more than her).

She wouldn’t drag you along to come foraging with her - unless you wanted to, in which case, you’d be more than welcome.

But she would be happy to spend the month joining you in whatever holiday traditions you preferred, as long as you didn’t mind her braiding and weaving various forms out of her plants when she did.

You’d sit with your head on her shoulder, your eyes torn between the black and white movie on the screen and the skillful work of her nimble hands. While you wrapped presents or trimmed your own tree, she’d be a chair away, working on her latest projects (until you needed help reaching something on the tree itself, in which case she’d immediately shoo you off the ladder like you were something fragile and take your place).

The only time her hands would stop were when the two of you were getting ready for bed — or when she’d abruptly appear next to you when you were reading or watching something, holding a sprig of fresh mistletoe over your head with a sly smile on her face.

For the holiday, you would find at the end of a silver chain a resin pendant, encasing a smaller sprig of mistletoe.

Rora, at your request, would put it on you immediately, her eyes glowing the same soft green as the leaves inside…

And then immediately bend down and enthusiastically kiss your chest, all over and then some.

She was only human, after all.

Mostly.

She, too, would insist on your house for Christmas Eve.

The House didn’t frighten her. Nothing really frightened her anymore, after being dead for so long.

Save for something happening to you. She would do anything, bend this world and the one beyond to her will, if it meant she could keep you from seeing a tenth of what she’d had to endure.

The mistletoe and holly served a dual purpose, you see. For every so many sprigs and boughs set aside for her little stand at the local flea market, she set one aside for you.

In the winter evenings, when you were busy with your own holiday secrets or blissfully asleep, she would tinker with the branches and the leaves, waiting for them to dry and diminish of their original hue before she infused it with some of her own.

On Christmas Eve, after she’d thoroughly worn you out before bed (she couldn’t cook, but she was always delighted to dine) and laid out milk and cookies both laced with enough cyanide to kill a horse (it wouldn’t work, it was just for her own catharsis), she set to work on her true, intricate design.

Yes, she uses the firebox wire, same as the boys. They’d been using it since they were thirteen, she wasn’t about to abandon tradition. But she also etches her own runes around your mantle, hiding them after with a garland of beautifully arranged plants that seems to nearly glow with just how verdant they are.

When the whole fireplace almost seems alive with fresh greenery, she settles herself on the hearth, pulling on the protective smock she wore over her clothes for all her taxidermy projects.

After a deep breath, and a moment to angle her arm around the firebox wire, she shoves her hand as far up the chimney’s throat as she can manage it.

She grumbles as she searches, wincing at the ash that falls while she moves her hand over the bricks and around the lintel - and nearly smashes what she’s looking for.

Oh-so-carefully, moving as slowly as she can, she frees the pathetic little bundle from its tomb before bringing it back down to her own eye level like she’s holding a handful of diamonds.

It is, in fact, a collection of mouse bones.

Small, sad, discolored from age and long shot of any fur it might have once had in life, the skeleton nearly crumbles apart in Rora’s hand.

She holds it close to her face, poking through it with her index finger as she counts. When she knows for sure she has the skull, and enough limbs for it to work, she folds the tiny remnants into her delicate fingers.

What happens next is hidden by the dark veil of her hair, her own deep green shining between the strands as she whispers something in Latin.

Around her, a breeze gathers in your perfectly still house, tiny whispers seeming to echo off the walls.

When she raises her head again, the scars from her own resurrection are a deep, pulsing green -

But the mouse skeleton is standing upright in her palm, assembled like it hasn’t been in years.

The eyeless little thing looks up at her, and if it had a nose to sniff and ears to twitch, it would.

She smiles at it - a soft one, one she usually only saves for you - and kisses the tip of her finger before pressing it to the tiny arc of the dusty skull.

The mouse, at first surprised despite its featureless face, presses back.

Rora strokes her finger along its spine, watching it shiver its little vertebrae in happiness as she whispers to it.

She holds her hand back to the firebox, and with some gentle urging, the little skeleton skitters onto the bricks again. Glancing back over its tiny scapulae, it eyes her with its empty sockets, before scrabbling its way back up into the chimney from which she pulled it.

Rora stands again, dusting her hands off on her smock before just standing there. Waiting.

Then, just as whispers had filled your house before, a new breeze sweeps along something else: squeaks.

As she listens, the tiny, echoing squeak develops yet another echo. Between your floorboards, she can see the hint of a deep green spark, which in turn seems to split itself in two.

She stares down, watching the green spark divide itself over and over as tiny echoing squeaks grows into a veritable chorus.

When it finally stops dividing itself, she stamps twice on the floorboards, and a mass of something that grows vivid green rattles incessantly in the direction of your chimney.

A small army of skeletal creatures in varying states of assembly squeezes its way out between the cracks in your floor, the pieces throwing themselves into the firebox and up the flue like some sort of horrific reverse vacuum.

Rora supervises until an entire extermination van’s worth seems to have shoved itself up your fireplace, glowing a nuclear green that fills the whole room, before it at last falls deceptively silent.

Smiling like a cat, she steps out of her smock, depositing it behind a chair and out of sight before sauntering her way back to your room.

Let that dead fuck try his luck against her new darlings.

She’d been wondering how well that petrified skin would hold up against thousands of little tiny teeth.

When she crawls back into your bed, you barely even stir when she pulls you close.

You will never know the terrors that lurk in the depths of old magic.This time of year will always be joyous for you.

They will each and all make sure of that.

(if you read this far, I hope your holiday is going swimmingly - or at least, less stressful than theirs. :’D thanks for stopping by and sharing part of it with us! 🥰♥️

merry creepmas to all, and to all a good fright! 🖤⚰️)