Day Eleven can be read here.

The supermarket had completely sold out of turkeys. So had the other five supermarkets Susan had been to. She knew in theory that she could just buy a chicken and cook that, but she also knew her mother-in-law would notice the difference and point it out to Susan all through Christmas day. She had arrived last night and had already told Susan she didn’t think the tree was decorated very well and that Susan’s husband was lying when he said he didn’t like mulled wine just to try to keep Susan happy. Susan hated mulled wine, even the smell. She knew she shouldn’t have waited until Christmas Eve to get the turkey, but she had just ran out of time, so here she was staring at the shelf where the turkeys weren’t.

Surely, having no meat at all on Christmas was worse than having a chicken, though? Susan decided she would buy the chicken and hide the bag from her mother-in-law until it was in the oven.

When she got back home, she tried to hide the bag with the chicken in from her mother in law, but as soon as she got in she heard her mother-in-law shout from the living room, “Is that you, Susan?” Before Susan could hide the bag, her mother-in-law was in the hallway. “Is that the turkey?” she asked, grabbing hold of the bag while Susan closed the front door. She peered inside and Susan held her breath, waiting for her to say something about the chicken.

“Oh, thank god,” said her mother-in-law. “Well done. I can’t stand turkey, I always get chicken instead.”

Day nine can be read here.

Everyone said the house was haunted. They said that ghosts danced in the ballroom during thunderstorms when lightning struck through the hole in the roof and that the bats sleeping in the main hallway transformed into vampires each night. They said that witches brewed potions under the light of the full moon. They said that they had all been inside the house and had brought back something from inside to prove it. They said Edwina had to do the same. She took a deep breath and pushed open the creaking front door.

Day eight can be read here.

When the last of the presents had been unwrapped and the dishes had all been piled into the sink to wash up later, they all went outside to watch the fireworks display Lily had decided she was going to put on. They all stood outside, bundled in their coats, with champagne in their hands, as Lily lit all the fireworks and they watched and waited for the firework fuses to burn down and for the rockets and shooting stars to soar into the December night air. When the display started everyone oohed and ahed as they were meant to.

Patricia, who had never really liked fireworks turned to go back inside while everyone’s attention was distracted by the noise and lights of the fireworks. She went into the bedroom and watched the fireworks from there. She finished her champagne and set it down on the windowsill. Once the display was over she watched as everyone came back in. She saw her boyfriend talking to her best friend as they walked inside. Then, as Patricia watched, her boyfriend pulled Patricia’s best friend close to him and quickly, when he thought no-one was watching, kissed her. Patricia knocked the champagne glass off the windowsill in her shock. The pieces shattered on the bedroom floor and she ran downstairs into the kitchen where everyone had gathered after the firework display. She tried to find her boyfriend or her best friend to question them or maybe shout at them about what she had seen, but there were too many people. She got handed another glass of champagne at some point and sipped it while she searched the entire ground floor of the house. By the time she had finished she was tired and went to bed, without ever having found one of them. The next morning, she was only slightly surprised to find that her boyfriend hadn’t come to find her last night at all.

Day seven can be read here.

Rose was down to her last candle and the power still hadn’t come back on. The storm had been three days ago, but the electric company had warned that it could be almost a week before she got power back to her home. She had checked that on her phone before it had run out of battery. She had been able to text or call everyone to tell them she was safe, only that her power was down. For the first day or two, she had quite relished the no power. After all, it meant she did not have to worry about cooking Christmas dinner if it did not come back on in time and she much preferred the Christmas tree when the lights were off. The storm had prevented her from travelling to her daughter’s house for Christmas so she would be spending the day alone, but still, she had hoarded so many scented candles over the years that for the first few days she could still light all the rooms and the house smelt like a perfume factory.

Now her phone was out of battery, the roads were still too treacherous for her to walk to the village and she had used up all but this last candle. It was Christmas Eve. She knew without having to check her phone that the electricity wouldn’t come back on before at least the 27th now. The last candle sputtered and went out. Rose sighed in the darkness and used her hands to feel her way up the stairs to bed.

The cuckoo clock was broken. The woman who had bought it into the shop for Martha to fix had seemed perplexed. “It’s fine during the day,” she said as she handed the clock over, “But at midnight, it just keeps going and going until I go down and reset it,”

Martha had taken the clock and taken apart all its mechanisms. She couldn’t see anything inside that could be jamming the gears so it would keep chiming. or keep cuckooing, as the term should be.

She had set the time to midnight around two, but the clock seemed to work perfectly fine, stopping at twelve just as it should.

Martha had told the woman that the clock would be ready by tomorrow and she had never yet been late with a repairing since she had opened the shop. So, tonight, she determined to stay up until midnight and see once and for all what was going wrong with the clock.

Midnight came, and Martha was dozing quietly in her workshop. The first cuckoo from the clock woke her up and she started to count them. The clock chimed twelve and just as the woman had said kept going. Martha reached to reset the clock, but it made no difference, the cuckoo kept chiming long past thirteen, long past twenty, even. She picked up the clock and pulled the cuckoo off its spring on the front of the clock. The mechanism behind it kept moving forward, but the sound itself was coming from the cuckoo she now held in her hand. It was carved out of wood, it couldn’t be real at all, it couldn’t be making a sound of its own, when the speakers were inside the clock. In terror, Martha dropped the cuckoo down onto the floor and ran out of her workshop, ran out of the town and into the forest hearing the cuckoo ring in her ears all the while.