Short Story: On the Twelfth Day of Christmas
Christmas is meant to be a season of warmth, family, and familiar songs drifting through frosted windows. But some traditions are older than the carols we sing, older than the tinsel in our shops, older even than the churches that ring in the holiday. Hidden beneath the cheer is a darker folklore that once shaped the midwinter rites of villages across Britain.
This story steps into that shadowed space. Inspired by The Twelve Days of Christmas, it follows a young woman who inherits more than a cottage and a few memories. What begins with a festive tune slips, step by step, into something older and hungrier, where each gift is a warning and every verse draws her closer to a truth no one should face alone.
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas
It was Christmas Eve… …Mum died in October, and the house still smelt of her.
Not the fresh, floral perfume she used to wear when Dad was alive, but the sour, stale scent of medicine, boiled vegetables, and years of closed curtains. The little stone cottage sat at the edge of the village like it was sulking, the moor crouched behind it, the church spire a black finger in the distance. The garden was a hard crust of frost, the air so cold it seemed to scrape my lungs as I carried the last box in.
I hadn’t planned to spend Christmas here. I hadn’t really planned anything, if I was honest. London felt too loud, too bright, too full of other people’s lives. So when the solicitor handed me the keys and said, “It’s all yours now, Miss Marsh,” I heard myself say that I might as well spend “the festive period” in the old place. Just until I’d decided what to do.
Inside, I turned the heating on, made a cup of tea, and stood in the front room, looking at Mum’s decorations still neatly boxed up in the cupboard. She had labelled each one in that careful looping handwriting.
BAUBLES – LIVING ROOM
LIGHTS – STAIRS
NATIVITY – HALL TABLE
At the very back of the cupboard, behind an old biscuit tin and a roll of dented wrapping paper, I found a smaller box wrapped in brown paper, tucked away as if she hadn’t meant anyone to see it.
On the lid, in the same handwriting, were three words:
TWELVE DAYS – DO NOT USE
Which is exactly the sort of label that makes you open something.
Inside lay an old sheet of music, its edges browned with age. It was handwritten, in ink that had faded to the colour of old tea. The notes traced a tune I recognised immediately, even though there were odd flats and sharps crammed in, knocking the melody slightly off. Above the stave, the title was written:
On the First Day of Christmas
Just that. No “my true love gave to me.” No composer’s name.
Underneath the stave, in a different hand, were the lyrics, written out over all twelve verses. The words matched the song everyone knows, except for the title line. Every verse began: “On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…”
Sent. Not gave.
At the bottom of the page someone had scribbled a note that made my skin prickle.
Don’t sing it alone.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered, and rolled my eyes at myself. Old village superstition. That was all. Folk here still muttered about “the old ways” and left bunches of holly on doorsteps for luck.
I should have put the sheet back in the box, back in the cupboard. I know that now. Instead, because I was tired and lonely and the house was too quiet, I set it on the piano.
The piano had belonged to my grandmother. Its keys were yellowed, some stiff, some dead, but I managed to pick out the first few bars. The tune slipped under my fingers, almost right, just skewed enough to feel… wrong. Like a familiar face with the eyes slightly too far apart.
Outside, the first few flakes of snow began to fall, spinning lazily past the window.
I hummed the tune once, then again, under my breath as I went around the room, hanging garlands on the mantelpiece and draping fairy lights along the curtain pole. By the time I opened the box marked BAUBLES – LIVING ROOM I had the full song running through my head.
On the first day of Christmas…
I didn’t sing it. Not properly. Barely a whisper.
Still. It must have been enough.
Because on Christmas morning the first gift arrived.
The First Day of Christmas: A Partridge in a Pear Tree
On Christmas morning I woke to light pressing against my eyelids and a sharp, strange smell. Not coffee, not Mum’s old frying bacon scent. Something green and raw and sweet, like crushed leaves.
When I opened my eyes, I saw leaves. Dark green, glossy, impossibly alive for December. A branch was arched over the foot of my bed, heavy with small, hard pears, the skin of them a pale gold tinged with pink.
I sat up so fast the duvet tangled round my legs.
There was a tree growing in my bedroom.
Its trunk rose from the exact centre of the bedroom floor, splitting the faded floral carpet. The roots burrowed down into the boards, splintering them. Frost glittered along the bark like sugar. Small white blossoms clung to some branches in defiance of the season, their petals edged with rime.
In the highest branches, something moved.
It was a bird at first glance. A plump partridge, feathers mottled brown and cream, head cocked. But its eyes… its eyes were not right. They were too bright, too knowing. They looked at me the way people do when they are deciding if they know you.
My heart hammered so loudly in my ears it almost drowned out the soft creak as the tree swayed, though there was no wind. I grabbed my mobile, thumbed it awake. Half past eight. No missed calls.
This wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. Trees did not appear overnight in upstairs bedrooms. Birds did not stare at you like that.
I swung my legs out of bed. The air was so cold my breath smoked. I reached out with one hand, fingertips brushing the bark. It was rough and bitter under my skin.
Real.
A pear hung just within reach. It looked perfect, the skin smooth and unblemished. Without meaning to, I plucked it. The stem snapped like a neck.
As the fruit came free, the partridge made a sound. Not a chirp. Not a cluck. Something between a sigh and a wordless note, the start of a tune I almost recognised.
My fingers tightened round the pear. It was warmer than it should have been. For a second I thought I felt a faint pulse in it, beating in time with my own.
I dropped it. It hit the floor with a thud too heavy for something that size, leaving a dark, pear-shaped bruise on the bare boards.
The mark didn’t fade.
I told myself it was some old root working its way up, that I’d somehow missed it yesterday when I’d put clean sheets on the bed. I told myself the partridge was just a bird that had found its way in.
By lunchtime, I had shut the bedroom door on the whole thing. I carried my mug of tea downstairs and put the telly on. Some Christmas special with forced laughter and paid audience.
The house felt wrong. Off key. I found myself humming the tune again, under my breath.
On the first day of Christmas…
I stopped, biting the words off with my teeth.
Behind the bedroom door, above my head, the partridge rustled its wings.
The Second Day: Two Turtle Doves
Boxing Day brought more snow. Heavy, thick flakes that blotted out the world beyond the garden wall. The village bells started up for morning service, the sound muffled and strange in the white air.
The partridge had not moved from its perch. The tree had not grown further, nor withered. It simply stood there, roots thrust into my floor, blossoms fresh, frost glittering. The pear I had dropped remained where it had landed, fleshy and firm, the bruise like a stain burned into the wood around it.
I closed the door and put a chair under the handle.
By late afternoon the house was dim, cold, and suffocating. Every carol on the radio made my skin crawl. I turned the music off and stood in the kitchen, staring out at the garden. Something grey-white and soft lay on the stone birdbath, where Mum used to throw crumbs.
Two small shapes, hunched against the cold.
Doves.
Their feathers were like old wedding veils, ragged at the edges. Each bird wore a ring of black skin round its neck, like a bruise or a collar. They sat side by side without moving, their heads tilted together. Snow piled up on their backs, but they did not shake it off.
I opened the back door. Cold slapped my face, a raw sting.
“Shoo,” I said, because it was something to say. My breath puffed out in white clouds. “Off you go.”
They turned as one.
Their eyes were soft, dark, and utterly empty. Not like the partridge’s bright intelligence. These eyes were wells.
Slowly, in perfect unison, both doves opened their beaks.
What came out was not a coo.
It was the sound of my parents arguing.
Not the words. Not exactly. Just the rise and fall of those old familiar cadences. The scrape of anger. The hitch of Mum’s breath as she tried not to cry. Dad’s sharp, bitter laugh. All of it woven together into a low, choking murmur that dragged at my throat.
The doves’ beaks worked, but no words formed. Just echoes. Fragments. The air between them shimmered with something like heat, though the snow kept falling on their backs.
My hands were shaking. I gripped the edge of the door until my fingers ached.
“Stop it,” I whispered. “That’s not funny.”
The noise grew louder, filling the air. In the sound, I could hear myself, a child’s voice, high and thin. “Stop. Please stop.”
The doves leaned towards each other until their foreheads touched. The sound cut off like a record needle lifted.
Silence rushed in, huge and bruising.
I shut the door, hard enough to rattle the glass. When I looked again, they were back to their hunched silence, snow perched between their wings.
That night, from the bedroom below the partridge tree, I heard them. Not arguing parents now, but a low, constant murmur, like rosary prayers said in a language I didn’t know. It seeped through the windows and under the doors, into my dreams.
On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…
My throat formed the words without my consent, a whisper against the pillow.
Outside, the turtle doves cooed in answer, a sound like someone sobbing through a gag.
The Third Day: Three French Hens
By the third morning, it was already a pattern. A sick little advent calendar, each day’s door opening whether I wanted it to or not.
I woke late, clammy with sweat. A faint scratching noise dragged at the edge of my hearing. For a moment I thought it was the tree, its roots shifting further into the house.
The sound came from outside.
I pulled on a jumper and peered through the bedroom window. The snow had stopped. The garden lay under a thick white quilt, edged by the dry stone wall. Thin light picked out every ridge and dip.
Down near the back gate, three dark shapes hunched in the snow, pecking and scratching. Hens. At least, that was what they were meant to be.
They were taller than normal chickens, thin-legged, their wings ragged. Their bodies were covered in feathers the colour of dried blood, with a glossy black sheen. Their combs were not bright cheerful red but greyish, as if frostbitten. Above their beaks, their eyes were a startling chalk-white, ringed with red like raw skin.
As I watched, one lifted its foot and scratched a line into the snow. Then another line. Then a curve.
They were drawing.
I went downstairs, pulled on boots, and stepped out into the cold. The air smelt like iron and sap and the faint sweet rot of old leaves under the snow.
The turtle doves watched me from the birdbath, heads tucked, wings fluffed. The hens ignored them.
Closer now, I could see the pattern they were scratching. Lines and arcs, intersecting circles, symbols that made my head throb if I looked at them too long. Something old and wrong.
“…Shoo,” I tried again, voice thin in the empty garden.
One of the hens stopped scratching and turned its white gaze on me. Its beak was dark at the tip, as if stained. It took two hopping steps, then another, its claws leaving shallow gouges in the snow.
It stopped less than a foot from my boots.
The smell coming off it was not farmyard. It smelt like raw meat left on a windowsill in summer. Under that, faintly, there was a whiff of incense.
Slowly, never breaking eye contact, the hen squatted. Its body flexed.
Something wet and pale dropped into the snow between us with a soft thud.
An egg.
Steam rose faintly from it in the cold air. Its shell was not smooth and cream like a normal egg. It was veined, like the surface of an eyeball.
Against my will, I knelt.
The egg twitched.
Lines bulged under the membrane shell. Fingers, I thought wildly. Little fingers. Or maybe wings.
I staggered back. My boots slipped on the snow. The hen made a soft, satisfied cluck and went back to scratching at its pattern, its claws overlapping the egg, tracing a ring round it.
By the time I scrambled back into the house and slammed the door, the egg had cracked. Something pale and small was pressing against the opening, little blind hands reaching, scrabbling in the snow.
I drew the curtains.
All day, I tried to ignore the noises from the garden. The faint wet pop of shell after shell splitting. The skitter of too many small limbs.
On the third day of Christmas…
The words crawled under my skin, curled behind my teeth. I forced myself not to say them.
By evening, the pattern in the garden glowed faintly, a circle of symbols traced in trampled snow and something darker. From an upstairs window, I saw the three hens standing at the points of a triangle, the doves on their birdbath throne, the partridge’s tree looming from my bedroom roof.
The village remained quiet beyond the wall. Warm lights, wreaths on doors, smoke from chimneys. No one came by. No one looked in.
It was just me and the gifts.
The Fourth Day: Four Calling Birds
On the fourth day, the blackbirds came.
I woke to tapping on the glass. Not gentle, curious taps. Repeated, frantic hammering. I sat up, heart already tripping, and saw them on the windowsill: four birds with feathers black as coal and beaks the sickly yellow of old teeth.
They were too thin, their feathers patchy, eyes bright and hungry. As soon as I moved, all four jerked their heads in the same movement and stared straight at me.
“Go away,” I rasped, throat dry.
One opened its beak.
“Ellie.”
It was my voice. My own name, in my own tone, slurred as if said through a broken jaw.
Another bird chirped, and the chirp became my mother’s voice. “Eleanor. Answer the phone, love.”
The third’s call was my father’s bark of laughter.
The fourth opened its beak, and nothing came out but the sound of the village bell, tolling slow and heavy. Funeral, not church service.
Their claws scrabbled at the glass, beaks tapping. Over and over: “Ellie.” “Answer.” The bell tolling. Laughter.
I grabbed the nearest thing to hand, a heavy snow globe from the bedside table, and flung it at the window.
The glass shuddered with the impact. The snow globe bounced, hit the floor, and cracked. Greenish fluid leaked out, carrying a strong smell of mould and pennies.
The birds didn’t flinch.
The one with my voice laughed with my father’s laugh. Another with Mum’s voice said, “Let us in, sweetheart. It’s freezing.”
“No,” I whispered.
The partridge shifted in the tree, sending a shower of frost down. One of the hens squawked outside, a harsh note that rose and fell exactly in time with the tune of the carol.
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me / Four calling birds…
The blackbirds began to sing.
They called not just my name now, but other words. Fragments of conversations I’d had. “Yes, that’s fine.” “I’ll be there.” “I promise.” Every broken promise, every casual lie, every petty, unfinished thing laid out in birdsong.
When I clapped my hands over my ears, it didn’t help. The song was inside my skull.
That day I didn’t leave the house. Not even to look at the garden. Shadows moved under the gap in the kitchen door, scratching patterns I couldn’t quite see.
The house felt smaller, as if the walls had shifted inwards by an inch. The air smelt thick, full of feathers and sap and something sour. The Christmas lights on the tree flickered in time with the blackbirds’ tapping.
I fell asleep on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, the telly muttering Christmas repeats to an empty room.
In my dreams, black beaks pecked at my eyes while a partridge watched from a frost-bright tree, and somewhere, someone kept time with a slow, steady drum.
The Fifth Day: Five Gold Rings
I woke on the fifth day with something tight around my fingers.
The telly screen glowed blue. It was still dark outside. The house was silent except for the tick of the old clock in the hall. My hands were cold. I wriggled my fingers and heard the faint, dry rasp of metal on skin.
On my right hand, five rings gleamed.
For a second I thought they were Mum’s old wedding set. Then I looked closer.
They were gold, or plated to seem so, but not smooth. Each ring was made of small interlocking segments, ridged and knobbly, like pieces of bone set end to end. They were warm to the touch, warmer than my skin.
I hauled myself upright. My head throbbed. When I tried to pull the rings off, they tightened, digging into the flesh below my knuckles. The ridges bit into my skin, hard enough to sting. I gasped and let go.
The ticking of the clock seemed louder. Between each tick, I heard another sound, a faint, distant chiming. Bells. Five notes, over and over, in the sequence of the carol. They rang through my bones more than in my ears.
On the telly, the blue screen shifted. For a heartbeat I saw my reflection, pale and wide-eyed, and behind me the outline of a tree that was not the one I had decorated. Its branches were full of shapes that might have been birds, or people hanging by their necks.
I turned the telly off.
When I stood at the front window and looked out, the village seemed further away than ever. No tyre tracks marked the road. No footprints broke the snow. Every house had its fairy lights, its wreath, its little tree twinkling in the window. Not one curtain twitched.
When I pressed my fingers to the glass, the rings hummed.
Heat surged up my arm, blooming in my chest. For a second, the garden vanished. I saw instead a circle of standing stones in the snow, each one draped with garlands of entrails. Figures moved between them: tall men in antlered masks; women in long, tattered dresses. Their hands were linked in a chain of gold.
On each finger of each hand, a bone ring.
They were singing the carol, their voices wordless and layered, the tune twisting in on itself. The sky above them was thick with birds. The ground was slick.
I yanked my hand back. The vision snapped. The garden returned.
The partridge’s tree had grown. Its branches pierced the bedroom floor above and now pushed through the roof tiles, black silhouettes against the white sky. The turtle doves sat closer together, their bodies almost fused. The hens’ scratched pattern had widened, reaching the back door in a smear of dirt and dark streaks. The blackbirds took turns patrolling the sill.
The rings pulsed against my skin, beating in rhythm with something deep under the house.
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me / Five gold rings…
The tune wound through the house like smoke, too faint to pin down, impossible to block out.
I tried the front door.
The key turned in the lock, but when I pulled, it stuck. Wood had swollen, I told myself. Old house, damp, cold, the frame warping.
I put my shoulder against it. Pushed.
From the other side came the unmistakable sound of something sliding into place. The scrape of a bolt I did not own. The dull thud of a heavy bar dropping across.
I was locked in.
The Sixth Day: Six Geese A-Laying
On the sixth morning, the sound of honking dragged me from sleep. Not the cheerful gabble of farmyard geese. This was lower, angrier. A warning.
The hallway was full of feathers.
They drifted in slow eddies when I opened my bedroom door, floating on a draft of air that smelt of pond water and blood. Each feather was long and grey, ragged at the tip. Some were streaked with something darker.
My slippers squelched.
The carpet was wet. A thin film of water covered it, shining faintly. I followed it downstairs, each step a cold slap.
At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped.
The back door had gone.
In its place, where the kitchen extension should have begun, the house simply… ended. Beyond the threshold, water stretched away under a slate-grey sky, choked with reeds and dead leaves. The snowy garden was gone, swallowed by a marshy expanse that stank of rot.
Floating on the water, six white shapes drifted, necks curled, beaks tucked. Geese.
Their bodies were wrong. Too big, too bloated. Their feathers hung in clumps, as if soaked in grease. The water round them was slicked with a rainbow sheen.
As I watched, one lifted its head. Its beak dripped something thick and red. Its eyes were the same milky white as the hens’, but wider, more human.
The goose made a low sound. Not a honk. A groan.
It heaved itself up, wings flapping. Water slapped against the threshold, splattering my feet. The air filled with the scent of offal.
The goose waddled to the edge of the flooded world and squatted. Its body clenched, straining. A pale oval slid from beneath its tail and landed on the kitchen tiles with a dull, wet splat.
The egg split open.
Inside was not a chick. Not even a twisted, half-formed thing like the hens had produced. It was… flesh. Pink and grey and veined. It twitched, pulsed, joined to the egg by ropes of gristle.
The goose bent its head and tore into it with slow, methodical bites.
I stumbled back, one hand on the wall for balance. My stomach churned.
The other geese were watching. One by one, they began to heave themselves towards the house, wet bodies slapping, bellies bulging with whatever they had been fed. Eggs dropped from them, slick and shuddering, across the threshold, onto my floor.
Six geese a-laying.
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…
Water soaked into the carpet, climbing the stairs. The house smelt like a butcher’s at closing time.
I ran to the front door. The rings on my fingers burned. When I grabbed the handle, the metal was freezing, the kind of cold that burns the skin. I yanked, shoved, kicked.
Somewhere beyond the door, something big and heavy shifted, then slammed more firmly into place.
The geese’s feeding noises echoed down the hall. Wet tearing, satisfied grunts.
I retreated to the living room, shut the door, and pushed the sofa against it. A stupid, pointless gesture. The house was theirs now, as much as mine.
On the telly screen’s black glass I saw myself reflected, pale and shaking, rings gleaming. Behind my reflected shoulder, at the edge of the image, something moved.
A tall, pale figure that looked very much like my mother, standing at the hall’s end, watching me.
When I whirled round, the hall was empty. Only water, feathers, and the shadow of the geese moving in the doorway.
The Seventh Day: Seven Swans A-Swimming
By the seventh day, the house had shrunk to the living room and the bedroom. The kitchen was a swamp. The hallway was a sluice. The stairs creaked with every step, soaked through, patches of damp blooming like bruises on the walls.
I barricaded the living room door each night with furniture, as if that would help. The smell came through anyway. Rot and feathers and something sweet, like burnt sugar.
At first light, I crept to the front window and peered out through a gap in the curtains.
The village was gone.
In its place, water stretched in every direction. Not the churning grey softness of the sea, but still, black water, edged in ice. The dry stone walls of the garden jutted like tombstones from the surface. Here and there, the tops of trees broke through, their bare branches slick with clinging weed.
On that water, seven white shapes drifted.
Swans.
They were beautiful, at first glance. Long necks, smooth bodies, feathers pure as fresh snow. They cut through the black water without a ripple, their movements slow and stately.
Then one turned its head.
From the base of its beak to the tip of its throat, the skin was raw and red, as if it had been flayed. Its eyes were rimmed with thick, black lashes that looked almost painted. Around its neck hung a garland of something dark and limp.
Intestines, I realised. Twisted like tinsel.
Each swan wore a different adornment. One had bells tangled in its feathers, small, gold, crusted with rust. Another dragged a string of cracked baubles behind it, each one filled not with glitter but with cloudy liquid. One’s wings were pierced here and there with candles, their flames steady despite the cold.
They swam in slow circles round the house, their white bodies stark against the water. Every so often, one would dip its head and bring something to the surface: a shoe, a broken doll, a sodden Christmas card.
Or a hand.
They let the pale things sink again, always in the same pattern. Circles within circles, tracing some vast design whose centre was my house.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me, seven swans a-swimming…
Their movements matched the rhythm of the tune exactly.
At the edge of my hearing, there was another sound. A far-off chorus, like carollers in the next street. Voices, faint but growing louder day by day.
The rings had become part of my hands. The skin around them was red and bruised, flaking in patches. When I touched them, they pulsed.
That afternoon, the first cracks appeared in the ceiling. Little hairline fractures, radiating out from the point where the partridge’s tree thrust through the roof. Dust rained down. Somewhere above, something heavy shifted, and I heard the rustle of wings.
I slept on the sofa, curled up in a nest of blankets, the telly off, the room lit only by the fairy lights on the tree. They flickered in odd patterns, sometimes spelling out something that looked almost like letters, almost like words, if I squinted.
In the night, I woke to the sound of something dragging along the roof.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
Seven beaks, perhaps, carving the pattern deeper.
The Eighth Day: Eight Maids A-Milking
They came with the dawn on New Year’s Day, stepping out of the water as if it were fog.
I was at the window when I saw them: eight figures wading through the black flood, skirts floating round their legs. Each wore a long, old-fashioned dress, the sort you see in pictures of dairy maids and harvest festivals. Aprons tied at the waist. Shawls pulled over their heads.
Their faces were wrong. Too smooth, too pale, eyes deep and bruised. Their hair hung in wet strings. Each carried a wooden pail in one hand, and something that looked like a curved knife in the other.
They left no ripples in the water. Their feet touched the surface as lightly as swans’.
When they reached what had once been my garden gate, they stopped. One raised her head and looked straight at me.
Her eyes were the colour of sour milk. Her lips were blue with cold.
She smiled.
“Eleanor,” she said. Her voice sounded like milk poured from a jug. Thick and soft, with a sour edge. “Open the door, love. We’re expected.”
Behind her, the other seven chuckled, a low, bubbling sound.
I stepped away from the window.
The front door’s handle rattled. Just once. Then there was another sound: the crackle and pop of swollen wood splitting. A wet, slow tear. The faint clink of metal on wood.
They did not need me to open the door.
By the time I had shoved the sofa back across the living room entrance and pressed my shoulder to it, the maids were in the hall. I heard their bare feet on the soaked carpet, the slosh of liquid in their pails.
The door shuddered.
“Eleanor,” the lead maid crooned through the wood. “Your mum knew us well, she did. Paid her dues right up to the end, she did. Brave woman, your mum.”
My stomach twisted. “What do you want?”
A ripple of amusement went through the eight voices, like wind rustling through reeds.
“Milk,” the lead maid said. “And meat. And music. And the rest.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “Always the same gifts, every twelve days. That’s what keeps it all turning, duck. That’s what keeps them out there.” A pause. “Or in here.”
Behind her, faintly, I heard the honk of geese, the groan of swans’ wings, the cluck of hens. The blackbirds scratched at the living room window, beaks chirping half-heard phrases.
“You’re late,” one of the maids tutted, “Should’ve had your own by now. Your mum was younger than you when she started paying.”
The rings bit into my fingers.
“Paying what?” I whispered, though I knew.
“Love,” the lead maid said. “Your true love, duck. What else?”
The pounding started again. Not fists, not really. Something harder. Bone, maybe, or hooves. The doorframe splintered. A crack appeared, widening inch by inch.
Through it, I saw a sliver of the lead maid’s face, and beyond her, a blur of antlers.
The Ninth Day: Nine Ladies Dancing
That night, I dreamt of a hall lit with candles.
It was the old village hall, or near enough: wooden floor, high ceiling, decorations strung from beam to beam. Holly and ivy and mistletoe, glittering tinsel, paper chains made by children’s hands. Tables leaned against the wall, piled with mince pies and sausage rolls, bottles of cheap fizz.
In the centre of the room, nine women danced.
Their dresses were tatters of velvet and lace, some in rich jewel colours, others in white turned grey with age. Their hair floated round their heads like they were underwater. Their feet were bare.
They moved in a perfect circle, hands linked, skirts swaying. Their faces were blank and serene, except for their eyes. Those burned with desperate joy.
I realised, as the dream sharpened, that some of them had no eyes at all. Just empty sockets. Still they danced, their steps measured and relentless.
In the corner, a scratchy recording of The Twelve Days of Christmas played on a warped gramophone. Each time the word “dancing” came round, the record jumped, stuttered, and repeated it over and over. Dancing, dancing, dancing.
One of the women turned her head towards me.
“Come on, Ellie,” she said. Her voice was my own. “You’re missing your cue.”
Their joined hands opened, leaving a space.
My feet moved without my consent.
As soon as my fingers touched theirs, the circle closed. The nine women smiled, their mouths cracking at the corners. The music surged.
Pain shot up my legs. Every step jarred, bones grinding in their sockets. My knees wrenched. My ankles twisted at impossible angles, but I could not fall. The circle held me up.
We spun faster and faster, skirts flaring. My heart hammered in time with the drumbeat that had been growing louder every night. Through the hall windows, I saw the swans glide past, the maids trudging through the snow, the lords leaping over the roof, shadows against the moon.
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me / Nine ladies dancing…
I woke on the living room floor, my body a map of bruises. My joints ached as if I had run for miles. The fairy lights flickered. The telly screen showed static, white snow hissing quietly.
On the glass, nine handprints bloomed in frost, arranged in a perfect circle.
The Tenth Day: Ten Lords A-Leaping
The tenth day announced itself with thunder. Not in the sky, in the walls.
At first I thought it was the drums, finally fully arrived. Then I realised the rhythm was wrong, not steady. Like Galloping. I staggered to the window and peered out.
Above the house, the sky had darkened to an almost greenish grey, thick and low. The water that had swallowed the village was churned now, broken by whitecaps. The swans rode the waves, their necks arched.
From the horizon, a line of figures approached. They moved in great bounds, leaping over the water as if it were nothing, slamming into the air with such force the house shook.
Ten men, tall and thin, with antlers sprouting from their skulls.
Their faces were hidden by masks carved from dark wood, antlers twisting like branches. Furs hung from their shoulders. Their feet were bare, leaving no mark in the air or the water. From their belts hung bags that dripped steadily, dark and viscous.
As they leapt over the house, I saw their eyes through the mask slits: bright and hungry, wild as the moor in a storm.
Ten lords a-leaping.
They were the old folk stories made flesh: the Wild Hunt, the antlered god, the lords of misrule. The ones Mum had always laughed off when the older villagers hinted at offerings left at the crossroads.
They landed in a ring round the house, their feet splashing lightly on the surface of the water. It did not even ripple.
One stepped forward, head tilting as he considered the front door.
“Late,” he said. His voice echoed through the house, not through the wood. It came from inside my head, from the bones the rings encircled.
“Sorry,” another replied, laughter in his tone. “She’s town-bred. They forget the old songs, those ones. Need reminding.”
Mum, I thought wildly. Mum, what did you do?
One of the lords lifted his bag and tipped it. Something spilled out onto the water with a soft plop. A heart. Human, by the look of it. It floated for a second, then sank, leaving a cloud of red that did not diffuse.
“Your mum kept them sweet,” the lead maid had said. “Paid her dues right up to the end.”
The ten lords began to circle the house, leaping in great, effortless bounds. Each time they landed, the house shook, cracks snaking further down the walls.
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…
Their laughter joined the tune, deep and booming.
The maids’ voices, the ladies’ song, the birds’ calls, the geese and swans, the whisper of the tree’s leaves, the distant bells: all of it layered into a cacophony that rose and fell in the structure of the carol. The air vibrated with it.
I pressed my hands over my ears. The rings burned. Through my fingers, through the wood, through the water, something rose.
The ground, what there was left of it, tilted.
The house groaned.
The Eleventh Day: Eleven Pipers Piping
By the eleventh morning, I was past fear. It had hollowed me out, left me shaky and weak. Everything smelt of damp and rot and old smoke. My clothes clung to my skin. The fairy lights had gone out, one by one, leaving only the dull grey of a sky that never quite turned fully to day.
That was when the children came.
They walked across the water in a neat line, boots barely making a dent on the surface. Eleven of them, coats too thin for the weather, hats pulled down over their ears. Each carried a pipe.
Not plastic recorders or cheap tin whistles. Long, bone pipes, carved and polished, the finger-holes dark and slick.
They stopped outside the window and looked in.
Their faces were grey with cold, lips tinged blue. Some had no eyes. Their sockets were filled with ice. Others’ eyes were too big, too dark, catching the faint light. Their breaths puffed out in white fog.
One lifted its pipe.
The first note cut the air like a knife.
It was high and thin and piercing, but not quite shrill. It threaded its way under the door, through the cracks in the walls, through the gaps in my fingers. It went straight to my bones.
The other ten joined in, one by one, until there was a web of sound round the house. The tune was not the carol, not exactly. It was older. A hunting song, maybe, or a harvest hymn, twisted and bent to fit the twelve-day shape.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me, eleven pipers piping…
The tune pulled.
It plucked at muscles, jerked nerves. My hands twitched in time to it, fingers flexing, rings digging in. My feet tapped, the old instinct to step in time to music surfacing even now.
I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood and pressed back against the wall.
Outside, the maids began to sway. The ladies in their tatters spun over the water as if the hall had broadened to cover the flooded world. The lords leapt in patterns more complex, their antlers tracing arcs in the air. The birds hopped and flapped, keeping time. The geese and swans dipped and rose, making ripples in shapes I half-recognised from the hens’ scratched sigils.
All of it was building.
All of it was for tomorrow.
Twelfth Night.
My true love.
Mum’s voice surfaced in my memory, from some long-ago Christmas. “The twelve days are important, you know, Ellie. Everyone thinks Christmas is the big day, but it’s really Twelfth Night you’ve got to watch. That’s when the masks come off.”
I had been eight, more interested in presents than pagan hangovers. “Masks?”
She had smiled, but it hadn’t reached her eyes. “Don’t worry. We pay our dues.”
I slid down the wall, the rings singing along with the pipes, my whole body humming in tune with the thing coiled under the house. The tree’s roots, I thought. Or something older, that the roots had grown down to meet.
I slept, or fainted, or simply slipped out of my body for a while. In that soft, grey space, I heard another sound begin to creep in under the piping.
A beat. Slow. Relentless.
A drum.
The Twelfth Day: Twelve Drummers Drumming
Twelfth Night dawned without light.
The sky was the colour of slate, unbroken by sun or cloud. The water around the house was still. The swans waited, necks curved. The geese floated, bellies swollen. The hens stood at the points of their half-submerged pattern, claws dug into frozen slush. The doves shook their ragged wings, as if readying themselves.
The partridge sat high in its tree, eyes bright, feathers fluffed. Frost rimed its beak like a smile.
The lords took their places round the house, antlers brushing the low sky. The maids lined up at the door, pails brimming with something dark. The ladies danced on the water, skirts trailing ripples that froze as they spread. The children raised their pipes, fingers poised.
Then, from the horizon, came the drummers.
Twelve figures, marching in perfect time. Their uniforms were an odd mix of periods: red coats here, khaki there, breastplates on some, police jackets on others. All wore tall hats, some plumed, some plain. Their faces were covered by smooth, featureless masks, white as bone.
Each carried a drum.
Not neat little parade drums. Great round things slung at their hips, skins stretched tight. The skins were not leather. They were something paler. Something marked with freckles, or hairs, or scars.
As they drew nearer, I saw the drums were made from human torsos, hollowed out and stretched. The sticks they beat them with were bones, the knobs at the end still shaped like knuckles.
Twelve drummers drumming.
Each beat shook the house. Plaster rained from the ceiling. Cracks yawned wider. The floor heaved.
The tune had been building for days, all its parts spiralling towards this point. With the first stroke of twelve drums in unison, it locked into place.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…
The air thrummed. The water rose, lapping at the windowsills. The tree’s roots tore through the floorboards, thick and wet and pulsing, smelling of grave earth.
The front door blew inward, shards of wood flying. The maids stepped aside, skirts swishing, heads bowed.
Beyond them, filling the hall, was something that did not fit any song.
It was not a person, not entirely. It was a shape made from all the gifts, woven together. Branches of pear tree, bones of lords, feathers of birds, skirts of ladies, shawls of maids, pipes and drums and antlers, twisting and coiling round a core of black water and red meat.
At its centre, a face formed.
Mum’s.
Not as she had been at the end, gaunt and grey in her sickbed, but younger. The way she looked in the old photos, smiling in front of the cottage with snow in her hair. Her eyes were bright.
“Ellie,” she said, her voice the sum of all the sounds outside. “You should have listened. You shouldn’t have sung it alone.”
I shook my head, tears freezing on my cheeks. “What is it?”
Her smile flickered. “It’s ours. The village’s. The land’s. The old one. Call it what you like. We keep it fed, it keeps us safe. It likes its little patterns. Its little games.”
She looked past me, taking in the bare walls, the dead fairy lights, the extinguished tree.
“You were meant to have someone,” she said, almost gently. “A husband. A child. Someone to give. Your true love. That’s the bargain. One each generation. That’s how we carry on.”
I thought of my tiny flat in London, the string of exes, the nights alone on the sofa. The way I’d avoided anything that felt like tying myself down.
“I don’t have anyone,” I whispered.
Mum’s eyes darkened.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
The rings tightened, grinding bone. Pain shot up my arms.
Around the house, the lords leapt in place. The maids lifted their pails. The ladies span faster. The children’s pipes squealed. The birds’ wings beat a storm. The geese and swans thrashed.
The drummers raised their sticks.
“Then I’ll give myself,” I said, the words spilling out before I had quite decided to say them. “If that’s what it wants. Take me.”
Mum’s face flickered, and for a moment I saw something else beneath it. A thing of roots and veins and hunger, of patterns scratched in snow and hearts sunk in water.
The house stilled.
Even the drums paused, sticks held above the skins.
“That’s not how the song goes,” Mum said, a hint of regret in her voice. “You’re the one who receives, love. You’re the true love. You’re the tree.”
The partridge shifted above us. Frost rained down.
The roots surged.
They burst through the floor in thick, muscular ropes, wrapping round my ankles, my calves, my thighs. They were slick and warm, pulsing like veins. I screamed as they dug into my flesh, burrowing, splitting skin, fusing with bone.
The rings flared white-hot. For a second, I saw all the women who had worn them before me, stretching back through generations. Each one standing in this house, in this place, their faces set, eyes bright with terror and something else. Acceptance? Resignation?
Roots tangled round my ribs, squeezing. I couldn’t breathe. My vision narrowed.
Outside, the gifts gathered.
The hens stood at the cardinal points, eggs pulsing at their feet. The geese lined the stairwell of water that now spiralled up into the sky. The swans circled, garlands trailing. The maids lifted their knives. The ladies’ hands blurred as they spun. The lords’ antlers scraped the clouds. The children’s fingers flew on their pipes. The drummers brought their sticks down.
Boom.
With each beat, my heart matched the rhythm. Slower. Slower. Then racing, then slowing again, dragged into line with the twelve-beat pattern.
The roots reached my hands. They curled round the rings, forcing my fingers apart, then driving on, bursting through skin, snapping knuckles. My hands opened like flowers.
The partridge dropped from its branch and landed on my chest.
Its claws sank through my jumper, through my skin, into my sternum. Its beak touched my lips.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…
The song rose around me, deafening now, no longer words but pure sound, pure pattern. The notes rolled through my blood, rewriting it.
“You’re the tree,” Mum had said.
I felt my legs lock in place, my spine stiffen. My skin hardened, cracking, sprouting bark. My arms rose, fingers splitting, branching, reaching. Birds’ nests formed in the crooks of my elbows. Feathers sprouted along my shoulders.
Pain blurred into something else. Not relief, exactly. Completion. I slotted into the pattern like a missing note.
The house fell away. The roof split. Snow and frost and black water rushed past.
I rose, my roots burrowing deep into the land beneath the flood, tapping into something old and endless. Above, my branches spread, full of gifts: birds and rings and hearts and bones, swaying in the wind of the drummers’ beat.
In one of my highest branches, the partridge settled. It shook its feathers, pleased.
Below, the village reassembled itself. Water drained away. Stones stacked back into walls. Lights blinked on in cottage windows. The church bell rang, bright and clear.
Inside the houses, people exhaled without knowing why, relief loosening their shoulders. Babies slept more soundly. Cars started first time, illnesses eased.
Somewhere, in someone’s front room, a child hummed the start of a familiar carol without knowing where they’d heard it.
On the first day of Christmas…
Behind the shifting bark of my trunk, something that had once been a woman screamed, once, and then began to laugh instead, because the pattern was so neat, so tidy, so inevitable.
In twelve years’ time, give or take, when the old songs needed singing again and the land began to hunger, a box in some cottage cupboard would be opened. Inside, an old sheet of music with a single warning:
“Don’t sing it alone.“
Snow began to fall, soft and bright, turning the world clean and white.
High above, in the branches of the Christmas tree that was my body, twelve drummers drummed on and on, their rhythm buried under carols and cracker-pulls and the quiet, contented sighs of people who had no idea what their true love had given them.
© Colin Lawson 2025
© Colin Lawson Books