“You have to admit,” Dan said as the drone hovered over our deck and lowered its box full of supplies with surprising care. “There’s something kinda funny about them.”

“Yup,” I said with very little enthusiasm.

“Normally we can’t get corporate to buy us coffee,” he said. “Now we’ve got a conga line of flying roombas bringing us our food.”

“I feel like royalty,” I replied in a flat monotone, barely listening to my own words.

“Oh come on!” Dan cried. “I know this sucks but it’ll be okay. We’ve got supplies. There’s the rig just ten miles away. We can walk to them if we need to. This isn’t the 1800s. We’re not gonna go mad from lead poisoning in our peaches. We just need to hold out.”

I don’t know if he meant it, but Dan’s choice of words had a sobering effect on me as I stood beside him on deck. Hold out. I wondered if he realised how tough the next few months would be. I was about to say something when I was distracted by the drone. Quietly, it lifted itself from the deck, wobbled gently in the arctic wind, and then flew off at a deceptively high speed. It was the last one corporate would send for at least a month and before it had even left my sight I found myself missing the quiet reminder of civilisation.

“It’s just a bit of a fucker,” I said. “First the engines, then Gabe…”

“Just bad luck,” Dan replied. “Besides, you know Gabe would’ve found this whole situation hilarious. He really left us up the creek and without a paddle. Wherever he is, he’s laughing his ass off.”

I knew at some point I’d have to come to terms with the loss of our chief engineer, but for now I was still cursing his stubbornness. If he’d just let one of the other mechanics take care of the engine alert instead of telling them to go back to sleep while he sorted it, the ship would never have gotten stuck. It wasn’t like he’d planned on having a heart attack half-way down to the engine, leaving things to go from bad to worse as the ship froze in place. That was just plain bad luck. But it was bad luck that would cost us four months of waiting around for Spring.

“Any news off the others?” Dan asked.

I walked over to the railing and stared down at the jagged shoreline around our hull. Blocks the size of small trucks lay angled haphazardly against our hull, their sharp edges threatening all kinds of damage. It was going to be hell of a job making sure everything down there stayed intact over the next few months. Our ship was big, but the weather was bigger.

“They’re facing a tough hike to the rig given the weather,” I said, “but nothing they can’t handle. From there it’ll either be chopper or sled dogs, depending on how generous corporate is feeling. Either way, they’ll be home for Christmas. Us on the other hand…”

There was a moment of silence, the first we’d had in days since the evacuation got underway. Now with the last of the drones gone, and our crew having disappeared over the horizon, there was no ignoring the full weight of our isolation.

“Any radio contact off them?” Dan asked.

“I’m sure they’re fine. It’s only been six hours since they left,” I said. “But if you’re worried, why don’t you try and raise them anyway? Weather will make it hard, but not impossible.”

Dan gave this some thought before agreeing.

“Can’t hurt.” He shrugged. “That storm is getting serious though. Don’t stay out here too long feeling sorry for yourself.”

He patted me on the back before making for the nearest door. He was right about the storm. The wind out on deck was making short work of my cold weather gear, and already a fine layer of frost had started to form on my lashes and eyebrows. But I decided to stand outside for a few minutes more as I came to terms with the complete shitshow that had left me stranded in the Arctic during Winter. At the very least, I figured, I should get used to being alone.

It was a little galling, to be honest, standing out there facing the enormity of the Arctic climate, a tiny man stood on a colossal ship that itself was trapped in the ice like a bug in amber. Deafened by the wind, I turned and surveyed our little metal fortress and found myself wishing I could have joined the others in the evacuation. But the ship was my responsibility, and there was nowhere else for me to go.

I decided that before I went back in I should grab the last of the supply packages. Carefully I fumbled across the icy deck looking for the small yellow crate. I found it half-tipped over and buried in a growing pile of snow that threatened to hide it entirely. It was only a small box, just big enough to fit a decent supply of potentially life-saving medication, and I stooped down to pick it up with both hands before noticing it wasn’t alone. Another package was on top of it, no bigger than a ring box. Without thinking I grabbed it, stuffed it in my pocket and hurried back indoors.

I didn’t feel much better once inside, despite the warmth and light. There was something awfully lonely about the way the metal corridor beckoned ahead of me in eerie silence. The ship was normally a hive of activity but now it felt derelict and faintly sinister, and with near-hurricane winds just beyond the metal walls there was the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a cavern deep beneath the Earth, a constant reminder of the enormous forces pressing down on you, threatening to crush you.

I stripped out of my coat and shook it free of melting ice water before reaching into the pocket and removing the tiny package. The drone could only bring a single item, so where did this second one come from? I wondered. Holding it up to the light I saw that it was a rough looking thing. A tiny box made of poorly cut wood, wrapped in ragged fabric and tied together with a peculiar waxy string. It came undone easily enough revealing some old hay and a tiny thumb-sized piece of coal.

“Well that’s just the weirdest fucking…”

Thump thump thump!

The sound came from behind me, a hard object striking the door I’d been leaning against. I cried out and leapt away, instinctively reaching out to open the door under the assumption that someone was stuck outside. But something made me hesitate at the last moment. I couldn’t say what, just a vague sense that the fist that had hammered against the door was not pleading for help. And who on Earth could be out there? Everyone was inside…

I turned back and looked down the corridor. It was uncomfortably dark. What few lights lined the walls were flickering and weak.

“Dan?” I cried, hoping he’d appear, but nothing responded to my voice.

I cranked the door open by an inch, peered into the furious white gloom that lay outside, and slammed it shut before any more of the cold could get inside. There was nothing out there, obviously. Any noise must have been made by something loose getting thrown around, or perhaps the metal shrinking as the temperatures dropped.

“Just the wind,” I muttered to myself while thumbing the piece of coal I’d unconsciously put in my pocket. “Nothing to be worr—”

“Mike?”

The radio went off at my belt and I damn near jumped out of my skin. For a second I actually thought of running, although God knows where that would be, before I got the better of my nerves and calmed myself down.

“Dan?” I said into the radio hoping to hell I didn’t sound half-as-scared as I was. “What’s going on?”

“You haven’t been mucking around in the freezer have you?” he asked, and even over the radio I could tell he was deeply unsettled.

“God no,” I said. Until we could get a chopper out to us that was where poor Gabe’s body was being stored. “Why?”

“It’s Gabe,” he said. “He’s gone. His body… it’s just gone.”

-

We found him just as night began to fall and the storm really picked up. I had spent the last few hours searching the lower deck, relying on the tiny disk of light emitted by my torch to sweep each room in the hope of finding Gabe’s corpse. The entire time my imagination was in overdrive, and it conceived a thousand horrible ways I might find him. But the worst by far was the idea of opening some dark room deep in the bowels of the ship and glimpsing his upright body standing in the corner, lit starkly by my feeble light. It was a ridiculous idea, an intrusive thought that lodged in my mind, but just like a splinter I found it hard to leave alone. My mind kept toying with this idea, unable to skip past the awful image of his pallid face turning to face me in the eerie silent dark...

“Shit! Mike! You’re gonna want to see this!”

Dan’s voice blurted from my radio and I jumped a mile at the intrusion. I’d only just pushed open the door to some random cupboard when the sound came and burst the tension that had gripped me. After a brief second spent catching my breath and trying to smooth any anxiety out of my voice, I replied,

“What’s going on?”

“We’ve found him,” he said. “One of the engineers checked out the port that opens directly onto the ice. He wanted to take a look at the staging areas the evacuees used.”

“And?” I asked.

“Just get down here. This… fuck this is something else.”

-

I reached the port in question a few minutes later. It was situated below deck, close to the very bottom of the ship. It was already open, but standing inside by the doorway were several engineers who looked at me, but seemed unable to speak.

“What the fuck is going on?” I asked when I noticed one of them had been sick on the ice just outside.

“Up there,” one of them said while pointing upwards. “Just… just see for yourself.”

I stumbled out onto the ice, bracing myself for the cold, and found Dan with his jaw hanging open and his eyes wide, fixed on the hull of the ship somewhere above my head.

“Dan what the fuck is–”

The words froze in my throat as I turned and saw what had left everyone so shaken.

Gabe’s naked body had been flash-frozen to the side of the hull, thirty metres up, his back pressed firmly against the steel until ice had formed and kept him there hanging freely. His legs, arms, and head were left to dangle loosely under their own weight giving him the forlorn look of a disappointed child, and his head was so low it appeared to be staring right at us. And yet I couldn’t see anything of his actual expression. The lights on deck were directly overhead and cast his face in harsh shadows.

For a moment I was stunned into silence. Part of me was disgusted, another horrified, and another part entirely was quietly thinking about the mechanics of lowering a body over the side and then pressing it against the metal so firmly that it froze so completely it could be left there under its own weight.

In the end the paralysis faded and I managed to turn to Dan and say,

“We’ll have to get him down once the storm passes.”

-

It had been a long night, one I’d spent locked in my room with the wardrobe piled up against the door for extra security. Even then I barely slept, unable to stop myself thinking of Gabe’s body that, through some dark twist of fate, lay only a few metres on the other side of my bedroom wall. And when my mind wasn’t focused on this, I kept wondering who amongst our crew was capable of such a fucked up thing.

This lack of sleep left me groggy and disgruntled as I stood out on deck–pleased to at least see that the storm had cleared for a while–and had the engineers rig me up to go over the side. I’d be riding a cleaning platform the entire time, but I was also to be equipped with a harness that attached both to the winch and the ship’s gunwale as a backup. With any luck if the winch failed I’d get knocked around a little, but I wouldn’t be sent plummeting to my death.

When it came time to mount the platform I did so with an outward confidence borne from years of experience, but on the inside I was like a kid with stage fright. It took everything I had to not rip the harness off me and go running back to my room. But I had a job to do. It was a hell of a job, going over the side and securing Gabe before the engineers applied torches to the other side of the hull to thaw him off the metal, but as the guy in charge it was my job.

Still, I couldn’t stop myself from jumping a little when the motor started up and for a moment it felt like the floor was going to fall out from under my feet. As I descended I caught Dan’s eyes and I realised he was every bit as terrified as I was. Neither of us were that bothered with heights, of course. Sure something could go wrong but we spent our lives running an icebreaker between oil rigs in the Arctic. It was dangerous work.

No. It was the thought of what waited for me partway down.

After a minute or two I saw a lump against the ship’s hull appear below my feet. Gingerly I guided the platform away from the ship by pushing against the hull, making just enough space to let Gabe’s body pass as the platform came level. This meant I was hands-on with the hull as his body rose up to head height. It felt like something out of a nightmare. Up close I could now see details that had been invisible the night before. Cracked and frozen skin had turned a ghoulish shade of blue, and his open eyes bulged from the sockets like he was on the verge of popping like a balloon. But worst of all were the swollen cracked lips that had been forced open by a glistening object the size of a fist.

Tepidly, I reached out and took Gabe’s head, pushing it upright as gently as I could but still unable to prevent the frozen meat of his neck cracking from the effort. It was a red sphere, a little polished orb of glass, that had been stuffed into his mouth. It was the size of a large apple and was capped with a brass ring that had twine looped through it.

“Jesus fucking Christ it’s a Christmas bauble,” I cried aloud, speaking only to myself before looking up to see if anyone on deck had heard my outburst. When no one appeared I returned my attention to Gabe. Briefly, I tried to remove the bauble, if only to get a better look. But it had been jammed so violently into his mouth that it had dislocated his jaw and split the edges of his lips, revealing bloodless flesh as blue as the ice that coated his exposed skin.

I swore with disgust for a few seconds before I took my radio and considered letting Dan know, but what difference would it make? We could all go over the details later, for now we had a job to do.

Better to just get on with it, I figured.

With gloved hands I secured one of the loops around his shoulder, tightening it as best as I could without pulling on him too hard. God knows I didn’t want to separate him from that metal with his skin still welded to it. But despite being as gentle as I could, I still noticed the faint sound of frozen flesh cracking as I tugged the second strap tight on his right shoulder.

“He’s secure,” I said at last. “Tell them to start heating the hull.”

“Will do,” Dan replied.

This of course was another part of the process I’d been dreading. It could take nearly an hour for the engineers to heat the hull up to the point where ice started melting. That left me dangling nearly thirty metres off the floor with no one but Gabe for company. To distract me I tried facing the open Arctic, but that savage landscape filled me with an existential dread that frightened me in a different way. It was a painful reminder of how precarious our situation was. Sure, drones could ferry us supplies, and if the situation became truly dire we could always flee to one of the rigs on foot, but that was still a ten mile hike in one of the most hostile environments on Earth.

I looked towards the oil rig anyway, if only whatever minor comfort it might provide. From my position, and with the sky clear, I knew I should be able to at least glimpse the very top of it. And yet even when I saw the very tip of its crenelations, I found no relief. I saw no smoke, no lights. That in itself was worrying, but not as worrying as the tiny bundle of colour I glimpsed about four miles out from our ship at the very limit of the horizon. I hadn’t brought binoculars so I couldn’t say for sure, but I knew there was only one thing that could have left such an unnatural mark on the glistening white expanse that lay beyond me.

“Dan,” I radioed. “Can you get someone on comms. Now the storm’s clear we need to reach the rig and make sure the evacuees were received safely.”

“Already tried,” he said. “Got one of the engineers up there now. Told them to contact me if they had any luck.”

“Have they?”

“Nothing yet. Any sign of that ice thawing?” he asked.

“Some,” I said while looking back at Gabe with discomfort. Beads of sweat were slowly forming on the metal around him.

“We can try ourselves once you’re back up. For now, you’ve got a hell of a wait ahead of you. Might as well buckle up.”

I accepted this logic with a grunt and a grimace before turning back to the Arctic where my eyes focused on that little patch of man-made colour that I knew could only mean something very very bad.

-

“Where the fuck are they?”

Dan fell to his knees and tore into the snowdrift with both hands, slowly revealing a sled laden with supplies. We both recognised it from the convoy of evacuees, only it had clearly failed to reach its destination.

Standing farther back I counted the other lumps of snow, many with bits of plastic and metal poking out, and realised that this abandoned collection of sleds represented almost all of the gear the evacuees had taken with them.

“They must have cut and run,” I said.

“Why would they do that?” Dan asked as he stood back up. “It’s not even that far a walk. And their pay would be docked for leaving all this shit behind. The company specified this material was to be evacuated as well. Fuck it’s half the reason they authorised the evacuation! They wanted their most expensive shit flown to safety too. There’s no way those guys would’ve left it because the walk got a little hard. I mean they didn’t even try to salvage the most important bits.”

“Or even their own personal items,” I added pointing to one sled whose cover had blown over revealing a pile of rucksacks and suitcases. With a gloved hand I fingered a nearby pouch and found an old photo of one of the ship’s navigators beside his wife. Dan, standing over my shoulder, observed with a groan of despair.

“What the fuck man?” he cried. “This is fucked. Why would they do this? We’ve got to keep going to the rig and ask them. We’re already half-way there. Fuck! Why haven’t they come back for it?”

I looked towards the rig. It was closer now, but still no sign of life. No blinking lights. No distant smoke. Nothing.

“Dan I got a bad feeling about all of this. We need to head back.”

“No we need to go ask these fuckers–”

“Dan, I don’t think they left this stuff behind because of bad judgement.”

“What do you mean?”

“They cut and run,” I said. “Something made them drop everything and run for their lives. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. And when you think about Gabe’s body, what happened to it–”

“You think we got a psychopath on our hands?” he asked. “I mean I been thinking the same, if I’m honest, what with Gabe’s body and all the sneaking around leaving shit on people’s beds.”

“What do you mean?”

“The little lumps of coal,” he said. “Everyone got one. Figured it was a prank at first… but look, even if there was a lunatic on board. Someone who seemed normal but was secretly waiting for an opportunity to go all Michael Myers on us, an opportunity just like this one where help was too far to come, how the fuck does one guy make nearly a hundred people shit their pants and run off scared? And how the fuck did they do that to Gabe? We need answers. We need to speak to the evacuees.”

“I got a bad feeling,” I repeated as I scanned the ice and snow. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m not hiking any farther in this, not today. That storm could make a comeback at any time.”

“Should we… should we try and grab some of this stuff?” he asked while pointing to the abandoned convoy. “Some of the more sensitive equipment, maybe?”

“Tomorrow,” I repeated while trying to hide my nerves. Out in the open I was gripped by the inexplicable sensation of being watched. “Let’s just get back on that ship.”

-

“I think it’s time to consider a mayday,” Dan muttered as we both stood paralysed with fear at the lower port. Neither of us could truly believe what we were seeing.

Gabe’s body had been returned to its previous spot.

And now it had company.

“It’s fucking everyone,” Dan groaned. “Every one of them. I count… I can see…”

I forced my eyes to wander over the naked bodies of my former crew, men I’d seen just hours before, now frozen to the side of my ship like little baubles. Even from this far down I could see clear signs of mutilation. Unlike Gabe, they hadn’t been dead long enough for their blood to coagulate. Their wounds had bled freely for at least a few minutes before the cold sealed them, so that below many of the bodies were burgundy patches of ice as large as cars, strange triangular stains that pointed to the gruelling acts of cruelty that ended them. A snipped foot here. A missing arm there. A face caved in so badly it looked like a half-eaten boiled egg. These bodies had been brutalised, and even now some of their wounds still dripped onto the ice below.

“It’s not all of them,” I said after a few minutes of inspecting the damage. “There’s only seven. Someone must still be left onboard.”

-

The canteen was a mess. Tables were overturned and dragged to the far wall, and gore smeared the walls in strange almost hypnotic patterns. Looking at it I couldn’t quite escape the notion that someone had decorated the room with bits of people. What looked like intestines trimmed the windows and draped every flat surface, and shrivelled bits of black and pink meat hung from light fixtures with old brass hooks. On one of the doors lay a wreath made of something I couldn’t entirely recognise, but which I felt no compulsion to investigate further. All I knew for sure was that there were enough fingers bound in its strange material to account for nearly a dozen people.

And in the centre of the room lay three boxes. Plain packaged. Wrapped in brownish paper, and tied with a familiar waxy string. But unlike the packages with coal these were far larger, and they also had tags.

Dan stood in the doorway, audibly gibbering as I approached the nearest box and inspected the little note. The letters seemed Germanic, and the handwriting oddly ancient in its styling. I had no hope of translating it, but I did at least have the sense to take a picture with my phone as a reference so I could recreate it here.

Tîma rið âîeðan ûs of pro icêow êow.

“What the fuck does that mean?” I muttered before pulling at the twine. The note made no sense, but it was clear this ‘present’ had been left for us to find.

“This is leather, or something like it,” Dan said as he stood by my side and ran a palm over the paper the box had come wrapped in. “Ah Jesus fuck!” he cried suddenly, jumping backwards as if it had given him an electric shock.

“What is it?” I asked.

He jabbed nervously at the square foot of fabric he’d dropped on the floor.

“It’s got a fucking tattoo!” he groaned.

I looked down and sure enough, the waxy beige paper had a faded blue ink tattoo of what looked like an anchor.

“Someone’s fucking with us big time,” Dan cried as he shuffled over to the door. It looked like he wanted to flee but when he realised I wasn’t following he couldn’t bring himself to go running off alone. Instead he waited nervously as I finished unwrapping the box.

When I finally opened it I felt an icy terror run down my back like a trickle of cold water.

“What is it?” he asked from the door.

“It’s a bauble,” I said. “Like the one we found with Gabe. Only much, much bigger.”

I lifted it up gingerly, gripping the thread with a gloved finger and thumb. This one was glass, much like the other, but three times the size, and its contents were not an opaque red. They were ivory with glimmers of pink and crimson.

Teeth. Hundreds of them. I uncapped the top and, turning it upside down, I watched as they poured out like little pebbles onto the floor. Many of the roots still had bits of gum attached, and a few were shattered from the force of being removed. But what really terrified me was the sheer quantity. They couldn’t have come from the men who remained on the ship. There were too many. At a guess, it looked like twenty, maybe thirty people’s worth of teeth slowly piling up on the floor.

“Dan I think it’s time to send out a mayday and get the fuck outta here.”

-

“Well, they found the radio,” Dan said, his voice a flat monotone as we surveyed the damage to the helm. Not to mention what was left of Alec.

“Is that a fucking Christmas tree?” I muttered, only just able to glimpse Dan’s nodding head as he confirmed my suspicions.

What remained of Alec had been mutilated beyond almost all recognition, barring his surprisingly intact head and the expression of agony painted across it. Otherwise his body had been stripped and repurposed into a conical shape. His spine, fused with other bones, ran straight to the ground, and his skin had been removed and replaced in a strange new arrangement such that it bunched around his neck and spread outwards in a cone where it reached the floor and was nailed down with black, wooden pegs. It strongly resembled a wigwam, complete with a slit down the middle that revealed the contents within.

“They made him into a fucking tree,” I muttered again, surveying the gut-wrenching arrangement of his ribs and limbs made to resemble stunted branches that helped prop up the ‘tent’.

“What do you make of that?” Dan asked while gesturing to the large glass pane that made up the helm’s view of the ship beyond. Normally it’d be clear, but right now it was covered in what looked like thousands of tiny hand prints made of blood and what might have even been shit. You might imagine the handprint of a child, by the way, but this was not the case. Small as they were, these hands had the slender proportions of an adult, just somehow shrunk down. The effect was bizarrely unsettling, the kind of thing that simply didn’t look right. And yet as horrifying as this sight was, it was the smashed and broken radio that truly threatened to send me spiralling into despair. Nothing remained. Even worse, all other spares on the ship had been gathered up, brought to this location, and pulverised into barely recognisable bits and pieces. I recognised the radio from my own office, and Dan’s, and even Gabe’s.

“I’d say that’s every last radio on this ship,” I said.

“Look,” Dan said, gesturing to the two boxes at Alec’s feet, or foot rather, as he now balanced on a single vertiginous limb. I had to imagine those boxes were the unopened presents we’d left behind at the canteen. “Shall we open them?”

“Fuck that,” I replied. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

-

“You know the more I think of it, the more fucked up the whole concept is,” Dan said as we approached the abandoned convoy.

“What concept?”

“Just the elves in the workshop,” he replied.

“Elves?” I scoffed.

“Little handprint,” he replied while waving his own palm at me. “And yeah, lumps of coal, decorations… fucking elves, man. Sounds stupid but can you imagine being the first guy to describe a gorilla to someone? It’s a weird world. Plenty of weird stuff in it. Why not elves?”

“So what?” I asked as we continued trudging through the snow. “We were naughty?”

“No I think it’s different,” he said. “I mean like I said, right, it’s a fucked up idea isn’t it. All those toys being made by elves. Why? Who pays ‘em? Can’t be their natural environment.”

“Pays them?” I cried and for a moment I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yeah who fucking pays them?” he snapped. “Like what? They do it for the fun of it? I mean come on we’ve heard that one before, right? Forced labour, but don’t worry they actually like it. They like making free shit for us to enjoy?”

“I just assumed it was just a story,” I said.

“I think we got bits and pieces of something lost to history,” he replied. “But whatever the real deal is, these things are pissed off and mean. I get the feeling we’re paying for sins that were made centuries ago. Feels like they hate us, doesn’t it? I’m just saying, if you think about the stories that we’ve got, stories that were passed down, makes sense why they feel that way. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I’m not gonna say there hasn’t been something of a… theme, to what we’ve what seen,” I said. “But let’s hold off before we start throwing words like elf aro–”

Before I could finish my sentence something caught my foot and I went over head first so hard that I practically disappeared into the snow. Thankfully, even as I fought against the suffocating white that enveloped me Dan ran over and was digging me out before panic could really set in. That helped me get my bearings and as I used both hands to push myself up I realised, at last, what had tripped me up.

“Ah fuck,” I hissed. “It’s…” for a moment my mind stalled as I tried to think of another way to describe what was laying at my feet. “They’re our presents,” I finally said.

Dan knelt down beside me and surveyed the two brown boxes.

“I think we need to take the hint,” I said. “I’m 99% sure these are the same ones in the canteen and the helm. The tags look identical.”

“Should we open them?” Dan asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s getting co–”

Out of nowhere a snowball pelted me in the face. It hurt like a fucker, and I cried out before swearing violently. Ice had gotten right in my eye, and something sharp had lashed my face. Looking down I saw the remnants of the snowball and noticed glass shards glistening in its crumbled remains.

Another one flew past and narrowly missed Dan’s face. Looking around neither of us could spot where they were coming from, but the snow drifts were deep and only growing as the blizzard worked up to full strength.

“Just take them with us,” I cried. “And let’s get to that fucking rig!”

-

The elevator didn’t respond to our call, so we were forced to climb the stairs and it was no easy feat. It wasn’t just that we were exhausted. It was the sheer weight of despair brought on by the realisation that the oil rig was so clearly unpowered. Your average rig houses thousands of people and will often come close to being the largest man-made object you’ll ever see, but this one was silent like a haunted house. And the further we went up the stairs the more certain I became we’d find no one alive. Our evacuees never made it, and the men who awaited them had likely suffered the exact same fate.

“Here we go,” Dan said at last as we reached the door. “That’s not a good sign,” he added as we both observed that it had been left open and snow had already begun to gather on the other side.

We squeezed past anyway and surveyed the small room beyond. It was filled with coats and boots and other cold-weather gear reserved for the workers who had the misfortune of having to go down the ice for whatever work needed doing down there. All of it looked untouched, half-frozen in the cold and slowly icing over. That door must’ve been left open for a long time.

Beyond that we found our first signs of a massacre. Streaks of blood along the floor and walls. A lone shoe with a foot still inside. A scalp nailed to a door. The further we went the more we saw of the crew and the inventive damage done to their remains. Some of the rooms had been barricaded, we noticed. And while most of those barricades had come tumbling down and their occupants dragged out–kicking and screaming from the looks of the bloody finger marks–only to end up mutilated God-knows-where in the depths of the rig, other barricades remained steadfast and intact. At these doors Dan and I would stop and knock furiously in the hope that at least a few people had survived holed up in their rooms, but no one ever replied. On the few occasions these rooms had windows, we looked inside and saw only empty rooms filled with tins of food that no one ever got to eat. Clearly people had tried to plan for the long term, but what happened to them no one could say.

“At least it’s silent,” Dan said as we ventured deeper inside. “No footsteps.”

“And the heat is on,” I added.

Dan stopped and sniffed the air, his grimace showing that he clearly understood what I meant. The stench in the air spoke volumes about how many corpses must lay nearby.

“Maybe whoever’s hunting us abandoned this place,” Dan said but before I could reply his words were proven drastically wrong. From deep within those haunting corridors came a keening wail that slowly drifted into what I could only describe as a sort of singing. The tune was alien to me, bordering on pure noise instead of music, but there was no denying an underlying pattern that evoked in me fear and unrest. It was music made for inhuman ears and maybe even inhuman minds.

I damn near pissed myself when I realised it was rapidly approaching our position.

“Where’s the radio room?” I asked Dan, who had experience of this particular rig in the past.

“Shit!” he hissed as he scanned the different hallways. “I think it’s this way.”

Together we took off down the hall he singled out, and on more than one occasion we were sent nearly skidding to the floor as we ran across a slick layer of half-congealed blood, amongst other things. By the time we finally reached the radio room our clothes and hands were soaked in foul-stinking gore that looked nearly black in the low light. Although, I noticed with a hint of humour, that neither of us had dropped our ‘presents’.

“Alright,” Dan cried as we barged into the room and he ran over ready to fiddle with the machinery. I slammed the door shut and locked it and turned around to see what might be the single greatest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

The radio was intact, and it was even blinking with lights. And to reinforce the good news, Dan began to cackle with hysterical joy.

“Oh fuck they did it!” he squealed. “They got an SOS out! It’s been ringing for… holy shit two days! Oh fuck Mike they’re on their way man! They must be!”

I slid against the door and began to laugh and cry with relief. I’d spent so long expecting the worst-case scenario that this little bit of good news felt like it was at risk of making my heart explode.

“Oh thank fuck for that!” I cried. “We can hole up in here and–”

The singing returned, a distant howl that quickly ramped up. Before either of us had a chance to speak it became a deafening cry and the door behind my back began to vibrate with a chorus of a thousand alien voices.

Dan looked at me with utter despair.

“We’re not going to make it,” he said. “So close, maybe a day at most, but those fucking things will never let us go. We should just open these fucking presents and then sit back and wait.”

An idea struck me. I looked down at the box in my hand and realised it might be our only hope.

-

“Are you sure about this?” Dan whispered as he stood by the door. Much to our surprise the singing had cut off suddenly, but the rapid patter of little feet just beyond told us we were not alone, not yet.

“You said yourself,” I said. “They fucking hate us. Let’s give them a reason not to.”

Together we had opened the boxes we’d carried so far, emptied them, and stuffed whatever objects we could find on hand. Shiny things. Electronics. A radio handset. A phone. A watch. We piled as much as we could into the empty boxes before rewrapping them and tying the twine into delicate bows.

“Fucking gift exchange,” Dan snorted as he gripped the door handle. “I’m gonna die over a fucking gift exchange.”

“Just do it,” I said. “On the count of three, open the door and push the boxes outside.”

“Alright,” he nodded and we both counted down in unison.

One.

Two.

Three.

Dan ripped the door open and shoved the boxes outside but before he’d even extended his arm all the way he was pulled so hard that his face slammed into the steel. For the briefest of moments he looked at me with terror in his eyes. I overcame my terror and began to run towards him but it was already too late. A grotesque but tiny fist reached out, hooked a clawed finger into his mouth, and was soon joined by nearly a hundred others that all gripped Dan’s body and clothes wherever they could find purchase.

The last thing Dan said was a muffled bunch of words I never managed to understand. And then with a single effort our hunters dragged him beyond the threshold and I reached the door in time to slam it shut and lock it tight once more.

-

Help came, in the end. I couldn’t say how long I was in that room. It felt like weeks but in truth was probably no more than a day. Still, it damn near drove me insane. Not just the waiting, but the sounds of claws scratching at metal and strange symbols daubed on the glass outside. I slept whenever exhaustion took over my body, and each time I would awake to find new decorations inside my room. Whatever those things were, it was clear they could have killed me anytime they wanted. I had to assume my plan had worked, but all the same it was piss poor consolation given the loss of my closest friend.

Too little, too late.

When help finally arrived it came in the form of some very stern looking men in black-military uniform, devoid of any signifying markers. Given the way they set about planting explosives while two of them manhandled me towards a chopper, I assumed they were gonna fly me to some dingy little room and interrogate me. But they didn’t. They dropped me on a civilian ship and left me to receive medical attention from some very confused looking researchers. Of course, when I tried telling them what I’d seen and heard, it quickly became clear why my rescuers didn’t think it was necessary to beat or threaten me into silence.

No one believed me. Why would they? My story was the rambling of a lunatic. The ship was sunk and I was blamed for sailing it right into an ice shelf which, technically, wasn’t incorrect. And the oil rig was lost to a nasty fire, at least that’s what official reports said.

I never really moved on though. And even now this time of year threatens to overload my senses. It isn’t just the constant reminder of the fucked up things I saw.

It’s the cards they keep sending me, each one written in what I’ve since discovered was Anglo-Saxon, or old English. They thank me for my gift. Not the box, you understand. But Dan. They thought Dan was the gift. They took him gladly and spared me. I might find it possible to move past this, to live with the guilt even, if they weren’t so insistent on including bits of him in the card.

A finger.

An ear.

A tooth.

His tongue.

Fresh meat pinned to the raw looking paper made from God-knows-what. And their notes scrawled in that bizarre Germanic tongue keep thanking me over and over.

Willes êow gifol lêoflic!

Thank you good friend! They write me, and the words chill me to my core. Because it doesn’t take a doctor to tell that even though it’s been over a year since I last saw Dan, the bits of him they post have been freshly cut and taken from a man who must surely be alive.