Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house
There was no living creature, not even a mouse.
The dust had all settled. The chimney was bare,
And a musty dank odor hung thick in the air.
The upstairs was empty, the rooms and the beds,
While ghostly lights played on the curtains’ bare threads.
And creaking in the kitchen, a loose water tap,
Had been dripping forever since the last cold snap.
But out in the woods where the snow was now scattered,
A ruined old cabin with windows all shattered,
Lies a secret of old now buried in ash;
A memory lost from the minds of the past.
The moon and the mist and the squawk of a crow,
Rends the silence, the stillness, like a fiddle bow.
And there in the darkness, but standing right near,
Is that thing quite un-nameless, the cause of all fear.
In darkness enveloped and features black and slick,
The creature, the demon with muscles so thick,
Slinks forward like fog or like smoke from a flame
As it passes the cabin the house now its aim.
What horrible summons could call forth and mix in,
This nameless and shapeless dark abomination.
Up the path to the house, at the door, in the hall.
‘Neath a coal blackened cloak eight spider legs crawl.
No more children that lived in the house there to cry,
At the passing of evil with death in its eye.
From the hall to the dining room now scuttled through,
In shadows a whisper the nameless didst spew,
A breath of pure malice demanding the proof
Of treachery deep from the one who’s aloof.
And out of the shadows stepped a creature so fair
With a translucent figure and long flowing hair.
In her eyes was a sadness, though lightness afoot,
Was a weight in her presence an object she put,
In the hands of the beast, a brown rotted sack,
was the proof of the deed in the soot in the black.
She glided from vision to whence she was buried,
Her part in the summons no longer to tarry.
A spot in the distance for her all aglow,
And she faded from earth and the morbid tableau.
The house shook and trembled from earthquakes beneath,
And a coldness so bitter, would rattle your teeth.
The rumbling, the house was like that of a belly
Filled with nothing for days, not bread, and not jelly.
The creature now hurried, like ’twas sure of itself,
To the basement, the cellar, the hidden back shelf.
The call was now clear from the victim long dead,
A summons for vengeance the truth had been said.
The token acquired from deep basement murk,
The cabin in sight, and the tools for the work.
The fragments recovered, the calling of crows,
The morning now chases, the shadow now goes.
In life quite afar from the woods and the thistles.
The man with the secret just leans back and whistles,
But the sudden reveal and a death from the fright,
Now the summons completed and all is set right.