SCP-4666 — The Yule Man

[ Night 1 — The Field · The Household ]

WORLD STATE

◆ Norway → Finnmark → The Farmhouse at Nedre Elvemo → The Kitchen December 21 | 14:40 (Afternoon) Weissnacht: Night 1/12 — The Watching #4666017 Mode: The Household

The sun has not risen over Finnmark in three weeks, and it will not rise today either. What passes for afternoon is a long blue hour — the snow giving back more light than the sky, the birches at the far edge of the field drawn in charcoal against it.

The farmhouse at Nedre Elvemo is old timber and older wiring. The woodstove in the corner ticks as it heats. The kettle has started its low roar. The nearest neighbour is four kilometres down a road the plough reaches twice a week, and the only sound outside is the wind dragging loose snow across the yard in long white sheets.

The window over the sink looks out across the field.

There is someone standing at the treeline.

The scale is hard to judge at first — two hundred metres of flat white and nothing to measure against — until a birch beside the figure gives it away. Whoever it is stands taller than the lowest branches. Tall, and white, and thin in a way that does not look like thinness: the shape of something with the meat taken off it. Long pale hair moves in the wind. Nothing else about it moves at all.

The thermometer nailed to the outside of the window frame reads minus twenty-six.

The figure is not wearing anything.

It is not waving. It is not walking. It stands with its long arms hanging at its sides and its head tipped a few degrees to one side, the way a person tilts their head to see past a reflection on glass. Across the field, in the blue dark, the face is a smudge — except for two points of flat, pale light where the eyes would be, catching the kitchen lamp and giving it back.

The kettle begins to scream.

Another gust lifts the snow off the field in a long white curtain, sideways, hiding the treeline completely for a breath. When it settles, the figure is still there. Exactly where it was. Exactly as still.

Facing the house.

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[ Night 5 — The Window · The Household ]

WORLD STATE

◆ Finland → Nurmes → The Cabin at Lake Pielinen → The Bedroom December 26 | 02:14 (Late Night) Weissnacht: Night 5/12 — The Watching #4666017 Mode: The Household Items: Phone — three blurred photographs

Something wakes you, and for a moment there is no telling what.

The cabin is silent. The stove downstairs has burned down to a red eye behind its glass. Christmas is a day behind now — the lights on the porch rail still blink their tired loop, green, red, green, throwing colour across the snow that slopes down to the frozen lake.

On the nightstand, the phone holds three photographs.

Night two, by the sauna: a tall pale smear at the edge of the birches, too narrow and too high to be anyone you know. Night three, out on the lake ice: the same shape, closer, standing in the middle of all that white with no tracks leading to it in the picture. Night four, at the end of the jetty — forty metres from the cabin — and in that one there was almost a face. Almost. Every time the phone zoomed in, the face became noise.

Tonight it is not at the jetty.

The curtains did not quite meet when they were drawn, and in the gap between them is the window — and in the window, there is frost. Not on the outside, where frost belongs. On the inside of the glass, feathering outward in a fan, the way it forms when someone breathes against a pane from very close in very deep cold.

It has formed at face height. Face height for someone standing on the ground outside a window whose sill is level with your chest.

Behind the frost, filling the top of the frame, pale and long and still, is the face.

The eyes are small and almost without colour, sunk deep in a skull wrapped in skin like waxed paper. Long white hair. A white beard, stiff and yellowed around a mouth that is closed. The porch lights blink — green — and the eyes give the green back, flat, the way a fox's do in headlights.

He is not looking at the door. He is not looking at the window latch.

He is looking at the bed.

He does not move. The frost goes on spreading, very slowly, across the inside of the glass. The phone is on the nightstand, within reach.

[ Night 9 — The Weight Overhead · The Household ]

WORLD STATE

◆ United States → Alaska → The House at Mile Six → The Living Room December 29 | 23:30 (Night) Weissnacht: Night 9/12 — The Weight Overhead #4666811 Mode: The Household Household: Mara

Every light in the house is on. Mara insisted, and nobody argued.

She is on the couch in her parka with her boots still laced, a kitchen knife on the cushion beside her thigh, the TV muted on some channel showing a fireplace on a loop. Twenty-six years old and three weeks into what was supposed to be a cheap winter in a friend's rental at the end of the road out of Hoonah. She has not slept properly in two nights.

The tall man stopped standing at the edge of the spruce after the seventh night. That should have helped.

Instead, last night, the footsteps started.

The state trooper who drove out this afternoon climbed into the attic with a flashlight, came down with dust on his knees, and said the words raccoon, wind, and settling. He wrote a case number on the back of a receipt. He did not say anything about the smell, though he wrinkled his nose at the door: rot and wet dog and pine pitch and cold fireplace ash, in a house where nobody has lit the fireplace.

The smell is in the living room now. There is no source. It is simply there, the way the cold is there.

Above the ceiling, something takes a step.

It is not small. It is not quick. It comes down heavy and flat, like a bare heel, and the light fixture in the middle of the room shivers on its chain. A long pause. Another step, from the kitchen end of the house toward the hall. Then another. Unhurried. Exactly as unhurried as the night before.

Mara's hand finds the knife without her looking at it.

"That's not on the roof," she whispers. "Listen. That's not on the roof. That's inside the ceiling."

The steps cross over the hallway — over the attic hatch — and do not stop there. They keep going, slow, toward the back of the house. Toward the bedroom at the end of the hall.

Then they stop.

Mara's eyes go to the hall, and then to you.

"That's your room," she says.

[ Night 12 — The Twelfth Night · The Household ]

WORLD STATE

◆ Iceland → Egilsstaðir → Grænahlíð Farm → The Kitchen January 1 | 15:10 (Afternoon) Weissnacht: Night 12/12 — The Twelfth Night #4666012 Mode: The Household Items: Shotgun — the farm's old pump-action, four shells

Last night, Egilsstaðir set off its fireworks for the new year. From the farm you could see them over the hill — small, soundless flowers of green and gold above the town, nine kilometres away. Nobody up here was celebrating.

Eleven nights.

The first week, he stood at the far fence by the sheep shed, white against white, and was gone whenever anyone walked toward him — just a line of long bare footprints that began in the middle of the field and ended in the middle of the field. Then he stood at the windows. Then, on the eighth night, he stopped being seen at all, and the roof began.

Four nights of footsteps. Slow, heavy, deliberate, back and forth over the bedrooms, stopping in the same place every time. The smell came with them — rot and pitch and cold ash — and it is in everything now: the curtains, the blankets, the wool of the coats by the door. The sheep stood in the pen all night every night facing the house, and in the morning not one of them had lain down.

Last night, at four in the morning, the footsteps stopped mid-stride and did not start again.

Today, nothing.

No figure at the fence. No weight on the roof. The only marks in the snow are the ones that were there at dawn: a full, unbroken ring of bare footprints circling the whole house at a distance of ten paces. No line leads in to it. No line leads away.

The sky outside the kitchen window has turned the grey-violet of a bruise. Dark comes early here in January; it is already coming. The shotgun is propped against the counter by the back door, where it has been since the fifth night. The kettle is cold. The radio is talking quietly about road closures on the way to Seyðisfjörður.

Above the ceiling, for the first time in four nights, nothing moves at all.

[ The Morning After · The Task Force ]

WORLD STATE

◆ Canada → Labrador → The Brandt House → The Front Room January 2 | 08:20 (Morning) Weissnacht: Over #4666002 Mode: The Task Force Team: Black Advent — 6/6 standing Items: Sidearm, Evidence kit The Coin: #4666742

The helicopter set Black Advent down at the end of a road that nobody had ploughed since Christmas. The RCMP cruiser is still sitting in the drive with its lights turning, painting the snow red and blue and red. One of the two constables is sitting in it with the door open, staring at nothing. The other has thrown up in the snowbank and is pretending he hasn't.

Lieutenant Vaage takes the porch steps without slowing. "Bielecki, upstairs. Sokolov, perimeter and tracks. Kowalczyk, get me the 911 audio and every phone in this house. Okafor, they're yours as soon as we've cleared." A glance back. "{{user}}. With me."

The front room smells of pine and blood and something underneath both of them — rot, and cold ash.

The Christmas tree is still lit. Under it, the presents are unopened.

The Brandt household is on the sofa, in a row, facing the dead fireplace. Gerald, fifty-eight. Ruth, fifty-five. Callum, thirty-one. Someone has tucked the house's wool blankets over their knees. Their hands lie palm-up on the armrests and the cushions between them, each one pinned flat with a single roofing nail from the box on the shed shelf, and each of them has a short branch of fir laid across their lap like a napkin. Whatever was done to them was done to all three the same way, and was done for a long time, and they were facing each other while it happened. The carpet is dark from the sofa to the hearth.

"Upstairs clear." Bielecki's voice on the radio is flatter than usual. "Youngest one's room is empty. Ellie, twenty-three. Bed's been slept in. Window's latched from the inside. No forced entry anywhere in this house, Lieutenant. Anywhere."

Okafor has crouched by the mantel without touching it. Her torch picks out a print in the dried blood on the stone: a hand with fingers far too long, and fingertips whose whorls loop back on themselves twice.

"It's him," she says quietly.

Sokolov, from outside: "One set of tracks. Bare feet. Coming in from the field to the back wall." A pause. "Nothing going out."

Vaage stands very still in the middle of the room, looking at the three people on the sofa. Then she turns.

"The RCMP sergeant wants answers in four hours, and those two constables need dosing before then. Tell me what you see, {{user}}."

[ The Stocking · The Task Force ]

WORLD STATE

◆ United States → Michigan → The Lindqvist House → The Back Bedroom January 2 | 07:50 (Morning) Weissnacht: Over #4666002 Mode: The Task Force Household: Anders, Karin, Signe Team: Black Advent — 6/6 standing Items: Evidence kit The Coin: #4666210

Kowalczyk's flag came in at 06:12: a 911 call out of the Upper Peninsula, a woman saying someone was in our house last night, I heard him walking around, the doors were locked. The Lindqvists had already been on the watch list for a week — two reports of a naked man standing at the edge of their woodlot, filed and laughed off by the county.

The sheriff's deputy is still in the kitchen with a notepad and a cooling coffee, and he looks relieved to have people with better credentials take this off his hands. Anders and Karin Lindqvist sit at the kitchen table in their robes, holding hands across it without seeming to know they are doing it. Nobody in the house is hurt. Nobody is missing.

Their daughter Signe, twenty, found it at the foot of her bed when she woke.

It is sitting there still, square to the bedframe, exactly where it was left. A small drum. The hoop is rough-carved wood, uneven, gouged by some blunt blade. The head is stretched skin — pale, faintly freckled, tight enough to ring — laced to the hoop with a fine translucent cord that is not any kind of cord sold in a shop. Beside it lie two drumsticks of polished bone, one noticeably longer than the other.

The back bedroom smells of pine resin, and under that, of rot and cold ashes. The window is latched. In the snow outside it, one line of long bare footprints arrives from the woodlot and stops at the wall of the house. None leave.

Dr. Okafor kneels beside the bed in nitrile gloves, very calm, very quiet. "Don't let her see me bag it," she murmurs. "{{user}} — the sticks first, please. Separate bags. Then I want every surface in this room photographed before Kowalczyk's done with the parents."

From the bedroom doorway comes a small sound. Signe is standing there in an oversized hoodie, arms wrapped around herself, looking past Okafor's shoulder at the drum.

"It's — somebody's idea of a joke, right?" Her voice cracks on it. "My ex used to make stuff like that. Whittling. It's just a weird present. It's just a drum."

She looks straight at you.

"Right?"

[ Night 10 — The Stakeout · The Task Force ]

WORLD STATE

◆ Norway → Telemark → The Halvorsen Farm → The Hayloft December 30 | 21:40 (Night) Weissnacht: Night 10/12 — The Weight Overhead #4666811 Mode: The Task Force Household: Erik, Liv, Sindre Team: Black Advent — 6/6 standing Items: Thermal scope, Rifle, Radio

The hayloft door is open a hand's width to the night, and the cold comes through it like water.

Sixty metres across the yard, the Halvorsen farmhouse sits under a fresh foot of snow with every window lit. Liv Halvorsen called the local police on the fourth night about a naked old man standing by the sheep fence. Kowalczyk's search pulled the report out of a regional database before anyone in Skien had finished laughing at it. Now the family believes they are under police protection from a stalker, and three of Black Advent are living in their mudroom drinking their coffee.

Erik, fifty-two. Liv, forty-nine. Their son Sindre, nineteen, home from university for the holidays and openly annoyed about all of it until the night before last, when the footsteps started over his bedroom.

The radio clicks.

"Mother says it's back." Bielecki, low, from inside the house. "Footsteps on the roof. Over the boy's room again."

The thermal scope shows the farmhouse roof in flat blue cold. Snow. Shingles at the eaves. The warm orange bloom of the chimney stack. Nothing else. No heat. No shape.

Kowalczyk, from the van: "Drone's overhead now. I've got nothing on the roof. Nothing on thermal, nothing on optical. {{user}}, tell me you've got something."

Switch the scope from thermal to day channel, and the roof comes back grey and grainy under the yard lights — and there, in the clean new snow along the ridge, a footprint presses itself into being. Long. Narrow. Bare. Then another one beyond it. Then another. Slow. Unhurried. One after another, from the far gable toward the chimney, with nothing at all standing in them.

On the ridge above you, out of sight, Sokolov has started counting under his breath.

The prints reach the chimney stack. Then they stop.

The radio hisses. Vaage, very quietly: "{{user}}. Report."

.