A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART SIX

Ah, now, you see I’ve kept myself to myself for the last couple of days, and letting myself get far too engrossed in the process of telling the story. Now that’s either a good sign, or a very bad one, because once I believe that the story itself is becoming worthwhile, the fact that nobody else gives a rat’s kidney about it will start to bother me, and then I’ll probably start to doubt the worthwhile-ness (if that is even a word…?) of the entire exercise.

Nevertheless, at that point of an unfolding story, a couple of segment’s worth of exposition was required, because the “main players” needed to be introduced and then placed into their positions ready for the rest of the plot to unfold, so I suppose that (in that way at least), it served its purpose. The laws of storytelling have been obeyed and the loyal reader can go forward and get more engrossed in the story with confidence at least, if not with any real sense of satisfaction.

I have, however, started to worry now that one of the characters introduced very early on might already be getting forgotten about as the party season gets under way and whatever readership that there might be wakes up with sore heads and gaps in their memory, so perhaps we’d better go back to the future and reintroduce the first (or last) Mr Snatch, however briefly.

In the far future of his desolated world, Mr Snatch turned awkwardly and with more than a little fear. The creak behind him could, after all, been little more than the building settling as it occasionally did, or it could indicate the imminent final collapse of the entire precarious structure.

Equally, given the sudden extra chill that he was feeling on an already chilly day, it might well have been that someone, somewhere had just parked themself upon his grave and sent an involuntary shudder throughout his entire body.

He smiled at this slight superstition. The one thing that he could almost guarantee with any certainty was that he was unlikely to ever have anything resembling a grave. As he suspected that he was in fact the very last human being alive upon this desolate world, he could be pretty sure that no one was likely to ever come along and bury him, nor indeed walk upon it afterwards.

His destiny, he knew, was in all probability for his remains to slowly disintegrate in his favourite chair, and for the last humans seen alive on that God-forsaken planet to be Tom and Barbara and Margo going over the same old routine on that old tape of his.

As extinctions went, he smiled to himself, there could probably have been worse ones.

The one thing that never crossed his mind, however, was the possibility that the mysterious creak had been caused by the footfall of another human being. That was so unlikely now that it no longer ever bore thinking about, and he had long ago stopped leaping at the thought of mysterious figures lurking in dark shadows and hidden corners waiting to pounce upon him and suddenly bring an unwelcome end to his empty days.

Whilst he was pretty sure that nothing else human was alive enough to share this miserable world with him, wolves had been rumoured to survive and be roaming the desolate wasteland. Well, he said “rumoured” but the rumours had only come from within his own imagination and probably had more to do with the instruction manual he’d read whilst he was inside the shelter than in any actual sighting which he might have imagined.

He shivered again as he again got the strange sensation that the echoes of the past seemed to be catching up with him once more, and he recalled the last days of the fall of civilisation and shuddered.

When he’d locked himself inside the shelter he’d genuinely believed that he was doing himself a favour. The last days had not been easy, but everyone else seemed far too interested in smashing everything or in having some kind of wild Christmas party (for it had been at that time of the year that things got really bad) as everything turned to hell.

Nobody had seemed to see any wisdom in his offers of sanctuary, no matter how much he offered them. All of the riches, all of the money and the gold that his family had accumulated didn’t seem to be worth anything any more in a world all gone to hell, and nobody seemed all that impressed with the idea of him as a suitable person to share a chance of survival with once those trappings had been stripped away.

He had never though of himself as much of a “catch” anyway, but his shortcomings became even more apparent once you took the fact that he had been extremely wealthy out of the equation.

Later on, once he had shut himself away from the madness in the dark gloom of his steel trap, he had heard them pleading to let him in, but by then the time-locks had been in place and there had been nothing more that he could offer them. Eventually the voices and the screams had died down and it had gone really quiet and he had sat alone in the dark, weeping.

Weeks later, when the satisfying hiss and click of the time-locks releasing had freed him from his self-imposed imprisonment, he had hoped that there might be others, but as the weeks of listening for signals and searching the horizon and beyond had stretched into years, he had come to realise that it was becoming more and more unlikely that there was anyone else left to share this world with him.

He shrugged. This line of thought never did him any good and it was usually best not to pursue it. Instead, he decided that he ought to return back to his room and place himself safely back in his familiar chair in front of the old cathode-ray tube with Tom and Barbara, and Margo, but when he did so, he felt a sudden chill descend upon the room.

He looked around him and noticed an old piece of faded cardboard pinned to the wall that he didn’t remember ever having been there before. It was positioned just behind the dancing blue cube, so he thought that he would have noticed it if it had been there earlier.

The tiny dancing cube had been part of a pointless piece of trivia that generations of his family had clung on to for various reasons, and had sprung out from amongst the old papers that he had found in that battered suitcase which his father had kept and he’d had to sort through when he had died. He’d rather liked it and somehow it had been amongst the few things that he’d grabbed to take with him into the shelter on that last morning.

He was sure that the cardboard hadn’t been there before, though. Surely he would have noticed it…? The fact that it had been pinned there seemed dangerously significant in some way and that troubled him far than the vague sense that all those years alone had finally taken their toll and that his memory had finally started to fail.

He moved cautiously across the room and pulled it off the wall and turned it over in his hands before deciding to read it…