Chapter 1: The Letter

The 27^th of November was a calm day with little wind and no rain, yet overcast and cold. The puddles from the night before were still lingering around, and despite the beginning Christmas season, the world seemed to be stuck in autumn. It was too early for snow, but the weather still did not fit the season, and it felt wrong.

Trapped between the season’s carols and TV shows, films about this spirit visiting that man, and the traditional advertisements, a lonely person was sitting in their cold room. The heater was turned off, but at this point, they were not quite sure why. They could have turned it on at any moment, perhaps after letting out the air that might have accumulated over the past year. In the great chaos of the world, not turning on the heater was a small bit of control they had, something they could do, and as insignificant as it may have been in the grand scheme of things, refusing to burn this small bit of oil for heat gave them the feeling of a small success. Of course that meant they had to leave the window tilted open all the time, or else the humidity in their small chamber might have got too high and moulded away the walls. Whether the open window was enough to prevent that, they were not sure, but so far, their room still seemed to be intact.

Why does Christmas lose its spirit to so many people? Is it just part of growing up, perhaps seeing behind the curtain that used to hide the season’s miracles? They weren’t sure, but they had an idea formulated in their head. A theory that was not yet ripe enough to be articulated but that was based not on Christmas but the life surrounding it.

But what kind of life was it that surrounded Christmas? Their life itself seemed fine. Parents who were difficult at times, but at the end of the day, they loved their child and supported them as much as they could. A good financial situation – they didn’t even need to work while they went to university because their father had worked himself into a position that was paid well enough to keep them all afloat. Going to university in the first place was a privilege, and with their degree, they could make a decent living in the future.

Every upside, however, has its downsides. Do good parents in the present amend the mistakes they made in the past? Nobody is without fault, but surely there is a point at which present love cannot cover up the hurt of the past. And what good is a stable financial situation when one refuses to take any money one doesn’t need to function? An understaffed university that leaves its students to fend for themselves, too, can be a curse for someone from a working-class background.

“You cum stain,” they exclaimed sitting in front of their computer. For the past three hours, they had been trying to get the dependencies of a package in RStudio into a working condition, but even with the help of the internet, they were unsuccessful. “Listen, bitch, I need you to work. I need you to-- know what, I give up. I’ll do it differently. Fuck you. I’ll just use a spreadsheet. The visualisation won’t be as nice and it’ll be more work, but who cares. And it’s just a case study, there are only, like, two variables, I can easily do that with a spreadsheet.”

sudo apt remove rstudio
sudo apt remove r-base-core

On the bright side, they thought, they hadn’t spent any time actually learning the R language. If the script from the internet didn’t want to work, so be it. Professional-looking graphs in their Master’s thesis would have been nice, but a boxy graph from a spreadsheet would do just fine. And if the extra day of work to put together a working spreadsheet for statistical analysis were to break their back, their thesis would have been doomed from the start anyway.

The computer’s fans stopped spinning as it shut down. The one upside of living in the cold was that their computer could barely run hot enough to throttle its performance. Even in the summer, though, that wasn’t an issue because they rarely put their computer through something that could cause such heat. Still, it was a comfortable lie to believe.

The TV in the living room was too loud, as always. They had come down from their room on the first floor to see how their family was doing, and as usual, they were all in the living room. Their sister was staring at her laptop, working on some university project herself. Their parents sat on the sofa, both of them with their smartphones in their hands, while a nature documentary was blaring from the TV. Amidst them sat a bunny who used to be small.

“Don’t--” their sister yelled as the bunny jumped onto the sofa where she was working. The bunny could have chewed through one of the charger cables, or bit into the pieces of paper lying around, and the little critter was just too annoying to deal with at the moment. She lifted him up and put him back on the ground. He hopped away, towards the table in the middle of the room, under which he often sat.

As they entered the room, their family gave them a quick hello, but everybody was too busy doing other things. They looked at the Christmas decorations that had been put up without them because they had been busy deleting RStudio from their computer. Those lights and plastic twigs used to contain a magic that enthralled them every day of the season, but now they were meaningless. A ritual. We’ve always done it this way. Going through the motions.

The bunny came running towards them, and they sat down on the ground. The bunny was curious and sniffed their pants, stood up on his hind legs, and stubbed their hand with his nose. An attempt to pet the bunny was quickly rejected as he ran back to his spot underneath the table.

They took a cookie from the plate on the table, but before they could eat it, and before their father could strike up a conversation, the doorbell rang.

“Oh, who could that be? On a Sunday?” their father said. When he put down his phone and prepared to stand up, they were already at the door to the stairwell. “Oh, you’re already going.”

Through the glass panes in the front door, they saw a short man. The door swung open, and the short man stood in the cone of light radiating from the lamp above the door, the becoming darkness around him.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “My Liege has tasked me to deliver this.”

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His hands, at first hidden on the back of a black, tailored suit, came into sight and revealed a rose. It lay on the open palms of both of his hands, and attached to it was a small envelope, just big enough for a postcard. He presented the rose to them, but they were too fascinated by the light’s reflections on the man’s bald head. A reminding cough brought them back to the present situation, and they took the rose from the man’s hands.

“Who exactly are you?” they asked. “And who would send me a rose?”

They looked at the envelope, as black as the rose, and tried to decipher the letters on it. Glossy black ink on a matte black envelope was hard to read, especially in this light, but they had to admit that it had a certain style.

“Who sent this?” they repeated, but when they looked up from the envelope, the man was gone. Bewildered, they stepped out the door and looked left and right, but there was no sign of him anywhere. The lamp, which was attached to a motion sensor, turned off, and they went back inside. They put the rose and the accompanying envelope on a stair and went back to their family.

“Who was it?” their father asked, his phone in his hand again.

“Just… Jehovah's witnesses,” they lied.

“Ah, they’re trying their luck during Christmas season.”

“I guess,” they said. “I’ll just take my cookie and go back up.”

With the door to their room not only closed but looked from the inside, they stared at what had just been delivered to them. The rose was cool, it being black and all, but the envelope that came with it made them far more curious. On it, in cursive, handwritten letters that could have come from their grandma, stood a name: Agbar Dux.

Although they didn’t know who that was supposed to be, they opened the envelope and found a heavy, cream-coloured piece of paper in it that fit the size of the envelope perfectly. It felt special, almost royal. They had never received a letter this impressive before, and they hadn’t even taken a look at its content.

The letter, the small card, was written in the same cursive handwriting and with the same black ink that was used on the envelope:

My Dark Lord,

it is with pleasure that I invite You to the initiation of Your status in our family.
Please, find the time to attend at the below address, at eleven o’ clock in the morning, on Saturday, the tenth of December, two thousand and twenty-two.

With respectful wishes,
B. R.
A. G.

The address was in a nearby town. It would take them a fifteen-minute train trip and a ten-minute walk to attend if they decided to.

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