It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and you know what that means… (Say it with me, folks)
Terrifying ghostly Welsh horse skull!
…You didn't say it with me.
Anyway. The Mari Lwyd is a Welsh tradition in which a ghostly horse skull knocks on your door and if you can beat it in a singing competition, it goes away. Otherwise, you need to feed it.
Yes really. This is a thing they do. It is weird and I love it.
So naturally, I wrote a horror story about it. It was originally published in 2018 as part of Neon Druid anthology, and I'm offering it here to you for free as an early Christmas present.
So enjoy, but quietly, lest the ghost horse hear you…
Mari Lwyd
By Jennifer Lee Rossman
We hear the bells first. Merry little jingles not unlike those on the merchants' carts, so far off and so faint that on any other night I would almost dare to mistake them for ringing in my ears.
But the stockings have been emptied, the turkey dinner reduced to soup bones, and we've all gone to Mass and filled our souls with holy superstition in preparation for tonight. It can only be the horse.
Dim light still fights its way through the heavy curtains. It's come early this year.
My sisters and I, frozen in place by the sound, share a look of horror, each of them no doubt sharing my hope that we'd imagined it all. That it was just some game our parents played along with, like Father Christmas. Then, in unison, we launch into action, our childhood duties surging back like muscle memory.
I race to snuff out the candles and douse the fireplace, running water over rags to dampen the smoke. Ffion goes to secure the doors and windows; a table scrapes against the floor as she blocks the kitchen door that never did latch quite right. And Alys is in the pantry grabbing the food and drink, along with Daddy's shotgun. It won't do her any good against something that isn't alive, but you try telling her that. The thing's been her security blanket since he taught her to shoot when she was seven.
We move with the practiced precision of a drill team, no footstep or second wasted, and it's only once we're locked inside in the near-darkness that I meet the children's eyes.
They look up at us from the floor where they were playing a board game. My little girl Serena, Ffiion's son Luca, and Alys's boyfriend Harry. He might not be a child, but he's young and clueless and scared, so he's as much a liability as the kids are tonight.
Oh, Lord. I don't want Serena to grow up with this terror. Subconsciously, I think it's why I never brought her to see where I'd grown up until both my parents died—so they wouldn't goad the neighbors into playing Mari Lwyd again and scaring the living daylights out of her. But maybe they weren't playing.
I kneel on the floor beside the kids and hold my finger to my lips.
The bells grow louder, closer.
"Do you hear that?" I whisper, remembering the way Mum used to tell the stories. Like they were scripture, something to be awed and revered as much as feared. "That's the Mari Lwyd, and it's coming."
Luca looks to Ffion uncertainly as she goes to tape the curtains closed. "Mom?"
"Stay with your Auntie Caron," Ffion hisses.
Harry does the same with Alys as she drags a chair over to the front door and sits, gun at the ready. "Honey? What the hell's going on?"
Alys reminds me of Daddy when she grunts, "It's Christmas."
"The Mari Lwyd," I continue, taking Sarena in my arms as her inexpressible confusion turns to tears in that unique toddler way, "comes calling every Christmas. If it hears you, if it even hears your heartbeat, it sings at you, and you have to sing back. You have to sing better, cleverer songs, or it'll get angry and come in."
Luca's eyes are wide as the baubles on the tree. "What happens when it comes in?"
Alys checks the food beside her. It looks like everything from the pantry, but I know in my heart it won't be enough of an offering.
I look to Ffion to continue the story. She's the oldest, the only one who was born the last time the Mari Lwyd came in. When we were kids, she told us she remembered it, but how much of it was real and how much was invented memories is anyone's guess. I'm not so sure she even knows.
A long moment passes before Ffion says, "I wasn't always the eldest Bowen sister."
This sets off a flurry of questions and hushed shouts.
"Shut up; it'll hear!" The volume of my command startles even me, and I hold my breath in the abrupt silence that follows, my ears pounding as I strain to listen.
Footsteps. Not hoofbeats, but hard-soled shoes clomping softly on the cobblestones. Its gait is that of a human, the better to lull you into a false sense of security.
There's no way to tell how far away it is. The steps sound like they're right outside, but the bells still sound a ways off. I remember Mum telling us it's a trickster, that it throws its sound to throw us off.
Ffion comes to sit with me and the kids, treading lightly and avoiding the floorboards that squeak. She pulls her son onto her lap and holds him tight like Mum used to hold us on Christmas. I don't remember Mum ever looking so afraid.
This isn't right. We're the adults now. We're the ones putting presents in their stocking and drinking the milk they leave out. We're supposed to be the ones jingling the bells tonight, too.
We were supposed to inherit the mantle of Mari Lwyd just we became Father Christmas. I never thought we'd still be cowering in the dark, afraid to breathe like we did when we were small.
A shadow encroaches on the curtain, the sharp silhouette of a horse's head. I turn Serena away, but my eyes are locked onto it.
The stories say it's not the entire head, just a bleached skull. They say it has unblinking, glass eyes that see into your soul. I don't know if they're right; I've been lucky enough to only see the shadow, but Ffion tenses beside me, remembering.
The bells are louder now, so loud I can't hear myself think, and underneath them is the sound of footsteps and rattling bones. I slide my hand up to cover Serena's mouth, praying she won't cry out.
I don't remember when I started holding my breath. My lungs ache, begging for oxygen, but I don't dare give in.
The Mari Lwyd has passed the door now, its silhouette patiently marching by the second window. Almost gone. Almost to the next house. Almost—
"This is so cool."
The bells stop mid-chime at Harry's whisper, plunging us into a silence so absolute it hurts, and the horse freezes in place.
No. I reach out and grab Harry's arm, digging my nails into his skin as a warning. Maybe it'll go away.
He jerks out of my grasp. "What the hell—"
"Shh!" Even the kids shush him. They know this isn't something to fool around with.
The Mari Lwyd turns, stares straight through the curtains. If it had the flesh to do it, its ears would be up and alert, searching for any noise.
Harry looks at us like we're being irrational, and goes to stand up. Alys swivels in her seat and aims Daddy's shotgun at him.
She won't shoot, won't even risk the sound of pulling back the hammer, but her eyes are dark and steady. She's not about to let her family get taken by a skeletal horse, and if that means she has to threaten to murder her boyfriend, so be it. I don't blame her.
For a second, it looks like the Mari Lwyd is moving on. Then the tapping starts, slow and steady, back and forth across the front of the house though the horse head remains stationary. Something like a broom scrapes against the door in long strokes. Ffion and I huddle closer; Alys cocks the shotgun.
That, more than anything else, fills me with a sense of doom. There's no use keeping quiet anymore. It knows we're here.
Still I don't dare move, don't dare let myself cry. Mum never cried, so I can't, either. I have to stay strong for my family.
A low warbling comes from just outside the door, a song without words, without voice. The mournful whinny of the Mari Lwyd permeates the house, surrounding us until I can't discern its origin. It may be coming from the inside of my head, for all I know.
"This is ridiculous," Harry mutters, and that's the last straw.
I cling to the hope that we may still have a chance. It might not be singing at us. It might be singing at someone else's house, and will leave us alone if we can just stay quiet a little longer.
But I can't do that. I can't sit here and listen to someone tell me this isn't happening, that my childhood terrors are unfounded. I won't listen to him say smoke and mirrors are the reason I never met my big sister Efa.
"Stop it," I tell Harry, my voice shaking with the effort not to scream. "You stop right this second."
The Mari Lwyd delights in hearing us. Its bells ring louder, its song grows more insistent. The tapping at the door becomes a steady pounding, like the rattle of an epic windstorm.
It wants in.
"We need to sing at it," Alys says as the children start to cry.
We look to Ffion, whose horror I can see even in the dark. "It didn't work," she whispers. "Last time. We sang every song we knew. All the hymns, even Efa's silly skipping rhymes. It had heard them all before."
"You're going to sing at it?" Harry has to raise his voice to be heard over the chaos of the Mari Lwyd. "You think there's a demon horse out there, and your answer is to sing—"
The end of his sentence is cut off when the door slams open.
The Mari Lwyd stands there on its two legs, everything from its shoes to its toothy, grinning skull shrouded in a sheet that flaps and billows in the wind. Its eyes shimmer, glassy and unblinking, as it looks over the offerings at Alys's feet.
Alys trembles, Daddy's shotgun forgotten in her hands, and I pull her away from the door. Harry reaches out to comfort her, and something inside me snaps.
I give Serena to Ffion and stand, forcefully dragging Harry along as I march up to the horse.
Its breath is hot and smells like sulfur, but I don't flinch. That's what it wants: the fear. It thrives on it, on our desperation to satisfy its demands.
Well, I'm not playing along anymore. This ends here, tonight. My children will be the last generation to cower on what should be a holy night, and I only regret that I didn't do something about it when I was their age.
"I will not sing for you." I don't know if it can hear me over the bells and screaming, but I don't raise my voice. "No one in this house will sing for you ever again, nor will we feed you."
The Mari Lwyd lowers its head, glaring at me.
"If you want a sacrifice, take this one." I gesture at Harry, who yelps. I'm not actually planning to give him to it, but I won't cry if it calls my bluff. "We're done with you terrorizing us."
With that, I grab at the sheet covering it, and yank. The Mari Lwyd gives an awful shriek, throwing its head back and letting off a burst of heat that instantly melts the snow on the front walk.
The skull drops to the ground with a clatter, coming to rest beside its shoes, and a grateful silence overtakes the town once again.
The neighbors cautiously emerge from their houses. Someone grabs the skull and hangs it on a stick, and parades it down the street. I shut the door, taking care to lock it though I hope this is the last we'll see of the Mari Lwyd, and go to hug my family. We'll be back next year for the safe Christmas we always dreamed of, and we'll have a new story to tell about the Mari Lwyd.
