Coming soon from Midnight Showcase
Sometimes, when the moons are high on cold nights and the fog begins rolling across the moor, I can hear them calling.
We don’t usually have snow for Christmas, but I think this year will be different. I think this year will be just like the winter of 95, when I saw them for the first time.
There were five of them, two men and three women. They were not human; no human is that perfect and that beautiful. Little tufts of fur grew from their ear tips and their strange eyes glinted with blue fire, as blue as the water of a glacier lake, and just as cold.
They came walking out of the moor during a snowstorm, like ghosts out of nowhere. Their thin furs, which they had wrapped around their lean bodies, had turned white with the dusting of snow.
I was a young man then, young and arrogant, barely out of my teens. We all were, my brother James, my friends Jeremy and Peter, and Hagar, who was the oldest. Tall and lanky, his long hair the color of the setting sun, he was also the most arrogant.
The girls liked him; something I could never understand, until I saw him naked one day. I’ve never seen anyone with a trunk that huge. No wonder the girls liked him so much.
He was the first one to spot them and the first to step into their path.
Times have changed since then, but in those days not many strangers came through our village. The ones who did were always greeted with suspicion.
“Ho, strangers.” Hagar spoke boldly. “State your business!”
He should have looked closer into their eyes. We all should have, but we only saw their perfect bodies, especially the bodies of the women. Even the furs didn’t hide the shape of their breasts and flaring hips.
“We seek shelter from the storm,” one of them said, his voice soft and silky.
“We’ve never seen the likes of you,” Jeremy said, studying the strangers with open hostility.
The stranger laughed. “Where we come from humans know us well.”
“Where do you come from?”
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