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The streets of Cambridge were powdered with snow. A rare sight in December. The city center was busy with Christmas shoppers and no one would notice the lack of students and professors during the holiday season, but this wasn’t any holiday season. It was snowing in December. They were bound to have a white Christmas in who knows how many years. The populace was overjoyed.
The academics, however, were anything but. Most of them didn’t know, but even they could feel the tension around the colleges. From the subtle notes of canceled meetings, to the too-keen “enjoy the holidays”. The professors were instructed not to send home any tasks for the Christmas period. They were instructed to make the best out of their holiday with their families. It was extremely uncharacteristic of the prestigious scholars.
Said instructions came from higher up, from the underground secrets of the occultist roots of the city. Very few people knew of their existence at this point, but they had managed to maintain just as much control in the academy as they always had. In the shadows of Cambridge, they worked on maintaining the veils of reality, only maintaining power in case of catastrophic emergencies.
As such, when the air cooled enough in an area where the veils of the world were already as fragile as Cambridge, they would begin to crystallize. Mirrors of translucent ice would form on a multitude of surfaces. Some of these could be easily confused with black ice. None of them were safe to civilians.
The warm human bodies and their dense masses could never dream of passing through the portals, but in the heavy breathable air, the thing from the other side could float easily all around. And so every winter the occultists were made alert to stop another tragedy, but none of the ones working on it now had been alive the last time. If they had, they would surely remember… After all, the memory wipe shouldn’t work on them.
While they worked to contain the indubitably finite number of portals, it roamed the streets. Phasing through the glistening snow that reflected the dimly lit streetlights. It looked soft and inviting, the cold almost forgotten from behind the warmth of closed windows. It wasn’t invisible, it didn’t have to be.
The snow-globe-perfect bits of white floating in the night drew people in. Made them almost yearn for the split lips, numb fingers, that gnawing pain on the tips of the ears, all in exchange for the romance of letting the white flecks cover their coats. If only they knew the yearning was more than just some magical coincidence of winter.
The crunch of snow and frozen dew on the grass was part of its siren’s wail. Keeping people from running inside, keeping them entertained while it surrounded them. It was hard to pick it apart from the rest of the snow, the real snow. Alas, the brain likes to pretend things are okay more than it likes to survive, smoothing edges, turning your eyes away from it and back at the snow, the ground, the satisfying crunch.
When the snow isn’t falling, it hides. It hides in the cracks of ice, in the frosty car windows, and even in the cold chunks of salt lining the streets. There it waits for distracted passerbys, for the children that never grew old, for the smell of blood thickened by the cold and rushing full of the endorphins of Christmas magic.
And as the snow falls once more, the people close their eyes, turning their heads to the sky, trying to catch the flakes in their mouth. A seemingly innocent tradition, until you realize the flakes are not snow, but a creature from beyond.
You wouldn’t realize though, no one does. Not even as it seeps into their tongues, filling their bloodstream with ice and death, leaking into their lungs and crystalizing. They cough, thinking maybe the snow hit the backs of their throat, but the coughing doesn’t stop. They hack and topple over, clutching at their middle, digging their hands into the fluffy ground, they still don’t see it in front of them. The snow might’ve stopped, but the creature is still there.
The people aren’t found after that. They seem to be absorbed into the snow around them, never to be seen again. Could it be that the cold in their veins allows them to be dragged back through the portals? Or does the creature consume them completly? The occultists hope to never find out, not again. Not another white Christmas.