Up on the Housetop

For a man consumed by his own failings, a lonely Christmas season takes a very strange turn.

***Content Warning: Includes frank depictions of misogyny, racism, and reference to sexual harassment. Listener discretion advised.***

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Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Holiday Special: Up on the Housetop.

(Sounds of footsteps and boards creaking)

NARRATOR

Hap Lobar sits in his battered ’91 Chevy truck, so rusted that the original cream coat is hardly discernible. Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, he feels the extra weight that he’s slowly accumulated over the years, squeezing and crowding his innards.

Peering into the rearview mirror, he runs a hand through his lank, greying hair and scratches at his scraggly beard, thinking that he really should have taken a shower.

Aw, fuck it, he says to his reflection. Not getting paid anyway.

With that, he dons his cheap Santa’s hat and steps out, ambling slowly toward the small white school building, which at its height educated no more than fifty children – and which has fallen far from that height.

Within, the smells of cheap coffee and mulled cider and freshly baked sugar cookies saturate the hallways, along with the low murmur of parents and the giggling and screaming of the children. God, how he hates the children, filthy and noisy and needy, all snotty noses and grasping, grimy fingers. Every year he swears he will not do this again, and every year, he lets the guilt and the fear of disappointing the community’s expectations lead him back here.

Before he steps into the gymnasium, where the teachers have set up a little cardboard North Pole workshop for him, he gives himself a quick breath check to see if it smells of bourbon. He cannot really tell.

Fuck it, he mouths again to himself, and steps through.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When he steps into the Low Bar, run by his cousin Bobby, Hap is still wearing the Santa outfit. Sometimes, if they are drunk and desperate enough, women will sit on his lip and slur their Christmas wishes to him, and once, he even took one of them home. That was seven years ago, when his gut was smaller and his beard was more grey than white, and it was not even a particularly good night, but he still secretly cherishes the hope that he might get lucky again.

Tonight, though, no one seems to pay him much mind. So he sits in the corner, downing his PBR and feeling that dark smolder deep in his insides, the thin, oily smoke rolling up to cloud his brain.

Where the anger has come from, he cannot say exactly – it’s everything, and it’s nothing, and trying to think any more deeply about it only makes him angrier. Glancing around the dark bar, he suddenly feels certain that everyone in the bar has a better life than he does, that they all look down on him. Those stupid fucking smiles on the face of that couple he can’t quite place in the other corner, the awful cackle of that old bitch Tilda Reese at the counter, the booming voice of red-faced Bowen Sykes – they all incense him horribly. Standing so suddenly he knocks his chair over behind him, he downs the last of his beer in a single gulp and walks out into the cold night, craving the darkness and the silence.

But as soon as he has climbed into his dusty, stained pickup cab, the silence is too much again, not merely an absence but a living, mocking presence in its own right.

He tears the Santa cap off his head and tosses it into the passenger seat, then slumps forward to rest his forehead against the steering wheel. The cool rubber feels good against his skin, soothing the overtaxed blood vessels of his face.

Faintly, he recalls a time when he wasn’t like this, when every day wasn’t a desperate attempt to escape from an inescapable reality, when the dark enervation of rage was not his only reprieve from listless apathy and vague despair. When he was a boy, he thought Christmases were beautiful, all colored lights reflecting off of pristine snow and the warm comfort of a cheery, loving home.

Time sours everything, he thinks, his drink-addled mind perceiving great import in those three words. And he also realizes with dismay that he is still five days out from Christmas.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When morning comes, Hap cannot remember how he made it home the night before. He is still wearing the pants from his Santa suit, which have tangled intolerably with the bedsheets, but the rest of the suit lies on the floor. His back aches, his mouth tastes like cat shit, and his head throbs.

Groaning, he rolls out of bed, picks up the Santa coat and shrugs into it as a makeshift robe. The house is cold, and he wonders if the heater has gone out or if he has simply never turned back up the thermostat since the warm spell earlier in the week.

He moves clumsily out of the cluttered bedroom and down the narrow hallway, toward the thermostat control in the living room. The house, inherited from his late mother, is still filled with more of her possessions than his own, Hap never having mustered the will to sort through them in the fifteen years since her passing.

He turns the set temperature up five degrees, and the heater hums to life.

Then he shuffles toward the sagging grey armchair and slumps into a resting position, mindlessly picking up the remote and turning on the television. A morning news program is reporting the discovery of even more children’s graves at some old Indian school, a place called Saint Anthony’s. The woman on the screen gazes into the camera with tear-filled eyes as she recounts her father’s stories about his time as a student.

Maybe they had it coming! Hap roars at the screen. Ever think of that, you dumb bitch? Stop trying to make us feel bad for being white!

Disgusted, he thumbs the TV into silence, a silence which fills the room like the breath of an opened grave. Even with the heater blasting, the air feels cold again, and he shivers.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

He comes home late again, having drunk too much eggnog at the office party. The rest of the people on the road crew seemed less friendly even than usual, and the generous amount of rum added to the eggnog had been his sole comfort at a social event he would have rather avoided in the first place.

For a while, he even thought he might be able to talk Sandy into coming home with him, but she turned cold and snooty at the last, after he playfully smacked her ass. The boss took him aside then and asked him calmly to leave, and he did, but did not go home, driving instead around the country roads and sometimes stopping to stare at the house lights that dotted the night.

A strange feeling came over him, a feeling that he could do anything, absolutely anything. It was a feeling not unlike stepping into air when you expect to find a solid foothold instead.

At the last house, he stopped and stared so long that the lights winked out as the inhabitants went to bed. It was the old Grissom place, but he was pretty sure that a younger couple had moved in a few years back, and he thought of creeping through the yard and slipping through the unlocked front door, making his slow and stealthy way up the stairs, watching them as they slept. Maybe he would even approach the bed, pull back the covers…

When he realized he was no longer sure whether he was fantasizing or planning, he came home.

He moves toward the torn and stained couch, collapses onto it face first, and falls almost at once into drunken slumber.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When he wakes later, the living room light still on but the rest of the house dark, he cannot tell if he has slept five minutes or five hours. At first, he isn’t even sure what woke him – until the sound repeats.

No fucking way, he says aloud, as for a third time, there is the distinct clacking of hooves on his rooftop overhead.

For a moment, childish notions run through his head, still foggy with sleep and alcohol fumes. Then rationality gradually returns, and he thinks of the Turnbull family down the road, about those damn goats they keep. They have never made it this far before, but Hap knows that they do get out of their pens frequently, and that goats love to climb. It is well within the realm of possibility that one might have ventured out of its pen and down the road, found its way up onto his roof – much more likely than a magic reindeer, he snorts in self-derision.

Set somewhat at ease with this realization, he settles back onto the couch, more than willing to leave dealing with the situation until the morning. Just as his eyes are drifting shut once more, there is a louder sound from overhead, and he swears.

Sitting up, he decides that he can at least get the damn thing off the roof tonight, and if it wanders away before dawn and gets eaten by coyotes, that’s not his problem. He stands and fetches a flashlight, stumbling outside and switching it on. The beam is a little weak, bespeaking the need for a fresh battery, but it will suffice for his purpose. He walks around the little house, casting the light over the roof, but he doesn’t see anything at all out of the ordinary, not even a raccoon or a squirrel. Two more times he circles the house, and then returns indoors, shivering and irritated.

As he settles back onto the couch, letting the flashlight clunk to the floor, the sound comes again, louder than ever. This time, it is not merely a momentary disturbance, but a protracted movement, and perhaps for this reason, or because he is more awake and sober now, Hap realizes that it is not a set of hooves as he first thought, but a single hoofbeat, followed by a shuffling, dragging sound. And whatever is making the sound, he realizes now, is far larger than any goat he has ever seen.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

This time, he takes not just the flashlight, fueled now by new batteries, but also the Bushmaster XM-15 he keeps in his bedroom, along with a spare magazine in his coat pocket.

The temperature seems to have dropped another ten degrees as he steps out once more, and the moon has just set, so that the only natural light is that of the cold and distant stars.

Slowly and carefully, he circumambulates his mother’s aged little house, scrutinizing every square inch of the rotting shingles by the light of the refreshed flashlight. Several times, he freezes as the beam sweeps over something out of place, but always it is only a clump of dead leaves or a broken branch or a dislodged shingle, or even merely an unexpected shadow.

In truth, he can hardly imagine anything of the size he ascribed to the sounds walking on that roof without falling through. Still, he looks, making the rounds a half dozen times before he finally decides that whatever it was is either gone, or something he has misinterpreted.

He mounts the squeaking, dilapidated steps to the front door when there is a heavy shifting overhead, and the fall of a large hoof. Breath catching in his lung, he looks up, fumbling to point both the light and the semi-automatic rifle at the source of the sound.

Something peers slowly over the edge of the roof at him: twisting black horns glistening in the moonlight, spiraling down to a long face whose features are an awful intermediate between the hircine and the simian, the horizontal pupils floating in irises of bright blue rather than gold or brown. The long muzzle is split by a gleeful grin, the teeth far too long and sharp for a goat’s.

Quick as sight, long, coarse-haired, taloned fingers shoot down and rip the rifle from his hands. And before he can give voice to the scream in his lungs, the mouth opens and the face descends.

(Tense music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is three weeks before anyone bothers to visit the lonely, deteriorating house, the county road boss having assumed that Hap simply decided not to come back to work, since he would have been fired anyway. Hap has no immediate family left, and a large unpaid tab at the Low Bar had put a definite chill on his relationship with his cousin Bobby.

It is Anna Turnbull who at last comes, only to inquire about a nanny goat that escaped two days prior. When she sees the large tanning rack in the yard, seemingly new and constructed of pine, she pauses. After she has inspected the strange, pale, nearly hairless hide stretched upon it, and the rancid leavings in the blue plastic five-gallon buckets nearby, she begins to babble incoherently, so disoriented that it takes her a full five minutes to locate her phone and remember the correct emergency number.

Later, the police will find more than enough to determine the grisly fate of Hap Lobar, but nothing at all to indicate who could have perpetrated it. The few usable imprints they find in the soft soil, shifted and smoothed by three weeks of intermittent snowfall and freezing and thawing, are utterly baffling, seeming to show one bare right foot of more or less human proportions, but seemingly a little deformed – and a corresponding left hoof, almost the size of a yearling heifer’s, but decidedly goatlike in its arrangement.

Most inexplicable of all is the disappearance from the county sheriff’s evidence locker of the fully tanned skin of the hapless Hap Lobar, but a few days after its awful discovery.

(Creepy music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Thank you for listening, and happy holidays. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]