Chapter 1: The Merry Man's Gift

Chapter 1: The Merry Man's Gift

The silence in her grandmother’s apartment was a physical weight. It wasn’t the peaceful quiet of a library or the hushed reverence of a museum; it was the dense, suffocating silence left behind by a life abruptly stopped. For three days, Tamara Volkov had been wading through the artifacts of Elena’s eighty years on earth, sorting memories into cardboard boxes labeled ‘Keep,’ ‘Donate,’ and a third, smaller pile she couldn’t bring herself to label at all.

Her own grief felt distant, a low hum beneath the surface of the meticulous, academic task of archival. It was easier to focus on the scent of dust and lavender, the precise fold of a silk scarf, than the gaping hole her grandmother’s absence had torn in her world.

In the corner of the living room, perched on a stack of books about Eastern European folklore, sat Elena’s laptop. It was an old, clunky model, its silver case scuffed at the corners. It felt like the final frontier of her grandmother’s life, a digital ghost Tamara had been avoiding. With a sigh that stirred the dust motes dancing in the afternoon light, she picked it up and settled into Elena’s worn armchair.

The machine whirred to life, slow and protesting. The screen flickered on, displaying a photo of a much younger Elena, her dark hair braided, laughing into the camera in front of a forest of impossibly tall pine trees. Tamara’s breath caught in her throat. She’d never seen that photo before.

There was only one application open: a simple word processor. The document was untitled, the cursor blinking patiently at the end of the last line, as if waiting for a thought to be completed. Tamara’s brow furrowed. It wasn’t a letter or a recipe. It looked like a story. A blog post, maybe. Her grandmother had been trying to “connect with the world,” as she’d put it.

Curiosity overriding her sorrow for a moment, Tamara scrolled to the top. The title was stark and simple.

The Merry Man of Solenvol.

She began to read.

“Every day is Christmas in Solenvol. I know how that sounds. You’re picturing twinkling lights, the smell of gingerbread, the warmth of a fire. You are wrong.

Our Christmas begins not with joy, but with the tolling of the 7 a.m. bell. The sound cracks through the morning quiet, a command, not an invitation. Before the last echo fades, every family must be gathered in their main room. In the center of every room, on a small table, sits the plant. We call it the Christmas Begonia, though it is no begonia you would recognize. Its waxy leaves are the colour of dried blood, and it never flowers. Beneath its lowest leaves, placed there the night before by no human hand, is the gift.

One for every member of the household. Each wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with a single, coarse red string.

The rules are absolute. You must smile as you approach your gift. You must express gratitude before you open it. You must say the prayer: ‘Thank you for your bounty, Merry Man. We are pleased with your generosity. Keep us in your festive heart.’

Then, you open the gift. It is always the same. A pair of socks. They are handmade, thick and woolen, but always ugly. The colours clash—mustard yellow with lime green, pale pink with a sickly brown. Sometimes they are mismatched. No one knows who makes them. To ask is to break a rule. To not accept them is to break the most important rule of all.

You must put them on immediately. Your old socks are to be burned in the hearth before breakfast. It is a cycle of replacement. A daily shedding of skin.

You might think this is a quaint, if eccentric, tradition. You might think it’s a harmless folk custom preserved in some forgotten corner of the world. I need you to understand. This is not a tradition. It is a cage.”

Tamara stopped reading, a chill tracing its way up her spine despite the stuffy warmth of the apartment. As a folklore graduate, her mind immediately began cataloging the details: the ritualistic elements, the appeasement of a local deity, the symbolic object. It was a fascinating, well-constructed piece of folk horror. Had her grandmother been writing fiction? It was so unlike the practical, grounded woman who had raised her.

She scrolled down, her fingers suddenly slick with a nervous sweat. The tone of the writing shifted, becoming more frantic, more personal. The neat paragraphs dissolved into a raw stream of memory.

“This is not a story. This is a memory. A warning. I am writing this because I am old, and the memory of the sun on my face in a world without the bell is fading. But I will never forget my sister, Lucinda.

She was thirteen, and full of a fire the Merry Man had not yet managed to extinguish. She hated the socks. She hated the cloying smell of the plant, the forced smiles of our parents, the tremor in their hands as they tied the red string around the offering bundles.

One morning, she broke. It was not a grand rebellion. It was a sigh. A quiet, weary sound as she unwrapped a pair of particularly hideous socks, the colour of a bruise. ‘They’re ugly,’ she whispered. Just that. Not to anyone in particular. A thought given voice.

Silence fell over our small house. It was a terrible, absolute silence, heavier than anything I have ever known. My father’s face went white. My mother’s hand flew to her mouth, a choked sob caught in her throat. Lucinda just stared at the socks in her lap, her small act of defiance hanging in the air like poison.

The bell did not ring. The birds did not sing. It was as if the whole town held its breath.

They locked her in her room. My parents whispered prayers all day, their faces grey with terror. They begged the Merry Man for forgiveness. They left offerings of honey cakes and their best embroidered linens by the plant. Nothing happened.

For two days, a strange peace settled over Solenvol. The morning gifts were still there. The ritual continued. We wore our ugly socks, we smiled our hollow smiles, but we could all feel it—a pressure building behind the fabric of the world. On the third morning, my mother went to Lucinda’s room with her breakfast. Her scream is the sound I hear in my nightmares.

The room was empty. The window was locked from the inside. She was simply gone.

My father forbade us from speaking her name. We were to pretend she never existed. But the Merry Man does not allow you to forget. The Merry Man always gives a gift in return.

The next morning, under our Christmas Begonia, there was an extra package. It was larger than the others, wrapped in the same brown paper, tied with the same red string. No one wanted to open it. My father, his hands shaking so violently he could barely undo the knot, finally tore the paper away.

It was my sister’s legs.

From the knee down. They were neatly severed at the joint, the skin pale and cold. She was still wearing her favourite shoes, the ones with the scuffed toes from climbing trees. And on her feet, pulled up over her ankles, was the pair of ugly, bruise-coloured socks she had refused.

They were arranged under the plant as if she were kneeling. A gift of submission. A lesson for us all.

The worst part wasn’t the gift. It was what happened to the rest of her. It was the fact that we were supposed to…”

The text ended there. The cursor blinked. Blinked. Blinked.

A wave of nausea washed over Tamara. She slammed the laptop shut, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The story was a shard of ice in her gut. This wasn't fiction. The raw, unedited terror in Elena’s words was too real, too visceral. Lucinda. Her great-aunt. A name she had never heard before.

She pushed herself out of the chair and stumbled to the window, forcing herself to breathe. The mundane street scene below—a woman walking her dog, a car pulling into a driveway—felt alien, a world away from the suffocating dread of Solenvol.

But the dread was here now. It was in this apartment, in the silence, in the blinking cursor of an unfinished story. Her grandmother hadn't died of a simple heart attack in her sleep. She had died with this horror still churning inside her, trying to claw its way out onto the page.

Tamara looked back at the closed laptop. The quiet grief she had felt just minutes before was gone, burned away by something sharper, more urgent. It was an obsession, taking root in the fertile ground of her loss. She had to know. She had to understand the story that had haunted her grandmother until the very end.

Her research had just begun.