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  I’m on my feet and over the other side of the desk before I have time to think. There’s an anomalously cold chimney in my office. Cold enough that the air is condensing on it. Cold enough that it sucks the heat out of a cup of tepid tea in milliseconds. But what does it mean? (Aside from: I’m in big trouble. That’s a given, of course.)

  What it means is . . . there’s an incursion. Something’s coming down the chimney, something from the dark anthropic zone—from a corner of the multiverse drained of all meaning and energy. Let’s steal a facetious phrase from Andy and call it the Filler of Stockings: Lurker in Fireplaces, Bringer of Gifts. (Odin, Jòlnir, the King in Red. Pick your culture: prepare to die.) All it knows is that it’s cold and it’s hungry—and it wants inside.

  These things gain energy from belief. This office, this organization—we’re its first target because we know it’s kind of old. If it can get a toehold anywhere, it’ll be here, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t have to believe—damn Kringle for coming and talking to us! If I can keep it out of the New Annexe until dawn it’ll be too late for the Bringer of Gifts to claw its way through the wall between the worlds, for this year at least. But if it’s already in the incinerator chimney—

  I pull the chair out from under the door handle, grab my torch, and head out in a hurry.

  * * *

  Nighttime hijinks and explorations in the office take on a whole different significance when you know that it’s eighteen minutes to midnight and—by tradition—that’s when something hungry and unspeakably alien is going to break out of the incinerator in the basement, expecting to find a stocking and some midnight snacks to appease its voracious appetite.

  Here’s the flip side of millions of sleeping believers-in-Santa providing an opening for something horrible to enter our cosmos: they expect him to go away again after he leaves the toys. The summoning comes with an implicit ritual of banishment. But you’ve got to get the ritual right. If you don’t, if you break your side of the bargain, the other party to the summoning is free to do whatever it wills.

  Seventeen minutes to midnight. I’m in the admin pool again, and there’s the stationery cupboard. It’s locked, of course, and I spend a precious minute fumbling with the bunch of keys before I find one that fits. Inside the cupboard I find what I’m looking for: a box of pushpins. I move on, not bothering to lock it behind me—if I succeed, there’ll be time to tidy up later.

  I bypass Mahogany Row and the sleeping ghosts of management to come, and head for the canteen. Maxine and her friends put some effort into preparing it for the party, and if I’m lucky—

  Yup, I’m in luck. Nobody’s taken the decorations down yet. I turn the lights on, hunting around until I see it: a red-and-white stripy stocking stuffed with small cardboard boxes hangs from the corkboard by the dumb waiter. I grab it and dig the boxes out, nearly laddering it in my haste. The canteen’s bare, but the kitchen is next door, and I fumble for the key again, swearing under my breath (why aren’t these things clearly labeled?) until I get the door unlocked. The fridge is still humming. I get it open and find what I was hoping for—a tray of leftovers, still covered in cling-film.

  Ten minutes. I run for the staircase, clutching stocking, pin box, and the tray of stale mince pies. In my pockets: conductive marker pen, iPhone loaded with the latest Laundry countermeasures package, and a few basic essentials for the jobbing computational demonologist. I’m still in time as I leg it down two stories. And then I’m at the basement doors. I pause briefly to review my plan.

  Item: Get to the incinerator room without being stopped (optionally: eaten) by the night watch.

  Item: Get the stocking pinned up above the incinerator, and place the pies nearby.

  Item: Draw the best containment grid I can manage around the whole mess, and hope to hell that it holds.

  What could possibly go wrong? I plant my tray on the floor, pull out my key ring, and unlock the door to the basement.

  * * *

  It’s funny how many of the pivotal events of my life take place underground. From the cellar of a secret Nazi redoubt to a crypt in the largest necropolis in Europe, via the scuppers of an ocean-going spy ship: seen ’em all, got the tour shirt. I’ve even visited the basement of the New Annexe a time or two. But it’s different at night, with the cold immanence of an approaching dead god clutching at your heart strings.

  I walk down a dim, low-ceilinged passage lined with pipes and cable bearers, past doors and utility cupboards and a disturbingly coffinlike ready room where the night staff wait impassively for intruders. No stir of undead limbs rises to stop me—my warrant card sees to that. Forget ghostly illumination and handheld torches—I’m not stupid, I switched on the lights before I came down here. Nevertheless, it’s creepy. I’m not certain where the document incinerator lives, so I’m checking door plaques when I feel a cold draft of air on my hand. Glancing up, I see a frost-rimed duct, so I follow it until it vanishes into the wall beside a door with a wired-glass window which is glowing cheerily with light from within.

  Looks like I’ve got company.

  I’m about to put my tray down and fumble with the key ring when my unseen companion saves me the effort and opens the door. So I raise the tray before me, take a step forward, and say, “just who the hell are you really?”

  “Come in, Mr. Howard. I’ve been expecting you.”

  The thing that calls itself Dr. Kringle takes a step backwards into the incinerator room, beckoning. I stifle a snort of irritation. He’s taken the time to change into a cowled robe that hides his face completely—only one skeletal hand projects from a sleeve, and I can tell at a glance that it’s got the wrong number of joints. I lick my lips. “You can cut the Dickensian crap, Kringle—I’m not buying it.”

  “But I am the ghost of Christmases probably yet to come!” Ooh, touchy!

  “Yeah, and I’m the tooth fairy. Listen, I’ve got a stocking to put up, and not much time. You’re the precognitive, so you tell me: is this where you try to eat my soul or try to recruit me to your cult or something and we have to fight, or are you just going to stay out of my way and let me do my job?”

  “Oh, do what you will; it won’t change the eventual outcome.” Kringle crosses his arms affrontedly. At least, I think they’re arms—they’re skinny, and there are too many elbows, and now I notice them I realize he’s got two pairs.

  The incinerator is a big electric furnace, with a hopper feeding into it beside a hanging rack of sacks that normally hold the confidential document shreddings. I park the pie tray on top of the furnace (which is already cold enough that I risk frostbite if I touch it with bare skin) and hang the empty stocking from one of the hooks on the rack.

  Ghastly hunger beyond human comprehension is the besetting vice of extradimensional horrors—if they prioritized better they might actually be more successful. In my experience you can pretty much bet that if J. Random Horror has just emerged after being imprisoned in an icy void for uncountable millennia, it’ll be feeling snackish. Hence the tempting tray of comestibles.

  I glance at my watch: it’s four minutes to midnight. Then I eyeball the furnace control panel. Kringle is standing beside it. “So what’s the story?” I ask him.

  “You already know most of it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” He sounds bored, as well he might. “Why don’t you tell me, while we wait?”

  “Alright.” I point at him. “You’re here because you’re trapped in a time paradox. Once upon a time the Laundry had a Forecasting Ops department. But when you play chess with the future, you risk checkmate—not to mention being assimilated by that which you study. The first thing Forecasting Ops ever forecast was the probability of its own catastrophic capture by—something. So it was disbanded. But you can’t disband something like that without leaving echoes, can you? So you’re just an echo of a future that never happened.”

  The spectral shade in its ragged robe bobs its head—or whatever it has in place of a head.

  “The
Christmas incursion—” I glance at the cold furnace again, then at my watch “—would have killed you. But without Forecasting Ops to warn us about it, it’d happen anyway, wouldn’t it?” Three minutes. “So you had to maneuver someone into position to deal with it even though you don’t exist.”

  I remember sitting through a bizarre and interminable lecture at the Christmas party. But who else remembers sitting through it? Andy doesn’t remember Kringle’s talk. And I bet that aside from my own memories, and a weirdly smudged photocopy—emergent outcome of some distorted electron orbitals on a samarium-coated cylinder—there’s no evidence that the ghost of Christmases rendered-fictional-by-temporal-paradox ever visited the Laundry on a wet and miserable night.

  So much for the emergency phone book. . . .

  Two minutes. “How far into the future can you see right now?” I ask Kringle. I take a step forward, away from the furnace hopper. “Move aside,” I add.

  Kringle doesn’t shift. “The future is here,” he says in a tone of such hollow, despairing dread that it lifts the hair on the back of my neck.

  There’s a booming, banging sound inside the furnace. I squint: something writhes inside the tiny, smoke-dimmed inspection window. My watch is slow! There’s no time left. I step close to the control panel and, bending down, hastily scrawl a circle on the floor around my feet.

  “Wait, where did the pies come from?” Kringle asks.

  I complete the circuit. “The kitchen. Does it matter?”

  “But you’re doomed!” He sounds puzzled.

  Something is coming down the chimney, but it’s not dressed in fur from its head to its feet, and it doesn’t have twinkling eyes and dimpled cheeks.

  “Nope,” I insist. I point at the bait: “And I intend to prove it.”

  “But it ate you!” Kringle says indignantly. “Then we all died. I came to warn you, but did you listen? Nooo—”

  The trouble with prophecies of your own demise is that, like risk assessments, if you pay too much attention to them they can become self-fulfilling. So I ignore the turbulent time-ghost and stare as the fat, greenish tip of one pseudopod emerges and, twitching, quests blindly towards the frozen pies on top of the furnace.

  I stare for what feels like hours, but in reality is only a couple of seconds. Then, in a flashing moment, the tentacle lashes out and simultaneously engulfs all the pies, sucker-like mouths sprouting from its integument to snap closed around them.

  The Filler of Stockings is clearly no exception to the hunger rule. Having fed, its questing tentacle slows, perhaps hampered by the bulges along its length: it lazily curls over towards the gaping, ice-rimed mouth of the stocking. Waves of coldness roll from it. As I draw breath it feels like I’m inhaling razor blades. The temperature in the room is dropping by double-digit degrees per second.

  “What?” says Kringle. He sounds surprised: clearly this isn’t the future he signed up for back in time ghost central casting. “Who ate all the pies?”

  I twist the handle of the main circuit breaker to the LIVE position, and stab at the green ON button with rapidly numbing fingers. “There were quite a lot left over,” I tell him helpfully, “after you spoiled everyone’s appetite with that speech.”

  “No, that can’t be—”

  There comes a deep hum and a rattle of ventilators, and the incinerator powers up. There follows a sizzling flash and a howling whoop of pain and fury as the Filler of Stockings, thwarted, tries to disentangle its appendage from the gas jets. To a many-angled one, we impoverished entities who are stranded in three-plus-one dimensions are fairly harmless; nevertheless, even the inhabitants of flatland can inflict a nasty paper cut upon the unwary on occasion.

  My ward is alight, blazing like a flash bulb as it sears the skin on my chest: the tentacle sticking out of the furnace hopper combusts with a flash of fire and a horrible stench of burning calamari. Simultaneously, the shade of Dr. Kringle swirls and spirals from view, curling into the hopper even as a nacreous glow shines from inside, half-glimpsed things looping and writhing like colored worms within. The howling fades into a flatulent sigh, leaving a faint ringing in my ears, as of distant church bells. I take a deep breath as my ward dims, trying to get my terror-driven pulse back down to normal.

  There’s something on the floor. I squint and bend forward, puzzled. And after a moment I see that the Filler of Stockings has left me a coal.

  Copyright © 2009 Charles Stross

  Cover art copyright © 2009 by Carl Wiens

  Books by Charles Stross

  THE LAUNDRY SERIES

  The Atrocity Archives, (Golden Gryphon, 2004)

  The Jennifer Morgue (Golden Gryphon, 2004)

  THE SINGULARITY SERIES

  Singularity Sky (Ace, 2003)

  Iron Sunrise (Ace, 2004)

  THE MERCHANT PRINCESS SERIES

  The Family Trade (Tor, 2004)

  The Hidden Family (Tor, 2005)

  The Clan Corporate (Tor, 2005)

  The Merchants’ War (Tor, 2007)

  The Revolution Business (Tor, 2009)

  The Trade of Queens (Tor, 2010)

  OTHER NOVELS

  Accelerando (Ace, 2005)

  Glasshouse (Ace, 2006)

  Halting State (Ace, 2007)

  Saturn’s Children (Ace, 2008)

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Toast (Cosmos/Wildside, 2002)

  Wireless (Ace, 2009)

  NONFICTION

  The Web Architect’s Handbook (Addison-Wesley, 1996)