Welcome, Talebones Readers!
While I do like to write a more heartfelt tribute to the season—and you can certainly expect a sweeter short story soon—it’s fun to dabble in a little bit of dark holiday uneasiness, too.
Winter, after all, has its shadows.
So here’s a little eerie, festive fable for the modern age. ;)
I hope you enjoy!
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STAVE I.
“Bellevue Chimney Services, this is Steve. Happy Holidays and how may I help you?”
“Hi, Steve.” Isabelle readjusted her messy bun with one hand and kept her tone light and pleasant, slipping easily into the I really hope you can help me timbre she reserved for customer service calls. “So, I’m hosting a party tonight, and I was just lighting the fireplace…you know how it is…and it wasn’t lighting properly? Kept going out? So I went outside to look and, um, there’s a leak in the chimney. Between the bricks, you know?”
Steve made an “uh-huh” noise of affirmation, a “go on” noise.
“So I’m wondering if I can still use it tonight? For the party?”
A hissed intake of breath. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. That’s really not safe at all, ma’am. A real danger of carbon monoxide poisoning, which would definitely put a damper on your party.”
He paused and chuckled. She did not.
“I’m so sorry to hear about your problem,” he continued, “but we would be happy to come and check it out for you. Get it all fixed up.”
Isabelle sighed in relief, her body relaxing into the couch. “Oh, that would be so great, thank you. When can you be here today?”
An awkward pause. “Ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you this, but this is our busy season. Winter is tough on chimneys. But I can fit you in for an appointment on, let’s see, the twenty-eighth?”
“The…twenty-eighth?” Isabelle’s stomach dropped. “That’s…that’s two weeks away.”
“Yeah, I’m real sorry. We’re booked solid.”
“What about the party?”
“Is this for heat or for mood?”
“Just ambience,” she replied, gloomily.
“Well,” Steve said, “there’s always those yule log channels. You know the ones, with the looping fireplace video? Got a TV?”
Isabelle decided she didn’t like Steve. She stood up from the couch and slipped her freshly-pedicured bare feet into her shearling slippers with a sigh. “Yeah, sure, I’ve got a TV. Thanks for the advice, and forget about the appointment.”
She ended the call without waiting for his cheery holiday-flavored response, slipped the phone into her pocket, then peered around at her living room. She had carefully stacked a few store-bought logs beside the fire in the cute brass firewood holder she had bought from Pottery Barn, and there was a scattering of kindling and balled-up newspaper in a rough halo around the hearth from her interrupted attempts to get the flames started. She had only lit a fire in the hearth a few times since Ben packed and left in the summer. She did her best, but he had always been the one who had the “magic touch” with the fireplace. In her weaker moments, she missed that.
Ugh. Move on. New year, New Isabelle.
Other than the fireplace, everything else was ready. The house was pristine; she had vacuumed and scrubbed and dusted every surface. The Christmas tree was up in the corner, an expensive artificial one she had wrestled out of the attic and decorated with neutral-colored baubles and lights, leaving all the mismatched ones that she and Ben had bought during their years together still in their big, fraying box.
All of her decorations were going to be tasteful from now on.
The kitchen was stocked with all of the right party foods and beverages. Her outfit was carefully laid out on her bed. She was ready in every way, except this damn fireplace.
Isabelle reached down and grabbed the remote control off of the ottoman, then clicked on the TV. She was still getting used to all of the TV’s bells and whistles; it was relatively new, her Christmas gift to herself. Ben had taken the other one they had bought together at a Black Friday sale years before and she had been watching movies on her laptop for months.
On the menu screen she tapped through the tiles, the different apps and streaming platforms available, feeling the overwhelm creep in. She could turn on a classic Christmas movie, maybe? Something nostalgic? But she shook her head. This was a party, not a movie night. She didn’t want people parking in front of the TV all evening, distracted. She wanted them to mingle.
Back on the TV’s home screen her eyes fell on a new banner alongside the usual app tiles, a garland-festooned graphic declaring: NEW! YOULOG CHANNEL! With an image of a crackling fireplace.
Puzzled—what the heck does YouLog mean?—Isabelle selected it.
She was presented with a description screen and a short explanation: FULLY personalized FREE looping fireplace channel! Perfect holiday ambience!
Down at the bottom was the note, in smaller font: Brought to you by NuMystic Generative AI Solutions.
She had heard of NuMystic, but never used it before. Her confusion deepening, Isabelle selected the PLAY button.
A new screen loaded with a handful of toggles: brightness, fire intensity, crackling sound on/off, whether or not she wanted canned Christmas music to play. She tapped a few options, then selected LAUNCH.
Another loading screen while the channel chewed over her selections, and then there it was: a crackling fire in a fireplace.
In spite of herself, Isabelle sucked in a shocked breath.
It looked like her fireplace. It wasn’t a perfect replica—like most AI imagery, it had a sort of plasticky, uncanny-valley, mirror-world quality to it—but it was very, very close. The same color of brick, the same leaping-stag andirons, the gray-painted mantel with a handful of trinkets, photos, and decorations on it. The portraits in the photos weren’t very clear and the decorations were a little mushy-looking, but if you squinted you couldn’t tell. A gentle selection of instrumental Christmas music played in the background.
A smile spread across Isabelle’s face. Despite its uncanny look, it would work just fine.
If she wondered how the AI had seen her fireplace in that much detail, enough to replicate it that well, she quickly put that aside. It didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that it would make a perfect backdrop for the party, and it was unique to boot.
Satisfied, Isabelle turned off the TV and went upstairs to get ready.
*
STAVE II.
If there was one thing Isabelle prided herself on, it was throwing a good party. The wine was flowing, the food was quality, and upwards of thirty people showed up in their holiday best, mingling and laughing and sharing stories from the year.
Isabelle was grateful that of all the things she lost in the divorce, her friends were not among them. Ben was the one who left town, moving all the way from their sprawling suburb outside of Bellevue to the urban center of Chicago. He got a fresh start, and she kept the house and the relationships. It seemed only fair. And from what Isabelle had tearfully confided to her friends during the divorce, all about how controlling and manipulative Ben was throughout their marriage, no one minded seeing him go.
The party was, maybe, the best one she had ever thrown. Isabelle herself was a practiced hostess, milling around the room, refilling glasses, joining in the conversations where she could. The unique glow of a good evening filled the place, turned every simple chat and reconnection sparkling, golden.
The YouLog Channel was a real hit, too. A few friends gathered around it to marvel, pointing out how wild it was that it looked so much like her own fireplace.
It was Tim who explained it. Tim and his wife lived a few doors down the street, and he worked for a tech company downtown.
“The AI uses both an imaging sensor in the TV—” here Tim pointed at a corner of the TV itself, where you could barely make out a hidden lens, like a webcam, “—along with images from your phone camera, Izzy. Your smart TV has an app on your phone, correct?”
She nodded in the middle of refilling someone’s glass.
“Well then,” Tim said, “that’s what it uses. It builds an image of the fireplace and fills in the gaps with its own guesses. Generates the flickering flames from a database of fire videos online. Voila.”
Though she didn’t understand it fully, Isabelle smiled. “It’s pretty amazing, right?”
Everyone agreed. She decided that she was glad the real fireplace had failed on her. This was so much better. This was unique.
Perfect holiday ambience, just like the description said.
But it was around an hour into the party when Isabelle noticed the first glitch.
She was in the kitchen, pulling a tray of finger foods out of the oven where they were keeping warm. She set the tray down on the kitchen island and glanced through to the living room where the YouLog Channel was playing on its loop. Just then, a shadow flickered across the screen, as though someone in the video feed had walked in front of the virtual fireplace.
Isabelle blinked, thinking she had imagined it. But the shadow passed across again going the other direction, slowly, like someone pacing.
Her brow furrowed. But after the shadow passed a second time, it did not reappear.
But she did not have long to wait. The second glitch occurred only a half-hour later, when muffled voices were heard from the TV.
Isabelle had decided not to play the canned Christmas music through the channel, playing her own curated playlist instead from her Bluetooth speakers. So there was nothing to stifle the sound of voices, words unclear, rising over the crackling virtual fire. The words may have been garbled, but one of the voices she recognized.
It was hers.
The party was lively enough that no one noticed at first, until there was a sound of laughter from the TV, rising up and over the chatter. Cheerful, excited laughter. It was recognizably Isabelle’s own laugh, but distorted. Stitched together. An AI’s approximation of her average giggle. A few of the guests took notice then, interrupting their conversations to turn and look at the screen, thinking Isabelle was playing a video.
As Isabelle watched in deepening dread, shadows passed the virtual fireplace again. Her voice was joined by a second one: a man’s voice.
It was not Ben’s.
A trickle of icewater slipped down Isabelle’s spine as she recognized it.
How did it know? How could it possibly know?
As her guests glanced between the screen and Isabelle, faces turning in confusion, she crossed the room fast, heading for the couch, searching madly for the remote. It was nowhere, not on the couch, not on the ottoman, not on the side table.
Where the hell did I put it?
The conversations on the screen fell away, and Isabelle looked up, briefly relieved, when it was just a flickering fire again and nothing more.
But then, something crawled into view in front of the fire, moving in an unnatural way. A woman. Isabelle stared, transfixed. It looked like her, but wrong. She was naked except for the wedding ring on her finger. And the man who crawled into frame to join her—too many virtual fingers, ghoulish virtual smile—was not Ben.
There was no more conversation. There were only digital moans of pleasure, synthy and electronic. Shadows rippled across the fireplace, the virtual flame guttering, the shapes distorting with rhythmic sounds. The two bodies collapsed into each other and then away again like clay as the AI guessed, filled in the gaps of what it had seen and not understood.
Isabelle heard her own voice on the screen, crying out, over and over, clear as a church bell in chill winter air, dark digital mouth open too wide: “Nate! Nate! Nate!”
There was a wedding ring on her finger. You could not miss it. It was the only thing the AI gave her to wear, as if it knew.
As if it knew.
All eyes were on her, now. All eyes were full of confusion. She had told them what her marriage was like, why they had to divorce. She had been the tearful, sorrowful wife. He had been the controlling, manipulative husband. It had been a tidy story. He ran away, and she kept the house and the friends.
But now she could see it in their eyes.
Izzy. Who the hell is Nate?
Isabelle’s heart pounded under her cashmere sweater as she gave up on the remote, ran to the TV, and smacked the power button on its side with a flat, enraged hand. The screen went black, the sounds and shapes vanishing, the fire winking out.
The guests were silent, thirty mute witnesses. Only Bing Crosby remained, crooning lightly about being home for Christmas.
“You can count on me…”
*
STAVE III.
The party didn’t end the way parties should. It died in quiet grief, the mood shattered into distasteful pieces. Guests left without saying anything, just filtered out in twos and threes, until Isabelle looked up and only a handful of neighbors were left. They, too, wandered away within minutes, realizing that the party was over.
In the stillness that followed, Isabelle turned off the Christmas music. She ignored the glasses of wine perched on every surface, the dishes piling up around her sink, the overflowing garbage can. She didn’t even change out of her party clothes. She went to sit on the couch. This couch. It felt damp now, for some reason. Soaked in the blood of a vicious lie, clear for all to see.
Nate. It had started as a workplace fling and spiraled out of control. The AI had plenty of content to work with: they had made love on this couch, on this floor, while Ben was away on business at least a half-dozen times, maybe more. They had never been caught. She broke it off with Nate when he started asking for too much intimacy, too much closeness.
But that was when she realized she was better off alone. In the storm around the divorce, Isabelle told everyone the story she wanted to believe: Ben didn’t want her to be happy. Making him look like the bad guy had been surprisingly easy. Probably because he had been too dumbfounded to fight back.
Isabelle slid her hand down into the cushions and found the remote there.
Of course.
She turned on the TV, and the YouLog Channel was still on-screen. Artificial flame flickering. But the voices, the shapes—her and Nate—were gone.
Isabelle stared, transfixed, at the fire.
She stared because there were teeth in the flames, maggots crawling in the logs, leaping in the sparks. She thought she heard weeping somewhere in the background, a shrill wailing. The portraits in the photos on the mantel were empty-eyed, slack-mouthed, silently screaming. The wall around the hearth was stained, cracked, bleeding. The floor was covered in glitter, like shattered glass. The garlands seemed to reach out, like arms, like fingers, transcending the boundary of the screen.
Voices whispered, filling the house, closing her in like smoke.
Isabelle. Liar. Who the hell is Nate?
It knew. It had known all along, somehow.
With shaking hands, never taking her eyes off the screen, Isabelle picked up her phone.
*******
Ben had been deeply confused by the voicemail he received from his ex-wife. Her long, hoarse confession. Her strange, disjointed apology. Admitting to an affair with her coworker, weeping over a recounting of her lies against his own character.
Something about a party? About the TV?
She had not sounded quite right, not like Isabelle at all. And while he was glad to be safely across the country and away from her and her mess, he still felt a tug of responsibility.
In the end, it was good that he called in the welfare check to the local police. The officers found Isabelle sitting on the couch in her pajamas, staring mesmerized at the black screen of the TV, which was powered off. She was unresponsive, her phone in one hand and the remote in the other, a thin trickle of crimson blood snaking down from her nose and over her lip.
There was no evidence of a party. But in the hearth were the embers of a recent fire, and there was a very high concentration of carbon monoxide in the house from a leak in the chimney. It had surrounded her for days, and the possibility of intense hallucinations and other cognitive effects was extremely likely.
It was a miracle, they said, that she was alive.
In his report, an officer wrote that when the EMTs loaded her onto a gurney, Isabelle only had one thing on her lips, staring hypnotized at the TV’s dark screen.
“Ambience,” she murmured, smiling softly. “Perfect holiday ambience.”
END
You should have seen my face when NuMystic showed up. Aaagh!
The table is ready for…*checks sheet*…Isabelle? Party of one?