Every Step a Word

Nine Ladies Dancing - A Dark Tidings Horror Story

Twelve Days of Christmas—Dark Tidings is a Substack special holiday event. Each day beginning Friday the 13th, we’ll count down to Christmas Eve with a dark tale featuring one of the gifts from the classic Christmas carol. A guide to all the stories can be found here.

Image credit: MARK of the BRAND

Two hundred and seventy-nine nutcrackers.

It was a lot, but there was always room for one more, wasn’t there?

And two hundred and eighty was a much nicer number. A better, prettier, rounder number for the holidays. Even Gerard would have to agree.

But where to put it?

Penny had considered the side tables and the window sill, but this stunner deserved pride of place. She carefully rearranged the nutcrackers already standing at attention on the mantelpiece. It would be a tight fit, but she could make it work.

Lips pressed tight, she situated the nutcracker in the middle of the others and stepped back to admire her work.

The wooden solider gleamed in the light of the fire. The glow bounced off its crimson jacket and golden buttons. It edged the black mustache and tiny white teeth in orange and lent the glassy painted eyes a spark that flickered along with the snap and crackle of the flames.

This was a special one. Penny wondered if it had been handmade. She stepped closer again and ran a reverent finger down its shiny painted legs, enjoying the slickness of the lacquer under her touch.

“Another one?”

Penny startled and turned. She kept a protective hand on the nutcracker.

“I got it at an estate sale, hon,” she said. “Barely cost a thing.”

“It’s so big,” Gerard said, eyeing the nutcracker with distaste. “And red.”

Penny felt her grip on the nutcracker tighten. “I’m making the house festive, Gerard.”

She watched as her husband scanned the room.

“This isn’t festive, Pen. This is insane.”

Penny felt the familiar prick of tears in her eyes, the tightness in her throat. She hated when Gerard criticized her, but she hated crying in front of him even more.

“You’ll hardly notice one more,” she said, turning away so she could dash away the tears from her cheeks. “And it’s really well-made. Seems old, too, like it could be an antique. Maybe it’s worth something.”

Gerard sighed, and she held her breath. She wished he would go away. To another room, or another house, or another country. Not forever, of course. But for now.

“Pen,” he paused, and she squeezed her eyes shut. “Pen, maybe you should go see somebody. I—I don’t think this is healthy for you…for us.”

Penny tightened her grip on the nutcracker’s legs.

“After the accident you haven’t been the same, and—”

“Shut up!” The words came out wild, edged with tension. She hoisted the nutcracker up, brandishing it like a club.

Surprise flashed across Gerard’s face, followed quickly by anger.

“You need help.”

It was a proclamation and a condemnation. Penny watched as he retreated from the room and clomped upstairs. She didn’t return the nutcracker to the mantel until she heard their bedroom door slam.

Penny crossed the room to the liquor cabinet and wrenched open the door, setting the nutcrackers stationed there wobbling. The whiskey sloshed into her glass. She didn’t bother with ice. Just sat down in front of the fire and nursed her drink.

The clock in the hall struck eight. It’d already been dark for hours. She focused on the chimes and tried to calm her racing heart. She didn’t drink much—an old habit from her dancing days. Her tiny frame couldn’t absorb a lot anyway. But today she needed it.

She got more comfortable, folded herself up onto the cushions, tipped her head back. She ran a hand abesentmindedly below the hem of her jeans and along the scar cutting its brutal path down her leg. The skin there was tight and puckered into a silver seam.

The feel of it made her stomach clench.

Penny took another swig, enjoying the burn. She exhaled into the glass and let her eyes drift around the room. A sea of nutcracker eyes, black and gleaming, stared back at her.

She finished her drink, then got herself another one. And, twenty minutes later, another. And all the while the nutcrackers stared. She realized, snorting a little at the thought, that maybe she should be unnerved by all the wooden toys with their blank eyes. But deep down, it’s what she craved. What she missed most. Undivided attention. All eyes on her.

The familiar dank tendrils of desperation slithered around her insides, and she choked on a sob. She pressed her hands against her cheeks and dragged them back hard, wiping away her tears and pulling her features into a grimace.

God, she was sick of this. Sick of crying. Sick of sitting. Sick of the dark and the cold and this time of year and Gerard. Sick of their house and her life.

She was even sick of the goddamn nutcrackers.

Two hundred and eighty of the stupid fucking useless dolls. She hated them. With their hard little bodies and their constant staring.

She hated them.

And she loved them. Their staring and their eternal standing ovation.

Penny got to her feet. She would give them what they wanted. What she wanted.

Third position. She swung her foot to the side, glided it to the back. Now fourth position, leg to the front. She closed her eyes, bobbled into a low bow.

The nutcrackers stared with their inkdrop eyes. They were quiet but rapt. Penny could appreciate that.

Up to the side now, into a relevé. Then down once more. Into fifth position. And changement. Tiny jumps, changing feet. And—

Penny’s bad leg crumpled under her weight, and she fell, smacking her head against the coffee table on the way down.

The room around her went dark.

***

She awoke to the clock in the hall chiming three o’clock. The fire had died down to embers, and the room was full of shadows. She tried to lift herself from the floor, but her head throbbed out a vicious protest and her vision swam, turning what she could see of the room into a nightmarish swirl.

Penny let herself sink back down to the floor and concentrated on her breathing while her eyes fought for focus. Colors and shadows slowly coalesced until she could finally pick something out of the churning darkness.

The red nutcracker.

Penny stared hard at it. It looked back at her, the dying light of the fire still reflected in its eyes. It’s corvid gaze seemed hungry.

The thought had barely had a chance to register before the nutcracker’s jaw slid open like an invisible hand was pulling the lever at its back. Penny startled. Blinked. For a moment she thought it was just a trick of the light.

But then the nutcracker’s mouth kept growing until a great black hole gaped in the wall where the fireplace had been. Inside there was nothing but darkness.

A chill breeze blew through the nutcracker’s maw, and Penny pushed herself away from the opening, her head pounding as she dug her heels into the carpet. The darkness in the hole felt alive, breathing in her terror and breathing out great gusts of winter wind. It loomed before her, but it didn’t advance into the room. Instead it waited, expectant.

Penny shoved herself to her feet, using the wall for support. The nutcrackers all stared at her, standing tall, their eyes bright even in the gloom. Just a few hours earlier their attention had been intoxicating. But now it seemed wrong. Too intense. Too greedy.

She needed to be away from their inkdrop eyes.

She ran through her options. Gerard was upstairs. She could go to him, but he’d hardly believe her. Probably wouldn’t even get out of bed to check her story. She could leave. Disappear into the night. But the bitter cold outside, indifferent and unrelenting, seemed worse than the waiting blackness yawning ahead of her. Where would she go anyway? There was nothing for her out there.

But in the strange darkness ahead of her, Penny thought she could make out a pinprick of light shining through the gloom. At least it was a place to point her feet.

So on unsteady legs, skull hammering, Penny crossed her living room and stepped through the mouth of the red nutcracker into the blackness beyond.

***

Inside, in the dark and cold, a wave of dread washed over her, and Penny craned her neck around to look back. The nutcrackers still stared at her from the dim living room, tall and straight and armed with axes and staffs and jaws meant to break things.

They did not seem festive anymore.

Forward, then. She made her way in a series of awkward gallops, sped on by sudden jags of fear but hobbled by her old injury and the cold bite of the wind.

By the time she drew close enough to the light for the bright spheres to coalesce into something coherent, her lungs burned and her fingers were numb.

She blew on her hands, trying to warm them up, and stared at the source of the light. It was the large marquee of an old-fashioned theater. Red neon lights spelled out Honoree Odeon. Below that, black letters against a glowing white background announced the scheduled entertainment:

Drosselmeyer’s Living Puppets, one night only.

“Getting a ticket?”

Penny jumped. Her eyes slid down to the ticket booth. Behind the window was an ancient-looking woman, small and wizened. She gazed up at Penny with nutcracker eyes. Black, shining, empty.

“You’re here for the show, no? Her voice reminded Penny of the wind in the darkness.

Penny stared, at a loss.

The woman regarded Penny for a few more moments and then sighed and shrugged her shoulders when she was met with continued silence. “The show’s starting soon. One night only, you know. It’s not to be missed.”

“I don’t have any money,” Penny said. And that was true enough. But really, Penny had a feeling in the pit of her stomach that she didn’t want to see whatever lay beyond the red doors of the theater entrance.

“You don’t pay with money here, doll.” And the old woman slid a ticket across the counter and through the slot at the bottom of the glass. Penny picked it up with shaking fingers, and the doors in front of her swung open on silent hinges.

Penny paused. Maybe she should turn back the way she’d come. But the black beyond the glow of the marquee was absolute. There’d be no way she could pick out the mouth of the nutcracker until morning. Maybe not even then. And she didn’t fancy wandering, lost in the dark.

With a sigh, she stepped past the ticket booth and into the theater’s lobby. It had red padded walls that were quilted at regular intervals with shiny gold buttons. Behind a red counter gleamed chrome machines with dials, handles, and grills. They were beautiful, in an industrial way, but they didn’t seem to serve any purpose as far as Penny could tell.

She tottered forward, her frozen toes adding to the ungainliness of her walk, and made her way to the next set of double doors. Inside, the theater was completely empty. Just rows and rows of seats upholstered in red velvet.

“Show’s about to start.”

Penny clutched at her throat, stifling a grunt of surprise. The lady from the ticket booth was at her elbow. Her white hair brushed against Penny’s arm.

“You might want to sit towards the front.” The woman stared directly at the spot beneath Penny’s jeans where her mangled leg had healed into a twisted parody of a working limb. The woman licked her lips. “So you can see.”

Seeing wouldn’t be a problem. Not in this deserted place. And the front felt far too exposed. Penny hobbled to an aisle seat in the middle and wrapped her fingers around the armrest. Unease gnawed at her gut.

Quietly at first and then growing steadily louder, the strains of an unseen orchestra drifted through the air. Cellos and basses provided a steady oom-pah-pah beat. Horns bugled a sweet melody. And a harp ran through dream-like arpeggios.

The Waltz of the Flowers. From The Nutcracker.

Penny knew the song. She had lived and breathed it for months. The lilting tune was studded with her memories. The scratch of the sequined bodice she wore, the gentle swish of her skirts when she came on stage. The way the crystal tiara sparkled in the mirror as she put on her makeup. The slip of the tights as she pulled them over her smooth, strong, elegant legs.

The Waltz of the Flowers was Dewdrop’s showcase. Penny had fought for that role. Outside of rehearsals, she had danced Dewdrop in the Waltz only once, on opening night. She’d danced it with all her heart. Had filled every step with a word spoken directly from her soul. She’d written poems across the stage and basked in the glow of an entralled audience.

They had been on their feet, cheering, clapping. All for her.

And then Gerard had insisted they go out to celebrate, had insisted he was okay to drive after they finished the bottle of champagne, had slammed on the brakes, skidded across the road, and hit the steel barrier.

Her leg was crushed by the impact.

But the show goes on, doesn’t it? The Nutcracker is a holiday tradition. Someone took over her role. But they could never dance poems the way Penny did.

Never.

She heard a creak and realized she’d been squeezing the arm of her chair so hard she’d etched a groove into the wood and pried her fingernail up from its bed. Blood seeped onto her skin, and she put the whole mess into her mouth, trying to suck away the pain.

The curtain came up then, just as the oboe winnowed its way through its first melodic line.

Penny forgot all about her nail.

In three groups of three danced nine women. Meat hooks were sunk into their shoulders. Smaller ones pulled at the skin of their elbows and knees. From the hooks, lengths of steel cable unspooled to a catwalk above the stage where some unseen puppeteers made the women dance in spasmodic time to the oom-pah-pah beat.

Their heads lolled onto their chests, bouncing against their sharp-edged collar bones whenever they were made to sissone or jeté. Their mouths were sewn shut. Their eyes were glassy, black disks—the painted eyes of puppets and nutcrackers.

Through the gauze of their red costumes, Penny could see their skin was gray, almost transparent. They looked like corpses. But one raised a hand and extended her white fingers into a graceful wave. Another tilted her head to the side as she slid through an attitude. She looked right at Penny with her saucer eyes, and the corners of her mouth lifted into a close-lipped smile.

The song skipped on in triple time, and the ladies danced around the stage forming intricate patterns as the skin stretched and tented around the hooks, revealing large swaths of red flesh.

Penny ran.

As fast as her hobbling gate would allow, she left the dancing ladies gamboling about like nightcrawlers on the ends of their hooks. No one tried to stop her.

She burst through the front doors of the theater and limped out into the darkness until she reached the edge of the circle of light created by the marquee. The wind buffeted her, the cold sinking down once more into her bones. She could hear the last notes of the strings as they crescendoed against a backdrop of tinkling chimes.

Pulling up to a stop, she brought a hand to her ribs, massaging away the stitch of panic pulling at her lungs.

Ahead of her stretched the vast darkness. No matter how hard Penny looked, she could see no end to the shadow world around her. She would surely die out there on her own with no jacket and no light. Her flimsy shoes and mitenless hands.

She stood, fixed to the spot, afraid to go forward into the dark and afraid to turn around.

The wind whipped past again, and on it she thought she heard Gerard’s voice, calling for her. She took a step toward the dark. Maybe she could follow her name on his lips. Find her way back to their living room.

Gerard.

She imagined his wiry arms around her. She thought of being surrounded by his embrace, being surrounded by the nutcrackers. Follow his voice and she could go back. Safe. Buttressed by the familiar. Shored up. Hemmed in.

The dark breathed its winter breath.

It began to snow.

One night only.

Penny clenched her jaw, set her chin. And stepped out of the dark and into the light of the marquee.

No one was in the ticket booth at the front of the Honoree Odeon this time. The lobby was empty too. When Penny pushed back through the doors to the theater, the curtain was still up, but the dancing ladies now dangled, motionless, on their hooks. Their heads rested against their bony chests, their arms hung at their sides.

Slowly, Penny made her way toward them, climbing onto the stage. Her head screamed for caution, but her heart drove her closer.

She limped over to the first one. The dancer’s inkdrop eyes stared into the middle distance. Penny could see herself reflected within the black disks. She raised her finger to the dancer’s cheek.

“They can dance for you again.”

Penny gasped and drew her hand back. It was the old woman. She was in one of the red velvet seats.

“I don’t want them to dance,” Penny said, her voice shaking. “They’re trapped. Just little bits of flesh at the end of some string. They shouldn’t be here.”

“Where should they be then?”

Penny turned back to look at the dancer in front of her. She thought of what waited beyond the theater—the blackness, the room with the nutcrackers. Gerard.

“Trapped,” the old woman said into the silence. “Hmm. I don’t know, doll. Sometimes the strings are attached for a reason.”

And then the dancing lady next to Penny reached out a hand and wrapped tight fingers around Penny’s throat.

Penny kicked and punched and fought for breath. She wrapped her own fingers around the dancer’s wrist and pulled, but the ballerina only smiled at her through her stictches.

Penny struggled on, as hard as she could. But eventually she slowed. Her fingers slipped, and her arms fell to her sides. As her vision tunneled, she let her head roll back. She could see the catwalk above.

No puppeteer worked the strings.

***

“Don’t move. Don’t blink now. Okay, doll?”

Penny felt two sharp stabs of pain. One in each eye socket. And then a kind of reaching, a grasping, and a locking.

“There. All finished.”

At first, all Penny could see was black, but then the old woman’s face materialized before her. She looked sharper, her edges more defined. Beyond her the room had the irridescent sheen of an opal.

Penny tried to blink, tried to clear her vision of the odd effect. But no eyelids slid down to moisten her eyes. A sharp stab of panic kicked at her heart. She threw up her hands, fingers finding the edges of hard circles.

Her arms, when she moved, felt weirdly heavy, and she looked up to see cables extending above her. Sharp steel hooks were lodged in both elbows.

Terror shot through her, and she flung out her arms, like she was trying to unseat a spider. The shaking turned into violent pulling, but the hooks held firm. She wanted to scream but only managed a muffled choke. Her lips were sewn shut.

“Don’t fight it, doll.”

The little woman was in front of her, a bloody needle tucked behind her ear. Penny ran at her, but she stood just beyond her reach, the cables slamming into taut lines at Panny’s failed attack.

“Monsters,” the old woman said as she continued to back away. Penny could barely hear her over the drumline of her heart in her ears.

“Ugly things. Wounded things. But powerful.”

The old woman was razor-edged, but her tongue was pink and soft, a lifeline of gentleness in a world turned serrated.

“They can be harnessed, you know,” she continued. “Can be made to sing, sometimes. Sometimes they can even be made to dance.”

Spotlights lit the stage, and the old woman faded into the shadows. The opening notes of the Waltz of the Flowers filled the still air of the theater once more. A group of three ballerinas descended from the ceiling on their hooks, followed by another, and then another.

Nine ladies dancing a macabre waltz. And Penny was in the middle of it all. A Dewdrop with inkdrop eyes.

She felt her feet lift into pointe. Felt herself piroutette and jeté. Felt herself rising and spinning through a series of fouetté turns. She was dancing. Moving in a way she hadn’t been able to since her accident. In a way she never had before.

It was strange. Loose and fluid and wrong. A grotesquerie. An abomination.

A triumph.

From the stage, Penny could see the seats were full of nutcrackers. They stared at her with black eyes. Eyes like hers. She let go of her fear. Gave in to the moment.

And she carved the words of her dance into their wooden hearts with every step.

When the music stopped, Penny dipped into a bow. The nutcrackers didn’t clap. They didn’t need to. The sound of the poem she had just danced into life was louder than any ovation.

Nine ladies dancing.

Now ten.

A better, prettier, rounder number for the holidays.

---

Read Eight Maids a-Milking by

EJ Trask

here.

Or return to Ten Lords a-Leaping by

Honeygloom

here.

And if you’re looking for more tales fresh from the witch’s oven check out my other dark fantasy and horror stories, including the contest winner, The Echo of Gods.