The Duck on the mantlepiece

It was a beautiful thing, really, if you could separate beauty from the sense of existential doom it exuded. A glass duck, delicate yet malevolent, its multi-coloured swirls shifting slightly when you weren’t looking, as though it contained something alive. It had been in our family for generations, stolen—looted, my great-grandfather always corrected—from some distant land during one of his colonial jaunts. He had brought it back like a talisman, only to be haunted by it until he died raving mad in the greenhouse, naked but for his medals, screaming about a “fire-tongued judgment.”

No one ever touched the duck. It was law. The kind of law that’s neither written nor spoken but absorbed into the bones of the house. My father told me that if I so much as laid a finger on it, it would whisper to me the truths of my soul—the blackness within—and show me my fiery future below. As the youngest in the family, I listened. I feared. I avoided.

Then one day, the cat knocked it over.

Romwell, a miserable bastard of a feline with contempt for all living things, leaped onto the mantle, flicked his tail, and sent the duck flying. Without thinking, I reached out and caught it.

The instant my fingers touched the glass, my vision darkened. Something unfurled inside my skull, vast and cold and watching. It did not arrive. It had always been there, waiting for me to notice.

"You."

The voice was fire over distant ice.

"Oh, this is going to be fun."

I returned the duck to its place, my hands shaking. My father had been right. The nightmares began immediately.

At first, it was subtle—a shadow where no shadow should be, my reflection lagging a second behind my movements. The duck’s voice, curling into my thoughts like smoke:
"Ah, your posture. That of a man who suspects he is doomed but still hopes the soup at dinner will be nice."

It whispered my past sins, both great and small, including the time I stole a toffee from Aunt Judith’s purse when I was six.

"And you thought no one saw."

The real horror began when it started showing me things.
I would catch glimpses—reflections where my face wasn’t my own but something hollow-eyed and grinning. A shadow that stretched towards me when I wasn’t looking. The sound of my own voice speaking when my lips remained still.
And always, always the sensation that I was being watched by something ancient, something amused, something waiting.

One night, as I lay in bed, the darkness thickened like ink. I heard the familiar clank of Mr. Tibbens, our butler, moving through the house, his mechanical claw clicking against the banister. But then the clicks came closer, closer—inside my room.
I turned my head. Mr. Tibbens was standing by my bedside.
Only it wasn’t Mr. Tibbens.
It was taller. Thinner. Its claw was larger now, dripping with something too thick to be water.
It leaned down, breath reeking of burnt sugar and rot. And in a voice layered over with the duck’s eternal amusement, it said:
"Would you like to see?"
Then it grabbed my face.
I woke screaming.
The next morning, the duck was sitting on my pillow.

The village knew.
The butcher gave me knowing looks when I passed, muttering, “The duck sees all.” The vicar, a wiry man with nervous hands, avoided my gaze entirely. The postman, pale and sweating, thrust a letter at me and whispered, “Mind the duck, lad.” Then he pedalled away with unnecessary haste.

My uncle Jack watched me carefully over breakfast, his mane of white hair making him look like an electrified owl. He sipped his tea. “Ah,” he said finally. “You’ve seen.”

The family had been waiting. It had happened to all of them in turn. The duck, it seemed, was patient. My father, a man of immense stolidity, merely nodded. “Try not to let it talk too much,” he advised, as though it were a particularly pushy solicitor.

And so, life continued, now accompanied by a malevolent artifact that enjoyed making me question my sanity.
My breaking point came one evening when Aunt Judith, who had never acknowledged the duck, found me staring at it. She sighed, wiped her flour-covered hands on her apron, and said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, dear. Just don’t let it win.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You’ll find out.”
The laughter of the duck echoed in my skull as she walked away.

That night, the duck made me an offer.
"We can be rid of this house, of these people. They are all dull, aren’t they? You want to be special, don’t you? You want to matter."
I clutched my blanket. “I matter enough already, thank you.”
The duck chuckled.
"Oh, but you don’t. Not yet. But you could."
It showed me.
Grand halls filled with gold and light. People hanging on my every word. Power beyond imagining. They bowed as I passed, whispered my name like a prayer. I could feel it.
"It is yours. The smallest of prices."
My mouth was dry. “…Which is?”
"You already know."
I closed my eyes. I would not listen. I would not—
I opened them to find myself standing before the mantlepiece, my hands inches from the duck.
My heart pounded.
I had nearly given in.
The duck sighed in my head.
"Sooner or later, they all do."

It has been years now. The duck remains. Sometimes I find it in places I didn’t leave it. Sometimes I hear it laughing in the silence. It is patient. It is waiting.
And every night, I dream of fire.
I have not touched it since.
But some nights, I wake with my hand outstretched, reaching, reaching, reaching.
And last night, I woke up.
My hand was on the duck.
A voice, fire on ice, whispered in my skull:
"Ah. At last."

FSF