The Festival

A man returns to Kingsport, the old sea town of his fathers, to keep the Yule festival his family has kept for centuries. He is led through snow-bound streets to a church, and down, beneath the town, to a vast lit cavern and an underground river where the celebrants take wing on things that are not birds.

What he witnesses is older than Christianity, older than the town, a rite carried out of a drowned antiquity by people who are no longer entirely people. He wakes in hospital, told it was all delirium, and is left with a passage from the Necronomicon that suggests otherwise. The Archive keeps it as a procession, a cold measured walk down into the lit dark.