Krampusnacht: Twelve Nights of Krampus (8 page)

“Not possible,” I said. This was something I knew about.

I am the only legitimate daughter of Rotten Tom Lilly, president of the Pan Lords Motorcycle Club, Falcon Original.

Drew knew it. He’d put it together after Rotten Tom’s arrest for racketeering, extortion, arson and homicide, and his face and story were well-documented national news, as well as his plea to his estranged daughter, StarGazer, for reconciliation.

Falcon was a town of 350. It had fewer bars, more churches, and was closer to an urban center than was Euell.

“Someone’s keeping the peace. An MC,” I said.

Drew shook his head.

“It’s a church town?”

He shook his head harder. “No. They have a sheriff. No organized crime. No cults. No gangs of any sort. No groups, in fact, except an Eagles Lodge. The only reported crime in the past 10 years has all been committed by theme park visitors. Or transients passing through.”

I didn’t know what to say. Crime, deviance in general, was not a single issue with a single solution. It existed in some form wherever there was a group of humans. Any context in which where there was the construction and application of rules.

Drew and I looked back at the map on the screen.

“When do you leave?” I asked.

“As soon as possible,” he answered.

* * *

Sometimes the man I love would hold my face in his hands, like he was going to look very deep in my eyes or kiss the top of my head. But instead he’d just look beyond me, at a spot on the wall. Like he was listening. Like he was hearing my thoughts.

Mädchen, hört, und Bübchen!

Sometimes the man I love would take my hand as we were walking. I was proud when he did. Neighbors and townsfolk would look at him, then look at me with him. I saw respect in their eyes.

Macht mir auf das Stübchen!

I should have seen the fear. It was a look, I, more than anyone else, should have recognized.

Bring euch viele Gaben!

People in Falcon had looked at Rotten Tom that way. A tunnel of faces play back, looking down at me with composed smiles, expressions I did not understand. I was just a little girl, holding hands with her daddy.

Sollt euch dran erlaben!

When I was 15, I heard noise in the back shed: Rotten Tom whipping red, and pink, and white, from the backside of Suff Tally, the Pan Lord’s third. Rotten Tom looked at me, looking at the ribbons of flesh.

Kling, Glöckchen, kling!

“Like bacon,” he said, then smiled at his own joke. “Bacon! From a pig.” Tom slapped Tally’s torn back with the palm of his hand. “Oink for us, pig!”

Kling, Glöckchen…

I ran away from the shed, off the property, down the road, and didn’t stop until I reached the elementary school three miles away. I understood all the faces now. I can still hear the agony.

I wonder if Reiner can hear that, when he listens.

klingelingeling!

* * *

Instead of Drew, I went to Euell. The department first tried to sell it to me as honoring Drew’s memory. Then, they flat out threatened expulsion if I allowed this research to go outside the department. I was promised the funding would fall like rain. Journal articles
and
the popular media would court me. I’d have a blank check I could just make out to “tenure,” wherever I wanted.

“It’s just six months, Star,” they said.

“OK,” I said. I didn’t seem to have a choice. “Six months.”

The town was a dream. Distilled from then the collective dreams dreamed by anyone who ever dreamed a dream of a small town—where kids rode bikes, Main Street shopkeeps greeted all by name. Friday night socials at Eagles Lodge, where grandparents and teenagers, parents and toddlers all danced together, and then were home by nine.

I moved into the perfect little craftsman intended for Drew. I found fresh-cut flowers in vases set around and a freezer full of casseroles. The utensil drawer even squeaked me a little welcome.

And then he knocked on the door, and let himself in. I was on the hardwood floor, unpacking a box. He came to me and extended his hand. I took it. He helped me up.

His eyes were the pine green of a forest. His features were carved facets in a stone arrowhead. I stood up and, tall, rangy, he towered over me.

I knew who he was, but he introduced himself anyway. “I’m Reiner Lidon,” he said. He didn’t look like a sheriff. Then he smiled at me, a perfect, pointed smile and wrapped an arm around me, like I was already his. “Welcome home.”

There’s a line sociologists walk interacting with field work subjects: hovering alongside, a peepshow voyeur. But Reiner, and then the whole of Euell, took that line and tied it into a bow around me, like a wrapped present. In Reiner’s arms, that very first moment, he became the man I love.

* * *

The man I love is close now. He is going to find me. He sings slowly, drawing out the syllables.

Hell erglühn die Kerzen…

His feet clop like a horse’s on the linoleum floor. He opens a cabinet, then closes it again. Clop, clop.

Öffnet mir die Herzen…

He plays with me. He opens the utensil drawer, as if I could fit. It squeaks open, then closed. Clop, clop.

Will drin wohnen fröhlich, Frommes Kind, wie selig!

As he clops around the kitchen island, he picks up the tempo. Since I know he knows where I am, I let myself mouth the words of the song: Candles glow in splendor / Hearts are warm and tender / Blessings pure and holy / From the child so lowly.

Kling, Glöckchen…

I can feel him outside the door. Like when you sense someone’s heat, I can sense his cold. The doorknob turns. Ring, little bell.

klingelingeling!

Ring.

* * *

I spent days observing Christmas Village, dressed as an elf to blend in. Weekends, I greeted the biking children and shopkeeps by name. Friday nights, I danced with Reiner at the lodge. Within a few weeks, he was in my bed by nine.

Aspens turned yellow; the red maples looked like flames. The department wasn’t impressed with my notes, my narratives.

“They’re stilted. On guard,” they said. “Have you built enough trust?”

The department got the grant extended, my leave renewed. “Stay through the new year,” they advised. “And return with something.”

Reiner wouldn’t completely move in. He left a toothbrush, but was careful to leave no other trace, to hurry back to his own house in the purple dawn to shower, shave, and dress for work.

We never fought. But if we had, it would have been about this.

“Everyone knows,” I told him. “If you’re worried what people would think.”

“That’s not it, Star,” he answered.

“I’d marry you, if you asked. If that’s the problem,” I said. “If you were wondering.”

“I love you, but it isn’t right for us to be together,” he said. “I have too many secrets.” I imagined pain in his eyes as he said this.

“Everyone has secrets.” I’d reach for him, to soothe the hurts I saw.

But I couldn’t hold him. He had to hold me. I liked that. If I sat very still, his arms would seem to grow around me like the roots of a strange tree.

And as I sat, I was sure that whatever it was, it’d be OK. It’d come to light and it would heal.

He is a good man, I told myself. “You are a good man,” I said.

The snows came. Euell was a portrait of winter. Bare trees formed a black net against the sky, cut by creamy pipes of smoke from chimneys. There was so much depth to the shades of frost: milk, opal, maggot, silver, vanilla, faintly blue ice.

In Christmas Village, it was Christmas always. But Euell prepared for the actual holiday with purpose and determination—hanging lights and wreaths, bells and tinsel, mistletoe and pierced luminarias. I never found the source of the aroma of cinnamon and cloves, but it was suddenly there, luscious and unceasing.

At the hanging of the angel atop the town tree, I stood gripped with joy, though Reiner had to answer a call at the park. The carolers wore mufflers trimmed in ermine. Their songs were interrupted by enthusiastic wassailing, calling for toasts, and everyone would hold aloft their cup of cider or eggnog or cocoa.

The librarian tugged gently on my sleeve. I hadn’t even seen her next to me, caught up in the spectacle. She looked around, and whispered something. I had to move close to her to hear.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, words clipped and harsh.

I was dumbfounded, then hurt. “It’s Christmas Eve,” I answered.

“No, I mean, here.” She looked around. “We thought you’d be gone by Christmas.”

“My project isn’t complete,” I said. I’d become unwelcome.

“You should get out of here.” The librarian was a small woman, and she gripped my wrist then, between my glove and sleeve. Her fingers were strong as they dug in. “You need to go. Now.” Then she looked worried. Even seeing only what I wanted, it was unmistakable.

Before I could ask her why, I shivered. Then, I felt another hand on my other shoulder, long enough to stretch from scapula to collar bone. Reiner kissed the back-top of my head. “Hello, Lucinda,” he said to the librarian.

She smiled, tightly, rehearsed. “Reiner. Happy to see you. Merry Christmas!” she said, and offered him a cheek to kiss. Afterward, she nodded at both of us, then slipped back into the party, a mosaic of red and green, gold and silver and white, singing in harmony, syncopated movement.

A wassail for a toast. Reiner called out, “Here, here!” Then he turned to me. He slipped off my glove and took my hand in his, then turned to look at the town and the tree. While I hadn’t been able to hear the librarian without coming close, Reiner’s voice was clear and loud.

“You want truly to be with me?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I answered, without hesitation.

He squeezed my hand. “I have a gift for you,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked. Delighted, like a child.

As soon as he smiled, snowflakes started to fall. “It’s a secret,” he said. And the carolers began a new song. Reiner squeezed my hand again. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “This is one of my favorites. Do you know it?”

He didn’t see me shake my head because he was already singing along in that surprisingly beautiful tenor. “Ring, little bell, ring!”

* * *

The man I love fills the pantry doorway with his terrible new silhouette. It’s not just because he is terrifying that I can hardly look at him; I am shallow and want to see the face and body I came to know, the face and body that belong to that voice, instead of the hooked horns and the goat ears, the red eyes and bulging tongue. He shifts position, hoofs clacking on the linoleum as he waits for my eyes to adjust, then to take him in.

With his claw, he plucks me up and out from behind the pantry shelf, sets me onto the kitchen island.

“I found you,” he roars. When he laughs, he raises his head, and his horns scrape plaster from the ceiling. Then, he crouches, sober again, to my eye level. “Why did you hide from me?”

I can’t answer him.

“Come sit with me,” he says. He picks me up, again, with his claw, but gently. He carries me to the living room, deposits me in a chair.

In the middle of the room, a sack jumps and kicks, rattling the rusted chain that binds it closed.

“What’s in there?” I ask, though I’m sure I know.

“It’s the wicked,” Reiner answers. He sits his great black and red body down onto the sack like a stool.

I hear some screams, some cries. “What do you do with them?”

“I throw them into the fire.”

The sounds are familiar. They are agony.

But I don’t run away.

The man I love reaches for me with one massive arm, beckoning with his claw. He pats his bent knee. “Come here,” he says. “Come and get your gift.”

* * *

Caren Gussoff is a SF writer living in Seattle, WA. The author of Homecoming, (2000), and The Wave and Other Stories (2003), first published by Serpent’s Tail/High Risk Books, Gussoff’s been published in anthologies by Seal Press, and Prime Books, as well as in Abyss & Apex, Cabinet des Fées and Fantasy Magazine. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2008, was the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia E. Butler Scholar at Clarion West. Her new novel, The Birthday Problem, was published by Pink Narcissus Press in 2014, and her first contact novella, Three Songs for Roxy, will be published by Aqueduct Press in 2015. Find her online at @spitkitten, facebook.com/spitkitten, and at spitkitten.com.

Sixth Night of Krampus: “A Visit”

by Lissa Sloan

Inspiration
: Being carried away from home in a basket by a terrifying beast-man, whipped with a birch rod, and possibly receiving heaven knows what other sinister punishments is a harsh consequence for childish wrongdoing. Lissa Sloan wondered what actions would truly deserve such a fate. This question, along with her fondness for 19th century books, inspired “A Visit.”

Mr. Pennyrake smiled. He was awfully fond of Christmas. No other time of year offered so many, as he liked to put it,
opportunities
. He admired his new coat in the glass. It was a great improvement on the last one, which that girl Sukie had so carelessly burnt with the iron. She had rather carried on when he had sacked her, sobbing incessantly about her sick widowed mother with an excess of little ones still at home. But he had to make an example of her, or the rest of the servants would think they could be equally careless. And she was much less willing than she had been at the beginning of her employ. So an example was made.

Mr. Pennyrake straightened his cravat. People said he was a handsome fellow, and who was he to argue? With a final approving look in the glass, he picked up his gloves and made his way towards the stairs, where he nearly collided with Jane.

“Beg pardon, sir,” she said, blushing prettily and trying to step around him. Like the new coat, Jane was also a great improvement on her predecessor. She was far prettier than Sukie, and Mr. Pennyrake had high hopes of her contributing to his domestic happiness.