Krampusnacht: Twelve Nights of Krampus (2 page)

“Peppermint Sticks”: A down-on-his-luck guy takes a job with Krampus. It proves to be a tough gig.

“Ring, Little Bell, Ring”: Krampus is a lover and a lawman in a strange little town.

“A Visit”: This story has an old-fashioned setting, and tremendous buildup toward a faceoff with Krampus.

“Santa Claus and the Girl Who Loved to Sing and Dance”: He tussles with a monstrous child who won’t let Santa or anyone else get in the way of stardom.

“Between the Eyes”: The Horned One walks into a bar and wreaks hell on the life of an unwitting victim.

“Nothing to Dread”: The Christmas Devil is well and truly caught by a little boy.

“Raw Recruits”: Krampus runs a sweatshop. In Hell.

“The God Killer”: Krampus is stalked. Things get choppy.

“A Krampus Carol”: There really, truly is a “get off my lawn” story of Krampus in these pages. And just who’s the bad guy here?

Unwrap these little “presents” all at once or one by one. You’ll see all sides of Krampus and the holidays. I’ve enjoyed discovering them and putting this collection together, and hope you’ll love these stories as much as I do. And remember, if you’re inclined to listen for footsteps on the roof on Christmas Eve, don’t just expect the thump of a boot. Keep your ears open for the clip-clop of hoofs, the rattle of chains and the whoosh of a ruten.

Enjoy the holidays.

Kate Wolford, Editor

First Night of Krampus: “Prodigious”

by Elizabeth Twist

Inspiration
: Elizabeth first learned about Krampus through Monte Beauchamp’s beautifully curated collection of Krampus postcards,
The Devil in Design
. In addition to the numerous images of Krampus hauling away naughty children, she noticed there’s another theme running through the collection: Krampus wooing cute women. “Prodigious” is based on the notion of a Krampus who longs for romance.

Sweet Gwendolyn’s voice calls to me across Super Fun Toy Super Store. “Brian! Come here!”

For a moment my heart and nethers flutter. She’s going to ask me to a Christmas party and kiss me lightly, then passionately, under the mistletoe. Or maybe not, but I can dream.

Between me and Gwendolyn stand twin boys pelting each other with hard rubber balls. A baby girl has fallen on her bottom trying to toddle after her big brother who, based on her shrieks, is named Peter. He scowls and points and laughs as he whips stuffed dinosaurs at her head. Some children are naturally worse than others but I don’t care; I catch a glimpse of Gwendolyn standing by the staff room door.

A tot catches my pant leg, smearing me with what I can only hope is chocolate. I plastic smile down at him. A woman tugs my sleeve. She’s covered in let’s-hope-it’s-chocolate too.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Where’s the washroom? Thomas needs a diaper change.”

I gesture wildly and give instructions and extract myself from their sticky embrace. She doesn’t so much as thank me.

One of Gwendolyn’s porcelain hands is resting on the door handle to freedom, for beyond the staff room door is the locker room that holds our coats and car keys, and from there it’s one more door out to the back parking lot. I imagine we won’t say a word as we rush out to my car and maybe drive a block or two before we pull over and do to each other what we are clearly meant to do.

“What’s up?” I’m playing it cool. The only time we’ve ever done anything is in my imagination. I recognize that.

She smiles. Her brunette curls bounce and shine over her perfect shoulders and she says perfect words: “I need you out back.”

I bet you do.
I can’t—and don’t—say that out loud. “Need help with something?”

She nods, and opens the door. My heart jumps into my esophagus and performs a tango. She takes her coat from her locker. “Cold out there. You’ll want your coat too.”

Adding more clothes to the situation is not what I want, but she’s right; it’s freezing outside. We bundle up and she opens the door, and I can’t believe I get to spend time with her. Payne has never been anything but nice to me. He goes out of his way to pretend our jobs are important, and he always asks how I’m doing and remembers my name and everything, but I swear he sets up our shifts so Gwendolyn and I are never together.

The back parking lot, normally containing a few staff cars, is crowded with people. It looks like everyone who works for the store is here, arranging lawn furniture and wrapping things in red and green paper and making piles of glittery cotton “snow.” They’re hammering together a small train track and assembling a plywood stage with a foil-wrapped arch on it that says “Santa Claus.”

The Christmas party is tomorrow night. With the rush inside the store, I’d forgotten.

Mr. Payne waves us over. His red cheeks make him look like a Campbell’s soup kid. He thumbs his suspenders—he wears them even when he’s not about to play Santa—and yells Gwendolyn’s name magnanimously even though we’re only a few feet away. He follows it up with a few ho ho ho’s.

She laughs. “Pretty good,” she says. She has to say that, though. He’s her dad.

“Well?” Payne asks. He looks at me expectantly. I smile. I’m coming in partway through the conversation.

Gwendolyn smiles at me. It’s enough to make me swoon, but I still don’t know what all this is about.

“Stick out your tongue,” she says.

I freeze. My tongue is my thing.

Everybody has a thing. You can wiggle your ears or turn your eyelids inside out or flare your nostrils. You’re double jointed or have a weird birthmark shaped like a hand or a bunny or a something. Your thing.

One of my deepest regrets, second only to the fact that I work at a place called Super Fun Toy Super Store, is that two weeks after I started here, this past January, I attended a staff party at which I got way too drunk. I was trying to impress a girl. Okay, it was Jeannie from the stock room. This was before I met Gwendolyn. Anyway, I popped my eyes open and stuck out my tongue at her.

If you ever have the misfortune to get a job at Super Fun Toy Super Store, “Have you seen Brian’s tongue?” is the question they will ask you
before
they ask if you know how to work a cash register.

“Come on,” Gwendolyn says. “Stick out your tongue. Daddy wants to see it.”

Ice devours my heart and I stick out my tongue.

“See?” Gwendolyn says. “It’s perfect, right?”

Mr. Payne frowns. I tuck my tongue back behind my teeth. It’s long enough that I know it looks like it shouldn’t fit. It does.

The frown melts into a smile and Payne howls, not the fake ho-ho of a toy store Santa, but a this-is-gonna-be-good laugh of a frat boy planning a week of hazing. Hey, if he’s happy, I’m happy, but still. It’s disconcerting.

“All right!” Payne wipes tears away. “I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s perfect. Just like you said, honey.”

Gwendolyn’s squee fills the parking lot. The busy worker bees pause in their hammering and wrapping and lift their heads for a moment, then drop them when they see Payne standing there, smiles playing on their faces. Everybody’s mood seems to lift when Payne is around. He’s always laughing and making a joke, but never at anybody’s expense. Not until today, anyway.

To say this is awkward doesn’t come close to covering it. I don’t love my job, but Payne is pretty much my favorite of all the bosses I’ve had, and somehow the girl of my dreams has just exposed me to something that feels a whole lot like a weirdly sexual medical exam. There has to be some explanation.

“Brian, this year you’re going to play Krampus! Gwendolyn and I insist.”

“Uh.” I manage. “What’s a Krampus?”

* * *

Payne’s second-in-command, Lennox, takes me into the storage room behind the staff locker room, her high, tight ponytail waving in my face. She flips through the substantial collection of keys on her key ring, selects one, and uses it to open
the door
.

The door
is the weirdest thing. It’s located in the back of the broom closet, where you wouldn’t think a door would be. No one I’ve talked to has ever seen
the door
open, not even once, in the almost-year that I have worked here.

Don’t cross Lennox is one of the first rules you learn here. That she has a key to
the door
is one of many signs of her power.

My running theory, that
the door
is a secret access to Narnia, is finally put to rest as she pulls the chain on the single ancient light bulb dangling from the ceiling. My first impression is that the room is full of furs: I see empty skins hanging, and there’s a musky smell. Then I catch a glimpse of red velvet trimmed in white and I realize: costumes. They’re hanging from pegs and hooks and hangers, elaborately rigged for each outfit.

It all makes a kind of sense now: There is the white bunny outfit that Ken wore at Easter. There’s the greasy black wig, pointed hat, and green hooked warty nose that Shelley wore at Halloween, and the turkey costume Alex dressed in just a few weeks ago for the Thanksgiving! Blowout! Sale!

I stare at the Santa outfit. It seems custom made for someone bigger than most of the staffers. On the floor beside it sits a pair of soft black leather boots. I reach out to touch one.

“Better not,” Lennox says. Her tone is so peculiar I turn and stare at her. She wears a sneer that I can only describe as “triumphant.”

It’s Christmas, though. “Isn’t this for me? You know, for the party?” Krampus could be a word for Santa, in some language. Even as I think it, I know that’s probably not right.

Her laugh is hideous. I remember I turned her down, back in January, when she shyly asked me if I wanted to see a movie with her. Then I told a couple of the other girls on staff. I have a big mouth sometimes. Lennox hates me. She’s loving this.

My voice only squeaks a little as I ask, “So if I’m not Santa, then who am I supposed to be?”

There’s an elf costume to the right of the Santa outfit, but Lennox points to the back of the long, narrow room, at a rough, brown-furred thing hanging where the light doesn’t quite manage to penetrate. I go to it, as to my doom.

The thick smell of animal skins I detected from the doorway originates from this costume. I pull it out from the wall and for a moment I think I’m looking at a disheveled coat sewn entirely from wolves’ hackles—the fur is that long, that spikey. As I examine it, I see it’s a onesie, having pants and top with holes for the hands, feet, and head, and access granted by a row of large wooden toggles down the front.

A flexible mask—skin, I think, not rubber—hangs from a peg nearby. It’s hideous, a flapping devil’s face with a gaping open mouth. An ancient bottle of spirit gum hangs beside it from a bit of string. There’s no elastic to hold the mask on. I’ll have to glue it to my face.

The costume comes with a single awkward looking shoe. “There’s only one,” Lennox says. “Krampus has one cloven hoof and one human foot. The foot is bare.” She finishes with a smirk.

“Help me out here,” I say, genuinely scared at the prospect of wearing this thing, although I couldn’t say why.

“You know how Santa is supposed to leave lumps of coal in your stocking if you’re naughty?”

I nod.

“Let’s say it isn’t Santa. Let’s say Santa only wants to deal with nice kids. Somebody still has to deliver the coal.”

“Krampus.”

“Krampus.” She pops her gum as if that’s the last word.

I take the costume down off its hook and drape it over my arm. I clutch the shoe, mask, and glue bottle in one hand. I’m about to leave the costume closet, which Lennox is waiting to lock, but she stops me.

“You forgot that stuff. That’s yours too.”

In the back corner I find a thing like a three foot long whisk made of sticks and a giant curving pair of ram’s horns that look like they’ve been torn directly from the animal. Shreds of fur and dried skin stick to the flat ends. A strange harness attaches them together. There’s also a bushel basket with straps so you can wear it like a backpack. It’s all too weird.

Lennox tells me I’ve got the rest of the afternoon to go home and prepare. On my way out the door, I pause.

“Who’s playing Santa Claus?”

Lennox rolls her eyes. “Who do you think?”

Fear has made me utterly stupid. “You?”

She laughs and shakes her head. Her ponytail swishes like it’s got anger of its own. “The big guy, dummy.”

I don’t quite stop myself from saying “God?” I know who she’s talking about. Of course it’s Payne.

* * *

I park a few blocks away from the store, so no one who’s likely to attend the party will see me struggle into the horns or strap the bushel basket onto my back. I’ve spent the afternoon at my apartment, practicing threatening poses in front of a full-length mirror, the one legacy of my last girlfriend.

The Krampus gear looks awesome, if I do say so myself. The fur outfit is a little more like a weird coat than a costume, but the mask and the horns more than make up for it. I’m eight feet tall with all of it put together, and when my prodigious tongue sticks out through the rubbery black lips of the mask, it’s magic. I look truly demonic. For once I’m okay with the fact that my mom is dead, I never knew my dad, and I don’t have any living family that I know of. It makes for a bummer of a holiday season, but maybe I can be different, maybe there’s room for a demon in the story of Christmas, and maybe that’s my place.

Once I’m all strapped in, I grab the giant whisk thing, and I set off for the parking lot.

By this point I’ve figured out how to walk with just the one hoof. It’s actually a clever rig that fits over a tennis shoe. The other foot is supposed to be bare. Hard-core Krampus imitators use shoe polish and nothing else, but it’s below freezing, so I’m wearing a brown knitted slipper with individual toes and a patch of leather on the sole, kind of a glove for your foot. It’s one of a pair that my mom gave me, a million Christmases ago, before she got sick.

I’m only sort of limping as I cross the parking lot. I snort and show my teeth as I pass the first bunch of kids. They stare.