Krampusnacht: Twelve Nights of Krampus (13 page)

Krampus began to laugh as he rose, a coarse, dark baritone mockery of Santa’s laugh. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” His black mane was lifting like an angry cat’s fur, still sodden with that stinking ooze, and then he paused halfway up, arched his back, and shook like a wet dog, showering the onlookers with his wretched, stinking slime.

He continued rising. It seemed to take forever for him to stretch his cramped muscles out to their full length, but when he did he stood 10 feet tall under the tower’s 12-foot ceilings. He had the legs of a satyr and the upper body of an impossibly muscular man. His face, though covered in black fur, was a hybrid of jungle cat and human. His fur was the length of a shaggy cat’s except along his spine where it grew in a thick mane so long and tangled and clotted with fat and pus that it formed dreadlocks cracking like whips with every move he made. His eyes were barely visible, long thin slits that allowed the faintest glow of blood-red light to escape. He stood looking down at the group, swaying slightly from the uncertainty of his own limbs after being balled-up in a fat man’s torso for so long. He ran the four powerful long fingers of his left hand down the length of his arm, gathering a sticky thick wad of ooze from his fur. He then released a 10-inch tongue from his mouth which hungrily lapped the gobs of pus and fat from his fingers.

His glance moving from chair to chair, the monster spoke. His words, long and sandpaper rough, were charged with an irrepressible black joy.

“I would see you better,” he said.

And with that the fur on his forehead parted. A giant third eye was released, bulging now from his forehead. If it weren’t for the long lashes above it no one present would have understood that this was indeed an eye because there was no iris, no white, and its surface wasn’t smooth. It was a jaundiced yellow and honeycombed like a beehive.

“Better,” he growled. “Eye to see you. Now. Horns.”

And so his horns erupted. Two fat grey-black horns burst from his temples with the sickening sound of a skull cracking open. Quickly they thickened, nourished from some furnace of energy inside the monster, and curled into two giant ram’s horns, each of which was larger than the head from which they had sprouted. Then more cracking sounds. Spectra, Kandi, and Darla could see movement under the skin of the creature’s forearms. Two thick protuberances made of the same stuff as his horns suddenly erupted through his wrists. They extended a foot and half past his knuckles and their points were as sharp as spears. His eye, that honeycombed orb, moved to and fro, proudly surveying these terrible weapons his arms had produced. His wheezing breath was heavy with anticipation.

Krampus closed his third eye and sniffed at the air. His black lips broke open in a long smile that revealed a set of razor-sharp teeth, every one of them an inch-long yellowed incisor.

“I smell… candy…” he said, and took a single step forward to the chair where Kandi sat. His third eye opened. “There’s my Kandi!” He took in a long, great breath of air, and shivered with pleasure. He shook his long, clawed index finger at the girl, the spear-horn on his forearm slashing at the air with every movement of his hand.

“Naughty. Not nice.”

“You don’t scare me,” Kandi said with a calm that was almost as chilling as the joy in the creature’s husky, murderous utterances. “My mommy’s here, and any parent would die before she allowed her little girl to get hurt.”

Krampus turned to Darla, still pressed against the fireplace.

“Hello,” Darla said in a squeaky little voice.

The monster smiled again.

“Kandi, honey,” Darla said, edging along the wall, her voice squeaking higher with every word. “Make sure your phone is turned on so I can reach you.”

Then she bolted from the room.

“Oh, fine,” Kandi said, rising calmly from her chair as Krampus, snorting with glee, turned back to her.

And then her face erupted with a rage like a boiling, bubbling vat of porridge.

“You think you’re tough?” she yelled. “I’ve negotiated residuals with advertising execs who eat cat-faced monsters like you for breakfast!”

She flung her hot chocolate into Krampus’ third eye. He closed it, staggered back, burying his face in his hands and howling in pain and rage.

Throughout all this Spectra’s terror had frozen her to the seat of her chair. But this sudden eruption of violence—initiated, unexpectedly, by Kandi—had a bracing effect. She leapt to her feet. Krampus’ horrible third eye opened again and he drove the spear on his arm forward, in Kandi’s direction. Somehow Spectra was faster. She pulled Kandi out of the way and the monster’s spear pierced the seat the girl had recently vacated, impaling it so deeply that his hand was buried to the wrist in the chair back. He lifted his arm, chair and all, and shook it high and low around the room until his arm spear, through the chair back, pierced one of the oval track lights embedded in the ceiling. He convulsed with an electrical shock, roaring furiously.

What Spectra desperately wanted to do now was abandon Kandi and find somewhere to hide while Krampus tore the little brat to pieces. But she couldn’t. Terrified as she was, Spectra just didn’t have it in her to allow a child to be murdered. What’s more, she knew that if there was even the slightest chance that Nick could somehow reverse this transformation, he’d be destroyed by the memory of murdering a little girl, even one as despicable as Kandi. Nick needed Spectra more now than ever before. He needed protecting from himself.

Spectra grabbed Kandi’s hand. “Run!”

Out of the den and down the hall they ran. Spectra was pulling Kandi in the direction of a door marked “Stairs” when Kandi broke free of her and ran farther down the hall to the elevator. She pressed the down button.

“There’s no time for that,” Spectra screamed.

“It’s on this floor, you mouth breather!” Kandi said, pointing to the row of numbered lights running over top of the doors. The elevator opened immediately and Kandi ran in, pressing the ground floor button a dozen times. Spectra raced after her, leaping through the doors just as they were closing. The elevator’s motion detector, registering Spectra’s body, opened the doors wide again, and the woman and girl stood inside, waiting. Suddenly the entire tower shook. Krampus had finally freed himself, hurling the chair off his hand and across the den with a terrible crash.

Just as the elevator doors began to close again, Spectra stuck her head out to look around the corner. She saw that the damaged chair had gotten stuck in the doorframe of the den and was jutting out into the hall.

“Get your damn head out of the door!” Kandi yelled. Too late. Spectra had again triggered the motion detectors and the doors fully opened once more.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Spectra cried.

The doors were sliding shut a second time when again the tower shook, this time with the shock of Krampus’ mighty leg kicking the chair through the doorframe, propelling it into the hallway wall where it shattered into a mangled mass of wood and fabric. He emerged roaring from the den. Once again Spectra stuck her head out of the elevator to look. And once again the motion detector opened the doors wide.

“He’s coming!” Spectra screamed.

“Are you on drugs, lady?” Kandi grabbed Spectra’s floral silk scarf and pulled her back into the elevator. She coiled the scarf around her hand over and over until there was no slack and Spectra was brought to heel, choking and kicking on the elevator floor. They could hear Krampus’ hooves thundering their way.

“You never seen a horror movie, retard?” Kandi said. “Just watch. He’s gonna get his goddamn hand in the doors before they close.”

The doors slid shut. Kandi let go of the scarf.

“Or maybe not,” Kandi said, shrugging as Spectra scrambled to her feet.

And then came an explosive force that knocked them both against the far wall: Krampus’ fist punched right through the elevator’s metal doors. His arm spear managed to skewer one of Spectra’s buns, lifting her off her feet as the lift began to descend. She was carried to the ceiling, the horn slicing upwards through the metal as the elevator dropped.

The horn sliced right through the ceiling, ripping the entire bun from Spectra’s skull, until finally Krampus was forced to withdraw his arm. Spectra crashed down to the elevator floor.

The lights on the control panel showed the floors counting down as the torn metal on the door screeched and blew sparks along the concrete surface of the elevator shaft: 30. 29. 25. 20. 17.

Kandi let out a labored, breathy chuckle of relief. “Sayonara, stinky.”

“Sayonara stinky?” Spectra sobbed. “Sayonara us! Are we supposed to run outside? If he doesn’t kill us the storm will!”

“We’ll cut open a couple of the huskies from my sled team and climb inside. Like in Empire Strikes Back.”

“I can’t fit inside a husky!”

“Then gut a reindeer! Why am I coming up with all the answers? I’m a kid!”

Then, just as the elevator passed the third floor, it shook violently and came to a halt.

“Oh, crap,” Kandi said.

All was still for a moment. Then the elevator shook and began to ascend again in a series of violent jerks that forced the woman and girl to the floor.

“We—we’re going up,” Spectra gasped, as Kandi’s little finger stabbed wildly at every button on the panel.

Krampus was pulling them back, pulling the whole elevator up by its cables like fish on a line. They could hear slackening coils of elevator cable crashing onto the ceiling as he closed the distance between them.

One final great yank and they were back on the 30th floor. They watched as Krampus’ giant fingers reached into the hole he had made in the doors and ripped them right out of their frame accompanied by the deafening scream of tearing metal. Tossing both panels to either side of him, he stood, his breath slightly labored, emitting a grunting, snorting laughter. They were trapped. They were his, now.

Spectra fell back against the elevator wall and slid to the floor, screaming. Kandi did not. She strode forward to the monster and calmly pointed at his prodigiously exposed genitals.

“You ever considered a loincloth, Tarzan?”

And then her body dipped back and off to the side. Her foot shot upwards, and with a “KEE-YA!” she nailed him, hard, right in the balls. Krampus grabbed himself and collapsed onto the floor, howling in pain and rage. “
Kung-Fu Princess
, asshole! I trained four months and puked off 20lbs for that and who got the part?”

She jumped, landing both feet on Krampus’ left horn. It made a slight cracking sound on impact. “Cyndy Symmons!” Kandi shrieked.

Krampus clambered to his knees and was about to stand up when Kandi dropped him once again, this time with a piercing sustained G Sharp Seventh, which made both the monster and Spectra curl into fetal positions, covering their ears. Kandi turned to Spectra in the elevator. “Yo! Prescription Pad!” She kicked her. “Let’s go!”

Now it was Kandi who took Spectra by the hand. As Krampus roared and rolled in pain they ran down the corridor and turned a corner. At the end of this new corridor they saw another “Stairs” sign over another doorway. As they pulled the door open they could hear Krampus getting back onto his feet and running after them. The floor jumped and the walls hummed with the force of his hoof-falls.

Kandi ascended the first few stairs. Spectra tore her hand free. “The roof? We can’t go up there!” she said. “We’ll be trapped!”

“Duh! He’ll think we went down!”

Kandi was already up the first flight of stairs and turning on the landing as Spectra began mounting the stairs after her. On the landing she paused to look back just as Krampus arrived at the door. He saw her. He knew they were headed for the roof.

At the speed he was going he crashed into the doorframe, which was too small for him, but with both hands pressed against it, and with no greater exertion than if he were opening curtains, he forced the frame open wide, the metal contorting and the cement of the firewall around it exploding in a cloud of dust and concrete shrapnel.

But Kandi and Spectra were able to climb faster than Krampus, whose hooves were too big to fit cleanly on the steps. He would run up a few, then lose his balance and skip down a few, bellowing with rage.

Kandi and Spectra arrived at a door marked “Roof.” Kandi threw it open. Immediately a powerful gust of wind and snow blasted her, but she pushed on through it, disappearing into a whipping, roaring cloud of white.

Again, Spectra hesitated. The whole building shook with the sounds of Krampus charging up the stairs. He would appear any second. But that polar storm was lethal. For a moment she considered surrendering, begging for mercy, imploring any trace of Nick that might still exist in the creature to spare her. And why not? She had only ever, ever been his friend.

No. She was Nick’s friend, not the monster’s. In every therapy session she had taught Santa how to thwart this monster that was kicking for freedom inside of him.

Spectra ran through the door onto the roof, into the white rage of the storm. In a silk pantsuit she’d last five minutes out here, if she was lucky. But as she lifted each leg high to plant her foot down in the deep snow (no hope of running in the stuff) she was surprised to find her terror slowly receding the farther out into the storm she went. Even as her body temperature plummeted she had the strangest sensation of a profusion of peace suddenly flowering in her heart, overflowing and warming her from the inside out.

With nothing to look at but a screen of snow, her vision turned inwards to an image of herself sitting at some long, beautiful library table with a thick, hardbound textbook open before her. She was turning the pages, researching her own current state of mind. Either the storm was slowly killing her and this loss of fear, this sudden feeling of peace, represented the gradual shutting down of her nervous system, or this feeling was psychological, a moment of great significance, an epiphany that she hadn’t fully realized until now she very much needed. There was a clinical name for this, but she couldn’t find it in this enormous textbook, and she was losing interest in even trying.

It troubled her, just a little, that her survival instinct seemed to have quit on her. But there was something bracing in the grandiosity of the storm, in having fled to the top of a building on the top of the world with not one but two obliterating forces of nature upon her—Krampus and the storm. She closed the book in her mind. A sudden rush of sadness: she pictured herself leaving the North Pole having fully cured Nick, going back to Europe and Hollywood for a resumption of the parties, the awed celebrities and dignitaries lining up to hear her stories—Spectra, the great supernatural psychiatrist. Everyone talking about her latest triumph. “The shrink who saved Santa Claus!”