Krampusnacht: Twelve Nights of Krampus (4 page)

The thought of being able to leave the store only adds to the joy I’m feeling. My cup runneth over, and I clap my hands. “What do I have to do?”

Santa pauses, looks me up and down. I get the sense that he’s a little reluctant to say this next part. “Well, what I need is a new Krampus. The job fell out of favor with humanity a couple of centuries ago. Sure, there’s been an uptick in the popularity of the idea recently, for reasons I don’t completely understand, but people just want to put Krampus on for a night. They don’t want to
be
him. They don’t really understand about good and evil, or how to distinguish between the two.”

“But I was just in costume, too. I was just pretending.”

He holds my gaze for a long moment. I think about what happened earlier, think about the lights around the kids, about my claws, and the way the fur of the costume seemed to sprout from my body. Gwen saying that I became Krampus. This is the moment that I realize I can be more than just an orphan with a terrible job and a crush on the evil daughter of my evil boss.

Briefly I worry about what this is going to do to my already almost non-existent sex life. It’s only a small quibble. I look down at Gwendolyn, sleeping the sleep of evil. There must be other women like her out there, who find big hairy beasts appealing. I bet some of them aren’t even evil. There’s somebody for everyone. Surely Krampus is no exception.

I nod. Santa winks.

When the change happens, I grow tall. My legs lengthen and my hoof hardens and my horns reach for the sky. I know that the whisk thing I’m carrying is really a bundle of birch switches. The basket on my back is vast inside.

I’m not confused any more. I know just what to do. I lope off into the trees as the bells of Santa’s sleigh jingle through the night sky overhead.

* * *

Elizabeth Twist is a speculative fiction writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. Her short fiction has appeared in Dark Faith: Invocations, Suction Cup Dreams, Enchanted Conversation, and is collected in Six by Twist, available on Amazon. She blogs about fiction and weirdness at elizabethtwist.com.

Second Night of Krampus: “The Wicked Child”

by Elise Forier Edie

Inspiration
: Elise used to love the Christmas season, and took great delight in its celebration of peace, love, beauty and joy. Today, she finds Christmas distasteful and upsetting, and sets her teeth every October against the seasonal onslaught of commercial exhortations to be more covetous, more ostentatious and more greedy. In the midst of such topsy-turvy values, she wondered how a truly virtuous person would react and behave. It was with this in mind that she set about writing “The Wicked Child.”

The bishop and his companion had come to her grandfather’s inn every autumn for as long as Tuva could remember.

It was always a great event, for the bishop rented rooms until nearly winter and paid lavish sums at a time of year when very few visitors traveled to the Arctic Circle. Everyone in the village, from the tanner’s boy to the reeve, talked of his arrival, of how he would always come by reindeer sleigh, wrapped in white furs and purple velvet, how he tossed gold coins and sweets to the children, chuckling and smiling, and how his dark companion sat silent and grave by his side, a single, stick-straight shadow in the bishop’s sparkling cloud of beneficence.

Once Tuva’s grandmother ventured to ask what brought the bishop and his assistant so far north at such a prohibitive time of year, when the snow fell sometimes four feet in a night, trees rattled with ice crystals, and clouds blanketed the world in vast swaths of freezing fog. The bishop seemed to contemplate this question most seriously, his shrewd gaze meeting the grandmother’s frank and curious one, his round face flickering in the candlelight. At last he answered gravely. “Why, I love to behold unmolested God’s seasonal lightshow in the winter sky. It renews my faith and allows me to celebrate His spirit in the clearest way possible.” He gestured at his companion and continued. “Is it not so for you, dear Peter?”

But the bishop’s dark companion remained silent, folding lines and shadows into his gaunt cheeks as he frowned and shook his head. But Tuva saw his eyes twinkling like snowflakes in moonlight, as he glanced her way. She twinkled back at him, hoping he could see, even though she had stuffed herself into a corner of the great room, far from the fire, where she was most likely to remain unnoticed and therefore unbeaten.

Tuva was her name, but her grandfather called her “Brat” and her grandmother called her “Spawn.” They hurled both these names at her, and many other worse ones, along with cuffs, kicks, and pinches, which was why Tuva preferred to hide in dark corners when she could. They had called her dead mother “The Ruination of Our Son” and the “Curse of Our Hopes.” Of her father they spoke not at all.

The villagers whispered more about it, how Tuva’s mother had been a beautiful gypsy queen, with clouds of black curls and lithe brown arms. The miller’s daughter gushed that she had danced into the village with the Summer People, and Tuva’s father, the innkeeper’s only son, had taken one look at her lush lips and black eyes and fallen head over heels in love. The green grocer murmured sadly about how the innkeeper’s son had followed the gypsy queen to the southern lands, where he died inconveniently and tragically (for such things happened in the south, as everyone knew). And the stable lad liked to say that when the Summer People returned to the village three years later, they brought with them a wretched story and a black-haired babe. The Summer People left Tuva at the inn, making signs of the evil eye as they fled. And everyone in the village agreed not to touch Tuva or talk to her for she was a “Danger to Their Souls” and “A Very Wicked Child.”

“I tell you, I thought of dashing her brains with river rocks and leaving the Spawn in the forest to die,” said Tuva’s grandmother to the bishop one morning, as he dined on split peas and salty ham. “She is as bad as they come; as black haired and black eyed as the foul fiend who seduced my Yngvar, and that’s the truth. But Christian charity stilled my hand and so did the sight of her face. For she has my son’s face, God bless us all, right down to the bones, even as she has that harlot’s blood.” The grandmother ground out through her clenched teeth. “She’s all I have left of him, curse her to hell, and so she lives under my roof for now.”

The bishop shot a quick glance at Tuva, as she shivered behind her curtain of tangled hair. Then he said mildly to the grandmother, “Wicked children will be punished soundly, and good ones rewarded, as God judges, dear woman. Or don’t they teach that in this village?”

“It’s so,” said the grandmother darkly. “But the child must be beaten often anyway, lest her gypsy ways lead the rest of us into ruin.”

Though the bishop claimed to travel north in autumn so that he might enjoy the miraculous northern lights, Tuva never once saw him look at the sky. Instead he spent endless hours in his rooms, pouring over papers, which seemed to be nothing more than lists of names, muttering to himself and making checkmarks, his plump cheeks quivering. But his companion, whom he called Peter, often went out into the night, especially when the aurora borealis burned. Then he would stand very still in the snow, his long fingers clasped at the small of his back, hollow cheeks turned to the sky, until his black coat glistened with snow and ice.

One night he gestured at Tuva, as she crouched by the doorway of the inn, keeping her thin bare feet warm under her ragged skirt. “Come here,” the bishop’s companion said.

Tuva tiptoed toward him cautiously. He was so very tall and thin! And even in the light of the arcing, mysterious night rainbows, she could see how brightly his eyes burned. When she drew near enough, he suddenly snatched her up in his arms.

“It’s not right that you should be so underdressed when the nights are so cold,” he said gently.

Tuva said nothing at first, for her heart beat fast and her throat closed. But soon she noticed how his body gave off delicious heat; how his coat seemed to be lined with soft fur; and how good he smelled, like peat fires and pine needles and smoke. Gradually she unclenched her body and nestled into his embrace; for it was very nice to watch the sky in his arms, the stars sparkling between great silvery night flowers, which blossomed into impossible colors.

Tuva did not know how long he held her but finally he asked, his voice seeming to rumble through her whole body, “Are you really as wicked as your grandmother says?”

Tuva had been sucking her thumb and nodding into sleep, but she answered automatically, “I am the worst of children and I am cursed to hell for all eternity, sir.”

“I thought so,” said Peter. He sounded pleased.

The bishop and Peter left, as they always did, on the first of December, taking their baggage and lists and ink stands with them. Tuva never saw them depart. Instead, they seemed to vanish in an instant, like a pair of candle flames snuffed by the wind. Then there would be the long, dark winter, with only school and church and the occasional group of reindeer herders to break the cold monotony, until spring returned with her green leaves and other wonders.

“St. Nicholas brought me candies,” a flaxen haired girl announced at school, not long after the bishop and his companion had departed.

All the children at Tuva’s school were flaxen haired and looked like the plump angels in picture books, with fat cheeks and rosy complexions. Their parents had warned them not to touch the gypsy’s child, but they would have despised Tuva anyway, for she was thin and dark and quick, and did sums better than anyone. They pinched her often and called her “Bohunk” and “Ink Face” and said she did sums well because she was a born cheater, a “gyp.” Tuva knew better than to talk to them, but she listened avidly as they compared notes about St. Nicholas. All over the schoolyard, the good saint was found wanting.

“He brought me only one toy soldier!”

“I wanted lemon sours, not peppermints.”

“I only got an orange.”

“What did you get?”

On and on they grumbled and compared, ignoring the last precious slivers of noonday sun.

“But one chocolate!”

“And my sister got a sled.”

“I wanted so much more.”

Of course, Tuva had got no chocolates, or peppermints or oranges from St. Nicholas. Tuva never got a single gift at all, for Tuva was a wicked child. All she ever received was an enormous bundle of sticks or a bulging sack full of coal from St. Nicholas’s helper, the devil Krampus. “And a fitting gift for the likes of you, Spawn,” her grandmother was fond of saying.

But what Tuva never told anyone, least of all her grandmother, and certainly never the ungrateful cherubs at school, was that she liked the coal and sticks very much, more than she would have liked candied dolls. For every Krampus-night was the warmest night of the year for Tuva—who was hardly ever warm in winter—and as she heaped her precious fuel on the fire, and watched the coals glow orange and red, she thanked the evil Krampus again and again in her mind and hoped that he could hear her.

One year, the same year that she had watched the Northern Lights with Peter, Krampus brought the usual bundle of switches for Tuva, but nestled in the middle, smooth and golden, was a special stick, with tiny holes poked in the sides. Tuva had seen pictures of pipers in her schoolbooks and knew the golden stick could make music, if properly used. So she set it aside in the mess of rags she used as a bed. Then she burned the rest of her present with her dark brows drawn together in a thoughtful frown.

Good children she knew played the spinet and the harp, while grown-ups sat stiffly in straight-backed chairs and drowsed or clapped politely. But a piper played the devil’s music, and sometimes the music of war. And these sounds stirred the blood, giving rise to improper thoughts and wild urges. Tuva wondered at the golden pipe, and what Krampus had meant by giving it to her. Did he know it was in the bundle? Had it been a mistake? Should she learn to play it, or burn it with the rest of the switches? Tuva didn’t want to make Krampus angry. He was, after all, the only being in the world who ever shown her any kindness.

All night long, and for many days afterwards, while the good children at school fretted over how St. Nicholas had cheated them, Tuva wrestled with whether or not to destroy to the pipe. At last, just after midwinter’s day, when the sun glimmered on the horizon for a frozen breath longer than it had the day before, Tuva decided to keep it and teach herself to play. She began slipping into the barn every night to practice, after her grandparents, and indeed all the village, had taken to their beds.

The music came quickly, much to the delight of the cow, the cat, the donkey and the ducks, who slept in the barn all winter. Tuva’s secret pipings first sounded like birds cheeping, then dogs howling, then like a proper gypsy’s tune, whistling the earth spirits up from their winter slumber. By spring Tuva could play sweet songs to the new kittens, ducklings and calves. And all summer her grandfather remarked at how peaceful and blessed the inn seemed to be—how fruitful the garden, how satisfied the guests, how happy every creature in the pasture.

“Thank God your wicked nature has failed to infect my beasts and garden,” he spat to Tuva, as he cuffed her.

“God has blessed us for our charity,” the grandmother fluted, as she planted a kick on Tuva’s shin. “Although he could bless us more, if I do say so myself. The duck has raised but three ducklings, we have had but four hay cuttings this year and the neighbor’s cow gives more milk than ours, though the cream is not as sweet.”

When the bishop and Peter returned in the fall to rent their rooms as always, Tuva had danced and blown in her pipes all year long. The bishop looked at her coolly from under his thick white eyebrows. But Peter patted her dark head, not seeming to mind the dirt and straw snarled in her curls.

“How is the wicked child?” the bishop inquired politely of the grandmother, still looking Tuva up and down.