A Fantastic Holiday Season

by Kevin J. Anderson

  St. Nikolas rewarded good behavior. But … that wasn’t enough. Not for some people. And it wasn’t enough for bad children to be pleasurably scared, and deprived (at least a little) of presents. No, for some people, bad children had to be terrified into utter submission, under threats that if they didn’t behave, something horrible would happen to them.

  She sensed, rather than saw, something happening behind her. The Krampus was about to attack! She dodged to the side and went into a martial-arts shoulder-roll, narrowly missing being hit by that … tongue.

  Ew! Ew! Ew!

  Professor Hakenon had warned her about that, and a good thing, too. That tongue wasn’t just obscene, it was a weapon. She got a lot more proactive with her magical tangles as she hit the stairs and jumped down them three at a time as she headed for the basement. The basement, that held the only room big enough for their purposes.

  The Krampus was St. Nikolas’s hit-man. Disobedient children didn’t just get lumps of coal, according to the legend. They got a visit from … the Krampus, who had carte blanche to do whatever he liked depending on how naughty you had been. And he wasn’t content just to warn like Black Peter, or give you a little switching, oh no. If you were lucky, he whipped you around the room until you bled from a dozen or more cuts. If you weren’t?

  You ended up in that basket on his back. And he carried you off, and you were never seen again. The Professor wasn’t certain what happened to you when he carried off the naughty children at dawn. Some versions of the legend said they were taken to Hell. Some, that they were found later, dismembered, as a warning to other children. Some, that the Krampus ate them.

  That was why the Dean had expressly forbidden Vickie to be here, and left. And Professor Hakonen had given her explicit instructions that the Dean was not to know about. And why Vickie was running for her life now, with a demon on her heels. Because when she got to the basement …

  She hit the basement door running, slammed into it, ran down the hallway to the rec area, and slammed through another door, and bolted across the room until she literally hit the back wall of the handball court. Then she turned, back to the wall, just in time to see the Krampus in all its ugly glory come barreling through the door behind her. It was grinning. It was an expression that made her whimper with horror and fear. Then her throat was too paralyzed with terror to do anything; in fact, she was having trouble breathing.

  The Krampus reached the middle of the room.

  “Now!” the Dean shouted. And that was when the lights went out, and the black lights came on, and the intricate demon-catcher that she and Professor Higgins had crafted in otherwise-transparent fluorescent paint—the same stuff the kids were allowed to use to paint star-fields in their room with—lit up bright enough to make her wince.

  It did more than make the Krampus wince. The hideous thing howled, then screamed, then was held rigid in the grip of the spells of five of the best magicians on the continent.

  As for the sixth—and Vickie—she and Professor Higgins were unraveling the magic that created the basket on the thing’s back. It was very primitive, almost like knitting, and it was Vickie who realized that first, found the loose end, and “yanked” on it. The spell came apart, and with it, the basket. Heidi tumbled to the floor of the basement.

  She looked half dead and only semi-conscious. The poor kid had her eyes squeezed tight shut, and was moaning and shivering. Vickie ached to reach her, but right now, that wasn’t an option. No passing the boundary of the demon-catcher. Not until the demon wasn’t in it anymore.

  “Three, two, one. Now!” commanded the Dean, and all those binding spells started tightening, squeezing.…

  The Krampus began to shrink, struggling the entire time, but unable now to get enough breath to shriek. There was more than one way to banish an otherworldly creature back to whatever plane it came from, and one—this one—was to make things so impossible in this plane that it had nowhere to go but back.

  In silence, it got smaller … smaller … and then, with a pop, it was gone.

  Now Vickie and the Dean ran for Heidi; the Dean got there first, and gathered her up, then began firing orders at the rest of them.

  “And you, Miss Nagy!” she snapped out last of all. “You are given explicit permission to be here at all times. I take back what I told you earlier. You were exactly where I wanted you.”

  “Thank you, Dean,” Vickie breathed. Now she was no longer naughty, and thank goodness the Dean had thought of that. Because … just in case Heidi somehow brought the Krampus back again … better safe than sorry.

  “So it was Heidi?” Vickie asked over French Toast the next morning. “Professor Hakonen was right?”

  Professor Higgins nodded, and passed her the powdered sugar. “As you intuited, her grandmother convinced her she was responsible for her parents’ death. And she knew magic was real, of course, so her subconscious was perfectly capable of summoning the worst monster her grandmother had ever told her about, a creature tailor-made to punish a sinful and evil child. That was how the Krampus bypassed our protections. They were never made to hold against something that had been summoned by a child that wanted it here.” He ate a bite of bacon. “Needless to say, we’ve remedied that hole in our defenses.”

  “How’s Heidi now?” Vickie wanted to know. The last she had seen of the child, the poor thing was being taken away to the infirmary. She felt a lump starting in her throat, thinking about how messed up the poor kid must be, to have actually—well—tried to kill herself. Or at least, punish herself horribly. Could she ever get over that?

  “She’ll be all right eventually.” The Professor looked at her sharply, and patted her hand. “Don’t worry too much; she was as loved by her parents as you are by yours. A few months of emotional abuse by her grandmother isn’t going to destroy that sort of foundation, and the Dean is one of the best people with troubled children in our entire community. I think we’ll get her set to rights.”

  “But—what about Christmas?” Vickie asked. “If you send her back to her grandmother, what’s to stop the Krampus from coming for her there?”

  “The fact that she won’t be going. We contacted her grandmother this morning and told her Heidi had come down with the flu, and before we could say anything, the wretched woman demanded that we keep her here.” The corners of his mouth turned down in a rare scowl. “Needless to say … we are going to ensure she never has to go back to that … harridan again.”

  Vickie ate some French Toast, already plotting in her mind how she was going to approach her parents about having Heidi with them over at least some of the breaks. And meanwhile … if she could get back to Quantico for a couple hours … there were some things at the house she thought Heidi would probably like a lot.

  Like the snow-globe with the slightly-enchanted fairy castle in it, that lit up at night, and had a tiny, tiny fairy princess in one of the towers who’d wave her wand at you. A good thing to look at if you were scared, in the dark.

  “Could you take this afternoon off, Professor?” she asked. “I’m not supposed to leave the campus without a teacher, and I’ve got some unexpected Christmas ‘shopping’ to do.”

  Reading about Quincy J. Allen’s young upstart inventor’s coming of age—like some brainy General Grant at a steampunk Appomattox—was as fun as finding a multifunction ray-gun underneath the Christmas tree!

  Also, if your kids ever clamor for a chemistry set or electronics lab, indulge them! You never know what amazing things they might whip up!

  —KO

  Jimmy Krinklepot

  and the

  White Rebels of Hayberry

  Quincy J. Allen

  “As of this day, December 24th, eighteen-sixty-eight, you are hereby forbidden to go near the junkyard or your father’s workshop!” Judge Davenport’s booming Missouri drawl filled the courtroom. Virtually the entire town had gathered, word spreading like wildfire that charges had been levied against the accused, whom everyone knew all too well as a t
roublesome but well-meaning miscreant of high cerebral capacity.

  Davenport’s gavel came down like a clap of doom as he eyed Jimmy Krinklepot with a steely glare. A quiet chatter flitted across the gathered townsfolk of Hayberry in the aftermath of the sentence.

  Davenport was a fair man, to be sure. Indeed, folks around town called him the fairest judge in the Union half of Missouri. But even a judge has a right to be angry when his property has been, as the judge put it, unduly molested. In this case, his property were seventeen prize chickens, and molested referred to Jimmy’s latest invention.

  Jimmy hung his head low, and his shoulders slumped. He blushed beneath a dusty, eight-panel grimwig, his hands jammed into tweed pants held firm by black suspenders. His mother stood silent behind him. He knew he’d miscalculated. What with his papa being away for so long on government business, he’d just let his imagination wander … and Jimmy’s imagination, being what it is, could wander a sight farther than your average teenage boy.

  “I must say that I resent being brought in here the day before Christmas on account of your dreadful judgment and propensity for vandalism, well-intentioned though it may be. You would be well advised,” Davenport growled, “to ponder what brought you here before me today.” The judge reached beneath the bench where he sat and pulled forth a glass of iced lemonade. He sipped slowly, his eyes never leaving Jimmy.

  Jimmy’s eyes drifted to the courtroom window, picking out several dark spots in the sky, and did as the judge directed.

  Jimmy had gotten it into his head—thinking only of the family cook Consuela, mind you—to lend his not insignificant gray matter to the matter of cooking. The previous evening, he’d overheard Consuela lamenting how long it took to prepare dinner for the household. Being of an inherently helpful nature, Jimmy woke early and walked through bitterly cold air to his workshop hidden in the junkyard. It was as close an approximation to his father’s as he could make, and he set about tinkering with wires, condensers, emitters, and batteries of his father’s design. The net result was portable, albeit a bit unwieldy, and a dire temptation for Jimmy and his diminutive but trusted cohort William Clarence Simplefig, who, as usual, accompanied Jimmy on his adventures.

  But the device needed testing.

  A proper test requires a proper subject. Again, Jimmy put his gray matter to the problem at hand. Realizing that a suitable target did not exist in the junkyard, he and William set off for, literally, greener pastures, although green was a color hard to come by in what had turned out to be a dry, cold winter in Missouri. Indeed, most of the town decried that there was little possibility of a white Christmas.

  Travelling well past the edge of town, and walking down a wide country lane lined by tall oaks and maples bereft of leaves, the boys soon found themselves within earshot of a fine white house, with a fine white picket fence. Betwixt the house and the fence stood a fine white chicken coop with a run of low chicken wire that contained two dozen fine white chickens.

  Jimmy opened the gate and stepped through, heading straight for the coop. Only a few strides had him standing before what he deemed to be suitable test subjects.

  “But what about whoever lives here?” William queried from behind, a tinge of worry creeping into his voice. William, being of an inherently nervous sort, made up for his considerable squeamishness with a healthy dose of common sense. Unfortunately, on any scale, squeam would outweigh sense as a result of an absence of backbone. The boy had little foot to put down, as his father would often say.

  “It’s perfect,” Jimmy said to his sidekick. “Set the power level to one and flip those three switches on the side,” he added, excitement filling his voice like wind-blossomed sails.

  William gulped once, his eyes shifting from the pack on Jimmy’s back to the house. He carefully turned the knob from zero to one, noting that it went to eleven, which struck him as a bit odd. He had long ago, however, given up trying to understand his companion-in-mischief, finding the exercise futile in the extreme. He then flipped the first switch, eliciting a quiet buzz from the mass of brass plating, coils, and wires strapped to Jimmy’s back. He flipped the second. The buzz became a hum. He flipped the third and felt a tremor vibrating his teeth. Quite prudently, he stepped away from the device, as he had been caught in errant detonations from Jimmy’s inventions more than once in the past.

  “Step back,” Jimmy said without looking.

  William blinked slowly at the wide gap he’d already placed between himself and the device, pondering fruitlessly if any distance would be sufficient.

  Jimmy raised a strange looking apparatus connected to the pack by several feet of cable, gripping it like a soldier holds a rifle. The apparatus was long, but that’s where the similarity ended. The grip at the back was a modified spade handle, with a lever built in. The handle plugged into a brass housing adorned by thick coils of wire on each side. A three-foot, copper cylinder extended out, and silver prongs protruded from a bulbous end. Three grapefruit-sized copper spheres bulged along the length, with wires sticking out hither and yon in an almost haphazard fashion.

  Jimmy took aim at the nearest chicken and held his breath. Its head bobbed up and down almost peacefully as it pecked at barren earth. He pressed the lever.

  CRAAAAACK!

  A zagging bolt of red electricity shot from the apparatus and struck the hapless chicken square on. A pall of steam filled the air as Jimmy’s weapon super-heated the natural humidity of Missouri. Feathers burst into a cloud of white that swirled and settled slowly around a steaming corpse. The pleasing scent of cooked chicken wafted into the boys’ nostrils, setting their mouths to watering. A vision of Consuela’s chicken fricassee passed before Jimmy’s eyes, a dish of tender stewed meat that had often sated Jimmy’s growing appetite.

  Staring intently through the quickly dissipating cloud, Jimmy took in what remained of the chicken, and, in no small part based upon the scent, deduced that the internal moisture of the bird had caused his weapon to steam rather than roast. A triumphant giggle slid past his lips … followed by a guilty chortle from William’s.

  “I dub this …” Jimmy announced, holding the apparatus up into the air as if it were the holy sword Excalibur, “the Fricassee Pistol!”

  “But it’s a rifle,” William said between laughs.

  “Shh …” Jimmy hissed, disinterested in something as trivial as descriptive accuracy when phonetic alliteration was so much more satisfying.

  Now, boys being what they are, Jimmy felt that a single test simply was not sufficient. One could argue that it was in the name of science. One could also argue that it was the simple yet maniacal delight of a boy with a gun.

  CRACK! The fricassee pistol barked. CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  The air swirled white. The ground around the coop quickly filled with a layer of feathers and down fit for any man’s pillow, that pristine white plain interrupted only by a scattering of perfectly fricasseed chickens.

  “WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU BOYS DOING?” a thunderous voice shouted from behind them.

  Pleased as punch and innocent as a lamb, Jimmy turned away from the steaming chickens and said, “Testing my new invention.” He recognized the considerable girth of Judge Davenport straight away, and realized a moment later that the situation might have taken a turn for the worst. Judging by the apoplectic hues of crimson spreading across the Judges features, Jimmy correctly deduced that the man was not one of science.

  Jimmy stood in Judge Davenport’s courtroom that very afternoon, despite the looming celebration of Christmas Day.

  It was, in fact, the drone of Davenport’s voice once again filling the courtroom that brought Jimmy back from his reminiscence of the morning’s escapade. However, it was no longer reminiscence that occupied his youthful thoughts, so he respectfully raised his hand to speak.

  “Your mother,” Davenport continued, nodding in her direction, “has graciously provided remuneration for the loss of my property, and I am inclined to leave the matte
r in her lovely hands until the return of your father from our nation’s capital, who will, I hope treat with you most severely.” Davenport paused, his eyes narrowing at Jimmy’s raised and clearly offensive hand. “Do not, I say, do not interrupt me when I am speaking, boy!”

  “But—”

  “There are no ‘buts’ in my courtroom, young man!” the judge barked.

  “That may be, sir,” Jimmy plowed on, “but it appears as if there are about to be Rebels in your courtroom.”

  That stopped the judge cold. “I beg your pardon?”

  Jimmy pointed out the window at three approaching zeppelins, each the distinctive gray of the Confederate Air Force.

  “JESUS PALOMINO!” Davenport shouted, lurching to his feet with his eyes fixed upon a Rebel-besmirched sky.

  Three women, including Jimmy’s mother, fainted straight away, although it could not be ascertained whether it was because of the looming Rebel attack or Davenport’s overt, albeit unintentional blasphemy. Each lady, thankfully, was caught by a nearby gentlemen and eased onto the benches where considerably more conscious ladies fanned them.

  The two bailiffs present dashed to the window, drawing their service revolvers as they ran. They stared up at the zeppelins, each gondola lined with heavy gun emplacements, and then stared pointedly at each other’s pistols. A silent exchange passed between them in the fleeting moments that followed a synchronous realization: they were outmanned and outgunned.

  They turned as one towards Davenport as a mass of townspeople crowded behind them at the window. In one voice they shouted over the clamor of frightened townsfolk, “We’re in trouble, Your Honor!”

  There were cries of “What are we gonna do?” mixed with “We’re doomed!” from the terrified townsfolk.

  One man shouted in a rather accusatory manner, “Where’s the sheriff?”