by Chris Morey
Dad comes for me again and tries to grab me but I catch his wrists and slam him against the wall, knocking over the last family photo we ever took.
“Let me go, you son of a bitch!”
“Bobby, stop! Stop this!”
“Booobbbyyy! Oh God it hurts please make it stop!”
I lean in and get close enough to Dad’s face that I’m breathing in his exhales. “Austin found his way to Fort Worth. They found him pressed and flattened to the thickness of a layer of sheet cake. Baked. Cooked long enough so he was hard to the touch, with white frosting patterns drawn on all over, zigzagging. No gumdrop buttons or eyes. Coal. Twisted into him and lodged there. Candy-cane sticks were laid out on the floor to spell out the word Naughty.”
Dad fights with all he has, but the years of liquor and grief and regret have weakened him up, and he can’t do anything but show me his teeth and breathe hard.
Mom isn’t making a sound anymore. Just watching me like a person might watch a TV program. Even Audrey has quieted down.
“Drew they found just last year. Moved all the way to New York. Found him in pieces too. Skin and hair was used to make dolls. Bones were used to make a train set. Some of his insides inflated like fucking bouncy balls. His head was still baking in the oven when they got there, all basted and seasoned. And stuffed with coal dressing.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Mom jumps at me and slaps me across the face. Her bottom lip trembles. “What’s happened to you, Bobby?”
Dad shoves off hard, and even though I can still hold him, I let him go. He doesn’t attack, but goes to Mom and holds her like I might hurt her.
“I read they thought maybe the killer was still there since the head wasn’t burned. That maybe they got there in time before he had a chance to run off. They hear some noises on the roof. Footsteps. They run out there and don’t find anything except the word Naughty drawn in the snow with blood. And footprints. A man’s and an animal’s. Something with hooves.”
“You need help, son,” Dad says. “You’re sick and you need help.”
“Nobody can help me. Don’t you understand yet?”
“I don’t blame you for it, Bobby. I don’t. A boy at your age shouldn’t have had to see something like what you saw in this house. Gets in your head and messes you up. We’ll get you some help, son. I swear it we will, all right?”
Mom’s still crying and shaking her head. Won’t look at me.
“Now let’s go on back and see to Audrey. You’ve got a baby coming, and right now our priority needs to be getting it out safe and making sure that girl of yours has everything she needs. All right? Now come on.”
“I can’t. I have to stay here. Where I can see the fireplace.”
“Goddammit, Bobby! It’s in your head, son. If that story you told me is true what we need to do is talk to the sheriff and let him know the whole thing. Have him go talk to that girl Kristy’s parents, any other family she might have. Ask questions. Whoever did that to David, and if you’re telling the truth about them other boys, it’s that girl’s family got something to do with it. Not goddamn—”
“You’re wrong, Dad. Nobody cared about her. You know it and so does the rest of Bergstrom. That’s why nobody ever found her. Because everybody was glad she was gone. Especially her family.”
“Come on, now, Bobby. Listen to what you’re saying here.”
“You don’t have to believe me. Not yet. You’ll see. Before the day is over, you’ll see. And I deserve whatever happens to me. We all did. David especially. David was the worst of all of us. You don’t have to believe that either, but it’s the way it is.”
Mom cries harder and buries her face into Dad’s chest. He puts his arm around her and gives me a look that could have melted all the snow in town. Before he has a chance to say another word, Audrey lets go with a scream I could feel vibrating under my shoes. A scream I’ve heard only once before. A scream Rickety Kristy saved just for me.
I run past my parents and toward the room. I’m not sure what I’m expecting to find but I know it’s almost time. I can feel it in the air like static sliding over my skin. Tickling me.
Audrey is lying on her back with both legs in the air, toes spread so wide it looked like the webbing would split. Her top half is curled over so that her head is nearly between her thighs. Hands gripping her knees. Teeth bared as she pushes and spittle mists out and dusts her chest. Blood stains the sheets and the floor just at the foot of the bed. More splashes out as she screams again. That same scream. A scream that had no business coming out of my girlfriend’s mouth.
Mom shoves by me and rushes toward Audrey. She looks up at me and then past me at Dad who is standing in the doorway.
“Baby’s head is already out. There’s no time. No time.”
“What do you need?” Dad says.
“Towels. Clean towels and water. And scissors!”
Dad stomps away and leaves me there with them. I want to help but I’m too scared I’ll make things worse. Scared to get anywhere near them.
Mom gasps and mumbles reassuring words to Audrey as she pulls the baby out. It only takes about a minute for the rest of it to slide free. Once it’s out, Audrey’s body relaxes and she goes flat and passes out. Just like that. Unconscious and off to some happy place in her mind. I’m grateful for that.
Mom’s got the baby in her bare arms that are now slick with blood and fluid. She’s staring down at it with an expression I can’t read. Dad runs in and pauses when he sees the baby, but snaps out of it and gets Mom the towels which she wraps around the baby and cleans the blood off.
“Bobby,” she says. “It’ll be all right. Everything will be just fine.”
I realize the baby’s not crying. I don’t know a thing about babies or birth, but I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to cry first thing. I figure it was born dead. Stillborn. From where I’m standing I can only see one of the baby’s feet. Hanging down over the crook of Mom’s arm. And it moves. Kicks a little. The toes wiggle.
I run forward and Dad tries to stop me but I go by him and look down at my child. A girl. First thing I notice is that she’s a girl. I’ve got a daughter.
Then I look at her face. The large forehead. Far apart eyes.
It’s dead silent. I can hear “Santa Baby” playing from the other room. Soft like ghost music.
Dad puts his arm around me. “Don’t you worry. Plenty of folks get by just fine. And we’re here to help you, son. Always.”
She looks at me. We stare at each other for what feels like forever.
And she smiles.
KRAMPUSNACHT IN
CELL BLOCK J
One stupid puff put me here, is all Dewey Snodgrass can think, sitting in the middle of his module’s common area at the Vision Quest Youth Correctional Facility, with the cup of jungle juice in one hand and a shiv made from a melted plastic spoon in the other, just trying to hold his wasted cellmates at bay. And now I’m going to die in here.
Then the exterior door opens and smoke pours in and up jumps the Devil.
Dewey drops the untouched drink and knuckles his bleary eyes, but he still sees it coming. Seven feet tall on glistening black hooves, with glowing red eyes and gnarly horns raking down the plastic holly garlands and family snapshots they were forced to hang everywhere, sending stabbing shadows across the roomful of puking, brawling, praying juvenile delinquents.
Bellowing to drown out both dueling boomboxes, it brings down a shaggy arm and cracks a whip across the bare ass of the drooler jacking it to the all-girl gang-bang on the monitor, then points a long red claw right at Dewey like he’s gonna get it the worst.
What the fuck did I do? Dewey wonders. It must be his face. He just makes people feel stupid, challenges their authority. He figured those retarded ads were all lying when they said one joint could ruin your life, put you on a slippery chute to destruction. But he’d only hit that joint once, that one time he and some guys left campus for lunch and got high behind the Del Taco. When
they got caught, the cops just kneejerk fingered him, like his face was some kind of confession.
Kicked out of the zero-tolerance charter school, he was the one left holding the whole bag. He wasn’t even tested, because the state said his parents had to pay for it, and Dad wanted him to “learn a lesson.” A crooked judge with coke in his mustache lectured Dewey for an hour about personal responsibility before throwing him in here. One joint and it’s Christmas in jail. Circumstances never factored; what they saw when they caught you was who you were for life.
And now one shitty Christmas party with the goons who steal half the food off his tray every meal and suddenly, he isn’t just trapped in a cut-rate privatized thug factory run by the same corporation that administered the aforementioned charter school franchise; he’s trapped in an honest-to-shit Chick tract.
The Devil wades into the half-dozen kids still upright with a whip and a knobby club that’s clearly a baton wrapped in towels. The few who can stand up at all go blind when the cloud of teargas hits them. Cracking one across the jaw, kneeing another in the face and snapping the whip to pulverize the snotty nose of a third, the Devil puts Hell in session. Casting about with his lambent crimson eyes, he casts his vote in the boombox wars by lashing out and cracking the one playing hiphop off the table. Leaving the skinheads’ shitty bootleg blaring to add another layer to the torture, the Devil steps on three half-conscious, crying kids to advance on him.
Dewey hadn’t touched the drink. He’d only come out of his cell so they wouldn’t dogpile him. Was he the only one who smelled a trap when the doors popped open at midnight, and the TV was showing porn, the same day that juggalo kid scored a jug of Mexican Everclear and a batch of indica wax from the guards?
The skinheads played it like they’d set it up with the guard, like they knew what was going on. Krampusnacht! But they’re bleeding on the floor with the rest.
And the Devil is coming for him and he’s never even been in a serious fistfight before; the cops charged him with resisting arrest just to be assholes, but he’s the only one who’s not shitfaced and he’s not superstitious. If this is Hell, then he’s got nothing to lose.
Half in panic and half in the gleeful freedom of a dream, Dewey springs off the bench and flying-tackles the Devil. Left arm across his throat and right trapping his club hand, he knocks the towering bastard off his hooves and they’re flying sideways. They land on a steel table, slide across and tumble off the edge.
He’s sprawling across the Devil’s chest—and a long, cold rubber tongue tickles Dewey’s ear. The Devil bucks him off. Dewey crabs backwards until he hits a wall. The Devil flips over and tries to crawl after him with one arm wrenched backwards to vainly fumble for the plastic shiv sunk to the hilt alongside his spine, no doubt piercing his right lung.
The emergency lights still glow like red alert on a submarine, and the alarm above the exit still blinks like a strobe, but there’s no siren. Nobody out there knows anything is wrong. The Devil’s eyes still glow, but he’s clearly done kicking asses for the nonce.
The two Mexican kids are praying, the black kid is trying to wake up his friend, and the other three white kids are jumping out of their skins. Two kids are out cold with concussions. Three are passed out from drinking and a sixth huddles in the corner, crying into his knees.
“Turn that shit off!” The music cuts out. The big skinhead whom the others call Cyclops rolls up on Dewey. Deltas of dried blood from his crushed nose streak down the front of his white T-shirt. “What the fuck, fag?”
Andre, one of the black kids, says, “We fucked for real. State time—”
“It was an accident, man!” Dewey rolls to his feet, but he knows they’ll pile on if he backs off. “You bitches saw him. It was self-defense, I swear! He was coming at me.… I thought it was really …”
“Really what?”
In a small, tissue-thin voice, he says, “Really the Devil…”
The other kids laugh, and they forget him again.
“Shut up!” Cyclops edges closer to the dead monster, nudges its long, lantern jaw with one sneaker, then kicks it in the face like a football. “It’s not the Devil, it’s fucking Krampus.”
“Who?”
Greasy Steve the juggalo jumps in, “Yo, I heard of that shit. Like the anti-Santa, know wha’ mean?” Steve’s bouncing in place, scum in the corners of his mouth, on a Ritalin tweak. “My granny, yo, like she used to say Krampus or Ballsnichol would come fix your shit, and if you didn’t say sorry for all the crimes you did, he’d drag your ass back to his crib, like, next door to Hell.…” He jumps on the dead demon’s back a couple times, going, “Ho, ho, ho,” but nobody’s feeling it.
“Chill,” Andre says. He points at the cameras. Red lights off all around. “Any second, they gonna come back on…”
“Naw, they’re not,” Dewey says, “not until this big fuck gets done.” Creeping over, he touches one of the horns like he’s expecting an electric shock. Then he grabs it and yanks on it.
The mask comes off. A skullcap knotted around his head tugs out a hunk of hair, making the head jerk up and the whole room jump. Dewey nervously laughs.
“See?” Even in the murky flashing light, everybody recognizes Persons, the chief of the third watch. Creepy hardass, combat vet, never, never talks except to issue commands, like to dogs. “They’re just playing some kind of fucked-up game to beat on us.”
“All I see,” Andre says, “is you iced a fucking guard.”
“You gonna tell them that?” Dewey turns around. “He was beating all your asses, too!”
“We kind of deserve a beating,” this Mexican kid says. “Look around, dumbass: this is a jail.”
“That’s what they’ll say. We’re rotten kids, killers. We’ll be tried as adults.…”
“Whatta you mean ‘We,’ white boy?”
Dewey kneels beside the body, tugging at the shaggy pelt, a loose gorilla costume. The hooves are platforms strapped to his engineer boots. “He’s got to have the keycard.…” Clinking against the floor, something metal. Dewey grabs it and pulls it out, but it’s only dogtags on a chain. CHARLES “CHIPPER” PERSONS… No wonder he kept it a secret.
The Mexican kids are beating on the door. Someone must be waiting outside for the little prank to end, to turn the cameras on and backstop whatever story they’ll make up to account for the injuries.
This time, only Dewey notices it when the dead guard’s head jerks up. He jackrabbits backwards into a steel bench.
The dead guard arches his back and rolls over, coughing, gagging and a whole lot of blood splashes out of his mouth. Not so dead after all, he rolls his eyes at Dewey that same way his dad does when he says, This’ll hurt me more than it hurts you. And then, heaving out a final glurt of blood from his severed tongue, he dies for real this time.
“Get that door open, man,” Cyclops says, “before he kills us, too.”
“Stop talking like that, you bald-ass piece of shit!” Dewey gets up and runs for the door, waving the guard’s card over the sensor, then punching the four-digit code into the ten-key, and nothing happens. “What’s the fucking password? Isn’t it still 5252?”
But nobody answers him. They’re all screaming again…
He turns around and all his conscious cellmates are back in their cells and screaming like bitches, and he’d be screaming too, if he could breathe.
The little crimson oxbow lake before the dead guard bubbles and boils over, spreading across the floor like it’s growing, reaching for them. Something breaks the surface, reaches out a spindly paw, dragging gnarled claws until they get enough traction to lever the rest of it out of the simmering puddle of blood.
A pair of twisted horns emerge, and then a long, goatish head. Milky yellow eyes blink away blood. A canine blue-black tongue lolls from a panting mouth, snags and tears on broken fangs. Stooped shoulders squeeze through the cooling, clotting portal and then the thing slithers out onto the floor like a half-drowned cat.
It
’s the size of a starving toddler, hunched like an ancient under a wicker basket strapped to its back. Huge, gnarled hands wrapped over its face; shaggy, backward goat legs spasm so the hooves click against the pavement. Ribs jut out against slimy, almost translucent blue-gray skin, like when you leave a Band-Aid on too long.
Drawing itself upright on shaky legs, it moves like a stray dog in a gas chamber, but as it throws its baleful glare around the cell module, it clearly sees much more than the drunks passed out or the kids cowering in their bunks. It takes a deep, long breath and swells larger, stretches taller, eyes grow brighter. Again, Dewey’s Disney education serves him well, but this fucking fairy doesn’t feed on clapping.
From a drooping leather belt around its bony hips, it draws out a lump of coal, and with the other arthritic paw, it picks up Chipper’s bundle of birch branches.
Dewey’s feelings and impressions are complex and almost forceful enough to overwhelm his simple desire to protect himself from harm. In spite of a long line of eager teachers, from his dad to Guard Persons, he hasn’t seen much hard evidence of any real difference between right and wrong in this life, but he has a master’s in the study of the chasm between caught and not caught. The company gets paid by the state whether or not the beds are empty, but the officers lose a bonus when offenders get out. It’s in their best interest for you to re-up.
Faced with undeniable evidence that invisible forces do indeed work to reward the good and punish the evil, he realizes it’s clear as glass that the game is rigged, that only the evil-punishers seem to love their work.
What did he ever do? One joint, and he didn’t even get high off it.
Whatever internal debates the other prisoners might be entertaining, it’s over a lot sooner than his. Cyclops and Greasy Steve the juggalo charge back out of their cells to stomp the sickly imp. It runs up Steve’s swinging leg and crouches on his shoulders. Cyclops punches at it but hits Steve square in the mouth.
The troll swipes the branches across the skinhead’s eyes, blinding him. It grabs Steve's cheek and pries his mouth wide. The juggalo grabs for the thing but can’t rip it off. Its hooves kick him in the neck, cracking a collarbone. The thing stops his howling scream with a fist-sized lump of coal, jamming it deep behind the few teeth the juggalo has left.
