Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Hundreds of miles from Pleasant Ridge, and an incomprehensible distance from where Justin currently lay unconscious, the sun was setting on a small town called Dennisville, finally bringing an end to the calamity that was Black Friday. The people were slowly returning to their senses, the shopping madness fading, leaving them with vague feelings of guilt for the half-remembered atrocities they had committed in the name of Bonnie Blah Blah and Major Monkeytron. Thanksgiving leftovers were being microwaved, smiling children were trying to cajole their parents into revealing what they had bought for them, while greasy-faced CEOs added up the day's profits, cackling at the very idea of putting any of it into a holiday bonus.

But not every face in Dennisville was smiling tonight.

“I hate Christmas!” growled Collin Foster. He paused to kick snow at a passing cat. It ran away with a hiss, and the surly eight year old stood there alone for a few minutes, face red, tears streaming down his cheeks, silently fuming at the injustice of the whole Christmas season, before continuing his aimless wandering.

He had been good this year! Well, better than he had been the year before. Sure, he had been sent to the principal's office back in March when Miss Ketzel had caught him trying to steal stupid Alex Sherman's bike. And there was that time in June when he'd eaten his sister's entire birthday cake and then blamed it on the dog. And just a couple weeks ago, he'd stolen a pack of his dad's cigarettes and left them under his friend Shane's pillow where he knew his parents would find them. It was all he deserved for refusing to let Collin copy his homework, after all.

The point was, he may have been bad, but the number of times he'd been caught being bad had gone down significantly from last year. And yet his parents still had the nerve to sit him and Gracie down and tell them that Dad hadn't made as much money at work as he'd hoped, so Santa probably wasn't going to bring them any presents for Christmas this year.

What kind of sense did that make? Everyone knew that Santa didn't sell his toys. He gave them away for free as long as you wrote him a letter! For his parents to so confidently say that Santa wasn't going to bring him anything…well, that could only mean one thing: that they had written to Santa and told him not to bring Collin any presents!

The injustice of it all made him want to track down that cat and give it a real kick.

“Stupid Mom,” he grumbled, hands stuffed in his pockets and eyes fixed angrily on the ground in front of him. He'd left his neighborhood behind and was now trudging down the cold, empty sidewalks of town. “Stupid Dad! Stupid Christmas! Stupid, dumb Santa—”

“You'd better be careful, saying stuff like that around this time of year.”

Collin stopped short, gasping in surprise. The voice had come from a nearby alleyway. It was dark, like a solid wall of shadow that the streetlights couldn't pierce. An icy wind blew out of that darkness, as if the night itself were laughing at him.

“Who's there?” Collin demanded, trying to sound brave. “You'd better come out before I—”

A pair of bright golden eyes appeared just in front of him, and Collin recoiled with a yelp.

“Sorry, didn't mean to scare you,” it said in a raspy hiss. “Couldn't help but overhear you just now.”

Collin watched those eyes warily. Whoever they belonged to, he doubted very much that they were human. They looked like a cross between a cat's and a lizard's eyes, and they glittered with an emotion he wasn’t sure he wanted to identify.

“I- I'm not afraid of you!” Collin said, balling his fists.

“Well, of course you're not!” the voice said with a snicker. “Why would anyone be afraid of one of Santa's elves?”

Collin blinked in surprise. “What do you—”

The eyes stepped out of the alley, and Collin finally got to see what they were attached to. The creature was short and squat, with thick arms and a wide, flat face that seemed to leer mockingly at him. It was dressed in dark red pants and a dirty green shirt, and had a floppy, pointed hat on its head with a rusty jingle bell sewn onto the tip. A lumpy burlap sack was thrown over its shoulder.

“You're…an elf?” Collin asked in disbelief.

It grinned at him, revealing two rows of needle-sharp teeth. “The genuine article! The name's Krakkers.”

“Since when are elves so ugly?” Collin asked with a grimace.

Krakkers frowned. “Well now, that's not very nice of you. And here I came all this way to give you a little…ah, token of Santa's appreciation.”

He put his sack on the ground between them, and Collin's eyes widened.

“What's in there?” he asked, taking a tentative step forward.

“It’s one of Santa’s magic bags,” Krakkers said with a grin. “The question isn’t what is in there, it’s what do you think is in there?”

Collin began to think. It was only a day after Thanksgiving. He hadn’t written his letter to Santa yet. But Santa knew every kid on earth, right? That meant that, letter or not, he had to have at least some idea about what Collin wanted.

And now that he thought about it, there was one thing Collin wanted more than anything else. Could it be that Krakkers was telling the truth? Was he really one of Santa’s elves, here to…what had he said? Give Collin a token of Santa’s appreciation?

Collin reached toward the bag, but then stopped and gave Krakkers a suspicious look.

“What’s this for?” he asked, taking a step back.

Krakkers’ eyes narrowed, but his grin only widened. “You know how the song goes. He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, fa la la, deck the freakin’ halls and all that.”

He leaned in so close that Collin could smell his breath. It smelled like olives and those sardines his dad liked to eat.

“The man in red knows a lot more about you than you’d ever guess,” Krakkers whispered.

“Duh,” Collin spat. “Everyone knows that! But why are you here, giving an early present to me?”

Krakkers spread his arms. “Because Santa knew you would need it. Didn’t you just say that you hated Christmas? That you thought Santa was dumb and stupid? He sent me so that that little spark of Christmas spirit in your heart wouldn’t go out.”

He nudged the sack with his foot.

“You just have to open your present.”

Collin thought about that. It did make a weird sort of sense, he decided. If Santa was watching him close enough to know every good and bad thing he did, then surely he had to know that Collin’s parents had just done their best to choke the Christmas spirit out of him. And for that matter, if any kid on earth deserved an early present, wasn’t it Collin Foster? He had worked so hard pretending to be good, after all.

Slowly, he stepped forward.

“That’s it,” Krakkers encouraged him with a glint in his golden eyes. “Just open the bag and take a look inside!”

Collin took the hem of the sack in both hands and, remembering what Krakkers had said, thought as hard as he could about what he wanted to be in there. Trembling with excitement, he pulled the sack open, and saw…

Nothing. The inside of the bag was as dark and empty as a freshly dug grave.

“Hey, what’s—”

That’s when Krakkers pushed him. With a scream of terror, Collin fell into the open bag. But he didn’t hit the bottom. Instead, he kept falling, and falling, catching brief glimpses of Dennisville up above as the mouth of the sack got farther and farther away. And there was Krakkers, grinning and waving goodbye.

After falling for what must have been minutes on end through pitch blackness, Collin finally hit the ground. He knew the impact from a fall like that should have killed him, but all it did was knock the breath out of his lungs.

Where was he? It was still too dark for him to see his own hand in front of his face. It was cold here too, much colder than Dennisville had been. Only being eight years old, Collin had no idea what the word hypothermia meant, but even he understood that this was the kind of cold that would kill him if he stayed in it too long. He moved to sit up, and…

With an echoing CLUNK, what felt like four metal bracelets snapped into place, two around Collin’s wrists, two around his ankles. They were so cold that they actually felt like they were burning him, and Collin screamed again, fighting to break free.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Let me go!”

To his right, a torch burst into life with blue flames, followed quickly by another on his left. They didn’t provide much light—if anything, they seemed to make the shadows even deeper—but he was still able to make out his surroundings.

Collin lay on a stone slab in what appeared to be a cave. The room was small, and the walls and ceiling were made of black stone that shimmered wetly in the flickering blue torchlight.

“Krakkers?” he called. “This isn’t funny! Let me out of here!”

Clack.

Collin fell silent as terror swept over him.

Clack.

Something was outside Collin’s room…and it was getting closer.

Clack.

Clack.

Clack.

A shadow stepped into view, and Collin was struck by the putrid scent of wet fur and sickness. The creature was tall and thin, but Collin couldn’t make out any details because of the long hooded cloak it wore—except for its eyes, which glowed with an eerie purple light.

“Ahhhh…”

The voice sounded like a freezing wind dragging razor sharp shards of ice across frosted glass. It was the sound of the final breath that escaped someone’s lungs when they froze to death. It was everything that warmth and happiness was not.

“It’s always good to see the light of Christmas,” it practically spat that last word in disgust, “die in the heart of someone so young.”

“P- P- Please,” Collin begged the shrouded figure. “Let me go!”

“I have been doing everything I can to smother that light for centuries,” it went on, ignoring him. “It has been slow work, but now, more than ever before, you can truly see the effects. Every year, the power of Christmas grows a little weaker, and my darkness grows deeper.”

“I want to go home!”

The creature reached out and stroked Collin’s cheek almost affectionately, making him recoil in horror. “But for a child to lose the light of Christmas…now that is a truly great victory! Your heart must indeed be cold and black, young one. What acts of selfishness and violence you must have committed to bring you to this point.”

It crossed from one side of the room to the other, and Collin noticed something he hadn’t seen before: a pair of horns rising from the beast’s head, piercing the cloth of its hood and dragging against the roof of the cave.

“Children have always been my enemy’s strongest weapon against me,” it said. “Oh, but it is a rare treat to take one of you from him! To claim you as my own!”

“M- Mommy,” Collin whimpered. “Daddy!”

“But don’t worry.”

A ball of light the same color as its eyes appeared in front of its face. The moment Collin saw what was beneath that hood, he screamed so loud and so hard that his voice gave out. The light shot from the monster’s face, traveling in a straight, almost solid, beam to strike Collin directly in the chest.

“You will always have a place in my army.”

Black magic pounded in Collin’s chest like a second heartbeat, seizing the darkness that was inside him. It took his every sinful desire and strengthened them, cultivated them, until the shadows overflowed and drowned everything that was good and pure in him. His mouth opened as wide as he could stretch it, but he had no voice to scream with.

One last time, he thought of his family. His mother. His father. His little sister, Gracie. And…And he regretted being so bad to them.

Then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again they glowed with the same golden light as Krakkers’.

The iron manacles undid themselves, and the creature beckoned to him.

“Rise, my faithful straggele. There is much work to be done.”

The ugly, misshapen creature got unsteadily to its feet. It took a moment to inspect its new form, and then knelt on swollen, knobbly knees before its master.

“How may I serve you, Lord Krampus?” the thing that was no longer Collin Foster asked.