Unsainted

Christmas Horror Story

It was way past Jamie’s bedtime, but she still had so much work to do. With Daddy’s help she poured a glass of two percent milk and placed it on the table by the tree, arranged carefully behind the plate of cookies she’d help Mommy bake. With little tin cutters they’d shaped the cookies like candy canes and mittens and, her favorite, fat little men with open arms, asking for a hug. She straightened the four stockings, one for each of them, even Thomas. Then she tip-toed into the fireplace and peeked up, making sure the chimney flume was open for business.

In the yellow-white light of the moon, Jamie watched a snowflake drift down in lazy curves before melting on the air like cotton candy. As she did, something grabbed her from behind and pulled her out of the fireplace, snarling and slurping at her neck.

It was the Daddy Monster. She giggled and howled, but then it was back to work.

The only item left on her checklist was to fall asleep, but that was the hardest one of all. Even though Daddy had marched her upstairs and tucked her in tight as a mummy, arms pressed to her sides, she was too excited to settle down. When the door eventually opened and Mommy peeked in to check on her, she noticed Jamie’s eyes were still open.

“Have I been good?” Jamie asked as Mommy sat on the side of the bed.

“Do you think so?”

Jamie scrunched up her nose. She would have scratched her chin, the way Mommy did when she was thinking, but her arms were still stuck to her sides. “Well, I wanted to smack Susan Doolidge and her friends for always being so mean to me, which is bad. But I didn’t, so that’s pretty good.” She added, “I know Thomas hasn’t been good.”

Mommy made her surprised face. “Why do you say that?”

“Because he cries so much that it makes you and Daddy fight.”

Mommy nodded. “You know, sometimes grown-ups argue when they’re tired, it doesn’t mean they love each other any less. Or that it’s anyone’s fault.” She stood up, looking down at Jamie. “And as for your question, I guess you’ll find out how good you were when you wake up. But to do that, my little elf, you have to go to sleep first.” Jamie nodded. Then Mommy walked across the room, moonbeams from the window dancing across her back.

She was halfway out the door when Jamie thought of one last question. “What does a sugarplum look like?” she asked, and Mommy turned back. “I’m supposed to dream about them but I’ve never seen one.”

Mommy snickered, holding the door frame. “You know I haven’t, either? But I’ll tell you what, tomorrow we can look one up together. In the meantime I think regular plums will work the same.”

Jamie smiled, and Mommy smiled, and then Mommy was gone and Jamie felt her eyes sinking into her head like the raisins in her oatmeal. She listened to the wind moaning across the glass like a cat asking to be let in, and her bed, so soft and warm, became a giant hand pulling her down.

She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until something woke her up. She was so drowsy that it took a few seconds to realize what it had been. A noise in the night, a bump from up high, like when the mouse family moved into the attic last winter and Daddy had to kick them out. That was the first time she’d heard Daddy scream, and the hardest she’d seen Mommy laugh.

Another bump from above. Was it the roof? Could it be? Jamie lifted her head from the pillow—the dinosaur said it was 12:21. Jamie crawled up from the covers and hopped out of bed, bare feet thudding on the floor. She hissed at herself for being too loud, then padded to the window.

The snow came down like fluffs of cotton plucked from the holes in her comforter. Jamie’s eyes were wide as they moved over the pillowy world the backyard had become, picturing Daddy pulling her through it on the sled, him shouting to hold on, her shouting to go faster. The window fogged up from her breath and she had to wipe it clear to keep looking out. As she did, a heavy clump of snow came loose from the roof above and fell past her window, hitting the ground somewhere below with a muted whumpf like a snowman getting punched in the stomach.

Maybe that was the noise that woke her up. Just some boring old snow falling from the boring old roof.

She was about to climb back into her bed and try to fall asleep again, though it would surely be even harder this time, when a rustling downstairs stopped her. It wasn’t the usual sound of Mommy getting up to use the bathroom down the hall because her wine glass was so big. This was more of a dragging, like when Jamie had to carry her own suitcase to the car after she’d packed too many shirt options. It was too big to be Mommy, and Daddy? Daddy was snoring away like an angry pig.

That left one possibility. A name on her tongue like melted sugar.

Jamie ran as fast as someone could balanced on the fronts of their feet, no thumping heels to give her away, and stopped herself at the door. She couldn’t hear the dragging anymore, though she could picture the size of the burlap sack that would make such a sound. But what she could hear sounded like the quiet munching of cookies, followed by the squeak of a door.

It was all she could take. Jamie opened the door, quiet as she could, and tip-toed out of her room.

From the upstairs hallway, the living room below glowed from the green and red lights wrapped around the tree, though Jamie saw no movement, no sign of guests in their house, jolly or otherwise. She was so close to the finish line, mere moments from the payoff of being good for an entire year, and yet the thought of seeing him with her own eyes was too much to pass up. She crept down the stairs one at a time, avoiding every creaky step that might give her away.

Finding herself alone in the bright living room, Jamie looked first under the tree. She was surprised to find no boxes, no colorful paper, not so much as an errant ribbon with the ends curled up. Perhaps he’d only gotten to the stockings.

But turning to check on them, Jamie found a curious sight. Where there should have been a set of snowy boot prints leading away from the fireplace, instead a trail of brownish-black muck had ruined Mommy’s perfectly clean floor. The dark mess covered the inside of the fireplace, splattered against the brick so much it dripped from the mantel.

Jamie knelt down next to the muck. It smelled like the time the freezer in the basement broke and Mommy had to throw out all the chopped meat while she held her nose and made faces. A handful of wet shapes were curled up in the muck at the foot of the fireplace, like when they said the squirrel on the side of the road was sleeping but she knew it wasn’t. She reached in with two fingers and pinched one, feeling the soft give of sticky fur, then pulled it out. The wet shape grew longer and longer, threads of goo stretching down to the floor, until the furry mess unfurled into the shape of a large, wet sock.

The stockings. They’d been pulled down from the mantel and left to soak in the moist grime. Worse, they were empty. She dropped the sticky stocking, not angry at it, just disappointed. The muck felt like molasses on her fingers but she didn’t dare taste it. She wiped her hand on her pajama pants and followed the trail of muck down the hall.

She hopped back and forth over the messy trail that looked like the oil paint she wasn’t allowed to use alone, not after the one time. But the paintbrush had to be huge, bigger than Mommy and Daddy put together. The lazy S led her all the way down the hall until the muck curved to the right and continued under Mommy and Daddy’s door.

Jamie knew the rule about opening Mommy and Daddy’s door when it was shut, but she also knew Mommy would be upset about her nice clean floor being painted with black, sticky muck, and that the longer stuff sits, the more it stains. She also noticed the angry pig had gone silent, and that was weird because if Daddy was asleep, he always sounded like the angry pig, so she reached up and turned the handle and broke the rule. She had to step into the muck to walk inside. It was warmer than she thought it would be.

The lights were off, but in the faint light of the snow-choked moon the room looked absolutely festive. Garland hung in strands atop the curtains, tinsel dangled from the mirror on Mommy’s bureau. A pair of huge wreaths hung over the bed, and candy canes had been left scattered about, hanging on this thing and that.

All the new decorations surprised Jamie, the happy kind of surprise. Mommy and Daddy never decorated their room, which meant they’d been meaning to surprise her in the morning. Maybe they were going to have breakfast in bed together, or open the presents there, or a dozen other things she was excited to find out. She just hoped they weren’t mad she’d spoiled the surprise. But then they would want to know about the mess she’d found, and any anger would surely be outweighed by how proud they’d be.

She beamed at how responsible she’d been. Then the clouds outside must have parted for a moment, because the moonbeams through the curtains grew brighter, and the room lit up. By the soft glow of the moon, she saw the truth.

Mommy and Daddy hadn’t decorated the room; someone had decorated the room with them.

The garland over the curtains looked like the pink stuff that spilled from the belly of the not-sleeping squirrel, though much bigger. The tinsel hanging from the mirror, it was hair, blonde like Daddy and brown like Mommy. The candy canes were fingers and toes bent to let them hang.

The wreaths above the bed had been assembled from ridiculous things like legs and arms, interlocked to keep their shape. Mommy and Daddy’s faces looked out from their centers, one in each. Their eyes didn’t follow her, didn’t wonder if she’d had a bad dream, if she needed to crawl in bed and sleep between what was left of them. What hadn’t been used to make the garland and the tinsel and the wreaths.

If anything, they were asking her to leave.

To go now.

To run.

Thomas began to cry in the nursery room, the scream he made when he woke up and the first face he saw wasn’t Mommy’s. The black muck, spread so roughly around the room, spattered on the dressers and walls, trailed off toward Thomas’ screams, painted in a straight line into the nursery.

Jamie walked toward Thomas’ screams.

As she stepped inside the nursery room, she wondered who had taken the crib and the dangling airplanes above and the chair next to it, the chair Jamie stood on to lean in and tell Thomas he was being too loud. She wondered who had replaced the crib and the chair with a big, inky shadow, even as Thomas continued to cry in the place where the crib should have been.

She looked up, trying to see the top of the shadow, to find where it ended, and saw instead that it had a head.

The man was half the size of the nursery room. He wore a burnt coat, the collar and sleeves lined in blackened fur. He leaned over Thomas’ crib, and Thomas cried louder the further the man leaned in, sticking his head inside. A head that tilted at the sound of Jamie’s gasp, followed by the rest of his giant body. It reminded Jamie of the way the planets spun at the planetarium.

His gray eyes turned like two broken snow globes. They found Jamie there, so far below, looking up at him and his charcoal skin. His round lips parted in a smile, and when they did, warmed-over milk spilled from his mouth to run down his dirty beard.

She didn’t know what to say. As Jamie watched, the man wrapped his burnt sausage fingers around the edges of his coat, the place where the black buttons had melted, and parted the fabric. He showed her the way his garbage bag belly had torn open, spilling his pink garland to hang in lazy loops down to his boots. Freed from the coat, something half mushy slipped out the open end of one garland strand and plunked to the floor.

It was a fat little cookie man, his arms spread out wide, asking for help. Jamie looked up again. The man raised one burnt sausage finger, brought it to his plump, cracked lips, and said, “Sshhh…”

Thomas cried louder in his crib, cried so loud it shook the dangling airplanes, their wheels and propellers bouncing and shaking like they were coming in for a bad landing. For the first time since Mommy and Daddy brought Thomas home, Jamie agreed with him.

Jamie ran around the big man in the burnt coat, ran fast enough to stay out of his grasping sausage fingers and jump up onto the chair so fast it almost fell over. She leaned into the crib, past the crashing airplanes, past the point Mommy said she should reach, and grabbed Thomas by his chubby, flapping arms and pulled him up with all her strength until he was away from the planes, the crib, the grasping sausage fingers and their wet, dirty, growling beard, and then she jumped back down to the floor. She hit so hard that Thomas slipped from her hands, but she held onto him like the egg and spoon race at school, his giant egg head safe in her hands, and then she was running, running, right out of the nursery and into Mommy and Daddy’s room, slipping on the muck. But she stayed on her feet with Thomas still clutched in her hands, pressed against her body so she could feel him in her chest, her ribs, not looking at the wreaths with eyes that screamed the big man was following her, as if she didn’t know, as if she couldn’t feel the ground shake under each thundering boot fall, his broken belly jiggling like jelly, and then she was out of their room and into the hallway.

She thought about running upstairs, to her room, but she knew that kids always hid in their rooms, and if she knew that, then the big burnt man would know it. She wanted to run out the door with Thomas but the snow in the windows was so bad she could barely see the moon or the sky.

Thomas had stopped crying, maybe because he was dizzy or confused, not because, as Daddy liked to say, Thomas loved Jamie so much and wanted to make her happy. Whatever the reason, it meant she could hide with him from the big burnt man without being found in ten seconds flat.

Hugging Thomas to her, Jamie looked around the living room for the perfect hiding place. The big burnt man would expect her to hide somewhere dark, like the closet, because that’s where people always hid, so what if she hid somewhere bright?

Jamie ran to the wall and squeezed behind the tree, squishing Thomas against her body as she slid further into the blinding light. The smell of fake pine pushed into her nose and crawled down her throat, plastic pine needles scratching at her face when she crouched down in the corner.

The footsteps that came from Mommy and Daddy’s room sounded like a great, big, melted dinosaur squish-stomping its way up the hall. Visions of plump slugs danced in her head, touchy-eyed snails with shiny trails stretching out behind them. Jamie wanted to shut her eyes, but for the second time tonight, and this one for a very different reason, she couldn’t.

As she listened to the big burnt man thump and slide around the living room, then the kitchen, opening cabinets and pulling out drawers, Jamie heard another sound stir. It was smaller, and higher, and growing closer.

A sniffing. And a squeaking.

Then she saw it: a mouse, gray and tiny and oh so cute, walking along the corner where the wall met the floor just behind the tree skirt. It had tiny little pink feet that seemed to twinkle as they padded toward her and Thomas. Luckily Jamie wasn’t scared of mice, not like Daddy, so she didn’t have to scream or run, she just shushed it to keep it quiet.

But Thomas took one look at the furry little thing sniffing his foot, and he didn’t like what he saw. His eyes grew enormous and his face boiled pink, and before Jamie could cover it he opened his mouth and let out a scream that brought down pine needles.

Jamie didn’t pause for a second, so that when the angry, wet snort came from the kitchen she was already running, running and clasping Thomas to her, even though he was the reason she had to run. A great clatter rose up as dishes and pans and silverware upturned and flew, and the sticky, thundering boot sounds cannonballed out of the kitchen. But Jamie was quicker, and she’d already unlocked the front door and slipped away, bad baby and all.

The snow came down as a great, big, woolen sheet pulled down over her eyes. The air chewed her fingers and cut through her cotton pajamas like a knife through cake. Thomas continued to cry in her arms as snowflakes melted on his red cheeks. Jamie knew she had to keep him warm but didn’t know how, had never had to think about something like that.

Instead, she climbed down the icy steps and stepped down into the fluffy snow, so cold on her toes, and ran away from the house to look for a grown-up. Everyone should have been in bed at such a late hour, fast asleep in their winter’s nap and unable to help her, but maybe she could find someone awake on her snow-covered street, someone in her neighborhood who could take her in and give her hot chocolate with the little marshmallows, not the big ones that didn’t melt right.

She’d barely gone very far at all when she found tracks in the snow, proof someone had been in her front yard very recently. Jamie followed the tracks with her screaming brother, passing strange things she knew Daddy never would have decorated the yard with like burnt boxes and melted doll legs sticking up from the snow, and broken toy trucks scattered in a tiny car crash.

A smell on the air made Jamie hungry, like when Mommy cooked her signature roast that was actually quite juicy and moist, compliments to the chef. A little further on, the sight of something dark drifted out of the snow, like a car but bigger and older.

Parked beneath the tree she wasn’t allowed to climb was a long wooden sleigh on splintered runners. The wood on its side, painted gumball red with black licorice trim, was cracked and burnt where it looked like it had crashed into something and caught fire. Maybe an airplane, its wheels and propellers shaking as it came in for a bad landing.

At the front of the sleigh, leather straps swayed and bounced. They connected to the nine massive beasts tasked with pulling it, animals that wore crowns of broken antlers like lightning-struck trees atop their heads.

They weren’t handsome or strong or noble, not like the stories, they were more like Mommy’s roast, juicy and moist from the way they’d cooked. Though they didn’t seem to know it by how they huffed great puffs of steam into the cold night, shuffling on charred hooves. The smell must have made them hungry, too, the way they nibbled and chewed at each other. Lazy and so content with their meal they didn’t feel the other’s teeth on them.

Thomas didn’t like them.

The animal at the front of the pack perked at the sound of the baby’s renewed wailing, its rack of singed antlers turning toward them. Jamie saw a glow at the center of its face, like a railroad stop light flashing through the snow. She turned and ran and didn’t look back, not even at the sound of the front door opening with a crash.

One house, two house, three she passed, all of their windows dark and their porch lights cold. Everyone was asleep like she’d suspected, and she wanted to ring their doorbells and knock on their doors. But which? Who would answer her at such an hour? And who would just ignore the ringing and knocking like Daddy did the religion people?

She could hear the boots now, trudging through the snow, causing the antlered beasts to shuffle and snort. The big burnt man would find her soon, she knew, but that didn’t mean he had to find Thomas. If she could only find a place to stash him like Daddy stashed the cookies his doctor told him to stop buying, she could lure the man away.

In the night above, far north of the snow and the crying and the squish-stomping boots, Jamie swore she saw a twinkle of light in the sky. A brief glimmer like diamonds. Then it was gone, and her eyes drifted down, down to Mister Normand’s lawn and his prized decorations.

Jamie ran to Mister Normand’s house, ran though Thomas was getting so heavy she almost let him fall. But she held on and ran right to the centerpiece of his decoration, the gem in his crown, as Daddy called it. Mister Normand had built the small barn himself, painted the donkey and the ox and the cow by hand, as well as the three men and the Mommy and Baby. Daddy said he’d probably woven the basket himself, but Mommy said she doubted that very much.

She laid Thomas down in the soft, crunchy hay and looked up into the lens with the blinking light. Some older kids kept stealing Mister Normand’s Jesus, Daddy said, so he put up a camera to protect his Jesus. Mister Normand was probably scrambling to put his slippers on right now, coming to protect his gem.

Jamie opened the blanket inside the basket and picked up the Jesus. It was lighter than she expected, or maybe she was stronger than she thought. She laid it aside in the hay and replaced it with her screeching brother.

“I know you like to cry,” she said, wrapping him up tight as a mummy. “It’s not your fault. I don’t love you any less. But just don’t do it this one time, okay?”

Simple as that, Thomas went quiet. So quiet she could hear the squish-stomping coming for her. She waved to Thomas as she stood, tried to memorize his little nose and big eyes. Then she left the barn and crossed Mister Normand’s yard, shivering at the center of the snowy road.

The burnt man emerged from the night like a hunk of burning coal melting through snow, great huffs of air turning to clouds. His boots were nearly gone now, left behind him in wet, rubbery tracks, so that his crispy bacon toes touched the cold street, the same as Jamie’s. He stared down at her with his yellowed snow globes as his tummy garland swayed and swayed.

“Look, sir, I don’t know what happened to you,” she said, “but I know you’re still you.”

He snorted, blowing soot-stained snot onto the soft, white ground.

“You’re still you and I’m still me,” she said. “And I’m not a bad kid.”

The reindeer bristled and the snow fell and the burnt man, he didn’t stop. As he took another step forward, then another, Jamie added, “But I know where some live.”

Now the man stopped. He craned his head to look at her once more, seeing something there he hadn’t seen before. Then his eyes seemed to twinkle and his mouth slowly drew up, up like a red and black bow.

Jamie still had so much work to do, and so did he. They weren’t about to let little things like bedtimes and plane crashes get in their way. Not tonight.

As Mister Normand’s front door opened, the light inside falling across the barn in his yard, Jamie took the man by his hand. His sausage fingers, still warm from the fire, felt good on her chilly hand. Then she led him away, away from her brother, away from her house, away from the Mommy and Daddy wreaths, and into the quiet night.