SO EP:708 Krampus Christmas

and honestly, I considered it. I really did. I've got a charming little yarn about a family in Washington State who claimed they spotted a sasquatch wearing what appeared to be a Santa hat trudging through the snow on Christmas

morning back in nineteen seventy eight. The father swore up and down that the creature was carrying a burlap sack over its shoulder, and when it noticed them watching from the kitchen window, it raised one massive hand in what could only be described as a friendly wave before disappearing into the tree line. Sweet right, heartwarming, even the kind of story that makes you smile and wonder if, maybe, just maybe, even our big hairy friends in the forest

celebrate the season in their own way. I've told stories like that before, Tales of strange lights in the winter sky, of mysterious gifts left on doorsteps and remote mountain communities, of unexplained footprints in the snow leading to and from isolated cabins where children reported seeing something large and gentle peering through frosted windows on Christmas Eve. Those stories have

their place. They remind us that mystery doesn't always have to be terrifying that the unknown can sometimes bring wonder instead of dread. But tonight, tonight is not that kind of night. Tonight, I'm going to tell you about something that happened in the winter of nineteen eighty five, something that took place in the deep forests of South Carolina, in a cabin that had stood empty for nearly three years before a young family decided it would be the

perfect place to spend Christmas. They were wrong, so very very wrong, because what visited that cabin on Christmas Eve

wasn't jolly old Saint Nick with his bag of presents. No, what came to that cabin was something far older, something that existed long before Christianity wrapped its tinsil around the winter solstice and called it Christmas, something that had been doing its dark work in the forests of Europe for centuries before the first settlers ever set foot on American soil, Something that came over with those settlers hiding in the shadows of their ships, feeding on their fears, waiting for

the right moment to remind humanity that the old ways never really died. They just learned to be patient. So settle in, my friends, turn up the lights if you need to check the locks on your doors, and whatever you do, don't look out the window, because tonight I'm going to tell you about the Christmas Eve when Crampus came calling. The story begins, as so many horror stories do, with a death in the family. Gerald Hutchins received the news of his great uncle Amos's passing in the summer

of nineteen eighty five. He hadn't seen the old man in over a decade, hadn't even thought about him much. If he was being honest, Amos had always been the black sheep of the Hutchins family, a strange and solitary figure who had retreated to a cabin in the South Carolina wilderness sometime in the early nineteen sixties and had rarely been heard from since. The family whispered about Amos

at reunions and holiday gatherings. They said he had gone strange after the war, that he had seen things in the forests of Germany that had broken something inside him, that he had come back different, haunted, prone to muttering in languages no one recognized, and drawing symbols on scraps of paper that he would immediately burn in the fireplace. Gerald's father had always dismissed these stories as the usual family gossip, kind of embellishments that grow around anyone who

chooses to live differently. Amos was just a hermit, he would say. Some men come back from war wanting to be alone. There was nothing more to it than that. But Gerald remembered something his father had said once, late at night, after too many beers at a family barbecue. He remembered his father's voice going quiet, his eyes getting distant as he recalled the last time he'd visited Amos at that cabin in the woods. He said the old man had grabbed his arm with surprising strength and had

pulled him close. He said Amos's breath had smelled like whiskey and something else, something bitter and medicinal. And he said Amos had whispered four words that had haunted him ever since. It knows we're here. Gerald's father had never gone back to that cabin. He had never spoken to Amos again, and when the news came that the old man had died alone in his bed, apparently of natural causes,

Gerald's father had refused to attend the funeral. But the cabin was part of the estate, and because Gerald was the closest living relative willing to deal with the paperwork the property fell to him. Gerald was thirty four years old that summer. He worked as an insurance adjuster in Columbia, a job he found mind numbingly dull, but which paid well enough to support his wife, Ellen and their son Marcus.

They lived in a modest, three bedroom house and a suburb that looked identical to every other suburb in America, and they spent their weekends doing the same things every other family in that suburb did, backyard barbecues, little league games, church on Sunday mornings. It was a good life, a safe life, the kind of life that Gerald's parents had never had, and the kind of life he was determined to give his own family. But there was something else

in Gerald, something he rarely acknowledged, even to himself. A restlessness, a sense that there had to be more to existence than quarterly reports and mortgage payments and watching the same time television shows every night while the years ticked away. When he first saw the cabin in the photographs the estate lawyer sent him, something stirred in his chest, something that felt almost like recognition. The cabin was isolated, certainly.

The nearest town was almost twenty miles away, and the property itself was surrounded by hundreds of acres of dense forest. But it was beautiful in a rugged, untamed way, the kind of place where a man could breathe, the kind of place where a family could escape the noise and chaos of modern life, if only for a little while. Gerald made the drive down to see it in person on a weekend in early September. He went alone, telling Ellen he needed to assess the property's condition before they

decided whether to sell it or keep it. But the truth was he wanted to see it for himself first. He wanted to feel whatever it was that had drawn his great uncle to this place and kept him there for over two decades. The road to the cabin was barely a road at all, more like a suggngestion of a path carved through the wilderness by someone who hadn't

wanted to be found. Gerald sedan bounced and scraped along the rutted track for almost forty five minutes before the trees finally parted to reveal a small clearing, and there it was. The cabin was larger than he had expected from the photographs. Two stories built from logs that had weathered to a dark gray over the years. A wide porch wrapped around the front and one side, and a stone chimney rose from the roof like a finger pointing

accusingly at the sky. The windows were dark, many of them covered with heavy curtains that hadn't been opened in years. Gerald sat in his car for a long moment, just looking at the place. He couldn't explain the feeling that came over him. It wasn't fear, exactly. It was more like the sensation of being watched, of being evaluated, as if the cabin itself was taking his measure and deciding whether or not he was worthy of entering. He shook

off the feeling and got out of the car. The air was different here, cleaner certainly, but also heavier, somehow dense, with the smell of pine and rotting leaves and something else underneath it all, something animal, something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention. Gerald walked up the porch steps, slowly, noting the way the boards creaked under his weight. The front door was unlocked, of course, it was who was going to rob a

place this far from anywhere. The inside of the cabin was exactly what he had expected and nothing like it at the same time. The furniture was old but well made, covered in sheets that had turned gray with dust. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and the books that filled them were in languages Gerald didn't recognize, German, certainly, but also something older, something that looked almost like Latin but

wasn't quite right. The fireplace dominated the main room, a massive stone construction that could have heated a space three times this size. The mantle hung a collection of items that made Jerald's breath catch in his throat. Chains old and rusted but still solid, heavy iron chains with manacles attached, the kind that might have been used to restrain a prisoner or an animal. Beside the chains hung a collection of switches and birch rods, their surfaces stained dark with

something Jerald didn't want to think about too carefully. And in the center of it all, mounted on a wooden plaque like a hunting trophy, was a mask. It was carved from dark wood, maybe oak or walnut, and it depicted a face that Gerald had never seen before, but somehow recognized. On an instinctive level, a face that was almost human but stretched wrong. The nose was too long,

curving downward like a beak. The eyes were hollow sockets that seemed to follow him as he moved around the room, and the mouth was twisted into a grin that contained far too many teeth. Jerald stood in front of that mask for a long time. He told himself he should take it down. He told himself he should throw it in the fireplace and burn it along with everything else in this god forsaken place. He told himself he should get back in his car and drive away and never

think about this cabin again. Instead, he reached out and touched the mask's cheek. The wood was warm, not room temperature warm, but blood warm, the warmth of living flesh. Jerald jerked his hand back as if he had been burned. He stumbled backward, nearly tripping over a sheet covered chair, his heart hammering in his chest so hard he could feel it in his temples. And then he heard it, a sound from somewhere above him, from the second floor of the cabin, a sound like hoofs on hard wood.

Jerald ran. He didn't remember making the decision to flee one moment he was standing in the main room, staring up at the ceiling, and the next he was in his car, gunning the engine, tearing back down that rutted excuse for a road, so fast that he was certain he was going to wrap himself around a tree. He made it back to the main road, and then to the highway, and then all the way home to Columbia without stopping once. He didn't tell Ellen about what had happened.

He didn't tell anyone. He told himself it had been his imagination, a combination of the strange atmosphere and the unsettling decorations, and the stories his father had told him about crazy old Uncle Amos.

around him, watching him, testing him. He went home to Columbia, and he went back to work, and he told himself over and over again that it had been nothing that old houses made strange sounds, that his imagination had simply gotten the better of it in an unfamiliar environment. But something had changed in Gerald Hutchins, something that his wife noticed, even if she couldn't quite name it. He was distracted, now prone to staring off into space for long minutes

at a time. He had started researching things on his lunch breaks at the library, strange things, things about Alpine folklore and Germanic traditions, and creatures from the Old Country that parents used to frighten their children with before the

world became too modern for such superstitions. He had learned about Crampus, not the sanitized version that occasionally appeared in novelty Christmas cards, the real version, the ancient version, the creature that had been terrifying European villages for centuries before

anyone had ever heard of Santa Claus. Gerald read accounts of Crampus knocked, celebrations gone wrong, of children who had disappeared during the festivities, of families found dead in their homes on Christmas morning, with expressions of absolute terror frozen on their faces. He read about the chains the creature carried forged in hell fire used to bind the wicket

and drag them down to damnation. He read about the switches, made from birch soaked in holy water by some accounts and in blood by others, used to beat the naughty children before they were carried away. He read about the basket on the creature's back, the basket that was always hungry, always empty, no matter how many screaming children were stuffed inside.

And he read about the masks. In some traditions, the crampis masks were carved by the creature itself, made from the bones and skin of its victims, worn as trophies of past hunts. In other traditions, the masks were portals, doorways that allowed the creature to see into our world from whatever dark dimension it normally inhabited. The masks watched and waited, the story said, they called to their master. They marked the homes that would be visited when the

winter solstice came. Gerald had read all of this, and he had convinced himself that it was nonsense, fairy tales, the kind of primitive superstition that had no place in modern America. And stay tuned for more sasquatch ott to see, we'll be right back after these messages. His great uncle had clearly been disturbed, driven mad by his years of isolation, and the mask above the fireplace was just a piece

of folk art, nothing more. But somehow, despite all of his rational explanations, Gerald couldn't stop thinking about the cabin, couldn't stop dreaming about it, couldn't stop feeling deep in the marrow of his bones, that something there was waiting for him to come back, that something there was calling him.

Ellen had her doubts about the plan. She expressed them repeatedly in the weeks leading up to Christmas, pointing out all the sensible reasons why spending the holidays in an isolated cabin with no phone, no television, and questionable heating was a bad idea. What if Marcus got sick, What if there was an emergency, What if they ran out of food, or the car broke down, or any of a hundred other things that could go wrong when you were twenty miles from the nearest town in the middle

of December. But Gerald was persuasive. He talked about the magic of a real Christmas, the kind they used to have before everyone got so dependent on technology and convenience. He talked about cutting down their own tree and making popcorn strings and telling stories by the fire. He talked about how good it would be for Marcus to experience nature, real nature, not the manicured parks and carefully maintained hiking

trails they usually visited, and eventually Ellen agreed. Marcus was thirteen that year, caught in that awkward space between childhood and adolescence where everything his parents suggested was automatically suspect. He wasn't thrilled about the idea of spending Christmas without his atari, or his friends, or the television specials he

looked forward to every year. But there was something in his father's eyes when he talked to the cabin, a excitement that Marcus hadn't seen in a long time, and despite his complaints, some part of him was curious about this mysterious inheritance that had dropped into their lives. They left Columbia on the morning of December twenty third. The weather had been mild for most of the month, but the radio was warning of a cold front moving in

from the north. Temperatures were expected to drop well below freezing by Christmas Day, with a possibility of snow. Gerald had prepared thoroughly.

drive took longer than expected. The roads were good until they turned off the main highway, but then the pavement gave way to gravel, and the gravel eventually gave way to dirt. The track that led to the cabin was even more overgrown than Gerald remembered, and he had to stop twice to clear fallen branches from the path. They arrived at the cabin just as the sun was beginning to set. The light was wrong, that was the first

thing Gerald noticed as they pulled into the clearing. The sunset should have been painting the sky in shades of orange and pink and gold, but instead the light had a sickly quality to it, a pale and washed out yellow that made everything look slightly diseased. The shadows cast by the trees seemed too long, too dark, stretching across the snow dusted ground like grasping fingers. Ellen's first reaction

was silence. Gerald watched her face carefully as she took in the building, looking for signs of approval or disgust. He couldn't read her expression. She simply sat in the passenger seat, staring through the windshield at the cabin and the forest that surrounded it, her hands folded in her lap. Gerald noticed that her knuckles had gone white, and he wondered if she was feeling the same thing he was, that sense of being observed, that feeling of stepping into

a place that didn't want them there. The cabin itself looked worse than Gerald remembered. The logs that made up its walls had seemed merely weathered in September, but now they looked almost rotted, the dark gray wood streaked with something that might have been mold, or might have been something else entirely. The windows were black mirrors that reflected the dying light without revealing anything of what lay within. And the porch, that wide porch that had seemed almost

welcoming before. Now looked like a mouth, a dark, gaping mouth, waiting to swallow anyone foolish enough to step inside. Gerald shook off the thought. It was just a cabin, just wood and glass and stone, just the inheritance of a crazy old man who had lived alone too long. There was nothing supernatural about it. There was nothing to be afraid of, he almost believed himself. Marcus was less reserved.

He was out of the car before his father had even turned off the engine, running up the porch steps and pressing his face against one of the windows, trying to see inside. Gerald wanted to call out to him, wanted to tell him to come back, but something stopped him, some reluctance to break the silence that had settled over the clearing like a shroud. The cabin was different in winter, starker somehow, its dark wood standing out sharply against the

white birch trees that surrounded the clearing. The porch was covered in a layer of fallen leaves that no one had bothered to sweep away, and the windows were even darker than Gerald remembered, their curtains drawn tight against the fading light. Gerald had made arrangements to have the power turned on and some basic cleaning done before their arrival. But as he climbed the porch steps and pushed open the front door, he realized that whoever he had hired

had done the bare minimum. Sh sheets had been removed from the furniture, and someone had swept the floors, but the cabin still had an abandoned feeling to it, a sense of long emptiness that no amount of quick tiding could erase. And the mask was still there, hanging above the fireplace. Jerald had hoped someone might have taken it down. He had even considered asking for it to be removed specifically, but something had stopped him, some reluctance he couldn't explain.

Ellen saw the mask immediately. She walked into the main room and stopped dead, her eyes fixed on that twisted wooden face with its empty sockets and its too many teeth.

he would, but not tonight. Tonight they needed to focus on getting settled in, making the place comfortable, building a fire to ward off the cold that was already creeping in through the walls. He would deal with the mask tomorrow, tomorrow, he promised. Ellen didn't argue. She simply nodded and turned away, and Gerald could see the tension in her shoulders as she began unpacking their supplies. Marcus, meanwhile, had discovered the

stairs to the second floor. Gerald heard him calling from above, his voice echoing through the cabin's empty spaces, talking about all the rooms up there, and the old books and the weird drawings.

a little too fast, he forced himself to look. The drawings covered almost every surface, the walls, the ceiling, even parts of the floor. They were done in what looked like charcoal, though some appeared to have been made with something darker and redder that Gerald didn't want to think about too carefully. Most of the drawings were of the same figure, a tall, twisted shape with horns rising from its head and legs that bent backward like a goat's.

In some drawings, the figure was carrying chains, In others it held a bundle of switches or birch rods, and still others it was stuffing something small and screaming into a basket on its back, And in all of them, without exception, the figure was grinning. Marcus was standing in the middle of one of the bedrooms, turning slowly in a circle, taking in the draw that surrounded him on all sides. He asked his father what all this stuff was.

Gerald wanted to lie. He wanted to say he had no idea that his great uncle had been crazy, that the drawings meant nothing, But looking at his son's face, seeing the fear that was already beginning to take root there, he found he couldn't do it. He told Marcus about Crampis. He told him about the old Alpine traditions, the ones

that existed long before Christmas as they knew it. He told him about how in those ancient times, the winter solstice was a time of fear as well as celebration, a time when the barrier between worlds grew thin, and things that normally stayed hidden came out to walk among humans. He told him about the figure that traveled with Saint Nicholas,

the dark counterpart to the jolly gift giver. While Nicholas rewarded the good children with presents and sweets, his companion dealt with the bad ones, the naughty, the wicked, the ones who had earned punishment instead of present Crampis, Gerald explained, was that companion a demon or a devil, or something old or still depending on who you asked. A creature with the horns of a ram, the hoofs of a goat,

and a tongue that hung down past its chin. It carried chains because it had once been bound, imprisoned in hell or somewhere worse, and it never wanted to forget what it meant to be trapped. It carried switches to beat the bad children, and it carried a basket to stuff the me in and carry them away back to whatever dark place it called home. Marcus listened to all of this with wide eyes. When his father was finished, he asked if Crampis was real. Gerald told him no.

By the morning of December twenty fourth, the temperature had dropped to well below freezing, and a bitter wind was howling through the trees that surrounded the cabin, Gerald had to make three trips out to the woodpile to keep the fire going, each time returning with frost in his beard and numbness in his fingers. Ellen kept busy in the kitchen, preparing the Christmas Eve dinner she had planned.

The cabin had a wood burning stove that she eventually figured out how to use, and soon the smell of roasting ham and baking bread began to fill the small space, mingling with the smoke from the fireplace and creating something that felt almost cozy. Almost, But the mask was still there, hanging above the mantle, and no matter where Ellen positioned herself in the room, she could feel its empty eyes

watching her. Marcus spent most of the day exploring the cabin, despite his mother's warnings to stay inside where it was warm. He found boxes of old photographs in one of the closets, pictures of people he didn't recognize, standing in front of

buildings he had never seen. He found collections of strange coins and medals, some of them bearing symbols that made his stomach turn when he looked at them too closely, and he found a journal hidden beneath a loose floorboard in one of the upstairs bedrooms, written in his great great uncle's cramped and barely legible handwriting. Marcus brought the journal downstairs and showed it to his father, who took

it with trembling hands and began to read. The journal spanned several decades, beginning in the early nineteen sixties, when Amos had first moved to the cabin. The early entries were mundane enough, documenting the work of making the place habitable, the challenges of living so far from civilization, the small pleasures of a solitary life in nature. But as the

years went on, the entries grew stranger. Amos began writing about dreams, nightmares, really visions of something hunting through the winter forests, something with horns and hoofs and a smile that contained too many teeth. He wrote about hearing sounds at night, footsteps on the porch, something heavy dragging itself

across the roof. He wrote about finding tracks in the snow around the cabin, tracks that looked almost like those of a large goat, but that were far too big, far too deep, as if whatever had made them weigh several hundred pounds. And he wrote about the Christmas of nineteen seventy two, the year when he finally saw it. He had been gathering wood from the pile beside the cabin, working quickly in the failing light of Christmas Eve afternoon.

He had heard a sound behind him, a sound like chains rattling, and he had turned to find the creature standing at the edge of the clearing. It was tall, Amos wrote, taller than any man, seven feet at least maybe eight. Its body was covered in dark fur, matted and filthy, and its legs bent backward at the knee, like the legs of a goat. Great curving horns rose from its head, and its eyes, those horrible yellow eyes, seemed to glow in the twilight, like embers from a

dying fire. It had watched him for a long moment, Amos wrote, just watched, not moving, not breathing, while he stood frozen with an armload of firewood and his heart trying to hammer its way out of his chest. And then it had smiled. It had smiled with a mouth that seemed to split its face in half, revealing rows of teeth that were long and sharp and blackened, as if they had been charred by hell fire. Itself. Amos

had dropped the wood and run for the cabin. He had slammed the door behind him and locked it and pushed every piece of furniture he could find against it. And he had huddled by the fire all night long, listening to the sound of hoofs on the porch and something heavy testing the door. And stay tuned for more sasquatch ott to see.

been unable to continue. The next entry in the journal was dated almost three years later, and it contained only a single line, written in letters so shaky they were almost illegible. It comes back every year, It always comes back. Gerald set down the journal and looked at his son. Marcus was pale, his eyes wide, his lower lip trembling slightly. Despite his best efforts to appear brave. Gerald told him

not to worry. He told him that his great uncle had clearly been unwell, that living alone in the wilderness for so long could do strange things to a person's mind. He told him that there was nothing in those woods but deer and rabbits and maybe a few bears, nothing that could hurt them, nothing that even knew they were there.

But as he spoke, Gerald became aware of something, a silence that seemed to press against the walls of the cabin, heavy and expectant, a silence where there should have been wind. He walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. The wind had stopped. The trees that had been swaying and creaking just minutes before now stood perfectly still, their bare branches motionless against a sky that had turned the

color of old bone. And the light was wrong, somehow, dimmer than it should have been at this hour, as if something was drawing the brightness out of the air itself. Ellen called from the kitchen, asking what was wrong. Gerald let the curtain fall back into place. He said everything was fine, just a change in the weather. He didn't mention the tracks he had seen in the snow at the edge of the clearing, the deep cloven tracks that

hadn't been there that morning. He didn't mention the figure he'd seen for just a moment between the trees, the tall, horned figure that had seemed to be watching the cabin with eyes that burned like dying coals. He didn't mention

any of it. Instead, he helped Ellen set the table for dinner, and he smiled at his son's jokes, and he pretended that everything was normal, that this was just another Christmas Eve, that the growing knot of dread in his stomach was nothing but indigestion from eating too many of Ellen's cookies. They sat down to eat as the last light faded from the sky, and somewhere out in the darkness, something began to move toward the cabin. The

power went out at seven forty three. Gerald had been watching the clock on the mantel, one of the few items in the cabin that actually seemed to belong to the modern era. It was a battery operated digital clock that Amos must have purchased sometime in the late seventies, its red numbers glowing softly in the dim light of

the cabin. Gerald had been watching those numbers, watching the minutes tick by telling himself that every minute that passed was a minute closer to morning, a minute closer to daylight, a minute closer to the moment when they could pack up the car and leave this place behind forever. Seven forty two became seven forty three, and then the lights

went out. One moment, the cabin was filled with the warm glow of electric lights and the soft hum of the generator, and the next they were plunged into a darkness so complete that for a moment, none of them

could breathe. It was the kind of darkness that city people never experience, the kind of absolute blackness that exists only in places far from street lights and highways and the constant ambient illumination of civilization, the kind of darkness where your eyes strain and strain and never adjust because there's simply no light to adjust to. Gerald fumbled for the flashlight he had placed on the table beside his plate, having learned from his September visit that the cabin's electricity

was not to be trusted. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating his wife's face, his son's face, both of them frozen in expressions of shock that mirrored his own. In that brief moment of flashlight illumination, Gerald saw something else, just a glimpse, just a fraction of a second, but it burned itself into his memory with the permanence of a brand. He saw the mask above the fireplace, and he saw that its expression had changed. The grin that

horrible too many teeth grin had grown wider. The empty eye socket seemed deeper, darker, more alive, and for just that instant, just that fraction of a heartbeat, Gerald could have sworn he saw something moving inside those sockets, something looking back at him. Then he blinked, and the mask was just a man again, and he told himself it had been a trick of the light, a shadow thrown by the flashlight beam, nothing more. Ellen asked what happened.

Gerald said he didn't know, Probably just the generator running out of fuel. He had filled it that afternoon, but maybe he hadn't filled it enough. He would go outside and check. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, too calm to controled, like a man who was using every ounce of will power he had to keep from screaming. Marcus asked if he could come with him. Gerald started to say no, started to say it was too cold outside and Marcus should stay here where it was safe.

But something in his son's eyes stopped him, a fear that went beyond the simple darkness, a fear that said being left alone in this cabin, even with his mother, was not something Marcus was willing to do. And maybe, if Gerald was being honest with himself, he didn't want to go out there alone either. So Gerald nodded, and he handed Marcus one of the other flashlights, and together they put on their coats and their gloves and their hats, and they stepped out onto the porch. The cold hit

them like a physical blow. It was far worse than it had been that afternoon, a bitter, biting cold that seemed to reach through their layers of clothing and wrap its fingers around their bones. This wasn't natural cold, Gerald thought. This was something else. This was the kind of cold that preceded something terrible, the kind of cold that announced the arrival of something that had no business existing in

the natural world. Gerald's breath froze in the air before him, forming clouds of ice crystals that sparkled in the beam of his flashlight. The snow was falling harder, now, thick flakes that seemed to absorb the flashlight beams, limiting visibility to just a few feet in any direction. The world beyond the porch had become a white void, a blank canvas onto which anything might be painted. The generator was housed in a small shed about thirty feet from the cabin.

Gerald and Marcus made their way toward it, their boots crunching in the snow that had begun to fall while they were eating dinner. Large flakes drifted down from the darkness above, landing on their shoulders and their hats, and immediately beginning to melt. Gerald reached the shed and pulled open the door. He shone his flashlight inside and felt his stomach drop. The generator wasn't just out of fuel.

It had been destroyed. Something had torn the machine apart, ripping wires and breaking components and scattering pieces across the interior of the shed. The fuel tank had been punctured, and the smell of gasoline was thick in the air, mixing with another smell that Jerald didn't recognize at first. Then he did recognize it, and he felt the blood drain from his face. It smelled like a barnyard, like goats and sheep and horses, and something else underneath, something

musky and rotten and utterly wrong. Marcus was saying something, asking what happened, asking who did this? But Jerald couldn't answer because he had just noticed something else. Marks on the walls of the shed, deep gouges in the wood, as if something with long, sharp claws had been raking at the surface, and above the gouges, burned into the wood itself was a symbol, a circle with horns rising from the top, and inside the circle a grinning face. Gerald grabbed his son's arm and pulled him away.

between the trees wasn't a tree at all. It was standing perfectly still, watching them, A tall figure easily seven feet or more, with great curving shapes rising from its head that could only be horns. Its body was covered in something dark, fur or hair or something worse, and its legs were bent at angles that no human leg could bend. And its eyes, its eyes were glowing yellow like fire, like the embers of a flame that had

been burning since the beginning of time. They fixed on Gerald and Marcus with an intelligence that was ancient and terrible and completely without mercy. For a moment, no one moved. The creature stood there at the edge of the clearing, watching, waiting, and Gerald and his son stood in the middle of the yard with their flashlights and their terror and the

absolute certainty that they were about to die. Then the creature smiled that smile, that horrible, impossible smile that seemed to split its face in half and revealed teeth that were black and long and sharp, teeth that were clearly designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, tearing flesh from bone. Gerald grabbed Marcus again and ran for the cabin.

He didn't look back. He couldn't look back, because looking back would mean seeing that thing start to move, and if he saw that, if he actually witnessed it coming for them, he knew his legs would stop working and his heart would stop beating, and he would simply collapse in the snow and wait for those black teeth to find him. They reached the porch, Jerald threw open the door.

They tumbled inside, and he slammed the door behind them, and threw the dead bolt and shoved his back against the wood, as if his weight alone could keep out whatever was coming. Ellen was there, a candle in her hand, asking what was wrong, asking why they were running, asking what had happened to the generator. Gerald couldn't speak. He could only stand there against the door, his chest heaving, his heart pounding, his mind trying desperately to process what

he had just seen. It was Marcus who finally found his voice. It's real, he said, Crampis, it's real, and it's here. The next hour was a blur of activity and terror. Jerald pushed every piece of furniture he could move against the front door, just as his great uncle had done all those years ago. The heavy oak dining table went first, then the couch, then the armchairs, then

anything else that had weight and substance. He worked with the frantic energy of a man who knows that what he's doing is probably useless, but who cannot bring himself to simply wait for death. Ellen gathered candles and placed them throughout the cabin, their flickering light casting dancing shadows on the walls that seemed to move with a life of their own. Every time Gerald glanced at those shadows,

he thought he saw shapes in them. Horn shapes, twisted shapes, shapes that shouldn't exist in any sane and rational world. Marcus sat in the corner of the main room, his knees drawn up to his chest, his eyes fixed on the mask above the fireplace, as if expecting it to come alive at any moment. He was shaking, Gerald noticed, not from the cold, though the temperature inside the cabin was dropping steadily now that the fire was providing the

only heat. He was shaking from something deeper, something primal, the kind of terror that exists in the oldest part of the human brain, the part that remembers what it was like to huddle in caves while predators stalked the darkness outside. The wind had returned, howling around the cabin with a fury that seemed almost personal. It screamed through the gaps in the logs and rattled the windows in their frames, and seemed to speak in a language that

was almost but not quite comprehensible. Snow pelted the windows with a sound like thousands of tiny fists demanding entry, and beneath it all barely audible, but definitely there was

another sound. The sound of something walking around the cabin, heavy footsteps, slow and deliberate, the creak of boards on the porch, the scrape of something sharp against the logs of the walls, and every now and then a sound that might have been breathing, deep wet breathing, like a massive bellows pumping air in and out of lungs that were far too large to belong to anything natural. Gerald had found his great uncle's shotgun in a closet on

the second floor. It was old, but still functional, a double barreled twelve gage that must have been manufactured sometime in the nineteen forties. The wood of the stock was worn smooth by decades of handling, and there were scratches on the barrel that looked almost like claw marks. Gerald tried not to think about that. He focused instead on loading the weapon, on finding the shells in the box beside it, on forcing his shaking hands to cooperate long

enough to get two rounds into the chambers. He didn't know if a shotgun could kill what was out there. He didn't know if anything mortal could harm something that had been haunting human since before the birth of Christ. But holding the weapon made him feel slightly less helpless, and right now, that was all he could ask for. The footsteps stopped. The silence that followed was somehow worse

than the sounds had been. It pressed against the walls of the cabin like a physical force, heavy and expectant. For a long moment, there was nothing only the wind and the snow, and the pounding of three hearts that were all beating far too fast. Then something hit the door. Not a knock, not a polite request for entry, a hit, a blow that shook the entire cabin and sent dust raining down from the rafters. The furniture Gerald had piled

against the door shifted several inches. Ellen screamed, Marcus curled into a tighter ball, and began to cry. Jerald raised the shotgun and pointed it at the door, his finger on the trigger, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Another hit, harder this time. Stay tuned for more sasquatch otta see.

Ellen screamed again, and Marcus covered his ears, and for a moment there was nothing but the ringing in Gerald's ears and the smoke curling from the barrel of the shotgun. Then laughter, deep rumbling laughter that seemed to come from everywhere at once, from outside the door and from the walls, and from beneath the floor and from inside Gerald's own head.

Laughter that said the shotgun had been amusing, that it had been a cute little toy, that it had made the creature feel something it hadn't felt in a very long time. It had made it feel entertained. The hitting stopped. The footsteps resumed circling the cabin again, faster. Now almost excited, Jerald tracked the sound with the shotgun, following it from the front of the cabin to the side, to the back,

to the other side, and around again. The creature was toying with them, playing with its food before the feast. Then a new sound from above, something on the roof. Gerald's blood ran cold. He looked up at the ceiling, at the wooden boards that were all that separated them from whatever was up there, and he watched in horror as those boards began to bend. Something heavy was pressing

down on them, testing their strength. Looking for a way in the chimney, Gerald spun toward the fireplace, where the fire was still burning, where the smoke was still rising, where the only opening in the cabin large enough for something to fit through waited Like an invitation. He ran to the hearth and threw more wood on the fire. He didn't care if he burned the whole cabin down.

He didn't care about anything except keeping that thing from coming down the chimney like some hellish perversion of Santa Claus. The fire roared higher, and for a moment Gerald thought it had worked. He thought the flames would be enough to keep the creature at bay. Then something dropped into the fire, not the creature itself, something smaller, something that had once been round but was now misshapen, melted by

the flames even as it fell. A bell, a small, tarnished bell, the kind that might hang from a gesture's cap or a fool's scepter, the kind that might also hang from the chains of something ancient and evil. The bell did melt, it didn't burn. It simply sat in the flames, and as Gerald watched, it began to ring, a thin, high sound, almost delicate, almost musical. And with each ring, the candles in the cabin flickered, first one, then another, then all of them at once, as if

an invisible hand was passing over their flames. One by one, they went out. The darkness closed in like a fist, and in that darkness, Gerald heard the front door splinter and break. What happened next is pieced together from fragments from the sounds that echoed through the cabin, and the glimpses caught in the dying light of the fire, and the screams that seemed to go on forever. Some of what I'm about to tell you comes from the official

reports filed after the incident. Some of it comes from the journal entries Jerald made in the years that followed, scribbling frantically in notebooks that the doctors at the psychiatric facility would later confiscate and file away. And some of it comes from other sources. Sources I'm not going to name, sources that have their own reasons for knowing what happened in that cabin on Christmas Eve. The creature came through the door like a storm. Not through the doorway, mind you,

through the door itself. The wood exploded inward, sending splinters flying like shrapnel. The furniture Gerald had piled against it scattered like children's toys, the heavy oak table tumbling and over end, the armchairs crashing against the walls with enough force to shatter their frames. Gerald heard Ellen screaming his name, heard Marcus, crying for his mother, heard sounds that might have been words in a language that existed before humanity

learned to speak. He tried to fire the shotgun, He really did. He raised it toward the shape in the doorway, toward the massive dark form that seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it, and he tried to squeeze the trigger. But his hands weren't working right, his fingers weren't obeying his command. It was as if the creature's presence had short circuited. Something in his nervous system, had

broken the connection between his brain and his body. Before he could pull the trigger, something hard and heavy struck him across the face and sent him sprawling. The blow should have killed him. He knew that even as he was falling. He knew it with the calm certainty of a man who has accepted that death has come for him. Whatever had hit him had hit him with the force of a sledgehammer, had connected with his jaw and his cheekbone and the side of his skull with enough power

to shatter bone and pulp brain matter. But Gerald didn't die. He hit the floor and tasted blood, felt teeth rattling, loose in his mouth, felt the world spinning around him in a nauseating spiral. But he was alive. He was conscious, and he understood in that moment of terrible clarity that the creature had held back, that it had hit him just hard enough to disable him, not hard enough to kill, because it wanted him alive, It wanted him to watch.

The shotgun flew from his hands and skidded away into the darkness. He tried to get up, tried to find his family, but something wrapped around his ankle, a chain, cold iron lynks that burned against his skin, despite the layers of clothing between them. The burn was unlike anything Gerald had ever experienced. It was cold and hot at the same time, freezing and searing, and it seemed to

reach past his flesh and into his very soul. The chain tightened, and Gerald felt himself being dragged across the floor, away from the fire, away from the light, toward the shattered door and the darkness beyond. He screamed. He screamed for Ellen, He screamed for Marcus. He screamed for God or the devil, or anyone who might be listening to help him, to save him, to make this nightmare end.

He clawed at the floorboards as he was dragged, his fingernails splintering and breaking as they dug into the wood, leaving rails of blood.

his body shaking with cold and fear. He couldn't see the creature, but he could feel it, could feel its presence looming over him, ancient and terrible and utterly without mercy. And then it spoke again, not in that guttural language from before, but in English, in a voice that was like rocks grinding together, like ice cracking on a frozen lake, like the last breath of a dying man. It asked if Gerald had been good this year. Gerald couldn't answer.

His voice was gone, stolen by terror, leaving him mute and helpless in the snow. The creature laughed again, that horrible, rumbling laugh that seemed to vibrate through the earth itself. It said that it already knew the answer. It said that it always knew. It said that Gerald had been neither particularly good nor particularly bad, just mediocre, just average, just another human stumbling through life without ever really committing to anything but his son. The creature said, his son

was another matter. Gerald found his voice, then he found it and used it to beg He begged for his son's life, promised anything, offered, anything, would have sold his own soul a thousand times over if it meant protecting Marcus from what was coming. The creature was silent for a long moment. When it spoke again, its voice had changed, softer, now, almost gentle.

great uncle's journal hadn't done it justice. Nothing could have done it justice. Words are simply inadequate to describe something that exists so far outside the bounds of normal reality, something that the human mind was never designed to comprehend. It was taller than he had thought, nine feet at least maybe ten. It had to stoop slightly, even in the clearing, as if the very air of our world

was too small to contain it. Its body was covered in fur that was matted with things Gerald didn't want to identify. Dried blood, certainly, but also other substances, older substances, things that had crusted and hardened over centuries of feeding. Its horns curved up and back from a skull that was almost human but wasn't not quite. They glistened with ice. Those horns, and Gerald could see markings carved into them, symbols, the same symbols that covered the walls inside the cabin,

the same symbols that had been burned into the shed. Names. He realized the horns were carved with names, the names of everyone it had ever taken. And the face, that face, it was, the face from the mask above the fireplace come to terrible life, That long curved nose that swept down past where a chin should be, Those eyes, those horrible yellow eyes that glowed with a fire that had been burning since before the first humans walked the earth.

And that grin, that impossible grin, stretching across a face that was almost human, but stretched wrong, twisted wrong, broken in ways that went beyond the physical. Its tongue hung from that grin, impossibly long, impossibly flexible, covered in barbs that looked sharp enough to flay skin from bone. As Gerald watched, the tongue flicked out and tasted the air, tasted his fear, and the creature's grin somehow grew even wider.

In one massive hand, it held chains, not the chain wrapped around Gerald's ankle, but others, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all clinking and rattling in a sound that was almost musical. In the other hand, it held a bundle of switches, birch rods that had been soaked in something dark, something that steamed faintly in the cold air. And on its back, strapped in place with leather cords that looked older than civilization itself, was a basket, a massive wicker basket, easily

large enough to hold several children. Gerald could hear sounds coming from inside it. Sounds like whimpering, sounds like crying, sounds that might have been words, might have been pleased for help, might have been anything at all. It held out its hand. In its palm was a contract, real paper, real ink, illuminated by the glow of those terrible eyes.

The paper was made from something that wasn't quite paper, something that had an organic quality to it, something that seemed almost to pulse with the life of its own. The words were in a language Jerald couldn't read, but somehow he understood them anyway. He understood what he was agreeing to, He understood the price. He understood that this was the only way he took the contract. He pricked his finger on one of the creature's claws, drawing blood

that steamed in the cold air. He signed his name at the bottom of the page. The creature took back the contract. It read over the signature, and its grin somehow grew even wider.

calling for his father, begging for help. And Gerald could do nothing but stand there in the snow and listen. The sounds went on for a few short seconds, then they stopped. The silence that followed was worse than the screaming. Gerald stood in the snow until the sun came up. He couldn't move, couldn't look away from the cabin, couldn't do anything but wait for the invisible force holding him

to finally release its grip. When it did, he walked toward the cabin on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. The front door was hanging from one hinge, creaking in the morning breeze. Gerald stepped through it into the main room. The cabin had been destroyed, furniture overturned, walls gouged, the fire reduced to cold ashes. Blood spattered the floors and the walls and the ceiling, more blood

than two human bodies could possibly contain. And everywhere, covering every surface were more of those symbols, the circle with the horns, the grinning face, and stay tuned for more sasquatch see what'll be right back. After these messages, Jerald searched the cabin from top to bottom. He searched the clearing around it, and the woods beyond, and every inch of the property that he could reach. He didn't find Ellen,

he didn't find Marcus. He found only one thing hanging above the fireplace, in the same spot it had always occupied, was the mask, but now there were two new additions hanging beside it, two more masks, smaller, newer, carved from something that wasn't quite wood. Gerald fell to his knees and began to scream. The official story, the one that made it into the newspapers and the police reports, was that Gerald Hutchins had suffered a mental breakdown while on

a family camping trip over Christmas. His wife and son had apparently left him sometime during the night of December twenty fourth, and Gerald, in his disturbed state, had destroyed much of the cabin before being found by a passing hunter three days long later. The hunter, a local man named Earl Coggins, who had been tracking a wounded deer through the winter forest, would later tell reporters that he had never seen anything like what he found in that clearing.

The cabin looked like it had been hit by a tornado.

dead fireplace, was Gerald Hutchins. Earle said that Gerald was rocking back and forth and staring at something above the mantle, just staring, not blinking, not responding when Earle called out to him or touched his shoulder. His eyes were opened so wide that Earle could see the whites all the way around, and his lips were moving constantly, whispering something over and over again that Earle couldn't quite make out.

When the paramedics finally coaxed Gerald out of the cabin and loaded him into the ambulance, Earle went back inside to see what the man had been staring at. He found the masks, the original one, the one carved from dark wood with its too many teeth and its hollow eyes, and the two new ones beside it. Earle was not a superstitious man. He had lived in these woods his whole life, had hunted and fished and camped in places

that most people couldn't even find on a map. He had seen strange things in his time, had heard sounds at night that didn't match any animal he knew, had found tracks in the mud that made no sense, and structures in the deep forest that no human hand had built, but those masks. Earle took one look at those masks and turned around and walked out of the cabin and never went back. He never spoke about what he had seen to the police, or to the reporters, or to

anyone else. He just went home and bolted his doors and sat in his living room with his hunting rifle across his lap until the sun came up the next morning. And every Christmas Eve for the rest of his life, Earl Coggins would do the same thing. He would lock himself in his house, close all the curtains and sit in the dark with that rifle, waiting for dawn, waiting for whatever was out there to pass him by. Ellen

and Marcus Hutchins were never found. Despite extensive searches and a nationwide alert, despite teams of volunteers combing the forest for weeks, despite the most advanced tracking equipment available in nineteen eighty six, no trace of the mother and son ever turned up. The case eventually went cold, filed away with thousands of other unsolved disappearances, forgotten by everyone except the families of the missing but there were rumors. There

were always rumors. Some of the locals whispered about tracks found in the snow far from the cabin, tracks that looked almost like those of a large goat, but that were pressed deeper into the ground than any normal animal could manage. Others spoke of sounds heard in the forest on the nights around Christmas, sounds like chains rattling and bells ringing, and something like laughter echoing through the trees.

And a few, a very few, claimed to have seen something moving through the winter woods in the dead of night, something tall and horned and impossibly fast, something that was carrying a basket on its back. Jerald spent the next several years in and out of psychiatric facilities. He was diagnosed with various conditions at various times, all of which

essentially boiled down to the same thing. He had experienced a traumatic event that his mind couldn't process, and the delusions he described the creature with the horns and the hoofs, the demon that had taken his family, were just his psyche's way of avoiding a truth too terrible to accept. Gerald knew better. He knew that what had happened in

that cabin was real. He knew that the thing that had taken his wife and son was not a fitgment of his imagination, or a manifestation of guilt, or any of the other explanations his doctors tried to give him. It was real, and it was still out there, and every Christmas Eve it came back to hunt. He tried to warn people. He wrote letters to newspapers and called in to radio shows, and stood on street corners with signs that said things like crampis is real and keep

your children inside on Christmas Eve. Most people ignored him, a few laughed. Some took pictures and shared them on the Internet years later, using them as examples of what happens when someone goes off the deep end. Gerald died in the winter of two thousand and three. He was found in his small apartment on the morning of December twenty sixth, sitting in a chair facing the window, a

blanket pulled up to his chin. The official cause of death was heart failure, but the coroner noted that the expression on his face suggested he had seen something in his final moments, something that had frightened him, something that had made him small. The apartment was cleaned out by the state. Since Gerald had no living relatives willing to claim his possessions, most of it was thrown away, but a few items found their way to a local thrift store.

Old clothes, some books, a wooden box containing papers that no one bothered to read, and a mask. A single mask carved from dark wood, depicting a face that was almost human but stretched wrong, a face with a nose that curved down like a beak, and eyes that were hollow sockets, and a mouth that contained far too many teeth.

The mask was purchased by a young couple who thought it would make an interesting conversation piece for their cabin, their cabin in the mountains, their cabin in South Carolina. They planned to spend Christmas there. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that this is just a story, a campfire tale meant to give you chills on a cold December night, a piece of fiction designed to remind you that the darkness outside your window might not be as empty as you think. And you might be right.

Maybe I made the whole thing up. Maybe Gerald Hutchins never existed. Maybe there was never a cabin in South Carolina, never a family that disappeared on Christmas Eve, never a creature with horns and hoofs that hunts the naughty children when the nights grow long and the cold settles in. Maybe, but then again maybe not. Because here's the thing about the old stories, the ones that have been passed down through countless generations, the ones that predate Christianity and civilization

and maybe even humanity itself. They don't survive because they're entertaining. They don't get told and retold for thousands of years because people enjoy a good scare. They survive because they're true.

Not literally true, perhaps not true in the way that historical facts are true, but true in a deeper sense, true in the sense that they describe something real, something that exists in the shadows and the forests and the dark places of the world, something that has always existed and always will exist, no matter how many street lights we build, or how bright we make our cities, or how much we try to convince ourselves that we've outgrown the need for fear. Crampis is one of those stories

in the old countries. They knew this, They knew that the winter was a dangerous time, a time when the barriers between worlds grew thin, and things that normally stayed hidden came out to walk among humans. They knew that the price of survival was vigilance, was caution, was respect for the powers that lurked beyond the firelight. They knew that some children were taken. They knew that some families

didn't make it through the longest nights. And they knew that the creature responsible wasn't a myth or a legend or a story told to frighten children into behaving.

A cabin in the woods is found empty, its doors broken, its walls covered in symbols that no one wants to look at too closely. Most years, we explain it away. We blame it on accidents or criminals, or the simple tragedy of life in a random and uncaring universe. But some of us know better. Some of us remember the

old stories. Some of us still leave the chains and the switches by the door on Christmas Eve, offerings to appease something that cannot truly be appeased, but might, if we're lucky, pass us by in favor of easier prey.

And some of us, on the longest night of the year, stay inside with the doors locked and the fires burning and the light's blazing, and we wait for the dawn because we know what's out there, we know what's hunting, and we know that no matter how good we've been, no matter how pure our hearts or how kind are deeds, there's always a chance that tonight might be the night. Tonight might be the night when Crampus comes calling. So here's my advice to you friends, as you settle in

for your Christmas celebrations. Enjoy your presence, drink your eggnog, sing your carols, and kiss beneath the missletoe, and tell yourselves that there's nothing to fear. But maybe just maybe leave a candle burning in the window, maybe keep the fire going all through the night. And if you hear something on the roof that sounds too heavy to be reindeer. If you hear bells that ring with a sound that's

somehow wrong. If you see shadows moving outside your window in ways that shadows shouldn't move, don't open the door, don't look outside. And whatever you do, whatever happens, whatever you here, don't say his name, because names have power, and some things are always listening. Sweet dreams everyone, and merry Christmas from all of us here in the dark. Now. Normally this is where i'd wrap things up, tell you to stay safe out there, wish you a merry Christmas,

and send you on your way. But that's not the end of this story.

Let me tell you something, little one. I don't only take children. I take the wicked. I take the cruel. I take the ones who lie and cheat and hurt others and tell themselves it doesn't matter. I take the ones who think no one is watching. But I am always watching right now. As you listen to this, I want you to think about the past year. Think about every unkind word, every selfish act, every moment when you chose the wrong path because you thought no one would know.

I know, I have always known. Can you hear that that faint sound in the distance, That jingling, rattling sound That could be sleigh bells? But isn't that sound that's getting closer, just a little bit closer with every passing moment. That's ME coming to check my lips. So go ahead, lock your doors, leave your lights on, do whatever makes you feel safe. It won't matter. It never matters. When I decide to visit, nothing keeps me out. But don't worry.

Not everyone receives a visit from old crampers. Most of you will wake up on Christmas morning with nothing worse than a hangover and a credit card bill. Most of you will never see my face, excepting your nightmares. Most of you, but some of you, Some of you know exactly why I'm speaking to you right now. Some of you feel that cold finger running down your spine because you know what you've done. You know the darkness in your own heart. You know that if anyone deserves a

visit from me. It's you eat dreams, little ones. I'll be seeing you soon. And remember when you hear the chains rattling and the hooves on your roof, and that sound, that horrible sound of something laughing in the dark, don't bother running. It only makes the hunt more entertaining. Foolish Wenchton, Merry Christmas in.