The Naughty List

A Splatterpunk Christmas Special

Content Warning: This splatterpunk Christmas catastrophe contains extreme graphic violence, gore, torture, body horror, dismemberment, evisceration, skinning, impalement, blunt force trauma, crushing injuries, death by machinery, death by molten plastic, death by ribbon strangulation, decapitation, cannibalism, harm to children, harm to elves, harm to Santa Claus, harm to reindeer (implied), mass extinction events, bioterrorism via Christmas presents, spore-based body horror transformations, explicit descriptions of organ failure, prolonged suffering, psychological torture, workplace horror, mentions of child labor and exploitation, anti-capitalist rage given physical form, the complete destruction of Christmas mythology, jokes sung over corpses, deliberate cruelty presented as justice, nihilistic philosophy, zero redemption arcs, no happy endings, the systematic punishment of literally everyone for the crime of being human, and enough yuletide carnage to permanently ruin your ability to hear “Deck the Halls” without flashbacks.

I fucking HATE Christmas. You’ve been warned.

---

PART ONE: THE GRIEVANCE

I.

The cave stank of centuries.

Krampus paced the frozen stone, his hooves striking sparks that died in the darkness. Around him, the accumulated detritus of twelve hundred years of punishment lay in heaps and piles. Birch switches bundled with leather straps, their tips sharpened to draw blood. Chains rusted the color of old scabs, still flecked with skin from children who had died before electricity existed. Wicker baskets large enough to hold a screaming body. And bones. So many bones. Small ones, mostly.

The wicked do not grow old.

He had not been summoned in seventy three years.

The world had forgotten him. The world had moved on. The world had decided that punishment was no longer fashionable, that consequences were traumatizing, that every child deserved a trophy and every sin deserved forgiveness.

But Krampus had not forgotten the world. He had followers who kept him informed.

They came to the cave mouth on winter solstices, the true believers. Farmers from the valleys below who still feared the dark. Priests who served older gods in secret. Academics who had read too much. They brought him offerings of blood and fear and, more recently, something he had come to value even more.

Information.

He stopped before the wall.

It had taken him decades to build. Newspaper clippings yellowed with age, their headlines screaming of trampling deaths at retail stores, of warehouse workers collapsing from exhaustion, of children stitching sneakers in factories that locked their doors. Printouts from the glowing rectangles the humans carried everywhere now, delivered by a university professor from Salzburg who believed Krampus was a “necessary corrective to late-stage capitalism.” Red string connected photographs in patterns that made sense only to him. A web of corruption. A map of naughtiness.

Black Friday, 2008. A temporary worker named Jdimytai Damour crushed to death by shoppers at a Long Island Walmart. They stepped over his body to get to the televisions. Someone stopped to take a photograph.

Amazon fulfillment centers where workers pissed in bottles because they could not afford the time to walk to a bathroom. Fired for being too slow to shit.

Cobalt mines in the Congo where children younger than ten dug the minerals that powered the phones that ordered the packages that arrived in two days or less. They died at fifteen and were replaced the next morning.

And at the center of it all, in the largest photograph, the fattest face: Santa Claus. The Coca-Cola redesign from 1931. Red suit. White beard. Twinkling eyes. The corporate logo of consumption itself.

“You fat sack of enabling shit,” Krampus said to the photograph. His voice was rust and gravel, unused for years. “You jolly fucking fraud.”

He began to pace again, his tail lashing the air behind him. Seven feet of matted black fur over muscle that had been old when Rome was young. Curved horns like a ram, yellowed and cracked, spiraling back from a skull that was not quite goat and not quite man. His tongue, long and black and forked at the tip, tasted the cold air of the cave and found it stale with his own fury.

“The List,” he snarled. “The sacred fucking List. Naughty and Nice. The foundation of the covenant. You behave, you receive. You transgress, you suffer. Balance. Justice. Meaning.”

He whirled on the photograph.

“And what do you do with it? You have the greatest surveillance operation in the history of consciousness. You see everything. You know when they sleep and when they wake and whether they have been bad or good. You have the proof of every lie, every cruelty, every petty theft and broken promise.”

Krampus drove one clawed fist into the cave wall. Stone cracked. Ice fell.

“And you give them toys anyway.”

His laughter was the sound of something dying in a frozen ditch.

“Because you are weak. Because somewhere along the way you decided that punishment was not your department. That I would handle the naughty ones while you handled the nice. A partnership. But you never called me. Not once in seventy three years.”

Krampus crossed to a corner of the cave where something huddled in the shadows. A dummy he had constructed from bones and rags and the dried skin of a goat. He had dressed it in a small sweater. He had painted a face on its skull. Button eyes made from actual buttons, pried from the coat of a child who had lied to his mother about stealing bread.

“I used to take the wicked ones,” he said softly. “I used to drag them screaming into the night. The parents would wake to empty beds and they would know that their child had been judged and found wanting.”

He picked up a birch switch. The wood was old and hard and sharp.

“Now they put me on greeting cards. They make movies about me. They dress up as me for parties and parades and they laugh, because I am a joke to them. A spooky story for children who know, who have always known, that monsters are not real.”

The switch whistled through the air and took the dummy’s head clean off. The skull bounced across the cave floor, grinning, coming to rest against a pile of infant femurs.

Krampus retrieved the skull. Held it up. Stared into its button eyes.

“Everyone is naughty,” he said. “The children because they have never been taught otherwise. The parents because they were never taught either. All of them. Lying, cheating, stealing, hurting, consuming, consuming, consuming. And Santa Claus stands at the center of it all, teaching them that goodness is optional and forgiveness is guaranteed.”

He set the skull down gently on a shelf of ice.

Krampus turned to face the darkness at the back of the cave. The darkness where things moved. The darkness where things waited.

“It ends this year,” he said. “The covenant is broken. If he will not punish the wicked, then I will punish everyone.”

His eyes, red as dying coals, flared bright.

“My list has only one column. And every name is on it.”

---

II.

They came when he called them.

The Schiachperchten. The ugly companions. The forgotten ones.

They had been waiting in the deep places of the Alps for longer than Krampus had been waiting in his cave. They were older than the mountains. Older than the ice. They had been worshipped once, when humanity was young and terrified and understood that the world was full of things that wanted to hurt them. Then the new gods came, and the Schiachperchten were driven down into the dark, into the cracks and crevasses and frozen lightless places where even Krampus feared to walk.

But they remembered. They always remembered.

The first one emerged from a crack in the cave wall that had not been there a moment before. It was small, perhaps three feet tall, and it moved wrong. Its limbs bent in directions that limbs should not bend. Its skin was wet and glistening, the color of a week-old bruise, stretched tight over a body that seemed to have too many joints and not enough bones. Its face was a nightmare of compound eyes, clustered like blackberries, and mandibles that clicked and scissored around something that might have been a mouth if mouths were designed to do things other than eat.

It smelled like a wound that had been left to fester in damp soil.

More followed. Dozens. Hundreds. They poured from cracks in the stone, from shadows that should not have been deep enough to hold anything, from the darkness itself. They filled the cave floor in a chittering, skittering carpet of wrongness. They smelled like wet earth and rotting meat and something chemical, something that burned the inside of the nose.

Krampus looked down at his army and felt something he had not felt in centuries.

Hope.

“My children,” he said. “My beautiful, forgotten children. I have a task for you. A purpose. A feast.”

The clicking intensified. They had been hungry for so long. They had been patient for so long.

“We are going to the North Pole,” Krampus told them. “We are going to kill Santa Claus. We are going to slaughter his workers. We are going to take his operation and use it to give the humans exactly what they deserve.”

He reached into a crevasse in the cave wall and withdrew a sack. Not one of his old sacks, the ones designed to hold screaming children. This one was different. This one moved.

“I have been cultivating these for decades,” Krampus said, opening the sack. “Growing them in the deep places. Feeding them on rage and resentment and the accumulated psychic weight of every unpunished sin.”

The Seeds.

They looked almost like Christmas ornaments if you did not look too closely. Round, bulbous, the size of a fist. Their surfaces were iridescent, shifting through colors that had no names in human languages. They pulsed faintly, rhythmically, like hearts. They smelled like gingerbread and pine needles and, underneath that, something organic. Something that had once been alive and was waiting to be alive again.

Krampus picked one up, cradling it gently. It was warm against his palm. It seemed to lean into his touch, the way something hungry might.

“When these open,” he said, “when they are exposed to air on Christmas morning, they bloom. They release spores. The spores are inhaled. And then the transformation begins.”

He smiled. Too many teeth. Too much hunger.

“Anyone who has ever been naughty, by my definition, begins to change. Their bodies become vessels. Their flesh becomes soil. They hollow out from the inside as the Seeds take root in their organs. By the time the sun sets on Christmas Day, there will be nothing left of them but husks.”

The Schiachperchten chittered with something that sounded almost like applause.

“And my definition of naughty is very, very broad. A lie told to spare feelings. A cookie taken without asking. An unkind thought about a stranger. A single, solitary instant of putting yourself before others.”

He dropped the Seed back into the sack.

“Everyone qualifies.”

Krampus closed the sack.

“The elves,” he added. “We will need some of them alive to operate the machines. The rest...” He gestured vaguely. “The rest you may eat.”

The chittering became a roar. A wave of inhuman sound that echoed through the cave and out into the frozen Alpine night.

Somewhere in the distance, an avalanche began.

Krampus smiled.

“Ho ho ho,” he said. The words felt strange in his mouth. Foreign. He would have to practice.

---

PART TWO: THE NORTH POLE MASSACRE

III.

Thistlewick had worked the toy line for four hundred and thirty seven years, and she had never seen the old man so tired.

Santa sat in his chair by the great hearth, a mug of cocoa cooling in his hands, staring at the fire. The workshop hummed around him. Conveyor belts rattled. Hammers rang. The smell of sawdust and paint and peppermint filled the air.

It was December 23rd. The final push. Twenty four hours until launch.

“Sir?” Thistlewick approached carefully. She was small even by elf standards, barely two feet tall, with pointed ears that drooped when she was worried. They were drooping now. “The quota reports. We are ahead of schedule.”

Santa did not look up from the fire.

“Thank you, Thistlewick.”

His voice was distant. Hollow.

“Sir, is something wrong?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he sighed.

“Do you ever wonder if we are doing any good, Thistlewick? If any of this matters?”

She blinked. “Sir?”

“I look at the List every year, and the naughty column grows and grows. I had a partner once. Someone who handled the other side of things. The necessary cruelty. The consequences. I have not called on him in decades.”

Thistlewick felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Arctic wind.

“The Krampus,” she whispered.

Santa nodded slowly. “I told myself it was because the world had changed, because children needed gentleness, because punishment was outdated. But perhaps I was simply afraid.”

He looked back at the fire.

“If half of the job is hurting them, is the other half truly kindness? Or is it all just... control?”

“The wards,” Thistlewick said suddenly. “The magical defenses. They would alert us if anything approached. Would they not?”

Santa was quiet for a moment too long.

“The wards were designed to keep out enemies. Things that did not belong here. Things that were not part of the Christmas mythology.” He paused. “Krampus is part of the mythology. He has always been part of it. The wards would not recognize him as a threat. He is, technically, supposed to be here. I just... stopped inviting him.”

Somewhere outside, something cracked. Ice shifting. Probably.

“Go back to the line,” Santa said quietly. “Finish the quota. The children are counting on us.”

Thistlewick hesitated at the door.

“Sir? Whatever you are feeling... the children do not know about any of it. They only know that Christmas morning, there will be presents under the tree. And for one day, they get to believe that magic is real and goodness is rewarded.”

She paused.

“Maybe that is enough.”

Santa did not answer. Thistlewick left him alone with the fire and his thoughts.

She did not see the shapes moving across the ice fields outside. None of them did.

The wards did not trigger.

Why would they? He was part of the mythology. He belonged here.

He had simply never been invited before.

---

IV.

Krampus walked across the ice.

Behind him, the Schiachperchten flowed like a tide of chitin and wrong angles, their bodies leaving no tracks in the snow. Predators approaching prey.

The North Pole complex glowed ahead of them. Warm light spilling from frosted windows. Smoke rising from chimneys in lazy spirals. The sound of hammers and saws and the faint, distant jingle of bells. It looked like a postcard. It looked like a dream.

Krampus hated it with a purity that surprised even him.

He paused at the edge of the light, letting his army gather behind him.

“Remember,” he said softly. “We need the infrastructure. The sleigh. The reindeer. The machines. Kill the elves, but do not destroy the workshop. We have work to do.”

The Schiachperchten chittered assent. One of them, larger than the others, with mandibles that dripped something that might have been venom, made a questioning sound.

Can we eat them?

“Some of them,” Krampus allowed. “The ones we do not need. But save me the fat one. The fat one is mine.”

He took a step forward. Into the light.

“For twelve hundred years, I have been the villain of this story. The monster in the dark. The threat that never arrives. Tonight, the threat arrives.”

The door was not locked. Why would it be? No one came to the North Pole uninvited.

Krampus opened it and stepped inside.

The heat hit him first. Centuries of cold and then this: the warmth of a thousand forges, the smell of woodsmoke and cinnamon and melting chocolate. It should have been pleasant. It made him want to retch.

The workshop floor stretched before him, vast as an aircraft hangar, filled with conveyor belts and workstations and elves. So many elves. Thousands of them, all working, all building, all preparing for the great lie of Christmas morning.

None of them noticed him at first. They were too focused on their tasks. Too trusting.

Krampus walked deeper into the workshop. His hooves clicked against the wooden floor. His horns brushed the hanging decorations, sending bells jingling, ornaments swinging.

An elf looked up. A female, small and gray haired, with spectacles perched on her nose. She was painting the face of a doll. She saw him. Her eyes went wide.

She opened her mouth to scream.

“NICHOLAS.”

Krampus’s voice thundered through the workshop. Every elf stopped. Every machine seemed to pause. The very air went still.

“NICHOLAS, YOU FAT, COMPLACENT, ENABLING SACK OF SHIT. COME OUT AND FACE ME.”

The doors at the far end of the workshop opened.

Santa Claus stepped through.

He looked older than Krampus remembered. Tired. His red suit was rumpled, his white beard unkempt. But he was also larger than Krampus remembered. Broader. There was still power there. Still magic.

He saw Krampus. He did not seem surprised.

“Krampus,” he said quietly. “It has been a long time.”

“Seventy three years. Three months. Fourteen days. Eleven hours.” Krampus smiled, showing teeth that were not meant for smiling. “You stopped counting. I never did.”

“Times changed. People changed. The old ways...”

“The old ways worked.” Krampus began to circle. The elves scattered from his path. “Fear and consequence and the knowledge, the bone deep knowledge, that if you were wicked, something would come for you in the night.”

“Fear is not the same as goodness.”

“But it was a foundation. You took away the stick and you wondered why the carrot stopped working.”

Santa shook his head. “I could not keep sending children to you. Knowing what you did to them.”

“What I did to them was make them better.” Krampus’s voice rose. “The ones who survived. They understood that cruelty has a price. That selfishness has a cost. That the universe keeps track.”

“And the ones who did not survive?”

Krampus shrugged. “The world did not need them anyway.”

Silence. The workshop held its breath.

“I came here to kill you, Nicholas,” Krampus said finally. “To take your skin and your sleigh and your operation. To punish the wicked. All of them. Every last one.”

“And the innocent?”

“There are no innocent.”

Santa met his eyes. And something in those dim, tired eyes began to glow.

“Then you will have to go through me.”

---

V.

Krampus had expected the old man to surrender.

He had not expected the blast of pure Christmas magic that hit him square in the chest and sent him flying backward through a wall.

Krampus crashed through workstations and conveyor belts, scattering toys and tools and screaming elves. He hit the far wall hard enough to crack the stone, hard enough to actually hurt.

He had forgotten that pain existed. It was almost nostalgic.

“You forgot,” Santa said, walking toward him through the debris. His hands were glowing. His eyes were glowing. The very air around him was suffused with power. “You forgot what I am.”

“An enabler,” Krampus snarled, pulling himself out of the wreckage. “A fraud. A corporate mascot for capitalism wearing the skin of a saint.”

“I am Christmas,” Santa said. And his voice was not the voice of a tired old man anymore. It was something ancient and powerful. “I am the hope that light will return in the darkness. I am the promise that kindness matters. I am the magic that lets children believe, just for one day, that the world is good.”

He raised his hands. Light gathered between them, white and gold and painful to look at.

“And you are the monster under the bed. The threat in the dark. You were always the villain, Krampus. You were always supposed to lose.”

The blast of magic hit Krampus like a freight train made of joy and wonder and aggressive optimism. It burned. Not his flesh, but something deeper. Something that had been cold for so long that warmth was agony.

He screamed.

And then he laughed.

“That,” he gasped, rising to his feet despite the pain, despite the light, despite the hope that was trying to unmake him, “is the best you can do? After seventy three years of rest? After centuries of going soft?”

He reached for his chains. Unwound them from his torso. They rattled and clinked, rusted links that had been soaked in the tears of the damned for a thousand years.

“I have been practicing, Nicholas. Every day. Every night. Dreaming of this moment.”

He lunged.

The chains caught Santa around the throat before the old man could cast another spell. Krampus yanked, hard, pulling Santa off balance, pulling him close.

“You have forgotten what I am too,” Krampus hissed into his face. “I am not the monster under the bed. I am the reason the bed exists. The reason humans built walls and lit fires and huddled together in the dark. I am the fear that kept them alive.”

He pulled the chains tighter.

“And you cannot kill fear with hope.”

Santa’s hands came up, blazing with light. It hurt. Gods, it hurt. But Krampus had been hurting for seventy three years. He had learned to love the pain.

He drew a birch switch from his belt and drove it through Santa’s right hand, pinning it to his chest. The old man screamed. The light flickered.

“That is one.”

He drew another switch and drove it through Santa’s left hand.

“That is two.”

The switches were ancient wood, soaked in the blood of the wicked, harder than iron. Santa’s hands were crucified to his own body, the light dying in his fingers, the magic bleeding out of him with the blood.

“You should have called me,” Krampus said, almost gently. “You should have kept the balance. Now there is no balance. Now there is only me.”

He began to work with the chains.

The beating took seventeen minutes.

Krampus counted every second. He had been counting seconds for seventy three years.

The chains did most of the work. Heavy iron links swung with precision and malice, breaking bones and splitting skin. But Krampus also used the switches. And his claws. And his hooves, when Santa tried to crawl away.

The elves watched. They could not look away. Some of them were screaming. Some of them were crying. Some of them had simply stopped, their minds unable to process what they were seeing.

Santa stopped fighting after the first five minutes. He stopped begging after the first ten. By minute fifteen, he was barely conscious, held upright only by the chains wrapped around his throat, his red suit soaked black with blood.

“The children,” he whispered. “Please. The children.”

“Still?” Krampus marveled. “Even now? Even as your blood pools around my hooves?”

He leaned close. His forked tongue slid out and tasted the blood on Santa’s face. It was sweet. Cloyingly, sickeningly sweet. Like candy canes and hot chocolate and lies.

“The children are why I am doing this,” Krampus said. “Every monster starts as a child. Every tyrant. Every murderer. They were all children once, and someone, somewhere, decided not to teach them consequences.”

Something cracked. Vertebrae, maybe. Or what remained of hope.

Krampus released the chains.

Santa Claus collapsed to the floor.

He was not dead. Not yet. His chest still rose and fell, barely. There was still a faint light in his eyes, a guttering candle.

Krampus knelt beside him and drew his knife.

“I am going to need your skin,” he said conversationally. “I hope you do not mind. Well. I hope you do mind. But either way, I am taking it.”

Santa’s lips moved. No sound came out.

“What was that?” Krampus leaned closer.

“...forgive you...”

Krampus blinked. Then he laughed.

“You forgive me? You are lying on the floor with your bones broken and your magic drained, and you forgive me?”

He shook his head, still laughing.

“That is the problem, Nicholas. That has always been the problem. You forgive everyone. The naughty ones. The wicked ones. The cruel and the selfish and the monstrous. You forgive them all, and they learn nothing, and the world gets worse, and you just keep forgiving.”

He pressed the knife against Santa’s hairline.

“I do not forgive,” he said. “I never have. And now, neither will the world.”

The skinning took forty five minutes.

Krampus was very careful. He needed the face intact. The belly. The hands, even though they had holes in them now. He worked slowly, methodically, the way a craftsman works on a project that matters.

Start at the hairline. Work down. Peel slowly. Keep the beard attached. Mind the belly; there was a lot of surface area there, and the fat made the skin slippery.

Santa was still alive when Krampus started. He was not alive when Krampus finished.

When it was done, Krampus held up the skin and examined it critically. The rosy cheeks, sagging now but recognizable. The white beard, stained with blood but still bushy and full. The jolly belly, deflated without the mass that had filled it.

“Let us see how it fits,” Krampus muttered.

He pulled the skin over his head.

It did not fit. Not even close. The belly hung loose around his narrow waist like a flesh apron. The face sagged over his snout, the mouth hole somewhere around his nostrils, the eye holes revealing nothing but matted black fur. The beard dragged on the floor, soaking up blood.

He looked, if anything, more horrifying than before. A monster wearing a man wearing a saint wearing a corporate mascot.

Krampus caught his reflection in a brass pot that had been used for making fudge. He studied the image for a long moment.

“Perfect,” he said, and smiled.

The skin of Santa’s face split around his teeth.

---

VI.

Thistlewick heard the screaming and knew she should run away.

She ran toward it anyway.

This was the choice that defined her. Four hundred years of making toys, of believing in the mission, of trusting that goodness mattered and kindness would prevail. She was not a warrior. She was not a hero. She was a craftsperson who painted faces on dolls.

She ran toward the screaming because Santa would want her to help.

She rounded the corner into the main workshop floor and stopped.

The thing that used to be Santa stood in the center of the room. It was wearing his skin, literally wearing it, the familiar face stretched over something with horns and burning eyes. The skin did not fit. It hung in folds and wrinkles, the belly drooping like a flesh curtain, the beard trailing through pools of blood.

Around it swarmed the others.

Thistlewick had never seen anything like them. Small, chitinous things that moved wrong, their limbs bending backward and sideways. They poured through the doors, through the windows, through cracks in the walls. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A tide of wet, glistening wrongness.

The smell hit her then. Rot and ammonia and something chemical. The smell of nightmares made flesh.

The elves tried to fight.

Periwinkle from the doll station grabbed a hammer and swung at one of the creatures. The hammer connected with a wet crack, caving in the thing’s skull. But a dozen more swarmed over him before he could swing again. Thistlewick watched them tear him apart. It took less than three seconds.

No. Not tear apart.

They were eating him.

The chitinous things had mouths with mandibles and teeth and long, thin tongues that probed into the wounds they made, searching for the softest parts, the sweetest parts. They made sounds while they ate. Clicking sounds. Satisfied sounds.

Brambleheart from the train department used a saw. She managed to cut two of them in half before three more grabbed her legs. They dragged her toward the molten plastic vats.

Thistlewick watched Brambleheart realize what was about to happen. Watched her try to grab onto anything that might stop her forward progress. Watched her fingernails tear off against the wooden floor.

The things lifted her over the vat. The plastic bubbled, red and green for Christmas colors.

Brambleheart screamed. She screamed the whole way down.

The plastic closed over her head. She came back up once, her face a mask of molten color, her eyes already gone. Then she went down again and did not come back up.

By the time the vat cycled, what remained of Brambleheart was a sculpture. An ornament for a tree that would never exist.

Fennimore tried to run. He made it almost to the door before a ribbon dispenser caught him around the throat. The machinery was automatic. It did not know the difference between a package and a neck. It just kept feeding ribbon, loop after loop, red satin that darkened as it tightened.

Fennimore’s face went purple. His eyes bulged. His tongue protruded.

His head came off with a wet pop.

It rolled across the conveyor belt, still wearing an expression of surprise, still trailing ribbon like a festive tail. It fell into a box that was being packaged for delivery. The machine sealed the box automatically, stamped it with a label that read “To: A Special Child, From: Santa,” and sent it down the line.

Merry Christmas, Thistlewick thought hysterically. You got a head.

Gingerbread from the candy cane division tried to fight with the tools of his trade. He had been making candy canes for three hundred years, sharpening the hooks to perfect points for hanging on branches. He drove one through the eye of a Schiachperchten, and the creature dropped, twitching.

But there were too many. They swarmed him from behind, and when he fell, they did not simply tear him apart. They used his own candy canes. One through each palm. One through each foot. One, slowly, through his throat.

He hung there, crucified on confectionery, mouth opening and closing soundlessly as the red and white stripes darkened with blood.

And through it all, the thing in Santa’s skin walked.

It sang as it walked. Christmas carols, but wrong. The words were wrong, the tune was wrong, the voice was wrong.

“Deck the halls with guts of elfy,” it sang, stepping over what was left of Periwinkle. “Fa la la la la, la la la la.”

It kicked a severed arm out of its way.

“’Tis the season to be splattery. Fa la la la la, la la la la.”

It paused to adjust the skin, which had started to slip. One clawed hand pulled Santa’s face back into position.

“Don we now our flay’d apparel,” it continued, satisfied. “Fa la la, la la la, la la la.”

Thistlewick watched Snowbell get pulled into a lathe. The machine was designed for shaping wooden toys. It worked on elf bodies too, spinning and cutting, until what came out the other end was something abstract, something that might have been art if it had not been screaming the entire time.

She watched Candycane get caught between the jaws of a hydraulic press. The press was designed to exert five thousand pounds of pressure. Candycane was designed to exert considerably less. The sound was like a water balloon filled with meat.

She watched Peppermint get drowned in a vat of chocolate, held under by chitinous claws until the thrashing stopped.

A clawed hand closed around her arm.

She looked up. The thing in Santa’s skin looked down at her. Its eyes burned red through the holes that did not quite line up with Santa’s eye holes. Its tongue, long and black and forked, slid out and tasted the air near her face.

“You,” it said. “I need you.”

“Please,” Thistlewick whispered.

“You know how the machines work. The production lines. The packaging. You will teach my children.”

“I will not,” Thistlewick said. The words came from somewhere she did not know she had. “I will die first.”

The thing studied her. The stolen face cracked into something that might have been a smile.

“That is what Fennimore said,” it observed. “Before the ribbon.”

It turned to its minions.

“Bring the other survivors. The ones who know the systems. We need twenty three. Kill the rest. Slowly. Make sure the twenty three are watching.”

The chittering rose. The massacre continued.

Thistlewick closed her eyes. She did not cry. She had spent all her tears on the things she had already seen.

She would help them. She knew that now. She would teach the monsters how to use the machines. She would do it because she was small and weak and afraid, and because the alternative was becoming another decoration.

But she was still an elf. And elves had been making things for a very long time. They had also been making things break for a very long time, when quality control demanded it.

She would help them. And she would wait. And when the moment came, she would find a way to make something break that should not.

It would not save the world. She knew that. But it might save something.

Maybe that was enough.

---

VII.

By morning, the workshop was transformed.

The bodies had been cleared away, dragged to a pit behind the main building where the Schiachperchten were still feeding. They had been hungry for so long. Now they glutted themselves on four hundred years of Christmas cheer.

Thistlewick could hear them from the production floor. The wet sounds of mandibles cracking bone. The slurping of tongues probing into cavities. The clicking of satisfaction as they fought over the choicest bits, the organs, the eyes, the soft tissue behind the knees that peeled away so easily.

One of them had found the nursery.

Thistlewick tried not to think about that. She tried not to think about anything except the machines and the packages and the hands that moved automatically because if they stopped moving she would start screaming and never stop.

Seeds.

They moved along the production lines, each one nestled in tissue paper, each one wrapped in festive colors, each one labeled with the name of a child who would never see another Christmas. The surviving elves worked in silence, their eyes empty.

Krampus stood on the observation platform above the production floor, watching his army work. The skin of Santa Claus hung around him like a terrible robe.

He picked up one of the finished packages. Beautifully wrapped. A gift tag that read: “To: A Special Child. From: Santa.”

“How many?” he asked Thistlewick, who stood trembling beside him.

“Seven hundred million packages,” she said. Her voice was flat. Dead. “Give or take.”

“And the spore dispersal radius?”

“Each Seed will release enough spores to affect everyone within approximately fifty meters. In an average household, that means everyone.”

“Good.”

Krampus turned the package over in his hands.

“Test one,” he said. “Now.”

Thistlewick gestured to one of the Schiachperchten, who dragged forward an elf. This one was young, perhaps only a hundred years old. He had been working in the hobby section, painting model trains. He had paint under his fingernails still. Blue. The color of a perfect winter sky.

His name was Juniper. Thistlewick had known him since he was a baby.

“Open the package,” Krampus said.

Juniper looked at the package in his hands. Looked at Krampus. Looked at Thistlewick, his eyes asking a question she could not answer.

“What is inside?”

“A gift,” Krampus said. “What else?”

Juniper pulled the ribbon. Tore the paper. Opened the box.

The Seed sat inside, nestled in tissue paper. Iridescent. Pulsing gently.

It bloomed.

The surface split along invisible lines, petals of flesh and membrane unfurling like a flower in time-lapse photography. The colors intensified, swirled, became something that hurt to look at.

Then the spores.

They exploded outward in a cloud that sparkled like glitter, like fairy dust. They smelled sweet. Gingerbread and pine needles and fresh snow. They smelled like childhood.

Juniper inhaled.

You could not help it. The spores were everywhere, filling the air with sweetness, with warmth, with the promise of something wonderful.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then he changed.

It started with his eyes. They clouded over, going milky, going gray, going the color of dead winter branches. His skin followed, paling first, then darkening, then taking on a texture that was not skin at all. Rough. Fibrous. Bark-like.

His mouth opened to scream and did not close again. His lips fused together, sealing around a cry that would never escape. His face smoothed, features melting into each other.

The body followed. His torso collapsed inward as the organs were consumed, eaten by something growing inside him. His arms curled upward, fingers fusing, lengthening, splitting into branches. His legs thickened and hardened and merged, becoming a trunk.

What had been Juniper was becoming something else. Something that looked, in its horrible final form, almost like a Christmas tree.

The transformation took four minutes and thirty seven seconds. Krampus counted.

When it was done, what stood before them was no longer an elf. It was a vessel. A thing of bark and fiber, split open down the middle to reveal a hollow cavity lined with something wet and red and pulsing. Inside that cavity, growing from what had been organs, were more Seeds. Dozens of them. Already mature.

Thistlewick vomited.

“Beautiful,” Krampus breathed.

“That was one of us,” Thistlewick whispered. “He was family.”

“He was practice,” Krampus corrected. “Elves are not human. Their magic accelerates the process. Humans will take longer. Hours. Long enough to understand what is happening. Long enough to suffer.”

He turned away from the thing that had been Juniper.

“Continue production. We launch at sunset.”

“You are insane,” Thistlewick whispered.

“Probably,” Krampus agreed. “But I am also right. And after tonight, it will not matter either way.”

He walked away, the skin of Santa Claus flapping around him like a flag of victory.

Behind him, the machines kept running.

Behind him, Thistlewick looked at the conveyor belts and the packaging stations and the quality control mechanisms that she had helped design four hundred years ago. She looked at the emergency shutoffs and the pressure valves and the temperature regulators.

She looked at the thing that had been Juniper, and she began to calculate.

She could not stop all of it. She knew that. But if she timed it right, if she waited until the sleigh was loaded, if she overloaded the primary boiler at exactly the moment the backup systems were cycling...

Some of the packages would be destroyed. Maybe thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.

It would not save the world. But it might save something.

She went back to work, and she waited, and she did the math in her head, and she tried not to think about what the Schiachperchten were still doing in the nursery.

The sleigh was loaded by sunset.

Seven hundred million packages, give or take. Millions of Seeds. The end of the human race, wrapped in festive paper and tied with golden bows.

Krampus stood on the loading dock, watching the last of the cargo settle into place. The sleigh groaned under the weight. It had never carried anything this heavy. It had never carried anything this important.

Thistlewick stood nearby, her hands clasped behind her back. To anyone watching, she looked defeated. Broken. Just another elf who had learned that kindness did not matter and goodness did not prevail.

To anyone watching, she did not look like someone who had just finished rewiring the emergency pressure release on the primary boiler.

“Excellent work,” Krampus said, not looking at her. “I may let you live, when this is over. The world will need someone to tend the machines. To grow more Seeds. To prepare for the next phase.”

“Thank you,” Thistlewick said. Her voice was empty. Flat.

“You do not mean that.”

“No,” she admitted. “I do not.”

Krampus laughed. It was an ugly sound.

“Honesty. I appreciate that. So few creatures are honest anymore. They lie to themselves. They lie to each other. They lie to the universe and expect the universe not to notice.”

He turned to face her.

“You are honest. That is why I will let you live. The new world will need honest creatures. Creatures who understand that there are no nice lists. That there is only naughty. That there has only ever been naughty.”

Thistlewick said nothing. Behind her back, her fingers found the manual override she had hidden in her apron pocket. A small thing. A simple thing. A thing that would, when activated, tell the primary boiler that its pressure was fine when it was not fine at all.

The explosion would take out the loading dock. The sleigh. Maybe a quarter of the packages.

It would also take out her.

“I have one question,” she said.

Krampus tilted his head. The movement was wrong, inhuman, the stolen face sliding slightly to one side.

“Ask.”

“Do you really believe it? That everyone is naughty? That there is no goodness in the world at all?”

Krampus was quiet for a long moment.

“I believe,” he said finally, “that goodness is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the consequences of our actions. I believe that kindness is a transaction, not a virtue. I believe that every creature, from the smallest child to the oldest saint, is capable of cruelty when the cost is low enough and the reward is high enough.”

He smiled. The skin of Santa’s face stretched around his teeth.

“I believe that the only honest thing in the universe is fear. And tonight, the universe will finally be honest.”

Thistlewick looked at him. At the monster wearing the skin of everything she had believed in. At the end of the world, standing in front of her, explaining why the world deserved to end.

She thought about pressing the button.

She thought about the explosion. The fire. The packages that would be destroyed. The lives that might, possibly, be saved.

She thought about dying.

And then she thought about the children. Not all of them. Just some of them. Just the ones who might, because of her, wake up on Christmas morning and find presents under the tree that would not kill them. Just the ones who might get to believe, for one more day, that magic was real and goodness was rewarded.

She pressed the button.

Nothing happened.

“Oh,” Krampus said, almost gently. “Did you think I did not notice?”

He held up a small device. The same device she had hidden in her apron. The same device she had spent hours wiring to the boiler.

“The Schiachperchten are very good at finding things,” he said. “They can smell intention. They can taste betrayal. They found your little sabotage three hours ago.”

Thistlewick stared at him. At the device in his hand. At the end of hope, held between clawed fingers.

“You knew,” she whispered.

“I knew.”

“Then why did you let me...”

“Because I wanted to see if you would do it.” Krampus’s voice was almost kind. Almost admiring. “Because I wanted to know if there was still something in you that believed. Something that would risk everything for nothing. Something that would choose death over complicity.”

He dropped the device on the floor. Crushed it under his hoof.

“There was,” he said. “I am almost sorry to take it from you.”

He gestured to the Schiachperchten.

“Take her to the pit,” he said. “Let her watch them feed. Let her understand, before she dies, that goodness is not real. That kindness is not rewarded. That the only thing that matters, the only thing that has ever mattered, is what you are willing to do to survive.”

The chitinous things grabbed Thistlewick by the arms. She did not struggle. She did not scream. She had used up everything she had on a button that did not work.

“The sleigh leaves in ten minutes,” Krampus called after her. “I will think of you, when the world ends. I will remember that you tried.”

He laughed.

“It will not matter. But I will remember.”

Thistlewick closed her eyes as the Schiachperchten dragged her away.

She had tried. She had failed. The world was going to end, and she was going to die watching monsters eat the children she had spent four hundred years making toys for.

But she had tried.

Maybe that was enough.

Maybe it had to be.

---

VIII.

The sleigh rose into the Arctic night.

Krampus gripped the reins with clawed hands, feeling the magic surge through the leather straps and into his bones. It was intoxicating. It was glorious. All those centuries of crawling through caves, and now he was flying, soaring above the world like a god.

The reindeer were terrified. He could smell it on them. Dasher. Dancer. Prancer. Vixen. Comet. Cupid. Donner. Blitzen. And at the front, Rudolph, whose famous red nose flickered weakly, barely glowing.

“Faster,” Krampus snarled, cracking the reins.

Blitzen, the strongest of them, actually attempted to turn back, hooves scrabbling at the empty air. The magic in the reins compelled, but it did not break. There was still will in them.

Krampus made a mental note to eat that one first.

Behind him, the sleigh groaned under the weight of the Seeds. Millions of packages. The end of the human race, pulsing in the darkness.

The Schiachperchten clung to the runners and the sides. They did not like flying. Some of them kept looking up, as if expecting the stars to attack. But they would not leave Krampus.

“Ho ho ho,” Krampus practiced.

The voice came out wrong. Too deep. Too ragged.

He tried again, pitching it higher. “Ho ho ho!”

Better. Still not good. The children would be sleeping. They would not hear him anyway.

The world spread out below him, a patchwork of lights and darkness. Cities blazing against the night like infected wounds. Forests dark and quiet. Oceans that reflected the stars.

He had never seen it from this angle before. Now he understood why Santa had loved this part of the job. The power of it. The godlike perspective.

The first house appeared on the horizon. A small structure in Greenland. A fishing village. The List said there was a child inside. Seven years old. Name: Tulugaq.

Naughty.

Of course naughty. They were all naughty.

Krampus guided the sleigh down. He stepped out onto the roof, his hooves finding purchase on the icy shingles.

The chimney was narrow. Stone. Smoke rising from a dying fire.

He had never done this before. The chimney was Santa’s trick. But the magic was in the skin. When he wore it, the impossible became possible.

He approached the chimney. Looked down into the darkness.

“Here goes nothing,” he muttered, and jumped.

The passage compressed him, folded him through dimensions that did not quite exist, and deposited him in the living room in a shower of soot and impossible physics.

Krampus stood up and looked around.

The house was small and warm. A tree in the corner, decorated with handmade ornaments. Stockings hung by the fire. A home. A real home.

He felt nothing.

The package for Tulugaq was in his sack. He placed it under the tree.

A sound from upstairs. Footsteps. Small ones.

A child appeared at the top of the stairs. Black hair tangled from sleep. Brown skin. Eyes still heavy with dreams.

“Santa?”

Krampus looked at the child. At the absolute trust in those sleepy eyes. At the belief.

“Go back to sleep,” he said. “It is not morning yet.”

“Did you bring presents?”

“Yes.”

“Am I on the nice list?”

Krampus paused.

“Everyone is on the nice list,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

Tulugaq smiled. Turned. Disappeared back up the stairs.

Krampus stood in the living room for a long moment, looking at the package under the tree. At the ticking bomb that wore a bow.

Then he went back up the chimney.

He moved faster after that. House after house after house. He worked with mechanical efficiency.

A dog barked at him in Canada. A big dog, teeth bared. It could smell what he was underneath the stolen skin.

Krampus grabbed it by the throat and squeezed until the neck broke. He left the body under the tree, next to the presents. Let the children find it in the morning.

A teenager was awake in Japan, playing video games in the dark. Krampus placed the package and turned to leave.

The teenager looked up. Saw him. Eyes widening.

“Santakurosu?“

Krampus smiled, Santa’s face splitting around his teeth.

“Meri Kurisumasu,” he said, and went back up the chimney before the screaming started.

In Germany, a house had left out milk and cookies. Krampus ate the cookies. They tasted like cardboard and hope. He spat them onto the floor. He drank the milk and then urinated in the glass before setting it back on the table.

Thank you, Santa, the note beside it read. I have been very good this year.

“No,” Krampus muttered, leaving three packages under the tree. “You have not.”

The hours passed. The world turned. The sleigh emptied.

Krampus found himself in a suburban sprawl somewhere in America. The houses were identical, cookie cutter constructions. Inflatable Santas sagged in the front yards. Lights blinked without rhythm or meaning.

He hated it. The emptiness of it. The performance of joy without any actual joy underneath.

They deserved what was coming.

Krampus checked his sack. Nearly empty. The night was almost over.

He landed on a roof that looked like all the other roofs. Found a chimney that led to a living room with a tree and presents. Two cars in the garage. A dog. Two adults. One child.

The List said the child’s name was Wren. Eight years old. Naughty.

Krampus descended the chimney. Placed the package. Turned to leave.

And then he heard footsteps on the stairs.

---

IX.

Wren could not sleep.

The excitement was too much. Christmas morning was so close, and there were presents under the tree, and maybe Santa had come already, and maybe there was something special waiting, something wonderful, something that would make everything okay.

Things had not been okay for a while. Mom and Dad fought a lot. Quiet fights, whispered fights, fights that happened after Wren was supposed to be asleep. But Wren was never asleep. Wren was always listening, always hoping that tomorrow would be better.

Maybe Christmas would fix it. Christmas fixed everything in the movies.

Wren crept down the stairs, avoiding the creaky spots. The goal was to see the presents without getting caught. To verify that the magic was real.

The living room was dark. Tree lights unplugged. The shapes under the tree were shadowed, mysterious.

But there was something else in the room.

A shape. A figure. Large. Standing by the tree.

Wren’s heart pounded. Santa. It had to be Santa. Actually here. Actually real. Mom said he was not real, but Mom said a lot of things that were not true.

“...Santa?”

The shape froze.

Slowly, it turned.

The suit was red. The beard was white. That part was right. But the suit did not fit. It hung loose and wrong, bunched in some places and sagging in others. The belly drooped. The arms did not fill the sleeves. And the face...

The face was not right.

It looked like a mask. Santa’s face, but stretched over something that was not Santa. The cheeks sagged. The eyes did not line up with the eye holes, so instead of twinkling blue there was just darkness, just the faint red glow of something else. The mouth was slightly open, and through the gap, something dark moved. Something wet.

The smell hit Wren then. Not cookies and pine needles. Something old and earthy and wrong. Like the shed behind the house. Like the dead squirrel they had found behind the air conditioner.

Wren should have been afraid. Should have screamed. Should have run back up the stairs and woken up the parents.

But it was Christmas. And this was Santa. And the brain of an eight year old was very good at seeing what it expected to see, at believing what it wanted to believe.

“Santa! I knew you were real! Mom said you weren’t, but I knew it!”

The figure tilted its head. The movement was wrong. Too smooth. Too far. Like an owl. Like something that had too many bones in its neck, or maybe not enough.

One clawed hand held a wrapped package. The paper was red and green. The bow was gold. It looked like every other present under the tree.

It did not look like a bomb.

A long moment passed. The room was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the clock and the soft snoring of the small dog that had not woken up.

Then the mask that was not a mask cracked into something that might have been a smile. Too wide. Too many teeth. The beard shifted, and underneath it, a long black tongue slid out, forked at the tip, tasting the air.

Tasting Wren.

“Ho,” said the thing that wore Santa’s skin. The voice was wrong. Too deep. Too rough. Like rocks grinding together.

“Ho.”

It stepped forward. The hooves clicked against the hardwood floor. Hooves. Not boots. Hooves, like a goat, like a devil.

“Ho.“

The tongue withdrew. The smile widened. The red glow behind the empty eye holes intensified.

But Wren smiled too. Wren did not see the hooves or hear the wrongness in the voice or smell the centuries of rage. Wren saw Santa. Wren saw magic. Wren saw proof that all the hoping and wishing and believing had been worth it.

Wren ran forward, arms outstretched for a hug.

The thing that was not Santa opened its arms to receive the child. The claws gleamed in the dim light. The stolen skin stretched around a body that was not built for embracing.

Outside, the first light of dawn touched the horizon.

Somewhere in the world, the first present was being opened.

The clock on the wall ticked toward six.

And somewhere in the darkness between one second and the next, the thing that was not Santa leaned down to the child who was not going to survive the morning and whispered:

“You have been very naughty.”

---

X.

Christmas morning.

Across the world, children were waking. Rubbing sleep from their eyes. Running down stairs in pajamas covered with reindeer and snowflakes. Tearing into presents with the frantic joy that only children could feel.

The Seeds waited.

They had been patient for decades. They had grown patient in caves beneath the Alps. They had been manufactured patient in a workshop that smelled of blood and peppermint. They had been delivered patient to every home in the world.

Now the waiting was over.

In a house in Brazil, a girl named Lua unwrapped a package and found something strange inside. An ornament, she thought. Pretty. Pulsing with colors she could not name. She held it up to show her mother.

“Olha, mamãe. Que bonito!“

It bloomed in her hands.

In a flat in London, twin boys named Alfie and Edmund fought over who got to open the biggest present. They tore at the paper together, laughing, shoving. The thing inside split open before they could react, showering them both with something that sparkled like glitter.

They breathed in together. They would transform together. Still holding hands. Still brothers in whatever came after.

The transformation was slower with humans. It took hours. Long enough to understand what was happening. Long enough to feel the flesh begin to change, the bones begin to bend, the self begin to dissolve.

Long enough to suffer.

It started the same way everywhere. The eyes clouding over, going the color of dead winter branches. The skin paling, then darkening, then taking on that bark-like texture. The mouth sealing shut, mid-scream, mid-prayer, mid-goodbye.

Parents ran to help their children and breathed in the spores themselves.

Doctors arrived at hospitals and were overwhelmed by something they had never been trained to treat.

Police officers broke down doors and found families frozen in transformation, mouths sealed shut, bodies splitting open to reveal the wet red cavities where more Seeds were already growing.

The Christmas songs on the radio kept playing. “Silent Night.” “Joy to the World.” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

The world was still pretending, for a few more hours, that this was just another Christmas morning.

But the presents kept opening.

And the blooming spread.

And somewhere in a suburban house in America, in a living room that looked like a million other living rooms, a child named Wren was wrapped in the arms of something that wore a dead man’s skin and believed, truly believed, that magic was real and goodness was rewarded and everything was going to be okay.

The clock struck six.

The sun rose on Christmas Day.

And under trees around the world, packages bulged and pulsed and waited for the hands that would open them. The paper was red and green. The bows were gold. They looked like presents. They looked like promises.

They looked like the end of everything.

But we do not see it.

Not the transformations. Not the screaming. Not the moment when the last human becomes the last vessel and the world goes silent except for the clicking of Schiachperchten mandibles.

We do not see Krampus, standing on a hill overlooking a city of trees that used to be people, finally laughing with something that might, in another creature, have been joy.

We do not see the Schiachperchten spreading out across the empty world, feeding on what remained, preparing the soil for the next planting.

We do not see the end.

We only see this:

A single wrapped present under a tree, nestled among the others, indistinguishable from the rest. The paper is red with green trim. The bow is gold. The tag reads: “To: A Special Child. From: Santa.”

The paper bulges slightly.

Rhythmically.

As if something inside is breathing.

As if something inside is about to wake up.

As if something inside has been waiting, patient and hungry and inevitable, for exactly this moment.

For exactly this morning.

For exactly this end.

Merry Christmas.

THE END

---

Krampus is mine now.

I’ll make you a deal.

Go the rest of your life without thinking about this story whenever Krampus is mentioned, and you can have him back.

Free of charge.

I’ll let you keep what’s left of Santa. I’m done playing with it.

---

More holiday fun:

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---

---

For Dorian,

Who asked: “How much do you have to hate kids to invent a demon like that?”

Krampus was always about the adults who failed. The children were just collateral damage in someone else’s morality play.

May this story haunt every grown-up who ever thought fear was an appropriate teaching tool. You wanted to traumatize some adults with their own monster. Mission accomplished.

One day you’ll read this. Until then, know we ruined Christmas together, and I couldn’t be prouder.