Krampusnacht: Twelve Nights of Krampus Read Online Free PDF Page A

tall. My legs lengthen and my hoof hardens and my horns reach for the sky. I know that the whisk thing I’m carrying is really a bundle of birch switches. The basket on my back is vast inside.
    I’m not confused any more. I know just what to do. I lope off into the trees as the bells of Santa’s sleigh jingle through the night sky overhead.
    * * *
Elizabeth Twist is a speculative fiction writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. Her short fiction has appeared in Dark Faith: Invocations, Suction Cup Dreams, Enchanted Conversation, and is collected in Six by Twist, available on Amazon. She blogs about fiction and weirdness at elizabethtwist.com.

Second Night of Krampus: “The Wicked Child”
    by Elise Forier Edie
Inspiration : Elise used to love the Christmas season, and took great delight in its celebration of peace, love, beauty and joy. Today, she finds Christmas distasteful and upsetting, and sets her teeth every October against the seasonal onslaught of commercial exhortations to be more covetous, more ostentatious and more greedy. In the midst of such topsy-turvy values, she wondered how a truly virtuous person would react and behave. It was with this in mind that she set about writing “The Wicked Child.”
    The bishop and his companion had come to her grandfather’s inn every autumn for as long as Tuva could remember.
    It was always a great event, for the bishop rented rooms until nearly winter and paid lavish sums at a time of year when very few visitors traveled to the Arctic Circle. Everyone in the village, from the tanner’s boy to the reeve, talked of his arrival, of how he would always come by reindeer sleigh, wrapped in white furs and purple velvet, how he tossed gold coins and sweets to the children, chuckling and smiling, and how his dark companion sat silent and grave by his side, a single, stick-straight shadow in the bishop’s sparkling cloud of beneficence.
    Once Tuva’s grandmother ventured to ask what brought the bishop and his assistant so far north at such a prohibitive time of year, when the snow fell sometimes four feet in a night, trees rattled with ice crystals, and clouds blanketed the world in vast swaths of freezing fog. The bishop seemed to contemplate this question most seriously, his shrewd gaze meeting the grandmother’s frank and curious one, his round face flickering in the candlelight. At last he answered gravely. “Why, I love to behold unmolested God’s seasonal lightshow in the winter sky. It renews my faith and allows me to celebrate His spirit in the clearest way possible.” He gestured at his companion and continued. “Is it not so for you, dear Peter?”
    But the bishop’s dark companion remained silent, folding lines and shadows into his gaunt cheeks as he frowned and shook his head. But Tuva saw his eyes twinkling like snowflakes in moonlight, as he glanced her way. She twinkled back at him, hoping he could see, even though she had stuffed herself into a corner of the great room, far from the fire, where she was most likely to remain unnoticed and therefore unbeaten.
    Tuva was her name, but her grandfather called her “Brat” and her grandmother called her “Spawn.” They hurled both these names at her, and many other worse ones, along with cuffs, kicks, and pinches, which was why Tuva preferred to hide in dark corners when she could. They had called her dead mother “The Ruination of Our Son” and the “Curse of Our Hopes.” Of her father they spoke not at all.
    The villagers whispered more about it, how Tuva’s mother had been a beautiful gypsy queen, with clouds of black curls and lithe brown arms. The miller’s daughter gushed that she had danced into the village with the Summer People, and Tuva’s father, the innkeeper’s only son, had taken one look at her lush lips and black eyes and fallen head over heels in love. The green grocer murmured sadly about how the innkeeper’s son had followed the gypsy queen to the southern lands, where he died