Everett Ambrose is a speculative fiction author and poet with a penchant for horror and dark fiction. His work has been published in The Cult of Horrotica Magazine as well as Creamscene Carnival Magazine. He resides in the Midwest with his wife and kids and growing horror steelbook collection.
YULE LOVE THIS
by
Everett Ambrose
The year I was told Santa Claus wasn’t real was the same year my parents divorced. The same year the Christmas lights were stolen off our houses in my neighborhood. The same year the graves in our local cemetery were dug up and a pile of human corpses were gathered like presents under a white pine in our local cemetery. I never told my parents what I saw that night when I woke up looking for Santa out my window. And they never asked why I didn’t want to celebrate Christmas any longer after that.
That year all I wanted was a BB gun. Tommy Riley down the block had one and I had to hear how fun it was to go out and shoot frogs in the swamp. I figured Santa would have reservations about giving me a weapon, but I put it top on my list anyway.
The week before Christmas our lights were stolen off our houses in the dead of night. Not just ours, the whole neighborhood’s. Our cul de sac became a sad Christmas black hole; an unlit and infected gangrenous limb on the block from an aerial view. We kids were a little scared. We didn’t know how to categorize the violation we’d collectively experienced with the petty larceny. The adults were upset, believing it to be a tasteless prank from punk teenagers, sticking it to suburbia.
Christmas Day was a horror movie. I was the first one awake, like every year. I ran down the stairs to see what Santa had brought us. When I made it to the living room, everything looked how I expected it to with overfilled stockings and presents under the tree. Everything but a flickering light casting an eerie orange glow against our window curtains. At first this detail excited me. I expected to find a sleigh parked in the front yard with twinkling lights. Then I suddenly remembered my dream from the night before and I didn’t even look out the window, I was too terrified. I ran up the stairs and woke up my parents.
In the early twilight of dawn, before the cops and fire department were called, before crying kids and shouting adults in the street, the scene was horrifying but still calm. Our parents milled about our yards where in each, a burning white pine had been staked. Presents wrapped in black wrapping paper with red ribbons and bows were placed underneath the effigies. They had tags that had our names etched in a hostile scribble on them, with the line “Yule love this.” We were dumb and curious enough to open them.
Mom was the first. Her face turned to disgust as she pulled out some Polaroids from the box she unwrapped. Tears came when she discovered who they were of. She looked to dad and stared for awhile before she asked him “How could you?”
He was confused until he saw them himself. Then incredulous and guilty, he fumbled with lies and quick cover up excuses while mom cried and shouted at him. They were so busy with their own drama they didn’t notice me open mine.
“Mom?” I called out after unwrapping my own gift. I held a shiny new handgun upside down by its handle. “Is this a BB gun?” I asked but knew it wasn’t. The metal was cold from being out all night. It felt heavy, lethal, and wrong dangling from my fingers.
“Oh my god, we didn’t get you that! Give it to me before you hurt yourself,” she said to me and took the gun.
Other families were out inspecting their burning trees and black wrapped gifts. Parents shouted at each other and kids cried after opening them. Whoever gave us these gifts knew things about us they shouldn’t have. Dad got a bottle of whiskey; he was a few years sober at that point. Mom got several Polaroids of dad with various prostitutes. Tommy Riley got a box of dead frogs, swollen in death and peppered with BB wounds.
The authorities showed up and were questioning us all. The adults were convinced it was a sick prank that started a week ago with our lights but I had an idea what happened to them. They hadn’t been to the cemetery yet so they didn’t know.
I thought it was a dream. Late at night on Christmas Eve I was awoken by a commotion out in the streets. What I saw out of my second story bedroom window was too fantastic to believe, until the morning came. Then all the pieces came together.
It was like a dark parade. Twenty or thirty people dressed in dirty suits and gowns and entangled in Christmas lights like barbed wire. They shambled into our yards and staked the trees down before putting the black wrapped presents underneath. Then they doused the trees with gas or kerosene cans and lit them on fire. Others were dragging a large black and red sleigh through the street. The tangled lights snaked like horse reigns to their operator standing inside it. He was a little too tall and thin, his cloak somewhere between Santa Claus and the Grim Reaper, billowed as he yanked at the reigns of his thrall. I could hear the grinding of the steel runners along the pavement even under my covers as I ran back to my bed.
It made the news and was a hot story for a bit. How grave robbers exhumed the plots of some of the relatives in the neighborhood, decorated the corpses with our stolen Christmas lights, and piled them under a tree in the cemetery, like presents.
I never told anyone I saw the corpses move on their own. Or about their wicked puppet master yanking the reigns from his sleigh. I never told another soul about that dark dream I had on Christmas Eve. And I never celebrated Christmas again, too afraid of what else may come with it.