Krampusnacht: Twelve Nights of Krampus (11 page)

“Are you, like, dying of Alzheimer’s? I said I want you to break Cyndy Symmons’ ankles.”

Her voice sweetened again. “I was only going to ask for one ankle, but you called me fat, so now it’s two.”

Santa was speechless.

“It’s only fair, after all. I have a seven octave range and Cyndy only has six.” Suddenly Kandi belted out a jingle. “Home Wholesalers—your home is our home toooo!” On the last word she hit a G-sharp seventh that felt like a scalpel piercing Santa’s eardrum.

He leapt to his feet, howling in pain, tossing Kandi to the floor. “My scoliosis!” she screamed—in a G-sharp sixth.

Rage squeezed her face down to the size of a pimple as her hand made a rattlesnake strike at Santa’s arm. Four long, frosted-pink fingernails dug into the bare skin of his wrist just above his glove. Surely the child was only trying to hoist herself up. But Santa shook her off and staggered back, behind his throne. Kandi crashed down to the floor of the Enchanted Castle again.

Santa had four bloody quarter-moon fingernail marks on his arm.

He ran. He ran through the back door of his cardboard castle and into the mall, shoving shoppers aside in his panic. He threw open the Staff Only door at the far end of the corridor, closing and locking it from the inside.

Dr. Spectra was there. She was eating a watercress sandwich with the crusts removed. Her long, thin fingers, emblematic of her entire frame, were prying open the center spread of a celebrity gossip magazine she’d found on the table, its pages stuck together by the spilled soy sauce of some lunching mall worker. Spectra was Caucasian, but she wore her long brown hair in a Japanese-style double bun. It was her trademark, a carefully cultivated eccentricity, along with her little red satin Chinese slippers and the flowing flower-strewn silk pantsuits she always combined with a billowing flowery silk scarf.

She looked up at Santa, a watercress leaf pasted to her incisors, and said, “What happened?”

“Gnh!” Santa uttered through gritted teeth before gripping his belly in agony and toppling over.

* * *

Months earlier, in late summer, Mrs. Claus had spotted the signs of a relapse on the toy assembly line. Santa had designed an action figure called Sergeant Payback whose gun fired tiny plastic live rounds, and, when disrobed, showed signs of torture by the enemy. L’il Sailor Mouth was a baby doll dressed in a pink sailor’s middy top who uttered a different obscenity every time you squeezed her belly.

Santa had no memory of making these toys. He blamed the elves, and in a terrible rage stuffed his three foremen into the cellar freezer for a sentence of 40 years in suspended animation. This left Mrs. Claus unable to access her supply of frozen chicken-flavored soy burgers without having to snap off an elf arm to get at them, which is something a vegetarian would never do.

She sat him down in his den.

“You always get depressed this time of year,” she said. “But we both know this is more than your usual funk.
He
wants out. The last time this happened there was no such thing as therapy, so I suppose it was excusable that you laid waste to half of Europe—to say nothing of the upholstery in my sitting room. But nowadays there’s no excuse for you not getting help.” She marched resolutely to the hallway. He followed her. Two suitcases sat by the door. “I’m tired of begging you to get yourself some proper professional care. I still have nightmares about those damn elves operating on your prostate. And if
he’s
coming back, you won’t have me to chase after him with a broom and a dustpan. I’m off to stay with Myrtle.”

Myrtle was Santa’s sister-in-law who had retired to Myrtle Beach so she could be Myrtle of Myrtle Beach. She was constantly on the phone telling Mrs. Claus Santa should be doing more to help out around the house. Santa despised Myrtle. Just hearing her name made him grab his belly and moan.

“See?” Mrs. Claus said. “That’s
him
kicking. And I’ll bet your head is full of that fog. Hm? Am I right? Of course you’d never admit it. Denial, my dear, isn’t just a lake in Egypt.”

She made him crazy with her insistence on using clichéd phrases and then getting them wrong.

“It’s a
river
in Egypt!” he thundered.

“And now you’re in denial about Egypt, too,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “I’m leaving Dr. Spectra’s business card on the dresser. It’s a matter of complete indifference to me whether or not you use it.”

She left.

Blast that ungrateful woman, she left!

And after everything he had just had done for her.

Four months ago Santa had torn down the Claus’s ancient log cabin on its frigid North Pole ice cap, as well as the rows of wooden toy manufacturing barns and elf barracks. In their place he had erected two 30-story gleaming glass office towers. Tower A housed all the manufacturing and Tower B was residential, with the top four floors going to the Clauses. Santa spent millions on it, and it was all for Mrs. Claus, who had for years complained of drafts in the old house. The day the towers were finished he led her into her very own office with its phone and computer on a vast mahogany desk and an en suite conference room with a table that sat 30. “It’s for your knitting!” he said proudly.

“All this for my knitting?” Mrs. Claus said. “Where’s my fireplace? And my rocking chair!”

Another 50 million to outfit the offices and living quarters with fireplaces.

Santa told himself he was well rid of her. But the night she left he couldn’t sleep without the sound of her snoring beside him—that full-nosed inhalation and twittering exhalation, a duet of pig and bird. And now he was alone with no one to run interference between him and the endless grousing of the elves who despised the new corporate overhaul. Seems they couldn’t reach the buttons on the elevators and now had to carry little stools with them wherever they went. What’s worse, the towers were designed to withstand the polar winds and shifts in the ice plates by swaying, which meant that in a storm nobody could spear their meat with a fork because their dinner plate was never in the same place long enough. And the rays of Arctic sun, intensified on the mirrored surface of the towers, melted a glacier whose waters flooded Scandinavia. Worst of all there was so much unused space in the buildings that you could go an entire day hearing your boots echo on those cold marble floors without seeing another living soul.

Santa felt foolish. Old. He had ruined everything. And now he was completely, unbearably alone.

He would do anything to have Mrs. Claus back.

The fog in his head grew thicker. The kicking in his belly grew harder. He was scared. In his solitude, in his despair, he could finally admit it. He was so scared his skin had gone whiter than his beard.

Finally he picked up the business card Mrs. Claus had left on their dresser.

* * *

Dr. Spectra was known as the Supernatural Shrink. And she was famous. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by her work? Everyone wanted to hear her stories, and she used them to regale the highest of high society. “I’m bound by confidentiality,” she always began, and then proceeded to loosen those bounds until they had all but fallen away: “A vampire I treated—let’s call him ‘Fracula….’”

She dined with royalty, tossed her champagne glasses into fountains at Hollywood parties, had her own key to 10 Downing Street, and danced in zero gravity in her very own Space Shuttle launch.

Forever in her mid-30s thanks to access to age-retarding witch’s spells and the best Park Avenue plastic surgeons, she had helped hesitant ghosts cross over to the other side, supported vampires as they kicked their blood addictions and switched to iron supplements, traced poltergeists’ anger issues back to emotionally absent fathers, told werewolves they were sprouting hair to compensate for weak gender identities, exposed the Invisible Man to his unconscious shame of his own genitalia, and persuaded demons to leave their teenage girl hosts and possess politicians instead because even with a devil inside, politicians couldn’t get much worse.

But last year her reputation had gone south when one of her patients, a celebrity ghost who had been a seminal influence on the creation of rock-n-roll, committed suicide after she pushed him too hard, too fast to accept that the dead simply cannot eat cheesecake. Ghost suicides were extremely rare and so difficult to pull off that only the most motivated phantoms ever succeeded. It was a huge scandal. Spectra’s patients fled in droves to her main rival, Dr. Blavatski Conundra, and the invitations to the Oscars after-party, Kosugi camel races, and New Year’s Eve at Buckingham Palace faded faster than a mummy’s speech impediment after a round of childhood regression.

Mrs. Claus, though, remained a loyal friend. Ten years ago Spectra had helped Mrs. Claus through a mental breakdown in which she thought she was an elf and broke both her baby toes forcing her feet into those curly little elf boots.

When Santa phoned her, Dr. Spectra flew the very next day to the North Pole and hired a dog team to complete her journey from the airport across the miles of glacial ice to Santa’s offices. “Phallic overcompensation,” she noted as she saw the towers rise up on the horizon.

Every day Spectra laid Santa down on a couch and spoke to him from behind in her slow, soft voice. Santa resented the hell out of her at first. This buttinsky poking away at him, trying to get him to reveal his innermost thoughts—and getting paid a fortune for it too! But after sulking and saying almost nothing for a week he found himself talking, talking as fast as his lips could possibly move. Within a fortnight he came to rely completely on Spectra. She was just so compassionate, so understanding, so validating. He couldn’t confess his worries and insecurities and psychic injuries fast enough before their 45-minute sessions ended.

“Nick,” Spectra said in one of these sessions, “when you describe how it feels to see the other reindeer taunt Rudolph, I’m reminded of the mistreatment you experienced as an adolescent with a gynecomastia.”

“They called me Titty Nicky,” he said, sobbing softly. And then, wailing with grief: “St. Titcholas!”

He was in therapy. Deep.

And Spectra’s compassion, which had moved him so quickly to trust her, was indeed genuine. It was just as real as her hunger for fame.

Often the two were in conflict. She had always felt guilty turning down desperate clients who were too low-profile to get her name bandied about in the best circles, but turn them down she did. She was fully cognizant of her love of celebrity and had long ago determined it was filling the void left by her emotionally impoverished upbringing, by that traumatic sixteenth birthday when she had asked for a Cadillac and been given a Volkswagen instead. She was less cognizant of some other voids her fame might have been filling, even though she was trained to spot such things. She never married, never successfully dated a man for more than a few weeks. “I’m married to my work,” she would say, and for the most part she believed it. But with the world’s richest, most powerful, most creative, most beautiful people fascinated by her, desiring her presence—what a wonderful way to fill a void!

When her star sank after the ghost suicide she was desperate to regain that fame. Santa was exactly the high-profile case she needed. But she very quickly came to love the old man, too, for being so fallible, such a mess, really; so ashamed of himself for belying the jolly image by which the rest of the world knew him. She would save this tortured man, so loved by all but so lacking in self-love. Oh yes. The happiness of a man who made children happy would also ensure her own renewed happiness. If everybody won, surely there was no conflict here?

She was convinced from the start that Santa was breaking under the strain of the world’s expectation of his perfect goodness.

“Your real self,” she said, “is in conflict with the flawless image that for centuries you’ve tried to live up to.”

“It’s worse than that,” he said cryptically. “If only it were just that.”

It took several more weeks before he worked up the courage to tell her.

To tell her about
him
.

About Krampus.

“As I recall, Krampus was a maniac who terrorized half of Europe in the 1800s before disappearing,” Spectra said. “It’s interesting that you would identify yourself with such a man. The other day when you fired that elf for auctioning two of your sleigh bells on eBay you were perfectly entitled to your anger, Nick. Kicking him in the rump may have been an inappropriate expression of that anger, but it hardly makes you another Krampus.”

“No, not ‘another’ Krampus,” Santa said. The fog in his head was thickening. The blood drained from his ruddy cheeks and nose. “The. The Krampus. Krampus was me. At least, he’s in me. He lives in me. In my belly. Why do you think that damn ab-workout DVD did nothing to tighten my midsection?”

“Nick, diet and cardio will tighten your abs. Not some gimmick from an infomercial.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I do believe you,” Spectra said. “Full confession. When your wife first called me she mentioned you had, in the past, manifested a second persona. Multiple personalities are rare, but in your case it would be wholly understandable if you created a separate identity to express all of your very human and very understandable feelings of anger and hostility and aggression. Nick, you obviously had a breakdown back in the nineteenth century and ended up mistaking yourself for this psychopath who was rampaging across Europe. You started to believe he was you.”

“But Mrs. Claus saw him too.”

“You know I adore Mrs. Claus,” Spectra said. “But the woman has cataracts and she’s incapable of remembering where she put down her glasses. One time she mistook me for Lionel Richie.”

Nick stared, frozen, at the wall.

He was silent a long time.

Finally he spoke.

“You really think he’s not me?”

“I know it.”

“But… I feel him kicking to get out. Like last week. At the mall. When that rotten little girl—I mean, that
troubled
little girl—asked me to break her friend’s ankles. Krampus was literally trying to kick his way out through my belly.”