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Every Christmas my family booby-trapped the chimney. I never knew why until one year we finally caught something
That year my trap did not work. They never worked. The week before Christmas we’d gone shopping as a family, first to a craft store for the kids, and then a hardware store for the grown ups. Walking the colourful aisles, Mariah Carey in the background, I’d excitedly bought a packet of orange HB pencils, flat on either end. They made me think of the scaffolding the builders had put up around school one year. Full of endless possibilities. Along with the pencils I bought a bag of rubber bands to bind them together. In my imagination I conceived of a truly fantastic catapult that would pelt the invader with marbles and thumbtacks. Come Christmas Eve my sister and I sat at one table and went to work making our own traps with the materials we had selected. I had my pencils and my sister, a few years younger than me, was busy making… *something* out of pipe cleaners and play-doh. I remember scoffing at her and thinking whatever she had in mind wouldn’t even work.
On a table beside us, our mother made her own traps. I always remember thinking that the grown ups put no real imagination into their creations, but every year the sight of them would turn my stomach nonetheless. Mum liked broken lightbulbs hung on ropes, and this year she prepared another five or six to be nailed to the inside of the chimney. She also fashioned some heavy wooden planks with dozens of old rusty nails and bent jagged knives driven into them. She always made the same things, and would stand at her table every year furiously sawing or hammering with sweat pouring down her forehead.
Dad did his work in the garage. He had a welder’s torch in there and something called a lathe and all sorts of other interesting tools. His traps were almost always made of rusted metal and razor sharp edges. Creaking hinges and quivering springs that made even my childish fingers weary. When he finally emerged from his workshop this year he revealed a funny looking contraption that looked to me like some sort of cannon with a large air canister attached. The sort of thing I’d seen on diver’s backs. When a pressure plate was triggered, a sharp-looking metal spear came shooting three feet out of the barrel in a heart-stopping explosion. Dad grinned with pride when we all jumped back during the test fire. Then he spent thirty minutes swearing angrily as he tried to reload the spike.
After that he set about hiding it in the fireplace. This involved digging a hole and there was a brief moment as he knelt there, covered in soot, where he reached his hand out towards me and called me Alex, asking me to grab the gas canister and bring it over. Before I could even try and do what he asked, Mum intervened and did it instead. Of course she could not pick it up, so she had to sort of roll-walk it over. Dad was quiet the entire time. That happened whenever someone mentioned my older brother. People went quiet.
*He* could’ve picked up the gas canister easily. He had always been big, even bigger than Dad. He took after Grampa who was a giant at 6’ 5. In later years, my PE teacher would lament I never got those genes. My sister and I both took after our father who, while big, was no giant.
After all this was done. After the loose rock and ash was put back in place, after the pressure plate and tripwires were hidden or disguised as standard Christmas decorations, after the bear traps were draped with old clothes or empty boxes and Mum’s knife-covered planks were placed beneath meticulously crafted false-floors, my sister and I gave Mum and Dad our traps and they were placed carefully in the middle of the ambush.
I loved this moment. I don’t know why. I think, looking back, it was the feeling of being a unit. A family. *We helped*. I was still scared of the dark and my sister had barely mastered the toilet, but we were *helping* and good God, ever since Alex had gone I’d wanted to help so bad. The shape of my older brother was a vague one. I loved him, but I didn’t really know him. Couldn’t have, given my age. Instead, I grew up in a world where Mum and Dad cried a lot and fought even more and sometimes they themselves would admit they fought over nothing at all. They fought because it hurt. Because even after my sister had been born, they still couldn’t bring themselves to touch Alex’s room, or to even really acknowledge that he’d existed without it causing a painful, sullen silence.
So for that brief moment where we stood surveying the fireplace and living room, it felt like our version of the perfect happy family.
After that it was bedtime for my sister and I. We liked our special Christmas beds. I liked that they were cozy and special and that Mum would put the telly on and turn the volume all the way up and no one cared if we ate too much candy or even watched films we weren’t allowed to watch. So long as we stayed in the basement it was fine. We had all these blankets and pillows so we could make forts, and no one came down to check if we were asleep at a good time. Despite all the excitement though we usually never made it past midnight. There was only so much our little bodies could handle.
Mum and Dad though, they stayed up. I thought that was normal. You don’t know how much your parents sacrificed until you become one yourself. Never appreciated what it meant for my Dad, mid forties by this point, to stand upright and stay awake all night, or for my mum to do the same. The two of them, all night, shaking each other awake when the other one started to flag.
That was the year I lost the privilege of ignorance. Isn’t it funny how the best and worst moments of your life often overlap? Maybe it’s just the lightbulb effect. I don’t know. That night my sister and I went down into the basement, climbed into our blanket forts, and watched The Neverending Story. She fell asleep ten minutes in. I stayed up and watched every second of it. I can still see all that in my mind as clear as day. Feels like one of the happiest and purest moments of my life. Falling asleep on the credits, gently dreaming of what it might be like to have my own dragon to fly over school… I think that was it. The last time I was just a child. I think most of us have memories like that, don’t we? The moment in time when we stopped being kids.
Next thing I remember was coming to bathed in a cold grey light. Eyes heavy. Head woozy. Something was wrong and I could feel it. It was quiet, cold with a draft, and my sister was nowhere to be seen. It took me a moment to realise that the lights were off, along with the TV, and I was seeing the basement only by the glow of the upstairs hallway. That was unusual. Mum and Dad always locked the basement door and barred it from the other side. Tonight it was wide open and something about the world up there seemed sinister to my childish eyes. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. I’d woken up and something was *wrong*.
I sat upright and slinked out of bed in the hope that any moment I’d see a better, happier world coming down those stairs. Mum and Dad, sister in arms, telling me Christmas was here. They’d just let me sleep in. Maybe it had even snowed. Maybe that was why the light seemed so… odd. Pale and diffused. God I wanted a white Christmas so badly. It was all over the telly. In movies and magazines. But all it ever seemed to do around us at that time of year was rain in a fine wet drizzle. Black windows come night. Heavy winds. Puddles that reflected street lamps. My only memory of my grandmother was her singing *rain rain go away, come back another day*. Nothing else. Not a face. Just the sound of her singing that old nursery rhyme. Like Alex, she was another person I knew largely through the grief she left behind in others.
I climbed the basement stairs on my hands and feet, following some hidden instinct to be quiet. Years of sneaking around to listen to Mum and Dad’s fevered arguments had taught me to always put my weight on the edge of the steps where they were strongest. Whenever I spied them mid-fight Mum would be standing somewhere looking thin and sad, arms crossed, with the smell of cigarettes strong in the air. I thought of this as I reached the top, pausing to sniff the air, wondering if I might smell smoke coming from somewhere further in the house. Instead I picked out a gentle whiff of something burned. Not dissimilar to the smell of party poppers or old fireworks. Certainly nothing like old cigarettes. And there was something else in there too. Something behind that black and sooty odour. Something metallic. Almost sweet.
Eventually I looked, lifting my head over the final step and peering left and right down the hallway that stretched either side. For a long time there was nothing and I stayed in place, frozen by indecision. But then somewhere to the right, near the kitchen doorway, the cold morning light that filtered through seemed to shift and move. Someone was in there, surely. Moving around and casting shadows. Of course it could be Mum or Dad, I told myself, but I still did not move. Whoever it was, they were silent.
Deathly so.
When I finally got the courage to move, it was to go in the opposite direction. Not yet ten years old, but even a child has an animal’s instincts, and mine were telling me to avoid anyone who was that quiet. So I crawled towards the living room, letting the old carpet absorb the sound of my movements. When I looked inside I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. It was like a bomb had gone off. The sofa was torn to shreds. The coffee table lay in pieces. All of our Christmas decorations lay crushed beneath broken floorboards and ripped up carpet. The bear traps stood upright, their teeth locked, their jaws snapped shut. Dad’s piston was in two bits. The oxygen canister embedded in one wall. The barrel bent and lying on the floor. The sight of our traps destroyed set something off in me. I hadn’t thought of it until that moment but they had always been an integral part of our Christmas decorations. A little different to the usual fare, sure. But every bit as important to us as anyone else’s homemade decorations. Everywhere I looked there was another little bit of our history lying in a broken heap and it broke my little heart because I so desperately wanted to fix them, to return the living room to the pristine state it had been in the night before when we’d been a happy family.
I wondered if maybe Dad’s little invention had gone wrong, somehow. One year he nearly burned the house down, so it wasn’t strange to think that dangerous looking piston was responsible for all that destruction. All that pressure building up.
Still no sign of my family, though. Didn’t look like they’d been caught by anything, either. No blood. Back in the hallway, I looked at the light cast by the kitchen door. There was no further movement, but I didn’t trust the stillness in the air. Wrong. All wrong. Best chance now was to try upstairs. Same game as before, really. It involved making my way to the front door where the stairs leading up were near, and then slowly, and carefully climbing them on all fours. I knew these steps *very* well, and disappeared up them as stealthily as anyone could hope to.
My bedroom was empty. So was my sister’s. She had a big window so I got a good look at the world outside and saw the sun was well on its way to rising. Early morning light and a heavy fog made everything look washed out and faded. Eerie too. Like the world was holding its breath. In a way, it was. My parent’s bedroom looked empty too, at a glance, and I almost moved on without noticing the strange and heavy shadow beneath their bed. I’m glad I didn’t. I lingered and looked a little harder. Something about the light down there convinced me it wasn’t empty, not like normal. And before I had any time for my imagination to start conjuring up nightmares, my sister’s face appeared from the gloom.
I nearly yelped with joy, but the expression she wore was as serious as they come. Not just afraid or concerned, but almost sick. Pale with wide eyes. It was like she couldn’t quite register my presence. So I slinked forward and reached out, touching her hand. She flinched and receded further into the darkness. Something was wrong, so I crawled in beside her and checked her for injuries, doing my best not to alarm her further. She looked fine, so all I could do was take her in my arms and try my best to coax her out of her shock.
When I finally whispered a question, it felt far too loud, even though the only real sound was the smacking of my lips. She recoiled a little when I spoke, making me feel like I’d broken the most precious silence of our lives. But I had to ask. I had to know.
“Where’s Mum and Dad?”
She merely shook her head. So I asked again, this time trying my best to stay even quieter. But it seemed like any sound was going to alarm her.
“Where are they?”
In the end she replied only so that I would stop asking. She pulled away as she did so. She loved me but… well, she was an animal with a hiding place, and I was at risk of ruining it.
“He took them up there,” was the only thing she’d say while pointing at the roof. Those five words chilled me to the core. They carried some subtle implication that our parents were dead. I didn’t like this thought. It made my skin itch, made the space we’d crawled into feel too small and uncomfortable. A hot sensation began to well up in my throat, threatening tears. Was she really saying we were alone? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted them to come back and sweep us up in their arms.
Without really knowing why, I refused to believe her. I shook my head and crawled out from under the bed, hoping to go off and find them. I looked back briefly to see if she followed but she remained. Seeming all too ready to leave me to go off to my fate, she disappeared into the shadows and I was left with only the slim comfort that she might at least be safe there.
Out of sight. Out of mind.
Crawling out of our parents’ bedroom, I realised I had very few options left. There was the phone in the downstair’s landing, by the front door. It was that or maybe I could run down the lane and out to the nearest house, which was maybe a quarter mile away. Not far under normal circumstances, but did I really want to go sprinting out the front door, hoping to God that whatever had marched through all those traps like nothing wouldn’t see me running out in the open?
Better to get help to come to *us*. Better to reach the phone. I thought of Grampa. Mum’s dad. A hulking man who generally terrified us all. A cantankerous old widower who had a bad habit of telling us things Mum said we shouldn’t know, like how it was our Grandmother’s fault we had to be scared of the chimney at Christmas. I didn’t like him. He smelt of mildew and soil. A hulking giant who told us awful stories of growing up with a part-time job in a slaughterhouse that made me want to cry. But right then, I couldn’t think of a better man to ask for help.
I made it down the stairs as quietly as I’d ascended them. I lifted the phone gingerly from the receiver like it was ready to explode. I didn’t know what might make a noise, if anything. Didn’t know if the table would rock from a wobbly leg. If the plastic would *click* from hitting something, or the dial-tone would be a little too loud. When you’re trying to be quiet, everything feels dangerous. Every movement. Every object. It’s all just another way to get caught out.
One of the reasons I’d thought of Grampa was he was on speed dial. I pressed the 3 and listened to the ringtone. I was tense at the sound, muted as it was, and waited eagerly for this part to be over. The whole time I couldn’t take my eyes off the hallway that turned towards the basement and the kitchen. Occasionally a muffled creak or groan would emanate from somewhere inside and my skin would crawl. I had never known a longer, more unsettling wait, in my entire life.
When it was finally over, there came no relief. Grampa didn’t answer the phone with tact. Old men usually don’t. I hadn’t expected the sound of his voice to be so damn loud.
“Hello! Alice! Is that you?”
It was probably just the atmosphere, but it sounded like the old bastard was bellowing the words in the very room I was in. Terrified of how that noise might carry, I slammed the phone down onto the receiver and cringed at the sound of the internal bell ringing with the force. If there really was someone in that house, they *must* have heard that.
I wasted no time waiting. I ran, not crawled, up the stairs, still trying to be as quiet as I could but putting a good emphasis on speed. As I climbed I wondered if maybe I was overreacting, but no. From the kitchen came the sound of breaking glass and clattering metal, like someone had torn a cutlery drawer right out of the cupboard and hurled it against a wall. Whatever had been in there was moving faster than it had any right to. Heavy foot falls closed the unseen distance, turning the corner and reaching the front door and stairs just in time for me to disappear over the top step and drop to the floor.
The fear that gripped me was electric. All the paranoia I’d been feeling up until this point felt thin and plastic in comparison. The way that, as a kid, you might run back from the bathroom, convinced that something evil lurked in the shadows when really, deep down, you know there’s nothing there. But this was a deep and gruelling fear. I could hear something smashing the phone and little table to smithereens and *I had just been standing there!* A visceral fear coursed through my body as I crawled on my stomach as fast as I could towards the nearest door, which happened to be my own bedroom. It made my vision pulsate and my stomach twist and churn, urging me to crawl on my belly faster and faster like a soldier dodging gunfire.
Once inside I briefly considered hiding under the bed like my sister, but something about that didn’t feel safe enough. I wanted something, a door, a wall, *anything*, that I could between me and whatever had made that noise. The closet, I decided. That made sense. It was full of old junk I could squeeze between, and a small hatch that led into the attic.
All of this flashed through my mind in a split second and I veered towards the closet door just in time to hear the first step coming up the stairs. God, whatever it was, it was heavy. I could hear the wood creak and the bannister crack and splinter as it forced its way up. I was breathing so hard now I was nearly whimpering with each movement, coming damn close to losing control over my muscles and my bladder. It felt like the finest piece of twine was holding all of me together. My body. My mind. My sanity. All of it waiting for that final thread to break and for it all to come undone at once. Collapsing into a heap as I pissed and shit myself, choking on desperate sobs and tears.
I don’t quite know how I made it to the closet in such silence. I managed to open the door and crawl inside without making a noise, and then watched in terror through the slits in the door as I waited for God-knows-what to happen.
Whatever it was, it was out there, in the hallway landing, sniffing the air. I expected some sort of animal by this point. A twisted reindeer, for some reason. Probably the season. And the sound of its hefty snorts reinforced that but, when it finally poked its head through the open doorway to look for me I saw something that was perplexingly human. Or at least, had been. Hard to say.
As a family, even now, we don’t really talk about *it*. Not before that day, not after. Not at any of the extended family reunions where all the branches of my line come together and discuss tactics for dealing with the curse. It, whatever *it* is, seems to deliberately play on our expectations. Talking about it makes you sound mad, even if it is with other members of the family. I don’t know how else to put it. You feel silly. Make the problem feel silly by extension, like you don’t need to take it as seriously. Of course, the curse is not some random force. It has a sense of… humour? I want to say. Taunting. Cruel, certainly. It hurts to admit this but everything it does. All of the dead, and there are plenty of them, for my grandmother had a *lot* of children and they all went off and had children too, so much so there were eleven households at the last reunion giving it plenty of victims to choose from. But all of it, all the pain and misery… landing on the roof, climbing down the chimney, leaving safely if it was hit by a single one of our traps…
It was a fucking game.
They were *tricks*. It was playing a trick on us, and it always had been. And these tricks were part of a game that had rules. That’s why we *had* to have a chimney because if we didn’t, it would behave unpredictably. And that’s why the thing that poked its head through my door was wearing a Santa hat and white beard.
I hate this, by the way. Hate going over how the worst night of my life was some kind of joke to *it*. But yeah, that’s what it was. It wore a Santa hat and beard and in truth, it made for a pretty fucking terrifying image. Especially to a ten year old. Wasn’t human, wasn’t animal either. Looked like a rotting corpse. Something you’d find withered and preserved out in the Alaskan Tundra only for some scientist to say it’s some caveman from the pleistocene. It may have been some kind of dead thing, actually. It was leaking a foul grey fluid from a lipless mouth crowned by yellow teeth, and its cheap nylon beard was matted with the stuff. God I can almost smell it just talking about it.
This ghoul came and went in seconds. It didn’t know which room I’d gone in, so it made only a brief sweep of mine before leaving to go take a proper look elsewhere. A part of me considered shouting out to help my sister but… well, I couldn’t have moved my arms to do that if I’d wanted to. Instead I thought of how it was almost-definitely going to take a closer look at this room once it didn’t find me elsewhere. Maybe it found my sister first, but I didn’t really want to think of that. Instead I kept imagining it returning to this place and stomping around, opening drawers, looking under the bed. And surely it would turn its head at one point towards my closet, see the slatted doors, and realise exactly where I’d been hiding all along.
I had to move on from this place, and looking up I remembered the entry to the attic accessible from the very top shelf. This was my best chance. My *only* chance, really. I began to climb, only this wasn’t the graceful and quiet sneaking I’d been relying on so far. Unlike the stairs, I hadn’t made a habit of going this way silently. I made it two shelves before I knocked an old Transformer toy off where it hit the ground with a plastic *clack*.
Another time, another place the noise would’ve barely registered. But to me and that *thing* outside it might as well have been a gunshot. As quickly as the head had disappeared that monster came roaring into my room and I began to climb with quivering arms that came close to flailing out of control.
I didn’t look back. I reached the top, pushed the hatch open, and pulled myself through just in time to hear the closet door torn off its hinges. Once through I couldn’t stop myself turning around briefly and that thing was right there, grinning at me. It *saw* me. It *knew* where I was. There was no hiding now. Only running.
This time I really did lose control of my bladder.
When one of its clawed hands wrapped around the hatch, I realised I had to keep going. Keep running. Keep moving. I didn’t know my way around the attic but that didn’t matter right now. I had to keep going. Keep putting distance, *any* distance, between me and *it*. Unfortunately the way wasn’t very clear. My family, like most, had jammed a lot of old junk into the attic. At first when I turned and saw the piles of old boxes I nearly panicked at the claustrophobic maze that faced me, but when I had to get on my hands and knees to crawl through the only way forward I came to hope that maybe it meant that thing wouldn't be able to follow. This hope spurned me on, but I was only half-way through through the tunnel of old plastic and cardboard when there came the overpowering stench of rotting meat letting me know that thing was closer than I dared to imagine.
Then, what little light there was went away.
And something grabbed my ankle.
I screamed. This was the moment I was meant to wake up. This was the moment when something was meant to happen to stop the terror. I pulled at the boxes around me and they came tumbling down spilling old furniture and photos, and I grabbed at them too hoping for some kind of leverage. But this thing was big, and it hauled me out like a hunter plucking a rabbit out of its warren.
Briefly it held me upside down and surveyed me and I stared into black sunken eyes and a gaunt face covered in lesions and pocks.
With a smirk, it grabbed something from over its shoulder, put it on the floor, and before I even realised what was happening it had stuffed me into a sack and thrown me over its shoulder.
The world became a blur. I felt my mind close in on itself and the world narrow to a point as I fought to stop my thoughts racing with images of what *might* happen to me. Of being dragged to its home where that wretched mouth would open wide to swallow me whole. Of being killed or butchered or tortured. I don’t know if you can really imagine what it was like for me, as a kid, to curl up in that dark space and contemplate my own mortality. To come face-to-face with my own death or worse. But it broke me. Irreparably and completely. To this day. I am broken because of it.
Because of that moment.
So much so that when it dropped me down with a heavy *thump* on the fireplace mantel I did not even move or try to escape. I already *knew* where it was taking me, of course. *Up the chimney*. Where else? And it was too late. The fight was lost. If anything, at this point, I wanted it to be over with. I wanted to be with Mum and Dad.
Instead the moment stretched on and on. Seconds turned to minutes and I waited with held breath for this nightmare to move on. But it didn’t happen. It must have been making preparations for… *something*, but what? And how long? Eventually I opened my eyes. Thin light made its way through the coarse fabric of the sack. Enough to let me make out a vague outline of the destroyed living room. But the opening of the sack had also fallen slightly, and a small aperture was visible where the cord that bound it wasn’t quite pulled tight enough. And there, like some strange reminder, was a broken HB pencil.
A tiny little piece of my trap.
One night.
One sleep.
That was all that had separated me from this nightmare. Just the day before we’d been happy, or something close to it. And I remembered that not only had this *thing* taken me, it had also taken my mother, my father, and even Alex who I knew only through ancient memories and a room my mother didn’t like letting me into. And there was a damn good chance it was going to get my sister too. All of it gone, leaving behind an empty house with broken things that no one else would care about. Not the tree. The presents. Not any of it. I felt something wash up from within me. An anger. A petulant childish tantrum. I was fucked anyway, right? I had lost everything so…
Why not?
I reached out, grabbed the pencil, and poking my head out of the sack saw that thing enter the room with my sister held by her ankle in one of its misshapen fists. She was bawling hysterically, and I hoped that with this final action I might *somehow* save her.
I crawled out of the bag, launched myself at *it*, and jammed the broken pencil into its booted foot.
Immediately it dropped my sister, and I stayed where I was on the floor, sobbing, head bowed, waiting for the rest to come. Only nothing did. Instead that thing that sighed. A bone deep weary sigh. The kind a parent lets out when they realise their toddler has been quiet for too long. With a voice like gravel, it spoke in a harsh Germanic accent, spitting some of the words from between its broken teeth.
*So close, this year. Good trap, little one, but I will not fall for this one twice.*
With one of its clawed hands it pulled the pencil out of its foot and stomped away, and I passed out before I had a chance to hear the rest.
\-
It was our grandfather who eventually found us both, huddled together on the living room floor. The next month or so was a blur. A lot changed. We were taken into my grandfather’s care. And we had to bury our parents. Not to mention moving out, sorting the home. Our contribution to this wasn’t much, of course. We were kids. But we still had to go back and get some of our things. I don’t remember much of it, to be honest.
My grandfather, years later, would sit me down and give me an account of the night as best he could. My father’s piston trap had gone wrong and blown half the living room to smithereens. Bad luck on any day, but this time it had happened the year that thing came to visit us. And with no traps left, it had a clean run into the house where it wrought its havoc.
“Only has to be nick,” my grandfather said with a stoic shrug while gesturing a cut on his palm. “Your father overcomplicate things. I told him this after that time he caused fire. Too much! Trap has to work *in principle*. Not practical. No need for compressors or pistons. That is why your pencil, ja, sent it away. You made trap, trap hurt it, it go away. Those rules. We follow rules. Give it chimney to come down. Play its game. We win or it wins, either way, it has its *fun*.”
He spat the last word. Can’t blame him. No part of that was fun for us.
But at least Grampa was honest with us. He explained the curse as best he knew it. The rules. The traps. Introduced us to our extended family from Germany, and we learned that the game is played with at least one household from the family every year. And it helps to stay in touch and talk about what did or, God forbid, did *not* work.
As for its origin. Well, our grandmother took that to her grave, unfortunately. Grampa didn’t know it. Nor did anyone else. Might’ve been something from her childhood, maybe. A deal with something she found in the woods. Who knows? It doesn’t matter.
He was a miserable man who raised us as best he could, but I could at least understand *why* he was so cantankerous and difficult. He’d fallen in love with a woman and gotten her pregnant before the first Christmas, having no idea what lay in wait. And then when he found out the bizarre truth he stuck it out, year after year, one painful loss after another. I admire him for it. Admired the way he didn’t let anything get to him, at least not in front of us.
Because I do remember some things about waking up that day. About him finding us.
I remember that the monster, having lost its game, had returned our parents to us. Only it was a little too late for them.
I remember wet sacks beneath the chimney.
Blood leaking from the fabric.
My parents were cremated for good reasons. Whatever it had done to them… well that *thing* is a sick and twisted creature, that’s for sure. I can only assume that’s why, after returning the sacks, it had taken little tags and tied them around the top, gifting our parents back to us even after it had butchered them until only ribbons remained.
*Merry Christmas little ones!* The tag read. *And so many more to come!*
#entertainment
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That year my trap did not work. They never worked. The week before Christmas we’d gone shopping as a family, first to a craft store for the kids, and then a hardware store for the grown ups. Walking the colourful aisles, Mariah Carey in the background, I’d excitedly bought a packet of orange HB pencils, flat on either end. They made me think of the scaffolding the builders had put up around school one year. Full of endless possibilities. Along with the pencils I bought a bag of rubber bands to bind them together. In my imagination I conceived of a truly fantastic catapult that would pelt the invader with marbles and thumbtacks. Come Christmas Eve my sister and I sat at one table and went to work making our own traps with the materials we had selected. I had my pencils and my sister, a few years younger than me, was busy making… *something* out of pipe cleaners and play-doh. I remember scoffing at her and thinking whatever she had in mind wouldn’t even work.
On a table beside us, our mother made her own traps. I always remember thinking that the grown ups put no real imagination into their creations, but every year the sight of them would turn my stomach nonetheless. Mum liked broken lightbulbs hung on ropes, and this year she prepared another five or six to be nailed to the inside of the chimney. She also fashioned some heavy wooden planks with dozens of old rusty nails and bent jagged knives driven into them. She always made the same things, and would stand at her table every year furiously sawing or hammering with sweat pouring down her forehead.
Dad did his work in the garage. He had a welder’s torch in there and something called a lathe and all sorts of other interesting tools. His traps were almost always made of rusted metal and razor sharp edges. Creaking hinges and quivering springs that made even my childish fingers weary. When he finally emerged from his workshop this year he revealed a funny looking contraption that looked to me like some sort of cannon with a large air canister attached. The sort of thing I’d seen on diver’s backs. When a pressure plate was triggered, a sharp-looking metal spear came shooting three feet out of the barrel in a heart-stopping explosion. Dad grinned with pride when we all jumped back during the test fire. Then he spent thirty minutes swearing angrily as he tried to reload the spike.
After that he set about hiding it in the fireplace. This involved digging a hole and there was a brief moment as he knelt there, covered in soot, where he reached his hand out towards me and called me Alex, asking me to grab the gas canister and bring it over. Before I could even try and do what he asked, Mum intervened and did it instead. Of course she could not pick it up, so she had to sort of roll-walk it over. Dad was quiet the entire time. That happened whenever someone mentioned my older brother. People went quiet.
*He* could’ve picked up the gas canister easily. He had always been big, even bigger than Dad. He took after Grampa who was a giant at 6’ 5. In later years, my PE teacher would lament I never got those genes. My sister and I both took after our father who, while big, was no giant.
After all this was done. After the loose rock and ash was put back in place, after the pressure plate and tripwires were hidden or disguised as standard Christmas decorations, after the bear traps were draped with old clothes or empty boxes and Mum’s knife-covered planks were placed beneath meticulously crafted false-floors, my sister and I gave Mum and Dad our traps and they were placed carefully in the middle of the ambush.
I loved this moment. I don’t know why. I think, looking back, it was the feeling of being a unit. A family. *We helped*. I was still scared of the dark and my sister had barely mastered the toilet, but we were *helping* and good God, ever since Alex had gone I’d wanted to help so bad. The shape of my older brother was a vague one. I loved him, but I didn’t really know him. Couldn’t have, given my age. Instead, I grew up in a world where Mum and Dad cried a lot and fought even more and sometimes they themselves would admit they fought over nothing at all. They fought because it hurt. Because even after my sister had been born, they still couldn’t bring themselves to touch Alex’s room, or to even really acknowledge that he’d existed without it causing a painful, sullen silence.
So for that brief moment where we stood surveying the fireplace and living room, it felt like our version of the perfect happy family.
After that it was bedtime for my sister and I. We liked our special Christmas beds. I liked that they were cozy and special and that Mum would put the telly on and turn the volume all the way up and no one cared if we ate too much candy or even watched films we weren’t allowed to watch. So long as we stayed in the basement it was fine. We had all these blankets and pillows so we could make forts, and no one came down to check if we were asleep at a good time. Despite all the excitement though we usually never made it past midnight. There was only so much our little bodies could handle.
Mum and Dad though, they stayed up. I thought that was normal. You don’t know how much your parents sacrificed until you become one yourself. Never appreciated what it meant for my Dad, mid forties by this point, to stand upright and stay awake all night, or for my mum to do the same. The two of them, all night, shaking each other awake when the other one started to flag.
That was the year I lost the privilege of ignorance. Isn’t it funny how the best and worst moments of your life often overlap? Maybe it’s just the lightbulb effect. I don’t know. That night my sister and I went down into the basement, climbed into our blanket forts, and watched The Neverending Story. She fell asleep ten minutes in. I stayed up and watched every second of it. I can still see all that in my mind as clear as day. Feels like one of the happiest and purest moments of my life. Falling asleep on the credits, gently dreaming of what it might be like to have my own dragon to fly over school… I think that was it. The last time I was just a child. I think most of us have memories like that, don’t we? The moment in time when we stopped being kids.
Next thing I remember was coming to bathed in a cold grey light. Eyes heavy. Head woozy. Something was wrong and I could feel it. It was quiet, cold with a draft, and my sister was nowhere to be seen. It took me a moment to realise that the lights were off, along with the TV, and I was seeing the basement only by the glow of the upstairs hallway. That was unusual. Mum and Dad always locked the basement door and barred it from the other side. Tonight it was wide open and something about the world up there seemed sinister to my childish eyes. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. I’d woken up and something was *wrong*.
I sat upright and slinked out of bed in the hope that any moment I’d see a better, happier world coming down those stairs. Mum and Dad, sister in arms, telling me Christmas was here. They’d just let me sleep in. Maybe it had even snowed. Maybe that was why the light seemed so… odd. Pale and diffused. God I wanted a white Christmas so badly. It was all over the telly. In movies and magazines. But all it ever seemed to do around us at that time of year was rain in a fine wet drizzle. Black windows come night. Heavy winds. Puddles that reflected street lamps. My only memory of my grandmother was her singing *rain rain go away, come back another day*. Nothing else. Not a face. Just the sound of her singing that old nursery rhyme. Like Alex, she was another person I knew largely through the grief she left behind in others.
I climbed the basement stairs on my hands and feet, following some hidden instinct to be quiet. Years of sneaking around to listen to Mum and Dad’s fevered arguments had taught me to always put my weight on the edge of the steps where they were strongest. Whenever I spied them mid-fight Mum would be standing somewhere looking thin and sad, arms crossed, with the smell of cigarettes strong in the air. I thought of this as I reached the top, pausing to sniff the air, wondering if I might smell smoke coming from somewhere further in the house. Instead I picked out a gentle whiff of something burned. Not dissimilar to the smell of party poppers or old fireworks. Certainly nothing like old cigarettes. And there was something else in there too. Something behind that black and sooty odour. Something metallic. Almost sweet.
Eventually I looked, lifting my head over the final step and peering left and right down the hallway that stretched either side. For a long time there was nothing and I stayed in place, frozen by indecision. But then somewhere to the right, near the kitchen doorway, the cold morning light that filtered through seemed to shift and move. Someone was in there, surely. Moving around and casting shadows. Of course it could be Mum or Dad, I told myself, but I still did not move. Whoever it was, they were silent.
Deathly so.
When I finally got the courage to move, it was to go in the opposite direction. Not yet ten years old, but even a child has an animal’s instincts, and mine were telling me to avoid anyone who was that quiet. So I crawled towards the living room, letting the old carpet absorb the sound of my movements. When I looked inside I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. It was like a bomb had gone off. The sofa was torn to shreds. The coffee table lay in pieces. All of our Christmas decorations lay crushed beneath broken floorboards and ripped up carpet. The bear traps stood upright, their teeth locked, their jaws snapped shut. Dad’s piston was in two bits. The oxygen canister embedded in one wall. The barrel bent and lying on the floor. The sight of our traps destroyed set something off in me. I hadn’t thought of it until that moment but they had always been an integral part of our Christmas decorations. A little different to the usual fare, sure. But every bit as important to us as anyone else’s homemade decorations. Everywhere I looked there was another little bit of our history lying in a broken heap and it broke my little heart because I so desperately wanted to fix them, to return the living room to the pristine state it had been in the night before when we’d been a happy family.
I wondered if maybe Dad’s little invention had gone wrong, somehow. One year he nearly burned the house down, so it wasn’t strange to think that dangerous looking piston was responsible for all that destruction. All that pressure building up.
Still no sign of my family, though. Didn’t look like they’d been caught by anything, either. No blood. Back in the hallway, I looked at the light cast by the kitchen door. There was no further movement, but I didn’t trust the stillness in the air. Wrong. All wrong. Best chance now was to try upstairs. Same game as before, really. It involved making my way to the front door where the stairs leading up were near, and then slowly, and carefully climbing them on all fours. I knew these steps *very* well, and disappeared up them as stealthily as anyone could hope to.
My bedroom was empty. So was my sister’s. She had a big window so I got a good look at the world outside and saw the sun was well on its way to rising. Early morning light and a heavy fog made everything look washed out and faded. Eerie too. Like the world was holding its breath. In a way, it was. My parent’s bedroom looked empty too, at a glance, and I almost moved on without noticing the strange and heavy shadow beneath their bed. I’m glad I didn’t. I lingered and looked a little harder. Something about the light down there convinced me it wasn’t empty, not like normal. And before I had any time for my imagination to start conjuring up nightmares, my sister’s face appeared from the gloom.
I nearly yelped with joy, but the expression she wore was as serious as they come. Not just afraid or concerned, but almost sick. Pale with wide eyes. It was like she couldn’t quite register my presence. So I slinked forward and reached out, touching her hand. She flinched and receded further into the darkness. Something was wrong, so I crawled in beside her and checked her for injuries, doing my best not to alarm her further. She looked fine, so all I could do was take her in my arms and try my best to coax her out of her shock.
When I finally whispered a question, it felt far too loud, even though the only real sound was the smacking of my lips. She recoiled a little when I spoke, making me feel like I’d broken the most precious silence of our lives. But I had to ask. I had to know.
“Where’s Mum and Dad?”
She merely shook her head. So I asked again, this time trying my best to stay even quieter. But it seemed like any sound was going to alarm her.
“Where are they?”
In the end she replied only so that I would stop asking. She pulled away as she did so. She loved me but… well, she was an animal with a hiding place, and I was at risk of ruining it.
“He took them up there,” was the only thing she’d say while pointing at the roof. Those five words chilled me to the core. They carried some subtle implication that our parents were dead. I didn’t like this thought. It made my skin itch, made the space we’d crawled into feel too small and uncomfortable. A hot sensation began to well up in my throat, threatening tears. Was she really saying we were alone? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted them to come back and sweep us up in their arms.
Without really knowing why, I refused to believe her. I shook my head and crawled out from under the bed, hoping to go off and find them. I looked back briefly to see if she followed but she remained. Seeming all too ready to leave me to go off to my fate, she disappeared into the shadows and I was left with only the slim comfort that she might at least be safe there.
Out of sight. Out of mind.
Crawling out of our parents’ bedroom, I realised I had very few options left. There was the phone in the downstair’s landing, by the front door. It was that or maybe I could run down the lane and out to the nearest house, which was maybe a quarter mile away. Not far under normal circumstances, but did I really want to go sprinting out the front door, hoping to God that whatever had marched through all those traps like nothing wouldn’t see me running out in the open?
Better to get help to come to *us*. Better to reach the phone. I thought of Grampa. Mum’s dad. A hulking man who generally terrified us all. A cantankerous old widower who had a bad habit of telling us things Mum said we shouldn’t know, like how it was our Grandmother’s fault we had to be scared of the chimney at Christmas. I didn’t like him. He smelt of mildew and soil. A hulking giant who told us awful stories of growing up with a part-time job in a slaughterhouse that made me want to cry. But right then, I couldn’t think of a better man to ask for help.
I made it down the stairs as quietly as I’d ascended them. I lifted the phone gingerly from the receiver like it was ready to explode. I didn’t know what might make a noise, if anything. Didn’t know if the table would rock from a wobbly leg. If the plastic would *click* from hitting something, or the dial-tone would be a little too loud. When you’re trying to be quiet, everything feels dangerous. Every movement. Every object. It’s all just another way to get caught out.
One of the reasons I’d thought of Grampa was he was on speed dial. I pressed the 3 and listened to the ringtone. I was tense at the sound, muted as it was, and waited eagerly for this part to be over. The whole time I couldn’t take my eyes off the hallway that turned towards the basement and the kitchen. Occasionally a muffled creak or groan would emanate from somewhere inside and my skin would crawl. I had never known a longer, more unsettling wait, in my entire life.
When it was finally over, there came no relief. Grampa didn’t answer the phone with tact. Old men usually don’t. I hadn’t expected the sound of his voice to be so damn loud.
“Hello! Alice! Is that you?”
It was probably just the atmosphere, but it sounded like the old bastard was bellowing the words in the very room I was in. Terrified of how that noise might carry, I slammed the phone down onto the receiver and cringed at the sound of the internal bell ringing with the force. If there really was someone in that house, they *must* have heard that.
I wasted no time waiting. I ran, not crawled, up the stairs, still trying to be as quiet as I could but putting a good emphasis on speed. As I climbed I wondered if maybe I was overreacting, but no. From the kitchen came the sound of breaking glass and clattering metal, like someone had torn a cutlery drawer right out of the cupboard and hurled it against a wall. Whatever had been in there was moving faster than it had any right to. Heavy foot falls closed the unseen distance, turning the corner and reaching the front door and stairs just in time for me to disappear over the top step and drop to the floor.
The fear that gripped me was electric. All the paranoia I’d been feeling up until this point felt thin and plastic in comparison. The way that, as a kid, you might run back from the bathroom, convinced that something evil lurked in the shadows when really, deep down, you know there’s nothing there. But this was a deep and gruelling fear. I could hear something smashing the phone and little table to smithereens and *I had just been standing there!* A visceral fear coursed through my body as I crawled on my stomach as fast as I could towards the nearest door, which happened to be my own bedroom. It made my vision pulsate and my stomach twist and churn, urging me to crawl on my belly faster and faster like a soldier dodging gunfire.
Once inside I briefly considered hiding under the bed like my sister, but something about that didn’t feel safe enough. I wanted something, a door, a wall, *anything*, that I could between me and whatever had made that noise. The closet, I decided. That made sense. It was full of old junk I could squeeze between, and a small hatch that led into the attic.
All of this flashed through my mind in a split second and I veered towards the closet door just in time to hear the first step coming up the stairs. God, whatever it was, it was heavy. I could hear the wood creak and the bannister crack and splinter as it forced its way up. I was breathing so hard now I was nearly whimpering with each movement, coming damn close to losing control over my muscles and my bladder. It felt like the finest piece of twine was holding all of me together. My body. My mind. My sanity. All of it waiting for that final thread to break and for it all to come undone at once. Collapsing into a heap as I pissed and shit myself, choking on desperate sobs and tears.
I don’t quite know how I made it to the closet in such silence. I managed to open the door and crawl inside without making a noise, and then watched in terror through the slits in the door as I waited for God-knows-what to happen.
Whatever it was, it was out there, in the hallway landing, sniffing the air. I expected some sort of animal by this point. A twisted reindeer, for some reason. Probably the season. And the sound of its hefty snorts reinforced that but, when it finally poked its head through the open doorway to look for me I saw something that was perplexingly human. Or at least, had been. Hard to say.
As a family, even now, we don’t really talk about *it*. Not before that day, not after. Not at any of the extended family reunions where all the branches of my line come together and discuss tactics for dealing with the curse. It, whatever *it* is, seems to deliberately play on our expectations. Talking about it makes you sound mad, even if it is with other members of the family. I don’t know how else to put it. You feel silly. Make the problem feel silly by extension, like you don’t need to take it as seriously. Of course, the curse is not some random force. It has a sense of… humour? I want to say. Taunting. Cruel, certainly. It hurts to admit this but everything it does. All of the dead, and there are plenty of them, for my grandmother had a *lot* of children and they all went off and had children too, so much so there were eleven households at the last reunion giving it plenty of victims to choose from. But all of it, all the pain and misery… landing on the roof, climbing down the chimney, leaving safely if it was hit by a single one of our traps…
It was a fucking game.
They were *tricks*. It was playing a trick on us, and it always had been. And these tricks were part of a game that had rules. That’s why we *had* to have a chimney because if we didn’t, it would behave unpredictably. And that’s why the thing that poked its head through my door was wearing a Santa hat and white beard.
I hate this, by the way. Hate going over how the worst night of my life was some kind of joke to *it*. But yeah, that’s what it was. It wore a Santa hat and beard and in truth, it made for a pretty fucking terrifying image. Especially to a ten year old. Wasn’t human, wasn’t animal either. Looked like a rotting corpse. Something you’d find withered and preserved out in the Alaskan Tundra only for some scientist to say it’s some caveman from the pleistocene. It may have been some kind of dead thing, actually. It was leaking a foul grey fluid from a lipless mouth crowned by yellow teeth, and its cheap nylon beard was matted with the stuff. God I can almost smell it just talking about it.
This ghoul came and went in seconds. It didn’t know which room I’d gone in, so it made only a brief sweep of mine before leaving to go take a proper look elsewhere. A part of me considered shouting out to help my sister but… well, I couldn’t have moved my arms to do that if I’d wanted to. Instead I thought of how it was almost-definitely going to take a closer look at this room once it didn’t find me elsewhere. Maybe it found my sister first, but I didn’t really want to think of that. Instead I kept imagining it returning to this place and stomping around, opening drawers, looking under the bed. And surely it would turn its head at one point towards my closet, see the slatted doors, and realise exactly where I’d been hiding all along.
I had to move on from this place, and looking up I remembered the entry to the attic accessible from the very top shelf. This was my best chance. My *only* chance, really. I began to climb, only this wasn’t the graceful and quiet sneaking I’d been relying on so far. Unlike the stairs, I hadn’t made a habit of going this way silently. I made it two shelves before I knocked an old Transformer toy off where it hit the ground with a plastic *clack*.
Another time, another place the noise would’ve barely registered. But to me and that *thing* outside it might as well have been a gunshot. As quickly as the head had disappeared that monster came roaring into my room and I began to climb with quivering arms that came close to flailing out of control.
I didn’t look back. I reached the top, pushed the hatch open, and pulled myself through just in time to hear the closet door torn off its hinges. Once through I couldn’t stop myself turning around briefly and that thing was right there, grinning at me. It *saw* me. It *knew* where I was. There was no hiding now. Only running.
This time I really did lose control of my bladder.
When one of its clawed hands wrapped around the hatch, I realised I had to keep going. Keep running. Keep moving. I didn’t know my way around the attic but that didn’t matter right now. I had to keep going. Keep putting distance, *any* distance, between me and *it*. Unfortunately the way wasn’t very clear. My family, like most, had jammed a lot of old junk into the attic. At first when I turned and saw the piles of old boxes I nearly panicked at the claustrophobic maze that faced me, but when I had to get on my hands and knees to crawl through the only way forward I came to hope that maybe it meant that thing wouldn't be able to follow. This hope spurned me on, but I was only half-way through through the tunnel of old plastic and cardboard when there came the overpowering stench of rotting meat letting me know that thing was closer than I dared to imagine.
Then, what little light there was went away.
And something grabbed my ankle.
I screamed. This was the moment I was meant to wake up. This was the moment when something was meant to happen to stop the terror. I pulled at the boxes around me and they came tumbling down spilling old furniture and photos, and I grabbed at them too hoping for some kind of leverage. But this thing was big, and it hauled me out like a hunter plucking a rabbit out of its warren.
Briefly it held me upside down and surveyed me and I stared into black sunken eyes and a gaunt face covered in lesions and pocks.
With a smirk, it grabbed something from over its shoulder, put it on the floor, and before I even realised what was happening it had stuffed me into a sack and thrown me over its shoulder.
The world became a blur. I felt my mind close in on itself and the world narrow to a point as I fought to stop my thoughts racing with images of what *might* happen to me. Of being dragged to its home where that wretched mouth would open wide to swallow me whole. Of being killed or butchered or tortured. I don’t know if you can really imagine what it was like for me, as a kid, to curl up in that dark space and contemplate my own mortality. To come face-to-face with my own death or worse. But it broke me. Irreparably and completely. To this day. I am broken because of it.
Because of that moment.
So much so that when it dropped me down with a heavy *thump* on the fireplace mantel I did not even move or try to escape. I already *knew* where it was taking me, of course. *Up the chimney*. Where else? And it was too late. The fight was lost. If anything, at this point, I wanted it to be over with. I wanted to be with Mum and Dad.
Instead the moment stretched on and on. Seconds turned to minutes and I waited with held breath for this nightmare to move on. But it didn’t happen. It must have been making preparations for… *something*, but what? And how long? Eventually I opened my eyes. Thin light made its way through the coarse fabric of the sack. Enough to let me make out a vague outline of the destroyed living room. But the opening of the sack had also fallen slightly, and a small aperture was visible where the cord that bound it wasn’t quite pulled tight enough. And there, like some strange reminder, was a broken HB pencil.
A tiny little piece of my trap.
One night.
One sleep.
That was all that had separated me from this nightmare. Just the day before we’d been happy, or something close to it. And I remembered that not only had this *thing* taken me, it had also taken my mother, my father, and even Alex who I knew only through ancient memories and a room my mother didn’t like letting me into. And there was a damn good chance it was going to get my sister too. All of it gone, leaving behind an empty house with broken things that no one else would care about. Not the tree. The presents. Not any of it. I felt something wash up from within me. An anger. A petulant childish tantrum. I was fucked anyway, right? I had lost everything so…
Why not?
I reached out, grabbed the pencil, and poking my head out of the sack saw that thing enter the room with my sister held by her ankle in one of its misshapen fists. She was bawling hysterically, and I hoped that with this final action I might *somehow* save her.
I crawled out of the bag, launched myself at *it*, and jammed the broken pencil into its booted foot.
Immediately it dropped my sister, and I stayed where I was on the floor, sobbing, head bowed, waiting for the rest to come. Only nothing did. Instead that thing that sighed. A bone deep weary sigh. The kind a parent lets out when they realise their toddler has been quiet for too long. With a voice like gravel, it spoke in a harsh Germanic accent, spitting some of the words from between its broken teeth.
*So close, this year. Good trap, little one, but I will not fall for this one twice.*
With one of its clawed hands it pulled the pencil out of its foot and stomped away, and I passed out before I had a chance to hear the rest.
\-
It was our grandfather who eventually found us both, huddled together on the living room floor. The next month or so was a blur. A lot changed. We were taken into my grandfather’s care. And we had to bury our parents. Not to mention moving out, sorting the home. Our contribution to this wasn’t much, of course. We were kids. But we still had to go back and get some of our things. I don’t remember much of it, to be honest.
My grandfather, years later, would sit me down and give me an account of the night as best he could. My father’s piston trap had gone wrong and blown half the living room to smithereens. Bad luck on any day, but this time it had happened the year that thing came to visit us. And with no traps left, it had a clean run into the house where it wrought its havoc.
“Only has to be nick,” my grandfather said with a stoic shrug while gesturing a cut on his palm. “Your father overcomplicate things. I told him this after that time he caused fire. Too much! Trap has to work *in principle*. Not practical. No need for compressors or pistons. That is why your pencil, ja, sent it away. You made trap, trap hurt it, it go away. Those rules. We follow rules. Give it chimney to come down. Play its game. We win or it wins, either way, it has its *fun*.”
He spat the last word. Can’t blame him. No part of that was fun for us.
But at least Grampa was honest with us. He explained the curse as best he knew it. The rules. The traps. Introduced us to our extended family from Germany, and we learned that the game is played with at least one household from the family every year. And it helps to stay in touch and talk about what did or, God forbid, did *not* work.
As for its origin. Well, our grandmother took that to her grave, unfortunately. Grampa didn’t know it. Nor did anyone else. Might’ve been something from her childhood, maybe. A deal with something she found in the woods. Who knows? It doesn’t matter.
He was a miserable man who raised us as best he could, but I could at least understand *why* he was so cantankerous and difficult. He’d fallen in love with a woman and gotten her pregnant before the first Christmas, having no idea what lay in wait. And then when he found out the bizarre truth he stuck it out, year after year, one painful loss after another. I admire him for it. Admired the way he didn’t let anything get to him, at least not in front of us.
Because I do remember some things about waking up that day. About him finding us.
I remember that the monster, having lost its game, had returned our parents to us. Only it was a little too late for them.
I remember wet sacks beneath the chimney.
Blood leaking from the fabric.
My parents were cremated for good reasons. Whatever it had done to them… well that *thing* is a sick and twisted creature, that’s for sure. I can only assume that’s why, after returning the sacks, it had taken little tags and tied them around the top, gifting our parents back to us even after it had butchered them until only ribbons remained.
*Merry Christmas little ones!* The tag read. *And so many more to come!*
#entertainment
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