A SILENT NIGHT (FOR A DEMI-GHOUL): XII

by Vincent Daemon

Chapter XII

Creature Eternal

 The beast came at Santa full force, gliding silently from the treetops it had been hiding in for hours, lurking...awaiting this exact moment. 

 Its mouth, all gaping maw, teeth, and bluish-skinned simian, like a baboon’s facial structure, came at Santa with all it had, devouring his head in one full removal-by-jaw alone. It sat upon the town’s cheap, ancient papier-mâché Christmas float Santa-throne and in one fell swoop crushed the Santa-head like an overripe late summer watermelon, splattering the children and nostalgic locals not in Dum Dums and peppermints, but bits of skull and brain matter. 

 One of Santa’s eyes exploded out of his crushed skull with such force that it landed in a baby’s carriage, right on the kid’s forehead. 

 The onlookers had all mostly frozen in the sickening terror of witnessing Santa being beheaded and having his stomach splayed open for all to see with one swipe of the beast’s claw. It was now clutching loops of innards, stuffing them greedily into its maw along with the remnants of Santa’s head. It swung what wouldn’t fit into its overstuffed mouth above its head like some odd victory maneuver, soaking the panicked, rapidly maddening Christmas crowd in every possible bit of Santa’s innards there were to be flung: shit, vertebrae, bile and the old man’s huge intestinal tumors. 

 There were those who made the mistake of catching the manic, constantly shifting gaze of the beast, being caught and drained by those horrid yellow eyes into a maddened living psychological zombification from that accidental millisecond glance. Its horrible eyes resembled those of all creatures of this world and many others all at once; seven pupils in one eye, countless in the other, larger one. Its bluish simian face was of the most nightmarish visage one could imagine, a horror in sheer concept that no single word alone could capture. Only an ancient and conceptual word, quite frankly, before an unfelt terror of some kind, could explain it correctly, perhaps. Its virtually neckless head was attached to an immense dark red skin and torso coated in tufts of fur, an anomaly of both size and standard bone structure, repulsive and most apparently not of this world.

 Its gait was wrong. Its face...wings...hyena frog-like legs. Every last thing about it, wrong. One couldn’t look away...once caught, its image got trapped forever in their minds...and their mind in its.

 The creature pulled the vile vomiting-into-hands-and-slurping-back-up-the-fluids routine before it noticed the mostly catatonic reaction from the crowd. Knowing that look well, it pounced from the gore-sluiced float to the bumbling, tripping and trampling groups of rapidly-aging parade goers, knowing a quick buffet when it sees—or induces—one.  

 In fact, it thought the little creatures funny as they tried to avoid its gaze—its swiftness of claw and maw tore a literal path of bloodshed through the crowd, from ages eight months to ninety-eight—consuming, vomiting, slurping, tearing young and old alike apart. These were true paths of bloodshed leaving a grim labyrinth of collapsing body parts piled knee deep in its wake. 

 Much like it did so many times before, when safe in its shell, shifting through dimension after dimension, and Time inside Time, forever, before this Time was even there. Only now, it was tangible: physically textured, and tastefully narcotizing.  

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Chapter XIII