Page 21 of The Krampus' Queen
The lights drop behind us, and the glass wall vanishes.
“Oh my god,” I gasp.
Children, with their tiny heads bent, scoop up armfuls of coal to deposit into buckets. Dangerous dust smears over their TMNT pajamas, their Christmas socks black with filth. They don’t say a word, their eyes dead as they dump the coal into a cart then return to gather up more.
“How…how could you?” I gasp, slapping a hand over my mouth to stop a scream.
“You ask me that after spending a night with the youngest DeVere?”
“That’s different.”
Krampus twists his head. “How so?”
“He’s a spoiled rich brat and they’re…” I blink and stare harder. Where I once saw gaunt faces desiccated from hunger they shift into a smear of coal on rather robust cheeks. Despite the hard labor, their pajamas are holding up well with nary a tear in a hem. No tissue-thin knockoff could survive more than fifteen minutes down here. Is that seven-year-old wearing makeup and a tennis bracelet?
“So they’re well off, too. That doesn’t give you the right to abduct children, to force them to mine your coal for you just because they’re naughty. What’s the worst they could do? Pull their sister’s hair? Put a bug in a teacher’s desk?”
A long claw slips out of the Krampus’ sleeve. “That boy killed a stray cat.”
“What?”
“And that one pushed his grandmother down the stairs.” He points to another child who’s refused to work, his lip jutted out in a pout.
“That’s…that’s a lot but— Is she alive?”
“I don’t know.”
Okay, killing animals is the number one sign of becoming a serial killer. And the grandma thing, I don’t even know where to start with that. But they’re still kids. “Just because they’re a danger to pets and…people.” I gulp again at the grandma-murderer. “Doesn’t mean you can kidnap them. What about their families? They have to be traumatized.” To wake up on Christmas morning without their kids…even if one did try to off Granny.
A whistle breaks out like it’s break time. Two children covered in soot drop their buckets. They’re all smiles as they turn expectantly toward a door I hadn’t seen before. Leaping over the others still trudging on without end, they tug on the knob. White light pours from the door. They don’t even blink as they leap through it.
“What was that?” I gasp.
As soon as it happened, it didn’t. The door closes and fades to nothing. Strangest of all, the other children don’t even look up as two of them leave. All they do is work, their heads heavy with exhaustion… Or is it shame? Regret? Guilt?
“Once their penance is paid, they return through the same door as yours, back to their Christmas beds, forgetting every second they were here.”
“But why? If they’re just going to forget everything they did here, what’s the point?”
He leans on his staff as if he’s carrying the whole world on his shoulders. “They may forget their time here, but they’ll forever remember the punishment in the back of their minds. Of paying their penance for a crime no one else noticed. No one but the Krampus.” His chest puffs up, his head rising until the horns brush against the ceiling under the hood. A chill warps around him despite the boiling heat of the cavern. I shiver, my skin prickling as my brain realizes a wild animal stands beside me.
A single laugh rips off the fur, raising the man to the surface. “And I leave a little reminder on their mantle every year after to make sure they’re staying on the straight and narrow.”
That doesn’t sound so bad. Far too many parents are willing to look the other way when little Susie bullies another kid to the point of night terrors. Or Randy…murders his grandmother? I am never getting over that. In a world where justice is only awarded to the wealthy and never their victims, does an eight-foot-tall kidnapping goat-man seem like such a bad thing?
“How long are they here?” Even if they forget, they still have to suffer the aches of moving coal, of stale water and moldy bread. That isn’t fair.
“A day,” Krampus says and I wheel back on him.
“A day?”
“More or less. It depends upon the severity of their crime and…” He points to the grandma pusher. “…if they’re willing to do the work.”
The others are at least trying, while he stubbornly refuses to move. When one girl places his bucket close, he kicks it over.
“Sometimes they add time to their sentence as well. I have no control over it. I’m merely the vessel for collecting the lost lambs. They decide their fate.” He turns to me, his chin jutting out of the shadows of his hood. “They write their tabula, as it were.”
Funny.
