Episode 11: Inexplicable and Unsavory Gifts

*Click*

Voncid:  It is the solstice.  A very dangerous day, much like all hallows, midsommar, the other thinnest of times.  We have arrived at the home of the Hutchins.  Authorities were alerted to some sort of disturbance in the home earlier when someone inside called 911.  Unable to get them to pick up after disconnection, officers were dispatched.  Upon arriving at the scene… they were unable to enter the home, and are still unable.  It has been nearly twenty four hours.  

Doors, windows, even an attempt to enter by the chimney… how appropriate for the day, have all been unsuccessful.

My associates in the Chapter of Doors are attempting to force entry by less direct means, but I believe by the time we are able to enter, the damage may already be done.  

Luca: Cid, they’re in, hallway closet.

Voncid: Let us hope for the best.  

*Click.*

Voncid:  Drink this.  It will help you calm down and will help draw the story out of you.  It’s effects should not last long, and then *gulping noises* I will leave you to your grief. 

Voncid: Try to breath.  It is over. Tell us about Christmas day.

Nick: I loved Christmas.  I always did.  I loved the version I got to enjoy as a little kid, the mix of anticipation bordering on psychosis and joy crossing into mania on Christmas morning.  When Grandma Jo was alive, they tried to restrain my sisters, cousins and I.  Everyone sat in a circle, shaking with a barely restrained present-based frenzy, with a pile of gifts overflowing with potential.

When Grandma Jo died, everything changed.  I don’t think her kids, my dad and his brother and sister, liked her very much.  A lot of traditions went up in smoke after she died.  Traditional christmas goose (or greasy chicken as my dad called it) was replaced with Chinese takeout.  The early christmas present embargo was lifted, we got to open one or even two the night before.  And finally all our parents took the official Christmas morning position of “let em rip.’

It was an absolute frenzy.  It was chaos.  Paper cuts, infighting… the accidental opening of cousin Jane’s baking lady playset by cousin Donald led to the chin biting incident of ‘95.  Dark times.

I loved the Christmas of my older childhood and teenage years.  I’d tricked my mother regarding the Santa Claus thing early

I sat awake one night wondering about the deal with Santa when I devised a plan to get the truth out of my mom.  What’s the best way I can phrase it, that will make my mother feel most comfortable about admitting it was make believe.  I think what I came up with was pretty ingenious actually: when she came in to check on me before she went to sleep that night I called to her silhouette ringed in the gold light of the hallway

“Mom, is Santa real-real, or is he real like how things in your heart can be real?”

I figured that made it sound nice, saccharine, like if it wasn’t true, I still got it.

She stood there for a long time before finally responding, a little apprehensive.  “... In your heart, honey.”

It was the first time I thought I wanted an answer but realized I didn’t.  I said I understood, but cried myself to sleep.

Still the next morning was somehow no less magical.  I was shocked, honestly.  It was like I was in on some beautiful, ancient tradition now, oh, i mean, I guess it wasn’t “like” that, that’s what it was.

My young-adult Christmases were amazing too.  Coming home, seeing my parents again, we always got along well enough that I was actually happy to see them.  Just drinking in all the nostalgia and then drinking in the spiked eggnog that my dad would sneak me with a wink.

I managed to make my mom happy-cry three or four times with “just so thoughtful” gifts.  My siblings and I got into a sort of competition about it.

My parents, they’re in Florida now, didn’t make the trip up this year, bad weather, covid, my dad’s surgery, it just was too much.  They didn’t want us to come down.  

Last night, as I was heading up to bed, the house night-quiet, the only light twinkling rainbows from the lights running around the windows, I let myself finally wonder if they were really staying in Florida, or if they’d gone to see John or Laura, my siblings.  

We don’t talk anymore.

I wish we did but we don’t.

My wife, Sara, her family has money and so she wanted this big house we’re in, and the first time we had John and Laura here… I could tell it was going to be a problem.  After that, well, politics was poison and we had some ugly fights… it's been bad lately.

Bad enough that I actually thought the presents were from them at first.

So, Christmas morning, my wife and I came down the stairs, the robe she’d gotten me as my Christmas Eve early gift wrapped snugly around me, my kids hurried over with my morning coffee that they’d made themselves, to hurry the whole process along, I looked out the windows and saw Christmas flurries adding to the heavy snow we’d gotten. Everything was beautiful, everyone seemed so happy… it all seemed so perfect.  I let myself be happy.  Today was going to be beautiful.

I love Christmas, even still.

My wife, Sara, patted the spot next to her on the big couch with a great view of the tree… maybe John was right, maybe it was too big… but anyway my son Johnny and daughter Meagan were sitting underneath it, amid a huge pile of presents, smiling Cheshire cats.

It was perfect.

It was Norman Rockwell.

“Ok, Johnny, Meagan, divy up the presents by the name tags.  Four piles, then the giftening can begin!”  I was trying to savor the moment.

Sara squeezed my shoulder.  “You rascal.”

I didn’t know what she meant but I smiled anyways.  “Hmm?” I asked.

“Where did you hide them?”

I didn’t know what she meant.  I just raised my eyebrows to indicate that.

“The gifts, silly, all the extra ones.”

It took me a minute, but I realized she was right.

There were a lot of presents I didn’t recognize.

 “Oh no, I’m not letting Missus Claus pin the extra presents on me.”

She was still smiling, I was still smiling, but I saw a little something in her eyes.  “No, Nicholas, these are definitely from ol St. Nick, even though we talked about not overdoing it this year.”

The twins were dragging a really big perfectly square package out from behind the tree with an awed “woah”.  It was wrapped in black paper with off white sort of cream colored stripes.  It had a big black silk ribbon around it.  It looked kind of like a big chocolate cake you’d get at a nice restaurant.

“Black wrapping paper?” Sara asked quizzically.

I didn’t know how scared I should have been then.  I didn’t know how bad it was going to get.  I was a little surprised, weirded out… it wasn’t the kind of joke Sara would normally play.

“Honey,” I said, trying not to laugh.  “That’s not from me.”

“Of course not,” my daughter yelled.  “It’s from Santa!”

Meagan went first, she had been born second by a few minutes, she was technically the youngest, so she got to go first.

She ripped into a chocolate brown package I didn’t recognize.  She pulled a doll out of the box inside.  Its dress was moth-bitten and so dry it was brittle.  The doll didn’t have any hair and no eyebrows painted on its face.  Something was wrong with its body shape.  Meagan frowned, but laughed, “Dad, gross,” she said.

*laughing* “Don’t blame me!”

Everyone looked at me, disbelieving.  “Really, it’s not me!”

Meagan set the doll down on the coffee table and we all realized it was made to stand on its own, but on all fours, the middle of its back hunched up like a spider.

Sara started cackling, “Oh for god's sake Nick, that’s sick.”

Johnny, taking his cue from all of our laughs, put down the present he was holding and grabbed a dark wrapped one like Meagan had just opened.  The whole thing was ridiculous, I thought Sara was making a very strange joke, she thought I was, no one knew how scared we should have been.  

He unwrapped another box and pulled the lid off.  His eyebrows shot up and he reached in and carefully lifted out an apple, chewed down to the core.  “What the heck? So weird.”

We all started looking around trying to figure out which one of us it was.

“Ugh, they stink,” Johnny said, pushing the box of eaten apples away from him.

They did stink.  They had some weird chemical smell I didn’t recognize. 

It hit me all at once.  Sara hadn’t done it.  The worry in her eyes was real. It was too sophisticated for the kids.  

“Hold on, kids,” I said sternly, standing, crossing to the tree.  There were so many presents I didn’t recognize.  All that black paper, dark cherry red ribbons, everything crisp and sharp…

If I didn’t put them there, and Sara didn’t, that meant someone had been in the house.  Maybe someone was still in the house.

“My turn, my turn,” my daughter said, grabbing up a pitch black wrapped box in her hands.

“No,” I tried to say, but the sound was drowned out by the tearing of paper.

Sudden panic shot up in my chest.  I didn’t really know how scared to be.  I grabbed the box away from her, harder than I should have.  

Something stuck into my palms.  Through the sides of the cardboard and the paper, something sharp, or a lot of sharp somethings, stuck into my hands.

I dropped the box.

Its contents hit the floor and scattered across the carpet.

Sara screamed.

Dozens of dirty hypodermic needles bounced and danced, dully catching the lights off the tree.

I tried hard not to shout and curse, I didn’t want to scare the kids.  “It’s ok, nobody move, no one move.”  I could see most of the needles had plastic syringes still attached. Some of the syringes were partially filled with some sort of black mostly coagulated substance.  I didn’t want to think about what that might mean until after I had carefully gathered them all up and double, triple checked.

Sara got everyone's shoes and told everyone to get out of the living room.

The kids didn’t start crying for a few minutes.

I got all the needles and filthy syringes gathered up and put back in the box they’d come in.  Little trickles of blood were running into the riverbeds of my palms.

We regrouped in the kitchen while I soaped and scaled my hands.

“Where’s Mittens?” Meagan asked.  The cat was the friendliest, fluffiest black and white you could ever meet.  The fact that she wasn’t purring at our feet was another shock.

My eyes slowly drifted back to the tree.  To all the boxes big enough that the sick fuck that left us these gifts could have stuffed her in.

“I have to find her,” my daughter cried.

“No,” Sara shouted, then she lowered her voice to a hissing whisper and said aside to me, “Whoever did this could still be here.”

She was right.  I told her to call the police and went to the closet in the mudroom, got one of Johnny’s aluminum bats.  “Don’t leave the kitchen,” I told them before I went to the stairs.

The stairs in our house is a big wide space that go up and down.  I figured down was more likely since the bedrooms are upstairs, and that’s where we came from, we couldn’t have missed him if he was in one of our bedrooms…

The hideous image of some sick freak hiding in one of my kid’s closets, or under their beds poured over.  I felt sick.

“Yes, hello?  We’ve had a break in.” I could hear Sara from the hall.  That was good, response times were great in this neighborhood.

I went down the stairs, slow, careful.  Our basement is big, furnished, has the bar we had shipped from Ireland, the projector room, all kinds of nooks and crannies to hide in.  I carefully searched every space I could think to check, some that were silly, too small to hide in, but I had to check.

At the end of a hallway downstairs were some guest bedrooms.  I checked closet, closet and then went to crouch down to look under the bed, when the dust cover moved.

It rippled like a wave.

Something was under the bed.

I could see a face in my mind.  No hair, no eyebrows, a big yellow smile spreading beneath bulging watery eyes… 

I raised the bat to swing, but Mittens made a noise and peaked just her head out.

I exhaled so hard I scared her back under the bed.

Some kissy sounds lured her back out.  She followed me back upstairs to the kitchen where Meagan and Johnny scooped her up in a double bear hug.

“Basement is clear,” I said and immediately felt stupid for how I’d said it.

“I’m on hold,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it.  “You’re what?”

She just shrugged, bewildered.

I couldn’t get the thought of the hairless smiling man out of my head.  I realized he looked like my brother.

It was a crazy invasive thought.

Still, I checked upstairs just as thoroughly, all the closets and beds, didn’t find anything, *laughing lightly* didn’t have any more horror movie cat fake out jump scares.  I couldn’t believe I’d had one of those in real life.  When I went back down the kitchen I found my wife still on hold.

It was fucking ludicrous.

“I am going to raise hell,” I said, red rising into my face.

I don’t know why I thought it might help, maybe I thought I could get a different, less incompetent operator, but I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to call the police myself, and saw it was actually ringing.

It was my brother, John.

The man I’d named my son for.

He hadn’t called in almost a year.  I assumed he was calling to take credit for this sick, what, joke?  No, fucking assault.

I picked up, but I was too angry to say anything.  I brought the phone up to my ear.

*electronic fuzz and static*

It was staticky, like the connection wasn’t clean.

Fuzz and silence.

Then:

*The Benefactor’s voice is dry and croaky, but with an affected “fancy” lilt to it”

Benefactor: Did you get your gifts?

Nick: It wasn’t John.  I don’t know who it was.  They must have been using something to alter their voice.

Benefactor:  Did you like your gifts?

*The static continues under their conversation*

Nick: “Where is John?”  I tried to sound strong, to keep the quiver out of my voice.  I don’t know If I succeeded because my family looked terrified when they heard me.

Benefactor:  Open your gifts.

Nick: Tell me John is ok.

Benefactor: You want me to lieeeee to you?

Nick: There was something sick and satisfied in its voice, I couldn’t stand it.  I wanted to hang up, but I also didn’t dare.

Benefactor: *Commandingly* Open your gifts.

Nick: Things I wanted to stay flooded my head.  I wanted to ask why, *voice rising in anger* why are you doing this to us?  Who are you? *voice breaking*  I wanted to beg. I wanted to promise we’d do what it said if it didn’t hurt my brother, but I knew that was a lie.

Benefactor: You didn’t want them.  You don’t deserve them… but they are yours.

Nick: The line went dead.  So did Sara’s, she shouted into the phone futilely.

I ushered the kids upstairs, we all bundled up warm, then hurried to the car.

It wouldn’t start.

We had neighbors not too far, the snow had picked up, but it wasn’t too far to go.  We bundled up even more and gathered up at the front door.

It wouldn’t open.

I kicked and battered at the glass patio door with the baseball bat until my hands opened back up again.

I couldn’t even crack it.

We all slept together in the master bedroom that night.

The only channel that would come in on the TV was some sort of QVC type thing.  The man and woman were selling some kind of really strange looking sweaters.  They leered into the camera and took way too long in-between their sentences.  We turned it off and just huddled up for sleep.

I don’t know when I actually fell asleep, I hadn’t intended to.  When I woke up the tv was on.  The man and woman selling sweaters were on the screen, staring at me.  They were watching me sleep right through the tv.

*Nick continues, affecting a creepy voice*

“This sweater… this is quite a sweater we have for sale.”

*long pause*

“You can’t find, you can’t find a sweater like this just anywhere… Nick”

“Open your gifts, Nick.”

*Yelling now*

“Open your gifts.  Open them.  They are for you.”

I unplugged the tv. 

I didn’t fall back asleep again.

The next day we found all the food in the refrigerator, cupboards, even the freezer had rotted.

Everything except the Christmas cookies we had made the night before last.

“Sara,” we have to open them.  We had gone back and forth on this for an hour.

“We can’t,” she said, her eyes wide with fear.  She said that, but we were hungry, and cold, the heater was slowly dying, we didn’t have a choice.

We went back into the living room, the twinkling of the tree now a mockery.

“I’ll go next” I said, but Sara cut me off.

“It’s my turn.  If we are going to do this, let's do it right.”

She picked one with sparkly black ribbons.

As the lid of the box slid off, she breathed in sharply through her nose.  Billowing white cobwebs filled every corner of the box.  Glossy black shapes scuttled between the silk away from the light, the red hourglass stamps on their thoraxes were plain to see.

Sara stayed calm and went to put the lid back on the box, but it wouldn’t fit, no matter how she tried it wouldn’t make a tight seal.

We thought about starting a fire and burning it, but somehow knew that wasn’t an option.  That our, I guess it was our captor, wouldn’t like that.

We closed the box of black widows up in the refrigerator hoping they’d go into torpor, stay in the box.

I was next.

I opened mine as far away from my body as I could, slowly and carefully.  Inside was tissue paper carefully laid around a shiny, circular object.  I took it out, turned it over, to see the cracked orange reflective plastic on the other side.

I knew what it was right away.  I remembered how it had rolled away from the bike, staying on its side until it fell in a storm drain.

The details you remember during a traumatic moment are so strange.

John had been driving.  He’d been on his phone.  The kid on the bike really did come out of nowhere.  John kept driving, I kept quiet.  I looked back and saw the reflector from his bike rolling away on its side…

“What is that?” Johnny asked.

“Nothing.  It’s your turn to open one.”

Johnny opened a box of black candies that stank like turpentine.

Meagan opened a deck of tarot cards, but when we looked closer the only cards were Death, the Devil and the Tower.

Sara opened a box full of blood soaked dog collars, the tags jangled as she tossed the box down in disgust.

My next gift seemed to be empty, but as soon as the lid was off my stomach began to churn.  Mittens hissed and growled from where she watched under the tree.  I had run to the bathroom to vomit up a large amount of leeches.

When I came back, I tried not to look as horrified as I was.

Johnny had opened what looked like a full set of animal organs, vacuum sealed.  Kidneys, liver, heart… We decided they were from an animal and moved on.

Meagan opened a knife, covered in rust and dried blood.  The serrated edge had hair clinging to it.

Sara’s next gift looked like the inside was painted black, we couldn’t see into it.  Then we realized there was nothing to see.  The box had no bottom and cold air gently wafted out.  There were gurgles and voices from the below.

It went on like that… on and on… When I opened my last gift, my hands were shaking.  My skin hurt from the wasp stings, my ears were bleeding from the screaming music box Meagan opened.

I opened the box, looked down and saw John looking up at me from the bottom.  Where he was, he was looking down at me, as he opened his last gift…

His had more in it than mine…

There was a snap *snap* as some spring loaded mechanism popped and a thin sharp thread slashed out under his chin. *voice shaking*  It didn’t look like it hurt.  

His head fell into the box.

It rolled up over the edge and into my lap.

*Nick pauses and tries to compose himself* 

I guess that’s it… oh, well that’s…

That was when… You walked out of the closet.

Voncid: We could not enter by the usual routes, I am sorry we weren’t able to do more.  I am very sorry for your loss.  If you would excuse me a moment.

*We hear Voncid walking into another room where he meets with Luca*

Voncid:  awful.

Luca:  The kids are… it’s bad.

Voncid:  I can imagine.

Luca: could we… you know… take it away?  Make them forget?

Voncid:  No.

Luca: we can’t?

Voncid:  We can… but I wouldn’t dare to.

Luca: You… wouldn’t?

Voncid:  No.  It was The Benefactor.  I wouldn't dare make it angry.  

*Click*