Two vagrants needed to find shelter- one woman help her infant- and with them chased an uninvited chaperone. Each shared an interest in escaping the winter night. Already the cold cracked tower bells. Wind swept snow under their clothes. The creature in the red coat watched from atop a street light halo. Both strangers ran to the highest building. Windows boarded up and the door nailed shut, they trusted its promise for refuge.
The stranger pried away door panels. Frostbite ate away at his fingertips. He felt no pain, and dug all four fingers in between the panels. His screwdriver rolled away. The wind tunneled into the archway and after two panels his shoulders dropped wings of snow. At the third his head fit into rectangle and his neck sunk into the gap. He removed two more panels. Sour airbrushed the strips of glue hanging from the borders. His shoulders fit now.
He crawled through, ski boots spikes dug into the snow and slipped in after him. His black glove stabbed out. “Give him to me.” his eyes flashed from the otherside. She shook in the cold, and feared the pain numbing in her ears suffered from the same condition. She kneaded them and kept switching hands to warm the stinging. She lowered her young son, and he vanished into the dark.
“Now you-”
Her hands stung in the snow and the wind slipped through the fibers of her linens. Locomotive bearings mounted the doorway. Tracks of cold railed her back. She heard the brick solid quiet in front of her. Dust funneled into her nostrils. But once inside she felt relieve from the whip lashes of bitter wind. Even pigeons sought shelter in the high rafters. Ceiling tiles lay on the floor. They saw up four levels, and watched until they saw the birds land. The girders swung and whined, so the pair kept to the wall where the rats ran. It felt warmer the further they went, but they knew to sleep in the elevator cart- if safe. Instead they found an empty shaft with dangling cables.
Outside pistol shots lingered. They faded as the red coated menace swept the street. His shadow stopped at the street rays through the stripped door panels. His red coat brushed snow through the pass. The infant cried more, and the red shadow lowered into the light. Claws and snarled breathing peeked inside. Black eyes sparkled and thirsty teeth barred. The monster wore a thick red coat. However he left a spiked trap rigged by the door big enough to capture raccoons or stray cats. Then passed to search the next shadow.
“Let me have him,” she asked the stranger who studied the infant like half ripe fruit, then smiled as verdict came to mind.
“There’s something I’d like to show him.”
“He’s sick-” she told him. “And needs his mother.”
The stranger nodded, and felt the trembling skin of the infant with a gasping expression. “Not sick- withdrawing. One so premature- it’s dangerous.”
He pulled open the door to the stairs. It scraped the floor. The base of the well looked smooth and cozy under the stairs, but the stranger took her son up the stairs. His footsteps rattled the brass rails. Dust and fibers of lost hair sifted through the grating to the place the woman wanted to rest at.
“Your name is Bianca. Mine is Arkamel.” He didn’t look back and her child relaxed in his embrace up the dark steps. “And that creature outside is looking for little Theodore here.”
"for us both," she thought. Bianca turned sixteen in January.
Arkamel turned the corner and rose up the next flight The shaking of the platform did not interrupt his concentration. Bianca tried to hurry to grab the tails of his coat, but he floated up the steps with increasing haste while she panted and grabbed at her scar to open her throat, he hunched his shoulders, even stopped to light a cigarette. He smoked it to the filter. Bianca still hadn’t caught up to him when he dropped the sparks down onto her. They burned her hair but she felt only the living skin reawakening from its cold hibernation. Out windows in the stair tower she saw the red coated beast polish its horns clinging to the snow capped gutter before a cracked chimney. The rest of the city glowed with distant Christmas lights. The tree glowed from across the frozen pond.
“Here it is,” Arkemel told her. He found a door jammed shut by moldy cardboard. Caulk filled the keyhole and yellow paper obscured the window. The printed ink long since rubbed away left scars in the glass. In the paper long dead faces smiled under bold headlines of city prosperity. He whispered to the baby, and it laughed, tugging on his beard point. They giggled together as Bianca heaved her way up the final steps. Her pacing slowed with each sway of the platform. Bolts she heard tingle on the ground below and echo.
“Give him back to me,” she muttered to Arkemel.
“He reminds me of my days learning to resurrect dead frogs back home. Come, child-”
He placed his hands on the glass, the scars frosted, and cracks expanded until the glass shattered into mist. Bright orbs sprinkled but settled to the darkness below. Arkamel let the infant try to open the door from the otherside, but he only laughed at how it struggled to grasp the concept of a knob.
He opened the door and stood aside for Bianca to enter. She stood by and shook. Arkamel held something new. A plastic bag filled with crystal dust. The sight of it made her veins pinch. He tossed it inside, and she chased after it. The bag tore on the hardwood and spilled between the seeps. She rubbed what little she could onto her teeth. It tingled her lips and sustained its sensation for almost three minutes. Arkamel rolled gems in between his fingers. One by one he slid them on to his fingernails. The infant lost his voice in amazement, and he shuddered in excitement when Arkamel collapsed the gems into a single stone which he hanged to the infant. He tried to swallow it, but he made the gem too large.
Bianca hungered for more lotus but as the stinging subsided the more became clear to her. A heavy desk fortified the center of the room. A skeleton in a wool vest leaned back on a chair stripped of its leather, leaving only seams and staples. A revolver sat on the desk in front of the hand at rest by a box of cigars. Cockroaches already made it their home. The jaw hung open, and seemed to sigh after a day’s long work. Escaping wind whistled through slits in the window sill. Red fur blocked the window view and breathed hard against it. Arkamel took the gun, and counted the cylinder.
“How would you like to see this man live again?” he asked the infant.
The infant clapped his hands. Arkamel smiled at him and placed him on the desk. He didn’t sit up, rather attempted to roll from the desk. Bianca tried to catch him, but he rolled away from her towards the corpse. Arkamel scoped the skeleton into a bag as the infant played with the bony fingers.
Bianca touched him, and when she did his muscles tightened and he sneezed until his breath ran out. She held him, tried to console him, but his spasms and fever came back. His flesh went from white to rosy. When his cries reached a new high peak, she set him back where Arkemel had him, and the boy went back to sticking the dead fingers in his mouth. Arkemel laundered the sack over his shoulder, but left the skull out for the baby to hold. He picked the boy up. In his frail arms, the skull started laughing. First the cracks of an immature joke, but then bowed into the bellowing at the discovery of brilliantly applied crassness. The infant laughed with it, sticking his fingers into the eye sockets nostril holes. His probes tickled the skull and it sounded so clear that Bianca heard a voice bouncing between strained throat muscles.
Bianca took the revolver from the table. Her baby snug in the strange cloaked arms, she dared not fire. Arkamel smiled at her.
“Trust me, I studied Necromancy from the finest minds. You may contract me, if you ever accumulate the wages I charge. I fly all over the world, you see.”
“Give him back to me,”
“Of course, I will. But you need to follow me now. I have one more thing to show the both of you.”
Arkamel carried a jar with him. A jar that he dared not let the mother see when they first ran through the same alley to escape the frozen wind. At that time he didn’t imagine he’d ever change his plan, so he kept it hidden under layers of secret pockets. But she didn’t look on at the laughing skull with fear, but rather disgust as if interrupted by a contradicting opinion. She dipped her finger back into a pocket of lip to dig out any powder left to suck on. Arkamel took the skull from the infant, and dropped it back into the bag. He reached into his coat, and pulled out a heart floating in a mason jar. He handed it to her.held it out for her to take.
She didn’t take it but step back so he entered the hallway. The heart still beat. And seeing it process the starch thick fluid made her disgust manifest into toxin melting on her tongue. He let the infant open the jar, then he reached in and pulled the heart out. It throbbed between his fingers. “Here. I won’t be needing it anymore.”
He stepped closer, held it to her nose so she could smell the copper aroma blast when he squeezed the organ until his fingers sunk into the foaming flesh. Still it beat even as he strangled it with his talons.
Bianca reached into her coats and found the gap in her rips where after a long night, she awoke unbuttoned, plagued by terrible chest aches, and that once naked in the shower she discovered a crevasse filling with water where her organ once beat.
She knocked it from his hold. The jar shattered, and the heart still beat among the broken shards. The dust soaked up the blood. Their shoes tracked it across the wood. Arkamel walked away from her paralysed terror to the elevator shaft across from the office. He tied cables around his arms, put the infant in the sack tied around his neck, and floated down. Bianca ran to the shaft but found only darkness, not even an echo. The heart kept beating on the floor. She felt cold gusts, and looked behind her to see the curtains writhing. The window open.
Cursing the necromancer, she hurried away when she saw the red arm of the coat take hold of the sill. She fired the weapon but the bullet hit the desk. The other arm grabbed the sill, and its long horns entered first. Snarling, it almost smiled at her, waved hello, and rolled behind the desk. She fired again, and the desk drove against the doorway. She thought she remembered dying once, but it might’ve been before her recollection. The harm drooling before her didn’t strike fear. Instead it reminded her of all the decisions leading to this moment. She wanted her heart, but the winged creature already held it in his jaws, his fangs pierced its flesh.
She almost fired once more, but then she recalled meeting a small gang that told her they traded anything for the substance she broke her control for. With no money, she thought they wanted to use her in dishonorable ways, but instead they showed her their surgery room in a abandoned bus station bathroom. They told her they wanted a kidney but their boss recognized her and told them she owed too much for a kidney.
The monster flapped its wings and delicately glided down the center of the stairwell as Bianca peddled down the rocking scaffolds. Tumbling into the dark, mucus obstructing her breathing, but once she pondered why a dead person may need air she stopped breathing, and found moving no less pain inflicting, but with the power over her condition, she lowered herself in confidence that the Christmas demon may not catch her. The bottom floor warm tickled her skin. She let herself breath again, and life filled her once more as the monster dropped the heart from above. It still beat on the floor.
Bianca hurdled over the wreckage, kicked rats over, and vaulted for open way. The trap snatched shut around her wrist. The chain snagged on the tracks above. She’d been born in the city. Raised in the gutters and parking lot playgrounds. She knew nothing of traps other than they appeared in films. The windows over her head broke and glass rained down on her. The wings and red tails fluttered over her. The Krampus snarled, and lowered itself like a feather to the tracks on the doorway, where it took hold of the chain and pulled her up to examine her face. Her shoulder popped with each tug of the chain. Another three feet, she rose from the ground. He grabbed at the trap with her free hand. Bits of tackle jingled together. Pins and clips she picked at, until the teeth of the trap loosened at sight of the creature’s furry soles. She reached into the teeth, and held it open long enough for her hand to fall loose, and she landed on her hips and elbow. The monster dropped the trap, and she heard its wings flap as she tore away from the building, past the steaming street lights, beyond the fractured streets and burning barrels, through the abandoned subways to parts unknown where snow fell silent in an empty court.
Here she froze in fear as a red coated figure shuffled from the other side. This one didn’t stand eight feet tall, nor did they have wings on their back, but she took no chance and fired the last rounds. The gunpowder rose to the milky sky. A fat sack spilled. She walked closer to see an old man clutching a red hat, and gasping as bubbles choked the last life from him. Blood stained his white hairs.
She assumed, "a mall Santa is all", kicking the body and rifling his pockets. She found no money, no ID, no phone. Then concluded a madman must’ve dressed in this manner to roam the streets without persecution from nosy interlopers.
She walked more until the frostbite took the feeling from her ears and toes. Frosted cemetery gates opened, and she went inside after the familiar crying. Within she saw the Necromancer sink into a mausoleum with the infant. Rave lights flashed from the fanlight and narrow fenestras. Naked spirits climbed from their graves to join them. Slow, no matter how hard she tried to run, she hobbled through the snow, as invisible feet left tracks for her to follow, bells rang in her head, and dazed by the collisions of kaleidoscope colors, she entered the mausoleum. In the back, the Krampus awaited her with all the children he claimed in a sack kicking.
