Issue 88 – Santa’s Claws

Krampus in disguise
heavy sack, red hat and coat
cannot conceal claws

By DJ Tyrer

The Bad Saint
By Harris Coverley

cutting of holly
wrath cold shaken from the tree
blood berries blister —
‘tis a season of vengeance
of ill-will to many men

Santa, Claws and the Raccoon
By Mark Hudson

Santa Claus was on his sleigh ride,
going down a family’s chimney.
He was just about to get inside,
just like a cricket named Jiminy.
He entered the chimney with boots,
the drop to the floor was steep.
His body was covered in soot,
neglected by a chimney sweep.
When a raccoon scampered up,
and scratched Santa with his claws.
So they had cookies and milk in a cup,
and Santa petted his paws.
Santa, gives to everybody,
even when his hands are bloody!

Santa’s Grotto
By Simon MacCulloch

“To Santa’s Grotto” says the sparkly sign.
An hour already trailing round the store
Or shuffling in a sluggish checkout line,
And now, when it was over, there was more.
“Oh yeah,” thinks Ruth, “That’s swell, that’s really fine.”

“I want a combat knife!” snarls Todd, and stares
With wiggle-browed malevolence at Trish
Who shrinks against her Mum and hardly dares
To whimper. “Oh dear God,” thinks Ruth, “I wish
For darkened woods with children-hungry bears.”

The Grotto, when they find it, does have trees
And furry creatures painted on the boards
That flank its entrance. Todd begins to tease
His sister with a tale of hidden hoards
With monstrous guardians. “Stop it, Todd, now, please.”

Inside (the only customers) they meet
A softly smiling Santa and his sack.
“I want a pellet gun!” shouts Todd. “How sweet.
And for the little girl?” Behind his back
The shadows promise every kind of treat.

“I want a doll,” she whispers, and her brother
Growls “Yeah! I’ll cut its eyes out with my knife!”
The Santa smiles again. “And for the mother?”
“An end,” she sighs, “To inter-sibling strife.”
The Santa nods, as if to say “Another.”

“You’ll have your doll,” he says to Trish. “For you,”
He turns his smile on Todd, “This little door,
Which only certain children can pass through,
Will take you to my special Christmas store
Where everything is made as good as new.”

The door he shows them really looks too small
For anyone, but Todd, with nervous giggle,
Gets down on scabby knees and starts to crawl,
And then to duck, and squirm, and writhe and wriggle,
Until he’s gone. “Well,” Santa smiles, “That’s all.”

“I didn’t get my doll,” whines Trish. “Don’t fret,”
Says Ruth, as they are trudging to the car.
There’s something she’s been trying to forget
And now she can’t remember… As things are
She’s happy, though she can’t say why just yet.

On Christmas Day it works just like a charm.
Trish loves her doll, though Ruth finds rather odd
Its look of wide-eyed, true-to-life alarm.
“A little boy,” says Trish. “His name is Todd.”
She smiles, and, slowly, starts to twist its arm.

Murders on Christmas Eve
By Matthew Wilson

I never did like Jolly Santa Claus
Not since he came home and killed mom
When he found her in bed with another
And knew she wasn’t on his nice list.

I can’t forgive him for shooting mom and her lover
This good man who took a winter job
Supporting his wife and son with a fat suit
All while she eased her loneliness with another.

But it’s been years now since dad died in that asylum
Screaming to the guards he was really Santa
That one day his elves would set him free
Instead he bashed his brains out on the walls.

Now I am a family man working christmas eve
Trying to bring money in anyway I can in this grotto
I try to ignore rumours that sons inherit a dad’s bad blood
And whispers my wife loves another while I work.

When Santa Lost It
By DS Davidson

When Santa lost it
The old guy really flipped
Donned Freddy Krueger claws
And the kiddies’ throats ripped
It was really awful
A most heinous and horrible crime
But the police don’t believe in Santa
So it’s the parents doing time

The Night Before Christmas
By Simon MacCulloch

The night before Christmas young Jim sits awake
Alone in a darkness mysterious and tense
And wonders what route the deliverer will take
And what he will bring in his sack to dispense.

The moon is long risen, his parents abed
His small baby sister lies quiet in her cot
The village is sleeping as sound as the dead
(But Jimmy knows dead folk don’t sleep, they just rot).

The moon is bright, icy and gazing down blindly
(Do dead folk have faces that look like the moon?)
When Santa comes, will he treat every child kindly?
The answer, and Santa, must surely come soon.

The village is huddled in blankets of snow
Reminding our Jim of a story once told
A Christmas-time legend of long, long ago
When villagers, snowbound, were dying from cold.

Then lived an old hermit, high up on the moor
His house just a shack made of roughly cut board
Grey, bitter with loneliness, terribly poor
And yet long suspected of keeping a hoard.

That hoard was of coal, or so rumour had said
And rumour, in this case, was probably true
And coal at that time was more needed than bread
So most felt the hermit had more than his due.

How welcome it was on that dark Christmas night
As shivering children sat down to cold fare
When menfolk came trudging with sacks bulging tight
To give out the coal that the hermit could spare.

And so, to remember that generous deed
On each Christmas after the sack-men went out
Distributing all that a family might need
The gifts of the men of goodwill all about.

But sadly, the woman who tried to repay
The old hermit’s kindness with personal thanks
Found all that was left on the following day
Of him and his home was some smouldering planks.

Well, that’s just a story of times and things past
It’s Santa, not coal-men, who visits us now
And look out the window – he’s coming at last!
Approaching as quick as his sack will allow.

That sack must be heavy, he moves dreadful slow
While Jimmy squints out through the steam-ghosted pane
To watch the deliverer, a blot in the glow
Who plods like a man made of mud up the lane.

He reaches the house, slouches up to the door
Young Jimmy goes back in a rush to his bed
Pretending to sleep, lest the treats held in store
Be given to children less wakeful instead.

And then the intruder climbs creaking upstairs
All fumbling and bumping as if he was blind
And here comes the sack that is full of his wares
On tow with a soft heavy thudding behind.

The baby’s room first is where Santa goes shuffling
Jim wonders if baby will wake from her sleep
But if there is crying, his blankets are muffling
And out from those blankets the boy dare not peep.

So now the slow tread comes at last to Jim’s door
And stops; and then, after a long breathless pause
Turns, leaving, and Jim can stay hidden no more
But sits up and whispers: “Me too, Santa Claus!”

The door inches open and there on the landing
With cloak and hood black as soot hiding his face
The visitor Jim has invited is standing
As silent and still as if frozen in place.

Then finally, entering, raising his head
His eyes glowing cinders, his face a burnt hole
He holds up his sack, squirming, dripping and red
In voice clogged with ash says: “I’ve come for my coal.”

The Blood on Santa’s Claw
By Aeronwy Dafies

Hoary old saint stalks Whitechapel
Offering coins to destitute young ladies
Nothing immoral, of course, no
Although no objection to some quid pro quo
In a secret alley nook
Only then reveals claws like knives
A special gift to himself
Strikes another name off the naughty list
His own in stark letters at the head

Issue 80 – Ancient Horrors

Eldritch
By Harris Coverley

an eldritch menace
hatched outwith the blackest stars
haunting the aethers
relic in the frozen wastes
lurking in some ancient swamp

this is the nightmare
beyond all of the unknowns
beyond truth itself

Mythos
By Simon MacCulloch

“Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” – H P Lovecraft, The Festival

There used to be dragons asleep in the hills
Their smouldering belly-fires charring their dreams
Alive to their treasures but dead to the schemes
Of Georges swift-circling to make them their kills.

There used to be giants and ogres and trolls
Abroad in the forests, a-prowl on the roads
But since all the princes have turned into toads
The monsters have dwindled and died in their holes.

There used to be aliens come visiting Earth
In spacecraft like saucers with kidnap in mind
But now that they’ve finished dissecting mankind
They’ve found that the trouble was more than the worth.

So now little humans go walking round tall
A plague on the Earth and a plaque on the moon
But wait – for the Old Ones are coming back soon
And walkers will once again learn how to crawl.

Atlantean Secrets
By DJ Tyrer

Once grand temples, palaces
Now hidden in deep ooze, mud
Remnants of a civilisation
From the dawn of human time
Built upon the ruins
Of a civilisation older still
As old as time
Identity obscured, forgotten
Perhaps never truly known
Mankind no longer dwells here
No longer walks streets millennia drowned
But the things that came before
Remain, waiting
Twisting and curling
Hidden in secret chambers
Sleeping, dead yet not dead
Awaiting the day they shall awake
And rule the world once more

Originally published in Outposts of Beyond (Alban Lake).

There’s a Hole in Our Town Again
By Marcus Whalbring

It appeared this time in the field behind Home Depot.
We go about our day at the bank, at the store, driving to work.
It’s better to let the singing happen as long as it needs to

because that’s usually all that happens,
hat constant knelling of what sounds like distant bells
deep below the earth, dissonant voices dwelling in the ears.

We don’t talk about it. We don’t ask the teller,
So how far do you think the darkness goes?
Instead we say, Have a good day!

Ignoring the fact that there is no ‘day’ to have right now.
We know our town is trapped in another kind of night,
the kind that was here before the first day formed.

So what if we don’t know when to sleep.
So what if, when we do, that namelessness of space
fills our dreams, its hand-shaped shadows

reaching around inside the darkness that’s already in us,
making a hole in who we are until we’re mostly sick
of who we are, bored with ourselves.

We don’t know who to blame for this. Not God.
We feel it: whatever watches from that black absence
gave us God, taught him to bore the light forth

by boring a hole in what wasn’t there.
At least, while we wait for the hole to fill back in,
for the day to come back, after we can’t keep pretending,

we can look at the stars and pretend again
that they’re little holes in the darkness
letting the day that’s still there shine through.

Or maybe they’re sentenceless periods, spoken
by someone else who means to put meaning into the void.

Maybe the someone is us and we’re not just pretending
that, when the stars flicker, they’re fighting the light they are
so darkness can, in its own way, shine.

Azzazzoth
By Cardinal Cox

Imagine two circles touching. They touch at a point and as you focus in the point remains infinitesimal. Now imagine not circles but multi-dimensional spheres containing whole universes. The pressure at that point in incalculable. 14 billion years ago – beyond the past horizon – at the point where two or more universes met in the foam of existence – a point that had no in/of itself space/time scrunched into its non-existence through a multitude of dimensions. Space with no space. Time with no time.

Then time. Ten to the minus forty three seconds later. Temperature of ten to the thirty two degrees centigrade – though there is nothing to be that temperature – temperature without existence.

Space ten to the minus twenty of the diameter of a proton. All force is one. Space/time expands in all dimensions. Not just our four of the cause/effect universe but also backwards into what would be/was the anti-matter effect/cause universe. Gravity becomes a thing of itself though there is no matter for it to be a function of.

At ten to the minus thirty seven of a second space/time expands faster than the speed of light for there was no light. Within this expansion the energy has no intention – awareness but without comprehension – referred to in the Nag Hammandi fragments as Azzazzoth. The energy that is Azzazzoth cools by a factor of one hundred thousand.

At one ten to the minus thirty sixth of a second the nuclear force becomes a thing of itself though there is still no matter for it to be a function of. Somewhere between one to the ten to the minus thirty three and ten to the minus thirty two seconds the inflation of space/time slows. Azzazzoth expands into it and it sleeps – sentience collapses into stupor. In the wake of the expansion the vacuum cools the temperature and it is spun by micro-dimensions into the building blocks of sub-particles. This is the lullaby that the pipers play to the sleeper.

All the energy in our universe comes from this point. Matter in our universe and anti-matter the other side of Azzazzoth in the effect/cause side of the inflation. And our existence is made of the sleeping bones of Azzazzoth. The energy of our atoms is the sleeping energy of Azzazzoth.

And we pray Azzazzoth does not awaken.

Ends

The Old Gods
By Simon MacCulloch

A god with a bulbous brain
And lightning bolts in its claws
So the others obeyed its laws
Though its eggshell eyes were insane;

A god with the power to frighten
With the growl of the sea in its breast
And its fangs and its lizard crest
And the grin of an angry triton;

A god with the tusks of a boar
And the snout and the temper too
With its hide glowing orange and blue
And its hooves caked thick with gore;

These gods were my childhood friends.
Now I think of the roaring sky
And the fires where the futures fry
And I wonder when childhood ends.

Belch
By Jay Sturner

The planet hasn’t been this warm for millions of years. Jungle is the new skin. A spinous beast of flesh-and-stone comes along and gnaws on the dying cities, swallows all it can manage. It meanders along the blossoming curve of earth, coughing up guns and concrete, art and cell phones, machinery and bones. Now it bays at the indifferent moon, its belly fat with the lingering screams of monochrome souls. Its gut swells, heaves, rumbles like an angry volcano. And before curling down for another million-year nap, it drops its forest-covered jaw and lets out a putrid, roaring belch—expelling the failed god of a thing called Man.

Originally published in Space & Time Magazine (2012).

The Eye in the Darkness
By DS Davidson

A single great eye
Unblinking
Staring out from the darkness
Of that abyssal void
Far, far below the surface of the earth
Wreathed in a mane
Of twitching tentacles
Grasping towards the light
Older than humanity
Older than the Earth
Older than time itself
It waits
For what, no sane mind knows

Originally published in Cyaegha

Submerged Nightmares:
Unearthly Terrors of the Hidden Depths
By Betty Ann Rohlic

In shadowed depths where darkness thrives,
Ancient horrors stir, their nightmares alive.
Beneath the waves, where moonlight fades,
Unearthly terrors, serpentine shades.
Voices of doom, forgotten lore,
Sinister secrets, forevermore.
Monsters of old, their hunger awakes,
Young hearts shiver, as fear overtakes.

Submerged nightmares rise from the deep,
A chilling dance, their secrets to keep.
Brave souls beware, the abyss’s breath,
For hidden horrors beckon, heralding death.
Beneath the moon’s pale and trembling light,
Eldritch whispers weave a haunting plight.
hrough ancient wrecks and coral’s embrace,
Unearthly terrors, a chilling grace.

Screams unheard in the watery tomb,
Lost souls consumed in the shadows’ gloom.
Submerged nightmares rise from the deep,
A realm of dread where secrets sleep.

Lullaby
(based on a classic Dutch song)
By Nieske den Heijer

Sleep evil sleep
Please keep on counting sheep
With tentacles or oozes,
So sweet Cthulhu snoozes
Sleep evil sleep
Our souls aren’t yours to reap

Sleep evil sleep
My mind I’d like to keep
R’lyeh is where he is dreaming
His lullaby is us screaming
Sleep Cthulhu dear
This is the end I fear

Undead G’harne
By Harris Coverley

some unnameable
chthonian deity
of a lost city –
dead heart of an engulfed land
pulsing to rise up again