8

It was Christmas in our own little tinseltown, and the streets were coated with a tacky shade of festive folly. Lights, strung across the road from lamppost to lamppost, dipped in the center like the jagged-toothed smile of a psychotic clown. Tinsel hugged lampposts and signs like brightly colored bristly snakes. Dancing Santas, cirrhotic reindeer, and bulbous snowmen stood to attention in windows of shops and homes.

It was festive. It was joyful. It was merry.

It was fucking disgusting.

I hate Christmas and everything the season stands for.

I hate the sense of self-importance in the church workers or the heavily religious; they think it’s their time to shine, their moment in the sun. Eleven months of regular church visits and senseless dogma all pays off when Christmas comes around and they can look down on the have-a-go Christians who go twice a year. And where have you been, hmm? I haven’t seen you since Easter.

For the young, it’s all about presents, about receiving an ocean of gifts that they barely wanted and will never play with. It is about pigging out on chocolate and flying through the day on a rush of dopamine-induced hysteria. For adults, it is a season of indulgence and a season of loss, where overeating, overdrinking, and maxed-out credit cards combine to make sure that, whatever they do over those few days, they will be paying for it for the rest of the year.

My dad was never big on Christmas, but he didn’t want me to feel left out so he did his best for me. He would buy me something small and then spend all day cooking a meal for the both of us. He was a terrible cook and he had no taste when it came to presents, but it was the thought that counted, and he wasn’t the source of my hatred for the season. I blamed everyone else. I blamed the smiley well-wishers on television, the presenters who always have a grin on camera, but are probably surviving on a diet of regret and cocaine off camera; the mail carriers, and paper boys and girls who are late and useless for fifty-one weeks of the year, but make sure they’re bright and early during the week of Christmas. Christmas is the Las Vegas of holiday seasons, coated in lights and colors bright enough to distract your attention from the misery that lies underneath.

This Christmas was going to be different for me, though. This Christmas I was going to give myself the greatest present anyone had ever given me. It was going to be a momentous occasion. Christmas is a celebration of the birth of a powerful man, a God, a leader—a name that resonates throughout history. And this Christmas, a new God and a new legend would be born. This time nothing would stop me, because I knew that whatever happened, I was going to have my first kill. I was going to do what I was born to do.

“Where you going dressed like that?”

My uncle stood in the open doorway to my bedroom, looking me up and down with glazed-over eyes. Over the past few months, he had returned to being a miserable and worthless piece of shit. His girlfriend had left him, he had started drinking again, and I also suspected that he was using drugs. He had never looked worse, and I had never been happier. Some people don’t belong in regular society; I should know because I am one of them. But while people like me will thrive in the shadows, feeding off the darkness, people like my uncle live on the borderline. They are on the edge of both worlds, close to both, loved by neither. There are two evils in the world. There are the people like me, the ones who nightmares are made of, and then there are people like my uncle, the ones who leech from society, taking everything, giving nothing back, and who have the tenacity to pretend they are normal.

Darren Henderson was also one of those people. He had nothing to offer the world and nothing to give anyone in it. He was a bully, a coward, a thug who would grow into a wife-beater, an addict, a waster. I didn’t see myself as a vigilante, but I was certainly doing the right thing, whether or not people realized it.

I stared back at my uncle, gave him a little smile. I loved seeing him like this. It was early afternoon Christmas Eve and he was already dead to the world.

“I’m Santa Claus,” I told him simply, gesturing toward my red outfit, my black boots, and the sack by my side.

He didn’t reply and merely sneered at me.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You got anything in that sack for me?”

I nodded slowly. “As it happens, yes I do, but you’ll get it later.”

He perked up a bit, but as is so often the case with the terminally depressed, it didn’t last very long. He had nothing to be happy about. “Should I get excited?”

“You can try.”

I kicked out and caught the edge of the door, slamming it in his face. I heard him groan on the other side, heard the silence that followed as he waited and contemplated what to do with himself, and then I heard him slowly descend the stairs. He had a habit of taking them one step at a time, prolonging it as long as he could, as if hoping that by the time he reached the bottom, his life would be over or, at the very least, would be a little less shit than when he began.

I stayed in my room for another couple hours, keeping a close eye on the world outside my window as it turned from gray to black. It had been like that all day. No sunshine, no joy. The perfect day for what I had planned.

I spent a couple of hours downstairs, watching tedious television. All the programs that had done nothing of interest all year now had Christmas specials on and the nation was expected to tune in. There were also firework shows, talks with celebrities, and live music. I watched with disinterest, keeping one eye on the clock.

“Are you going to go anywhere in that?” my uncle asked, gesturing toward the Santa suit.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

I paused and stared at him. I realized I could have told him every inch of my plan there and then, and he wouldn’t have remembered any of it in an hour or two. He was already slipping into the abyss, his brain bathing in a cocktail of booze, heroin, and God knows what else since he first dragged his smelly, sweaty, and worthless ass out of bed.

“I’m doing some charitable work.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Really?

I nodded.

“What sort of charitable work?”

“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“Do I?” He seemed amused at that one.

“If you must know,” I told him, “I’m helping out some disadvantaged teenagers, kids who were never as lucky as I was, kids who, without my help and assistance, might end up as worthless drunks or drug addicts, leeching from their dead brothers and pissing off their nephews.”

I wasn’t entirely convinced he would put the pieces together, but he managed to do just that. The grin faded from his face and he no longer looked pleased with himself. “I try my best to look after you, you know that.”

“No. You really don’t.”

“Your dad would have wanted me here.”

“No. He really wouldn’t have.”

“It’s not my fault things are like this.”

I sat forward, leaning on the edge of the sofa. “Really? Then why don’t you enlighten me? Whose fault is it? Is it the government? Is it your parents? Is it the little green men who sneak into your room at night and force the heroin into your veins?”

He stared at me for a moment and I sensed something happening behind his eyes. I didn’t know whether he was about to cry or whether he was about to jump up and grab me by the throat. In the end, he did neither. His head lowered to his chest and he said, “I’m sorry. I really am. I tried my best and I was doing so well. But then she left and I couldn’t face another day without a drink.” He looked at me with sorrowful eyes. “I need help.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him softly. “I’ll help you.”

“Really?”

I nodded. “Just give me some time and I promise, you’ll be a different man when I’m finished with you.”

He seemed content with that, and I was happy that he was happy, because it gave me something to look forward to.

We watched television in silence for another two hours, during which time he slipped into the abyss that had been calling his name all day. Realizing it was time to do what needed to be done, I turned off the television and walked over to him. I stood over him and watched him for a few moments, wondering just how bad one person’s life had to be for them to turn into the polar opposite of what their brother had been. He had always insisted that life hadn’t given him the breaks, but it couldn’t have been just that. You make your own luck in life and you create your own breaks; there are options, get-out clauses if you will, that can take away your pain and make life more bearable, but these options come with side effects and invariably leave you a worthless, decaying pile of flesh by the time you reach middle age. My uncle had taken every available get-out clause and now his existence was an excuse, a lie. He lived to pretend that he wasn’t living; he drowned out his mind, silenced his body, and dumbed down everything that made him human in an effort to ignore the pain, the regret, the fear, and the doubt, emotions that make us human to begin with.

I put my hand on his throat and wrapped my fingers around. I stared at his eyelids as I did so and he didn’t stir. I tightened my grip, feeling his warm flesh yield against my palm. I felt a pulse; it was incredibly faint but it was still there. He would be lucky if he ever woke up again, but there was a good chance that he didn’t want to anyway.

I backed away, picked up my Santa sack, and then left. I was heading out into the night, into the blackness and the chill of Christmas Eve, just a couple hours from Christmas morning. I was leaving my house a virgin and a child, but I would return as a man with experience. I was leaving as a nobody, but I would return as The Butcher.