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🎄 December’s ShadowSphere Microhorror Competition
🎄 Voting Now Open — Click Here to Cast Your Vote!
Your votes will decide which three stories earn their place in the next volume of Dark Descent: Whispers From Beyond.
Christmas has a way of softening the world—until something reminds you that winter has teeth.
The lights, the songs, the cheer… they never quite drown out the things that move in the dark. Not up here. Not now. And certainly not when something colder than the snow has dragged itself into the season wearing a smile that doesn’t belong to anything human.
Some visitors don’t come for cookies and milk.
Some traditions shouldn’t be revived.
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For the Children
I plunge my knife into the fat bastard's belly. He screams in pain; I laugh. No one can hear him in the basement thanks to a little bit of Christmas magic.
I call it Santa’s Workshop, and it has workbenches, carving tools, vices, and more. Twinkling lights illuminate the space, and the pillars are painted with candy cane stripes to give it a cheerful feeling. Festive murals of reindeer, snowmen, and elves decorate the walls.
I really do love it down here.
“You’ve been a very naughty boy,” I admonish. I pick up a handheld sledgehammer, testing its weight in my gloved hand. His eyes go wide in terror.
I found Mark on the sex offenders registry, just like all the others. It sickens me what he did to those poor children. If Santa can’t protect the children of the world, then he damn well can avenge them.
Mark groans, and I turn up the Christmas music before taking the sledgehammer to his face. Blood splatters across my toymaker’s apron and snowy white beard. He isn’t the first naughty person I’ve punished, and he won’t be the last. Santa, after all, has a job to do.
I don’t care what they told me at the hospital. I’m the best, nicest person in the whole world. Because I’m making sure these evil people won’t ever hurt anyone again.
Mark’s dead. His face is smashed to an unrecognizable pulp, and he’s gutted like a fish. Time to dismember the corpse and put it in the garden with the others. But first I think I’ll make a cup of hot chocolate.
The children can sleep well from now on; Kris Kringle is protecting them. Rest assured that the naughty will learn their lesson.