Arka was not prone to the fantastical – a strange quality for one who distinctly remembered that not 24 hours before he had been a horse, to be sure. But the same experience made the sudden appearance of a green, furry creature with a smile too crooked at the margins a little easier to swallow. He sensed that even if he hadn’t wanted to accept the new presence in his house he would have had little choice. His gun was gone – spirited to some corner of the room, shattered in to its component parts and now useless – but he didn’t really care. There was something so hypnotizing about the King Demon’s smile, disarming in his even tone.
If Arka were a different man, he would have found the Grinch’s idealism hard to refuse. As it was he was just disappointed the demon had promised no harm would come to his family no matter his decision. That was kind of the whole point, wasn’t it?
Some force he didn’t recognize begged him to go with the Grinch despite the acrid flavor the demon’s speech left him with. He was left with two choices floating up from the murky depths of his consciousness, struggling to break through the Grinch’s spell. He could fight the Grinch for invading his home, join with whatever merry band was outside waiting to oppose him. Or he could join the Grinch. Neither option saw him being relieved of his wife & children, and frankly the King Demon’s talk about ‘returning Christmas to the family’ or whatever was kind of nauseating. But only one of the two choices involved wonton destruction.
“I’ll help you,” he answered, taking the antlers and tying them snugly to his head. The Grinch nodded, his pleasure with the decision accentuated further by his eerily large smile. The antlers left him with a sense of power he had not known before and he neglected to pick up his gun again, though he had the sense the green fuzzball calling the shots wouldn’t have minded so much now that Arka was proving to be helpful.
“Let’s just go,” he said, in reference to the notion that he should tell his wife and children to go back to bed. None of the aforementioned appeared to have left their mattresses, cowed by fear and uncertainty. Disgusting.
The imperative driving their mission made the notion of shoes and a shirt obsolete, leaving the house alongside his new companions with just a pair of sweatpants on. He sensed the eagerness wasn’t entirely his own, some magic from the Grinch. But the King Demon had found an exceptionally willing participant in Arka and he had little trouble riding the waves of otherworldly persuasion. The cold bit viciously at his skin, the snow making his feet scream for a pair of socks. But the potential drove him on, the promise the dark cul-de-sac offered. Rows of houses stretched out in the light of the moon reflecting off the snow, their windows dark – their inhabitants unsuspecting.
He would see it burn.
…to return Christmas to the family, of course.
Arka and his family lived in one of those communities where all the houses had been built at the same time to meet a demand, and therefore were all close to each other and sickeningly similar. The monotony drove him insane, made him white-knuckled and angry as he drove home from work every day (how do I remember all of this?)…but it made this current job very easy. He appreciated order, and with no house presenting more of a prize than the other, he chose to just hit them in order.
The house immediately to his right – a neighbor he knew well, though not through choice – was dark save for the faint glow of a television somewhere on the first floor. Insomnia? It would make sense. Jack was intensely frenetic – always looking over his bushes as he trimmed them, looking for conversation, too nosy, always watching and thinking and being irritating – and Arka could imagine it was difficult for him to sleep.
Loping up to the doorway, Arka took a deep breath and wound a smile on to his face, knocking on the door. With a posse of demons he assumed he didn’t really need to enter the house in such a conventional way, but there was something ironic about intruding on his nosy neighbor Jack with the same unassuming, dopey expression the man always seemed to wear.
Bleary-eyed and yawning, Jack opened the door looking somewhat bewildered.
“Arka? Is something wrong – its 3am…”
Almost without thought Arka lifted his right hand and ‘pushed’, watching Jack go flying backwards, skidding until he knocked up against the small table at the end of the foyer. It overturned on him with a crash, causing Jack to sputter and swear as he attempted to push it off of him. The power the antlers had granted Arka was not infinite, nor exceptionally powerful, but that had given him enough satisfaction for his faux-dopey grin to turn disturbing.
Stalking in to the house, his new friends skittered around him, shoulder-blades rolling like waves under their inky hides as they invaded.
He followed as they flooded in to the front room, making a beeline for the tree covering an enormous array of presents. Jack had lots of children, but it looked as if he’d cleared out every store in the county. It would be so good destroying it all. Hurrying forward he joined his newfound friends, stomping the first present he reached with a joy unmatched from all his Christmases past. It crunched under his bare foot, gift wrap tearing under his force to reveal the now-mangled body of a Batman action figure. It stared up at him accusingly.
White-hot pain tore across his skull as something hit him. Disoriented for a moment, he lifted his fingers to his face and came away with blood. One eye twitched in rage as he turned his head slowly to see Jack’s terrified wife – Martha, wasn’t it? – standing stock-still in the doorway as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just done. The vase she’d thrown at him lay in dozens of pieces at Arka’s feet.
“Stupid, Martha,” he growled at her, reaching down for one of the larger shards.
“It’s Maria, you asshole!” she shouted back, the fear in her voice egging Arka to wilder heights of excitement. She took a step back as he stalked towards her. He waited for the Grinch to say no – to mention the thoughts pounding through Arka’s head weren’t particularly family-oriented – but the command to stop never came.
Maybe that acrid taste he’d had in his mouth at the Grinch’s plan hadn’t just been coincidence.
“Does it matter?” he asked as he grabbed the front of her nightshirt in a fist, holding her in place as he wound his arm back to drive the piece of ceramic in to her throat. (And he could almost imagine it. Red was one of the quintessential Christmas colors anyway. He would be so festive, painted in her. And she would be too! A beautiful present, a Noel tableau for her children when they woke from their dreams of sugarplum fairies and crept down the stairs with excitement. Blood!)
But Jack seemed to have grown a spine, his yell and bull-like charge stopping Arka at the last minute. He let out a grunt as Jack slammed him in to a wall, Martha – no, Maria – flying backwards and going limp. At the last minute Arka lowered his head to the right to avoid Jack’s punch, shoving the rotund man off him and snarling like something feral.
“Why are you doing this?!” Jack screamed, reaching with a shaking hand to pluck the last piece of the broken lens in his glasses out before it stabbed him in the eye.
“I always thought about killing you Jack. But my new friends just gave me an excuse,” Arka answered, stalking towards the blubbering waste of air crawling backwards up the stairs to escape him.
At that moment, the Grinch materialized between Arka and his prey. Arka thought about killing the King Demon but held back, looking at the expression plastered along the creature’s face. He looked…pleased – delighted, even.
“Arka, you are doing magnificently. With your help, Christmas might just be saved. But we cannot waste time. There is an evil coming to oppose us and we must keep moving. Leave these people to my pets. Come,” he said, sweeping out of the house with six of his demons in tow. The other three stayed behind, covering Jack’s body as they devoured him so Arka could see nothing. He could only hear bones crunching, flesh torn, and screams of agony.
He wanted to be doing it himself.
But that same otherworldly insistence had him following the Grinch to the next house, taking one more glimpse of Jack’s trashed front room. The demons had left not a single present intact.
The next house was completely dark. Arka could see the shadowy outlines of some of the demons crawling up the sides of the house to enter through the chimney – some crude parody, no doubt – while others searched for another point of entry. Arka simply reached for the doorknob and, using the power afforded him by the antlers, broke the doorknob off so the front door swung open. With joyous cackles the remaining demons swarmed by him, heading right for the tree as if they possessed some sixth sense to find it.
He was about to follow when the obnoxious and panic-inducing blare of an alarm system sounded.
“Shit!” he cursed, scrambling to find the alarm-pad. The house was nearly pitch-dark, forcing him to run his hands along the walls to try and find the offending plastic interface. Nothing! Panic clawed at his throat, made him work faster and faster. Grabbing the doorknob of the small coat closet, he felt around for light-switch and was almost immediately rewarded in more ways than one. The light snapped on and he saw the alarm console blinking furiously. At this point the police had already been alerted but that worried him less than the potential for his insanity if the sound didn’t stop. It was louder than usual, seeming to pierce his very brain. He started smashing it with his elbow, the plastic screen blooming a brilliant rainbow as the computer chips inside shattered. But it went on and on and on and he couldn’t make it stop and JUST STOP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Looking down, he saw a bag of golf clubs and ripped the zipper off in his rage and haste, pulling the biggest club he could find from the bag. The cessation of the alarm was the sweetest thing he’d ever accomplished in recent memory. He considered cracking a golf joke as the security panel sparked in its death throes, but thought better of it.
Joining his compatriots in the front room he proceeded to destroying everything in sight with them. Presents were thrown, ornaments smashed, the tree uprooted from its stand and torn to pieces – a carpet of evergreen needles, soft under his sore feet.
It didn’t occur to them until they’d finished that besides the alarm there had been little resistance. Almost at that exact moment he heard something upstairs. A soft, reassuring voice…
“Do not be afraid. Stay up here, and we will protect you…”
“Th—thank you!”
The floorboards creaked as multiple people moved upstairs. Arka stalked to the bottom of the carpeted staircase, watching with eyes narrowed in predatory curiosity as a group of short creatures traversed the second floor’s landing to stand at the top of the stairs. They jingled as they walked, little red hats bouncing bells sewn to the tips. They came to stand together in perfect formation as they stared down at Arka.
“Where is your leader?” asked the first of them, the same voice that had reassured the family cowering upstairs.
“You won’t get to him,” Arka answered, tilting his head in alien expression.
“You still have a chance to really save Christmas. He is twisting your mind, don’t you see? He’s promised you nothing but falsehoods. What you’re doing is destroying Christmas,” said the little Helper, taking a step down the stairs.
Arka took a step up to meet him in the middle, hearing the demons gathering behind him.
“Honestly, he’s not taking it far enough for me. He even promised nothing bad would happen to my family, and I hope he was lying about that too,” Arka answered, grinning at the look of disappointment on the little creature’s face.
One of the demons behind him threw a coffee mug – still wrapped – at one of Santa’s helpers and it was on. Arka sprinted up the stairs two at a time, grabbing for the little creature that had told him he could stop if he wanted to, grabbing him by the arm and lifting him from the stairs to throw him over the banister towards the first floor. More elves grabbed at him, screaming in outrage. Demons swarmed around him to get an opponent of their own, a chorus of two opposing sides intent on stopping the other.
He imagined they would make an excellent Christmas jingle out of this – the kind that made people forget about Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.
Arka
whirl the wheel oh father, oh satan, oh sun