Holly-Jolly Body Count [Wraith]
The snow falls thick over cul-de-sacs and cracked old curbs, but it hisses when it lands, eaten by rain that burns the paint from plastic reindeer and chews through tinsel in slow, patient bites,
Streetlights flicker behind the haze, halos smeared, as if even the electricity is ashamed of what it lights, of the way the night smells wrong—like burnt sugar and copper and smoke rising from candy-cane-white bones in piled-up drifts that used to be white,
Once, these sidewalks were safe for out-of-tune choirs in thrift store scarves, kids with cheap songbooks clutched in mitten fists, knocking door to door and mangling the high notes with warm breath and frostbit fingers that still trusted the dark to play nice,
But somewhere between “comfort and joy” and the second verse no one quite remembered, something else joined the harmony—low, guttural, amused in that lazy way predators get when their dinner walks itself into their bite.
They came dressed festive, that first year the sky went wrong,
Red and green cloaks stitched from nothing any shepherd ever wore, bells at their wrists ringing not quite on the beat of the song,
Hoods pulled low enough that porch lights slid from their faces like water over oil, never catching on eyes that watched too long,
Choruses rose, doorbells chimed, and the air tasted of cider, exhaust, and the metallic perfume of something badly, badly wrong.
The choir started “Hark” and ended on a scream that never made it past the storm door,
Every throat opened wide to reach that clean, impossible high note, then stayed open wider than any note required, spraying red confetti across the porch floor,
Boots slid in the mess, hymnals dropped, pages soaking up more than melted snow as new verses wrote themselves in splatter-script no hymn writer ever asked for,
Neighbors drew their curtains, turned up their televisions, told themselves it was just firecrackers, just drunk kids, just anything but what their gut knew roared.
By the time anyone had the courage to look, the street was almost peaceful again,
Just scorched wreaths hanging crooked, porch lights swinging, the faint drip of something thick from ruined gutters into puddles of acid rain,
Songbooks charred and curled like dead leaves around mics with melted heads, wires running back into the dark where the hoods had already slipped down a side lane,
And clustered in the intersection like a choir frozen mid-chorus, the carolers themselves still standing, ribs open like cracked bells, lungs gone, voices stolen, yet somehow still trying to sing through chewed throats, loyal to their refrain.
Now the town pretends the massacre is folklore, something whispered over eggnog when the kids are finally asleep and the adults’ liquor is honest,
They smile at the newscasters with their forced laughs and call it “that weird winter” while they bolt their doors and trade real candles for battery-powered tealights, swearing the glow looks just as modest,
But every December the air thickens, the sky stains sour, and the old church bells choke on whatever crawls into the tower and plays them off-key, turning worship into hostage,
And every year the dead choir comes back down the hill, shoes leaving blackened footprints in the snow, mouths full of cinders and carols warped into something that chews the edges off comfort.
You hear them before you see the glow—Not voices, not yet, but a kind of charred humming that skates across your windows and seeps through your vents, slow,
Christmas classics run backward, syllables stripped and stretched until the words mean nothing, just raw sound dragging its feet through the snow,
Then the first verse hits the block, and your spine answers like a tuning fork, whether you lock the door or not, whether you tell yourself it’s just the radio.
They don’t bother knocking much these nights; they already know which houses left cookies and milk on the table as if sugar bribes could buy mercy from what owns the dark,
They glide up the walkways in robes that smoke at the hem, holly stitched around their sleeves not in thread but in tiny bones painted green, each red berry a clotted mark,
From under their hoods, no eyes, just deep, dogged pits where music lives now, vibrating with notes too low for human throats, a choir reshaped, each burned-out mouth a cracked, unwilling harp,
And when they finally open into song, the sound hits your ribs like a hammer wrapped in soft—no, wrong word—wrapped in barbed garland, something festive and sharp.
“Deck the halls” arrives shredded, dragged through ash and turned inside out,
The melody limps, then lurches, finds a new rhythm built from door-slams, sirens, and the meaty thump of bodies hitting frozen ground when the first year’s panic shook the doubt,“Holly jolly” becomes a chant, three words stripped of cheer and stuffed with static, each syllable landing heavy as a countdown you can’t opt out,
And behind the music, faint but real, you hear the original voices begging under the notes, like a radio stuck between stations—children and baritones and old ladies all trapped inside the same dislocated shout.
Above them, the clouds hang low and mean, fat with the acid storm that loves to crash their concerts,
Rain starts slow, then thickens, each drop sizzling where it lands on dead flesh and frozen scarves, steaming up the night with fake-fog effects no stage crew could source,
The carolers don’t flinch; their skin long since abandoned any argument with pain, their bones blackened but stubborn as old hymns that refuse to retire regardless of divorce,
They just keep singing, let the rain polish their skulls, let it rinse soot from their ruined fingers, each note pulling more warmth out of the houses around them like a tithe paid in breath and remorse.
If your porch light is on, they turn their heads toward you, move in unison without touching the ground,
Feet trail cinders instead of footprints, robe hems dragging little comets of ash that eat through welcome mats and chew the rubber from boot soles down to the sound,
They don’t break glass or splinter locks; they simply sing against the door until the hinges whine and the deadbolt hums, until the wood forgets it is solid and lets the song seep around,
Next thing you know, your living room is full of smoke that tastes like burned pine and old choir robes, and the walls quietly buckle as the melody starts to pound.
You may live through it. Some do.
They wake on the floor with a ringing in their ears and soot on their lungs, the TV looping some saccharine holiday movie that now feels like a lie too bright to chew,
Biscuit tins overturned, ornaments cracked, stockings shredded and stitched back together in new, crooked shapes with hair-thin wires of something no sane needle ever drew,
On the window, a streak formed by bony fingertips tracing musical notation into the condensation, staff lines in grime, a note or two carved deeper, as if leaving you sheet music you never asked to review.
Those people hear carols differently after that,
Every mall speaker, every background playlist in a grocery aisle slides razor-thin along their nerves until their hands shake and they stare too long at the automatic mat,
They flinch when bell ringers shake their buckets, swear they can smell char and chem rain when the choir in matching sweaters starts their first verse and the crowd politely claps,
And when someone suggests maybe they lead “Silent Night” this year, they just smile too wide and say they’ll pass, because they know silence is never what arrives when that song unwraps.
Out in the ruins past town limits, where the first massacre left its scar,
You can see them from a distance every year on the same frozen evening—rows of black figures around the burnt-out shell of the old church, lit by fires that never quite figure out whether they want to be flame or tar,
They rehearse there, the charred choir, voices weaving through broken stained glass still clutching fragments of angels whose faces melted down the walls like overpriced wax from a boutique jar,
Holly wraps the railing, its red berries swollen too big, pulsing gently as if they house hearts now, beating in time with the song that crawls under your skin and lives there like a tattooed scar.
Neighbors say the antidote is simple: don’t answer the door, don’t sing along, don’t leave cocoa or cookies where they can see your hand in the ritual,
But legend and trauma rarely obey common sense; there are always the faithful, the curious, the drunk, the ones convinced they can fix anything with one more verse and a well-meant miracle,
They wake the next day with mouths full of ash and throats that hum when their lips are shut, no sound in the room yet harmonies curling just under their tongue, quiet and habitual,
And by the following year, they’re out there in the robes, bells on their wrists, standing in the acid rain and grinning through burnt cheeks as they join the holly-jolly funeral.