A green beast that lives in a cave high atop a mountain, terrorizing the residents of a happy Christmas village down below. Attempting to steal their Christmas. Attempting to steal away their happiness. The classic Dr. Seuss tale “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” isn’t a horror story – even if that green beast was voiced by horror legend Boris Karloff, who famously also played a whole different green beast entirely – but rather a heartwarming story about the true meaning of Christmas. It’s not found in a store, after all. It means a little bit more.
But if the classic Christmas tale was to take a few little detours, well, it would probably find itself looking a whole lot more like a horror story. Say, if the Grinch was just a little bit meaner. If he wanted to steal a little bit more than Christmas. And if he never did find redemption, his small heart never growing three sizes bigger through the sheer power of Christmas cheer.
What if “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” took some of those detours and leaned in to the darker elements already present in Seuss’s family-friendly story? That’s a question I’ve asked myself for several years, pondering a horror version of the story that I would love to see up on the big screen. This holiday season, myself and my partner Kim Faul – who, truth be told, came up with some of the more clever twists and subversions to the children’s book and subsequent animated special – decided to have a little fun and answer that question ourselves.
What we came up with is “Roast Beast,” an original piece of fan fiction that reimagines “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” as a tale much darker than Seuss ever intended. Enjoy…
“Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot. But the Grinch… he did not.”
As stories are passed down from generation to generation, and even year to year, it becomes a bit like a game of telephone, the original tale diluted and transformed to the point of becoming a whole different beast entirely. You’ve probably heard of the “Grinch” who “stole” Christmas and the adorable little “Who” child that saved her little “Who” village, but the story you’ve heard – as memorably relayed by that Seuss fellow – isn’t quite the story as it actually played out on that coldest of Decembers back in 1863. Told on the page in 1957 and on the screen in 1966, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is the sanitized, kid-friendly version of a tale much more horrifying than Dr. Seuss probably even realized when he sat down and created a new holiday icon. For starters, this “Grinch” never did see the error of his ways. His heart never did grow three sizes and he never did share a nice Christmas meal with the community he dedicated his life to terrorizing. That’s fantasy stuff. Make-believe. The real world we live in, you and I, is a whole lot less pleasant than the whimsical mind of Dr. Seuss.
This is the real story of the beast who killed Christmas. And the girl who slayed the beast…
Nestled away in Eastern Europe, the little Alpine village known as Winterville was, at one point in time, and most certainly prior to the year 1863, the leading exporter of Christmas cheer, to the point that it’s probably safe to say Christmas the world over could simply not have existed without the residents whose hearts were so big and so warm that their only real desire in life was to spread good tidings – to those they lived with, those they loved, and those they would never even meet. Christmas was a year-round business for Winterville, and legend has it that their holiday cheer machine was so well-oiled that it even made Santa Claus and his elves a little bit jealous. Unlike Santa and his North Pole, there was no actual magic coursing through the veins of Winterville, this much is true, but you sure wouldn’t have realized that if you stepped so much as one foot into the village around Christmastime. Or, if we’re being quite honest, any other time of the year. Winterville was so named because, no matter the month, there always seemed to be snow falling down from the heavens. And therefore, it always felt like Christmas was right around every corner. All year round, every house and every storefront and every square inch in sight was decked with the most gorgeous holiday decorations you’ve ever seen, all of them hand-crafted in the village by Winterville’s finest artisans.
Of course, nothing is quite so perfect in the real world, and living in Winterville – magical as it may have been – did have its downsides. The biggest one? Winterville was walled off on all sides by Mount Crumpit, which reached so far up to the sky that you could swear it was piercing into Heaven itself. And though even they seemed magical on the brightest and most beautiful days, there were those dark nights where the mountains that cut Winterville off from the rest of the world seemed more like giant monsters that were just waiting to strike. Winterville, you could say, was the warm, beating heart at the center of it all, while the cold and dark mountains surrounding the village were ominous reminders that the little Christmas utopia existed in a world of fantasy – a snow globe that could be burst at a moment’s notice by the jagged mountain ranges that seemed to howl at night with the sounds of death.
That howl the residents of Winterville often heard while they were lying in bed, according to village myth, wasn’t the mountains themselves but rather the beast who called them home. Some called him a “Grinch” while others referred to him simply as “Crumpit” or “the Crumpit Creature,” unwilling to bestow upon him any sort of true identity for fear of giving life to the monster they couldn’t be sure actually even existed. But he wasn’t a palatable shade of green and his capacity for kindness and warmth had run on empty the day he came to be – never to be filled back up again. I say “came to be” rather than “born” because, truth be told, there’s no evidence that this “Grinch” actually was born. Not in the traditional sense, at least. Nor is there any evidence that he was anything more or less than the first and only of his dreadful kind. Where did he come from? What exactly was he? And why in God’s name was he ever put on this Earth to begin with? These are the questions that kept many of Winterville’s residents up at night, though the only one who would probably admit that to you was young Cindy Cane, too young at the time to bother suppressing any of her truest and most heartfelt feelings. Cindy was the child of Charles and Catherine Cane, her first name bestowed upon her for obvious reasons. Almost everything in Winterville, you see, was sickly sweet with Christmas cheer.
Nobody hated “sickly sweet” quite like this so-called Crumpit Creature, who was believed to be so anti-Christmas that he was talked about like the dark shadow of the season itself, a sort of balancing counterpoint to all the good that came along with the holiday. If the residents of Winterville were on one side of the coin than Crumpit was on a different coin found in a different realm entirely, making it quite ironic that they were asked by the gods above to exist in such close proximity to one another. More cruel than ironic, some might say, and though the villagers dedicated themselves to never speaking of the beast aloud, there was that icy cold feeling of dread at the back of their throats that no amount of silence about the subject could ever have quelled within each of them. True, the “beast of the mountains” seemed to keep entirely to himself, at Christmastime and during all other times of the year, but nothing could shake the feeling within the villagers that the peace and serenity of Winterville could be shattered at the slightest whim of the beast. “Will this be the year?” the adults in the village asked themselves every single January 1st. But those sighs of relief that often came after another holiday season went off without a hitch, well, there were no such sighs on the morning of Christmas in the year 1863. And there was no such relief.
“Then he growled, I MUST find some way to stop Christmas from coming!”
Santa Claus could be counted on to arrive at the very same time each and every Christmas morning, he and his nine reindeer making a pit stop in Winterville at 12:24am on the dot. This was information, of course, that Winterville’s adults never got around to relaying to their children, lest they all be setting their alarms and waking up to catch a glimpse of the big jolly guy in the even bigger red suit. Mind you, Winterville didn’t exactly need Santa to deliver presents in the wee morning hours of Christmas, as the adult artisans and toymakers in the village had more than mastered the art of matching and in many cases even topping what Santa’s elves were capable of, but it was a welcome annual visit nonetheless. In a place like Winterville, Santa Claus might as well have been God, and a visit from the head elf every year confirmed to the villagers that all of their hard work the past several months was worth it. It was as if Santa gave them a pat on the back and a high five by simply showing up each year, his presence in the town providing a sense of validation to the villagers. For many in the village, it was these annual visits that kept them going year after year. Granted, there were also those villagers who believed deep within their guts that Santa only ever came to Winterville to steal ideas for how to make the North Pole even better, but much like the tales of Crumpit, these were hushed whispers they were too ashamed to acknowledge aloud.
But Christmas morning of 1863 was the day, you could say, where the dam finally burst. All of Winterville’s secrets, insecurities and fears were laid bare for all the children to see, and it was Crumpit who exposed them to the world. To say that he “stole” Christmas would be an understatement for the ages. The Grinch-beast who lived in the mountains looming over Winterville didn’t just steal Christmas. He massacred Christmas on that cold winter morning, and he didn’t return to his mountaintop hideaway until he was sure there wasn’t a single morsel of Christmas cheer left in the small slice of the world that he now called his own.
Right about now you’re probably picturing the family-friendly stuffed animal version of the Grinch in your mind as I relay this tale to you, so allow me to shatter those misconceptions entirely. His eyes a sickly yellow & red, Crumpit stood a towering 8-feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than 70 pounds, an impossibly lanky, animal-like beast who got around on two legs but who otherwise barely appeared humanoid in any way, shape or form. His entire body, head included, was covered in fur, and though it was once upon a time some shade of green, that cheerful color had long since faded. Crumpit’s fur was mostly a sinister shade of black by now, matted down, discolored, and caked with years of disgust and disregard. And thank god for that, as the black fur masked the thousands of termites that called his body home. Legend had it that the beast would snake down the chimneys of Winterville’s many homes around this time of the year to steal away bits of their Christmas spirit – little things like stockings, candy canes, and gingerbread cookies… at first – and he wore that soot on his fur like a badge of honor. Soot and the blood of his many four-legged victims, that is. The creature’s mouth seemed to almost permanently hang open, ensuring that every victim knew right out of the gate that he intended on feasting on their flesh. And feast he did, every night prowling the mountains for any warm-blooded animal that he could tear apart and devour. Their blood left permanent stains on the fur around his mouth and upper chest, hardening the fur to the point that you’d probably prick your finger on it if he allowed you to get close enough. But nobody ever did get close enough. Not unless they were on the beast’s menu.
Most only ever saw the faint shadow of the creature lurking amongst the trees, but these encounters were so vague and so fleeting that they were often written off as the workings of overactive imaginations. The accounts, however, were always eerily the same. The shadow, in every single tale that was relayed, was outfitted with a sinister set of horns, which let the villagers of Winterville know that the creature probably wasn’t there to spread cheer. And it was precisely those horns that made the creature the stuff of whispered legend around the village, horns that Crumpit quite frankly wasn’t even aware that he had. That’s because they weren’t horns, per se, but two tufts of fur that sat atop his head, so filthy and so hardened from years of unwashing that they eventually formed two horn-like protrusions. As you might imagine, those horns were all it took for the villagers’ imaginations to run wild with fear. Even today, those horns remain as the most prominent feature in all depictions of the creature once known as “Crumpit.” You may know him by a different name, but that’s another story for another night. That is, after all, how these kinds of stories tend to evolve.
“Then he got an idea. An awful idea. The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea.”
The Crumpit Creature never was outfitted with anything resembling vocal chords, so to say the beast couldn’t actually speak… well, human… would be another understatement. This Grinch, the one and only, was capable only of guttural, animalistic sounds, terrifying chords that were muted by the time they actually reached the village of Winterville. Had the villagers been able to hear them as they sounded high atop the mountains, it’s probably safe to say they would’ve left Winterville behind a long time ago. For years they were swimming in a lake that was prowled by a hungry shark, and it was their own foolish unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of their tenuous existence that was their own undoing. Call it Christmas cheer or just call it plain stupidity, but the villagers were so naïve to the threat lurking above that they were caught completely by surprise when he finally struck.
He waited until 12:24am on Christmas morning. Not a second earlier or later. The little visits here and there, stealing stockings and cookies… they did nothing to dampen the spirits of the villagers. They hardly even noticed, instead blaming their children for these minor peculiarities. The creature realized that he needed to steal something they could not replace.
Famished at this point as a result of abstaining from his daily feast for a record 7 days, Crumpit came down from the mountains on that Christmas morning with a hunger that could only be sated by an act of horror that nobody would ever forget. Almost the instant Santa and his nine reindeer made contact with the surface of Winterville, the beast was there to greet them, tearing out Santa’s throat in one fell swoop and catching every last drop of that delicious magical blood in his gaping hole of a waiting mouth. Santa Claus, all-magical as he may have been, was never built to be all-powerful, and he never stood a chance against the creature who had been privately plotting his murder for decades. Santa’s limp body, drained of too much blood to keep the big guy upright, fell to the icy ground, and that’s when the once-green beast commenced an even more savage attack on the Christmas spirit. He didn’t just want to kill Santa, he wanted to consume Santa, ripping open Claus’s blubbery chest and removing the still-beating heart from the cavity left behind. The creature clutched Santa’s massive heart in his clawed hands and held it up to the sky for a better look, the moon illuminating the thing that was never intended to be outside of its host’s body. And then he dropped it. Almost carelessly. The heart of Santa fell and fell and it fell right into the Grinch’s mouth, not chewed up like a wood chipper but swallowed whole, like it had been tossed into a deep, dark abyss with no bottom. And then he got to work on the reindeer.
There were nine of them in total, and the beast ripped through them with ease, slashing into their bodies one-by-one as he made his way up the line. Blood and guts splattered onto the snow beneath his feet, the area all around the horrific crime scene now no longer white but a grisly shade of red. He sliced open Dasher’s stomach and ripped out Dancer’s entrails; he gutted Prancer and took a massive bite out of Vixen; he removed Comet’s head and he tore out Cupid’s heart; Donner and Blitzen were the last to go, the crude holes in their necks draining their blood like dual faucets hopelessly stuck in the “on” position. But it was the ninth and final reindeer who proved a bit more difficult to dispatch. His nose was glowing red, illuminating the darkness around him and suggesting that he wasn’t quite like the other four-legged beasts the creature from Crumpit was making quick work of. This particular reindeer had the power of magic on his side, allowing him to tear from his reins and from the heavy sleigh that had unintentionally locked his friends in their death prison. This ninth and final reindeer, as unique and one-of-a-kind as Crumpit himself, broke free and took flight, evading the hungry beast whose mouth was ready to taste his uncommonly scented blood. But this red-nosed reindeer wasn’t headed for the North Pole, as much as he wished he was. Without Santa’s navigation system in place, the red-nosed reindeer flew into the night sky, ending up high atop the village on a mountain that seemed to be a safe space to collect himself. And it would’ve been, at least until its sole occupant came back, if not for the well-laid trap that ate into his flesh the instant he made landfall. Like a light bulb being fed with more electricity than it could stand, the red light within his nose popped… and fizzled out.
The beast, meanwhile, started to feel a rumble in his stomach, an unnatural feeling that could only have come from an unnatural act. Looking down, Crumpit realized that his belly had become so large he could no longer see his own two feet, but the size of his stomach was hardly even the most concerning thing to the creature. There seemed to be a new light source deep within the distended belly of the beast, pumping and pulsating with a glowing red that penetrated even the thick black fur that covered his body. What the creature never could’ve realized, gluttony and hate and hunger dominating his entire field of awareness, is that every single part of Santa Claus was magical. That included Claus’s massive heart, which was engorged with warmth, love, and belief. While Crumpit’s own heart looked more like a dead tomato, Santa’s heart was the beating embodiment of the Christmas spirit, and it now beat not within Santa but within a creature it never could’ve fathomed finding itself in. Unchewed and now very much undigested, Santa’s jolly old heart was stuck in the Grinch’s belly like a holiday anchor, so heavy that it pulled him forward as he walked. With every beat the magical heart lit up the Grinch’s belly like a Christmas tree, and he reached for Santa’s big red coat to stifle the cheer he was unintentionally emitting into the dark winter night. It was a beacon seen only by little Cindy Cane, who caught only the faintest glimpse of a fat man in a red coat. The snow, thankfully, obscured the bloody massacre this shape left behind.
“If I can’t find a reindeer, I’ll make one instead.”
Back on Mount Crumpit after a lengthy journey that had become much harder than usual given his increased size, doubly so considering he pulled Santa’s sleigh all the way up the mountain as a sort of sick trophy, this Grinch could barely move another inch. So the story goes, the bloated creature sat himself down on Santa’s sleigh and slept straight through the New Year, waking up to find that he was no longer alone on Mount Crumpit. Drawn to the beating mass of red within his belly, Santa’s sole surviving reindeer had traversed Mount Crumpit and found his way back to the energy source he was hopelessly connected to, on that day becoming Crumpit’s own personal pet. His nose no longer glowed red and he was no longer treated with kindness and care, instead becoming a slave to the creature that now needed someone else to carry out his most loathsome tasks. To go into any further detail about the reindeer’s next few years of existence would be too horrifying to recount, and it was all the more sad given the poor little animal never quite realized that his new owner wasn’t quite Santa Claus. He lost his nose and he lost his name, a once magical Christmas reindeer made into a guard dog by the creature that was now permanently affixed to the top of Mount Crumpit.
As for the beast, he found himself unable to enjoy even the smallest meals; even the meals of a mouse. The cruelest of fates for a creature that once devoured everything in sight with glee, to be sure. The massive ball of muscle that resided within his belly was so impossible to break down and work around that there was simply no more room in his stomach. The irony, of course, was that the beast was hungrier than ever before, piling more and more food into the dump heap that was once a functioning digestive system. His reindeer companion would hunt down and bring back other animals for his master to eat, their flesh and their meat consumed and their fur and their bones vomited back out and left to rot at his feet. He ate and he ate, growing bigger and bigger as his appetite grew bigger and bigger. And he just kept on growing.
Down in Winterville, Cindy Cane also grew from a girl of nine to a teenager of thirteen, her parents keeping secret the specific details of what exactly had happened on that night in 1863. For the first couple years, Cindy had believed that the person she saw that night was Santa Claus, unaware that it was actually the beast who made sure that Santa Claus would never again pay a Christmas morning visit to any good girls or boys. But as Cindy got older, those hushed whispers around town became a little louder and a little clearer, and it was soon crystal to a teenage Cindy that she had been living a lie. The more the rumors spread, the more little bits and pieces of that fateful night popped back into Cindy’s head, almost as if they were being placed there as rewards for her continued efforts to remember. “How could it have been Santa?” it soon dawned on 13-year-old Cindy. “Santa doesn’t have horns.”
While Cindy grappled with the reality of the world, the village of Winterville as a whole began to grow darker and darker with each passing day. It wasn’t just Santa who was killed on that night but the Christmas spirit within the village, and by extension, the beating heart of the village itself. For the next several years, “Christmas” became a word that went unspoken. The trees remained in the forests. The decorations were stuffed away in attics and basements. The ovens seemed to cook anything but turkeys and Christmas cookies. And while the thousands of strands of Christmas lights strewn about the village still hung where they had always been, they had long since died out. Once a village that relied on Christmas as a sort of power source, Winterville fell into a state of disrepair, the money drying up and the good spirits sputtering away like engines that had no more gas left to give. Winterville had, in less than one year’s time, transformed from a mini North Pole into an appalling sight, the once bustling village reduced to a shadow of its former self. It was a sight that surely would’ve delighted the creature responsible for it all, but even the Grinch was so changed by that night that he never was able to come down to appreciate his handiwork. He just sat on that sleigh atop Mount Crumpit like a hideous star atop a hideous tree, the pulsing of Santa’s undying heart serving as an eerie crimson reminder of the final meal he would ever enjoy eating.
Now four years older and four years wiser but no less terrified of the creature that had been chattered about behind closed doors for as long as she could remember, Cindy Cane had no idea what kind of danger she was heading towards on Christmas Eve of 1867. All Cindy knew for sure on that night was that someone needed to do something to save the village and the people she loved, and her heart told her who that someone should be. After all, Cindy was the only one who had actually caught a glimpse of that thing on that night, so perhaps it was only right that Cindy see this horror story to its conclusion. Aware enough of what had happened four years prior to know that the faint red beacon atop the mountain was the place to go for answers, Cindy made up her mind that she was going up to the very top of Mount Crumpit and she was going alone if need be. Not surprisingly, the adults in the village frowned upon the idea, all of them too wise – or perhaps too cowardly – to even think about undertaking such a task. Even without the threat of a beast at the top, scaling the steep incline of Mount Crumpit was a harrowing thought all on its own, the elements likely to claim your life long before any furry demon of legend reared his ugly head. But Cindy, either too foolish or too brave to heed their adult advice, assembled a team of equally courageous young friends and set forth their battle plan. They would conquer Mount Crumpit, and they would restore Winterville’s Christmas spirit. If they had to slay a beast, then a beast they would slay.
“The Grinch had been caught by this tiny Who daughter. Who’d got out of bed for a cup of cold water.”
Cindy was joined by her best friend Noel as well as twin brothers Josiah and Euchariah, the four of them a combined grand total of 49.5 years old, still younger than most who called Winterville home. But they had the courage of a thousand and one adults on that Christmas Eve, bundling up in their winter best and packing the makeshift weapons that they were able to cobble together like little worker elves. Josiah and Eucharia cleverly turned candy cane-shaped decorations into festive swords, while Cindy brought along her finest hand-crafted slingshot and Noel packed the cheery cherry bombs she had stolen from her little brother. All useless implements against a beast like Crumpit, to be sure, but up they marched towards that red beacon with the confidence of army soldiers carrying the best firearms the military could provide. They chatted a bit along the way but mostly kept to themselves, each child spending the first leg of the trip wondering if they ever would be coming back down the mountain. If they ever would be waking up for this or any other Christmas morning. Brave Cindy Cane led the charge at the front of the line, thinking only of saving Christmas once and for all.
It was about halfway up the mountain that the group of children began to hear the strangest of sounds, almost as if the mountains themselves were coming alive underneath their feet, breathing and snarling. They barely had a moment to come up with their best guess as to the origin of the sound before Josiah was swiftly snatched away from the group, followed shortly thereafter by Euchariah. They entered the world together, and it seemed horribly fitting that they also left the world together. The screams of the twin brothers filled the air, replacing the previous noises with ones that now sent icy chills racing up and down the spines of Cindy and Noel. For they knew where those particular sounds had come from, and they knew what those sounds had meant. The snow had a way of shielding Cindy from the horrors playing out in front of her over the years, and Christmas Eve of 1867 was not much different than Christmas morning of 1893 in that regard. On the other side of the wall of white that protected Cindy and Noel from the most horrific of sights, Josiah and Euchariah were gruesomely torn apart by a hungry reindeer who knew not what he did, only that he had no other choice but to do it. Not even the fierce winter winds, however, could protect the young friends from the sounds, an array of wet squelches, violent tears, and angry snarls that told them the whole story. Josiah and Euchariah would not be waking up on Christmas morning.
Cindy armed herself with her slingshot and Noel tossed a handful of cherry bombs in the direction of the sounds, but alas, the mini bombs fizzled out in the snow. Not that they would’ve done much of anything, anyhow. But Cindy’s slingshot proved to be much more useful to the duo. At the ready, Cindy fired a shot off at the first sight of anything, making direct contact with the reindeer’s left antler. Cindy herself wasn’t able to discern this at the time but the rock she catapulted toward the unclear form managed to hit the base of the antler, creating a fracture in its wake. But the minor injury didn’t deter the reindeer who was unknowingly protecting his former master’s murderer. Rather, it just made him even angrier and more vicious than before, lunging towards the duo huddled together on the mountain. Gnashing its teeth and biting wildly at the wind, the reindeer eventually made contact with flesh, tearing into Noel’s arm and sending a geyser of blood flying into the air. Cindy, loyal and brave as she always was, stayed and fired off another rock from her slingshot, this one hitting the very same spot as before and shattering the bone clear off the animal’s head. The antler sailed off and into the snow below, and the reindeer sailed off into the distance just the same.
Heading higher up the mountain, Cindy surviving round one without a scratch but Noel now turning the snow red in her wake, the two teenage girls pressed forward with even more courage than they had before, getting closer and closer to the beacon beating within the monster that was waiting for them. All was silent again for a moment, the wind-whipped snow forming the only sound they could hear through their winter hats. But just when they both thought the reindeer that had attacked them earlier was no more, it roared down the mountain towards them like a speeding freight train, gaining speed and growing angrier and angrier with each passing gallop. Out of nowhere, and before Noel even had a moment to watch the brief highlight reel of her young life flash before her eyes, the reindeer slammed its sole set of sharp antlers deep into her stomach, tearing away flesh and piercing through her internal organs. Noel’s body filled with blood, almost instantly killing the young girl. Her limp body hung from the reindeer’s antlers like an ornament dangling from a Christmas tree, eventually sliding its way off the blood-slick bone. Noel’s body hit the snow and a pool of blood emerged from the gaping wounds the antlers left behind, the heavy flakes falling so fast on that night that her body was quickly – perhaps mercifully – encased in an icy tomb.
The reindeer again ran off, this time leading Cindy into the gaping maw of the beast.
“The Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day.”
By the time Cindy Cane made it to the top of Mount Crumpit, all by her lonesome as the only survivor of her doomed search party, the creature that called it home had grown three sizes bigger than he had originally been. The friendly red Santa suit, a suit once worn by the real Santa Claus himself, had long since burst off his body, no longer masking the horror underneath. There he sat on Santa’s sleigh and there Cindy stood at the front of the sleigh, the little girl from four years prior finally laying eyes on the pathetic, horrible beast that had ruined her life. Flanked by the blood-covered reindeer that brutalized her friends, the creature was too big to move and too weak to make a sound, a massive black monster with two horns slicing upwards through the snow. Even his tongue, it seemed, could no longer fit inside the beast’s mouth, as it had dislodged and was now drooping low over his lips and down his chin. And the smell, oh god the smell. He didn’t just stink, he stunk, looking and smelling as foul as he truly was inside. Even the termites had long since scattered, in desperate search of anywhere else to be. The beast had been reduced to such a poor and despicable state that Cindy hardly even feared him. The reindeer, a fraction of its master’s size, was somehow more imposing, barking and licking its lips by his side. But when Cindy spoke, the reindeer listened.
“I’ve come to take back Christmas,” Cindy Cane said to the beast, who sat there in silence, his blood red tongue wagging like a sick dog’s. “I know what you did. I saw you. You killed Santa Claus. You took everything from my family. My friends. My village. We haven’t celebrated Christmas for the last four years, but that ends tonight. You end tonight. Whatever you are. I’ve spent the last four years wondering what you might look like. Imagining you in my head. Even drawing you. But you’re more foul, more grotesque, and more pathetic than I ever could have imagined. And most pathetic of all, you’re not even scary. You only make me sad.”
“Tonight,” Cindy finished her brief declaration of bravery. “You die.”
Cindy picked up a nearby rock and aimed her slingshot at the most obvious source of weakness, the big red bullseye emanating from the beast’s stomach. But just as she pulled back the thick rubber band and readied herself to let it go, the creature’s loyal lapdog stood directly in her sights. He seemed calmer now, less vicious and less angry. There was a warmth to the animal that Cindy was surprised to see. And so she dropped her guard. She lowered her weapon. In that moment, the reindeer quite reminded young Cindy of her dog Max, surely warming himself by the fire back home. And so Cindy walked up to the reindeer, suddenly feeling bad for the animal, and she pet it on the head. To her complete surprise, a light flickered on and then quickly off. A red light, particularly bright and coming from the reindeer’s nose. She pet the reindeer again, and again the light came on; again, it went off when she pulled back her hand. It was then, illuminated by the bright flash of red, that Cindy realized how much damage her little slingshot had done. And it was then that the reindeer, now seemingly aware of the lie that had been shattered by Cindy’s love and courage, picked up something in his mouth that been lying next to him. It was the broken antler that had once stood proudly atop his head, presented to Cindy as a sort of proposition. And she knew just what to do with it.
The jagged bone-knife now clutched in her hand, a much more formidable weapon than a mere rock, the reindeer stepped to the side, its red nose blinking on and off like a lightbulb that was desperately trying to power back on. Cindy now had a clear path to the Crumpit Creature, who could do nothing more than sit there and drool. Its own gluttony, its own hate, its own horror, had rendered it immobile. Once the most fearsome being in all of Winterville, the creature was now little more than a big fish in a small barrel. An unfathomable, otherworldly creature that couldn’t even defend itself from a teenage girl with a little love in her heart.
There was only one thing left to do. Cindy fired the reindeer’s jagged antler deep into the creature’s stomach, piercing through the fat and muscle and puncturing the heart that was all too happy to stop beating. And just like that, the red light went out. The beast slumped over in his sleigh. Cindy knew that her adversary would not have been as easily defeated if the circumstances were slightly different – in all likelihood, Cindy was keenly aware, he would’ve been the one firing the kill shot – but that mattered not to Cindy at this particular moment. The beast that stole Christmas from Winterville had been slain, and though it had accomplished its goal of taking something that could not be replaced, it seemed for a moment that all was right in her little corner of the world. A feeling within Cindy that was confirmed by the reindeer whose nose was now growing as red as the heart that once beat within Santa’s chest. It was no longer flickering on and off but rather shining bright with no interruptions, and Cindy instinctively knew that whatever evil resided within the animal had died with the monster who enslaved it. It was the big guy who was at fault for the murders of Josiah, Euchariah and Noel, and this was something Cindy felt sure of within her own beating heart.
Cindy hitched her new four-legged friend up to the reins of the sleigh that had become the creature’s final resting place, his glowing red nose guiding Cindy safely down the mountain a whole lot faster than the way she came up it. Picking up speed on the descent, the reindeer, the sleigh, Cindy, and the massive, bloated corpse of the defeated Grinch took flight over the mountains, sailing the skies safely down to the village below with a little help from the holiday magic that had been extinguished four years prior. Santa was dead, that much Cindy could be sure of, but that didn’t mean that Christmas had to die with him. Upon their arrival in the village, at exactly 12:24am, not a second earlier or later, the reindeer’s nose cast a beautiful red light upon Winterville, shining through each and every window with such a vivid burst of life that the villagers were all awoken in their beds at precisely the same moment. It wasn’t just the red nose that lit up the village but also those thousands of strands of Christmas lights that died out long ago, magically restored in all their colorful glory. As the villagers quickly put on their winter boots, coats, hats and gloves and rushed out of their houses, they saw something else they hadn’t seen in years. It was Santa’s sleigh, a red-nosed reindeer at the front and a jolly bringer of Christmas joy riding in the driver’s seat. Cindy took a moment to feel that moment, imagining that it was how Santa must’ve felt every year. But even Santa Claus never delivered a gift quite like the one Cindy was about to unload from his sleigh.
Cindy saw to it that this year’s Christmas feast would be a most bountiful roast beast.
“He hadn’t stopped Christmas from coming. Somehow or another, it came just the same.”