Title: The Silence of the Sixth December
Author: Kassfinol
Genre: Horror
All rights reserved
The birch branch on my desk started bleeding this morning.
It’s not blood, I tell myself as I watch the dark liquid drip onto the police reports. It’s sap, resin, something completely natural that happens when wood rots. But it smells like copper and fear, and when Marta came in with the coffee an hour ago, she vomited into the wastebasket without saying a word. Now there’s a stain of yellowish bile on my carpet mixing with the liquid dripping from the branch. I haven’t called cleaning. I don’t know why.
The package arrived three days ago, on December 3rd. Wrapped in butcher paper that wasn’t paper but skin, tanned skin with hair still attached in some places. Marta left it on my desk with her hands trembling so violently I thought she’d have a heart attack right there. Her lips moved without sound, repeating something that looked like a prayer. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded like ground glass.
—My grandmother told me about this. About what happens to people who don’t pay.
—Pay what?
She didn’t answer. She just crossed herself three times and left my office without closing the door. It’s still open. It’s been open for three days. Nobody comes near.
My father was German. Born in a village near the Alps where they still hung birch branches on the doors every December. He told me about Krampus when I was six years old, the first time I misbehaved at Christmas. “It’s not Santa Claus who comes for bad children, Elías,” he told me while smoking his pipe by the fireplace. “It’s the other one. The one who drags chains. The one who judges.” I thought they were stories to scare me. Until the night I saw Heinrich Keller being dragged away by something that shouldn’t exist and my father told me it had been a dream. But dreams don’t leave claw marks in the snow. Dreams don’t make people disappear.
The phone rang at midnight on December 6th like the scream of a dying animal. I had fallen asleep over the Morales file, that nest of vipers where we all knew who deserved a shot in the back of the neck, but no judge had the balls to sign the order. The heating had been dead for four hours and the cold had gotten so deep into my bones that when I moved to answer, something cracked in my spine like a dry branch snapping.
—Vargas —my tongue was swollen, pasty with whiskey and lies.
—Castellana Jewelry —the operator’s voice sounded strange. Distant. As if speaking from the bottom of a well—. Something… something is wrong there.
—Define wrong.
—I don’t know, detective. The owner called screaming. We didn’t understand anything. Just numbers. “Six, six, sixth of December,” he kept repeating. And then something in German. Or something worse.
I hung up. My hands left sweat marks on the receiver.
The snow had started falling while I slept, but it wasn’t normal snow. It was too heavy, too silent. It fell in a straight line no matter the wind, as if it had intention, as if it knew exactly where to land. Every step I took toward the patrol car sank my shoes fifteen centimeters into that white, dead mass; when I reached the vehicle, my pants were soaked up to the knee and the fabric had frozen against my skin, cutting it.
The whole city smelled of burnt electricity and something older, like stale incense mixed with goat meat rotting in a basement.
Santoro was at the door of his jewelry store, smoking with one hand while with the other he tore out clumps of his hair. Literally tearing them out. Whole clumps with root and scalp skin attached. Blood was running down his forehead, but he didn’t seem to notice it. He just smoked and tore out his hair and stared at the falling snow.
—Detective —his voice was a wet whisper—. Do you see it?
—See what?
—In the snow. The tracks.
I looked. There were no tracks. Only virgin snow except for mine.
—There’s nothing.
—The hooves, detective. The goddamn hooves everywhere —Santoro threw the cigarette away. His fingers left pieces of skin stuck to the filter—. They came in and out. One, two, three times. Around the store. Sniffing. Choosing.
—He’s in shock. He needs a doctor.
—What I need is a priest —he grabbed my arm with surprising strength. His nails dug into my jacket—. What I need is for you to tell me you didn’t see it when you were a child. That your father didn’t lie to you. That Heinrich Keller left town of his own free will.
I felt the blood freeze in my veins.
—How the hell do you know that name?
Santoro smiled and it wasn’t a human smile… It was too wide, stretching beyond what facial muscles allow.
—Because he saw it too. Thirty years ago. In his town. And that’s why he fled here. Just like you.
He let go of me and went into the store. I followed him because the alternative was staying outside with that snow falling with purpose.
The safe was in the back room and when Santoro opened it, the smell that came out made me step back three paces. It wasn’t sulfur; sulfur would have been merciful. This was worse, because it smelled of burnt hair, of soured breast milk, of the breath of something that chews raw meat in the dark.
The diamonds shone without being touched. The gold gleamed with indifference, but things were missing. A locket that contained the lock of hair of the first child Santoro had let die for not paying a debt. A pocket watch engraved with the initials of a man who killed himself after Santoro sold him stolen jewelry as if it were legitimate. A metal box with photographs of girls. Very young girls. Girls whose parents Santoro had been blackmailing for years.
And there, in the exact center of the safe, placed with a surgeon’s precision: the birch branch. Tied with black goat hair that still had flesh attached in some places. Living flesh. Throbbing.
—Do you recognize it? —my voice sounded as if it came from very far away.
Santoro had knelt down. He was crying. Not with sobs but with howls, like a beaten dog.
—My grandmother showed it to me when I was five years old. She told me that if I ever saw one, I had three days to confess everything. EVERYTHING. Every sin. Every lie. Every time I let something terrible happen for money.
—And?
—AND WHAT, DETECTIVE? —he turned toward me and I saw that his eyes were bleeding. Literally. Dark blood dripping down his cheeks like tears—. Should I tell you about the clients who came with gold stolen from corpses? About the man I killed in 1987 because he knew too much about my imports? About the girls?
He stopped abruptly. His mouth was still open, but no sound came out. Just a wet gurgle.
I looked down. The birch branch had moved. I didn’t touch it… Santoro didn’t touch it, but now it pointed directly at him like an accusing finger.
—Three days —he whispered—. I have three days left.
I closed the case as a robbery without violence. I did the routine paperwork, but I wrote down Santoro’s address and the date: December 9th.
That night I dreamed of my father. He was sitting in our village kitchen, with his diary open in front of him. He wrote without stopping, his hand moving so fast the pen tore the paper. When I approached, I saw he wasn’t writing words. He wrote the same symbol over and over: a goat’s hoof.
—You had to forget —he told me without looking up—. I told you they were thieves… I told you to forget.
—I can’t forget what I saw.
—Then you’ll have to pay —he finally looked at me. His eyes were empty sockets full of snow—. He collects with memory or with flesh. You chose memory.
I woke up with the taste of copper in my mouth. I had bitten my tongue until it bled.
On December 9th at three in the morning, they found what was left of Santoro.
I say “what was left” because he wasn’t complete. Parts were missing. The forensic reports would later say the organs were removed with “unnatural precision”, as if something had pulled them out knowing exactly where to cut so he would stay alive as long as possible. His heart beat for seventeen minutes after they removed his lungs. One of the paramedics killed himself that same week. He left no note, he only drew goat hooves on all the walls of his apartment using his own blood.
But the worst wasn’t what Santoro was missing. It was what they left. His mouth was sewn shut with goat hair, forcing it to stay open in a perpetual scream. And inside that open mouth, carefully stacked: all the photographs of the girls. Now stained with something the tests couldn’t identify because no database contained its chemical composition.
And on his chest, carved with something that was neither knife nor claw, a message in old German that I had to look up in my father’s books:
“Der erste. Fünf bleiben.”
The first. Five remain.
The birch branch on my desk started dripping faster.
On December 13th, Aguirre, the moneylender, disappeared. They didn’t find him in pieces like Santoro. He simply evaporated. His office was intact except for one thing: all the surfaces — desk, walls, ceiling, window — were covered with tracks. Goat hoof tracks. Thousands of them. Overlapping. As if something had been going around in that room for hours. Days. Years.
Calculating.
The secretary, Rosa, was catatonic when I arrived. Sitting in Aguirre’s chair, rocking back and forth, humming something that sounded like a Christmas carol, but distorted. When she finally spoke, she did so without looking at me.
—He came at midnight. I heard the chains from my apartment upstairs. That sound… —she stopped, trembling—. That sound metal makes when it drags over bone. Not over floor, but over bone.
—Did you see anything?
—I saw his shadow. Projected on the wall by the moonlight. Horns touching the ceiling. And something else. Something he was carrying. A big sack. Moving.
—Aguirre?
—Aguirre was screaming, but not with his voice. With all the voices. The voices of all the people he destroyed. I heard them. A chorus of destruction coming out of his throat while they put him in the sack —Rosa finally looked at me. Her pupils were just tiny dots in a sea of white—. Do you know how many people he drove to suicide with his loans, detective? Seventeen. And last night I heard all seventeen voices coming out of him. All at the same time.
On Aguirre’s desk, perfectly centered, another birch branch. This one came with a gift: a human tooth still with a fresh root and a piece of gum attached. Forensics confirmed it was Aguirre’s. Torn out while he was alive.
“Der zweite. Vier bleiben.”
The second. Four remain.
I stopped going home. I stayed in the office, surrounded by files I could no longer read because the letters moved when I looked at them, danced, formed words I hadn’t written, and words appeared like:
“Witness.” “Accomplice.” “Coward.”
Marta stopped coming. She sent me a message through the internal system:
“I’m sorry, detective. I can’t. The branches are growing.”
I didn’t understand what she meant until I went down to the archive in the basement looking for old cases.
The birch branches had sprouted, they were everywhere: the walls, the floor, the damn ceiling… Growing downward like living stalactites. All tied with goat hair, all pointing toward a single thing: the folder containing the Heinrich Keller case, that case that was never officially opened, that case of the man who disappeared twenty-three years ago.
The man I saw being dragged away by something impossible.
I opened the folder and inside there was only one thing: a black-and-white photograph of Heinrich being taken to a cell in 1979, three months before his disappearance. He’d been arrested for domestic violence, but they let him go because his wife withdrew the charges. In the photo, he looked directly at the camera with an expression of absolute contempt.
And behind him, blurry but unmistakable, a shadow with horns. The photograph was dated July. Five months before his disappearance in December. I felt the air escape from my lungs. I had seen the same pattern with Santoro: the branch arrived on December 3rd, he died on the 9th. Six days. But what if it wasn’t a matter of days but of months? What if Krampus didn’t just hunt in December, but chose much earlier? Watching. Cataloging sins. Waiting for the exact moment of the harvest.
I turned the photograph over. On the back, written in my father’s handwriting:
“Elías saw. Elías knows. Elías will pay when his turn comes.”
My father knew. From the beginning he knew I had seen and that someday, somehow, I would have to answer for my silence.
On December 21st they found Carvajal. Or what he had been.
They hung him in his own office, by his feet, like cattle in a slaughterhouse, but he was alive. Conscious and screaming through a throat sewn with barbed wire. They had removed his eyelids so he couldn’t close his eyes. And in front of him, projected on the wall, an infinite cycle of images: all the families he had evicted. All the children left on the street because of his greed. An eternal loop of suffering he caused, forced to watch it without being able to look away.
The paramedics said his heart was still beating when they arrived. He’d been hanging there for three days. Three days watching. Three days without being able to close his eyes.
When he finally died in the hospital, his last words were a number:
—Forty-seven.
The exact number of families he destroyed.
The burnt deeds in the center of his office formed a symbol when the ashes settled: a goat’s hoof. And buried in the ashes, another birch branch. This one was actively bleeding, dripping onto the still-hot embers.
“Der dritte. Drei bleiben.”
The third. Three remain.
I started hearing the chains that night, not in dreams. I was awake with all the lights in my office on. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere at once; it was metal dragging, approaching, and it stopped just outside my door.
I opened the door, but the hallway was empty. Although on the floor there was a line of frost. Not normal frost, frost in the shape of hooves, small, perfect. Leading from the entrance to my desk.
To the birch branch that now throbbed like a living organ.
On the night of December 23rd, Mayor Mendoza called me. His voice was pure liquid terror.
—Vargas. It’s happening to me. The tracks in the snow. The chains. The dreams where they tear my skin off strip by strip while I pray and nobody listens because God abandoned men like me a long time ago.
—Where are you? —I demanded, gripping the phone very hard.
—At my house. Alone. My family left, I told them to leave. I don’t want them to see what’s coming for me —he sobbed. A sob that sounded like bones breaking—. Come, detective… Co- co- come witness the trial. Maybe if there’s a witness… maybe…
He didn’t finish the sentence.
I drove to his mansion through the most violent snowstorm I had seen. The wind didn’t just howl. It spoke. In German. In something older than German. Words I didn’t understand, but felt in my marrow: accusation, trial, condemnation.
Mendoza waited for me at the door. He had aged twenty years in two days, his skin hanging from his face like melted wax. He had the silver crucifix stuck to his chest. Literally stuck. The skin had grown around the metal, fusing with it in an obscene marriage.
—It didn’t work —he whispered as we climbed the stairs—. I prayed every rosary. I confessed to three different priests. One of them killed himself afterward. He said my confession was so atrocious it proved God didn’t exist, and he was right.
His study on the third floor was frozen. My breath turned into ice crystals that fell to the floor with a musical tinkling. The windows were frosted with patterns: torture scenes. Scenes of all of Mendoza’s sins engraved in the ice with photographic detail.
The fire in the fireplace burned, but the flames were black. Black and cold. When Mendoza passed his hand over it, he burned with cold. His skin came off in frozen strips.
—He comes at midnight —he said—. Always at midnight. Because it’s the darkest hour. The hour where God sleeps and the other one walks.
The clock began to strike.
Each chime was a hammer blow to the skull. On the third, my ears started bleeding. On the sixth, Mendoza vomited teeth. On the ninth, the black fire went out and something came out of the smoke.
I can’t describe it without lying. There are no words for what I saw. Only approximations: horns that pierced reality, eyes that didn’t reflect light, but absorbed it, creating black holes in space. Chains that didn’t hang, but floated, moving with a life of their own, tinkling a melody that was every lullaby in the world played backward.
And the smell. God, the smell. Of corrupted breast milk, of decomposing placenta… of everything sacred turning putrid.
Krampus didn’t walk. He materialized. Here. Then there. Blinks of movement too fast to follow. Mendoza screamed and the sound that came out wasn’t human. It was all his victims screaming through him.
The chains wrapped around his body. They didn’t grab him. They grew from inside him. Coming out through his mouth, through his ears, through every orifice, tearing, emerging covered in blood and pieces of organ.
—Detective Vargas —Mendoza looked at me while the chains lifted him. His eyes… God, his eyes begged—. Shoot me. Please. Don’t let him take me alive. Don’t let him take me where he’s going to take me.
I took out my gun. I aimed.
Krampus looked at me.
And in that moment I knew. I knew that if I pulled the trigger, if I gave him that mercy, he would take my place because the balance must always be maintained. Five were harvested. If I saved one…
I lowered the gun.
Mendoza began to confess. Not with words but with images. Projecting from his mouth like visual vomit. I saw every act. Every abuse. Every life destroyed. I saw things that would make the devil kneel in reverence. And I saw it all while the chains dragged him toward the fireplace, toward the smoke, toward the place where sins go to rot eternally.
His last words before disappearing:
—Help me, Elías. You’re on the list too. Help me and maybe he’ll forgive you.
He lied. Krampus doesn’t forgive.
When the smoke cleared, I was left alone in that frozen study. On Mendoza’s desk, his broken watch. It read 12:01. And next to it, a new birch branch. The biggest so far.
Tied with human hair. Gray. Like mine.
With a note written in something that wasn’t ink but still-fresh blood:
“Der vierte. Zwei bleiben. 31. Dezember. Mitternacht. Deine Ernte.”
The fourth. Two remain. December 31. Midnight. Your harvest.
Krampus had left me for last. For New Year’s Eve. For the last moment of the year where sins are counted and debts are collected.
I’m in my office. It’s two in the morning on December 30th. I’ve stopped trying to sleep, because in forty-six hours he’ll come for me.
The birch branch on my desk now has roots. They grow downward, piercing the wood, searching. Searching for what, I don’t know… Maybe my heart.
I’ve written my confession. Thirty pages of every time I saw and didn’t speak. Of every case I closed knowing the culprit was still free. Of Heinrich Keller and the night I saw him being dragged away while I hid behind the curtain like a coward.
But it’s not enough. I know because the branch keeps growing. Because I hear the chains getting closer and closer. Because when I look in the mirror, I see the shadow with horns behind me, waiting.
In forty-six hours I’ll know where the chains lead. And if Heinrich Keller can still scream after twenty-three years.
The snow keeps falling, with purpose, with direction, always toward me.
The chains sound closer now.
My God.
He’s in the hallway.
The End.
You don’t need to stain your hands with blood. Silence stains them just the same.