Free Twelfth Krampus Night by Matt Manochio

mouth and released the leg bone, which landed on a metal plate with a deadening thump.
    â€œAgain, just a superstition,” Theodore said.
    â€œAnd this Krampus? The devil my father spoke of to us as children to scare us?” Wilhelm said. “Saint Nicholas’s brutish right hand that absconds with naughty children every December fifth to torture them? That’s the man who knocked Perchta in the moat?”
    â€œMy lord, it was no man,” Otto said. “It had hooves for feet, a tail, Horns that were part of no costume. Nothing in this world has ever scared me. Not until tonight. That thing did.”
    â€œThen perhaps this Krampus fellow should invest in a calendar because he’s a month behind schedule,” Wilhelm said. “The Eve of Saint Nicholas has long since past. The people in the village—even a few in the castle—who dress as the beast on that night and partake in drink and merriment have put their costumes away for next year. Maybe one of them is a little overzealous or still eats off of lead plates.”
    Nobody replied to the elder brother. “Now then, I’m tired of this nonsense and wish to be fitted—girl, Beate—accompany me please. Hopefully this won’t take too long.”
    Wilhelm made a beeline for the exit. Beate kissed Heinrich on the cheek. “Stay in here, please. Don’t venture outside.”
    â€œWatch out for yourself.” He looked to make sure Wilhelm had gone. “I don’t trust him.”
    â€œNor I.” Beate scampered to catch up to Wilhelm, but Karl waited by the exit to accompany her.
    â€œIt was real.” Otto straightened himself and walked to leave the hall. All eyes looked at him. “Whether you believe me or not.”

Chapter Eleven
    The wall walk archers lit extra torches lining the castle’s front curtain wall and poked their heads between the battlement crenels to scour the moat.
    â€œLots of good the torches do us up here,” Franco, the castle’s burgmann and best bowman, said before spitting a gob of tobacco in the moat. “We can see shit up here but none of the shit down there .”
    â€œMaybe the moonlight will help.” Otto, his neck and cheek wounds salved with a mix of yarrow and myrrh and bandaged in linen, gazed at a white moon illuminating the castle in a silver glow—only to be dimmed by hulking black clouds drifting across the sky.
    â€œLet’s get on with it then,” Franco said. “Archers, draw!”
    Twenty-four archers stretched across the wall walk, two to a crenel, aimed at all parts of the moat. “Lower the bridge!” Franco yelled.
    The wooden door yawned to a stop and out scurried four cottars, the lowest-ranking castle employees—each with a torch in one shaky hand, a pike in the other. They spread out, lowering the torches to the moat to look for a floating body.
    â€œThree men up here witnessed that thing whipping the hag into the moat,” Franco told Otto. “They’ve not taken their eyes off the spot where she splashed down. She went under and did not come out.”
    Vettelberg Castle was specifically built atop a massive rock surrounded by an O-shaped ditch that made for a natural moat. A mix of water and waste filled half of the twenty-feet-deep ditch, whose edges stood ten feet above the murk’s surface, making it near impossible for attackers to pull themselves up and out. Even if they managed to escape on the castle’s side of the moat, they had only ten feet of rocky space to maneuver, nowhere near enough room to queue forces.
    The cottars, whose duties included removing waste from the moat when the stench became too powerful, now dipped their heads uncomfortably close to the watery filth, hoping, praying they could somehow see a body that could be pulled out with pikes.
    â€œCould she have swum around, maybe snuck out on another side of the castle?” Otto said.
    â€œWe’ve