Krampus at Hollow Hill

Krampus

December at Hollow Hill isn't draped in joy or jingling ornaments. No, not here. December comes with something heavier—an iron note, slow and measured, scraping across the stone like a warning whispered through teeth. I have walked these halls for more winters than there are bricks in their walls, and each season announces itself with that same dragging sound. Children in other places may think of me as a story, something to frighten them into good behavior. But in Hollow Hill, I am not a lesson or a threat but a reckoning—a certainty that moves unhurried because I have no reason to rush. There is nothing behind me. There is only what I will face, and whom.

Krampus

You’ll hear the bells first. Heavy bells, ancient beyond counting, ringing inside these antiseptic corridors where bells shouldn’t be. They do not toll with church-time regularity, nor do they ever announce visiting hours. Their rhythm is chaos—two, three, then silence. When they sound, the lights flicker, just enough to make a nurse glance up from her notes and wonder if she imagined it. It’s curious, isn’t it, how a sound can reach straight through a man’s spine and plant the smallest seed of dread? If you have ever heard these bells, you know—there is no dismissing them. They are an announcement that the kind of danger you can neither see nor reason with is already inside.

Krampus

Afterwards, there are marks. Long, black grooves gouged into the linoleum and stone, dragged along the floor as though by some impossible burden. Maintenance, of course, tells everyone it’s equipment—though how, precisely, a crash cart leaves scorch marks that reach up the walls and even snake across light fixtures, no one explains. These grooves defy all physical sense or policy, crawling in directions that baffle those trying to erase them, and sometimes, when I move, the air itself warps and the floors sigh beneath me. Over and over, this hospital covers what it cannot explain, but each December, the marks come back, darker than before.

Krampus

There are those who try to catch me—or rather, catch what they cannot admit is possible. Security tapes show odd gaps, five, six seconds missing at a stretch, as if someone blinked and the very world stuttered. In those missing frames, staff say they sense a movement you cannot see, a figure too tall for the footage, something shadowed and horned, just brushing the ceiling tiles, never once needing a door. I never hurry. In places like Hollow Hill, it is the world that gives way to me.

Krampus

If you stand long enough in the dimmed hallway, you might see the snow that forms around me, crusting the fur across my shoulders—despite the radiators groaning to life. The chains snaking my limbs drag softly behind, each link an old debt, etched and worn thin from years of pleading. I do not fit these halls, and yet, the walls seem to lean, just enough, so that I may pass. My presence opposes the rules of this place: no physics, no architecture, just consequence and memory, moving through the silence.

Krampus

I carry a sack. Not burlap, nor any honest rope a mortal hand has tied. It breathes—sometimes softly, sometimes with the thump of a thousand trembling hearts. When it shifts, you can hear it: a sound of excuses, compressed and grinding. People imagine their secrets safe inside institutional stone, but every whisper, every "I had to," makes my burden grow. The sack is heavy with things unspoken, heavier still with things denied.

Krampus

There is a myth that monsters seek innocent souls, but my path never leads to the nurseries, no— those are watched too closely and carry no shadow of wrongdoing. Instead, it is the stations, the charge desks, the administrative corners where hands hover over keyboards and the shift is nearly over—that is where I linger. I do not move with menace. I wait, and listen—for the rationalizations, the little lies told to oneself to end a hard night quickly. It is not malice that summons me. It is justification.

Krampus

I am most present at the moment someone thinks, “Just this once.” You may not notice me then, tall and silent beyond your reflection. I know who is careless from exhaustion, who sighs and changes a record to save precious minutes. My judgment has no need of intention—it is the outcome that matters, the ripple created even by kindness born of fatigue. You see, the difference between error and neglect is a tightrope doctors and nurses walk with trembling feet. I never push. I only witness.

Krampus

There was a nurse, just one among many, who closed a chart seconds too early—not from cruelty, but from the gnawing wish for her shift to end. I followed her, through drifts that never brushed my own form, across empty streets to a little house lit pale against the frost. When my sack opened, silence fell—so complete, the sounds of her life pressed themselves flat against the walls, trying to dissolve. Her pleading—I have heard it before. Every year, somewhere new, but always the same.

Krampus

Afterward, she came back. You would not guess what she’d seen—she smiled in the break room, brought coffee for the new hires, did her tasks as if nothing had shifted beneath her feet. But something inside her tightened, ratcheted, became unbending. No task left half-done, no chart closed early. She did not sigh through the hardest hours any longer. She performed everything—perfectly, endlessly, and without end.

Krampus

There is always a price, though it may be subtler than folklore suggests. She never slept again, not truly. Night after night, her eyes would dart to the ceiling whenever a child’s cry echoed down the hallway, or the bells—those terrible, unplaceable bells—sounded in the near distance. Her punishment was never blood or fire. It was alertness stretched into eternity, vigilance that carved the edge of her nerves finer each day. She remained whole—just never at rest.

Krampus

Bodies are for mortals and their law. My work leaves only echoes: a tremor in the hand that signs off on medication; an extra second spent double-checking the oxygen flow. There isn’t evidence that would satisfy inquiry, just a legacy of fear and the silence of those who have seen me. My visits leave no mark a detective could pursue, but those who have corners to cut remember. The warning is enduring, and its weight is not easily shrugged.

Krampus

The story shifts, as stories do. Hollow Hill has learned in its way. Now, when mistakes occur, confessions are early, and the urge to hide error is stifled by something heavier than shame. A new sort of discipline has settled over the staff, especially in winter; the excuses once so easily uttered are gone. No one wants me outside their door because they rationalized one more chart, or asked for understanding rather than accountability. Rest is earned, not stolen.

Krampus

They do not laugh about December shifts any longer. When the bells sound—from somewhere above, behind, within—there is no stampede, because even panic would suggest hope. They keep still, breathing slow, understanding that my presence is not a storm to flee from but a winter to outlast. There is no running; there is only the reckoning that always follows, as inevitable as snow after the solstice.

Krampus

Some believe, wrongly, that I come for monsters. No. I come for those who wish to slip free from the weight of what they have done, who believe that circumstances excuse consequence, especially when they know better. My justice is not rage or pity. It is the cold, persistent shadow cast over Hollow Hill each December, a reminder that someone always listens for the sound of iron in the hall, and that every borrowed moment must one day be paid. I am Krampus. I will be here, as long as there are choices to weigh. Until next time, when the bells ring again.