Final Christmas

By Robert Harris

HO, HO, HO, SANTA CLAWS IS COMING TO TOWN…

 

On Christmas Day in 2010, Santa Claws descended upon the city of Boston and gave a debut performance that shocked not only the city, but the rest of the country as well. He visited three separate households during said festive day and calmly slaughtered every family member who crossed his path, before disappearing into the silent night, never to be heard from again.

 

FAST FORWARD TO THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS DAY 2011…

 

Atlanta PD receives a short note that simply says, "HO, HO, HO, SANTA CLAWS IS COMING TO TOWN… ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS.", but unlike the Homicide Detectives of Boston the year before, they now at least have some idea of what it means, and what is coming their way.

 

The FBI have come to Atlanta as well, hunting the infamous Santa Claws, and at their request, a rather unusual Homicide Detective by the name of Jonas Sabre is going to do his very best to try and help them put a stop to Santa Claws's not so jolly antics.

 

Santa Claws is coming to the city of Atlanta to butcher three more families on Christmas Day, but he's not the only person whose life has been shaped by a bloody childhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Harris
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9798223966296

Book preview

Chapter 1

It’s Christmas Day, but you already knew that.

What you don’t know, is that it’s mid-morning and there’s a flurry of playful snowflakes swirling in the cold air under a low, pregnant, dirty-white sky. There’s also a healthy layer of crisp snow covering the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, which isn’t all that unusual during the festive season in the state of Massachusetts.

Santa Claws didn’t mind the snow, though. If anything, it actually helped him today as he went about his business of visiting the first of the three families that he’d selected this year for his special brand of merry attention.

The wispy flakes of snow would provide an extra element of cover by limiting the field of vision of any unwanted prying eyes, and the blustery conditions and the further sudden drop in temperature would help to keep even the hardiest of dog-walkers indoors for the next few hours.

Santa Claws didn’t really need these added advantages this morning, mind you, but he welcomed them anyway.

One should never look a gift horse in the mouth, he thought.

The man trudging along the snowy sidewalk in Jamaica Plain wasn’t wearing a bright red suit today, however, and he didn’t have a bushy white beard or a bulging sack full of presents, either.

Santa Claws was clean-shaven and wearing some blue workman’s overalls and a sturdy pair of brown work boots. He was also wearing a dark-blue wool hat pulled down around his ears, some nondescript black leather gloves, and he was carrying a black backpack that was slung over his right shoulder.

The boots helped him to keep his footing in the slippery conditions. The clothes would minimize his chances of shedding anything containing his DNA. And the backpack contained the tools of his very special hobby.

And as for a sleigh, Santa Claws didn’t have one of those either. Instead, he had a three-year-old Jeep Grand Cherokee that was packed, stacked, and ready to go. The black SUV contained all of his meagre belongings, including his most treasured possession, which is why he had parked it in the driveway of a known empty house on an adjoining street.

Parking the SUV outside of a vacant private residence didn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t get any unwanted attention while Santa Claws was busy carrying out his joyful task over the next few hours, but it was a hell of a lot safer than street parking it.

Santa Claws continued along the sidewalk, paying little attention to the myriad of bright lights and gaudy Christmas decorations that adorned the houses and yards that he passed. He had no interest in these properties or the people living in them. He only cared about the three-storey townhouse owned by the Armstrongs.

The triple-decker townhouse had been a defining image in urban New England architecture in the late eighteen hundreds, but Santa Claws didn’t care about that either. What mattered to him was that the house was set back from the road and surrounded on all sides by mature pine trees and high hedges, which is why he didn’t need the unpredictable weather to aid him with his malevolent endeavors this morning.

The exterior of the Armstrongs’ house was painted in a calming, pale-yellow color with glossy white trim, but that wasn’t what was capturing Santa Claws’s complete attention right now. The sides and rear of the house had gained some scaffolding since his last visit, and it went all the way up to the top floor of the building.

Santa Claws had confidently spent the last few months just focusing on the other two families that he’d be visiting later today, and consequently, he wasn’t aware of the building work that had just started. He had learnt some time ago that the Armstrong family would definitely be staying home for Christmas this year, had heard it directly from the horse’s mouth during an AA meeting, and was therefore very comfortable forgetting all about them until now.

Like the weather, the scaffolding was an unexpected bonus, and Santa Claws only took a split-second to make the easy decision to take advantage of it.

He had planned to gain entry to the Armstrongs’ property via a small ground-level basement window and work his way up through the house, but this would be much, much easier. And he had no problem at all with starting at the top of the house and working his way down, instead.

Santa Claws didn’t break stride, he simply continued on down the street and turned left when he got to the end of the hedge that identified the boundary of the property. Said hedge was several feet thick and very dense, but Santa Claws had found a weak spot during one of his many previous scouting visits.

He moved down the side of the hedge, pushed his way through the handy gap, secured his backpack onto both shoulders, and was soon climbing up the scaffolding at the back of the house.

Getting to the top floor didn’t take very long, barely a minute, but Santa Claws didn’t have time to catch his breath.

He pulled a sturdy folding knife from one of the deep pockets of his overalls and used it to slice through the external blue plastic sheeting that had been put up to keep out the bad weather. He slipped through the flapping hole, closed and stowed his knife, grabbed the silver duct tape from his backpack, and used it to seal up the tear so that it wasn’t obvious that the plastic sheeting had been damaged.

He still wasn’t actually inside the house yet.

There was more plastic sheeting in the way, but this stuff was clear and a lot thicker than the blue stuff, and it was also stuck together using large strips of white Velcro.

Easing apart the Velcro, squeezing through, and gaining entry to the third storey of the townhouse was easier than stealing candy from a baby, and Santa Claws was starting to feel the first tingle of excitement throughout his entire body.

He relished the thought of what was about to happen, whilst scouting his unfamiliar surroundings.

The top floor of the building was being renovated by the looks of things, and based on personal experience and the light and airy open-plan nature of the work so far, Santa Claws was pretty sure that it was being turned into a studio for Mrs. Armstrong.

He thought it was almost a pity that it would never get finished; almost.

Given that he was fairly certain that this part of the house would be off-limits, Santa Claws was finally able to take a few minutes to calm down and get ready for the really fun part of his visit to the Armstrong family. And it all started and ended with his unique claws.

He considered his claws to be one of his greatest creative achievements. He’d made them himself and he was extremely proud of them.

The starting point for his claws was a pair of black leather gauntlets. They went from hand to shoulder, but unlike the medieval gauntlets of olden times, the hand parts were made out of a thin leather that fit as snug as a pair of latex gloves.

The gauntlets were also covered in metal studs, from wrist to shoulder, and hid a steel ringed sub-structure, from wrist to elbow, that provided Santa Claws’s forearms with some extra strength and protection. Though, these were merely added bonuses, as the metal sub-structure’s real purpose was to act as a set of welding points for the dual blades that gave the claws their apt name.

Said dual blades of each gauntlet were fashioned from the blades of four quality Samurai swords. They were tough, razor sharp, highly polished, and curved up at the ends as they extended beyond Santa Claws’s knuckles. This gave him the ability to inflict the most damage to his victims, whilst still being able to have a full range of motion and dexterity with his hands.

Santa Claws took his steel claws out of the backpack, admired them for several seconds, and slipped them on over his blue coveralls after removing his cheap leather gloves.

The gauntlets were attached to a full harness mechanism, so they could be worn like a jacket. The harness had three sets of evenly spaced clips built into it at the front, like those of a backpack, so they could be easily done and undone without the risk of the claws coming off while they were being used.

They really were magnificent!

Although his heartrate increased slightly as he put on his gauntlets and fastened the clips, Santa Claws still felt relatively calm. That wouldn’t last much longer, however. Soon there would be much chaos and terrified screaming and fear, and all amidst a frantic rush of slashing claws and showers of sticky blood.

Chapter 2

Santa Claws took a moment to psych himself up, smiled at the thought of what was to come, and carefully opened the door that led to a small, cream-carpeted landing area at the very top of the townhouse’s final staircase.

All had been quiet in the relative seclusion and dusty gloom of the top floor, but Santa Claws could actually hear faint, disparate voices now as he made his stealthy descent to the next floor.

One of the voices belonged to the music that was playing – some old crooner from a bygone age digitally remastered for perfect clarity and maximum profit, but the other voices belonged to the family he’d come to visit.

Helen Armstrong was in the kitchen with her mother, Cynthia, and Helen’s father, James, was in the living room with her husband, Brian, and their two children, Rickie and Eve.

The women were busy collaborating on the beginnings of Christmas lunch, which included gossiping about friends and sipping on glasses of classic Bucks Fizz. And the men were supposed to be keeping an eye on the children and dealing with the mess that had been generated earlier by the excitable unwrapping of presents, but they were more interested in their own bubbly drinks and a couple of fat, aromatic cigars.

And as for the kids, they were happily lounging at weird angles on the pristine magnolia furniture and enjoying playing with their brand new his and hers Nintendo 3DSs.

Everyone was having fun and enjoying a special family day, and therefore they were all completely oblivious to the unwanted guest that was creeping around above them.

Santa Claws knew that there would be six people in the house this morning – four adults and two kids. He just didn’t know where they would be until he actually came face-to-face with them, which was, of course, all part and parcel of the fun.

He loved the thrill of the hunt. Absolutely loved it!

There was no one on the first floor, though. Santa Claws had thoroughly searched all the bedrooms and bathrooms and come up empty, and that meant that everyone was on the ground floor, unless of course someone had a reason to be in the basement.

There was only one way to find out.

Santa Claws balled both his hands into fists – thumbs tucked inside the fingers in a karate style – and started descending the final set of plush stairs to the ground floor.

The stairs led down to a hallway that was full of shoes, boots, sneakers, and hanging coats and scarves of various hues and sizes. Beyond the mishmash of colorful clothing stood the front door, and the hallway itself abruptly turned into a corridor that ran back past the stairs and on to the kitchen at the rear of the house. And finally, leading off of the corridor, there were two closed doors that Santa Claws knew led to the living room and the dining room.

Santa Claws had visited the Armstrong residence when the family were all away on their summer vacation, and therefore he knew that the living room and the dining room and the kitchen were all open-plan. And that of course presented him with a huge problem, as once he began his task, it would rapidly become apparent to everybody else in the other adjoining rooms what was going on. And that meant he had to act quickly, but it didn’t mean that he had to act recklessly.

He still had to be smart. He still had to deal with everyone in the correct order, circumstances permitting of course.

It was important to handle either the strongest family member or the perceived most dangerous threat first. After that, it was just a matter of reprioritizing his targets until there were none left.

Santa Claws could hear voices coming from the kitchen as he hovered at the bottom of the stairs. There were two female voices and no male voices, which meant that the men were probably in the living room with the children.

The men were of course his biggest initial threat this morning, so he had to take care of them first, which is why he left the stairs, crept across the hallway, and silently opened the first door to the living room.

The two well-dressed gentlemen in the living room were both taller than Santa Claws’s five-feet-ten-inches. They were also both physically larger than him as well, and therefore both potentially dangerous to him in equal measure, which meant he couldn’t afford to take any risks with either of them.

He had the element of surprise, though, as well as a clear path from the door to the drinks cabinet that they were both standing by on the other side of the room, which is why he turned up the volume on the CD player to his right, ignored the confused and screaming children, and went at the men full tilt.

Santa Claws started striding purposefully across the living room, his claws glinting in the muted daylight that was fighting its way into the room.

Who the hell are you? shouted an indignant Brian Armstrong. The thirty-nine-year-old was holding a glowing cigar in his right hand and a half-empty champagne flute in the left, and he wore an expression that was a mixture of surprise and bemusement. And what the hell are you doing in my house?

Santa Claws thought it was a stupid question. Like his immaculate, sparkling claws didn’t make it fucking obvious for all to see.

In spite of Santa Claws’s custom weapons, Brian Armstrong and his sixty-eight-year-old father-in-law still technically had the upper hand. They didn’t use it, however.

Instead of splitting up to divide and conquer the unwelcome intruder, they stupidly stayed together. They probably thought they had the advantage, safety in numbers and all that, but they were dead wrong.

Santa Claws closed in on them quickly, drew back his arms, and simultaneously struck forwards and upwards. He caught both men squarely in the throat at the same time, pinning them with his razor-sharp claws like two insignificant insects.

The dual strike was perfect. One blade punctured each man’s larynx, which stopped them from calling out, and one blade sliced through each man’s jugular vein, which caused great gouts of arterial spray to splash like claret over the pale furniture and the cream-carpeted floor.

Both men were guaranteed a quick and painful death as they collapsed in a heap and their thick blood pooled around their anguished faces and darkish hair.

Santa Claws couldn’t have wished for anything better, and by the time the women reacted to the children’s shouting and screaming, he was already moving towards the dining room to meet them head-on.

The two similar-looking blondes entered the dining room side-by-side and just in time to witness both their husbands expelling their final, ragged, gasping, bloody breaths.

Cynthia Murray was holding a large chopping knife and she turned into a screeching, vicious hellcat at the sight of the carnage in the living room. The sixty-six-year-old let out a wild yell and charged at the bloody intruder, brandishing the weapon in her right hand, high above her head.

Santa Claws was surprised by the grandmother’s reaction, but her sharp knife was no match for his even sharper and deadlier claws.

He easily blocked her downward strike with his left claw and lacerated her face deeply with his right claw, like he was hitting a backhand in tennis.

Cynthia Murray hit the floor like a 50kg sack of flour and stayed there, twitching.

Helen Armstrong wasn’t carrying a weapon, which is why Santa Claws was happy to just plunge his right claw into her abdomen and watch while she coughed up blood and the life in her beautiful blue eyes slowly flickered and died out.

It took quite a while for thirty-eight-year-old to bleed out and die.

Santa Claws reveled in every glorious second of her agonizing death, though, and only when she had expelled her last, dying breath, did he withdraw his claw and return to her mother.

Although the parallel, livid cuts in Cynthia Murray’s face went deep enough to expose bone, she wasn’t dead, which is why Santa Claws put her out of her misery by gutting her like a fish.

The savage gashes he carved into her body went from pelvis to chest, but Cynthia Murray died of shock long before he’d actually finished ripping her internal organs to shreds and spilling the last of her lifeblood.

Nearly done!

Santa Claws was covered in crimson blood and grinning like a madman, and there were still two children left to slaughter.

Chapter 3

Everything was going exceptionally well.

Santa Claws couldn’t have hoped for things to go any smoother this morning and finally turned his attention to the remaining survivors – the two youngsters.

Rickie and Eve Armstrong were still in the living room, which wasn’t all that surprising for a seven- and eight-year-old who were paralyzed with fear. They were now sat on the floor, in front of the TV, and clutching each other tightly while they continued sobbing over the sudden and brutal loss of their parents and grandparents.

It was a terrible thing for two young children to witness and their constant crying was part grief and part terror, and it annoyed the shit out of Santa Claws.

He had dealt with the four adults quickly and relatively efficiently, as they posed the most danger to him physically and also to him completing his delicious task, but now it was time to make a statement.

Now it was time to shock the country.

Santa Claws grabbed hold of Eve Armstrong by her pink hoodie and yanked her away from her brother. She didn’t want to let go, though, neither of them did, but Santa Claws wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

He tugged and tugged and tugged until he eventually separated Eve from her cowering brother. She spilled onto the floor at his feet and immediately started screaming for her life.

Santa Claws’s response to the racket was to use his right claw to stab Eve in the throat, in order to shut her up and to incapacitate her for later.

Rickie Armstrong watched on in horror and knew that he was next, but he still didn’t run for his life.

He couldn’t.

He couldn’t move.

He couldn’t bring himself to leave his butchered family.

Instead, he pissed his pants and continued blubbering and whimpering like a baby.

Santa Claws watched on in amusement as Rickie Armstrong suffered the ultimate humiliation.

Part of him couldn’t believe that the kids hadn’t fled for their lives, but part of him also understood that they were a couple of pampered, spoilt little brats who were incapable of thinking for themselves.

Killing them was like stabbing goldfish in a bowl.

Santa Claws loomed over Rickie Armstrong and used his right claw to repeatedly stab him in the torso. The bloody castoff from his claw stained the lofted, white ceiling above him with each violent thrust, and he continued until he was literally too tired to lift his right arm.

It was a frenzied, savage attack and the dark-haired boy’s new chunky, white sweater soon looked like it had been used to sieve a large amount of strawberry jam.

Santa Claws took a moment to admire his handiwork and wipe the bloody sweat from his brow, before turning his attention to Eve Armstrong.

Technically, Eve was dead, but that still didn’t stop him from using the young blonde as a human pin cushion. She’d bled out and died from the vicious wound to her throat, and therefore didn’t feel a thing as he raged out on her with his left claw.

Eve’s attack didn’t last as long as her brother’s, but it was still ferocious enough to add more swirling bloody patterns on the ceiling and make it hard to tell that her hoodie was actually pink.

When he was finally finished, Santa Claws took off his claws and collapsed onto the nearby couch, so that he could take a few minutes to recover from his exhilarating exertions.

Six people were dead – four adults and two kids – and it had all happened in a little more than five minutes.

Planned and executed to perfection!

Santa Claws donned a pair of latex gloves after he’d rested and helped himself to a glass of Bucks Fizz and a handful of expensive Belgian chocolates that were lying open on the mahogany coffee table. And having replenished his energy levels, he turned the music back down, retrieved his backpack from the top floor, and set about collecting his trophies.

All serial killers take some sort of memento to remember their victims by, and he was certainly no different.

He took his manicure kit out of the backpack, along with one of the fifteen small plastic pots he’d brought with him, and started with Helen Armstrong.

Santa Claws knelt beside Mrs. Armstrong’s body, admired her subtle perfume, and busied himself with carefully clipping all her fingernails – putting each clipping into the clear plastic pot as he went. Her nails were painted a pale-pink today, which made his job harder, but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t dealt with before.

Now for the really tedious part!

Clipping the nails was the easy part, but now he had to disguise the fact that he’d actually clipped them. After all, he didn’t want to make it obvious to the authorities which trophies he took.

Santa Claws set about filing each nail, and once the filing was done, he removed Helen Armstrong’s white ballet pumps and repeated the process with her toenails.

He still wasn’t finished with Mrs. Armstrong, though. He still had to collect some of her hair.

He couldn’t of course just cut off a clump of her hair. No, that would be far too noticeable. So he used tweezers to pull out some single strands of hair from random places on her head and dropped then into the pot with the nail clippings.

When the final hair went into the pot – he’d extracted twenty hairs in all – he secured the screw-on top and labelled the pot with Helen Armstrong’s name and the date of her demise using a black Sharpie.

Santa Claws was finally finished with Mrs. Armstrong, so he slipped her ballet pumps back upon her feet and moved on to her mother. He repeated the process with Cynthia Murray – fingers, toes, and hair; moved on to the two men – fingers, toes, and hair. And finally did the children.

The kids were always the hardest to do, especially if they bit their nails, but he salvaged what he could from each child and made sure that he covered his tracks.

Taking his trophies was a long and laborious process, a labor of love, but Santa Claws knew that he wasn’t going to be interrupted or discovered. He had planned everything to the tiniest detail, just like he’d always done in the past. And everything had gone exactly to schedule.

All done!

It was now time to think about getting cleaned up and moving on, but Santa Claws still had one more trick up his sleeve.

He dragged each of the six bodies over to the twinkling Christmas tree in the far corner of the living room and posed them in a semi-circle – shortest to tallest, sitting with their backs to the tree.

Santa Claws emitted a little chuckle as he repacked everything into his backpack, knowing full well that the police would see this gruesome tableau and jump to the wrong conclusion. And, to add insult to injury, he left a wooden carving of a monkey with its hands over its eyes on one of the antique side tables, before he grabbed his backpack and headed for the nearest bathroom.

The carving was a special message to the police. A visual and tangible message that would remind them that they’d failed to do their job today, even though he’d given them a weeks’ notice that he was coming.

It didn’t take Santa Claws long to wash the blood spatter off his face, hands, and boots, get cleaned up, change into a new pair of overalls, don a new wool cap, secure his backpack, put on his leather gloves, and leave the house through the front door like he owned the place.

He’d greatly enjoyed his time with the Armstrong family, but it was well past lunchtime now and he still had to visit the other two families he’d chosen to represent Hear no evil and Speak no evil before he’d be done for the day.

Chapter 4

Santa Claws was pleased to find his black SUV undamaged and exactly where he’d left it outside the empty house.

He was confident that it would still be there, mind you, as all the windows were heavily tinted to protect its precious cargo from unwanted, prying eyes, but nothing is ever really certain in this day and age.

There are some crazy-bad people walking around!

He blipped the driver’s door, opened it, slid his backpack across to the passenger seat, and followed it inside.

His next destination was the neighborhood of Roxbury, which was only about two miles from Jamaica Plain as the crow flies.

Roxbury was northeast of Jamaica Plain and was actually one of the first towns founded in the Massachusetts area in the early sixteen hundreds. And it had soon become an important town, too, because all the initial land traffic to Boston had to pass through it.

It had even become a city two hundred years later, but now it was just simply one of the official twenty-one neighborhoods spread throughout the city of Boston.

Santa Claws had learnt these things, and many other facts, during the past twelve months that he’d lived in Boston. The knowledge didn’t help him with his job, however, or his hobby for that matter, but he felt it was important to learn a little about his current home before he eventually moved on to somewhere else.

He’d also learnt a lot about the Howell family over the past year, which was, of course, a very crucial part of his enjoyable hobby. Though, perhaps obsession or addiction might be a better word.

The Howells lived in a three-storey Brownstone, on a street that was full of three-storey Brownstones. The dirty, connected houses were crowded together on both sides of the street and reminded Santa Claws of tramps huddling together for warmth.

He wondered how the Howells could afford a three-storey Brownstone all to themselves, given that most of the other properties in the street were rapidly being turned into condos.

Nathan Howell worked for a company that designed headphones and therefore couldn’t afford the house he was living in. His wife, Rachel, was a successful divorce lawyer, so she was arguably the family’s main breadwinner. But they also had three teenagers to clothe and feed, and kids weren’t cheap these days.

Maybe they had the backing of family money.

Perhaps the Armstrongs had had the backing of family money as well, given that they’d also lived in a three-storey townhouse.

Brian Armstrong had been a team leader at a company that manufactured lenses for microscopes, so he’d probably been earning a decent wage; his wife not so much, though. She’d been a mediocre artist at best as far as Santa Claws was concerned, when she wasn’t drinking, which meant that they must have had some sort of financial help from someone.

Maybe they had gotten the money from Helen’s parents.

Maybe…

It was a moot point now, however. The Armstrongs were water under the bridge as far as Santa Claws was concerned.

He’d moved on and was only interested in the Howells right now,