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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  12 + 1

  Copyright © 2011 Jamieson Wolf

  Cover Artist: Jamieson Wolf

  Text: Jamieson Wolf

  ISBN: 978-0-9917580-4-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  ~ A Note About the Text ~

  This book is being given free for the Holidays! It’s my gift to you and I hope you do enjoy it.

  It is being distributed free under a Creative Commons licence. You are free to download it as it won’t cost you a thing. You are also free to share it, to pass it amongst friends and family.

  The only restriction is that no alterations be made to the text.

  Wolf Flow Press

  www.wolfflowpress.com

  12 + 1

  a holiday novella

  Jamieson Wolf

  To Allen

  Who made the blood shine and planted the seed.

 

  More Blood for the Holidays

  I love the Holiday Season.

  It’s always full of cheer for me, as much as possible at any rate, but there has always been a part of me that has been curious about the darker side of the season of joy.

  I am also a horror film buff. One of my favourite horror films (as corny as it is today) is the original Black Christmas. I haven’t even seen the remake, so I apologize to those of you who like it. But the original movie kicks. The idea of a horror film set at a time of joy has for some reason always appealed to me.

  This is probably because of some of my holiday experiences. One I remember clearly was when my father drilled through the first finger on his left hand.

  See, here’s the thing: he had been drilling holes in the bottom of the pine tree so that it could get water. But he had heard that if you drilled holes in the trunk of a pine tree diagonally, it would last longer throughout the Christmas season.

  Well, imagine my surprise when he drilled right through the trunk of the tree and through the bone and flesh of his finger, the drill bit lodged into the wood. My father had let out a loud yell but I said nothing for a heartbeat. I should have said “Let me go get help” or “Holy shit!” but I was struck dumb. I mean, WTF, right?

  Any sensible person would have said: Oh, fuck. I have just drilled through my finger. I better detach the drill bit from the drill and go to the hospital.

  My father was not a sensible person.

  Instead of removing the item from the drill, and dislodging the bit from the wood of the trunk, my father pressed reverse, so that the drill bit turned counter clockwise towards its escape, this time coming out of skin, bone and trunk.

  My father drove himself to the hospital, trying to cover the wound with a cheap napkin. There was blood on the upholstery for years, the stains dark red and receding over the years.

  When we threw out the tree after New Year’s Eve (after my father had blown out the power again plugging in too many lights…think Homer Simpson here, folks), I could see where my father’s blood marred the bark.

  I mean, who wouldn’t be scarred in some way from an experience like that? And Black Christmas is a perfect horror story for the Holiday Season. It’s original in that you never really ever see who is slowly killing off a house of college society sisters and their alcoholic den mother. It was a ballsy move that made the movie standout.

  It’s a gory film, but perhaps not for the bloodier reasons (though the blood and revenge is satisfying). It’s the more human portions that stay with you. The scene that those who have watched the movie will remember.

  It’s what we can do to one another, even with malice intent.

  I had written my novella titled 12. It was Allen who suggested I think about what came after. He pointed out to me that I had left room for another portion for the story. I thought of the third one myself and that has yet to come. However, he was the one that asked what happened afterward. Had I thought of what could happen?

  So now you are reading this book. Thanks Babe.

  Allen had got me thinking, which is always dangerous to do to someone who tells stories for a living: Did I want a killer who would live, or who would die? In the original storyline, 12 + 1 had a quote from Dante’s Inferno and was told in the first person. But something wasn’t jarring for me. I wondered if, after all he had gone through, would Oliver just become a Ghost of Christmas Past?

  I thought not. I had made him too mean to die, perhaps too evil. I had wanted to create an old man who was about to go to his grave, perhaps giving him a motive for what he does. I came to realize that Oliver didn’t have to poses such a mundane thing as a motive-he simply did as he will.

  I had given him a happy ever after, but it was Allen who showed me the parallel’s which I hadn’t seen. He got me thinking about another angle, another way I could tell it so that Oliver could live and I could still pay some sort of homage to horror for the Holidays.

  He got me thinking: What if Oliver lived and what if his happily ever after was really something else all together?

  If the story is too dark and you don’t like it, that’s okay. In the end, it is a Holiday novella and it is a Horror novel. Or it is a Horror novel set at Christmas? What you make of it is up to you.

  Happy Horror for the Holidays!

  Jamieson Wolf

 

  “Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”

  Edgar Allen Poe