Friday Night, December 13, 9:16 p.m.

Let’s get one thing straight: I do not believe in Santa Claus. Christmas magic. Ho ho ho. Peace on earth and good will toward men is a pipe dream for people with too much free time, too many toxic pine-scented candles, and not enough rational thought.

Christmas is a bunch of crap.

Which is why I’m sitting in my apartment at 9:16 p.m. on Friday the 13th, two weeks before Christmas, jonesing for coffee and surrounded by the beating heart of American capitalism: Santas and snowmen and elves. Oh, my.

But they won’t take me without a fight.

One dollar-store Santa peeks over the top of the lamp shade like a peeping tom. Several shelf-elves hang from red-ribbon nooses in front of the windows. Another lies face down on the end table at an unfortunate angle, encircled by a chalk outline.

My little fake Christmas tree (bought last year to shut up my best friend Blair) is strung with red and blue flashing lights and is decorated with crime-scene tape, numbered evidence markers, and acrylic paint blood spatter.

That was fun. Blair nearly had a stroke.

She says I’m being passive-aggressive. I quote the master and say every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. Present company excepted.

She says I’m swirling dangerously close to obsessive compulsive disorder, and that my lack of meaningful human relationships is due to my addiction to true-crime podcasts.

Madness, I say.

“What do you think, Charles? Is it too much?”

Charles, my life-size plastic Halloween skeleton, relaxes on the sofa in his jaunty Santa hat and white beard, leg crossed. His detached radius, ulna, and hand lie on the coffee table holding a rubber knife covered in the aforementioned red acrylic paint. His other hand, still attached, holds open a copy of “A Farewell to Arms.”

Which I found humerus.

I’d intended to replace Hemingway with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but I’d committed to the armless gag at Halloween with super glue, so it is what it is.

Still, the white beard is kinda fun. Maybe I’ll put a plastic spider in it.

As for the true-crime podcasts: full disclosure, I’m listening to one now. The Christmas Strangler. Episode six. Which is just another in the long string of bad life choices that have gotten me where I am today.

Because I’m supposed to be working on my article.

What can I say. Some people procrastinate with TikTok. I prefer the soft, soft whisper of unsolved murder.

Also: I’m out of coffee, which is the real crime here. I will never finish this stupid article without biochemical enhancement of the caffeinated kind.

My phone dings with another text notification. Brenda again, my editor at the Oldport Standard. She’s been texting me increasingly desperate pleas for my article draft, which is due…four hours and forty-seven minutes ago.

I don’t want to look. But I do anyway because I can’t help it.

Curiosity killed the cat, my grandmother always told me. And satisfaction brought him back, I would say. I wish she were here now so I could tell her she was right.

I pick up my phone and check my texts.

Already read:

Brenda: Holiday Piece???

Brenda: X-MAS DECOR—Need Copy ASAP

New:

Brenda: For the love of God, I Am BEGGING You!

She secretly hates me. Or maybe it’s not all that secret. She’s assigned me yet another gripping piece of hard-hitting journalism: “New England Elegance: Last-Minute Decor Ideas for a Sophisticated Christmas.”

Hilarious, considering my place looks like an axe murderer lives here. My last-minute idea was to put a plastic spider in my skeleton Santa’s beard.

In her defense, she did say the article would be an easy win for me, since “last minute is kind of your brand.”

Fair. But I didn’t appreciate the snark.

Apparently, what Brenda failed to notice, even after working with me for five years, is that I hate Christmas with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns.

See, I was born on Halloween. A superior holiday in every way (and since it’s my birthday, I also get presents, so it’s apples to apples). It’s understandable, then, that I prefer black and orange over red and green, and going out at night collecting candy in cool costumes over sitting on some strange man’s lap at the mall.

But it’s more than that. It’s been my lifelong observation that there are more ghouls and vampires looking to suck the life out of you at Christmas than at any other time of the year.

So if you’re waiting for some Christmas miracle, or some Hallmark hero wrapped in bows and sprinkled with magic snowflakes, to come save your ass, you’d better pack a lunch and let the dog out. Cuz it’s gonna be a minute.

I lean back in the swivel chair I liberated from the Dumpster last year and which now lives at the kitchen table where I work. I glance at my laptop screen, where the cursor blinks sadly against the Arctic white emptiness of my Word doc.

I scan the living room for elegant sophistication inspiration.

In addition to the crime-scene tree, dead elves, and Charles, I have a dollar-store Santa sign on the wall that says “I’m Only Here for the Ho’s.” Classy, I know. There are a few legit pictures on the wall--my grandparents and me at my graduation from UMass Dartmouth, Blair and me at our ice hockey banquet with my eye plastered in concealer, and us again during spring break in Cancun. But they’re barely visible beneath the strands and strands of skull-shaped string lights. The walls are festooned with so many of them that I’m afraid a passing 747 will try to land on my coffee table.

I let my head thunk onto the table top.

I am so getting fired.

I glance at the clock. 9:47. I really need coffee if I’m going to stay awake to write this stupid article.

Which means: unless I can teleport myself to Souza’s Mini Mart (spoiler alert: I can’t), I have to go back out there.

With a huge sigh of resignation, I pad to my bedroom closet, which I hide behind a folding screen with a “Joe Kenda for President” poster because there’s no closet door.

I pull down my warmest sweater: a baggy, chunky-knit orange number circa 1986 (like most of my wardrobe. I love me some long blazers with padded shoulders and slouchy calf-high boots).

I pull the sweater on over my Clash T-shirt and black fleece comfy-pants with the little dancing skeletons on them (or as they’re more commonly called, pajamas). I pull my hair back into a vintage banana clip and step into said slouchy calf-high boots. Which are admittedly not as cool with the skeleton pajamas, but it’s ten thirty at night, and this isn’t a runway.

Before I go, I take one more look at the laptop, just in case I’ve been wrong about everything and the Ghost of Christmas Present has decided to communicate my article to me via automatic writing on MS Word.

It has not.

Shocker.

I grab my wallet and phone, clutch my keys so they protrude out from between my fingers like Wolverine (true crime happens in even the smallest towns), and drag myself to the door. Guess if I want coffee, I’ll have to perform my own little Christmas miracle and get it myself.

Out in the hallway, the once-ornate wood wainscoting is dented and dinged from a hundred and fifty-plus years of bad tenants and cheap landlords who just slap on another layer of paint. The lights are those old glass sconces that look like tulips, which probably gave off more illumination when they were lit by gas. The maroon industrial carpeting smells like feet. Which might have something to do with the indelible dirt track down the middle that probably hasn’t been cleaned since Harry met Sally.

And while I do love all things 80s, I draw the line at dingy, faded wallpaper—black with giant mauve roses—which gives the whole place a dusty, retro funeral-parlor vibe.

I’m barely past the threshold when something catches my eye up ahead, at the far end of the hall.

It’s a man, just standing there. A shadowy figure in a black overcoat, standing perfectly still.

The hair on the back of my neck stands up, and I freeze.

He’s male, six-foot-plus, black hair, lean build, posture reminiscent of every image of Jack the Ripper ever seen. He’s backlit by the flickering hallway sconce, which makes his outline pulse in and out like an old silent movie. His face is shadowed, but I get the sense of eyes—dark eyes, simmering in the shadows.

His hands are gloved.

He looks like he’s preparing to dump a body in the harbor.

And I am not in the mood to go swimming with the fishes.

I dart backward into the safety of my apartment, throw the deadbolt, and fumble with the chain as if my fingers are made of fettuccine. Frantically, I press my ear to the door.

Who the hell is this guy? And what’s he doing skulking through the halls?

I might not be the ripest banana in the bunch, but I’m smart enough to know that this guy does not belong here.

I know every single person in this building. All three floors. And while you can’t say that everyone who lives here is normal, in the strictest sense of the word, no one here looks like that.

I could call Blair, but I’d still have to leave the apartment and walk right past where Overcoat Guy was lurking. Or she’d have to walk by him to come up here, and I can’t sacrifice my best friend, even if is one of those Christmas-loving freaks. Besides, I kind of told her a little white lie around noon when she asked how the article was coming and I said “fine.”

It is not fine. Nothing is fine. I’m either going to get fired or get chopped up into little pieces by the psycho killer in the hallway.

I’m dead either way.

And if I'm going to die, I sure as hall am not doing it without coffee.

I pull open the door, and head out.