Once upon a time, it was customary to tell ghost stories at Christmastime. I'm not sure why, but before I started writing Loud House fics, I was a horror writer and resolved, at one point, to compose a new holiday themed horror story every year, a tradition I kept from 2014 to 2017. This was written in 2017. I dusted it off and changed a few things around to make it a proper Loud House fic, and I think it serves its purpose well. Merry Christmas and I hope you enjoy this glimpse into what Flagg wrote before he became the overrated pervert with a keyboard he is today.
"Goddamn kids!"
George Grouse stood on his front porch in a robe and slippers, the Sunday paper tucked under his arm and forgotten.
The previous night, close to eight inches of snow had fallen on Royal Woods, covering the jagged and crusted remains of an earlier snowfall. Sometime in the morning, someone stole onto his front lawn and built a seven foot tall snowman, complete with a stovepipe hat and pieces of black coal for eyes. The snowman, smiling like a damn fool, faced the house, one stick arm bent as if in a wave.
Grouse looked balefully around. The other houses on the street were quiet and shuddered against the cold. Only a few people were out shoveling their driveways. No cars moved in the street. Next door, the Louds' was just as silent as the rest, but Grouse could sense the malignant presence of eleven children lurking within the way a dog senses illness in its master. It was them, he decided with absolute certainty. They were always pulling pranks on him, especially the little bitch with the braces. She rang his doorbell then ran away; slipped a rubber snake into his mailbox and nearly gave him a heart attack; and soaped his windows on Halloween. Grouse hated the Loud kids, but he hated her most of all - too bad she was such an evil little cunt, because fourteen or not, she had a nice butt.
"Goddamn kids," Grouse muttered again, shaking his head, and went inside.
In the den, Grouse sat down in his Lazy-Boy and opened the paper. On TV, the Channel 5 weatherman was standing in front of a map of the region and predicting more snow over the coming days. "Looks like we'll have a white Christmas after all," he said with a smile.
"Like we need it," Grouse said, snapping the paper. He hated snow. It was cold and wet and turned his lawn into a soupy mess.
He hated Christmas too. All the crowds and chaos, fake cheer and "gimme, gimme, gimme" bullshit. Kids were too damn spoiled these. Why, when he was young, you were lucky to get a toy and some candy for Christmas. Now kids weren't happy unless their parents went into bankruptcy over it. Sniveling little shits deserved coal crammed up their asses, not fifty presents and a stocking full of diabetes. So loud and rude and ungrateful. Grouse hated kids. He was damned glad that Martha had been barren.
Grouse shuddered at the thought of Martha. She'd taken a handful of pills in January and convulsed to death on the bedroom floor. To get away from you, the note pinned to her housedress had said. She'd been alive when he found her. He could have saved her. Instead, he had sat on the bed with his arms crossed and watched her die. Served her right.
Martha had been on his mind a lot lately. Christmas was always her favorite holiday. He almost went all out and decorated. Look at me, Martha, he would say, looking down as if into Hell, it's Christmas. Do you have Christmas down there?
Shaking his head again, he scanned the headlines. President Trump was in the soup over an offhand comment; the president of the Philippines was boasting about strangling "a drug dealer with each hand last night," and one of those Hollywood sluts was mad about women's rights. Grouse uttered a hateful laugh. In his day a women didn't get uppity like they do now. They shut up and did what they were told. None of this feminism bullshit. That's one thing he had liked about Martha: She knew her place. And if she ever rose above her station...SLAP.
When he was done ingesting the morning news, Grouse went into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Looking out the window over the sink, he saw that stupid snowman waving at the house like a pedophile. He'd have to get dressed later, he thought, and go knock the son of a bitch down.
Surveying the dumb thing, Grouse noticed something that he hadn't before: The snow around it was pure and unbroken. No footprints. No bare patches stripped of snow for the snowman's head or balls. It was like the little demons carted in their own stock.
Good.
Back in the living room, the news had given way to one of those stupid daytime courtroom "reality" shows. A black woman in a black robe sat on the bench and listened to a big fat black woman tell her story: "Well, I done axed him where he were, and he said..."
Stupid niggers. They could barely speak English anymore. At least Martin King could formulate a goddamn sentence. They were better than spics, at least; niggers were born here, spics stowed away in a coyote's ass and slithered across the border like the freeloading bastards they were. Oh, and how the liberals kissed their asses. He'd been working, paying taxes, and contributing to the ecnomy for sixty years, and they acted like he was a second class citizen - they shoved him out of the way in favor of brown asshole Catholics from bum fuck Mexico. Fuck them. Fuck them all.
When the show was over, Grouse resolved to get up and take care of the snowman, but he was suddenly tired, so he closed his eyes, and didn't open them until the noon news was almost over. Feeling groggy and sore, he went into the kitchen to brew another pot of coffee. The snowman was still there, only something looked...different about him. Grouse couldn't quite place it, but something had definitely changed. Grouse watched him (it) as the coffee brewed, filling the kitchen with its rich, warm aroma. He didn't like its eyes. They seemed to follow you no matter where you went, like a creepy painting in an old movie. In his bedroom, he drew aside the curtain and confirmed this to himself: The snowman seemed to be watching him, waiting for him to undress so that it could masturbate itself. Grouse briefly thought of fetching his old .22 from the closet, leaning out the window, and blowing its ugly head off, but decided against it. The last thing he needed was a couple of lamebrain cops taking him to jail. Maybe after dark, he thought, when no one was out and couldn't tattle.
Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it as he walked from one side of the kitchen to the other, old linoleum popping under his feet. That snowman was really bothering him now. What was different about it?
By the time he was done with his second cup, he still didn't know, but he knew that he wasn't going to worry about it anymore. He dressed, pulled on his coat and his winter boots, and went outside. The world was silent, save for the stupid, ear-piercing laughter of the Loud kids playing in their front yard like a bunch of goddamn monkeys in a zoo. Grouse stopped and glared at them: The dumb one sat on a sleigh while the tomboy and the princess strained to pull her. Like, hurry up, guys, I I totes wanna go fast. The boy (whom Grouse suspected was a fruit) made a snow angel, and the freak with the glasses knelt in front of some kinda contratpion straight out of a James Bond movie. She was one of the worst of the Louds - her little 'lab' was always exploding and waking him up.
He hoped one time it killed her.
A little red sedan passed in the street, nearly losing its traction on the ice several times before steadying itself. Grouse watched, hoping the miserable bastard went off the road and into a ditch. Serve him right for being out on a day like this.
When the car was gone, Grouse sighed and trudged through the ankle-high snow to the little detached garage where he kept his tools. Inside, he reached for a shovel, but stopped and grabbed an ax instead. He chuckled.
"In the meadow we can build a snowman..." he sang as he approached the towering figure. It was taller than it looked from the kitchen. "And pretend that he's a circus clown..."
Oh, he was going to enjoy this.
"We'll have lots of fun with mister snowman...until the other kiddies knock him down."
Grouse was standing directly in front of the SOB, so close he could reach out and punch him in his icy testicles, if he had any.
Damn kids. Damn women. Damn Christmas and damn niggers. Grouse hefted the ax over his shoulder and let fly, burying the ax in the snowman's soft center. Take that. Again. Take that.
Grouse was pulling back for a fourth blow when a car horn honked. He turned, and it happened: The snowman's twiggy arm lashed out, scraping Grouse's neck and knocking him down, the ax flying from his hands. Gasping, Grouse rolled onto his back, but the snowman was perfectly still, waving at the house, all smiles and gay happy greetings.
Trembling, Grouse pressed his gloved fingers to the skin of his neck: They came away bloody.
Inside, Grouse stood in front of the bathroom mirror and examined his wounds: Two brief but deep scratches. He wetted a cotton ball with a draught of alcohol, pressed it to the gashes, and then taped a Band-Aid over it.
As he worked, Grouse replayed the incident over and over again in his head. A gust of wind. That had to be it. A gust of wind hit the branch and forced it down. The thing was, he didn't remember a gust of wind. He remembered the horn, turning away, and POW, he was lying on the ground and bleeding all over the place, practically half-dead.
In the living room, Grouse drew aside the curtain and studied the snowman. It looked different again.
It looked…
...closer.
Snorting at his own foolishness, Grouse let the curtain fall back into place and went to his chair, where he sat heavily. He turned the TV on and went casting for a good program. He finally settled on a black and white war movie playing on Turner Classic Movies. American boys moved stealthily through a godforsaken jungle while japs leapt out of the bushes at them like the buck-toothed cowards they were. At one point, a gook attacked a G.I. from the back, dropping his knife and running away when the American fought back. Then, the G.I. scooped up the knife, called, "Hey, Jap, you forgot something!" and threw it after him: It struck the slant-eye in the back and knocked him down. Grouse laughed so hard tears streamed down his face.
When the movie was over, Grouse got up and went to the bathroom. In the bedroom, he pulled back the curtain. The snowman was where he'd left it, watching the house with those dead, malevolent eyes. Grouse shivered. He should really go out there and take it down for good, even if he had to run it over with the snowblower.
Instead, he went back into the living room and watched another war movie, this one about Normandy. John Wayne was in it. Grouse liked John Wayne.
By the time it was over, twilight had settled over the world. He went to the living room window and peeked out.
The snowman, he saw with a jolt, looked closer. A full foot, maybe.
No, couldn't be. Unless those damn Louds were playing a trick on him, hiding behind it and pushing it toward the house.
Still...
He made himself a frozen chicken dinner and ate it in his chair. He was finishing up when a knock came at the door, and his heart leapt into his throat.
It came again, and a ripple of fear ran through his stomach.
Get ahold of yourself, damn it!
Sighing, he got up and went to the door, opened it.
The oldest six Louds, Lori, Leni, Luna, Luan, Lynn, and Lincoln, stood on the step in ugly red sweaters, their fat sow of a mother behind them, her arms crossed and a smug smile on her lips.. As soon he made the mistake of stepping out, the kids began to sing, reading their lines from sheet music.
"We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas..."
"Take your Merry Christmas and shove it up your ass," Grouse said. "Santa Claus isn't real. And neither is Jesus."
With that, he slammed the door and went back to his chair. Damn fools. Didn't they know he got enough of that terrible music on the radio, and in the grocery store? Did they really have to bring it to his home?
After the 6'o'clock news, Grouse made another pot of coffee and looked out the kitchen window.
The snowman was standing on the walkway, a good five diagonal feet from where it had been that morning.
That does it.
Grouse went into the bedroom, grabbed the old rifle from the closet, and took down a box of rounds from the shelf. He sat on the edge of the bed and loaded it. Damn kids playing tricks on him. He'd blow that snowman to hell and hopefully hit whoever was behind it.
Gun in hand, he went the window, lifted the sash, and dropped to one knee. "Have some of this, you..."
He stopped.
The snowman was gone.
There were no tracks, no piles of snow to suggest that it had fallen or been knocked over. It was simply gone.
Impossible.
Holding the gun tightly, Grouse crept down the hall and into the living room, his heart pounding and his breath caught in his throat. He checked the kitchen, the pantry, even Martha's sowing room, which had been standing empty and unused since January.
Moving slowly, cautiously, he went over to the front door and pressed his ear to it. He didn't hear anything. He sighed,
Alright, you bastard, and turned the knob.
The door swung open, and the snowman was there, standing larger than life, its shiny eyes the color of midnight and its psycho smile frozen in place
"Hello, George," it said, speaking in his late wife's voice.
"Martha?" Grouse asked dumbly, his heart seizing.
"I came back for you, George," it said, its smile unmoving. "You made me miserable for all those years, George. You hit me, you cussed me, you made me want to die. Now it's your turn."
The world swam out of focus. Grouse's heart was pounding fast, too fast. Pain like the thrusting of a thousand knives flooded his chest. He cried out and dropped the rifle.
Martha's laughter tittered forth.
The world began to gray then. Grouse clutched his chest and slumped against the wall. His knees gave out, and he fell to the floor, blackness stealing over him.
The last thing George Grouse saw before he sank into death was an empty doorway.
Martha was gone.