Slippers from Hell
by Lene MacLeod
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
There was nothing like the arrival of Aunt Belinda’s gift each December to bring an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, but not the good kind. Her offerings were reminiscent of the presents we received from her as children: gawdy fashion jewelry, frumpy beige house coats, over-sized pyjamas, and huge bottles of bath salts, often along with stale candy found in the bargain basement of some obscure department store in her neck of the woods.
But now, this package, arriving on December twenty-second, was a mystery. The handwriting was hers all right, the crumpled brown paper sack used to wrap the parcel, the string, even though the postal service advised against using it, and the Christmas Seals plastered all over.
The thing was, Aunt Belinda had passed away even before last Christmas. Sure, I received a gift from her last year, a cow-shaped coffee mug, but it had been posted before her sudden death.
I rang up my brother, Kyle.
“Yeah, Lucy, it came today. I’ll open it on Christmas I guess,” Kyle said.
“I might as well wait, too, but how?”
“How what?”
“How did we get gifts from Aunt Belinda when she died last year?”
“Hmmm, didn’t think of that. Maybe a friend sent them for her? You know she always shops well in advance. Whenever she finds one of her bargains.”
Shopped, I thought, found… but I didn’t bother to correct my brother. He had a hard time accepting death as it was. He still talked about his pet canary that died when he was seven.
“You know she didn’t have any friends,” I said before hanging up.
That evening, I sat by my twig tree, the miniature Yuletide decoration all lit with white lights and adorned with plastic acorns and miniature snowmen. I couldn’t keep my eyes from wandering to the gift, still in its brown paper wrap, which would be the only covering since Aunt Belinda felt fancy paper, ribbons, and bows were frivolous.
I planned to open the few gifts under the tree on Christmas morning before heading to see Kyle and his family. His wife, Maya, would prepare a feast, and his two little girls would be excited to see me coming—so long as I was bearing gifts, which I still had to purchase.
On the morning of the twenty-third, I couldn’t stand looking at the thing any longer. The present. The present from beyond the grave? The string looked ancient, dull and fraying, soft with decay perhaps. I grabbed a pair of scissors and went for it.
The first thing I noticed was a mess of mauve. I picked up the contents, unfurling it from the compact ball it’d been in to fit the small wrappings. A package of chocolate eggs tumbled to the floor—the sorts that were fresh around Easter. The mauve thing… things, proved to be a pair of hand-knitted slippers. I was sure I’d received a pair just like them when I was a kid. Aunt Belinda had asked me what my favorite color was, and I’d told her purple. When I’d opened that year’s gift on Christmas morning, I was not at all surprised to be disappointed. There were a pair of slippers and a note: Purple is for old people. This shade of mauve is nicer for a young lady. The knitted slippers had big, messy pom-poms on top, and they were two sizes too big for my then nine-year-old feet. I’d stealthily tossed them in the garbage. Could they be the same pair? Preserved all these years to look still new?
I wanted to simply toss them away again, but then I thought I’d donate them, to a women’s homeless shelter maybe. Then I felt bad, expecting someone down on their luck or in a scary situation to appreciate my discards. I placed them on my feet. They fit now.
Time ticked on, and I had to get ready for work. I tried to pull the slippers off, but they wouldn’t budge.
“What in the—”
Okay, I tried everything. I attempted to cut the yarn strands, and the scissor blades simply slid over them. I tried to pry the things off with the aid of a screwdriver, a spatula, and a knife. No such luck. Not even when I doused my feet with olive oil. All that did was make the slippers live up to their name when I finally relented and headed to the door. I jammed the mess into my winter boots and headed to the job.
My feet were burning. I knew it wasn’t from the olive oil, which was good for the skin and the insides, too. The cause was whatever diabolical type of yarn smothered my feet.
I called Kyle. “I opened the package early,” I began.
“Not surprised!”
“Kyle, this is the worst yet. It… it’s like or is… the pair of slippers she gave me as a kid.”
“So, she repeated a gift. It’s happened be—”
“No. Kyle, listen to me. These are the slippers. The same pair. The ones I threw away, which would have been incinerated in the building garbage room. They should be nothing but long-disappeared ashes.”
There was silence. He thought I was mad, or lying?
“Kyle, open yours when you get home, would ya? I want to know what’s going on… who sent these. They hurt my feet.”
I didn’t bother to tell him the part about them being a permanent fixture.
I couldn’t bear the thought of going to the shopping mall, not with the way I felt. The next day would be Christmas Eve, leaving only a few hours in the morning to buy gifts for Kyle’s girls.
Not far from home, on my way from the commuter train station, I found Swan’s Gift Shop was open, and having a sale. Not the best place for little girl gifts, but I couldn’t show up empty-handed on Christmas, and I preferred not to fight the crowds in the morning. I grabbed some things, nice colorful and small items, and swiped my card. I was in agony by this point and so tired, I couldn’t even remember what I bought as I trudged the final blocks home.
The phone was ringing as I stumbled into my apartment.
“What kind of sick joke is this?!”
“Kyle? What—”
After getting him to stop shouting at me and stop accusing me, Kyle told me his gift was a bird, a stuffed canary. His canary. That’d died when he was seven. That had no doubt gone up in flames in the same incinerator as my slippers. We’d figure it out, I told him, and that I’d see him Christmas day.
I had a glass of water, couldn’t stand the thought of food, and headed to the bathroom. Maybe a good soak would loosen the blasted things. They’d begun cutting off my circulation. When I stripped down, I saw why… the mauve disasters had spread. The gnarly yarn encased my feet and legs. It was embedded in my thighs… digging in. I felt nauseous and defeated and plopped into the water anyway. I stuck my feet out to rest on the tub’s edge, and they were no longer my feet. They were the feet of a knitted rag doll. They felt numb.
I crawled from the bath. My feet were fairly useless, all wobbly and soft. I poked at my knitted legs, feeling bones inside like those of a bird, thin and fragile. I noticed a smell I thought I might have been smelling all day, but now it was stronger. A smoky odor.
I made it to a living room easy chair just as my legs no longer had feeling and the mauve reached my hips. Still, it climbed, burning, burning, then numb as my flesh was replaced with yarn.
I reached for the brown wrapping paper, discarded that morning on the coffee table, and I examined it with tears in my still-human eyes. The inside of the paper was scorched. I hadn’t noticed that before. Nor had I seen the small grey card which now fell onto my yarn-doll lap. I picked it up and read the familiar scrawl of Aunt Belinda.
You discarded the gifts. But like bad pennies they come back, and now, sent from my new home, the curse is so much stronger.
I didn’t understand. I looked at the scraps of brown paper again. What I thought were Christmas Seals, as I had expected them to be after seeing them year after year—were not. They were stickers with strange characters, beastly eyes, and grimacing faces. If there’d been a return address, all that remained now was 66. And 6? I wondered. I’d heard whisperings about Aunt Belinda. That she’d been a wild one. That she’d done things, maybe even hurt people, but in the end, we simply chose to remember her as an eccentric aunt. Harmless. Harmless.
The yarn stopped its invasion at the top of my hips. The rest of me remains human. I had Kyle come pick up the gifts for his daughters and explain to them I’d see them soon—that I’d had an accident.
I’m not sure how I’ll navigate a mobility scooter in the snow, but I began researching them and ordered a beautiful walking stick, too. I thought about going to the doctor; an amputation might be a good idea. But then again, maybe curses can be… reversed… passed on? Kyle’s girls might not be too anxious to see me now. The gifts I gave them were odd. Cheap. Old-auntie-like.
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