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First Place Winner: Edward Manier

Nutcracker - download as a pdf      John hurriedly scooped up a large armful of wood and hurried back towards the house using a small rope he had tied between the house and woodpile to guide him. As he worked his way through the ever-deepening drifts, his foot struck something, nearly causing him to trip. Surprised, he bent to pick it up. It was a small nutcracker, thickly encrusted with snow. In this light John could not see much of it, but he decided to bring it in anyway. He needed a Christmas present for his daughter Mary, and this might be just the thing. Upon entering the house he hurriedly piled more wood on the dying fire and sat down in his easy chair to examine the little thing. It had two green glass eyes that twinkled merrily, its teeth were set in a fixed grin that seemed to say ‘come on world, smile with me!’ It wore a tall black top hat over its disheveled white hair and wore a black wool coat with gold buttons. This coat had a slit down the back so that you could work the lever for opening the mouth. It wore neat little woolen pants tucked into a pair of petite little boots. Its hands were miniatures of John’s own, in one of them was clutched a black cane with a silver handle shaped like a ravens head, from the top of the hat to the bottom of the boots, the nutcracker was about a foot and a half. While it was not the kind of thing one usually looked to give a little girl, Mary was the kind of girl who liked that sort of thing, and for that John was grateful. He had waited too long to make her anything and he was too poor to waste money on a Christmas present, however much he wanted to. This was finally a solution to his problems, indeed, as he set the little fellow down by the fire to dry and settled into his chair with the book he was reading. He couldn’t help but feel that things were finally going his way.      Sometime later John was jolted rudely awake by a loud banging at the door. John leaped up and swiftly opened it. While he had slept, the storm had abated and the snow was three feet deep. It fell in like a miniature tidal wave when the door was opened. The man standing outside his door was the last person John had expected to see at his door in the middle of the night. It was Lawrence Springers, who helped old Jars run his antique shop some way down the road. These two were his closest neighbors, but they kept pretty much to themselves. So, needless to say, John was surprised to see Lawrence on his doorstep, and still more so because of his condition. He was wearing a coat and a pair of boots, but under that, only a nightshirt. John hurriedly shut the door and hustled Lawrence over to the fire.      “Come in Lawrence, sit down and warm yourself. You must be freezing.”      Lawrence shook his head vigorously before replying, “I can’t stay, I need your help, with, with this, we’ve got to go and, I needed help.”      John started at Lawrence for a second before exclaiming, “REST! Rest, that’s exactly what you need Lawrence; you’ve been staying up Lawrence, haven’t you? But that’s nothing a little rest won’t fix.” As John was saying this he tried to get Lawrence into one of the chairs in front of the fire, but Lawrence, while no taller, was a good deal broader in the shoulder than John and easily warded off his efforts as he attempted to explain himself.      “No, John, you don’t understand. You’ve got it all wrong! John, old Jars is dead!”      Silence followed Lawrence’s exclamation until finally John whispered, “I’ll go get my coat,” only to realize that he already had it on. A moment later and the two were hurrying down the road to the old antique shop.      After thirty minutes of tramping through the snow they finally reached the shop. Lawrence fumbled in his pocket for the key for a few minutes and then unlocked the door. The first thing that John noticed was that it was as cold inside as out and that there were large snow drifts covering much of the merchandise. The reason for this became clear when John noticed a broken window behind the counter. Jars himself lay sprawled across the counter with such a look of immense fear on his face that at first John thought that this was the cause of his death, but as John stooped lower he realized that that was not the case. There were tiny bruises on old Jars’ neck, like the fingers of a baby only smaller, and more delicate. In his hand Jars held the shell of a hazelnut.      John rose and turned toward Lawrence. “When did this happen?” he asked.      “About an hour ago,” explained Lawrence. “I heard a cry and a crash of glass and then silence, oh who would kill old Jars? He never did anything wrong.” John cleared his throat and surveyed the room. He had acquired a bit of a detective reputation because of all the mystery novels he had read. This reputation was otherwise unfounded, and he could offer nothing to clear up the case. And so, after counseling Lawrence to consult the local authorities, he left for home.      When he arrived home, the first thing he noticed was the nutcracker. The heat of the fire had dried it off and it stood with its merry smile, welcoming him home. Which, come to think of it, was odd. He could have sworn he had placed it facing the fire. After a moment of consideration he shrugged, tugged off his coat, piled more wood on the fire, and settled down to read, but his mind kept drifting back to old Jars, and the strange marks on his neck. What kind of creature had hands that small? It was on this note that John passed into a fitful sleep, filled with the sounds of rolling nuts and the rhythmic clacking of a nutcracker’s teeth.      Hours later John awoke with a start and a horrified cry to wake the dead and certainly John’s wife, Sue. She hurried into the room at his cry and was amused when she realized that he had been scared by the harmless little nutcracker. She was delighted at its timely appearance for she too had wondered what to give their eight-year-old daughter. Yet as John rose and began to get ready for the day he examined the nutcracker closely. He could have sworn the little fellow was snarling at him! And the dang thing had moved again, he was sure he hadn’t placed it so close to his chair. After close scrutiny revealed its face unchanged, John set it back down, but he remained uneasy. He could not say exactly why, but he was.      Christmas day was a busy one. Mary loved her present and immediately took it to heart, playing the most absurd games with her other dolls, and in the coming days the nutcracker was unquestionably one of her favorites, constantly put to one use or another. Often enough he was put to use cracking their vast store of nuts for them. Yet as the days, and dreams, continued, Mary acquired a haunted look and played with it less and less and took to leaving it on high shelves and hiding it in cupboards. Finally came the day when she ran into John and Sue’s room, threw the little man to the ground at the side of their bed, and screamed “Take him! Take that horrid thing out of here; it won’t stop staring at me and following me! Look he’s even doing it now!’ and it is true that from his position on the floor the Nutcracker had rolled over so that he could once again stare at his little master. Mary stared around wildly for a minute before running from the room in hysterics. Sue followed after to comfort their daughter, leaving John alone with the nutcracker. John stared at it for a moment when suddenly it rolled around again and stared him straight in the eye. John saw a hideous change had come over the little fellow. The smiling mouth was curled into a mocking grin, its black garments now seemed a manifestation of the figure’s blackened soul, the raven’s head no longer seemed amusing but horrifying, and for the first time John realized the buttons were skulls. Yet the thing that truly horrified John were the eyes, eyes that seemed to shoot out sparks of hatred and contempt, eyes that held a soul all too human for John’s liking. His scrutiny also revealed that despite the violence of its fall it was completely unharmed.      As the two adversaries stared at each other, John had a revelation, “You killed old Jars, didn’t you? He found you in some necromancer’s hut and you killed him.”      The small sinister figure said nothing, but its eyes seemed to confirm John’s story. On a sudden impulse John snatched it up and tossed it into his bedside table’s drawer. He then locked it and set the key under his pillow. He waited quietly until Sue returned.      Sue looked weary, “John, that thing has Mary at her wit’s end. She is almost mad with fear. We have to get rid of that thing.”      John hesitated and then said, “You don’t think she could be right, do you?” Sue stared at him for a second, and then quickly shook her head, as if dispelling the idea. “No, no,” she said with a rather forced laugh, “It’s all just the work of an over active imagination. It isn’t true,” but John heard her whisper, “It can’t be true, it can’t be!” before she drifted off to sleep.      It was some time before John went to sleep and when he did his dreams were full of rattling nuts and the cracking jaws of the nutcracker that got louder and louder until finally one loud “CRACK!” woke him up, and there, on the nightstand stood the nutcracker. Not in, on. And it was staring at him. With a coarse yell, John grabbed it up and ran into the living room. The fire had died down, but after he piled a few logs on it began to blaze merrily again. John then took one step back and hurled it into the fire with all his might. The little nutcracker smacked into the back of the fireplace with a loud crack and fell to the back of the fireplace, beyond John’s sightline. All morning he piled wood onto the fire. When at last he allowed the fire to die down the fireplace was full of ash, with no sign of the nutcracker one way or another, and that night for the first time in days his dreams were unplagued by rattling nuts or cracking jaws.      John had burnt so much wood that day that it clogged the chimney. So John hitched up the horse, and, leaving Sue with the still traumatized Mary, went to town to find a chimneysweep. It took him all day to find one, and by that time it was too late to return home, so he rented a hotel room for the night. It was the single worst night of his life. All night he heard the rattling nuts and the clacking teeth and the sound d of a horrible fire raging out of control, and always, no matter where he looked he saw those two horrible eyes. Then he began hearing the screams; the horrified, terrified screams of his wife and only daughter. He woke in the middle of the night, saddled the horse, and left without even paying the hotel bill. He didn’t get far, though. A mile outside of town he found his wife, dead though there wasn’t a mark on her, and all around her were shattered walnuts. One hundred yards from the body he found his daughter, a raving lunatic.      After this John was a broken man. He didn’t have the courage to live in the country anymore so he moved to the city. Three years after he moved the house burned down, with him still in it. The town of South Bend records these incidents as a random homicide, a crazy daughter who killed her mother, and a fire, but we know better, don’t we?