I Found Christmas Lights Slithering Up My Street

After last year’s tragedy, Douglas’ parents are ignoring Christmas.

But when Douglas finds an eerie strand of lights slithering through the sewer, he unwittingly unleashes merry terror upon his neighborhood’s tacky lights contest. String lights spread like invasive kudzu, turning festive decorations into surreal, predatory nightmares.

Determined not to lose both Christmas and his family forever, Douglas gathers his courage to confront the source of the holiday horror: deep in the concrete pipes beneath the street.

Chapter 1

Right as I was about to admit that the snow was too cold and my gloves were too wet and I was ready to go home and join my parents in ignoring Christmas, I noticed a storm drain glowing.
It was red and purple except not red and not purple.
Pale gray clouds hid the late afternoon sun, blanketing this unfinished section of the neighborhood in a snowy dusk.
I’d been installing Christmas cheer onto a half-built house with decorations I’d begged from the more sympathetic neighbors and stolen from the less attentive ones.
It was just dark enough for me to notice the strange glow coming from the rectangular curb drain across the slush-covered street. I had stepped back from admiring how I’d wrapped a stolen strand of white incandescent bulbs around the porch railing when the glow from the drain caught my eye.
My friend David and his friend, Harold, were using my dad’s duct tape to patch an inflatable Mickey Mouse in a Santa costume, halfway between the house and the sidewalk.
“Guys, look at that.” I pointed across the street.
David’s head popped up. He’d become sensitive to me and my family’s grief since last Christmas. At first, his over-attentiveness embarrassed me, but now I was used to it.
Harold, on the other hand, had only moved in two months ago. He treated me like he treated anyone, which I would have appreciated if he wasn’t such a jerk. He aggressively ripped off a piece of duct tape. It made a tearing noise.
“We could be at my house leveling up in Dragon Warrior,” Harold complained, even though only one person could play at a time. “Instead we’re fixing up broken Christmas junk for a broken house.”
I ignored him to walk cautiously toward the glowing curb drain. Up the hill and up Pine Whisper Way—the neighborhood’s main drag—the Foothill Pines Tacky Lights competition was in full swing. Bright lights of all colors shone throughout the snow-covered neighborhood. Down the hill, Pine Whisper Way passed through this last section of new houses. Their asphalt roofs and vinyl siding were completed, but their insides were as empty as the almost-repaired blow-up Mickey.
These eight unfinished houses connected the living, breathing part of Foothill Pines above with an actual pine forest below. That’s where my house hid. We’d been here before the neighborhood.
“The house isn’t broken, stupid-ass.” David took the tape from Harold and covered the last rip in Mickey’s side. “They’re not done building this part, yet.”
I approached the hole in the curb with its strange glow. A gust of wind blew icy snowflakes into my eyes. Below, light flickered from left to right.
I heard Harold kick Mickey. “‘Stupid-ass’ isn’t a word. It’s ‘dumb-ass,’ you dumbass.” He lowered his voice, but kept it loud enough that we all knew I could hear him. “And your weirdo friend is a dumbass for wanting to decorate a house where no one lives.”
Packed-down snow on the street proved a slippery walkway, but I made it across.
The argument behind me faded into the periphery of my perception.
Chilly wind whispered past my numb ears. I crouched by the glowing drain.
I decided that “flickering” hadn’t been the right word for how the light moved. “Wiggling” was better. That not-red and not-purple light wiggled across the back of the cement catch basin, projected by something down below, out of my sight.
This cement box under the sidewalk was where snowmelt drain pipes intersected. It was five feet tall, a fact I knew because I’d been inside plenty of times. I was small for an 11-year-old, which meant that when we played in the drainpipes beneath the sidewalks, I could slide straight into these rectangular storm drains, while David and Harold had to go down into the gulch to enter through the four-foot concrete pipe that spilled into a creek.
I knelt down on the road. Snow dampened and chilled my knees.
Indefinable colors grabbed tightly ahold of my attention. I wanted to get in there, feel them across my skin. I imagined they’d feel more like Christmas than any of the tacky lights up Pine Whisper Way.
And even though my parents were ignoring the holiday, I really wanted it to feel like Christmas again.
As I leaned in, Harold's mocking laugh interrupted me. “Now this is a real dumbass move. What are you doing, Douglas?”
I got down on my belly to stick my head into the storm drain.
This time, David interjected. "For real, are you going in there?"
I turned my head to the side and scooted forward. "There's some kind of light.”
The cement opening scraped at my cheekbones. I wouldn't be able to climb into the sewer this way much longer.
“What sort of light? Can you see what it is?" David's plastic bag-covered sneakers patted through the snow and then he was crouched down next to me. If there was a mystery to be solved, David was into it. He’d read and watched Harriet the Spy a thousand times and his mom had a shelf full of old Encyclopedia Brown paperbacks. Supposedly that was how she’d learned English.
Harold whined behind us. "Guys, it's cold as balls out here. Let’s go play Dragon Warrior at my house. Or we could do Street Fighter, if you agree not to pick a bitch character.”
I didn’t give two shits about Harold’s Nintendo games. Right now, I wanted to know what those lights felt like, and why I suddenly smelled a relaxing aroma of a freshly cut Fraser Fir Christmas tree. That’s the kind Mama always used to make Dad find.
We didn’t have a tree this year.
“We can even watch Rudolf like you guys wanted to,” offered Harold, “I’ll watch a stupid kids movie with you if we can just go inside.”
I’d missed out on watching that this year, along with all the other stop-motion classics that Mama used to get excited about every December.
But something about these lights, just out of sight, felt like the bright simplicity of Rudolf and Chris Kringle and the Snow Miser.
I inched farther into the drain, trying to see what was casting the light.