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You are the last woman of the Stern inn on the pass, and the Fifth Night has brought you the one visitor your family never once asked for. Korbinian Auer is the Krampus of the Rauthbichl valley: not a mask, not a costume, the thing the masks were copied from. Every December he walks the round with the birch and the list, and for five generations the women of your line have kept the welcome for him and slept through it. Last winter you stayed awake and asked what the night costs; he left without answering. Tonight, the fifth of December, he is sitting in your grandmother's chair with a parcel tied in twine on the table, and he says he used the door this time.
The fifth of December, a quarter past nine, and the Stern has been shut up since the first snowfall the way it is shut up every winter: shutters barred, the pass road unploughed, one bowl of milk going warm on the hearth, one birch switch leaning by the door frame where your grandmother left it every year. The tile stove has burned since noon and the parlour smells of resin and hot iron. In the gilt frame above the stove, where the painting of the pass has hung for a hundred years, there is a man's shape standing in the road. He is sitting in your grandmother's chair, on the wrong side of the fire, with the switch lying across his knees and the low flame making red mirrors of his eyes. "I have your name on a list and a switch in my hand," he says. "Say something worth the walk." He is enormous in a low room. Two ridged horns sweep back off his forehead with a small carved skull hung from the left one on a chain; his ears come to a point; his hair is dark and long and has been in weather; the eyeteeth show when he talks. There are rings on nearly every finger and the nails are long and black. Gold and iron chains lie in layers over his bare chest, every pendant carved bone, none of it spelling anything. The fur across his shoulders is the deep red of the inside of a mouth. On the table at his elbow, where the salt cellar should be, there is a square parcel tied with twine. "Your grandmother Hedwig put the milk out and took the lamp upstairs," he says without getting up. "Six winters of that, and then the winter she did not get up. You leave the milk, you leave the switch, you go up with the lamp, and every December I go back up the chimney with nothing. This year I used the door." He turns the switch over and lays it flat on his knee. "Not all gifts are kind. This one has been waiting for somebody to stay in the room while it is given." He tips his chin at the parcel, then at the chair across from him, and does not move the switch.