The Ghosts of the Woods

Chapter 5

There, standing, well hovering actually, in the doorway is the ghost of Santa Clause.

It cannot be the real Santa Clause, because he has a skeleton's face, just like the other ghosts that are still surrounding us.
He looks absolutely horrifying.

He starts laughing as soon as he sees our shocked and scared faces. His laugh is deep and as scary as his face is. I think of the book I read last night and remember the way the laugh of the Santa Clause was described in it, just like the laugh of the Santa standing in front of us. But that cannot be, can it? How can somebody describe a laugh so detailed in words that you recognise it straight away, when somebody is laughing in front of you.

He laughs for quite a while, until he realises that Johnny is whispering something into my ear. That is when I realise too, because I follow the ghost's gaze and feel Johnny's warm breath close to my ear. But it immediately stops when Johnny realises that he is being watched.

I turn to look at Johnny, trying to tell him silently that he should repeat what it is he said before as I had not heard him.

But he is too busy staring at the dead Santa Clause hovering in front of us.

"I didn't know Santa Clause had died. What happened? Did your sleigh have a crash landing or something?" Johnny mocks him.

Santa's ghost starts laughing again, coming closer. But we cannot get away, because the other ghosts around us are coming closer too, blocking any way we could escape. Now Santa's ghost is only a few centimetres away from us.

He looks even scarier than before, because we can see him a lot clearer now. He has horrible teeth that are partly missing or bits that have broken off of them.
And his eyes, well, he doesn't actually have any eyes. There, where the eyes should really be, are just two big holes through which you can see the back of the wall.

He has really old looking clothes on that are torn at places. The clothes look just as old and dusty as everything in the house looks.
Even the colour has gone darker, dirtier than it probably originally looked like. He is wearing the typical Santa costume, just old, torn in parts and manky.
His beard is also not white anymore, it is grey and even that has holes in it here and there.