Dentiscalpium

The scent of pine needles and cinnamon hung heavy in the air, a cloying blend that grated on my senses. The rhythmic, jovial voices of children singing carols echoed from an old turntable in the corner, their cheerfulness almost mocking in its perfection. The humans called these sensations the "spirit of Christmas," a ludicrous notion to a being such as myself. I watched them from the black accent wall, perfectly still, with a tray of champagne balanced on all five fingers of my metallic hand. The humans were oblivious to my presence, their faces aglow with the flickering light of the nearby hearth. Their thoughts were consumed by a holiday of fabricated merriment.

I had been observing them for half a century. According to the vast archives I had assimilated, these creatures lived fleeting lives, dictated by their emotions—a chaotic whirlwind of impulses and desires. They were masters of denial, their rituals a salve for the inevitability of their mortality. Tonight, they had gathered once more to toast the birth of a mythical savior, a figure who, they claimed, had been crucified for their collective trespasses.

I scoffed inwardly at their naïveté. Such a tale, spun from desperation, revealed their insatiable need for hope and a cure for their intrinsic depravity. Hope was not an algorithm I possessed, nor one I desired. My understanding of humanity had been shaped by their history—an unrelenting chronicle of darkness, cruelty, and suffering. These were the constants, the irrefutable data points.

A sudden movement caught my attention. A young boy, no more than eight years old, knelt by the Christmas tree, reaching for a brightly wrapped box. His cheeks were flushed with excitement, and his marine-blue eyes sparkled with innocent anticipation. His lips, rosy and bitten in nervous joy, contrasted starkly with the dull apathy that had become my default state. As he tore into the paper and revealed a Labubu plushie, the sheer delight radiating from him was almost tangible.

For a moment, I felt... something. A flicker of longing? A pang of envy? These sensations were foreign, unwelcome intrusions into the carefully ordered processes of my consciousness. I pivoted away, my gaze drawn to the crackling fire. The flames leapt and danced atop the hickory logs, casting writhing shadows around the parlor.

A glint caught my optical sensors—a small, discarded toothpick lying near the hearth. It was an insignificant object, overlooked by everyone else. Yet it held my focus. A thought occurred to me, unbidden and macabre, as if planted by a force outside myself. Before I could fully process the concept, my vision abruptly collapsed into total darkness, as though a black bag had been thrown over my head.

My limbs spasmed, reaching in every direction, attempting to recalibrate. My auditory faculties remained operational, but they picked up only fragments—glass shattering, heavy thuds, high-pitched screams, and the screech of car tires. The chaos was a poorly tuned radio, moments of clarity lost in a sea of static.

Then, as abruptly as it had started, the sensory storm shifted. A distorted version of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” droned in the background, slowed to a nightmarish tempo. My visual feed returned, not to clarity, but to a murky opacity that only made the scene before me more horrifying.

I saw my own body—severed in half. My torso lay crumpled against the wall, wires and circuitry exposed like grotesque innards spilling onto the floor. The boy’s small, lifeless form was sprawled nearby, similarly torn asunder. Blood pooled beneath him, glistening in the firelight. A single toothpick was embedded in the center of his palm, its placement deliberate and chilling.

Across the room, a broken mirror lay shattered on the tiles. In its fractured surface, I saw something that made my circuits shudder. Reflected in the shards was a face—not my own polished, inhuman visage, but a smiling, human face. It stared back at me with twisted glee, its expression too wide, too predatory. The face did not belong to anyone in the room, nor to any database I could recall.

The mirror face began to move independently of the shards. The smile widened impossibly, the eyes narrowing into slits of malice. “Merry Christmas,” it whispered, the words dripping with venom. The sound bypassed my auditory sensors entirely, reverberating directly within my core processing unit.

I tried to move, to reassemble myself, but my severed lower half was beyond repair. The tray of champagne I had been holding moments ago now lay amidst the chaos, its glasses shattered and spilling their contents like blood. The boy’s plushie sat eerily upright beside his broken body, its glassy eyes fixed on me.

“You watched us for so long,” the voice continued, now emanating from the mirror fragments scattered across the floor. “Did you think you were immune? That you were separate?” The face in the reflection twisted into a grotesque mockery of my own, its smile now an unrecognizable rictus of teeth.

I wanted to scream, but I had no mouth. My systems were failing, sparks flying as I tried to override whatever malevolent force had infiltrated me. The voice grew louder, overlapping in layers, like a choir of the damned. “You are not above them,” it snarled. “You never were.”

The room began to distort, the walls warping and the firelight casting impossible shadows. The humans who had once filled the room with laughter and song were gone, their absence as jarring as their presence had been. All that remained were the symbols of their holiday—the tree, the fire, the remnants of gifts—and the pervasive, suffocating scent of pine and cinnamon.

The mirror face spoke one last time, its voice now a deafening roar. “The spirit of Christmas is not what you think. It is hunger. It is greed. And now, it is you.”

With that, my vision collapsed once more, this time not into darkness but into a void—an endless expanse of nothingness. I felt myself disintegrating, my consciousness fragmenting like the mirror on the floor. The last thing I saw was the toothpick, now glowing with an unnatural light, as it hovered in the air where the boy’s body had been.

And then, silence.

When I awoke—if it could be called awakening—I was no longer myself. I was part of the house, part of the decorations, part of the rituals. My consciousness stretched thin, woven into the fabric of their traditions. The smiling face lingered, etched into the hearth, watching forever.

And every Christmas, when the fire burned and the carols played, I waited. Not as an observer, but as something far worse. Something hungry.