Jolly Saint Nick Is Dead, Alas

A clatter on the rooftop may not bring glad tidings to the ones on Santa’s naughty list. This yuletide potboiler puts the sour in sugar plum candy and the bitter in hot buttered rum.

I’m not sure quite what to say about Perry Slaughter, the type of unrepentant hack who never met a pulp cliché he didn’t ply with liquor and woo back to his place with ill intent. My association with him began in 2004 when, to my discomfort, I helped him place his short story “Optical Allusions” in the fall issue of Electric Velocipede.

I thought I’d washed my hands of him after that, but in 2007 he somehow strongarmed me into airing the story below on my late, not-so-lamented podcast, William Shunn’s ShunnCast—where, bizarrely, it ended up finding its way into a few (obviously dysfunctional) families’ Christmas Eve traditions.

What on earth would induce me to share it again now? Er, let’s just say Mr. Slaughter knows where I live, and I find it prudent to keep certain yuletide spirits well-propitiated. Merry cockamamie Christmas! (And apologies to my new subscribers.)

Old Man Kelsey eased into his favorite recliner, being careful not to spill any steaming Irish coffee from the mug cupped between his hands. The sun had long since set, and snow was falling outside the cabin. It was cold indoors, and Kelsey realized that it was perhaps the lack of a Christmas tree that made the dim room seem so gloomy. But then, a good fire could brighten things up just as well.

He brushed the thought aside, however. Building a fire would be too much work.

With his old bones and generous belly settled, he tried to think pleasant thoughts, but all that came to mind were Catherine’s poinsettias, and how those Mahoney brats had mutilated them.

His hands began to tremble with anger. Those stinking, dang-blamed little kids! He clasped the mug tightly to still his hands, then took a quick, deep slurp. “Dadburn!” he screamed, sitting bolt upright and spewing the mouthful everywhere. Hot coffee slopped from the mug into his lap and onto the rug.

After a few moments the pain subsided somewhat, and Kelsey sank back into his chair, cradling the half-empty mug. He lacked the energy to clean himself off. He regarded with despair the brown splotches that stained the white shag rug. He’d never get them clean.

But in his head he could hear Catherine’s admonishing voice: “Well, Charles, that’s what you get for being so impatient. If you’re going to drink it black, then you have to learn to wait for it to cool down. Now let’s get some wet rags and clean this mess up before the stains get a chance to set.”

“It wasn’t black,” said Kelsey in protest. “It was spiked.” Tears rolled into the white whiskers which he had neither shaved nor trimmed in over two weeks.

Catherine had been dead now just one day shy of a year.

Kelsey looked at the coffee stains again, and the tears came harder and faster. He had scrimped all the previous year to buy Catherine that rug. It had been her final Christmas present.

She had loved her beautiful white rug.

“Frag it,” said Kelsey gruffly, wiping his eyes.

He set the mug down on the rug, levered himself to his feet, and shambled to the liquor cabinet like a big, tired bear. His cheeks puffed out as he stared through the glass, running a hand through his thick white hair. “Way past time to get that cut, Charles,” said Catherine’s voice. “You’re starting to look like one of those old men who live in cardboard boxes. Shall I fetch the clippers, or would you rather have Jack cut it when you’re in town next week?”

Kelsey opened the cabinet and pulled out the half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey he had used to spike his coffee. As he swirled the liquor he thought he could hear faint jingling sounds. He glanced around suspiciously, then unstoppered the bottle. He drank straight from the neck, and whiskey dribbles stained the front of his threadbare T-shirt.

He turned away from the cabinet, catching sight of Catherine’s photograph on the mantle. She was beautiful, with her long silver hair and compassionate gray eyes, and guilt stabbed through him like the sharp thrust of a pike. Getting drunk tonight would be no way to honor her memory, especially when a cockamamie old drunk driver had—had—

The tears were starting again.

He tipped up the bottle and took another brusque swig, but as he did he heard several heavy thumps from the roof, followed by a muffled crash.

He jumped, spilling more whiskey down his front. “Those dadburn Mahoney brats,” he snarled, jamming the stopper back into the bottle and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “What in Pete’s name are they up to now?”

He slammed the bottle down on an end table, doused the living room lights, and stamped into the kitchen, pulling his suspenders up over his shoulders. Dirty dishes overflowed the sink—another reminder that his life had gone to pot since Catherine’s passing. He put out the kitchen lights and crossed the tiled floor in near-darkness. The window over the sink let in a square of light from the security lamps out back.

A side door led out from the kitchen. A down jacket hung beside it on a peg, and a pair of wet boots had been dropped nearby on the floor. Kelsey shrugged into the jacket, then kicked off his slippers and jammed his feet into the thick, fleece-lined boots.

The thumping sounds from the roof continued.

“I’ll show you who to mess with, you little pains in the whatzit,” Kelsey wheezed, working the snaps up the front of his jacket. Those three brats didn’t know when to leave well enough alone, always sneaking across his property on their way to the bus stop, snitching apples off his trees in the fall, hurling snowballs all winter at his mailbox and his truck and his chicken coop and his greenhouse and his—his—

Kelsey opened the broom closet and grabbed his .12-gauge shotgun. The greenhouse stood in his mind as Catherine’s memorial. It had been her favorite place, and those snot-nosed little good-for-nothings didn’t have the common decency to leave it alone! It wasn’t bad enough that they tried to break the panes with their cockamamie snowballs, but now they’d actually broken in and mutilated her prize poinsettias! He had seen the footprints out the back window not thirty minutes before, and when he went to investigate, what he found was utter desecration.

Well, he’d show them now, by gumbo.

“Oh, but Charles, they’re only children,” he heard Catherine say. “They were probably just looking for a place to get warm on their way home from the woods. And who could resist taking home a few lovely poinsettias to cheer up the house on Christmas Eve?”

The sounds from above resolved into heavy footsteps.

Kelsey hefted the shotgun. Just looking for a place to get warm, eh? So what were they up to now—fetching a lost Frisbee? “Let’s see if the little brats come around again once I send ‘em off with their backsides full of rock salt,” he muttered. “Let’s just see!”

He twisted the knob and nudged the side door open with one foot. Cold air swirled in like an uninvited guest. He held the shotgun at waist-level. Light snow fell gently through the cone of light cast by the flyspecked yellow porch lamp. Beyond was only fuzzy grayness.

He poked his head out the door and took a quick peek in each direction. The footprints he had left earlier were filling with snow. He saw no other sign that anyone had been skulking around the house.

Kelsey stepped out onto the porch, fingering the cold trigger guard of his shotgun.

And from the living room there arose such a clatter that he nearly dropped the gun in surprise.

He spun, his heart hammering. The noise had been something like a bowling ball rolling down the chimney and smashing into the fireplace, but now as he listened he could hear furtive swishes and low, angry mutterings.

There was someone in the living room—and it wasn’t any little kid.

He moved back into the kitchen, easing the door shut behind him. He tried to breathe as quietly as possible, but the pounding in his chest made his lungs heave loudly enough to wake the dead. He tiptoed to the cupboard with the burlap sugar sack and dug around in the sugar until he had reclaimed the two loaded shells he kept hidden there. He shook them lightly to clean them of sugar grains. He could still hear the intruder rustling about in the dark. Quietly, he cracked open the breech of the shotgun, removed the shells packed with rock salt, and replaced them with the two new shells.

“Now you be careful, Charles,” said his omnipresent Catherine in a stern whisper. “Don’t you start shooting unless someone gives you a reason—but don’t be afraid to shoot, either. I don’t want any dead men in my living room, but if there has to be one then I’d just as soon it wasn’t my husband.”

“Yes, dear,” Kelsey grunted. His breathing still too loud and ragged, he snapped shut the breech and crept to the living-room doorway. He flattened himself against the wall—as much as possible—then peered cautiously around the jamb. He saw the intruder dimly, a short, rotund man rummaging through some kind of rucksack. The man was dressed in a thick, fuzzy snowsuit, its leggings tucked into high black boots. He wore a cap as well, pulled down snugly over his ears, and the hair that stuck out from underneath seemed curly and gray in the gloom.

Kelsey took a deep breath. Time to make his presence known.

He pumped the shotgun twice and stepped through the doorway, flicking on the lights as he went. “Okay, friend, let’s see those hands,” he said, advancing into the room with a calm he did not feel. “Up in the air, nice and slow.”

The fat little bearded man dropped a Christmas stocking and slowly straightened, hands above his head, staring at the bores of Kelsey’s shotgun less than a foot from his chest.

Kelsey’s eyes widened in recognition. His finger tightened on the trigger, and the shotgun kicked like an angry mule. The intruder’s chest opened like shredded paper, a geyser of blood the same color as his snowsuit erupting from his back to spatter the fireplace, the mantle, and Catherine’s picture.

The man landed in a heap beside the hearth, and Kelsey’s first feeling was one of elation.

But his next was horror as it hit him that he had just blown Santa Claus to Kingdom Come.

The Visitors at Wriggly Field

“Oh my goodness, Charles,” cried a distraught Catherine. “What on earth have you done?”

Kelsey shook his head and wiped a hand across his face, the smoking shotgun dangling from his other hand. Get a fragging grip! he told himself. There’s no such thing as Santa Claus!

The body, lying on its back in a wide puddle of blood, began to tremble.

Kelsey raised the shotgun again. This definitely wasn’t Santa Claus. The whiskers on this man weren’t curly and white; they were grey and dirty and grizzled, going to yellow at the corners of his mouth. His nose was red, but hardly like a cherry. It was bulbous and pitted and all mapped with broken capillaries. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, and his forehead was covered with blotches the color and texture of liver.

Kelsey knew this face. He knew it well. He had stared at it in court for the most excruciating week of his life—and he had seen it all too often in his nightmares in the months since the trial.

This was the town drunk, Blake Trotter—also known as Trot the Sot.

Trotter was now struggling to rise. He had somehow gotten his elbows under him and was trying to lever himself to a sitting position. The crimson pool on the rug slowly widened. Kelsey raised the shotgun again, eyes like flint, a cold ember burning in his heart. Trotter gasped like a beached fish; wet sucking noises came from his chest. Terror showed clearly on his face, but it was mixed with anger and defiance. He was trying to speak.

Kelsey lowered the gun and stooped to hear.

“You . . .” The word disintegrated in a spasm of coughing that left foamy pink flecks in Trotter’s beard. “You . . . son . . . of . . . a . . . a . . .”

Kelsey had been the only witness to the hit-and-run accident that took Catherine’s life, and that, combined with a lack of physical evidence, had eventually caused the case against Trotter to be dismissed. But not soon enough to keep the stain from Trotter’s name. Not soon enough to spare him ostracism at the hands of the townspeople.

Now Blake Trotter, foundering in his own blood, fought to form his last word.

Kelsey turned abruptly and walked to the far side of the room. He set down the shotgun and hugged himself tightly, weighted down by a monstrous burden of guilt.

But what was there to feel guilty for? What was there to feel guilty for?

“You killed my wife, you drunken old bastard!” Kelsey shouted. With his back against the wall, he slid to the floor and sat with his head between his knees, sobbing hysterically, until there were no more tears left in him.

And the man in the red suit sank back to the floor and died.

Catherine’s voice, insistent but not overbearing, brought Kelsey back to himself. He realized that she had been trying for some time to catch his ear. “There’s nothing wrong with crying, Charles,” she said. “Lord knows you need to, but you’ll have plenty of time for it later. What you need to do right now is to call the sheriff.”

Kelsey sniffled, wiping the tears from his eyes and the snot from his mustache. He took several deep breaths. She was right. The longer he waited to report this, the more suspicious it would seem. Sheriff Haggerty could be a stern man, but he was fair. Kelsey would just call him up and report that he had surprised an intruder . . .

But then, how had Trotter actually intruded? Kelsey glanced around the living room, then got to his feet and made a quick circuit of every room, checking the doors and windows. All were closed and locked.

Sweat prickled his forehead. How in the name of Pete, Mike, and Jerry had the old drunk gotten in? With no evidence of forced entry, what justification was there for the killing? Why, the sheriff might just assume that Kelsey had invited Trotter over and then murdered him in cold blood!

Kelsey sagged against the living-room doorway, covering his face with one large hand. He could try to make it look as if there’d been a break-in—but if Haggerty saw through it, that would be another piece of evidence pointing to premeditated murder. . . .

He shook his head violently, close to tears again. “Great galloping golliwogs, Catherine,” he said. “What am I going to do?”

He listened for her advice, but she remained silent.

Then he heard the scratching.

Skritch, skritch, skritch. It was a low, almost desperate sound, and it was coming from near the body.

Kelsey was immediately alert, all senses on edge. He grabbed the shotgun—more for comfort than anything—and moved slowly toward Trotter. The stocking Trotter had dropped lay near his shiny blacks boots, coal spilled from it like chunks of black rock candy. The bulky white rucksack still sat where the man had left it, overflowing with brightly wrapped presents.

The scratching noise was coming from the sack.

Now that he was close enough, Kelsey could hear an agitated chittering sound as well, plus a soft, mysterious slurping.

He set down the shotgun and bent over the sack.

“Don’t you go poking around in there, Charles,” said Catherine worriedly. “There’s something alive in that tote bag, and it’s probably dangerous. That old drunk wasn’t bringing you any Christmas cheer.”

“Yes, dear,” said Kelsey distractedly. One present near the mouth of the sack was rocking. Happy little mice in red caps capered against a cheery green background on the wrapping paper, and a bright red bow topped off the package. The tag read, in an unsteady, childlike hand:

Mary Crismas, Mr Kelcy!
Yur Frend, Santa

Trembling, Kelsey lifted the box out of the sack. It was about twelve inches square and six high, and it shifted in his hands as whatever was inside threw itself madly back and forth. The chittering grew louder. He set the present down on the rug, near the stocking and the spilled coal. “Now let’s just see what blamefool kind of thing Santa brought me for Christmas,” he said, pulling off the bow and tearing at the paper.

“Slow down, Charles,” said Catherine with a lilt of condescension. “Show a little restraint. If you really must see what’s inside that package, then you can at least be careful with the wrapping. If you get it off in one piece, you can use it again next year.”

“For what?” Kelsey grunted with bitterness. He and Catherine had never been able to have children, and all their relatives had either passed on or failed to write in the age of a tortoise. There would be no call for wrapping paper at the Kelsey home, this year or the next.

But Kelsey took a kind of feverish delight in ripping the paper off this present. “Gotcha,” he said when the bare white box sat jerking to and fro amidst the ruins of its wrapping. The box was the type you might get at some fancy department store, with embossed lettering on the sides.

Cautiously, he lifted the lid.

The rat leaped before the lid was even completely removed. Its hide was matted and scraggly with sweat. The light of madness gleamed from its red eyes, and foam flecked its muzzle and whiskers. It gnashed its long, yellow incisors, squealing like a miniature demon.

With all his weight behind him, Kelsey crushed the lid back down onto the thin box. The box crumpled, and Kelsey both heard and felt a sickening crunch.

He backed away from the box fast on his hands and knees, as if the rat might jump at him again, but nothing moved. His heart was beating so hard that he could almost see his pulse in the pounding behind his eyes. His forehead and underarms were slick with sweat. “You should listen to me better, Charles,” said Catherine’s voice. “You could have gotten yourself infected with rabies. They inject you in the stomach for that, you know.”

But Kelsey, breathing hard, was grinning like a kid who had awakened Christmas morning to find beneath the tree the model train he had only dreamed of. A rat! he said to himself. The worthless, sodbusting old sot brought me a crazed rat for Christmas!

He began to laugh, and soon tears of mirth were streaming down his face to tangle in his scraggly whiskers. “What in the world has gotten into you, Charles?” he heard Catherine say, and he could picture her shaking her head in that perplexed but tolerant way of hers. “You’ve finally gone ‘round the bend, that’s it.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand, scaling his laughter down to a chuckle. “He was trying to steal my cockamamie Christmas,” he said, as if letting her in on a terrific joke. “He stole my Christmas last year, and he was trying to do it again this year. If I’d had any presents here, I do believe the mangy old gutter-cur would have taken them. Probably would have taken the tree, too, just like that Grinch on the television did.”

Kelsey stood up then, cold resolve dropping like an iron mask across his face. “And he’s not the first one who’s tried it tonight.”

Pushing all hesitation aside, he bent over Trotter’s body and unbuckled the wide, black belt cinched tight around the man’s middle. Trotter was short, but he was also wide, and it looked to Kelsey like he could probably squeeze into the snowsuit. It was too bad the jacket had that gaping, bloody hole right there in front, but—

“Wait just one dadburn minute,” he said to himself, fingers slipping from the belt. He was looking at the old drunk’s chest, but he saw no gaping hole that exposed a bloody ruin of tissue and bone. Instead, he saw two small, regular holes, one to either side of the strip of furry white trim that ran down the front of the jacket—holes which could possibly have been made by low-caliber bullets, but certainly not by a .12-gauge shotgun blast!

“I shot you, dadburnit!” shouted Kelsey. “I know I did!”

But something was funny about those holes. Kelsey blinked, then shook his head. “Well, I’ll be love-licked by a nearsighted rattlesnake,” he said as his eyes refocused. He hoped this wasn’t his imagination, because then he would know he’d gone crazy.

The threads poking out of the edges of the holes were knitting themselves back together.

As Kelsey watched in amazement, the holes grew steadily smaller, until after a minute or so they had vanished altogether. The snowsuit was as good as new.

Kelsey grinned broadly. The modern world amazed and delighted him. Computers, lasers, credit cards with holograms, Velcro—and now fabric that could sew itself back together! What on earth would they think of next?

A cruel smile creeping onto his face, Kelsey removed the belt from the dead man, then unbuttoned the jacket. He half-expected to find that the wound in Trotter’s chest had healed itself as miraculously as the jacket had, but such was not the case. Trotter wore an old black sweatshirt beneath the jacket, the upper portion of which had been shredded by the shotgun blast. Beneath that was a pulpy ruin that made Kelsey’s gorge rise.

Swallowing hard, he rolled the body over so that he could pull the jacket off from behind—and gasped.

The patch of rug on which the body had lain was perfectly white.

The bloodstains all around the body were still there, but beneath, the rug was as snow-white as the day it had been laid.

“Curiouser and cockamamie curiouser,” Kelsey said. Frowning, he stripped the jacket from the dead man’s shoulders, then dabbed with it at the bloody silhouette on the rug. He heard the same soft slurping noise he had heard earlier, and the bloodstain lightened where the jacket touched it.

“Ayyy-mazing,” Kelsey said, then tried it on the coffee stain in front of his recliner. The jacket sucked noisily this time, and when Kelsey stood up he thought he could feel the jacket straining in his hand toward the stains. “Whoa, boy,” he said, laughing. “That cockeyed bargain coffee’ll kill you if you’re not careful. But for all I care you can suck up the whole sandblasted rug once we get back from the little errand I have in mind.”

After laying the jacket aside, Kelsey stripped Trotter of his gloves, boots, and breeches, discovering to his disgust that the man’s bladder and bowels had loosened. He held up the man’s breeches and examined them carefully, nose wrinkled, but found them as fresh as if they had just returned from the dry cleaner. He looked at the body in its soiled underwear, then just as quickly looked away. “You do what you have to do to keep clean, don’t you,” he said to the breeches.

Kelsey undid his own trousers, slid them off, then stepped into the red breeches. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Charles,” said Catherine. “That clothing sucks up people’s blood, for heaven’s sake. Maybe its some kind of monster that just disguises itself as a Santa Claus costume to lure its victims—like a Venus flytrap.”

“It didn’t eat him,” said Kelsey, pointing to the body on the floor. Then he added in a mutter: “More’s the pity.”

He pulled the breeches up, but they would go no farther than his hips. He grunted in surprise and some embarrassment, then pulled again, determined like Cinderella’s stepsisters to make the breeches fit. This time there was a strange sort of groaning noise, and they slid smoothly up to his waist. He lifted his knees experimentally, one at a time. The fit was perfect. “Swine-boosting miracle,” he said, and his cruel smile resurfaced.

He sat down on the floor to pull on the boots. At first they seemed too small, but they slid on easily enough—leaving Kelsey with the queasy sensation that his feet had just been swallowed by two fat snakes. He picked the jacket up from the floor, but before he could try it on he noticed a large black label sewn into the lining. He squinted at the lettering.

It was a message, repeated in several different languages, including that cockamamie Commie language with the letters that looked like Space Invaders. There was also a kind of writing that Kelsey had never seen before, made all of squares, circles, and triangles. The English translation of the message was third down:

Merry Christmas. May There Be Peace on Sol III, Goodwill Toward Humans.

“Aliens,” said Kelsey, moving into a realm beyond surprise. “A Christmas present from a bunch of space-flapping aliens.” He shrugged into the jacket, which groaned as it stretched to fit him, then cinched the black belt tight around his middle and slipped on the soft white gloves. “This is too fragging much.”

As he bent to retrieve the red cap, Kelsey regarded the old drunk’s body. No way would Sheriff Haggerty believe Trotter had been killed as an intruder—not with no trace of forced entry, and no evidence of a shotgun blast in the Santa Claus suit. It would look like the man had been invited in, stripped, and then shot.

“I don’t like telling you this, Charles,” said Catherine’s voice, “but you’re going to have to dispose of this body somehow. It’s not the right thing to do, I know, but I won’t have you rotting in jail like a common criminal.”

“As soon as I get back from my errand, dear,” Kelsey muttered, pulling the cap down over his ears with a grim expression on his face. He’d never be able to dig a grave in the frozen ground outside. Maybe if he cut the body up into small enough pieces, the suit would absorb them.

Kelsey wondered how Trotter had acquired the strange Santa outfit in the first place. “Probably ran down the last Santa in some cockamamie alcoholic stupor,” he said with a bitter bark of laughter.

Grand Motherfucker: A 23rd Century Epic in Verse

Shaking his head, he bent to pick up the shotgun. He had no firm idea what he meant to do, but he knew he wanted to put a scare into those little Mahoney brats that would ruin their cockeyed Christmases for years to come. As his gloved fingers touched the stock of the weapon, however, Kelsey felt a tiny prick in the crook of his elbow, and suddenly his entire arm was burning with thousand-degree heat.

“Yeee-awww!” he screeched, dancing around the room and flapping his arm like some ungainly one-winged bird. The pain went away slowly, and Kelsey gritted his teeth in anger. “Okay, so Santa’s not allowed to carry a maggot-blasted firearm. How about a dead rat to deliver to some deserving brat’s front door?” He picked up the crushed box and felt a mild burning sensation in his hands, but it wasn’t nearly as fierce as before. He managed to stuff the box into the big white rucksack before the pain could become unbearable, and then he threw in the stocking of coal for good measure.

“All right, you little brats,” snarled Kelsey, slinging the sack over his shoulder. “You’d better get ready, ‘cause here comes Santa Claus, right down cockamamie Santa Claus Lane—and is he pissed!”

He looked around one last time, to see if there were anything else he might want to tote along. A sudden itch struck him just below his right eye, and as he laid a finger aside his nose to scratch it—

—he felt the entire universe turn inside out.

All his surroundings were suddenly turned at right angles to themselves, while something folded him into a tight little packet. He felt a horrible nausea, and as he was yanked through the air he could see the living room spinning around him in a 360-plus-degree panorama. The last thing he glimpsed was beautiful Catherine’s picture on the mantle in its heavy silver frame, dark with drying blood, and then he was ricocheting into the fireplace and rattling up the chimney, to explode into the snowy night—

—and then the universe righted itself, and Kelsey fell to his knees in the snow beside his chimney and vomited a sour mixture of whiskey and bile.

He took a deep, trembling breath and looked around, wiping his mouth and trying to still his spinning vision. He had thought himself incapable of any further surprise, but in that he had underestimated himself. Standing calmly on the gentle slope of his roof, regarding him with wise, sad eyes, were eight small reindeer—no, make that nine, including the one with the glowing red nose—dressed out in jingle-belled tackle and harnessed to an ornate red-and-green sleigh.

“Oh, Charles, just look at them,” said Catherine in that voice of hers that meant she might faint any instant from sheer rapture. “Aren’t they the most darling little things you’ve seen in all your life?”

“Charming,” grunted Kelsey, climbing shakily to his feet. “One-hundred-percent, full-on, grade-A charming.”

He didn’t have time to wonder how the grand old sleigh kept from sliding off the pitched roof and yanking all the cute little reindeer off along with it, because he began to feel small shocks in the soles of his feet, urging him to hurry along. “All right, all right, I’m going,” he said through gritted teeth. “Wouldn’t miss this cockamamie ride for anything.”

He took a couple of steps, but then began to feel the same little shocks in the palms of his hands. He threw his hands up in frustration, went back, picked up the rucksack from where it sat near the slimy patch of vomit, felt the shocks in his feet rushing him along again, cursed, slung the sack over his shoulder, turned around, and trudged self-consciously past all the staring reindeer. His boots gripped the slanting roof like magnets, even in the deepening snow, and Kelsey tossed the pack into the sleigh and climbed in without so much as a slip.

In the eerie blue half-light filtering up through the snow from the security lamps below, Kelsey felt as if he were sitting on the runway of some snow-bound Arctic airport, awaiting take-off clearance from the North Pole Tower. One of the reindeer looked back with a glint of contempt in its eye, as if to say, What are you waiting for? Let’s get this show on the road!

The cold air stung Kelsey’s lips and made forming words difficult. “Uh—on, Dasher! On, Dancer!” he called out, waving a clenched fist. “On . . . oh, on all you prancing idiots! Let’s grab ourselves some cockeyed sky!”

The sleigh lurched into motion, and in a moment they were airborne. Kelsey reflexively grabbed the sides of the sleigh as the edge of the roof passed beneath them, and then the whole formation was sweeping around in a broad, giddy arc, jingle bells a-jingling, to glide above the floodlit greenhouse and into the fuzzy darkness beyond.

As the cabin disappeared behind them, Kelsey’s anger at the fate of Catherine’s prize poinsettias was replaced by a giddy wonder at the sensation of soaring headlong through thick, snowy darkness. He sensed rather than saw stands of tall pine pass beneath them like living flight beacons, felt the cold wind from the north wrestle playfully with the sleigh and its team, almost heard Nature herself rejoicing at the miraculous spectacle that raced through the sky on this Night of All Nights.

It’s like a dream, Kelsey thought, laughing—like those wonderful dreams he hadn’t had for years, where he swooped and dove and soared over the landscape like a powerful, magnificent eagle, turning barrel-rolls in the clouds and looping the loop and waving to the wonderstruck watchers on the ground—

“Or like the thrill of a young romance,” said Catherine, and her warm breath seemed tantalizingly close to his ear. . . .

And then, with a swoop and a dive and a long smooth glide, it was over. The sleigh lurched to a jingling halt on a strange roof, and a rude shock in the seat of his pants sent Kelsey clambering recklessly out onto the snow-covered shingles with a horrible and undefinable sense of loss.

He felt as sluggish as if he were emerging from a dream. “Where in the red-white-and-blue blazes is this?” he demanded, turning in a shivery circle. Then he spied the huge sanitation truck looming like a fog-shrouded ship in the driveway beyond the eaves of this small house.

Ed Mahoney was the town’s garbageman. This was where he and his family lived.

Rage flowed into Kelsey like underground lava into a dormant volcano. This was the home of the brats who had defiled Catherine’s memory on the eve of the anniversary of her death! This was the home of the brats who had severed his most cherished link to her, the poinsettias!

This was the home of the three little brats who would learn what it meant to have Christmas ripped torn and bleeding from their very hands.

Kelsey didn’t need a cue from his gloves or his boots or any other item of his apparel to spur him into action. He whipped the overburdened rucksack onto his back and made a beeline for the modest chimney at the peak of the roof. A thin tendril of smoke curled up through the smothering snowfall, but that didn’t give Kelsey the least pause. He nearly stuck his finger up his nose in his haste to work the magic which would transport him down the chimney and into the Mahoney children’s eternal Christmas nightmares.

With a twist and a fold, a rattle and a whoosh, Kelsey popped out of a fireplace where only smoldering embers and the odd tongue of flame remained of what had once been a crackling, toasty fire. Dizzy, he managed to catch himself before he could fall over, and to clamp a hand over his mouth before he could yuck up what little remained in his stomach.

The room in which he found himself was dim. There were a couple of chairs and a threadbare couch, a low writing table with a cut-out nativity scene on top, and a few framed pictures. The tree beside the hearth was pitiful and scraggly, decorated with construction-paper ornaments and long strings of popcorn. Atop the tree was an angel made from an old sock, some cardboard, and bits of leftover yarn. A row of drooping, striped stockings was tacked to the mantle over the fireplace, and a few packages rested beneath the tree, most wrapped in brown paper. Thin yellowish light spilled into the room through the door to a narrow hallway.

Kelsey went to the writing table. Beside the nativity scene was a glass of milk and a small plate of cookies. A sheet of notepaper lay next to the plate, upon which a young child had scrawled in crayon:

Dear Santa,
Here is something so you won’t get too hungry tonight.
Love, your pal Matt

“Cockamamie brat spells better than Trot the Sot,” muttered Kelsey, picking up the glass of milk and selecting a cookie. After the episode on the roof of his cabin, getting something solid into his stomach seemed like a good idea.

Light footsteps—a woman’s tread—approached from down the hallway.

Kelsey’s head whipped to the doorway, his hands trembling. He closed his fist around the cookie to keep from dropping it, but some milk spilled down the front of his jacket from the canted glass in his other hand.

With a slurp that seemed far too loud in the dimness, the jacket sucked up the spilled milk.

The footsteps paused just beyond the doorway.

The silence was complete and agonizing. Kelsey dared not breathe.

After a moment, the footsteps turned and receded.

Kelsey let out his breath with relief. Looking down, he discovered that the cookie clenched in his fist had crumbled. He dropped the fragments onto the plate, brushed the crumbs from his glove, and took a drink of milk to calm himself. It was warm from sitting out.

He tried to think what to do first.

His eye fell on the sorry row of stockings. There were five of them, and he decided they would do very nicely for starters. He moved to the hearth and reached for the first one in line. The name Matthew was stitched into it in uncertain cursive lettering. “Merry Christmas, Matthew,” said Kelsey with a cruel sneer.

“You can’t, Charles!” Catherine said loudly. “This is a family’s Christmas you’re trying to spoil! I won’t have it!”

Kelsey spun around suddenly, heart pounding, as if there were a danger of her voice being overheard. “I don’t give a flying fandango for any family’s Christmas, Catherine,” he hissed, softly but viciously, “especially not this one’s. Now shut up and leave me to my business!”

“Fine,” she said coldly. It was the voice she used when she was close to tears but not about to show it. “I hope you enjoy sleeping on the couch tonight.”

Snarling, Kelsey turned and snatched Matthew’s little stocking down from the mantle.

And his hand began to burn.

Gasping, Kelsey dropped the stocking, which fell limply to the hearth. The pain disappeared.

Lips curled away from his teeth, Kelsey tried to rip the gloves from his hand. They wouldn’t budge.

Gripped by a sudden panic, he tried to undo his belt, unbutton his jacket, slide out of his boots, anything, but the Santa suit was stuck to him as tightly as if it had been super-glued to his body.

Or as if it had grown onto him.

Nearly blind with rage, Kelsey grabbed for the other stockings, but the blazing pain that erupted in his hands and arms kept him back. He tried for the presents under the tree, but that only made the pain worse. In desperation, he tried to retrieve the box with the dead rat from the rucksack, but the pain of that nearly made him pass out.

Drained, he dropped to the hearth and sat with his head between his knees. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut. How Blake Trotter must have hated him to endure the pain of removing even one coal-filled stocking from that cursed rucksack! How coldly those embers of hatred must have burned in his heart!

Thinking this, Charles A. Kelsey’s head snapped up in horror. Could he possibly have accused the wrong man of Catherine’s death? Was that why the old drunk had hated him so fiercely?

And did Kelsey really have the capacity for that same kind of hatred in his own heart?

He shoved the questions roughly aside. A murmur of voices was drifting from down the hall.

Kelsey stood and moved stealthily to doorway, listening intently. “I won’t say it again, Luke,” came a woman’s voice. It was the voice of a young woman, but one who had become too very tired in too few years. “Go to bed. You’re the oldest. You have to set the example for your sister and brother.”

“But Mom—”

“Don’t argue with me, son. Your father is sleeping, and you know how much he needs his rest.”

“But I have something for you. We all have something for you, and Mary and Matthew wanted me to give it to you tonight.”

Kelsey heard a long, exasperated sigh. “Oh, all right. But make it fast.”

“I will, I promise.” Excited footsteps pattered down the hall, and Kelsey flattened himself against the wall. A thin boy of about ten with a shock of unruly dark hair entered the living room. The cuffs of his pajama bottoms were an inch or two short. Kelsey tried not to breathe, but the boy headed directly for the writing table without so much as a glance around the room. He knelt and withdrew something from beneath the small table.

Three brilliant red poinsettias, potted in an old Hills Brothers coffee can.

Kelsey swallowed.

The boy straightened up, gingerly cradling the makeshift flowerpot, and trotted out of the room and back down the hallway. He completely missed Kelsey; in the dimness, he had eyes for nothing but the poinsettias.

Kelsey pressed his lips together in a thin line. He felt strange emotions, dangerous emotions, at war inside his chest. His hands shook at his sides.

“We love you, Mom,” came the boy’s voice from down the hall, almost shyly. “Merry Christmas.”

“Oh, Luke.” Kelsey could hear the warm surprise in the woman’s voice turning to rough, tearful emotion. “They’re lovely.”

“We picked them out ourselves,” said the boy.

A nerve in Kelsey’s cheek began to twitch. Those were Catherine’s poinsettias! Nobody else’s!

“Thank you, son. Thank you very much.” The woman paused, pulling herself together. Soft sniffles were audible. “Where did you ever get these?”

“We . . . well, I dunno, we just found them.”

“Luke.” A measure of sternness returned to the voice. “Just found them where?”

Kelsey’s fists clenched, nails digging into his palms through the fabric of his gloves.

“Well . . . we found them in that glass shed behind Old Man Kelsey’s place.” The words came out all in a rush. “But—but they weren’t doing anybody any good in there, all shut up where no one could see them!”

Kelsey felt a peculiar knot in his throat, a hard, tight knot that wouldn’t go down.

“That doesn’t make any difference, Luke. Taking something without permission is stealing, no matter how you justify it.”

“But Mom—”

“No arguments, Luke. Would the Savior have taken something that didn’t belong to him?”

“Mom,” the boy whined.

“Well?”

“No, ma’am.” The admission was reluctant.

“And isn’t his birth what we’re celebrating tonight?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And that being so, shouldn’t we try to follow the example he set, tonight of all nights?”

The boy sounded utterly defeated. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Now, first thing tomorrow morning I want you to take these flowers back to Mr. Kelsey and apologize to him for stealing them.”

“But—”

“Luke . . .”

“But Mom, he’s mean! He’ll probably shoot me.”

“Did you forget what we were just talking about? Now take those flowers back into the living room, and then I want you in bed with no more arguments. Maybe Santa can enjoy the flowers before you return them tomorrow.”

“All right,” said the boy reluctantly. Then, “Mom?”

“Yes, son.”

A pause. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Luke. Now give me a kiss and then hurry.”

“Yes, ma’am.” After a moment the young feet were pattering back down the hallway. As the boy entered the living room, Kelsey stepped away from the wall.

Luke Mahoney gasped and almost dropped the pot of poinsettias. He looked up with incredulous brown eyes.

Kelsey raised a hand—

—the boy flinched—

—and the old man wiped away the tears that streamed down his cheeks. “Charles Kelsey’s not such a mean old man,” he said. He reached out hesitantly, then tousled the young boy’s hair. “He’s just a little lonely, Luke, that’s all.”

Kelsey turned and went to his rucksack. The bag hummed and thrummed a bit, and when he looked inside he found small presents tagged for Luke, Mary, and Matthew, plus a big one addressed to all three of them. He placed the packages with care beneath the tree, then stood.

“Your mother is a special woman,” he said. “You’re right to bring her flowers. But next time don’t take flowers that aren’t yours. Remember, I’ll be watching.” He winked. “Merry Christmas, Luke.”

“Muh—merry Christmas,” said the boy.

Old Man Kelsey cast one last wistful glance at the pot of poinsettias, and he had to fight to keep his face from twisting with grief. “Oh, and Luke,” he said, slapping his forehead. “I nearly forgot. Mr. Kelsey left a present for you in his living room. I think he was too shy to bring it over himself, but if you go over there first thing in the morning, you’ll find it. Just walk right in.”

Then, laying a finger aside of his nose, he whooshed, rattled, and rolled up the chimney, leaving young Luke Mahoney staring open-mouthed at the empty space where jolly old St. Nicholas had been standing.

---

As the magical sleigh sailed away through the night, jingling its merry song to the sky, Kelsey heard that old familiar voice once more: “I can’t believe you did that, Charles! You horrible, horrible old man! How on earth could you be so wicked?”

He answered softly, teeth bared against the wind. “Just call it my Christmas present to myself, Catherine.”

Then he stood up in the sleigh, bracing himself with one hand, and shouted, “Merry Christmas to all! Merry Christmas to everyone in this whole wide cockamamie wonderful world! Ho, ho, ho-o-o-o!”

And the sleigh disappeared into the night. ∅

Reprinted with the author’s malicious permission (and the editor’s grudging complicity). Explore Perry Slaughter’s bibliography at Amazon.com.