The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “You can’t save me,” he said with indescribable malice. “I shall die and put you both in the dock—”

  Mollie Strangeways sank down beside the bed and began to cry, and Garth Deane, who by his master’s express desire had been in and out of the room all night, stopped and looked at her with a peculiar expression. Sir Harry looked at her also.

  “Don’t cry,” he gasped, “this is Christmas Day. We ought all to be happy—bring me my cambric tea—do you hear?”

  She rose mechanically and left the room to take in the tray with the fresh milk and water that the housekeeper had placed softly on the table outside the door; for all through the nightmare vigil, the sick man’s cry had been for “cambric tea.”

  As he sat up in bed feebly sipping the vapid and odious drink the tortured woman’s nerves slipped her control.

  “I can’t endure those bells, I wish they would stop those bells!” she cried and ran out of the room.

  Bevis Holroyd instantly followed her; and now as suddenly as it had sprung on him, the fell little drama disappeared, fled like a poison cloud out of the compass of his life.

  Mollie was leaning against the closed window, her sick head resting against the mullions; through the casement showed, surprisingly, sunlight on the pure snow and blue sky behind the withered trees.

  “Listen, Mollie,” said the young man resolutely. “I’m sure he’ll live if you are careful—you mustn’t lose heart—”

  The sick room door opened and the secretary slipped out.

  He nervously approached the two in the window place.

  “I can’t stand this any longer,” he said through dry lips. “I didn’t know he meant to go so far, he is doing it himself, you know; he’s got the stuff hidden in his bed, he puts it into the cambric tea, he’s willing to die to spite you two, but I can’t stand it any longer.”

  “You’ve been abetting this!” cried the doctor.

  “Not abetting,” smiled the secretary wanly. “Just standing by. I found out by chance—and then he forced me to be silent—I had his will, you know, and I’ve destroyed it.”

  With this the strange creature glided downstairs.

  The doctor sprang at once to Sir Harry’s room; the sick man was sitting up in the sombre bed and with a last effort was scattering a grain of powder into the glass of cambric tea.

  With a look of baffled horror he saw Bevis Holroyd but the drink had already slipped down his throat; he fell back and hid his face, baulked at the last of his diabolic revenge.

  When Bevis Holroyd left the dead man’s chamber he found Mollie still leaning in the window; she was free, the sun was shining, it was Christmas Day.

  THE 74TH TALE

  Jonathan Santlofer

  THE AUTHOR OF FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS, JONATHAN SANTLOFER is even better known as an artist who has works in the permanent collections of such prestigious institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Norton Simon Museum, among many others, and has been reviewed by every major publication devoted to contemporary art, including Art in America, ArtForum, and the New York Times. His crime novels feature Kate McKinnon, a Queens cop and art historian, and Nate Rodriguez, a New York City forensic sketch artist; the author includes his own original sketches in this series. “The 74th Tale” was first published as a chapbook, given to customers of the Mysterious Bookshop as a Christmas gift in 2008.

  The 74th Tale

  JONATHAN SANTLOFER

  I SWEAR IT WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED if it were not for the book. Really, I didn’t plan it. It’s just that I’m impressionable you know, sensitive to others and to suggestion. It’s the way I’m made, the way my brain works and I’ve come to accept that.

  The book was a gift to myself. For Christmas. I knew I wasn’t going to get any and was feeling a little bad, like I deserved something, you know, at least one, and it was just a paperback, no big deal, though you could say it changed my life; two lives, really.

  I got it at this place called the Mysterious Bookshop. Woo, woo, right? Like it should have been Halloween, not Christmas. What lured me in were the books in the window, all those titles with death and murder and blood, which is not something I think about all the time, just on occasion like most people. Someone had tied black and red ribbons around some of the books which is what got me thinking about a present, plus the little lights, black and orange ones, again more Halloween than Christmas, and funny.

  Inside, the store was old and new at the same time, lots of wood and stuff but airy and nice, with books everywhere, floor-to-ceiling, on tables, stacked on the floor; I’d never seen so many in one space. There was even one of those ladders you have to climb to get at the books on the top rows which I couldn’t do for “insurance reasons” I was told by this woman, from England I think, with a fancy accent, who smiled when she told me I couldn’t use the ladder, that she’d get the higher-up books for me. I said I’d make do with the ones I could reach which was more than enough.

  They were in alphabetical order, which appealed to my mind. I may not have leadership qualities but I’m organized and methodical, just as important, if you ask me, and why I was so good in my job at the post office.

  I spent a long time going from A to Z but of course there were big gaps, like I missed half of D and more of H and other letters as they were in the top rows, but it didn’t matter because I was just choosing books with titles that appealed to me. I wasn’t looking for anything special. That’s always the way, isn’t it, the important things just sort of coming to you when you least expect it?

  After a while my eyes were starting to blur from all the books and the English lady came over and asked if she could help me. I told her I was okay and then this white-haired guy came out of a back room and the English lady went and talked to him and I could see they were eying me and then he came over and asked exactly what the English lady had asked: if he could help me, which was annoying because I could tell they thought I was going to shoplift, which I’d never do, I’m not that kind of guy.

  I told him I was making up my mind and he said that was fine but they were closing in a few minutes so I had to hurry, which sort of annoyed me, I mean the pressure of making a decision like that when I could buy only one book and I had pulled out about twenty. Like I said I was feeling bad because I knew I wasn’t going to get any Christmas presents, not from my mother who I hadn’t spoken to in like five years and my father was long dead and my brother, hell, he hated me because I’d mouthed off to his wife last time I saw him which was at Thanksgiving two years ago, a holiday I haven’t celebrated since, but she deserved it and to be honest I don’t miss my brother or his wife or his two bratty kids or their stupid split-level house out in Levittown or wherever. He, my brother, is six years older than me and never really gave a crap about me and told me I was crazy, like I’m crazy and he isn’t? and I’m not going to patch it up unless he calls me and makes like a huge apology and I don’t see that happening because I read in the newspaper that some reporter called him and he said I have nothing to say, which proves he never really cared about me, right? I mean, wouldn’t you say something nice about your brother at a time like this?

  The white-haired guy was going around the store adjusting books but keeping an eye on me which made me want to leave but I wasn’t ready to go back to my one room above the Korean deli because the thought of seeing the owner with his creepy bent finger and the way he was always looking at me, squinting, was just too much, too much, so I went through the twenty books and decided to buy the one that had seventy-three stories, which seemed like the best deal, all those stories for the price of one book. It was a paperback, like I said, but really fat with poems in it too, which I didn’t think I’d read but it was still a good deal.

  The white-haired guy came over while I was looking through it and said it was a classic and how I’d made the right choice and that made me feel good and he smiled and patted me on the arm and called me son, which was nice even though I’m not crazy about being touched and h
e said, You’ll learn a lot from that book.

  I asked him what he meant and he said I’d have to read the book to find out, which was pretty cagey, like he was pressing me to buy it and that’s when I saw it was fifteen dollars so I said no way I could afford it being out of work and all and he asked how much I could spend and I told him I had seven bucks on me, a lie, I had twenty-two but wasn’t going to admit that. He sort of rocked back on his heels and tilted his head with his face screwed up like he was making a decision and finally said, Okay, it’s yours for seven dollars, Merry Christmas, which kind of blew me away.

  If I’d known then that the book was going to change everything I wouldn’t have felt so good, but when someone does something nice like that you just want to believe in the goodness of people, don’t you?

  Funny thing is I hadn’t planned to buy a book. I’m not much of reader; I haven’t read much my whole life except for comic books, lately Bloody Skull and Blade and Hack/Slash, before that X-Men and Fantastic Four which are more for kids but when I turned twenty-one my brother—this was before we had our fight—said I needed to improve my mind which sort of irritated me but my friend Larry who worked with me at the Post Office before I got laid off said the same thing when he saw me reading Fantastic Four and he meant it as a good thing because he knows how smart I am and he’s the one who turned me on to horror comics, so I figured I could learn a lot from a book with seventy-three stories and that was true, though some people don’t agree it was such a good thing.

  By the time I left the store it was dark and drizzling with little icy puddles that looked like frozen lemonade because of the yellow light cast from streetlamps, no one around and I was glad. I liked the feeling that I was alone in the world, which I guess I am but don’t start feeling sorry for me because I could have lots of friends and a girlfriend if I wanted one. I’ve had plenty, and most girls say I’m good-looking which doesn’t mean anything to me though I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing. My last girlfriend who I met in a bar and went home to her apartment in Murray Hill decorated all modern with girly touches like a ruffled bedspread and such said my mouth was pouty. I wasn’t totally sure what she meant but didn’t want to ask and appear uneducated so I looked it up in her dictionary. It said: To protrude the lips in an expression of displeasure or sulkiness. That didn’t sound so good to me though I was pretty sure Loretta, that was her name, meant it as a good thing since she liked running her finger over my lips, but we didn’t last too long so it didn’t matter if my lips were pouty or not.

  I live only five blocks from the bookstore so it was weird that I’d never seen it. I guess you could say it was fate or evil forces, as they say in X-Men, that drew me to it.

  When I got to my apartment building I stopped into the deli downstairs and bought a six-pack of beer and a family-size bag of potato chips and a Snickers bar. I tried not to look at the owner’s bent finger. I carefully laid my money on the counter so I wouldn’t have to touch him, but when he gave me the change he made a point of rubbing his finger against my hand and I know it was on purpose because he’s done it before, and I swear a chill went through my entire body.

  As soon as I got inside my apartment I gulped down a beer then started another, tore open the chips and sunk onto my couch, which I got from the street, leather and really nice except for a few stains and a tear on one of the back pillows and on one arm which I fixed with Scotch Magic Tape and you can hardly see it now, I’m handy that way. Then I skimmed through my new book and read all the titles making sure I was not moving my lips even though no one was around because one of my girlfriends, Susie, I think her name was, made fun of me for doing that.

  I was sorry I hadn’t asked the white-haired guy or the English lady which were the best tales, as they were called, because there were so many, so I just went by the titles like I do the names of the horses when I put a few dollars down at OTB, though I usually don’t win.

  The first tale I chose was about a gold bug that bites a guy, I think, I wasn’t sure because it was really hard to read with too many words and sentences that went on so long that I had to reread them and I finally stopped and might have given up and been really annoyed that I’d wasted seven dollars if I hadn’t started another tale which grabbed me right away about a nervous guy who gets pretty crazy as the story goes on because this old guy’s eye is driving him nuts. It was pretty funny and got me thinking about the guy in the deli downstairs and his pinky, which is arched up away from his hand as if it’s been yanked out of the socket and put back in all wrong with no nail at the end, just a stump. I always end up staring at it, you know how that is, and then it stays in my mind. Sometimes I avoid going into the store for weeks so I won’t have to see it but when I need something quick it just makes sense to go there and then I see it again and it’s all I can think about for days.

  I didn’t want to think about the finger so I read another tale about some guy named Roderick and his friend who bury Roderick’s twin sister, only she isn’t dead, which reminded me of the time I found an injured bird on the sidewalk outside my apartment building when I was a kid. I think it flew into the side of the building; it was alive but couldn’t fly. I put it in a shoe box and fed it birdseed and gave it water with an eyedropper but it just got weaker and I knew it was going to die—which is exactly what Roderick and his friend thought about Roderick’s sister—but I couldn’t kill it outright so I buried the box in an empty lot on the corner and marked the spot with a brick. A week later I dug it up but it was gone and I was never sure if someone else dug it up or if the brick got moved or what happened so I tried again with a mouse that I caught in one of those glue traps.

  I didn’t wait so long this time, just a day, but when I dug the mouse up he was dead. Mice are easy to catch, so I used more, burying one for like a half day or so—dead when I dug him up—another for like a third of a day, also dead, so I decided I had to make it more methodical. Like I said my mind works best when I’m methodical which is why I was good in the post office and would still have that job if I hadn’t gotten into that fight, which wasn’t my fault.

  I buried the next mouse for exactly eight hours, dead, then one for seven, also dead, and so on subtracting an hour until one finally lived. Two mice lived for five hours after being buried alive. It was awesome, you know, to open the box and see this little creature panting for breath but alive. But then I had to see if they could live for six hours and they both died.

  I did that, buried animals and such, on and off for the next few years till we moved away from the corner lot and I sort of stopped thinking about it; well not really but I hadn’t thought about actually doing it again until I read the story because Roderick’s sister who doesn’t die but comes back at the end, like a zombie, and falls onto her brother and they both die and the friend races out—I couldn’t blame him for that—and when he looks back the house is cracking apart and crashing down and my heart was beating like the heart under the floorboard in the first tale but I kept reading and the next tale was about the same thing—like the writer was speaking just to me—all about being buried alive, and worse because the guy who told this tale had this like sick fear of being buried alive and in the end he wakes up and he is buried alive, at least he thinks so, really he’s in a boat or something, which was a cheat, but it got me all caught up again in the idea of being buried alive, well not me, but something, someone.

  I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. It was all I thought about for days while everyone else was thinking about Christmas.

  Now they’re saying it was premeditated, and it’s true I thought about it, a lot, I even dreamed about it, but I still say, and I told this to my court-appointed lawyer—a woman who looks at me with a blank stare and wears the same suit every time I see her—gray stripes with a different blouse so she thinks it looks different but it doesn’t—that it was the book, the tales that were the premeditation part, not me. You see what I’m saying? But she says that’s no defense, which makes me think she’s
a lousy lawyer.

  I’ve been here for seven months now and have read all seventy-three tales, some more than once, and a lot of the poems, which were okay, and they inspired me to write my own tale especially since there have been lots of stories written about me, one by a reporter who came to interview me but still got it wrong, so I decided to write my story, my own tale of what really happened and why. It was the hardest thing I ever did.

  I let my lawyer read it and she says I should destroy it because it will seal my fate, but like I said I don’t think she’s a very good lawyer because I think I did a really good job of explaining my feelings and my motive, if you want to call it that, but you be the judge.

  The Tale of the Man & the Construction Site

  First of all I am not nervous. I am sensitive. Very, very, dredfully sensitive, but not so dredful that it is a bad thing. I eschew that people are saying I am crazy—mad as they use to say in the olden days but I am not. How could I be mad and get away with what I did and I would have gotten away with it I could have if I wanted to. That is the unequivocal point!

  I was careful and filled with dissimulation for days before I did it and I was methodical which is how my mind works and a little melancholy mainley because I live alone and there is a veil of gloom draping over my apartment and I was all-absorbed with this fancy of being buried alive which is like the shadow between life and death and I had to know where one ended and the other begins.

  It vexed me for days but methought I could not do it I mean you cannot exactly bury yourself and even if I could get someone to help me like Larry who laboured beside me at the post office how could I keep track of the time and unearth the grave and see if I lived right? Impossible!

  So I needed a volunteer! I wasn’t sure who but once I had the idea I was inflamed with intense excitement and bought the trunk which was not made well just a mockery of cardbord painted to look like lether which I could scrap off with my fingernail but I thought it would work singularly well for my endeavor!