by Mark Teppo
I fumbled with the zippers on the thermal suit as the warm blast of the climate-controlled environment melted the layer of ice on the suit. Inside, the Residence was dark, lit only by the reflected light coming in through the windows from the miles of snowpack surrounding the Residence as well as the dim glow from the angel's halo. The inside air was still, and I felt like we were secretly entering a hidden chamber in one of the pyramids at Giza.
Rudolph headed for the second floor. I had half-hoped that Rudolph's words had been a scam—a shameless attempt to retrieve me for other reasons—but as we came off the stairs, that hopedrained away. We were heading for the infirmary, and the door at the end of the hall was partially open. Rudolph paused before the door, illuminated in the weak antiseptic light coming from the room beyond, and I felt his body tense beneath me.
I was suffering from a similar shortness of breath.
I thought of Schrödinger's experiment with the cat. The one where he posited that any observer couldn't know whether the cat was dead or alive until someone looked inside the box. What lay beyond the door in front of us was in that same quantum state—neither alive nor dead—until we entered the room. As soon as we peeked, the state solidified, and, well, in Schrödinger's case, the cat died.
Rudolph pushed his head against the door, and with a heavy step, we entered the infirmary. The walls and floors were ethereally white, and the bank of machinery next to the narrow bed was silent, the lines crossing the scopes flat and unmoving. Mrs. C sat on the edge of the bed, and she was as pale and devoid of color as the walls.
She raised her head as Rudolph came up to the bed, and her eyes were frozen chips of bent glass. "You just missed him," she said. "He might have been out there in the hall . . ."
I slid off Rudolph's back and approached the bed. Santa's skin was the color of fireplace ash, and his mouth hung open as if the muscles of his jaw had been severed. He had lost a lot of hair and most of his beard. His right hand stuck out from under the blanket, and it looked like nothing more than the bent wire frame of a toy that hadn't been run through the papier-mâché machine yet.
Mrs. C touched my head. "He asked about you," she said quietly. "He wanted to know if Rudolph was bringing you home."
I didn't argue the use of the word. This wasn't the time. "Yeah," I replied. I leaned forward, unwilling to come any closer. "Rudolph brought me back. You hear? It's me. It's Bernie. I've come back."
There was no response, and I felt a lump in my throat that I couldn't swallow away. I gulped air as if I was drowning. "How?" I finally asked.
"It started right after Christmas," Mrs. C said. "The letters started coming. More than a hundred thousand before Valentine's Day."
"What letters?" I had been on administrative leave by that point. IA was done talking to me, though the inevitable farce of a summary meeting hadn't happened yet. We all knew the NPC was going to yank my card—it was just a matter of when—and all my friends had long stopped pretending to know me.
"Christmas wishes. They started writing early this year. In the US, they wrote letters to Santa before they filed their income taxes."
Rudolph's voice was cold, like the bitter taste of a chain link fence on a winter morning. "One wasn't enough for them. They begged. They pleaded. They demanded that Santa bring each of them a Christmas miracle. Like he was some circus pony that would perform a trick on cue."
"He began to regret last Season," Mrs. C continued. "He began to doubt that he had made the right choice in bringing Mr. Anderson back." She stopped, and stared down at her hands. "And then—" she said softly, "—then the angel showed up."
"What angel?"
"The one on the rooftop."
I remembered the helium-filled figure floating over the village. "The balloon?"
Mrs. C shook her head. "No. That's just the reminder. The real angel is on the rooftop. The day after he appeared, Santa didn't get out of bed. At first, he just said it was a late summer cold, but it didn't pass. A week later, we moved him in here and started an IV-drip to keep him hydrated. He said he felt like an empty jack-in-the-box, like you could wind him up and he would pop open, but that there wasn't anything inside." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Nobody wants an empty jack-in-the-box."
"What about the others? What about the rest of the staff? I thought the medical staff were all graduates from the best schools in the Northern Hemisphere."
"They're gone," Rudolph snapped. "They've all left."
"What?" Questions were beginning to collide in my head. "Why?"
"Holy Quarantine, Bernie. The North Pole has been shut down."
I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. "Christmas has been canceled," I murmured, looking at Santa's skeletal visage. "So, there's nothing between Thanksgiving and New Year's now. Just a lot of cold days and cold nights."
"And they're going to get colder," Mrs. C said softly.
"This is how the next Ice Age starts," Rudolph explained. "This is how it begins: despair and the death of the holiday season. The nights are long, Bernie. They are very long. And if you can't push it back with extended shopping hours, then it will come into your house, into your heart. We can't let it end this way, Bernie. We can't."
My heart was already cold. "It's already started, Rudolph. It's too late. You—" I wanted to say that he came too late, but what would it have mattered if he had come and found me a month ago? "We can't—" I stopped. There was no point. This was Divine retribution for what we had done.
"Who says we can't?"
I looked up at Rudolph. The reindeer's eyes were dark and light like shutters were blowing open on the furnace inside his head. "Oh no," I said. I knew what he was thinking. Santa may have wanted to see me, but Rudolph came to fetch me for something else entirely. "No way. I'm not going back there."
"Why not? We know the way. What more can they do to us?"
"You're out of your mind."
Rudolph laughed, and I flinched. Rudolph wanted to go back to purgatory. He wanted to make another raid on heaven for another soul.
Santa's soul.
II
I went outside to clear my head. Specifically, I went up on the roof. The angelic balloon hovered perfectly over the North Pole, its white fire halo bleaching the landscape. There was a line keeping it in place, and I traced the thin thread—losing it several times—down to the rooftop of the Residence.
On the far side of the climate control tower and the row of satellite dishes was a small lean-to made from bubble wrap and the plastic rods we got in bulk from a German weapons manufacturer. The same stuff that goes into those new H&K replicas carried by all the latest action figures. A worn lawn chair sat beneath the ragged structure, and a portable heater was partially submerged in a pool of tepid water beside the chair. A deep-sea fishing rod rested in a brace, and the line from the rod went straight up into the sky.
A man dressed in a long, white cloak was sitting in the lawn chair, reading a paperback novel. He looked up as I approached and gave me a dazzling smile that was more teeth than lip. His hair was cut close to his scalp, and his skin was a dark bronze. His eyes danced in his face like tiny sparks, and his fingers were long and finely boned. He reminded me of a wet seal.
"Hello," he said cheerfully, dropping a bookmark in place.
I nodded in return. The last time I had run into angels, they had been trying to kill me. I was—understandably—a little cautious.
"I didn't realize any of the little folk were left," he said breezily. "I had heard that most of you went to Alaska for the salmon fishing season."
"One assembly line to another," I murmured.
He shrugged. "Some are more suited to it than others. I'm glad they found work."
"How about Santa?" I asked. "You glad about him?"
The angel caught the edge in my voice and raised an eyebrow. "I'm sorry. I don't think I quite understand."
"Santa's dead."
Something flashed in his eyes, and his lips pressed firmly against his te
eth for an instant. "Ah."
"You can get the hell out of here now," I said. "Your job's done."
The angel shook his head. "I'm afraid not."
My hands balled into fists. "What's left, you parasitic leech? The North Pole has been shut down, everyone's been driven off, and Santa's dead. What's left for you to pick through?"
He pointed skyward. "Orders from on High. You've been placed under Holy Quarantine. This whole area is subject to enforcement. You can go about your life if you like, but the office of Santa Claus has been shut down until further notice."
"How long is that?" I asked.
"Further notice?" he shrugged. "Substitute the word ‘eternity' if you need a little help on the bigger picture. Do I have to quote chapter and verse for you?"
"But why?"
"You might ask yourself that question, Mr. Bernard Rosewood. The last elf to be Senior Elf in Charge of Operations." He smiled at the expression crawling across my face. "Yes, I know who you are. You're a bit of a celebrity in heaven."
His fingers folded around themselves in a manner that seemed to bend space, and when they stopped, he was holding a folded sheet of paper. He held it out for me to see that it was not unlike the FBI's Most-Wanted posters you see in the Post Office. There were two pictures on the page: one of me, and one of Rudolph. Rudolph looked like someone had just slapped him with a salmon, and I looked like I was auditioning for Sesame Street. Typical.
"You were on duty that night, weren't you?" he asked. "It was your responsibility to avert crises, forestall disaster, head off certain catastrophe."
"But I did—"
"What did you do?" He caught me trying to read the fine print on the page, and his fingers did that trick again, making the paper vanish.
"I . . . I helped, I guess," I said.
"Bingo, Button Boy. And as an official Little Helper—" He flashed his grin at me again. "You still have your pin, don't you? As a Little Helper, you go down with the ship. So to speak."
I took a menacing step towards the seated angel. "Now just a minute. We were helping. We were bringing light. Not like you. Not like you towel-wrapped, feather-dusted, blood sucking—"
The angel clapped his hands. "Ooh. Name calling. This is grand. Are you going to hit me next?"
I stopped, my clenched fist dropping to my side. Taking a swing at him wouldn't solve anything. And anyway, he could blow me off the roof with even his tiniest exhalation.
I had wandered aimlessly out of the infirmary; Mrs. C and Rudolph hadn't tried to stop me. I was in shock. I was hurt and angry, and I wanted an explanation. My feet had brought me to the roof in search of that explanation, and my hands wanted to wring it from the angel. But my brain kept trying to be rational.
My eyes rested on the paperback in the angel's lap. It was a thriller by a famous writer who had died recently, but I didn't recognize the title. "I don't think I've read that one," I said conversationally, trying to resurrect that feeling of languid torpor that I had been trying so hard to perfect at the hotel.
"You haven't," the angel smiled. "He just finished it last week." He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper. "There are no long publishing lead times in heaven."
My spine wanted to melt into my shoes, but I tried to keep the quaver out of my voice. "Maybe I could borrow it when you're done." I tried to affect a bored yawn, though it felt like my jaw would crack and fall off.
The angel laughed. He held out his hand. "We haven't properly met. I'm Ramiel."
I stared at his outstretched hand. Rational brain or no, I wasn't going to take that hand. We had gone toe-to-toe with the Host and had made them look bad. So, okay, maybe we had been asking for it by busting David Anderson out, but there was no way I was going to be that civil. Santa was . . . well, yeah, what was the point of being civil now, right?
I thrust my hands behind my back so he couldn't see how tight my fists were. "Okay Ramiel, now that we're on a first name basis, why don't you tell me the ‘chapter and verse' version of why you're here."
Ramiel cast his eyes heavenward in a ‘give me strength' manner. "Which ‘thou shalt not' would you like to hear first? Okay, let's start with ‘Thou shalt not worship any images but Mine.' I realize most of you don't remember much of the Old Testament, much less which Commandment that is, but the basic problem is that you performed a miracle last Christmas. On the day before the birthday of Jesus Christ, you performed a resurrection. How many people hoped that you would go one better and bring back the King of Glory on his birthday?"
"Elvis?" Rudolph interjected. He had come up like a silent fog and was standing in the snow behind me.
"The other King," Ramiel said politely, though his tone was crisp. "The point is that Santa performed a capital-M Miracle. Now, there are some things that you can get away with: being out of range of your dog when it shakes itself dry, making a parking meter stick, winning the lottery twice in a row, always getting the short line at the grocery store, and so on. But a resurrection is an entirely different class of miracle, and those are reserved for direct agents of the Man Upstairs." Ramiel spread his hands. "I barely get to influence parking, and I'm one of the Seven. Santa Claus is, let's face it, a minor deity. At best. This effected a huge swing in the balance of belief structures.
"What do you think would have happened this coming Christmas if we let you go unpunished. ‘What did you get for Christmas?' Suzy Anderson's schoolteacher asked her after the holidays. ‘I got my Daddy back,' she said. And after the school psychologist called Suzy's house and actually talked to dear old Dad, little Suzy brought him in for Show-and-Tell."
Ramiel waved his arms and dropped his voice an octave. "‘Hello kids, my name is David Anderson, and I was brought back to this mortal plane of existence by Santa Claus and his reindeer as my little girl's Christmas present. Does anyone have any questions about the afterlife?'"
"So what's your point?" I asked just to be difficult. I wasn't that dense. I had gotten the point pretty clearly, but somewhere during Ramiel's monologue I had snuck a peek at Rudolph, and I could tell from his body language that it was going to be impossible to talk him out of his damn fool plan. The one that required me to drink the same Kool-aid. If I let Ramiel ramble on enough, then maybe Rudolph would see the futility of his plan and back down. They might not have been expecting us the first time—God's attention to detail notwithstanding—but there was no way we were going to catch them by surprise a second time. And without that precious element, I didn't see how we had any chance at all. Less than a snowball's chance, in fact.
Ramiel was enjoying having an audience. If we were in grade school, he would have been the big kid who would have talked about what he would do to you if he had the time, but since recess was only fifteen minutes long, he was going to have to settle for beating your head against the tetherball pole for twelve of those precious minutes. But those other three? He would definitely fill them up with as much self-aggrandizing prattle as possible.
"My point is this," Ramiel said. "You minor leaguers have always coattailed on the important dates for the majors. And you couldn't be satisfied with that. You got a little greedy." He lifted his hands. "I can understand that. Hubris can happen to anyone. Just ask the guy who took the Long Drop. But you were supposed to have learned from his example; instead, here you are, trying to horn in on our territory like some overzealous vacuum cleaner salesmen."
"What if we apologize?" I asked, out of sheer curiosity more than any real hope. "A big press release apology. And, you know, a couple thousand Hail Marys and six lifetimes worth of community service? Can we get Santa back?"
Ramiel shook his head. "It's too late for that. Even if Santa was returned to this plane, what do you think is going to happen the day after Thanksgiving?"
"There won't be any parking at the mall?" Rudolph tried.
"No, it'll be the first day that the Church of Santa Claus will be open for business. And every mall across America—across the world—will have their own little alta
r and High Priest for you to visit and deposit your little prayer—your little tithe for something ‘extra-special' to come your way. What'll it be next year? Loved ones two years gone? Your favorite cat—Fluffy—get hit by a car? No problem, just drop on by the First Church of Claus and put in an order to get them back. Don't you worry your pretty little head about a thing. Santa always delivers. Who cares if your grandmother's been dead ten years. Santa always comes through for good little girls."
Ramiel leaned forward. "Look, I'm not trying to downplay what you guys did. It was a splendid thing. But you acted without thinking about the consequences. There's an order to this universe. There is a Plan. Didn't either of you read Revelation? Bringing back the dead has always been part of the agenda. It may seem like you did a little thing, but in ten years, will it be so little anymore? Where does it end? Who decides what Santa can't bring you for Christmas?"
I felt something crack in my spine. "What? You couldn't just come down and talk about it? You couldn't drop by and ask Santa to keep his gift-giving to more secular fare. Who gave you the right to shut us down and kill Santa? Is that justified by what we did? Is God that much of an asshole?"
Ramiel refused to get ruffled. "There's no need to be rude about it."
"Oh? We're just supposed to take this? We're just supposed to roll over and say ‘thank you' for this display of wisdom and justice?" The venom in my spine flooded my body. I realized I had been holding a lot of things back since that circus sideshow that had been the NPC investigation. First I lost my union card, and now Santa was gone. The venom flushed through my cheeks. "I did my job. Do you think that mattered? Do you think anyone cared? I lost everything—my apartment, my pension, my union card, my life—everything!—because I wanted to bring some happiness to someone's life. That little girl was hurting!" I was shouting now, screaming at the angel. "Hurt and lost and she wanted someone to help her. She turned to us. Why did she turn to us? Because no one else would listen to her. No one did anything to help this little girl's pain. What were we supposed to have done?"