Rudolph!

by Mark Teppo

  The wind shifted slightly, blowing an especially fetid effluvium of rotten vegetables right in my face. I clamped a hand over my nose and mouth and tried my best to not breathe.

  "Here," Rudolph said, and something tapped me on the head. He was offering me a long candy cane. Still wrapped in plastic.

  "Where did you get that?" I gasped as the words forced me to inhale.

  "I packed some treats," he said. He twisted and rummaged through the pack on his back, producing another candy cane, which he ate—plastic wrapper and all.

  I fought with the plastic for a second, and then managed to free the end of the candy cane from its wrapper. I licked it cautiously, and a tingling sensation crawled up my tongue. My head cleared almost immediately, and the pressure behind my eyes eased. I rolled the plastic up and took a large bite, and somewhere in my chest, my stomach started to crawl out of its hiding place. "What's in these?" I asked.

  "Natural ingredients," Rudolph said, mouth full. "Totally organic. Hand-shaped by joyous volunteer children."

  "The NPC doesn't let children work in the factories," I pointed out.

  "I never said they were locally made," Rudolph said. He jerked his head toward the pack on his back. "There are more. Hand them out to the others. We could all use a pick-me-up."

  Still sucking on the curl of my cane, I rooted through the pack on Rudolph's back, taking a proper inventory: nearly a dozen more candy canes, only two of which had broken in all the chaos; the plaid thermos I had seen earlier; and a walnut case without hinges.

  "What's this?" I asked, hefting the case.

  "Oh, that. Yeah, it's for you," he said.

  "Celebratory cigars?" I asked, shaking the box slightly.

  "Don't—" He shook his head. "You're not supposed to shake presents. Don't they teach you that?"

  "You got me a present?"

  "Yes. Well, no. I was just being prepared, and I didn't know . . . just open it."

  The box was nicely made—all of the edges were rounded and smooth—and it took me a few moments to find the seam along the top. Once I found it, opening the box was easy.

  "Oh," I said when I saw what was inside. "You shouldn't have."

  Inside the box were a pair of pistols, delicately cradled on a bed of purple velvet. They looked like something René Lalique would have made if he had been hired to make the props for a Flash Gordon serial. Silvered glass and polished metal. Elf-sized too. The grips were insulated, and the pistol was heavier than I expected. I would probably have better luck clubbing someone on the head with the gun than actually shooting them.

  "A little short on ammo," Rudolph said. "Which is why I didn't tell you about them earlier. They wouldn't have been much help against all those crabs."

  "How short?"

  "Four, I think. They're a bit unusual."

  "How unusual?" I asked. The barrel of the pistol was cold, and I realized why the grips were insulated.

  "Nitrogen pellets. Cold kiss of Absolute Zero with those puppies."

  "And you could only manage four?" I scoffed.

  Rudolph shrugged. "Hey, four in each. Everyone else only got armor piercing rounds. I don't see what you're bitching about."

  I wasn't quite sure where I was supposed to put the gun. I didn't relish shoving it down the front of my thermal suit. The trouble with experimental weaponry was twofold: one, it probably hadn't been tested; and two, someone had identified a target that might require this kind of firepower to vanquish. And pointing that sort of firepower at my crotch didn't seem like the best idea.

  Rudolph reached over and deftly snagged the piece of forgotten candy cane in my left hand. "Pose for Guns and Ammo later," he said, crunching. "There should be some holsters in the bottom of the box. Let's get moving."

  I lifted the corner of the velvet case—there were, indeed, some holsters. Shoulder holsters, in fact, and already rigged for someone my size. As I struggled into the rig and slipped the pistols into their leather holsters, Rudolph trotted off to meet the pair of reindeer.

  His gait was solid. Whatever had been troubling his left leg was gone.

  "There's something out there," Donner said. Unlike the others, he was a sucker, and he still had several inches of candy cane left. Donner had been the last to rejoin the team, and he looked like he had been running awhile when we had found him.

  "Rodents of Unusual Size?" Blitzen asked.

  "Larger," Donner replied. He nodded at Ring, who was nursing a bump on his forehead from tangling with a kid's bicycle when he had landed. "Bigger than that one."

  "Big enough to eat him in one bite?" Cupid wanted to know.

  Donner shrugged. "Would it really matter if it took one or two bites?"

  I ignored them, focusing instead on the problem at hand. What had Dante said about the third circle?.

  Prancer called out to Rudolph: "That's a dead end," Prancer called out to Rudolph, nodding toward the narrow gap between two pillars of trash. Rudolph had been about to slip through the gap; he paused, eyes narrowing as he considered our options.

  Rudolph's innate sense of direction was better than my map, and we had been following his lead as we wandered through the canyons of garbage, picking up the rest of the team. I could tell that Rudolph wasn't pleased by the idea of backtracking as it meant we weren't moving directly toward our goal, but I couldn't think of any other way. We had tried to stay up on the top of the ridges, but the smell had been worse up there, even with the tingling menthol afterscent of the candy canes in our nostrils. It was easier down in the canyons, but the route wasn't going to be direct, which was making Rudolph grumpy.

  "Did you hear that?" Ring asked.

  "What?" I asked, straining to hear anything other than the distant sound of the wind as it murmured through the canyons.

  "It's big," Donner reminded us.

  Rudolph glared at the muscular reindeer as he starting trotting back the way we had come. The reindeer fell in line, moving quickly to keep up with Rudolph, and I hooked an arm around Prancer's shoulder as he came by and swung up onto his back.

  We followed Rudolph as he ducked through narrow openings and led us down wide trenches. I gave up trying to make sense of our wandering. It was like following a route in a forest that had been cut by a schizophrenic woodsman with an inner ear imbalance. Rudolph was getting more and more frustrated. He knew where he wanted to go, but there wasn't a direct path; turning away from his goal was like forcing the compass to point south.

  When we ended up in a box canyon with sheer garbage walls, I called for a conference. We huddled up while Rudolph stared angrily at the wall in his path. "We need to think about where we're going," I said. "There's got to be a key of some kind."

  "This is hell," Blitzen pointed out. "There may not be a key to this maze."

  Rudolph took a running leap at the wall in front of him, zooming up to the top of the cliff like crazed hummingbird. As soon as he reached open air, the wind caught him. Rudolph bared his teeth, and his muscles stood out in stark relief on his bare skin as he strained madly against the wind. He made a valiant effort, but the wind was too strong, and when his hooves stopped dancing, he was thrown back like a leaf. We watched as he sailed overhead, and then he dropped below the upper edge of the cliff and neatly swung around to land on the ground nearby.

  "It was a nice effort," Cupid offered.

  "I hate mazes," Rudolph said. His skin was slick with sweat. He glared at me like the confusion of garbage was my fault.

  I ignored him as I tried to think. Dante had written a long poem about visiting hell, and as I had said a couple times to the reindeer already, it was just a metaphor. While our journey had obvious parallels to his, it wasn't the same. I might as well have brought a foldout to the Super Mall of the Americas. It would have been filled with tiny graphics of stuffed animals and floating hamburgers and would have been just as useful.

  We came from a different time than Dante. We were different. Our cultures were different. Our hells wouldn't match,
and as long as I kept clinging to the notion that we were making the same journey, we'd keep getting lost. Sure, Dante's third circle had been a mass garbage heap—a prison for the slothful and gluttonous—just like the one we were in now, but there weren't any trapped souls.

  In fact, other than the hunger crabs, our trip so far had been suspiciously free of any tormented spirits. The only torment was our own, and that was being heaped on us by the environment.

  "It doesn't matter," I said, the thought forming in my head. Hell wasn't a place. It was an idea—a fluid environment that only became solid as we brought our own perceptions and apprehensions to bear on it.

  "I thought Dante would give us directions," I said, "but all Dante really did was show us where the door was. Everything else has been different. Well, sort of the same, but different, you know?"

  "Not really," Blitzen said. "You're rambling a bit there, Bernie."

  "What is hell built on?" I asked him.

  "Torment and frustrated desire," he said without hesitation. "Founding principle of Satan's misery."

  "And each circle is a new iteration built upon the previous one, isn't it? The first was hunger—lust—a totally uncontrolled urge to consume. And then came despair, right? The sudden realization that you could never consume what you truly wanted, that you could never aspire to what you dreamt about. And after despair?" I waved my hand around me. "Confusion. Discord. The discarded refuse of your cast-off dreams and feeble attempts at creative accomplishment. This garbage heap is everything that we ever bought, ordered, or had manufactured that wasn't quite what we wanted."

  "Are you heading somewhere inspirational with this speech?" Cupid asked. "Because you're not off to a very good start."

  "I'm thinking out loud."

  "Well, talk faster then."

  I was watching Ring's ears and nose twitch, as the little reindeer alternated between smelling and listening. "What's the key to the fourth circle?" I asked. "What's the key to every circle? What keeps us moving forward? We keep thinking there's something better out there. We keep hoping that we're going to find the inner core of hell."

  "No, seriously," Cupid said. "You should just stop talking now."

  "Temptation," Blitzen said. "It's all about temptation."

  "What?" Cupid looked at Blitzen. "How did you get there from his blather?"

  "There has to be some moment that gifts you with momentary illumination," Blizten explained patiently. "We have to have reoccurring epiphanies that lure us into thinking that there is still some hope. Every failure is not absolute; there is always some tiny nugget of hope that makes us get up and try again. It's nothing more than temptation. The Temptation of the Infinitely Unobtainable."

  I grinned. "Which makes your next failure even worse, doesn't it?"

  Blitzen nodded. "The pit keeps getting deeper and deeper."

  I waved an arm at the walls of garbage. "That's why the walls are higher, and why the wind is stronger."

  "So, wait a second," Cupid said. "I'm not following this. It's going to get worse, every step we take?"

  "Of course it is," I said absently. I was becoming mesmerized by Ring's nose.

  "And there's no end to it?"

  "None at all," I said as I wandered over to the small reindeer.

  "Okay, so what's the point then?"

  Ring caught me staring at his nose, and he stood stock still, his tail vibrating with the effort to keep his nose from wiggling. "What?" he squeaked.

  "What do you smell?" I asked.

  "Garbage," he said. "And Brussels sprouts."

  I wrapped an arm around his shoulder. "No, you don't," I said. "There's something else, isn't there?"

  He wrinkled his nose and shook his head. "Come on," I urged him. "Tell me."

  "It's rotten," he said quickly, lowering his head. "Like a tub of Santa's sweaty socks."

  Vixen made a choking noise, and Comet hung his tongue out of his mouth.

  "It doesn't smell good, Bernie," Ring whined.

  "I know," I said gently, patting him gently. I looked over at Cupid. "It's all about temptation. The key to every circle, or the key to the only circle. Do you get it? I thought we had to cross all these circles of hell to reach the center, and I convinced you all that was the right path, but it's an endless path, isn't it? We're going to wander each circle forever. But it doesn't have to be that way. We made this hell; we can unmake it too. We can get right to the heart of it. But to do that, we have to dream really big. We have to think really hard on the single thing that we want more than anything in the world."

  I hugged Ring. "Come on, little one," I said. "What do you smell? What do you want more than anything in the whole world?"

  Ring acquiesced finally, lifting his head and opening his nostrils to the horrible effluvia whirling through the air. The little reindeer's knees shook, and his eyes started to water, but he didn't stop trying. He didn't shirk from smelling as hard as he could.

  "Come on," I whispered, hoping that I had guessed right. Hoping that the heart of an innocent reindeer was the purest of them all. "Let yourself be tempted."

  His eyes widened suddenly. "Mrs. C's peanut brittle," he squeaked. "I smell it. I smell it!"

  My stomach grumbled, and the back of my throat seized with sudden hunger. How long had it been since I had eaten anything other than a candy cane? "That's it," I whispered. "That's our ultimate temptation. Follow that smell, Ring. Follow it."

  I let go of Ring, and the small reindeer bounced around me, his head up and nose tracking the most elusive of smells.

  "You sure about it?" Rudolph asked, his eyes dark.

  I shivered under that gaze, but I kept my apprehension under control. "Hell is supposed to draw us in. It's like the Hotel California. Sure, Satan's got an eternity to wait for us to show up, but there's a fast track. Because it's not the trip in that he wants. It's having us stuck here, knowing that we can never leave. And we've been wandering around, thinking that we just have to get to the center where we can get Santa's soul back, but come on, that's our job, right? That's not what we really want, is it? What is it that we really want? More than anything else in the world?"

  "Lunch," Ring squealed suddenly, and he galloped off, lead by his nose.

  "Off you go," I said to the others, signaling that we should follow Ring before he left us all behind. Cupid gave me a hairy eyeball as he passed, not quite sure that anything I had just said mean sense, but he followed Ring's lead. Lunch was lunch, after all.

  Rudolph waited for me. "That was a pretty good trick," he said as I climbed onto his back. "Will it work?"

  "I hope so," I said. "Remember Persephone? She craved a pomegranate. Imagine the lure of a pound of Mrs. C's peanut brittle."

  "So the real trick is going to be stopping them from actually eating any," Rudolph said. "Who is going to tell them they can't have a bite?"

  I patted his warm skin. "That's your job," I said. "They already expect you to be the killjoy. Might as well live up to it."

  X

  Mrs. C's peanut brittle was an old family recipe, gleaned from the hand of her Norwegian grandmother, and it had the texture of soft gold. She usually made it after Halloween, and I stuffed myself stupid on it more than one night while writing FitReps for Santa during the run-up to Zero Hour. I had the dullest nose of the team, but after following Ring for about an hour, I could smell it too. It was almost like that vapor trail you see in the old cartoon, the one that lifted you up and carried you.

  And finally, we found the source of the smell: a silver portal at the end of a long canyon, not unlike the one where we had conducted our confab. But this one was more imposing, longer and deeper. The walls curved inward as they rose overhead, blotting out the dark clouds thrashing in the sky. The sound of the wind rose in pitch as it faded, crying and wailing in anguish as we approached the portal.

  Ring was waiting for us. "Come on," he whined, shaking with excitement. "It's just through there."

  The portal shimmered sudde
nly, silver motes rising from the bottom. Prancer saw the tiny sparks before Ring did. "Look out," he cried, shoving the little reindeer out of the way.

  A large shape catapulted through the portal, and Prancer was knocked aside, his body twisting painfully. The monster landed heavily, its weight shaking the ground, and we all stared at the three-headed beast that had just appeared.

  I knew his name because, before I had given up on Dante, I had read about him. Cerberus. The three-headed guardian of hell.

  Hercules faced Cerberus once. His twelfth and final labor was to retrieve the hound from hell, and the stories say that Hercules admitted that he couldn't have accomplished that deed without the help of Hermes and Athena. Dante used Cerberus as an allegory for the uncontrolled appetite which haunts the gluttonous, their punishment for a lifetime of excessiveness. The Disney animators turned him into a gigantic black beast with flaming eyes and jaws that dripped lava.

  Maybe they hadn't done the lava dripping part. But they should have, because that was certainly how he was.

  He was tall enough to stare down a truck driver behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler, and his teeth gleamed like polished chrome. His three heads perched atop thick necks that looked like the trunks of old-growth redwoods. His tail bristled with rattles and spikes—and maybe a tambourine or two for all I could tell. A mane of hissing serpents rose from the peak of his massive shoulders. Fire bled from his eyes, and what dripped from his black and pointed tongue burned a hole in the garbage beneath him.

  Prancer was lying very still not far from the hound's massive paws. One of his legs was bent painfully under his body. His eyes were open, but he was doing his best not to look up at the beast towering over him. Cerberus's leftmost head was eyeing him, considering whether or not he would make a good snack.

  "Nice doggy." Comet had been next in our file, and he was directly in front of the growling beast. "Anyone got a spiced ham or something?"

  "I don't think a whole cow would slow him down," Rudolph muttered. His shoulders twitched. He wanted me off, but I didn't want to move. He shook me again, and I slid down reluctantly. I got it: I was small enough that Cerberus probably wouldn't consider me a threat, and Rudolph could move faster without me clinging to his back. But I wasn't going to outrun the big dog, not with my short legs. My stomach was hiding behind my lungs again, tapping out an SOS on my spine.