by Mark Teppo
Someone was going to have to teach him the words. If he was going to be leading, he was going to have to know the words. "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night."
Could we do it? Could we get everything done in time for Christmas?
I put the cap on.
It fit. Someone had shrunk it to fit my head more snugly.
I guess Mrs. C wasn't the only one who believed in me.
Off Season
"What's that sound?"
"That? That groaning noise? It's nothing."
I blinked several times, not sure if I was seeing things in the dark or if Rudolph was putting out a little light. The drugs were wearing off. Ahead of schedule. In a few minutes, he was going to be fully awake. And pissed.
I still wasn't sure this was a very good idea, but I hadn't known what else to do. It was our first Christmas away from home. I didn't know how he was going to take not being there at Zero Hour, and so I did something creative. Or maybe stupid. It was too early to tell yet.
Rudolph moved around in the dark, and I heard his hooves banging against metal. "We're not in the sled," he said. His voice was getting stronger and angrier by the syllable. "Bernie. Where are we?"
"I'm not entirely sure," I lied.
More banging noises, and now I could definitely see a ruddy glow coming off Rudolph's skin. The light revealed the plain metal bulkheads of the tiny chamber where he and I were hanging out. "What is this?" Rudolph demanded.
"It's called a bathysphere," I said. "It's used for deep sea exploration."
He cocked his head, listening to the sounds coming from the metal around us. "We're underwater, aren't we?"
"We are," I said. "More than a mile down, I think."
"You think?"
I shrugged, and adjusted the pillows behind me. "We're kind of floating free," I said. Kind of. There was a thick cable attached to the bathysphere that ran all the way up to a boat, but he didn't need to know that.
The interior of the bathysphere had been stripped down to the bare metal. It wasn't the most comfortable place to spend a few days over Christmas, which is why I had packed along some pillows, a cooler, and more than one thermos of hot chocolate, spiked with peppermint schnapps. Heavily spiked.
He clattered over and loomed over me, his skin ruddy with anger. "Bernie," he said. "What's going on?"
I glanced at the luminous hands on my watch. "Well, it's Christmas Eve," I said. "Almost midnight, in fact. Zero Hour is coming right up."
He snorted angrily and lowered his head, pointing his antlers at me. "Why are we here?" he repeated. "Why aren't we at the Pole?"
I shook my head. "You know why."
He rapped a hoof against the metal flooring. "I could bust out of this thing," he said.
I was watching the sweep hand on my watch. "We're a mile down," I said.
"I could hold my breath," Rudolph said.
"You'd get the bends," I said. "It's a nitrogen-rich atmosphere in here. Because we're, you know, a mile from the surface of the ocean."
"No, I wouldn't."
I glanced up at him. "Yes, you would. And then you'd be all weird and crampy and floating out in the middle of the ocean. Is that how you want to spend Christmas?"
He blew air heavily out of his nose and stomped around in the bathysphere. "You know how I want to spend Christmas," he said.
"I know." I sighed. "I'm sorry."
Five more seconds.
"For what?" he asked.
The sweep hand passed the twelve. It was now midnight. If the boat towing us was on time and on course, we had just crossed the International Date Line, heading west. Two seconds ago, it had been 11:59PM on Christmas Eve. It was now 12:00AM the day after Christmas.
We skipped a day that year.
The Musical
December 2nd
"We're considering torture."
I was still blindfolded. "This your first kidnapping?" My lips were parched. "I'm just curious ‘cause you're kind of off to a rocky start."
I got slapped for that. It was what tough farm boys would consider a girlish slap, but, in my exhausted and dehydrated state, it was enough to rattle my molars. My jaw hurt; I hadn't had any food or water in at least thirty-six hours; my feet and hands were numb from the bonds that kept me sequestered on this uncomfortable chair; and my bladder had long ago given up on trying to get my attention. All in all, nothing a decent massage and six hours submerged in a hot tub couldn't erase. My captors were amateurs.
The fact that they had managed to tie me to a chair and blindfold me notwithstanding.
The slapper grabbed my chin and squeezed me like an overzealous grandmother. "The account password," he said. "That's all we want."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I replied through mashed lips.
"The money in the account, Rosewood. Just give us the password and we'll let you go."
"Where?" I asked through fish-lip pucker. "Where will you let me go?"
My head was shoved back. "We'll send you to hell if you don't cooperate."
I laughed. "Really? That doesn't frighten me as much as you think it might."
Slapper tagged me on the head again, and I rocked back in the chair. The front legs came off the ground, and I teetered there for a second and then the chair came down again. The impact woke my bladder, and I felt like someone had just dropped an anvil in my lap.
There was a scrape of shoe leather against the worn floor as the two men stepped away from my chair to talk quietly. They thought they were playing church mice, but my hearing was a little better than they knew. "I don't like this," the meek one said. "This isn't what I signed up for."
"There's more than a million dollars in his account," Slapper said. "All we need is the password, and we can move the money somewhere else. You gonna walk away from a million fucking dollars?"
"I can't spend it in an American jail."
"We're not going to jail. Not here. Not anywhere."
"We might be if he talks."
"He's not going to talk," Slapper said. "We'll get the password, move the money, and then . . ."
"And then what?"
"We'll see. Okay. Just don't panic. I've got this under control."
There was a rustle of fabric, and Meeker's voice became strained. "Take your hand off me," he said.
"Did you hear what I said? I've got this."
More rustling. "Yes, I heard you." Scrape of shoe leather again. "You're an utter fool if you think he's going to talk. He's been down here a day already, and he doesn't seem the slightest bit worried."
"Maybe not. But there's a couple of things to try yet."
"You had better try them soon. The longer we stick around . . ."
"God, you can be such a—look, don't worry. Everything is under control."
"Yeah?" I heard Meeker walk away from me, and then a door opened. "Whose?" Meeker asked as he left, closing the door behind him.
"Drama queen," Slapper muttered under his breath, and I didn't disagree with him. That exit was pure stage drama, of the most ham-fisted sort.
I waited for something to happen, straining to hear any clue as to what Slapper was doing. There was more rustling—of paper and plastic this time—and then the metallic click of a lighter being opened. Thumb raked flint wheel, and then a crackling sound of tobacco burning. Slapper closed the lighter and exhaled heavily. My nose picked up the pungent smell of cheap hand-rolled tobacco.
Slapper wandered back to my chair, and I flinched as he bent over and pulled heavily on the cigarette next to my ear. It sounded like I was in the path of an approaching forest fire.
"I've done dinner theater," he whispered in my ear. I could feel the lit tip of the cigarette dancing somewhere near my cheek. "I know something about pain," he said. "You will tell me what I want to know."
This was how my holiday season was shaping up.
November 21st
The Fantasyland Hotel at the West Edmonton Mall has theme rooms. What motel with the
word ‘fantasy' in the name wouldn't? However, since the hotel had a couple of skybridges connecting it to the mall, the rooms' themes were more family-friendly. The Igloo Room, for example, had penguins painted on the walls. Happy little penguins.
It drove Rudolph nuts. There were no penguins in the Arctic. But we could get the thermostat down to fifty-four which made him less grumpy, so we put up with the penguins.
Anyway, the Fantasyland was where Rudolph and I stayed between assignments. The 60th parallel was the line we didn't cross, and goofy penguins aside, the Igloo Room helped us deal with our separation anxiety. Well, it helped Rudolph. After last year's incident with the bathysphere, I had promised to not trick him like that again. But we still needed coping mechanisms for the fact that we didn't work out of the North Pole anymore.
The Igloo wasn't available this time around, so we ended up down the hall in the Exploration of Space room. There was a scale model of Sputnik attached to the wall over the bed, and a dial next to the bed provided three levels of lighting—ambient, sensual, and stark. Scattered across the ceiling and the other walls were luminescent points of the Milky Way. The designers had made some effort to match the play of stars across the actual night sky, and when all the lights were off and the satellites (Sputnik wasn't the only one) were darkened, it was almost like sailing beyond the troposphere into the inky blackness of unexplored space.
I could only get the thermostat down to sixty-two, but Rudolph didn't mind so much as long as I kept the lights off.
He started getting extra cranky as soon as the stores put out their Halloween costumes, because it meant that Christmas was coming. We were still working, and the approaching Season meant we were busy, but the final days before Zero Hour were hard. Last year—our first year away from the Pole—I had doped Rudolph up and taken him for a ride in a deep-sea bathysphere. I'll admit it wasn't the best Christmas present, but we made it through the holiday without an international or supernatural incident, which made everyone happy. Including our new boss, Mrs. C.
We worked for her now. Seasonal stealth agents.
The balcony of our room looked out over the eastern radius of the mall, and even at this early hour of the morning, the parking lot was nearly half full. Through the clear windows of the dome over the center of the mall, I could see the frenzied shopping action going on inside. It was like watching ants in a glass-walled ant farm, scurrying back and forth. Package and parcel standing in for leaf and twig.
I had just wrapped up breakfast—pancakes smothered in maple syrup, crisp bacon, and a cup of fresh fruit—and was finishing my coffee. Rudolph had eaten all the plates already.
"You done with that?" he asked, eyeing the partially empty cup in my hand. There was a smear of maple syrup on his nose.
"I was going to have a second cup," I said. "But then you went and ate the carafe."
"You shouldn't drink so much coffee," he said.
"And why is that?" I asked.
"Caffeine makes people unpredictable." He looked down at the tray resting on the side table next to me. "How about the flatware?" he asked. "Can I have that?"
I shook my head. "Management says they don't care what happens to the china, but they want the silverware back."
"Flatware," Rudolph corrected me. "There's no silver in it."
I glanced up at him, and he held my gaze for a moment before his tongue flicked out and cleaned the syrup off his nose. "What?" he asked.
"Okay, Super Goat," I said. "When did you have the mass spectrometer installed?"
He shrugged. "It just tastes different," he said. His head swiveled toward the mall's parking lot all of a sudden. His eyes narrowed, and he lost interest in gnawing on the silver—sorry, flatware. His nostrils widened as he took in the scents rising across the mall. "Fat Boy," he announced.
I sat up, trying to pretend I could make out any real details all the way across the parking lot. It was a pretty typically overcast day for Edmonton, the sunlight diffused into a gentle radiance by the layer of gray clouds cloaking the sky from horizon to horizon. Even with the uniformity of light, I couldn't match Rudolph's ocular ability. "Where?" I asked.
"Silver Acura." Rudolph said. I glared at him. As if there were only one Acura or one silver car in the lot. "He just got out. Blue windbreaker. He's wearing a baseball cap. It's got a moose on it."
I gave up, sinking back into the lounge chair. "What's he doing here?"
Rudolph wandered over to the railing and watched the tiny figure make its way across the lot. "We're expecting contact today, aren't we?" he asked.
"Yeah, but not Fat Boy. She usually sends Blitzen."
Rudolph chewed on the inner lining of his cheek. "Last weekend before Thanksgiving, isn't it?" he asked.
It took me a minute to remember the NPC schedule. "Lockdown," I said. "It's the weekend before Lockdown."
The day after Thanksgiving, the North Pole entered Lockdown—the final thirty days before Zero Hour. All leaves were canceled, and no one was permitted to leave the North Pole, including Santa. Especially Santa. They didn't need to be wondering where Fat Boy was the night before Christmas.
That had happened once already. The NPC wasn't keen on it ever happening again.
Rudolph nodded. "He's heading for the amusement park. One last ride this year."
The phone back in the room rang, and Rudolph glanced over his shoulder. I knocked back a final swallow of my lukewarm coffee—knowing that the cup would be gone when I returned—and went inside to answer the phone.
So, even though Rudolph and I saved Christmas the Season before this last one—again—the NPC didn't budge on their previous decision to kick me out. Ungrateful bastards. Who invited them back after Ramiel was turned into an ice sculpture anyway? Rudolph called their bluff, saying that if I went, he went too. The NPC didn't even blink.
Which meant I had some company on the ride south this time.
We ended up at the Fantasyland—in the Iguana room that first time, which wasn't a very good choice. That first night was really long, and the only reason we weren't banned from the hotel was because Mrs. C was there in the morning to smooth things over with the hotel management. You two are my special ambassadors, she told us over breakfast. There will be no more incidents like this one with the lizards. Okay? You will go wherever I tell you to, do what is needed, and you will ensure that the world understands how Christmas works now. There will be no more miracles. There will just be people being nice to one another all year long. And at Christmas time, there will be lots of presents under the tree for ALL the good boys and girls. Do you understand?
After she left, Rudolph said we were going to be the Christmas SEAL team: we'd drop in out of nowhere, bag and tag, refresh some memories, and get out before anyone really noticed us. Mission: Impossible-style. And, sure, I'll admit that it sounded a lot more fun when he put it that way. We'd even taken to calling Blitzen "Mr. Phelps" when he visited to deliver a mission briefing.
Blitzen played along. He's good that way.
"Ride the roll," he said when I answered the phone in the hotel suite. "Go go green. Granddad's got a moose."
"Rudolph saw him in the parking lot," I said. "Why aren't you here?"
"Last ride before Lockdown," Blitzen said. "You know how he is." He paused for a second. "Look, Bernie. Talk to him, okay? He's a little . . . moody."
Uh oh. "What's going on?" I asked.
"He'll . . . he'll tell you," Blitzen said. "Just . . . just listen, okay?"
"Okay."
"And don't tell Rudolph."
"Wait. What?"
But he had already hung up.
Santa loved any vehicle that played tug-of-war with gravity using your body as the rope. Roller coasters were a passion he indulged whenever he could. The one at the Edmonton Mall was only a four hour reindeer hop from the top of the world and he could usually get in five or six rides, check stock at the toy stores, buy Mrs. C something lacy and nice, and still be home in time for dinner. Which m
eant that making Santa wait to ride the roller coaster was akin to pulling out his fingernails with pliers.
When I arrived at the ride, he was already sitting in the lead car of the green train, and the kid working the line had roped off the cattle chute to the front half of the train. The kid gave me a funny look when I came up, and recognizing that universal gleam in his eye, I slipped him a few twenties as I ducked under the rope.
We were going to be riding awhile.
Behind me, children wailed and shouted at the kid who had let me through, and we both ignored them. I slipped onto the wide bench next to Santa, and the kid banged down the security bar, which didn't come down nearly as far as I liked. Santa's belly was already pretty round, and there was an inordinately large space between the rubber-coated bar and my belt. There was no chance Santa was going to fall out. There was every chance I might.
I hate roller coasters.
We did the whole course three times before Santa deigned to acknowledge the white-knuckle signals I was throwing him. When the train came to a complete stop, he signaled to the kid, who came over and raised the security bar. "Come on, son," Santa said in that voice he used whenever he's at the mall. "Let me buy you a smoothie." He clapped me on the back as I staggered out of the car. Just the two of us out for a lovely day at the mall—jovial grandpa and green-around-the-gills grandson.
As soon as the floor stopped spinning, I was going to grab one of the metal poles that fed the cattle chute ribbons and smack grandpa in the kneecap.
The smoothie did little to assuage my mood; my stomach was all knotted up and wasn't in the mood for anything—not even mixed berries and sherbet and a couple superdoses of powdered vitamins.
Santa wolfed down two enormous chilidogs while I sat on a bench near the merry-go-round, trying to coax my stomach back into its normal place. "You going to finish that?" he asked, indicating the smoothie sitting on the bench between us.
I shook my head. This seemed like the question of the day.
Santa happily slurped away at my smoothie. His baseball cap was pushed back on his wide forehead, revealing a curling lock of his shaggy white hair. It hadn't been cut to regulation length yet, and more of it curled out the back of the cap and disappeared past the collar of his windbreaker. There actually was a moose with a rather surprised look on its face stenciled on the front of the cap. He was surprisingly tan. "I love field work," he said, tugging at the straw. "I don't get enough of it anymore."