by Tom Holt
That was what the Venturis had done, drat them. They’d killed emotion. Once you’d got into the habit of stopping and thinking carefully and sensibly before you let your heart rule your head, it was hard to let go long enough to relish a beautiful sunset or the song of the nightingale or a haunting piece of music, or even a good-looking (though decidedly on the short side) man. Instead, you thought, well, we’d have to get married, and do I really want someone under my feet in the mornings when I’m getting ready to rush off to the office? And how would it affect my tax position, and as for the implications for personal pension planning …
One more caller, and then it was time for her break. Venturicorp was a good employer; you could choose your shifts to suit your circadian rhythms, and there was a nice staffroom with proper coffee and digestive biscuits, though nobody talked much. She sat down in the corner and took out her phone. Dinner tomorrow? She hesitated, then hit the send button. Yes, she thought, while I can still remember what it’s like to be in love. Sort of in love. Whatever.
On the noticeboard there was a new sheet of paper from the management. It had come to their attention, it said, that several members of staff were under the misapprehension that the office would be closing for the day on 25 December, also that there would be unscheduled social activities immediately preceding that date and a bonus. This was just a foolish rumour. Staff will be expected to work their normal shifts, and any absenteeism will be treated severely. There are no exceptions. THIS MEANS YOU.
She frowned. That wasn’t the Venturi style at all. They took the view that a contented workforce was a productive workforce, and if you wanted time off or a party, all you had to do was ask, hence the Venturi medical miracle: colds and flu down 36 per cent in a matter of months. Blanket prohibitions and block capitals were the old way of doing things and so last year. Clearly, therefore, the Venturis didn’t hold with Christmas. Understandable, she thought, and then she thought, no, not really, because it’s been decades since Christmas had any religious associations, so they can’t feel threatened by it, surely.
Maybe they’re fundamentally opposed to joy? That made her grin. If that was the reason, the Venturis didn’t know much about it. Forget for a moment the grim office parties, the nauseating iconography ubiquitous from early September onwards, the griping terror that you might not have spent enough on your loved ones’ gifts, leading to reckless escalation and mutually assured destitution; just consider the awful day itself, the dark heart of the bleak midwinter, trapped like a moth in amber, time standing still, marooned in a Sargasso Sea of scented soaps, bath salts, the literary works of Nigella Lawson, cold chestnut stuffing and torn wrapping paper, with nobody for company except your nearest and dearest. If the Venturis want to free us from all that, then bless them. Curious, though. Murder, domestic violence and divorce notoriously spike at Christmas, and for every one who strikes a blow or speaks the irretrievable word, there are a hundred thousand with mayhem in their hearts. A really great business opportunity, in other words, which the Venturis seemed determined to deny themselves. Why would anyone do that?
You know how a trivial anomaly can sometimes irritate the lining of your mind out of all proportion to its magnitude or relevance, like a tiny splinter lodged deep under the skin or the smallest wisp of sweetcorn skin wedged between the teeth. The Christmas thing was still bothering her when she met Jersey for dinner the next day. She’d been hoping for bright smiles, lively conversation, the human equivalent of the peacock fanning its tail to attract its mate. Instead, he seemed gloomy and preoccupied, just like she was. She decided to investigate with subtle, nuanced questioning.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Sorry?”
“Why are you so miserable? Work?”
He frowned. “Yes and no,” he said. “The job’s all right, I suppose.”
She grinned. “Your first time in a call centre, isn’t it?”
“First time in regular employment, actually.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “It strikes me as a curious way to use up one’s lifespan. Not actively unpleasant, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it. And it cuts so badly into your free time, which is a nuisance.”
“Didn’t you even have a Saturday job when you were a kid?”
He shook his head. “We lived next door to an army firing range. I made my pocket money salvaging unexploded ordnance and selling it to collectors. Anyway, they said they were collectors. Saved enough to pay my way through college.”
She looked at him. “So actually working for a living …”
“You know me, I’ll try anything once. But trying it three hundred and forty days a year probably isn’t my cup of tea. Trouble is, I’m not quite sure there’s an alternative, the way things are now.”
“The Venturis.”
He shrugged. “I guess most people aren’t like me. For most people this must be a sort of golden age.”
“Hardly. Do you want your bread roll?”
“Not if you do.”
“Good, I’m starving. This is not a golden age. Everybody you see is miserable. Like you.”
“Actually, I’m more preoccupied.”
He hadn’t seen her for over a week and his mind was on something else. Fine. So, as it happened, was hers. “What’s the problem?”
He looked at her, and he didn’t need to preface his next words with, this is going to sound really strange but … “Why do the Venturis hate Christmas?”
Have you ever walked into a wall because what you thought was a doorway turned out to be a mirror? “You what?”
He shook his head. “Probably I’ve got it all wrong. But I get the impression—”
“Me too.”
He looked up sharply. “Go on.”
“It’s true. They don’t like it. One bit.”
They shared a long, startled look. Then she said, “But it makes no sense.”
“None whatsoever.”
“You’d have thought the money-grubbing and crass commercialism would’ve touched them to the core.”
“Yes, quite. Only …”
A man was hovering over them, but it was just a waiter with two plates of spaghetti. “Only what?”
He looked furtively round, then leaned forward. His shirtfront went in his Bolognese sauce, but she didn’t mention it. She didn’t want to break the flow. “Years ago,” he said, “when I was in Rome, searching for the Eighth Seal of the Holy Blood, something weird happened.”
“Quite probably.”
“Something unexpectedly weird. There was this man called Dmitri.”
He told her about it, and when he’d finished, she said, “That’s so bizarre.”
“Yes, isn’t it? By the way, you’ve been winding your hair round your fork along with the spaghetti.”
She looked down. He was quite right. “So what does it mean?”
“You were interested in the story?”
“The inscription. Compiling a catalogue, schedule or register.”
“Checking it twice.” Jersey nodded. “The thing about ancient myths is that they generally have some foundation in truth. In fact, pretty much always, in my experience. I spent five years navigating through tunnels and crypts using ancient myths like a satnav, and—”
He stopped. She knew what he was thinking, and it would be better if neither of them said it. All that effort, and some bastard changes the rules. “Behold, he will return to the city?”
Jersey nodded. “ When you think about it, he shares most of the usual attributes of your traditional Eurasian thunder god. He rides through the air in a chariot drawn by magical horned beasts. He rewards the virtuous and smites the wrongdoer.”
“Gives them bits of coal. That’s hardly smiting.”
“Coal. Cinders. What’s left of you after a direct hit from a thunderbolt. Naturally you’ve got to allow for a little paradigm shift when you’re dealing with four thousand years of oral tradition. He’s heavily bearded, he dresses in
rich robes coloured like blood, and the hat is strikingly similar to the headgear worn by storm deities in classic Babylonian iconography. Even the bobble. I think what we’re dealing with here is a typical Indo-European weather god.”
“The snow.”
He nodded gravely. “The snow. His advent is heralded by a dramatic change in climate. Dark is his path on the wings of the storm.”
She frowned. “But he’s nice.”
Jersey smiled grimly. “It ain’t necessarily so,” he said. “Consider the associated rituals. You hang up a sock. You leave out mulled wine and mince pies. You make burned offerings of plum pudding. Propitiatory sacrifices. Lord, take these gifts of food and clothing and spare the children. The mistletoe should’ve been a dead giveaway, but we were too blind to see it.”
She felt a faint shiver run down her spine. “You think—”
“Oh yes. And there’s no point barring the door and bolting the shutters, because he’s so powerful he can come down the chimney. No hiding place, you see. And who else would you expect to come calling at the darkest, coldest time of the year? Nobody cheerful, that’s for sure. Back then, before electric light and central heating, they must’ve been terrified. And he lives in the far north, the realms of perpetual ice. The Vikings believed that was the Land of the Dead. What would anybody nice be doing in a place like that?”
“Um.”
“And the elves. You know what elves are, originally? Count yourself lucky. Take it from me, somebody who hangs around with elves is not the sort of person you’d want to have unrestricted access to your home at the dead of night, particularly if you have children. Tell me,” he took a deep breath and gazed steadily into her eyes, “do you believe in Santa Claus?”
“Well, no. Maybe once, but—”
“I think the Venturi brothers do. And I think it’s possible that they might know something that we don’t. Or more accurately, something we’ve forgotten. I think he might just still be out there.”
“Oh come on. That’s—”
“Exactly what I said when the possibility first dawned on me. But—” he glanced around and leaned closer still “—what if I’m right? What if, when the previous management rounded up all the rest of the competition, he was the one who got away? Too strong or too crafty, or maybe he faked his own death or they underestimated him and reckoned he wouldn’t be any trouble? And by the time they realised their mistake, it was too late. People knew. There is another. So they took the only course of action open to them. They whitewashed him. They hijacked his special time of year, distracted everyone’s attention with presents and tinsel, confused the issue, got everybody thinking he’s just some kindly old buffer with a merry laugh as opposed to a voice that splits rocks. What’s the first thing your parents tell you about Father Christmas? You’ve got to be asleep when he calls, or he won’t leave you anything. In other words, he mustn’t be seen. Not, as the saying goes, someone you’d want to meet on a dark night.”
Her spaghetti had gone stone cold. She didn’t care.
“And the really insidious thing,” Jersey went on, “where they’ve been so clever, is the way we believe in him. Which, left to ourselves, we would do, because he really exists and he’s out there. So we’re taught as kids, subtly and with nothing ever expressly said, that it’s fine to believe if you’re a child, but as soon as you start to grow up, you stop. We reach a certain age, and we’re programmed to lose that deeply rooted inherent belief, something that’s hard-wired into our DNA. When you stop and think about it, that’s brilliant.”
She gazed at him for a long time. Then she said, “You’re barking, you know that?”
“Excuse me?”
“Father Christmas.” Heads turned and she lowered her voice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that. But are you really serious?”
“Yes.”
She pursed her lips. Time for a massive tact injection. “Isn’t it possible,” she said, “that because you spent all those years snooping round after some crazy cryptic-mystery-conspiracy theory—”
“Which turned out to be true.”
“Yes, well, that’s the typewriters-and-monkeys approach to philosophical enquiry: sooner or later one crackpot notion will prove to be the truth. That doesn’t mean the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand aren’t pure unadulterated dog poop. I think you miss the old days.”
“Well, yes, I do.”
“You yearn to be back chasing hooded villains down rat-infested sewers and battling deadly assassins on the roofs of moving trains. And fair play to you, why not? Much more fun than working in a call centre. I think that ever since you’ve been forced to settle down and actually earn a living—”
“Actually, it was more the intellectual challenge than the getting beaten up.”
“—you’ve been casting around for some new hidden secret of the ancients to go rushing off after, and this is the best you’ve been able to come up with, and basically you’re just afraid of growing up and committing to a serious relationship.”
She stopped dead and turned pink. So did he. Five seconds passed, during which stalagmites grew and glaciers carved out valleys. “Basically,” she said, “you’re just afraid of growing up and facing boring, mundane everyday life. Hence all that garbage about Santa Claus.”
He looked at her. “If I was going to go and look for him—”
“Which you shouldn’t, because he doesn’t exist.”
“Maybe,” Jersey said. “But if I were to go and look for him, I’d want you to come with me.”
“Right,” she said. “When do we leave?”
22
Kevin glanced down at his watch, frowned and shook it to see if it had stopped working. He was about as at home with sequential linear time as the average Anglo tourist is with speaking French: he could cope, just about, but deep down inside him was a little voice complaining that he shouldn’t have to. To his mind there was something inherently silly about a system in which all the little seconds line up like a bus queue, and in order to get to the interesting bits you have to grind your way patiently through all the boring stuff, instead of skipping ahead. If all the seconds of all the minutes of all the hours in a week were laid end to end, eventually it would be Friday. For crying out loud. Where’s the sense in that?
Still, when in Rome … No, bad example for a member of his family. When on Earth, do as the humans do. As we humans do. Time (on Earth, but decidedly not as it is in Heaven) is the water we humans swim in, it’s the clay from which we are moulded, it’s the cold congealed custard through which we wade … I’m never going to get used to all this, he told himself; it’s just not going to work. To which his better self replied, patience. Stick at it. Give it, no pun intended, time.
People were looking at him as they walked by—not quite suspiciously, not exactly with disapproval, but it was clear that they were wondering why he was standing outside an Italian restaurant, in the dark and the rain, with no hat or umbrella. Fair enough, and yes, he ought to make more of an effort to blend in, not be conspicuous. But since rain didn’t make him wet (sort of like diplomatic immunity), it was so easy to forget what a big deal the humans made of it. Well, he’d walked enough miles in their shoes recently to know that shoes gave him blisters and walking is an overrated pastime. So far he’d found being human was like moving from a mansion to a one-bedroom apartment on the thirty-second floor: it was cramped, inconvenient and rather disagreeable, but you could see a lot further, if that mattered to you.
None of this, he reminded himself, is my fault. I didn’t decide what being human involves. I didn’t boot them out of the Garden, force them to waste their time and energy on food and clothes and horrible tight shoes that grind down your heels. That was Dad and Jay, and, bless them, they had done what they thought was right; they only ever had the poor things’ best interests at heart. Quite possibly they were misguided, or for some reason had never quite managed to figure out how to create the best of all possible worlds. Quit
e possibly they weren’t as smart (he shuddered as he thought it) as the Venturi brothers. The fact remained: not my fault. I didn’t do it, it’s not up to me to do something about it, even if there was anything I could do, which there isn’t. I wash my hands of the whole business.
Jay hadn’t. Oh no, quite the reverse. Jay had gone the extra mile for these people, and though Kevin had never quite been able to see the logical connection between getting oneself lynched by a mob on a trumped-up charge and making things better for people, he was convinced there had been one, because Dad said so. But he’d felt at the time that it wasn’t the way he’d have gone about it. Maybe a trifle too subtle for the human mind? Put yourself in their (toe-skinning) shoes for a moment. A guy comes along. He heals the sick, criticises the wealthy and suggests that we all be nice to each other, and so the Romans string him up. And the moral? Well, you didn’t have to be a genius, did you? And that, judging by the results over the intervening centuries, had been the lesson they’d taken to heart. Screw the sick, suck up to the rich, stomp on your neighbour and you’ll avoid the gallows. Just common sense, really.
Not what I’d have done—and that, presumably, was why they’d kept him out of the family business on the grounds of incompetence. Too dumb to see the subtle nuances of the grand design, which had led to … Kevin frowned. To what? To a takeover by the Venturi corporation, a new Heaven and a new Earth. To everything getting better for everybody, as promised in the manifesto.
Some things are bred in the bone. No matter how hard you try, you can’t run away from your heredity. If you’re the son of the Big Guy, you can’t help it: you’re born with an overwhelming instinct to redeem, even if none of it’s your fault and you had no say in the major policy decisions. The realisation hit him like a sock full of sand. I can’t just walk by on the other side. I’ve got to do something. It’s who I am.