He turned to Brittney. "Close it, Britt. I’ve got to go talk to Mrs. Claus."
She rolled her eyes and cordoned off the big chair.
***
IT WAS SNOWY and the roads were a little slick. Nick drove towards patches he thought might be black ice, only to be disappointed when the car didn’t swerve out of control into a ditch. He let the car veer itself over into the other lane. He rolled down the window and yelled, "Look, I’m in England! I’m Father fucking Christmas!"
He was amazed he made it back to Dee’s place alive. He wished, in some ways, that he hadn’t. This was not a confrontation he was looking forward to. He was not good at break-ups, but goddamn it, this piece of news had hurt him, peeled his heart right back to the quick.
He parked and stepped outside. He could smell Dee’s cooking through the cold air. She was frying potatoes. Nick considered not breaking up with her until after dinner, just so he could have one more of those amazing meals, but then he knew he would stay past that and his ego wouldn’t let him.
He opened the door. Delores turned to greet him, all smiles and not much clothing. "Hello, Nicky!" she said.
He kept his face cold. "Hello, Mrs. Claus," he replied.
Her face fell. Her eyes skittered, trying to find a place to look that wasn’t Nick’s eyes.
"So he was right," Nick said. "I thought maybe he was just fucking around with me. But I can see by your face it’s all true."
She laughed nervously and said, "It’s really not what you think, Nicky."
Nick raised his arms in puzzlement. "What the bongwater fuck is it, then? How can you possibly spin this to be something that isn’t what it is? You shack up with the local department store Santa every year and it’s not what I think? Can’t you just buy an Advent calendar, like most people? There’s even chocolate in an Advent calendar!"
She began crying. "No, you don’t understand, Nicky! You don’t understand, you can’t understand! It’s what I do. It’s what the town tells me I must do and I have to do it, don’t you see?"
"See what?" Nick asked.
"It’s not what I want," Delores said. "It’s what the Keep wants. The Keep always gets what it wants."
"Enough of your mumbo-jumbo, Delores," Nick said. "It’s just a shitty little town." He pushed past her and into the back bedroom, where he began stuffing his belongings into his gear bag, the one he had brought in that first day, the day Bamelyn tried to destroy his car.
"It was you, wasn’t it?" Nick zipped up his bag, spun on the ball of his foot and ran towards Delores, catching her throat in his giant right hand. "Are you the one who fucked up my car? Did you try to destroy my stuff so I would stay here with you?"
Delores frantically shook her head and tried to speak. She hit Nick on the chest with the heels of her hands until he let go. Gathering her breath, Delores said, "I never meant to hurt you, Nicky. And I was never anything but sweet to you. And I never said anything to you I didn’t mean."
Nick glared at her, looking directly into her eyes. She had said a lot of things to him. "I love you" had not been one of them, but he sensed she had been close a couple of times. He knew he had. Hell, he been ready to pop the question for a week now. Good thing he had waited. Good thing he knew the truth now.
He picked up his gear bag. "I gotta go," he said, and he walked out into the frigid night, with Delores wailing loudly behind him and a lousy motel room in his near future.
Small-town crazy bullshit, Nick thought. Fuck this town and all the people in it.
Including himself.
VII
24 December (Bamelyn Descending)
THE ENERGY IN the air was different on Christmas Eve. The different departments in The Store seemed to ooze their own particular stenches of desperation and fear. Fear of not making their numbers, fear of the Wrath of Dick, fear of the day after Christmas, when all the returns would wreck numbers and destroy hard-earned commission checks.
Nick was lightly hungover, in that way that made all of his thoughts seem frosted and hazy on the edges. It was almost pleasant. He had expected a lot worse having been away from Brother Ouzo for so long.
The children were in a good mood and they seemed more inclined to remind than to ask.
"Don’t forget about that electronic drum set," said one out-of-towner, "and most importantly, don’t forget about the headphones for the electronic drum set because if my mother hears it, she’ll take it away from me, for sure."
"Oh yes," Nick said, in his most reassuring voice. "I’ll certainly remember the headsets."
Most of the children, however, being locals, were insistent about one thing.
"Don’t forget about Bamelyn," they said. "You can’t forget about Bamelyn. It’s very important about Bamelyn."
"Yes, yes, yes," Nick said, exasperated yet somewhat professional. "The Bamelyn. Everything about the Bamelyn."
And then it was over. The Store closed early for the holidays. It was already full dark outside.
"So that’s it, then? We’re done?" he asked.
"That’s it," Brittney said. "Thank God for that. Maintenance will clean this up. Happy holidays, pedo-freak." And she was gone.
Well, that was a bit anti-climactic, Nick thought. The big overhead fluorescent lights shut off, one by one. Everyone was gone with no chatter, no rest-ye-merry conversations.
The maintenance man, a constantly smiling man who spoke no English that Nick was aware of, let him out into the cold night. Nick stopped awkwardly, not quite knowing what to say. "FelizNavidad," he said to the man.
"I’m an atheist," the man said. "I appreciate the thought, though."
***
"OH, FOR FUCK'S sake," Nick said. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."
Nick’s tires were flat. All of them. Slashed, from the look of it.
"And why not?" Nick cried to no one. "Why the fuck not? Because fuck this fucking town, that’s why!" The wind blew sand-like snow into Nick’s face.
Nick pulled his phone out of pocket, hating to call Sheriff Strahan away from wherever he was on Christmas Eve, but really having no choice in the matter. He was about to start dialing when he heard a voice from behind.
"It’s too late," the voice said. "No one’s coming to help you."
Nick turned. "Who is that? Who the fucking hell is that?"
His eyes focused into the dark and he saw someone walking towards him.
"It’s me, Santa."
"Who is it?" Nick squinted until he could finally make out who it was. "I knew it! You little fuck! You wretched little shit-sucker!"
"Not me who’s in the wrong this time," said Brian Cameron. He was wearing an insulated school jacket and a knit hat with a picture of some fighting robot on it. "I asked you."
"Asked me what?"
"I asked you!" the boy said again, and the anger and sadness in his voice was unmistakable. "I asked you and you lied to my face."
"The fuck are you talking about?" Nick cried.
Another couple of children appeared behind Brian, scowling and focused on Nick. "Are you the real Santa Claus?"
Nick laughed. "Are you serious? Do you mean to tell me you did all this because you figured out I’m not Santa? You destroyed my car? Tried to kill me by turning my car into some kind of Burmese tiger trap? That was fucking imaginative, I’ll give you that, but…"
"You’re a liar!" the little boy cried. "What gives you the right to lie to children? Just the fact that we’re young, is that it? That we’re gullible?"
The children (there were more now, eight, maybe nine) began walking towards Nick.
"It’s a story, Brian!" Nick yelled. "It’s a game, a fucking game. Everybody does it. Everybody plays, everybody gets their heart broken and then they move on to other things like marriage and religion that will also break their hearts. Consider this a necessary step towards easing you into adulthood."
"No, Nick," Brian said. "Not everything is a game. See, the real Santa Claus would never have told me he wa
s the real Santa Claus. He would need to keep his true identity secret, like a superhero. But you, you came right out and said you were the real Santa. You didn’t even try to hide it! You lied. To my face. If I do something like that, I get in trouble. You get a paycheck."
More children appeared out of the snow, and the crowd around Nick was looking more like the army of the night than a group of kids. Nick shrugged. "Look," he said, "I know this is hard for you to grasp, but this is the way the world works."
Brian shook his head. "No," he said, "this is the way your world works. Our world is based on belief. Our world is based on what you tell us is real. And when you lie to us, you take away our world. And we have to create our own."
Nick could feel his eyelashes starting to glaze over with ice. He could also feel the ground shaking, just a little, but that could have been his imagination. "Look, I’m sorry," Nick said. "I’m sorry I had to be the one to show you how things really work."
"Bamelyn," said the boy. And behind him, the children took up the word as a chant, a summoning.
"Enough!" Nick lurched forward and grabbed Brian by the front of the jacket and began to shake him. "What is it what is it what the fuck is a Bamelyn?"
"The Bamelyn is our friend! Our protector! We made him to protect us from people like you."
"People like me?"
"Liars!" The chant grew louder, more insistent, whipping around the parking lot with the snow. The vibrations grew more insistent with each recitation of the word. Something was coming.
"What are you doing, Brian?" Nick asked. "What are you doing?"
"We told you we wanted Bamelyn for Christmas," Brian said. "He’s coming. He’s coming for you."
The air shifted then, and the smell of fresh snow was replaced by something more fetid, like a cigarette fire in mulch. Nick looked around frantically. He was surrounded by children. Every direction in which he could possibly run was blocked by rows of children, two or three deep. If they managed to pull him to the ground, they would tear him to bits.
Then he remembered his phone. He checked the screen. No bars. Now the hell was that possible? He was at a department store, for Christ’s sake! How could there not be phone reception here?
BamelynBamelynBamelyn
The vibrations were now cadenced, obviously the footsteps of something large and more than likely, horrible. The snow blew harder into Nick’s eyes. More children came, each taking up the chant of the horrible name of their new god. The stench on the air became something more smokey and earthen than before, what Nick imagined a pile of burning corpses would smell like. And still, his brain insisted he was right and demanded to be heard, to be acknowledged.
"This is bullshit!" Nick cried. "Your god doesn’t exist!"
BamelynBamelynBamelyn
"Your moral code is stilted! You haven’t thought it through! You’re children! You don’t know anything about anything!"
BamelynBamelynBamelyn
And then the light of the moon was blotted out by an unspeakable shadow. The children fell quiet. Nick looked up and the sky was full of Bamelyn.
Its legs were constructed of pieces of fighting robot toys and dolls that talked. AA and AAA batteries peppered its chest. Nick could see sections of toy guns and video game controllers in Bamelyn’s massive arms. Multi-colored hair waved in the wind, made from shreds of wrapping paper and velvet bows. Its head was many heads; the tiny heads of action figures, animals and dolls are came together to form a giant skull. Flashlights were its eyes, and its mouth moved up and down, baring its baseball bat teeth. Bamelyn was made of all the Christmas wishes that never came true, somehow animated, giant and forlorn, moving about on its own, in a dimension it was never meant to inhabit.
"I don’t believe in you," Nick said.
Bamelyn reached down with one giant hand and scooped Nick up like a tortilla chip. It poked Nick in the belly, piercing his flesh easily with sharpened pieces of Taiwanese plastic. Nick screamed into the swirling wind. When Bamelyn withdrew its finger, Nick’s intestines were swirled around the tip like old bubble gum. Down below, the children could hear Nick laughing and screeching at the same time. Louder, they chanted the name of Bamelyn, their Dark Lord, here to do their bidding.
The Bamelyn pulled Nick up face to face, its flashlight eyes blinding Nick. It regarded Nick curiously, like a bird, its head moving quickly from side to side. All the tiny heads in the monster’s face smiled vacantly at Nick, a plastic catacomb, the ruined grave of playdays that never happened. Nick spat in the Bamelyn’s face, sending a mixture of phlegm and dark blood into the grin of a pretend fashion model. "Ho, ho, ho, you piece of shit," Nick said.
The Bamelyn made a terrible noise, like every talking toy in the world were turned on at once, a cacophony of electronic syllables, glossolalia coating Nick’s skin. Nick’s ears rang with the strange cry. The Bamelyn began closing its hand. Nick could feel tiny tires from toy cars digging into his back. He could hear the sound of plastic and metal, grinding together, squeaking and cracking. The inexorable pressure soon began cracking Nick’s bones. His right arm went first, stuck between two of the Bamelyn’s giant fingers. His humerus sheared through his freezing skin like an ice shard. The children cheered and laughed as Nick screamed, his blood mixing with the snow, falling onto the parking lot. Some of the children started dancing spontaneously in the red snow.
Nick took one last breath before his rib cage collapsed. His spine fractured longways, before finally shattering into different pieces. His neck snapped like a frozen pencil. Piss, shit and blood ran down the Bamelyn’s wrist.
The Bamelyn turned slightly, facing the woods that rimmed the parking lot. It reared back and hurled Nick’s compressed body into the trees like it was gently tossing a softball.
The children gathered around the Bamelyn’s feet in a circle. They knelt, and lovingly stroked its feet. "Thank you, Bamelyn," they whispered and cooed. "Thank you, so much."
The Bamelyn bent over and the children kissed its hands in supplication, licking Nick’s blood and viscera from its filthy fingers. "Thank you, Bamelyn," they said. "Thank you, so much."
Brian backed off from the others. He had been privileged to be the one to call the Bamelyn this year. It wouldn’t be anything he remembered, though. It was too late. He couldn’t stay in the world of children any more. He had been dragged kicking and screaming into young adulthood by that terrible false Santa. It would happen again next year, too. Someone else would come to town, holding the dreams of children in his hands. He would be found wanting. And again, one of the children of Elders Keep would call upon the Bamelyn to maintain order and sanity, to keep that world alive as long as possible.
As he watched the others, his friends and schoolmates, worshipers at the altar of pure belief, he understood for a brief second, that the Bamelyn was the spirit of Christmas. It was innocence and hope and laughter. It was also sacrifice, but a child couldn’t understand that concept. Brian knew it now, and there was no going back.
The wind blew harder, and Brian Cameron, who was now sadly wise beyond his years, couldn’t remember what he was doing in that parking lot. It was cold, and he was uncomfortable. He turned around, got his bearings and headed off for home. He had the vague feeling he should have gotten his parents something for Christmas, but it was too late for that now. Maybe he could do some extra chores around the house instead.
Jeffery X Martin lives with his wife, Hannah, and children, Rhiannon and Bishop, in Knoxville, TN. He also writes a music column for the website, Popshifter. He can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/EldersKeep and on Twitter @JefferyXMartin. In his spare time, Martin watches old horror movies, makes bad jokes and cooks a mean risotto.
For more delicious dark fiction, visit
www.elderskeep.com
and www.shadowworkpublishing.com.
>
Black Friday: An Elders Keep Collection Special Edition Page 20