Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes

by Robert Devereaux

“I’m sure you do—”

  “But they lack respect for themselves. You lack self-respect. Would any self-respecting elf pick his nose? He would not. That’s the long and the short of it.”

  The back of Fritz’s neck grew hot.

  Gregor wagged a finger three times sharp, as if he were shaking out a thermometer. “Get right with your nostrils, little elf, before you come marching over here blowing smoke up mine. You speak to me of scorn? You deserve it in spades. Santa’s little favorite, huh? You know how long that would last if he caught wind of this foul practice? Gone in a trice. Now, you just march your meddling little slippers right back across the commons and tend to your own garden. I’ll tend to mine, with no unsought advice from the likes of you!”

  With that, Gregor slammed the upper door in Fritz’s face. Fritz stood there, in shock, forgetting to breathe. Then his breath returned over the pounding of his heart.

  Well, he thought. How about that?

  With a huff and a sigh, Fritz shook his head, and trudged back toward the replicas, doing his best to shake off Gregor’s belittling and feeling very bad indeed about the deteriorating state of affairs.

  * * *

  The aroma of hot chocolate lured Matt from sleep. When he opened his eyes, there stood Santa with a steaming mug redolent with the beguiling scent of cocoa and mint and marshmallow. At his side, Wendy held a piping hot plate of shortbread.

  “Courtesy of my wives,” said Santa.

  Matt sat up, accepted the food and drink, and glanced about his bedroom. “Wives,” he said. “Whatever. Man, how’d you get snow in here?” Drifts glistened beyond the bedposts. Bedposts? Where had they come from?

  “A gift from my helpers,” said Santa. “But we have more serious matters to speak of.”

  Matt stiffened. There was that tone. Some grown-up was about to tell him what to do. What to think. How to behave. Refuse, and that grown-up would beat him until he cried uncle. That’s how his father had been before they put his ass in stir. That’s how his boozy bitch of a mom was, with her smoker’s breath and her jowly made-up face and her red-lipped, hate-spewing pie hole.

  He wouldn’t be shoved around. Not by anyone.

  “Okay, Wendy,” said Santa. “Bring on the future.”

  With a gesture, the lemon-yellow walls of the bedroom sparkled and fell away. There before them slumped three slit-lidded punks against the wall of an alley, dragging on cheap cigarettes.

  “Hey, it’s me!” said Matt, though the kid he pointed at was pimply, tightlipped, and needed a haircut. “And there’s Robbie Stover. But the other guy...who the heck is he?”

  “You’ll meet him next year in junior high. Jack Pangborn’s his name, a good little boy until he turned four.”

  Robbie Stover had put on bulk and was stooped over, one shoulder higher than the other as he listened to Matt and glared at the bricks under his boots. The other kid was more compact and stared intently from under a wild shock of hair. Matt could tell this Pangborn dude wanted to topple him as leader but didn’t have the guts to take him on.

  The scene switched. Now the three of them were pistoning slow and sullen along a sidewalk, watching the approach of an alarmed kid in white band pants. When he tried to cross the street, they cut him off. “Hey, queer boy, no problem,” Matt said, giving him a shove, “there’s room on the sidewalk for everybody. We’ll just brush past you. You’d like that, I bet, huh?”

  “Please, I’m only trying to—”

  “Yeah. I know. In your ice cream pants. You got any ice cream for us, queer boy?”

  Matt smacked the kid’s head and he took off terrified, Stover and Pangborn hurling taunts after him. Stover hooted through megaphone hands, while the other kid looked fierce and yelled and threw his fists into the air.

  “That’s you at fourteen, two years from now.”

  “The kid’s a fruit, a gutless wonder. He deserves....” Matt stopped, ashamed. “Okay, maybe not. But I got the power. You can taste it, can’t you? So I get to slam rich queers. I get to screw up their smug little world.”

  Santa started to say something, then stopped himself. Matt could tell he was pissed. “Let’s add two more years, Wendy.”

  The same three, Matt’s gang, emerged from a bar carrying beer bottles. Matt held the neck of his between two fingers, the bottle swinging easy as he walked. He looked one way, the other, found his target. “Let’s head the cocksucker off,” he said. They fleetfooted it over one street and parallel to the one the bar was on, then back just in time to intercept into the guy at an intersection. Matt stopped him with a hand to the chest. “Hey, faggot, you looked at me funny in there. What’s with that? You find me good-looking or sumpin’?”

  “I didn’t—”

  Matt slammed his beer bottle into the guy’s head and they dragged him into the bushes and kicked him and punched out his lights. There’d be no chance he would raise a cry. Stover pummeled the kid’s face with his fists, but Pangborn gave him the worst of it.

  The scene went blank and the bedroom came back. “Jeepers,” said Matt. “That’s me?”

  Santa smoldered, a terrifying sight indeed. Matt’s throat went dry. “If you don’t wise up. You and your naughty friends get into this quite a lot.” In quick succession, Matt saw terrified young victims being taunted and trounced by his gang. He felt stunned and exhilarated and ashamed and light-headed all at once.

  “This next episode,” said Santa, “sends you to prison.” Wendy froze on a kid, the same one he had seen on the bike, Terry something, but halfway through his teens, a sweet face, the kind that made you think weird thoughts. And that face—because no way in hell did he dare show Robbie and this Jack dude what he really felt—he struck over and over, gut-punching the kid with his left fist and breaking his jaw with his right. At last the kid lay there unconscious, his body jerking with the beating they gave him.

  The scene abruptly wiped away.

  Santa was in tears, and that tore at Matt’s heart. But a great rage, barely contained, boiled beneath the surface too. Finally, he stormed off toward the dresser. “Wendy, show him the rest!”

  The girl touched Matt’s arm and said softly, “You can change. I know you can. We wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t.” Then she laid open before him his life behind bars. How he would bully weaker prisoners into rape, while always watching his back for this bull-headed, dead-eyed farm boy, in jail for taking an axe to his father. Wendy shut it off as the farm boy’s assault began. But Matt remained shaken at his helplessness in the face of terror.

  Santa stormed back. For an instant, Matt feared the great elf’s massive fists would beat him bloody. Instead, Santa once more summoned up Terry Samuelson’s death by beating. Close-up, in freeze-frame, stood the members of his gang. Matt felt their desperate need for family, for male bonding, all of it masked by anger and fear.

  “We’re shackled,” said Matt. “We’re uptight and stupid, closed off and full of fake bravado.”

  “Yes,” said Santa.

  Matt broke down and wept then, cradled in Santa’s arms. He cried so hard he felt light in the head. Somewhere in there, Santa eased him down, covered him, and kissed his forehead, and Matt felt the bedroom lose its charm and slip back into squalor, as sleep carried him far far away.

  Chapter 14. Awakenings

  BY TORCHLIGHT ANGLED across dripping rock, the Tooth Fairy drew from an ancient stash of treasures a jewel-encrusted box. Carrying it with care to her stone altar, she blew away centuries of dust and raised the lid, which was stopped at an obtuse angle by thin gold bands. The air above the altar turned a harsh red from the glow cast by its contents. Inside, gripped by a worn velvet extrusion, sat a glass vial stoppered and sealed with lead.

  In that vial was a single drop of blood caught when Kronos swung his sickle of ox teeth to castrate Ouranos, his father, overthrowing him and thereby separating heaven from earth. His blood had drenched the soil, and from that soil had sprung the Giants, the Furies, and the ash nymphs, of which sh
e, the Tooth Fairy, had been the firstborn and most fierce, Adrasteia by name.

  She flung wide her arms, the necklace of teeth slapping against her breasts at the abruptness of her movements. “By the blood of Ouranos,” she intoned, the cave depths sending up a sorrowful echo, “given me by Alecto, winged fury of the snaky hair at the instant of my birth, as I and my sisters fled from the battle that raged about us, I summon from the outer circle of Tartarus black-winged Nyx, goddess of night, daughter of Chaos, granddaughter of Kronos, and the mother of Hypnos and Thanatos.

  “Arise, o mighty Nyx, I command it.” The drop of god-blood gleamed with a deepening ferocity as she spoke, the cavern dancing with crimson fires. So close grew the air, so red and glistening the moisture that trickled down the walls, it seemed like the chamber of some vast dead heart, new beating.

  “By the blood of the great god Ouranos, I command it!”

  Then, without noise or shattering, the vial’s contents seemed to burst from its confinement, flooding the cavern. There before her rose a black-winged creature, dark her brow, dreadful her face. Her breasts were spent and withered, her nipples in-turned conical pits.

  It had been eons since the Tooth Fairy had known fear. It wasn’t that Nyx towered over her, for she didn’t. Indeed, her dimensions were impossible to fix, seeming one moment to be as small as the blue flame of a cook’s torch, the next glaring down from impossible heights.

  When she spoke, she did not boom, yet her words bruised eardrums and hurt the heart. “Who dares summon Nyx from the Underworld?” She fixed her eyes on the summoner. “The blood of Ouranos may have the power to force immortals to its presence, but if your reasons for disturbing my rest prove inadequate, I’ll crush you into oblivion, Adrasteia, boldest of the ash nymphs.”

  “Hear me, goddess of night,” said the Tooth Fairy, falling to her knees. “Zeus, who turned me into a wretched childhood icon and saddled me with thirteen brats, he who, upon making himself into the Christian god, slaughtered my sisters, broke into kindling the sky chariot with which you drew the mists of darkness across the sky, consigned you to the oblivion of your palace in Tartarus, and trivialized your son Hypnos, god of sleep, and his three sons by collapsing them into the Sandman—this Zeus has overstepped his self-imposed limits once more. He is allowing Pan and his stepdaughter to dissuade four mortals from their predestined course, by nocturnal visit, by dazzling them with magic and miracle, and worse, by thrusting them into a dreamscape designed to propagandize on behalf of this violation of the natural order.” She bowed her head and raised her palms in supplication. “I beg this boon: Allow me and my imps access to that dreamscape. We will foil the plans of the insufferable sky god and his minions. Nay, we vow to coarsen these mortals, increasing the woes Zeus and Pan would ease, avenging myself, you, and all who have suffered or lost their lives at the hand of Zeus-turned-Jehovah.”

  The echo of the Tooth Fairy’s words died away. Silence fell, a silence full of foreboding. She dared not raise her eyes, but the fine hairs rose on the back of her neck.

  “Am I to understand,” began Nyx, “that you have summoned me from the rim of Tartarus, through rock and earth—”

  As the contempt in her voice deepened, the Tooth Fairy’s body was lifted off the cavern floor and pressed slowly and relentlessly against a jagged wall of rock.

  “—which tattered my flesh and tore my limbs, wreaking havoc upon my entire physical being—”

  The wall was cold and wet against her buttocks and shoulders. An invisible hand pushed her hard into the stone jags. She winced as one rib, then another, cracked under the pressure.

  “—merely to avenge yourself on Pan?”

  Her necklace of teeth pressed pits into her chest, broke skin, and drew blood, the teeth against the nape of her neck doing likewise.

  “Not Pan,” she managed. “Zeus.”

  “We’re not stupid down below. We hear things. Santa Claus had his way with you. Twenty years, wasn’t it? Then he dumped you for a mortal woman. You and the Easter Bunny caused quite a stir. You devoured your rival with one great gulp and turned her into a coin, as I hear. Zeus restored her life, degenitalized the Easter Bunny, and made you quick with imps, nasty little creatures that blight Christmas for bad urchins. They’re a bother, no doubt. But it’s Pan, isn’t it? A woman scorned. Pan, in whom I take not the slightest interest.”

  “It is,” admitted the Tooth Fairy, regretting her summoning. “I would topple them both.”

  “Well,” said Nyx, softening. She gave a dark chuckle. “That is indeed a worthy goal. You flatter me, Adrasteia, with appeals to my wounded pride. That irks me. But everything irks me these days. You are a flea. Pan is a flea. Zeus? A vile little flea of a god. He fears me, you know. He always has.”

  The pressure eased. The necklace, its thong cut by a stray bite, fell with a clatter to the floor. The Tooth Fairy’s ribs healed and her breath came easier.

  “Look at me.”

  Against her will, her eyes met the dread glare of Night. Into whirlpools of negation she peered, grasping for one positive thing on which to anchor her sanity.

  “Your brats.” Nyx gestured. The Tooth Fairy heard distant shouts as they were seized, followed by bellows of pain as the dread goddess drew them through solid rock to this cavern. Bloody pools of bone and brain and flesh appeared in blotches on the floor, each one reconstituting into a son, Chuff here, Frash there, Gronk nearest her, groaning in agony.

  “Silence!”

  With a resounding clack, their jaws slammed shut.

  Nyx pointed her finger at the Tooth Fairy and drew it down. As she descended, her back tore to ribbons against the jags and blood ran in rivulets down her thighs.

  “I will consider granting your wish.” At these words the Tooth Fairy thrilled. “But not here.” Nyx’s voice dripped venom. “You were kind enough to force me through untold miles of painful obstruction, now I shall return the favor. All of you!” Her voice towered into majesty. “At once to Tartarus!”

  The imps rose protesting into the air, then plunged with a cry through the cavern floor. The Tooth Fairy too was dragged inexorably downward, subject to massive trauma as she was pressed through stone, struggling to stay together, her body’s integrity violated, nor no mercy shown as her consciousness remained sharp and pained and acutely fixed upon the journey Nyx forced her to take.

  * * *

  Moments before, en route to the Stratton house, Wendy had asked Santa if he was all right. She knew his damped-down anger at Matt Beluzzo had upset him. He had steamed and mumbled all the way to the sleigh, trying in vain for jolly.

  Santa looked away. “It’s the elves,” he said in a transparent attempt to spare her. “Their work on the bedrooms is getting sloppy. Matt didn’t notice, but I did. The paint was streaked in places and thinly applied. The heads of wood screws weren’t always countersunk. If you had brushed past the dresser, your tunic would have snagged on one of them. It’s unlike my helpers to overlook such things. Something’s up.”

  “I must have missed that,” said Wendy. “Everything looked pretty impressive to me.”

  Santa slapped a lax rein against Blitzen’s flank.

  “What else, Daddy? You can tell me. I’m a big girl now.”

  “It’s just that...,” he began. Then he fell silent, the bright lights of the Broadmoor Hotel passing beneath them. “I became angry at that boy, murderously angry. He goaded me. I’ve told you I was Pan in an earlier life. When God brought you back from death, I thought he had shoved that old revived self down sufficiently far, I’d never have to worry about him again. But as much as my generous nature predominates, vile impulses lurk just below the surface. I’m out of my league with these closed-minded grown-ups and rotten bullies. I almost struck that child back there. He deserved a solid smack in the teeth and I would have enjoyed delivering it, for an instant. But if I had done that, Santa Claus as we know him would have died.” He shook his great locks and lowered his head. “I’m not sure I can se
e this through.”

  “You can,” Wendy insisted, encircling his great arm and resting her head on his biceps. “I know you can. You’re Santa Claus, and my father. You can do anything.”

  Santa smiled bitterly. “For your sake, I won’t argue the point. Though failure may await us, I’ll make the attempt. No, wait, that’s the wrong attitude. I will succeed. We will succeed. With God’s help, we will right these listing mortals. At the very least, we’ll shift their course just enough that they walk right past the critical moments fated to sap Jamie’s will to live. We’ll do our best to save these four, but we shall most certainly save the child.”

  Wendy hugged him tight. “That’s my daddy,” she said. Though seventeen in years, she allowed the nine-year-old to come out in her embrace. She and Santa were embarked on a grand adventure, and they would infuse it with as much risk-taking and daring-do and sheer unfettered zest as they possibly could.

  At that moment, Wendy heard a noise so faint she wasn’t sure she had heard it; so faint that Santa took no notice, or at least made no mention, of it. Finally, she dismissed it and set her sights on the Stratton house spiraling up from below.

  But it hadn’t been imagined. Gronk had let out a gasp as Nyx’s summons yanked him from the sleigh and slammed him downward through the earth toward his mother’s island.

  The sleigh descended, stars twinkling merrily above, a soft breeze in their ears, and the jingle of bells on the team’s traces beating out a gleeful tzing-tzing-tzing as they flew.

  * * *

  The instant its runners touched down, Santa leaped out. Gripping Wendy by the waist, he lifted her to the late autumn lawn. “Let’s have at them!” he said, and up the porch steps they bounded, passing through the locked front door. It was strange entering homes with nary a Christmas trapping laid out. A coffee table strewn with magazines stood in the space the Strattons’ tree usually occupied, where Santa would set out presents and stockings for Kurt and Jamie, their names embroidered on flat red felt stockings, which Santa filled with trinkets and gold-wrapped chocolate coins and other oddments until they plumped up like overstuffed peapods.