Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  “I know, you’re right, but most of those things you mentioned only remind me of who’s missing from the picture.”

  Lenny leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his hooked nose mere inches from Jake. “It’ll get easier,” he said and laid a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “But you have to start somewhere before you smother yourself.” He stared hard into Jake’s eyes, as if trying to discern something written there. “Do you understand?”

  The phone rang then and Lenny sat back in his chair. “Joanne, most likely,” he said and Jake nodded as he rose, pain flaring in his knees.

  “Will I tell her you’re here?” he asked as he made his way out into the hall.

  “Might as well,” Lenny said. “She can sense it anyway.”

  “Still reading tea leaves?”

  “Earl Grey, morning noon and night.”

  Jake was smiling as he picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  The voice on the other end of the line was gruff, even over the static the weather wrought.

  “Mr. Dodds?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Sheriff Baxter.”

  Jake swallowed and felt a chill thrum through him, even though a distant voice inside him posed the question: what’s left for you to be afraid of?

  “Mr. Dodds?”

  “Uh yeah, hi Sheriff. What can I do for you?”

  “Is Lenny Quick there with you?”

  The chill intensified. “Yes, why?”

  “Good,” Baxter said, ignoring the question. “Tell him to stay put until I get there.”

  “All right. But what’s – ?” The realization that he was talking to nothing but static stopped him and he stared at the receiver for a moment before hanging up.

  All sorts of nightmarish scenarios paraded through his mind as he slowly made his way back into the living room, where Lenny was gazing into the fire and humming to himself, but he pushed them away, blaming his own recent loss on the almost overwhelming dread that attempted to drape itself over his shoulders as he took his seat.

  “Well?” Lenny asked a few moments later when his expectant look went unnoticed.

  “It was uh…it was Sheriff Baxter. The line is buggered with all the snow. I couldn’t hear him very well.”

  “Baxter? What did he want? Is he on to our little speakeasy here?”

  Jake tried to think of a lie, or at the very least a semi-truth he could give Lenny to appease him, but the cryptic nature of Baxter’s call left no room for anything but the truth.

  “It was about you.”

  The joviality vanished from Lenny’s face, replaced with an immediate look of concern that added twenty years to him. “What about me?”

  “I don’t know. He just asked if you were here. I told him you were and he said to tell you to stay put until he arrives.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. That’s all he said and then he hung up. I’m sure it’s nothing. Maybe Joanne’s car broke down and she’s going to be late home or something.”

  Lenny slowly shook his head. “A sheriff wouldn’t come looking for me just to tell me that. He could have told me that over the phone. No, something’s happened.”

  “Aw c’mon, don’t go thinking like that,” Jake said. “Look out the window, there’s nothing but white. Going to be all sorts of traffic problems tonight. I’m sure that’s all it is. When you left, was Joanne heading somewhere?”

  “Yeah,” Lenny said, eyes glassy. “To the store, but that’s only a few blocks away. She wouldn’t have taken the car.”

  “She might have, to be out of the cold.”

  “Jake, I see what you’re trying to do, but she didn’t drive. Whatever Baxter is coming here to tell me, it isn’t about a goddamn breakdown.”

  Jake couldn’t argue further because he knew nothing he’d say would sound believable, even to himself. Lenny was right. When Sheriff Baxter made house calls, it was to ask questions or deliver bad news, and Jake felt certain his own tragedy had attuned him to bad tidings.

  And his nerves were singing now.

  Mind racing, he almost managed to block out the sound coming from the walls. But then his guard faltered and his heart skipped a beat, allowing that unmistakable ticking sound an undistracted audience.

  Tick-tick-tick.

  It ticks for thee.

  No, he thought, braced by panic. Maybe not. Maybe not me at all.

  Lenny rose, tugging Jake from his fearful musings and quieting the deathwatch in the walls.

  “What are you doing?”

  Lenny’s nerves didn’t seem to be faring much better. A faint trembling made the glass wobble as he finished his brandy in one gulp and started towards the hall.

  “Lenny? What are you doing?” Jake repeated, rising to follow.

  “Going home. If something has happened to Joanne, I’m not waiting on a cop to break the news. Might be too late by the time Baxter gets his fat ass through that snow anyway.”

  “Wait,” Jake said and hurried after him into the dark hallway, his knees aflame with pain. In the few seconds it took to reach him, Leroy had already donned his coat and hat and was turning to the door.

  “Damn it, wait!” Jake said again, and the near-hysteria in his voice made his friend pause, one hand on the knob.

  “Something’s happened,” Lenny whispered, face grave.

  I don’t want to be here by myself, Jake almost blurted, immediately shamed by his selfishness. Instead he reached for his coat. “You wanted me to start getting out more,” he said, “so if you’re not going to wait, I’m coming with you.”

  He couldn’t believe he had said it and only when it was out did he realize how truly small and unfriendly his world had become. In here was loneliness and despair, all measured by the ticking of the deathwatch. Out there was the snow, the loathsome blanket of putrescent mold beneath which Julia slept forever.

  Lenny looked about to argue, then sagged and yanked open the front door.

  The hostile night roared into their faces as they stepped out into the cold.

  * * *

  This is insane.

  Jake bowed his head against the wet white kisses the sky drove into their faces. Already his skin felt numb and sore, his nose wet and dripping, knees raging with the agony of battling through the ankle-deep drifts that hunkered against the light like protective mothers.

  The buildings on both sides of Brennan Street stood like monoliths, fringed with snow and twinkling with the ice that bejeweled them. In some, dim yellow light hugged the frosted windows; in others there was no light at all. Vehicles hunched against the curbs wore scaled skins of white. For such a change in the costume of the earth, noise was expected, but it was as if silence itself fell in shreds from the darkness above.

  Lenny was a rail-thin silhouette against the gathering of lights at the head of Brennan Street, his stride purposeful, shoulders tight, hands jammed into his pockets, breath pluming.

  Jake squinted, hobbling through the packed snow as fast as he could bear it, praying his knees wouldn’t quit on him. The thought of ending up face down in that cold fluffy mold was enough to send shivers rippling through him. “Lenny, slow down,” he called at one stage but his cry went either unheard or unheeded.

  Lenny moved on, Jake struggling to keep up and wondering, as he guessed his friend was, what the hell Baxter had to report and what he’d do when he found they’d left the house rather than wait.

  He prayed Joanne was all right, though a selfish part of him, a mindless, insensitive creature he kept locked away in the foulest recesses of his subconscious, yearned for her to be dead, so Lenny could share in his suffering. So he would no longer have to face the nights alone. Lenny’s advice was good, but it welled from a shallow pond in which his friend had never washed, a source that sprung from sympathy, not empathy.

  Only through his own loss could he understand Jake’s and then, they could help each other through the dark.

  Jesus, Jake thought, snapping
back to himself, what the hell is wrong with you?

  He’d been friends with Joanne almost as long as he’d known Lenny. She was a small, stout woman, full of well meaning bluster but more than capable of adopting an evil temper if it suited her needs. In many ways, she was her husband’s polar opposite and in this case at least, the old saying about attraction held true. Their love was as strong as Jake and Julia’s had been, even if the Quicks' method of maintaining their relationship was to feign indifference towards each other and to trade sarcastic barbs as much as possible.

  Remembering that malevolent whisper from the back of Jake’s mind brought a rush of guilt so strong it was almost debilitating and only a quick glance at the seething white mass engulfing his feet kept him moving.

  Six blocks did a respectable impression of twelve before they reached Lenny’s house – a small two-story stucco with sagging gutters and a crumbling chimney electric heating made redundant. A television aerial, lashed to the chimney, stood against the paler patches of wind-wracked sky like a stitch in discolored flesh.

  Jake was somewhat surprised to see that Baxter’s car was not parked outside. If he had already set out for Jake’s house then they would have met him on the way here. The vehicle he had initially mistaken as the police cruiser as they approached proved to be Joanne’s Toyota. From what he could see of it in the grainy light, it appeared undamaged.

  Lenny, who had not spoken a word since they’d left Jake’s house, suddenly stopped at the foot of the driveway and looked from Jake to the dark house brooding before them as if it was an alien thing, a cold and indifferent replacement for something he had loved. His face was unreadable.

  “Something’s going on. I don’t like this one bit,” he said, just loud enough for Jake to hear. “She always leaves a light on, even when she’s out.” He shook his head. “Always.”

  “Maybe she’s gone to bed already.”

  Lenny stared at Jake for a moment before sidestepping a mound of dirty snow presumably left in the wake of a plow, though the street certainly didn’t look as if anything but the wind had traveled it in the past few hours.

  Heart thudding and unable to shake the feeling that there was something amiss out here, something other than Lenny’s deserted house, Jake looked around, his breath emerging as ragged ghosts the wind tore away from him.

  Quiet.

  Perhaps that was it, he thought. Even for a night like this with apparently no end to the snowfall and the bitter cold, the streets were peculiarly empty. Miriam’s Cove was a relatively small town but the people normally didn’t forsake its streets until all hours of the morning. Where were the defiant drivers struggling to get home? Where were the emergency services, the police, the salt trucks? The absence of these mundane, but expected sights, unsettled him. It made him feel as if he and Lenny had missed the imparting of a monumental secret and now they were left alone in the world with the ghosts of their neighbors circling around them on white waves, waiting for them to realize their folly.

  He shuddered and followed Lenny up the driveway where they had to squeeze between the Toyota and a clump of snow that resembled a misshapen hand with weeds sprouting from the knuckles. White eddies spun above their heads like tattered scarves blown from a clothesline. Lenny clumped to the door and when he raised his hand to the doorbell, it was trembling.

  “Don’t you have the key?” Jake asked.

  “I wasn’t intending on being out long enough to need one,” Lenny said and poked the thin white plastic rectangle until ‘Greensleeves’ sounded within. It was a jingle Jake hated, but now it seemed horribly ominous because he knew deep inside there was no one in that house to hear it.

  “Damn it!”

  “Try again,” Jake told him, at a loss for a better suggestion.

  “She isn’t deaf and she isn’t there.”

  “Then where could she be?”

  “Would I be standing out here like a fool if I knew?”

  “Maybe she’s at the police station. Maybe that’s what Baxter wanted to tell you.”

  “Yeah, if he wasn’t coming to tell me she’s under a white sheet.”

  Under a white sheet. Jake swallowed. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why? You saying you haven’t thought it?”

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere, Lenny. Maybe we should – ”

  The street suddenly dimmed, as if something huge had flown overhead. As one, the streetlights winked out.

  “What the hell?”

  “Power’s out,” Lenny said and cursed as he launched a kick at the door. Startled, Jake wiped melting snow from his eyelashes and blinked into the dark. The mounds of white gradually began to emerge as if possessed of their own luminescence.

  Even in the dark I can see it, Jake thought and shuddered. Though he was wearing a wool-lined overcoat, cold tendrils slithered up his legs and down his neck. He pulled the coat tight around him and lifted one foot, then the other, alternating stances to dissuade the cold and the feeling that the snow was trying to reach his skin.

  “What now?” he asked, disturbed by the tremble in his voice.

  Lenny was staring at the door, as if still expecting it to fly open.

  “Lenny?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he replied. “Maybe the police station is where she went. We can’t stand around in this all night, we’ll freeze to death. At least if she isn’t there, the cops will know the score. They can drive us back if we need it.”

  “Right,” said Jake and they hurried down the driveway and back onto the street.

  They had only gone a few feet, the snow blowing into their faces, when they saw lights up ahead, accompanied by a low growling.

  “That a car?” Jake yelled over the wind and he thought he saw Lenny nod.

  “Sure looks like it. C’mon.”

  Jake eventually managed to draw level with Lenny and they trudged on, heads lowered. More than once, Jake had to convince himself that his imagination was on overdrive and that any malevolence he felt at work around him was nothing but a reflection of his own sorrow and the result of weeks of self-imposed isolation. Imagination, nothing more. Had to be. Because rational men did not feel things moving in the snow around their feet.

  “Snowplow!” Lenny exclaimed and Jake looked up, a hand tented over his eyes against the glare of the lights. The growling was louder now and Jake saw that Lenny was right. A truck with a plow blade mounted on the front was slowly making its way toward them.

  Jake felt a swell of relief. And then he noticed something odd.

  He tugged Lenny’s elbow. “Why isn’t the blade down?”

  “What?”

  “The plow blade. It’s raised up. There must be almost a foot of snow out here. Why isn’t he using the blade?”

  Lenny turned back to look at the truck, then shrugged. “Maybe it’s damaged. I don’t know. Or maybe he’s calling it a night.”

  Jake persisted. “That’s Carl Stewart’s truck. The guy always has these streets cleared before it gets too deep. For Chrissakes the town gave him an award for it a couple of years back, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I don’t get why he isn’t using it now. And look at the way he’s driving.”

  The truck’s lights swept across their faces, washing the walls of the house to their right before returning to dazzle them once more.

  Lenny moved in the direction of the truck. “You need to calm down a tad,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s snowing and snowing hard. Ol’ Carl’s tires are slipping that’s all.”

  But for whatever reason, Jake didn’t think so and was about to tell Lenny as much when the truck provided all the confirmation he needed.

  The headlights dipped then crawled over the burgeoning plain of snow and fixed on them, turning Lenny into a black scarecrow amid a swarm of snowflakes. The old man tensed, his back hunching into a defensive posture. The truck came on, now less than twenty feet away, its engine roaring, steam billowing from beneath the hood, the u
praised blade like a grim smile in the remnants of light it stole from the headlamps.

  “Hey!” Lenny called then, waving his arms.

  The truck kept coming, the suspension jerking as the vehicle bounced over hard-packed snowdrifts, the tires slipping and sliding.

  “Hey, Carl!”

  The beams found him again; the engine growled and whined.

  Ten feet.

  Jake shook his head and reached out a trembling hand to Lenny. “If he’s seen us, he’ll stop.”

  Lenny nodded, but continued to wave his arms with the fervor of a man who is not yet sure how much he has lost but is compelled to find out. In the headlights, Jake noted how very, very old he seemed.

  Five feet and now the lights were as bright as the sun in their faces. On instinct, Jake lunged forward and grabbed a handful of Lenny’s coat, tugging him back hard enough to send them both sprawling on their backs into the snow. The cold was immediate and fierce and Jake had to struggle not to panic at the feel of it pressing against his skin.

  “What did you do that for?” Lenny yelled in his face, but sat up just in time to find out.

  The truck hit a drift hard enough to make the front end rise, a lower corner of the blade scything through the snow. As Jake and Lenny watched, the truck showed a brief glimpse of its undercarriage before slamming back down, the plow blade twisting until it hung aslant on the grille. The back end of the truck slid out, tugging the truck clear of the drift and sending it slipping backwards toward where the two men had stood watching mere moments before. Snow flew from both sides of the truck as it carved its way past where they sat gasping, spinning one last time on the frozen ground before it met the side of Mabel Brannigan’s house and stopped with a bang that sent sparks racing up the wall.

  “Jesus,” Jake said, easing himself up. Steam from the melted snow and whatever damage had been done to the truck billowed from beneath its crumpled hood. Only one headlight worked now, its single eye blazing into the dark.

  Lenny got up and brushed himself off, disbelief contorting his face. He looked about to say something, but instead dropped his gaze and studied the deep grooves the tires had left in the snow not three feet away.