by Various
“You can ask him yourself, in a bit,” Gibson said. “Four days a year, I go out and get what I must, and that’s when the cancer works on me.” His eyes became brighter and more intense. “You can’t imagine. It feels like rats are nesting in my brain, Mr. Wyndam-Pryce. You’ve saved me some of that this time, at least.”
Wesley could think of only one law firm that might make such an arrangement. “I take it you’re represented by Wolfram and Hart?” When there was no response, he continued. “I rather have to wonder if you’re their client, or if the demon is.”
Gibson said nothing.
Wesley shifted in his chair, making the chains that held him rub together and clink. Again, he considered the ballistic possibilities of hot tea. “I wonder if I might have a refill?” he asked, gesturing with his cup.
“Help yourself,” Gibson said, but he kept the gun trained in Wesley’s direction.
As Wesley leaned forward to the tea service, an electronic chirp sounded from his jacket pocket. His wireless phone had rung a dozen times since he had come here. He said, “I told you I have friends.”
“Had,” Gibson said, correcting him.
Wesley settled back in his chair. The newly filled teacup was warm in his hand. He gazed at Gibson and at the runes and the picture on the wall behind him. The arcane symbols were moving again, but so was something else, inside the framed image.
Beyond the picture’s surface, a little boy with red hair and freckles trudged past his field of view.
Timmy was in the foyer when the big brass doorknob rattled. Daddy had told him to stay in his room tonight, upstairs on the top floor of his house, but the water in the kitchen tasted better than the water in the bathroom, so he had made his way there. He took the shortcut from his bedroom, through the library and the library picture and into the gallery, and was on his way to the kitchen. He was thirsty and wanted a drink of water.
First the doorknob rattled, then knuckles rapped against wood for the second time that day. Timmy paused in his tracks again, considering the almost unprecedented sequence of events. He knew from reading and from television that you were supposed to answer a door when someone knocked.
But he wasn’t allowed to use the front door.
The unknown someone knocked again, and Timmy heard a muffled voice through the wood. He wondered who it was.
Only Daddy was allowed to use the front door, but did using really meant going through the door. Could he open the door without breaking the rule? He decided that he could, if only just this once.
His hands were small and he had to stand on tiptoe to reach the bolt mechanism, but at last, the heavy panel of wood swung back and revealed a stranger standing on the doorstep. The stranger wore a long, black coat and a black shirt and black pants, so dark that he almost faded into the night behind him. Something about him was just a little bit scary, too.
“Hey, buddy,” the stranger said. He smiled and made a little wave and knelt so that he could meet Timmy’s gaze, all without entering. “Hey. You’re Timmy Gibson, aren’t you?”
Timmy nodded yes, but said nothing. He felt suddenly unsure of himself. He hadn’t given any thought to what he would do after he opened the door.
The visitor peered at him. “And you’re not—,” he started to say, and then he smiled, showing big white teeth that were square and bright. “You’re not. You’re okay.”
Timmy nodded, fascinated. This was the first new person he had seen in as long as he could remember.
“Timmy, your mother sent me,” the stranger said, after a moment.
Timmy wasn’t sure what to say to that, either.
“I need to see your father,” the stranger continued. “May I come into your house?” He said the words carefully, as if to make sure that Timmy would understand.
The words finally came. “I’m not allowed to let strangers in,” Timmy said.
“Please,” the stranger said. “I’m here to help.”
Timmy shook his head. “It’s almost Christmas,” he said. “I have to be a good boy.”
“You are a good boy, Timmy. Just let me in so that—”
Timmy decided not to listen to him anymore. He swung the door shut. It slammed with a reassuring thump. He put the lock back the way it had been, then headed for the kitchen and his water, secure in the knowledge that he had done the right thing.
Realization struck like lightning, a flash of awareness bright enough to illuminate all of the puzzle pieces and show Wesley how to put them in place. The cube-shaped room, the picture that was actually some sort of window, even the way the house went in and out of focus with the rest of the world—all those factors added up to only one thing.
The place was a tesseract.
Wesley’s studies had focused more on history and the occult than on theoretical mathematics, but he remembered the term nonetheless. If a cube like this room was the three-dimensional equivalent of a two-dimensional square, then a tesseract was the four-dimensional version of a cube. Tesseracts were defined by lines that were straight in normal space, but which bent through a dimension that humans could not perceive directly. A tesseract was a cube with opposing faces that nonetheless met one another. The pictures on the walls weren’t mere pictures, but windows into other sections of the tesseract’s structure.
“They’ll find nothing but an empty house, shuttered and dusty,” Gibson had said. “Except for four days a year.”
“Four is a sacred number to Dhoram-Gorath,” Wesley’s own words came back to him now, and Dhoram-Gorath was a powerful time-binder. Time and space were different aspects of the same thing, according to Einstein.
Wesley wished fleetingly that the agency’s science authority, Fred, were here with him, but then gave silent thanks that she was not. Her expertise in mathematics and inter-dimensional physics would have come in handy. No doubt, she could have read the strange equations as easily as a child’s primer, but he would not have wanted to see her in the danger that was surely coming.
The runes and symbols on the walls had coalesced now. They clustered in a complex knot in the center of one wall. They moved and they glowed and they lit the dingy basement with a brilliant light.
And as he watched, the knot of symbols emerged from the two dimensions of the room’s walls into the three dimensions of the space those walls bounded. They became something real and physical, a glimmering tendril of incandescence, a glowing ribbon that reached outward. It groped as if searching.
“Scream if you like. It helps,” Luther Gibson said, and set down his gun. “Timmy is up in his room and won’t hear you.”
Dhoram-Gorath’s tentacle touched Gibson’s shoulder.
Sleigh bells rang. Heavy boots clomped on the doorstep. Someone pounded yet again on the door, hard enough to shake it in its frame.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” a deep voice called out. “Timmy? Timmy, are you there?”
Timmy raced down the staircase, his shortcuts forgotten. He half ran, half bounced down the carpet stairs, his heart pounding. With fingers made clumsy by excitement, he worked the big door’s lock and knob again. Then he pulled the door open, for only the second time in his whole life. What he saw made him blink his eyes and rub them, then look again, in near disbelief.
Santa Claus was on his doorstep!
Santa was big and tall, and the only part of him that was fat was his big, round belly. He wore a red suit trimmed with white. His boots and belt and gloves were black leather, and he had a bag slung over his shoulder. A string of bells jingled in one glove-clad hand.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Santa said. “Hello, Timmy! I hear that you’ve been an extra-special good boy this year, haven’t you?”
The whole world became a brighter place. Timmy was bouncing from one foot to the other, nearly hopping in his excitement.
“Santa!” he said. That was all that he could think to say. “Santa Claus!”
“That’s right, Timmy,” Santa said. His voice was booming and deep, just like Timmy had heard on the forbi
dden TV, and just like the voice that Daddy made when he read to Timmy about Santa. “Merry Christmas!”
The words made Timmy pause. “Hey,” he said, suddenly puzzled. “It’s not Christmas yet!”
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Santa said again, with a little bit less energy this time. “It’s the Christmas season, isn’t it?”
Timmy nodded eagerly.
“One of my helpers told me a little boy here probably wouldn’t get to see me, so I thought I would come by and visit in person!” Santa spoke like every sentence was a cheer. “You have been a good boy this year, haven’t you, Timmy? Ho! Ho! Ho!”
A dozen remembered transgressions raced through Timmy’s mind. Spilt milk, watching TV without permission, opening the front door, leaving his books on the floor, not finishing his vegetables. Surely none of them made him a bad boy. “Yes, sir, Mr. Santa Claus!” he said, nodding. “I’ve been very good!”
“Good,” the strange visitor said. “Very good! Now, why don’t you invite ol’ Santa inside, and we’ll talk about what you want for Christmas?”
Timmy paused. “I’m not allowed to let strangers in,” he said, for the second time that evening. This time, the words tore at him.
“Hey,” Santa said softly. He smiled. “I’m not a stranger, kid. I’m Santa Claus, everyone’s friend. And I sure could use some milk and cookies.” Then he laughed again, “Ho! Ho! Ho!”
Timmy knew what to do then. “Come in, Santa,” he said.
Santa’s booted feet had barely crossed the threshold when Timmy heard the scream, distant and faint.
But familiar.
Gibson shrieked in agony at the shining tendril’s touch. He continued screaming as the rippling tide of ideographs and glyphs flowed like quicksilver from the walls. They flowed like water into a sponge, or like ink into a blotter—penetrating, intermingling, marking. In an instant, his body was sheathed in an infinitely complex web of interlocking runes and glyphs, a pulsating sheath of cryptic symbology. The symbols themselves seemed to follow some otherworldly orthography, and the lines that made them met at angles that made Wesley’s eyes hurt.
Then, where Gibson had stood, Dhoram-Gorath stood instead.
Even as he watched the transformation, Wesley worked to free himself. A dozen lock-picks rode in a pouch at his waistband, tools he had brought along when he expected to find the house sealed. Now, with fingers made nervous by circumstance, he found the little metal probes and inserted one into the massive lock of his leg-irons.
“No,” Dhoram-Gorath said. He spoke the word with lips and tongue that might once have belonged to Luther Gibson, but he did not speak with the man’s voice. It was a single gurgling syllable, barely comprehensible. A hand that had been Luther Gibson’s rose and gestured in Wesley’s general direction. Light flared from the tips of entirely too many fingers.
Wesley’s lock-pick crumbled into rust and slipped through his now-trembling hands.
“Daddy?” Timmy asked, half to himself and half to Santa. The scream had been in a familiar voice. “That’s my Daddy!”
“Take me to him, Timmy,” Santa said, speaking with the voice of command. “Now.”
“He’s in the basement, but I’m not allowed—”
“Now, Timmy!” Santa said. “Where’s the basement door?”
The basement door would be locked, Timmy knew. Instead of answering, he clambered into a gallery picture. He did not look to see if Santa followed.
Wesley threw himself to one side, drawing his chains taut as he stretched them. As he moved, he pawed desperately at his kit and found another lock-pick.
Before he could use it, however, more light flared from Dhoram-Gorath’s far-too-many fingertips. The glaring radiance was of a color that Wesley had never seen before, even under the alien suns of another world. The strange fire licked out, retreated.
When it faded, the chains crumbled into rust and dust, freeing him. Wesley drew back his hands, confused. As his vision cleared he stared at them without comprehension. They shook with tremors. The skin on the backs of his hands was pale and mottled with liver spots. The knuckles were swollen with arthritis.
They were the hands of a very old man.
Timmy had spent nearly his whole life in the house, and he certainly knew all of its shortcuts. The normal route to the basement involved moving through the kitchen to the rear hallway, then to the utility room, then to a flight of stairs. Another hall ran the length of the basement, past the old coal bin and the furnace, and to Daddy’s special workshop there. The normal route would take too long, even if the door were open.
He scrambled through the library picture and through the library, to the picture of the dining room that hung here.
“What—what is this?” Santa asked from behind him, baffled but following. “What are you doing?”
Timmy didn’t answer, but kept going. Clambering through that picture and the next brought him to another. This one looked out over the special room Daddy had in the basement. Timmy had stumbled upon it early in his exploration of the house. Ordinarily, it held no interest to him; most days, Daddy’s workshop was shadowed and dark. Now, however, as he approached it, the image within the frame glowed with strange colors and lights.
A hand found Timmy’s shoulder. “Hold it, kid,” Santa Claus said. “I’ll take over from here.”
More of Dhoram-Gorath’s strange light flared. Wesley, rolling desperately, tried to avoid the pulsing glow, but his body would not move the way it should have. His joints hurt and his bones ached and his breath came in short gasps. The world went into soft focus as his vision blurred. He blinked to clear his eyes, but to no avail. The world was wrapped in fog and seen from a distance. Then the glow swept over him and the world seemed to move a little bit further away.
All he could focus on now was Dhoram-Gorath, in his chosen vessel of Luther Gibson. The demon’s body was a glowing fractal network of curves and angles, none of which seemed quite right for the world in which Wesley lived. Only the eyes that glared from beneath his lettered brow remained those of Luther Gibson.
Again, Dhoram-Gorath gurgled, but the sounds he made were incomprehensible, not even remote approximations of human speech.
This time, Wesley was too weak even to try to dodge. He could only lay motionless as the eldritch luminescence found him. When the glow faded, he felt even older and weaker, and a hot line of pain stretched from his chest and down one arm.
He was dying, he knew. Dying of old age. Dhoram-Gorath was taking his years from him, and giving some of them to Gibson instead.
“Wesley!” a familiar voice shouted. “Hold on!”
For a brief moment, Wesley wondered if senility had come, and if he could trust what remained of his vision.
Behind Dhoram-Gorath, leaping from the picture that decorated one wall, a fighting-mad Santa Claus had erupted into the room.
With the instincts of a hunter, Angel took stock of the situation. There wasn’t much to see. An old man who wore clothes Angel could recognize as Wesley’s lay sprawled on the floor. He was clutching his chest. Another figure, man-size but not man-shape, and covered with glowing tattoos, loomed over the fallen one, with many-fingered hands raised to strike.
The problem wasn’t vampires, then. That much was good news.
Angel leaped through the picture frame, driving himself through the air with muscles that were far stronger than those of any living human. The creature grunted as he slammed into its back. Immediately, Angel’s left arm snaked around the demon’s neck, and his right hand dug into Santa’s bag of presents that still hung at his side.
“Dhoram-Gorath…,” the old man said, with a whispering gasp that was an aged echo of Wesley’s voice. “Time…binder.”
Cold fire radiated from Dhoram-Gorath’s body as Angel clung to him. Even through the thick layers of his Santa Claus costume, he could feel the demon’s power touch him. It touched and it burned, and it stirred strange sensations within Angel’s undead flesh.
His right ha
nd had found the weapon it sought. Angel brought the stake up in an arc and then down, stabbing into what would have been the soft hollow between a man’s neck and collarbone. The tip of the seasoned wood found its target, and dug in—
Then it crumbled into dust, the way wood crumbles beneath the passage of years. In a split-second, the stake was gone, as if it had never been.
Dhoram-Gorath reeled and bucked, trying to shake his attacker. Forgetting Wesley, the demon reached behind himself, clawing at Angel. His many fingertips glowed like suns.
Dodging one raking slash, then another, Angel groped again in his sack. This time, his strong right hand closed around the haft of the small battle-ax he had stowed there.
He never had a chance to use it. The barest tip of one demon finger found the curved blade and touched it, and then all Angel held was rust and dust.
“Santa!” Timmy Gibson wailed, from somewhere a world away.
The weapons he carried were useless, Angel realized. Rather than try for another, he pulled back hard with his left arm, attempting to strangle the thing. For a moment, the effort seemed to yield no results, but then something inside Dhoram-Gorath gave with a satisfying cracking sound. The demon howled in pain.
“That got your attention,” Angel snarled. Fury surged through him, fury and bloodlust. His brow extended itself forward and down, and his teeth became a pair of ragged horizons as wrath lit his suddenly feral eyes. His free hand came up and clawed at Dhoram-Gorath’s face. He scarcely noticed as the leather glove he wore decayed and then disintegrated.
“Santa!” Timmy cried again.
Wesley said something, too, barely audible to any senses less keen than a vampire’s. “Years…,” the dying man said. “Took my years…”
Dhoram-Gorath reeled again, this time slamming into the hard stone nearest wall. The impact was hard enough to break Angel’s grip. The vampire fell and rolled. Before he could rise, however, the demon’s fingers of fire reached toward him.