by Brian Hodge
“For the love of Christmas don’t let him slip away again Dooley — grab him grab him GRAB HIM!”
Eye-witnesses on the street at that point would later spin quite a yarn regarding what happened next. The consensus was this: The old man was taking his first, tentative, yet frantic step down the wrought iron ladder, unaware that the ladder was affixed to a rotting hinge, when the ladder gave way. It swung the amnesiac across the adjacent alley. He managed to desperately cling to the pinion like a giant worm being cast on a line.
The old man crashed into a row of burning trashcans aligned at the mouth of the alley, their meager flames flickering and warming a group of morose men standing in the next morning’s bread line. The impact of the amnesiac’s feeble bones sent sparks spuming sixteen feet in the air, and sent the men scattering, their fedora’s flinging into space, and the rusty oil cans rolling every which way. The incident created such havoc – such an unexpected disturbance of noise and chaos — that nobody even noticed the old man crawling toward the street, and then vanishing around the corner, only to hobble away into the anonymous city. Nobody saw the elves scaling down the side of the building like winged monkeys, too late to catch the old man or even discern the direction into which he had fled.
On second thought, in the interest of precision, let us clarify and amend that latter sentence to instead say that no adult saw the elves.
LUNATIC ESCAPES NUTHOUSE
Orphan Spies Pygmy Invaders
Cleveland, Jan. 11th – A rogue patient at the H.P. Eldritch Inebriate Asylum escaped Sunday evening in a daring plunge from the fourth floor window. “The man was elderly and being treated for a nervous disorder,” reported Dr. Toombs of the hospital staff. “He was here on an involuntary state commitment, but I assure you he is not in the least bit dangerous.”
Currently At Large
Citizens of greater Cuyahoga County are asked to be on the lookout for a man that fits the following description — six-foot-one, a hundred and ten pounds, gray-hair, possibly arthritic and stooped. The man was last seen on Pearson Street near the Catholic Mission breadline on Sunday night. If a citizen spots this individual they are asked to call the sheriff’s department at Baker Hill 217.
A Tall Tale
In a related story, a child, age 6, a resident of the hospital’s third floor orphanage, is said to have seen two intruders enter the hospital only minutes before the escape. “The boy said they were ‘pygmies,’” claims Nurse Hattie Stevenson, the Matron of the orphanage. “In the boy’s own words, ‘They were pygmies with magical weapons, and they looked real sore.’”
Stories of a less sensational nature – mostly factual and sans any mention of pygmies — also appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Cleveland Press. By February, sightings of the mysterious old goat were being reported across the northeast on an almost hourly basis. People were claiming they had seen the escapee hiding in barns, in the shadows of allies and abandoned buildings, amidst breadlines, in soup kitchens, and among the desperate masses. Over the ensuing weeks, word leaked out regarding the old man’s alleged psychosis, and the dark irony of it all captured the crestfallen imagination of the battered citizenry. The Man Who Killed St. Nick became a gloomy cause célèbre. Stories were exchanged around flaming trashcans, folk tales manufactured in hushed reverence.
The true whereabouts of the old man, however, were a far more slippery matter.
Throughout the gray spring months of that year, the amnesiac managed to elude both elf and authority, tacking westward in fits and starts, zig-zagging across the dwindling tributaries of the Ohio, trudging across the wasted hollows of coal mine country, across the Ozark plateau and into the vast wasteland of dust bowl states. His demeanor – unknown to those who hunted him – was one of utter despair, a fate worse than death.
In fact, the final seven months of his flight across Missouri and Kansas made the first three and a half years of his exile seem like a picnic. He rarely ate. He lost another eight pounds, and was nearly incoherent by the time it was all said and done. He had begun to believe that he was not human, had never been human. He was a demon, an assassin sent by the devil, and he had killed Christmas as part of some apocalyptic plot to bring about the end days, or maybe to bring about something worse than the end days, maybe the end of hope.
By the time he reached Childress County, Texas, a dirt-poor swath of desolate scrubland on the southwest edge of the dust bowl, he had lost track of the time of year. Relentless drought had sandblasted away the colors of the turning seasons. Now, one season looked like the next, an endless succession of sepia-hued haze. In fact by the time the old man, a walking-cadaver in rags and dusty pelts, had stumbled into the tiny, hard-scrabble outpost of Kirkland, just after dawn, he had lost track of everything but the endless agony of his guilt and aimless flight.
Huddling throughout that day in a deserted, reeking chicken coop on the outskirts of town, he simply waited for some merciful end – by way of either elf or succubus – to put him out of his misery.
He didn’t know that it was December, and his long journey was indeed about to come to an end.
He also didn’t know that it would happen almost precisely at the stroke of 7:00 that very evening.
Official accounts of that last afternoon vary, depending upon the source. Aside from single chapters in numerous works on Dust Bowl folklore, there are two volumes in existence today devoted solely to the case. Christmas Reckoning: The Little Known History of the Kirkland Stand-Off by Erik Larson has become the most popular, best-selling of the modern commercial works; in the book Mr. Larson paints the final moments of the old man in almost Shakespearean tones. The Man Who Stole Christmas by Vincent Bugliosi treats the showdown as more of an indictment of early twentieth century jurisprudence and the mistreatment of the mentally ill. There are also several oral histories of that last day on file in the great archives of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. One such account – a field recording made for Folkways Records by Moses Asch – is provided by a Texas Ranger named Harlan Wickham. Told on his deathbed in a halting, emphysemic wheeze, the lawman recounts a story that many have either disputed as fabrication or the delirious ravings of the terminal. Wickham, alas, was present that last afternoon, and was unequivocal in his belief that he had seen something miraculous – his account full of contradictions and changing facts — until the day he died.
The final struggle, according to Ranger Wickham, began with the advent of one of the greatest dust storms in recorded history. The weather across the arid plains had been unsettled for weeks, and that afternoon two opposing fronts smashed up against each other over Oklahoma. The resulting sirocco churned up half the iron-tainted topsoil of the panhandle.
In those tumultuous years, people across the western states had grown accustomed to the red dust maelstroms. Schools would close down, and day would turn to night, and people would hunker down in their basements – if they were lucky enough to have a basement – and cover themselves with wet sheets to stay cool in the oven-like storm. Entire towns would virtually vanish in the scarlet plague.
That afternoon, the old man heard the noise of the approaching storm before he saw it. Stirred from his rancid coop, he peered out the slatted doorway in the direction of the western horizon. What he saw in the dying twilight must have turned his bloodless veins cold because the horizon was no longer there. A giant monolith of rust had unfurled a mile away, and was coming directly toward him, gobbling everything in its path, swallowing the countryside and turning the dusk into midnight-darkness.
Although no one can be sure, the amnesiac must have regarded that roaring tidal wave of dust as a sign, a portent, a variation of the Revelations to John – the end of the world – because he realized it was accompanied by a softer noise, a noise he had been hearing all day, a noise from his dreams, a noise now all but drowned by the freight-train roar of the dust cloud.
This lower noise came from the opposite direction, from the east: a series of tiny, angry
, swift footsteps – unearthly fleet footsteps — crossing the parched, cracked earth. The old man had no choice now but to flee — directly into the oncoming deluge.
The elves arrived at the chicken coop just in time to see the object of their three-and-a-half year pursuit a hundred yards away, plunging into the wall of crimson haze. They would not lose him this time. They refused to lose him. They would rather die than fail.
Trembling with excitement, they circled around the coop, carrying weapons of exotic design fashioned out of brass and gold, their musket-like muzzles as delicate as buttercups, forged in the cellars of their magic workplace.
“Shamus!” The elder elf motioned frantically with the barrel of his gun. “Take the north flank! I’ll take the south!!”
The elves darted off into divergent directions on nimble feet, weapons raised and ready, until they, too, were swallowed by the vast blanket of hell-dust. The light went away, and the night swallowed the day.
And the landscape vanished into a nimbus of blood red wind, which choked the breath out of the earth and shattered windows and tossed tumbled weeds a hundred feet into the sky and deafened the elves with its cacophony. And still they closed in on their quarry.
At this point, the only other living souls in the general vicinity entered the fray. They came hurling into the leading edge of the dust storm on horseback, these three brave souls on a pair of mounts — an old muscular bay mare carrying a man and a boy, and a young Appaloosa hauling a single man – all of them, human and animal alike, coughing and spitting as the red wind buried them alive.
One of the witnesses, the man on the Appaloosa, a man who had come all the way from Cleveland, Ohio, yanked on the reins and scuttled to a stop before the storm had a chance to up-end both him and his steed. “Forget it – forget it! Let the old nutcake go!” yelled the orderly from the Eldrith Asylum, dropping to the earth, his voice muffled from a bandana across his mouth.
“Stay with the horses!” bellowed old Ranger Harlan Wickham, as he pulled back on the lead and grabbed his young passenger around the waist. Wickham squinted to see through the flurry of red dust in front of him as he slid off his horse with the little boy under his arm like a sack of potatoes.
“I can still see ’em out there! – the pygmies!” the kid, squirming in the Ranger’s burly arm, was hollering.
The boy had also come all the way from Ohio. The Ranger had sent for the child after reading his strange account in The Amarillo Daily News. Wickham had gotten the idea after tracking the amnesiac across the barren rose fields of east Childress for the last seventeen days, watching the old cuss dodging invisible tormenters, and noticing ghostly footprints forming and vanishing in the dust. The boy from the orphanage held the key – somehow Wickham felt this in his bones — even though his fellow rangers thought Wickham had lost his mind.
“There! – See?! – Straight ahead!” The boy was pointing at the crimson nothingness while continuing to squirm in Wickham’s arms, and it took quite a bit of effort for the Ranger to brandish his .45-caliber Schofield with his free hand without breaking stride. It was impossible to see through the pink soup more than a cow’s length ahead of him.
“THERE!”
Wickham raised a bead on the swirling dust-devils ahead of him, squinting through watery eyes. He could barely see the shadow of a spindly old coot about three stone-throws away, arms flailing, stumbling wildly back and forth, rushing headlong across the hard-pack.
Meanwhile the little boy was pointing off in another direction like an English spaniel on the scent. He was pointing at the invisible pygmies of his dreams. “THEY GOT GUNS! — LOOK OUT MISTER! – DUCK! – DUCK!!”
The ranger swung the muzzle of his Schofield at the area to his right –
— and he started to squeeze off a shot, when the strangest sound rang out over the roar of the storm: It was a cross between a gigantic church bell being struck and a clap of dry thunder.
The ranger flinched at the bang, and then felt a tremendous blow to his solar plexus. The impact nearly lifted the tall man out of his boots, taking his breath away, knocking off his Stetson hat, snapping the buckle of his Sam Browne belt, and flinging him backward through the storm with the gentle violence of a leaf on the wind.
The Schofield spun free, and the orphan slipped from Wickham’s grasp and landed in a drift of tumbleweed. Eyes blinking against the dust, the little boy gaped at what was transpiring in the flame-colored miasma in front of him.
The two pygmies had converged predatorily on the Ranger, who was now blinking fitfully, trying to sit up, trying to see, trying to make sense of what had just happened. But oddly… the child could see the ranger wasn’t hurt. In fact, the ranger looked eerily replenished, as if he’d just been baptized by a benevolent savior.
No bullet hole riddled the ranger’s body, no wound sullied his form.
The orphan now saw the pygmies, unseen by the ranger, kneeling down on either side of the man. From their anxious, worried expressions it was clear that the little ones were making sure the ranger was okay.
What the orphan didn’t know was that elf-weapons don’t shoot projectiles. Elf-guns operate on principals antithetical to mortal weaponry. Elf-weapons are designed to suck the bad from peoples’ hearts. Like a bolt of rejuvenating tonic, the blast of an elf-pistol removes injury.
At that moment, in fact, amidst the raging red storm, the little boy from Cleveland probably could have surmised as much, because he now saw the ranger sitting up with a beatific smile on his face, a smile that said volumes – here was a man who needed to tell his wife he loved her, who needed to visit the ocean.
Like a blind man who had just been dipped in a miracle spring, the ranger could suddenly see everything clearly, and he seemed to fix his gaze on the pygmies, as he wiped a tear of joy from his wind-burned features and started to say, “Who the hell are yy —?”
“Dooley!” The younger elf, the one with all the questions, interrupted the scene. “Pssssst!”
“One moment, Shamus!” The elder elf did not take his fervid gaze off the ranger. He spoke above the noise of the storm. “Are ye all right then, Sir?”
“Y-yes.” Apparently the ranger could see fleeting glimpses of the ghostly elf. “Y-y-yes I am.”
“Dooley look!”
At last, the elder sprite glanced up from the fallen lawman and saw that his comrade was indicating something off in the middle distance, in the vague halo of twilight a hundred yards off, made all the more ethereal by the last shreds of dust storm raking across the sunset.
The storm was passing, the tail already departing, moving eastward, like the caboose of a demonic train receding into the dusk, leaving the landscape a sand-blasted shambles. And out there on the edge of a downtrodden little ranch – its modest corral void of life-stock, its ground seared by the relentless drought – lay a tangle of barbed-wire blown up against a split-rail gate.
In the nucleus of that knotted mess – caught like a bug in a web — lay the dying amnesiac.
“Come, Shamus,” the elder one murmured with a reverence approaching prayer. “Time to finish it.”
At precisely 6:59 PM, as the man who killed Santa Claus lay snarled and spent in the tangle of barbed-wire, the small dark assassins approached cautiously from the east. To the amnesiac they looked like evil spirits emerging from the dwindling extremities of the dust storm, and he considered struggling, but he realized almost simultaneously with that innate impulse that the running was over, and it was time to surrender to Fate, and it was time die for his sins.
He tried to hold his head up as the tiny ones loomed in the wan, filtered twilight. As they drew near, the dusky light shimmered on the tulip-shaped muzzles of their infernal weapons. “Easy there, Captain,” the old man thought he heard one of them say. “Go easy there, Sir.”
The old man started to weep. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to do it….”
The bounty hunters paused on either side of the knot
ted mess of wire coated with bloody dust, each one kneeling with musket cradled. The storm had almost completely diminished now, and the silence that fell upon that wasted terrain seemed to stretch all the way to the Rio Grande. Within that alien hush, the sound of voices softly droning, far off in the ether, could be heard.
“Be still now, be still,” muttered the older one. He gently loosened the tangle. The old man felt the pressure ease off his skeletal limbs, his bony hip-points and his scourged bare feet.
“I didn’t mean to kill him.” The old man’s dust-clogged voice was barely a ragged croak. The distant voices were more discernible now, they were singing, singing “The Carol of the Bells.” The sound wafted over the barrens like a salve on the wounded land.
“You didn’t kill ’im, Captain,” the younger one said as he gently cradled the old man’s shoulders and helped him sit up in the dust.
All at once the land seemed to go still, the very air calming as though a switch had been thrown.
“I didn’t?” Confused, dazed, the amnesiac glanced over his shoulder and saw the ramshackle ranch house fifty yards away on the edge of a rotten, wind-scarred fence. It rose out of the gloom like an apparition – the hand-hewn logs and timbers frosted with dust – a single window burning with candle-light. The silhouettes of a poor migrant family were visible inside that window, singing around a meager Christmas tree.
The realization washed over the old amnesiac like a warm wave. It was December 24th, 1932. Christmas Eve. “Is this a dream?” the old man wanted to know.
The elves sat down in the dirt next to him. “I surely wish it was,” the older elf said with weary sigh, brushing the dust from his Jodhpur pants. “Ye gave us all quite a scare, Captain.”
“I didn’t kill Santa?”
Shamus the Elf smiled at him then, the warmest smile ever proffered in the mortal world. “You didn’t kill Santa, Sir – you are Santa.”