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X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
GARAGE SALE, by Janet Fox
Originally published in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, August 1982.
They were driving around the city on a steamy late-summer afternoon, two secretaries beating the heat of their inner-city walkup by cruising through suburbia. Here lawns lay crisp and green under a mist from sprinkler systems, the houses hermetically sealed to hold in the coolness breathed by air conditioners. Stella clacked as she drove, but only because she was addicted to plastic bracelets. She also liked to dye her hair different colors—though mercifully just one color at a time. Jen was to Stella as the wren is to the cardinal, not noticeable beside the more flamboyant display, yet having a quiet style all her own.
“They got it made, huh?” said Stella. “Not having to bust their buns in a dumb office every day. House, hubby, and kids—the American dream, right?”
“I think you made a wrong turn.”
“Where?”
“Back there. Some of these residential streets end in a cul-de-sac, and—”
“A cool de what?”
<
br /> Jen subsided since it was too late to get Stella going in the right direction. Shadows of low-hanging foliage immersed the car, but only served to intensify the heat. The neat cookie-cutter ranches had given way to older residences in a variety of styles, most of them pretentious, spread more widely apart and set well back from the street.
“Or how about these? Woo-eee!”
As they passed a neo-Victorian horror, rife with gingerbread and flanked about with fountains and marble statues, both of them saw at once the hand-lettered sign poked into the funeral-grass lawn:
GARAGE SALE
TODAY ONLY
“Do you believe that?” giggled Stella, putting on the brakes so suddenly that Jen had to steady herself with a hand on the dash.
“What do you suppose they’re selling, the Crown Jewels?” asked Jen.
“As long as it’s a bargain,” said Stella, her bracelets rattling as she climbed out of the car. The house awed Jen a little as she walked toward it. Stella giggled and pointed as she passed a marble Cupid relieving himself into an ornamental pool.
“I know you love these sales,” said Jen, “but every time I go to one, I get talked into buying some worthless junk.”
“Never can tell. Today may be your day to find a treasure.” Jen looked furtively at the cupolas and the stained glass windows. “A place like this—it could just be some kind of joke.” Stella gestured toward a cardboard sign tacked to the porch railing: GARAGE SALE IN BACK, with a scarlet arrow pointing the way.
There was a garage in back, though the builders had evidently not felt called upon to give it the ornateness they’d showered upon the house itself. Though the place was large inside, almost barnlike, they saw to their wonder that it was stacked wall to wall with a jumble of artifacts, furniture of all kinds and periods, clothing of several different eras, tools, household gadgets, and things that defied description.
“I think I just died and went to heaven,” said Stella. She began to root contentedly about among the merchandise.
Jen nodded a greeting to the woman who seemed to be in charge of the sale. She sat behind a card table on a tattered chaise lounge of violet brocade, most of her attention claimed by a cheap paperback romance. There was something odd about her, something Jen couldn’t quite put her finger on, though certainly she might have been any housewife in faded jeans and a checkered shirt rolled to the elbows, a bandanna covering her head, the fat coils of hair rollers distending it.
“There’s something funny about this place,” she told Stella, who ignored her, rummaging through a trunk of musty-smelling garments, a moth-eaten feather boa draped about her shoulders. “Something funny,” she muttered to herself, and began to move desultorily around the place, seeing an enormous moose head, the bottom half of a store-window mannequin and the photographs of generals Grant and Lee framed in what looked like the seat of a privy.
“What an incredible collection of junk!” she said under her breath. Yet despite her incredulity, she began to be carried away by the sheer volume. What had Stella been saying about finding treasure? She was poking about in a dim corner when she moved aside a Chinese silk screen patterned with tigers. As she did, she drew in her breath and hastily began to apologize. A man sat before her in a threadbare recliner, seemingly staring out at her, though with the reflection on his glasses she couldn’t quite be sure. Her apology trailed off as she realized he wasn’t moving.
“My God! Stella, he’s dead! Stel—” As she turned to run, she collided with someone she at first thought was her friend. It was the woman in charge of the sale; she smiled a small, secretive smile that made her angular, high-cheekboned face seem anything but ordinary, and she gripped Jen’s arms to keep her from falling. Jen opened her mouth to scream to Stella, but as she looked, by some trick of vision, her friend seemed small and far away, waltzing dreamily, a gown of blue voile held up before her.
“She can’t hear you—not from here,” said the woman calmly. Released from her grasp, Jen stood unsteadily before the strangely immobile man in the chair.
“Here? Where’s here?”
“A juncture. A pivotal moment outside of time. Do you like him?” The woman removed the man’s glasses with a proprietary gesture and cleaned them on the tail of her shirt. Jen saw that he had gentle myopic blue eyes.
“Do I like him?”
“I won’t pretend he’s like new. The hair’s thinning on top, and he could lose a bit down here.” She patted the obvious paunch beneath his white shirt. “But in many ways he was a good husband.”
“He’s your—No, you couldn’t be selling—”
“Well, a person gets tired of things sometimes before they’re quite worn out. You know how it is.” A tiny dark questing head peeped from beneath the bandanna and slowly oozed its length down the woman’s face: a snake as big around as a pencil with a minuscule tongue that darted out to taste the woman’s cheek. Almost before the image registered, certainly before it was believed, the woman had swept it back under the bandanna with a casual gesture. Up close Jen could see the bulges beneath the cloth move, coiling and sliding.
“I guess so,” said Jen, licking her lips and looking back toward the man in the chair. “He looks nice, but—” She hadn’t noticed before, but there was a price written in grease pencil on his forehead. $10. “But why does he just sit there like that?”
“Since it’s getting late,” said the woman, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “and no one else has been interested, I’ll let him go for half price.”
“Is he dead or—”
“He’s fully functional. I’ll reanimate him when the time comes.”
“Are you telling me you’re some kind of…witch?”
“That’s just a word, but I guess it’ll do.”
“They used to catch witches and burn them!”
The woman laughed, shaking her head until a darkly patterned tail slipped out onto her forehead and quickly slithered back under cover. “Not real witches, they didn’t,” she said.
“You must be crazy, and—” Jen looked desperately for Stella, but she was no longer there. A yellow plastic bracelet lay on the floor in a prosaic patch of sunlight.
“Don’t expect corroboration from your friend. She was never here. Neither were you, if I don’t make the sale.”
“What if you do? Make the sale.”
The woman smiled. “Yeah, I kind of thought you were interested. Well, you’ll have a husband, that’s all. Say you met him right after you finished business school.”
“That’s what I’ll think?”
“That’s what will have happened,” said the woman, looking at her fingernails. They were very long fingernails, polished black, and the tips curved inward.
“Do we have children?”
“For five dollars?”
Jen’s fingers moved numbly, opening the catch of her purse. She didn’t think she could just leave him there like that, staring into space and sitting in that ratty recliner for all eternity. And then, she hadn’t had much luck getting a husband the usual way, so…
As she handed over the bill, the woman’s eyes caught hers, cool amber eyes, steady-burning as lamps, the pupils a horizontal bar of darkness. Her whisper, grown low and sinister, hung in the air. “Tell you what, I’ll even throw in the chair.”
* * * *
“Just look at me, Ben. Sometimes I think you’re glued in that goddamned chair!”
Ben blinked up at her, his blue eyes so innocent, so vulnerable behind their panes of glass that she felt she could gladly throttle him. It was so predictable, so irritating. Screwing up his face with concentration, he did something to the tv’s remote control, and the volume of the football game rose imperceptibly. “Really, Jen, I don’t suppose you could come up with this overpowering desire to go out on any night except Monday. A man w
orks hard; he deserves a chance to sit down once in a while.” He twitched like a rabbit. “So what’s for supper?”
“Oh, God!” A wisp of smoke curled through the kitchen door, and Jen ran to remove the smoking pan from the stove. She turned the water on it, half choking on the smell. Then she stood at the sink looking at the charred and drowned remains.
“If I had it all to do over again,” she said quietly, drawing a hand across her face and leaving a black smear. She sighed inaudibly, thinking that no one ever had a chance to do it over, no one. Never.
She busied herself in the kitchen for a few minutes, then returned to the living room, automatically picking up newspapers from the floor and an empty beer can that had left a ring on the coffee table.
“I burned the chops, so I put in a couple of tv dinners. I figured you’d like that, you like the damn tv so much anyway.” For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard her; he sat there immobile, like a graven idol, blue images from the screen flickering on his glasses.
At last he grunted. “That’s just great,” he said. “A man works hard all day and comes home to tv dinners. Some wife I found for myself.”
“Listen,” she said, interposing herself between him and the set. “You’re not that big a bargain yourself, mister.” For some reason even she could not fathom, she found that vastly amusing, and repeated it. “No bargain,” she said, and laughed until tears came to her eyes.
SOULS OF THE DAMNED, by John D. Swain
Originally published in Argosy, Nov. 3, 1917.
Carrington had a canvas in the Salon while he was a pupil at Lemaitre’s. I remember it well, for I saw it on vernissage day, and thereafter many times. It wasn’t skied by the committee and always there was a crowd before it. The French government ultimately purchased it for the Luxembourg.
In general, good artists may be divided into two classes; those who make you think, and they who make you feel. Carrington did both. “Just Around the Corner,” he called his painting; and the fact that he was a wonder in drawing and pretty fair in color doesn’t in the least explain the appeal of it.
You saw a typical French village street, the houses linked one to the other, solidly constructed, thatched, with the cross of the old parish church brooding over all. In the middle of the street a dog lay sleeping in the warm sun whose light—the stippled luminosity of the impressionists—flooded the composition. In a doorway a fat baby rolled on his back and tried to get a toe into his mouth: a pursuit he would abandon later in life, but was surprisingly successful at now.