by Paula Guran
“This club you were going to . . . ?”
“Yes, George?”
“What else happened there? If you don’t mind my asking.”
Jealousy sounded the same on every earth. But she did her best to deflect his emotions, laughing for a moment or two before quietly asking, “Did your Mary ever enjoy sex?”
Despite himself, George smiled.
“Well, I guess that’s something she and I have in common.”
“And you have me in common too,” he mentioned.
“Now we do, yes.”
Then this out-of-place man surprised her. He was stared at her bare knees and the breasts behind the sheer fabric. But the voice was in control, lucid and calm, when he inquired, “What about that tiny gun? The one you took out of your coat and put in your purse?”
“You saw that?”
“Yes.”
She laughed, thrilled by the unexpected.
Pulling open the satchel, she showed the weapon to her guest. “Every earth has its sterling qualities, and each has its bad features too. My home can seem a little harsh at times. Maybe you noticed the rough souls along Main Street. Crime and public drunkenness are the reasons why quite a few good citizens carry weapons wherever they go.”
“That’s terrible,” he muttered.
“I’ve never fired this gun at any person, by the way.”
“But would you?”
“Absolutely.”
“To kill?” he blubbered.
“On other earths, that’s what I am doing now. Shooting bad men and the worst women. And I’m glad to do it.”
“How can you think that?”
“Easily, George.” She passed the gun between her hands. “Remember when I told you that our richest citizens can travel from earth to earth? To a lesser degree, that freedom belongs to everyone, everywhere. It was the same on your home world too, although you didn’t understand it at the time.”
“I don’t understand it now,” he admitted.
“You are here, George. You are here because an angelic individual took the effort to duplicate you—cell for cell, experience for experience. Then your wingless benefactor set you down on a world where he believed that you would survive, or even thrive.” With her finger off the trigger, she tapped the pistol against her own temple. “Death is a matter of degree, George. This gun can’t go off, unless the twin safeties fail. But I guarantee you that right now, somebody exactly like me is shooting herself in the head. Her brains are raining all over you. Yet she doesn’t entirely die.”
“No?”
“Of course not.” She lowered the gun, nodding wistfully. “We have too many drinkers on this world, and with that comes a fairly high suicide rate. Which is only reasonable. Since we understand that anybody can escape this world at any time, just like you fled your home—leap off the bridge, hope for paradise, but remaining open-minded enough to accept a little less.”
George finally settled on edge of the bed, close enough to touch her but his hands primly folded on his long lap. “What are you telling me?” he asked. “That people kill themselves just to change worlds?”
“Is there a better reason than that?”
He thought hard about the possibilities. “This angel that saved me. He isn’t the only one, I take it.”
“They come from endless earths, some far more powerful than ours. There’s no way to count all of them.”
“And do they always save the dead?”
“Oh, they hardly ever do that,” she admitted. “It is a genuine one-in-a-trillion-trillion-trillion occurrence. But if an infinite number of Georges jump off the bridge, then even that one-in-almost-never incident is inevitable. In fact, that tiny unlikely fraction is itself an infinite number.”
He shook his head numbly.
She leaned back on her elbows. “Most of these benefactors . . . your angel, for instance . . . throw those that they’ve saved onto earths that feel comfortable with refugees like you. My world, for instance.”
“This happens often?”
“Not exactly often. But I know of half a dozen incidents this year, and that’s just in our district.”
George looked down at his cold wet socks.
“Unlike God,” she promised, “quantum magic is at work everywhere.”
“Do you understand all the science, Mary?”
She sat up again. “I’m a librarian, not a high-physics priestess.”
That pleased him. She watched his smile, and then at last she noticed that her guest was beginning to shiver.
“You’re cold, George.”
“I guess I am.”
“Take off those awful socks.”
He did as instructed. Then laughing amiably, he admitted, “There. Now you sound exactly like my wife.”
They were both laughing when something large suddenly moved beneath the big bed.
George felt the vibration, and alarmed, he stared at Mary.
“My cats,” she offered. “They’re usually shy around strangers.”
“But that felt . . . ” He lifted his bare feet. “Big.”
“Kitties,” she sang. “Sweeties.”
Three long bodies crawled into the open, stretching while eyeing the newcomer from a safe distance.
“What kinds of cats are those?” George whispered.
“Rex is the miniature cougar,” she explained. “Hex is the snow leopard. And Missie is half pygmy tiger, half griffon.”
With awe in his voice, George said, “Shit.”
“I take that to mean you didn’t have cats like this on your earth?”
“Not close to this,” he agreed.
She sat back again, sinking into the mattress.
And again, this man surprised her. “You mentioned Mars.”
“I guess I did. Why?”
“On my earth, we thought that there could be some kind of simple life on that world.”
“You didn’t know for certain?”
He shook his head. “But a few minutes ago, you mentioned something about Martians. Are they real, or did you just make them up?”
“They’re real somewhere, George.”
He frowned.
Then she laughed, explaining, “Yes, my Mars is home to some very ancient life forms. Tiny golden aliens that drink nothing but peroxides. And my Venus is covered with airborne jungles and an ocean that doesn’t boil because of the enormous air pressure. And Sisyphus is covered with beautiful forests of living ice—”
“What world’s that?”
“Between Mars and Jupiter,” she mentioned.
George blinked, took a big breath and burst out laughing.
That was when Mary told her blouse to fall open.
He stared at her, and the laughter stopped. But he was still smiling, looking shamelessly happy, begging her, “But first, Mary . . . would you please put your gun away? Someplace safe. After everything I’ve been through, I don’t want even the tiniest chance of something going wrong now.
In some ancient traditions, the winter battle between the light and the dark called for human sacrifice. During the festival of Fröblot, which occurred at the winter solstice every ninth year, Swedish kings made human sacrifices. There is also evidence for a “Lord of Misrule” who, for the period of the Roman Saturnalia, had the power to command anyone to do anything. At the end of his “reign” he was killed on the altar of Saturn. In James Stoddard’s story, young Eric faces the possibility of a terrible sacrifice and witnesses a bloody holiday battle.
Christmas at Hostage Canyon
James Stoddard
For hours the family rolled like tumbleweeds through the flat expanse of West Texas, past pumpjacks and pastureland, fields of winter wheat and empty reaches of harvested cotton. Now, with a sudden turn, they descended into darkness.
“Hey, we’re goin’ down!” Eric yelled.
“I told you where they live,” his mother said from the front seat. “Remember us talking about the Caprock Escarpment?”
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sp; “Oh. Right.” After driving through one of the largest tablelands in the country, they were entering a canyon at the edge of the plateau, one of a series of ravines marking the Caprock boundary.
“What’s this canyon called?” Eric asked.
“She already told you that, dummy,” his brother Daniel said beside him in the backseat. “Hostage Canyon, ’cause this is where the Apaches met to ransom their captives back to their families.”
“Don’t call your brother a dummy,” their father ordered, dimming the car lights. “You guys look around. They really decorate for Christmas here.”
The sedan made its way along the steep incline and curved around a boulder-strewn hill. Along the headlight beams, Eric glimpsed mesquite, cactus, and yucca.
As they rounded the bend, Eric gaped as a fairy valley opened before them. Houses, decorated with lights of every color, huddled around a small lake. Electric stars hung over garages; bulbs covered pines in Christmas-tree splendor. Shepherds and Smurfs, wise men and snowmen, mangers and Power Rangers stood on the lawns. Banners proclaimed the season. The lights shimmered off the water, and in the darkness it was hard to tell which was real and which, reflection.
“Look at that!” Eric shouted, pointing at a mechanical Santa waving from a row boat in a front yard.
“Don’t yell in my ear!” his brother warned.
“Sorry.” In a departure from his usual good humor, Daniel had recently joined the vagabonds drifting along the borders of teenage moodiness. Though Eric never consciously expressed the thought, his brother’s faltering desertion from childhood left him uneasy.
As the car wound its way around the lake, they encountered other vehicles going both directions, creeping along to see the lights. Their Ford slowed to a crawl. More cars came up behind them and it became a parade. Inflatable choirs on the lawns generated music, providing both band and audience. Eric lowered the window and shouted, “Merry Christmas, everybody!”
“It’s too cold to have the window down,” Daniel complained.
“Better roll it up,” their mother said. “You might catch a chill.”
“Bunch of Scrooges,” Eric said, annoyed at his brother’s treason.
“He’s right,” Dad said. “Leave it down, son. We’re here for Christmas.”
Eric was wise enough not to look at Daniel. With a four-year age difference between them, he had learned long ago not to celebrate his triumphs.
They passed a plywood display running the length of the roof of a Colonial—Santa in his sleigh pulled by the reindeer.
“There’s Rudolph,” Eric said.
A man walking his German Shepherd passed beside the car, his breath a cloud in the cold.
“Merry Christmas!” Eric called.
“Merry Christmas to you, son,” the stranger replied, smiling, all the lights making his face clearly visible.
“Nice people,” Eric said.
They were forced to stop a few minutes later, as all the drivers paused to observe a particularly festive house, its roof a sea of bulbs, its seven pine trees crowded with twinkling lamps, its Chinese elm and desert willow dipped from trunk to tips in illumination. Eric bounced in his seat in anticipation of drawing next to it.
“Calm down, can’t you?” Daniel said.
Eric cut his efforts in half to suggest compliance. He glanced beside the car. Beneath the shadows of a row of oaks sat a figure on the curb, face shining dead-white. Eric studied the creature, thinking it must be a mannequin. To his shock, the figure stood and stepped into the street, a man with a long, thin head and sneering elven features. His face shone with a zombie light. Was it a mask? Some kind of paint?
The creature looked at Eric with pale, piercing eyes that made the boy shudder. There was something animal about him, like an elf gone bad.
The stranger leapt into the air in a fluid movement, twisting his body in a way that seemed physically impossible. He pirouetted, rising over the ground like a ballerina. His clothes were blood red and the dark green of stagnant water.
Inserting a finger of each hand into the corners of his mouth, the elf stuck out his tongue, pulling his mouth wide and then wider, impossibly wide, hideously wide, until his whole face was contorted beyond anything Eric thought imaginable.
“Death,” the elf said, looking right at Eric, his voice high and grating.
For an instant, under that dreadful gaze, Eric froze. The elf reached a clawed hand toward him. With a shout, the boy pushed the button to raise the window.
The glass went up; the car moved forward. The elf ran a hand against the rear window, cutting long scratches in the glass with two-inch fingernails.
“Did you see that guy?” Eric yelled.
But his parents were talking and pointing out lights, while Christmas music droned from the car speakers. Daniel ignored him.
“What is it, honey?” his mother finally asked.
“That man! See him?”
Eric turned to where the elf had been, but he was gone. He vainly searched the shadows beneath the trees.
“I don’t see anyone,” Mom said.
Eric kept his eye on the back window until they reached their aunt and uncle’s house.
Aunt Laura and Uncle Gregg lived in a sprawling Victorian on the south lake shore. Eric’s uncle, full of stories, loved to play chess and checkers; his aunt did crossword puzzles and read romance novels. They didn’t have any children, which Eric thought a shame.
Everyone stayed up late the first night, talking and drinking hot cider around the burning logs of the ornate fireplace. Eric’s parents brought the presents out of the trunk of the car and placed them beneath the Christmas tree, a real pine bedecked in golden bulbs with a ceramic angel atop the highest branch. The brisk aroma of the needles tickled Eric’s nose.
At bedtime, Eric was led to his room upstairs, which had an ebony dresser and queen-size bed. The blinds covering the long picture window were closed.
“There’s a flashlight on the nightstand if you need one,” Aunt Laura said, “or I have a nightlight if you want.”
“I’m too old for nightlights,” Eric asserted a little uncertainly, glancing at the shadows crowding the corners of the high ceiling.
He was tired but unwilling to turn loose of the day, so he played with the flashlight a while, casting the beam to different parts of the ceiling, illuminating the portrait of a sailing boat, and the carved faces of monks and angels on the antique dresser.
Downstairs, the grandfather clock struck midnight, the sound humming through the walls of the house. He counted the long, slow strokes of the witching hour.
With the sounding of the last chime, he heard a snarl outside, a high throaty cry like a child in pain. His whole body tensed. He shone the light at the window, then remembered cats sometimes made such noises. Despite that reassurance, he lay in bed, the covers around him in the winter chill, waiting. When the noise came again, he rose, gripping the flashlight, and crept to the window. Lifting one slat of the blinds, he peeked out.
His room overlooked the backyard, which sloped down to the water’s edge. A canoe and kayak were moored to his aunt and uncle’s narrow dock. It was a moonless night, but the lights from the far shore illuminated a figure dancing across the frost-kissed lawn, the elf Eric had seen on the street, his face shining dead-white.
The creature spun in a circle, leapt high into the air, somersaulted across the grass, came upright, did a handstand, pushed himself up by his arms, and landed on his feet. He slid toward the water without moving his legs, like a skater on ice. Turning, he danced backward, then rushed forward and did a roll that brought him just beneath Eric’s window.
Landing on one knee, arms outspread as if awaiting applause, he leered up at the boy. His lips were crimson. Even at this distance, Eric could see the hunger in the glistening glare.
The elf dropped one arm to his side, pointed straight at Eric, and with a voice clearly audible through the glass, cried, “Death on Christmas Eve!”
; Eric gasped. The elf sprinted back toward the lake, bounded forward, and vanished. For a moment, Eric searched, thinking he must have leapt into the water, but the surface remained undisturbed.
Grasping his flashlight, Eric bolted down the hall toward his parents’ room.
“Just a bad dream,” his father said, helping Eric back under the covers. “Too many Christmas treats late at night. Happens to the best of us.”
“It wasn’t a dream, Dad. I promise it wasn’t. I saw him in the street and I saw him again. He was like a big elf, but evil!”
From the glow of the hall light, Eric rested beneath the study of his father’s thoughtful eyes. Eric’s dad was one of those parents who believed his children.
“I’ll talk to your uncle in the morning about it. It’s probably some local prankster in makeup. But look, we’re on the second floor. You saw how high the windows are. No one can possibly climb up here, and Laura and Gregg have a security system, so your elf couldn’t get in without the alarm sounding. Go to sleep and we’ll figure this out tomorrow. I’ll sit by your bed a minute.”
Under his father’s scrutiny, Eric drifted off to sleep.
By the next morning, the incident seemed more dream than reality. Having placed it in his father’s hands, Eric dismissed it, for it was Christmas Eve, and there were games to play and pies and candy to eat, and a light snow that started at noon.
“A white Christmas after all,” said his uncle.
That night they drove around and looked at Christmas lights again, though Daniel didn’t really want to go. Only then did Eric remember the elf. He found himself searching the shadows, looking for the creature, but they covered the route along the canyon without any sign of him.
“You’re awfully quiet,” his mother said. “Aren’t you enjoying the lights?”
“He’s afraid of ghosts,” Daniel said.
“Am not!” Eric grimaced, feeling betrayed. His brother must have heard him last night and ferreted out the story from Dad.
“Maybe they’ll let you have a nightlight tonight,” Daniel said. “Just don’t get any ideas about sleeping with me.”
Eric hunkered down. Older brothers have all the power.