Blood Samples

by Bonansinga, Jay

  When the sheriff's deputies finally found him in that barren field outside Muncie, he was as close to death as he had yet come, and the boys had to carry him away in a horse cart. They took him to a welfare hospital in Fort Wayne for observation. His weight was down to a mere hundred-and-two pounds, and he was dangerously anemic. They tried to nurse him back to health but he refused nourishment of any kind. And when he was finally able to speak, his delirious tale convinced the doctors that he belonged in a sanitarium.

  The Howard Phillips Eldritch Inebriate Asylum in Cleveland, Ohio, was where the amnesiac made his temporary home for the next seven months. He was fed intravenously for a time, and they talked to him every morning for sixteen weeks, and he never changed his story.

  "Let me ask you again, John," the doctor with the Coke bottle glasses and clipboard said to the old man early one gray January morning. 'John' as in John Doe. Which is all they could think of calling the old gent. The doctor was sitting on a wooden schoolroom desk in a desolate white chamber lined with barred windows. The hyena yelps of the insane echoed out in the hallway, and the air smelled of disinfectant and vomit. Outside the filthy windows, a dry winter wind coughed against the glass. "When you say they're coming to get you, whom are you referring to exactly?"

  The old man, skin and bones now, his flesh the color of stale bread, his skeletal fingers clutched together in his lap like a phalanx of ivory, sat on a folding chair staring at the scarred parquet floor. "I told the other doctor already, I told him about a hundred thousand times, the little ones, the elves is what I told him."

  "Elves."

  The old man twitched but didn't look up. He had been in the asylum for over six months now – shuffling the hallways, mumbling to himself, writhing through sleepless nights, just waiting for the inevitable — but had yet to elaborate on the nature of the elves for any of the physicians. On this dismal January morning, however, the old man was for some reason feeling inordinately expansive. "Well they ain't what you'd call regular elves."

  The doctor wrote something on his clipboard and then looked up. "By 'regular' you mean the ones in Santa's workshop? Building toys and such?"

  "They're in my dream," the old man muttered into the floor. "They're the soldiers, the guards, the mean ones."

  "Santa's soldiers?"

  "Yep."

  "Santa needs an army?"

  The old man shrugged. "You'd be surprised, this day and age."

  The doctor wrote some more. "John, I have to ask you this again: Why you?"

  The old man swallowed air and looked at the doctor. "You just want to hear me say it again, don't ya. Like yer lookin' in on a freak show."

  "This business about you killing Kris Kringle?" the doctor ventured.

  The old man shook his head, looked back at the floor. "Look around you, Doc. Take a gander outside. You see any holiday cheer out there? You think there's any Christmas left in this world?"

  The doctor rubbed his mouth. "Can you tell me again about the dream?"

  A pained sigh. Then the words come out on puffs of anguished, noxious breath. "I'm climbing outta the sleigh after I made it crash, I don't – I don't exactly know how I did it, why I did it, how got there — but I killed the old man and climbed out of the sleigh cuz the sleigh's on fire and the reindeer… " The old man's voice broke then, tumbled like a house of cards, and the sobbing started up again. "They're all dead – they're burned – and then I'm running – horrible, horrible – all them reindeer — burning cuz of me."

  "Okay. All right." The doctor rose, recognizing the signs. "That's enough for today, John." The doctor went over to the door, unlocked it, cracked it open and called for the orderlies.

  They took the old man back to his room and locked him inside, and for another few endless days they observed him without bothering him or talking to him much.

  It was late the next Sunday afternoon, after dinner, after the hospital had quieted down and the second shift nurses had all come on the clock to play their card games and drink their Chase and Sanborn and gossip their gossip, that the old man heard the first faint noises of elves on the roof. It was almost as though they had been summoned by the amnesiac's interview earlier that week, as though the old man had tempted fate by giving the doctors a deeper insight into the nature of these killer elves.

  The old man stiffened on his bunk suddenly like a weather vane, his skinny neck craning and cocking as he listened. His room – or his cell, as he had come to think of it – was on the fourth floor of the sanitarium, the top-most story. The building's roof was directly overhead, and right then the old man could hear the faint padding of tiny humanoid footsteps along the tarpaper rooftop.

  Lurching out of bed, the amnesiac hobbled over to the door in his stained white gown. "Hey nurse?! – Hey there nurse! – Anybody there?!" The old man pounded his knotty fist on the door, his sagging, bony ass visible and jiggling out the back of his gown.

  The viewing slat slid open, revealing the face of a middle-aged nurse in cats-eye glasses. "Sir, you're not due for your medication until –"

  "Nurse, please, I'm having – I'm – I'm having pains in my chest —!"

  The lock clicked, and the door began to swing open, when the old man suddenly shoved with all his might.

  The force of the door bursting open – as well as the shock of it – sent the poor nurse pin-wheeling backward. She banged into a desk, sending coffee cups and paper flying, as the old man lunged out the open doorway and into the corridor with fists clenched and eyes bright with alarm. "THEY'RE HERE! BY GOD THEY'RE HERE!"

  For a moment the old man froze with indecision, gazing up and down the deserted corridor, the sudden roar of glass breaking in some nearby room making him start, followed by the scream of a patient. The old man scurried away from the noise, his bare feet padding on cold linoleum, moving toward the north end of the hallway, toward the great arched window over-looking the fire escape.

  He didn't look back, he didn't look over his shoulder, but had he looked — had he found the courage to look — he would have seen the oddest sight: doors opening along the corridor, nurses and orderlies coming out of rooms, eyes wide and shifting back and forth, oblivious to the intruders appearing only inches away from them, birthing themselves from a laundry dumbwaiter near the nurse's desk at the opposite end of the hall like two unformed blackened fetuses. The elves hopped onto the tile with preternatural nimbleness.

  "There he is Shamus!"

  One of the intruders let out a cry that was heard only by the old man at the far end of the hallway, as he clawed at the latch on that filthy window, his palsied hands seizing up, his lungs heaving for air, his heart racing, as he prayed for deliverance. All the remaining souls on the fourth floor at that moment – nurses, orderlies, an intern named Dr. Malachi Toombs – heard only the strange clanging of invisible wind chimes, or at least that's the effect the elf's cry had on their auditory nerves. An elf's voice is incomprehensible – even at high volumes – to an adult.

  At last the old man got the window latch open, and managed to yank up the sash and punch the screen open. He squeezed his slender bones through the gap and out into the winds of January, which engulfed the precipice. Dizziness coursed through his malnourished brain and he clutched at the wrought iron for purchase and tried not to look down at the vertigo-inducing drop. Traffic noises wafted up at him, and the light and space of a dying city blurred in his vision, as the intruders closed in behind him.

  "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.