The snow was ankle-deep.
What's going on?
Then he knew.
The sound came from above him, high in the swirls of snow. He remembered one Christmas Eve when it had snowed like this. That was the special snowfall he'd remembered. He'd been out in the fields at the edge of town with Bobby and with Luke Marple, talking about the next day, all of them hoping it would snow like the radio said it might. And, just as they started for home, it had begun to snow. Big flakes, just like this. They'd begun to whoop and dance around one another as if a prayer had been answered.
But he hadn't heard this sound then.
He heard it now. God, it can't be. It was up there, high in the snowy clouds, part of the snow, belonging to it, just like he'd thought about it that same night when he and Bobby and Luke had seen the snowfall start. He'd lain in his bed that night, knowing the magic hour was not far off, waiting for sleep, listening through the snow for that sound, that wonderful sound.
He reached down and picked up his wire basket of milk bottles, and made the sound along with it.
"Bells!" he shouted. "Sleigh bells!" He stared up, one arm moving the basket of milk bottles, clinking them in time with the sound above, the other arm waving over his head as if in signal. "Here!" his arm was saying. The sleigh bells grew louder. He could hear the individual tap of them against the reins, the swish of something large drawn through the air—he could hear, just hear, a muffled cry and a faint, faint laugh. The snow was up to his shins, but he danced and danced and shouted into the maelstrom, "Here! Here!"
He knew it was descending. In the snow his eyes were a blind man's, but so were his ears. He could sense each movement in the naked air. He felt a swish past him. Then he gasped and shouted, his mouth open with pleasure as he saw, just poked out of the snow clouds over his head, the long cool line of a sleigh runner and the flat bottom of a hoof. It pulled up and away, and he heard and felt it circle before it landed. He heard a loud bump and a laugh behind his milk truck, then the snorting of reined animals.
He felt the weight of something heavy out there in the snow.
"Is it you?" he cried. "Is it?"
Someone laughed the right laugh.
"It can't be," Potty Johnson said. He knew it couldn't be. But it was. Why? But why not? Each morning he had relived the happiest time of his life, pushing from his mind the fact that his brother, Bobby, had been killed in Lebanon by a suicide bomber; that Marian, whom he hadn't seen in three years, was unhappily married in California to someone everyone could see right from the beginning would be no good to her, to someone she had fought with them about, had run away and married, and now didn't even send Christmas cards, trapped at home with a child she didn't want and two-thirds an alcoholic; that his parents had divorced when he was fifteen and his brother and sister were only twelve and ten; that the happy life he had thought they'd always have had gone to ashes in the space of three short months, when his mother couldn't take the fact that his father had been cheating on her with various women for ten years and just got tired of taking it, tired of trying to wait until all the kids were grown and out of the house, so she just left and let the lawyers do the rest. He had been able to forget it all every morning, what his own life was: thirty-five, divorced, full of the memories of his fights with his wife over having kids, since she didn't want to have any and he did, remembering what it was like to be a kid, the things he could give his own kids, the Christmases he could give them. "Big baby," Janice had called him, with affection when they'd first married, later in derision, and finally in hate. "You dream about something that probably never really existed," she spat at him that last time, when she'd moved out of the house, not back to her mother like she'd said, but to live with the guy she'd worked for as a secretary, whom she'd probably been screwing for a year or two . . .
The sleigh bells jangled.
He heard that laugh again. And now he didn't care. It had to be real because sometimes your dreams come true, just like Walt Disney said. Here was his dream coming true. He was back in his childhood, it was Christmas, and Santa was here. "Ho-ho!" he heard out in the swirling snow, on the other side of the truck. One of the reindeer snorted. And then he heard his name. "Potty!" Santa called, his bass voice filled with mirth. "Potty, where are you?"
"Here!" he said, and then he was up on his feet, stumbling over the milk bottles ("Ching! Ching!" they answered) and moving around the truck into the clouds of snow. It was nearly up to his knees. He plowed through, feeling it soak through his pants to his skin.
"I'm coming!" he shouted, and in answer he heard Santa laugh.
He was surrounded by a fog of white. He began to shiver. He was aware of how cold it must be if it was snowing like this. There were snowflakes sticking to his eyelids, pushing against his face, making it difficult to see. He heard more laughter, and he moved toward it. He was very cold. He shivered, like the time when he'd gone swimming one summer night, forgetting to bring a towel, just peeling off his clothes while his brother watched, and when it suddenly turned cold and the chill night air got to him, he felt the way he did now.
"Potty, where are you!" the chuckling voice called.
"Here! I'm coming!" Potty shouted breathlessly. He fell, but his hand brushed across something thick and solid, and when he grabbed it, he knew it was the runner of the sleigh.
"Santa?" he asked, standing up. His hand moved over the smooth cherry-red surface of the sled. It was trimmed in polished gold, a thin perfect line of fresh-cut holly laced around it. His bare hand touched the reins, brown leather as supple as a baby's skin. The front was hollowed wide for its single passenger, lined in green brocade. He put his hand out into the blinding snow and found the warm flank of a reindeer, hard and bristle-haired. The animal moved from side to side and chuffed breath from its mouth. "Santa?" he called into the snow.
"Potty? Back here!"
"Yes!" Potty said. He stumbled to the rear of the sleigh. He saw a flash of moving red and then everything was swallowed up by whipping snow. His hands found the sleigh and he moved alongside until he felt something made of burlap, stretched tight and filled with jutting objects. He felt as high as his hand could reach, standing on the runner of the sled, but still he couldn't reach the top of the bag. As he moved around behind the sleigh, the bag only grew in dimension.
He said, "Wow," just as he had on Christmas mornings so long ago.
An old feeling came to him: he didn't want this to end. He knew he was coming to the open end of the bag. When that happened, the surprise would be gone. All the toys would spill out around him, and Christmas would be over. He felt things under the folds of the bag—curves that told him he was touching a boat, a box that felt like a model airplane, a dog with button eyes, a baseball bat, a wagon. Was this the wagon he had asked for that Christmas and not gotten? Though he was nearly sightless, he had touched the open rim of the bag, his searching fingers finding the long black handle of the wagon.
"Potty," a voice said from behind. He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. The hand was black-gloved below, a rim of rich white fur bordering a velvet red sleeve. Potty blinked, and could just make out the white beard, the red-apple cheeks, the shining blue eyes and napped red cap inches from his own face.
"Potty, it's all for you." The voice was his father's voice the way Potty wanted it to be. It was Santa Claus's voice, every day of the year. This voice never got mad for no reason, never said things it didn't mean; didn't order him to his room, taunting him with his nickname, telling him that they'd called him that because he hadn't been potty-trained until he was nearly six, that he'd wet the bed nearly every night and spent endless fruitless hours on the toilet seat trying to learn; this voice never yelled at his mother, calling her a frigid slut and screaming that he was sick of them all.
"All for you, Potty." The smiling, white-bearded man gently pressed Potty's shoulders, so that he would turn around to the bag. He didn't want to yet. He wanted to wait, to savor it. But he turned because Santa wan
ted him to. He looked into the bag. It was dark, so long and so deep he couldn't see anything at first. Then, down at the bottom, he saw something. There was a pile of boxes down there, all angles and bright colors and wrappings. His presents were stacked a mile high on top of his red wagon. There was everything he'd ever wanted down there—the microscope, the butterfly kit, the ant farm, the rock polisher, the autograph model Harmon Killebrew glove, the six-foot glider made of white Styrofoam, the radio-controlled boat.
But it was all so far away.
"Santa," he said, and when he turned, Santa's face was there in front of his, the snow forming a halo behind it. Santa's face was bright and merry, and his beard was fluffed and his cheeks were red. But his eyes had turned from twinkling blue to bright sun, the color of summer days far from Christmas.
"Santa," Potty said, and Santa smiled and once again turned him around by the shoulders. Potty saw the bag open wide as he fell down into it, the presents down there getting closer, rising toward him. Then all the sharply angled new boxes and brightly colored wrappings, the bows on top, the spanking new wagon with red hub capped wheels and black enameled handle, the one he wanted so badly—all of it was gone, and where everything had been, where his wagon had been, was only a hard shiny thing, a laughing flat face with huge copper eyes and red flaming cheeks and a laughing mouth filled with rows and rows of sharp grinning teeth and he fell at the horrid laughing thing that became the ground.
ALSO FROM AL SARRANTONIO & CROSSROAD PRESS
Novels:
Moonbane
Skeletons
October
West Texas
Kitt Peak
The Boy With Penny Eyes
House Haunted
Collections:
Toybox
Halloween & Other Seasons
House Haunted
Unabridged Audiobooks:
Moonbane – Narrated by Kevin Readdean
Tom Piccirilli
BIO:
Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including SHADOW SEASON, NIGHTJACK, THE COLD SPOT, THE COLDEST MILE, THE FEVER KILL, and A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN. He's won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L'imagination. Learn more at:
www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com
This, and That’s the End of It
Tom Piccirilli
Previously appeared in the anthologies Mean Sheep & Shivers III
Madsen kept visiting the hospital two weeks after his mother was dead. He’d get halfway through the main doors and see the security guard’s shoulders hunch up beneath his tightly fitted gray uniform. The two tiny Asian nurses at the administrative desk would whisper and watch closely, all eyes and long black hair and immaculately pressed bleached uniforms, and Madsen would suddenly remember he wasn’t supposed to be there and turn around.
He’d wind up facing the massive five-tiered parking structure across the street, trying to remember where he’d left his Mustang. The snow continued to fall and was already nearly six inches deep, with plows and sanders coming through the area every fifteen minutes. They didn’t help much and you could hear the sound of harsh crushing slams of metal striking metal from the highway overpass a couple of blocks away.
He watched the ambulances, police cars, and people huddling around their own dying children. Some kind of a bomb scare in the pediatric oncology ward had forced them all to congregate in the main lobby, but the dining area had closed hours ago. Kids in wheelchairs, left with only clots of burnished hair, throats and chests swathed in bandages, sat wide-eyed as the cops poured past. Madsen looked up at the windows of the north and south wings and sucked air through his teeth, wondering what he ought to do.
The bomb squad didn’t seem put out by the fact that he stood along with everybody else. German Shepherds trained to sniff out C4 sat barking t the terrified mothers trying to keep warm in the overcrowded waiting area. Nurses in sweaters flitted past carrying coffee cups around the corner of the building.
He stepped outside and let the roughly hewn moonlight slam across his back. The snow swirled around his feet and he tried hard to find something to do, at the moment and with the rest of his life. Madsen couldn’t quite remember who he’d been before his mother had become so ill, and everything ahead remained hazy, foggy. It annoyed the shit out of him. He’d once had a distinct goal that seared fiery outlines into his dreams, but in the last few days it had faded until he couldn’t remember what it had even been. A sense of relief was marred by the vague feeling of regret.
A young cop stormed past, giving him the slow once-over. Around twenty-two, new to the uniform, with a blond buzz cut and an aura of self-importance. Madsen cocked his head curiously, knowing a confrontation was inevitable.
“Who are you?” the officer asked.
“Madsen,” Madsen said.
“Do you have a kid here?”
“No.”
“Then clear out. What are you doing?”
He still didn’t have an answer, two weeks later. He had nothing to say for a second and then it came to him. “My mother just died.”
“What room?” the cop asked.
“What the hell difference does it make?” Madsen said, feeling the warm anger flood his belly. It brought back some calm and then there he was, ready for whatever might happen next.
“You should leave, sir, there’s been some trouble.”
The cop vanished around some vending machines and a dog wandered closer, nosing into Madsen’s crotch. One of the kids giggled and his mother, a broad lady with features as bland as a shopping bag, shushed the boy. Madsen winked hoping he didn’t appear to be a child molester. He held the back of his fist out to the dog and one of the bomb unit guys pulled the animal away and stomped down the hallway.
Tires scraped against spikes of jagged ice, coming off the exit ramp, and another screaming ambulance appeared at the corner, swaying as it turned too sharply and clipped the curb. Madsen took a step towards the doors as if he might...what?...protect anyone near him. Sometimes you acted without realizing the meaning behind the movement, or how stupid it might be. The ambulance slowed and coasted past, heading around to the other side of the building. The emergency room.
His step-brother Bobby had died four weeks earlier and Bob’s ex-wife still hadn’t so much as notified a mortuary. They’d only hold the body for another few days, Madsen remembered, and then...what the hell would they do? He wasn’t sure whether he should bother going and claiming it himself, giving the name of Chapey’s Funeral Home, half a mile up the road. No matter what you thought you knew, the art of dying proved how incompetent you were.
He walked back across the lobby and the guard perked up once more. Madsen ignored him and went to the elevators. He already knew where the morgue was because he’d missed his mother’s death by forty-five minutes and been forced to say his good-byes while she lay on a gurney shoved up against the wall. Chewing through his tongue and trying not to be distracted by her nakedness beneath the sheet, with her eyes a quarter of the way open, scowling at him.
He got in and pressed the button, held himself in the corner while the elevator lurched to a stop and the doors opened.
The lights were dim down here, one end of the corridor being remodeled. Wires hung in a colorful lump from the ceiling and a wooden ladder stood with stained cans and tools placed on every other step. He hadn’t seen a wooden ladder in years and it reminded him of his father, the man’s thick hairy arms speckled with paint. Yellow caution tape had been strung across the width of the passage.
Madsen decided to go the opposite way and continued along the corridor past half-open doors until he reached an empty desk blocking the vestibule. Like in high school, some monitor asking you for a hall pass.
A woman appeared in the room beyond, staring through the doorway at Madsen without any expression. Not a nurse or doctor, just a middle-aged lady wearing a
prim brown business suit and tan shoes that didn’t go. Jesus, maybe she really did want a pass, a doctor’s note. Please excuse Johnny from algebra, he has to go pick up his brother’s remains. Her pursed lips were covered in a heavy wax lipstick, the kind women didn’t wear anymore. Madsen almost liked the look, mainly because it was old-fashioned and made him think of when he was a kid and his parents threw big holiday parties.
“Yes,” she said abruptly, as if answering a question he hadn’t asked. “And why are you here?”
The offhand, curt manner of the woman drew him forward another two steps until his knees were pressed against her desk. “My brother. Robert Harrington.”
“Yes?”
“His body is still here. I’d like to make arrangements.”
“How so?”
“If you’ll let me use the phone I’ll call information, get the number of Chapey’s, and finalize details.”
“And you are...?”
So it was going to be like that.
A shudder went through him as he tried to find a more patient resolve, not clamber over the side. “His brother.”
“I’ll need to see identification.”
He pulled his driver’s license and laid it on the metal desk top that was so shiny it startled him to see his face, the reflection of his own hand coming up at him.
“Just a moment, please,” she said.
“Sure.”
She disappeared into the room beyond, where he watched the shadows play against the open door but never saw anybody go past. He waited, realizing that he wasn’t supposed to be here and had, for reasons unknown, thrown the place out of sorts by showing up. Sometimes all you had to do was breathe to ruin somebody’s else’s day.
Tales from the Crossroad, Volume 1 Page 3