by Gene Wolfe
“I’m coming out in a minute,” Sherby said. His father’s face was twisted. Because he knew what was happening, Sherby thought. It had been wrong, wrong of his father particularly, to go away and leave him alone with House.
“You see, my son, Carker’s Army is looting and burning all the homes along East Mountain Road, and they’ve left the McKays’. They will probably burn this house as well. If they do, that freezer is the part of House most likely to survive. If you snuggle up with Smoky, you might stay alive until they leave.”
“No,” Sherby said. He wanted his mother to pat his head the way she always had when she put him into bed, and thought of bending down and touching her hand with his head. He knew it would not be the same, but he did it anyway, then turned away, shivering worse than ever, and led Smoky out into the cellar again, where Father Eddi waited.
“This is your best chance, my son. You know that House can open this door. He’ll open it for you when it’s safe.”
Sherby did not bother to reply. He pushed hard against the big door, swinging it shut.
“Are we going back upstairs? Santa Claus is about to appear. It will be the high point of the party.”
“I don’t care about Santa,” Sherby declared.
Smoky, who had been so reluctant to go down the stairs, trotted up them quite readily. “House!” Sherby called when they were back in the kitchen. “House, say something! Answer me!”
“What is it, Sherby?” The big voice seemed to come from all around him, as it always had, but there was a tension in it that Sherby had never heard before.
“I want to see out front. Is it okay to open the front door?”
“No,” House told him. “There is a screen in the study—”
“Not that. You let me open it before.”
“They were not here then, Sherby. Now they are.”
Sherby considered the problem. Behind him, Father Eddi said, “House would like to show you Santa Claus, and this may be the last chance you’ll ever have to see him with a child’s eyes. Won’t you please go into the family room and look?”
House said, “I will make an agreement with you, Sherby. If you’ll see Santa, I’ll open the security shutter on one of the windows in the living room a little and let you look out there; I promise.”
“All the way. And look for as long as I want.”
House hesitated. Smoky stamped in the silence; faintly, Sherby could hear voices outside and the loud bangs of people pounding on things. At last House said, “All right.”
There seemed to be fewer guests in the family room than Sherby remembered. Christmas Rose was talking to the tall, turbaned king and an older king with a long, white beard, but Knecht Rupprecht was nowhere to be seen. As Sherby and Smoky advanced toward the fireplace, in which the immense Yule log was blazing, Santa Claus stepped out of the fire, a fat little man no taller than Sherby himself, his red and white clothing all tarnished with soot and an enormous bundle of toys on his back.
“Look, my son!” Father Eddi exclaimed from behind Sherby. “There’s Santa Claus! He came!”
Sherby nodded. A sort of aisle had opened between Santa Claus and himself. His mother was standing on Santa Claus’s right, his father on his left, and an elf was peeping from between his father’s legs. As Sherby came nearer, leading Smoky, Santa Claus roared with laughter. “Here I am again, Sherby! Second time today!”
“Are you really Santa Claus?” Sherby’s voice wanted to shake. It was as if he had been crying.
“I certainly am!” Santa Claus laughed again, louder than ever: “Ho, ho, ho, ho!”
“Then you’re nothing,” Sherby told him. Sherby could not talk as loud as Santa Claus did, but he talked as loud as he could. “You’re a big nothing, and I never, never want to see you anymore. House! Are you listening to me, House?”
Sherby waited for House’s reply, and all the guests were silent too. His mother and his father looked at each other, but neither spoke. Smoky nuzzled his hand.
“I’m the only one here, House! You’ve got to do what I tell you! You know you do!” Sherby looked for the butler in the crowd of guests, but could not find him. “Make them all go away. I mean it! No more promises. Make them all go away right now!”
He and Smoky stood alone in the big, dark, empty family room; the fireplace that had blazed an instant before was cold and dark.
Gradually the lights came up, so that by the time Sherby and Smoky had taken a few steps toward the door, the room was lit almost normally, though nowhere near as bright as it had been during the party.
“House, I’m hungry. I’m going to the study now, to look out. When I’m finished I want a bowl of Froot Loops. Get out the stuff.”
House’s big voice, coming from a dozen speakers in that part of the house, said, “There is no milk left, Sherby. I told you so at noon, remember?”
“What is there?”
House considered, and Sherby knew there was no point in interrupting.
“There are sardines and two slices of bread. You could make a sardine sandwich?”
“Peanut butter?”
“Yes, a little.”
“I’ll have toast and peanut butter,” Sherby decided. “Get out the peanut butter. Toast the bread and have it waiting for me when I’m through looking.”
“I will, Sherby.”
The hall was nearly dark, the study as black as pitch. House said, “If I turn on the lights, they will see you at once when I raise the security shutter, Sherby.”
“Turn on the lights now so I can get over to the window,” Sherby instructed him. “Then turn them off again. Then pull up the shutter.”
His father’s desk was still there, and the big computer console, its screen dark. Save for one large and equally dark window, books lined the walls—his grandfather’s law books, mostly; Sherby remembered his mother opening one for him to show him his grandfather’s bookplate.
“I wish that you would go back to the frozen-food locker, Sherby. That would be the safest place for you and Smoky.”
“What’s that banging the front door?”
“A log.”
The light above the desk dimmed, then winked out. Sherby flattened his nose against the chill, black thermopane of the window, and the security shutter glided smoothly up.
There were too many people to count outside, some of them so close they were nearly touching the glass. Among them were policemen and firemen, but no one paid any attention to them; when he had been looking out for perhaps half a minute, Sherby recognized one of the firemen as the fox. A man holding a big iron bar ran right through the fox toward the window, but two women stopped him and pulled him out of the way.
The window exploded inward.
Sherby found himself on the floor. The light was bright and the shutter closed again, and he lay in a litter of broken glass; his right hand was bleeding, and his head bleeding from somewhere up in his hair. He cried then for what felt to him like a very long time, listening to the bang, bang, bang from the big front door.
When he got up, he took off his pajama shirt, wiped the blood away with it, blew his nose in it, and let it fall to the floor. “Where’s Smoky?” he asked.
“In the dining room, Sherby. He is all right.”
“Is my toast ready?”
“It will be by the time that you reach the kitchen. I would not try to catch Smoky again right now, Sherby. The shots frightened him very much. He might hurt you.”
“Okay,” Sherby said.
Kneeling on a kitchen chair, he spread the last of the peanut butter on his toast. He found that he was no longer hungry, but he ate one piece anyway. Somebody banged on the security shutter of one of the kitchen windows and went away. Climbing the stairs to get to his bedroom, Sherby thought that he had seen Yeshua on the landing. Yeshua had smiled, his white teeth flashing. Then he was gone, and it seemed he had never been there at all. “Don’t do that,” Sherby told House.
House did not answer.
In his
bedroom, Sherby slipped out of his pajama bottoms and pulled on underwear and long stockings, jeans, and his red sweater. He was not skillful at tying shoes, but that morning there had been green Wellingtons under the tree. Now, for the first time ever, he tugged them on; they were only a little bit too large, and they did not have laces to tie. His green knit cap kept the blood from trickling into his eyes.
“You are not to go out, Sherby.”
“Yes, I am,” Sherby announced firmly. “I’m going to get on Smoky and go someplace else.” He paused, thinking. “Down the mountain.” Smoky had been very unwilling to go down the cellar stairs, but Sherby felt pretty sure he would run faster down Lonely Mountain than up.
House said nothing more, but Sherby could hear people running and shouting downstairs. It sounded as if House was showing the party again, and Sherby told himself that if it sounded like the party it couldn’t really be as bad as House had been pretending.
It was hard to decide which toys and books to take; in the end he settled on the yo-yo with the blinky lights in its side and the copter, telling himself that he could make the copter fly after him when he didn’t want to carry it. He put on his big puffy down-filled coat, buttoned the easy buttons, slipped the yo-yo into one side pocket and the copter control into the other, and went out onto the landing again.
Knecht Rupprecht was there, standing at the head of the stairs—but a new Knecht Rupprecht, hideously transformed. Shreds of decaying flesh dangled from his skull face now, his eyes were spheres of fire, and he was taller than ever; in place of his bundle of switches he held a sword with a blade longer than Sherby and wider than Sherby’s whole body.
People were clustered at the foot of the stairs staring up at him, arguing and urging each other forward. After a second or two, Sherby decided it might be better to go down the back stairs to the kitchen, but as he was about to turn away something very strange happened to Knecht Rupprecht: he vanished, reappeared, roared so wildly that Sherby took three steps backward, dimmed, and dropped his sword.
The lights went out.
Something knocked Sherby down, and something else stepped on his fingers.
A flashlight beam danced on the ceiling before it too winked out.
Sherby tried to crawl on his hands and knees. Somebody tripped over him and said, “Shit! Oh, shit!”
Something was burning in the hall downstairs; from where he lay, Sherby could not see the flames, but he saw the red light of them and smelled smoke.
Thick, soft, warm arms scooped him up. “Little boy,” the owner of the arms said in a voice like a girl’s. “Little cute boy. Don’t cry.”
Outside the moon was up, and some of House’s security shutters were lying on the snow-covered flower beds. Behind them, their windows glowed with orange light. Thick black smoke was coming through the shutters over his mother’s and father’s bedroom windows.
Smoky galloped through a milling crowd of people. One threw a bottle at him, and there were popping noises. Smoky stumbled and fell, tried to get up, and fell again. Someone hit him with a snowball, and someone else with a big stick.
“You want to hit him, little boy?” the man holding Sherby asked. Sherby could feel the man’s whiskers scraping his ear. “You can hit him if you want to.”
Sherby said nothing, but the man set him down anyway. “You can hit him if you want to,” the man said again in his girl’s voice. “Go ahead.”
It would be better, Sherby thought, to do what they said. To be one. He got closer, not looking at the man behind him, stooped, and tried to scrape up enough of the trampled snow for a snowball. It stung his fingers and there wasn’t enough, so he found a rock and threw that instead.
The fat man picked him up again. “I’m going to call you Chris,” he told Sherby, “ ’cause you’re my Christmas present. You can call me Corporal Charlie, Chris.” He was bigger than anybody Sherby had ever seen before, not as tall as Knecht Rupprecht but wider than Sherby’s bed. “You come along with me, Chris. We’ll go on back to my van. You got cut, didn’t you?”
Sherby said, “Uh-huh.”
“I’ll put a little splash of iodine on that when we get back home. We—”
House’s roof fell in with a crash as he spoke. A great cloud of swirling sparks rose into the sky, and Sherby said, “Oooh!”
“Yeah, that’s somethin’, ain’t it? I seen it before. All these soldiers here are meaning to do some more, but you and me are going home.” Corporal Charlie chuckled. “We’ll take off our clothes and have some fun, Chris. Then we’ll go to bed.”
Corporal Charlie took up the whole front seat of the van, so Sherby rode in back with furniture and some dresses and a lot of other things. There was a thing there lying on some coats that Sherby recognized, and when he was sure that it was what he thought it was, he traded the copter control for it.
That night at Corporal Charlie’s house, when Corporal Charlie was asleep and Sherby was supposed to be asleep on Corporal Charlie’s smelly old sofa, Sherby got the thing he had found in the van out again. “Merry Christmas, Mouse,” he said to the shiny round lens in front. “It’s me, Sherby.”
But Mouse was quiet, still, and cold.
Sherby put her under the sofa cushion.
Christmas was funny, Sherby thought, snuggling underneath the coats. Christmas was happy and sad, green and red, real and fake, all mixed together. “I don’t like it,” he muttered to himself, but as soon as he had said it, he knew it was not true. He wished—somehow—that he had been nicer to Santa Claus, even if Santa Claus was not real.
Afterword
Do you know how M. R. James came to write all those great old ghost stories? He wrote one a year, no less and no more, to read to his family at Christmas. We associate ghost stories with Halloween now—see Neil Gaiman’s marvelous “October in the Chair”—but ghosts at Christmas are far older. The three seen by Ebenezer Scrooge are not the beginning but almost the end of a lengthy tradition. If you were to return as a ghost, wouldn’t you rather revisit your family at Christmas?
So I hope you noticed the ghosts, and that you noticed (as only a few readers do) that there is an anti-Santa, too. Poor Sherby rejects Santa Claus and gets someone much worse.
Bed and Breakfast
I know an old couple who live near Hell. They have a small farm, and to supplement the meager income it provides (and to use up its bounty of chickens, ducks, and geese, of beefsteak tomatoes, bull-nose peppers, and roastin’ ears) open their spare bedrooms to paying guests. From time to time, I am one of those guests.
Dinner comes with the room if one arrives before five, and leftovers, of which there are generally enough to feed two or three more persons, will be cheerfully warmed up afterward—provided that one gets there before nine, at which hour the old woman goes to bed. After nine (and I arrived long after nine last week) guests are free to forage in the kitchen and prepare whatever they choose for themselves.
My own choices were modest: coleslaw, cold chicken, fresh bread, country butter, and buttermilk. I was just sitting down to this light repast when I heard the doorbell ring. I got up, thinking to answer it and save the old man the trouble, and heard his limping gait in the hallway. There was a murmur of voices, the old man’s and someone else’s; the second sounded like a deep-voiced woman’s, so I remained standing.
Their conversation lasted longer than I had expected, and although I could not distinguish a single word, it seemed to me that the old man was saying, “No, no, no,” and the woman proposing various alternatives.
At length he showed her into the kitchen, tall and tawny haired, with a figure rather too voluptuous to be categorized as athletic, and one of those interesting faces that one calls beautiful only after at least half an hour of study; I guessed her age near thirty. The old man introduced us with rustic courtesy, told her to make herself at home, and went back to his book.
“He’s very kind, isn’t he?” she said. Her name was Eira something.
I concurred, callin
g him a very good soul indeed.
“Are you going to eat all that?” She was looking hungrily at the chicken. I assured her I would have only a piece or two. (I never sleep well after a heavy meal.) She opened the refrigerator, found the milk, and poured herself a glass that she pressed against her cheek. “I haven’t any money. I might as well tell you.”
That was not my affair, and I said so.
“I don’t. I saw the sign, and I thought there must be a lot of work to do around such a big house, washing windows and making beds, and I’d offer to do it for food and a place to sleep.”
“He agreed?” I was rather surprised.
“No.” She sat down and drank half her milk, seeming to pour it down her throat with no need of swallowing. “He said I could eat and stay in the empty room—they’ve got an empty room tonight—if nobody else comes. But if somebody does, I’ll have to leave.” She found a drumstick and nipped it with strong white teeth. “I’ll pay them when I get the money, but naturally he didn’t believe me. I don’t blame him. How much is it?”
I told her, and she said it was very cheap.
“Yes,” I said, “but you have to consider the situation. They’re off the highway, with no way of letting people know they’re here. They get a few people on their way to Hell, and a few demons going out on assignments or returning. Regulars, as they call them. Other than that”—I shrugged—“eccentrics like me and passersby like you.”
“Did you say Hell?” She put down her chicken leg.
“Yes. Certainly.”
“Is there a town around here called Hell?”
I shook my head. “It has been called a city, but it’s a region, actually. The Infernal Empire. Hades. Gehenna, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. You know.”
She laughed, the delighted crow of a large, bored child who has been entertained at last.
I buttered a second slice of bread. The bread is always very good, but this seemed better than usual.
“ ‘Abandon hope, you who enter here.’ Isn’t that supposed to be the sign over the door?”