The Saint

by Melanie Jackson

  Adora felt her mouth tighten. Every time she thought she had him more or less safely stowed in the sane column, Kris said something crazy like this. She could feel a pressure headache building in her skull. But . . .

  “My grandmother was a MacLeod. How did you—? Did you have me investigated?” she demanded. The idea was offensive, though she supposed it made sense, given that he was opening himself up to her, paying her a lot of money and trusting her with his secrets. He had a right to know if she was trustworthy.

  “No, there was no need,” he said. He leaned forward. “I read your books about Ninon and Byron, and that was recommendation enough. The rest is just a guess. But an informed guess. As I said, you have the look of the ancient MacLeods about you.”

  “You’ve read my books?” she asked, diverted. Very few people had.

  “Of course. Did you think that I selected your name out of a hat? The books were excellent,” he said enthusiastically. “You captured your subjects well. The portraits were uncanny. It was like seeing them alive again. Your empathy and ability to look into their souls, and to see the truth of them, is what convinced me you were right for this job.”

  “You . . . you knew them? Ninon de Lenclos and Byron?” He couldn’t possibly have known them— that was just part of his fantasy construction—but she found herself awaiting his answer anyway.

  “Of course.” Kris got up and began to prowl. “But then, I know everyone. And they apparently think that they know me!” he complained. “At least, by sight. Who would have thought that those Coca-Cola Santa illustrations would be so popular? Do you know why they decided to use my image in the first place?” He was conversation-leaping again. Adora began to wonder if he might have Attention Deficit Disorder.

  Among other problems, Joy suggested.

  “Uh . . . no, actually. Why did they choose you?”

  Adora wanted to ask why being a MacLeod made her a candidate for knowing his Christmas Eve travel secrets but knew Kris couldn’t be pinned down when he didn’t want. He was as slippery as an eel—a charming slippery eel, of course, but one that could still shock anyone foolish enough to get close.

  “Back in the nineteen thirties, Coca-Cola was made to a different formulation,” Kris explained.

  “I heard about that,” Adora interrupted, diverted as he had no doubt intended. “There was a rumor that Coke was made from coca leaves. You were supposed to add aspirin, and it would make you high.”

  “So I gather. Mind you, I’ve had to learn all this from research, since I was drugged out of my gourd and wandering the wastelands when it happened. Anyhow, advertising Coke to children was not allowed. So the company hired an artist called Haddon Sundblom—a smart man. Wish he was still alive, because I’d hire him myself. They had him come up with a campaign to make the drink more family friendly. I was his answer. Kids couldn’t be shown drinking Coke, but they could be painted bringing soda to me. It was a brilliant bit of iconography. Later the laws changed, but the advertising campaign was such a success that they went on using me—and that blasted red suit—until the nineteen sixties.”

  “Are you angry about that?”

  He sighed. “I wasn’t thrilled at first. I hadn’t tried Coke and was suspicious of its ingredients. Besides, they made me fat in those paintings! But I’ve lately found it an enjoyable beverage, so I won’t kick too much—especially since I do drink it, and they were using an image that was mostly a construct and will shortly be replaced.”

  Adora raised her eyebrows. “You sound surprisingly cheerful and complacent about this identity hijacking. I mean, if nothing else, the whole red-suit-and-reindeer thing could be seen as your intellectual property. I would think that such merchandising would have you frothing at the mouth. Aren’t they profaners of the holiday?” She herself had always thought so. Not that her family had celebrated Christmas with any regularity, but the rampant commercialism had always bothered her.

  “Minor sin. It’s all water under the bridge.” He waved a careless hand. “And why not be cheerful? After all, you’re beginning to believe in me—just a bit here and there,” he pointed out happily. “Pretty soon you’ll stop thinking of me as a schizophrenic and see me as a man.”

  His words made her blink. Had she been too obvious about distrusting his mental state?

  Maybe he’s reading your mind, Joy suggested.

  Are you kidding?

  I don’t know.

  “I may stop seeing you as schizophrenic, but I doubt you’ll ever be just a man,” Adora said, getting up and going to the window. Kris was making her restless. She couldn’t get a handle on him. It was like herding a pack of cats; she wanted to tie him up and inject him with sodium pentothal so he’d sit still and answer any questions she asked.

  At least you aren’t swallowing his bullshit hook, line and sinker, Joy said.

  “I gather from your agent’s comments to Pennywyse that you greatly prize your privacy. He seems surprised you agreed to stay on. I’m pleased, of course,” Kris announced to her back. Once again, he seemed more interested in hearing her story than telling his own. Normally Adora would enjoy such a novelty, but this situation was far, far from normal.

  “ ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ ” she quoted glibly. “Not everyone likes the limelight.”

  “In some cases, you may be right,” Kris answered quietly. “About the fences. Some races have never gotten the knack of playing together and should be separated until they have some spiritual growth spurts.” Then he brightened, adding, “Fortunately for us, I play well with everyone. I truly think you’ll be happy here when you stop fighting reason and accept who we are and what we’re doing.”

  That was the second time he had said that—we. She didn’t know how to answer him.

  “Um, speaking of other races,” she said, glancing out the crack in the curtains and looking down in astonishment at the suddenly thronging Rodeo Drive. The day was beginning to change colors with the sunset, and everything was colored by soft rose light. That was unusual enough, but the creatures so backlit were truly unique. “Kris? Did you know that there are a number of naked greenish people running through the street—and that many of them have more arms than they should?”

  “Those would be goblins going through species reassignment,” he replied calmly.

  “Species reassignment? Are you kidding?” She turned to look at him.

  “In L.A., it’s popular to look human—you get more work in film and television. Many other hives do it as well, at least the ones that want human tourism. Goblins in those hives have to make a choice: If they want to live aboveground and interact with humans, they have to have surgery. It’s understandable, but what a shame. I mean, what an awful message to send to your people. Bad enough that humans are convinced the height of beauty is an anorexic fourteen-year-old girl, or a barely pubescent boy who is nearly androgynous and likely hooked on heroin. Now they’ve got the lutins striving for the look too!” He sighed. “Anyhow, this is their last swarm as unmutilated goblins.”

  “I see.” Adora stared, both fascinated and repelled. Their four arms made the goblins look a bit insectlike. “But . . . why are they naked?”

  “Well, you’ve heard of the running of the bulls in Spain, which is used as a rite to prove your courage?”

  “Yes, but that’s in Pamplona. And last I heard, the runners are clothed in that event.”

  Kris laughed. “Well, this is southern California. And it’s the running of the trolls, who are also naked. You may notice some humans down there as well. It’s a popular cross-species event, beloved by modern Los Angelinos. It isn’t my cup of tea, but I can’t completely condemn anything promoting interspecies bonding.”

  “Looks like a sport for drunks, fools and suicides. Good heavens! What’s that? A troll? But it’s huge. How can anything be that big and walk on two legs?”

  “It takes all kinds,” Kris said, finally moving to the window and twitching the drapes aside. Adora could smell his scent, the
damp green of an ancient forest with a touch of bonfire. It was the kind of smell that made her want to bury her face in his neck and breathe deeply. “Yes, that is a troll—a young one. They don’t let the adults out in public anymore. There’s a limit to how much aboveground mayhem the city government will tolerate—and be lieve me, a troll frenzy is as much mayhem as anyone can handle.”

  “I see.” Adora took herself away from the temptation of her employer’s cologne and went back to the table. But once there, she found herself disinclined to sit down. She had definitely picked up some of his nervous energy. She began to pace. “Where were we?” She glanced at her notebook. “Oh, right. You are rumored to have a naughty-and-nice list. What exactly do you have to do to get on the naughty list? Does it have to be a capital crime? Or was Grandma right—will a messy bedroom and dirt behind the ears get you there?”

  “Sin,” Kris answered, startling her. She turned to look at him. His craggy face was as serious as she had seen it. “Sin gets you on the naughty list.”

  “You believe in sin? Even if you aren’t a saint or a Christian?” she asked, trying to hide her surprise. And annoyance. She just couldn’t get this guy pegged, and it was making her crazy. Well, something was.

  “Yes. However, unlike many religious types, I believe that there is no sin except one—or perhaps that all sins are the same one.”

  “Explain, please. You can’t mean original sin. That would be too unoriginal.”

  Kris smiled a little at her joke. “Each of us has something special within us—let’s call it Divinity. We are born touched by this Grace—by Gaia, which is the old name for this Divine Love. It tells us what is right and what is wrong. It is what feels compassion and lets us love other people. To deny this grace, this voice, which is in all living things, that is sin.

  “You have asked who is on the naughty list. At the very top are the hollow men: they who dress up in the Season’s holy robes but spread emptiness instead of cheer. They who do not believe in love, but only in money and power and fear. I know that some act in ignorance, and because they have never known the true light. But whether done out of ignorance or malice, they must be stopped before they ruin other souls with their bleak vision. There will never be peace on earth as long as our leaders have fear and greed in their hearts.”

  Kris’s voice was firm, almost grim. Adora swallowed.

  “These hollow men—don’t you mean the merchandisers as well as the politicians? The ones who have taken your image and used it to sell things? While you are fairly tolerant, you can’t actually approve of the modern idea that you have to buy Christmas at a store.”

  Kris sighed. “It is the brains behind the merchandisers—as well as behind other things— that I despise. They are the puppet masters. Many have profaned the holiday, or tried to kill it altogether. The vendors themselves are simply parasites come to feast on a sickening body. But we ailed long before this. In fact, it all started once Constantine entered the picture. It was then that the old religions fell hard, and they are slow getting back up.”

  “So Constantine along with—oh, let’s say that puritan Cromwell—would be on the naughty list?”

  “Oh, definitely—when they were alive. Especially Cromwell. Christmas has rarely had a greater enemy.” Kris shook his head, looking thoughtful. “I think he grew up mean because he was so very ugly in an unforgiving society. There is a saying about that.”

  “ ‘Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly is to the bone?’ ” Adora suggested.

  “Something like that—except in Latin, and it referenced the soul and not the skeleton.”

  Adora nodded. “What happens to those on the naughty list?” she asked, morbid curiosity getting the better of her. “Do they get coal in their stockings?”

  “That depends. Often I am especially kind to the errant person’s spouse and children.” Kris grinned. “Winning their kids’ love and devotion usually pisses them off.”

  “Hm. Devious, but I like it.” Adora scribbled down notes. She could use this. It made Kris seem clever and clearly nonviolent. That was good in a kook. “So, going back the capitalistic beat of Christmas in modern America. You said in your notes that you encouraged Washington Irving and Dickens to write about the giving of earthly things—of commerce, really. Isn’t some of this your fault?”

  Kris gave her a piercing look. “I will assume you are playing devil’s advocate and aren’t really blind to the difference between charitable giving and conspicuous consumption that does nothing but fatten the body and deplete one’s coffers. Speaking of the Devil, have I told you how I won the services of Black Peter in Holland?” His conversation, which reminded Adora of a hard-thrown Superball, bounced on to the next topic. He needed Ritalin. “No? Well, another day. But as for the misguided people trying to find Christmas at the mall—don’t blame that on me. At no point did I tell the masses to go and worship at the House of Nike or the Gap—though I like their clothes well enough. Damn, I don’t want to sound like I’m condemning them.”

  Adora leaned over and wrote down both names and then: possible endorsements?

  “And I have never said: Have a merry Christmas, and now go forth and buy presents you can’t afford for people you secretly despise—though giving to our enemies can be a valuable lesson.” Kris shook his head. “And Goddess be my witness—I never told anyone to make fruitcake, let alone inflict it on their family and friends annually.”

  Adora bit back a smile. Kris saw—he always saw—and his face relaxed. His eerie blue eyes began to twinkle. Adora sat down again. She turned the page in her notebook.

  “I’ll tell you something that sounds funny after that speech,” Kris confided. “You actually can find Christmas at the mall. You can find it anywhere if you look with the heart. It’s just that you can’t buy it. Some things, like love, are not for sale.”

  “Any other dark confessions or trade secrets?” Adora asked, leaning forward. She looked intently at his shadowed face. The sun was nearly gone, but Kris hadn’t turned on any lights. Perhaps it was easier to share secrets—and believe them—if the room wasn’t too brightly lit.

  “Just one.” He also leaned forward. There came the spark of electricity that only happened when two people recognized the potential attraction between them. Kris blinked once, then said in a hushed voice, “Please don’t tell a soul, but I like some fruitcake. Missus Etta Dixon used to bake one for me when I came through Savannah. It was stupendous. But I can’t encourage consumption by the masses. Like fireworks, fruitcakes should be left in the hands of those who are trained to make them.”

  Adora became aware that she was watching Kris smile with a little too much fascination, and she forced herself to lean back, providing a professional distance.

  “I’ll never tell a soul—cross my heart and hope to die. What happened to the reindeer, anyway?” she asked, changing the subject, half-hoping to trip him up or find a hole in his story. But she was only half-hoping; she didn’t really want to find out that he was a con man looking for some way to make a buck or influence the more gullible segments of the population. Of course, that left insanity as his motivator, didn’t it? Which wasn’t a great option either. Adora sighed. She had to hope for some acceptable undiscovered motivation to surface. “There were flying reindeer, weren’t there? That wasn’t all made up?”

  “Yes. I had to give up the horses when I moved to Finland. That was after my gig in Asia Minor. Sadly, some of these reindeer became venison steaks.”

  Adora was shocked at his words, and also annoyed with herself for feeling shock. After all, none of this was real.

  “You ate Vixen?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kris replied. “The goblins ate them, after they fed me their filthy drug and left me to die. They didn’t get Vixen, though. Clever girl, she got away.”

  Adora hurriedly changed the subject. She still wasn’t ready to hear about bad goblins. The good ones running naked through the street were weird enoug
h.

  “Was the now-lamented red suit your idea?” she asked.

  Kris shook his head.

  “Not entirely. Clement Moore advised it. It was a nice blend of the red of Saint Nicholas and the fur robe of the pagan shaman. A bit flashy for my tastes, but even then I understood the power of the right icon when it came to capturing human imagination. And we needed a powerful icon.” Kris shook his head. “Since Cromwell and his Puritans had done such an excellent job of wiping out the few Celebrants who survived the Inquisition—he killed some thirty thousand ‘witches’ and drove the rest into deep hiding—it was necessary to revive the old symbols here in the New World. Thankfully, ancestral memory supplied a spiritual understanding for those who were descended of the Celebrants. I could sense the reawakening in the land, and it encouraged me when the task of reinventing Christmas looked too daunting.”

  “Celebrants? You’ve used that word twice. What does it mean? The Puritans weren’t Celebrants?”

  “No, poor creatures. They couldn’t celebrate. They didn’t know it, but they were terribly impover-ished, spiritually speaking. As for understanding what a Celebrant is, I’ll give you some of the fey holy texts—the Fey Bioball Na Sidhe—to read. Basically, Celebrants were those humans—mainly what you would call pagans, though some Christians were also of this ilk—who saw Divinity in the natural world all around them, who knew joy every day, with or without prayer. Celebrants don’t have a coherent religion really. For them, God is everything. This tends to annoy more organized religions.”

  “God is everywhere,” she said, recalling her brief Sunday school teachings.

  “Precisely. Now, Worshippers are men and women who strayed from the old relationship with Nature, and who now require enforced worship— what we might term the magical ceremony of a church, and the prayers of a middleman, a priest, to get outside of themselves long enough to connect with their Creator. It’s sad that it happened, but not unexpected. Worshippers have always been organized souls, and it was natural that they should evolve their religion indoors and make it tidy and clean.” Kris spread his hands. “The trouble really began when they locked their idea of God into a house of prayer, as though fearing that thieves might steal their Deity when their backs were turned. But out of sight, out of mind—and they often forgot him anytime they weren’t inside their portals. I say Him because the Worshippers also forgot that Divinity is both male and female. They created idols too, and some arrogantly gave Divinity human shape—male human shape. Frankly, I found the Worshippers’ insistence on a human-looking male god annoying, because it is so exclusionary of other races. I nearly gave up on them more than once. But that estrangement ended with the coming of the Son.”