know!’ It was not often that 105 allowed anger to take control of him, but he was near breaking point now. One friend was missing, another had been brutally attacked, he himself had been assaulted and then fired through time and space – and all by the devil who currently stood, gloating, beside him. Allowing himself no time to think, he swung a fist at the demon who, evidently not expecting the attack, stumbled backwards before following with a satisfying thump to the hard ground. 105 towered over him, his fists still clenched, and willed him to stand up, so that he could knock him back down again. But Pitch stayed where he was. In fact all he did was hold the portal up above his head and mutter some words under his breath.
Instantly, the portal flared orangely. Through the miasma of colors,105 could faintly make out a busy sidewalk and people rushing past, about their important business. Pitch tilted the portal to one side and a store front appeared. Quixanos! 105 stepped forward, reaching out , but Pitch leaned back and whispered a new phrase. The portal closed and became a poorly hewn chunk of wood once more. ‘I am not so strong here as I will be in the future,’ Pitch said, with no trace of a smile. ‘But I am the only person on this entire planet who can work the portal and take you home. I suggest, therefore, that you refrain from violent assault for now. Too sharp a blow could knock that knowledge straight out of my head.’
‘So tell me what’s going on!’ 105 managed to unclench his fists, but could not entirely rid himself of the rage which had surged through him like molten lead, leaving him burned up inside. He lowered his voice. ‘You seem to want me to trust you, but so far you’ve given me no reason to do so. You tell me that in time I will understand, that I will one day applaud your aims, but that day is not today. Today you have shown me a beast who you claim is an old friend, that is all.’ He was becoming heated again, but he didn’t care. This needed to be said. ‘Explain yourself now or, portal or not, I will be forced to take action to make you explain.’
He fell silent, and waited as the silence grew between them. Pitch looked up and down, from the portal to 105 and back again. If 105 had expected cunning and lies, he was to be disappointed, because it was plain that the demon was simply searching for the right words. Once, twice he opened his mouth to speak, then choked off the first word out of his mouth and lapsed back into silent thought. Finally he placed the portal carefully beside him and began to speak.
‘The man you know as Nick, and the children of the world call Santa Claus, is my oldest companion. I have known him...well, forever – or so it seems to me. Certainly, I can remember no point in my life where he was not also present, nor a time before him. In fact, in many ways it is simplest to say that he is me. Part of me, anyway.
‘You’ve heard it said that without darkness there can be no light? Equally, without evil there can be no good. Goodness requires evil to give it shape, to provide a contrast against which it is visible. I give good old Nick contrast. I am the background against which he exists, the part of the image which is not him, the backdrop which is cropped and discarded, unnoticed until someone takes it away and suddenly nothing has shape any longer.
‘But it wasn’t always like that ... like this. Once we were close. Closer than friends, closer than lovers, even. Once we were that savage you just watched.’
He held up a hand to stall the several questions which 105 was desperate to ask. ‘Let me finish, please, then you may ask as many questions as you wish and I will do my best to answer them truthfully and in full.’
He traced a finger round the rim of the portal. ‘This is very difficult for me, Señor. Until this moment, I have never told anyone any of this, for many reasons. For one thing, it’s a difficult concept to accept with no evidence and until those dear sweet ladies sent this delightfully utilitarian portal to me I had no way of proving anything I said. For another, there seemed little purpose in telling anyone. Even if I were to be believed, what difference would it make? He would still be Santa Claus, I would still be the Devil. Plus, when all’s said and done, I am known as the Prince of Lies. That does tend to cramp my ability to tell a credible story somewhat.’
He laughed, looking up at 105 and inviting him to join in, but the wrestler said nothing. He remained uncertain about what Pitch was saying, but he could not deny that he was intrigued and was willing to listen a little longer.
Pitch allowed the laugh to die away with a shrug. ‘Understand that I meant what I said to be taken quite literally. The sweet, white bearded old duffer and myself; we are one and the same person. Or were once.’
He closed his eyes, as though suddenly tired. But 105 knew he was remembering, recalling some experience from his own dim and distant past, some key moment which he had locked away for a very long time, but which he now needed to hand.
Without opening his eyes, the demon continued. ‘I – we – …I was a powerful man amongst the Jisa. That’s the name of the people you saw, the Jisa. Worshippers of the jaguar and the cayman; pacifists, a holy people. For a thousand years the Jisa existed here, without a single conflict. No war, no battles, nothing. We didn’t even have weapons, Señor. People came from all over Peru to this village to worship and give thanks. Mothers prayed that their sons might become priests and learn the holy mysteries. Men proved their manhood as they walked the dark paths under the temple, with the jaguar roaring in their ears and the cayman waiting to reveal itself.’ He sighed, and 105 could hear a long, long time passing in the sound. Against his will he was finding it difficult to dislike this new Pitch. He lowered himself to the ground as the demon went on.
‘In any case, I was one of the priests. No, not just one; the highest of all. It was I who administered the juice of the cactus to worshippers and led the luckiest ones into the darkness, I who walked the canals deep underground and tended to the needs of the gods. I was a proud man, and not a particularly good one, but neither was I an especially evil one.’
He looked 105 straight in the eye, and held the look until the wrestler became uncomfortable. His voice was barely louder than a whisper, drowning in grief and loss. ‘And then the strangers came in their ships of fire! Loud were the lamentations of our women as the temples burned and priests died in their unholy flame!’ He covered his face with his hands. 105 could hear the unmistakable sounds of weeping coming from between his fingers and took a step towards the demon……who opened his hands and shouted ‘boo!’ into the wrestler’s mask.
Pitch’s laugh was surprisingly deep and warm. ‘Sorry – I simply couldn’t resist that. I knew you were just the sort of do-gooder to buy the superstitious peasant routine - even after we fell a couple of thousand years back through time via a chunk of wood and I told you that I used to be the high priest of an ancient Peruvian culture.’ 105 growled in annoyance.
‘More prosaically, what happened was that aliens arrived. We had no idea what was going on, of course. We never worshipped the Sun or anything of that sort. All our gods were the spirits of animals, not the type of thing very likely to descend from the sky. So when the men of the nearby villages came to me, I was as confused and frightened as they.
‘I could tell them nothing useful, especially after our own men began to turn on one another. A villager would be sitting in front of his house, speaking to a neighbor, and then out of nowhere he would pick up a rock from the ground and strike and kill his friend. I had no idea what to do or say, so I disappeared into the darkness beneath the temple – to pray for guidance, I told myself. I walked the banks of the underground canals for days. I think that the largest part of me was simply terrified. I hid behind my jaguar headdress while my world was being destroyed above my head.
‘I believe that I lost my mind a little then. All I can say with certainty is that I ripped my robes from my body and, naked, ran deeper and deeper into the underground tunnels. At some point I found myself sitting by a canal, staring into it, watching the water ripple and twist. A face appeared in the disturbed water and it see
med entirely natural. A jaguar face attached to the body of a snake. Come to judge me. I prostrated myself, closed my eyes and waited for the god – what else could it be? – to strike me down for my cowardice. I lay that way for hours, too scared to move, or even blink. Eventually part of me realised that I couldn’t lie there forever, but I was still too afraid to risk the wrath of the gods. All this time I had kept a hold of my ceremonial thorn studded whip. Thinking to offer up myself as a sacrifice – which should give you some idea of how far from sanity I had wandered; human sacrifice is anathema to us – I began to whip my bare flesh, eyes still tight shut. I could feel my blood flowing down my back, along my arms, on the back of my legs; everywhere I could reach. I suspect I would have bled to death had it not been for a sound I heard, there in the deep tunnels where nothing lived.
‘It was the softest of sounds, such as a woman might make brushing a floor, then another like a poorly rooted plant being pulled from the ground. A pop. Then another and another. Something was there in the darkness with me and that scared me even more than the god in the water. I opened my eyes.
‘Standing round me, glowing greenly in the dark, were a dozen children. Yes, Señor, the ones you saw appear at the village. Where they came from and who brought them to me, I can’t say even now, because I don’t know. But they were clearly intended to be put to some use. I ran straight out of the temple, right past the statue of the cayman and the jaguar, not stopping until I was back at the entrance to the underground sections. And the whole time I ran, the green children ran with me. Somehow I knew they intended me no harm.
‘When I emerged from the temple, the heat of the midday sun was beating down on the main square. Everything was blurred and painfully white to my eyes. I fear I stumbled forward into the center of the clearing, alternately groaning and shouting. Of course my people recoiled from me. My hair and beard had turned white while I was underground. I was naked and coated in blood and twelve spirits followed in my wake. The villagers were terrified; surely they thought this was a new weapon of the invaders.’
‘One man dared approach me. I could just about make his face out as my eyes became used to the light once more. My little green followers snapped and snarled at him, but still he came forward, with his arms reaching towards me and his palms open. He was a brave man, that one. When he was a matter of feet from me, he stopped and said my name. How he had recognised me under the blood and filth which covered me I do not know, but as he said my name sanity returned to me and I was able to speak to him, to all the villagers gathered round. I knew that the gods had given me the green men as a weapon to fight the invaders and I knew – as though I had always known, though I was also paradoxically aware that I had never known it until that moment - that some of the invaders had hidden themselves in the bodies of my own people.
‘The instant I had this thought, the green men left my side and, as one creature, ran into the crowd. One man, someone I had known all my life, tried to run but the green men - my little devils – surrounded him. They threw themselves at him. They clambered all over him, like mountain goats, and everywhere they went they bit into him. He fell to the dirt and was covered in a cloud of dust so that we could see nothing except one exposed foot, twitching and kicking. And then it was over. All that remained of the man was a mess of bones and my little devils were gone.’
He fell silent. 105 could see in his face how painful he found all these memories, and wondered again what exactly had happened to turn the vicious, feral devil of the Pole into a man he was beginning to trust and, unbelievably, like. ‘So you started to fight back?’ he asked, keen to nudge Pitch’s mind onto more positive times.
‘I would love to say so,’ the red man replied. ‘But in fact it took me some time to figure out that the little devils only came when summoned by blood. Even then, they could only kill one alien at a time – and each time they did, we too lost a man. You saw how it was. One of the Jisa would be suspected of infection. He – or she – would be brought to me and I would strike them until they bled. When the devils came, they would know the truth. If infected, that villager would die. If not, they would disappear into the night, and another infected villager would die instead. Either way, they would not rest until they had killed. But it wasn’t enough and hurt us at least as much as it hurt the invaders.’
‘Did you not also attack these alien invaders yourselves?’ Señor 105 interrupted.
Pitch shook his head. ‘I told you. We were a peaceful, pacifist people, without even the propensity for violence or aggression. We tried, but even when the invaders attacked one of our villages in force, we were defeated. Hard enough to fight when centuries of peace have removed the desire to kill from your psyche, worse still to fight and kill men and women who you have known all of your life.’
‘So what did you do? I have studied ancient cultures all of my life, but I have never heard of the Jisa. Were you eventually completely overcome? More importantly, what became of you and Nick?’ 105 had found Pitch’s tale fascinating, but he was also keenly aware that he was supposed to be rescuing his old friend, not listening to folk tales from the ‘man’ who had stolen him away. ‘Just where is Nick?’ he asked, as angry at himself as Pitch. ‘Why did you take him?’
Pitch sensed the shift in 105’s mood. The change he had felt come over him when he followed the masked wrestler through the portal was something he was still trying to come to terms with, but he couldn’t deny that it felt good to once again be thinking and not just reacting. Already he could barely recall how it felt to be a beast. If he concentrated he could recall events from his recent past, but motivations, desires? Those were gone, like mist in the morning.
He remembered surprising Nick at the Pole, for instance. He had swept into the workshop like a flash fire, destroying everything in his path as he ferreted out his target. He had found him in the rear grotto, standing unafraid in the open, pushing little elves behind him and daring Pitch with his eyes to harm them. Double dare you, fat man.
‘What happened to us?’ he said finally, not catching 105’s eye. ‘We...became divorced from one another.’ He laughed, but where that laugh had earlier been suffused with warmth, now it was brittle and cold. ‘We were losing, it was as straight-forward as that. We taught ourselves to fight, but could not teach ourselves to kill enemies who looked like our brothers, our sisters, our mothers. My little devils did what they could but it was never enough. They killed without compassion, true, but for every infected man they killed, two more took his place. Unless we could steal ourselves to slaughter our own, we were doomed.
‘I returned to the spot where I had been given the devils and prayed for guidance – for further help, if truth be told. I flagellated myself until the dirt beneath me was a brownish-red paste, but no god spoke to me. Finally, I passed out with the pain. And lying there unconscious, I had a dream.
‘The snake with the head of a jaguar spoke to me in my dream. It said to me that I was doomed. It said that I must die if my people were to survive, that I must be ripped in two as a sacrifice. I protested. I have done all that I can, I said to the snake. I brought the little devils from the darkness into the light and set them on the invaders. I taught the men of the villages to fight. I shed the blood of Jisa I have known my entire life. What more, I said, do you want of me? How will my death help anyone?
‘The snake just licked its jaguar tongue over its lips and slid closer to me. I could feel its hot breath on my face, and its scales rubbing against my skin. You will not be dead forever, it said. Only while it is necessary.
‘Necessary? I said in my dream and the word broke down into shapes in the air which were swallowed by the snake. Part of you is needed, it said. A sacrifice is needed. And as it spoke, its words too crumbled into pieces in the air and this time I swallowed them and understood their meaning.’
105 had been frozen to the spot while Pitch talked but now, as the demon pi
cked up the portal again, he came to himself once more. There were times he wondered whether Pitch could be hypnotising him. He leaned forward and placed a warning hand on Pitch’s arm. He could not allow himself to take the red man at face value. ‘Understood what meaning?’ he asked.
Pitch frowned at the wrestler. ‘What I needed to do to save my people, of course. But what is it they say? Show don’t tell.’ He ran a long finger over the edge of the portal and began to whisper just beneath his breath.
‘What are you doing with that?’ 105 asked, endeavouring to keep the suspicion in his voice to a minimum. If he were to find out what happened to Nick, he needed to keep Pitch on his side.
Pitch had no time to reply, even if he wished to. Before he could say a word, the portal coloured and blurred. He grabbed hold of 105's sleeve and stepped through, pulling the dumbfounded wrestler behind him.
Everything became confused and 105 felt consciousness slip away from him again. His last thought, before blackness set in, was to wonder why he felt he could trust the Devil himself...
Nothing had changed when he woke to find himself propped up against a tree, with Pitch holding a cup out to him. The liquid it contained tasted of hazelnuts and wasn't unpleasant. He drank it down in a single draft, then handed the cup back. 'Where are we now?' he asked.
Pitch said nothing, but pointed to an out-cropping of rock which topped a nearby rise in the ground. They were in a long, oval hollow 105 realised as he stood and moved up the gentle slope. At Pitch's insistent whisper he dropped to his stomach before cresting the incline, feeling his companion do the same. They shuffled forward the final few feet and peered over the rim of the hill.
The same village 105 had observed earlier lay exposed like roadkill before them. Huts were no more than blackened sticks leaning at angles to the ground. Fires burned here and there, their fuel nearly exhausted. The corpse of a dog half lay on a dirty blanket. The large building from which Nick had previously emerged still stood, in part at least, but the roof was gone and one wall had slid to the ground. 105 made to stand up, but Pitch held him down with one powerful red hand. 'Wait' he said, quietly.
Two figures appeared from behind the semi-ruined building. One was obviously the Hairy Man, the man who
Senor 105 and the Secret Santa Page 9
