Secret Santa

by Andrew Shaffer

  Could this place be any quainter?

  The double doors at the top of the stairs opened into a waiting area staffed by a blue-haired woman older than Cthulhu. The fourth floor was even more resplendent than the entryway, if such a thing were possible. The floor-to-ceiling windows were draped with heavy red velvet curtains, which looked like they’d been stripped from a Hammer film set. The wood-paneled walls were lined with built-in bookcases. She imagined she was looking at first editions of every novel Blackwood-Patterson had published since its inception in 1947. The room smelled like dried glue and dusty paper…the smell of old books. The smell of happiness.

  Blackwood-Patterson hadn’t been on her short list of places to work. It hadn’t even been on her long list. But this…this was beyond all expectations. She was going to cry if she didn’t get this job. This was as old-school publishing as you could get, a holdover from an era she’d only heard tall tales of. The skyscrapers of Midtown had nothing on the Blackwood Building. If the employees were even half as charming, this was a place she could see herself working for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Lussi was shown into Mr. Blackwood’s office, she found him seated behind a green leather-topped mahogany desk, his white hair in a perfect widow’s peak. If his secretary was ancient, then he was positively prehistoric. Mr. Blackwood made no move to rise. Instead, he motioned for her to take a seat across from him.

  “Miss Meyer.” His voice was cool yet polite.

  The enormous club chair made her feel smaller than her five-foot-two frame. As she struggled to get comfortable, he stared at her over long, steepled fingers.

  “This won’t take long,” he said. “I can already tell you won’t do.”

  She stopped fussing around. “I’m sorry, I think I misheard you.”

  He held up a sheaf of paper, which trembled in his liver-spotted hand. “I’ve interviewed all ten of you to make Agnes happy. But I’m afraid I’ve already chosen our new editor. He’s very qualified. A Skull and Bones man, like myself. No need to prolong the inevitable. You may go.”

  Lussi was dumbstruck. She couldn’t believe it. She refused to. She hadn’t spent the last of her checking account to get her bangs professionally trimmed and feathered only to be kicked to the curb after half a minute.

  “Mr. Blackwood, forgive me, but you’re making a big mistake.” His eyebrows shot up. Encouraged by his shock, she continued. “When was the last time a Blackwood-Patterson book hit the Times list?”

  “I have the feeling you’re about to tell me.”

  “August 1984. Over two years ago. And that was only for one week before dropping off. Before that, another two years. Now, I don’t know about my competition, but during the past five years at Broken Angel, I’ve had thirteen New York Times best sellers.”

  He sighed heavily and held out his hand. “Your resume, please?”

  She whisked another copy out of her purse. Good thing she’d run off enough to paper the town.

  He perused it with a blank face. “Let’s take a look at your work…The Kitchen Demon? A marital drama, I assume.”

  It was a novel about a possessed kitchen mixer.

  “Something like that,” she said. “It debuted at number eight on the paperback list and hung on for three months.”

  “Paperbacks,” he muttered, as if it were a swear word. “We’re in the hardcovers business here. Who is this…Nightingale? Fabien Nightingale? That’s not the gentleman with the long hair on the bodice rippers, is it?”

  She almost laughed—the thought of Fabien on the cover of a romance novel was too much. He wrote like Edgar Allan Poe, dressed like Oscar Wilde, and drank like William Faulkner. “I believe you’re thinking of Fabio.”

  Mr. Blackwood rolled his eyes. “And this Randall Daubins…his book is called Satan’s Lament? As in, the movie Satan’s Lament?”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  He shook his head. “My son asked me to take him to it. I did a little research on it, first—the New Yorker review was enough for me to know it wasn’t appropriate viewing material for him.”

  “How old is your son?”

  “Thirty-five,” he said. “I’m glad you like your work at this Broken Angel. You can continue to do it. There. Not here.”

  “I can’t,” she said, hating how desperate she sounded. “Harper acquired us this summer. I was let go in September, along with half the editorial staff.”

  There. Now that she’d said it, she felt better. It wasn’t like she’d been fired. She’d been let go. It wasn’t her fault, but she still felt like she’d been dumped. Her laid-off coworkers had mostly landed on their feet. They were now scattered among the other large corporate publishers, where the right connections and Ivy League credentials guaranteed you a job. For a Midwest girl who had never been that great at playing the game, there were no guarantees. No guarantees, and no interviews.

  “That’s unfortunate, Miss Meyer,” Mr. Blackwood said. “But you’re a smart gal. You’ve done your research. What made you think you were even remotely qualified for this position?”

  She dug her nails into her palms. True, Blackwood-Patterson hadn’t been her first or even tenth choice. They were old-fashioned, snooty. They pumped out depressing literary fiction about middle-aged men who masturbated and cried. Sometimes, the men also cheated on their wives and cried. So, yeah, she’d applied as a last resort, only after striking out everywhere else. But just because her past was in genre publishing didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of editing different types of books.

  “Cat got your tongue, Miss Meyer?” Mr. Blackwood said. He held her resume up between his thumb and index finger, as if it were a used tissue. “Tell me,” he said slowly, enunciating each syllable as if he was talking to a very stupid child, “did you really think you had a shot, when all you’ve worked on is this…tripe?”

  “Tripe?” she repeated. Horror was the hottest genre in the industry. The unholy trinity of horror—King, Straub, and Rice—were in a three-way competition to see who could kill the most trees. You’d have to be a fool to not see how commercial “tripe” had become. “Forget my own books. What about Rosemary’s Baby? Is that ‘tripe’? I don’t suppose you’ve even read Shirley Jackson. If you’d only open your eyes—”

  He raised a cadaverous hand to silence her. “One need not read a book to make an informed opinion about its content. Just as one does not need to eat McDonald’s to know such ‘food’ is unfit for human consumption.”

  She straightened her spine. If he was going to be that way, then…

  “Mr. Blackwood,” she began, “you wouldn’t know a good book if it walked into your office and…and took a bite out of your cold black heart.”

  They stared at each other for a long beat.

  “Young lady,” he said finally, “you’ve been reading too many horror novels. Good day.”

  Lussi scooted off the chair. She was seething…seething and embarrassed. Had she really thought she could convince an old codger like Mr. Blackwood that her track record in the industry was anything more than a joke?

  As she spun on her heel to leave, the toe of her Mary Jane caught in a fold of the vast area rug, sending her tumbling, arms splayed, into a bookcase. She caught herself on the lip of an eye-level shelf with her fingertips, but almost immediately fell backward, taking the shelf and its contents with her. She landed on her backside, surrounded by Mr. Blackwood’s books and trinkets.

  He didn’t even lean over the desk to see if she was okay. “Agnes will clean that up,” she heard him say in an unperturbed tone.

  She sat up. She was uninjured, but thoroughly humiliated. Was this building trying to kill her? She was getting to her feet when a tipped-over black box caught her eye. She turned it right side up, and nearly squealed with delight at what she found underneath the lid.

  “Wow,” she said, picking up a
weathered, handmade doll with strikingly odd features. An electric charge of recognition ran up her spine. “I had one of these when I was a kid. My grandmother brought it over from Germany. It’s supposed to drive away evil spirits, right?”

  Everything was made of plastic these days. Not Mr. Blackwood’s doll. Like Oma’s, this one had a torso and appendages fashioned from a long-haired animal pelt. The gray-black fur was matted and gunky with age. Its devil-like face, carved of wood, was just as hideous as the one she remembered, right down to the double set of horns made of polished bone.

  Germans were into some strange shit.

  No wonder Lussi had grown up to be a horror fan.

  “Warding off evil is one of the many…unusual properties of the Perchten,” Mr. Blackwood said, pronouncing the German word like a native speaker. “PAIRK-ten.” The plural of Percht. Lussi and her sister had never mastered the pronunciation. They’d simply called Oma’s doll “Perky.”

  “I used to make him marry Skipper,” Lussi said, lost in her reminiscence. “Barbie had Ken, but poor Skipper was always so lonely. I guess she was only in junior high. Not that Perky—”

  “The Perchten are not toys,” Mr. Blackwood said, reaching over her shoulder and ripping it away. He stuffed the doll back into its box and set it high on the bookshelf. One of its hairy arms was sticking out from under the lid, as if it didn’t want to let her go.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Blackwood,” she stammered. “If I broke anything, I’ll buy you—”

  “Leave,” he said, falling back into his chair. He held one hand with the other, failing to mask a slight tremor. Was he shaking from anger, or something else?

  There was no point in her saying more. If she wasn’t going to get the job before, she certainly wasn’t going to now. The man in charge was mercurial. Ill-tempered. Was this what working in the world of dreary, too-serious literary fiction did to you? If so, she’d dodged a silver bullet.

  “Thank you for your time,” she said, trying to end their meeting on a polite note. But something was wrong. Mr. Blackwood’s eyes were unfocused, scanning the room wildly. She could see that he was taking sharp breaths in, with no air going back out.

  “My…pills,” he rasped. He slapped a heavy hand on his desk.

  She elbowed past his trembling body and rifled through his desk drawer until she found a clear orange prescription bottle. Nitroglycerin. Her heart was beating as hard as it had when she was twelve and stayed up to watch Night of the Living Dead for the first time. Her hands were shaking, but she forced them to pry the bottle open.

  She pushed a pill into his mouth. “Mr. Blackwood, do you need some water or—”

  He grabbed Lussi’s forearm, clung to it so hard she knew he was leaving a bruise. “Don’t,” he said. “Leave me—”

  “I won’t. Not until an ambulance—”

  “No…Don’t…leave me…alone with it.”

  Lussi looked into Mr. Blackwood’s eyes. They were filled with terror.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next day, Lussi went to see Mr. Blackwood at the NYU Medical Center. The moment she stepped off the elevator and into the intensive-care unit, she knew she’d made a mistake.

  She didn’t know Xavier Blackwood. Not really. What would his family think of her? Easy—she’d already decided she wouldn’t introduce herself. The plan was to drop off the bouquet she’d picked up at the corner bodega and be on her way. But if his secretary was here, she would recognize Lussi from yesterday. Would she think Lussi was trying to suck up to the old man in an attempt to squeeze past the other job candidates?

  The thought made her nauseous. That wasn’t who she was.

  Coming here was a bad idea. She shoved the flowers into the small bronze trash can, hit the down button, and waited. The floor numbers lit up one by one. This was going to take forever—there were fourteen floors, and the elevator seemed to be stopping at every one on its way back to her. Were there stairs? There had to be. If she could just—

  A man in a wrinkled suit stubbed out a cigarette on the ashtray on top of the trash can. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered.

  Lussi turned to him. “Are you speaking to me?”

  He pointed at a portable cellular phone the size of a high-top tennis shoe pressed to his ear.

  “Yeah, Dad’s dead,” the man said into the phone, turning away from her. “Heart attack. That asshole. What am I supposed to do now? Run the company? Last book I read was The Great Gatsby, back in prep school. Stop crying, Mother. Can we focus here?”

  Oh God. Xavier Blackwood was dead.

  A man she’d practically wished death upon yesterday.

  She plucked the bouquet from the trash and followed Mr. Blackwood’s son down the hall. She would keep her distance until he finished his phone call. The plan—the new plan—was to give him her condolences, then leave. She’d make it fast.

  “You can handle all that funeral bullshit, right? Come on, I know you two have been divorced for twenty years, but seriously. I have a lot on my plate right now.” Then, “Great. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Mother. Goodbye.”

  He punched a button on his phone and mimed throwing it on the ground and stomping on it. He was a pretty good mime.

  “Um, Mr. Blackwood?” she said. He looked her up and down. “I just wanted to say I’m so, so sorry for your loss,” she said, handing him the flowers. “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. I just…I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  He glanced from the bouquet to the elevator at the end of the hall. “Did you get those from the trash?”

  She gave him a sheepish grin. “They’re carnations. I think.”

  “Who are you again? You’re not with the Post, are you? I already threw one of you goons out—”

  “Lussi Meyer. Book editor,” she said, extending a hand. He looked at it like she’d just had it in the trash can, which, to be fair, was accurate. “I was in your father’s office when he…uh, when he took ill.”

  Took ill? When had she turned into Jane Austen?

  “Digby Blackwood,” he said without shaking her hand. “You must be the girl they told me about. The one who tried to save him. But that’s my father for you—stubborn. If he’s determined to do something, there’s no stopping him.”

  She could only nod.

  “You were interviewing for the open editorial position, right? How’d that go?”

  Lussi bit her lip. She hadn’t considered that she was the only one who knew how badly her interview had gone. Not even Mr. Blackwood’s secretary knew.

  “We…had a nice chat,” she said, skirting the truth.

  “Nice? That doesn’t sound like Dad.”

  “We talked about the books I edited. My background is in genre fiction—horror, mainly.”

  “Anything I’d know?”

  “Satan’s Lament?”

  A flicker of recognition. He took a step closer, staring at her intently. “He liked to break people. You hardly seem broken to me.”

  She tucked a stray hair behind her ear and offered a weak smile. “You don’t know me.”

  “Not yet,” he said. There was a mischievous twinkle in his blue eyes that hadn’t been there moments ago. He might have been handsome if he didn’t have such thick bags under his eyes. And dried blood just under his left nostril. She couldn’t imagine the stress of losing a parent. Losing her grandmother had simply wrecked her.

  He shook his head. “I wished him dead a billion times, but I didn’t mean it. Well, no, I did mean it. But I wanted him dead after he unloaded that book dump off on someone else.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  The air between them grew arctic, and for a moment she glimpsed more of the father in his son than she’d noticed before. But then his eyes thawed as quickly as they’d chilled. “I don’t have to tell you that the publishing house is in bad shape
.”

  As she’d suspected. “How bad?”

  “Put it this way: they’re up shit creek and being fucked by the paddle.”

  “Ouch.”

  “The company needs a cash infusion before the end of the fiscal year, or it’s lights-out at the Blackwood Building. I’ve been making calls all afternoon. Nobody wants to put up a dime. Every conversation is the same: Oh, you’re a publisher? Anything I might have read? They don’t care about Dad’s Pulitzers. If they haven’t seen people reading our books on airplanes, then we’re worthless.” He ran both hands through his hair, pulling on the curly locks until they stood on end. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s my problem, not yours.”

  He was on the verge of tears. A wreck, drifting on an ocean of despair. She wanted to help him…but how? An idea slowly began to form, first a blur, but growing more concrete by the moment. Perhaps…perhaps there was a way they could help each other.

  She cleared her throat. “Forgive me if this comes off as crass…but did Mr. Blackwood tell anyone that he’d come to a decision about the open job? Before he passed. Which I’m so, so sorry about, by the way.”

  Digby shook his head. “He was in and out of it. Why do you ask?”

  “I wasn’t being honest with you earlier.”

  “Oh. Do tell…”

  “You were right about my interview—it wasn’t a nice chat. It was brutal. Your father trashed my record in the industry, all because he didn’t think there was any value in books about vampires and werewolves and interdimensional, soul-sucking leeches. Ask any bookseller what their hottest-selling genre is right now. Then try telling me there’s no ‘value’ in horror. The cold, hard fact is that Blackwood-Patterson hasn’t had a real blockbuster since Carter was in office. Meanwhile, all I do is shit best sellers.”

  Digby raised an eyebrow. This, from the paddle-fucking guy.