Each year on December 25th, as the sun sets, God sends the Angel of Death winging down to earth with a sharpened scythe, which whistles through the air: scrreeeeeeeeeee. If your faith is deep, and you listen very hard, and have a little luck, you can hear it sometimes. The Angel of Death yearns for this night throughout all the 364 others. It is the one in which he finds his deepest fulfillment. Statistically, he reaps 25 percent of his annual harvest on Christmas night, or, as any schoolchild can tell you, a full one-quarter. The Angel is a serious, stylish, nasty, demented, and pranksterish spirit. Sometimes he does the work himself, leaping upon a sleeping schoolteacher and throttling her. Or he'll force self-destruction, as with Mae. On other occasions he might use a second party as agent upon the first: recall the wife of the mayor of Pittsburgh, who roasted her infant daughter and served her up with dumpling gravy last year.
We do not call these people who die victims, but rather selections. "Selection" is a word without judgment (other than that it is a thing chosen); whereas "victim" denotes someone of innocence who suffers because of ruthless design. And while the Angel of Death acts wholly upon his own whimsy, it is still God from whom his authority derives (as indeed does the authority for everything we can perceive). Thus, since God is incapable of ruthlessness, it would be error to think in terms of victims. In fact, it was this very concept of victim that spawned the Manerian Heresy in France, which ultimately resulted in the Hundred Years War.
When the Angel of Death comes swooping down, he sings:
"I'm gonna getcha, I'm gonna getcha,
I'm gonna getcha, Yes I am!"
We have this on the report of St. Helena of Damascus, who was struck down by the Angel on three successive Christmases, but who had lived with such exceptional purity that her body, to the astonishment of neighbors and friends, suffered neither decay nor mortification, and who was miraculously restored to life each Easter Sunday following her demise. St. Helena's favorite animal was the rabbit, and thus rose the legend of the Easter Bunny.
The Angel apparently works by mood or impulse. He might kill everyone in a family, or wipe out an entire street, or he might skip a city in total, a state, even a nation (though the latter has occurred infrequently in history). Sometimes he's gentle, and expiration eventuates with only a low sigh and a slump. Other times he'll burn you to death in a flaming gasoline explosion. Selection and mode of execution never correlate with the "goodness" or "badness" of an individual. Some unsophisticated minds see in this fact an arbitrariness on the part of God. But the more insightful will recognize in it yet another indication that He is ineffable, to say which, as Augustine reminds us, is already to have presumed too much.
Watson Hollow is a rural community, a town only by political definition. There are a little less than 600 people on the voter rolls. We have a stratum of elderly retired people, another of small businessmen who are the civic leaders, a handful of artists who've fled Manhattan, ridge runners or back mountain people, cautiously liberal management personnel from IBM, urban refugee families in which the man commutes back in to his job, and some just plain folks. It's a nice little town, American, community-minded, and we like it well enough.
The Angel took ten of us last night. Of course there's a fair amount of keeping to one's kind and, as you'd expect, and not everyone knows everyone—but everyone does know someone, who knows someone else, who knows someone else. If it's a close strike you're informed in minutes; the last of the list comes trickling in by the time you've finished your morning coffee. Last year the Angel got my mother. She was up visiting with my stepfather over the holidays. The Angel blew her brain apart while she was standing at the wash basin in her nightgown. Spurted blood out her eyes and ears, got thick gobs of it all over the mirror and walls. We called the Watson Hollow First Aid Unit (not that there was anything that could be done, but we had to remove the body to a mortician) a little after midnight. The first sympathy call came in at 12:35 and the phone hardly stopped ringing after that.
This Christmas, Mae Sporky put on her galoshes and coat and told her family she was going out for some air. Eight minutes later the church sexton heard the bell tolling and found her bobbing slowly on the end of the rope. Mae's tracks led through the snow in a straight line from her house to the church door.
Jimmy Clark's red Corvair left the pavement on the switchback curve up on High Falls Road and he and Brenda Gilvey were flying at 70 miles per hour when they hit the concrete bridge abutment.
Harry Winchell, who drove a county grading machine and liked to throw people through bar windows, had the arteries and veins disconnected from his heart and he fell forward onto the kitchen table with his face in a bowl of ice cream.
The Angel wrenched off Frank Henderson's forearm at the elbow and beat him to death with it.
John VanGaasbeck and Sinclair Allen, two intellectuals retired from Columbia University, had met for their weekly night of discourse, which was at first spirited, then heated, and finally degenerated into name-calling while VanGaasbeck's wife clucked disapprovingly.
“Sophist!" VanGaasbeck cried. "Kantian!" Allen retorted. “Nihilist!" "Panphysicist!" “Casuist!" "Dualist!" "Fool!" "Dunce!" "Donkey!" And at that point the Angel of Death rushed through the brick wall (visible only to the selection, as it should not be necessary to say) and climbed up on VanGaasbeck's back, threw a hand over his mouth and pinched his nostrils closed.
VanGaasbeck shot from his chair and ran around the coffee table flailing his arms and kicking his knees high. He crashed to the floor and beat his head up and down, drummed with his shoes, and made muffled sounds.
"Fakir!" Allen raged. "Swedenborgian, daemonicist, Thomist . . . asshole!"
On the other side of town a young woman making love to her husband was jerked out of bed, had her belly opened with a single swipe of the scythe, and her stomach was ripped out.
Little Tim Koeler's blood froze in his vessels while his twin brother Tom slept on beside him.
Pearl Bell, born and raised here, ninety-three years old and having at the disposal of her clear mind nearly 200 years of local history, a sprightly woman to whom graduate students and historians made weekly treks, and who wouldn't speak a word until she was kissed on the mouth, was lifted several feet from the floor and squashed and twisted until her bones were broken and her organs ruptured.
The owner of the Watson Hollow Inn keeled over in the middle of a Republican dinner party. Medical examination could provide no explanation of the mode of his demise. He was just dead.
We came through better than some years, worse than others. Perhaps the only principle that can be drawn is that we came through.
This has been true since the night of that first Christmas, 3000 years ago, when God in his anger sent down the Angel of Death to slay all the brown-eyed people in the city of Gath. God speaks so softly that we can hardly ever hear, but the stick he carries is large indeed, as we were given pause to contemplate again last night here in Watson Hollow, and as all men were across the world. The Angel takes wing each Christmas, and though individuals do not, man himself always comes through. And that is why we gather with friends and loved ones the night of Christmas After to exchange gifts beneath our Christmas trees, where, above the tinsel and ornaments, the candy canes and twinkling lights, on the very crown, a little figurine of the Angel of Death smiles down upon us.
Chaz Wood
WAITING FOR ANAIS
a Christmas Horror Story
Act I
“HOW MUCH FOR a private?”
It had been a night like any other night. A night of neon, dry ice, itchy eyes and sore feet. The dancer hadn’t been having the best of luck lately, and the cold, dark nights had begun to weigh her down, as though the receding sun was taking all her hope and enthusiasm away with it. Everything was an effort. For someone who was paid to give pleasure to others, she saw very little of that commodity herself; wasn’t even sure she ever would again. The Christmas rush which accelerated daily in the real world outs
ide only helped to remind her just how empty, meaningless, pointless her life was. Nobody had celebrated her birthday for the past two years – why the hell should she get excited about celebrating someone else’s, someone who may not even have existed?
She’d worked in Chicago and LA before making the trip to New York, hoping the change of scene would bring changes of fortune. But it didn’t matter – one sleazy blue-collar red-light inferno looked like any other, although few existed with the robust pulchritude of 42nd St.
All the men looked the same everywhere – sightless eyes, gargoyle mouths spewing second-hand and third-rate aphorisms like dirty rainwater. The women looked aloof, sometimes slightly uncomfortable, more often than not clinging too-tightly to the arm of whichever chaperone had led them there. Now and again, one would even look vaguely interested, and if one happened to look at home, it was even odds that she was in the business herself and checking out the competition.
It happened that night, a few days short of Christ’s unlikely birthday. It was raining outside and the forecasts had promised snow later on. She’d been glad for her job that evening, grateful for the small mercies, that she wasn’t housed in wet blankets and cardboard like some of the wrecks she’d passed on her way in and would no doubt pass on the way out, as well.
It had been a long night. She’d had no invitations, no requests. It was late, her calves and thighs were starting to hurt from the relentless plodding which had started off as her usual strut, and had now ended up an unmotivated skiff-skiff across the tables. Maybe her sour attitude was infectious – maybe it reflected on her face just a little too much. Maybe she was too skinny, or putting on a bit too much weight, or a bit too old now for this kind of thing, maybe she just didn’t give a damn any more.
She had never been born to be a showgirl. Two failed marriages and a string of ill-judged affairs had left her over the proverbial barrel, emotionally and financially. She had been walking home one night in the rain, mentally choosing between razor blades or the full contents of the paracetamol jar as a solution, when she passed the door of the “Desert Fox”. ‘Hostesses/dancers wanted – apply within!’ yelled the notice in the window of the entrance booth. The manager auditioned her, laughed at her attempts to cavort in 5 inch stilettos but hired her as a waitress anyway on account of her 36-inch assets. Within two months, she’d seen enough, and practised enough, to be able to graduate to the dance floor. And there she stayed. A pantomime life, fuelled by spastic strobe lights and burning spurts of whiskey, but a life at least, until this night.
As the last group of men at her table laughed among themselves and turned their backs, seeking drinks at the bar, she stopped.
Kicked her heels on the wood, would have dropped her hands to her hips if she’d had the energy. The lights continued to strobe at the corner of her eye, flickering like an old silent movie about to break down and burn in its projector. So, oiled up skin and wobbling boobs weren’t where it was at for that gang. She knew if she’d ripped her G-string off and opened herself up right there in their faces that they would still have preferred the support of the bar and the dribbling profanities that passed for conversation.
Or perhaps they just had some taste.
She felt an uncomfortable itch in her groin, where the sweat and the baby oil mingled under hot black lycra. Longing to scratch it, but knowing if she started, it would only burn and drive her mad for the rest of the night. She’d forgotten to shave again. How wonderful. It would turn into a zit, get infected and burst, and that would be her back to waiting tables topless again for minimum wage until it cleared up.
The slobs at the bar pulled on Santa Claus hats and got another round in. They were laughing with the barmaid, who was about ten years younger than her and magnificently carefree. Arlene or Darlene or something which rhymed with that; blonde and tanned and trim, not pale and freckled and ginger-haired, nor on the side of thirty which succumbed to gravity too readily.
It was the night she asked herself that question again: razorblades or paracetamol? She looked at the empty glasses on the table under her, considered breaking one there and then and taking it to the bathroom with her. Nobody would notice, after all. The way that nobody had even noticed that she hadn’t moved a muscle in two minutes. The music was starting to get on her nerves, as though she had never actually noticed it before: Guns ‘n Roses, a band she used to love.
And then she showed up, on the dirty side of midnight, swishing and striding through the bar like a dark-robed hunter, sweeping all before her with a calm sense of majesty.
Moving through the crowd with a purpose, head moving in line with a hidden sense, as though homing in on something or someone. She came to the stage, right up to the edge, elbow resting on the rail to physically impose herself upon the dance space, demanding attention, expecting service.
Her eyes travelled upwards to the dancer’s, dragged her down to that level.
“Sorry – what did you say?”
“I said – how much for a private?”
The accent was strong, maybe European or Southern Hemisphere, though hard to define. Her hair was long and platinum, and shone like gunmetal in the lights. She was dressed in black and wine-red, impeccably in fact, and looked as though she should have been partying on uptown in an Italian restaurant than hanging around a mediocre strip joint. And she had drawn more attention in the past minute, than the previous two hours of bored jiggling had managed.
“How much? Uh – hang on.” The dancer bent, suddenly invigorated. She pulled herself down to the floor and did fussy, nervous things with her hair. Looked around – Drum, the manager, was nowhere in sight. For a moment, she felt cold panic set in. Could she still handle this – especially such an incongruous, unknown quantity?
The other woman blinked gray-green eyes under wonderfully thick lashes, waiting.
“Eighty.” she swallowed a dry lump of fear. “No, let’s say-” she was about to make it fifty – she hadn’t been worth that kind of money for weeks now – but a stack of notes appeared under her nose to silence her.
“Deal. Put this somewhere safe and lead on.”
As they walked to the private room, drawing hushed comment and query, the stranger spoke.
“My name’s Anaïs, by the way.”
“Interesting name. Never heard it before.”
“It’s French, dear. Derived from that of the ancient Persian goddess of love, Anahita.”
“You don’t look ancient, or Persian for that matter.”
“I’m flattered. But I’m not paying you for compliments, darling. I’m paying for pleasure. Speaking of which-” The door opened at Anaïs’ touch and she stood back, waiting. “The goddess also leant her name to a species of nocturnal, predatory spiders.” she twisted her mouth at one corner. “Well, no-one’s perfect, eh.”
The dancer hesitated, not knowing how to handle this one. She crossed the floor into the private room, the room it had taken her three weeks to see the inside of after graduating from serving drinks to dancing. Drum liked to keep things low-key, and this one was furnished in soft velvet drapes of mainly mauve and red.
Anaïs let the door close on them both and strode over to the couch, foregoing the close-up seat at the edge of the circular stage.
The dancer leant herself against the pole, trying hard to invoke a fraction of the confidence that was seeping from the other woman. “I can definitely only see two legs from here,” she tried, holding back a nervous laugh. Anaïs stretched out slowly, crossing those very artefacts, encased in shiny black leather jeans. A little shrug fluttered across her shoulders. She had paid, now she was anticipating service.
The other woman wiped the anxious grimace from her face. She could taste sweat on her palm. That zit was beginning to pulse under her skin, like something from An American Werewolf in London. No, Alien. That would be more like it. Some deformed little ugly space bug making a break for it. Hell, right at that moment she wished she could escape from her cold, shivering body a
s well and flee out into the night.
“Sorry, Anaïs. I don’t do this very often. So I apologise if I’m a bit-”
“No apologies necessary.”
“My name’s-”
“Ssh. Don’t say. I like a mystery. Perhaps I’ll find out, one day. Now, please – in your own time.” Spoken with a remarkable lack of impatience, though the hand gesture suggested otherwise, a grandiose sweep in the direction of the dance floor.
Anxiety tugged at the side of her jaw. She turned to switch on the boom box and adjusted the CD platter. This was personal choice time, so she threw out the cheap disco, the trashy rock, the sleazy lounge jazz and slipped on a homemade disc of Dead Can Dance. It was the music she had learned her moves to in the bedroom, and which she hoped would remind her exactly what she was supposed to be doing here.
The first track was The Host of Seraphim. Perfect backing, in fact. Anaïs’ eyes betrayed some recognition, and with a few steps across the floor, the old moves started to fill the dancer’s limbs, gently thawing out the chill which had held her stiff. It only then occurred to her that she was already half naked, and found herself having to improvise around that, but she warmed to the performance, ramping it up from slow and aloof to grinding and intimate.
The G-string finally made its way to her ankles after the longest tease she had ever performed. Almost hobbling herself in her excitement, she drew herself down to the floor to reclaim her breath, some composure, and gear up for the predictable self-loving, oil-soaked climax. Throughout it all, Anaïs had sat entranced as though viewing some piece of classical art, chin-stroking and head-twitching with thoughtful calm. As the G-string was kicked up and away, Anaïs sat back, arms draped across the back of the seat and made full eye contact for the first time that night, her gray-green eyes demanding acknowledgement.
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 94
