The beast’s mouth opened, and from it issued the loudest, most terrifying sound David had ever heard. It was louder than the engines of a jet taking off, more tortured than the wail of train brakes when the engineer sees a car blocking the tracks just a couple hundred yards ahead. With the sound came a blast of arctic cold that washed over David and Kyla like a tidal wave.
David felt his eyelashes turn to ice.
“Ask him.” Kyla said again. He squeezed David’s hand.
“I can’t,” the boy cried. “He’s going to eat us!”
Without so much as a “See ya,” the sprite vanished. The dragon roared again, this time taking two steps through the clouds so that his monstrous snout leveled with the boy’s eyes. David could have reached out and touched the beast’s frozen teeth. They spiked up and down in its mouth like the icicles hanging off Mom’s gutters at home. He floundered in the air, waving his arms like a drowning infant. In terror he looked up and down and around for the sprite, and called out the little man’s name.
“Kyla! Kyla, help!”
Then he thought, I’ll fall. And if I fall, I’ll get away from the dragon. Then I’ll be safe for awhile.
But David stared into the burning blue eyes of Hrrrl and knew that he wasn’t going to fall this time. He could not run away. For a second, he wondered if his own eyes mirrored those of a trapped mouse. Or the bird.
In his head, he heard Kyla’s earlier admonitions. “Strength comes from the heart. You can beat any beast if you believe.” And, “Ask him.”
In front of him, the stakes of ice gleamed, slowly drawing apart. Hrrrl was preparing to eat him. David shrugged his shoulders, What have I got to lose?
“Were you ever a boy like me?” David said, his voice a tremulous whisper.
The dragon dipped its head, raising a frosted brow. “Eh?” it growled.
David repeated his question. Louder this time. “I said, were you ever a boy, like me?”
Hrrrl didn’t move. Didn’t answer. One eyelid closed. Then the other.
David didn’t know what to think. Had the dragon just gone to sleep? If it had, maybe he could try to escape…
…No. He had asked a question, and he wanted an answer. There was no outracing a dragon in its own cloud. Heck, he couldn’t even keep himself aloft without the help of the frost sprite. Although he seemed to be holding his own now.
“Hrrrl,” he said, raising his voice another level. “I asked if you were ever a boy. A human boy.”
“Yeeessss,” the beast hissed, its eyes springing open. The force of its breath knocked David backwards. He tumbled through the moist fog, coming to rest many yards away from the icy beast.
“I was a boy. I had parents, just like you,” the dragon growled. “But I hated them. I hated everybody. But that’s all over now. Because now I’m the most powerful beast in the world!!!”
David thought for a moment. “But you’re up here in the clouds, all by yourself.”
“I LIKE to be alone.” the dragon bellowed, fountains of fog steaming through his craterlike nostrils.
“Aren’t you lonely?”
“Leave me alone!” the dragon turned tail and dove deep into a veil of cloud.
“Not bad,” a voice chimed in his ear. “I told you, be brave and face your foes. Even if you don’t have a broom.”
“How do you know about the broom?” David asked, turning to see the frost sprite. Kyla lounged in the air beside him, legs crossed, head resting on his hand. He looked like a frozen genie.
“I know a lot of things about you,” the sprite said. “Why do you think I chose you to take from the plane and not another kid?”
David shrugged.
“How about a stop in Halla, the Frost City?”
“Can I get a drink there?” David asked.
“You can get whatever you want there,” the sprite replied, “as long as it’s made of water. And it’s cold.” With a whoosh of speed, they left the cloud of the dragon behind.
It was beautiful! Sweeping spires of intricately molded ice rose from turrets of fog and snow to make a fairyland scene. The streets were endless, and wreathed in flowing cotton. The sprite held David’s hand as they walked along a path through swirls of cloud dust closer and closer to the peaks of the city. There was music in the air, a high, pure, angelic wash of sound that made David’s heart leap. It was cool and perfect, and utterly devoid of the aching passions of pain and love. Suddenly he yearned to be inside the twin towers of ice that marked the city’s entrance. He wanted to stay here, to be a human boy living in a castle in the clouds. His life would be a fairytale. People would write about him, the boy in the sky.
Kyla nodded at the keepers of the gate, twin wraiths of many arms, eyes and motions. They shimmied away from the opening, allowing the boy and sprite passage into the city. As they passed through the gate, David saw a wondrous mix of beings dancing through a crystalline square. Winged creatures fluttered delicately above, while many-legged white beetles skated dizzily across the open ground. The song floated in the air. Frost sprites dashed between doorways, and snowy hummingbirds feasted at frozen nectar in a garden of glass.
They passed through a door, and walked quickly down a blinding hallway.
“You’ll stay here,” Kyla said, escorting David into a small room. A cot was set up in one corner, across from a window that looked onto the square they’d just crossed.
“I’ll be back for you at breakfast. Sleep tight.” And with a wink, the sprite was gone.
David stared out onto the frozen square, watched as cool white lights flickered on in windows across the way. Slowly, the skaters and flyers disappeared and the fairy garden was left still; an ice sculpture hidden in a cloud.
Sighing, David climbed into the cot. Ice crystals crunched beneath him as he shifted in the bed. The heavy sheets did nothing to warm him, and he couldn’t find a comfortable way to rest his head. He missed his own pillow. His own bed. Even the bed at Dad’s! Idly he wondered if sprites from this city ever left to try to make it on their own in a human town.
The night passed slowly. David felt the cold creeping through his fingers and toes. But it wasn’t coming from Halla, or even the frozen bed. The cold was steaming out of his heart. He felt it knotting up like a fat icicle inside as he reminded himself of the dull weeks he spent with his father and the heated flashes of temper that drove him to wish for escape from his mother. Wasn’t it better to stay here and hug the ice to his chest? To become a frost sprite himself, maybe?
He lay still in the bed of ice and pictured the frost covering him completely. He felt his lips turning blue and his cooling blood flowed ever more sluggishly.
Sometime during the night, he thought his heart stopped.
Kyla picked him up the next morning.
“What’s for breakfast?” David asked, stuffing a fist into his mouth to stifle a yawn.
“Slept well, did you?” the sprite asked.
“Not really.”
“Hmmm.” The sprite looked grim for a moment, then dropped its eyes to the ground.
“There are two menus to choose from,” Kyla said. “But whichever one you choose is the one you must live on for the rest of your life. After this meal, there is no going back. Follow me.”
They walked through a maze of icy corridors. Tiny gauzy fairies zipped out of their way, while snow beetles sunk like water through the floor to avoid their steps. At last they stepped into a huge open room.
Twisting spires of ice rose from the floor, glittering with a faint rainbow tinge all across the room. At each stalagmite, a transparent creature, or two or three, fed, licking greedily at the delicate spikes of ice.
“If you choose the ice, you will stay here in the clouds,” Kyla said. His eyes were dead stones. “Forever.”
The sprite looked at David with its frighteningly still gaze.
“In the clouds you will not feel the pain. Your heart won’t ever feel like it’s being sliced in two by an electric knife. But the ice do
esn’t taste anything like a hot stack of pancakes dripping with maple syrup. It tastes like ice. It will leave you numb, kyla.”
“Your name means numb?”
The sprite nodded grimly. “You will sing and fly and dance… but you will not really feel. You won’t get that pit in your stomach that you get when you visit your father, but you won’t feel that hot maple syrup feeling that you get when he tells you he’s proud to be your dad, either.”
David thought for a moment, watching the crystalline creatures of the cloud flit and flutter.
A distant chime sounded like a tinkle of tiny bells. The whole scene looked so fragile, he felt as if he could shatter it with a sneeze.
“You must choose.”
“If I stayed, it wouldn’t be very brave, would it?” David asked.
Kyla shook his head. “Not if you stay only because you are running away from your parents. From your fear. From the possibility of pain.”
“But I can beat any beast if I try, right? If I’m really brave?”
“There’s a good chance, yes.”
“Then I’ll choose…”
David looked longingly at the scene around him. Thought of shivering on a mountain top while seeing the most beautiful sunset in the world; thought of feeling afraid, but still beating a dragon with a simple question. Thought of Dad’s apartment and Mom’s mousetraps.
“…pancakes.”
* * *
David ran ahead of his father down the narrow hallway and into the airport waiting area. The sprite had dropped him back in his seat just before landing. Dad didn’t seem to have noticed that he’d been gone.
“Be brave,” the icy creature had said, and then David was staring at a window of intricate frost lacery. Try as he might, he couldn’t locate anything in the crystal pattern that looked remotely like the tiny man. The page of a newspaper crinkled familiarly next to him, as his dad folded up the Wall Street Journal into a neat, complete stack.
After awhile, David began to hum. Not the cool beauty of the Frost City square song, but the friendly tones of his father’s Simon & Garfunkel records and his mother’s Barry Manilow tapes. His fingers and toes warmed to the glow of the songs of home. And Dad didn’t tell him, “Cool it.”
“David, over here,” his mother called. The boy ran to her and hugged her tight.
“Was he good for you, Merle?” she asked when his father came up from behind. David could hear the brakes she put on her voice whenever she talked to his father.
“Good as gumdrops,” Dad growled, ruffling David’s hair with a hand.
“Did you have a good flight?”
“Not bad. Kinda cold on the plane, I thought.”
His mother felt David’s hands to see. “Did you get cold, kiddo?”
“I’m fine,” he said, pulling his hands back. “It wasn’t that cold.”
“How about I buy us all breakfast before I head to the hotel?” Dad volunteered. “The food on the plane was…” he wrinkled his mouth in disgust, “…plane food.”
His mother didn’t answer right away, her face wrinkling as if to sneeze… or complain. But then David could see her expression shift.
“Okay. But then we’ve got to get going.”
* * *
They all sat down at a noisy IHOP near the airport. There was music playing on the radio with bells and strings and guitars, and David thought it sounded somehow… dirtier than the music of the clouds. Certainly not angelic. And yet, he liked it better.
The waitress set a plate of steaming pancakes in front of him, along with a rack of flavored syrups.
His parents looked at each other with tight mouths, but then smiled as they watched David dig into the food. It warmed his stomach like a big, bright fire. He mixed the syrups indiscriminately, pouring boysenberry, strawberry and maple syrup all over the cakes while his parents beamed.
“Merry Christmas, son,” his dad said.
His mom sighed and then nodded her head. “Yes, Merry Christmas.”
In his heart, David felt a rime of frost melt away.
Rod Serling
THE NIGHT OF THE MEEK
IT WAS CHRISTMAS. There was absolutely no question about that. Festive good will filled the air like the smell of maple syrup-sweet, sugary, and thick with insistence. There was one more day to complete Christmas shopping and this item of information was dinned into the minds of the citizenry like a proclamation of impending martial law “One More Shopping Day until Christmas!” It was the war cry of the big sell, and on this twenty-fourth day of the twelfth month of the one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-sixty-first year of our Lord, it served as a warning that just a few hours remained for people to open up their wallets and lay rather tired fingers on dog-eared credit cards.
“One More Shopping Day until Christmas.” The words were strung in tinseled lettering across the main floor of Wimbel’s Department Store. Mr. Walter Dundee, the floor manager of Wimbel’s, glanced at them briefly as he did his rounds up and down the aisles, casting businesslike eyes at the organized mayhem surrounding him.
He was a balding little fellow in his fifties, inclined to paunchiness, but briskly efficient in his movements and attitudes. Mr. Dundee could spot a shoplifter, a bum credit risk, or a grimy little child breaking a mechanical toy—he had an abhorrence of children of all ages—in one single all-pervading glance. He could also spot an ineffectual sales-person just by listening to a couple of sentences of the opening pitch.
Mr. Dundee walked through the aisles of Wimbel’s that December 24th, barking out orders, snapping fingers, and generally riding herd on these last few moments of Yuletide humbuggery. He extended watery smiles to harried mothers and their squalling children, and he gave explicit and terse directions to any and all questions as to where merchandise could be found, where rest rooms were located, and the exact times of delivery for all purchases over twenty-five dollars, no matter how far out in the suburbs they went. As he walked up the aisles past Ladies Hand Bags, toward the Toy Department, he noted the empty Santa Claus chair. One of his sparse little eyebrows, set at a rakish tilt over a tiny blue eye, shot up in fast-mounting concern. There was a sign over the chair which read, “Santa Claus will return at 6:00 o’clock”
The large clock on the west wall read “6:35.” Santa Claus was thirty-five minutes late. An incipient ulcer in Mr. Dundee’s well-rounded abdomen did little pincer things to his liver. He belched, and felt anger building up like a small flame suddenly blasted by a bellows. That Goddamn Santa Claus was a disgrace to the store. What was his name—Corwin? That Goddamn Corwin had been the most undependable store Santa Claus they had ever hired. Only yesterday Dundee had seen him pull out a hip flask and take an unsubtle snort—smack dab in the middle of a Brownie troop. Mr. Dundee had sent him an icy look which froze Corwin in the middle of his tippling.
Mr. Dundee was noted for his icy looks. As a boy, thirty-odd years before at military school, he had become Sergeant Major of the Fourth Form—the only non-athlete ever to achieve this eminence—because of the icy look that he carried with him throughout his professional career. It made up for the fact that he stood five feet four inches tall and had a figure like a coke bottle.
Now he felt frustrated that his rage had no outlet, so he scanned the store until he spotted Miss Wilsie, Ladies Inexpensive Jewelry, primping in front of a mirror. He stalked over to her, pinioned her with his look, and then announced:
“You have nothing better to do, Miss Wilsie? Preparing yourself for a beauty contest? There are customers waiting. Be good enough to attend to them!”
He waited only long enough for the color to drain out of the girl’s face as she hurried back to her place behind the counter, then he turned again toward the empty Santa Claus chair and cursed the errant Santa Claus, now thirty-eight minutes late.
* * *
Henry Corwin sat at the bar, a moth-eaten Santa Claus outfit engulfing his sparse frame. Discolored whiskers hanging from a rubber band covered his chest like a napkin. Hi
s cocky little cap, with the white snowball at the end, hung down over his eyes. He picked up his eighth glass of inexpensive rye, blew the snowball off to one side, and deftly slipped the shot glass toward his mouth, downing the drink in one gulp. He looked up at the clock over the bar mirror and noted that the two hands were close together. Precisely where they were he couldn’t tell, but he did feel a sense of time passing. Too much time.
He suddenly noticed his reflection in the mirror and realized that he was not drunk enough, because he still looked like a caricature. The Santa Claus uniform, which he had rented from Kaplan’s Klassy Costume Rental, had seen not only better days but many earlier ones. It was made out of thin cotton, patched and repatched. The color had faded to a kind of ailing pink and the white “fur” trim looked like cotton after a boll weevil assault. The cap was several sizes too small, and was actually a reconverted Shriner’s fez with the insignia taken off. The face looking back at him had gentle eyes and a warm smile that was slightly lopsided. It crinkled up at the ends and made you want to smile back.
Corwin was neutral to the face. He rarely took note of it. At this moment he was more concerned with the costume, fingering it and noting considerable lollipop stains, week-old ice-cream spots, and some brand-new holes, sizable enough to reveal the two pillows he had strapped over his union suit. He took his eyes away from the reflection and pointed to his empty glass.
The bartender walked over to him and gestured at the clock. “You told me to tell yuh when it was six-thirty,” he announced. “It’s six-thirty.”
Corwin smiled and nodded. “That’s exactly what it is,” he agreed.
The bartender picked his teeth. “What happens now? Yuh turn into a reindeer?”
Corwin smiled again. “Would that that were so.” He held up his empty glass. “One more, huh?”
The bartender poured him a shot. “That’s nine drinks and a sandwich—that’s four-eighty.”
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 119
