Then she turned the barrel toward herself and squeezed the trigger.
The scarlet flame swallowed her alive —
— and the ground began to rumble almost in reply to this amazing gesture.
"NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" the piercing shrieks exploded in unison out of the Old Ones.
The vibrations erupted all around the studio, as though a huge engine had started, and the foundation began to buckle down the middle, the timbers and beams suddenly groaning, warping, cracking like kindling as Eva writhed in a cocoon of flame. Fractured memories of yellowed diaries shimmered in her traumatized brain, blurred notes on parchment, messages from her ancestors: The fire bites, the fire bites; the Father with thee, the Son with thee, the Holy Ghost between us both to be!
A chorus of feeble screams rose out of the skyline above Eva like a dissonant symphony. Flames jumped and rose and vanished. Lightning bolts licked up the sides of the walls, and the ground opened up, sending noxious fumes through the air. But Eva was oblivious to the destruction.
She collapsed like a blazing rag doll coming apart at the seams, folding into itself.
The pain devoured her, leaving only a faint awareness of the chaos around her, and the shards of old memories swirling through her mind, her cracked, seared lips mouthing an old incantation sent through the ages from grandmother to granddaughter: Old clod beneath the clay; Burn away, burn away; in the name of God be thou healed; Burn away now, burn away evermore.
Miles above her, the impossible world crumbled and gave way, sending the six Old Ones flailing into the gathering clouds of smoke and dust below. The enormous walls collapsed. And the building became a maelstrom of fire, smoke, blood, and death — all sinking into itself like a fallen house of cards.
And amid the smothering debris, the cleansing fire, and the blessed smoke — amid the place to which clean-up crews would come in subsequent days and completely miss the significance of what had happened here — Eva Strange breathed her last breaths, eyes open, hand still clutched around the elemental, her last conscious thoughts flickering like dying candle-light in her brain:
Hark the life of woman, a virgin travailing and not bearing, quickly coming to the marrow of His house, Amen, Amen, and made fast and sure her salvation in Heaven!
THE TRUE CAUSE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION
For many years, long after the events of that fateful time had been relegated to legend, revisionist histories of how the stranger had first appeared — most of them apocryphal — would regularly surface in the pages of popular periodicals of the day. Beloved monthlies such as Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Companion, with their jovial J.C Leyendecker covers of cherubic children at play, and their advertisements for Ovaltine beverage mix and Imperial Leather soap, would carry small items relating eye witness reports of how the mysterious old man had first insinuated himself into the beleaguered American psyche. Some said they first glimpsed the stranger emerging from the dust on the edge on a squalid Okie encampment outside of Tulsa. Others swore they first saw him disembarking from a tramp steamer on the shores of Nova Scotia. But none of these tall tales could withstand the rigors of substantiation. According to official archives from President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration Folklore Project, only two confirmed eyewitness accounts have survived. These matching accounts place the first official sighting of the old man on the edge of a hobo jungle just west of Prineville, Oregon, on the morning of March 23rd, 1930.
The weather was harsh that morning, even for early spring in the Pacific Northwest. A low-pressure cell had roared down across the Cascades from Vancouver, dumping about six inches of powder on the Crooked River Valley. The hobos along the old Southern Pacific line were dug in deep under the Douglas firs, huddled in meager lean-to's of oily particle-boards and discarded boxcar tarps, their fires dwindling throughout the night. The first pale rays of dawn brought another day of misery.
"You hear that?" The first eyewitness spoke in a shivering wheeze. A gangly middle-aged man in rags and fingerless gloves, he went by the name of Greenie. He hadn't slept well the previous night, and now he was trying to draw sustenance from a tin cup of cheap corn whiskey and weak coffee. The air smelled of wood-smoke and brimstone.
His companion peered out from under a ratty, torn blanket, blinking rheumy eyes at the light. "What's that ya say?"
"Ssssh! Listen."
The man under the blanket, a rotund specimen in brakeman's overalls, held his breath and listened.
The sound seemed to be coming from a pile of ragged blankets covered with snow about fifteen feet away. It sounded like a mewling animal, like a gut-shot dog in its death throes – a faint, high keening moan.
"Grab the spike setter," Greenie whispered, putting down his cup. He painfully rose on creaking knees, brushing the snow off his shoulders, flexing his frigid, greasy hands.
The fat one scrambled for the rusty hammer that lay on the ground next to the bedroll. Primitive weapons were a standard accoutrement for the stumblebum in those days. Ever since the crash of '29, people were meaner. The dogs were hungrier, bolder, wilder. There were fewer clothes lines out, fewer bread lines from which to scavenge. The big guy – the one nick-named Cinder Box Sam – got his frozen mitts around the spike hammer and raised it.
Fifteen feet away, the moaning abruptly ceased. "Git outta there!" yelled the fat one, taking a step toward the mound of snow-dusted blankets with the hammer at the ready.
All at once the pile of blankets erupted.
"Watch it!" Greenie called out, shielding his greasy face from the commotion.
In a cloud of white dust an ancient figure burst out of the blankets, flailing his big arms at the daylight like a giant baby being born. He was gnarled and scarred and looked like an emaciated derelict Viking in a stolen parka. He wore trousers fashioned out of stained buckskins.
"Who the hell — ?!" Greenie and the fat man both jerked backward with a start, nearly slipping on the frozen rocky earth.
"Ah God! Ah Jesus —!" The stranger fell to his knees, slobbering on himself. Ice crystals in his beard mingled with snot. He was as skinny as a corpse.
"Easy now, easy." Cinder Box Sam held the hammer menacingly.
"I'm sorry – please! – ah Christ I didn't mean it – I didn't mean to do it!" The stranger was on his hands and knees, sobbing.
"Calm down, brother."
The stranger heaved in a breath, and he looked up as though seeing the hobos for the first time. His skin was frost-bitten and clothes and boots were worn and bedraggled from traveling a great distance. "I ain't got no – I didn't mean to do it!"
The two hobos looked at each other. Finally Greenie took another step toward the stranger and spoke in a very low, very measured voice, as though trying to corral a rabid Doberman. "Do what?"
The old man on the ground looked up at the hobo. "You ain't gonna kill me?"
Greenie sucked his cheek and shivered. "That depends on what ya done."
The bony Viking wiped his icy, mucusy beard. "I didn't mean to do nothin'."
"Who the tarnation are you?" Cinder Box demanded. "What's your name."
The old man sobbed. "See… that's just it. I don't know. I don't know who I am."
Again the hobos shared a suspicious glance. Greenie watched the old coot blubber. "The hell d'ya mean? You don't know yer own name?"
The old man cried and shook his head. "Something terrible happened – ah Jesus – I can't even tell ya – all I got is the nightmares – over and over I see the damn thing – I think I done something awful!"
"Take it easy, brother." Cinder Box Sam lowered the hammer. He could tell this old rum pot was fairly harmless. Probably nutty as a soup sandwich. But definitely not dangerous.
"No – no – no – no-no-no!" The old codger lifted himself to his feet with great aguish and effort. "I did a terrible thing – they're gonna get me for it – I gotta get outta here." He started backing away with a stumbling, lame stagger. "Gotta get outta here."
"
Wait!" Greenie was intrigued all of a sudden. He had to know. He shivered and raised his hands in deference to the geezer. "The nightmares. What was it? What was it ya did?"
The old man swallowed his agony as he backed away, his yellow, sagging eyes widening like shiny Buffalo nickels. "I killed him."
"Killed who?"
The answer came out on one tortured breath between sobs, right before the old coot turned and fled. "I killed Santa Claus."
For one long thunderstruck moment, the two hobos watched in silence as the ancient stranger whirled and trundled away into the swirling veils of snow.
In those days, very few souls had any clue that the source of the great tribulations gripping the land at that time actually began before the stock market crash of 1929. In fact, the troubles began way up north, far, far above the brutal, blasted ice fields of the Northwest Territories. At that time, the Queen Elizabeth Islands were even meaner than they are today, which is saying something, because even now you'd be a fool to make your way north of the McClintock Channel. And if you did, you'd want to bring along a boxcar full of firewood and provisions because the wind is a wild beast up there. It can chew through steel and drive a person insane with its constant shrieking refrain. And if you were mad enough to cross the Parry Channel, and travel even further north, all the way to the end of Point Eureka, what you would find is the land plunging away into the alabaster mists of hell. The horizon line vanishes and the average temperature dips to sixty-five below zero, and the nights go on forever. And even back then, before the Industrial Age had infected the Great White North with its cancer, the Inuit and the Lapps and the Samis had long ago left these angry ice shelves to the polar bear and the walrus, and only the heartiest of those creatures survived, hunkering down beneath that rime of endless ice, eking out a living on lichens and frozen moss. So it comes as no surprise that very few mortal souls – if any – had ever glimpsed the nameless community that lay on the edge of Ellesmere Island.
If you blinked as you passed it — or if perhaps you looked away for a moment — you might miss it, despite its immense length and breadth. It ranged along a five-mile stretch of glacier-land and it radiated a kind of otherworldly corrosion. A line of magnificently ornate chimney spires — once grand and colorfully striped, huffing the smoke of magical production lines — now bordered the colony like skeletal remains, all dead-cold and desiccated. The candy-cane columns along the northern edge of the village now stood scorched and blackened with neglect. The windows of the once-whimsical workshops were shuttered, the holly trees shriveled and dead, the ice sculptures of angels and snowmen and gingerbread boys burnished by the winds into featureless stalagmites. Even the great south gate with its festive lintel of carved marble bells and Yule logs, its holiday tympanum rising nearly fifty meters into the gray sky, now stood dark and covered with a patina of decay. In just over a year, the magic village had transformed into a gothic ruin.
It was almost inconceivable that only thirteen months earlier – in the wake of the terrible event — a pair of figures emerged from that same great south gate in search of the man responsible for all this misery.
Moving like ghosts through the ashen haze of the ice field, the twosome wore caribou skins and ermined-trimmed parkas, and carried packs laden with weapons dismantled into unrecognizable components, and spoke very few words to each other. An observer – had there been one around at that point to observe – might have misjudged this pair's collective stature. The arctic light and space can play tricks on the senses. But upon close and prolonged scrutiny, one would be forced to conclude that these two individuals were either children or dwarves. Trudging with snow-shoes through the unforgiving crust, communicating with hand-signals and nods, they looked both fragile and relentless against the gelid winds. They moved with the purpose of salmon spawning.
It took them nearly three months to negotiate the Northwest Territories, ultimately crossing into the land to which they believed the man had fled. Others had found the death scene in the wilderness of British Columbia, the magical team strewn across a barren snowfield, their awful carcasses burned beyond recognition. Now it was up to these two diminutive bounty hunters to bring balance back to the world.
The twosome rode a dog sled across Bathurst Island, and then slipped into the cargo hold of a whaling ship crossing Viscount Melville Sound, riding all the way to Hudson Bay without speaking a single word to each other. Once the ship had docked in northern Quebec, the twosome set out on foot once again, acquiring a kayak in Nunavik, and portaging between the frozen rivers when necessary, moving unseen among the indigenous villages, invisible to all but the most gifted children and scattered herds of reindeer.
It is a little known fact that reindeer are the only mammals on earth – other than certain children — that are able to see elves.
By the time the twosome reached Ottawa, it was nearly spring. The pair hadn't taken nourishment for many weeks, and they were near death. When they reached the northern trunk of the Canadian Pacific Railway, they hopped a freight bound for Toronto and searched for sustenance in the shadows of the cattle cars. Elves subsist upon sugar and dairy products, so it was a stroke of luck, in the moldering hay and shit, that they found a life-saving Hereford.
"What if we never find him?" ventured the younger of the two sprites, as he tugged the udders in the dark, filling a rusty, faded Eight-O-Clock coffee can. At a youthful one-hundred-and-two-years-old, and the youngest member of the Special Forces, Shamus the Elf was always full of questions.
"We'll find him alright," the older elf grunted, wiping the milk from his dark face. "Action must be taken, Laddie. Justice must be served."
The older elf went by the name of Dooley and was as grizzled as a pixie can be, with dark, parchment-like skin, and the eyes of a jackal. Contrary to fairy tales and folk stories, not all Christmas elves are adorable. There are sanitation worker elves with oily skin and nasty dispositions. There are demented elves relegated to retirement homes. And there are the elves of the special-forces – the fixers, the secret police – who operate underground, in the back channels. Shamus and Dooley were the skip-tracers of the Special Unit, the most skilled of all the gnomes.
"But Dooley, how in the name of cinnamon sticks will we do it?" Between gulps of the tepid milk, Shamus twitched and frowned at the conundrum. "Why, he could be anywhere in the lower forty-eight."
"Shamus –"
"He could have changed his name. For all we know, he could already be –"
"That's quite enough, Shamus!"
"But how, Dooley?"
The older elf did not reply. He merely turned and gazed through the slats of the cattle car as the train wended through the deep blue Ontario twilight.
The elder sprite did not know it then but he and his comrade were about to become part of an infamous misadventure that would span more time than either elf could imagine in their darkest dreams.
Nearly eighteen months had passed since the incident in the hobo jungle. After fleeing the scene, the amnesiac wandered aimlessly eastward without plan or purpose. Eastward toward no particular destination, toward no fixed point. All he wanted was to evade the faceless, shapeless pursuers on his tail, the invisible hellhounds, the little ones. Traveling mostly at night, the half-mad old man in rags and tears stumbled from back alley to vacant lot, skid row to deserted farm, moving in the general direction of the Midwest, living off scraps from garbage heaps and church missions, the guilt a malignant tumor in the pit of his soul, eating him alive. He passed through shanty-town and slum, squatters'-camp and godforsaken ghetto. It was the spring of 1931, and the Depression had set in like a fever that wouldn't break. To add insult to injury, a horrible drought had gripped the country for over a year now. Farms had dried up, crops wilting away, rivers and streams shriveling like hardened arteries. The very soil cracked and fissured as though a consumptive disease had infected the land.
On the border of Indiana, on the 15th of May, the old man ran across his first Hooverv
ille.
Named for Herbert Hoover, the recalcitrant U.S. president, who believed that relief should be left to the private sector, and the answer to all the torments of the damned was to do nothing, Hoovervilles came in all shapes and sizes, but they all shared the same garish scent of human degradation. Victims of foreclosures and bankruptcies – entire families with nary a pot in which to piss – would huddle in giant makeshift tent-cities, cobbled together with spit and spoor. This one, the one outside Crawfordsville, Indiana — the one upon which the amnesiac stumbled that terrible May night — was immeasurably huge. As far as the eye could see, thousands of downtrodden and diseased huddled in reeking sheds and shacks clinging to the edge of a half-mile-long dry river-bed.
Overcome with a dawning horror, the amnesiac fled into the darkness of a fallow bean field that night, and he kept on fleeing, and fleeing, as fast as his cadaverous old legs would carry him, as though he could outrun the horrible realization spreading through his marrow: he made this happen. He brought this on the world, and now the world was dying. And all he had to show for it was a devouring guilt and a recurring nightmare that showed him over and over, like a hellish nickelodeon, how he had destroyed the sleigh, the eight tiny reindeer, and the driver, in a paroxysm of fiery rage.
A few miles south of Muncie his ancient limbs finally gave out. He collapsed in the overgrown brambles of a deserted farm, and prayed for death to finally come and take him away. He had tried to kill himself on more than one occasion since waking up in the snows of British Columbia nearly three years ago. Once in a fetid alley outside Portland he tried to hang himself by fixing a tow-rope to a fire escape trestle. The trestle had broken under the scant weight of his bones and sent him plunging into a Dumpster. A few months later, alone in a freight car somewhere in Nebraska, he had tried to open his wrist with a broken Jax beer bottle but he was so emaciated he couldn't even find a vein.
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