Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel

by Laura Resnick

  The boy’s mother again screamed, “Jonathan!”

  “Jonathan!” I shouted, with Miles, Twinkle, Candycane, and Saturated Fats running right behind me.

  As I reached Santa’s Workshop—where little mechanical elves engaged in a very limited range of repetitive-motion activities twelve hours per day, every day, throughout the season—I was relieved to see the child and to find him apparently unharmed. He ran toward his mother as she sobbed his name with relief, having found him at last, and scooped him up into her arms.

  Something had obviously terrified the kid, though. He was red-faced and sobbing loudly, his nose running and his face screwed up with emotion.

  “What happened?” I asked, coming to a halt beside the pair.

  “He got lost,” said the mother, her voice breathless with relief as she clutched Jonathan in her arms and stroked his blond hair. She crooned to him, “It’s all right, sweetie. Mama’s here now. You’re okay, you’re okay.”

  The boy kept crying hysterically.

  Behind me, Satsy asked with concern, “Is he going to be all right?”

  The mother started to say something reassuring, but Jonathan opened his eyes at the sound of Satsy’s voice—and when he saw Scary Face Santa, he started shrieking, “Santa tried to eat me! He tried to eat me!”

  “Fuck me,” said Candycane.

  “That’s enough,” said Miles, glaring at her. But I’d evidently been right; he wasn’t going to fire her for profanity three days before Christmas Eve, not when we were so understaffed. “Candycane, get back to work. Now.”

  The elf turned and left with alacrity.

  Twinkle said that he needed to find his abandoned accordion and then find Rudolfo, and he left, too.

  While Jonathan’s mother tried to soothe the boy (but he would not be soothed), Miles said censoriously to Satsy, “Now do you see the consequences of your actions? Do you see how your irresponsible behavior has upset this child?”

  “Well, the freight elevator tried to eat me,” said Satsy. “I was upset, too.”

  Miles, perhaps fearing that the mother was thinking about suing Fenster’s for emotional trauma, grimaced alarmingly at the child (a moment later, I realized this was intended to be an ingratiating smile), gestured to Satsy, and said, “Santa is very sorry that he frightened you, young man. And he’s going to apologize to you personally for that. All right?”

  “No, no, no!” Jonathan shrieked. “I don’t want to see Santa again! No!”

  Now Satsy looked distraught. He was doing this nightmarish gig for the second year in a row primarily because he liked kids—and, indeed, he was good with them. Frightening a child was certainly not what he wanted to do, let alone ruin a little boy’s faith in Santa Claus.

  So Satsy approached the child tentatively, his scarily streaked face gentle and concerned as he said, “Jonathan, I’m so sorry I upset you. Especially since I was looking forward so much to meeting you! But I had a really scary experience when I was on my way here from the North—”

  “Not you!” Jonathan said to him.

  “—Pole today, and it made me—”

  “Not this Santa!” Jonathan said tearfully to his mother.

  “—made me . . . made me . . . Huh?” Satsy’s long, purple lashes fluttered a couple of times as he gave the boy a puzzled look.

  “It was the other Santa,” Jonathan said, tears of fear still running down his face.

  “The other Santa?” I repeated blankly.

  “The other Santa tried to eat me,” Jonathan said, exasperation creeping into his voice. “The other one! The scary one!”

  “This isn’t the scary Santa?” I asked in surprise, nodding toward Satsy.

  “No, the other one tried to eat me! The one with big fangs and claws and glowing eyes!” Jonathan buried his face against his mother’s shoulder and cried loudly again, overcome anew.

  His mother’s expression was appalled as she asked us, “Do you really have a Santa here with fangs and claws and—”

  “No!” Miles said, while I shook my head and Satsy stared at the child with his jaw hanging open.

  Jonathan’s mother said indignantly to Miles, “Then I guess one of your Santas is going behind your back to pull nasty pranks on children who get separated from their parents!”

  “I assure you,” said Miles, “if that’s the case, the employee will be dealt with very severely.”

  “If that’s the case?” she repeated angrily, still trying to soothe her son. “What else could it be?”

  “Well, your child had just been frightened by the, uh, unfortunate event which occurred earlier . . .” Miles gestured again to Satsy. “An event he associated with Santa . . . He was separated from you and probably feeling scared and disoriented. He was wandering around this exhibit alone, where it’s rather dark and perhaps very easy for a frightened and imaginative child who can’t find his mother to think that things from his nightmares are actually coming to life and menacing him.”

  It was a reasonable suggestion. And the sobbing child’s mother, though still very angry about her son being traumatized by his visit here, was obviously realizing that this could indeed be what had happened.

  But Jonathan had been listening, and now he insisted tearfully, “I didn’t make it up! I’m not lying!”

  “Shhh, sweetie. No one’s saying you lied,” said his mother gently. “But this is a big scary place, and you were all alone, and maybe—”

  “I wasn’t alone! Santa was there—right there!” The boy pointed to the shadowy Enchanted Forest that lay beyond the North Pole; the forest was rather dark and creepy by the standards of childhood (and sometimes also by the standards of grown-up elves). “And he tried to eat me!”

  The mother gasped as she realized what might really have happened to frighten her son—who may have interpreted a genuine threat to his safety in a way that made sense to his young imagination in these surroundings. She looked pointedly at Miles. “Do you think there could be someone lurking around here who . . . ? I mean, so many children come here, and some of them are bound to get separated from their parents . . .”

  Miles said, “Never fear, ma’am. We maintain heavy security on this floor to prevent such a problem.”

  “We do?” I blurted. This was certainly the first I had heard of it. I’d been working here for two weeks and seldom even saw a security guard on this floor.

  Miles’ cold glance warned me to keep my mouth shut. He continued, “At this time of year, we also have extra security at all the exits from Fenster’s.” He neglected to mention that the guards at those doors were looking for shoplifters, not kidnappers. “But in case Jonathan did encounter someone who poses a threat—”

  “I saw Santa,” the boy insisted.

  “—I’ll have security scour this floor right now.”

  “If you can find security,” I muttered.

  Attempting to close the matter, Miles said loudly, “Now, if you and Jonathan are willing to accompany me to our Customer Relations office, Fenster & Co. would like to offer you a special holiday gift to express our heartfelt apologies for your trouble today. Right this way, please.”

  “Well . . .” The woman tightened her arms around her distraught son. “All right.”

  Miles gave me and Satsy a “get back to work” look before he escorted the pair out of the North Pole toward the escalators at the other end of the fourth floor, making sure to avoid going through the Enchanted Forest. We called our farewells to Jonathan as the threesome departed, leaving Satsy and me alone here.

  As soon as we were alone, I turned to Satsy and said, “Now tell me. What happened to you?”

  “Oh, Esther . . .” He wiped his forehead with his other white cuff, ruining that one, too. “It was a nightmare!”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m the relief Santa for this shift—or I was. I got into my costume and clocked in on time, but it’s usually at least forty minutes into the shift before we do the first swap. So I figured I had plenty
of time to go down to the shipping and receiving docks for a friendly smoke.”

  I frowned. “Since when do you smoke?”

  Satsy performed nightly as a drag queen at the Pony Expressive downtown, and he was sensibly protective of his voice, as far as I knew.

  “Oh. Ah . . . not cigarettes,” he said, looking a little sheepish, his long purple lashes fluttering. “The guys down at the docks have some primo weed. And I enjoy a few tokes now and then.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, outraged. “I can’t even say ‘God’ when I’m on the floor, but they’re smoking pot down in shipping and receiving? I totally signed up for the wrong job here!”

  “But when I got into the—”

  “And you guys were having a joint at this hour?” I said incredulously.

  “I know, I know,” said Satsy. “But I wanted something to soothe my nerves after I got here. Haven’t you noticed how tense it is around here this year?”

  “You mean it wasn’t like this last year?”

  “Not like this.” Satsy waggled his hand. “Oh, sure, kids cry, families fight, couple breaks up. That’s just what people do at Christmas.”

  “You gentiles really know how to celebrate,” I said.

  “But the atmosphere is different this year. I wouldn’t have taken this job again if I’d known it would be like this. I wouldn’t have helped you get this job if I’d realized in time that something was wrong here.”

  Satsy and I had bumped into each other a couple of weeks ago at Zadok’s Rare and Used Books in the West Village. The occult bookstore was owned by our mutual friend, Max—the friend who specialized in confronting Evil. I spend a lot of time with Max, especially when I’m out of work, as I was then. He and I have formed a close friendship despite our age difference: Max is at least three-hundred-twenty years older than I am. Saturated Fats is a regular customer of the store, and he sometimes looks after the place for Max in exchange for free books on magic and mystical phenomena.

  Upon hearing, during our reunion that day, that my only income until January would be from a few scattered shifts at Bella Stella, Satsy had told me about the attrition rate among Fenster’s elves and suggested I come along to the department store with him to apply for a job, supported by his personal endorsement. I did so, and Fenster’s hired me on the spot.

  “I still can’t decide whether I’m grateful to you for the overtime I’m earning here,” I said to him now, “or if I blame you bitterly for getting me into this seasonal nightmare.”

  The hiring process took a full day. To become an elf, I’d had to fill out a mountain of paperwork, submit to drug testing, and be evaluated for psychological stability. The evaluation was done by a pale, pimple-faced guy so painfully shy that he trembled and seemed on the verge of tears every time I spoke to him. There was also an audition to test my performance skills. Then the training process took another couple of days. I was assigned an elf identity, fitted for my costume, and rotated through various floor assignments as a trainee under the supervision of Jingle, who was working his fourth Christmas season in a row here.

  Although Jingle took this job more seriously than I really thought a grown man should, he certainly knew Fenster & Co. well. The veteran elf was a font of experience and information, and he’d helped me get into the swing of things pretty quickly.

  “So you’re down at the docks getting high with your new butch friends,” I said to Satsy. “What happened next?”

  “Oh! Speaking of which,” he said, enthusiastically distracted from the subject, “there’s a really cute guy down there—very butch, indeed. His name is Lou. Much more Jersey Shore than I usually go for, but I really like him. And you should see his arms! He keeps saying he wants to come see my show. I think that’s code for something.”

  “Code for what?” I asked. “I’m on the down-low? Or: I want to experiment with my sexuality? Or: There’s a hot girl I think I can get in the sack if I show her how cool I am by taking her to a downtown club where I know one of the queens?”

  “I’m not sure,” Satsy admitted. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Anyhow . . .” I prodded.

  “Anyhow . . . So the boys have some unloading to do, and I realize it’s about time for me to go back upstairs, so I get on the elevator—”

  “Oh, that’s why you were on the freight elevator. Because you were coming from the docks.”

  He nodded. “It lets me off on the other side of the floor, of course. But I’m usually able to sneak behind the solstice mural and get into the break room without being seen.”

  “But something went wrong in the elevator today?”

  “Uh-huh. It suddenly stopped right between the third and fourth floors. At first I thought it was an ordinary malfunction, and I was just worried about how I’d explain being in there instead of where I was supposed to be. I waited a minute to see if it would start moving again on its own, but it didn’t. So I figured I had no choice, and I pressed the emergency button.”

  When he did so, the lights went off. The elevator was suddenly shrouded in complete darkness.

  “I didn’t think that was supposed to happen, but it’s not as if I know,” he said. “So I wasn’t scared right away, just surprised.”

  Then he heard deep, heavy, excited breathing. Right there beside him. And since he knew he was alone in the elevator . . .

  “That’s when I got scared,” said Satsy. “And then all hell broke loose.”

  His gasp of fear and the pounding of his heart seemed to set off a whole chain reaction of horrifying events. He heard ferocious growling in the darkness—

  “Growling?” I repeated.

  “Uh-huh.”

  —and felt hot, foul-smelling breath on his face. He screamed like a girl (he said), and this incited a long, loud burst of maniacal, menacing laughter. The elevator was shuddering and quaking, bobbing wildly up and down, as if threatening to fall four floors and crash into the ground. And then it burst into flames.

  “Flames?” I said.

  “Flames.” Satsy nodded emphatically. “All around me. I was drenched in sweat, screaming in terror, and certain I’d die in there!”

  “So . . .” I looked in the direction of the freight elevator. “Did it burn up? It is a charred wreck now?”

  “No. It’s perfectly fine. I’m not.” He gestured to his damaged costume. “But suddenly the whole crazy thing stopped cold. Just like that. As if it had never happened. The lights came back on, the elevator stopped rocking and shaking, and everything around me looked perfectly normal. Then the doors opened and I was ejected by an unseen force—one that was still laughing!”

  I stared at my friend, dumbfounded. Now it was easy to understand why he had careened screaming with mad terror into Santa’s throne room, looking like a demented nightmare and creating a stampede among the volatile visitors.

  “Satsy.” I gave him a hug. “How horrible!”

  “Esther, there’s something here at Fenster & Co.,” he said in a low voice. “Something that shouldn’t be here. Something . . . evil.”

  * * *

  Realizing that Satsy had endured a mind-boggling shock, I decided I’d better get him off the floor and into quiet surroundings. I escorted him into the men’s locker room, helped him remove his costume, got him dressed and then wrapped in a blanket that I found, and then gave him a cup of hot cocoa in the break room.

  While I was handing the cocoa to him, the Russian elf came into the room. She was a sullen, dour woman about my age, with dark hair, a pretty face, and a strong foreign accent. All I knew about her was that she came from Moscow and seemed to hate everyone and everything. I had worked with her only once and couldn’t remember her name. Holly? Ivy? Merry?

  I gestured to the big garbage bag into which I had stuffed Satsy’s Santa costume. “Hey, can you do us a favor and take this upstairs to the costume mistress? Tell her there’s been an accident and it’ll need to be repaired or replaced—preferably by this afternoon?”

&nbs
p; She looked at the bag, then looked at me. “No. I am not your servant.”

  I blinked. “I didn’t mean you were my servant. I just thought maybe you could . . .” I said to her back as she stalked out of the room. “. . . do us this favor?” I called after her, “Elves are Santa’s helpers. Have you forgotten that?”

  Twinkle, who passed the Russian elf as he came into the break room, said, “What—the bitch queen wouldn’t help you with something? What a surprise.”

  “I guess you’ve worked with her?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah.” He gave a dramatic shudder, which made his bells tinkle.

  “You’re on break now?” When the bespectacled elf responded with a nod, I said, “Good. Can you stay here with Drag Queen Santa for a while? I need to take his costume upstairs.”

  “Sure,” said Twinkle.

  “Don’t leave him alone,” I said. “He’s had a shock today.”

  “So have we all,” said Twinkle.

  Satsy asked the elf, “How did your alpaca story end? I think I missed that part.”

  “Ah! Well . . .”

  “Okay,” I said quickly, gathering up the garbage bag. “I’m out of here. Oh, and then I’ll check out, um, that thing, Satsy.”

  “What thing?” he asked, his lashes fluttering.

  “The place where you . . . had your shock.”

  “Oh! Right. Oh, my God. Be careful, Esther.”

  “Absolutely.” I exited the break room. In the hallway that ran alongside it and the locker rooms, I bumped into Jeffrey Clark. “Hey, you got here fast!”

  “I was on my way to the subway when Miles called my cell,” Jeff said with a shrug. “I had just been wondering how to pay for a Christmas present for Puma, so it seemed like a good idea to cancel my plans and come here when Miles offered me the extra hours.”

  Puma Garland was Jeff’s girlfriend, whom he’d been dating since summer. I had introduced them, in a sense, when dragging Jeff along with me to her voodoo shop one hot day while investigating some mystical mayhem in Harlem with my friend Max. A lady of strict ethics, Puma had asked for my blessing when romance developed between her and Jeff, since I’d previously been his girlfriend. Way previously, in fact. There had been a gap of four years between when I had broken up with Jeff (and, nope, no regrets) and when we’d unexpectedly reconnected this past summer. Puma was a fine woman and undoubtedly better than Jeff deserved, and I had granted the relationship my dubious blessing.