Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel

by Laura Resnick

  When the elevator car got to our floor and the doors swished open, we looked inside.

  After a moment, I noted, “Well, Satsy did say it looked perfectly normal when he left.”

  And it looked perfectly normal now. Just an ordinary elevator car, big enough to carry large freight, with a scuffed floor and fluorescent lights.

  “Let’s make sure,” Rick said, entering the car. “Why don’t we take a ride?”

  “What?” I blurted, hanging back.

  Seeing my anxious expression, he said, “You wait here. That way if anything goes wrong—”

  “No, I’ll come, too,” I said, shamed into accompanying him. I entered the car and pressed the button for the bottom floor. “Let’s be thorough.”

  Rick said, “And whatever happens, let’s keep our heads and not start another stampede of Santa’s visitors, okay?”

  I nodded. I wouldn’t have done this alone, not after what Satsy had told me; but Rick’s calm manner was easing my tension as the elevator descended. When we reached the bottom floor and the doors opened, I pressed the button to go back up to the fourth floor. A few moments later, we arrived there without incident. We exited the elevator, then turned around to look at it in bemusement.

  “I suppose a more valid test would be to ride it alone, when no one knows you’re there, the way Satsy did,” I mused.

  “I do have a theory.” Rick said hesitantly, “Uh, do you know why Satsy went down to the docks?”

  “I know it wasn’t just because he likes a guy named Lou,” I hedged.

  “Right. Well, he’s an imaginative person, a performance artiste, a creative . . . and he was under the influence of some pretty potent weed.” Rick smiled and admitted, “I’ve visited the docks a few times myself, Esther, and that is some really good shit they’re sharing down there.”

  “Did everyone know about this but me?” I wondered.

  “I think that maybe the elevator stopped or malfunctioned—maybe even because, without being aware of it, Satsy leaned against a bunch of buttons at once, which screwed with the electrical system.”

  “And then he imagined all the rest?” I shook my head. “You didn’t seen the condition his costume was in. There were scorch marks and places where it had been singed. It was a mess—even apart from all the smeared makeup.”

  Rick shrugged, unconvinced. “He was smoking on the docks. Maybe he got careless and burned a few holes in his costume.”

  “This was more than a couple of little spots from being careless while—”

  “Maybe he still had the joint with him when he freaked out in the elevator, and he set his own costume on fire by accident, without realizing what he’d done.” Rick added, “I’ve studied drug use in my psych courses, Esther, and there are instances of marijuana really messing with perceptions of reality. Also, it’s possible there was something added to that joint which Satsy didn’t know about—or that he knows about and hasn’t mentioned.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Satsy was imaginative. And his interest in the occult ensured that, in an overstimulated state, his brain could certainly cook up the images and sensations he had described to me. So I recognized that Rick’s theory was plausible.

  On the other hand, I certainly knew by now not to dismiss a tale like Satsy’s just because it sounded supernatural. My friendship with Max—Dr. Maximillian Zadok, a mage born in the seventeenth century and unquestionably the most unusual person I’ve ever met—has taught me that reality is much stranger than I ever imagined and that there are more things in it, Horatio, than were dreamt of in my philosophy.

  “But that’s just my theory. What’s yours?” Rick prodded invitingly, “What do you think happened?”

  “I have no idea,” I said shaking my head. “But I do know that I’m not getting on that freight elevator alone any time soon.”

  He smiled again. “Actually, I don’t think I will, either.”

  “And it bothers me that on the same morning that Satsy was terrified by a weird experience, this kid Jonathan was, too.”

  “Well, the boy’s episode is pretty easy to explain, don’t you think?” Rick’s take on that was very similar to what Miles had suggested: a frightened young child, lost in a setting that strongly suggested certain things to his imagination. Rick added some background about child psychology and how a very young brain interpreted sensory information, and it sounded convincing.

  “Yeah, maybe there really was only one weird incident here this morning,” I said. “The one Satsy had.” And since that experience had involved smoking some really good shit . . . I shrugged. Perhaps the bizarre events of the morning were indeed due to imaginative minds misinterpreting conventional experiences under the influence of stress or a psychoactive substance.

  Even so, I decided to be thorough. Mostly because of how terrified that nice little boy had been. “I think I’m going to check out the area, though, and see if I can figure out exactly what scared the kid. I’ll feel better if I know. And if it’s something that might frighten another child, maybe I can get it removed from the floor.” Miles might be persuadable; he wouldn’t want another incident like Jonathan’s.

  Rick glanced at his watch. “I’ve probably got some more time before Jeff gets hot under the fuzzy collar and wants to swap out. I’ll help you look around for a few minutes.”

  I smiled. “You really are Super Santa.”

  He made a wry face, as he usually did when someone used that name. “Well, we Santas have a big rep to live up to, you know.”

  “Of course.” I was glad he wanted to help. With his knowledge of child psychology, I thought he’d be more likely than me to spot something that had turned into a terrifying threat in the little boy’s mind. I led the way through the door that took us out of the delivery area and back into Solsticeland. “It happened way back near the North Pole.”

  “Let’s go this way,” Rick said, gesturing toward the path on our left. “It’ll be less crowded.”

  Three main paths meandered through Solsticeland—which was overall an immense, winding labyrinth of side paths, loops, and dead ends where I still got lost at times. Getting lost was often part of the fun of visiting this place, of course—and not just for kids. Later in the day, our visitors would include groups of teens, couples on dates, and adults nostalgically revisiting their youth.

  The path we were on passed by a giant hologram of floating ecofairies (I had no idea what an “ecofairy” was, but this was their official name), some little gingerbread condos that looked a bit like festively edible Anasazi ruins, and an elaborate manger scene. There was also a huge Saturnalia tree. I thought it looked exactly like the Christmas trees all over the store; but Jingle had told me emphatically that it was a Saturnalia tree, in honor of the winter solstice and in memory of the ancient Roman holiday which became Christmas after the empire converted to Christianity and needed to find a politically correct new frame for its popular pagan festival.

  Many current Christmas traditions originated in the Romans’ pagan Saturnalia, such as decorating the house with lights to ward off the encroaching darkness and with greenery to celebrate the imminent arrival of spring, as promised by the gradual return of the sun when the days start growing longer after the winter solstice.

  Most of the rest of contemporary Christmas customs come from Dickens and Disney, Jeff had told me. And who was I to disagree?

  Since night is longer than day during the winter solstice, and since the real North Pole is dark all season, the entire fourth floor of Fenster’s was shrouded in nocturnal gloom to harmonize with those themes. Working for long hours beneath a dark, star-studded sky tended to make me sleepy during my shifts here. And it didn’t strike me as a stroke of genius to have a vast immersive exhibit for children that was dark and shadowy; I thought Jonathan’s experience here was starting to seem inevitable, if a little extreme.

  In keeping with the multicultural concept of Solsticeland, scattered exhibits throughout the enchanted maze incorporated
Hanukkah, Diwali, and Kwanzaa themes. As Preston Fenster had noted, Islam was not (yet) represented here, but speaking as one of the Chosen People, I envied Muslims for that; Solsticeland’s Hanukkah exhibit was a collection of props that were simultaneously so garish and so stereotypical that they looked like leftovers from a Las Vegas casino production of Fiddler On the Roof. I was often assigned to work in the Hanukkah exhibit—where the predictable soundtrack, piped in through the speaker system, was always the sentimental squeal of klezmer music.

  A marketing station was set up near the Hanukkah display for one of the season’s hottest new products, a toy that Fenster’s was promoting aggressively: Chérie the Chef. Since I worked this area a lot, I often got stuck demonstrating Chérie’s selling points and urging people to buy her. As Miles had noted on a number of occasions by now, I didn’t do it well or with sincere enthusiasm.

  Chérie, a doll that was about twelve inches tall, made Naughty and Nice seem like flat-chested, fully clothed intellectuals who used admirable restraint with their cosmetics. She wore a tiny little apron—one that was better suited to a porn star than a child’s toy—and not much else. She came with her own upscale kitchen, fully stocked with little plastic gourmet tools and food, so that she could whip up a five-course meal for her hungry man when he came home.

  “I hate, loathe, and despise that toy,” I told Rick as we walked past it. It pained me to see children and parents gathering around Chérie now, as they so often did, and expressing wonder and delight at her domestic attributes.

  “Yeah, I think all the female elves hate her,” Rick said. “And the male elves want to date her. Well, the straight ones, I mean.”

  “That’s not exactly a big crowd.” I guessed, “Maybe two?”

  “I’m betting on three,” he said. “Twinkle, Eggnog, and Thistle.”

  “Thistle, I agree. Eggnog, maybe. I haven’t really worked with him.” All I knew about Eggnog was that he had an MA in literature from Princeton, which is what everyone knew about him. You couldn’t spend five minutes around Eggnog without him bringing up the subject, always with the shrieking subtext that elfdom was beneath an individual of his intellect and education. Frankly, I felt elfdom was beneath me, too; but I didn’t cite credentials to prove it every time I opened my mouth.

  “But Twinkle?” I said doubtfully. “Would a straight man really go along with being called Twinkle?”

  We didn’t necessarily get to choose our elf names, but we could object to an assigned name and suggest an alternative. I had objected to the attempt to name me Tannenbaum, the handle used by my predecessor in this role; she was a gentile who’d evidently been unaware it wasn’t a Jewish name, but rather the German word for a Christmas tree.

  “I think that Twinkle assumes we enjoy the witty irony of the name, given his obvious heterosexual masculinity.” When I gave Rick a peculiar look, he added, “I’m telling you what I think he thinks.”

  “Oh.” I thought it over. “Well, maybe.”

  As we continued our trek through Solsticeland, we enjoyed a jaw-wagging gossip session about our co-workers.

  Princess Crystal had been caught smoking on the job again yesterday and received her second warning. Similar to me in age, size, and physical type, Crystal was also an actress. I assumed that her throaty voice was the result of her two-pack-a-day habit. She spent her breaks puffing away on the fire escape overlooking the outdoor ventilation shaft, regardless of the weather and despite the logistical difficulty of squeezing into that small and dirty area in her voluminous, sparkling white ball gown. She also often sneaked a cigarette while on the job, hiding in various spots around the store and puffing away . . . as if she believed no one would notice the smoke. I was a little surprised that management had only caught her twice so far.

  Princess Crystal’s primary workstation was Solstice Castle. The castle and its snowy grounds bordered one side of the Enchanted Forest, while the North Pole bordered the other. The North Pole was very popular with children, of course; it was also a favorite with adults who recalled their own childhood visits to Fenster’s Holidayland, as it had been known back in the day. But the most-visited attractions on the fourth floor (except for Santa himself) were Solstice Castle and the Enchanted Forest. Neither of these immersive exhibits were holiday-themed (nor did they strike me as noticeably relating to solstice), but visitors loved them.

  The castle was a pseudo-medieval fairytale structure, bigger than my apartment, built all in sparkly white-and-silver, with little pepper-pot towers, battlements, and a glittering moat. Children could venture through the various rooms of the pint-size castle and climb spiral steps ascending the mini-towers.

  Princess Crystal spent much of her time on the castle’s ramparts, gazing across the Enchanted Forest in hopes of seeing Prince Midnight coming to beg for her hand in marriage (which he did several times per day; it was a popular performance). The prince was played by Rafe, a model who never buttoned his flowing white shirt, no matter how chilly the store got.

  “That guy just doesn’t seem to feel the cold,” Rick noted.

  “Neither do Naughty and Nice,” I grumbled.

  When not proposing to Princess Crystal, Rafe could usually be found posing for pictures with gushing female shoppers, many of whom asked for his autograph. I didn’t have the impression that Rafe’s feverish networking with visitors was getting him that big break he kept talking about, but rumor had it that he was getting laid by enthusiastic Fenster customers every night after he clocked out.

  “I don’t have Rafe’s abs,” Rick said, “but sometimes I wish I could switch costumes with him, anyhow. My Santa suit gets pretty hot after half a shift under those lights in the throne room, with wailing toddlers being shoved onto my lap, one after another, while bickering parents take photos.”

  Elfdom was tough, but being Santa was certainly no picnic.

  “I just wish I didn’t jingle every time I move. It gets irritating after the first four or five hours of a shift,” I said. I was sometimes tempted to sabotage my costume by removing the little bells from my cap and my boots. “And these ears chafe by the end of a twelve-hour day.”

  “But if you took off the pointy ears,” Rick reminded me, “even more guys might mistake you for a hooker or a cocktail waitress when you’re working on the other floors.”

  “True.”

  Although I experienced occasional problems due to my blue and white costume not always being recognized as ethnic elfwear, there were seasonal employees whose outfits were even less easily identified with the holiday season. An Asian-American dancer had been performing daily in Solsticeland’s Diwali display, playing Ganesh the Remover of Obstacles, the Hindu deity who looked like an elephant; he was among the staff who had stopped coming to work lately. A blond body-builder had been cast as Thor, the Norse god of thunder. He was usually stationed in a display with a Yule log and the solstice mural, which portrayed pre-Christian festivities in some vaguely Northern European setting. When things were slow, Thor liked to keep busy by bench-pressing the Yule log.

  Ever since my first day of wandering the thematically mixed and physically confusing maze, I wasn’t at all surprised that kids tended to emerge from Solsticeland with their worldviews challenged and their religious teachings in disarray.

  When we reached the North Pole, currently full of visitors milling around, I studied the setting, trying to figure out if something here could be interpreted as menacing by a small child. Once the centerpiece of Fenster’s Holidayland, the North Pole was now just a portion of Solsticeland. It had a comfortingly old-fashioned atmosphere, and I thought Constance Fenster had been shrewd not to alter this sentimental favorite when expanding the seasonal concept to create Solsticeland.

  A cluster of elves’ cottages surrounded Santa’s large, gift-laden sleigh, their tiny yards decorated with candy canes, Christmas lights, and gingerbread men. Their roofs were covered with thick snow, as was a nearby little hill where elf mannequins, forever frozen in time, were
sledding and playing. A painted mural behind them portrayed more elves skating on an icy pond. Santa’s house was near the toy workshop, and a mannequin of Mrs. Claus was inside, eternally paused in the act of cooking a hearty meal for Santa to eat before setting off on his worldwide journey on Christmas Eve. She wore spectacles, a gray bun, and a long skirt; I usually found her appearance soothing after spending time with Chérie the Chef.

  “Did the boy indicate where he saw his scary Santa?” Rick asked me, speaking in a low voice so that the visitors around us wouldn’t overhear this.

  “He pointed toward the Enchanted Forest.” Now that was a place where a lost and frightened child might very well have felt threatened. At twenty-seven, I had at least two decades on Jonathan, and even I found the Enchanted Forest a little spooky. “But this is where the Santa images are, in the North Pole. Not over there.”

  “Maybe when he saw something scary there, he imagined it to be Santa, because he’s afraid of St. Nick,” said Rick. “He might have left the North Pole to escape the Santa images here—which is how he wound up in the scariest part of Solsticeland, poor kid.”

  “Let’s check it out.”

  The Enchanted Forest was a large, shadowy, area illuminated by the moon and silvery stars in Solsticeland’s sky, as well as by little glowing lanterns posted every few yards. Being dark and rather eerie, the forest was very popular with couples, teens, and older kids. It wasn’t aimed at small children—and that was the whole idea, Jingle had told me. In creating Solsticeland, the Iron Matriarch had established an overall holiday attraction that New Yorkers and tourists would make a point of coming to Fenster’s to visit even if they didn’t have little kids in tow.