Betwixt

by Danielle Garrett

  “So, Scarlet, tell me why you’ve called us all here.” Gwen floated away from the tree and landed at my other side. She caught Hayward’s eye and smiled.

  A knock at the door interrupted my efforts to organize my thoughts. “That’ll be Holly,” I told Gwen, starting for the door.

  Holly and her boyfriend, Adam St. James, a dog-shifter, waited on the welcome mat.

  “Hello, Adam. Nice to see you again,” I said, ushering them inside. “Come on in. It’s not that much warmer in here, but it’s a little bit better than out there.”

  “You two are always so cute,” Gwen sighed, a dreamy look in her eyes as she noted their matching scarves and stocking hats.

  Adam smiled and picked up the edge of the scarf. “Two-for-one special.”

  Holly laughed. “He’s so romantic when he bargain shops.”

  Adam playfully elbowed her and then wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her against him before planting a kiss on her rosy, windblown cheek.

  “I was just telling everyone about the Red Snowman,” I started, turning back to face the assembled ghosts.

  “The Red Snowman?” one of the ghosts repeated, sending a ripple of whispers through the group. From the looks on their faces, none of them recognized the name.

  “Holly, why don’t you explain.”

  She took over, giving a condensed version of the joy-thieving elf. By the end, all those gathered were muttering angrily to one another. For the most part, they’d all lived in Beechwood Harbor or the neighboring towns their whole lives and now choose to continue into their afterlife. The idea of someone walking in and disturbing the local children felt like a personal assault on the town they all loved so much.

  “A walking nightmare wandering through Beechwood,” Adam said when Holly finished explaining. “What else is new?”

  Holly raised her hands. “What we’re proposing is a neighborhood watch until Christmas is over. If you can all organize amongst yourselves, I think we can have eyeballs on most neighborhoods without too much trouble. If you see anything strange, report directly to me. Scarlet is not to be disturbed unless absolutely necessary.” She smiled at me. “Anything else?”

  “Not that I can think of. Other than a thank you to all of you for volunteering. If this Red Snowman is wandering around town, I have no doubt that we’ll be able to find him and send him packing!”

  A chorus of whoops answered me.

  Gwen raised her hand, delivering a rallying cry. “Let’s go! We have a Christmas to save!”

  The ghosts poured from the room, all evaporating in the blink of an eye, leaving Holly, Adam, and me behind. They said their goodbyes and went out to catch up with the ghosts. When the door closed behind them, I sighed, and wished I were with them instead of fighting my way through housework.

  ***

  Seven o’clock came all too soon and when I peeled myself from my bed, I worried I might have caused permanent damage to the old-school alarm clock on my nightstand after the final slam I’d delivered to the snooze button. I pulled my phone from the drawer and was jolted fully awake by the series of text messages letting me know my parents had already landed and were on their way into town. I’d volunteered to drive up and collect my parents from the airfield as it was only an hour up the coastline, but they’d insisted they would find their way to me. It turned out to be a good thing, as I barely managed to shower, dress, and put on a pot of coffee before they were knocking at my door.

  I smoothed my hands over my still-wet ponytail and then pulled the door open. “Hello, Mom and Dad. You made good time. How was the flight?”

  Jack and Lynne Sanderson were every inch the king and queen of suburbia. My father was an investment broker who had enough money squirreled away to retire ten times over. My mother, a psychologist by profession, had retired from work once I was born and when I was in my school-aged years, busied herself with volunteer work for a myriad of organizations in between brunching with the other upwardly mobile women of Scottsdale.

  My mother frowned and stripped her gloves off. “I think the pilot must have been partaking in some buttered rum, pre-flight. Whose recommendation was he, again?” she asked my father. “Surely not Raphael’s?”

  My dad ignored her question and stepped inside, opening his arms to me. I embraced him, breathing in his familiar scent. “Merry Christmas, pumpkin,” he said against my ear.

  “Merry Christmas, Dad.” I took a step back and waved my hand at the small hallway. They’d been to my apartment once before, not too long after I’d moved. It was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom space that was only slightly larger than their walk-in closet back home in Arizona. “Come on, let me get you set up in my room.”

  We slipped into an easy small talk as they got settled into the room. My mother continued her griping about the supposedly drunk pilot and my father asked me about business. I took them on a tour of my flower shop and then we went to McNally’s, a local restaurant that boasted a mean brunch menu.

  When we returned later in the afternoon, my mother strode into the kitchen. My heart sank as she started peeking through my cupboards. One by one, she found the frozen beans, unbaked apple pie still in its bakery box, and half a dozen other ingredients she would deem unworthy of a Christmas feast. Sure enough, her lips quirked into a twisted pucker. “Oh, Scarlet, dear. It looks like we’ll need to make a trip to the grocery store. I thought you’d already picked up everything we would need?”

  “Mom, we can use everything I bought. It’s just not the way you’re—”

  “Busted now, huh, Scar?” Flapjack said, appearing at my mother’s shoulder.

  “Scarlet, dear, is something wrong?” my mother asked, her raised eyebrow and stilted tone clearly indicating that it would not be acceptable if something was wrong.

  “Um. No. Not at all.”

  It was Christmas time after all. Everything had to be as perfect as it was in the encapsulated scenes depicted in her collection of snow globes she meticulously set out each year. I’d lost count of them a few years ago, but she kept at least twenty just along the six-foot mantle above the fireplace in the formal living room. They popped up all over the house; guest bathroom, dining room centerpieces, entryway table, and last year she’d even thought to put some on the banister of the front porch.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I said, nodding at Flapjack.

  My mom nodded. “I’ll get started on a list.”

  I rolled my eyes and went to the bathroom. Flapjack was sitting on the counter by the sink when I flicked on the lights and closed the door. “What’s going on? Did they find the Red Snowman last night?”

  “No. I don’t think there even is such a thing.” Flapjack swished his tail and looked at the door. “How’s it going with Middle-Aged Ken and Barbie out there?”

  “So far, I’ve learned that my curtains are too loud, I need a new mattress, and that I can’t be trusted to go grocery shopping without supervision.”

  He snorted. “So, really, a seven out of ten.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “Just waiting for her to start prodding me about my love life and when I’m going to get around to giving her a pack of grandchildren.”

  “She’s probably saving that for Christmas dinner.”

  “Gee, I can’t wait.”

  By the time I went to bed that night, sprawled across my second-hand couch, I tossed and turned, coming up with imaginary arguments to all of my mom’s instructions at the grocery store, as though I was nothing more than a helpless child, playing make-believe. It was always so convenient how she managed to forget that I’d spent nearly a decade on my own traveling the world, and while I’d occasionally needed their financial help, I’d done it on my own two feet. I might not know how to pick out the perfect pineapple or make biscuits from scratch, but I knew three languages, had more stamps in my passport by thirty than most people managed to get in a lifetime, and I’d single-handedly opened and ran a flower shop in a town I’d never even visited prior to signing my
lease.

  Eventually, somewhere around midnight, I managed to shift my brain to less blood-boiling thoughts and started wondering if Flapjack was right and the Red Snowman was some kind of urban legend. Flapjack’s visit hadn’t lasted for long, but before he left, he’d told me that the search would be continuing that night, and that as it was Christmas Eve, it was likely the last chance to catch the ancient, mischief-making elf. If he even existed. It was hard to imagine anyone running through the neighborhood infecting children’s Christmas dreams with nasty horrors, but there were a lot of things I’d heard of that seemed far-fetched right up until I saw them come to life right before my eyes. There was a good chance the menace was real. When a voice and cold blast of air woke me, I jolted upright, my eyes scanning the moonlit room for signs of him.

  Instead, I found Flapjack, sitting at the foot of my bed.

  “What’s going on? You aren’t doing that creepy thing where you watch me sleep again, are you?” I asked with a scowl.

  “Turns out that I was wrong.” Flapjack twitched his fluffy, feather-duster tail. “The Red Snowman is real.”

  Chapter 4

  Gwen went with Hayward to get Holly and Adam. You’re coming with me.”

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stuffed my feet into the mid-calf faux-shearling boots I’d kicked off before climbing into my makeshift bed. They had rubber soles, and while I wasn’t sure they were quite the optimal footwear choice for chasing a Christmas-hating elf, I couldn’t say for certain they weren’t perfect. After all, this was my first angry-elf-hunting mission.

  And hopefully my last.

  My fleece-lined sweatpants would fight off the sub-zero temperatures but I shoved my arms into my thick winter coat and grabbed my satchel from the hook by the door before grabbing my keys and hurrying out the door. I moved as quietly as I could, because when it came right down to it, the idea of dosing my mom with Holly’s potion made me squeamish and I hadn’t been able to follow through.

  “Where is he?” I asked Flapjack, only once the apartment door was closed behind me.

  “In the Lilac neighborhood. It’s just like Holly said. He’s standing outside a window and there’s a chain of light coming from the room on the other side. It’s downright spooky, Scar.”

  I cringed. “Did anyone say anything? Or try to stop him?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” I fumbled through my keyring, my fingers already growing stiff from the cold. I found the one I needed and hurried across the small parking lot behind the row of shops and unlocked my custom-painted delivery van. Flapjack appeared in the passenger seat and we set off into the night.

  I parked a few houses down from the one Flapjack indicated and looked around, waiting for signs of Adam or Holly. Surely they would have been faster than me?

  “There he is!” Flapjack shouted, arching his back.

  I followed his wide eyes and saw what looked like a small child bolting across the street. There was no mistaking him. He wore an all-red outfit, made from some shiny material that glittered under the frosty pool of light from the street lamps positioned on either side of the street. Midway across, he jumped high into the air, clicked his heels together, and vanished, leaving behind nothing but the echoing sounds of the jingle bells on the toes of his slippers.

  “Great. Now what?” Flapjack huffed.

  “There’s Holly. And … Adam?”

  A large black dog was at Holly’s side. I’d known Adam was a dog-shifter, but the beast beside Holly came up past her hip and was twice as wide as any domestic dog I’d ever seen. Gwen and Hayward and two other ghosts followed in their wake.

  I jumped from the driver’s seat, shut the door softly behind me, and hurried to catch up to them. “He vanished!” I said. “He was there, right at that window.” I pointed, indicating the spot. “Then he ran across the street and disappeared.”

  “Slippery little thing,” Holly said.

  I nodded and then gestured to the ghosts. “Everyone, fan out. Maybe he’s still close by.”

  Holly and I found him two streets over, standing on his tiptoes to peek into yet another window. We crouched behind a row of hedges, watching him for a moment. A beam of light filtered from the window. The elf glowed as it surrounded him like a ribbon around a wrapped package. His eyes were closed, as though in some kind of blissful Zen. I started forward, but Holly stopped me. “Wait,” she whispered. “If we rush at him, I have a feeling he’ll vanish again. We need a way to trap him.”

  I looked to Adam, the massive dog sitting on her other side, his dark eyes trained at the elf.

  “Oh! I have an idea,” I whispered, looking back at Holly. “Wanna use some of that voodoo you do?”

  She smiled. “What did you have in mind?”

  I dug into my satchel and pulled out a silver sphere.

  “Your ghost trap?” she asked, one brow arched.

  “Technically, it’s a soul keeper. I’ve never tried it on anything other than ghosts, but in theory, at least, it should work on anything. Can you charm it to look like a snow globe?”

  “I think so.” She rubbed her hands together, conjuring up a ball of light. Her lips set in a firm line as she concentrated on the small silver ball. Magic poured from her fingers, feeding into the sphere and after a moment, the edges changed and became transparent and a little snow village formed inside the orb.

  “Now, the only catch is that he has to willingly enter the trap.”

  Adam turned, cocking his head in a quizzical way.

  “That seems like a tall order,” Holly whispered.

  “I think we can do it. Just hold onto the globe, okay?”

  She nodded.

  I peered over the edge of bushes, the elf’s light was starting to fizzle out, flickering like a candle burnt to the wick. In the moment before his eyes opened, I jumped up from my hiding spot. “Stop right there!”

  The elf started and turned to run, but was a half a heartbeat too slow.

  Holly let a stunning spell fly and hit her target dead center. It pushed him back against the wall of the house. That’s when Adam made his debut. The shaggy dog silently entered the yard and the elf’s eyes doubled in size. “N—in—nice doggy!”

  Holly frowned and folded her arms. “We know who you are, Red Snowman.”

  “And what you’re doing. You’re poisoning these children’s dreams and turning them into nightmares. You want them to be afraid of Santa Claus because you’re jealous of the attention he gets this time of year. Shame on you!”

  Adam growled.

  The elf shook his head, his range of motion limited by the hold of Holly’s spell. “No, no. You’ve got it all wrong!”

  Before I could argue, a muffled scream sounded from the room he’d been drawing power from moments before.

  Cringing, I turned to him. “You were saying?”

  “Okay! Sometimes that happens, but it’s not my intention.”

  A light turned on in the room and Holly ducked. I drew back away from the window, while Adam’s beast-form and the elf’s head were well below the window eave. “The parents are taking the kid to bed,” Flapjack reported, his tail dangling below the window as he hovered mid-air.

  The light went off and Holly straightened to her full height.

  The elf quivered, the spell wearing thin. His face screwed up, his eyes nearly squeezed closed. “Everyone thinks I’m a cheat!” he wailed. “A fraud! I can’t get a job at the workshop and no one else will take a chance on me. This time of the year always reminds me of those stupid rumors and I have to find some happiness somewhere! I discovered that I can … borrow … it from the children. They usually have more than enough to spare! They’re not supposed to even notice it’s missing!”

  I gave the darkened window a pointed look. “Safe to say, they’ve noticed.”

  The elf worked his hands together. “Sometimes I take too much. When that happens, well, it opens the door for a nightmare.”

  “That’s despicabl
e!” Holly added, scowling at the elf.

  Adam padded closer, baring his teeth.

  The elf howled, his pleas unintelligible.

  I held up a hand. “I have a solution. A place you can go where it’s Christmas all the time.”

  The elf’s eyes went wide. “You—you do?”

  I looked at Holly and she held up the trap, disguised as a snow globe. “You can have the whole place to yourself, but you have to agree to go and never come back.”

  He looked at Adam again and frantically nodded. “Okay! I’ll go!”

  With his permission, I muttered the password to the enchanted trap, and the elf soared up into the air and shrank down, smaller and smaller, until he was barely half an inch tall. “It worked!”

  We peered into the snow globe and sure enough, Red Snowman was there, already gleefully conducting the Christmas train as it careened around the track in a figure eight. He would have his run of the place; including the miniature version of Santa’s own workshop. He was trapped inside the globe but in a way, was getting what he’d always wanted.

  “Doesn’t look too broken up about it, does he?” Flapjack asked, hovering over my left shoulder.

  I flapped a hand at him. With my mother in town, I’d had more than my fair share of someone watching over my every move.

  “I guess the real question is what do we do with it?”

  “Not a problem.” I held out my hand and grinned at her. “I know someone who would just love to add this to her collection.”

  Flapjack snorted. “You’re bad, Scar. So very, very bad.”

  I laughed. “She’ll hardly even notice it, not with the six dozen other ones she has hanging around the house.”

  Holly cocked her head. “Won’t she notice the little elf running around inside?”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “I’ll tell her it’s some kind of new technology. A holograph or something.”