NIGHTMARE ON 34th STREET

            The first we heard of it was a kid over on West 75^th Street who was so traumatized by his visit to Santa he couldn’t stop barfing for three solid days.  Candy canes, toffee apples, turkey and stuffing, the kid couldn’t keep anything down, not even eggnog.  Eb and I figured it was just a case of too much holiday cheer, too much anticipation and you better not pout, you better not cry, and little Billy or Bobby or whatever the kid’s name was had just had a meltdown.  The holidays can do that to people.  Expectations run high, and we all end up feeling the pressure.  How wrong we were.  How terribly, terribly wrong.

            I should introduce myself.  Denny Colt, undercover with the NYPD and partnered with the foxiest sister imaginable, Ebony White.  Yeah, she gave me shit when I laughed about it too.  We were working the Loony Tunes beat, which means, you guessed it, the weird-ass stuff that always seems to crop up around the full moon or the end of the year.  People who thought they were werewolves running amok in Central Park.  Faux-zombies on the IND Train.  You get the picture.  We’d hose down the crazies and lock up the hard nuts and send the rest of the poor misguided slobs home to sleep it off, and pray the next time they stopped taking their Thorazine they’d do it in Jersey and not bother us.  We were immune to wonder, as tough as Teflon and as faithless and unimaginative as a two-dollar trick at the Bunny Ranch.

            And then all hell literally broke loose.  And we were the ones left standing in the Winter Wonderland, and had to figure out a way to make sense of it all.

            We got the second call around two A. M., on a night so cold it felt like you were wearing tit-clamps.  Another wee tot was going ballistic, this time in a roach motel down on Delancy.  Claimed he’d seen Santa Claus turn into a blood-thirsty monster with fangs and horns, wearing white fur and threatening to eat him.  Eb took down the kid’s statement and told him to lay off the bath salts.  We had a few similar incidents:  a little girl up in the Bronx who said Macy’s Santa had big teeth and tried to bite her; a little boy over on Staten Island who said Santa Claus had a big black bag so he could pack up naughty children and take them away to be killed; a little asthmatic four year old in Canarsie who couldn’t say anything except Santa was bad, a bad man; and a rich brat over on Central Park West who demanded police protection, while his hysterical au pair dialed the French consulate and popped Xanax.  We figured it was all part of the season.

            What finally made us realize we had a problem was the call we got around ten o’clock three days later, just when Eb had brought back a couple coffees from the Stop-n-Rob up on Lennox Avenue and we were swapping stories of holidays past.  She had just trumped my Car-Gets-Towed-And-My-Girlfriend-Breaks-Up-With-Me story with her Donkey-Takes-A-Crap-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Christmas-Pageant tale, when my cell phone throbbed to life with the order to get over to 151 West 34^th Street ASAP.  So we peeled out and headed on down there.

            The streets were still clogged with late-night saps staggering around from office parties to bars to restaurants to the latest incarnation of The Lion King, but once we got past the Theater District things settled down to your average New York City night in December, a frozen tundra of asphalt and silent buildings, as welcoming as the moon.

            Which is the last time I’m going to use the word “average” in this story.

            When we got there, the unis had already sealed off the area behind Macy’s, and Commissioner Dolan was breathing fire.  That’s when I knew we were Capital-P Pooched.  If Dolan had gotten his fat-ass out of bed on a night like that, something truly awful was going on.

            “Give it to me straight,” I said, feeling the coffee I’d drunk repercolating right up against my uvula.  He didn’t even answer me, just stepped aside.  And we saw.

            Did you ever see how a little kid takes all his clothes off?  Everything stays were it drops.  Pants end up pooled on top of shoes, with the underpants on top like the cherry on top of a sundae.  Shirts get the flying treatment, and might end up anywhere from on top of the bureau to out the window.  Well, it was kind of like that, except the kid was still inside them.  The lower half of his body was squashed down like someone had taken a fist and slammed him as flat as a piece of Play-Doh.  The upper half was on top of a dumpster ten feet away, oozing red.  There was an explosion of white fake snow-flakes everywhere, which didn’t make the blood look any better.  Eb lost the Taco Grande she’d had earlier for dinner, and I wasn’t that far behind her.

            “What happened?” I asked.

            “Fuck if I know.”  The Commish was white.  “The kid was found like this half an hour ago by some wino who’s currently taking the pledge.  Our only clue is this.”  He handed me one of those cheesy holiday folders, all holly and red ribbons, with a picture inside of the vic sitting on Santa’s lap, holding a candy cane and grinning like a moron on crack.  I looked more closely at the Jolly Old Elf and felt a chill.

            “There’s something weird about this Santa Claus,” I said.

            I don’t know whether it was the length of his nose or the odd lift of one eyebrow over a knowing, ink-dark eye, but I knew right away I had something to dread from this guy, and it wasn’t just coal in my stocking.  I said, “What do we know about him?” and the Commissioner shrugged.

            “He’s a replacement for Macy’s regular St. Nick.  Seems like that guy had been doing the job for years, but he up and quit this year, saying it’s too early to being working on Thanksgiving night, and he was damned if he was going to be part of the mad dash to make everybody bankrupt just so the corporate fat cats could stash away billions in the Cayman Islands.  I’m thinking they would have hired Jack the Ripper after listening to that Occupy bullshit.”

            “Maybe they did.”  Eb was looking better now, so I crooked my finger at her to suggest we step aside for a pow-wow.  When we’d walked to the end of the alley and were looking up at the stars, I said, “So what do you know about Santa?”

            “Just what I read in the papers.”  See, the thing about Ebony White is, she’s got a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University, but she’s too savvy to let all that brain-power show for the hoi polloi.  I had her number, though.

            “C’mon.  Gimme the straight poop and I’ll buy you a new set of Joseph Campbell books for Christmas.  Start talking, smarty-pants.”

            She said, “Okay, here’s the skinny.  Santa Claus is a modern version of the pagan god, Cernunnos, the winter stag-god who shows up everywhere people survived in the winter months by hunting game.  Originally, he had horns, and all that fur he wears was from animals he’d caught and skinned.  Then later on St. Nicholas got in on the action, because he supposedly gave secret gifts to people by dropping them down the chimney.  In Germany and Austria, there are also various dark Santa Clauses like Black Peter and Krampus, who come closer to the original idea of a dangerous winter god who will punish bad children and take them away and eat them.”

            I was sensing a pattern here.  “So Santa Claus was originally a bad-ass?”

            “No.  Not necessarily.  Santa Claus was still good, but the idea was that all human beings encompass both a light and a dark side, and Santa used to reflect that.  Of course it’s just a story.”

            “Right.”  I nodded.  “And our happy little camper here just scraped his knee falling down a flight of stairs.  Baby, we got trouble, and it ain’t over in River City.  We’ve got a child-killer on our hands at the very least, and I think there’s a pretty good chance he’s wearing a big red suit and goes ‘Ho-Ho-Ho.’”

            She sighed and admitted I was probably right.  That’s the other nice thing about Eb, she’s quick on the uptake.  The next thing you know, we were driving up Lexington and she’d already gotten this guy Norman Wasserman’s address on the GPS.  Seems Norman Wasserman was the talent agent who got our new Kris Kringle his job, when the old Santa got pissed and took a powder.  By now it was pushing midnight, but I figured he was always up for a new client, so when we got there I did my best imitation of Justin Beiber on the intercom, and he let us right in.

            What can I say, I’m a man of a thousand voices.

            Norman was about a hundred and two years old, but sharp as a tack.  He said the guy we were looking for was named Heinrich Himmeltod, but he though it was an alias.  Probably wanted by Interpol, was his guess.  He said Himmeltod was tall and thin and dark and had greasy black hair and a big hooked nose and looked about as Christmasy as the Grim Reaper, but Macy’s had been desperate, and had jumped at anything with a lap and a pulse.  Once he’d gotten through make-up and into the fat-suit he’d looked okay, and he’d had the knack of asking kids what they wanted down cold.

            Norman said he’d even leaned over to him before he left and asked him in a whisper, “And what do you want, Mr. Wasserman?” and the old agent said he practically shat his pants right then and there.  “There was just something hungry about him, that’s all I can say,” Norman finished up.  “Like he could get his claws into your insides and pull.  I was never so happy to get away from anybody in all my life.”

            So we had a name, but Mr. Himmeltod proved to be a slippery customer.  Of course the store shut down the Winter Wonderland the next day (over the protests of something like 1.2 million Mommys and Daddys who’d brought their darlings to sit on Mr. Psychopath’s lap and ask for a My Little Pony) but it wasn’t like old Heinrich was just going to waltz into the employees rest room and start changing into his red BVDs.  Eb came up with an alternative plan.

            “We need to find the other Santa.  The one who quit.  Don’t you see it, Den, there’s a pattern!  One Santa hits the bricks and then out of the blue this other dude shows up?  My guess is they were working together.  Some kind of a green-mail scheme to discredit the company.  Make people say ‘Bring your kid to Macy’s so Santa can eat him.’  It’s classic political theater, works every time.”

            Sometimes Eb could go off the deep end faster than Michael Phelps, but this time I figured she had a point.  The former Santa, it turned out, was a man named Homer Phletobottom who lived in Queens and who, when he wasn’t singing Rudolph and passing out the holiday cheer, made his living repairing watches in a dusty little shop on Steinway Street.  We went out to Astoria to check him out.

            “Yes, can I help you?”

            Homer was over seventy, with thinning white hair and a full white beard and twinkly blue eyes behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.  He was wearing a red shirt and a pair of red pants and he looked fit enough to have assisted in a homicide, although he could have stood to lose about thirty pounds.

            “Yep,” I said, showing some I.D., “I’m Denny Colt, and this is Miss Ebony White, NYPD.  We’re here to ask you a few questions.”

            “Go right ahead.  Can I offer you some refreshment?  Milk?  Some cookies?”

            “Can the Christmas crap, grandpa.  Where were you last night?”

            “Here.  I live over the shop.  You can ask Dasher.  He’s–”

            “Don’t tell me.  He’s your reindeer.”

            “No, he’s my landlord.  Dick ‘Dasher’ Dershowitz.  We were playing poker till two A.M.  That’s when he cleaned my clock on an inside straight and I decided to go to bed before I lost the rest of my social security check.”

            “Boo hoo.  I’m cryin’.  Now, look, do you know this guy?”  I slid a copy of Himmeltod’s head shot across the counter to him.  Eight-by-ten full of glossy menace, and I could see the old man’s adam’s apple move once, twice, before he said, “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

            “Bullshit, Homie.”  I figured it was time to start playing bad cop.  “Now how did it go down?  Did you ditch Macy’s on principle, or were you and Heinrich in this together?  Yeah, I know how it goes, and it got out of hand, right?  One minute you’re scaring some little kid’s nads off, and the next thing he’s dead and you’re stashing his corpse and laying low up here in the Old Curiosity Shop.  Now we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

            I moved over to his display case, where about twenty Movados were gathering dust, and leaned heavily on the glass.  Generally, I’m a peaceful guy, but hey, you do what you have to.  “Now either you tell me exactly what you know about Heinrich Himmeltod right now, or we go down to the station and book your jelly-belly ass as an accessory.”

            Well, he was tough, I’ll give him that.  Shrugging, he said, “Come on upstairs.  I need a drink if I’m going to get into this.  And my guess is, after I finish telling you what I know, you’ll need one too.”

            Well, Eb and I went upstairs with him and sat down across from him at the dinette table, and he started laying it out for us.

            “I found great joy in being Santa Claus for a long time.  Not just promising children toys and treats, but rekindling their sense of wonder.  You know a child always has a very real sense of wonder residing just under the surface of whatever cynicism may have crusted over it.  Even an older child.  Even an adult.  You scrape that layer of doubt away, and you find someone wide-eyed and delighted, willing to believe in anything, wizards and spirits and monsters.  Even in demons.  Even in God.

            “I enjoyed letting a little of that mystery sneak through for the longest while.  Maybe even sending the kids away a little uncertain of how much of what I’d told them was just make-believe.  Children want such simple things, after all.  An item they can hold in their hands that makes them feel happy.  A talisman to clutch.  Something that is, in effect, magic.  Well, I gave them that, or at least I gave them the hope of that, and they went away nourished for decades.  Even after life’s disappointments and the sheer terrible ordinariness of reality ground them down to the tiniest nub, they still believed.  A little part of them still believed in divinity.

            “And then, after a while…suddenly they didn’t anymore.  I’m not sure what the tipping point was.  Maybe 911.  Maybe 24/7 news did the trick, frightening their parents so much that their children grew up without fear.  Fear is a component, after all, of wonder.  So I decided maybe if I couldn’t move the children anymore with delight, maybe I could move them with horror.  Maybe…just maybe…they needed something stronger than mere happiness to reawaken their sense of the miraculous.  Maybe they needed divine terror.  So I contacted Mr. Himmeltod.”

            The old man downed his double-shot of schnapps and looked at the empty glass as though it was going to tell him his fortune.  Who knows, maybe it could?  Maybe this was all just the booze talking.  But I felt a shudder run down my spine that had nothing to do with the falling thermometer, and I said, “Go on.  What happened next?”

            “He’s always here, you know.  Always around.  He’s the shadow on the birthday cake, the darkness once the sparkly lights have been turned off and the last kiss has faded under the mistletoe.  He’s the three A.M. Christmas, the pale dawn of December 26.  All I had to do was invite him to the party, and he was there front and center, telling people what they didn’t want to hear.  He was the bad news biopsy, the form rejection letter, the police siren, the fracture, the existential doubt.  He was the delightful shiver, the rude song, the snappy wise-crack that puts Christmas in its place.  He opened the door of real fear, and let it all come in.

            “Only he got out of hand.”

            The old man sighed, and I could see where this might be going.  Not my fault.  I brought the monster in but I swear I didn’t know what I was doing.  I never thought he’d do that.  Only the old man had a few more surprises up his argyle socks.

            “He got out of hand because I wanted him to.  I knew I couldn’t do it, but a part of me wanted to embrace the darkness, blow up everything, ruin it all.  I wanted to get back at all the children who were just going through the motions, asking for things they didn’t even want that much.  Pay them back for all the jokes…Santa was fake.  His beard was held on by wires, and he smelled like mothballs, or bourbon, or gas.  How dare they mock what was once true awe?  The beast brought down on Christmas Eve to feed the tribe wasn’t felled by some overpaid elf in felt slippers and Spandex.  I once was a god!  It wasn’t just the fact that the kids didn’t believe anymore, they didn’t even want to believe.  So I told Krampus to do whatever he wanted, and I wouldn’t lift a finger stop him.”

            “Krampus?” I asked.  Eb was nodding.  She said, “That’s right, the evil twin brother of Santa Claus, the other half of the light, the winter beast-god.  So it really is him?”

            “Yes.”  Homer Phletobottom wiped his eyes and his nose on a big red handkerchief, and then said with greater fortitude than I would have expected, “And now, I’ve got to stop him.  You’ve made me realize that.  I can’t let him go on, I can’t let him suck all the joy out of this season, no matter how much he belongs in this world, and I don’t.  I’ve got to send him back.”

            Well, I wasn’t sure I was adding up every single item on this Christmas list, but I was getting enough to put my butt-cheeks in permanent clench-mode.  I said, “How can we help?”

            “I think the best way is for us to lure him out.  We need someone who doesn’t believe in anything, someone who’ll challenge him to show himself.  If someone, ideally a figure of authority, were to mock him and say he was nothing but a fable, I think he’d be drawn to confront such a person, and then I might be able to stop him.”

            He looked me right in the eye, and for all the fact that his cheeks were like roses and his nose like a cherry, he was clearly asking me to man up, and I somehow felt I couldn’t let him down.

            “All right,” I said.  “I’ll do it.  After all, what’s more authoritative than a cop, and a smart-ass one at that?  You tell Krampus I’ll take him on, mano a mano, anytime he likes.  After all…”  I gave my shoulders a roll.  “Who wants to live forever?”

            And if Eb knew I was just talking through my jingle-bell hat, she was nice enough not to call me on it.  That’s what a partner’s for, to allow you every once in a while to play the hero.

            We decided we’d trap him in his lair, the very Winter Wonderland where he’d played his evil pranks and terrorized his innocent victims.  The next evening, once Macy’s had shut its doors and the last perfume spritzers and over-zealous sales clerks had made their way out into the frosty night, Eb and I met Homer up on the seventh floor, where he hid behind the Santa Land facade and Eb took up a point at the far side of the Candy Cane Village, where she could cover us.  Then I sat down in Santa’s chair and went to work.

            “Hey, fatso!  Yeah, you!  Mr. Holly-Jolly.  I’m talking to you, Big Foot.  You want a piece a me?  I don’t think so.  You think you’re gonna huff and puff and blow my house down?  Yeah, you and what army?  You want to know what I think?  I think you’re just some overgrown polar bear with delusions of grandeur.  Yeah, right.  You probably couldn’t get a job selling Klondike bars.  Hey, Krampus?  I hear the New Jersey Devils are suing you for trademark infringement.  I hear Underwood deviled ham called.  You wanna give back the horns?  Oooh…. oooh…you gonna come get me?  You gonna come eat me up?  I’m shakin’ here.  You’re so chicken shit you probably couldn’t eat a Baby Ruth, much less a real baby.  What a wuss!”

            I was on a roll, and kind of enjoying yelling my head off in the middle of Macy’s with nobody to hear me but Eb and Homer and a bunch of weird-ass mannikins, when I suddenly saw one of the mannikins topple over.  Another followed suit shortly thereafter, and I saw a large shadow looming up at the far end of the floor.  I kept it up.

            “Hey, Krampus!  What kind of a name is that anyway?  That’s almost as dumb as Heinrich Himmeltod.  Do people call you Heinie?  Hey, Heinie-baby!  You wanna come over here and give me a spanking???”

            When he moved, however, he moved fast.  One minute there was nothing there and the next there was this big guy there who must have been at least seven feet tall, dressed all in black with lank black hair and a sallow complexion and piercing red-rimmed eyes, who said, “Mr. Colt.  Am I right in assuming you really want me for Christmas?”

            Well, Mrs. Colt didn’t raise no wimps, so I just snapped, “You got that right, Spook-face.  I want to arrest you for murder and advise you you have the right to remain silent and–”

            But I was the one who was silenced, as Heinrich Himmeltod reached out one four-foot-long arm and grabbed me around the throat, and as he tightened his grip, I felt nails pricking into my flesh that felt like talons.  He pulled me up close, and I could smell rotten meat on his breath, and see the dark, dark light of endless snows and bleakness and night at the top of the world, all pooling in my executioner’s eyes.  I shut my own eyes, and felt everything I’d ever thought and known and believed about the world falling away from me like a tower of dust, and I was filled with reverence, and dread, and a sense of the impossible vast mystery of the world.  I felt as if every cell in my body was miraculous, and at the same time as if this stunning gift of perception was all too brief, and my head was too small to contain it.  I wished with all my heart that I could keep this sense of the world as large and magical and live with it forever, and I never wanted to lose it…and I wished I didn’t have to die as a consequence of it, either.

            And just as I was about to lose consciousness, Krampus dropped me and turned to face Homer Phletobottom, who had stepped out from behind the front door of Santa’s house and was saying (and to tell the truth, not unkindly), “Now, now, that’s enough, now.”

            Krampus (or if you prefer, Heinrich Himmeltod) looked at the chubby old watchmaker and shook his head.  Something like grief seemed to cross his saturnine features for a moment, as he said, “Why?  What do you mean?”

            “I mean that’s enough, that’s all.  You’ve had your fun.  But we can’t go scaring everyone to death now, can we?  Where would the world be then?  People need to have things life-sized so they can understand them.  Christmas is about presents, and songs, and if you like, shepherds and babes in a manger.  If we were to make people see the full scope of the world’s astonishment, they’d go mad.  No one can stand to see the uncanny in everyday life.  I know…I got angry, too.”  Homer sighed and laid a finger aside of his nose, and I swear I expected him to rise straight up a chimney…except there was no chimney in sight.  “I got frustrated with knowing the world really is a stage on which great powers war and monsters and angels fight for domination.  But you can’t just frighten people into believing.  You have to lead them to it gradually.  You have to give them stories, and legends, and let them assume it’s all pretend. Otherwise they’ll be left with nothing…and where would we be without their belief?  We’d be left with nothing, too.

            “I expected too much,” Homer said finally.  “People need time.  Eventually they all realize the world is saturated with amazement.  Faith may be weak, but faithlessness is far weaker still.  Come, my old friend.  After all…”  He twinkled.  “It’s almost Christmas.”

            Well, I don’t know any other way to tell you this, but to lay it out straight.  Those two impossibilities just walked out of Macy’s arm in arm, and Eb and I just stood there and let them go.  When you think about it, what the hell else could we have done?  What would the D.A. have said if we’d brought him Santa Claus and the Devil, and said they’d conspired to scare New York witless just to awaken its sense of the transcendent?  Laughed us out into the street, that’s what he would have done, and we’d have been back pounding a beat in Coney Island or Flatbush.

            No, what Eb and I did was go out and get drunk.  We each had about six shots of Jager and as many Rolling Rocks apiece, and then we went and sat out in Sheep’s Meadow and looked up at the stars until we had sobered up enough and it was time for us to go home.

            And that’s the end of the story.  Now, every Christmas season, I keep my eyes open.  I know every out-of-work actor or Salvation Army bell-ringer might be hiding a secret face, and I always make sure and check them out real good, just to make sure they’re on the up and up

            And every once in a while I see it.  A malicious twinkle.  A dark, somber gaze.  A smile in a snowy white beard that’s a little too broad, too hungry, and horns hidden underneath that white hair and Santa Claus cap.

            That’s when I cross to the other side of the street and pull my collar up.  Because I know the world does contain wonders.  I just don’t want to run into any of them in a dark alley.

            And if you were me, would you really feel any different?

 

 

                                             COMING SOON: MORE TALES OF THE SATURNI

 

“DAEDALUS”

New students enter the Daedalus School, where very little is really as it seems

“FALL OF LIGHT”

A creation story of the original split between light and darkness.

“INSIDER TRADING”

A young stockbroker learns who really runs the world.

“BIDDEN OR UNBIDDEN”

A modern-day monk comes face to face with the conundrum of evil.

“SUGAR”

At a remote plantation, the Danvers siblings experience a slave revolt and witness the power of the voodoo gods.

“MEMOIRS”

A.P.Bowman describes his harrowing introduction to the reality of the omnipresent Saturni.

“F.E.M.A. BLUES”

In post-Katrina New Orleans, Fire Chief Tommy Declan wrestles with despair and finds hope in some lost children.

“SOLVE ET COAGULA”

At the Daedalus School in the 1970s, a stranger arrives who spells trouble for both Niobe and Strickland Danvers.

“BURIED TREASURE”

Three young devotees of horror movies meet A.P.Bowman in 1974.

“BAY OF PIGS”

Everything really does go back to The Saturni and Kennedy Assassination was the least of it.

“MIDNIGHT AT THE SATURN BAR”

A young hustler learns you can used to just about anything in New Orleans, and even enjoy it.