Halloween and Other Seasons Read online

  Santa laughed diabolically and straightened the sleigh out for the ride south. I was depressed, and the three elves huddled back there with me surrounded by empty sacks didn’t look too cheerful, either. I looked closely at them now: two shivering apprentices, and a third elf bundled up like a mummy with his face covered. I glanced up front; Santa was waving his arms madly, cracking the reins fiercely over the poor reindeer. I wondered what he was going to do.

  The bundled-up elf inched over to me and pulled down the muff covering his face. I almost shouted; it was Fritz!

  He motioned for me to be quiet, and leaned over to whisper in my ear. “Don’t raise your voice, my friend,” he said. “If Santa finds me here I’m sure he’ll throw me overboard.” He whispered that we should move carefully to the back of the sleigh, and we did so. We piled up empty canvas sacks to form a sort of wall.

  “I’ve been in hiding,” Fritz continued. “I’m the only one who knows what’s wrong with Santa and Momma Claus, and he knows that I know. I concealed myself in the basement of the infirmary, and, after the infirmary burned down, I hid in the Toy Shop trying to puzzle this out and come up with some sort of solution. “Gustav,” he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully, “to tell you the truth, I never believed the tale.”

  “Tell me everything,” I said.

  He nodded sagely. “Well, in summary form, this is the story. On Christmas Eve, eight hundred years ago to this night, when Santa and Momma Claus and their helpers still lived in Myra, in what is now southern Turkey, Santa and Momma lost their minds. It happened very suddenly. According to the story, they carried on like madmen all of Christmas Eve. The elves—my great-great-grandfather was the physician at the time—tried to stop them, but could not. They destroyed the village.

  I was dumbfounded. “Why didn’t I ever hear of any of this?”

  “I’m coming to that. After the destruction, on Christmas Day, Santa went to sleep, and when he awoke it was as if nothing had happened. He could not believe what he and Momma had done. At that time, St. Nicholas was just a local phenomenon. He hadn’t made his Christmas Eve visits, but they were limited at that time to poor children in the area, so excuses were easily made and the local furor eventually died down. No one outside the village ever knew what had really happened. The following year, Santa moved to the North Pole. A solemn vow was taken among the elves that only the physician would ever be tainted with the knowledge of what had occurred. The story was passed down to me by my father. I thought it was just a nasty fairy tale; even my father told me he didn’t really believe it.”

  “Did they ever figure out why it happened?”

  Fritz sighed. “No. The only explanation my great-great-grandfather came up with was that Santa had been possessed by a demon, and that the demon had been driven out by Santa’s extreme goodness.” He paused. “Very backward of him, don’t you think? But now I have my own theory.”

  I looked at him expectantly, and after some thoughtful beard-stroking he went on.

  “I believe that after eight hundred years of extreme, selfless, total goodness, something happens within Santa’s subconscious mind. I think there is a kind of reaction against all this goodness which builds and builds, a kind of ego-force, and when it has built to a sufficiently high point it bursts through to the surface volcanically. A similar reaction occurs in Momma Claus, also. That reaction is what we are seeing now.” He paused, shook his head quickly, resolutely, and reached inside his coat. “But no matter what the cause,” he said, producing a syringe, “we must now do something. Santa’s actions have now taken an even wilder course than they did the first time this occurred. We have no idea what he will do, and we cannot allow him to continue. I decided today that if he tried to carry his violence beyond the North Pole he should be stopped at all costs. We must give him this strong sedative and turn the sleigh back.”

  “Should we get the two apprentices to help?”

  “They are obviously in no state to be of assistance. We must—”

  “Having a nice chat, boys?” Santa’s demonically smiling face looked down at us over the little wall we had constructed. He reached over and pulled Fritz up by the collar, taking the syringe from his hand and throwing it overboard. I looked up front: the two apprentices were frantically trying to control the reindeer, and were being bounced all over the front seat by the reins.

  For a terrible moment, I thought Santa was going to pitch Fritz over the side after the syringe, but after shaking him a few times he put him down. He held him with one hand while he reached up front between the bouncing apprentices and rummaged in his sack, producing a length of rope. He tied Fritz up and gagged him, then let him go and grabbed me by the collar. “And you, little Gustav, will be my special helper, just like always. Hold this,” he growled, thrusting the sack into my hands. “And if you make one wrong move I’ll toss you out like a sandbag.” I threw a helpless look at Fritz, who was wriggling in his ropes, trying to tell me something, and followed Santa up front.

  He retrieved the reins from the two apprentices and frightened them into the back. We made a long, slow turn and came in over North America.

  Santa turned and showed his teeth. “And now,” he said mockingly, “it’s time for our Christmas visits. Ho ho! Ha ha ha!” He snapped the reins, and we swooped down to a landing on a snowy rooftop.

  He bounded out of the sleigh, and drove me and the two apprentices toward the red-brick chimney. I took a quick look in the bag I was struggling with; it was filled with all kinds of tools. I groaned silently. Santa hustled us down the chimney.

  We found ourselves in a cozy living room. There was a lot of comfortable-looking furniture, and the fireplace was big. I brushed past four small stockings as I stepped into the room. A Christmas tree was decorated and lit in one corner.

  Santa grabbed the sack from me and opened it, removing a set of fine jeweler’s tools, a heavy monkey wrench, a hammer, and a flashlight. He gathered them all into his arms, then turned to us. “Now let’s be quiet, boys,” he whispered, grinning. “We wouldn’t want anyone to disturb us, would we?”

  Santa Claus, the gift-giver, then set about taking everything of value and stuffing it into the empty bag. Whatever was fastened or bolted down, he lifted with the wrench or the back end of the hammer. He dragged me along beside him, making me hold the sack open as he dumped in all sorts of stolen goods.

  When he was through with the furniture and the other valuables in the room, he tiptoed through the rest of the house looking for money and jewelry. He found a wall safe in the den, and chuckled sardonically when it popped open under his sensitive fingers, revealing a small horde of gems and gold jewelry to his flashlight beam. When we came back to the living room he hoisted the stuffed sack and drove us to the fireplace. The room was completely bare. We’d even taken the lights and ornaments from the tree, which now stood naked and forlorn in the corner.

  Before hustling us back up the chimney he turned to the living room, put his finger to the side of his nose, and said, in a grotesque parody of his normal self, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night—ha ha.”

  We loaded the sleigh, and with a slap of the reins we were off to the next rooftop. Santa took a fresh empty sack with him, and we went through the same routine.

  We finished with the last house at about three in the morning. My arms ached from transporting stolen property. I dragged myself into the front seat, and we rose, the reindeer straining against the load, from the last snow-covered roof.

  Santa kept an eye on me for a while, but as the sleigh turned up toward the North Pole he finally forgot about me. He sat with a bag filled with the biggest diamonds and silver pieces he’d taken, and after telling the reindeer he’d “roast them alive” if they didn’t find their own way home, he put the reins aside and sat with all the precious stuff in his lap, scooping big handfuls up and letting it run through his fingers.

  I slipped silent as a shadow over the seat into the back. Fritz was wedged between a sack
of paintings and a bag filled with patio furniture that Santa had spotted piled up on someone’s back lawn. The two apprentices were exhausted, snoring in odd positions on top of two bags filled with bar stools. I pulled the gag out of Fritz’s mouth and said in a low voice: “Is there anything we can do?”

  He nodded. “There is in my left coat pocket another syringe which I brought for just such an emergency. If you could somehow give him an injection, we might still do something. But you must hurry.” I took the syringe from Fritz’s pocket and made my way back up front. Santa was still drooling over the jewels. I leaned over to push the needle into him, but as I did so my foot came down on a champagne glass that had rolled out of one of the bags.

  He whipped around at the grinding noise. “More tricks!” he said, grabbing me and lifting me off the floor. I hid the syringe behind my back, but he saw it and his face went red with anger. He reached around me with his free hand, and I kept it away from him by squirming this way and that. He stood up to get a better hold on me, and the sudden movement panicked the reindeer. They started weaving crazy patterns in the air. Santa lost his balance for a moment, and I gave him a kick in the belly. He said “Ooof!” and dropped me. I ran into the rear of the sleigh and hid behind a sack.

  Santa came after me, blubbering and huffing, and climbing over filled sacks as I darted between and around them. The reindeer were still flying out of control. The apprentices woke up; they started screaming and tried to crawl up front to calm Rudolph and the rest down. Santa bounded over one sack and came down inches from Fritz’s head; he was close behind me, his hands almost around me when I suddenly saw a tiny opening between two bags. I dove through it, scooting around to the right.

  I found myself face to face with Santa’s rear end.

  I froze there in surprise, the needle held out before me, when suddenly the sleigh lurched ahead and I fell into Santa and the needle hit the bulls-eye. He yelped once, went stiff as a board, and fell over backwards.

  I quickly untied Fritz as the two apprentices managed to calm the reindeer down and get them flying in a straight line again. Fritz examined Santa, nodded his approval, and then, at his instructions, we took Santa’s suit off and tied him up with the rope that had bound Fritz.

  When he finished, Fritz looked up into the night sky. “We have about two and one half hours of darkness left, Gustav,” he said. “I suggest that if we are to save Santa’s good name you put this suit on and go up front and take over.” He then told me his plan, and I balked and screamed, but finally gave in. The suit was forty sizes too big, but I put it on anyway and climbed into the front seat; we were soon heading at top speed back to the North Pole.

  When we touched down in the courtyard everything was dead quiet. We were expecting the worst from Momma Claus, and while Fritz ran over to try to find another syringe in the wreckage of the infirmary I climbed out of the sleigh and cautiously began to look around. My feet kept getting tangled up in the too-long legs of Santa’s suit, and I kept falling down. I looked in the toy shed, but found no one. When I tip-toed into the sleigh shed, hiking the suit up around me like a skirt, twenty-five elves jumped out of every crack and corner in the place, yelling like bandits and pummeling me with rubber toys. They wrestled me to the ground and had wound about two hundred feet of rope around my neck before one of them saw my face and shouted, “It’s Gustav!”

  They helped me to my feet, and I stood panting for a few minutes before I told them to go out and get Santa. They carried him off like triumphant hunters bearing a huge wild boar. I found Momma Claus already bound and gagged in their cottage; she’d passed out after drinking an uncounted number of bottles of claret while making everybody dance the rumba out in the snow. Good old Shmitzy had then rounded everybody up and set up the ambush for Santa’s return.

  After making sure the two of them were safely salted away, I got everyone together and quickly told them what had to be done. Their eyes all went wide, but they moved like jackrabbits. In fifteen minutes the sleigh, already packed solid, was piled twice as high with great sacks filled with toys. The Toy Shop was emptied. We harnessed a couple of back-up reindeer—Dentzen and Pintzen—to the rig for extra power. Fritz informed me that we had about an hour and a half to succeed. I pushed Shmitzy and the two apprentices who’d gone with me the first time into the front seat, and we made our take-off.

  It was quite a ride. Everything went by in fast motion. The reindeer, though obviously straining under the mountainous weight, didn’t offer a squeak of complaint as they moved like lightning from rooftop to rooftop. We hauled two bags down each chimney—one filled with toys and one filled with stolen goods.

  I’m almost sure we got all the stolen stuff back in the right place, though somebody probably ended up with an extra golf bag or can opener. If something looked like it didn’t belong in a particular place, I put it with the Christmas presents.

  The only time we came close to being caught in the act was in one of the very last houses when a little girl walked sleepy-eyed into the room where I was madly stacking gifts. She took a long look at my baggy suit and dark beard, and stared suspiciously at me. “I’ve been dieting,” I said, and darted up the chimney.

  We finished as the first crack of orange sunlight broke on the horizon. I tumbled into the sled, and the reindeer just barely managed to pull off the last roof and into the sky. Shmitzy and the two apprentices fell dead asleep in the rear, and I had to fight to keep my eyes open to guide us home.

  When we touched down at the North Pole there was a cheering welcoming committee waiting, but I stumbled through them with a tired smile on my face and went to my office and fell asleep on top of my desk for twelve straight hours with the red suit still on, the legs and arms draped over the desk like a tablecloth. When I awoke it was broad daylight, and the North Pole had been pretty much cleaned up—at least, all the wreckage had been swept into high piles. I was proud of my elves.

  Santa and Momma Claus, just as Fritz had predicted, awoke late in the day in apparently normal condition and were appropriately astounded by what they had done. Santa seemed quite depressed for a while, but I gave him the thumbs-up sign a few times and kept patting him on the back and before long he was rubbing his belly merrily once again and giving booming “Ho ho ho!”s that made me cringe. We drew up tentative plans to rebuild the North Pole.

  We had a long conference with Fritz, who explained all the psychological implications and convolutions and repressed reasons why all of it had happened. None of us had the faintest idea what he was talking about, but the upshot was that he thought he understood why it had happened—why it had—and that there was nothing wrong with Santa and Momma Claus. He assured us that according to all the scientific data he had it shouldn’t happen again for at least another eight hundred years; he even said it might be possible to offset its happening again by the use of encounter sessions, mind expansion, and other ego-soothing measures.

  “I am positive the effects are not cumulative, and that once this so-called volcanic gush of bad feelings is expelled, it will not build up again for centuries. And I believe that by using precise psychological techniques we can bleed off these feelings before they build. I am certain of this.”

  His lecture finally ended, Fritz gathered his notes together and prepared to leave.

  Momma and Santa had sat very still through all of this, but when it was all over they nodded slowly in understanding. I saw them turn to one another and smile sheepishly, and this was all very touching until Santa’s smile suddenly widened into that horrible toothy grin and both their eyes went big and white. I could swear I heard Santa say “Heh-heh-heh.” But it was all over in a second, and Fritz missed it, and the two of them were as normal and healthy as one of Momma’s pies again. The sheepish smiles were back, and they even kissed and held hands.

  I thought I’d imagined it until we were all leaving and Santa suddenly turned to me and winked, flashing his fangs. “Everything back to normal for another eight hundred years. Ri
ght, Gustav? All in my head, eh?”

  I gulped, gave him the thumbs-up sign, and scooted by him as he whacked me on the can. His smile had turned back to normal by then.

  That’s why I’m getting out of the North Pole tonight while the getting’s good. I’ve told Fritz and the rest of them, but they just won’t believe me. They think everything’s back on track.

  Maybe I’ll buy a house in Florida.

  Wherever it is, it won’t have a chimney.

  Baby Boss and the Underground Hamsters

  A Feature-Length Cartoon

  By Al Sarrantonio

  REEL SEVEN

  ~ * ~

  “Stop drooling!” Baby Boss snapped, in a fierce whisper. “You’re always drooling! And keep quiet!”

  “YES, BOSS!” Squirmy screamed at the top of his lungs. “I’LL BE QUIET FROM NOW ON!”

  Squirmy cowered in fear as the hairy flat of Baby Boss’s right paw caught him flush on the head. He dropped to his knees, reeling, but continued to slobber and mewl.

  ~ * ~

  “I said—!” Baby Boss began, then suddenly his rage turned to alarm and he pressed Squirmy tightly against the cavern wall.

  “Someone’s coming!” he hissed.

  Squirmy continued to whimper, and Baby Boss covered the slavering hamster’s mouth with his paw as he studied the cave gloom ahead.

  From around the cavern corner came a happy clucking sound, and Doozy the Chicken appeared, her feathery dugs prominently displayed before her as she twirled her Magic Umbrella, which gave a sparkly luminescence to the dank, dreary cave.