A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories (14 page)
Read A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories Online
Authors: Kevin J. Anderson
Now Jimmy, being the sort of boy he was, had quietly set his gray matter to the problem at hand. At first he couldn’t fathom why the Confederacy would want him. It was his father who worked for the Union.…And therein lay his answer. Jimmy was young and perhaps a bit naive about the ways of the world, but he’d read enough penny dreadfuls in his early years to understand how powerful a hostage could be. But what to do about it? He couldn’t be handed over to the Confederacy as a bargaining chip, and the townsfolk lacked the means to withstand the assault of three heavily armed Confederate airships. And, to add insult to injury, the lot of them had just under fourteen minutes to make a decision. Jimmy pondered and finally came upon a solution.
Amidst the confusion, he quietly walked over to a nearby table where Exhibit A stood waiting … and wanting.
“Excuse me, Your Honor?” Jimmy said quietly. His voice was drowned out by the cacophony flying between the judge, the sheriff, and the townsfolk. He stood up upon the table so that he might be heard better. “Your
HONOR!
” he shouted over the din.
Davenport spun at the intruding and somewhat high-pitched voice as the rest of the crowd continued to argue amongst themselves.
“What is it, boy?” he asked and then paused, silently contemplating the apparatus Jimmy held up in his hands. Said apparatus was offered with a mischievous grin and a raised eyebrow.
At first Davenport reveled at the thought of Rebels getting a dose of Jimmy’s fricassee pistol, but then images of his prize chickens, featherless, cooked, and scattered about his yard came to mind. The thought of fricasseed men dotting the streets of Hayberry, Rebel or not, filled him with dread.
“Boy, I will not see those men fricasseed before the eyes of our fellow townsfolk, before the eyes of your lovely mother, and before God Himself! It is indecent! Inhuman! I do not care if they are Rebels! I will surrender before I allow your mother to see such a sight!”
Jimmy glanced at his mother who was, thankfully, still unconscious.
“Well, technically, Your Honor,” he said a bit sheepishly, “my mother is still unaware of these events.”
Davenport raised a warning finger, preparing for the “but” he could clearly discern in Jimmy’s words.
“However,” Jimmy continued, realizing his position was untenable, “I do see your point.” Jimmy’s mischievous grin had turned to a frown, and his gray matter poured over this new obstacle to his freedom and the safety of the Hayberry.
Then his eyes fell upon Davenport’s iced lemonade.
Iced
.
The entire town of Hayberry enjoyed iced beverages as a result of a minor invention provided to the people by Jimmy’s father some years ago. Virtually every household, and even the courthouse, had a small icemaker that made the hot months of Missouri more bearable. And Judge Davenport was well known for his veritable addiction to iced beverages, even in the winter months. He had declared to Jimmy’s father some years hence that the icemaker was perhaps civilized man’s greatest achievement.
Indeed, the device was remarkable, and Jimmy had used its design as a foundation for his fricassee pistol, simply altering both current and polarity to achieve heating rather than cooling. His device, of course, was capable of exponentially greater output, but that was more a whim of youth than an engineering requirement.
Jimmy visualized the interior of the fricassee pistol’s powerpack, crossed a few wires in his head, adjusted a couple of condensers, and immediately had a solution with which the judge would not be able to argue.
Jimmy raised his hand once again.
“YOU HAVE TWO MINUTES!” the southern voice boomed.
Jimmy stepped through the doors of the courthouse into frigid December air. William followed close behind, his knees shaking more from fear than the cold. He would rather be anywhere else in the world, but he was familiar with the device’s controls, so he’d gotten the job of turning the thing on.
Judge Davenport and Sheriff Tate stepped out into the cold several steps behind the boys, Tate aiming his pistol at the boys’ backs as if he were forcing them forward. It was a ruse, of course, meant to ease the trigger fingers of the Confederate gunners.
“Are you sure that thing will work the way you say?” Davenport hissed from behind Jimmy.
Jimmy nodded without looking back.
The waiting harness swung back and forth slowly several feet above the street as the zeppelin held its position.
“You best get to shootin’, son,” Tate said quietly. “That thing is almost on top of us.”
Jimmy stopped several paces past the courthouse steps and turned to William.
“Turn it to eleven and flip all three switches,” he said a bit nervously.
William nodded and licked his lips. He turned the dial, his hand shaking, and flipped the first switch. What had originally been a buzz from Jimmy’s powerpack issued forth as an ear-splitting whine like a band saw. William flipped the second switch, and a drone pressed in upon them all like deep water. William flipped the third and felt his bones rattling inside his skin.
“You should all go back inside,” Jimmy said nervously over his shoulder. He turned just in time to see William already backed up against the building and Sheriff Tate disappearing through the courthouse doors.
Judge Davenport, to his credit and quality of character, stood only three steps behind Jimmy, his hands over his ears. “Go ahead, son,” he declared over the din, “I have no intention of letting you do this alone.”
Jimmy smiled and nodded, his respect for Judge Davenport soaring.
Jimmy raised the apparatus and took aim at the airship above them, its nose just short of where he stood. He held his breath and pulled the lever.
CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!
A cool green beam erupted from the weapon and splashed against the nose of the zeppelin. Energy enveloped the entire craft in a bright, green glow. The temperature at street level dropped twenty degrees in the blink of an eye as wisps of frozen air and crystalized water swirled around the coherent beam.
The slowly spinning rotors of the zeppelin froze in place. Ice formed where the beam contacted the envelope and spread, flash freezing across the entire surface of the aircraft. And then the ice around the envelope shattered as the whole thing expanded.
Jimmy released the lever, and the beam ceased. He watched in scientific fascination as some unexpected chemical reaction caused the envelope to bulge more and more with each passing moment.
“Holy shit,” Davenport said, his eyes locked on the doomed airship.
The expanding dirigible ruptured with an explosive
WHOOF!
as the top split apart. A tremendous gout of white swirled into the air and expanded. What remained of the upper frame as well as the gondola slipped from the sky, plummeting towards terra firma.
Davenport made a quick estimation and realized that the zeppelin would not hit them upon impact. He grabbed Jimmy and spun the boy towards another zeppelin, this one turning as its guns swiveled towards them.
“SHOOT!” Davenport shouted as he pointed to the vessel.
Jimmy fired just as the first zeppelin crashed down into Town Square and collapsed in a heap of splintering timber and sagging canvas.
Jimmy’s beam hit the second dirigible amidships, and seconds later it burst with a
WHOOF
, sending another white cloud into the air as the craft crashed to the ground.
Jimmy spun and aimed his weapon at the third Confederate zeppelin, but the craft was already turning away, its rotors screaming as it headed away at flank speed.
“Ease up, Mister Krinklepot,” Davenport said, placing a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Let them go.”
“But—”
Davenport nearly reprimanded the boy for using another “but,” but realized that they were no longer in his courtroom. Instead, he said, “Let them get home and tell the rest of those Rebels what happened here. They’ll not be coming back if they know we can drop them with one shot.” Davenport eyed Jimmy with newfound respect. The boy was more than a chip off the old block of his father.
Jimmy lowered the weapon and stared at the wreckage filling Town Square. The gondola had shattered, sending wood—and its occupants—flying out to the left and right. The shapes of frosty-white, ice-covered Confederate airmen littered the street, each one frozen solid, a surprised look captured on his face precisely as it was when Jimmy’s beam hit.
“Well,” Davenport observed, somewhat embarrassed by the presence of corpses littering the streets. “At least they’re not fricasseed.”
William stepped up behind Jimmy and flipped the switches. The drone of the powerplant faded to silence as he dialed the device back to its lowest setting.
The three stood there silently as large, moisture-laden snowflakes fell about them in what promised to be a short-lived blizzard at Confederate expense. A fine layer had already coated everything in sight, and a gentle smile spread across Jimmy’s face.
Filled with pride, he victoriously raised the apparatus once again above his head. “I dub this … the
Precipicrystalistivator
.”
Davenport and William turned confused faces towards Jimmy, astonished that so many syllables could come out someone’s mouth in so short a time.
Finally, William said, “But I thought you called it the fricassee pistol.”
“I did,” Jimmy intoned seriously, “but this is something else entirely.”
“It’s the same thing,” William pointed out. “All you did was cross a couple of wires.”
“Shhh …” Jimmy hissed, not wanting his moment of glory spoiled by trivialities like the facts.
“Okay … fine.” William said, exasperated. “It’s a precip—a precipacry—what on Earth does that mean, Jimmy?” William finally asked, his mouth unable to stagger out the torrent of phonemes.
“It’s quite simple, really,” Jimmy said loftily. “‘Precipi’ referring to precipitation, ‘crystali’ referring to the crystallization of said precipitation, and ‘tivator’ a derivative of motivation, referring to the complete and utter lack of motivation and therefore ambulation of the subject after being exposed to my device’s ray.”
The judge blinked his eyes in disbelief for several breaths, shaking his head. “You just came up with that off the top of your head,” he finally asked, stunned at the convolutions Jimmy Krinklepot’s brain was capable of.
“Yes, sir,” Jimmy replied. “And look …” he added, pointing to the accumulating snow. “It looks like we’ll have a white Christmas after all.”
“Indeed we will, Mister Krinklepot. I shall personally compose a Thank You letter to General Lee.”
The judge and both boys laughed at the thought of Lee getting such a correspondence.
Jimmy turned his gaze to the window where the townsfolk cheered. His mother, who had apparently come around during the battle, stood in the middle of the crowd, beaming with pride.
William, of course, could only shake his head, realizing full well that there would be little to stop Jimmy Krinklepot in the future. And Judge Davenport contemplated several of his friends in Washington, who would be very interested in working with such a remarkable young man. He then said a prayer to God in Heaven for anything unfortunate enough to get in the way of the boy’s not inconsiderable intellect.
“Mister Krinklepot,” the judge said slowly, “in recognition of your service to the Union and in no small part for having saved the entire town of Hayberry, I do hereby commute your sentence. Don’t you
dare
stop going to that junkyard of yours and doing what you do.” Jimmy looked up at Davenport, a broad smile across his face. “Merry Christmas,” the judge added almost jovially, and then his voice grew firm. “But if I catch you near my chickens again, young man, I will personally lock you up and throw away the key. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.” Jimmy smiled. “And Merry Christmas.”
***
There’s no place like home for the holidays, right? And home can mean many things: one’s house, one’s country, one’s family, one’s loves, one’s freedom …
Loneliness may drive Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s thoughtful Paris fantasy away from this sentiment at first, but a very special magic keeps the tale on track.
—KO
Midnight Trains
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Nights he would find himself in the Metro, just before closing. The wide tunnels emptied around 11:30 p.m. Most locals did not use the Metro late, avoided the buses that some ridiculous city planner believed could replace the trains in the wee hours, and generally, found their own ways home. Sometimes, he imagined that savvy Parisians simply stayed wherever they ended up, in some on-going party to which he would never ever be invited.
Alex was 100 percent American. Nothing reminded him of that as much as Paris, which looked familiar, but always, always had an air of impenetrable mystery. Perhaps to the French, it was simply their grand city, like New York was to him—marvelous, yes, but not mysterious at all.
He shoved his hands in his coat pockets—a heavy wool great coat he’d found in some thrift shop, not that thrift shops here were anything like the thrift shops at home. Here, they smelled not of mothballs and sadness, but of cigarettes and perfume, forgotten traces of someone else’s life.
He loved the coat. It warmed him and made him feel like a local, only because he dressed like one. Only because the coat had history. He did not.
His first Christmas in Paris left him flat-footed and unprepared. No one had warned him that the city shut down over the holiday. Even some of the ATMs stopped working.
Before he left America, his friends spoke enviously of his assignment—
Imagine Christmas in Paris
, they’d say.
Imagine the City of Lights
. The City of Lights was beautiful—holiday markets, decorations everywhere, elaborate baked goods that he couldn’t imagine seeing at his last job in Chicago.
He’d come here to work, and his job, ostensibly in tech, was so high-up, he had trouble finding anyone at work who wasn’t a subordinate, and therefore off-limits.
He had friends in the city now, but they didn’t ask him to their Christmas celebrations. He never mentioned the holiday, but one-by-one, his French friends pulled him aside to tell him why they couldn’t ask him to join them. As one woman told him,
The holiday, she is for family, no?
Only he had none. That was why the company had chosen to send him to France. That, and the fact that he spoke fluent French, although he soon learned that what he actually spoke was fluent American-flavored prissy and dated French, the kind that actually made the French wince and ask if they could practice their English instead. It was the polite French way of telling him that they didn’t want to hear him mangle the language.
He mangled anyway, and tried to imitate the accents he heard. Hard for him, since he grew up in Austin, then escaped to Chicago for high school. His personal accent was a jumble of the two cities, with Chicago taking precedence when he was awake, Austin when he was exhausted. Apparently, his French was mostly Texas-flavored, which his co-workers found hysterical. Once they relaxed around him, they’d mimic him in front of them, and rather than be offended, he learned what to say, when to say it, and how it should sound.
He had arrived in April; by September, he felt as accepted as a man like him could be, and by December, he’d been a bit surprised that he received no invitations.
And that was when he learned:
Christmas, she is for families, c’est ne pas?
It shouldn’t have bothered him. He had been alone for Christmas for ten years. He was eighteen when his parents died in a terrible plane crash. He had been old enough to live alone, but too young to figure out how to do it right. A girlfriend in college (which he could afford with insurance money) had taken him to her family for every major holiday in the three years they dated.
When they broke up, he felt it not as the loss of a love, but like the loss of his parents all over again. A man without family, and this year, a man without country, away from the familiar rhythms of the commercial holiday season that he had grown up with.
His late-night walks around the city had started in August, another time when the French seemed to abandon work and their lives en masse to go somewhere else. He noted the closed businesses, the confused tourists, the occasional angry employee, left to guard the restaurant, the bar or the shop.
He got to know the sound of his own footsteps, echoing along the Seine in the Ile de la Cite, and he liked that sense of anonymity, which used to frighten him back in the States.
Back there, he used to think:
What if I died here? No one would find me for days, weeks, even. No one would care.
Somehow Paris taught him a different attitude, a sense that nothing died, not really, and at the same time, that no one cared except in a way that interfered with their daily lives.
Maybe, someday, Alex would find someone who loved him as much as the couples who kissed on Pont des Arts bridge seemed to love each other. But not yet, and maybe not ever.
When he realized he would be alone on Christmas (
Noël est pour les familles, non?),
he checked his favorite restaurants in the area to see if they would be open. Of course, they were not. (
It is,
one kind chef told him,
the only time we escape.)
Alex could, he was told, eat at some brasseries (except Christmas Eve, when almost everything was closed) or a few tourist spots, or in one of the train stations. Or, as in America, in any of the Chinese restaurants.
Alex decided to decide on Christmas Day. He walked everywhere, after all. He could walk then, even if it rained. He didn’t mind the rain; it was so much better than the Chicago cold.
He bought some food in case he felt like staying in, and thought it done.
But he was not prepared for the silence in a city usually filled with traffic, honking horns, music in the streets, arguing couples, and the occasional singing drunk. The closed shops, the empty streets, the shuttered restaurants, brought the city home to him in a way he had never seen before.
It was as if he had gotten closer to her, only to find her abandoned by the ones who loved her the most.
The Metro stations remained open—some people had to go to work, after all—but they all ran Sunday hours, and Sunday hours meant some stations were, for all intents and purposes, closed, trains running on a whim, it seemed, rather than on a schedule.
Early in December, he went to the Galleries Lafayette, because a friend had told him he had to see the entire store festooned in light. He did, and instead of taking his usual train home, he went to the Left Bank, and stopped in the Cluny-La Sorbonne.
If someone asked, he would say it was his favorite Metro station. If they asked why, he would give them the tourist answer—because of the mosaics. They covered the station’s vaulted ceiling. Most tourists adored Jean Bazaine’s gigantic frieze,
Les Oiseaux
, a yellow, orange, and pink monstrosity that suggested birds in flight.
But Alex liked the historic signatures represented in mosaic tiles. Some he recognized, like Robespierre and Richelieu, and others he had never heard of.
He stared at them for hours. They receded into the darkness that marked both tunnel entrances, some illuminated only as a train went through. It was in the Cluny-La Sorbonne that he realized rats appeared the moment the station closed. He’d gotten locked in one night, and was saved only by a kind guard who took him for a dumb tourist.
He didn’t want to stay with the rats—they heard the final announcement and poured from the holes in the walls, like something from a bad horror movie. Strangely, they didn’t frighten him.
This station had belonged to them much longer than it belonged to humans.
Because, what he really loved about Cluny-La Sorbonne was its history. The station, then called simply Cluny, opened in 1930, and was closed in 1939 because, the official records said, it was too close to another Metro station.
The Cluny-La Sorbonne became one of Paris’s Ghost Stations, a place on a map that only a few knew about. For nearly fifty years, the station remained unused. In the 1980s, city planners decided to revive it because they needed the connection—making it, in his opinion, one of the few ghosts to ever return from the dead.
The station also felt odd to him—a little cold, a little displaced, as if it never got used to its return. No ads graced its white tile walls, and the benches seemed like all others in the Metro, placed a comfortable intervals. The plainness of the walls, the ornate ceiling, the miles of track, disconcerted him on a deep level, and made him feel out of time, as if nothing could touch him here.
He would wander in cold nights, and sit, staring at the ceiling as if it held answers, the great wool coat wrapped around him. If he sat very still, the coat’s faint scent of cigarettes and perfume would rise like a half-forgotten memory.
He wouldn’t let himself doze—the rats had cured him of that thought—so on nights when he was most exhausted, he would stand and sway like a drunk.
Sometimes he would board a midnight train and ride it to a station near his apartment, but most often, he would sigh, give his station a fond glance, and head back out into the well-lit Parisian night.
He thought of going to church on Christmas Eve, but he wasn’t sure when the services would start. And he knew he would have a choice of listening to Latin or French. He wasn’t particularly religious, nor was he greatly interested. Much as he liked the great cathedrals of Europe, he saw them more as architectural curiosities, filled with a potent sense of history, rather than as a place to worship.
A neighbor told him of a concert to be given that night; another mentioned that some of the revues would be open; a third had winked and offered to give him the name of a proper gentleman’s club.
Alex finally decided on the concert, and started his walk. He ended up in the Latin Quarter, not far from the Cluny Museum, right near his favorite Metro stop, and somehow he made a decision without making a decision—he walked down the stairs to see if the station was still open on this most unusual night of the year.
The station was open, but he was alone. A train whispered by as if inspired by the city’s holiday hush. Even the announcements seemed fewer than normal, and the usually strident voices giving commands in rather harsh French seemed warmer than usual.
He huddled in his great wool coat, and then he saw her. Black hair, wedge cut, lipstick so red that it shouldn’t have worked on anyone’s face, let alone a face as small and delicate as hers. Her black dress with its diamond shaped neckline and nipped waist looked a bit old-fashioned. Even her stockings seemed dated. They had seams running down the back of her legs.
She held a cigarette in her left hand.
“Light?” she asked in Parisian-accented English. He had become used to that sixth sense Europeans had about him. They all seemed to know his nationality before he even opened his mouth. Even after seven months in Paris, somehow, he had not assimilated.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said gently.
“Ah,” she said. “It is a filthy habit that they claim will kill me. They know nothing.”
She looked at the cigarette as if she were deciding whether or not to hang onto it, and then she touched its tip. It flared, glowed red, and the rich scent of expensive tobacco rose around him.
He frowned at it, wondering if it was one of those electronic cigarettes he’d heard about, but then wondered why she would ask him for a light if it were.
“I thought you needed a light,” he said.
“I decided you would not mind,” she said.
“Mind what?” he asked.
“Me.” She smiled.
He felt dizzy. Maybe it was the cigarette smoke—maybe he had inhaled too much. Or maybe he was tired; it was the end of a very long year, after all, and he was at loose ends—not professionally, never professionally—but personally. Wondering if this was all there ever would be for him: Christmas Eves alone, in beautiful places.
“Why would I mind?” he asked, wishing he could follow her logic.
“Some do,” she said.
The station remained silent. He wondered if he could check his phone for the time, and then decided against it because he considered it rude. The fact he was worried about being rude to this woman, this confusing woman, seemed strange to him.
“We probably missed the last train,” he said.
She looked at him sideways. Her eyes were the color of dark chocolate, her skin smooth. Her faint perfume seemed familiar.
“You do not take the train,” she said.
He frowned at her. Of course, he took the train. He took the train all the time.
Just not here. He’d disembarked here the first time, but after that, he hadn’t come here at all. Not for the trains. For the signatures. The feel, the clean white tiles and the dim lights. The sense of something other worldly.
“You’ve seen me here before,” he said.
“Yes.” Quick, with that accent. He was beginning to be able to distinguish one French accent from another, and this one had a curtness, a fillip at the end of words that he hadn’t heard before.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember seeing you.”
And he would. He would remember her, delicate and pretty and vibrating with an energy very similar to the trains themselves.
“I know,” she said. “I did not let you see me.”
He felt a chill. Was she stalking him? Was she crazy? He smiled at her, knowing the smile probably looked fake, knowing it probably seemed dismissive. He couldn’t help it. He no longer wanted to stand beside her.
He was about to move when she took the edge of his coat sleeve in her right hand.
“The man who owned this,” she said, “he was—how do you say?—a dreamer. Is that the word?”
How would he know what word she wanted when he didn’t know what she was trying to say? He bit back the irritation. He didn’t want to be near her any more.
“It’s just a coat,” he said.
“Ah,
mon cher
,” she said. “It is not just a coat. It is history, no?”
“No,” he said, and walked away. His footsteps echoed in the silence. The skin on the back of his neck crawled. She was watching him; he knew it.
He turned—
But she was gone.
He vowed not to go back. On his entire walk home, the cobblestone slick with rain he had missed while underground, his breath fogging before him, he told himself he was done with the Metro, with the Cluny-La Sorbonne. He’d seen it. He had had enough.
