Alternate Gerrolds (15 page)

“Satan Claus. ...” Bread Bryan considered the thought. “Mm. He must be the fellow who visited my house last year. He didn’t give me anything I wanted. And I could have used the coal too. It gets
cold
in Wyoming.”

“No. Satan Claus doesn’t work that way,” said Dhor. “He doesn’t give things. He takes them away. The suicide rate goes up around Christmastime. That’s no accident. That’s Satan Claus. He comes and takes your soul straight to hell.”

Then Railroad Martin added a wry thought—“He drives a black sleigh and he lands in your basement.”—and then they were all doing it.

“The sleigh is drawn by eight rabid pigs—big ugly razorbacks,” said Dhor. “They have iridescent red eyes, which burn like smoldering embers—they
are
embers, carved right out of the floor of hell. Late at night, as you’re lying all alone in your cold, cold bed, you can hear them snuffling and snorting in the ground beneath your house. Their hooves are polished black ebony, and they carve up the ground like knives.”

Dhor was creating a legend while his audience sat and listened enraptured. He held up his hands as if outlining the screen on which he was about to paint the rest of his picture. The group fell silent. I had to admire him, in spite of myself. He lowered his voice to a melodramatic stage-whisper: “Satan Claus travels underground through dark rumbling passages filled with rats and ghouls. He carries a long black whip, and he stands in the front of the sleigh, whipping the pigs until the blood streams from their backs. Their screams are the despairing sounds of the eternally tormented.”

“And he’s dressed all in black,” suggested Bread Bryan. “Black leather. With silver buckles and studs and rivets.”

“Oh, hell,” said George Finger.
“Everybody
dresses like that in my neighborhood.”

“Yes, black leather,” agreed Martin, ignoring the aside. “But it’s made from the skins of reindeer.”

“Whales,” said Bryan. “Baby whales.”

Dhor shook his head. “The leather is made from the skins of those whose souls he’s taken. He strips it off their bodies before he lets them die. The skins are dyed black with the sins of the owners and trimmed with red-dyed rat fur. Satan Claus has long gray hair, all shaggy and dirty and matted; and he has a long gray beard, equally dirty. There are crawly things living in his hair and beard. And his skin is leprous and covered with pustules and running sores. His features are deformed and misshapen. His nose is a bulbous monstrosity, swollen and purple. His lips are blue and his breath smells like the grave. His fingernails are black with filth, but they’re as sharp as diamonds. He can claw up through the floor to yank you down into his demonic realm.”

“Wow,” said Bread Bryan. “I’m moving up to the second floor.”

The cluster of listeners shuddered at Dhor’s vivid description. It was suddenly a little too heavy for the spirit of the conversation. A couple of them tried to make jokes, but they fell embarrassingly flat.

Finally, George Finger laughed gently and said, “I think you’ve made him out to be too threatening, Steve. For most of us, Satan Claus just takes our presents away and leaves changeling presents instead.”

“Ahh,” said Railroad. “That explains why I never get anything I want.”

“How can you say that? You get t-shirts every year,” said Bread.

“Yes, but I always want a tuxedo.”

After the laughter died down, George said, “The changeling presents are made by the satanic elves, of course.”

“Right,” said Dhor. He picked up on it immediately. “All year long, the satanic elves work in their secret laboratories underneath the South Pole, creating the most horrendous ungifts they can think of. Satan Claus whips them unmercifully with cat o’nine tails; he screams at them and beats them and torments them endlessly. The ones who don’t work hard enough, he tosses into the pit of eternal fire. The rest of them work like little demons—of course they do; that’s what they are—to manufacture all manner of curses and spells and hexes. All the bad luck that you get every year—it comes straight from hell, a gift from Satan Claus himself.” Dhor cackled wickedly, an impish burst of glee, and everybody laughed with him.

But he was on a roll. He’d caught fire with this idea and was beginning to build on it now. “The terrible black sleigh isn’t a sleigh as much as it’s a hearse. And it’s filled with bulging sacks filled with bad luck of
all kinds. Illnesses, miscarriages, strokes, cancers, viruses, flu germs, birth defects, curses of all kinds. Little things like broken bones and upset stomachs. Big things like impotence, frigidity, sterility. Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, encephalitis—everything that stops you from enjoying life.”

“I think you’re onto something,” said Railroad. “I catch the flu right after Christmas, every year. I haven’t been to a New Year’s party in four years. At least now I have someone to blame.”

Dhor nodded and explained, “Satan Claus knows if you’ve been bad or good—if you’ve been bad in any way, he comes and takes a little more joy out of your life, makes it harder for you to want to be good. Just as Santa is your first contact with God, Satan Claus is your first experience of evil. Satan Claus is the devil’s revenge on Christmas. He’s the turd in the punch bowl. He’s the tantrum at the party. He’s the birthday-spoiler. I think we’re telling our children only half the story. It’s not enough to tell them that Santa will be good to them. We have to let them know who’s planning to be bad to them.”

For a while, there was silence as we all sat around and let the disturbing quality of Dhor’s vision sink into our souls. Every so often someone would shudder as he thought of some new twist, some piece of embroidery.

But it was George Finger’s speculation that ended the conversation: “Actually, this might be a dangerous line of thought, Steve. Remember the theory that the more believers a god has, the more powerful he becomes? I mean, it’s a joke right now, but aren’t you summoning a new god into existence this way?”

“Yes, Virginia,” Dhor replied, grinning impishly, “There
is
a Satan Clause in the holy contract. But I don’t think you need to worry. Our belief in him is insufficient. And unnecessary. We can’t create Satan Claus—because he already exists. He came into being when Santa Claus was created. A thing automatically creates its opposite, just by its very existence. You know that. The stronger Santa Claus gets, the stronger Satan Claus must become in opposition.”

Steven had been raised in a very religious household. His grandmother had taught him that for every act of good, there has to be a corresponding evil. Therefore, if you have heaven, you have to have hell. If you have a God, you have to have a devil. If there are angels, then there have to be demons. Cherubs and imps. Saints and damned. Nine circles
of hell—nine circles of heaven. “Better be careful, George! Satan Claus is watching.” And then he laughed fiendishly. I guess he thought he was being funny.

I forgot about Steven Dhor for a few weeks. I was involved in another one of those abortive television projects—it’s like doing drugs; you think you can walk away from them, but you can’t. Someone offers you a needle and you run to stick it in your arm. And then they jerk you around for another six weeks or six months, and then cut it off anyway—and one morning you wake up and find you’re unemployed again. The money’s spent, and you’ve wasted another big chunk of your time and your energy and your enthusiasm on something that will never be broadcast or ever see print. And your credential has gotten that much poorer because you have nothing to show for your effort except another dead baby. You get too many of those dead babies on your resume and the phone stops ringing altogether. But I love the excitement, that’s why I stay so close to Hollywood—

Then one Saturday afternoon, Steven Dhor read a new story at Kicking The Hobbit—the all science-fiction bookstore that used to be in Santa Monica. I’m sure he saw me come in, but he was so engrossed in the story he was reading to the crowd that he didn’t recognize me.
“... the children believed that they could hear the hooves of the huge black pigs scraping through the darkness. They could hear the snuffling and snorting of their hot breaths. The pigs were foaming at the mouth, grunting and bumping up against each other as they pulled the heavy sled through the black tunnels under the earth. The steel runners of the huge carriage sliced across the stones, striking sparks and ringing with a knife-edged note that shrieked like a metal banshee.

“And the driver—his breath steaming in the terrible cold—shouted their names as he whipped them, ‘On, damn you, on! You children of war! On Pustule and Canker and Sickness and Gore! On Monster and Seizure and Bastard and Whore. Drive on through the darkness! Break through and roar!”
Dhor’s voice rose softly as he read these harrowing passages to his enraptured audience.

I hung back away from the group, listening in appreciation and wonder. Dhor had truly caught the spirit of the Christmas obscenity. By the very act of saying the name aloud in public, Dhor was not only giving his power to Satan Claus, he was daring the beast to visit him on Christmas Eve.

“... And in the morning,”
Dhor concluded,
“there were many deep, knife-like scars in the soft dark earth beneath their bedroom windows. The ground was churned and broken and there were black sooty smudges on the glass.... But of their father, there was not a sign. And by this, the children knew that Satan Claus was indeed real. And they never ever laughed again, as long as they lived.”

The small crowd applauded enthusiastically and then crowded in close for autographs. Dhor’s grin spread across his cherubic face like a pink glow. He basked in all the attention and the approval of the fans; it warmed him like a deep red bath. He’d found something that touched a nerve in the audience—now he responded to them. Something had taken root in his soul.

I saw Dhor several more times that year. And everywhere, he was reading that festering story aloud again:
“Christmas lay across the land like a blight, and once again the children huddled in their beds and feared the tread of heavy bootsteps in the dark....“
He’d look up from the pages, look across the room at his audience with that terrible impish twinkle and then turn back to his reading with renewed vigor.
“... Millie and little Bob shivered in their nightshirts as Daddy pulled them onto his lap. He smelled of smoke and coal and too much whiskey. His face was blue and scratchy with the stubble of his beard and his heavy flannel shirt scratched their cheeks uncomfortably. ‘Why are you trembling?’ he asked. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m just going to tell you about the Christmas spirit. His name is Satan Claus, and he drives a big black sled shaped like a hearse. It’s pulled by eight big black pigs with smoldering red eyes. Satan Claus stands in the front of the carriage and rides like the whirlwind, lashing at the boars with a stinging whip. He beats them until the blood pours from their backs and they scream like the souls of the damned—’”

In the weeks that followed, he read it at the fund-raiser/taping for Mike Hodel’s literacy project. He read it at the Pasadena Library’s Horror/Fantasy Festival. He read it at the Thanksgiving weekend Lost-Con. He read it on Hour 25, and he had tapes made for sale to anyone who wanted one. Steven was riding the tiger. Exploiting it. Whipping it with his need for notoriety.

And then the Christmas issue of
Ominous
magazine came out and
everybody
was reading it.

People were calling each other on the phone and asking if they’d seen the story and wasn’t it the most frightening story they’d ever heard? It was as if they were enrolling converts into a new religion. They were all having much too much fun playing with the legend of Satan Claus, adding to it, building it—giving their power of belief to Father Darkness, the Christmas evil ... as if by naming the horror, they might somehow remain immune to it.