Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel (21 page)

“That is not a poltergeist,” Max said apologetically to us, as if taking responsibility for the problem being bigger than we’d feared. “It’s a solstice demon.”

* * *

“This is the worst idea you’ve ever had,” Jeff said.

I replied, “That’s what you said to me this morning about a different idea. Make up your mind. Anyhow, this is Max’s idea, not mine.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Jeff said. “I was talking to myself. What was I
thinking
when I agreed to do this?” After a moment, he added, “But, just to be clear, though it wasn’t your idea, I do blame you for this.”

“Of course.”

“
Why
do I let you talk me into these things?” he moaned.

“Because I’m much stronger-willed than you are.”

Also, he hadn’t needed much convincing at the time. Jeff had been really spooked by seeing a demon peering over his shoulder.

Now, of course, he was rationalizing it, speculating that Twinkle—who was safely outside the store now, serving as our lookout man—had probably digitally altered those photos to enjoy playing a gag on us. Never mind that a possessed tree had nearly strangled me the other day while vocally craving flesh and blood. No, we were the dupes of a silly joke pulled on us by a college kid.

I had seen Jeff do this before, so his change of heart didn’t surprise me. I had expected it.

But it was too late now. Max, Jeff, and I had remained hidden in the store after closing to confront whoever was, Max believed, planning to raise a demon at midnight.

As he had explained it to us earlier, after dropping his bombshell about the solstice demon, “Since before the dawn of history, going back to the long-ago eons when men gathered around the fire at night—”

“And women,” I said.

“When men and women gathered around the fire at night to ward off the menacing darkness and protect themselves from the creatures, both mystical and mundane, which lurked in the shadows, beyond the light,” Max had told us, “many cultures have feared these days of deepest winter, when night is longer than day and the barriers between dimensions crumble and give way.”

“Wow,” Twinkle had said to me, transfixed. “Your blind friend is one good storyteller.”

“He’s not blind,” I said.

“On the longest night of the year,” Max continued, “the winter solstice, darkness tumbles into darkness, the night is too long for the fabric of this dimension to easily withstand, and that is when demons can emerge from their hell dimensions to enter this world!”

Looking back now, as we waited for midnight, I was pretty sure that was where Max began to lose Jeff, who had started shifting restlessly and looking skeptical.

“Winter solstice demons go by many different names in many different cultures, but they all impart an almost identical sense of dread.
They
are the reason that so many ancient faiths, dead and still surviving, created a midwinter celebration of light—to ward off the demons trying to break through to our world on the longest night of the year!”

“But Max,” Jeff had interrupted then, “those festivals occur all over the calendar. Hanukkah is already over. Christmas isn’t for three days. Winter solstice was last night. Other cultures—”

“Well, it’s not as if demons keep digital calendars in their hell dimensions,” Max said prosaically. “These events happen
around
this time.”

“Wait, what about what Jeff said? Digital calendars notwithstanding, is that why we saw this thing in these pictures
today?”
I asked then. “Because last night was winter solstice, so this thing is already here? We’re too late, and Hell has come to Fenster’s?”

Well, it turned out that the good news, so to speak, was that winter solstice was actually tonight, December 22nd. I objected vociferously to this information, since everyone knew that solstice fell on the 21st of the month.

“Only sometimes,” Max had said.

“That’s right,” said Twinkle, treasurer of his astronomy club.

The cosmos and the earthly calendar used for tracking time weren’t in perfect harmony. So just as we have Leap Year once every four years to straighten things out, it also happens that once every few years, winter solstice actually falls on December 22nd rather than on the 21st.

Which meant that
tonight
was the longest night of the year. And all of this mystical activity at Fenster’s over the past couple of days indicated that the barrier between dimensions had already been pierced and weakened, so to speak, and that the store was the epicenter of whatever was coming through the dark veil tonight.

“Someone is actively helping this demon,” said Max. “Someone is
inviting
it here. That is terribly dangerous.”

So,
naturally,
we had decided to stay in the store after closing and hide in the dark to confront it.

Actually, I was just hoping to confront Elspeth, who struck me as the most likely person to try raising a deadly solstice demon, given her interest in death, her flirtation with vampirism, and her easy access to Fenster’s after hours, as a family member and a stockholder.

Of course, Arthur was another possibility. Lopez had influenced me more than I liked to admit with his sheepish “least likely person” theory. But Arthur seemed sad and harmless, whereas there was something genuinely disturbing about Elspeth, though she was also adolescent and seemingly ineffectual. She was a grown woman who appeared to live under her father’s thumb as if she were still fifteen. She was the sort of person who’d had the time to be at
The Vampyre
night after night for weeks, since she had no job, vocation, or personal life to occupy her.

That somehow struck me as a ripe personality for falling into the mad notion of raising a solstice demon for kicks.

But it wouldn’t be a kick. According to Max, these creatures were horribly destructive; people had been sensible to fear them for millennia.

I was scared by the prospect of the three of us taking on this thing alone and without preparation, but Max had reassured me. “It is a relatively simple matter to prevent a solstice demon from entering this dimension and to force it to return to hell—or some abstract variation of that concept—where it belongs.”

“Okay, what’s the secret?” Jeff asked.

“There is no secret,” Max said. “It’s the same tool that has been used for millennia.”

“Fire!” I guessed.

“And light,” Max added. “That is how solstice demons are kept out of this dimension. Fire and light on the darkest nights of the year.”

So after closing, we had gone sneaking up to the home and garden department on the fifth floor (I’d never even known it was there until Twinkle mentioned it tonight), careful to avoid being seen by the occasional—
very
occasional—security guard, and we had collected flashlights, strobe lights, and patio torches. Although there had been menacing mystical activity in several areas of the store, Max believed that Nelli’s increasingly erratic behavior when investigating the fourth floor suggested that Solsticeland itself would be the site of the dimensional rift.

It was a fitting setting, since the entire exhibit was murky even when all the operational lights were on. It was always supposed to seem like the darkest night of the year in Solsticeland. We planned to throw the main switch for the operational lights when the time came, to help illuminate the scene . . . but that certainly wouldn’t suffice, Max had said. Hence the additional lights collected from elsewhere.

So Max, Jeff, and I huddled together nervously in the throne room with our torches and bright lights. We planned to make the demon, when it tried to break through to this dimension, feel like it was entering our world on the pitcher’s mound during a night game at Yankee Stadium—which should force it to turn around immediately and go back to where it damn well belonged.

It seemed like a workable theory—right up until about 11:00 PM, roughly an hour before we were expecting trouble, when the first stuffed teddy bear in the toddler’s play area started cackling madly as it raced across the floor of Solsticeland toward us, fangs bared, eyes glowing red.

I shrieked and fumbled with my flashlight, my hands shaking so hard that I dropped it. Jeff turned his strobe light on the possessed bear.

It keeled over instantly and lay there silent and inert.

“Oh, thank God,” I said, shocked and trembling with reaction. “Is it—
arrggh!”

Another one came rushing at us, then another—then another!

Then a dozen little Chef Chéries appeared out of the dark, having freed themselves from their packaging. They were chattering and cackling, racing toward us in their porn aprons with their little kitchen knives in their clawed hands. We shone our lights on them, but as fast as they lost animation and fell, others rose and appeared to replace them.

If we shone our lights one way, something attacked us from the other direction. I was screaming my head off, terrified, turning on flashlight after flashlight, then fighting off leaping, shrieking,
stinking
, drooling toys as I tried to light the patio torches.

“Esther!”
Jeff screamed. “Watch out!”

I turned in the direction of his horrified gaze and saw an old-fashioned mannequin of Santa Claus coming at me, looking exactly as little Jonathan had described him to me yesterday morning—eyes glowing, claws reaching for me, fangs dripping with saliva. He had entered this area from the North Pole—where, to my horror, I saw other displays coming to life, too. Maniacal elves were heading in this direction, bloodlust in their glowing eyes, evil grins on their sharp-toothed, drooling mouths.

Sweet old Mrs. Claus was racing toward us, grinning with homicidal intent, shrieking, “Kill . . . kill . . .
kill
you! I want
flesh!
And
blood!”

She chased me, cackling and screeching, as I ran around in circles, trying to light my patio torch. I’d lined up a row of flashlights to keep the Chef Chéries and teddy bears under control, but I had nothing left to defend myself from the elves, Santa, and Mrs. Claus if I couldn’t get this torch lighted.

Max was fighting off demonic toys from every direction as best he could with his mystical power, but I recalled with a sinking heart that fire was his weakest element—and we hadn’t anticipated an attack like this. We had expected to face one big demon that would cower when we showered it with light. Not dozens—hundreds?—of attackers from all over Solsticeland who were replacing each other as fast as Max could strike them down with his Latin incantations, flaming spears of light, and powerful waves of invisible force knocking them back like a giant, unseen hand. They still came at us, in wave after wave.

“Turn on the lights!” Jeff was screaming, pounding on the main power switches. “The lights!”

The Solsticeland lights were on. They were just too dim to affect our attackers.

I’d
always
thought the dim light in here was a terrible idea, I thought furiously. Now it was going to get me killed!

I got a torch lighted—and then I did the only thing I could think of to forestall annihilation. I started setting things on fire—starting with the hideous gold lamé curtains in the Hanukkah display. If we could create our own massive bonfire, as the ancients had done for millennia, maybe we could hold off our attackers.

“It’s working, Esther!” Max shouted, realizing what I was attempting. “It’s working!”

The room was filling with bright, fiery light! As it did so, the demonically possessed toys, dolls, stuffed animals, and mannequins started keeling over, falling down onto the floor, inert and harmless.

“Stop!” Jeff shouted. “Stop, Esther!”

“What?” I set a Christmas tree on fire.

I heard Jeff coughing and turned around to look at him. A small mountain of dead toys and elf mannequins lay in front of him, but he was coughing hard as smoke billowed toward him from the hideous Hanukkah exhibit, which was now entirely in flames. I realized the whole room was filling with smoke as well as with light.

“Oops.”

The smoke alarms went off at that moment, screeching shrilly overhead. They were industrial strength, intended to alert the whole department store to the fire. We couldn’t even hear each other shouting over their high-pitched clamoring.

A moment later, the sprinkler system came on, drenching us in water. The sprinklers also started dousing the fire. We all picked up strobe lights, terrified the demonic toys would rise and renew their attacks . . . but nothing happened.

I heard yelling behind me and whirled in that direction, pointing my strobe light at what I thought was another attack.

Then I realized that powerful flashlights were pointing at me. I also realized that the voices were shouting, “Hands up! Hands UP!”

I dropped my strobe light and squinted against the lights shining in my eyes. I gradually made out the shape of several security guards. Three of them were pointing flashlights at me. One was pointing a gun.

“Oh . . .
no,
” I said.

They, of course, saw two elves and Diversity Santa, standing amidst a mountainous wreck of ruined toys and vandalized displays, in the smoldering wreckage of the fire we had started inside Fenster & Co.

17

“Y
ou know what’s interesting about this?” Max said.

Jeff asked, “There’s something interesting about this?”

“What’s interesting is that we’re not dead.”

“Fascinating,” Jeff said wearily.

“I need to use the bathroom again,” I said. “Sir?”

“Let the next guy take you,” he said. “It’s almost the end of my shift.”

We had been locked up inside the holding cell on the sixth floor at Fenster’s for more than eighteen hours. I strongly suspected this wasn’t legal; but since they were treating us humanely (food, water, bathroom visits, a television), and since I wasn’t at all eager to face the police—let alone Lopez—I was disinclined to rock the boat.

“We should be dead,” Max mused. “A solstice demon from a hell dimension should have arisen in Solsticeland approximately one half hour after we were incarcerated, and it should have promptly begun destroying, devouring, and demolishing everything within its range.”

“Should?”
I repeated. “Can we choose a different word, Max?”

The security guard seated at the desk near our cell was looking at Max intently by now. “What is this thing’s range?”

“Initially?” Max said, “Midtown Manhattan, I would say.”

“Initially?”
the guard repeated, clearly unsettled.

Always pleased to lecture, Max strolled over to the corner of the cell closest to the guard and explained, “There are a wide variety of solstice demons, some of them very strong and voracious, some of them rather weak and fleeting. So I hate to theorize without more data—”

“No, you don’t,” Jeff said irritably.

“—and therefore I’m using a mid-range estimate. It’s possible the demon would only have the strength to destroy this city block before it would lose its ability to hold back the light—”

“Hold back what light?”

“The sun,” Max replied. “This genre of demon needs darkness to function. The greater the demon’s strength, the longer they’re able to keep this dimension—or, at least, a very localized portion of it—shrouded in darkness, and the longer the demon is therefore able to go on feeding and increasing its strength, thereby creating a cycle of—”

“Feeding?” the guard blurted. “Feeding on what?”

“Mostly on people,” Max said. “But not exclusively.”

“Holy crap!”

“So you can understand why we felt we must confront this demon last night and send it straight back to its hell dimension,” said Max, “before it had time to wreak untold havoc on our world.”

“Absolutely!”

“And given the intensified level of mystical activity last night here at Fenster’s,” Max continued, “I believe there is no question but that the danger is still imminent.”

“Really?” I asked in dismay.

“Oh, yes.” Max nodded emphatically.

“What do we
do?”
the guard cried.

“The most advisable first step,” Max said sincerely, “would be to release the three of us, so that we can determine why the demon did not arise last night—the longest night of the year—and re-plot its trajectory for entry into this dimension.”

“Release you?” The guard paused for a long moment, then laughed. “Let you go? Good one, buddy!” He seemed genuinely delighted. “You really had me going there! That was
great!
Hey, they didn’t say you were a con. Just an arsonist, vandal, burglar, blah blah blah. I had no idea. Got any others? I
loved
that one! Really gave me chills!”

Max sighed and turned away from him. He said to me, lowering his voice to avoid engaging the guard’s amusement again, “I think we need to narrow this down. Exactly what is being raised, why, and when?”

“I hate my life,” Jeff moaned.

“Oh, please, Jeff,” I said irritably. “Are you going to try to rationalize what happened to us last night? Pretend that someone accidentally animated—”

“No, I’m on board with the whole ‘demon rising and infiltrating Fenster’s with evil forces’ thing,” he said. “And I will be seeing last night in my nightmares for years to come. I just don’t see why this has to happen
here.”

“Here?” I repeated. “You mean Fenster’s? Actually, I have a theory that Elsp—”

“No, I mean here in New York. Why now? Why when
I’m
here? I was living in LA for over three years. Why couldn’t a solstice demon have struck New York then? Why did it have to wait for me to come back? Or why can’t it go eat Los Angeles? After all, I’m done with that town. But, noooo, this thing waits to destroy New York until
I’m
back. And it does it right when I’m at the absolute nadir of my life, playing Diversity Santa in Solsticeland. I mean, Christ, could this year turn into any more of a nightmare for me?”

I stared at him for a long moment, not wondering why I had broken up with him, but why I had ever dated him in the first place. “You’re right,” I said at last. “This is all about
you.”

“We’re going to prison,” he said to me. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Not necessarily,” I said gloomily, gesturing to Max. “New York may be shrouded in eternal darkness and devoured by a demon from hell, instead. So cheer up, Jeff.”

The guard opined, “Santa is right. I saw the damage in Solsticeland. Jesus, you guys went to town! There’s gonna be a lot of charges for what you did. A
lot.”

I wasn’t sure if staying at work after closing counted as “breaking and entering,” but I thought it seemed very likely we would be charged with vandalism, arson, destruction of property, and perhaps attempted burglary. For starters.

I wasn’t mentally ready to face criminal charges and a prison sentence, so I hadn’t yet objected to being kept in limbo inside this cell with Max and Jeff.

Max’s prognosis about the demon was a terrifying prospect, but since I sincerely doubted that anyone would free us to go deal with it, my thoughts mostly kept galloping toward being charged with various felonies and disgraced in front of Lopez. I felt sad when I thought of that. Also very queasy.

“You really won’t take me to the bathroom?” I asked the guard.

“I took you twice already,” he said. “Wait for the next shift.”

We had been brought here immediately by the security guards who’d apprehended us last night in Solsticeland. They said they were going to call Mr. Fenster, and then we would be turned over to the authorities.

Jeff and I had spent all night pacing the cage and occasionally sniping at each other. Max was very anxious about the demon, I now realized, but he accepted the prospect of prison with relative equanimity. Probably because he didn’t expect to live long enough to be tried and imprisoned if he wasn’t freed to confront the demon soon.

Thoughts like this had kept me wide awake since being placed in this cell—as had the absence of any place to sleep. There were some chairs here, but no bed. The cell wasn’t meant to hold people for long. It had been constructed to contain newly apprehended shoplifters until the police could pick them up. It was never intended to hold prisoners overnight.

This was also why we all had to keep asking to be escorted to the bathroom. The cell contained no facilities of that sort.

Max had attempted to use his mystical power to get us out of here, but all that had fizzled and flopped. He was depleted from last night’s battle. I hadn’t been in favor of staging a jailbreak, anyhow, which I thought would just make our problems worse . . . but now that I understood how imminent Max thought death by demon destruction was, I was rethinking that. However, I suspected he wasn’t likely to regain sufficient strength for more mojo unless he could get some sleep. He didn’t look a day over seventy, but 350 years do take their toll.

So here we sat. It was now dinner time of the following day, and we were still in this cell.

However, we had at least discovered a couple of hours ago
why
we were still here. There was a TV in the holding area, and the guards ran news programs most of the day. A couple of hours ago, the big local story of the day broke—and it wasn’t that half of Solsticeland had been destroyed or that a demon had pierced the dimensional barrier.

Freddie Fenster had been arrested as the shooter in last night’s hijacking.

No
wonder
the Fensters were a little too preoccupied to ask the cops to come pick us up! And given the scale of what had happened, apparently no one on duty here wanted to do an end run around the Fensters without knowing their exact wishes in this matter.

I had a dark moment of wondering if this meant that having us quietly executed was one of the possible choices. But then I realized the most likely scenario was that the Fensters wanted to control all the media spin about their company, so they didn’t let anyone else make decisions in a messy situation.

It was a management strategy that didn’t take into account the possibility of three employees destroying a substantial portion of the store on the same day that a member of the family was arrested for armed robbery. Moreover, surely the way the Fensters had handled the first couple of hijackings demonstrated that they’d be very wise to start leaving their decisions up to others.

Meanwhile, Freddie Fenster was not commenting, nor were any members of the family, nor was his lawyer. The police and the DA weren’t saying much, either. In the absence of anything resembling facts or information, the media didn’t waste its valuable time actually investigating this juicy case. Pundits just jumped straight into the fruitful practice of speculating, then stating each other’s speculations as if they were facts. After about an hour of this, I had begged the guard to turn off the TV, threatening to have him charged with prisoner abuse if he didn’t.

My elf suit was getting rank enough that I was about to start lobbying for a change of clothes when, to my astonishment, Elspeth Fenster entered the holding area and announced that she was letting us go.

* * *

“She let you go?” Lucky asked us incredulously. “Why?”

“She claims her father doesn’t want the scandal of pressing charges against three unhappy employees who had a drunken bacchanalia inside the store,” I said.

“I’m not even an employee,” Max said. “But I certainly did not protest my liberation on that basis.”

We were in the bookstore, where Max and I had come after being released. Jeff had gone home. Lucky, who had realized by mid-morning that we were both missing, had somehow found out what had happened to us (Gambellos had a way of getting information that was not necessarily available to everyone), so he had spent the day here at the bookstore, taking care of Nelli and making a gazillion phone calls, he said, in hopes of finding some strings he could pull to get us set free.

“Preston Fenster just . . . ain’t pressing charges?” Lucky frowned. “That don’t make much sense.”

“I didn’t think so, either,” I agreed. “But since Elspeth is a Fenster—and the only Fenster they’d heard from after eighteen hours of holding us—the guards let us go when she told them to.”

Max asked, “So that was not your doing, Lucky?”

“Nope.” The old mobster shook his head. “Back when Connie Fenster was alive, the Shy Don could’ve worked something out quick. He’s been trying all day to help you, too. He ain’t forgot what you done for our family in the past. And him and Connie had a lotta mutual respect. But since she died this year . . .” Lucky shrugged. “We really ain’t had contact with the family, and today turned out to be a bad day to try to establish it. So I don’t think we’re the ones that helped you out there.” He thought it over. “Maybe the girl was telling the truth about her old man’s decision. The Fensters do got a lot on their plates right now. Maybe dealing with you three was just too much for them to add to the load.”

“Or maybe Preston was actually relieved that someone’s destroyed so much of Solsticeland,” I reflected. “I wonder if letting us disappear without charges is his way of thanking us. When he had his heart attack, you know, he was in the middle of saying that he wanted to shut that place down immediately, after all.”

“So he’s stuck in the hospital still, his nephew is in stir, and his sister and brother are scrambling to do damage control on every front and keep the company going in the middle of this mess,” mused Lucky. “Yeah, I guess it makes sense that he sent the dead-looking girl to get you out, though she wouldn’t normally be anyone’s idea of a seminary.”

“I think you mean emissary,” I said.

Elspeth had been her usual sulky, sullen, socially inept, and rather creepy self when setting us free. She also seemed very pleased about something—insofar as Elspeth seemed capable of pleasure. I supposed she was experiencing schadenfreude over Freddie’s felonious disgrace and her loathed family’s steadily spiraling situation—the expensive hijackings were now exposed (the press claimed) as an inside job staged by a key family member, a big portion of Solsticeland was in ruins today, and her father was still in the hospital. This was an immense downturn in the family fortunes within just a few days.

I really didn’t think, though, that in the throes of her sly pleasure over all this, Elspeth took into account that she was ill-equipped to live without her family’s millions supporting her, in the event that they
kept
sinking in the world.

It occurred to me that the other people who were probably enjoying the Fensters’ spectacularly fiery descent didn’t have that inherent conflict of interest: the Powells. Bullied and marginalized for years by Constance, finally ejected from their own company, and then defeated in their various attempts at legal redress or restitution . . . They had not lived to have revenge on the Iron Matriarch, but they were probably delighting in the Fenster train wreck which had begun so soon after her death and seemed to be piling up by leaps and bounds now.

“Actually, it makes you wonder . . .” I said.

“What?” Lucky prodded.

“Whether the Powells could have engineered any of this.”

Lucky seemed skeptical. “I only knew them by reputation, too, but they seemed like a family that thought of lawyering up as big mojo, not cooking up polterheists, kid. Their biggest talent, as far as anyone could tell, was slinking away with their tail between their legs after every tangle they had with Connie—for years before she kicked them outta the company, as well as after.”