Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel (6 page)

We sifted through a rack of Santa costumes and soon found one that looked the right size for Saturated Fats.

“It’s a few years old,” said the costume mistress. “A little different than the style we use now. See how broad the cuffs and collar are? But Santa’s look is always pretty much your basic red suit with white trim, so this will work.” She tugged and twitched the fabric, checking for stains or weak seams. “If this were the start of the season, I’d have him come upstairs for a proper fitting. But since he only needs to get through a few shifts, it’ll have to do.”

“I think it’ll be fine,” I said, hefting the suit in my arms.

She asked, “What the hell happened, anyhow?”

“He had an accident,” I said vaguely. “I’m fuzzy on the details.”

After we exited the storage room, I realized there was something else I needed to do before returning to the floor. I asked, “Where’s the nearest bathroom?”

She pointed further down the hall, past her workshop. Then she leaned forward and whispered, “It was Mr. Powell’s private bathroom.”

I didn’t immediately understand the significance of this. “Who was Mr . . . Oh!
That
Mr. Pow—”

“Shh! We don’t say the name out loud around here.”

I nodded. This was one of the unwritten but well-known rules of Fenster & Co. It had slipped my mind, having no real relevance to my sojourn at the store, but Jingle had taught me the rule and explained its origin.

For decades, this company had been known as Fenster & Powell. When Constance, a pretty society debutante, had married into the Fenster family some sixty years ago, the profits and the power were shared equally by the company’s two founders, one of whom was Constance’s father-in-law. Mr. Fenster died a few years later, and Constance’s husband took over his family’s half of the business. A few years after that, he died, too—in a hotel room in Atlantic City. There was quite a whiff of scandal about it, but the family managed to ensure that very few facts were ever known.

Then Constance, a widow in her thirties with four young children, surprised everyone by taking her husband’s place in the family business. She also disappointed the dismissive predictions that she’d soon wind up either selling out to the Powells or else bankrupting the company. Constance proved to be a dedicated, talented, and ruthless businesswoman. The founding Powell’s immediate successor butted heads with her for about a decade before selling his shares to his nephew and leaving the company. Several more Powell men took his place over the years, but Constance increasingly became the captain of the ship and the driving force behind the retail empire’s expanding success.

As I headed to the bathroom, I recalled that Helen’s second husband had been a Powell. “And the less said about
that
, the better,” Jingle had told me—before proceeding to say quite a bit about it. The Fenster-Powell marriage, which had been encouraged (or, rather, engineered) by Constance, soon spiraled into notorious public quarrels, private mutual loathing, and blatant infidelities.

It was through that hellacious marriage, followed by the divorce settlement a few years later, that Constance changed the balance of power by acquiring company stock that had always belonged to the Powells. That gave her the foothold she needed to start gradually squeezing them out of the business. Her strategy included taking their name off the company, which she reorganized as Fenster & Co. It took years of additional maneuvering to achieve her goal; but finally, the Iron Matriarch, who was by then in her seventies, ejected the Powells completely from the retail company which their family had co-founded and helped build into a business empire.

Ever since then, according to Jingle, “Around here, it’s not a good idea to say a word that even
rhymes
with Powell.”

Predictably, Constance’s coup led to years of legal battles between the two families. But the Iron Matriarch fought the Powells so shrewdly that all their efforts eventually floundered. In the final years of her life, Jingle said, Constance seemed to have beaten them.

However, the Powells may have been biding their time rather than accepting defeat. They were reputedly planning a new legal assault on the Fensters, now that the Iron Matriarch was safely in her grave and the company was in the hands of her bickering heirs, none of whom had inherited her cool-headed business acumen (though I thought some of them had probably inherited her highly flexible morality). I suddenly realized, based on something he had said earlier, that Preston considered a new lawsuit a serious possibility.

But I wondered why the Powells would bother? It had all occurred years ago, and the woman behind those events was dead now. Why not just let the past go and move on? What could the Powells hope to gain from yet another legal battle after all this time?

Money and power,
said a killer’s voice in my head.
It’s
always
about money and power.

That was probably an accurate assessment of the bitter Powell-Fenster feud in all its permutations; but I recognized that voice and didn’t like hearing it in my imagination. So I gave myself a hard mental shake and tried to think of something else. Nothing else came to mind, though.

Months after she had tried to kill me on a storm-swept promontory in Harlem, that
awful
woman was still haunting me, I realized. She had murdered three men, and she came far too close to killing the man I . . . Well, she came far too close to killing him, too. Because of me.

“Be honest with yourself, Esther,” she said. “Would he be lying in agonized paralysis awaiting his death now if not for
you?
”

“He’s still alive, and you’re not,” I muttered aloud to my private demon. “So get out of my head already, would you?”

Feeling a little shaky, I splashed cold water on my face in what had once been the private Powell bathroom. I supposed the stress of this weird day was getting to me, and the result was that
she
crept into my head again. Or maybe I’d opened the door to her by thinking about Constance Fenster, who was a similarly merciless woman (though presumably not a similarly homicidal one).

As I washed my hands in what had been the private bathroom of the last Powell who’d been a partner of the Fensters, I reflected that I wasn’t sorry that the Iron Matriarch had died a few months before I ever came to work here. Jingle said she succumbed to pneumonia, a complication that arose after she’d undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. I suspected that, although very ill and in her eighties by then, she had been a formidably ruthless employer, enemy, and mother right up until her dying breath.

5

I
took Satsy’s new costume back down to the men’s locker room on the fourth floor, where I tapped on the door and called hello before letting myself in. Life in the performing arts forces you to shed conventional physical modesty pretty quickly, so I didn’t think any of the guys would be upset if I caught them in their briefs; but I wanted to give anyone who was naked a chance to cover up.

“I’m the only one here, and I’m perfectly decent,” was the friendly reply to my warning. I recognized Super Santa’s voice.

“Hi, Rick.” I pushed open the door, entered the room, and went to hang up Satsy’s replacement costume in his locker. Rick had evidently just arrived, since he was still in his street clothes. I said, “I see Miles tracked you down.”

“Hi, Esther.” He hung up his winter jacket in his locker. “It sounds like you guys had quite a morning.”

“You heard what happened?”

“I was just in the break room. Twinkle and Satsy told me about it.” He paused. “Their story was a little confusing. I’m still not really sure what happened.”

“I feel the same way, and I was
there.
”

Rick smiled at that. He had a solid, amiable face; nothing handsome or remarkable, but pleasant. Though still in his twenties, his hairline was receding, and it was easy to guess what he’d look like in middle age. He was a few inches under six feet tall, with a square, stocky build. What people mostly noticed about Rick, though, was his calm, reassuring manner.

“Actually,” I said, “I told Satsy I’d check out the freight elevator. His story is so disturbing that . . . Well, it really seems like someone should take a look. And experience suggests we can’t rely on Fenster’s to do it.”

Rick looked at his watch. “Jeff hasn’t been on the floor that long, and I haven’t clocked in yet—so, officially, I’m not even here. Why don’t I come with you?”

“I was kind of hoping you’d offer,” I admitted. The experience Satsy had described made me anxious about investigating the elevator on my own.

“Then let’s go take a look,” Rick said. “You’re right about both things: Someone needs to do this, and Fenster’s won’t bother until someone actually gets hurt.”

The store was keen on profits, obsessed with shoplifters, rigid about rules and punctuality . . . and very slack about safety.

I said, “Yeah, I’ll bet you that despite Miles’ promise to Jonathan’s mother to have security ‘scour’ this floor, they never even showed up.”

“Who’s Jonathan?”

“Oh. I guess Satsy didn’t tell you that part of the story? Come on, I’ll tell you on the way to the elevator.”

Following the route which Satsy had mentioned to me earlier, we cut behind the solstice mural and then proceeded across the fourth floor, finally going through the “Employees Only” doors at the other end of Solsticeland and coming to a halt at the freight elevator. I pressed the button to call it—and saw from the numbers that lit up on the panel that it was currently down on the same level as the docks. So it had evidently been used since Satsy’s scary experience. I wondered if anyone else had been terrorized inside its confines.

When the elevator car got to our floor and the doors swished open, we looked inside.

After a moment, I noted, “Well, Satsy did say it looked perfectly normal when he left.”

And it looked perfectly normal now. Just an ordinary elevator car, big enough to carry large freight, with a scuffed floor and fluorescent lights.

“Let’s make sure,” Rick said, entering the car. “Why don’t we take a ride?”

“What?” I blurted, hanging back.

Seeing my anxious expression, he said, “You wait here. That way if anything goes wrong—”

“No, I’ll come, too,” I said, shamed into accompanying him. I entered the car and pressed the button for the bottom floor. “Let’s be thorough.”

Rick said, “And whatever happens, let’s keep our heads and not start another stampede of Santa’s visitors, okay?”

I nodded. I wouldn’t have done this alone, not after what Satsy had told me; but Rick’s calm manner was easing my tension as the elevator descended. When we reached the bottom floor and the doors opened, I pressed the button to go back up to the fourth floor. A few moments later, we arrived there without incident. We exited the elevator, then turned around to look at it in bemusement.

“I suppose a more valid test would be to ride it alone, when no one knows you’re there, the way Satsy did,” I mused.

“I do have a theory.” Rick said hesitantly, “Uh, do you know why Satsy went down to the docks?”

“I know it wasn’t just because he likes a guy named Lou,” I hedged.

“Right. Well, he’s an imaginative person, a performance artiste, a creative . . . and he was under the influence of some pretty potent weed.” Rick smiled and admitted, “I’ve visited the docks a few times myself, Esther, and that is some really good shit they’re sharing down there.”

“Did everyone know about this but me?” I wondered.

“I think that maybe the elevator stopped or malfunctioned—maybe even because, without being aware of it, Satsy leaned against a bunch of buttons at once, which screwed with the electrical system.”

“And then he imagined all the rest?” I shook my head. “You didn’t seen the condition his costume was in. There were scorch marks and places where it had been singed. It was a mess—even apart from all the smeared makeup.”

Rick shrugged, unconvinced. “He was smoking on the docks. Maybe he got careless and burned a few holes in his costume.”

“This was more than a couple of little spots from being careless while—”

“Maybe he still had the joint with him when he freaked out in the elevator, and he set his own costume on fire by accident, without realizing what he’d done.” Rick added, “I’ve studied drug use in my psych courses, Esther, and there are instances of marijuana really messing with perceptions of reality. Also, it’s possible there was something added to that joint which Satsy didn’t know about—or that he knows about and hasn’t mentioned.”

“Hmmm.”

Satsy
was
imaginative. And his interest in the occult ensured that, in an overstimulated state, his brain could certainly cook up the images and sensations he had described to me. So I recognized that Rick’s theory was plausible.

On the other hand, I certainly knew by now not to dismiss a tale like Satsy’s just because it sounded supernatural. My friendship with Max—Dr. Maximillian Zadok, a mage born in the seventeenth century and unquestionably the most unusual person I’ve ever met—has taught me that reality is much stranger than I ever imagined and that there are more things in it, Horatio, than were dreamt of in my philosophy.

“But that’s just my theory. What’s yours?” Rick prodded invitingly, “What do you think happened?”

“I have no idea,” I said shaking my head. “But I do know that I’m not getting on that freight elevator alone any time soon.”

He smiled again. “Actually, I don’t think I will, either.”

“And it bothers me that on the same morning that Satsy was terrified by a weird experience, this kid Jonathan was, too.”

“Well, the boy’s episode is pretty easy to explain, don’t you think?” Rick’s take on that was very similar to what Miles had suggested: a frightened young child, lost in a setting that strongly suggested certain things to his imagination. Rick added some background about child psychology and how a very young brain interpreted sensory information, and it sounded convincing.

“Yeah, maybe there really was only one weird incident here this morning,” I said. “The one Satsy had.” And since
that
experience had involved smoking some really good shit . . . I shrugged. Perhaps the bizarre events of the morning were indeed due to imaginative minds misinterpreting conventional experiences under the influence of stress or a psychoactive substance.

Even so, I decided to be thorough. Mostly because of how terrified that nice little boy had been. “I think I’m going to check out the area, though, and see if I can figure out exactly what scared the kid. I’ll feel better if I know. And if it’s something that might frighten another child, maybe I can get it removed from the floor.” Miles might be persuadable; he wouldn’t want another incident like Jonathan’s.

Rick glanced at his watch. “I’ve probably got some more time before Jeff gets hot under the fuzzy collar and wants to swap out. I’ll help you look around for a few minutes.”

I smiled. “You really are Super Santa.”

He made a wry face, as he usually did when someone used that name. “Well, we Santas have a big rep to live up to, you know.”

“Of course.” I was glad he wanted to help. With his knowledge of child psychology, I thought he’d be more likely than me to spot something that had turned into a terrifying threat in the little boy’s mind. I led the way through the door that took us out of the delivery area and back into Solsticeland. “It happened way back near the North Pole.”

“Let’s go this way,” Rick said, gesturing toward the path on our left. “It’ll be less crowded.”

Three main paths meandered through Solsticeland—which was overall an immense, winding labyrinth of side paths, loops, and dead ends where I still got lost at times. Getting lost was often part of the fun of visiting this place, of course—and not just for kids. Later in the day, our visitors would include groups of teens, couples on dates, and adults nostalgically revisiting their youth.

The path we were on passed by a giant hologram of floating ecofairies (I had no idea what an “ecofairy” was, but this was their official name), some little gingerbread condos that looked a bit like festively edible Anasazi ruins, and an elaborate manger scene. There was also a huge Saturnalia tree. I thought it looked exactly like the Christmas trees all over the store; but Jingle had told me emphatically that it was a
Saturnalia
tree, in honor of the winter solstice and in memory of the ancient Roman holiday which became Christmas after the empire converted to Christianity and needed to find a politically correct new frame for its popular pagan festival.

Many current Christmas traditions originated in the Romans’ pagan Saturnalia, such as decorating the house with lights to ward off the encroaching darkness and with greenery to celebrate the imminent arrival of spring, as promised by the gradual return of the sun when the days start growing longer after the winter solstice.

Most of the rest of contemporary Christmas customs come from Dickens and Disney, Jeff had told me. And who was I to disagree?

Since night is longer than day during the winter solstice, and since the real North Pole is dark all season, the entire fourth floor of Fenster’s was shrouded in nocturnal gloom to harmonize with those themes. Working for long hours beneath a dark, star-studded sky tended to make me sleepy during my shifts here. And it didn’t strike me as a stroke of genius to have a vast immersive exhibit for children that was dark and shadowy; I thought Jonathan’s experience here was starting to seem inevitable, if a little extreme.

In keeping with the multicultural concept of Solsticeland, scattered exhibits throughout the enchanted maze incorporated Hanukkah, Diwali, and Kwanzaa themes. As Preston Fenster had noted, Islam was not (yet) represented here, but speaking as one of the Chosen People, I envied Muslims for that; Solsticeland’s Hanukkah exhibit was a collection of props that were simultaneously so garish and so stereotypical that they looked like leftovers from a Las Vegas casino production of
Fiddler On the Roof
. I was often assigned to work in the Hanukkah exhibit—where the predictable soundtrack, piped in through the speaker system, was always the sentimental squeal of klezmer music.

A marketing station was set up near the Hanukkah display for one of the season’s hottest new products, a toy that Fenster’s was promoting aggressively: Chérie the Chef. Since I worked this area a lot, I often got stuck demonstrating Chérie’s selling points and urging people to buy her. As Miles had noted on a number of occasions by now, I didn’t do it well or with sincere enthusiasm.

Chérie, a doll that was about twelve inches tall, made Naughty and Nice seem like flat-chested, fully clothed intellectuals who used admirable restraint with their cosmetics. She wore a tiny little apron—one that was better suited to a porn star than a child’s toy—and not much else. She came with her own upscale kitchen, fully stocked with little plastic gourmet tools and food, so that she could whip up a five-course meal for her hungry man when he came home.

“I hate, loathe, and despise that toy,” I told Rick as we walked past it. It pained me to see children and parents gathering around Chérie now, as they so often did, and expressing wonder and delight at her domestic attributes.

“Yeah, I think
all
the female elves hate her,” Rick said. “And the male elves want to date her. Well, the straight ones, I mean.”

“That’s not exactly a big crowd.” I guessed, “Maybe two?”

“I’m betting on three,” he said. “Twinkle, Eggnog, and Thistle.”

“Thistle, I agree. Eggnog, maybe. I haven’t really worked with him.” All I knew about Eggnog was that he had an MA in literature from Princeton, which is what
everyone
knew about him. You couldn’t spend five minutes around Eggnog without him bringing up the subject, always with the shrieking subtext that elfdom was beneath an individual of his intellect and education. Frankly, I felt elfdom was beneath me, too; but I didn’t cite credentials to prove it every time I opened my mouth.

“But Twinkle?” I said doubtfully. “Would a straight man really go along with being called
Twinkle?”

We didn’t necessarily get to choose our elf names, but we could object to an assigned name and suggest an alternative. I had objected to the attempt to name me Tannenbaum, the handle used by my predecessor in this role; she was a gentile who’d evidently been unaware it wasn’t a Jewish name, but rather the German word for a Christmas tree.

“I think that Twinkle assumes we enjoy the witty irony of the name, given his obvious heterosexual masculinity.” When I gave Rick a peculiar look, he added, “I’m telling you what I think
he
thinks.”

“Oh.” I thought it over. “Well, maybe.”