Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (33 page)

* * *

Gronk cowered before the Tooth Fairy, his misshapen body pelted by raindrops as big as dimes. His brothers hung back among the dunes, wary of getting too close.

Wimps, she thought.

“They were whisked to heaven?” It was beyond belief.

“Yes, by the archangel Michael. I tried to follow, but they went too fast. And when I reached heaven, I ricocheted off the Empyrean’s underfloor. I looked for a way in, but couldn’t find one. Don’t hit me, Mommy, I did my best.”

Rage boiled in her veins. She scooped up clumps of moist sand, heavy and gray as her soul, and flung them into the sea, the surface of which they pocked and pitted between random patterings of rain. Into the sky she sped, so swift that her necklace gave a sharp Venetian-blind slap against her chest.

“Foul trickster,” she shouted into the heavens, “you dare snatch away my triumph? Well, I shall topple you, I swear it. Headlong into Hades shall you be hurled. Your throne I will claim for my own and my sons will sprout wings and pluck discord from misshapen harps forever. From mortals, choking on the bile of misery, shall I pluck the tasty-boned. Their young I’ll devour, pelting anguished moms and dads with money in trade. Wasting and spending shall they seek to evade sorrow, making war, worshiping false gods, burning the meek in sacrifice to them—all in vain. Torment shall rain upon their heads all the days of their lives.”

She shot down among her brood. Slashes of rain sliced across their faces and their frog eyes blinked. “Your mother’s a fool, boys. Zeus has an ever-replenished quiver of thunderbolts. What have I got? A nasty streak and insufficient courage or cleverness in carrying out my transgressions. This requires thought. Be gone. Let me brood.”

At her shout, they scattered, Chuff ever at the hindmost.

“You too, you spy of nothing!”

Gronk turned tail and loped away.

On the sand she squatted, staring out to sea, not blinking though high winds assailed her and rain scoured her face.

Zeus hadn’t carried Pan and his bitch-brat to heaven on a whim. Miracles were brewing: creation loosed, if but for a moment, from its bonds. That meant chaos had been invited in. And chaos, so invited, brought opportunity.

But what was afoot? Where lay her advantage?

She railed against blindness, tearing her hair and shaking her fists heavenward. She had planned to topple humans; now that plan had been dashed.

Then a thought struck her and she calmed. No matter what plans the Almighty was hatching in heaven, she could still make Pan bleed. She would hit him where it hurt.

Wendy.

Though a child in appearance, Pan’s stepdaughter was no longer a child inside. Void then the injunction Zeus had laid upon her to harm no brats, that day when he had thirteen times blasted her innards with the brood-seed of her imps. True, he had commanded her to leave Pan and his family in peace. But what was life if one did not test the limits? Test them? She would defy them. Better to suffer payback than slink away in mewl and flinch.

Yes, Wendy.

A kidnap. A torment. It had been a joy, not so long ago, to rip out her teeth and snack on them, to traumatize her in the graveyard by summoning her dead daddy’s corpse and taking her pleasure with it. Now the child was immortal, those memories erased. But Wendy was still feeling her wings, according to Gronk, not yet fully understanding the immense powers immortality bestowed.

She would succumb to torment. And through her would Pan suffer as well. Perhaps Pan would himself turn against Zeus.

He might, she thought, if the trauma suffered by his stepchild was sufficiently terrible.

* * *

“There’s one thing more,” said the Son.

In a transition as smooth as silk, Santa found himself walking beside the Son in a garden, taken into his confidence. The air was redolent with rose and hollyhock and hyacinth.

One thing more.

Santa had gathered as much during the recruitment of the Easter Bunny. His own part had to involve more than simply ferrying the furry creature about.

“The inverted egg-seeds cannot remain in the hearts of those you visit. You need to remove them.”

“Fair enough,” said Santa. “No sooner suggested than agreed to.”

The Son smiled, and Santa chilled at what lay beneath that smile. “Removal so late in the cycle of growth, when so many roots have thrust so deep, can cause unbearable pain, pain unto death. Only if the one who removes the egg-seed bears the brunt of that pain will the mortal live.”

Santa halted beside a fruiting pear tree. “I have touched their hearts and seen how unrelentingly vile they are in ways beyond number. From childlike purity have so many devolved into monsters. Gropers for power, hard-hearted consumers, idle spendthrifts of their precious time alive, the envious, the lustful, lackhands and lunkheads—the list has no end. Were I to assume their pain in removing the egg-seeds, I would not have
begun
to heal all the diseased parts of them. Better they die in the extraction.”

“You don’t mean that,” replied the Son, condemning him not in the least. “My Father, infinitely wise yet inscrutable in his ways, has granted this one alteration in his creation’s plan, but only through you can it be achieved.”

“I seated the egg-seeds with the best intent. The Tooth Fairy about-faced them. Why shouldn’t she be ordered to remove them and suffer the pain you speak of?”

“Would you have it so?”

Santa hesitated. If forced, she would seek means to do worse. No, the Tooth Fairy should come nowhere near the sleepers. Besides, he felt like a shirker. There was a reason he had been chosen to walk with the greatest of all sacrificial lambs in this garden.

“Thy will be done,” he said finally.

“My will is that
thy
will be done. That is, that you willingly embrace this task, not provoked by feelings of obligation or guilt but out of love for these once innocent creatures. Observe.”

Santa gazed upon the earth, taking in the seething masses and focusing on each of them, seeking the uncorrupted infant at the heart of every mortal.

“Observe the children,” said the Son. “They live in them still, buried in the barren earth of despoiled community. If you make this sacrifice, it will be as the planting of a fresh bed of flowers, an invitation to these children to rise from dormancy.”

Santa fell in love with the buried boys and girls, their eyelids closed, their lips parted, their tiny noses no longer breathing.

“Mortal grown-ups can choose redemption at any time, if they will only give the child free rein. Eating the Divine Mother’s chocolate egg opens one small way to do that. And a goodly number will apply that lesson in other areas of their lives. You alone can give them that chance.”

Santa returned his gaze to the loving god who had given up his life to save all humankind, and who continued to bear the unbearable burden of their sins. “I’ll do it,” he said.

“Be blessed in that choice. And know that I am with you always. Take heart. This will not be easy. Often you’ll wish you had refused this task. But be assured, release awaits you on the other side.”

“Release?”

“When it is finished, you will understand.”

The Son’s remarks had turned cryptic, but their conversation was at an end. And now Santa stood where he had before, between Wendy and the Easter Bunny, as if there had been no walk in the garden at all.

“Go thou,” said the Divine Mother, “and heaven go with you.”

As the Easter Bunny sank through the clouds and picked up speed, Wendy shouted after him, “We’ll come for you.”

She took Santa’s hand then and they drifted earthward without regret or depression. Their visit had, after all, reached its natural conclusion, there was much to do, and they were determined to do it correctly.

“We can save them, Daddy,” she said.

“I know we can,” said Santa. “I know it, dear.”

Chapter 33. Racing Against the Dawn Line

WHEN TWO SLEIGHS LANDED in the clearing before his burrow, the Easter Bunny was surprised, though he knew Wendy had her own sleigh. “We’ll make better time,” said Santa. “A lighter load for the team.”

“Oh, I see,” he said, tumbling in beside Santa.

Santa glared. “Lighter than that. You will fly beside me, on your own steam. And never,” he added significantly, “are you to drop back and converse with Wendy. In fact, you are not to converse with
me,
unless I initiate it or it’s germane to the task at hand.”

“Ah,” said the Easter Bunny. If he thought about it, he could have read much into Santa’s words. He decided not to think about it. Tonight would be long enough without erratic detours into valleys of fret and fidget.

Santa turned about, the heavy reins creaking in his hands. “All set, Wendy?”

“Yep,” she said.

“Off we go, then!” A whipsmack, and their sleighs rose into the air, the Easter Bunny easily paralleling Santa’s maneuvers. So swift they flew, in one breath they had landed on their first lawn. In the time it took Santa and Wendy to reach the first sleeper, the Easter Bunny dashed through the house, pulling baskets out of the air, placing them just so, and dotting the back lawn with concealed Easter eggs. He met them in the bedroom, where the pouch slung upon his back took on weight for the first time that night. He gestured toward his shoulder and a chocolate egg leapt between his paws. Before him, Saint Nicholas removed with a grunt some terrible excrescence from the sleeping mortal’s chest, a thing of blood and tendrils, which crumbled to dust and blew away in his hands.

“Leave the egg and let’s go.”

The look on Santa’s face shocked him.

“Are you okay, Daddy?”

“Yes, dear.” But the Easter Bunny, placing the chocolate egg on the sleeper’s nightstand, wasn’t so sure.

Quickly they established a routine, flying and landing, dashing through the house for his annual deliveries—and into neighboring homes where no implants had been left—then to bedside, where Santa did his best to absorb the pain as he grimaced and extracted and the vile dust fell through his fingers, after which the Easter Bunny set beside each dozing extractee the Divine Mother’s redemptive gift.

Never did it become monotonous, though tens of thousands of homes went by in a normal-time’s heartbeat and their routine never deviated; they couldn’t spare the time to pause or ponder or trade idle remarks. The Easter Bunny imagined a sorrow-filled world, vast looming mountain ranges of gloom everywhere, each delivery of a heavenly egg replacing a tiny smear of gloom with a brilliant dab of lemon. Their way was long and tortuous, but when they were done, the world would be bathed in the purest light, an entire race of beings transformed.

His one worry, though he dared not voice it, was for Santa. The tormented elf moved more and more as though he amassed worlds of pain. And he began, almost imperceptibly, to slow.

Every so often, Wendy voiced her concern. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she would repeat, doing her best not to sound alarmed.

“Yes, dear,” he would answer, the soul of patience and dissembling, minimizing the seriousness of what was happening to him. But though sunrise lay far off, the Easter Bunny knew they were racing against time and that it was a race they could not afford to lose.

On, on, on they went, through a world of darkness, leaving tiny spicules of light by each bedside, next to huddled homophobic homeless men and women, alongside hospital beds, and marriage beds in honeymoon suites, and deathbeds. He neither stinted nor scrimped on his regular deliveries; even so, this grand odyssey had the spirit of Easter writ large upon its face, the dark sorrows of the Savior’s sacrifice, from which would emerge a rebirth of hope, of generosity, and an embrace of the astounding variety of the Father’s creation.

At first, the
impression
of Santa’s slowing and not the fact came to the Easter Bunny. Then the fact. But he saw the worthy saint fight back, driving himself and his reindeer even harder. If but one sleeper woke to a prejudice unleavened with the least modicum of good will, the world might be utterly lost. For as Santa had commented in heaven, one determined miscreant can change the course of history.

Another image sustained him.

He fancied he was delivering one gargantuan Easter basket to the entire world. If you could step back and view all the divine eggs they were leaving, you would see in minute detail the woven basket, the towering chocolate bunny, surrounding him a generosity of jelly beans, peeping marshmallow chicks, and brightly wrapped ovoid confections, everything cushioned in green cut shreds of plastic grass. And on the morrow, a slumberous and reinvigorated World Soul would wake and blink and scarce credit its eyes, delighting in heaven’s miraculous gift and striding into a new day, the burden of one sad sin lifted from its shoulders.

Holding off the night even as they sped through it, on the trio flew, the Easter Bunny soaring along their redemptive path with mingled hope and anxiety.

* * *

Santa’s first instinct was to recoil from the task, to perform it mechanically, shutting off all feeling. If he deadened himself to the extraction and the lances of pain, becoming nothing but a red-suited, black-booted automaton, he could, he thought, maintain the stamina to survive the night’s work.

Very quickly he learned that that was folly. More intimate than during the implantation must he now become with these sleepers, lest he extract imperfectly. He could not afford to overlook any abortive matter nor feel inattentively the agony attached to the removal. He had to stay focused on the pain.

One hundred homes in, as he grasped the gangrenous implant in seventy-six-year-old Benjamin Norton’s chest, deftly wrenching it free of its moorings and drawing it forth to pulse and die and turn to dust and then to a pestilent vapor in his palms, two significant shifts occurred in him.

The first was the realization that the suffering he had taken on was not going to diminish or dissipate in any way, that all of it would persist as the night progressed, piled on top of what had come before.