The Master Page 5

  Jeff didn’t like Ee-Em. He was pretty sure that he was a terrorist like the ones on TV. He and his best friend, Matt, had talked it over and decided that that was what Ee-Em was. Jeff really wished that Matt was there right now so they could talk about this Santa thing. Matt was almost seven and watched a lot more TV than Jeff did, and he knew a lot more things. He could probably tell right away if Santa was some kind of a vampire or just a really weird elf.

  Jeff put his eyes back to the binoculars.

  Man! One thing was sure, though he wanted to defy Ee-Em and visit with Santa—mostly to ask him to bring Christmas to their house, even though Ee-Em said they couldn’t have it anymore—he sure wouldn’t be doing it today. He’d have to wait until he came to the mall with Grandpa tomorrow. Maybe the other Santa would be back then. And if he wasn’t, maybe Jeff would write a letter to the real Santa at the North Pole. Grandpa would help him— or Matt. Matt would be better, because he would understand about the vampire, and the real Santa really should know what was going on here.

  Suddenly, the bad Santa’s eyes turned Jeff’s way— just like he had heard what Jeff was thinking. They blazed brightly, a wicked yellow light shining right through the contacts.

  Hello, Jeff, a deep, scary voice said. Such a smart, observant little boy. Wanna come play?

  The boy gasped and scrambled away from the shrubs. He almost dropped his binoculars as he fled, not even realizing that he was running away from the arcade, where his mother would be waiting. In the back of his mind, he heard laughter, and that scared him more than anything.

  Nicholas Anthony knew what they called him behind his back, but he was with the original Scrooge on this one; if he hadn’t taken a Hippocratic oath, he’d want to see those drunken holiday bozos boiled in plum pudding and buried with a stake of holly through their hearts.

  Every year it was the same. The world was rational until Thanksgiving, and then, sometime late on that Thursday night, Christmas rolled into every town in America and set up shop, hanging tacky decorations where they were most likely to hurt people that passed by. Gold tinsel, fake metallic trees, twinkle lights—showgirls’ costumes weren’t half so gaudy. And everywhere he went carolers were shouting at him to deck the halls and to have a silent night. As if there were any halls left to deck. Even the restrooms at the hospital were draped in garlands and blinking lights. And as for finding anyplace that was silent . . . ha! Even in the bathroom, it was impossible to escape the jingle bells they insisted on piping in with the seasonal music.

  And what about those bell-ringers? Nick believed in charity, but these fake Santas who lurked about the town’s superstore seemed sinister to him, chasing people with their torturous bells, which pierced eardrums like metal spikes. He was certain that some permanent hearing loss had to be suffered by everyone who came within twenty feet of them, and he’d come to view them with as much enthusiasm as he would witches hovering over cauldrons of poison. On bad days, he had to wonder if they were part of some governmental experiment in brainwashing, a test to see how quickly the civilian population could be broken. On good days—well, there were no good days in December.

  But in this feeling of distaste, he was apparently alone. Why didn’t the rest of the world see that almost everything connected to this now artificial holiday was potentially dangerous? Maybe he should try to get on “Oprah” or “Larry King.” Hospitals collected statistics, and last year there had been over four thousand emergency room visits related to accidents with Christmas lights alone. Even things as seemingly innocuous as Christmas cards could hurt people. Postmen’s sacks were twice as heavy as usual, leading to strained muscles and sprains when they fell on icy walkways. One woman had been infected with a insatiable need to send Christmas cards, and after licking seven hundred of them had been rushed to the hospital for treatment of a dangerous glue allergy.

  Kissing under the mistletoe? A surefine way to spread flu and cold germs! And he had personally treated four cases of strained neck muscles acquired while trying to fit overly large Christmas trees into too-small tree stands.

  And then there was all the food and drink! Leaving aside alcohol-related injuries, the nation’s collective cholesterol count shot through the roof every December. Twenty-one million gallons of artery-clogging gravy were slurped up. Twenty-five million pounds of chocolate were eaten in the United States alone. And then there was the eggnog. It wasn’t all bad like his grandmother’s; he’d had some with Chivas Regal that could be habit-forming. But it wasn’t good for the body. And then there was the final abomination—five million pounds of sugar-ridden fruitcake were consumed every year. And people didn’t even like fruitcake! They had to be noshing out of boredom with their relatives, or else seasonal depression. If people were smart, they’d take the time off work and, instead of going home to family they despised, they’d spend it with people they really liked.

  And what about those crushed by Christmas merchandise? Thousands were injured and even killed every year when temporary employees got onboard forklifts and started messing about with stacks of furniture. He had personally treated a pair of sisters crushed by a falling sofa.

  Then there were pellet guns. It was hard to believe, but some parents still got them for their kids. And they were always amazed when, yes, the kids did shoot eyes out.

  Nick’s mind suddenly veered toward his worst Christmas memory of all, the disaster that had happened while he and his friends, David and Jason, were still in college. They had stayed at school that year, determined to enjoy the holidays for once by avoiding crazy, unpleasant or missing family. And they had almost succeeded, too. They had chipped in and bought a tree—decorative but tasteful and restrained, with a reasonable number of lights that did not have frayed cords. They’d had eggnog. They’d even had “The Chipmunks Christmas Album” to strike the right, festive mood.

  But on Christmas Eve, instead of being visited by the Christmas angel bearing light and goodwill, the dark spirit of food poisoning had come around— probably from the eggnog Jason made. Eggnog! It was a wonder Nick still drank it. Only Dave was spared, and he’d had his own trauma that night, what with being dumped by the love his life and finding out his father was dying.

  Vomiting and heartbreak would have been enough to make the holiday memorable, but there’d been a city-wide power outage, too, caused by frozen power lines being downed by accumulations of ice. The ensuing lack of heat had frozen the water in all the toilet bowls in the deserted dorms, and many of the porcelain receptacles had shattered. It had been a long five days and nights that led to a lot of expensive repairs and much business for the local infirmary.

  That had been the last time Nick attempted to celebrate the holiday.

  He shook his head. In spite of that Christmas, he, Dave and Jason had all remained friends. They had, in fact, grown closer. And he would call his buddies—after the holidays. Neither of them would be thrilled with getting a ring right now, not even from him. They’d be too busy fighting off unwanted fruitcakes from relatives and friends who just didn’t understand that some people didn’t feel the same Christmas magic as everyone else.

  George Bernard Shaw had called Christmas “a cruel, gluttonous subject,” and he was right. It was both.

  Not everyone feels that way, Nick. It isn’t all commercialism and drunken stupidity. Have you forgotten about the whole peace-on-earth thing?

  “Bah, humbug. What peace?” Nick said to the annoying reflection in his sideview mirror. It was with him almost constantly these days—always eating something sweet and sticky, too. And it liked to talk. The first time he’d seen it was early one morning when he stumbled into the bathroom; He had been still enough in the realm of sleep to make the mistake of addressing it, of asking who and what it was.

  Ghost is as good a word as any, the apparition had replied. Or revenant. I like to think of myself as a spirit messenger sent from your older, wiser soul. Calling myself a “spiritual visitation” is a bit over the top, I admit, but you’ve no
one but yourself to blame for my being here. You have gotten so far removed from your spirit that normal messages sent through dreams just won’t do. Nick, my boy, you live in a world of plenty, but your soul and emotions are starving to death. It is time to release your spirit from its imprisonment and join the feast of life. This will be hard for both of us—you’ve always needed observable truth to convince you of things. But this time you are going to have to take a certain amount on faith.

  Faith—yeah, right. Nick had rolled his eyes and gone back to bed, dismissing the conversation as a very weird dream brought on by a combination of too much on-the-job tinsel and exhaustion.

  But the ghost had still been there when he got up an hour later. And it had remained with him ever since, chiding and cajoling and eating in turn.

  Reminded of things gluttonous, Nick looked at the basket in the backseat of his car and wondered for the tenth time what to do with it. It was lovely to have won—primarily because he never won anything, and it suggested that maybe his luck was about to change—but who in his family would actually enjoy a radio-controlled car, a teddy bear with a wardrobe of twenty-five dresses or a rather juvenile heart-shaped diamond pendant? None of it suited his family’s tastes. If he offered his nose-pierced niece a teddy, she’d look at him like he’d sprouted a second head. And as for the three pounds of white chocolate snowmen . . . Nick shuddered. His analretentive brother-in-law, the dentist, would pitch a fit if Nick gave it to either his teenaged anorexic daughter or son; it had taken forever to torture their teeth into perfection.

  Really, the only useful thing in the entire basket was the two-pound bag of dried apricots. Those might help his brother-in-law be a little less uptight, since Nick was sure the sourpuss still wasn’t taking Uncle Albert’s annually repeated suggestion of a Christmas cranberry punch high-colonic to sweeten his mood.

  How could his sister have married such a humorless cretin? Of course, they both came from a family of humorless people, so maybe it was inevitable.

  The family would probably appreciate the eggnog, though. This year, he had taken the precaution of bringing his own supplies and recipe. He was as traditional as any man, and treasured what few holiday rituals his family had, but his grandma’s recipe was something to pass swiftly from the face of the planet and never be mentioned again. Not even that chiding ghost in his mirror could argue with that. It was nice that there was something they agreed on.

  The ghost nodded solemnly. Lovely lady, but a lousy cook.

  His relationship with the specter was not a comfortable one, and Nick rather hoped it would disappear after the holidays. Things had worked that way in the Dickens story, so there was some expectation of eventual emancipation.

  But Scrooge saw the light and redeemed himself, the ghost said. So far you’ve managed to keep your lights switched off.

  Scrooge had a clot on the brain and was hallucinating, Nick thought in return, and then sighed. He might have a clot, too. It was scary to think about, but this ghost might not be a purely psychological disturbance. He’d have to see about an MRI after the holidays if the spirit remained with him after January second.

  I’m hurt.

  “You’re annoying.”

  This ghost was a bit different from anything in A Christmas Carol. True, the spirit often wore a stupid holly crown and a green bathrobe trimmed in gold tinsel—a sort of poor man’s royal robes—but the ghost wasn’t simply some spirit from another realm, or the revenant of someone who had died and come back to haunt Nick. That, he could almost have understood. There was tradition for that type of ghost. No, this specter’s body was still very much alive. Nick knew for certain since it was, in fact, his own face that looked out at him. His face, if older, more lined, more grim. The sight was fairly ghastly— especially in that stupid tinsel-trimmed robe. In recent weeks, Nick had taken to avoiding all mirrors and reflective surfaces. He didn’t need any more lectures about the hell of a wasted life.

  For heaven’s sake! It wasn’t as if he didn’t know his life had become a little unbalanced.

  Then do something about it, the ghost said. He sounded unusually testy.

  “Can you just be quiet until we get through the mountains?” Nick muttered. “I’m not dead yet and I need to watch the road.”

  The ghost nodded sadly. I’ve seen corpses with more Christmas spirit than you have. Your soul is shriveling, boy. It’s nearly dead—starved to nothing. You had best wake up before it’s too late.

  Nick didn’t say anything; he just stared out at the wet road beyond the windshield. Usually he liked the rain, at least the sound of it. He liked it mostly because it was something he didn’t have to respond to—not a voice, not a beep, not a siren. There was nothing he could or should do about the weather. Listening to the rain was as close to feeling lighthearted and irresponsible as he came these days.

  And that is sad, sad, sad. The ghost shook its gold-tinseled head.

  “Please shut up.”

  A couple of hours before dawn, a lightning storm broke over the Sierra Nevada mountains, bringing with it Ping-Pong–sized hail and thick sleet that clogged his Jag’s wiper-blades.

  “Merry Christmas, everyone,” Nick muttered to the heavens. “Great joke on the holiday travelers, God. Rates right up there with food poisoning.”

  It isn’t a joke—it’s destiny. The ghost sounded suddenly cheerful. I was hoping that this would happen. All signs pointed this way. Say hallelujah! We are saved.

  “Saved from what? You would want this. Look, just be quiet for a bit longer. I really need to concentrate. The road feels greasy.”

  Nick spared an unkind thought for the bastards at the weather bureau who had sworn the night would be fair. On their advice, he hadn’t bothered to pack chains for the car. Fortunately, the road was deserted, so he was able to crawl along at a turtle’s pace for a mile or so, but soon even that became impossible. His tires could barely gain traction on the ice-slick road. Nick began looking around for a place to stop.

  There’s something just ahead. Slow down just a bit more or you’ll miss it.

  “Quiet, damn you. Unless you want to drive.”

  But the excited ghost was right. Quite fortuitously, just as the storm reached blizzard conditions, a small dirt road suddenly appeared, leading off into the greater darkness of the forest.

  This is it. Then, almost like a prayer: This must be it.

  “I see.” Nick eased the car into something slower than a crawl.

  Normally, he would not have risked the Jaguar’s paint on such a narrow tunnel of spiky branches. His motto was: If it isn’t paved, men don’t need to go there. But as the hail was a greater threat than the dirt path and the somber evergreens offered shelter, he quickly steered to the right and followed the trail into the blackness.

  “If you go into the woods today—better not go alone . . .”

  “Shut up,” Nick replied. But he said it almost absently. He didn’t actually mind the ghost’s singing, as long as it wasn’t Christmas carols, and the specter had been completely silent for the last forty-eight hours while Nick was at work.

  Probably it was too much to hope that anyone actually lived out here in the wilds. The state of the road certainly discouraged any such optimistic thoughts. He’d be more likely to find an old abandoned miner’s shack, or a logger’s shelter. Or a moonshine still. Or an illegal marijuana garden. Those littered the area. Still, any structure where he and the Jag might find shelter until the storm passed would be welcome; the hail was ruining his paint, and the road was turning into an impassable river of mud.

  Don’t worry, my boy! I think someone’s at home and expecting us. I can see the fire from here. The ghost’s voice was filled with a smug satisfaction that bothered

  Nick more than he liked to admit. He had always assumed the ghost was benign—just a manifestation of his guilty conscience—but what if he was wrong? Just how destructive might his psyche be?

  Maybe he should leave, turn back, try to drive on.
The elevation was dropping. The ice was bound to disappear as the temperature warmed.

  As if hearing this thought, the hail doubled and then redoubled. Thick fog closed in around the car, shutting out the moonlight in a thick white curtain. The hair rose on the nape of Nick’s neck.

  “Damn it. How can there be fog up here in the mountains, and in a hailstorm? This only happens on the valley floor.”

  Better not try to go on. It’s too dangerous with this mist.

  He didn’t like to agree with the ghost, but it was right. One would have to have a real death wish to go on in this weather.

  Nick fumbled for his cell phone, praying he could get a signal. His sister wouldn’t like it, but he was going to be late for his first Christmas visit in several years. Probably very late.

  “I should make you explain this to my sister.”

  I would if I could. Come on. Cheer up, Nick. You didn’t want to go there, anyway. This will be way more fun. We’re going to have an adventure.

  “Quiet now. I’m on the phone.”

  Adventure? Nick disliked that idea only slightly less than he did Christmas.

  Chapter Four

  True to the ghost’s prediction, a dilapidated cabin appeared at once, rather like those witches’ cottages in the grislier fairy tales where someone got eaten or shoved into an oven. Of course, though this old cabin looked almost magical with the light of a hearth fire flickering on the paned windows and smoke billowing from the crooked chimney pipe, it would not contain any such wonderful or horrible things that those gruesome children’s stories provided. Or so Nick hoped.

  He parked his car under a thick stand of trees and turned off the engine. Looking about carefully before dousing his headlights, he found no sign of a garage or another automobile. And yet, plainly someone was at home. Fires didn’t light themselves—not indoors.

  Except in fairy tales, said the grinning old ghost looking back at him from the reflection in the Jag’s window. The image was exceptionally strong now that the headlights were doused.