Who Killed Santa Clause, a short story
Dec 7, 2020 19:30:25 GMT
osnafrank, spideyman, and 2 more like this
Post by prufrock21 on Dec 7, 2020 19:30:25 GMT
WHO KILLED SANTA CLAUS?
"Irving, it is too Santa Claus," Ellie Jane Pruitt insisted, pressing the collar of her pee coat against her chin to keep the cold wind at bay. "My dad hates costumes. He wouldn't dress up like Santa Claus."
Irving Turner smirked. "Yeah, just like you to believe in fairy tales, Santa Claus, goblins, ghosts and stuff. I'm telling you they all do it. They rent a costume, hide it somewhere in the house, put it on Christmas Day and go around saying Ho, ho, ho like they're really happy to see you. My dad used to do it until I told him I knew it was him behind the white beard and the fake belly. Boy, you shoulda seen the dumb look on his kisser when I told him."
Ellie Jane resumed her steady pace on a sidewalk cleared of snow, where bare-limbed trees cast lengthy shadows. Still unconvinced, her mood brightened when she rounded the corner and saw her house. The French windows in front, second story balcony and picturesque oak tree in the yard were unmistakable. Once there she could finally say so long to this jerk. And this time she would make it a point not to thank him for walking her home.
"Just like you to be jealous, Irving. That's why you're saying it. Cause your mom and dad are divorced, and your dad doesn't spend Christmas with you anymore."
"Know what?" Irving said. "I shouldn't waste my time being your friend. You're such a baby-a§§ ninny. You believe anything your mom and dad tell you."
"Like if I care," Ellie Jane snapped. "I bet you can't prove it. I dare you."
"Me?" Irving pointed a gloved finger to his chest. "I'm a sixth grade science whiz. I can prove anything."
"Not this you can't. I say my dad doesn't dress up like Santa Claus. Prove to me he does."
"Okay, no problem. Today's Christmas Eve, isn't it?"
Ellie nodded.
"Place close attention then. And do everything I tell you. First, you'll have to find out where your dad keeps his Santa suit. After you find it, you hide it somewhere in the house. Can you do it right away?"
"You mean right now?"
"Yeah. Pronto. Before he gets home."
Ellie Jane thought. "Suppose. Yeah, okay. Where should I look for it?"
"That's easy. Where your folks keep an old trunk or there's an unused closet."
"The second floor. That's where my mom keeps the stuff she no longer uses."
"Uh-huh, great. The second floor."
Ellie Jane and Irving stopped when they arrived at the front entrance to her house.
Irving whispered. "Very carefully, without making your mom suspicious, go to the second floor and search for an unused closet or an old trunk. That's where you'll find your dad's Santa suit."
"What if it isn't there, smarty pants?"
Irving made a sign with his index finger, his confidence brimming. "X marks the spot, little girl. My dad always hid his suit in an old trunk or in the closet."
"Your dad did, but mine wouldn't because he isn't Santa Claus." Ellie nodded her head as if to punctuate her statement. Then she stuck out her tongue at Irving and ran up the steps to the front door.
Irving said, "Zowie-bowie, Ellie Jane. Are you in for a surprise. Once you have it, don't forget to hide the suit, like I said. Your dad's gonna go bonkers when he can't find it. See you later, redhead, freckle face."
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Ellie Jane felt like a fool because she was sure she wouldn't find her dad's rented Santa Claus suit there--or anywhere else in the house for that matter. That Irving Turner was a snot. She'd show him. She'd shut his big mouth and pay him back for calling her a baby-a§§ ninny.
Then again she recalled last year asking her fourth grade teacher if the tooth fairy existed. Her teacher, Mrs. Cunningham, looked surprised, even though Ellie Jane was one of her best students. "Why would you ask that?" she said.
"Just curious," Ellie Jane answered.
Mrs. Cunningham smiled and said, "Ellie Jane, I can't lie to you. The tooth fairy is a folk story invented by adults to make the loss of a tooth less traumatic for children. I've spoken about folk stories before. In other words, to make it easier for the child to accept the loss of something as personal as a tooth."
She also said in many countries money is placed under the child's pillow for every tooth lost. Ellie understood this part very well since she was always given money for her lost teeth.
But the idea that Santa Claus was a lie she couldn't comprehend. Not Santa Claus, not St. Nicholas.
It was dark on the second floor, and cold in the room. Though Ellie Jane wore her wool skirt, wool socks, cotton blouse and pink wool sweater, she still felt the cold wind as it seeped through the cracked boards of the old house and rustled the awnings.
Except for a steady beam that filtered through the large windows, there was no light in the room. And there were no lamps or overhead fixtures as the room was no longer used, except for storage. Luckily she had brought a flashlight with her, whose piercing yellow glow she shone everywhere and at everything looking for . . . what?
She remembered there was a closet in the room, where her mom kept cleaning materials, so she went to it first. She focused the beam from the flashlight on the door of the closet and turned the doorknob. She noticed the door opened with a screech, the same soul-piercing sound one heard when opening a door in haunted houses.
Though the sound made her shiver, she shone the light and peered inside the closet. And there she found . . . nothing. Not even cleaning supplies. Just spider webs dangling from the ceiling and motes hanging in the air.
No skeletons in this closet. No Santa suit in this closet, either.
Now what?
The old trunk, of course, where her mom kept the family mementos. The trunk had to be in here somewhere. She looked for it and found it in the deepest and darkest corner of the room, partially obscured by an unfolded, moth-eaten drapery.
Now her heart began to beat. She felt it palpitate, with the pitter-patter of scampering mice, inside her chest.
She removed the drapes (which were very dusty) and saw the trunk had two locks. She pushed each individually with the thumb of her hand and they both opened. Next she placed the flashlight on the floor and used both hands to lift the lid of the trunk. Though heavy, she managed this operation without pinching her fingers or hurting herself. She picked up the flashlight and shone the light inside.
"Ah," Ellie exclaimed, reacting more with surprise than sheer fright. What surprised her was not that she found her dad's rented Santa suit where she expected to find the usual family bric-a-brac. Instead, she recoiled as if splashed with ice water because she saw her dad was still in the suit.
"B-b-b--" she mumbled.
No answer. Certainly no comment from the man wearing the white and red suit. Though his eyes were shut tight and his beard hung at an angle, slightly askew, he looked not in peril or pain but placidly asleep.
"C-come out," Ellie Jane said to the man in the box, shining the flashlight's beam on his face and shaking (timidly) his shoulder.
Again no answer. If her dad was asleep, a condition which Ellie Jane deemed the most reasonable, then his was a serene slumber to rival that of Rip Van Winkle's.
"Dad, you can come out now. I know you're Santa Claus. Irving Turner told me."
Silence. No reaction from Dad, and only the winter wind responded, howling as it shook the limbs of the oak tree so that its branches scraped the clapboards of the old house.
Curious, she touched her father's face and it felt cold. She touched his chest and her fingers came away moist, sticky with a red substance which looked like and could have been blood.
But how? Why blood? Why here, now? She never saw him enter the house and he should have been home from downtown hours ago.
Unexpectedly, the answer came from where Ellie least expected it. From behind her.
"Ellie."
The word hung, fluttered like a moth in the air: eerily strange, a sound both distant and disembodied.
Ellie Jane raised the flashlight, turned and directed the beam in the direction from which the word had come. The figure she saw there seemed familiar, a lithe, slender shape dressed in a nightgown Ellie Jane had often noticed between fits of slumber going in and out of her room.
"Forgive me, Ellie," the woman with the disembodied voice said. "Please, forgive me."
Ellie Jane took one step back, unsure how to react.
"Your daddy, he was . . . alien," the woman told her.
"H-he," Ellie Jane said. "Mommy, is he . . . d-dead?"
When the figure with the disembodied voice approached her, the girl saw she held something metallic in her right hand, an object which reflected the flashlight's beam off its shiny flat surface.
"Your daddy, he meant to harm us. He's not from this world. Can't you see he's not . . . from this world?"
"Just stop it," Ellie Jane pleaded. "Don't talk about my daddy that way. Mommy, what did you do?"
"I did what needed to be done, dear. You saw the way he looked in that suit. Not human, Ellie. Alien, completely strange and out of this world."
Ellie Jane stumbled when she moved back, but kept the flashlight's beam focused on her mother. If this was her mother. Her mother had been sick, she knew, she even had fits which the doctors attributed to some type of fever. But this was different. This wasn't the product of a fever. This woman looked . . . strange: hair in disarray, teeth bared, her eyes wild and menacing.
So maybe this wasn't her mother because Ellie Jane knew her mother usually took an early evening nap. Could this be someone pretending to be her mother? Ellie asked it, but no answer came. Her mother or not, Ellie was dead certain of one thing: what the woman with the strange voice and menacing demeanor held in her hand. A knife. The same knife her mother used when slicing vegetables and scraping the grizzle from chicken meat.
With a smooth motion the woman raised the knife and said, "Know what? Come to think of it, you're not from this world, either. You're Santa's daughter. I'm sure of it now. Come, Ellie. We'll go on vacation. Would you like that? Somewhere warm and sunny. Just you and me. Come, Ellie dear."
"L-leave me a-alone," Ellie pleaded, her voice shaky, unsure. "You . . . k-killed . . . my dad!"
"Mommy wouldn't do such a thing, honey, the woman said, smiling, white teeth showing. He's just asleep in his Santa suit. Wasn't that lovely of him, to dress up as Santa Claus?"
"No, no, he's not sleeping," Ellie Jane said, contradicting her, keeping the beam of light fixed upon the blade of the knife as well as on the hand that wielded it. "Daddy wouldn't sleep in a trunk, not with a Santa suit on. He just wouldn't."
"Oh, but he would, dear. He would if he was alien. He just wanted to surprise you, us. All these years, he was Santa Claus and we thought he was your dad. Isn't that funny, darling?"
"No, it isn't," Ellie Jane said. "Please, go away. I don't like you anymore. I want my daddy."
"Quiet," the woman said, whispering. "You'll wake him. And you know how Santa hates to be disturbed. Especially when he's so sound asleep in that pretty red and white suit."
Fretful with expectation, the flashlight trembled in Ellie's hand. Though her thoughts and emotions were a jumble, one impression soon gained a foothold in her mind. Escape. She must escape from this room, this craziness, because the intentions of the woman who looked like her mother (and probably was her mother, but Ellie wasn't sure) were definitely evil . . .
But how could Ellie escape? [More to come later.]
