The Mall Santa.

The Mall Santa

         Harlan Snipes rubbed his temples with his index fingers, trying to ease the throbbing in his head, and squeezed his eyes closed for a moment.

         He peeked through the red curtain behind the small stage and saw the line was even longer than when he'd gone on break. Dozens of children stood with mothers and fathers, wiggling and squirming, whining and crying, bitching and moaning, waiting to tell Santa their Christmas wishes.

         The fake white beard irritated Harlan's face, and he felt sweat rolling from beneath his arms, cutting a path down his sides. The heavy fur-trimmed, padded costume and the heat of the mall was worse than being in a sauna. He took a deep breath and stole a long swallow of cheap whiskey from the flask he kept hidden in the top of his shiny black left boot.

         What a shit job he reminded himself for the hundredth time. His degree in electrical engineering, however, seemed useless in the distressed economy. So, it was play Santa or starve. He hoped he could last the two days remaining until Christmas.

         Showtime! He opened the curtain and walked out, ho, ho, hoing to the crowd. The pimple-faced teenage girl who was Santa's helpful elf and amateur photographer stepped to his side and whispered in his ear. "I gotta have a smoke. Be right back."

         Harlan clutched her skinny upper arm and whispered back. "Get your sorry little ass back here pronto, Kim. It's bad enough working this crowd with a helper, but when Santa has to take the money, make change and try to focus that crappy camera, it really sucks."

         She pulled away from his grasp, shot him a melting glare and left the stage, leaving him alone with the greedy, avaricious children and their worn out, blank-faced parents.

         The first three children in line sat still on his lap and smiled while the timer tripped the flash bulb and the Polaroid picture whirred from the camera. They told him their Christmas wishes for the usual crap being advertised every half hour on television, batteries not included, some assembly required, guaranteed to last about as long as the mayonnaise in the Christmas dinner pea salad left at room temperature.

         Harlan scanned the crowd, looking for the green pointy elf cap Kim was wearing, but saw no sign of her. Little bitch. He placed a curse of redder, more pus filled pimples upon her and turned to the next child in line, a tiny blue- eyed blond girl of around four; poster child for sweet innocence. A woman, presumably the child's mother, dug around in an over-sized brown purse and retrieved a well worn wallet and a checkbook. She fished out her driver's license and handed it to Harlan while she juggled her purse, wallet, checkbook and a ballpoint pen.

         Harlan exhaled impatiently, ruffling his fake whiskers. "You don't have cash?" he asked the woman.

         "Sorry, no. How much for two?"

         "Fifteen dollars," Harlan answered. "But we don't do adults."

         "Oh, no, it's for my son," she said, tearing a check from her book and handing it to Harlan as a dark-haired boy of about eight moved from behind her.

         The boy smiled, showing a red, torn space where a tooth recently vacated his gum, then stuck out his tongue. Little fart, Harlan thought. About as useful as a fucking "Chia Pet". Writing the woman's license number on her check and matching the addresses on both, Harlan realized the woman, Carolyn Moore, lived only two streets over from the home he had before his marriage, job and life itself turned to pure, unadulterated shit. The check also had no other name besides hers. Divorced, he figured. A lot of that going around. He handed the license back to her and said, "HO! HO! HO! Who's first?"

         The girl wore a pained expression, forehead wrinkled, mouth pursed tightly, Harlan observed. Thinking she might be frightened of Santa, as some children were, he took her hand and led her to Santa's throne. He set the camera timer, sat down and lifted the girl onto his lap. "What would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas, sweetie?" Harlan asked.

         The girl wriggled in his lap, unspeaking, then suddenly put both small hands under her dress, between her legs, and whimpered. The hot flood spread across Harlan's knee, lap and soaked into the padding of his costume. He lifted the girl with his hands around her waist, holding her at arm's length, and stood up. Urine continued to trickle down her thin legs and drip from the toes of her shoes. "Shit, kid...you pissed all over me!" Harlan growled, setting her down.

         "Mama!" the girl screamed, shuffling in a bow-legged waddle toward her wide-eyed, disbelieving mother.

         "How dare you speak that way to my daughter!" The mother screamed, hugging her daughter's head to her waist.

         "She pee'ed all over me, woman! Ever cross your feeble mind to take the kid to the pot before standing her in line for an hour?"

         "I want to talk to your boss," she said with a wintry chill in her voice.

         "Yeah!" The boy piped up. "We wanna talk ta your boss!"

         "Bullshit!" Harlan shouted.

         Behind the woman, other parents began to murmur among themselves. A short, red-haired man covered his daughter's ears with his hands. "You're out of line, mister."

         As the crowd became more vocal, a young man in gray Dockers, a light blue shirt and a reindeer decorated tie stepped to the side of the stage and motioned to Harlan. Harlan stepped down and faced the man, his boss, John Timors. "What's going on, Snipes! I heard you yelling from the food court!"

         "Fuck you," Harlan said, shaking the front of the Santa costume. "Look at this mess! Kid there took a leak all over me," he complained, tipping his chin toward the sobbing child. "I smell like a toilet!"

         Timors leaned closer to Harlan. Sniffed. Wrinkled his nose. "You've been drinking, you sonovabitch. I smell it on your breath. Get out. You're fired, and if you're lucky the kid's mother won't call mall security."

         Harlan felt the blood boil to his neck and face. He was an engineer, and this little shitpie standing before him should be cooking hamburgers somewhere. He jerked the Santa beard up and off, the elastic band snapping his cheek painfully. He stuffed it in his pocket, grabbed Timors by his tie and pulled him forward until their noses touched. "I ought to kick your ass, you little high school dropout piece of shit," Harlan hissed.

         From behind, a hand swung and landed with a loud slap on Harlan's ear, compressing the air and sending a jolt of hot pain through his head. "Leave him alone!" The green clad Santa's helper, Kim, demanded, finally returning from wherever she had been loitering.

         Harlan shook his head, refocused his eyes, and noticed he still held Timons' tie in his left hand, and Timons was "cakking," trying to get air into his lungs. Harlan shoved his ex boss to the well-buffed linoleum, and turned to march away from the insanity of the past several minutes. From behind him he heard the boy with the missing tooth join his sister in her wailing. Harlan looked back over his shoulder, his eyes burning into the boy as he walked away. "Ah, shove it up your ass, kid! You're too old to still believe in Santa Claus anyhow."

         Reaching his six-year-old Toyota, Harlan climbed in, slammed the door and rested his aching head on the steering wheel. "Fuck," he said aloud, something he found himself doing with great regularity recently, "If another job doesn't materialize out of the blue my ex will be badgering me for the next child support payment." Already a month in arrears, he knew she would not hesitate to have his ass locked up. He took a deep breath of the chill night air, shook off his momentary funk and consoled himself with the knowledge that at least things couldn't get any worse.

         Wrong.

         When he arrived at his tiny, second floor furnished efficiency apartment, he found his few personal items stacked in cardboard boxes on the balcony beside the door. A note taped to the door whipped in the wind, the ink already running, though the light rain had just begun. Harlan knew what the note would say without reading it. You are two months behind in your rent and have been evicted, or words to that effect.

         Everything he owned he could carry to his car in two trips, tossing the boxes carelessly into the trunk and slamming the lid. The rain had turned to sleet and the temperature was dropping. The recurring stab of white hot pain, from the tumor he didn't know was growing inside his temporal lobe, pierced Harlan's brain again, lasting longer than usual. He climbed into his car, started the engine, then realized he had no where to go.

         No job, no home and with less than fifty dollars in his pocket, Harlan felt a lighting bolt of revenge stir within himself. "All this because some dumbass kid took a whiz on my lap and her mother and shit brother made a scene," he muttered. "Well, payback's a bitch."

         Driving to the address he remembered from the woman's check and license, Harlan parked two houses down the block and got the lay of the land. The house was a two-story faux Victorian, with a wide veranda and a balcony near enough an old oak tree to make it accessible.

         As he watched, the piss kid and her brother, tooth boy, stepped from inside the house onto the veranda, and bent over a cardboard box by the door. Straining to see, aided by the porch light, Harlan saw the children were playing with kittens. After a few minutes their mother opened the door, apparently calling them in. The little girl shook her head and backed away, clutching a small orange-furred kitten to her chest, nuzzling it with her face. The boy held another cat in the same fashion. After several seconds the mother threw her hands up in seeming resignation and the children put the kittens back in the box and carried it inside.

         He watched until the house became dark before driving away, a plan hatching in his throbbing, impaired brain. The next day was Christmas Eve, he recalled. Perfect.

         Harlan waited in the chill interior of his car. The precipitation from the previous night had stopped, leaving behind biting cold. It was after eleven and still two of the upstairs lights and one light downstairs continued to illuminate the darkness. Carolyn Moore must be having a hard time getting her two excited children calmed down enough to go to sleep, he thought, remembering how his own children fought the sandman on Christmas Eve, and being told that Santa wouldn't come until they were sleeping. This time, however, the threat was coming true.

         Earlier in the day Harlan had knocked on a neighbor's door and asked the blue-haired octogenarian who answered if Mr. Moore was home. The old woman was quick to tell him he wanted the house next door, but also that Mr. Moore no longer lived there, having run off with a woman nearly half his age two years ago, confirming Harlan's suspicion that there would be no man in the house.

         Finally, the lights on the second floor blinked out one after the other. Moments later he saw a shadow pass behind the downstairs curtain. Mrs. Moore, no doubt, beginning the routine: Filling stockings with hard candy, an apple, orange, various nuts and possibly some small "stocking stuffers", unknown when Harlan was a child. She would wait to begin putting out the hidden toys from "Santa" until certain the kids were sleeping soundly and not likely to wander down and catch her in the seasonal lie.

         Maybe she was having a drink -- a good stiff eggnog spiked with rum or bourbon. Maybe she was having a good cry at the prospect of Christmas without a husband around. He hoped so, closing his eyes tightly and shaking his head in a vain attempt to make the pain subside.

         Dressed in the rented Santa garb, he waited another half hour before taking his bag of Christmas goodies from the seat beside him. Metal clanked against metal as he tossed the heavy load over his shoulder and approached the tree leading to the balcony. Leaving the bag on the ground, he took the other end of the rope tied around the neck of the bag, swiftly climbed up, swung his legs over the railing, and stood on the balcony outside one of the windows lit up earlier. He then hoisted the bag up with the rope.

         The boy's room or the girl's? He wondered. Not that it mattered. Not that it mattered at all.

         There was no alarm system on the house and, even had there been, a man with Harlan's knowledge of all things electrical could have by-passed it easily. He shielded the small flashlight beam with his palm and found the latch on the window. With the glass cutter purchased from Home Depot he scratched an oval large enough to allow him to reach through and tapped gently until the glass fell silently inward onto the carpet. Reaching in, he opened the latch and retracted his hand.

         As he began to slide the window up he suddenly lost all sense of why he was there, on a balcony, in the cold, dressed in a Santa suit. The walnut-sized growth in his brain put him into a fugue state for a moment or two, but then he remembered his mission, slid the window fully open and climbed inside. A small night-light plugged into a wall socket cast a shadowy glow, enough for him to see the bed and the sleeping child. The boy. Good. Little trouble-maker. Harlan set his bag on the floor and rummaged around for the items he needed to make a "special" gift for the boy. Or of the boy, to be specific.

         Fifteen minutes later Harlan stood back and admired his work. Beautiful. Then he opened the door from the bedroom into the hallway, waved the flashlight beam until he saw another door, partially open, with a picture of a smiling blue unicorn taped to the outside. The girl's room, he thought with a smile. How sweet. He tip-toed across the hall and into the room, closing the door behind him.

         Another night-light. The angelic face of the little girl nestled into her pillow. The two kittens he saw the night before snuggled together on her bed. Awww! As Harlan stood there admiring the innocent scene the girl's blue eyes opened --saw him. In a sleepy whisper she breathed, "Santa?"

         "Shhh," Harlan hushed her, covering her mouth and nose with one hand. "Shhh. I have something for you."

         He tarried there, his imagination guiding him to leave her with a special, one-of-a-kind gift.

         Breathing heavily, Harlan left the girl's room. He looked for and found the staircase. His work upstairs was complete. Mrs. Moore would be next on his Christmas list.

         Stepping softly, he started down the stairs. Nearly to the bottom, he winced as one stair squeaked loudly, freezing him in place for a second.

         Mrs. Moore called out from a room to the left of the staircase, "Billy? Tricia? What are you doing out of bed?" She came to the foot of the stairs and looked up. But Harlan had already descended and slipped into a narrow hallway to the right. Now he stood right behind her.

         His forearm encircled her slender neck, squeezing hard before the scream could escape her lips. Her hands tugged at his arm, fingernails gouging his flesh as she struggled, pressing back against him. Nice looking woman. Shapely. He felt himself grow erect. He drew her closer and planted a kiss on her ear. "Merry Christmas," he breathed. His words echoed strangely in his own ears, as though from somewhere far away.

         When finished with Mrs. Moore, Harlan went back upstairs and carried the silent children down to the living room one at a time to join their mother. A family should be together at Christmas, he reasoned.

********

         Shortly before dawn, as Harlan sat in a comfortable recliner, sipping eggnog and enjoying the guttering flames in the fireplace, surrounded by the little family unit, a bright flash of white light flared behind his right eye and excruciating pain punched through his skull. He dropped the cup of eggnog and went stiff with seizure in the chair. The tumor, restricting the blood flow through his brain, caused a backup in an artery. Like a weak spot in an over-inflated inner tube the aneurysm suddenly exploded. Blood trickled from his nostrils and his right ear, staining the fake Santa beard with thick red streaks of blood. He was dead in a heartbeat.

********

         William Moore used his old key to let himself in after ringing the doorbell and hammering on the door for several minutes. He promised his ex-wife and his kids he would be with them for awhile Christmas morning to exchange presents before returning to his new, younger wife and eight month old son. "Carolyn?Tricia? Billy?" he called out, entering into the house. No happy voices yelling, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" greeted him. What the hell, he wondered, stepping into the living room.

         Then he saw the confusing tableau. "God! Oh, God! Carolyn!" he screamed. Then he saw his children and the bloodied Santa Claus. "Nooo!"

         He rushed to Carolyn, duct taped to a straight-backed chair. More tape covered her eyes and her mouth, but something . . .

         Christmas lights, he realized. A long string of multi-colored Christmas tree lights hung from Carolyn's mouth, behind the tape. His ex-wife and children were dead -- murdered in their own home!

         Then he saw Carolyn's chest expand with a labored breath. He quickly, gently removed the tape from her eyes. They were wide open and filled with fear. "Thank God," he whispered, easing the tape from her mouth.

         As soon as the tape came off, Carolyn spat the end of the string of lights from her mouth. Seconds later the stripped, bare electrical cord from her mouth shot sparks, and jumped like a spastic snake, barely missing her leg.

         William Moore grabbed the back of the chair and pulled his ex out of harm's way, then followed the string of lights to a wall outlet where they were plugged into a timer set to click on seconds earlier. "Jesus," he exhaled, yanking the timer from the outlet. Had he hesitated another minute at the front door Carolyn would now be frying in the chair.

         He took a penknife from his pocket and cut the tape binding Carolyn to the chair, then rushed to his almost unrecognizable son. The boy was alive, bound and gagged as his mother had been, laid out on the sofa. William couldn't tell what had been done to Billy. He was naked, with some dark substance covering and caked upon his entire body. It looked like mud, William thought, as he cut the tape binding Billy and removed the tape from the hysterical boy's mouth.

         Billy flung himself into his father's arms, saying over and over, "I'll be good! I'll be good, Santa!"

         While William attended to Billy, Carolyn was freeing Tricia, who was sitting in another straight-backed chair, a blanket covering her from the waist down. The girl smiled, seemingly unharmed and unaffected by her ordeal.

         Picking Tricia up, Carolyn carried the blanket-wrapped child to the sofa and set her down beside her brother, who was still sniffing and swallowing hard, but who was calming down. Carolyn touched her finger to the substance covering Billy, rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger, then sniffed it cautiously. "What is it?" William asked, kneeling between his children.

         Carolyn shrugged. "It smells like dirt and," she sniffed again, "fertilizer."

         William grunted, his eyebrows knitting together above his nose. "Fertilizer? But why? And who the hell is this guy?" he queried, nodding toward the man in the Santa suit who lay sideways in the recliner, mouth and eyes open and fixed in death.

         Before Carolyn could tell William the man was the mall Santa, and about the incident that took place there, Billy mumbled, "He said I was a bad boy. He said I was worthless. And the most worthless Christmas present he could think of was a-a Chia Pet, whatever that is. He said he was going to make me one. What did he do to me, Mama?"

         William and Carolyn exchanged astonished looks. Mud, and fertilizer and, looking closely, Carolyn could see the thousands of tiny seeds embedded in the stuff covering Billy. Christ! The sonovabitch had turned her son into a living Chia Pet, covered with a growth medium and, no doubt, herb and spice seeds. She wondered how long it would have taken for Billy to sprout green vegetation all over had she been electrocuted and the mall Santa had stayed around to see the results of his deranged work. And what he would have done to Billy later. But the plan had failed. Everyone was unharmed.

         "Mama?" Tricia said, drawing their attention to her.

         "Yes, honey?"

         "Did you see the nice slippers Santa gave me?"

         "What?" Carolyn asked, confused.

         Tricia wiggled her feet, covered until that moment by the blanket, and her mother and father and brother all screamed in unison as they saw the kittens, their spines cut out, disemboweled, and hugging Tricia's little feet.

The End

DM