Festival of Fear (33 page)

Dr Kenneth Deane was at a loss to explain what had happened to her, but said there was evidence that she had been bitten by a ‘very large aquatic creature with serrated teeth.'

Cincinnati Post, March 17.

Anti-Claus

I
t was the bitterest October for eleven years. An ice storm swept down from Canada across northern Minnesota and didn't let up for nine days and nine nights, which meant that Jerry and I had no choice but to book a couple of rooms at the Sturgeon Motel in Roseau, population 2,633, and wait until the weather cleared.

We spent most of the time in the North Star Bar, talking to the locals and listening to country songs about miserable trappers and women who wouldn't stay faithful. Outside the world was being blasted with ice, so that power lines snapped and trucks got stranded because their fuel had turned into wax and people went temporarily blind because their eyeballs froze over.

Jerry was as placid as a fireside dog and didn't seem to care if he spent the rest of his life in the North Star Bar, but I started to get cabin fever after only two days. I just wanted to get on with the job and get back to my family in St Paul. I called Jenny twice a day, and talked to the kids, too, Tracey and Mikey, but their voices sounded so tiny and far away that it only made the isolation seem sharper.

Most of the time we talked to the barmaid, Alma Lindenmuth. She had piled-up bleached-blonde hair with the roots showing and a thick, cigarette-smoke voice. She wore a studded denim shirt which showed a lot of cleavage and she smelled of Tommy Girl and something else, sex I guess, like burying your face in the sheets the morning after.

‘You guys shouldn't of come up here in the fall, you should of come in August when it's real warm and beautiful and you can fish and everything.'

‘Well, we didn't come to enjoy ourselves. We're doing a survey for the Minnesota Forestry Department.'

‘Can't you enjoy yourselves just a little bit?'

‘Oh,
I
can,' said Jerry, with one eye closed against his dangling cigarette. ‘But Jack here, he's married, with two young kids. Enjoyment
verboten
.'

Alma leaned forward on the bar, provocatively squashing her mole-spattered breasts together. ‘Do you know how to merengue?' she asked Jerry.

‘Sure, I can cook anything.'

We also talked to an old guy who sat at the far end of the bar knocking back Jack Daniel's one shot glass after the other, one shot every ten minutes, give or take. He wore a wild, high-combed gray hairpiece which looked older than he was, and had a skinny, emaciated face with white prickles of stubble where he couldn't shave into the creases. He was dressed entirely in black, and his eyes were black, too, like excavations to the center of the earth.

‘So you've come up here to do what?' he wanted to know, without even looking at us.

‘A survey, that's all. The Forestry Department wants to cut down a few thousand acres of jack pine and pitch pine and replace them with white pine and Austrian pine.'

‘Why do they want to do that for?'

‘Because white pine and Austrian pine are much more commercially profitable.'

‘Ah, money. Might have guessed it. And so where are you doing this survey of yours, precisely?'

‘Up in the Lost River Forest, mainly, between here and the border.'

‘Up near Saint Nicholas?'

‘That's right. Saint Nicholas and Pineroad.'

The old man gave a dry sniff and pushed his shot glass forward for a refill. ‘Know why they called it Saint Nicholas?'

‘I don't have any idea.'

‘They called it Saint Nicholas because that's where Santa Claus originated from.'

‘Oh, really? I thought Santa Claus came from Lapland or someplace like that.'

‘North Pole, isn't it?' put in Jerry, and gave his distinctive little whoop.

The old man turned to me and there was something in his expression that was deeply unsettling. I had only seen that look once before in my life, when a farmer drove up to me in his Jeep when I was carrying out a survey in Lac qui Parle, and came toward me with a pump-action shotgun like he really intended to use it. He said, hoarsely, ‘There's Santa Claus the story and then there's the real Santa Claus. The real Santa Claus lived on his own in a cabin on the Sad Dog River.'

‘Oh, sure,' said Jerry. ‘So how come he turns up every year at Dayton's department store?'

The old man knocked back his refill and pushed over his shot glass for another. ‘You want to learn something or don't you?'

‘Go on, then,' I encouraged him, and gave Jerry a quick shake of my head to indicate that he should keep his smart remarks to himself.

The old man said, ‘This was just before the turn of the century when there was only five or six hundred people living in Roseau. Life was pretty much touch and go in those days, and in 1898 the spring wheat harvest failed and some of the farm families were pretty close to starvation. But this guy turned up one day, just like out of nowhere, and said that he could change their fortunes if they agreed to give him ten percent off the top.

‘Of course they didn't believe him but he went out into the fields and he performed this kind of ritual on every farm, with bones and smoke and circles drawn in the dirt. He did this every week for the whole season, until the farmers came to accept him like they would the veterinary surgeon or the milk-collection man.

‘He set up home in a shack, deep in the tangly woods by the Sad Dog oxbow, and he painted that shack as black as night, and nobody knew what tricks he got up to, when he was alone, but some people say they heard screaming and shouting and roaring coming from out of that shack like all the demons in hell. The local preacher said that he was an emissary of Satan, and that no good would come of all of his rituals, and behind his back that was what the people of Roseau started to call him, Satan, even though they carried on allowing him to visit their farms with his bones and his smoke because they was superstitious as well as religious and if he really could make their wheat grow, then they wasn't going to act prejudicial toward him.

‘Well, the upshot was that the winter harvest was the very best ever, and they brought in more than forty thousand bushels of hard red wheat. They rang the church bell and they gave their thanks to the Lord. But that was when Satan came around asking for his ten per cent off the top.

‘Of course none of the farmers would give him nothing. They said that bones and smoke and patterns in the dirt was jiggery-pokery, that was all, and that God had provided, God and good fortune, and a long warm summer. So Satan said OK, if you won't give me my due, then I'll take it. I can't walk off with four thousand bushels of wheat, so I'll help myself to whatever takes my fancy.'

Alma Lindenmuth came up and filled the old man's glass again. ‘This one's on me,' I told her.

‘John Shooks, you're not spinning that old Santa story, is he? He tells it to everybody who's too polite to shut him up.'

‘Hey, it's a very entertaining story,' said Jerry.

‘I could entertain you better than that.'

‘I'll bet you could. But we're not pressed for time, are we?'

‘That's what the people of Roseau thought,' the old man remarked. ‘But they had no time left at all.'

‘So what did he do, this Satan?' I asked him.

‘On the night of December tenth, 1898, he went from one farm to the next, five farms in all, and he was riding on a black sled drawn by eight black dogs and he was carrying a sack. Several people saw him but nobody guessed what he was up to. All but one of the farms had locked their doors and windows, which was pretty much unheard of in those days, but mostly everybody in Roseau had taken Satan's threat to heart and they wanted to make sure that he didn't lay hands on any of their hard-earned property.

‘But it wasn't property he was looking for, and he didn't take no notice of their locks. He climbed on to their rooftops and he broke a hole through the shingles and he climbed down into their children's bedrooms. Remember they had big families in those days, and in one house alone there was seven kids. He cut their heads off with a sickle, all of them, regardless of age, and he stowed the heads in his sack and off he went to his next destination.

‘Nobody knows how he managed to break into those houses without anybody hearing him, or how he killed so many kids without waking up the others. But he murdered twenty-seven in all, and took all of their heads. Worst of all, he was never caught. Of course they sent out a sheriff's posse to hunt him down, and for a few miles they could follow his tracks in the snow. But right on the edge of the woods the tracks petered out, and the dogs lost his scent, and the sheriff had to admit that Satan had gotten clean away. The posse went to his shack and they ransacked it and then they burned it down to the ground, but that was all they could do. Satan was never seen again and neither was the children's heads.'

‘You won't read about that night in any of the local history books, and you can understand why. But when it's Christmas time, parents in Roseau still tell their children that they'd better be good, and that they'd better pay up what they owe, whether it's money or favors, because Satan will come through the ceiling with his sickle looking for his ten percent off the top.'

‘Well, that's some yarn,' I admitted.

‘You think it's a yarn and you don't believe it, but Santa is only Satan spelled wrong, and two Decembers back we had some professor up here from Washington, DC, because the FBI was investigating nine children who had their heads whopped off in Iowa someplace and she said that the mode-ass operandy was exactly the same as the Sad Dog Satan.'

‘That
is
interesting.'

‘Sure it's interesting, but I'll tell you what the clincher is. This professor said the same mode-ass operandy has been used for hundreds of years even further back than Saint Nicholas himself, which is why I say that the Sad Dog Satan is the real Santa and not your bearded fat guy with the reindeers and the bright red suit, although you can see why the story got changed so that kids wouldn't be scared shitless. The real Santa comes at night and he climbs through your roof and takes your kids' heads off and carries them away in his sack, and that's not mythology, that's the truth.'

Jerry lifted his empty glass to show Alma Lindenmuth that he was ready for another. Alma Lindenmuth said, ‘Same old story, over and over.'

‘It's a great story. And that never occurred to me before, you know, Santa being a palindrome of Satan.'

‘It's an anagram,' I corrected him. ‘Not a palindrome. A palindrome is the same backward as it is forward.'

Jerry winked at Alma Lindenmuth and said, ‘You're forward, Alma. How about doing it backward?'

On the tenth night the storm cleared and by morning the sun was shining on the ice and there was even a drip on the nose of Roseau's founder, Martin Braaten, standing in the town square with one of those pioneering looks on his face.

Jerry and I said goodbye to Alma Lindenmuth and John Shooks and we drove northward on 310 into the Lost River Forest. It was a brilliant, sparkling day and we had two flasks of hot coffee and fresh-baked donuts and everything seemed pretty good with the world. Jerry seemed particularly pleased with himself and I guessed that Alma Lindenmuth had paid him a farewell visit last night at the Sturgeon Hotel.

Saint Nicholas wasn't much of a place, only five houses and a gas station, but it did have an airfield. We had rented a helicopter from Lost River Air Services so that we could take a look at the forests from the air, and make some outline recommendations to the Forestry Department about the prime sites for felling and replanting. Mostly we were looking for sheltered southern slopes where the young saplings would be protected from the north-west winds, giving us quicker growth and a quicker return on the state's investment.

The blue-and-white helicopter was waiting for us with its rotors idly turning. Jerry parked the Cherokee and we walked across the airfield with our eyes watering and our noses running and the dry snow whipping around our ankles.

The pilot was a morose old veteran with a wrinkly leather jacket and a wrinkly leather face. ‘You can call me Bub,' he announced.

‘That's great,' said Jerry. ‘I'm Bob and this is my pal Bib.'

The pilot eyed him narrowly. ‘You pulling my chain, son?'

‘No sir, Bub.'

We climbed into the helicopter and buckled up and Bub took us up almost immediately, while Jerry unfolded the maps. ‘We want to fly west-north-west to the Roseau River and then south-south-west to Pierce's Peak.'

We triangulated the Lost River Forest for over three and a half hours, taking photographs and videos and shading in our maps with thick green crayons. At last I said, ‘That's it, Bub. I think we're just about done for today. Are you OK for tomorrow, though, just in case we need to double-check anything?'

‘So long as the weather holds off.'

We were heading back toward Saint Nicholas when Jerry suddenly touched me on the shoulder and pointed downward off our starboard side. ‘See that? The Sad Dog River oxbow. That's where Satan had his shack.'

I turned to Bub and shouted, ‘Can you take us down lower?'

‘You're paying.'

The land was flat and scrubby here, and the Sad Dog River squiggled its way across the plain before dividing itself into an oxbow. In the middle of the oxbow, I could make out the ruins of an old shack, with only its stone chimney left standing. The river ran on either side of it, shining in the two o'clock sunlight like two streams of molten metal.

‘Let's take a look!' I yelled.

‘You want to land?'

‘Sure, just for a couple of minutes.'

‘Bib's thinking of buying this place for a summer home,' put in Jerry.