Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel (7 page)

As we continued our trek through Solsticeland, we enjoyed a jaw-wagging gossip session about our co-workers.

Princess Crystal had been caught smoking on the job again yesterday and received her second warning. Similar to me in age, size, and physical type, Crystal was also an actress. I assumed that her throaty voice was the result of her two-pack-a-day habit. She spent her breaks puffing away on the fire escape overlooking the outdoor ventilation shaft, regardless of the weather and despite the logistical difficulty of squeezing into that small and dirty area in her voluminous, sparkling white ball gown. She also often sneaked a cigarette while on the job, hiding in various spots around the store and puffing away . . . as if she believed no one would notice the smoke. I was a little surprised that management had only caught her twice so far.

Princess Crystal’s primary workstation was Solstice Castle. The castle and its snowy grounds bordered one side of the Enchanted Forest, while the North Pole bordered the other. The North Pole was very popular with children, of course; it was also a favorite with adults who recalled their own childhood visits to Fenster’s Holidayland, as it had been known back in the day. But the most-visited attractions on the fourth floor (except for Santa himself) were Solstice Castle and the Enchanted Forest. Neither of these immersive exhibits were holiday-themed (nor did they strike me as noticeably relating to solstice), but visitors loved them.

The castle was a pseudo-medieval fairytale structure, bigger than my apartment, built all in sparkly white-and-silver, with little pepper-pot towers, battlements, and a glittering moat. Children could venture through the various rooms of the pint-size castle and climb spiral steps ascending the mini-towers.

Princess Crystal spent much of her time on the castle’s ramparts, gazing across the Enchanted Forest in hopes of seeing Prince Midnight coming to beg for her hand in marriage (which he did several times per day; it was a popular performance). The prince was played by Rafe, a model who never buttoned his flowing white shirt, no matter how chilly the store got.

“That guy just doesn’t seem to feel the cold,” Rick noted.

“Neither do Naughty and Nice,” I grumbled.

When not proposing to Princess Crystal, Rafe could usually be found posing for pictures with gushing female shoppers, many of whom asked for his autograph. I didn’t have the impression that Rafe’s feverish networking with visitors was getting him that big break he kept talking about, but rumor had it that he was getting laid by enthusiastic Fenster customers every night after he clocked out.

“I don’t have Rafe’s abs,” Rick said, “but sometimes I wish I could switch costumes with him, anyhow. My Santa suit gets pretty hot after half a shift under those lights in the throne room, with wailing toddlers being shoved onto my lap, one after another, while bickering parents take photos.”

Elfdom was tough, but being Santa was certainly no picnic.

“I just wish I didn’t jingle every time I move. It gets irritating after the first four or five hours of a shift,” I said. I was sometimes tempted to sabotage my costume by removing the little bells from my cap and my boots. “And these ears chafe by the end of a twelve-hour day.”

“But if you took off the pointy ears,” Rick reminded me, “even
more
guys might mistake you for a hooker or a cocktail waitress when you’re working on the other floors.”

“True.”

Although I experienced occasional problems due to my blue and white costume not always being recognized as ethnic elfwear, there were seasonal employees whose outfits were even less easily identified with the holiday season. An Asian-American dancer had been performing daily in Solsticeland’s Diwali display, playing Ganesh the Remover of Obstacles, the Hindu deity who looked like an elephant; he was among the staff who had stopped coming to work lately. A blond body-builder had been cast as Thor, the Norse god of thunder. He was usually stationed in a display with a Yule log and the solstice mural, which portrayed pre-Christian festivities in some vaguely Northern European setting. When things were slow, Thor liked to keep busy by bench-pressing the Yule log.

Ever since my first day of wandering the thematically mixed and physically confusing maze, I wasn’t at all surprised that kids tended to emerge from Solsticeland with their worldviews challenged and their religious teachings in disarray.

When we reached the North Pole, currently full of visitors milling around, I studied the setting, trying to figure out if something here could be interpreted as menacing by a small child. Once the centerpiece of Fenster’s Holidayland, the North Pole was now just a portion of Solsticeland. It had a comfortingly old-fashioned atmosphere, and I thought Constance Fenster had been shrewd not to alter this sentimental favorite when expanding the seasonal concept to create Solsticeland.

A cluster of elves’ cottages surrounded Santa’s large, gift-laden sleigh, their tiny yards decorated with candy canes, Christmas lights, and gingerbread men. Their roofs were covered with thick snow, as was a nearby little hill where elf mannequins, forever frozen in time, were sledding and playing. A painted mural behind them portrayed more elves skating on an icy pond. Santa’s house was near the toy workshop, and a mannequin of Mrs. Claus was inside, eternally paused in the act of cooking a hearty meal for Santa to eat before setting off on his worldwide journey on Christmas Eve. She wore spectacles, a gray bun, and a long skirt; I usually found her appearance soothing after spending time with Chérie the Chef.

“Did the boy indicate where he saw his scary Santa?” Rick asked me, speaking in a low voice so that the visitors around us wouldn’t overhear this.

“He pointed toward the Enchanted Forest.” Now
that
was a place where a lost and frightened child might very well have felt threatened. At twenty-seven, I had at least two decades on Jonathan, and even I found the Enchanted Forest a little spooky. “But this is where the Santa images are, in the North Pole. Not over there.”

“Maybe when he saw something scary there, he imagined it to be Santa, because he’s afraid of St. Nick,” said Rick. “He might have left the North Pole to escape the Santa images here—which is how he wound up in the scariest part of Solsticeland, poor kid.”

“Let’s check it out.”

The Enchanted Forest was a large, shadowy, area illuminated by the moon and silvery stars in Solsticeland’s sky, as well as by little glowing lanterns posted every few yards. Being dark and rather eerie, the forest was very popular with couples, teens, and older kids. It wasn’t aimed at small children—and that was the whole idea, Jingle had told me. In creating Solsticeland, the Iron Matriarch had established an overall holiday attraction that New Yorkers and tourists would make a point of coming to Fenster’s to visit even if they didn’t have little kids in tow.

Narrow paths in the Enchanted Forest wound between large trees with expressive faces, creepily twisted branches, and artistically twining roots (which people were always tripping over). Some of the trees’ faces were animated and programmed to speak, startling visitors by greeting them, warning them to leave the dark forest, or asking if anyone had seen Princess Crystal lately. The princess sometimes roamed the forest, looking for Prince Midnight and asking visitors if they’d seen him; at other times, he roamed the forest, looking for her.

I often encountered Crystal and Midnight there, since the Enchanted Forest was one of my regular posts. One of these trees was programmed to exchange some scripted verbal patter and sing Christmas duets with an elf. The performance lasted about twenty minutes and was scheduled to run during peak visiting periods. I usually did it at least once a day, sometimes twice.

As Rick and I wandered the Enchanted Forest, I thought that many things in this part of Solsticeland might have frightened Jonathan, but I didn’t see anything that might suggest Santa to him. Nor did I understand why that jolly image would become a menace in the boy’s mind.

“Why do you think he might be afraid of Santa images?” I asked Rick. “I mean, I talked to the kid, and he was really eager to see Santa.”

“Plenty of kids who like the
idea
of Santa are frightened by various physical manifestations of him,” Rick said. “Santa mythology is colorful and safe, and it leads to very attractive tangible rewards for kids: presents under the tree. All kids enjoy that.”

“No, Christian kids enjoy that,” I corrected.

“Ah! Right,” he said with a nod. “As a Jewish child, what did Santa symbolize to you? Your outsider status as a religious minority, excluded from the normative customs of your wider sociocultural matrix?”

“That was it
exactly,”
I said. “I was four years old the first time I told my parents that I felt excluded from the normative matrix because there were no presents under the Christmas tree that we didn’t have.”

Rick laughed. “So even though it wasn’t part of your family’s heritage, you still saw the appeal of the Santa mythology as a child?”

“Sure. Who wouldn’t?”

“Right. But encountering Santa in person can be very different from enjoying the Santa mythology. It can be a negative experience with unsettling ramifications, just the way that encountering the real-world version of
any
idealized fantasy can turn out to be disappointing or even disturbing.”

I thought of Elspeth Fenster’s recent disappointment upon encountering
The Vampyre
’s Jane Aubrey in reality. “I see your point.”

“Since these are children, who process information differently than adults do, it can even be frightening and disorienting. Sure, many kids make the transition from their fantasy of Santa to the ‘real’ thing very comfortably. But for others, visiting Santa is traumatic,” he said, as we continued poking around the Enchanted Forest with no real idea what we were looking for. “After all, the child is expected to speak with, get physically close to, and share wishes and secrets with a grown man he doesn’t know, one whose features are largely concealed by a theatrical beard and a wig. An event that was anticipated with excitement—meeting Santa—turns out to be emotionally uncomfortable or even intimidating, and the child becomes upset.”

I nodded as I thought this over. Never having visited Santa, I had no such memories to draw on from my own childhood. But while working as Santa’s helper during the past couple of weeks, I had seen any number of children become tongue-tied with shyness upon meeting Santa. And there were a few kids each day who started crying in panic or confusion when their parents put them on Santa’s lap. I had also witnessed children get cold feet at the last minute and leave without meeting Santa, after having waited in line for a half hour to see him.

I thought I also understood now why Drag Queen Santa had fewer such incidents than the other Santas. Satsy’s absurdly long, glittery, purple eyelashes (accompanied by the rest of his elaborate eye makeup and his favorite lipstick) were so unexpected, they altered the focus of the encounter. Some children were fascinated and impressed by his lashes, others were puzzled or bemused; either way, this distracted them and defused their anxiety. Above all, many children laughed about the lashes, especially if Satsy batted them playfully; and their own amusement put them at ease, so that the visit with Santa was buoyant and fun.

Thinking of Satsy also made me realize that his terrifying entrance this morning may well have created the equation in Jonathan’s mind between Santa and a scary creature. After that, although the boy hadn’t been scared of Satsy, he had been terrified of whatever he saw—or thought he saw.

“Esther?” Rick called softly to me as he peered around a trio of trees clustered at the edge of the forest, close to the cloth-covered west wall and the maintenance area beyond it. “I think we may have a winner.”

I trotted over to him and peered around the trees, too. “Hey,” I said in surprise. “I didn’t even know that was there.”

Tucked into a hollow at the back of this trio of thick tree trunks, huddling in his little cave-like shelter, was a chubby gnome, dressed in red micro-velvet with white trim. I thought the gnome was cute, but also startling, hidden from plain view as he was. It was easy to see how a young child might find him frightening. His spiky teeth were bared in a grimace (or possibly a gnomish smile), and his eyes glinted in the lantern light.

It wasn’t a portrayal of fangs and glowing eyes, but it certainly could have seemed so to a scared little boy who couldn’t find his mother. I supposed even the gnome’s little hands could seem like claws to a child on the verge of hysterics.

“So Jonathan bumped into this and mistook it for a monster Santa?” I said with a sigh.

“I think it’s the most likely explanation,” said Rick.

“Well, I can understand why it scared him, but I’m not going to suggest to Miles that it be taken off the floor. A child that young wouldn’t normally be in here without a parent, and anyone older than Jonathan probably likes this little guy.”

“
I
do,” said Rick. “He’s so ugly, he’s cute.”

I was about to agree with this when we were startled by someone brusquely barking, “Hey! You!”

We both turned around. The Russian elf stood looking at us. I noticed how well this dark, eerie setting suited her dour demeanor.

She gestured in the direction of the North Pole. “Black Santa wants break. Me, too. You both come now,” she said imperiously. Then she turned her back on us without waiting for a reply and stalked off.

“I am not your servant,” I muttered.

Rick started to call after her, then paused and asked me, “Do you remember her name. Is it Merry?”

“Now that
would
be witty irony,” I said. “I think she might be Holly. But I’m really not sure.”

“Well, either way, I guess we should hop to,” Rick said. “Considering what she’s normally like, I don’t want to find out what she’s like when she’s pissed off.”

“Agreed.”

Rick went to clock in and don his costume, then relieved Jeff—whom I instructed to spend his break keeping an eye on Satsy. (Jeff protested that I’d lost the right to boss him around when we stopped dating four years ago, but I overruled him.) I helped Candycane herd Super Santa’s visitors for a while, until Miles came along and ordered me to go promote Chérie the Chef to the afternoon crowds. (I protested that I found the doll a blatant symbol of oppression and objectification, but Miles overruled me.)