Rudolph! (31 page)

Sure, we were only canceling a show about Christmas. But that was how it started, wasn't it? That's what Rudolph was saying. If we let this one go, then it would be easier to let the next one go. One by one—we'd keep finding reasons to give up, wouldn't we?—until there was no Christmas left.

"‘Life's but a walking shadow,'" Rudolph said suddenly, "‘a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.'"

"What?"

"The Scottish play," Rudolph said. "Shakespeare."

"Yeah, okay, so we're back to Shakespeare again. What are you talking about?"

"You know what the next line is?"

Barb did. "‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'"

My arm ached. My heart ached. None of this made any sense, and I said as much.

Rudolph nodded at the poster. "What's the name of the company?" he asked. "It's right there. It's been right there all along."

I looked at the poster, trying to figure out what he was seeing. "Delirious Arts Renaissance Company," I read.

"And who wrote the script?" Rudolph asked.

"Dread Caspian," I said.

"The devil is in the details," he chuckled. "What do the letters of the company spell?"

"DARC," I said, and when I said it, I heard something else. "And the writer's initials are DC."

"As in ‘Demonic Copyright' or even the ‘Devil's Creation.' This is Satan's revenge, Bernie. This is how he destroys me. How he destroys us."

"Oh, my," I had a sudden thought. "Culpepper. The lawyer in Boston?"

"Who?" Barb wanted to know.

"We did a job in Boston," I said. "There was a lawyer named Culpepper. His firm was Daughty & Culpepper. D&C."

"Of course it was," Rudolph said with a nod. "Who else knows so much about the folly of anger, about the hubris of pride and arrogance? Who else plays the long game so well? Satan doesn't like it when you take him head-on. He wants you to tie your own noose and find your own hanging tree before he snaps the rope taut and kicks your feet out from under you. It's more delicious for him that way. When we strangle ourselves on our own fear."

He looked up at the flies over the stage. "Satan is never going to stop," he said quietly. "Not until I take away his power. Not until I beat him.

"How?" I asked, not quite sure I wanted to hear the answer to my question. I had my own inkling, and I didn't care much for it.

"I know what Christmas is all about, Bernie," he said. "I've always known. And so have you. Satan just wants us to be reactive, to run scared. He wants us to think we don't know our own hearts." He nodded towards the stage. "Raise the curtain," he said. "We're going to do the show."

"We don't have a lead," I said. "We don't have someone who can play Rudolph."

Barb put her hand on my arm, and I looked at her. She was smiling, even though her eyes were filled with tears. "You do," she said.

"Where's my nuclear family?" Rudolph bellowed, startling the few crewmembers still hovering in the wings. As they ran to find the cast, Rudolph lowered his head and nuzzled my forehead with his warm nose.

"I'm your Rudolph," he said. "I'm the only one you've ever needed."

He walked onstage, nodding at the stage manager who was staring at him from the stage left wing. The stage manager shrugged and spoke into his headset. As the cast members who played the family in the opening scene rushed onstage, the opening music swelled out in the house. Rudolph glanced back at me just before the curtain rose, and he smiled.

A spotlight came on, illuminating Rudolph, and he stood there, waiting for the audience to get over their surprise. "Good evening," he said when the hubbub of voices quieted down. "Thank you for coming to the show tonight. My name is Rudolph. I am one of Santa's reindeer, and I am going to tell you a true story."

I will always remember that look on his face just before the show started. I will always remember the serenity and the peace in his face. There wasn't any anger in his eyes anymore. Rudolph had stopped being afraid.

I will tell you true.

Zero Hour

D
aniel Prescott was just skin stretched tight across a frail frame
. His hair was short, and the scar was a bump that ran along one side of his head. It was barely noticeable, but the other lasting effects of his injury were very apparent. The lines on his monitor moved slowly, without many bumps.

Barb sat in a chair on one side of the bed, Daniel's frail hand in hers. Rudolph and I stood on the other side. We had been there ten minutes or so already, and Daniel hadn't moved at all.

The clock on the monitor read one minute before midnight.

I took the oblong device out of my pocket. It was silver and seamless—a product of all the recent industrial design aesthetics. It had two buttons and a single indicator light, which was pulsing once every second. Mrs. C had gotten me one from R&D—who had finally figured out how to pack a Time Clock Wave Generator into something the size of an iPhone.

"This might not work," I said. "Even if he responds, he might not know you."

"I know," Barb said, stroking her husband's hand. "But I want to do this." She looked at me. "This is what I asked for, remember?"

The display changed on the monitor, flipping not just minutes and hours, but the date as well.

"Clock's on," Rudolph said, a vibration running through his body.

The light on the generator went orange, and when I pushed one of the two buttons, the light turned red and stayed steady.

There was a disorienting moment, a wave that passed through us, and then we were synced up with the Time Clock. The wave persisted, and we were in a bubble outside of time. The lines on the monitor were frozen, and the time display was stuck at a few seconds past midnight.

Zero Hour.

Rudolph lowered his head and kissed Daniel on the forehead, and when he got out of the way, I kissed Daniel on the cheek. I felt the red and green tingle of the renewed Spirit move through my lips. We waited as the Spirit moved through Daniel's brain. We were patient.

We had an hour after all. An hour that lasted as long as we needed it to.

Eventually, Daniel stirred. His brain made a request for more oxygen, and his chest rose a fraction higher than it had on the last inhalation. And the next one was stronger still. His eyes moved behind his lids, doing the REM dance. Barb leaned forward, squeezing his hand.

He opened his eyes, and stared up at the ceiling for a long time. We could almost see him remembering himself in the tiny twitching of his eyes and in the fumbling movement of his lips. Finally, he turned his head, and slowly gazed about the room. He stopped when he saw Barb. His eyebrows tightened, and his breath hissed a long second before his vocal cords caught. "I . . ." was all he managed.

Barb got out of the chair and leaned over him, touching her hand lightly to his lips. "It's me," she whispered. "You don't have to say anything. Just look at me."

Rudolph nudged me with his shoulder, and I left the device on the bed. We didn't need to be crowding the two of them. As we left the room, I heard him say a single word: "Moose."

"No," Barb said gently. "Not a moose . . ."

We ambled toward the elevators, and we both shivered when we passed beyond the generator's six-meter range. Time snapped around us, and my ears popped with the sudden influx of all the normal noises of the hospital. On my wrist, I felt my watch get warm as it caught up.

"It's Christmas," Rudolph said as we wandered along.

"It is," I said.

"Merry Christmas, Bernie."

I smiled at him. "Merry Christmas to you too," I said.

"It turned out pretty well in the end, don't you think?"

"Yeah, it did. I'm a little surprised that we sold out every show. And that the local PBS station wanted to tape it."

"What?" Rudolph was surprised. "Which show? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't want it to affect your performance. That review from the first weekend was bad enough."

He looked down at me. "Which review? They all hated it."

"Please," I said. "You know the one. The one that went on and on about self-confessional theater. Called you some sort of mash-up between Hedwig and St. Augustine."

"Oh," he said. "That one."

"I heard about the note you sent to the American Theater Wing. They're not going to make a Tony category for Best Self-Confession by a talking animal."

"Of course not," he snorted. "I'd win it every year. I think Best Actor would be fine."

"When were you acting?"

"Well, that anecdote about the candy cane factory wasn't true."

There was some excitement in the hall behind us. I looked over my shoulder and watched two nurses rush into Daniel's room. A steady tone rolled out of the door while it was open, that steady note from the monitor that said all lines were flat and getting flatter.

Rudolph paused for a second and then kept walking. "Let's have a quiet Christmas next year," he suggested. "Maybe one where someone doesn't drug me."

"Hey," I said. "I meant well that time. You got a bathysphere ride out of it too. That was a pretty good present. And for the record, I opposed the whole anger management therapy proposal. I thought it was a bad idea."

Rudolph paused at the elevator. "Thanks, Bernie," he said. "Thanks for being my friend."

"You're welcome," I said, patting him lightly on the flank. "Thanks for watching out for me too."

"Hey," he said as the elevator car arrived. "Maybe we should drug
them
next year."

"Who?"

"The NPC. But not all of them. Just some of them, so that the rest worry they might be next. Think about it. They'll wondering when we're going to get them, for an entire year."

The elevator doors opened, and Barb was waiting for us inside. She had the generator in her hand. She had used it to shift around us. The light was green again, pulsing regularly like a heartbeat.

"He's gone," she said. Her face was still wet from her tears.

I took the portable generator and dropped it in my pocket. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

She wiped at her face and tried to smile. "It's okay. We had a lot of time together. We talked. Got caught up. I could tell it was hard for him to speak. He probably didn't understand half of what I was saying, but he listened." She looked up at the inset light in the ceiling, trying to keep the tears at bay. "He said he loved me. He said he had been dreaming about me."

Rudolph tapped the button for the top floor, and the doors closed. We went up, toward the roof, toward the wintery sky.

"We're all dreamers," he said. "Every last one of us."

Rudolph!
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used in an absolutely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental. Any resemblance to childhood icons is entirely subjective.

Copyright © 2014 Mark Teppo

All rights reserved, which means that no portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is R001, and the ebook ISBN is 978-1-63023-024-1.

This book was printed in the United States of America, and it is published by ROTA Books, an imprint of Resurrection House (Puyallup, WA).

You going to finish that?

Cover art by Ian Pamplona

Edited by Darin Bradley

Book Design by Aaron Leis

Ebook conversion by Hydra House

First ROTA Books trade paperback edition: November 2014.

www.resurrectionhouse.com