Authors: The Magic of Christmas
Rebecca Besser (4 page)
Solstice’s screams for him to stop went
unheard until Lyle’s body stopped his actions with weariness and
fatigue. He rolled off the pulverized zombie elf to lie in the snow
and stare up into the bright blue sky, where fluffy white clouds
drifted across his tear blurred line of vision.
An elf’s face shimmered before his eyes and
the world began to fade as darkness welcomed him with open arms of
oblivion. . .
~
Lyle regained consciousness slowly and
found himself inside a brightly lit room. He blinked rapidly,
trying to figure out where he was and why. It didn’t take long for
the events in the forest to come back in a rush. With a moan, he
closed his eyes again and tried to breathe around the ache in his
chest. His wife and daughter were dead.
Voices beyond the door, out in the
corridor, slowly filtered through his misery.
“What do you mean, ‘they woke up’?” a male
voice hissed. “That’s not possible! They were dead!”
“I know, I know,” a timid female voice
replied, “but they did. The woman and the girl are both awake.
They’re violent, and we’ve had to lock them in the morgue, but
they’re both very much awake. . .and alive.”
“I have to see this for myself,” the male
voice said gruffly before both of the unseen entities moved farther
away.
open. Lyle jumped and looked at the door, noticing a young female
elf in a white and red uniform, who looked like a nurse. Glancing
away from her smiling face, he looked at the room he was in for the
first time, noticing he was in a hospital.
“How are you feeling?” the nurse asked,
coming forward. “Solstice is quite worried about you and wanted to
stay, but she had to take a search party out to the forest and make
sure there were no more monsters lurking about.”
with realization. “I’m so sorry. . .” she said. “I didn’t think.
You must be feeling horrible about your family and everything. I
should tell you though, that I don’t think they’re dead; I heard
someone say they woke up! Isn’t that marvelous?”
Again, he didn’t answer, just raised an
eyebrow and looked at her with a crooked, sardonic grin.
your arms?”
Lyle looked down and shrugged. “Sore.”
“It’s to be expected,” Dr. Glint said,
glancing down at his clipboard and then around the room. “I really
don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just come right out with it.
Your wife and daughter were dead, but have reanimated on their own.
We are attributing it to the virus that ran ramped through the elf
population last year around this time. We believe the elf who
attacked them was a carrier and spread the disease to them when it
bit them.”
“Zombies,” Lyle said, with a harsh
laugh.
“Excuse me?” Dr. Glint said, squinting up
at him. “What do you mean by ‘zombies’?”
“My wife and daughter are now zombies,”
Lyle snapped, looking straight at the doctor defiantly. “Isn’t that
what you’re telling me? I mean, they’re the walking dead and crave
flesh, and anyone they bite will become one of them. They’re
zombies!” He ended, standing and yelling.
“Now, Lyle,” Dr. Glint said, raising his
hands to try to calm and placate his patient, “you need to calm
down. Getting all excited won’t help the situation.”
long, tense moments, before Lyle spoke again.
“I want to see them.”
Dr. Glint stared at him for a moment and
then nodded. He turned to the nurse.
“Take Lyle to see his wife and
daughter.”
“What?” she squeaked. “I can’t. . .”
The doctor huffed. “You don’t have to go in
or anything, just take the man down and let him look through the
window, so he can see his family for himself.”
The nurse opened her mouth to speak, but
quickly shut it and nodded. She glanced at Lyle, sighed, and
turned, heading out the door. He followed without even a glance
back at the doctor, who stood in the middle of the hospital exam
room, staring down at his chart with a frown.
He struggled to keep up with the little
nurse as they hurriedly twisted and turned around many passageways,
finally coming to a flight of stairs, leading down into the dimly
lit basement.
“Almost there,” she said over her shoulder,
fidgeting with her uniform nervously.
himself to look through the small circular glass window; it had
been swirled to make it look like a piece of candy, but he could
still see through it clearly. Beyond the transparent boundary, he
beheld his family. They were huddled together over a small body. He
accidentally bumped the desk and it, in turn, bumped the door; the
noise got Mandy and Kally’s attention. Their heads spun in the
direction of the door and he saw what they’d been doing. They were
eating the body of a dead elf, who’d been with them in the morgue
when they’d turned.
He gagged, seeing bits of muscle and other
bloody tissue dangling from their chewing mouths. It was a horrific
scene to behold. He stepped back quickly and they went back to
eating.
“I think you should go back to your room at
Santa’s house and try to rest,” the nurse said, coming forward and
laying her hand on his arm gently. “He wants to talk to you, but
was called away for another emergency.”
Lyle, shell shocked and unable to process
everything that was going on, let the nurse guide him to the
entrance of the hospital, where another elf met them and guided him
through the busy lanes of the North Pole, back to Santa’s house,
and even inside to his room.
Someone knocking on the door, right above
his head, some time later brought Lyle back to reality.
Slowly turning and using the door to
support himself, he stood on stiff legs to open the door. He wasn’t
really in the mood for company, but he didn’t know if someone might
be bringing news about his wife and daughter.
He was shocked to see Santa standing
outside the door, frowning with concern.
“Hello, Lyle,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t
greet you earlier, and I’m even more sorry that I couldn’t be with
you after your family was attacked. It disturbs me greatly. May I
come in?”
Lyle nodded and stepped back, opening the
door wider to allow the big man admittance. He closed the door
after him and rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the floor and
around the room, not really knowing what to say.
Santa took a seat on a chair sitting in the
corner of the room and motioned to the second. Lyle walked briskly
over and sat down, still not looking at his guest.
“I know things are hard for you, Lyle,”
Santa said. “But I’ve come to help you try and figure things out.
There is hope. . . You did read the story with Kallalaya that I
sent you, didn’t you?”
Frowning, Lyle nodded.
“So you know that I too was one of these
undead. . .creatures, and there can be something done about
it?”
With the light of hope in his eyes for the
first time since the attack, Lyle looked up and grinned. “You
really think there’s something we can do for them?”
“But, of course,” Santa said and laughed in
his ‘ho, ho, ho’ manner. “You are, after all, at the North Pole
where the Magic of Christmas is the strongest. We just have to
figure out what the right recipe of that magic is for your
family.”
“So,” Lyle said slowly, “you think I can
just go give them a hug and tell them Merry Christmas and they’ll
be good as new?”
Santa laughed again. “No, no! I don’t think
you should do that. Their teeth look dangerous and they appear
quite mean. I peeked in on them before coming to see you.” He
winked at Lyle and smiled. “I think they’ll need your love to bring
the Magic of Christmas to them. You see. . . I don’t think it was
the young elf’s hug that broke the spell for me last year. I think
it was the gift of caring. I was depressed, to be honest. Christmas
seemed to be falling apart and I didn’t feel I was doing the job,
so to speak, of keeping everything together. The girl brought me
hope with her gift and that’s what enabled the Magic of Christmas
to shine through the cursed disease and heal me.”
“Oh,” Lyle said, frowning down at his
hands, which he held clasped between his knees so tightly that his
knuckles were white. “How will I ever be able to do that?”
“I don’t know, Lyle,” Santa said, sitting
forward with a solemn expression. “That’s something, I believe,
you’ll have to discover for yourself, before it’s too late.”
“Before it’s too late?” Lyle asked, lifting
his eyes to meet Santa’s. “What do you mean, before it’s too
late?”
Sighing, Santa looked directly back at
Lyle. “If you don’t do it before I leave on Christmas Eve to
deliver gifts, I fear you’ll have to wait an entire year for the
Magic of Christmas to be strong enough to heal them. It’s the
strongest right before, and during the time when the children of
the world open their presents, and that’s when you need to make
your move. Do you understand?”
Lyle nodded and rubbed his face with his
hands. “How am I supposed to figure it out? Tomorrow is Christmas
Eve, so I have less than two days!”
Santa smiled, patted Lyle’s knee, and
stood. “I think you should rest tonight and let yourself think.
Tomorrow, we’ll tackle this task together. I’ve let Hammond know
that I would be occupied with this mess and that he would be in
charge of preparing everything for the grand delivery.” He walked
over to the door and opened it.
Jumping to his feet, Lyle dashed over to
the doorway in a panic. “I have to try now. I can’t waste any
time!”
Gently, Santa placed his hand on Lyle’s
shoulder and looked at him. “You’re fatigued. Your brain needs the
rest, or else you won’t be able to think straight, and you must,
Lyle, be able to think straight – for their sakes, as well as your
own. Sleep and see what the world brings tomorrow. It’ll be a
magical day!”
With that, Santa left the room, closing the
door behind himself. Lyle stood where he was, thinking, for a long
time. Finally, as long shadows crept across the floor of his room
as the outside world grew darker with night, he climbed into bed,
and surprisingly, he slept.
~
Bright and early the next morning, Lyle was
up and out of bed. He took a quick shower and dressed for an
action-packed day. For some reason, a couple of things Santa had
said kept rotating through his brain: ‘. . .the gift of caring. .
.’; ‘. . .with her gift. . .’. He couldn’t stop thinking that maybe
gifts were the key. Maybe he needed to find the right ones to give
his wife and daughter and it them the Magic of Christmas would do
its job. But, as before, he was stuck with the dilemma of figuring
out what the perfect gifts would be. Both of them had everything
they could ever want; he hoped Santa might have some ideas.
Rushing out of his room, Lyle paused in the
hall, realizing he had no idea where to go. To his right, a little
ways down the hall, he spotted the stairs and figured going down
them would be his best bet. With his renewed energy, his appetite
returned as well and his stomach growled loudly as the rich aroma
of cooking food floated to him on the air as he descended the
stairs. After that, he let his nose guide him to the kitchen.
He was welcomed in by a plump, short elf in
an apron. She was cooking up a huge breakfast and soon had a
heaping, steaming plate of food in front of him. She also promised
Santa would be down shortly, as he’d never missed one of her
breakfasts yet.
Lyle laughed and ate. He was glad to have
some time to himself to think about what he wanted to say to Santa.
The solution was going to be complicated and he hoped they would be
able to share ideas and resolve the matter quickly.
Santa arrived in the kitchen with a ‘ho,
ho, ho’ that made the cook break into a giggle fit. She hurriedly
started making him a plate of food and sat it on the table while he
and Lyle greeted each other.
unheard until Lyle’s body stopped his actions with weariness and
fatigue. He rolled off the pulverized zombie elf to lie in the snow
and stare up into the bright blue sky, where fluffy white clouds
drifted across his tear blurred line of vision.
An elf’s face shimmered before his eyes and
the world began to fade as darkness welcomed him with open arms of
oblivion. . .
~
Lyle regained consciousness slowly and
found himself inside a brightly lit room. He blinked rapidly,
trying to figure out where he was and why. It didn’t take long for
the events in the forest to come back in a rush. With a moan, he
closed his eyes again and tried to breathe around the ache in his
chest. His wife and daughter were dead.
Voices beyond the door, out in the
corridor, slowly filtered through his misery.
“What do you mean, ‘they woke up’?” a male
voice hissed. “That’s not possible! They were dead!”
“I know, I know,” a timid female voice
replied, “but they did. The woman and the girl are both awake.
They’re violent, and we’ve had to lock them in the morgue, but
they’re both very much awake. . .and alive.”
“I have to see this for myself,” the male
voice said gruffly before both of the unseen entities moved farther
away.
Alive?
Lyle thought.
How can that
be?
He forced himself to sit up, and felt
the weakness in his arms from the beating he’d given the
zombie-elf.
Wait, yes! That’s it!
he continued to himself in his head.
It was a zombie-elf! Does that mean. .
.?
He groaned, buried his
head in his hands, and covered his face. “No, this can’t be
happening. It would be better if they
were
dead.” Dragging his hands
through his hair, he looked up at the ceiling, unaware of the tears
flowing freely down his cheeks.
open. Lyle jumped and looked at the door, noticing a young female
elf in a white and red uniform, who looked like a nurse. Glancing
away from her smiling face, he looked at the room he was in for the
first time, noticing he was in a hospital.
“How are you feeling?” the nurse asked,
coming forward. “Solstice is quite worried about you and wanted to
stay, but she had to take a search party out to the forest and make
sure there were no more monsters lurking about.”
Lyle didn’t answer, he
just looked at her and blinked, thinking,
Did she really just ask me how I am? How the hell does she
think I am?! My family was just killed!
with realization. “I’m so sorry. . .” she said. “I didn’t think.
You must be feeling horrible about your family and everything. I
should tell you though, that I don’t think they’re dead; I heard
someone say they woke up! Isn’t that marvelous?”
Again, he didn’t answer, just raised an
eyebrow and looked at her with a crooked, sardonic grin.
The door opened again, to
admit a male elf with a clipboard in one hand and a stern
expression on his face. He was wearing a white and green lab coat
and the words
DOCTOR GLINT
were emboldened on his candy cane name
tag.
your arms?”
Lyle looked down and shrugged. “Sore.”
“It’s to be expected,” Dr. Glint said,
glancing down at his clipboard and then around the room. “I really
don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just come right out with it.
Your wife and daughter were dead, but have reanimated on their own.
We are attributing it to the virus that ran ramped through the elf
population last year around this time. We believe the elf who
attacked them was a carrier and spread the disease to them when it
bit them.”
“Zombies,” Lyle said, with a harsh
laugh.
“Excuse me?” Dr. Glint said, squinting up
at him. “What do you mean by ‘zombies’?”
“My wife and daughter are now zombies,”
Lyle snapped, looking straight at the doctor defiantly. “Isn’t that
what you’re telling me? I mean, they’re the walking dead and crave
flesh, and anyone they bite will become one of them. They’re
zombies!” He ended, standing and yelling.
“Now, Lyle,” Dr. Glint said, raising his
hands to try to calm and placate his patient, “you need to calm
down. Getting all excited won’t help the situation.”
Lyle barked out a harsh
laugh. “You got that right,
doc
!”
long, tense moments, before Lyle spoke again.
“I want to see them.”
Dr. Glint stared at him for a moment and
then nodded. He turned to the nurse.
“Take Lyle to see his wife and
daughter.”
“What?” she squeaked. “I can’t. . .”
The doctor huffed. “You don’t have to go in
or anything, just take the man down and let him look through the
window, so he can see his family for himself.”
The nurse opened her mouth to speak, but
quickly shut it and nodded. She glanced at Lyle, sighed, and
turned, heading out the door. He followed without even a glance
back at the doctor, who stood in the middle of the hospital exam
room, staring down at his chart with a frown.
He struggled to keep up with the little
nurse as they hurriedly twisted and turned around many passageways,
finally coming to a flight of stairs, leading down into the dimly
lit basement.
“Almost there,” she said over her shoulder,
fidgeting with her uniform nervously.
Lyle and the nurse came to
a stop outside a room at the end of the final corridor. The door
was locked and barricaded with a heavy desk. The plaque on the door
read:
MORGUE
.
himself to look through the small circular glass window; it had
been swirled to make it look like a piece of candy, but he could
still see through it clearly. Beyond the transparent boundary, he
beheld his family. They were huddled together over a small body. He
accidentally bumped the desk and it, in turn, bumped the door; the
noise got Mandy and Kally’s attention. Their heads spun in the
direction of the door and he saw what they’d been doing. They were
eating the body of a dead elf, who’d been with them in the morgue
when they’d turned.
He gagged, seeing bits of muscle and other
bloody tissue dangling from their chewing mouths. It was a horrific
scene to behold. He stepped back quickly and they went back to
eating.
“I think you should go back to your room at
Santa’s house and try to rest,” the nurse said, coming forward and
laying her hand on his arm gently. “He wants to talk to you, but
was called away for another emergency.”
Lyle, shell shocked and unable to process
everything that was going on, let the nurse guide him to the
entrance of the hospital, where another elf met them and guided him
through the busy lanes of the North Pole, back to Santa’s house,
and even inside to his room.
Once the door closed
behind him with a dull
thunk
, Lyle fell to his knees and
leaned back against the door. He stayed that way for a long time,
staring off into nothing, trying to process what had happened to
his life, in what seemed like mere seconds.
Someone knocking on the door, right above
his head, some time later brought Lyle back to reality.
Slowly turning and using the door to
support himself, he stood on stiff legs to open the door. He wasn’t
really in the mood for company, but he didn’t know if someone might
be bringing news about his wife and daughter.
He was shocked to see Santa standing
outside the door, frowning with concern.
“Hello, Lyle,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t
greet you earlier, and I’m even more sorry that I couldn’t be with
you after your family was attacked. It disturbs me greatly. May I
come in?”
Lyle nodded and stepped back, opening the
door wider to allow the big man admittance. He closed the door
after him and rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the floor and
around the room, not really knowing what to say.
Santa took a seat on a chair sitting in the
corner of the room and motioned to the second. Lyle walked briskly
over and sat down, still not looking at his guest.
“I know things are hard for you, Lyle,”
Santa said. “But I’ve come to help you try and figure things out.
There is hope. . . You did read the story with Kallalaya that I
sent you, didn’t you?”
Frowning, Lyle nodded.
“So you know that I too was one of these
undead. . .creatures, and there can be something done about
it?”
With the light of hope in his eyes for the
first time since the attack, Lyle looked up and grinned. “You
really think there’s something we can do for them?”
“But, of course,” Santa said and laughed in
his ‘ho, ho, ho’ manner. “You are, after all, at the North Pole
where the Magic of Christmas is the strongest. We just have to
figure out what the right recipe of that magic is for your
family.”
“So,” Lyle said slowly, “you think I can
just go give them a hug and tell them Merry Christmas and they’ll
be good as new?”
Santa laughed again. “No, no! I don’t think
you should do that. Their teeth look dangerous and they appear
quite mean. I peeked in on them before coming to see you.” He
winked at Lyle and smiled. “I think they’ll need your love to bring
the Magic of Christmas to them. You see. . . I don’t think it was
the young elf’s hug that broke the spell for me last year. I think
it was the gift of caring. I was depressed, to be honest. Christmas
seemed to be falling apart and I didn’t feel I was doing the job,
so to speak, of keeping everything together. The girl brought me
hope with her gift and that’s what enabled the Magic of Christmas
to shine through the cursed disease and heal me.”
“Oh,” Lyle said, frowning down at his
hands, which he held clasped between his knees so tightly that his
knuckles were white. “How will I ever be able to do that?”
“I don’t know, Lyle,” Santa said, sitting
forward with a solemn expression. “That’s something, I believe,
you’ll have to discover for yourself, before it’s too late.”
“Before it’s too late?” Lyle asked, lifting
his eyes to meet Santa’s. “What do you mean, before it’s too
late?”
Sighing, Santa looked directly back at
Lyle. “If you don’t do it before I leave on Christmas Eve to
deliver gifts, I fear you’ll have to wait an entire year for the
Magic of Christmas to be strong enough to heal them. It’s the
strongest right before, and during the time when the children of
the world open their presents, and that’s when you need to make
your move. Do you understand?”
Lyle nodded and rubbed his face with his
hands. “How am I supposed to figure it out? Tomorrow is Christmas
Eve, so I have less than two days!”
Santa smiled, patted Lyle’s knee, and
stood. “I think you should rest tonight and let yourself think.
Tomorrow, we’ll tackle this task together. I’ve let Hammond know
that I would be occupied with this mess and that he would be in
charge of preparing everything for the grand delivery.” He walked
over to the door and opened it.
Jumping to his feet, Lyle dashed over to
the doorway in a panic. “I have to try now. I can’t waste any
time!”
Gently, Santa placed his hand on Lyle’s
shoulder and looked at him. “You’re fatigued. Your brain needs the
rest, or else you won’t be able to think straight, and you must,
Lyle, be able to think straight – for their sakes, as well as your
own. Sleep and see what the world brings tomorrow. It’ll be a
magical day!”
With that, Santa left the room, closing the
door behind himself. Lyle stood where he was, thinking, for a long
time. Finally, as long shadows crept across the floor of his room
as the outside world grew darker with night, he climbed into bed,
and surprisingly, he slept.
~
Bright and early the next morning, Lyle was
up and out of bed. He took a quick shower and dressed for an
action-packed day. For some reason, a couple of things Santa had
said kept rotating through his brain: ‘. . .the gift of caring. .
.’; ‘. . .with her gift. . .’. He couldn’t stop thinking that maybe
gifts were the key. Maybe he needed to find the right ones to give
his wife and daughter and it them the Magic of Christmas would do
its job. But, as before, he was stuck with the dilemma of figuring
out what the perfect gifts would be. Both of them had everything
they could ever want; he hoped Santa might have some ideas.
Rushing out of his room, Lyle paused in the
hall, realizing he had no idea where to go. To his right, a little
ways down the hall, he spotted the stairs and figured going down
them would be his best bet. With his renewed energy, his appetite
returned as well and his stomach growled loudly as the rich aroma
of cooking food floated to him on the air as he descended the
stairs. After that, he let his nose guide him to the kitchen.
He was welcomed in by a plump, short elf in
an apron. She was cooking up a huge breakfast and soon had a
heaping, steaming plate of food in front of him. She also promised
Santa would be down shortly, as he’d never missed one of her
breakfasts yet.
Lyle laughed and ate. He was glad to have
some time to himself to think about what he wanted to say to Santa.
The solution was going to be complicated and he hoped they would be
able to share ideas and resolve the matter quickly.
Santa arrived in the kitchen with a ‘ho,
ho, ho’ that made the cook break into a giggle fit. She hurriedly
started making him a plate of food and sat it on the table while he
and Lyle greeted each other.
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