Allyn Allyn - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

Not long after St. Valentinesburg, Santa resigned from the Mart-Mart board of directors to enter politics. In his farewell speech he wondered out loud why it couldn’t be Black Whatever every day of the year. The board’s eyes brightened. “Ho-ho-ho,” they uttered approvingly.

Santa’s words gave everyone permission to Christmas shop all year round. Soon industry was humming away making the goods for the names on the shoppers’ long lists, for no one wanted the shame of getting more Christmas presents than they gave. Meanwhile, surrounded as it was by clipboard elves, exploding colleagues, suicides, and squealers, the underworld decided to bid goodbye to the gimmie-gimmies and the shifty-shadies. Hardened criminals took well-paying factory jobs and, showing the kind of focus management appreciates, they rose quickly through the ranks.

This was the holiday atmosphere in which the political conventions were held. Santa won the Sanity Party’s presidential nomination and named the Easter Bunny as his running mate. When Mr. E. B. himself loped on stage in a full bunny suit amid a release of balloons painted like Easter eggs, he set a tone of good-natured fun that would last all through the campaign. Happy times, had there ever been any before, were clearly here again.

Nothing but Halloween stood between Santa and a November victory.

Creatures of darkness shunned the sun for their complexions’ sake and feared a daylight attack most of all. But if Santa got to choose the time, they would choose the weather. So dawn did not break that Halloween morning. Instead, thunderclouds as black as night brought pelting rain and lightning bolts, all reeking of the cauldron. Every grim-jawed ghoulie, ghostie, and long-legged beastie manned the ramparts. Suddenly, in midmorning, the darkness blinked, the thunder stuttered, the lightning bolts bolted, and the sun broke through. (The SLH had infiltrated the fort’s supplier of magical ingredients, adulterating the eye of newt with tapioca, the toe of frog with toad, the bat wool with mouse.)

The rampart defenders fled from the light to their sturdy haunted houses, intending to make a vigorous stand. But they found the doors locked. Amid the wild weather, teams of Christmas Seals had snorkeled up from the sewer and entered by the drains and commodes while others rappelled down from humpsters onto the roofs and entered by the chimneys Santa-wise.

The witches and warlocks tried to escape the fort with their precious bubbling cauldron in a covered wagon with headless-horseman driver and outriders, all impervious to sunlight. But a heat-seeking missile from a humpster locked onto the cauldron and blew the wagon and its passengers to dark Kingdom Come.

Fixing their bayonets, the elves entered the fort. Quickly the moaning, wailing, and chain-rattling stopped. The Fort Halloween massacre foreshadowed Santa’s success at the ballot box a few days later.

Running late, Senator-elect Denis Ahern headed through the crowded hotel lobby, which was decked with stars and candy-cane striped flags. But before he reached the glass elevator up to the victory celebration in the Reindeer Room, Santa and his Secret Service entourage arrived through another bank of doors. The police cleared the way for them.

In the elevator, Santa turned to face the glass door and smiled out at the crowd. When he saw Ahern, his smile grew bigger still. Then, laying his finger aside of his nose and giving a wink, from the lobby he rose.

To make up time, Ahern hurried back to the service elevators. When he popped through a pair of closing doors, several serious-looking men reached inside their suit coats. But the mayor raised a calming hand.

“Ahern,” nodded the mayor.

“Your Honor,” said the senator-elect.

When the elevator doors opened again Ahern went one way and the mayor and the serious-looking men another, followed by a bellhop pushing a wheeled luggage rack from which hung a bunny suit in a plastic garment bag.

After two hours of smiles, handshakes, and victory signs on prime-time TV, Ahern left the hotel, feeling strangely let down. Two months from now he’d be in Washington with the police department and all its great guys and gals behind him. Was that it?

He headed toward his car, parked on the street down from the hotel, walking under lampposts decked with stars and candy-cane bunting and loudspeakers uttering a drumbeat of ho-ho-hos. Halfway into the car’s backseat Ahern saw he’d caught his temporary driver, a bookish old desk sergeant, with his nose in a hefty tome. To put the embarrassed man at ease, Ahern smiled and gave a cheery, “Hey, how about that Santa?”

The driver raised a finger. “Commish, remember where Elias Canetti wrote, ‘God is a preparation for something more sinister that we do not yet know? I never really got that one. Now maybe I’m starting to catch his drift.”

“Ho-ho-ho,” volunteered the loudspeaker on the lamppost at the curb.

Ahern pulled the door shut. He felt tired. Who the hell was this Canetti guy? he wondered. And when would the wonderful Samantha get back from the ski slopes?

Out loud he said, “Drive on.”

Copyright © 2010 James Powell

Val McDermid’s latest novel, The Fever of the Bone, will be released in the U.K. on September 3. The book is the sixth to feature clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Hill and Chief Inspector Carol Jordan, who also star in this new story. Val McDermid’s last novel to appear in the U.S. also belongs to the Tony Hill series. Entitled Beneath the Bleeding, it was published by Harper Paperbacks in summer 2009.Many TV viewers will recognize the characters in this story as the protagonists of the series Wire in the Blood .

Previously published in the U.K., in the Mail on Sunday, December 2008. ©2008 by Val McDermid

A chrysanthemum burst of colour flooded the sky. “Oooh,” said the man, his blue eyes sparking with reflected light.

“Aaah,” said the woman, managing to invest the single syllable with irony and good humour. Her shaggy blond hair picked up colour from the fireworks, giving her a fibre-optic punk look at odds with the conservative cut of her coat and trousers.

“I’ve always loved fireworks.”

“Must be the repressed arsonist in you.”

Dr. Tony Hill, clinical psychologist and criminal profiler, pulled a rueful face. “You’ve got me bang to rights, guv.” He checked out the smile on her face. “Admit it, though. You love Bonfire Night, too.” A scatter of green-and-red tracer raced across the sky, burning afterimages inside his eyelids.

DCI Carol Jordan snorted. “Nothing like it. Kids shoving bangers through people’s letter boxes, drunks sticking lit fireworks up their backsides, nutters throwing bricks when the fire engines turn up to deal with bonfires that’ve gone out of control? Best night of the year for us.”

Tony shook his head, refusing to give in to her sarcasm. “It’s been a long time since you had to deal with rubbish like that. It’s only the quality villains you have to bother with these days.”

As if summoned by his words, Carol’s phone burst into life. “Terrific,” she groaned, turning away and jamming a finger into her free ear. “Sergeant Devine. What have you got?”

Tony tuned out the phone call, giving the fireworks his full attention. Moments later, he felt her touch on his arm. “I have to go.”

“You need me?”

“I’m not sure. It wouldn’t hurt.”

If it didn’t hurt, it would be the first time. Tony followed Carol back to her car, the sky hissing and fizzing behind him.

The smell of cooked human flesh was unforgettable and unambiguous. Sweet and cloying, it always seemed to coat the inside of Carol’s nostrils for days, apparently lingering long after it should have been nothing more than a memory. She wrinkled her nose in disgust and surveyed the grisly scene.