started thinking about enchanted jewelry (and don't we all, really) conferring special powers on its wearers. And thus I began my own mock fantasy epic (though there is greater comic potential in more prosaic settings than Middle Earth) which is yet untitled, but the file is called Jewel Box, so I guess that's what it's called. For now. It was originally conceived as a sequel of sorts to Virus! and was to feature Zev Zyzzyx and Eep as a kind of extraterrestrial Nick and Nora Charles (if only so as to give them a pet named Astra), but that idea was fortunately abandoned pretty early on.
So, here is Chapter One, for your Tolkein-esque pleasure.
Book I: A Change in the Weather
Chapter 1: Heavy Petting
It was just after midnight when the snow started. By three a.m., six inches had already piled up in the upstate New York town of Schuyler Falls. More to the point, however, six inches had piled up on Harry Merton’s pickup truck. By six a.m., two more inches had fallen, and Harry’s Toyota Tundra could very well be confused with its namesake. Harry, still being asleep, was blissfully unaware of the digging out he was going to have to do in approximately 25 minutes. When the time came to clear the snow off the truck, he would be far too aggrieved to savor the irony that the reason his truck wouldn’t fit in the garage was that the snowblower was in the way.
In Harry’s bedroom, the clock radio clicked on, and a blast of Van Halen jolted Harry awake.
“Dah!” he shouted, startled. “Did war break out?”
His wife—who actually had once slept through a loud explosion—barely stirred next to him.
Happily for Harry, the song ended almost as abruptly as it had sprang on. Well, Harry at first thought it was a good thing.
“Hey!” said an overly exuberant disk jockey, “This is the X98 Rock Bottom Morning Zoo, and I’m Sleazy!”
“And I’m Cheesy!” chimed in his partner who, Harry thought, had the exact same voice.
“And this morning we’re your Blizzard Buddies, we’ve got eight inches—”
“And you better believe it, ladies!”
“Yes, eight inches of unexpected, fresh, virgin snow out there this morning, and you know what that means!”
“Well, Sleazy, it means we get to say ‘virgin snow’ as often as possible!”
Harry grunted.
“And, Cheesy, it also means it’s ‘Let’s write our names in the snow time’!”
Over the radio came the sound of what sounded to Harry like a herd of asthmatic water bison choking to death in a vat of Jell-O. Actually, as it turned out, it was just the guffawing of the DJs.
“Don’t radio stations play music anymore?” grumbled Harry. His wife stirred.
“Right you are, Sleazy, and we’ll be going outside to violate the virgin snow right after we find out today’s Painful Extraction.”
Sleazy took it from there. “As you know, this is the part of the show where we call local emergency rooms to find out the strangest objects people have had to have removed from their—”
Harry leapt up and slammed down the Snooze button on the clock radio. He pulled the cord from the wall and tossed the clock-radio across the room. His wife, more or less awake, looked over at him.
“You know, you do this every morning. And that’s the fourth clock-radio you’ve destroyed in as many months. Why do you set it to that station if you hate it so much?”
He smiled at her. “Because if I set it to something that didn’t absolutely appall me I’d never get out of bed.”
She laughed. “Oh, Harry.”
Suddenly, something hit him.
“Damn! Did those zoo animals say there were eight inches of snow?”
He dashed to the window and pulled open the blinds. “Ahh!! They were right. And we open at eight today.”
“Harry, if there are eight inches of snow on the ground, I don’t think anyone is opening at eight.”
“You want to make a bet? Last year when we had that blizzard I was 15 minutes late and Roger docked me an hour. This job only lasts six weeks out of the year; I have to make every hour count. It’s our winter getaway money.”
Harry Merton had been a chemical engineer for more than 40 years until he retired two years ago. Although he built up quite a little nest egg for himself and Martha, and Martha still worked as a real estate agent, every Christmas season, Harry played Santa Claus at a local retail store. The mere pittance he made as Santa was what he claimed finances his and Martha’s January-long trips to Fort Lauderdale. In point of fact, it wasn’t.
Harry was built for the part of Santa—a tad on the stout side, gray hair, long, white beard, and the unnerving tendency to smoke a corncob pipe. Despite his physically fitting the part, the only Santa role he could get this year was for the local Pets, Etc., which was starting a holiday gimmick, “Have Your Pet’s Picture Taken With Santa.”
“Even if you open on time,” Martha was continuing, “how many customers are you likely to have?”
“I’m hoping none,” said Harry, still gawking out the window at the snow. “The whole ‘Have Your Pet’s Picture Taken with Santa’ sounded like a cute idea. I like animals. But I’ve been scratched, bitten, and peed on more times in the last three weeks than…well, I can’t remember when.”
“How many chemical engineers are ever scratched, bitten, or peed on?”
“Oh, there have been some meetings…. Anyway, it’s bad enough when the customers bring in dogs and cats, but the loonies are starting to some out of the woodwork. Let me tell you something—the sensation of having a gerbil stuck in your beard is not one I would recommend.”
“I’m happy to say I can’t imagine ever experiencing that—for a whole host of reasons.”
“I wanted to draw the line at the boa constrictor, but, no-o-o. Roger insisted, ‘You pose with the snake and you’d better be jolly about it.’ I’d like to know who in their right mind can be jolly with a ten-foot snake coiling around their torso.”
“I’ll bet that crocodile hunter guy could.”
“Well, let him play Santa.”
“That would certainly be interesting,” said Martha.
Within 15 minutes, Harry had got the snowblower fired up and was clearing the driveway. By seven a.m., the truck was clean and it even looked like the snow had stopped. He went back in the house, showered, and changed into his Santa suit. By that time, Martha was up and preparing breakfast.
“Are the roads clear, did you notice?” Martha asked.
“Looks it. One thing you have to say about a town like Schuyler Falls, the Department of Public Works is run with an almost military precision.” He crunched into a slice of toast. “You’re not thinking of going anywhere today, are you?”
“We need food. I wasn’t expecting a storm, and there’s nothing in the house to eat. You’d never believe what I had to scrape off that bread to make toast.”
He froze, the slice of toast midway into his open mouth. He dropped it to the plate.
“Martha…” he groaned.
“Well, look at it this way. Think of all the bacterial infections you’ll stave off.”
“I think I’ll grab a doughnut on my way in,” he said. “Make a list of what we need. I’ll stop by FoodTrough on the way home.” He put on his trademark red fur-lined coat and fastened the enormous black belt.
“Ho, ho, ho,” he boomed, and strode out of the kitchen into the living room.
“Arf! Arf!” barked Martha, following him.
“Yeah, I hope all I hear is ‘arf arf.’ One more psychotic parrot and Santa’s gonna have two hands full of bloody stumps where his fingers used to be.”
“Oh, before you go, why don’t you wear this?” There was a glass tschotschke bowl on the coffee table. She reached into it and pulled out a small, red object. She handed it to him.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a Santa Claus pin.” He examined it. Yes, it was indeed a Santa Claus pin. A big, ruddy Santa face, mouth erupted in a disturbingly jolly smile.
“This is pure nightmare fuel,” he said.
“Oh, it’s festive. And look, see? If you press the beard the nose lights up.”
He did and, sure enough, it did.
“Where on earth did you get this?”
“I found it at that antiques show in Bouckville last summer.”
“Figures. Did you settle for this? I mean, was the eight-foot-tall Betty Boop statue sold already?”
“Oh, cut that out.” She slapped his lapel playfully.
“Okay, okay.” He clipped the pin to his coat. “Happy?”
“Now you look Christmasy.”
“Beautiful.”
They kissed, and he ventured out into the snow.
The roads were plowed, but still slippery so Harry inched his truck along Route 6Z, barely able to stop for the red light at the intersection of Route 6X. In Schuyler Falls, every state highway was numbered “6”; back in the 1940s, the public works commissioner in charge of the regional state highway numbering system was terribly innumerate, having graduated from the local community college with a degree in English and having failed—and quite spectacularly at that—every math class he ever took. Thus, every highway he had to specify used the same number—6—followed by a different letter. The locals were used to it, but out-of-towners were naturally confused, and the question “Where is Route 6?” would inevitably yield the response “Which one?” which just led to even more confusion.
The light changed, and Harry hit the gas. A car ran the light and cut Harry off. Harry had to hit the brakes and the truck miraculously stopped short, although Harry’s head smashed against the steering wheel. Oddly, he didn’t feel any pain; he examined himself in the rearview mirror and didn’t notice the slightest mark on his forehead, even though he had struck with a not insignificant amount of force.
“There’ll probably be quite a bruise later,” he groused.
He shook it off and proceeded into the heart of town, passing the spot that gave the town of Schuyler Falls its name. No, not a waterfall, but rather a spot on the sidewalk where Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler took a tumble one winter day after slipping on a patch of ice. Every February, there’s a weekend of special events to commemorate the event, with many of the locals taking their own spills on the ice—not all of them deliberate, it should be pointed out. Tourists came from miles around to attend the festivities, and the Broken Coccyx Inn on Route 6V has its one big weekend of the year.
Harry pulled into a strip mall and parked some distance away from the entrance to Pets, Etc. The store owner, Roger Spaniel (yes, his real name), had very strict prohibitions about employees parking in spots that customers would find convenient, and he used his connections in town to have this policy enforced by having his employees’ cars ticketed and or towed (depending on the extent of the foulness of his mood) if they violated it.
Harry entered the store and was greeted by the blast of both warmth and pet urine, combined with cedar chips and some kind of heavy, industrial strength room deodorizer that Harry could have swore could be used as a chemical weapon, if not first banned by the Geneva Conventions.
“You’re late,” said Roger, as Harry clomped the snow from his boots. Roger emerged from the back room with a Chihuahua tucked under each arm and an iguana perched on his shoulder. On his head was either a Scotch terrier or an even more ludicrous toupee than Roger was normally given to wearing.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but we had eight inches of snow last night,” said Harry.
“No, I hadn’t noticed.”
Roger actually did live in the store, although Harry never knew exactly where. He was suspicious after, one morning, he noticed that the cage next to the St. Bernard was filled with empty potato chip bags.
“Well, I can’t imagine we’re going to get very many customers today. Everyone’s going to be too busy digging out or resolutely refusing to dig out until April.”
“UPS is going to be delivering several boxes of gerbils later on,” said Roger. “I’ll need your help stocking them.”
Roger didn’t buy his gerbils from a very reputable pet supplier. The boxes were always labeled “Tennis Balls.”
“Hey, I’m just here to be your pet Santa. I’m not the stockboy. Where’s Josh?”
“He called in sick, although I had trouble hearing him over what I can only assume was the snowmobile he was riding at the time.”
Harry grumbled.
“Look, I’ll even pay you, if it’s that important to you,” said Roger. The iguana stared intensely at Harry, who quickly relented.
There wasn’t much to do for the first few hours, except watch Roger obsessively straightening things: the bags of pet food all had to be facing the same way, the containers of fish food on the shelf all had to have their labels out, all the pet toys had to be arranged, first alphabetically by type of animal and then alphabetically by type of toy. Roger even spent an inordinate amount of time in the aquarium aisle trying to get all the fish to swim in the same direction. Whether it was from sheer force of will, or some Aquaman-like ability to communicate with them, they inexplicably obliged, and Harry was mesmerized by the sight of 20 aquaria filled with fish all swimming in sync with each other. Roger then glared at the snakes; they all looked at each other and coiled in the same direction on the small treelets that occupied their cages. Harry just shook his head. It was Dr. Doolittle meets Monk.
At around eleven, the UPS truck pulled up outside, and the driver carried in two boxed marked “Tennis Balls.” Roger was in the back, so Harry signed for them. As the UPS guy left, Roger emerged from the back, a brace of ferrets draped over his shoulders.
“Ah, good, they’re here,” he said. “Harry, please unload these boxes and place the gerbils in those eight empty cages in aisle seven. There should be 24 gerbils, so that will work out to exactly three per cage. Please try to make sure all the gerbils in each cage are roughly the same color.”
“Aren’t gerbils all generally the same color? I mean, there aren’t any hot pink or fluorescent green gerbils in the world, are there?” Actually, Harry had to admit that he wasn’t entirely certain.
“Just humor me.” He handed Harry a box cutter. “You’ll need this. Be careful slitting open the boxes. We don’t want to end up with a number of gerbils that isn’t a multiple of eight.” He adjusted his ferrets and walked off.
Harry shrugged and looked at the boxes. As he was running the box cutter slowly along the top of the box, there was a loud crash from the back of the store as a lemur that Roger was trying to feed escaped from his cage and swung himself across the store and knocked over the stack of Math Puzzles for Dogs books. Startled by the noise, Harry lost control of the box cutter and it slipped, the blade plunging straight into his thigh. Except that instead of piercing first his red flannel Santa pants and then his flesh, the blade snapped clean off and clanged to the tile floor. Harry looked at it curiously.
“What a cheap box cutter,” he said, although he had to admit that he was a little relieved.
He instead used his keys to open the boxes and successfully stocked the gerbils in their mathematically appropriate cages.
There still being no customers, he wandered to the back of the store, where his Santa throne was set up. He sat down and reached under the chair, pulling out a paperback book he kept secreted there to read during the inevitable downtime.
Which didn’t last long.
As he was absorbed in his book, he didn’t notice a figure approaching.
“Oh, Harry Potter, you Satanic little scamp,” he said, turning the page. Then he looked up and started. “Hi…I mean, uh, ho, ho, ho.”
“Mr. Claus, I’d like to have my pet Alistair’s picture taken with Santa.”
It was difficult to argue with the man, as he was easily seven-and-a-half feet tall. His head was completely clean shaven—which has that odd effect of making people look even more menacing. His face was heavily scarred, as if he had been in a knife fight, or had at one time been the goalie for a darts team. He was dressed completely in black leather. In a word, he scared the crap out of Harry.
“Alistair,” Harry could barely say. There didn’t appear to be anything accompanying him. “Um, Mr….”
“Mennis. Dénis Mennis. Yes, Alistair.”
He opened his black leather trenchcoat and a large, dark brown shape flew out directly at Harry.
Harry screamed.
“That’s Alistair. He’s what’s known as a False Vampire Bat, or Spectral Bat—Vampyrum spectrum. Native to South America, the False Vampire Bat is able to reach a wingspan of three feet. Just like Alistair here.” He beamed with pride.
Alistair had attached himself to Harry’s beard and stared at him—presumably not discerning a great deal. He squeaked.
“What does this thing eat?” Harry didn’t really want to know but asked anyway.
“Birds, small mammals, things like that. They kill their prey by biting its head and crushing its skull.”
“Charming. And it’s just the thing to have flying around a pet store.”
This aggrieved Mr. Mennis. “He’s not a thing. He’s my Alistair. And your precious birds and hamsters are perfectly safe. Alistair is a perfect gentleman.”
“I see.”
“So, please keep your bat-phobia to yourself and just snap his picture.”
“Fine.” Harry reached down and picked up the remote control for the digital camera, which was mounted on a tripod a few feet in front of the Santa throne.
Mr. Mennis walked over and adjusted Alistair so that he was hanging upside down from Harry’s beard and facing the camera, his claws grasping tightly the thick gray hair. Despite Alistair’s weight, about seven ounces, Harry could feel no pain—though it could not be said that he was even remotely comfortable.
“Ready?” asked Harry, aiming the remote control. He pressed the exposure button and a blinking red light on the front of the camera counted down 10 seconds. “Say ‘freakish.’”
“Spread your wings, Alistair!” exhorted Mr. Mennis.
The immense bat obliged, and the flash went off.
“All done,” said Harry.
“See?” said Mr. Mennis. “Didn’t he behave perfectly?”
Harry had to grudgingly agree.
Mr. Mennis held open his coat. “Here, Alistair!” Alistair detached himself from Harry’s beard and flew into Mr. Mennis’s coat. He closed it over him.
Harry rubbed his beard. “God, I hope this picture came out,” he said to himself.
He walked around to the back of the camera and brought the picture up on the LCD—happily, it was perfectly exposed. He showed it to Mr. Mennis, who was pleased. He printed the image to the attached photoprinter and handed the print to Mr. Mennis.
“You can pay up at the front register,” said Harry.
“Thank you very much. And Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you…and to Alistair.”
Mr. Mennis smiled approvingly and departed. Harry collapsed on his Santa throne and closed his eyes for a good long time.
What began to concern Harry was the complete lack of pain he had been able to feel all day. First the blow to the head in the truck—which didn’t even leave a mark—then the box cutter, then having a half-pound bat hang from his beard—normally, these things would hurt or at the very least leave some kind of mark. And yet as he examined his forehead in the men’s room mirror—and then checked the thigh he had hit with the cheap box cutter—he could detect not even the slight bump, bruise, nick, or soreness. Not that he was complaining, but it sure was peculiar.
Later that afternoon, as the roads got better and people began to venture out, business started to pick up and get back to something akin to normal. Roger’s staff actually showed up, so Harry didn’t have to handle every customer himself.
“Are you Santa?” came a voice from behind him. He looked around the back of his Santa throne and beheld a small, well-past-middle-aged woman. Her face was pulled taut, obviously the result of a facelift, but it looked more like her face had been caught in some kind of industrial accident. Her hair, which should by all rights have been gray, was dyed some weird shade of red that made it look like a Bozo the Clown wig. She had the rough, gravel-strewn voice of someone who had smoked for at least 500 years.
“Yes, yes, I am,” said Harry, resisting the urge to make a sarcastic comment.
“Take Pookie’s picture.” She presented him with something that looked like a giant, white, furry millipede but was apparently a dog of some kind. It even had a little red bow in its hair.
“Pookie,” said Harry. “Is she a dog?”
“Yes, she’s— Of course she’s a dog, you idiot. What else would my precious be?” She kissed the dog’s head for emphasis.
“I don’t know. I missed that Empire of the Insects special on PBS last night.”
Suddenly Harry missed Mr. Mennis and Alistair.
“Sure, let’s get to it,” he said.
He sat down on his throne and the woman placed Pookie on his lap. The dog kept squirming and yipping. He tied to pet her and make soothing sounds to calm her down, but Pookie would not stop moving.
“I need you to keep her still, otherwise the picture’s not going to come out,” said Harry, as the dog’s yipping got more insistent.
“If you’re going to run this business, the least you could do is know how to handle pets.”
“Lady, for the past three weeks I have been handling pets that would literally make your skin crawl. Come on, Pookie, there’s a good doggie. Sit still.” He cooed softly and stroked the dog behind the ears. This did not please Pookie and she whipped her head around and sank her teeth into Harry’s wrist. Except that the teeth did not sink into Harry’s flesh, as Harry and Pookie were clearly expecting them to. In fact, not only wasn’t there a mark on Harry, but several of Pookie’s teeth broke off and fell into Harry’s lap. Pookie began yipping and yelping until her owner picked her up.
“What did you do to her?” asked the woman, distraught. “What did you do to my Pookie?”
“I didn’t do anything—she tried to bite me, and it didn’t quite…work.” Harry was just as bewildered as anyone.
“I’m going to report you to your manager, and then to the Humane Society.” She and Pookie stalked off.
Harry stared at his wrist. There wasn’t even a mark where the dog tried to bite him.
Harry was so focused on his wrist that he never even noticed the Santa pin on his lapel. The nose was glowing bright red.
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