I glanced at the familiar and realized she looked weary and worn. Her fuzzy antlers looked floppy, her head was drooping, and she was panting with fatigue.
"Thank you, my dear fellow. That is most considerate." As Max handed Nelli's leash over to Lucky, he removed his sunglasses. "It will also be a relief to me to cease wearing these. It's been almost impossible for me to see anything in Solsticeland today!"
"There is a sense in which that's a blessing," I said, thinking of the Hanukkah-goes-Vegas display.
Lucky said to me, "Kid, I guess the doc will catch you up on what we been doin' today. I'll talk to you both tomorrow."
"Goodnight, Lucky," I said as he left.
Jeff stared after him with a thoughtful frown. After a long moment, be turned an accusing gaze on me. "Oh, my God, Esther."
"Max," I said quickly, "maybe we should-"
"Lucky. The family. Forest Hills?" said Jeff, each phrase getting louder. "The boss!"
"Hello!" I said brightly to a child who was approaching the throne. "Are you here to see Santa?"
"‘The family's problems with Fenster's'?"
The kid and her parents took one look at the bellowing Diversity Santa, changed their minds, and left.
"Are you insane?" Jeff demanded. "Do you know who that man is?"
"Well, I gather you know now," I said.
Jeff was a pretty voracious news consumer. I had hoped he wouldn't put it together, but I really hadn't counted on that. Mostly, I had hoped to be in another part of the building when he figured out who Lucky was.
"There is a valid explanation for Lucky's presence here today," Max said to Jeff. "As there is for mine."
"Yeah, yeah, your poltergeist." Jeff rolled his eyes dismissively.
Unlike Lopez, Jeff wasn't stubbornly conventional and obsessively prone to seeking rational explanations in terms which adhered to his established belief system; he was just obtuse.
"Dreidel!" Twinkle came trotting over, his bells jangling as he bounced along. "I didn't know you were still here!"
"Nobody did," I said. "And I'm starting to wish it had stayed that way. Are you working the throne room with me now, Twinkle? I warn you, Diversity Santa is in a bit of a snit."
"Isn't he always?" said Twinkle.
"You brought a Gambello hit man here?" Jeff raged. "You got me to help you smuggle a wiseguy into Fenster's?"
"Lower your voice, would you?" I snapped.
Realizing this was good advice, he did so. "You brought a Gambello . . . Have you lost your mind, Esther?"
Twinkle gave Jeff a puzzled look, then said to me, "No, I'm on photo duty, Dreidel. The store's clearing out now, of course-"
"Well, it is getting late." I said to Diversity Santa, "Just a little longer until we clock out for the night. So let's all try to stay calm in this highly public place!"
Twinkle continued, "So I've just been uploading to the system the candid shots taken this evening. Probably no point, really. We fell hours behind today-we're so understaffed! So I'll bet all of these people have already left the store."
"It's all right, Twinkle," I said reassuringly. "We're bound to fall behind on things."
"Especially when a wiseguy-fraternizing elf doesn't even show up for her shift!" Jeff snapped.
"I came as soon as I could." I added primly, "I was detained for a police matter."
"Anything to do with smuggling a famous mob hitter into Fenster's today?" Jeff muttered.
Twinkle continued, "And what I found when I was uploading was so . . . so weird. Photo after photo."
Max said to Jeff, "The two problems may be linked. But even if they're not, Lucky recognizes the danger of the mystical evil haunting Fenster's-"
"Do we still think it's a ghost, Max?" I asked. "A poltergeist?"
"A ghost?" Twinkle asked doubtfully, tapping on the computer monitor to bring up some images. "Do you really think that's what this is?"
Max said to me, "I'm leaning away from that theory, now. I'm theorizing in a bit of a vacuum-"
"But that won't stop you from talking," Jeff grumbled.
"-but I suspect that Nelli's reactions today, which were at times dramatic, were not consistent with a ghostly presence at Fenster's. I think the entity we're investigating may be something else entirely."
"Good, because I don't think it's a ghost, either," said Twinkle. "I think it looks like . . . something a lot worse, don't you?"
He turned the flat screen monitor so that we could all see it.
We fell silent and stared in stunned alarm at the twenty or so digital photos he ran past us in a quick slide show.
In picture after picture, ordinary people smiling for the camera-in front of Solstice Castle, posing with Prince Midnight, greeting an elf, or visiting Santa-were unaware that, within easy reach, something indistinct and shadowy, with glowing red eyes and dripping fangs, was reaching for them with sharp, grasping claws.
When we got to the last picture in the batch, Twinkle said unnecessarily, "Here's one of you, Jeff."
"Holy shit," Jeff said with feeling, looking at the glowing eyes that peered over his shoulder as he posed with a wailing toddler on his lap. "What the hell is that?"
"That is not a poltergeist," Max said apologetically to us, as if taking responsibility for the problem being bigger than we'd feared. "It's a solstice demon."
* * *
"This is the worst idea you've ever had," Jeff said.
I replied, "That's what you said to me this morning about a different idea. Make up your mind. Anyhow, this is Max's idea, not mine."
"I wasn't talking to you," Jeff said. "I was talking to myself. What was I thinking when I agreed to do this?" After a moment, he added, "But, just to be clear, though it wasn't your idea, I do blame you for this."
"Of course."
"Why do I let you talk me into these things?" he moaned.
"Because I'm much stronger-willed than you are."
Also, he hadn't needed much convincing at the time. Jeff had been really spooked by seeing a demon peering over his shoulder.
Now, of course, he was rationalizing it, speculating that Twinkle-who was safely outside the store now, serving as our lookout man-had probably digitally altered those photos to enjoy playing a gag on us. Never mind that a possessed tree had nearly strangled me the other day while vocally craving flesh and blood. No, we were the dupes of a silly joke pulled on us by a college kid.
I had seen Jeff do this before, so his change of heart didn't surprise me. I had expected it.
But it was too late now. Max, Jeff, and I had remained hidden in the store after closing to confront whoever was, Max believed, planning to raise a demon at midnight.
As he had explained it to us earlier, after dropping his bombshell about the solstice demon, "Since before the dawn of history, going back to the long-ago eons when men gathered around the fire at night-"
"And women," I said.
"When men and women gathered around the fire at night to ward off the menacing darkness and protect themselves from the creatures, both mystical and mundane, which lurked in the shadows, beyond the light," Max had told us, "many cultures have feared these days of deepest winter, when night is longer than day and the barriers between dimensions crumble and give way."
"Wow," Twinkle had said to me, transfixed. "Your blind friend is one good storyteller."
"He's not blind," I said.
"On the longest night of the year," Max continued, "the winter solstice, darkness tumbles into darkness, the night is too long for the fabric of this dimension to easily withstand, and that is when demons can emerge from their hell dimensions to enter this world!"
Looking back now, as we waited for midnight, I was pretty sure that was where Max began to lose Jeff, who had started shifting restlessly and looking skeptical.
"Winter solstice demons go by many different names in many different cultures, but they all impart an almost identical sense of dread. They are the reason that so many ancient faiths, dead and still surviving, created a midwinter celebration of light-to ward off the demons trying to break through to our world on the longest night of the year!"
"But Max," Jeff had interrupted then, "those festivals occur all over the calendar. Hanukkah is already over. Christmas isn't for three days. Winter solstice was last night. Other cultures-"
"Well, it's not as if demons keep digital calendars in their hell dimensions," Max said prosaically. "These events happen around this time."
"Wait, what about what Jeff said? Digital calendars notwithstanding, is that why we saw this thing in these pictures today?" I asked then. "Because last night was winter solstice, so this thing is already here? We're too late, and Hell has come to Fenster's?"
Well, it turned out that the good news, so to speak, was that winter solstice was actually tonight, December 22nd. I objected vociferously to this information, since everyone knew that solstice fell on the 21st of the month.
"Only sometimes," Max had said.
"That's right," said Twinkle, treasurer of his astronomy club.
The cosmos and the earthly calendar used for tracking time weren't in perfect harmony. So just as we have Leap Year once every four years to straighten things out, it also happens that once every few years, winter solstice actually falls on December 22nd rather than on the 21st.