Polterheist(46)

Trap.

As I slipped into unconsciousness, I finally understood why Elspeth Fenster had released us from her family's private prison.

So that we would come here tonight and become her sacrifices.

* * *

"Esther, wake up! Esther, can you hear me? Esther."

There was an annoying whispering in my ear. My head was pounding fiercely. And that chanting was so loud . . .

Chanting.

My eyes flew open.

"Oh, my God," I said, appalled by the spectacle before me.

Elspeth Fenster had painted a bright red symbol in the fake snow on the floor outside of Solstice Castle. Based on the knife in her hands and the blood flowing from a cut in each of her arms, I gathered that the blood was hers.

Okay, stay calm, at least she's not cutting anyone else, I thought. Such as me.

Elspeth was also, incidentally, stark naked.

Although I really don't like to judge my own gender on the basis of appearance, public nudity was not a look that I thought anyone would ever recommend for this girl.

Given the ardor on Elspeth's face as she raised her bleeding arms and chanted to her dark lord, offering the solstice demon (who, fortunately, had yet to make an appearance) her body, I thought that her disappointments with sex were perhaps due to focusing a little too much of her sexual energy on this sort of thing, rather than on the simple pleasures of the flesh with an earthly partner.

She was surrounded by Solsticeland employees, all stone-faced and chanting with her. I saw Satsy, Poinsettia, Moody Santa, Thistle, Giggly Santa, and several other people whose names I didn't know-some of whose faces I didn't even recognize, so they had apparently gone missing even before I had been hired. Elspeth had been collecting victims for a few weeks. And she had gotten away with it, because (as I had thought from the start) it seemed perfectly understandable that someone might just stop showing up for this job. Still, it had taken people in Satsy's life less than a day to realize he was missing and to start worrying and making inquiries. I wondered if he was Elspeth's only miscalculation, or if she was leaving a trail of Missing Persons that led straight back to Solsticeland.

"Esther," that whispering voice said from behind me again. "You're awake? Good. No, shh! Don't say anything, and don't turn around."

I finally recognized that voice. "Rick?" I whispered. "What are you doing here?"

"She's gone insane," he whispered back. "We have to stop her. Will you help me?"

"Of course!" I blurted.

"Shh!"

Fortunately, my outburst had not been audible above the chanting. I noticed the bloody symbol in the snow was starting to glow a dark red. That struck me as a bad thing.

I started to move, then realized I had been tied up. Without turning around, I whispered, "Can you untie me?"

"Yes. I have a knife."

"Be very careful with it," I instructed.

As soon as I felt my bonds loosen, I said, "Now free Max-um, Belsnickel."

"That crazy old blind elf?"

"He's not what he seems," I said. "He can stop Elspeth."

I noticed with anxiety that Max appeared to be unconscious. This was not going well.

I supposed the first thing we should do was disrupt the chanting. As soon as Rick appeared to have freed Max, who was not yet awake, and then moved on to Lucky, I leapt to my feet with a blood-curdling scream and launched myself at Elspeth. Using a move similar to the one which had worked on Lopez's father, I drop-kicked her out of her enchanted circle and clear into the Enchanted Forest.

Damn, I'm good. I should study kung fu or something.

"Lucky, wake up Max. He's got to stop the demon from breaking through!" That red circle appeared to be glowing more robustly now. The thing was on its way.

Twinkle cried, "Untie me! Untie me! I can help!"

Freed from his bonds, Lucky crawled over and started shaking and slapping Max, shouting into his face.

I heard Nelli barking excitedly and looked around. I saw her tied to a fake tree. "The dog, Rick! Free the dog!"

"The dog?" he repeated incredulously.

"It's important! Free the damn dog!"

"Untie me! Untie me!" Twinkle shouted.

Without Elspeth directing them, the missing Solsticeland actors seemed unthreatening now. But they kept chanting. I wondered how to make them stop.

Max staggered to his feet. He took one look at the glowing red circle and said, "The demon is coming! It's arriving! We must stop it! Nelli!"

Freed from her tree by Rick, the familiar came running over to the circle and promptly began racing madly around it, going widdershins, trying to reverse the direction of its energy. She was howling at the top of her lungs as she did so, doing a fair job of drowning out the chanting.

With Max awake and on the job now, Lucky turned his attention to Twinkle, who was still demanding to be untied. As soon as that task was achieved, the two of them began flinging themselves at the chanters, trying to get them out of formation, startle them, interrupt their chant-anything to weaken the demon's attempt to break through the dimensional barrier and emerge here in all its power and ferocity. Max started bellowing out a chant of his own.

Cold wind filled the room, heralding the demon's arrival. The most unimaginably foul stench came with it.

"Aw, Jesus, that smell," Lucky said.

I realized that I hadn't seen Rick since he had followed Elspeth into the Enchanted Forest to free Nelli. Who knew what Elspeth might be doing to him in there? I went running after them, lifting my heavy skirts and praying that my amulet would protect me from being attacked by a frisky tree again.

But when I found the two of them, Elspeth wasn't torturing or tormenting Rick. The two of them were fighting. Like partners. Co-conspirators. A couple . . .

"You've ruined everything!" Rick raged. "We had a perfect plan!"

"You have betrayed me!" she screeched into his face. "How dare you interfere!"

"Interfere? When you're about to get half the city devoured? Including yourself! And, more to the point, me!"

"Death is the ultimate glory!" she proclaimed, indeed sounding insane. "The ultimate reward!"

"No," he shot back, "the ultimate reward will be getting back every penny of what your family stole from my family, you demented, frigid bitch!"

"Oh, my God," I said, as realization dawned. "Rick . . . you're a Powell."

He looked stunned to see me-and appalled to realize he had been exposed.

"No one noticed when you applied for this job?" I asked in surprise. We had to use our legal names on our employment forms, and people were very sensitive about the name "Powell" around here.

"He's a Powell on his mother's side," Elspeth said contemptuously. "And, God, if I have to listen to him whine even one more time about what my family did to the pathetic losers in his family."

"So Elspeth had the mystical mojo," I said to Rick, "and you knew how to apply it to human nature to get control of various employees' minds and turn them into drones in your hijacking scheme."

"And that's all it was supposed to be!" he screamed at Elspeth, beside himself with anger now. "Not this shit! I just wanted the money! I'm sick of my family doing nothing about what was taken from us!"

"Oh, for God's sake, Rick," I said in disgust. "It was a long time ago. Move on. Go out and get a job like the rest of us."

"Oh, that's great advice coming from you, Dreidel."

"You thought you could control her," I said to him with malicious satisfaction. "But once you got her going on the idea of revenge, of humiliating her family, of exploring her mystical gifts . . . You had no idea what you had set loose, did you? You've just been finding out in the past couple of days how far she's strayed from your plan and how little control of her you actually have."

"What kind of demented lunatic wants to destroy all of Midtown?" he shouted. "I thought she was only talking about destroying Fenster's-and I mean the business, not the damn building!"

We heard a horrible bellowing roar from Solstice Castle, so powerful that it blew a hot fetid wind through the Enchanted Forest. Max's chanting rose in volume. I heard Twinkle scream aggressively as he barreled into someone else, trying to break the demon's power circle. The kid was really showing his mettle tonight.

"I didn't know about this!" Rick insisted. "All I wanted to do was rob the Fensters!"

"Somebody got shot the other night, Rick," I pointed out. "That's what tends to happen once you dabble in armed robbery, you jackass!"

"No, that tends to happen once you dabble in an idiot like Freddie Fenster!" Rick shouted as another hot, grotesquely foul wind blew through this area. The grad student turned his ire on Elspeth again and raged, "What were you thinking? On top of everything else, using your idiot cousin has led the cops straight to us!"

I was about to say that the police seemed a minor matter at the moment, compared to a solstice demon. But then there was a long, loud, enraged demonic scream from the next room, and a prolonged flash of white light so bright that we had to shield our eyes, even though we were screened from it by fake trees. This was followed by a stunned moment of silence . . . And then I heard the chatter of confused human voices as Elspeth's victims regained their senses and started demanding to know what the hell was going on.