Part XVII

 

I opened my eyes.

Several thousand light pixels glittered and sparkled in what I imagined the inside of a computer’s brain was like when it was starting up.

I was starting to get tired of opening my eyes and not actually being awake. This psychological, metaphysical journey was getting mighty irksome. And surely the whole, ‘and it was only a dream’, thing is getting old.

The pixels danced in reverse mitosis, enhancing colours and depth as it gained shape and form. Imagine being on a really fast train and the world was being built around you by really, really slow ants.

The Sandman, should I ever meet him; has a swift kick to his dream-stones coming to him.

With no warning or inertia, everything stopped.

*

I opened my eyes.

There I was. In a way it was disappointing; I was lying in a very comfortable bed, in a place that felt like home. Déjà vulnerability. Familial sunlight played tug-o-war against pale curtains, warmly creating waves of welcoming light that edged across the shores of the ceiling. I rolled over…and there was a person shaped topography beside me under the covers, gently breathing as a proof of life.

I made a silent prayer that it wasn’t the Croc, which almost guaranteed it would be. I wasn’t ready for that. Best let sleeping Crocs lie.

The walls had paintings adorned to it. Paintings of places and times and shapes and colours that bore no meaning. The ceilings had lights repelling from its base. Behind the earlier mentioned curtains, were windows with glass and no bars.

The sudden awareness of the absence of sound made it appear in a drumbeat. Birds, those idiotic, winged things with all the world at their feathertips, but absolutely nothing to say; sang loudly about the lateness of worms. A faint drilling was reminiscent of a plane joining those birds but not killing enough of them. An unnecessarily loud hum came from the corner of the room where on a small desk in front of a small chair was a laptop – who was thundering and coughing as all old laptops tend to do.

I slipped clandestinely out of bed, although my bed partner didn’t notice. I sat down on the small chair and tapped on the space bar.

The laptop exploded into colour. It landed on an open document. A blank canvas of a document. A white so vast and expansive that it was painful to look at.

It was named SCMD Part XVII.

What?

I minimised the window.

A folder.

SCMD.

Part I, Part II, Part III and all the way up as the roman numerals got fuzzy.

What was this?

This wasn’t real. I opened a few documents.

“Santa Claus is evil. And he will die by my hands. Life mission (and what not)”

It had postscripts, but it was not really a letter.

“If you're reading this Santa, I'm gonna get ya, I'm gonna get ya good!!!!”

Other characters narrated it, I guess because it got very maddening to keep repeating it.

“Well, over the last few years, you have found a truth in the universe that very few people can comprehend, let alone believe. That Santa Claus is real. More than that you have also figured out that Santa Claus is evil.”

It even had French accents.

“You have decided to take it upon yourself to rid the world of la evil. Of course you are neither able nor capable. Yet you continued to try. And like a madman, you continued in spite of le fact that you continued to fail.”

One of the chapters had the story written from Santa’s perspective. That was clever actually. I wouldn’t mind reading that. If anything, just for some insight.

I read and read. It was some funny stuff. Some blasphemous stuff. Some just plain weird stuff. But that’s easy to do when you write it down rather than live it. It was everything that had actually happened. It was real. It was real?

It had to be real.

“Santa Claus is an evil git. Santa Claus must die.”

I closed all the documents and reverted back to the blank canvas.

I slowly typed.

“I opened my eyes…”

*

I was in a musty dark room. I was lying deep inside a soft couch. It was very comfortable. The taste of a bitter apple lingered on my tongue.

I realised I wasn’t alone. A girl dressed in black stood next to a calendar. She wore a potent black, even though the room was dark and the edges were finely drawn against the background. It was likely that I may have been able to see her even with my eyes closed.

“Hello,” I said.

“Sit in the chair,”

“Why,” I replied, “I’m already sitting.”

“Not that chair!”, she cut me off, “In that chair.” She pointed to a chair which had all the makings of an electric chair.

“Why?”

“So, we can play a game.”

“What game?”

“It's called, "Is There a God?””

I wasn’t really about to start playing games with little girls with no supervision, even if it had been scrabble and not what was clearly about to end with, “Is he dead yet?”

“Listen, my name isn’t Jeff.”

I realised there was no need to actually make any small talk at all, as the door behind her was wide open, so I made a dash for it when she turned her back. This actually took three attempts to take off from the couch, for which I blame the couch, and not my aging knees.

“Don’t be a baby, I know what I’m doing,” I heard her voice raise four octaves, “Where the fuck did he go…this happens every fucking time. Moooooooom!”

The soundwaves kept up with me for a long while but soon faded into silence. Darkness crept in to keep it company. With irritation I grumbled, “Load shedding…”

“Captain…”

If it wasn’t for the silence I wouldn’t have heard it, but I still perked my ears up. Imagination is a poor bedfellow in such times.

“Captain…”

I turned a corner and the thick blackness had a sandwich shaped electric blue glow cut into it. While thinking a sandwich would really go down well, I realised it was the outline of a closed door.

While one doesn’t simply just go around knocking at eerily glowing doors, I figured that it wasn’t Santa’s colours and any port in a blackout.

I opened the door gently and it complied without any complaint.

The room was lit up from corner to corner; and if one squinted in just the right way, I believe one may have been able to see the future. Even the spiders were wearing sunglasses.

“Captain…”

The disembodied voice was coming from a high wing back chair facing a fireplace which bloomed a lively blue flame. I couldn’t see the owner.

I cautiously approached and turned the corner.

“Croc?”

“Wotcher Captain, do you have…”

“No, I don’t have any weed.”

I took a moment to check my pockets and realised I was wearing silky pyjamas.   

“Figures…”

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, if I wasn’t here, then I’d be there, and you’d have a slightly different stupid question and still no fucking weed.”

Fucking Croc.

He looked me up and down like a baby monkey seeing a banana for the first time.

“You look like hell,” he said, “What have you been up to?”

“I don’t actually know. I just woke up in a room with a weird child trying to kill me.”

“Ah, so just another Wednesday, my dude…”

“Is this real, Croc?”

“You can call me Croc Marley…”

“Croc Marley? Like Bob Marley? Oh, because you think that will get you weed sooner?”

“You know the day you ask an intelligent question; you’ll probably get hit by a bus.”

I then noticed that several heavy chains were tied to the Croc.

“Are you doing some BDSM?”

“Ah! You do not know the weight and length of strong chain you bear yourself! It was as full and as long as this seven Christmas eves ago and you have laboured on it since. Ah, it is a ponderous chain!”

I gave him a quizzical glare that would translate into a wtf emoji.

“Tonight,” he continued, “You will be haunted Captain, by three spirits…”

“Whiskey, vodka and tequila?” I said hopefully.

He gave me a glare that would have solidified mercury.

“Hear me! Captain! My time is nearly gone.”

“No need to be so dramatic. It’s not like you have anywhere to be.”

“Oh, but I do, I have an hour booked with Agatha, wonderful German woman who really knows how to pull on a chain. I can’t wait to see her face when my tail pops out.”

I grimaced as he quickly unfolded himself from the chair, stretched, burped twice, and exited stage left to the sound of clinking metal. The lights went off with the closing of the door.

“Fucking Eskom,” I thought as I felt around for the chair and was about to sink into it when I had second thoughts about sitting in a place that had just been vacated by the Croc.

I stumbled to the corner of the room where I had seen another chair, felt its outline and sunk into it.

*

I opened my eyes.

An alarm sounded in the distance. A low, repeated tone breaking down the walls of my sleep. It grew louder. It suddenly stopped. A flash of light struck the air as the curtains were drawn and impatient sunlight flooded the room.

A strange creature appeared before me. Well, it wasn’t strange. It was a very proud looking dog. He was a canvas of different shades of brown but a very discernible halo hovering over his ears. The alarm sound finally registered as barking.

“Hello Captain,” he said.

“What the hell?! You can talk?! Who’s a good boy?”

He bounced up to me and buried his face in my lap.

“No weed then?” he said.

I needed to get a sign printed.

“Who are you?” I asked

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” he said in a gruff voice, “But you can call me Ottobiography”.

I looked at him and he looked back at me with deep puppy dog eyes.

“We are going on a journey,” he said, “Rise! and walk with me.”

I was about to argue but the scene faded into grey and refocussed.

“Where are we?”

As I asked the question, the picture became clear. We were in a small room whose geography was familiar. The low hills of the couches, the peaks of the shelves, the tree in the corner.

“This is where I grew up,” I said.

The tree was covered in cotton wool and toilet roll ornaments. Under it was a mishmash of wrapped shapes.

A little boy ran into the room. It was a strange figure – like a child: yet so not like a child. One could tell it was too early for him to be up, but excitement washed his face.

“That’s me!”

The boy walked over to the tree and stood still scanning the loot. Without touching the objects, you could tell that he was identifying labels where the black ink spelled out his name. Before he was the Captain, he was something simpler.

“EVERYONE WAKE UP, SANTA’S BEEN HERE”.

His voice was alien, a sound that no one had heard in decades.

“Be careful you idiot,” I shouted out, “It’s likely a trap, probably broken glass and a she-man toy.”

“He can’t hear you,” Otto-Biography said, “He can’t hear or see you; this is but a reflection of a memory.”

The boy had waited long enough with no response, so he carefully selected a present. It wasn’t the biggest. Eager hands carefully pulled back tape, preserving the gift wrap.

“Socks?!?!?”

Angry tears formed in his eyes, “I asked for an NES, how does Santa get that wrong??”

His face formed into a hard expression as he thought, “He knew what I wanted. I was good all year. All year! This is a trick. He’s playing with me. That evil…that evil…bastard!”

Before I could try to give him a high five, the scene faded and refocussed.

It was Christmas Eve. The boy had grown older. He stood over a table, a box of rat poison spilling its contents over the wooden surface.

“This will get you,” he muttered as he tipped a large portion into a glass of tap water. “And ha ha, I hate jellebi, let’s see what you do with that you evil bastard.”

A small chicken watched carefully from the corner of the room.

“Oh hell,” I cried out, “It’s Cat! Santa, that evil bastard, killed her.”

The young man laughed maniacally as he stirred the water one more time before turning off the lights and headed off to bed.

The moonlight drenched the room. A clock ticked menacingly on the wall.

Cat hopped over to the table, investigating the jellebi before moving on to…

“No!” I shouted.

Cat pecked at the rat poison that was still on the table.

“No.” I whispered, reaching out to the chicken but my hand ghosted through her.

Cat looked around quizzically.

And then she looked no more.

“No…”

The scene faded and refocussed.

An old man sat in a chair in a dirty room. An empty whiskey bottle watched him sleep. An unkept beard was drizzled a dirty white, the clothes clung snugly to a belly desperately looking for freedom. A television played a nondescript classic movie in the background.

“Santa!”

“Look again.”

“Wait, I thought you said this was the past, is that me? I don’t look like that…”

I looked down at myself.

“Oh…”

Snippets of paper scattered the table with almost illegible scrawls.

Back to the Future…

Thor…

Croc puns…

Santa blasphemy…

The figure stirred and started mumbling, “Santa, that evil bastard…need to…must…Santa Claus Must Die!”

He growled before picking up the empty bottle and gave it a studious look. He suddenly glanced right at me. Our eyes met. But he didn’t see me. But I saw him. The deep sadness and anger. For all the life that had died without having been lived. Time is a construct we don’t ever fully understand. Just passing of moments. Words that can be read a million times, but only written once.

“Can he see us?”

He growled again and looked away staring at the mess on the table, before laying his head down and fading back to sleep.

I had had all the energy sapped from me, “Spirit, remove me from this place”.

“These are shadows of the things that have been,” said Ottobiography, “That they are what they are. Do not blame me!”

“Remove me, I cannot bear it.”

I turned to the proud dog, and seeing that he looked upon me with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces he had shown me, jumped upon him.

“Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!”

It wasn’t really a struggle, but the spirit who offered no resistance, began to glow high and bright. The light could not be diffused, even when I tried to throw a blanket on it, and the light streamed from under it.

An irresistible exhaustion came over me, and the room faded. But it did not refocus.

*

I opened my eyes.

I was back in the chair, consciousness berating me for calling on it too soon.

“Enough is enough,” I thought, “When the next spirit comes, I’m going to politely tell him get a head start fucking off and I’d meet him at the end.”

With that, a sudden scratching noise. It evolved to a knocking at the door.

I convinced my form to unmerge itself from the chair and walked over to the door. The knock intensified.

“Who’s there?”

The knocking continued in triplets.

“No one’s home,” I said hopefully.

No effect.

Fuck it.

I opened the door.

“Come in,” a voice on the other side said.

This was a terribly backwards knock, knock joke. But I obeyed.

I walked into a beautiful room. It would have been featured on the covers of magazines, given a chance. Bright beautiful paint was well lit by a spiderweb of well-chosen light fittings, that perfectly complimented the fireplace of strong dark bricks. The furniture was posh and modern but looked welcoming and homely. A coffee table sat in the middle with a mug steaming delicious smelling cocoa.

“Come in, come in, and know me better man!”

It was Ottobiography. But he looked happier, more joyful. His eyes gleamed with happiness as he ran towards me and jumped up with his forepaws reaching my shoulders. His nose touched my nose and I felt a sense of unerring happiness.

“Ottobiography?!”

“No, no. I am Ottonomous,” his large tongue fell happily from his lips, “I am the Ghost of Christmas Present! Look upon me.”

Besides the demeanour, it was exactly Ottobiography, except then I noticed he was wearing a ridiculous little green bow on his head.

He saw me notice and said, “Get it? I’m a gift! Because present”

He chuckled and his whole body shook with laughter.

“Touch my bone…”

He had a large bone of indeterminate species hanging around his neck for easy nibbling access. I hesitantly reached out and touched it.

The room faded and refocussed.

“Say my name…”

A very manly voice broke through the gloom, and the room resonated with the crack of a whip hitting bare skin.

“Agatha!”

Agatha?

Croc?

What the fuck.

“Oops,” said Ottonomous with a twinkle in his eye, “Right time, wrong place.”

“Pull my tail!”

The room may have faded, or I may have gone temporarily blind.

When it refocussed, I opened one eye carefully.

A warm glow filled the room that you felt before you saw. A figure sat at a table, nimble fingers folding wrapping paper around a puzzle. She was beautiful. An angel in an oversized hoodie. No doubt to hide the wings.

“Who is that?” I asked, realising my mouth was open.

“Don’t you know?”

The woman, while being the personification of a sunrise, looked sad.

“Oh Captain, my Captain,” she whispered, “Where are you?”

“Who is she??” I asked again more urgently this time.

“She’s the foolish one who fell in love with you.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t I know her?”

“You’re off fighting your battles…real and imaginary…and she’s the one waiting for you to come home.”

“Why would anyone leave her alone??”

“You’ve chosen your path.”

“No!”

A side table sat in the corner, crowned with a vase of yellow roses. Picture frames held memories I was in, but didn’t remember. A bystander to my own happiness. Two figures in each others arms – smiling, laughing, a place I didn’t know where was possible. An NPC is my own story.

“Ottonomous, what is this?”

“This is the present.”

I was about to reply but realised I had nothing to say. I was off fighting demons. Santa. A fated life.

“We must go.”

“Can’t we stay longer?”

I saw Ottonomous look lovingly towards the ground. A great big bundle of fur lay at the woman’s feet.

“Unfortunately, we must go.”

The room faded.

*

I opened my eyes.

They were filled with tears that I could not control.

I wasn’t back in bed. I was in an open field. A storm was building, and the world felt like it was filled with the sooty remnants of a fire.

A robed ethereal figure appeared in the distance and slowly floated towards me. It was robed in an ashen, ragged cloak which guised its face.

“I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?” I guessed when the figure reached me, “Let me guess, Ottobe…”

He didn’t reply. The feeling of joy that Ottonomous exuded was replaced with a sense of unerring dread.

“Like Ought-to-be??”

The spirit didn’t answer, but from the folds in his garments, an appendage was raised pointing us in a direction.

“Is that your scythe or are you just glad to see me?”

In silence it started floating in the direction.

“Everyone’s a critic,” I muttered as I followed.

We walked across the field and the air grew heavier still. Bullets of raindrops fell, stinging the back of a neck.

We eventually reached a small hill.

“What now, Spirit?”

The robes lifted again pointing towards a small rock in the ground. But more than a rock. It was unnatural. A tombstone.

“No.” I said without any emotion.

I walked around to the front and a man size hole was dug out in front of me. I looked upon the stone at the head of the grave.

“Captain.”

It was in Comic Sans.

“No Spirit, how?”

I looked around. The Spirit had disappeared.

Was this how it ends? It was confusing though, for someone who was likely to be cremated or drowned at sea and never to be seen again.

“Wait Spirit. Hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!”

I wept.

“Spirit, show yourself, I know the error of my ways. Santa Claus is not real! I do not need to kill him. It is a representation of my own fears, my own failures, my own shortcomings. I must face these demons, not an imaginary man in a red coat. This is the end of all that. Today I start my life anew. I will give of myself and to myself all that is deserved. I will love instead of hate. I will love completely and wholly. I will be the man I should have become.”

Silence.

“Spirit, show yourself!”

…

“Somebody has been a bad boy…”

What the fuck?!

The robed figure appeared behind me. I turned my head catching him slowly pull off the hood. A twinkly eye, a full white beard, a hint of brandy fragranced the air.

“Wait…what???”

Before I could move, Santa kicked me in the back and I fell head first into the grave. I heard the crack before I felt it as my head hit what could have only been a rock or a hard place.

“Ho. Ho. Ho.” I heard from above, “Or perhaps a spade would be more useful now…”

And my eyes closed.

 

 

*

Dedicated to Otto, a good boy