Santa came in a red pickup truck with a giant electric nose strapped to the grille. Sheriff Travis — not a real sheriff but a former one, the man who along with a mildly retarded assistant was in charge of Severna Forest security — was in the back, lounging on a pile of presents. “It’s all a big fix,” Calvin whispered to Jemma as Santa took a seat on the throne beneath the tree, and the presents were unloaded and piled around him.
“I know,” Jemma said, because he’d already explained it the year before. The presents weren’t from Santa at all, but from their parents. They bought them in stores and wrapped them themselves and labeled them and dropped them off in a secret room at Mr. Duffy’s store. Calvin was puzzled and a little angered by the whole exercise, and was always rooting in his advancing vocabulary for words to describe it, an infringement, a travesty, a farce, but he had stopped asking their mother and father why the real Santa permitted it to happen because they always said the same thing: Because it pleases him to do so.
Jemma sipped on a cup of hot chocolate, waiting for the C’s. She went up just after Calvin, and did the curtsy just like all the other girls before her did. Calvin would not bow before the false Santa, or even shake his hand. They took their presents and walked back to their mother, and held on to them patiently, waiting for Santa to stand, after the last gift had been distributed, and cry out, “Open them now, children! Open your gifts and see how Santa loves you!” Jemma found that she could wait calmly to open her present, and that her agitation had not increased one iota from the time she got her present to when Oliver Zork claimed his, because she knew that this lesser Santa distributed lesser presents. She got a rubber ball and paddle set. Calvin got a fancy top.
Some stationary caroling followed. Jemma grew a little nostalgic as she sang, thinking back on previous days when this had all impressed her more, when she’d thought it was the real Santa up there on the throne, when the tree had seemed bigger and the hot chocolate hotter, when it had been so hard to remember the words to the songs, and she had liked the present she’d got so much it almost seemed like Christmas had already come, a little bit. Somehow the nostalgia soured back into the waiting feeling again as they walked home, her mother not holding her hand anymore but working the ball and paddle set vigorously.
“Did I ever tell you the story,” Calvin asked them as they approached their hill, “about the girl who tried to kill Santa?” Their mother said yes, but Jemma said no, though she had heard it before, always on the way back from the tree, and always at this same spot. Jemma liked the story, and wanted a distraction from the waiting. So even though she knew that she’d be listening to a story she already knew, on a night when all stories were endless and all journeys endless, when the hill would stretch infinitely above her, and she still had an eternity to pass even before bedtime, and even though she knew that listening to this story would be its own special torture, she said yes.
“She wasn’t a bad girl,” Calvin said. “Well, yes she was, but not in the way you think. She got excellent grades and was very polite and helped her mother around the house and never complained even on Christmas Eve that she was bored or that time was passing too slowly. She sold lemonade in the summer and hot brownies in the winter, door to door here in the Forest to raise money for starving children in Armenia and South Antarctica and Bowie and McLean, and she went to church every Sunday and was very quiet, and knew all the prayers, even in Latin, because this was a long, long time ago.
“And she looked like a nice girl, with very pretty curls that were almost blond, and big green eyes and a heart-shaped face, and she mostly acted like a nice girl, but she had a bad habit of creeping out at night and stabbing little animals with a big knife her father had unwisely given her for a birthday present. He worked in a museum, where they had knives like that, and he thought she should have it because it was pretty and because it used to belong to a princess. So he gave it to her, not realizing that he was encouraging in her this very bad habit.
“She went out every night, and at first she killed little rabbits, and then she killed cats, and then she killed dogs, and everyone in the Forest became very afraid, because they thought that a terrible black man had come to kill their pets. Nobody thought it would be the sweet little girl who lived up on the hill — yes, in our very house. Could anyone bad live there? people asked when they noticed which way the trail of blood pointed. The answer, they thought, was no.
“So the dogs kept dying, and then it was ponies, and then horses, and then an elephant, just passing through, poor sweet Simba visiting with the circus, asleep down by the river. She stabbed him right in his brain. She had killed something as big as a house, but it wasn’t enough for her. She needed more. It almost would be sad, that she still needed more, that she never got what she wanted even though she worked so hard for it, but don’t feel sorry for her. You may have noticed by now how thoroughly bad she really was. I shouldn’t have said that she wasn’t.
“What was she to do? No self-respecting circus would come near Severna Forest now, she’d have no second chance at another Simba, or at a giraffe, which would have been even better. She could travel to the zoo and kill a lion, smaller but fiercer than an elephant, or walk to the sea and stab at a whale. Or she could kill a person, the worst and mightiest creature of them all, much smaller than an elephant, but enough to satisfy her, she thought. Enough that she could just put her knife away afterward and never have to touch it again. That’s what she thought.
“It was a problem, though, to pick one. She looked around in her classroom at all the boys and girls and knew that none of them would do, and looked at her teachers, and almost stabbed her science teacher after washing his blackboards for him. But he was asleep on his desk, and looked so sweet and innocent and small as he slept that she just couldn’t do it. Because he wasn’t enough, and she knew it.
“She was very sad, then, though everyone else in the Forest was happy, because they thought that the big black man had moved on to greener killing fields. Then at Christmas she figured it out. She stood just where we were standing and the stupid fake Santa gave her her present, but not the one he thought he was giving her. He handed her a Raggedy Ann doll, but what he gave her was a perfect kill. She was one of those girls who got good grades, but wasn’t very smart — she could name all the counties in Ireland, but you could sell her her own underwear. She thought he was the real Santa, and thought for sure that if she could kill the real Santa, then she’d finally have what she wanted, and she could bury her knife. So she creeped out of her house — yes, our house too — as soon as her parents brought her home and went back down to the clubhouse, where the fake Santa and his helpers were having a party. She followed him home when he stumbled out — he’d had too much to drink, which should have clued her in that he wasn’t the real Santa. She followed him up this hill, thinking he was on his way to where he’d hidden his sleigh in the woods, and wondering if she should maybe kill all the reindeer too, but finally she couldn’t wait anymore. She ran up behind him and stabbed him in the back. Right here is where she did it.”