New Stories from the Twilight Zone by Serling Rod

Author:Serling, Rod [Serling, Rod]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Rod Serling Books
Published: 2013-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

The Night of the Meek

It was Christmas. There was absolutely no question about that. Festive good will filled the air like the smell of maple syrup—sweet, sugary, and thick with insistence. There was one more day to complete Christmas shopping and this item of information was dinned into the minds of the citizenry like a proclamation of impending martial law “One More Shopping Day until Christmas!” It was the war cry of the big sell, and on this twenty-fourth day of the twelfth month of the one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-sixty-first year of our Lord, it served as a warning that just a few hours remained for people to open up their wallets and lay rather tired fingers on dog-eared credit cards.

“One More Shopping Day until Christmas.” The words were strung in tinseled lettering across the main floor of Wimbel’s Department Store. Mr. Walter Dundee, the floor manager of Wimbel’s, glanced at them briefly as he did his rounds up and down the aisles, casting businesslike eyes at the organized mayhem surrounding him.

He was a balding little fellow in his fifties, inclined to paunchiness, but briskly efficient in his movements and attitudes. Mr. Dundee could spot a shoplifter, a bum credit risk, or a grimy little child breaking a mechanical toy—he had an abhorrence of children of all ages—in one single all-pervading glance. He could also spot an ineffectual salesperson just by listening to a couple of sentences of the opening pitch.

Mr. Dundee walked through the aisles of Wimbel’s that December 24th, barking out orders, snapping fingers, and generally riding herd on these last few moments of Yuletide humbuggery. He extended watery smiles to harried mothers and their squalling children, and he gave explicit and terse directions to any and all questions as to where merchandise could be found, where rest rooms were located, and the exact times of delivery for all purchases over twenty-five dollars, no matter how far out in the suburbs they went. As he walked up the aisles past Ladies Hand Bags, toward the Toy Department, he noted the empty Santa Claus chair. One of his sparse little eyebrows, set at a rakish tilt over a tiny blue eye, shot up in fast-mounting concern. There was a sign over the chair which read, “Santa Claus will return at 6:00 o’clock.”

The large clock on the west wall read “6:35.” Santa Claus was thirty-five minutes late. An incipient ulcer in Mr. Dundee’s well-rounded abdomen did little pincer things to his liver. He belched, and felt anger building up like a small flame suddenly blasted by a bellows. That Goddamn Santa Claus was a disgrace to the store. What was his name—Corwin? That Goddamn Corwin had been the most undependable store Santa Claus they had ever hired. Only yesterday Dundee had seen him pull out a hip flask and take an unsubtle snort—smack dab in the middle of a Brownie troop. Mr. Dundee had sent him an icy look which froze Corwin in the middle of his tippling.

Mr. Dundee was noted for his icy looks.

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