Santa Steps Out by Robert Devereaux

Author:Robert Devereaux
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dark Highway Press
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

10. Invitations Accepted

Needling his way in and out of an immense gloom-gray blanket of cloudcover, the Easter Bunny strained to pick out the tiny island from the vast wash of ocean. It had to be close by. There was no mistaking the ill winds weaving fiercely for miles now, nor the blind rage that shot through those winds, a rage whose precise counterpart he had seen spill out of Wendy's bedroom when the Tooth Fairy reared up and blasted Santa Claus above the child's bed. Banking low out of the clouds, he saw, no more than a mile ahead, the unmistakable sliver of land rising like a rude welt on the bare buttocks of the ocean.

She squatted upon the sand at the island's northern extremity. Near her hunched a cedar tree. Tattered strands of seaweed hung from the twists of its limbs; broken seashells lay like shattered bone about its base. At its top he saw the torn half of a starfish, as blue and lifeless as the hand of a dead Morlock. The Tooth Fairy's elbows locked her knees rigidly together. Her arms shot straight out, ending in tight claws turned up to the sky. Her eyes, shooting dread far out to sea, burned into a wall of gray that seemed continually to be thudding down upon the horizon.

With caution and cowardice, the Easter Bunny touched paw to sand fifty yards off and hopped closer on a zigzag, pretending to sniff curiously at the stiff dune plants, at driftwood, at strewn clumps of seaweed which marked the limits of the last tide. Her stillness spooked him. Were it not for the nearly imperceptible rise and fall of her necklace of teeth and the dreadful in-out-in-out of her belly, he might have thought her transfixed into statuary.

But despite her apparent calm, there was something unsettling about this ravishing creature's vital signs. Being near her had set up resonances in him, echoes from some dim time, the time before God made him the Easter Bunny, the old time when he had been more in control of his life, and perhaps of the universe itself. His brain hummed dangerously. He suddenly wished himself safe and snug in his burrow with Petunia, whose passivity covered not some smoldering fireball of fury but more passivity, passivity pure and simple.

His heart nearly gave out when she turned her head and demanded: "What do you want?" Leaping straight up, he collapsed into a heap of confusion and cowered in the sand, emitting a faint high-pitched squeal like a cornered piglet. She watched him with cobra eyes, waiting for an answer.

Swallowing his fear, the Easter Bunny hopped closer and sat back on his haunches. "I watch at windows," he began. "I watch acts of copulation. It excites me." He fell silent, though his jaws twitched, wanting to go on.

"Is there a point to this?"

He shut his eyes for a moment and forced his neck to bend forward. When he opened them, he was looking at the animal

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