Christmastime in the City
A Humorous Story
Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash
Snow fell thick in the thick darkness of the darkest night of the year. It fell heavy upon the ice and upon a squat building whose light spilled out upon the ice and upon the nearby trees. A door opened and a figure stepped out into the snow. The figure was dressed in black. It wore tinted goggles that shone purple in the yellow light of the doorway. Several more figures followed it.
The first figure looked around for a moment. When framed in the light of the doorway, it had first appeared tall, but upon further inspection it was rather diminutive. It reached a gloved hand up to its face and pushed its goggles up onto its forehead, revealing dark eyes set in a green face. It pulled down the balaclava covering the lower half of its face. Green skin, pointed nose, a twisted mouth.
With an exhalation of fog in the bitter air, the creature reached its other hand into a zippered pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Fishing one out, lighting it, and taking a drag, the creature grinned.
A klaxon sounded. Glancing over its shoulder at the other figures, the creature grinned more broadly, the cigarette hanging from one corner of its mouth.
“It’s Christmastime in the city, boys,” it said. Then, pulling the goggles and visor back down over its face, it said a more muffled, “time to go.”
With a crunch of black boots in ankle-deep snow, the creatures moved out. They traveled in loose formation, rounding the building and marching to where a winged black vehicle sat waiting. Miraculously, the snow seemed to fall only around the vehicle, without ever falling on it. As if some mighty and mysterious force of determinism gave each individual flake an imperceptible shove and the eddies and whirls of the air added their own to its momentum and in the end a flake would just barely miss the edge of the black craft and land in the snow beside it. Yet, somehow, the snow beneath the craft and the snow around it never seemed to differ in height.
As the creatures approached, the vehicle lit up with flashes of strange, multicolored lights. A hairline crack appeared, broadened, and became a portal. A ramp descended silently into the snow.
“Ah, good ole’ Blitzkrieg, still working after all these years,” muttered the jovial creature in front, somehow managing to finish his cigarette through a hole in his ‘clava.
“Doesn’t he mean...?” began one of the small creatures towards the rear.
“Yes. Shhh. It’s his joke,” muttered one of the others.
When they were reassembled inside the craft, the leader pulled off his balaclava and goggles. He also removed his black helmet, which he placed beside the pilot’s chair, exposing his pointed green ears in the process. He sat down and within moments the craft had taken off and begun zooming out over a darkened, pine forest. The floor of the craft appeared completely black when viewed from below – to the point where mortals looking up from the ground would have seen only a bit of sky that was blacker than the rest of the black sky (their confused brains might have thought that the sky was supposed to be covered in clouds, but by this point it would have been too late and the blacker patch would have been gone) – but it was transparent to those sitting inside, so that they could see every detail of the forest floor. Unlike their captain, the rest of them kept the night-vision goggles on.
“The old man let himself get seen again.”
“What’s he even doing out this close to the time?”
“Practicing.”
“Practicing for what?”
“The big night.”
“My foot. S’he need with that? He’s practiced twenny million times b’now. He’s playin’.”
“Pipe down back there. Don’t matter what the boss does to get hisself in trouble. S’our job to cover his tracks. And to keep our heads down and our mouths shut.”
They flew south over the North American continent until they reached a small town in the northeastern corner of the state of New York. As they flew over towns and cities, a scanner picked up bits of chatter from the locales below. They landed near where they’d heard the words, “sleigh tracks in the snow,” come across the scanner.
There was a farmhouse on the edge of town, with a field sloping gently down to pine woods. An unmarked road ran along the edge of the property, passing by the house and heading towards town in one direction, disappearing into the woods in the other. An old stone wall – tumbling down in places – paralleled the road.
They landed at the edge of the woods, in line with the red New-England-style farmhouse. One of the creatures grabbed a black device that looked similar to a rifle, but with a much wider barrel. Two others – including the leader – strapped on what appeared to be smaller versions of this same device, roughly the size of a handgun. The rest picked up various unidentifiable pieces of equipment, with odd-looking pneumatic tubes, greenish screens, strange-looking knobs and levers.
As they marched out into the snow, the leader gave out some brisk orders. “Standard cleanup. Jack, you get on the tracks. Kirby, head into the woods and see if there’re any branches broken or trees felled. Fred, snoop around on ‘print-mode’ and see if you see any traces anywhere – boots, gloves, fingers, you know the drill – wipe ‘em if you find ‘em. Charlie, head up to the house and knock. We got to talk to these people and see how many people saw and who they told. Frost, you’re with me since you’re observing. I’ll explain as we go.”
They fanned out, some heading into the trees and the one called Charlie heading up to the house. The one called Jack began attending to two fat lines in the snow running parallel to the house and ending abruptly, feet from the stone wall. He had a large plastic box on his back with a pneumatic pipe running over one shoulder and ending in a snow-blower-style aperture that he held in one hand. He began applying a white powder – which looked like snow – to hide the lines.
A vehicle came into sight on the road heading away from town. Everyone dropped, except Charlie, who was nearly at the house. They watched the headlights approach, hoping it would keep going into the woods.
It turned into the gravel driveway, pulling around the gravel circle and coming to a stop before the front door. It was a patrol vehicle with the blue lights switched off.
Charlie dove into a bush just before the door to the patrol car opened and a blue-uniformed officer got out. The cop strode leisurely to the door, glancing in the direction of the winged craft, which had turned itself invisible seconds before he pulled into the driveway. He narrowed his eyes, but continued up the steps to the front door. He banged the ornate knocker.
A balding man came to the door. He was perhaps late-middle-aged, with horn-rimmed glasses that had been in style decades ago.
“Someone called in a… sighting of a sleigh… with eight, tiny reindeer. From this address. Earlier this evening,” said the policeman, checking his notepad, as if unsure about the eight, tiny reindeer. “Four days before Christmas,” he added.
“Yes, that was me,” said the man. “I didn’t get it on video and my wife is out of town on business and my kids haven’t brought the grandkids up yet and so it was just me that saw it, but I saw it! I swear it was Santa! And his sleigh! And reindeer!”
“Really,” said the unconvinced officer.
“I know it sounds crazy. You wouldn’t believe me. But I swear.”
“You said eight reindeer? What about Rudolf? One of them got a red nose?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see one. I don’t know.”
Suddenly a gravelly voice shouted, “Freeze!”
It was Charlie. He was covering the two of them with what appeared to be an oversized handgun. It was the size of his diminutive forearm.
“Don’t move, mister,” he said, training the gun, if that’s what it was, on the cop. Charlie’s voice sounded like he’d gargled pine needles and icicles every morning for the last three decades. “Put your hands up.”
“What are you?” asked the homeowner, shyly raising his hands over his head.
“Is that a real gun,” asked the mustached cop.
“Hands up,” said Charlie to the cop.
Two more figures jogged up. It was the leader of the creatures and his trainee, Frost.
“There are more of you?” asked the officer.
“Hit ‘em,” said the leader to Charlie.
“Ok, boss.”
Charlie pulled the trigger on his device. Nothing issued from the barrel – at least nothing visible – but the policeman’s eyes glazed over for a moment.
“What did you do to him?” exclaimed the homeowner.
“Shut up, you’re next.”
“Steven, what do I say to him,” asked Charlie, indicating the officer.
“Tell him swamp gas. That should get us what we want. And you can call me Captain, none of this first-name stuff, Private. That’s insubordination.”
“Swamp gas?” asked the trainee.
“Shut up. I’ll explain later.”
Charlie walked towards the cop, whose eyes were still glazed over.
“What are you doing to him?” asked the frightened homeowner.
“Quiet.”
“Don’t touch him,” screamed the homeowner.
“Screw this,” muttered the captain, who pulled a similar device out of his belt and aimed it with his left hand at the homeowner without looking at him. The captain pulled the trigger.
Now it was the homeowner’s turn to have his eyes go fuzzy. Both he and the officer remained standing upright. Whatever had been done to them did not seem to affect their legs.
Charlie whispered something in the policeman’s ear, then tapped him on the forehead with some sort of stylus. The man shook himself, then wordlessly walked to his patrol car, got inside, started it, reversed out of the driveway, and drove off.
“What about ‘im,” asked Charlie, jerking his head at the dazed homeowner, “wipe his memory?”
“No, no,” said the captain, “just wipe the bit with the big man. We can use the rest.”
Charlie repeated his whispering and tapping. The homeowner shook himself similarly to the officer and walked wordlessly back into his house.
“C’mon. Let’s go see if the others’ve finished up.”
Later that night, the officer in question, Officer Paul Doe, went on the local television station’s late-evening talk show. The host asked him about the lights in the sky that had been reported by several residents in the vicinity of the farmhouse.
“Well, Parker,” he told the host, “While there appears to have been something mysterious going on tonight, it can all be easily explained. You see, there was some gas seeping out of the local swamp.”
“What swamp?”
“Never you mind. It was gas, and it illuminated in some – I’ll admit they were strange – but they’re easily explainable, physical phenomena.”
“Hold on a moment. You’re saying it was, ‘swamp gas,’ and you expect us to believe you?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Parker, now…”
The creatures watched the exchange on a screen aboard their craft, which was now flying over the Atlantic Ocean.
“Why swamp gas?” asked the newbie.
“It’s a code word,” replied the captain, who was piloting the craft on a course for Eastern Europe, “it’ll get all the right parties interested.”
“Swamp gas?”
“You’ll see.
“Where are we going now?”
“Poland.”
“Why Poland?”
“Because I said so. Any more questions?”
“What are we doing in Poland?”
“You’ll see.”
When they arrived in the airspace above Krakow, Charlie told Frost to take a seat next to him at the mission operator platform. At Charlie’s direction, Frost operated the controls to release a series of multicolored lights in the sky outside the craft. The lights reassembled themselves into what appeared to be saucers that blinked on and off.
“Flashing saucers?” asked the kid.
“Yes. To keep the theories alive.”
“Why do we still do this?”
“I just told you. Our job is to cover the Big Man’s tracks. This is the best way to do it. Nobody believes he’s real anymore. Just the way he likes it.”
“So, we fake some flying saucers to…?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“What’re we doing next, crop circles?”
“Nah. We don’t go in for that sort of thing anymore.”
Two days later, back in their polar compound, the team reassembled at the captain’s bequest. They stood in front of a large screen, split into perhaps ten thousand miniature moving pictures. He pushed a few buttons and the screen resolved into a single picture.
“Look,” he said. He pointed at the bottom, where the words, “Streaming Live on YouTube,” scrolled across.
Two men, one dressed in a Blink-182 concert shirt, the other dressed entirely in black, stood in the gravel driveway of the farmhouse from two days earlier.
“Aaaand, we’re live,” said the Blink-182 shirt-wearer. “We’re back, coming to you from Buffalo, New York, where the latest in extraterrestrial activity has been reported by one Albert J. Nock.”
“Alfred,” interjected his friend.
“Alfred. Alfred Nock. Who has reported what is almost without a doubt the biggest sighting in a decade. Today, we’ll be interviewing him. Do we go all the way or what? Don’t forget to rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.”
He leaned into the camera and smiled with practiced casualness, “By the way, you’re listening to the Yes, They’re Real Podcast. We’re you’re hosts, Jacob and Blake. Weeeeeee’re here.”
He grinned and his counterpart began speaking.
“We’ve got our guest right here. Alfred, please, please step into the picture. There you go, thanks. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the Yes, They’re Real Podcast.”
“Uh, good to be here, I guess. I must say, I don’t really want any publicity and I only agreed to go on your show ‘cause…”
“That’s fine. That’s fine,” interjected the black-clad man, who appeared to be nineteen years old. “Just tell us what you saw.”
“I saw these tracks in the snow. Like the runners of a strange landing vehicle.”
“Is that all you saw?”
“No. I saw them! The creatures.”
“What did they look like?”
“They were all dressed in black. Little guys. ‘Bout three-feet tall. But I saw one of ‘em pull his mask down a little. He was green! His skin was green.”
“Did they say anything? Do anything? Abduct you?”
“No, no, they didn’t abduct me. But they had ray guns.”
“Ray guns, ray guns, we’ll get to that. Did they say anything?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Oh, I remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“As they were leaving, one of them whispered something in my ear?”
“As they were leaving? Go on. What did he say? We’ve got a million fans who want desperately to know.”
“Well. It was curious. You’re gonna think I’m making this up.”
“No way, man! We believe you!”
“Well, okay then. I’m not making this up. He said, he said to me, ‘Merry Christmas.’”
“Merry Christmas?”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Just Merry Christmas?”
“That’s all I can remember. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Very puzzling. Very puzzling. Wonder what it means.”