Chapter 15
Terri: Early Saturday Morning
Terri is supposed to be at the table where the high school theater club has Rice Krispy treats for sale, all money going toward wardrobe for the winter production of “Once Upon a Mattress.” But when she gets to the table, no one is there. No kids from the theater club and no Rice Krispy treats. Terri, in her ever-nervous state, feels suddenly off kilter. Something’s wrong but she just hasn’t discovered what yet. She asks anyone she sees if they’ve seen the theater kids. No one has seen them. Terri sits down on the bleachers to get herself together and she’s suddenly reminded of that night she smoked pot with Kurt Bauman, when she couldn’t tell if what was happening was real or dream. There’s a fuzzy, not quite real feel to everything that’s happening. Terri keeps shaking her head as if that will clear it all up.
She does the only normal thing she can do under the circumstance, the one thing that always settles her when she’s was nervous. She starts taking pictures. Just a few shots here and there of the lights and the decorations. But even that doesn’t calm her nerves. Terri’s usually pretty excited when taking photos but now she feels off. She’s mentally losing her balance.
Terri walks over the concession stand thinking maybe everyone went to get hot chocolate or coffee. Then it hits her, like it hit so many others that morning: It wasn’t even cold out. Normally on a Winter Festival day, everyone is wintered out in gloves and scarves and hats and while they are all wearing their gloves and scarves and hats, just out of habit, they really don’t need them. It was… warm. Almost like spring. This freaks Terri out and she stands there for a minute, between the food tables and the concession stand, she just stands there like a lost little girl. And that’s what she is for a minute. Because being warm on Winter Festival day? That’s like being in another world. Terri looks up. Blue sky. Not a single cloud. She shudders.
She hears Mrs. Fetterling saying something about the lack of snow and the Fetterling kid starts to cry. People are having a mass freak out that it isn’t going to snow. Everything in Greener Valley is so standard. It never changes. They live off consistency. Terri thinks of the people who go into Polly’s for breakfast when she’s waitressing and they always order, say, two eggs sunny side up with a side of well done bacon, wheat toast and hash browns. They get it every single Saturday. What if one day they came in and they ordered pancakes? Or if she gave them a Greek omelet instead of their usual meal? That would just turn everything upside down. So the no snow thing, when it has snowed every single Winter Festival since Greener Valley existed, it’s just freaking weird. Weird enough to make Terri’s head spin.
She still can’t find her theater friends, so she wanders over toward the flagpole because it’s just about time for Stu McLundy to announce the opening of the festivities. She notices a couple of things. First, there are a lot of people missing. Every single person in Greener Valley comes to this thing, without exception. The only one who isn’t supposed to be there is Stu, because he’s at the radio station. But there are gaps. She can’t tell you right away who’s missing but there are definite gaps in the crowd. Her nerves, already frayed, are at risk of becoming shot. Nothing’s right, everything’s wrong and her Spidey sense tingles. She takes out her cell and calls a bunch of people – Eddie, Jed, Christy, Robin. No one answers. She checks her text messages. Nothing. She starts to wonder if there’s a conspiracy against her, if she broke some theater guild protocol and they’re all plotting something against her and then and then all of a sudden she’s hyperventilating. Just as she thinks she’s going to pass out, the PA systems squeak to life. Festival time. No snow. No Rice Krispy treats table. There’s no Grant, no Eddie or Christy and she doesn’t even see her parents until the last second, but they’re all the way across the center and they don’t see her waving frantically to them.
“Winter Wonderland” kicks in. The scratchy sound of the record, familiar and comforting, relaxes her and Terri started to breathe normal again. It’s the Motown version. There’s no snow and no friends and things are weird but she figures maybe this will put it all into place. She sings a little bit out loud.
The song ends. And that’s where it all goes to hell. As soon as the song ends.
“Scratch and Skip. Holiday edition. Stu McLundy here.”
Everyone stops and stares at the loudspeakers as if they could see Stu up there. There was something really, really wrong. Terri listens carefully to Stu’s voice. Maybe he’s sick. No, he’s definitely drunk. I know what drunk sounds like. It sounds like my dad at about 7pm. Then Eddie appears out of nowhere, grabs Terri by the arm. “Dude. Is he drunk?” They look at each other. Neither one of them says anything but they’re both thinking the same thing. Everything is wrong.
Stu puts on another record, but the needle misses and it makes this horrible skreeeeech sound that causes many people at the festival to do the sign of the cross. Terri starts to shake and she looks to Eddie to calm her down but his face has gone totally white.
Stu fixes the record. “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” plays. “Not a Christmas song,” Terri say to Eddie. She states the obvious, but only to say something. Eddie grabs her hand. “What the hell?”
Stu makes his announcement about being fired and the radio station being sold and Terri thinks he’s crying, which makes it even more bizarre. “Jingle Bell Rock” plays while he talks, which gives the whole scenario a bizarre soundtrack Terri will never forget.
Then it happens. The thing that turns everything. Because at that point Terri thinks maybe the day could still be redeemed, that Stu McLundy would sober up and it would suddenly start snowing and everything would be ok.
But he says it.
Motherfuckers.
“Holy. Crap. Did he really just say that?” Eddie and Terri look at each other and they don’t know whether to giggle or scream. Cursing isn’t a big deal, the kids do it all the time, their parents do it. But on a loudspeaker at the Winter Festival while drunk? If you ask Terri she wouldn’t be able to explain to you how wrong that felt. There’s a weird feeling hanging in the air. Everything is wrong.
When Terri turns from Eddie to start walking toward her family, she sees the shadows. They’re shadows of people except they aren’t attached to people. She can tell not everyone sees them. Eddie doesn’t see them. Mrs. Fetterling doesn’t seem like she can but her kid cries real hard, the kind of kid cry that says he’s scared shit of something. Fear. Terri had never really felt fear in her entire life but she knows for sure that what she’s feeling at this moment borders on real, honest fear. She feels cold, she thinks her heart is going to jump out of her body. She watches the shadows. They move across the center toward the podium. That REM song keeps going through her head. It’s the end of the world as we know it. Except she doesn’t feel fine. She wants to cry. This is Greener Valley. Where things follow a certain path. Where things go right. All this is as far from right you can get and she doesn’t know how to explain the feeling in the pit of her stomach to anyone but later she would say it was like someone poking holes in her soul.
Then it gets worse. Hank Hoffman, at the podium, starts shaking. He’s having a seizure. One minute he’s struggling into his Santa suit and the next, his eyes roll back in his head and he hits the ground shaking. Someone screams “Put your fingers in his mouth so he doesn’t bite his tongue!” But that’s a pretty wrong thing to do and John Miller ends up with two bitten fingers.
Someone calls an ambulance and a ring of people formed around Hank. He stops shaking but he’s not moving and the little Braun kid asked if he’s dead.
“I don’t think he’s dead, Greg. I think he’s just resting.”
“I think he’s dead.”
“Someone see if he’s dead.”
Then Rosie James comes forward and leaned down over Hank. “I can hear him breathing. He’s alive.” Everyone is about to burst into spontaneous applause when Hank opens his eyes and says “Merry Fucking Christmas” in a raspy whisper, a sound both dark and evil. When he says those words Terri swears the shadows shake like they’re dancing. His voice frightens the kids. A few adults grab the kids that are crying and bring them over the clubhouse to get them hot chocolate, as if that will make it all ok. People sort of back off from Hank a little because even though he just came out of a seizure and that might make someone act weird, this has become a weird beyond medical reasons.
Then Hank start singing. “O Holy Night,” the song his wife usually sings after they light the tree, but coming out of Hank it’s a song made of evil. It sounds dark and ugly and Eddie makes a comment about how bad Hank smells all of a sudden.
Hank stands up and takes off his Santa boots and pants, which he throws off to the side of the stage like a stripper. He’s wearing boxers underneath, so now he’s standing in the town center on the day of the Winter Festival – after just having a seizure in front of most of Greener Valley - in a Santa jacket and fake Santa beard singing a wicked version of “O Holy Night” and reeking like a diaper full of baby shit left out in the sun. Terri starts crying and she doesn’t care if anyone can see her crying because this is such a big clusterfuck of nasty crap happening, the only thing people notice is Hank Hoffman doing a really bad impression of Santa. But Terri sees other things going on, like the shadows dancing around Hank. The kids freak out. The only Santa they knows is fat and jolly and gives you presents with a smile.
Greg points at Hank and yells “Stop it you fake Santa!” and then something weird happens inside Hank. Terri doesn’t know how she knew this, she just does. It’s as if all of a sudden she can see inside all those people and it’s so ugly and hateful that she fears her own neighbors more than the shadows. She looks at Hank and knows what he’s thinking. Terri knows he’s thinking about workplace incidents and mass shootings and dead bodies everywhere. She knows he hates the Santa suit and the festival and Greener Valley itself and everyone who lives in this town is a liar and a phony. She hears him. She hears the voice inside him saying “I hate every last one of you motherfuckers” even though he never says that out loud and it scares her so much; that he can think these things, that she can hear them and the worst part, that she understood why he thought some of this stuff. Sometimes I think it, too. I think we all do. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this town. Everyone holds their feelings in. Everyone holds in the truth. And then it stays inside and turns ugly and sometimes it has to come out.
Hank has Greg Braun in a headlock. Mrs. Braun jumps on him in a minute, jerks her son out of his grip and starts to scream a bunch of curses. Hank tries yelling back at her, but when he opened his mouth a dark green mist pours out of him. And that’s when Greg Braun and all the other children at the festival start letting out high-pitched wails.
****
When Terri finishes telling me about the morning at the festival, she takes a deep breath and plops herself down on the couch next to a near comatose Stu. I still don’t know how Stu ended up in a Hank’s Santa outfit but I have a feeling that doesn’t even matter anymore.
I think I’ll offer Terri a drink. I know she’s only 17 or 16 or something like that but that girl deserves a damn drink.