By Donald Westlake (writing as Curt Clark)
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1964
Did God create men, or does Man create gods? I don’t
know, and if it hadn’t been for my rotten brother-in-law, the question would
never have come up. My late brother-in-law? Nackles knows.
It all depends, you see, like the chicken and the
egg, on which came first. Did God exist before Man first thought of Him, or
didn’t He? If not, if Man creates his gods, then it follows that Man must create
the devils, too.
Nearly every god, you know, has his corresponding
devil. Good and Evil. The polytheistic ancients, prolific in the
creation (?) of gods and goddesses, always worked up nearly enough Evil ones to
cancel out the Good, but not quite. The Greeks, those incredible supermen,
combined Good and Evil in each of their gods. In Zoroaster, Ahura
Mazda, being Good, is ranged forever against the Evil one, Ahriman. And we
ourselves know God and Satan.
But of course it’s entirely possible I have nothing
to worry about. It all depends on whether Santa is or is not a god. He certainly
seems like a god. Consider: He is omniscient; he knows every action of
every child, for good or evil. At least on Christmas Eve he is omnipresent,
everywhere at once. He administers justice tempered with mercy. He is
superhuman, or at least non-human, though conceived of as having a human shape.
He is aided by a corps of assistants who do not have completely human
shapes. He rewards Good and punishes Evil, And, most important, he is believed
in utterly be several million people, most of them under the age of ten. Is
there any qualification of godhood that Santa Claus does not possess?
And even the non-believers
give him lip-service. He has surely taken over Christmas; his effigy is
everywhere, but where are the manger and the Christ child? Retired rather
forlornly to the nave. (Santa’s power is growing, too. Slowly but surely he is
usurping Chanukah as well.)
Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god
that Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled
through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers
(requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the
Post Office, the specially garbed priests in all the department stores. And
don’t gods reflect their creators’ (?) society? The Greeks had a huntress
goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a
god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption? Secondary gods of earlier
times have been stout, but surely Santa Claus is the first fat primary god.
And wherever there’s a god mustn’t there sooner or
later be a devil?
Which brings me back to my brother-in-law, who’s to
blame for whatever happens now. My brother-in-law Frank is—or was—a very mean
and nasty man. Why I ever let him marry my sister I’ll never know. Why Susie
wanted to marry him is an even greater mystery. I could just shrug and
say Love Is Blind, I suppose, but that wouldn’t explain how she fell in love
with him in the first place.
Frank is—Frank was—I just don’t know which tense to
use. The present, hopefully. Frank is a very handsome man in his way, big and
brawny, full of vitality. A football player; hero in college and defensive
linebacker for three years in pro ball, till he did some sort of irreparable
damage to his left knee, which gave him a limp and forced him to find some other
way to make a living.
Ex-football players tend to become insurance
salesmen, I don’t know why. Frank followed the form, and became an insurance
salesman. Because Susie was then a secretary for the same company, they soon
became acquainted.
Was Susie dazzled by the ex-hero, so big and
handsome? She’s never been the type to dazzle easily, but we can never fully
know what goes on in the mind of another human being. For whatever reason, she
decided she was in love with him.
So they were married, and five weeks later he gave
her her first black eye. And the last, though it mightn’t have been, since Susie
tried to keep me from finding out. I was to go over for dinner that night, but
at eleven in the morning she called the auto showroom where I work, to tell me
she had a headache and we’d have to postpone the dinner. But she sounded so
upset that I knew immediately something was wrong, so I took a demonstration car
and drove over, and when she opened the front door there was the shiner.
I got the story out of her in fits and starts.
Frank, it seemed, had a terrible temper. She wanted to excuse him because he was
forced to be an insurance salesman when he really wanted to be out there on the
gridiron again, but I want to be President and I’m an automobile salesman and
I don’t go around giving women black eyes. So I decided it was up to me
to let Frank know he wasn’t going to vent his pique on my sister any more.
Unfortunately, I am five feet seven inches tall and
weigh one hundred thirty-four pounds, with the Sunday Times under my
arm. Were I just to give Frank a piece of my mind, he’d surely give me a black
eye to go with my sister’s. Therefore, that afternoon I bought a regulation
baseball bat, and carried it with me when I went to see Frank that night.
He opened the door himself and snarled, “What do
you want?”
In answer, I poked him with the end of the bat, just
above the belt, to knock the wind out of him. Then, having unethically gained
the upper hand, I clouted him five or six times more, then stood over him to
say, “The next time you hit my sister I won’t let you off so easy.” After which
I took Susie over to my place for dinner.
And after which I was Frank’s best friend.
People like that are so impossible to understand.
Until the baseball bat episode, Frank had nothing for me but undisguised
contempt. But once I’d knocked the stuffing out of him, he was my comrade for
life. And I’m sure it was sincere; he would have given me the shirt off his
back, had I wanted it, which I didn’t.
(Also, by the way, he never hit Susie again. He
still had the bad temper, but he took it out in throwing furniture out windows
or punching dents in walls or going downtown to start a brawl in some bar. I
offered to train him out of maltreating the house and furniture as I had trained
him out of maltreating his wife, but Susie said no, that Frank had to let off
steam and it would be worse if he was forced to bottle it all up inside him, so
the baseball bat remained in retirement.)
Then came the children, three of them in as many
years. Frank Junior came first, then Linda Joyce, and finally Stewart. Susie had
held the forlorn hope that fatherhood would settle Frank to some extent, but
quite the reverse was true. Shrieking babies, smelly diapers, disrupted sleep,
and distracted wives are trials and tribulations to any man, but to Frank they
were—like everything else in his life—the last straw.
He became, in a word, worse. Susie restrained him I
don’t know how often from doing some severe damage to a squalling infant, and as
the children grew toward the age of reason Frank’s expressed attitude toward
them was that their best move would be to find a way to become invisible. The
children, of course, didn’t like him very much, but then who did?
Last Christmas was when it started. Junior
was six then, and Linda Joyce five, and Stewart four, so all were old enough to
have heard of Santa Claus and still young enough to believe in him. Along around
October, when the Christmas season was beginning, Frank began to use Santa
Claus’ displeasure as a weapon to keep the children “in line,” his phrase for
keeping them mute and immobile and terrified. Many parents, of course, try to
enforce obedience the same way: “If you’re bad, Santa Claus won’t bring you any
presents.” Which, all things considered, is a negative and passive sort of
punishment, wishy-washy in comparison with fire and brimstone and such. In the
old days, Santa Claus would treat bad children more scornfully, leaving a lump
of coal in their stockings in lieu of presents, but I suppose the Depression
helped to change that. There are times and situations when a lump of coal is
nothing to sneer at.
In any case, an absence of presents was too weak a
punishment for Frank’s purposes, so last Christmastime he invented Nackles.
Who is Nackles? Nackles is to Santa Claus what Satan
is to God, what Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda, what the North Wind is to the South
Wind. Nackles is the new Evil.
I think Frank really enjoyed creating
Nackles; he gave so much thought to the details of him. According to Frank, and
as I remember it, this is Nackles: Very very tall and very very thin. Dressed
all in black, with a gaunt gray face and deep black eyes. He travels through an
intricate series of tunnels under the earth, in a black chariot on rails, pulled
by an octet of dead-white goats.
And what does Nackles do? Nackles lives on the flesh
of little boys and girls. (This is what Frank was telling his children; can you
believe it?) Nackles roams back and forth under the earth, in his dark tunnels
darker than subway tunnels, pulled by the eight dead-white goats, and he
searches for little boys and girls to stuff into his big black sack and carry
away and eat. But Santa Claus won’t let him have the good boys and
girls. Santa Claus is stronger than Nackles, and keeps a protective shield
around little children, so Nackles can’t get at them.
But when little children are bad, it hurts Santa
Claus, and weakens the shield Santa Claus has placed around them, and if they
keep on being bad pretty soon there’s no shield left at all, and on Christmas
Eve instead of Santa Claus coming out of the sky with his bag of presents
Nackles comes up out of the ground with his bag of emptiness, and stuffs the bad
children in, and whisks them away to his dark tunnels and the eight dead-white
goats.
Frank was proud of his invention, actually proud of
it. He not only used Nackles to threaten his children every time they had the
temerity to come within range of his vision, he also spread the story around to
others. He told me, and his neighbors, and people in bars, and people he went to
see in his job as an insurance salesman. I don’t know how many people he told
about Nackles, though I would guess it was well over a hundred. And there’s more
than one Frank in this world; he told me from time to time of a client or
neighbor or bar-crony who had heard the story of Nackles and then said, “By God,
that’s great. That’s what I’ve been needing, to keep my brats
in line.”
Thus Nackles was created, and thus Nackles was
promulgated. And would any of the unfortunate children thus introduced to
Nackles believe in this Evil Being any less than they believed in Santa Claus?
Of course not.
This all happened, as I say, last Christmastime.
Frank invented Nackles, used him to further intimidate the children and spread
the story of him to everyone he met. On Christmas Day last year I’m sure there
was more than one child who was relieved and somewhat surprised to awaken the
same as usual, in his own trundle bed, and to find the presents downstairs
beneath the tree, proving that Nackles had been kept away yet another year.
Nackles lay dormant, so far as Frank was concerned,
from December 25th of last year until this October. Then, with the sights and
sounds of Christmas again in the land, back came Nackles, as fresh and vicious
as ever. “Don’t expect me to stop him!” Frank would shout. “When he
comes up out of the ground the night before Christmas to carry you away in his
bag, don’t expect any help from me!”
It was worse this year than last. Frank wasn’t doing
as well financially as he’d expected, and then early in November Susie
discovered she was pregnant again, and what with one thing and another Frank was
headed for a real peak of ill-temper. He screamed at the children constantly,
and the name of Nackles was never far from his tongue.
Susie did what she could to counteract Frank’s bad
influence, but he wouldn’t let her do much. All through November and December he
was home more and more of the time, because the Christmas season is the wrong
time to sell insurance anyway and also because he was hating the job more every
day and thus giving it less of his time. The more he hated the job, the worse
his temper became, and the more he drank, and the worse his limp got, and the
louder were his shouts, and the more violent his references to Nackles. It just
built and built and built, and reached its crescendo on Christmas Eve, when some
small or imagined infraction of one of the children—Stewart, I think—resulted in
Frank’s pulling all the Christmas presents from all the closets and stowing them
all in the car to be taken back to the stores, because this Christmas for sure
it wouldn’t be Santa Claus who would be visiting this house, it would be
Nackles.
By the time Susie got the children to bed, everyone
in the house was a nervous wreck. The children were too frightened to sleep, and
Susie herself was too unnerved to be of much help in soothing them. Frank, who
had taken to drinking at home lately, had locked himself in the bedroom with a
bottle.
It was nearly eleven o’clock before Susie got the
children all quieted down, and then she went out to the car and brought all the
presents back in and arranged them under the tree. Then, not wanting to see or
hear her husband any more that night—he was like a big spoiled child throwing a
tantrum—she herself went to sleep on the living room sofa.
Frank Junior awoke her in the morning, crying,
“Look, Mama! Nackles didn’t come, he didn’t come!” And pointed
to the presents she’d placed under the tree.
The other two children came down shortly after, and
Susie and the youngsters sat on the floor and opened the presents, enjoying
themselves as much as possible, but still with restraint. There were none of the
usual squeals of childish pleasure; no one wanted Daddy to come storming
downstairs in one of his rages. So the children contented themselves with
ear-to-ear smiles and whispered exclamations, and after a while Susie made
breakfast, and the day carried along as pleasantly as could be expected under
the circumstances.
It was a little after twelve that Susie began to
worry about Frank’s non-appearance. She braved herself to go up and knock on the
locked door and call his name, but she got no answer, not even the expected
snarl, so just around one o’clock she called me and I hurried on over. I rapped
smartly on the bedroom door, got no answer, and finally I threatened to break
the door in if Frank didn’t open up. When I still got no answer, break the door
in I did.
And Frank, of course, was gone.
The police say he ran away, deserted his family,
primarily because of Susie’s fourth pregnancy. They say he went out the window
and dropped to the backyard, so Susie wouldn’t see him and try to stop him. And
they say he didn’t take the car because he was afraid Susie would hear him start
the engine.
That all sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Yet I just
can’t believe Frank would walk out on Susie without a lot of shouting about it
first. Nor that he would leave his car, which he was fonder of than his wife and
children.
But what’s the alternative? There’s only one I can
think of: Nackles.
I would rather not believe that. I would rather not
believe that Frank, in inventing Nackles and spreading word of him, made him
real. I would rather not believe that Nackles actually did visit my sister’s
house on Christmas Eve.
But did he? If so, he couldn’t have carried off any
of the children, for a more subdued and better behaved trio of youngsters you
won’t find anywhere. But Nackles, being brand-new and never having had a meal
before, would need somebody. Somebody to whom he was real, somebody not
protected by the shield of Santa Claus. And, as I say, Frank was drinking that
night. Alcohol makes the brain believe in the existence of all sorts of things.
Also, Frank was a spoiled child if there ever was one.
There’s no question but that Frank Junior and Linda
Joyce and Stewart believe in Nackles. And Frank spread the gospel of Nackles to
others, some of whom spread it to their own children. And some of whom will
spread the new Evil to other parents. And ours is a mobile society, with
families constantly being transferred by Daddy’s company from one end of the
country to another, so how long can it be before Nackles is a power not only in
this one city, but all across the nation?
I don’t know if Nackles exists, or will exist. All I
know for sure is that there’s suddenly a new meaning in the lyric of that
popular Christmas song. You know the one I mean:
You’d better watch out.
3 comments:
I'm very proud that I was just at a Christmas dinner where I only had the egg nog spiked with vodka once. As opposed to those who went back for a second, third and even fourth portion and ended up being maudlin drunks.
Merry Christmas to you too Lem!
Actually that was a great ghost story.
You might like this one too:
This American Life had the story of the Mutchler family…
Hey, look who stopped by. Merry Chrismas Fred4pres.
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