Secret Santa Read online

  Lussi handed the paper back. “Do they know how the accident happened?”

  Rachael motioned for Lussi to draw nearer. “You didn’t hear this from me, but they’re saying it was a suicide attempt,” the designer whispered in her ear.

  —stick it where the sun don’t shine—

  Lussi glanced out of the corner of her eye at the doll, perched on her bookshelf, thin legs dangling off the edge. Rachael obviously hadn’t seen the doll yet, but she would. It was unmistakably the four-horned creature in Stanley’s drawing. This would invite questions…questions that Lussi didn’t know the answer to. Who had gifted her the doll, and for what purpose? The idea of her Secret Santa being a prankster seemed less and less likely by the hour. There was evil in this building. Whether it was Xavier Blackwood’s ghost or something else was up for debate. All Lussi knew was that Frederick hadn’t been exaggerating when he said she was in danger. She could have easily fallen victim to the slush pile instead of Cal; Stanley could have turned his rage on her instead of on himself. Had Perky been protecting her all this time? Was its magic real?

  —do not bring detestable things into your home—

  There was a loud ping at the window. The blinds were drawn shut, so she couldn’t see what had hit it.

  Another ping, this time louder.

  “Snowballs,” Rachael said. “The kids run wild in this neighborhood. A bunch of animals. All from divorced homes, of course. That’s how those people live.”

  Lussi’s field of vision was shrinking, the wallpapered walls closing in around her. More pings against the windowpane, one after another after another. Faster. Faster. Faster.

  “What…what are you talking about?” she asked. “What people?”

  “Oh, you know,” Rachael said, marching to the window. The barrage was so loud now, it sounded like the building was under attack. “You just have to bang on the window and they run. Watch this.”

  Rachael yanked on the cord, sending the blinds shooting up. Lussi couldn’t see past her reflection, but Rachael was close enough to see through the windowpane. Suddenly, she began to scream long and loud, with the pitch and vibrato of a castrated Luciano Pavarotti. When her voice gave out, she crumpled to the floor.

  Lussi rushed over to Rachael to find she had fainted dead away. The pinging came to an abrupt halt. Lussi crouched and slowly peered through the window, just over the sill, dreading the sight of whatever had made Rachael collapse.

  The window was plastered with blood-streaked feathers, illuminated from behind by the streetlights. A stained-glass window in the devil’s church.

  Lussi’s nostrils burned with a thick, cloying sweetness. Lavender? Not Rachael’s perfume. The fragrance enveloped her, overwhelming her senses. Okay, I go night night now…she thought as she drifted off into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When Lussi came to, she was on her back staring at an unfamiliar checkerboard ceiling. Her temples were pounding. She lifted the back of her head an inch. It took an outsized amount of effort to complete this simple action. She wasn’t on the floor. A bed? Too hard. A table. It took a few moments for her eyesight to adjust to the dim light, but once it did she could pick out the detail in the wallpaper. Fleur-de-lis. She was in the second-floor conference room.

  Lussi tried to sit up, but was met with pressure in her chest. Something was holding her down. She craned her head farther upright, pushing her chin as far as she could until it pressed into her clavicle. Her arms and legs were bound tightly to her body with multicolored Christmas lights. Looked like several strands’ worth. Dozens of bell-shaped ornaments dangled off the cords.

  Somebody had tied Lussi to the conference table with fucking Christmas lights.

  The more she struggled, the tighter the strands constricted. After several attempts, she was forced to stop fighting. Her inhales and exhales were growing quick and shallow. She couldn’t open her mouth to draw in a deeper breath, or shout for help for that matter. It was taped shut—packing tape, probably. Publishing houses were lousy with packing tape.

  You can’t pass out again, she told herself. Steady your breathing. She’d been knocked out. Drugged. The sweet smell was still present. It was so strong she could taste it. Not lavender…chloroform. She’d never smelled it before in her life, but images were coming back to her—the wet rag, the hand pressing it over her mouth and nose as she gasped for air…

  This was going to make for one fascinating OSHA report.

  Shapes were moving at the edges of her vision. Dark figures. Cloaked figures. The fabric shifted as they slunk about, slowly, silently. Gathering around the conference table. The chairs had been wheeled out of the room. She saw less and less wallpaper as their shapeless bodies crowded around her.

  “…who plugged in the Christmas lights…”

  “…awake now…”

  One of the cloaked figures kneeled beside the table, tested the strands of lights. A man. Up close, she could see the stubbled chin underneath his Venetian Phantom of the Opera mask. It could have been any one of a dozen of her male coworkers.

  Lussi counted six figures total, each in a different plastic Halloween mask. Her coworkers, who’d been conspiring against her all along. It wasn’t paranoia, either. Paranoia wasn’t even an option, not when you’ve been chloroformed and tied to a conference table.

  Blackwood-Patterson wasn’t merely a cult of personality built around Xavier Blackwood.

  Blackwood-Patterson was a literal cult.

  Because of course it was. The signs were all there: Slavish devotion to their leader. Elitist thinking. Irrational fear of the outside world. Treating the excommunicated like they were dead. Lussi hadn’t realized it earlier because none of them had that faraway look in the eyes. The look those Jonestown converts had. The one that signaled nobody was home upstairs.

  And yet here they were.

  She shivered. The temperature had dropped several degrees in the room since she’d come to. Had someone cracked the door to the fire escape? Lussi’s winter jacket and black turtleneck had both been stripped off, leaving her shivering in a white tank top.

  One of the figures, this one in a Wonder Woman mask, produced a serrated Rambo-style knife from their cloak. Lussi’s eyes widened. The blade was as long as her forearm. It wasn’t a prop. If this had all started out as a prank, it had morphed into something else entirely.

  Lussi was supposed to turn thirty in two years. The big “three oh.” Her sister was already planning a girls’ weekend in Vegas for the two of them. Lussi had never been to Vegas. She hadn’t been looking forward to it, frankly, but now it was all she wanted. Her life couldn’t end here. It couldn’t.

  “Jesus Christ, where’d you get that?” someone shouted, their voice muffled by their mask.

  “It’s a bowie knife,” Wonder Woman said. “For the ritual. They sell them at the army surplus store in Union Square.”

  Lussi had known a couple of “devil worshippers” at her high school. All they’d done was listen to prog rock and smoke dope in the parking lot. They’d scared her a little—mostly by how brain-dead they’d seemed—but they’d never tried to sacrifice her. She wanted to go back and apologize for giving them the cold shoulder.

  “This isn’t a ritual,” another woman hissed from underneath a green witch mask. “It’s a spiritual cleansing.”

  “Then why do you want the knife?” Wonder Woman said.

  The Green Witch’s voice dropped an octave: “To cut her heart out, of course.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lussi wasn’t sure what pissed her off more: the fact that her coworkers were preparing to remove her heart, or that they thought she needed a spiritual cleansing in the first place. She wasn’t some bratty teenager wanking off with a cross, Regan MacNeil style. Even worse, the “cut the heart out” bit was taken straight from Satan’s Lament. She scanned the room, tryin
g to make eye contact with someone. Anyone. Just yesterday, she might have been in this very room with some of them discussing next year’s fall list. Now they were averting their eyes, doing their best to avoid her silent judgment.

  “Let me assure you, this is nothing personal, Ms. Meyer,” the Green Witch said. “In fact, many of us fought for you. We took a vote and decided not to take immediate action. That was a mistake, as Stanley found out. It’s only by God’s grace that we stopped you from harming Rachael.”

  The way the witch said her name, so formal and odd…like Mary Beth Wilkerson. But it couldn’t be The Raven. If she had a problem with Lussi, she’d confront her. Mano a mano. Wouldn’t she?

  The Phantom produced a book from his cloak. Frederick’s Bible. “This was found in your imitation Coach bag,” the Green Witch said, showing it to the room like evidence in a murder trial. “Doing a little opposition research, are you?” She pulled a folded notebook page from the book. “Oh, and what’s this? Looks like a list of your coworkers. There seem to be a few names crossed off…Stanley, Xavier…”

  Lussi struggled against her restraints, shaking her head no, no, no, no. This was a sham trial. They were trying to do her dirty, like the Count of Monte Cristo.

  The Green Witch chuckled at Lussi’s distress. “Don’t hurt yourself, dear,” the woman said. “That’s our job. Oh, and one last item, before we start: we also found your witch’s familiar. Let Alan in.”

  * * *

  —

  Alan cut through the mass of cloaked bodies in denim overalls and a conductor’s cap. Just your average sixtysomething maintenance man, toting a plastic cat carrier.

  She thrashed on the table and growled from her throat, her screams trapped beneath the tape across her mouth. Alan glanced down at her but didn’t look surprised. He looked bored. Like how dare she waste his time by trying to get him involved.

  “You brought the creature?” the Green Witch asked.

  He raised the cat carrier so everyone could see. Inside, through the carrier’s wire door, red eyes burned like hot coals. A trick of the light…or something more? The carrier shook, and Alan thwapped it hard. Whatever was inside stopped moving. Was this the animal that had been leaving little treats all over the office?

  “Y’all good?” Alan asked. His nonchalance and two-pack-a-day voice reminded Lussi of a Coney Island carnie. The Green Witch dismissed him and he left the carrier behind on the floor.

  The Green Witch crossed her arms. “So what do you have to say for yourself, Ms. Meyer? We’re all waiting.”

  Lussi tried again to make some sound resembling speech, without any success.

  “Tape,” the Green Witch said, pushing another cloaked figure toward the table. The figure—a woman who didn’t spend much time on a typewriter, from the looks of her alternating green and red nails—grasped one side of the packing tape. The woman whispered a quiet “sorry” and, without any further warning, gave the tape a hard yank. The sound of it peeling away engulfed the silence in the room.

  Lussi gulped for air. The skin around her lips was raw. “I’m not a witch,” she said between deep breaths. Her throat was dry, her voice scratched as an old record. “You’re making a mistake.”

  The Green Witch waved her hand around the room theatrically. “Hear how the devil alters her voice!”

  Lussi cleared her throat and spat to the side of the table. She could taste copper on her tongue. “So where’s your priest? You can’t perform a spiritual cleansing without religious supervision.”

  A figure in a William Shatner Star Trek mask raised a hand. “I’m a minister in the Universal Life Church,” the man said.

  A mail-order priest? Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle stick.

  “You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” the Green Witch said to Lussi. Nods all around. Lussi wanted to pull her own hair out, but of course she couldn’t move her arms.

  “Your little spiritual cleansing exercise is from Satan’s Lament. A book I edited.”

  “That was yours?” someone said.

  “Also, I’m not the one wearing a witch mask,” she said. “So think about that before you start throwing accusations around. Now, if you could untie me, I would super appreciate it. I’m begging you, pretty fucking please, with a cock-sucking titty-fucking popped cherry on top, let me go.”

  Lussi felt her face flush with embarrassment. She wasn’t sure where the words had come from or how her tongue had put them in that order.

  “Such vile language,” the Green Witch said. “What else would you expect from one who edits filth?”

  That sounded like a quote from her mother. She tried not to let on how close the words cut her. “Listen,” Lussi said, exasperated, “I don’t know why you’d accuse me of being a witch, but I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Care to explain your meeting with Frederick Munson?”

  Gasps around the room.

  “A select few of us received word of said meeting from a reliable source,” the Green Witch said. Had they been spying on her? “Did he mention to you that when he was fired, he had to be escorted out of this building in a straitjacket?” Lussi didn’t respond. “No, I wouldn’t imagine he did. What about going off his meds two months ago, right before he stopped showing up to work? His boss at Random House was most relieved to hear we’d found him.”

  Lussi didn’t want to believe any of it, but what reason did they have to lie? Whatever they told her, she would be taking it to the grave. If Frederick was as batshit crazy as they were implying, had he somehow infected Lussi with his madness? The birds hurling themselves against her office window…had that even happened? Was any of this happening?

  The Green Witch continued: “His family picked him up this afternoon. Right about now, I’d say they’re an hour or two away from the funny farm in upstate New York. The irony, of course, is that all his ranting about an evil presence in this building seems eerily prescient, now that you’re here. Oh well.” She held out her hand. “Knife, please.”

  Lussi twisted, trying to wriggle free. They were actually going to go through with this. If it wasn’t a ritual sacrifice, it sure felt like one. How much blood, she wondered, had been spilled in this building over the years? How much would have to be spilled until whatever dark force that ruled over it was finally satisfied?

  “I don’t know what I’ve done, but I’m sorry,” Lussi said. “Satan’s Lament was fiction, for chrissakes!”

  “You don’t know what you’ve done?” the Green Witch said. “You would lie about that today, of all days? The nerve. A legend was buried today, and you act like you don’t know what this is all about. You were in the room when Xavier Blackwood had his fatal heart attack…without which you wouldn’t have a job here. You also told your intern you would break his legs the next time he put them on your desk…”

  “I did? I don’t remember…”

  “That poor young man remembers,” the Green Witch said. “You know what happened next—he kicked his feet up on your desk in the afternoon, when you weren’t around. A force of habit. He was scared half to death you would fire him. But the punishment was worse than he could have ever imagined. A few hours later, his shin snapped in two like a twig. Because of you.”

  Lussi shook her head frantically. “How could I have known? You just said so yourself—I wasn’t around.”

  “That’s why you have a familiar,” the Green Witch said, a smile in her voice that Lussi couldn’t see but knew was there. “And then there’s Stanley…sad, sad Stanley.”

  * * *

  —

  Maybe it was just her panic-stricken brain, but what the Green Witch was saying…sort of made sense? Lussi had said those things. She had no supernatural abilities that she knew of, but those were her words. In the deepest, darkest recesses of her soul, Lussi knew she wasn’t capable of hurting anyone. She was a pacifist. She’d marched aga
inst the Vietnam War with her parents as a little girl. She’d voted to put a peanut farmer in the White House, of all things. She would never hurt somebody. Not intentionally.

  “If you believe I’m capable of doing all of these horrible things,” she said, “then what’s to stop me from using my dark magic to curse all of you right now? All I need to do is say the words…”

  The Green Witch polished the blade of the knife with the sleeve of her cloak. “The bells on the strands of light binding you are cast-iron,” she said. “Your magic has been nullified. Besides, if you could use your powers to save yourself, you would have by now.”

  “Counterargument,” Lussi said. “I don’t have powers, and you all need to reread The Ox-Bow Incident.”

  “Counter-counterargument,” the Green Witch said. “The movie was actually better than the book, and also: shut up.” She traced the tip of the blade from Lussi’s ear to the bottom of her chin. The cold steel made Lussi shiver all over again. She thought of her parents, her sister. Her niece. Her dearly departed Oma.

  “The stollen,” Lussi said.

  The Green Witch stopped what she was doing.

  “My fruitcake,” Lussi said excitedly. “I brought it in last Monday and somebody took it from the fridge. If there’s anybody around here I actually wanted to hurt, it would have been that person. Sloppy Joe was there. He heard me. I said, ‘I hope whoever took my fruitcake chokes on it.’ ”

  The room was silent. If Sloppy Joe was among the cloaked figures, he wasn’t coming forward.

  The Green Witch poked the tip of the knife into her sternum. “You didn’t know who took it, so you couldn’t work your juju. Since you’re not a threat any longer…” She leaned in and lifted the bottom of her mask. Lussi felt her hot breath on her ear. “I had the munchies last week,” The Raven said with a giggle. “You could have made a lot of friends around here with baking skills like that. Alas.”