Читать книгу Hideous Faces, Beautiful Skulls - Mark McLaughlin - Страница 10

I AM NOT PAINSETTIA PLONT

Painsettia Plont eats

teddy bears and dollies,

rubber ducks and robots,

rocking horse surprise!

—from “Painsettia’s Theme,”

Santa’s Elves Meet Painsettia Plont

Arla stepped up to the cosmetics counter and examined the lipsticks. Spring Strawberry? Caribbean Coral? Jungle Pink? Anything would be better than—

“Sorry, Miss Plont, but we’re all out of green,” said the clerk, a plump, fortyish woman with frosted hair and a toothy smile. “I bought your show on video for my youngest, Debbie. She just loves it. She goes around the house singing that song, ‘Painsettia Plont eats teddy bears and dollies…’” She thought for a moment. “‘Rubber ducky pies’? Is that how it goes?”

“Well, no,” Arla sighed. “I’ll take the Spring Strawberry. I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“Certainly, Ms. Plont.” The clerk began to ring up the sale. “Or can I call you Painsettia?”

“My real name is Arla. Arla Merrick.”

On her way out of the department store, Arla noticed a sales display for the video of her old Christmas special, Santa’s Elves Meet Painsettia Plont. The cover of the box depicted her in full Painsettia array: green lipstick, white face powder, red fright-wig, sequined ornament earrings, white fur robe and silver curly-toed boots. The special, first aired in 1977, was broadcast each year during the holiday season. It had been released on video a few weeks ago, in time for Christmas shopping.

Above the display, the video played on a monitor. On the screen, Painsettia Plont was menacing her kindhearted younger sister, Mrs. Claus, in the Secret Christmas Cave.

“Ashamed of me?” hissed Painsettia, raising a bright red eyebrow. “You silly, mindless fool! I am very much a part of your life, and you cannot silence me! Now I have you, my sweet—and soon, you shall know the terror and the chill of my wintery vengeance!”

Arla crossed the mall corridor to a toy store. She needed to buy gifts for a niece and two nephews. She saw a few Painsettia dolls on a shelf next to some plush elves.

A red-haired girl in a quilted jacket pointed at Arla. “Look, Mommy! It’s the mean toy-eater lady!”

The girl’s mother looked up. “Oh my God!” She hurried to Arla’s side. “You’re Poin—Painsettia, yeah, Painsettia Plont! The kids watch your show every year. I love the scene where the elves roll you into that big snowball—”

Arla cleared her throat. “That was a part I played fifteen years ago. My real name is Arla.”

The girl moved closer, but remained half-hidden by an enormous stuffed panda. “You’re not gonna eat all these toys, are you?” she said. Her mother laughed.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” Arla said. “I have shopping to do.”

As she browsed the shop, children gaped and pointed. She used to be proud of her patrician good looks: high brow, full lips, noble curved nose. Now she hated her face—or more to the point, she hated having to share it with Painsettia Plont.

“Wanna eat this?” shouted a stout blond boy, holding out a baby doll.

“Leave her alone,” another boy whispered, “or she’ll eat all the toys.” The chubby boy looked from Arla to the doll to the shelves and shelves of toys. Then he started to cry.

An elderly woman poked her in the ribs with a bony finger. “Just look what you did. You’ve got a lot of nerve, scaring kids in a toy store.”

A thin housewife with horn-rimmed glasses stared at Arla. “The next time your show is on, I’m going to cheer when you go down the bottomless pit in that snowball.” She looked the actress from head to toe. “Bitch.”

“I’m just trying to buy some gifts,” Arla said.

A girl in an oversized pink sweatshirt hurried up to her and kicked her in the shin. Arla cried out as she fell into a display of toy fire engines. The pain brought tears to her eyes.

“She’s gonna eat all the fire engines!” screamed the girl in the sweatshirt. “She’s gonna eat everything!”

Arla pulled herself out of the pile. “I’m an actress, for Christ’s sake!” she moaned. She wiped the tears from her eyes and her hands came away streaked with mascara. She glared at the elderly woman. “Because of idiots like you, I can hardly even get a job in dinner theatre! Directors won’t take me seriously because people think I’m that damned Christmas witch! Painsettia Plont is a character from a TV program. I am not Painsettia Plont!”

Several children backed away from Arla. Many of them were crying.

Arla shouldered her way past the thin housewife and rushed out of the store. Out in the mall, she realized that she had dropped the small sack containing her lipstick. The hell with it. There was no way she was going to return to that damned toy store.

She found a restroom and cleaned the mascara from her face. She then left the mall, searched out her car in the packed parking lot, and drove until she found a restaurant. She parked and checked her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were red and she looked pale. She decided to visit a tanning salon soon. A pale complexion only emphasized her resemblance to bone-white Painsettia.

The walls of the restaurant were lined with bookshelves and mirrors. The hostess showed her to a table in the no-smoking section.

“You look familiar,” the hostess said. “Oh, you look like my old landlady, Mrs. Prescott. Any relation?”

Arla shook her head tiredly.

“My roommate and I used to call her the Snow Queen,” the hostess continued, handing her a menu. “She looked like that weirdo lady on that Christmas show. You know—what’s her name?”

Arla stared at her reflection in a mirror near her table. “Painsettia Plont. Painsettia Plont. Tell the waitress to bring me a Manhattan.”

Soon the drink arrived, and Arla downed it in three swallows. For dinner she ordered the Surf & Turf Special. She felt that she needed to pamper herself after the day’s ordeal.

A slim, black-haired woman waved to her from a booth at the far side of the room. She looked vaguely familiar. The woman left her seat and approached Arla.

“Well if it isn’t Painsettia Plont!” the woman said. “I’m Maggie Carlson.”

With the name, Arla now recognized the face. Maggie Carlson was the host of DayBreak, a local morning program.

“I never miss your Christmas show,” Maggie said, taking a seat across from Arla. “Do you live in town or are you just visiting?”

“I’ve lived here in Detroit for about ten years. And I watch DayBreak. I’m a morning person.” Arla wondered if her breath smelled too boozy. Then she decided that she really didn’t care.

“I bet my viewers would just love to see what Painsettia Plont is up to these days,” Maggie said.

“She’s up to her knees in monkey-doo.” Arla found the statement wonderfully liberating. “It’s hell trying to find work when everyone still thinks of me as Painsettia. My last job was as an extra in some penny-ante production of Oklahoma. Before that, I played a burn victim on a cop show. They covered my face with bandages.”

Maggie tapped a scarlet fingernail against Arla’s glass. “Let me buy you another. Your real name is…?”

“Arla Merrick. And thank you for asking. Most people don’t.”

Maggie pulled a small notebook from her purse. “Can I have your phone number, Arla? I’d like you to be on my show next week. Who’d have thought a cherished Christmas special could have a downside?” She winked. “I don’t mind tipping the occasional sacred cow.”

* * * *

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Arla wrapped gifts for her niece, nephews, and sister Mavis. She had bought them all gloves and scarves. She was determined never again to set foot in a toy store.

Her guest spot on Maggie’s show the day before had gone quite well. Arla felt good, even optimistic. Perhaps a sympathetic director had seen the show. God, but she longed to play a real role. Lady MacBeth. Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even old Mrs. Paroo from The Music Man would be better than nothing.

Mavis had said that she and the kids would be stopping by around noon. Arla glanced at her digital wristwatch. 7:42 AM. She still had plenty of time to finish a few chores around the house. She wondered if it had snowed the night before. Perhaps she needed to shovel the walk. She looked to the window, but of course, the drapes were drawn to help keep out the cold.

She crossed to the front door and opened it a crack. A little more. Then all the way.

Her neighborhood was—gone. Before her stretched an endless expanse of snowy hillocks and ice boulders. A blast of sub-zero wind blew snow into her eyes and momentarily stole her breath away.

She slammed the door shut and leaned against it. Something was wrong, incredibly wrong. It was as though her house had been picked up and dropped in an Arctic wasteland. Had some sort of freak blizzard covered everything in the neighborhood except her house? The lights were on; blizzard or not, she still had electricity.

She looked for the remote control but as usual, couldn’t find it. She clicked on the power button of the television. Perhaps she could find a news show that would tell her something.

When the screen lit up, the first thing Arla saw was the face of Painsettia Plont. She was looking at a close-up of the video box for Santa’s Elves Meet Painsettia Plont.

A sandy-haired man with a dark moustache appeared on the screen—Chip Carlyle, co-host of a national morning show, Breakfast with Chip & Sandra.

“Painsettia Plont has never been a happy camper,” he said, “and it seems that the same can be said for actress Arla Merrick. Yesterday on Detroit’s DayBreak, she claimed that the role has ruined her career.”

His blond co-host, Sandra Dupree, rolled her eyes. “It’s funny. I never really thought of Painsettia Plont as just an actress in a costume. She was like Scrooge, or a Christmas version of the Wicked Witch of the West—half legend, half real. At least, she was to me. I do feel sorry for Arla Merrick, but it’s a pity she had to spoil the illusion. Know what I mean, Chip?”

“Sure do, Sandra,” Chip said. “I’ll never be able to watch that show again without thinking of old Arla sitting by the phone, year in and year out, waiting for Hollywood to call.”

The show cut to a clip. Painsettia Plont was standing on a moonlit mountaintop. Her white fur robe billowed and flapped in the wind. In the distance, lightning streaked across a steel-grey sky.

What was this? Arla didn’t remember this scene. Painsettia was smiling her crooked smile straight into the camera. Yes, Arla was sure of it; there were no such shots in the special.

“Ashamed of me?” The voice of Painsettia Plont roared thunderously. “You silly, mindless fool! I am very much a part of your life, and you cannot silence me!” The voice grew louder, and Arla clapped her hands over her ears. “Now I have you, my sweet—and soon, you shall know the terror and the chill of my wintery vengeance!”

Painsettia sneered and began to laugh. The volume continued to rise, until the cups and plates in Arla’s living room cabinet rattled on their shelves. Arla tried to turn down the volume, but the knob was colder than ice—so cold that it turned the flesh of her fingertips dark grey. The knob would not move; she tried the power button, but it too was frozen.

The roar of Painsettia’s laugh rose so high that it shattered the glass in the windows. Icy gusts of wind tore the drapes from the walls and blew snow into the room. Arla felt twin bursts of pain in her head. She realized with horror that her eardrums had ruptured.

Arla stumbled away from the television, down the hall to her bedroom. She would lock herself in and wrap herself in quilts to keep out the cold—

The bedroom was a complete shambles. The windows had shattered here too, and snow covered her bed and nightstand. Arla cried out as the wrinkled face of a little man peered in through a broken window.

The little man leaped into the room. He wore a green suit and a red wool cap. Santa’s elves wore the same sort of outfit in the Christmas special.

More elves slipped into the room—Arla lost count after eight. Several of the elves grabbed her and proceeded to manhandle her through the broken window.

“What are you doing?” Arla shouted. “Let go! Let go of me!” She tried to shake free of them, but they were too strong. They dragged her through the windswept wasteland, over jagged shards of ice that tore at her clothes and flesh.

Eventually the elves stopped and scooped up handfuls of snow. They grinned wickedly as they packed the snow against her body.

Arla gasped with shock when she saw that they were situated on a edge of a huge chasm. She now knew that the elves were reenacting the finale of the Christmas special, in which they packed Painsettia Plont in the center of an enormous snowball and dropped her down into a bottomless pit.

“I’m not her! I’m not!” she cried. “For Christ’s sake! Stop it! You’re killing me!”

The elves packed the snow tighter, tighter, adding more and more. She tried to catch the gaze of even one of the elves. If only they would look at her—really look, and see that she was not their true enemy. But they were all so intent upon building the giant snowball. In a moment, only her head extended from the icy sphere. “You’ve got to stop,” she pleaded. “I am not Painsettia Plont!”

The elves pushed at the snowball. At first it wouldn’t budge, so they pushed harder. In a moment it rolled forward, teetered on the edge of the pit, and fell.

Arla screamed as she hurled into the chasm. Long after exhaustion forced her into numb silence, she continued to fall, down and down into an endless nightmare abyss of utter cold.