When he was satisfied, Ob vanished into the night, intent on finding the necessary ingredients to open a portal and free his brethren from their imprisonment in the Void.

  The cries of the dying and wounded drifted into the desert, and when Jesus heard them, he wept again.

  ***

  Many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him after the resurrection. But when the first light of dawn lit upon the massacre, they went to the Pharisees and told them what had occurred. None of them thought to connect Lazarus to the crimes. Instead, they assumed it was a demon. They didn’t know how right they were.

  The chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

  “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man, Jesus of Nazareth, performing many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation. Surely, he has loosed a demon upon us, as punishment for speaking against him.”

  Caiaphas, the high priest, spoke up. “The Romans shall do nothing. I have a plan. It is better that one man should die for the people than that the whole nation perish. We shall slay this Rabbi, and we shall slay this demon he has summoned forth. We shall also slay this man, Lazarus, whom has returned from the dead.”

  When word of this reached Jesus, he called his disciples together. “We can no longer move about publicly among the Jews. Instead, we will withdraw to a region near the desert, in a village called Ephraim.”

  And so they did. Mary and Martha wondered what had become of their brother. When Jesus and his disciples disappeared, they assumed Lazarus had gone with them. Meanwhile, Ob roamed the sands and mountains of Judea, raiding and feasting in the night and hiding during the day, plotting to unleash the Siqqusim. Word spread that a demon was on the loose, and people slept with a guard posted. Children were warned not to stray far from home.

  ***

  When it was almost time for Passover, many came to Jerusalem for their ceremonial cleansing. The crowds kept looking for Jesus, and as they stood in the temple, they asked one another, “What do you think? Isn’t he coming to the Feast at all?” The chief priests and Pharisees had given orders that if anyone found out where Jesus was, they should report it so that he could be arrested.

  Eventually, Jesus returned to Bethany. His spirits seemed low, and he did not teach. The sisters gave a dinner in his honor. Much to Mary and Martha’s delight, Lazarus arrived as well, and reclined at the table with Jesus. They could not understand why the disciples met his arrival with dread and shrank away from him. Lazarus’s flesh, while not marred, was sallow and ripe. Mary put a few drops of pure nard, an expensive perfume, on her brother’s head. Then she poured some on Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance.

  Judas objected. “Why was this perfume not sold, and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.”

  “Leave her alone,” Jesus said. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor, Judas, but you will not always have me.”

  Ob laughed, loud and boisterous. The dinner guests were shocked, but Jesus ignored him.

  “The hour has come,” Jesus continued, “for the Son of Man to be glorified. Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

  “And one day,” Ob interrupted, “all will die, and the seeds of my kind’s revenge shall be sown.”

  Jesus’ demeanor changed. He whirled on Lazarus.

  “Silence your tongue!”

  Ob leaned close and whispered, “Caution, Nazarene. I am forbidden to harm the sisters, but your Father said nothing of your precious disciples. I can eat their bodies in remembrance of you.”

  Ignoring him, Jesus turned back to his listeners. “The man who loves life will lose it, while the man who hates life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor those who serve me.

  There came a loud, insistent knock at the door. All of the assembled jumped, startled. The knock came again. Mary opened the door. A priest and four soldiers pushed into the home.

  “Where is Jesus of Nazareth?”

  “I am he.”

  “And where is Lazarus of Bethany?”

  Ob rose. “I am he.”

  The priest appraised them both. “And you, Jesus, claim you brought this man, Lazarus, back from the dead.”

  “I did, by the Glory of God.”

  “Then you blaspheme.”

  “If you have eyes,” Jesus said, “let them see. Follow me.”

  He strode past the armed men, and they did not molest him. The priest followed him outside, along with the disciples, the sisters, and the other guests. Ob remained inside. Jesus turned back to the house.

  “Lazarus, come forth.”

  Ob’s host body’s legs moved without him willing them. He glanced down in panicked confusion.

  “What is this?”

  His arms and hands defied him and opened the door. He strode out into the streets and cursed Jesus’ name.

  “What trickery is this?”

  “No trickery,” Jesus said. “I cannot command thee, but it suddenly occurs to me that I can command the flesh you inhabit.”

  Many among the crowd were confused, but did not intercede.

  Jesus turned to the priest. “I brought this man back from the dead. Is he not now marked for death because of it?”

  The priest nodded.

  “And if I did it again, would you not then believe?”

  “What are you saying, Rabbi?”

  “Carry out your sentence. Slay him. Then I shall bring him back and you shall see.”

  “Wait,” Ob shouted. “You cannot—”

  The priest nodded at the soldiers. “Make it so.”

  Mary and Martha averted their eyes, but were not afraid, because they had faith in the Lord. A soldier stepped forward, armor clanking, and thrust a spear into Lazarus’s chest. Ob grasped the shaft and grunted. The crowd gasped.

  “He lives,” they murmured. “He does not fall.”

  “His head,” the priest commanded. “He cannot survive that.”

  Ob’s eyes grew wide. “No. Strike not my head. Do not—”

  A second soldier drew his short sword and plunged it through the back of Lazarus’s head. He pushed hard, pierced the skull, and slid it the rest of the way in. The sound of splintering bone filled the air. Lazarus dropped, and Ob was dispatched. He screamed with rage, but none save Jesus could hear him.

  As he fled, Ob’s spirit whispered in Jesus’ ear. “You know what fate your Father plans for thee. I shall be there, waiting. And after your spirit has fled, when your discarded flesh hangs from the cross, I will take it for my own. When you rise from the dead, it shall be me inside this bag of skin and blood and bones. You may be the Life, but I am the Resurrection.”

  The priest looked at the corpse lying in the street and said to Jesus, “Now, if you are whom you say, bring him back.”

  Jesus folded his arms. “I will not. For you have eyes but do not see. I am the resurrection and the life, but your lack of faith blinds you.”

  “This Rabbi is touched in the head,” the priest said. “Nothing more. He is not the Messiah. He is a simple madman.”

  After the priest and soldiers had departed, and Mary and Martha wept for the second time over their brother’s fallen form, Jesus turned to the disciples.

  “Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!”

  Then a voice came from heaven, “I HAVE GLORIFIED IT, AND WILL AGAIN.”

  Some in the crowd thought the voice was thunder. Others said it was an angel.

  Jesus said, “This voice was for your benefit, not mine. Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. But when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself. You are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you all. For one day, it will. Darkness will descend upon this entire world, and shall not be lifted. That shall be the time of the Rising. Put your trust in the light while you have it, so that you may become sons of light, and not be left behind as the dead.”

  When he had finished speaking, Jesus left Bethany and hid himself from them. In the desert, powerless to act against Ob, he turned to the ways of man. He performed a secret spell, passed down from Solomon, taken from the Daemonolateria, and cast Ob’s disembodied spirit into the Void.

  Judas, who was hiding behind a stone, saw Jesus work the forbidden rites and was appalled. He had believed his Rabbi to be the Son of God, and had believed that Jesus’ powers came from the Holy Spirit. But now, here he was working arcane magicks.

  At that moment, Judas’ heart was filled with resentment, and he vowed to turn Jesus over to the priests.

  And in the Void, Ob wailed and raged and waited for the death of light and the time of the Rising.

  The Siqquism who stole Christmas

  Ob entered the fat man’s body at thirty-thousand feet. After taking control of the corpse, he glanced over the side of the craft. A snow-covered landscape zipped by far below. The wind howled in his ears as he passed through a cloud. The dampness chilled him.

  It was nighttime. Stars cast their cold, lonely lights from far above. Ob hated each and every one of them.

  The Lord of the Siqqusim stared at his reflection in the vehicle’s polished silver handrails. Outwardly, the man’s body wasn’t much. A long, white beard, bordering on unkempt, dangled from a face whose centerpiece was a bulbous red nose. The fat man was adorned in a red suit, matching the color of his nose, like the garb of a jester or clown. He smelled faintly of gingerbread. Ob scanned the body’s memories, picking through the brain like it was a filing cabinet, searching for clues to this new host’s identity.

  The fat man had died of an aneurism. He’d been—

  Ob’s laughter was louder than the roaring wind. Had the rest of the Thirteen been present, they’d have shared in his amusement.

  This host body had suffered an impossible aneurism—impossible since the fat man was supposed to be immortal. He was one of the old gods, known to various tribes as Santa Claus, Kris Cringle, the Dark Elf, Father Christmas and other, long-forgotten names. He was not able to die, and yet he had—the victim of a slow, eons-long spiritual rot. Ob had seen it before, in Rome and Greece and elsewhere.

  Santa Claus had died from the cancer of non-belief.

  All gods existed on belief. It was their power. Their food. The more people that believed in them, the stronger they became. But when they lost favor with their devout followers, when people stopped believing in them and began worshipping other deities, the gods grew weaker. If it continued long enough, the gods could die. It had happened to Zeus. To Odin. To countless others, both remembered and forgotten. History was written in the blood of forgotten pantheons. They’d been replaced with new gods. Shinier gods. Gods of medicine and science and peace.

  Of course, humanity hadn’t realized that Claus was a god. They just thought of him as some kindly old legend, a story to tell children. A benevolent figurehead. A marketing icon. Which was fine, since millennia ago, he’d been that very thing—a god of production and commerce. Claus had transformed over time, altering his identity and duties to suit the ever-changing demands of his fickle believers. All gods did so, when required. They had no choice. Beholden to the whims of the faithful, even the gods had to adapt or die.

  Ob and the rest of the Thirteen were not gods, and thus, they had no such weaknesses. The Thirteen scoffed at the inferior beings—gods, angels, demons, devils. All of them were amateurs. They were mere children, battling for scraps from the Creator’s table, fighting for the right to be chained to the desires of humanity, sentenced to obey their believer’s prayers, for to do so was to reward their faith. Rewarding humanity’s faith kept the belief strong—and thus, kept the gods strong.

  Ob longed for the day when he could destroy them all. He would kick the Creator from the throne and ascend for himself.

  But not yet.

  One planet, one reality, at a time. Ob and his fellow Siqqusim had just finished with another Earth, slaughtering the last of the humans and making a mockery with their corpses. While his brothers, Ab and Api, took over, Ob had led the Siqqusim into the Great Labyrinth between worlds, moving on to this level of existence.

  Finished with Claus’s memories, Ob looked around the sled. It was piled high with colorfully-wrapped boxes and bags. The vast storage space behind the seat was much bigger inside than it appeared from the outside. Ob knew that if he dived into that mound of presents, he could burrow all night and still not reach the bottom. Leather reigns lay in his lap. Ob picked them up and sleigh-bells jingled. The reigns were tied to nine mangy familiars. Each had taken the earthly form of a reindeer. The familiar at the head of the procession was smaller than the others, but its nose glowed scarlet with arcane energies.

  Ob experimented with the reigns. The familiars obeyed his commands, unaware that their master no longer inhabited this obese shell. Ob directed them to land. They dropped out of the sky and soared above a village in the Lapland province of Finland. The sled drifted to a halt in the deep snow. Other than the sleigh’s jingling bells, the town was silent. The streets were deserted and the villagers were most likely asleep. Smoke curled from a few chimneys. Many doors and windows were adorned with Christmas decorations. Icicles hung from roofs and gutters.

  Ob climbed out of the sled and approached the reindeer. They stomped their hooves and pawed the snow, sensing that something was wrong, but unaware of what it was. Their master smelled different. His aura had vanished.

  “Well,” Ob said, “ho, ho, ho and all that. Names have power, so let’s get down to the act of naming.” He pointed at each as he spoke. “Rudolph, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen. Now... do you know who I am?”

  The familiars glanced at each other, snorting in fear.

  “I’m the reason for the season.” Ob licked his lips. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

  His teeth flashed in the darkness.

  ***

  Alvar Pokka slept next to his hearth. The embers glowed softly. The warmth eased his aching joints, stiff with arthritis. He was eighty-two years old and had lived in Lapland all of his life. Until that night, Alvar had thought he knew everything there was to know about the region’s flora and fauna. But the sound that woke him was like nothing he’d ever heard.

  Alvar hadn’t known that reindeer could scream.

  He crept to the window. The fire’s warmth seemed to vanish. Alvar peered out the frosted glass and gasped. Santa Claus was slaughtering his reindeer. One by one, he tore out their throats with his hands and teeth. His white beard had turned crimson, dripping gore. The dead animals dropped to the frozen ground. Steam rose from their corpses.

  Then they got up again and prowled through the snow-filled streets.

  Soon, Alvar’s shrieks mingled with the rest of the villagers’ screams.

  ***

  Tony Genova bolted upright in his bed, wondering if he’d screamed out loud. His heart hammered in his chest, and his ears rang. He glanced around the dimly lit room. His long-time associate, the severely overweight Vince Napoli, sat in a chair, eating junk food and watching television. Vince turned when Tony cleared his throat.

  “Sorry,” Vince said. “Did the TV wake you up?”

  Tony shook his head, waiting for his racing pulse to slow down. He slid out from under the covers, fully dressed, and put his feet on the floor. A log on the fireplace popped, sending a shower of sparks drifting up into the chimney. He smoothed his tie and noticed that his hand was trembling.

  “Jeez, Tony! You’re sweating like a pig. You okay?”

  Tony nodded. “I’m fine. Just had a bad dream is all.”

  “It’s that shit they fed us for dinner,” Vince mused, his eyes not leaving the television. “You should have brought some stuff from the States, like I did. Sleep like a baby.”

  “No thanks. We’re in fucking Finland—I want to eat like they do. You go to Italy, you eat Doritos?”

  Vince nodded.

  “Okay,” Tony rolled his eyes. “Maybe you do. But other people don’t. People go to Italy, they want to eat Italian food. Same thing here.”

  Vince didn’t reply. Secretly, Tony thought he might be right. The village only had one place to eat—a rustic tavern with a few elderly patrons. Tony and Vince didn’t speak the language, and their translator, a young man named Tjers, had met with an unfortunate accident after offering Tony a blow job, so they’d had to muddle through the menu. Tony ended up getting a boiled sheep’s head on a plate. It stared at him with big mournful eyes while he ate it. What kind of country was this where they left the eyes in your fucking dinner?

  And who the hell ate sheep heads, anyway?

  Tony sighed. What was supposed to be a simple job had turned into a cluster-fuck. It had seemed so straightforward. Travel from the United States to the Savukoski county of Lapland, Finland, which was right on the border with Russia. Meet up with Tjers. Wait for Otar, who was based in Murmansk Oblast, to cross the border, and then make the exchange—money and heroin for a dozen vials of black-market Soviet-era anthrax—a weaponized strain that their employer, Mr. Marano of the Marano crime family, was anxious to obtain. Once the exchange had been made, Otar would fuck off back to Russia, and Tony and Vince were supposed to cross the Korvatunturi mountains, meet up with their transport, and deliver the anthrax back to the States.

 

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