December 5

         The man looked down at the sleeping boy.  He traced his finger along the blond curl on the boy’s forehead.  The child looked so innocent.  He was so innocent.  It didn’t matter that he tore around the house as if looking for things to break while he was awake.  High-spirited.  That’s what his teacher called him.  She also said he was very bright.  The man sighed.  It didn’t matter how bright the boy was, if the house was taken away from them.  It wouldn’t vanish into a poof of nothingness like their savings.  But it wouldn’t be theirs any more, if the bank took it.  Now you see it, now you don’t.  That’s what money was like.   That’s what jobs were like.  Jobs and money.  Poof.

         The man sat down at the computer.  In a few moments the boy would wake up, open a small cardboard box and find a large boar.  The man began to type.

*   *   *

         Brittany was waiting for Pete again outside his front door on his way to school.  Pete felt weird, walking up the hill with George’s little sister, while George trudged by, eyes on the ground, ignoring them completely, looking as if the effort of putting one foot in front of the other was too much for him.  Pete hoped his friend wasn’t mad at him, but Brittany assured him that George had been like this at home, too.  Walking around like he was in a trance.  Talking to himself, and yelling if anyone responded.  Yelling even louder if anyone showed enough concern to ask what was going on.

         Anyway, her brother was boring, and she had interesting ideas about the wiener dogs.  She pulled out a fancy, cloth-covered notebook, and asked Pete what he thought.  Pete really didn’t think much of anything, and he told her so.  It was just a notebook.

         “Somebody gave it to me for my birthday a long time ago.  I didn’t know what to do with it.  It’s like it’s meant for something special, and I never had anything special to do with it.  I mean, I don’t write, I don’t draw, and it’s not really right for a scrap-book, which I don’t do either, anyway.”

         Pete just looked at her, still not making the connection.

         Brittany supposed that boys could be pretty dense sometimes.  “I thought we could copy the wiener dog story into it.”

         She seemed excited about this, and Pete really didn’t understand why, but he didn’t want to upset her again.  He hadn’t liked the way she had pouted off the other day.

         “I guess so,” he answered.

         “Look, I know you’re busy, and I know it seems like some stupid, little kid project, but the thing is, I read a lot of fantasy books, and they all say that writing something down can be powerful, because words can like, have power, you know?”  Her words dwindled off when she saw that he was looking up at the clouds, and off at the field, and anywhere but at her.  OK.  She must be sounding like a little kid again.  She took a new direction.  “And the note-book is pretty.  Look, it’s got suns and moons, and stars on the cover.  I’ll do the writing, if you’ll lend me the pages as we get them.”

         She seemed awfully sure that they were going to get new pages.  Pete didn’t mind the mysterious pages so much if they came to his e-mail inbox.  He understood about e-mail.  Well sort of.  As much as anybody else did, anyway.  Stuff came to your inbox.  Sometimes it was from people you knew, and sometimes it was from people you didn’t know – people who wanted you to buy things you didn’t need, or to wire money into some bank account so that they can escape from some fraudulent captivity in a third world country.  He didn’t understand how the words were broken down into data and transmitted over wires, or even worse, wirelessly – through the air.  He wondered how many people really understood about that.  Now that he thought about it, the Internet was just as mysterious as bizarre stories appearing in his spiral bound notebook.  Unless you understood it.  And there were people who understood it.  Scientists, and computer programmers.  People like that.  They understood about the Internet.  Probably.

Pete didn’t really care if Brittany copied the story into a fancy, cloth-covered notebook.  He just wished that if it was going to keep appearing, that it would do it in a logical, conventional way. 

He pulled his English notebook out of his backpack and handed it to Brittany.  He didn’t have English today.  He didn’t need the notebook, and he had to smile at how happy it seemed to make her.  She was beaming, and bouncing again.  Her eagerness made her almost look pretty – well, except for the glasses, which didn’t really work on her round face.   She promised to use her best handwriting, and she skipped off toward the middle school.

         Step by step, Pete plodded up the long series of staircases that led to the High School.  Had he had that much enthusiasm back when he was in the seventh grade?  Had he actually used to look forward to his days?  It seemed like a long time ago.  What he had to look forward to right now was a geometry test.  He knew he’d ace it, because he had studied.  He could figure out the circumference of a circle with the best of them, but he wasn’t exactly excited about it.  And of course, Christmas was coming.  Unless it didn’t come, like in the wiener dog story. 

No.  He shook his head.  That would be too crazy – and too sad.  He liked Christmas.

*   *   * 

         Pete tried to walk home from school with George, but their last class that day was PE, and George left while Pete was changing out of his PE clothes.  George didn’t have to change out of his PE clothes, because George hadn’t even bothered to change into them for class, which wasn’t like him.  Coach marked you down for not changing.  Way down.

         Brittany was waiting on the bench, as was becoming usual.  She showed him the notebook.  She had copied all five installments of the story, using a calligraphy pen.  He had to admit it looked really good.  The first letters of each day were done in different colors, with flowers and butterflies flying around them, like some kind of medieval manuscript.  Where did she find the time?

         “Seventh grade isn’t exactly taxing,” she said, as if she had read his mind.  “You get a lot of time to think.  Like, I was wondering about the author.”

         “You mean like who is it?  Yeah.  I’m right there with you, but I’m more concerned about how it gets here.”

         “How it gets here?  Who cares how it gets here.”

         “You mean it doesn’t bother you, even a little bit, that these stories appear out of nowhere.”

         “I think it’s cool.”

         “It doesn’t bother you that it’s impossible?”

         Brittany shrugged.  “Somebody once said that you should believe six impossible things before breakfast.”

         “Who said that?”

         She looked sheepish.  “Alice in Wonderland.”

         “Wasn’t Louis Carroll on drugs?”

         “See!”  She got all excited again, as if he had just proven her point.  “It’s important to know what the author is like!”

         Pete sighed and shook his head.  She was obviously too deeply immersed in daydreams about fairy magic to comprehend that the world was based on provable, scientific fact.  That was OK.  For this conversation, Pete could play along.  “Well, he’s interested in the stock market.”

         “I think he’s worried,” Brittany suggested.

         “Why worried?”

         “Well he’s writing about Christmas not coming.  I mean, do you write about Christmas not coming if everything’s just going along peachy keen, hunky dory?  I think something’s wrong.”

         “You mean you think Santa’s drinking too much and there won’t be a Christmas?”  Pete couldn’t help smiling.

         “Don’t laugh at me.”  Brittany smacked him on the arm a little harder than he thought was necessary, as if she wasn’t used to smacking people on the arm.  “I just think he’s worried.”

         “Are we supposed to help?”  Pete was practically laughing out loud by this time.  She was so earnest, and so intense.  She would actually be a little scary, if he could possibly take her seriously.

         Brittany jumped up, and dangled the notebook over the garbage can.  The sun glinted off her long dark hair, and he could imagine her eyes flashing behind her glasses, although he had never really seen eyes flash before.  Books always describe people’s eyes as flashing when they got mad, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t actually possible. 

“I’m going to throw this away if you don’t stop laughing at me, and there’s yucky, disgusting stuff in this garbage can.”

         Pete leaned back against the bench, and crossed his legs.  “I don’t care if you throw it away.  They just keep coming.”

         “What if they stop?  What if I get this all covered with yogurt delight, and we have to come out here and dig it out tomorrow because there are no new ones, and we try to clean it up, but it always smells like spoiled dairy products, forever and ever, and you never get another page again, all because you disrespected this.”

         “Do what you want.”  Pete was confident that she was more interested in the story than he was.  She wouldn’t cover her pretty notebook with rancid yogurt.

         “Hey wait a minute!”  Her voice was burbling again.  More excitement, Pete decided.

         She pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of the garbage.

         “That’s disgusting.”  Pete observed.

         “No, look.”  And she sat back down, and spread it out.

December 5

"Oh, those deer are here.  Good."  Zeke was right on Tubby's heels.  Now, Zeke, short for Ezekiel, could have worn the nickname "Tubby" with aplomb.  The wheel this Ezekiel saw must have been a wheel of cheese, or maybe the wheel on a donut truck.  Zeke was the largest of the three pigs by size, but the middle one by age.  Both of the younger pigs had had unfortunate real estate experiences years ago--you might be familiar with the story.  It is not quite accurate, but, it turns out these things rarely are.  "Hey, Fred, the weirdest thing just happened."

"Somehow, that doesn't surprise me right now," said Fred.  "Please, tell us about it, won't you?"

"Well, I guess you've met these, deer...They were on about Christmas, no Christmas.  I told them you might be able to help.  But, it's not that.  It's that there was this water trough," said Zeke.

"This water trough," interrupted Tubby, "right by our house.  Last night.  It had never been there before."

"We thought maybe you guys had put it there.  I was going to call and ask about it."

"Then, this morning, we were looking at it.  I mean, we were looking right at it,"

"It disappeared.  Vaporized.  Poof.  Gone.  Like, beamed up or something.”

"It was there and then it was not.  Vanished.  I wouldn't believe it if someone told me something like that, I would think they were nuts.  But I saw it disappear with my own eyes.  I saw it.  Maybe I'm nuts.”

"I saw it too.  We both saw it," said Zeke.  "Oy vey.  Such a thing, I have never seen."

"I'm pretty sure that your water trough is in our lab right now.  And that it is not...right," said Fred.  "That there is something, perhaps something supernatural, at work here.  And I believe that these deer are on the level, that they do come from the, er, North Pole, at least in some way."

"Mystery and adventure do seem to find us," said Akelmeyer.

"Chloe and Fawn, would you tell us everything you can about what Christmas is to you, about your lives, and especially, about what is different this year from other years.  Then, we will go into the lab and take a very close look at that water trough."  When they were solving mysteries, Akelmeyer and Malchisedech rarely questioned Fred's directives.  He was unquestionably the mastermind.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Brittany’s eyes were shining.  (Pete had no trouble acknowledging that eyes could shine, even if he didn’t believe they could flash.  Shining could be caused by moistness.)  “See, I told you he’s worried.  Things are there, and then they aren’t there.  He can’t count on anything.”

Pete wasn’t quite ready to concede to worried.  That still seemed like a stretch, because people just wrote about stuff that interested them, right?  But he didn’t mind speculating about the author’s personality, or at least his background.

“I think he’s either Catholic or Jewish.  I mean he talks about the liturgical cycle in the beginning, and then about the dreidel yesterday.”

“I think Catholic.” Brittany was certain.  “I mean lots of people know about dreidels, but how many non-Catholics know about the three-year liturgical cycle?  When my Grandpa’s new girlfriend, two girlfriends ago, asked him what Catholic is, he didn’t tell her about the liturgy.  He told her it’s all just meaningless ritual.  That’s what most people think about Catholicism, and he even used to be a Catholic.”

Pete was still trying to figure out what Brittany had just said, when she jumped up and ran off to her apartment, taking everything with her, calling out that she would show it to him when she finished copying the new page.

*   *   *

         ‘Mystery and adventure do seem to follow us.’  Brittany liked that.  What did you have to do to attract mystery and adventure?  Her parents liked to travel around the world.  She liked that too, she guessed.  It was nice to see the Big Buddha on Lantau island – nice to know what it looked like from the back, not just what the guide books showed you, and nice to see people picturesquely plowing and watering fields by hand in Viet Nam, but once you had seen twenty or thirty temples, you had really seen enough, even if they were ancient. 

And she supposed being harassed by child beggars, and poor people trying to sell you things in third world countries could be considered an adventure.  Lots of people had never bargained for a piece of tribal H’mong jewelry with a genuine H’mong tribal person.  Brittany had, and when she had come away from the encounter, and done the calculations, she had felt a little disgusted at how she had haggled so aggressively over what had turned out to be a price difference of about fifty cents.  Fifty cents that really didn’t matter to her, but that might have meant a great deal to the old lady with her pitifully small basket of jewelry for sale.  But on the other hand, you were supposed to bargain.  They expected it.  It was part of the experience.

She preferred a good soccer game, herself.

And she had always wondered how you went about finding mystery.

How did you make the water trough appear in your own back yard?  She used to love to read the Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew when she was younger.  She remembered that she always assumed that when she grew up she would be able to help people, like they did.  When she was about eight years old, back in Bakersfield, she remembered her mother reading a newspaper article out loud about a ghost in a Toys R Us store.   She had insisted on being taken to that toy store so that she could help solve the mystery.  Her mom had done it too, taken her there, and helped her look, even though this particular Toys R Us store had not been the nearest Toys R Us store by any means.  They had looked up and down isles, examining Barbie dolls and bicycles, board games, and baby toys.  Her mom understood about things like that.  Maybe she had read the same books when she was a little girl.

But where the Bobbseys would have found clues, she and her mom had seen nothing but isles and isles of toys.  There were no mysterious footprints, or notes, or scraps of cloth laying around waiting for her to find them, after having been overlooked by hard working, always deferential police officers.  At least her mom had had the good sense not to try to make up for the disappointment by buying her a toy.  Even as a little girl, she had cared more about having a purpose than about having another toy.  She sighed, lamenting the lack of mystery in her life, and drew pretty bluish purple flowers twined around the O at the beginning of “Oh, those deer are here.”  Pete could get all weirded out if he wanted to about the seemingly inexplicable way the pages were appearing.  As far as Brittany was concerned, it wasn’t as good as if the magical water trough was actually appearing in her back yard, but it was better than nothing.  She didn’t want to get disappointed when it turned out to be some perfectly normal, scientifically explainable occurrence after all.