The 25th Christmas

By Benjamin F. Smith

It had snowed that Christmas morning. I remember looking out the window at a set of footprints that led to a bare spot in the driveway where the car had once been. A gray haze of exhaust smoke still hung in the air, slowly dissipating like memories of a dream. I’m not sure how I knew it then, but I remember having the feeling that I would not be seeing my mother again anytime soon.

The house was cold as I walked down the hallway. A faint light flickered in the living room and the sound of a news broadcast caught my attention before I entered the bathroom. An outbreak of crop circles this side of the county line had some farmers up in arms. The reporter went on to say there were five missing persons reported in the last four days. The image of the bare spot in the driveway immediately flashed in my mind. I scanned the living room and saw my father asleep on the couch. His pants unzipped, making room for his ever-growing stomach. Empty beer cans stacked in a pyramid on the coffee table gave testament to his one great skill. I quietly closed the bathroom door, not wanting to awaken the beast.

My father was still comatose as I left the house. As I walked down the street I drug my feet, making tracks in the snow like a cross-country skier. Just then, I looked up and saw Johnny Groton. Johnny was usually the bully on the block that all of the other kids, including myself, steered clear of. This morning Johnny looked so lost, with his head turned down sitting on the old rock retaining wall in front of his house. I had to ask him if he was all right. Johnny told me that his mother had left the morning before and had not returned. The police had told his father that they did not have any clues to the recent disappearances of several housewives who had just driven off and had not been seen since. The police chief was refusing to invest too many man-hours into the investigation as in each case the women seemed to have left on their own. Chills ran down my spine. I flashed back to the image of the empty driveway. Was my mother the next victim?

I sat down next to Johnny and tried to think of reasons why our mothers had just up and drove away. I had not been surprised that my mother had left. My mother and father had been yelling at each other all night. It seemed like too big of a coincidence that she had left at the same time as all of the others though. I kept trying on different scenarios as to why all of these women would just suddenly disappear without a trace. Was there a cult? Was there a Hindu monk who had some secret potion to gain control of them? And what was going on with the crop circles? Did they have something to do with this? Or was it just a coincidence that they were occurring at the same time as the disappearance of the housewives?

After awhile, Johnny and I decided to go check out the circles. On the way I looked down the street to see that our car was still gone. Disappointment filled my heart.

Johnny and I walked into old man Hoffman’s wheat field. It wasn’t long before we came across the first circle. The wheat stalks were broke off at the same level about three inches from the ground and laid in the same direction in a counter-clockwise direction. All around the circle the snow had accumulated to eight inches, but within the circle, there was no snow. The ground was warm to the touch. As I knelt within the circle I heard the distinctive noise of a shotgun round being chambered, and as I turned around, into the circle stepped old man Hoffman.

“I would not get too close to that if I were you there young buck,” he quipped as he spat a load of tobacco. Hoffman was one of the ugliest men I had ever seen; his eyes were lopsided and the left eye was bigger than the right. When he spoke his gargantuous nose crinkled like cottage cheese. “What in the hell you two boys doin’ out here anyhow?”

“Uh,” I responded, my heart nearly beating its way out of my chest “we were just looking…”

“Both of our mothers are gone.” Johnny broke in “it just seemed too weird that these circles showed up at the same time.”

Old man Hoffman lowered his shotgun and scratched his head. “Yup, just like it was too weird 25 years ago when these same darn circles appeared and all of those little girls vanished.”

“What? What little girls?” I asked.

“25 years ago, these circles appeared just the same as you see now. Five little girls from town, all about five years old, just vanished into thin air.”

“Were they ever found?” Johnny asked abruptly.

“Yup, they were found down in Devil’s Gulch. They didn’t remember a darn thing.” Hoffman looked up at the sky; “Lots of folks thought they had been abducted by space creatures.”

“Well we had better be getting home now,” I said, “Pa’s gonna be worried.”

We didn’t go home when we left old man Hoffman’s; we headed straight to the library. We figured that kind of event would have been front-page news back then. Maybe the papers would be able to tell us something.

It took a while to find the story about the missing girls. The occurrence was actually 23 years prior, but almost to the day.

“Geez” Johnny whispered, “look here, Mary Dolphini, that’s my mother’s maiden name, she was one of the girls.”

“Your mom’s name was Dolphini?” I asked sarcastically.

Johnny glanced up at me with an evil stare and I decided this was not a good time for jovial camaraderie; I turned my head down and looked at the list carefully. There was only one Susan on the list, but her last name was not one that I had ever heard of.

“My mother’s maiden name was Johnson, not Madera,” I said quizzically.

“Maybe it’s not your mom; maybe it’s a different Susan,” Johnny quipped, still a bit perturbed about me making fun of his mother’s name.

“I don’t know, look at the other three women. Their first names match up with the other missing moms, and I’ll bet their maiden names would match too.”

“So, how do we find out what their maiden names were?”

“Let’s go call their houses and ask.”

We wrote down the names from the article and then found a pay phone outside of the library. We were able to confirm two of the three maiden names. There was no answer at the third number. I kept wondering why the name in the list was different from my mother’s maiden name. There must have been some reason for it. Had my mother been married before my dad? I remember my mother telling me that she and my father had married when she was fifteen because he had gotten her pregnant and later she had lost the baby. Why would she have lied about something like that?

Johnny and I decided to meet early the next day and continue to think about what we would do next.

The house was dark as I approached it. There was enough light from a street light down the street that I could see the car was still missing. There was a strange eeriness about the house. It felt as though I were in some horror movie. As I opened the door, the hinges creaked a bone-chilling sound. I walked into the living room to see the beer can pyramid had grown exponentially. My father, still in the same unzipped pants looked up at me from his stupor.

“Where the hell have you been?” He asked with a growl.

“At the library,” I responded, not trying to make to big of a deal about it. “Where’s Mom?” I could feel my throat harden with the uncertainty of how he was going to respond to that question.

“How the hell should I know?” He replied with an angry voice, “She’s off doing her own damn thing, I guess.”

I could feel my father peering at me out of the corner of his eye, trying to see if I was going to question him, like a snake waiting for it’s pray to come just a little too close.

“Well, I’m really tired, and I have some homework to do.”

My father stumbled into the bathroom and slammed the door not even stopping to think that I would not have homework to do on Christmas break.

The next morning, my mother was still missing. I met up with Johnny. We both had come to the conclusion that the only place we could go to look for more clues was into Devil’s Gulch. Devil’s Gulch was a deep, crater-like ravine out in the middle of a wooded area south of town. It was said to be over a quarter-mile deep and there were no roads or trails down to the bottom. The only way to get into it was to scale the rock walls, or to be lowered in by helicopter. I grabbed some rope out of our garage and we headed out. We did not think about any other supplies that we might need in case something went wrong.

There was snow on the undergrowth and our pants were soaking wet by the time we reached Devil’s Gulch. The morning sun was reflecting off the red rock cliffs onto the fog that was covering the bottom of the gorge giving it an eerie glow. There was a strange smell in the air I had never smelled before and have not smelled since.

The rope was only about twenty feet long and it looked frayed so we decided not use it. We started down the wall slowly, Johnny first, then I followed. The rocks were covered with snow and hard to hold onto. I reached for a ledge that looked solid; the ledge crumbled in my hand. I hit the side of the cliff with my chest and knees sending searing pain through my body. Johnny looked up only to be pelted in the face with an icy dirt clod. He hugged the wall as he shrieked with the fear of falling.

I was holding on with my left hand and trying to find a place to regain a grip with my right hand. There was no place to get a good grip. The pain in my fingers was turning to numbness. I looked down at Johnny who was now affixed to the side of the wall with a look of shear terror. I yelled for help even though I knew that no one was anywhere nearby to hear my pleas.

I finally got a grip with my right hand. “Johnny, we’re not going to make it back up. We have to keep going down”, I said in a shaky voice.

Johnny did not reply or move. He was frozen with fear to the side of the cliff. My hands were getting number and I knew I would not be able to hold on much longer. Johnny had to move.

“Johnny!” I shouted, “You need to move, or we’ll both be dead!”

Johnny moved his head up slightly to look at me. His face was pale and his lips were blue. I could see his arms and hands were trembling. I knew I had to break the nervousness that had overcome him.

“Come on Johnny”, I laughed, “Let’s go kick some alien butt!”

A slight smile came to Johnny’s face.

“I hear they taste just like chicken” I said.

Johnny began to laugh. He loosened up and looked down. It was still another fifty feet to the bottom and there were jagged rocks; if we fell, it would be over.

It took us another thirty minutes to climb to the bottom. Both of us fell to the ground exhausted and out of breath. We looked around past the rocks down the gorge but all we could see was tall weeds and dense trees.

After a few minutes, Johnny stood up and I followed his lead. We stumbled into the dense woods heading deeper into the gorge. It got dark in the overgrowth and it was hard to walk, the ground was soggy and soft making each step harder. We had gone about a hundred yards or so when Johnny stopped.

“What?” I queried.

“Shhhhh”, Johnny replied, “Listen”.

I tuned in to a faint noise. It was hard to hear at first, but it was getting louder. It was a pulsating, droning sound that I had never heard before. The sound kept getting louder and we walked toward it. After five minutes, the sound became unbearable. It seemed to be piercing my brain, bouncing off the walls of my skull. Johnny had his hands over his ears in front of me when all of the sudden he fell to his knees. I took a step closer to him and could not move any closer.

I was leaning forward, trying to move my feet when a brilliant, blinding light flashed in front of me, blinding me. The noise increased and I blacked out.

I had a dream that I was on a flat metal table, nude and unable to move. There was a bright light and movement around me. I did not know who I was or where I was. It was like I was an ameba under a microscope. It seemed to last forever. Then, the light went out.

Another noise, a more familiar noise woke me. My back was wet. I was lying in the open brush, and nowhere near the place where Johnny and I blacked out. I squinted as I tried to open my eyes. There was a bright light shining down on me from above. And the sound, it was a whopping sound. I realized that it was a helicopter. I rolled over onto my hands and knees. I looked in amazement at six other people; Johnny and the five missing housewives. They were all just waking up, dazed and not knowing where they were. I scanned them looking for my mother, but she was not amongst them.

Johnny spotted his mother and crawled to her, throwing his arms around her.

♦♦♦

My father died thirteen years later of natural causes on Christmas day when I was 19 years old. I worked my way through college majoring in ancient civilizations with a minor in astrology. I wrote my thesis on crop circles. I set money aside to travel to any new occurrence of crop circles. I would search exhaustively for my mother in those locations. Hoping that she would eventually be released by the aliens whom I feared were holding her. I buried myself in my studies, ignoring relationships, parties and any other college activities. I received an occasional letter or card from Johnny Groton. He married his high school sweetheart and had a couple kids. I think he felt sorry for me and a bit guilty that he got his mother back that day.

I earned a Ph.D. by the age of twenty-four and I left college not really knowing what to do with it. By the time I was twenty-five, I had worked about half a dozen crappy jobs and I had taken to drinking quite heavily. Christmas that year was especially depressing. I had lost my mother on Christmas at twelve and my father on Christmas day at nineteen. I decided to carry on the family tradition. That evening, I went to the hardware store and bought a good, stout rope. I began walking back toward my apartment, reciting a suicide note in my head. I decided to stop in at a local tavern along the way to down an ounce or two of liquid courage.

As I turned the corner to enter the tavern, two drunken people came stumbling out of the door. It was a man and a woman. They fell forward, almost knocking me over.

“Excuse us” the woman slurred in my face, her breath burning my eyes.

“Mom?” I asked, stunned at the possibility. She was wearing a cheap wig, a ton of makeup and a mini skirt that only a cheap hooker would dare, but I recognized her.

“I beg your pardon?” she quipped, acting as if she had a tiny bit of class.

“You’re Susan Johnson-Reed”, I replied. “I’m your son. You left me and dad thirteen years ago”.

A sudden look of concern came over her face as she stared back at me for a moment. “Bobby?” she finally choked out my name. “Oh my god it’s my little Bobby!” she exclaimed. She stumbled toward me again. I took a step backward.

“Oh, Bobby”, she said, “I wanted to come back for you, but I just…”

At that moment it began to snow. A flashback of the bare spot in the driveway thirteen years prior came clearly into my head. All of the places I had traveled to find her and the hours spent trying to put together a dysfunctional puzzle and now I had found the missing piece. My memory of my mother to that point had been of a loving woman, who would never abandon her family. She loved me dearly. She was my rock.

The snow was now sticking heavily to the sidewalk, leaving bare spots in the wake of where we stood.

“I just have had such a tough time of things, Bobby”, she continued. I looked at the rope I held in my hands. “A tough time”, I mimicked. I handed the rope to her and I turned and walked away.

On my twenty-fifth Christmas, I found my mother. She had not been captured by aliens. The crop circles had nothing to do with her disappearance. That evening she gave me a gift, the gift of a new chance at life. I was the one who had finally been released.