Chapter 19 Too close. Then a voice began to wail #2
“Damned Green Yule,” he muttered. And didn’t care two jots how Gronk-ish he sounded.
He was minding his own business one of those quieter mid-afternoons, when the shop door tinkled open, and a guest entered: a woman of middle age and quiet dignity. She nodded politely to him and began to inspect the festive table center arrangements.
A few moments later, a gentleman in a rather worn winter coat stepped inside. He moved to the other side of the table. Neither he nor the lady acknowledged each other and seemed to possess no connection whatsoever.
Nigel’s heart lurched.
Somehow he knew. He just knew what was about to happen.
“Don’t even think about it,” he muttered.
Then he heard it again: skittering overhead. His pulse jumped, and his eyes flew wide.
The next thing he knew, he saw it—a cluster of mistletoe leaves and berries, descending slowly on its vine like a spider on silk. Dangling just above the gentleman’s felt cap.
Nigel reached for the pruning shears. Could he dash across the shop and cut that thing down before anyone noticed? He didn’t want to frighten the poor customer with a wild leap, but—
Before he could take action, the lady’s voice spoke up: “Oh! I do beg your pardon, sir. But you seem to be standing in a most interesting position.”
The gentleman looked up, blinked several times. He removed his cap, revealing a head of thinning, grey-streaked hair, but his careworn face broke into a charming smile. “Heavens bless me! How could I have neglected to see it there?”
The lady grinned across the table at him, her solemn expression altering into something altogether coquettish. “Tradition would dictate . . .” she began.
He looked at her, brows rising slightly. “One wouldn’t want to argue with tradition . . .”
And the next thing Nigel knew, the lady had rounded the table and planted a kiss on the gentleman’s cheek. A pair of total strangers! Rendered utterly ridiculous!
The mistletoe fluttered a leaf at him like a waggling tongue, before coiling up its vine and vanishing among the pipes.
Nigel gritted his teeth, his grip on the shears tightening.
But the next moment, both lady and gentleman were at the counter to make their purchases, nattering on like a pair of old friends.
They agreed to stop over at Simmer Down Deli for a warming cup of soup, while Nigel rang them up in a haze of furious indignation.
By the time they quit the shop, the mistletoe was nowhere in sight.
But he knew it would return. Sooner rather than later.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” he snarled at the beams. “This is the last year you haunt me, do you hear?”
The mistletoe appeared suddenly directly over his head, fluttering leaves and berries. Nigel leapt up, hacking at it ineffectually with the pruning shears, but it pulled out of reach and vanished, leaving him red-faced and panting below.
From that point on, the mistletoe became a menace.
Every day, it stalked the customers, tricking them into kisses unawares.
Somehow it always managed to choose victims who were utterly delighted to be thus persecuted .
. . which only galled Nigel all the more.
Why would total strangers want to go about kissing one another?
It was like the joint lunacy over all those stupid Green Yule carols, a group hysteria that gripped the collective minds of otherwise sensible people.
“I think it’s sweet,” Luna declared, after Nigel climbed up onto the stepladder, attempting to chase the rotten thing down after one particularly egregious occasion.
“A little kiss never hurt anyone! That old lady looked so lonely when she came in, and she said the fellow reminded her of her long-lost grandson.”
“Don’t let it fool you, Miss Talbot.” Nigel lunged at the rafters so hard, the ladder nearly tipped over. Luna caught and stabilized it, just preventing him from breaking his neck and taking out an entire display of poinsettias in the process. “It’s a wicked and vindictive blight upon the season!”
Luna raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like you have a personal grievance.”
“Oh, I do! I do indeed!” Nigel descended the ladder and pushed a lock of hair back from his forehead as he scowled up at the ceiling.
“We didn’t celebrate Green Yule in my household growing up, not as a rule.
Dad said it was my mother’s favorite holiday, but without her, he couldn’t see any point to it.
And yet . . .” He drew a breath through clenched teeth.
“And yet, every Green Yule, that same mistletoe would somehow find its way out of Garden and into the house. There it lurked, just waiting for opportunity to pounce. Only there never was much by way of opportunity, for the only woman who ever stopped in during the season was Great Aunt Galatea.”
Nigel shuddered as the memories returned, one after another. Though a lady of upright and decorous behavior, not prone to any offensive displays of affection, the minute mistletoe came into the picture, she became a veritable kissing machine.
“And who else should become the object of all her affections?” Nigel asked in a heavy voice.
“None other than her own, sweet, winsome, youngest nephew.” He rubbed his cheek with the palm of one hand.
“I can still feel her lips now. She had a mustache. And she smelled strongly of those hateful Camearian cigars she always smoked.”
Luna tsked sympathetically. “Did she never kiss your older brother?”
“No! Because the mistletoe only ever targeted me! I don’t know why. I never did anything to deserve it.”
Luna, however, was not born yesterday. “Nothing at all?”
Nigel breathed a low curse. “All right. Fine. When I was in the fifth grade, there was this girl. Iona Thwipwhistle. The most beautiful girl in school. I was . . .” He rubbed a hand down the back of his neck and shrugged.
“I was wildly in love with her, like every other boy of my grade. But far too shy to do anything about it. But the school Green Yule party was coming up, and I hatched a plan. I thought, if I could get her under a sprig of mistletoe, perhaps she would let me kiss her, and we could skip over all the difficult business of talking. So I cut a bunch of mistletoe out of Garden on the sly, stuffed it into the front of my winter coat, and carried it with me to school.”
“Oh dear,” Luna murmured. “Oh dear, Mr. Grimm, say you didn’t go through with it!”
He was committed to the telling now, however. “I wanted to hang it directly over her head. So I stacked her chair onto her desk, then stacked mine on top of that. I thought I might string it up from the ceiling, you see.”
Luna winced in preparation for what must inevitably follow.
“Of course, Mrs. Mewet, my teacher, walked in just as I crested the peak of this hazardous mountain. I lost my balance—and the mistletoe—and ended up with a broken arm in the nurse’s office, followed by a week of detention.”
“Oh, Mr. Grimm!”
“No kiss for sad young Nigel, oh no! As for the mistletoe, I thought it lost forever, only . . .” His voice dropped an octave.
“Only it followed me home. And when Great Aunt Galatea came to visit me in my invalid state, the cursed plant reappeared suddenly over my head. I had dreamed of Iona Thwipwhistle’s soft lips; but it was a cigar-smoking-and-mustachioed great aunt who smothered me in her affections!
And continued to smother me every Green Yule until her dying day. ”
Luna pressed a hand to her mouth and made a small coughing noise. It might have been a sympathetic sound, but he suspected it was, in fact, a derisive snort. At least she had the grace to try to hide it.
“I thought, after her passing, I would be spared,” he continued. “I left home soon after and glimpsed neither leaf nor berry for a number of years. But ever since I took over the keeping of Garden, it’s made a vengeful comeback.”
Other memories crowded in—dark images of dark times.
There was the first Green Yule after Jastira’s fall, which he had spent in a prison cell, awaiting sentencing from the Authorities of Plym.
That year he’d been kissed by one of the guards—a terrifying woman with most of her teeth knocked out, probably twice his size and breadth, who took one look at the mistletoe appearing so unexpectedly above his head, grinned like a shark, and very nearly swallowed him whole.
She released him only just in time for him to gasp in a lungful of air before darkness closed in.
Not a kiss he'd soon forget, no matter how he tried!
The following Green Yule, he’d been at liberty once more.
He’d found his way to a hole-in-the-wall diner, ordered a lonely supper, only vaguely aware of the season or its perils.
The waitress approached his table, set down his order of fish-and-chips, leaned down, and planted a kiss on his mouth that shocked him straight to his core.
(She tasted like mackerel.) Then she’d gone—wordless, expressionless, as though the whole incident were just part of her regular day—and Nigel saw the mistletoe slip out the door into the night.
He could have sworn he heard its leaves rustling in a wicked cackle of laughter.
“There were . . . incidents,” he finished darkly.
Luna made another coughing sort of sound, her eyes sparkling behind her fingers.
When she managed to get her hilarity in order, however, she dropped her hand from her mouth and said with appropriate solemnity, “It doesn’t seem to have it out for you this season, Mr. Grimm.
So far it is nothing more than a source of delight to your customers.
It always chooses those who are more than happy to be chosen.
Perhaps it isn’t out for vengeance at all?
Perhaps, after all these years, it is simply trying to fulfill its purpose in life. ”
Nigel sent her a look. “You are far too trusting for your own good, Miss Talbot.”
She shrugged. “I’ve heard that before, Mr. Grimm.”
With that, she went about her day, carefree as always. But Nigel kept a firm grip on the pruning shears and a wary eye on the ceiling.