Heaven Painted as a Christmas Gift Read online

  “Let’s see what happens if we touch an aura stream,” Belle said, reaching over a few feet and putting her hand through a thin golden ray of light coming up through the roof near them.

  She instantly knew the woman this stream was coming from was sitting at a slot machine near the pool area and losing. Her name was Callie and she was seventy. She had lost her husband a few years back and loved to play slot machines and she kept herself to a tight budget. Playing slots gave the woman a reason to get up in the morning and it wasn’t costing her much at all. In fact, so far this year, she was up slightly which gave her a sense of pride.

  Belle pulled her hand back and the memory of Callie faded almost instantly. “Just like touching a person.”

  Nancy nodded. “So this is everyone’s connection to the interconnected structure of life,” Nancy said.

  “And this is how erasing Christmas will be done in each person,” Belle said. “Along these channels of connection.”

  “You seemed to have solved that problem,” Laverne said, appearing beside the two of them.

  Belle had been expecting Laverne, but her sudden appearance still startled.

  “You knew all this was here, didn’t you?” Nancy asked.

  “Actually, I did,” Laverne said, nodding. “But as with all auras and such, I had tuned it out centuries ago. Very few can ever see the beauty of all this.”

  Laverne indicated the shimmering and glowing streams of light moving off the city floor and forming the giant column in the air.

  To Belle, it was the most beautiful scene she had ever had the luck to witness.

  “So where do they go?” Belle finally asked after a moment.

  “Let me show you,” Laverne said.

  She reached out and offered a hand to both Nancy and Belle.

  Belle took her firm hand and nodded.

  A moment later they were following the river of beautiful golden threads up into the sky. At first the threads stayed close together in the massive column, sometimes being joined by other groups of threads, but then after the city of Las Vegas was only a large spot below them, the threads started to spread out again like the top of a flower.

  And eventually the stream from Las Vegas merged into what looked like a golden lake surface.

  Only Belle and Nancy and Laverne were under the surface.

  They were above the height airlines flew, Belle knew that, yet she felt warm and could breathe just fine. Laverne must have the three of them inside an invisible bubble for some reason.

  And even stranger, Belle felt no fear of falling at all. Maybe that came from being dead already and knowing she could both fly and teleport.

  “This flows and covers the entire planet,” Laverne said.

  She pointed to a nearby thread. “See how that thread touches and sometimes joins many other threads as it moves off?”

  “That person influences a lot of other people, don’t they?” Belle asked.

  “They do,” Laverne said, nodding.

  “And from the looks of it,” Nancy said, staring at the incredible ceiling above them of flowing golden threads. “The six degrees of Kevin Bacon actually has some real meaning.”

  Laverne looked puzzled.

  “There is a theory,” Belle said, laughing, “that every person in the world is only six connections or less from Kevin Bacon, the actor. It’s a party game, but pretty accurate.”

  Laverne nodded and then said, “Very accurate.”

  “So this destructive instruction for people to forget Christmas will somehow be introduced into this and flow to everyone,” Belle said.

  “That seems like exactly the way it is to be done,” Laverne said.

  “I wonder if it has been introduced into this network yet?” Nancy said.

  “I’m afraid it has,” Laverne said.

  And with that all Belle could do was stare at Lady Luck as they hung many thousands of feet in the air just under the golden cloud of the life force of everyone in existence.

  TWENTY-NINE

  LAVERNE AND BELLE and Nancy appeared back at the table near K.J. and again K.J. damn hear hurt himself standing quickly.

  “Thanks,” Belle said to Jewel and Tommy. “We’re done.”

  Jewel tightened her aura back against her skin. Then she and Tommy moved back over to the table.

  “Anything?” Jewel asked.

  “Actually a lot,” Nancy said, nodding, but saying nothing more.

  To Jewel, both of them looked a little haunted and not laughing at all anymore. She had no idea what they had seen, but it was clearly something very important.

  “Poker Boy and his team are having another meeting in a few minutes,” Laverne said. “I would like all of you there again. You two discovered the delivery method, they may have found who did it. Or at least that’s the message I just got.”

  Jewel nodded, starting to feel slightly excited that this might get solved. And she was dying to hear what Belle and Nancy had found. But that could wait.

  A moment later the five of them were again standing next to Laverne in Poker Boy’s office. This time, besides milkshakes on the table, there were baskets of fries that smelled wonderful.

  Clearly all of Poker Boy’s team could still see them and nodded hello to them, as if seeing five ghosts was a normal occurrence to all of them.

  The same group as before sat in the same positions. From what Jewel remembered of names, it was Poker Boy, Patty, Screamer, Sherrie, Ben, and Stan around the big booth from left to right.

  At that moment, a large busty woman in a far-too-small waitress uniform from the 1950s appeared carrying two more baskets of the wonderful-smelling fries. Jewel had no idea how that uniform managed to hold in all of that woman, but it did.

  The waitress smiled and nodded at the Ghost Agents, so she could see them as well. The waitress put the fries on the table. “Dig in.”

  Laverne went over and sat down at the end of the table, taking a fry.

  The five of them moved a little closer so they were standing to one side of the booth so they could see Laverne from the side.

  The waitress glanced at K.J. and winked. “Been a while there, K.J.,” she said. “Still got that fantastic hot tub?”

  Jewel glanced at K.J. who was blushing and nodding.

  The waitress again winked and then turned and vanished back into what seemed to be an invisible doorway.

  Jewel started to ask K.J. who that was and he waived her question away with a whispered, “Later.”

  “Belle and Nancy have found the life connections surface that connects everyone in the world,” Laverne said. “Something I had forgotten was there, to be honest.”

  Poker Boy started to ask a question and Laverne stopped him. “Not important now other than we know how the memory erase will be transported to everyone. I understand you might have found out who planted this destructive problem in our life connections network?”

  Poker Boy nodded and then said, “The Awgwas.”

  Jewel had no idea who that was and from the looks on the faces of Belle and Nancy and Tommy, they didn’t either. K.J was just looking puzzled.

  “They were destroyed by The Huntsmen and others over a hundred years ago,” Laverne said, clearly looking puzzled as well.

  Poker Boy nodded to Ben and Laverne turned her attention to the older-looking god.

  “Some history first to make this understandable,” Ben said.

  Laverne nodded that that would be a good idea.

  “The modern Santa Claus, as we know it now, wasn’t so much invented, but documented by L. Frank Baum,” Ben said. “In his book ‘The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.’ It was that book that set most of the modern beliefs about Nick.”

  “Is Baum still writing?” Sherrie asked.

  “I loved those stories when they came out,” Patty said.

  Poker Boy looked at Patty, clearly shocked.

  Jewel was surprised as well. From her understanding, L. Frank Baum wrote way back in the late 1800s a
nd into the early 1900s. So that meant that Poker Boy’s girlfriend was at least a hundred years old.

  “He’s writing under other names now,” Ben said. “Never really stopped.”

  “But we had to force him to write fiction under his new names,” Laverne said. “No more documenting real world stuff. Between him and the Grimm brothers, more problems have been caused by their books over the centuries.”

  Jewel was just stunned. She really only knew Baum from the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” Was Oz a real place? How could that be possible?

  Then she reminded herself she was in a floating office over Las Vegas and she had been dead for a while. And Lady Luck was sitting at the table in front of her. Of course it was possible.

  Finally Screamer seemed to get it back together before anyone else. “What does this have to do with our current problem and who are the Awgwas?”

  “The Awgwas were a band of trolls that hated Nick,” Ben said. “They hated that he helped kids stay good during a year with presents, because if the children weren’t good, the children could be turned to the dark side by the Awgwas.”

  “The Awgwas caused a lot of the traditions that you hear Nick doing,” Laverne said. “Going on his rounds at night because they couldn’t see him, and going down chimneys because they would guard doors. And so on. It got so bad, and Nick was doing such great things with his presents for children, that finally The Huntsmen got a small army together and wiped out the Awgwas. No one shed a tear.”

  Jewel was stunned at that cold-blooded statement from Lady Luck.

  “So how did they cause this problem?” Laverne asked.

  “When we went to find Flick, the son of Krampus,” Poker Boy said, “it was clear he didn’t do it. In fact, he and two of his people have been helping Krampus and Nick try to discover what is going on.”

  “They are the ones that found the reference back to the Awgwas,” Ben said. “Nick went almost completely pale at even the mention of them.”

  “And we traced it from there to some dark magic the Awgwas used right before they were destroyed,” Poker Boy said.

  “How did they get it into the conscious stream?” Laverne asked.

  “They planted it in the subconscious of normal townspeople around them,” Poker Boy said. “It was passed from parent to child, completely hidden, and would not trigger until the number of people infected with the dark magic reached a certain number. A number large enough for the black magic to have enough power and begin to spread.”

  “That number was reached a week ago,” Ben said, “and the dark magic spell started spreading to make people forget Christmas.”

  Jewel was almost afraid to take a breath, the silence in the floating office was so intense.

  “Got any idea how to stop it?” Laverne asked.

  Poker Boy and the rest of his team just stared at the table in front of them and shook their heads.

  “Belle and I can stop it,” Nancy said from beside Jewel.

  Every head in the room snapped to look at the two new Ghost Agents. Both were nodding.

  “It’s a virus, or a form of worm in a system,” Nancy said.

  “I know systems,” Belle said.

  “And I know how to navigate networks,” Nancy said. “If there is access to that system and a way to kill that problem once we face it, we can stop it from spreading and kill the problem.”

  And once again the silence in the floating office seemed almost too intense for Jewel to bear, but she said nothing.

  THIRTY

  BELLE AND NANCY both stood there in the intense silence, waiting for someone to speak. Belle was confident that she and Nancy could kill this spreading problem if they could get some way to access all those golden streams that represented every person on the planet.

  She didn’t know how they would get access, or how they would track what they were searching, or how they would kill it when they found it, but she was sure they could do it. Convinced.

  Finally, Laverne stood and came to face both women. “What exactly do you need?”

  “A way to access the consciousness network,” Nancy said.

  “A way to map the network as it exists,” Belle said, “so someone with fantastic math and computer skills.”

  “Bookkeeper,” Poker Boy said from the booth.

  Laverne nodded.

  Belle had no idea who that was, but clearly someone they all thought brilliant at computers.

  “And a way to kill the virus when we find it,” Nancy said.

  “Or someone with us who has the power to kill it,” Belle said.

  Nancy nodded.

  Laverne never once moved as they spoke. She just stared at the two of them with her intense dark eyes. Belle refused to let those eyes rattle her.

  “Those three things. Nothing more?” Laverne asked.

  “Not that we know of at the moment,” Belle said.

  “But it is critical to move quickly,” Nancy said. “The more a virus like this one spreads into a system, the more powerful it will become and the harder it will be to fight.”

  Laverne nodded and turned to Poker Boy. “In a minute, I will show you and Patty and the Bookkeeper the consciousness net that these two reminded me existed. It will be up to you to get the Bookkeeper what he needs to map what I will show you.”

  Poker Boy nodded and said nothing.

  Laverne turned to Ben. “Access to the consciousness net? Has that been done before to your knowledge?”

  Ben shook his head. “Nothing like this. It would take a containment field of immense proportions to protect anyone going into that. It would be like being bombarded with the thoughts of a million people at once. Unprotected, that would cause instant insanity.”

  Belle felt her stomach cramp up at the thought of that.

  “We don’t need to go inside all the information flow,” Nancy said. “We just need to be able to skim through it in some fashion. Or even over the top of it.”

  “And see the patterns of it,” Belle said, instantly understanding what Nancy meant. “When searching for problems in computer systems, or corporation systems, you didn’t need to get lost in the details, in the data. You just need to be able to see the infection and how it infects the data.”

  Nancy nodded.

  Laverne again did not move. “You saw the vast surface of consciousness. Would you be able to find the problems skimming along the surface without dropping inside?”

  “If we knew the connections,” Nancy said. “So the mathematical mapping would be critical. And how we would connect as well.”

  “We are connected,” Belle said, smiling at the woman she was falling in love with more and more by the minute. “We would just need to have our minds opened up to see our own connections and how they connect to the surface.”

  Laverne nodded. “That is possible. But I feel you will need a full crew with you for this fight, both on the inside and the outside.”

  Belle looked puzzled.

  “I will gather some of the strongest of us to destroy the black magic when you find it,” Laverne said.

  “I understand black magic,” Patty said.

  Again Poker Boy looked at her with a puzzled expression on his face.

  “I know,” Laverne said. “Which is why I would ask you to host Belle and Nancy and Jewel inside your mind for this fight. And let them track along your connections.”

  “I would be honored,” Patty said, nodding. “I will be able to protect them from the black magic as well.”

  Laverne nodded.

  “So we have the connection into the network,” Nancy said.

  “And you will put a team together to fight the black magic when we find it,” Belle said. “So we just need the map of the structure and where the problem was planted.”

  “Get rested,” Laverne said to the five of them. “I will let you know how long this will take to get ready. And K.J. and Tommy, you will both be needed as well for a different task.”

  With that the five of the
m were back in the warm sounds and wonderful smells of the Golden Nugget buffet.

  K.J. slumped into a chair again at a table full of their dirty breakfast dishes. None of them had cleaned them off yet and they hadn’t yet vanished either.

  Belle had no idea what to think, other than she was again feeling hungry.

  She took Nancy’s hand and they walked toward the food once again. It had been a long day and it wasn’t even noon yet. And Belle had a hunch the day was going to get much longer very quickly.

  As they walked, Nancy pointed at all the golden threads streaming from the forty or so people around the buffet. The threads left their auras and swirled up through the ceiling.

  “Who knew we were all so connected,” Nancy said.

  “I’m just glad we are,” Belle said, squeezing Nancy’s hand.

  THIRTY-ONE

  JEWEL WORKED AT clearing off some of their old dishes and tossing them in a bus tub nearby as Belle and Nancy walked toward the food. Jewel planned on getting something more to eat as well, but after that meeting, she felt she just needed to do something to not think much.

  K.J. had slumped into one of the chairs at the table and looked washed out. He clearly, in all his time as an agent, had never worked around Laverne before.

  Tommy sat down as well. “Got any idea why Laverne wanted you to go with them on this?”

  “Not a clue,” Jewel said. “When we were all three inside that woman at the front desk, we seemed to mesh well. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s something medical because of my background.”

  Tommy nodded. “More than likely medical. That makes sense, since you are good at controlling emotions and such in people.”

  Jewel nodded and finished with the dishes. She wasn’t afraid, just confused.

  She sat down as well and faced K.J. “So who was the waitress?”

  “Name is Madge,” K.J. said. “She’s been around forever, knows everyone and everything that is going on. She’s a superhero in the food and beverage area.”

  “So she’s been to your famous hot tub?” Tommy asked.

  K.J. smiled and seemed to come back into his eyes a little as he remembered something. “She has been there a few times.”