“A Visit to Santa Claus” (1957)

[spoilers?] The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) sniffs at this story by Richard Matheson as “non-genre,” which, OK, fair enough. Call it a crime thriller story then. Either way it’s reasonably good for December, though it is soulless conte cruel in a way that Matheson and only a few others can do. It works quite well as suspense, though it trucks in the familiar midcentury trope of the homicidal marriage. This husband and wife have been together maybe 10 years, with a boy of 5, who still believes in Santa Claus. It’s December. They’re out shopping at a mall. They are tired. The kid won’t stop nagging them to see “Sanna Claus.” They have finished shopping and are at their car loading in purchases, when the husband decides he wants to humor the kid after all. They had been promising him he would see Santa on Tuesday. Now the husband says he’ll take the kid in, the wife can wait there, they won’t be long. It’s not hard to see something is off here. Why leave her waiting in the car on a cold winter night? As things unfold, we learn it's part of a nefarious plan. The husband has hired a hitman to kill his wife and this is when it’s going down. There’s a lot of business with the car keys—the wife wants them so she can pull the car up to get them when they come back out again. It’s a sensible plan, but the husband pretends he doesn’t hear her. When he drops the keys for the hitman to pick up the kid notices and calls it to his attention. Handing off the keys thus becomes a substantial part of the story, and it’s more and more apparent it’s all a harebrained scheme, hatched with a guy the husband met in a bar, and further confirmed when we learn the terms: $100 up front, $900 later. It’s not the way these things are done, as we know from movies and such—harder to say perhaps whether people were as sophisticated about murders for hire in 1957 as we are now. Matheson skillfully makes his own plot holes work for him, by making the scheme so painfully elaborate and amateurish. All kinds of complications keep coming along even as Matheson is revealing more about the plot. The kid is a perfect uncontrollable element. Yes, ISFDB, it has no supernatural or fantasy elements. It’s just an incident in December. But if it’s Matheson you can count on getting hooked and then getting a ride. This story goes to a bleak place, of course, with a twist of a twist of an ending, but that’s all just the usual drill. Get it on your kindle and read it at the food circus in your mall while taking a break from shopping.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.