Claus: The Trilogy
Page 23
He didn’t need them anymore, anyway. Not when the end was so near.
But in that final moment, something changed.
He realized there was another way. He didn’t have to pound his brother into oblivion. There was a way to resolve what had happened to Jack. Claus saw the way he changed when their mother stepped onto the stage. He silently mouthed a new directive to the abominable that towered over them, fists reaching through the hole in the ceiling.
There’s another way to end this.
The abominable’s body formed a wall around the stage to keep Jack’s guards out and allow the elven to evacuate the palace.
They would have to be as far away as possible when it ended.
C L A U S
77.
Jessica slipped and slammed hard on the floor, sliding into the wall just as hard. Her head rang with a high-pitched whine. She scrambled to her feet and tried to run and just repeated the desperate dance.
She remained on her hands and knees. Relax. Take a second.
In her rush, she forgot about the scaled foot-slips that Nog had fashioned for her and the slow, rhythmic pace it took to walk – let alone run – across a floor MADE OF ICE!
The music had stopped.
It was her only compass to follow. She ran blindly down one hallway after another, crashing through empty market stands and slamming into the wall at every turn. She didn’t know if she was any closer to her husband.
No algorithm.
“Jessica!” Nog’s voice echoed. “Stop! Now!”
She’d lost him shortly after bailing on the secret room. When she stepped out, she slid down a long, dark sloping ramp that pitched her into an abandoned marketplace with half-empty cups and plates with food, like the elven just disappeared.
Nog slid after her like a speed-skating Olympian. Posters plastered on the walls (she hadn’t even noticed them before) fluttered as he passed them. She stood up – half hunched over beneath the low ceiling – and read the nearest one. A big bluish face and two thumbs-up and an arrow pointing down the hallway.
They were all pointing down that hall.
Jessica pushed off with her right foot – slow and easy.
Nog pursued.
It was the first signs of life.
There were two elven in uniforms, sliding easily. Side by side.
When they noticed the oversized warmblood filling up the hallway and barreling toward them, they stopped and held out there hands. Jessica hit them like bowling pins and bounced them off the opposite walls. Nog zipped around them as they called for help.
“Jessica!” he shouted. “We must be TACTFUL!”
She was done with finesse. Done with mindfulness. She embraced her monkey mind.
She wanted her husband back.
She wanted him back now.
Something rumbled like a locomotive.
Jessica slowed. Nog pulled up even with her. It was a familiar howling sound, like a cyclone. The sound of an abominable was unmistakable, but it was accompanied by quaking in the floor.
The first screams brought Jessica and Nog to a dead stop.
They were joined by panic.
And then the elven stampede came slipping around the bend. Jessica and Nog pressed against the opposite walls and let the unending mass of fat-bellied elven rush past. They didn’t notice the warmblood trying to flatten against the wall.
They fell and bounced and picked each other up. One of the youngest crashed into Nog. Nog grabbed him before he could rush off.
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Nog screamed above the din.
“The arena’s collapsing!”
“WHAT?”
The elven kid tried to wrench out of Nog’s grip. “They released an A-bomb inside; it’s cracking up!”
Nog held on tightly. “WHO?”
“Who do you think?” he screamed in Nog’s ear. “The Cold One and Jocah and that warmblood, that’s who. NOW LET GO!”
He batted away Nog’s hands and joined the exodus.
Jessica heard.
Her eyes were wide.
C L A U S
78.
“All teams, assist with evacuating the arena!” Merry called to her teams.
It was already half empty, but elven were falling in the madness and some were getting hurt in the rush. Whatever was happening, they needed to get all of them to safety. They needed to get as far from this place as possible.
“Call the reindeer.” She pulled Tinsel and Jon closer. “Saddle them with the largest sleighs they can handle and get every elven away from the palace.”
A large block of ceiling shattered on empty benches.
“Go.”
The A-bomb was pulling ice from the ceiling and floor to form the massive storm around center stage. Fractures snaked overhead and beneath her feet. There was the risk of falling debris – that was a real threat – but what was worse was what lay below them.
Fourteen thousand feet of the Arctic Ocean.
Merry knew that in order to build an arena of this size, they would have to cut near the bottom of the ice floe. It could be a matter of feet. Nog would know exactly how close they were to the water.
If this place collapsed, they would go with it.
All fourteen thousand feet.
“Release the A-bombs!” she shouted. “I need all three of them supporting the ceiling!”
Merry saw her teams spread throughout the arena. They were the ones running against the flow of traffic, helping the fallen and elderly, guiding them to the exits.
There were three flashes of light as the A-bombs were activated. They inhaled the icy benches, building long pillar-like bodies that extended from the floor to the ceiling, spreading out along the dome like knobby roots holding the widening cracks together.
The arena settled.
The quake was reduced to a mild hum. But it wouldn’t last. The A-bomb at center stage was still pulling ice and snow into it, building a stronger, tighter eyewall.
It was keeping them out.
The arena was nearly empty.
Merry started toward the center stage. If she could open a hole, she could see what was happening inside. She might find Jocah and pull her out.
But the quakes were already increasing. They needed to get everyone out safely.
All the way out of the palace.
She couldn’t stay.
As the last of the elven evacuated, Merry told her teams to leave. When they were outside, they could call for the A-bombs to slip through a fissure and complete the evacuation.
Her section was empty. She walked out the door. She was about to start sliding away when the wind picked up. There was another howl behind her. A grinding like two storms colliding.
Merry turned to see another abominable. It was attacking center stage.
Frosty.
She ran back inside.
C L A U S
79.
The abominable ate a hole in the roof and revealed a sky that was black and dusted. Inside the storm, on center stage, it was difficult to tell that they were still inside the palace.
Impossible to know it was crumbling.
Jack shook all over. He just wanted to do it all over again. The whole idea of the party seemed like a good one, but now he wanted it to stop. The confidence flexing in his groin had turned to jelly. He shook with the fear of a young child facing the boogeyman in his closet. But there was no blanket to pull over his head.
There was nowhere to hide.
No way to fight.
What he thought was the boogeyman was now standing right there in front of him with a long white braid and a withered old face. He thought if he got rid of her, he wouldn’t feel so cold. So lonely.
It was going sooo wrong.
“When you were a young boy,” his mother said, “I didn’t hold you.”
“No, no you didn’t.” Jack felt little pricks of heat on his face. “You always–”
“I didn’t show you your value. I didn’t protect
you.”
Jack backed up a step. He felt the wind at his back. Felt a track of water stream down his cheek and run along his jaw. Drip from his chin.
He wanted all this to go away. He didn’t like feeling something, these emotions or warmth or WHATEVER THIS IS!
Bolts of icy frost slithered out from his feet but melted away before they reached his mother. He grunted and tried again.
Water dripped from his nose.
“No, no. No, no, no, nonononoNONONONONONO!”
Jocah held out her hands.
“It’s not supposed to end this way!” he shouted. “You were supposed to come in here and I turn you into a statue and use my brother for fishing–” Jack had to swallow a swelling lump. “For fishing… bait.”
He wiped his eyes.
He’d never had water in them. He couldn’t remember crying. Ever.
Jack tried to push himself into the eyewall, let the winds draw him into its violence and spit him into the sky, but it pushed back.
“I see you now, Janack,” she said.
Her fingers touched his hands.
No one ever wanted to touch Jack. No one ever wanted him.
Because he didn’t belong.
“I see you.”
She took his hands in hers.
He used to cry.
He remembered.
Jack would go into that closet where it was dark and safe and no one would hurt him. He sang songs and made up a world where everyone loved him. Where no one would laugh at him if he cried.
Because, sometimes, that’s what he’d do.
He’d cry.
And sing.
Jack whispered, “Silent night.”
His mother’s fingers wrapped around his.
Deadly bolts of cold did not shoot into her. Instead, warmth bled into Jack. It spread into his arms and through his chest.
It filled his belly.
And he felt like sunlight.
The frost melted from his face, falling in sheets from his scalp. It was raining, now. He saw the blurry image of his mother. She didn’t look old and wrinkled. She was glowing next to a blurry red image. Claus reached his red arm for Jack.
His hand fell on his shoulder.
Janack heard him through the wind and rain.
Claus uttered something he hadn’t heard in so, so long.
“Brother,” he said.
And the light and the warmth and the water were all around.
And he didn’t feel cold.
Janack didn’t feel lonely.
C L A U S
80.
Claus kept a few memories. Ones he didn’t want to pass along to someone else.
They were memories of growing up.
Of his brother.
He’d forgotten all those precious moments when they were so young and together in a crib. He’d forgotten when they learned to walk together and shared their toys. He’d forgotten that, for a time, his brother was the only thing he knew. They didn’t feel separate. They were once one in the womb.
But now Claus remembered.
He saw how he turned his back on his brother. He saw that he grew to lead his people and refused to love the very blood that was his. Claus pushed him away. Made fun of him.
Rejected him.
His brother became the Cold One.
Jack was still the child that needed to be seen.
Claus always believed that it was his brother – not Claus – that needed to see clearly. Claus had been so blind. And now that he could see, he wanted Jack to know what he saw.
He saw ignorance and suffering.
He saw more than a monster.
I see my brother.
They were standing in ankle-deep water. When he put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, it was like touching a flame to dry kindling.
Jack saw what Claus could see.
He saw his true value.
C L A U S
81.
It had been so long since Jocah had last held her son.
It occurred to her that, perhaps, she had never held him in her arms. There were only memories of caretakers that cared for Jack. She had the elven to lead and never time to see her own son.
She sensed the unending depth of his loneliness and dark cold that sat deep inside. She felt the suffering he had caused because he could not face his own. She saw the wicked nature of his behavior, that he believed he was truly cold and distant and full of hate.
That he was separate.
He was lonely.
He tried to fill it with the suffering of others.
Jocah opened to his pain and suffering. She allowed it to be present. And he allowed her to see just how ugly he had become.
She witnessed, for the first time, what had become of her son. It filled her with great sadness.
They held hands in the pouring rain.
They held hands as the water rose to their knees.
And they held hands as the sky and stars above them disappeared from sight.
Jocah, Janack and Claus sank into the dark water.
Holding each other.
C L A U S
82.
Nicholas watched the turmoil play out like a strange theatre production.
There were three fat short people. One was blue and another was wearing a bright red coat trimmed with white. He felt so numb and oddly disconnected from the vicious storm and the water rising above what was once an icy floor. Droplets were sucked upwards in the storm’s vortex and then falling back down. They dripped from his bushy eyebrows.
He blinked them away.
The blue one was turning a different color. At first it was lighter blue, but when the layer of frost melted from his cheeks, it revealed a pink hue.
Sweat mixed with the rain and stung Nicholas’s eyes.
The pressure spiked inside his brain. His skull made little cracking sounds. He wanted to lift his hands and hold his head together, but he was so numb.
When the one with the red coat lifted his arm–
When his hand reached for the previously blue one’s shoulder–
When the old lady was holding his hands–
The storm collapsed.
Nicholas let the winds wrap around him and lift him and carry him and–
POP.
Something clicked inside his head. A timer had expired or a magic word uttered or the abominable triggered it… whatever it was, it released all his memories. They weren’t gone after all. Just hidden from him.
And now he had them back.
He tumbled through the black starry sky–
He remembered who he was.
And so much more.
C L A U S
83.
Merry slid as fast as gravity would pull her toward the abominable battle.
The benches dissolved around Frosty. His body swelled but was dwarfed by the massive abominable swirling around the stage. Frosty pounded away at the icy snowstorm, attempting to tear a hole in the swirling wall so he could get Jocah and Claus to safety, but his icy fists were thrown back with little effect. He finally dove into the storm and the two mingled to form one tussling twister, bands of gray and white swirling and wrapping and twisting. Water spit out like projectiles. Merry covered her face. The wind blasted out and pushed her sideways. Holes opened in the thinning floor and water gushed in.
On the other side of the arena, standing at the top in a doorway, were two figures.
One short. One tall.
NOG!
Merry got to her feet and slid toward them.
Nog leaned forward and began sliding at her.
The ceiling fell in chunks and splintered on the floor between them, but they were on a crash course–
Silence.
The abominable storm suddenly lifted off the floor and funneled through the hole in the ceiling, leaving behind a neatly carved hole in the floor. The stage was gone, the Arctic water licking the sides of where it once was.
Like it just melted away.
There was a creak and a groan. A crackling of ice.
Fissures multiplied on the floor and ceiling. As each one forked, another forked off that. And another.
The palace was about to shatter.
“GO!” Nog shouted.
Nog held Merry’s hand and began climbing the slick incline. Their scaly feet grabbed the ice, but they couldn’t slide. They ran, step by step.
The ice tilted under them.
Nog squeezed Merry’s hand.
She squeezed back.
He felt the world buckle beneath them as the floor crumbled. They tumbled back as the doorways disintegrated and the ceiling came down and water gushed around their ankles–
And then a powerful wind hit them from behind, like a storm pounding the sails of a desperate ship. Nog went head over feet. He saw nothing but ice and heard the splashing of water. But he was soaring upward and out.
The chaos faded behind him.
He felt the cold wind of the sky on his cheek.
And his wife’s warm hand in his. He didn’t let go.
He would never let go.
C L A U S
84.
Jessica didn’t hear Nog shout.
She was staring at the hole in the ice. Staring at the lapping water where her husband was supposed to be. Transfixed by the emptiness all around and the doom that was moments away.