Claus: The Trilogy

by Tony Bertauski

  The Christmas tree falls over.

  Sir! We have a problem!

  Dad runs down the steps, a look of horror lighting up his face. Jack realizes he doesn’t have long ropes of hair that dangle across his forehead, that that’s not Willie. But still.

  Dad doesn’t notice the gray muck that’s creeping up the walls. Mom comes down with Cindy, sobs leaking around her thumb.

  Jack thought this would be more fun to watch. Maybe using live projection wasn’t such a good idea. He’s thinking a quick update would suffice. He doesn’t need the blow-by-blow report.

  A summary would be fine.

  He’s thinking, as the floor fractures and the furniture looks like poorly molded clay, that he’ll take a nap, let Freeda handle the rest of this. He’s tired. He’ll wake in the morning and read about it—

  “Stop!” Jack shouts. “Turn it off! I don’t want to see it!”

  The scene evaporates; the tower is once again empty but continues to shake. Jagged cracks form on the floor.

  The elevator emerges.

  Sir, you need to evacuate.

  “What?” Jack tries to keep his balance.

  Something happened. The launch somehow triggered micro-nuclear reactions inside the laboratories.

  “What?”

  The foundation of the house is being consumed, sir. You need to evacuate.

  The tower sways.

  “It’s eating the house?”

  Get out now, sir!

  “But I… I don’t have… where?”

  Long pause. You have to get out!

  Jack falls twice before getting inside the elevator. He lies on the floor, staring at a hole in the ceiling, as the elevator sinks towards ground level. He’s afraid, but strangely he’s not thinking of that. He’s thinking Cindy will never get those Pop-Tarts. The beige color of the elevator ceiling fades to gray and bubbles at the margin. A blob hangs like melting plastic.

  The elevator heaves to one side.

  The gelatinous glob splatters on the wall and starts consuming the surface, revealing the shiny, metal tube that contains the elevator.

  Don’t touch it, sir.

  “Okay.”

  The elevator opens.

  A rack of pots crashes on the counter, metal tumbling across the floor like alarms. The house groans. A crack opens across the ceiling, spilling dust.

  Get up, sir!

  Jack wishes he never woke up.

  Get! Up!

  He plows through the kitchenware clutter. The door is jammed in the frame, but one mighty blow from Jack’s adrenaline-fueled foot sends it off its hinges. In the hall, a mirror is facedown, reflective shards on the floor. Bad luck everywhere.

  The house shifts in the other direction. Jack steadies himself and finds his stride as gray goo oozes from ventilation ducts. Half a credenza is cocked in the great room.

  The back door is hanging on the bottom hinge. Jack runs full speed and leaps far enough to clear the gaping threshold. He rolls down the steps and into the brown grass like a giant ball.

  It’s below freezing, but not much.

  It’s hot.

  Four yellow-hat helpers stop him from rolling across the field. The ground heaves like a beast is rising. The yellow-hats jump up and down, wave, and run toward the garden.

  Sir… don’t go…

  She’s breaking up.

  Beams snap and the black, monolithic tower lurches like a tree about to fall in slow motion. Jack lets out a little squeak and pumps his fat arms, his wide feet slapping the earth, hot on the yellow-hats’ trail.

  The air feels like engine exhaust.

  The tower follows him as it leans. A sudden shift in the foundation temporarily brings it back into balance. Jack gets to the road as the ground caves behind him. The underground laboratories and toy factory are collapsing like mine shafts. The Christmas lights illuminate the garden’s entrance, where the yellow-hats jump and wave.

  He misses the first step and rolls through the boxwoods, coming to rest on a thin scab of ice. The pedestal is still shaped like elven feet. Jack slips getting up.

  SIR… SHOULDN’T…

  He doesn’t need that bodiless voice. It sounds like the Earth is grinding the house with massive molars. He runs after the yellow-hats bouncing up and down in the north exit, whimpering like a child stuck in a nightmare. He just wants to go home, wants to be back on the North Pole, where the world is flat, white, and cold.

  Where the air doesn’t bake his lungs.

  He rushes into the tunnel, but there’s nothing but thick branches and leathery leaves. It’s a dead end. The yellow-hats pull the branches open. There’s something white on the other side. They windmill their tiny arms, urging him to hurry, to keep going, to crawl through the hole.

  The house lets out one final groan. An explosion of timber and steel rumbles the ground.

  Jack’s feet pound the mulch.

  He gets momentum.

  The ground heaves him forward. He throws his arms in front of him and dives into a layer of white powder.

  Snow.

  Snow everywhere. Nothing but.

  He thinks he probably just died and went to heaven because if he designed heaven, it would be this. It would be just miles and miles of snow.

  But he’s not dead.

  The air is crisp. The sky is dark and clear.

  The wishing room.

  Jack laughs, rolls, and hugs the snow, rubbing it on his face, putting it in his mouth. He makes a snow angel in the deep white blanket.

  No more scary sounds.

  He lies back in silence—sweet, sweet silence—and counts the stars. The North Star twinkles brighter than he’s ever seen it, like it’s welcoming him home.

  “I don’t know how you did it, Pawn. But you did it.”

  He rests easy and alone, feeling safe and happy, wishing Pawn was there to enjoy it. Maybe when it is all over, they could come back to the wishing room and plan their next move.

  Surely Pawn would have a way out of the basement.

  -------------------------

  Sura sits in the corner, her coat around Joe. His head is cradled in the crook of her arm. She strokes his pale cheek.

  He isn’t shivering. Not anymore.

  “It’ll be all right,” Sura whispers. “It’ll be all right.”

  Max whines.

  The house groans. The doorframe cracks.

  “Do something!” Sura looks up.

  But there’s nothing Mr. Frost can do, nothing he can say. Max runs to her side. He licks Joe’s hand.

  Sura rocks back and forth, humming a song that perhaps her mom once sang to her, a wordless tune that Mr. Frost recognizes—a song that’s buried in her Inuit DNA. A song that Pana and Sesi hummed to Mr. Frost when he needed comforting.

  Joe’s lips move.

  She lowers her ear to his cracked lips. He says something barely above a whisper. She squeezes tightly, crushing him against her. A moan escapes from deep inside her, long and primal.

  Max begins to howl.

  Joe’s eyes are blank, a slight smile fixed at the corner of his mouth.

  “Please don’t go,” Sura whispers, rocking again. “Please, please, please.”

  Mr. Frost gently takes Joe’s body and slides it on the floor, careful to lay his head down. She fights him, at first, but then resigns. Hands to her mouth, eyes tearful.

  “How could you let that monster do this?” she says.

  “We cannot make people change or grow, Sura. We can only give them the opportunity.”

  Sura buries her face in her hands, shivering and wailing. Mr. Frost places Joe’s hands over his stomach and adjusts his legs until he appears comfortable.

  An explosion gives rise to panicked helpers stampeding through the incubation lab. The house thunders.

  “You must go,” Mr. Frost says.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Your death will not serve him. You live, Sura. You must.”

  “I’m staying.”<
br />
  Mr. Frost wraps the coat around her, pulling the hood over her head. Her teeth chatter through sobs. She lets him cover her, either out of desperation or apathy.

  “You should know,” Mr. Frost says as he buttons the coat, “that I didn’t create him to love you, or you to love him. I birthed you both out of love, and you came together on your own. None of what you feel is false, Sura. He loved you. He truly loved you, and I had nothing to do with that.”

  He puts his hand over hers and she reaches out, grabbing him tightly, pulling him closer, sobbing into his shoulder. Mr. Frost holds his own tears in check, comforting her while Max pushes between them, whining.

  The ceiling buckles. Debris showers the bed.

  He lifts her up. She lets him guide her from the room. Joe looks asleep and peaceful.

  The incubator lab is dusted with debris drizzling from cracks. Fractures have opened on the walls. Gray stuff spills on the floor and sizzles. It pulses over frozen limbs, the stainless steel table, and fallen chunks of ceiling.

  Mr. Frost guides Sura towards a hole in the back corner.

  “Follow Max,” he says. “Take it to the end, as far away as possible.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “My place is here.”

  Mr. Frost digs the metal tin from his pocket and feeds Max one last time. The white fox dives through the opening, disappearing in the darkness.

  “You must survive.” He squeezes her hand. “You must.”

  The ceiling continues to rain. He wants to think that she leaves because he compelled her to, that he expressed his true feelings about her as a daughter. He always thought of her as such. But maybe, in the end, it was simply an impulse to survive.

  It doesn’t matter. As long as she does.

  She looks back once, and then crawls into the darkness. Mr. Frost heaves a tank over the opening in case she thinks of coming back.

  A loud crack knocks the main door off its hinges. Helpers are still searching for an escape. Most are already out of harm’s way.

  Mr. Frost feels the contraction of fear in his chest, the twist in his belly. He watches the ceiling ooze like faucets of matter-consuming bile. The house moans, shifting on its foundation. The eyeTablets were the obvious choice to execute the master plan—Mr. Frost had a counter for that, in case Jack wisely chose it—but Mr. Frost knew Jack was too impatient, that he’d want results as soon as he could get them. Slave technology used to consume matter would be too tempting; Jack couldn’t say no to that any more than a child would refuse a marshmallow.

  Mr. Frost knew it would end this way.

  Wood splinters somewhere in the basement. Steel girders snap and a bright light flashes outside the incubator lab. Although he doesn’t hear it, Mr. Frost feels her death.

  “Goodbye, Freeda,” he whispers.

  And for the first time since fleeing the North Pole, the root falls silent. Completely silent.

  In his last moments, he relishes peaceful emptiness.

  -------------------------

  Sura can’t see.

  The ceiling isn’t high enough to stand. She crawls on soft, sometimes slimy, ground. When a cockroach crawls over her knuckles, she walks hunched over, hands out mummy-style. Max pants somewhere in front of her. Sometimes she brushes the side of the tunnel or feels something in her hair, but doesn’t stop.

  She can’t go back.

  Somewhere, in the dark distance behind her, something is grinding. She hums to blot out the sound, to distract her mind where the image of Joe, lying so still and quiet, demands her attention. Her thoughts try to turn her around, go back to the lab, and crawl up next to him.

  The humming keeps her going.

  She yearns for light, to see something, anything that will help her escape the haunting thought. The ground shudders, and she scrapes her head on the ceiling. Something crawls down her arm. Max begins to yip in the distant blackness. Sura swings her arms out to her sides, scrapes the concrete walls, and steps quickly and carelessly.

  Another monstrous groan.

  Max yips again.

  The darkness begins to change. A gray form takes shape, getting lighter and lighter with each step. Max waits for her like a furry lump of ash. Sura scoops him up. He licks her wet cheeks.

  There’s a short ladder attached to a wall. Ten rungs up, there’s a hole. Leaves blow inside. A head appears with a frumpy hat. Even in the dim light, it’s yellow. Two more yellow-hats look down, their fingers urging her to climb. Their rapid words tell her to hurry.

  Sura climbs the bottom rungs.

  The tunnel exhales a mighty wind that swirls her hair. The yellow hats are caught in the draft, twirling out of sight as the crowd quakes. Dirt rains down. She stops on the third rung to cover up. A terrible crash of wood, glass, and metal is everywhere.

  The helpers return with yellow hats back on their heads. Tea olives greet her at the top with their fragrant blooms. Sura peeks out from a hole wedged between the root flares of an enormous live oak. The yellow-hats take Max and help her up, covering the hole with an earthen lid.

  The helpers made it out.

  Blue hats, red hats, orange, purple, green, and every color in between, are huddled beneath the live oak grove. Some of them were probably the ones that threw her and Joe into the back room, but now they cling to each other, listening to the house snap like massive bones.

  Max climbs onto her lap. The yellow-hats press against her, their bodies warm. More crowd around her. She feels the weight of their neediness, the quake of their fear. The house cries out and the tower—listing to the north—is sucked down. A final tremor rides across the ground where bottomless ruts have opened. All that remains are holes. The toy factory is gone.

  And so, finally, is the house.

  Sura feels another emotional hole inside her, one right next to her mom. This one is Joe. The fear that drove her through the tunnel and steeled her legs evaporates, leaving her with the messy emptiness of her life. She puts her head down, letting the waiting grief have its way with her. She sobs uncontrollably.

  The yellow-hats put their small arms around her. She hugs them. When they climb off, more of them comfort her. Red-hats, blue-hats, green-hats… they all find their way to Sura and squeeze tightly. Some shake with fear, others sob with her. Some of them utter speedy little words that sound comforting. Apologetic.

  Sura openly weeps.

  And hugs them all.

  J A C K

  December 25

  Thursday

  Jack wakes in a soft bed.

  He rolls over, reaches for a pillow, and rakes his arm through powdery snow.

  He opens his eyes.

  The sun is rising somewhere to his right, but the stars are not dampened, not entirely. The sky is deep blue. A barren landscape of snow and ice extends in every direction. He’s on the North Pole. He’s back home. It was all a dream and now he’s home.

  HOME!

  Jack marches in a circle, stomping the snow and pumping his fist. “Snow! Snow! Snow!”

  Wait.

  A memory thuds. He jumped into the wishing room when the house tried to eat him. This is Pawn’s special place, a room to fulfill his every desire. That means this isn’t snow, not really. And if he’s in here, that means what’s out there…

  Jack’s heart lies heavy.

  Little Cindy opening her present, the fire, the creeping gray goo. The Pop-Tarts.

  “Freeda?” Jack jumps up. “Freeda!”

  His voice evaporates in the open sky.

  “Pawn!”

  Jack wades through the snow, white dust up to his elbows, sticking to his chin. He shouts their names over and over, walking in circles, but it’s snow forever and ever.

  There’s nothing out there.

  “Free—”

  A hole.

  It wasn’t there a second ago. Now there’s an opening like space has been parted like curtains, dark shrubbery on the other side.

  The door!

  He’s g
ot to get out. He can’t stay in the wishing room, he’ll starve. Without a coolsuit, he’ll overheat. At least, that’s what Freeda told him.

  “Freeda?”

  No answer.

  The vegetative alleyway is dim but, surprisingly, doesn’t feel too bad. It must’ve cooled down overnight. He steps onto the mulched path, twigs snapping underfoot. The garden is ahead; he can see daylight. He stops and listens for someone. For anything.

  He hears nothing—not a tree frog, not a bird or a bug.

  Jack stops at the entrance to the garden. There are holes in the boxwoods where he rolled through them on his way from the house, and there are still chunks of ice in the center. Jack walks around the outside of the garden. Steam rises from the remains of the statue. He stops at the exit.

  No wonder Freeda didn’t answer.

  The house is gone.

  Vanished.

  As if it never existed.

  There’s a hole in the earth and deep gullies in the field. The soil isn’t scorched, nothing is damaged, just a big vacancy where the house, the labs, and the toy factory used to be. The slave technology consumed it, transformed metal and wood, plastic and glass, into pure energy.

  Just… gone.

  What’s left is a massive vacancy, something that—it would seem—could never be filled again.

  The sun isn’t up, but all the stars have dimmed except for the North Star. Jack is too jittery to notice it twinkling white, red, and green.

  “Pawn!” Jack steps onto the road, hands cupped around his mouth. “Pawn! You there?”

  He was in the basement, locked in the incubator lab. Why didn’t he escape? Jack feels like he’s falling, even though his feet are firmly on the ground.

  “Pawn!”

  His voice echoes off the distant trees. He resorts to Freeda’s name, just in case there’s a backup somewhere under the rubble. He’d love to hear her voice inside his head. So far, it’s just his own. Each time he calls, it sounds shakier and a little higher pitched.