by Dante King
I looked around to see whether someone was going to give the game away and put an end to this joke. When no one did, I said, “You can’t mean the actual Klauses, you know? Like Santa and stuff.”
Reginald snapped his fingers. “You do know them. How extraordinary. Yes, well, the Klaus family is actually distantly—very remotely, in fact—related to the Chaosbane family. I actually borrowed this sleigh from Kris Kringle themselves.”
“Kris Kringle themselves?” I asked.
Reginald looked from Igor to Mort, as if one of the two men would be able to explain to him what the fuck I was talking about, but the two cousins simply carried on loading Igor’s luggage into the back of the sleigh.
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Mr. Mauler,” the Headmaster said.
With the fluidity of a snake, Leah flowed to her feet and turned easily on her heel.
“I think I can field this one, cousin,” she said, touching Reginald on the shoulder and coming to stand next to him. With marvelous balance, she slipped her long legs over the front railing of the sleigh and sat there.
“I think I can unravel this whole conundrum for you, cherrybutt,” she said to me. “Father Christmas, or Santa Klaus if you will, isn’t one man as I know your Earthling folklore says. Kris Kringle is, in actual bonafide fact, a whole clan of world-hopping folks who use Chaos Magic to jump like festive fleas from one world to another delivering presents.”
Leah blew a smoke ring that twisted itself into a figure eight, which slowly revolved until it was lying sideways and resembled a lemniscate.
“They’ve become very adept at stretching the rules of space and time, honey bunny,” Leah said as the infinity symbol faded.
My attempt to answer this very matter-of-fact explanation was drowned out by the arrival of Idman Thunderstone, Mallory Entwistle, and Barry Chillgrave, who came tramping out of the house. Each of the trio carried a traveling bag and was dressed for the bitter weather. Even Barry carried a ghostly green gladstone bag and was wrapped in the poltergeist version of an oilskin cloak. It looked like they were all coming along too.
“Barry,” I said, deciding to forget about the whole Santa Klaus being a franchised family business for the time being and focus on something that made a little more sense, “what’s with the cloak?”
“What d’ye mean, sir?” Barry Chillgrave asked me.
“I mean, you’re dead, man. What do you need a cloak for?”
Barry fiddled with the handle of his gladstone. “Just matchin’ the mood, you know, sir,” he mumbled.
“Fair enough,” I said. “You’re looking pretty sharp, pal.”
“Thank ye, sir,” said the founding member of Cecilia’s family.
“Can I ask what you’re planning on doing with the Blade Sisters, who are currently lodging in our dungeon, while we’re all away, Barry?” I asked.
“Ah, don’t you worry about them, sir,” the poltergeist told me confidently. “They’ll be just fine for a little while.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” Idman Thunderstone said with a thin-lipped smile. “Barry has really spruced up the dungeon.”
I detected more than a bit of sarcasm in Idman’s tone, but could not be bothered to pursue it.
”Idman is right, sir,” Barry said, nodding vigorously. Janet’s dad’s irony had, as usual, gone right over his head. “Those blighters won’t be able to escape, and they might even enjoy themselves, sir! I’ve left them all kinds of fun little bits and bobs in there, sir, to keep ‘em entertained like.”
“What about food?” I asked.
“I’ve got a rather tricky little enchantment that’ll serve ‘em up a steamin’ portion of boiled spuds and corned beef for every meal, sir!” Barry said enthusiastically. “A whole month’s worth, should we be delayed for any reason.”
“Just boiled potatoes and corned beef?” I asked, wincing at the very thought of the effect that that diet would have on the air of the dungeon.
Barry clapped a ghostly hand to his head. “Argh, no! Not just boiled spuds and corned beef, sir. I was forgetting! Every Sunday they get some lovely boiled brussels sprouts too.”
I said nothing. It sounded rough, but I was not exactly in the mood to give the Blade Sisters too lavish a lifestyle after they had so recently tried to kill me.
“Now,” Barry said, “time to lock the old place up.”
“Whoa, whoa,” I said, putting out a pointless hand to stop Barry before he could start doing whatever jiggery-pokery he had in mind, “I just remembered something—the girls are in the kitchen having coffee and talking about gowns and shoes and balls.”
Barry looked puzzled at the mention of balls but then said, “Never fear, sir, I informed my dear relative and her two companions that we would shortly be raising anchor. They were quite happy to finish their hot beverages outside. I set them up a hasty fire in the brazier under the pagoda, sir. They’ll be snug enough until they decide to make for their home port. They told me to bid you farewell again.”
I gave the poltergeist an impressed look. “Barry, you’re the man. I don’t know what we did without you.”
“From what I gather, sir, it sounds like you were rowing with only one oar in the water.”
“You’re probably not too far off the mark there,” I granted. “All right then, do your thing.”
Barry turned, raised his spindly arms above his head, and closed his eyes.
A green radiance flowed from his hands. Twin rivers of phantasmal light wrapped themselves around the fraternity house, twining about it like coiling supernatural ribbons. They grew, twisting around the entire building faster and faster until the entire structure was cocooned in green light. Then, after glowing three times, the luminosity faded.
“Locked,” Barry said happily. “Nothin’ will be gettin’ into your parents’ old place while we’re away, sir. Or out.”
“Right, you horrible lot!” Reginald Chaosbane yelled. “As adorable as a herd of turtles might be, I think that we’ve been acting like one long enough. Let’s go!”
With that verbal prodding, Enwyn and I took our place alongside the four Chaosbanes, Idman, Barry, and Mallory Entwistle.
I sat next to Mallory. Dressed in her habitual flowing white robe and a wintery thick white coat, she looked like a statue carved from snow. Pressed together as we were though, I was quite aware of the heat emanating from her.
I swallowed and tried to keep my mind away from what getting intimate with her holy of holies might be like. It was hard, due to the squashy proximity of cramming that many people into a single sleigh.
“We haven’t forgotten anyone?” Reginald yelled over his shoulder. Against the whirling snow, he cut a damn dashing figure.
“Negative,” Mort replied.
“Not even Igor?” Reginald said.
“Negative,” Mort said.
“Pity,” Reginald said, not quite under his breath.
“I bloody heard that!” called Igor from near the back.
Chapter 2
The sleigh shot into the air, going from zero to a hundred in less time than it took to say it. The legs of the six bulls that pulled the thing were a blur, though the creatures themselves appeared about as calm and relaxed as if they had just been hanging out in a field and chewing the cud. Their great heads glanced occasionally from side to side, as me and the rest of the sleigh’s passengers were pressed back into our uncomfortable wooden bench seats.
“I’m going to have piles after this,” I heard Igor moan from the back, his voice barely audible over the rush of the wind.
“It was my understanding, cousin,” the feared bounty hunter, Mortimer, said in his polite, slightly apologetic voice, “that you already had piles.”
“Yeah, I thought you were telling me the other day how you had even named a few of your faves, Igor,” Leah cut in.
“Ah, shut up, you know what I bleeding well mean, you maniacs,” Igor yelled back.
With some diffic
ulty, I leaned forward and managed to tug at the hem of Reginald Chaosbane’s flapping coat. I wasn’t sure how he was doing it, but the mage was still standing with one booted foot casually up on the front rail while he occasionally flicked the reins at the bulls. Feeling the pull on his coat, the Headmaster of the Mazirian Academy turned to face me.
“Headmaster,” I said loudly, “how the hell does this sleigh work?”
“Why’s that, Mr. Mauler?” Reginald asked me in return.
“Well, you know, we’re punching along at what must be about one hundred and fifty miles per hour at a height of…”
“About four thousand feet,” Reginald supplied.
“Right, and I was just interested in knowing the basic force that is keeping us from going into the very real and solid landscape below like a fuck—Like a dart, sir,” I said.
Reginald nodded understandingly. He leaned down so that I could not miss his whisky, rum, gin, and Irish cream laced words.
“This sleigh is powered by no other power than metaphor,” he said.
My face must have been a study of blankness.
“Headmaster?” I asked. “Metaphor?”
“Yes, my dear fellow! Metaphor!” Reginald said, a Cheshire Cat grin spreading across his dial. He flung out a hand and pointed at the half a dozen enormous beasts pulling us along.
“This sleigh is powered by nothing more than bullshit!” The man, who many considered to be the greatest living mage, crowed at the top of his voice and slapped his thigh.
I sat back in my seat.
I’d read somewhere that no truly great mind ever existed without a touch of madness.
I repeated that sentiment to myself as the sleigh climbed higher into the swirling maelstrom of snowy clouds and me and the rest of my fellow passengers huddled closer together.
Luckily, I was wearing the incredible morphing cloak that Igor had given me as part of his sponsorship deal. With a single thought, the black jacket I had been wearing changed into a long, thick woolen cloak with a hood I could pull snuggly up around my head.
I had just stuffed my hands under my armpits when someone slid down onto my other side, between me and the hard wood of the side of the sleigh.
“Budge up, budge up, ladybird-butt,” Leah said, slipping into the tight gap and forcing Mallory and Enwyn to shuffle along the bench as far as they could.
It should have been impossible for the pink-haired woman to clamber from the back of the sleigh to where I was at the front, but here she was.
“Don’t mind me,” Leah said dreamily. “I just saw you conjure up this lovely snuggly coat, and I thought that I’d come and take advantage of some extra warmth before we head into the wormhole.”
“Into the what?” I asked.
“Into that,” Leah said casually. She popped a piece of bubblegum into her mouth and began to chew languidly, nodding her head to indicate something in front of us.
There was a wormhole ahead. An honest to Betsy wormhole sitting in the middle of a vacuum of cloud free sky, into which we had just emerged. It was like a psychedelic black hole, bending air and light about its streaming, eye-watering rings.
“I’ve never been sucked into a wormhole before,” Leah said next to me, in a conversational tone. “We don’t usually travel to the ranch by sleigh.”
“Yeah,” I heard myself saying, my voice sounding weirdly calm in my own ears, “I’d have to say that I’m popping my wormhole cherry too.”
In the rear of the hurtling sleigh, Igor was laughing madly to himself—though at what could be anyone’s guess. Mort was chuckling politely along with him, although I doubt he had a clue as to what might be considered humorous about the situation.
There was nothing funny about it as far as I could see.
As we pelted toward the polychromatic wormhole, Leah reached up and grabbed my face. With a strength that belied her willowy model-esque build, she wrenched my head around and kissed me full on the mouth. It was a long, hard, passionate kiss with just a hint of flicking tongue. One hand slipped down from my face and dropped into my crotch to give my cock a firm squeeze.
“What. . . what was that for?” I asked, feeling slightly like I had just been clubbed over the head with a cosh.
Leah shrugged. “Well, you know what my cousin is like,” she said, indicating Reginald who was still standing in front of us and apparently conducting music that only he could hear, “we might all be quantum goo in a second, treacle-nips.”
There was something squishy in my mouth. Reaching between my lips I pulled something bright pink and sticky from off between my teeth.
It was Leah’s bubblegum.
At the head of the sleigh, Reginald now took up the words to the music that only he could hear—although I was put instantly in mind of Dean Martin’s “Let It Snow.”
And with the word ‘go’ stretching out all the way to the edges of the universe and back, the bulls, sleigh, and all its passengers were sucked into the gaping maw of the wormhole.
* * *
I had always imagined that being sucked into a wormhole would be like being, well, sucked down some enormous, mathematically charged plughole in the air. If I had thought about it, a luxury which I didn’t really have time for at that moment, I might have imagined being stretched into four different dimensions simultaneously or else being taken apart and put back together again in the blink of an eye.
What actually happened was far less dramatic than that. We simply entered a blackness that was so total, so complete and so still that, just for a moment, I thought that I must be dead.
“Excuse me for saying so,” Mortimer said from the row behind me, “but this is rather eerie.”
He was right. It was rather uncanny. What was uncannier still was the way that his words took shape in the air and started gamboling around us like a bunch of cartoon kittens, the letters forming out of the surrounding bottomless night so that we could actually see them.
We hung in that void for a handful of seconds. It was a mischievous handful of seconds though. A string of harmless little seconds that, nonetheless, could quite easily have turned out to have got together and allowed ten years to pass.
I’d seen Interstellar. I’d seen it twice. So I knew enough about quantum physics to know that I knew absolutely zero about quantum physics. However, what I’d taken away from that bit of film-making mastery was that space-time could be a wily son of a bitch.
An uncertain amount of time passed, while the bulls’ legs slowed to an apathetic walk. Back in the slow, the massive beasts appeared as deep dark as sable velvet. But here, in the endless, perfect inky void? They looked to be more gray than black.
And then, there was light!
A great swirling, kaleidoscope of light.
An immeasurable horizontal slit opened up ahead of us, ripping through the pristine nothingness like a world blooming out of the empty cosmos. It was like we had been flying toward a galaxy-sized monster that had lain completely camouflaged in the vast chasm of space. Now that monster had abruptly opened its jaws to swallow us. We could see the inside of its mouth and all the way down its infinitely long throat, as many-hued as an explosion in a paint factory.
“By the gods,” I heard Mallory say next to me, “it’s beautiful.”
And that final word extended and bent and distorted, as we all found ourselves going through the mildly uncomfortable sensation of briefly being squeezed and compressed into the size of postage stamps and then hammered out flat and thin enough to cover a football field.
Next thing I knew, the sleigh was hurtling along at breakneck speed and the world was an impenetrable dirty white.
All of us, bar Reginald Chaosbane at the helm, were thrown backward in our seat as the sleigh punched out from the cloud bank and into a quite normal-looking sky beyond. My stomach felt like it was crawling up my esophagus, which suggested we were heading downward. This hypothesis was supported by my registering a gorgeous, glittering city sprawled some few thousand feet b
elow us.
There were the beautiful, delicate spires of tall buildings that stood like crystal stalagmites in the midst of the snow-blanketed city. Myriad silver threads—rivers or canals —ran through it. Expanses of pristine evergreen woodland surrounded the whole metropolis.
And, sitting proudly in the middle of a sprawling high-walled estate, was a magnificent castle. Towers stood nobly on each of the four corners, towers that would have given Merlin a hard-on.
Before I could take in anything else, my view blurred and was obscured. I looked around us. We were tearing down what appeared to be a gleaming, translucent tube—a sorcerous version of the Lincoln Tunnel.
“What the fuck is this now?” I asked no one in particular. It was quieter in here, without the rushing of the wind to contend with.
To my surprise, Reginald Chaosbane turned on his heel to answer my question. For someone who was supposed to be manning the controls of a sleigh traveling at the top speed of a Corvette C5, I found his attitude to be on the casual side. If I hadn’t known the Headmaster, I might even have called it negligent.
“We have now passed into the city of Manafell’s border burrow,” the Headmaster said, pulling one of the many flasks that he carried on his person from the sleeve of his coat. “It leads directly to the border station where the guards will go about their boring business of quizzing us about any contraband that we might or might not be attempting to bring into the capital of Avalonia.”
The Headmaster took a long pull from his flask and smacked his lips. “Gods, that’s horrible,” he said. “Tastes vile enough to make a goblin gag.”
“Uh, sir, shouldn’t you maybe keep your eye on the… Ahead of you?” I asked tentatively, not wanting to sound like a worrywart.
“Hm? Oh! No, Mr. Mauler, you see, everyone that enters Manafell’s airspace is required to enter one of the five border burrows that are dotted on the edge of the city limits,” Reginald explained, taking another drink. “Once they are inside, a very clever bit of magic takes control of whatever it is they are flying and guides it down to the border station.”