by Adam Millard
My god, what if they’re copulating? What if I’m here, standing in their house, and they’re bumping fuzzies in the bedroom? He wasn’t a prude; far from it, in fact. Trixie had once allowed him to pop it in the other hole. But that didn’t mean he wanted to barge in on Jimbo if he was taking old one eye to the optometrist.
“Hello?” Yes, it was best to call out. Give them a chance to get dressed, or to finish, or to un-cuff themselves. “It’s Finklefoot. I’m in your house. You left your front door open, and now I’m in your house.” That ought to do it, he thought, and yet when nobody replied, his heart sank.
“Okay,” he said, moving slowly along the hallway. “I’m now walking along your hallway with the intention of entering your bedroom. If you are in the middle of fornication, I would very much like you to stop what you are doing and put some clothes on.”
Silence.
Well this is just effing wonderful, Finklefoot thought. He reached the bedroom door. He knew it was the bedroom door because all the houses in The Land of Christmas were of the same design. The only way you could tell one from the other was by its décor, and even then it was either glittery green, sparkly red, harvest gold, or white.
He knocked. “Last chance to spit out the butt-plugs.” When there was no reply, he turned the knob and pushed.
The door opened up onto an unmade bed, which was odd because elves were sticklers for tidiness. It came with the territory, like the pointy ears, rosy-red cheeks, and propensity to fall down the toilet.
This bed, though, was definitely unmade. It was so unmade that Finklefoot had to fight the urge to rush across the room and make it.
“Hello?” he said to the empty room. Elves, though small, would find it extremely difficult to hide in their pantie drawers, which meant that this room was very much empty.
An empty room…
An unmade bed…
A pair of missing elves…
“It’s a sign it’s Christmas again,” Finklefoot muttered, shaking his head in despair.
What was he going to tell The Fat Bastard? Something strange had happened here, something that had prevented two of Ahora’s jigsaw squad from making their bed as soon as they’d climbed out of it. And now they were MIA, or MINA (Missing in Non-Action) as it were, and Finklefoot had a thousand-and-one things he needed to be doing, things he’d much rather be doing than chasing missing elves through the empty streets of The Land of Christmas.
After searching the rest of the house, to no avail, Finklefoot stepped out into the cold, vaporous morning and closed the door behind him. There was a word for how he felt in that moment, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of it.
“Mystified,” he said. Yes, that would have to do.
He began the short trek up the hill, to where Santa sat in his workshop office awaiting further news.
6
“There’s a word for how I feel right now,” Jimbo said, squirming on the trestle table to which both he and his beloved wife had been strapped.
“Is it mystified?” Sissy asked, trying to pull her arm free of its restraints.
“No,” Jimbo said. “It’s fucked. I feel downright fucked!”
“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d clobbered him in the hallway.” There was a certain venom to Sissy’s tone that Jimbo didn’t appreciate.
“At least I didn’t jump in the damn sack,” Jimbo said.
“Yes you did,” Sissy said. “You were in it a few seconds after me.”
“I meant, at least I didn’t…you know what? I don’t want to talk about it.”
Sissy glanced around the room. It was cold, very surgical, and not at all… Christmasy. There were no lights, no decorations, nothing to suggest they were even in The Land of Christmas any more. The only sound came from a slowly-dripping tap on the other side of the room. At the front of the room, something was covered over with a black sheet.
“What do you think he wants with us?” Sissy asked, unable to bear the silence any longer. “I mean, we’re good elves. This kind of thing shouldn’t happen to good elves. We’re not Mexicans.”
Jimbo tried to shrug, realised he couldn’t, and settled for a sigh instead. “Whatever it is, I don’t think we’re going to enjoy it. Maybe we should start screaming for help. I mean, we weren’t brought far. We must still be in The Land of Christmas. Someone’s bound to hear us.”
The trouble with that, Sissy thought, was that the someone would most likely be the shrouded maniac, and the last thing they wanted to do was piss that guy off. “He’ll hear us. He’ll hear us, and then whatever he was going to do to us, he’ll just do worse.”
“I think he’s going to kill us,” Jimbo said, which wasn’t the best way to comfort one’s wife. “How could he possibly kill us worse than he was already going to?”
Sissy whimpered. “This doesn’t happen in The Land of Christmas. This is like something out of a terrible movie; one of those ones with the human kids and the inhuman killers. I don’t want to end up roasting on an open fire, Jimbo! I’ve got too much to give.”
Just then, the door sprang open in the only way such doors spring, and in came the shrouded figure. Only now he was wearing a white apron, and blue gloves, and neither Sissy or Jimbo thought he was a qualified baker, which meant…
“Ah, how are my first two subjects on this fine morning?” For a raging lunatic he was awfully chipper.
“You won’t get away with this,” Sissy said, her head the only part of her off the table. “If you let us go now, we’ll forget all about it, won’t we, Jimbo?”
Jimbo nodded. “Forget about what?” he said, winking at their captor. “Heh.”
“That does sound like a very good deal,” the beast said as he began to unpack a small leather case that neither of the hostages had seen before. It seemed to contain a lot of sharp things. A lot of things designed to cut and carve and amputate. “However, I brought you here for a reason. On the plus side, you won’t be alone for long. Soon you will be reunited with all of your friends. Better than reunited. You’ll all be as one. Isn’t that a lovely thought?”
“Not really,” Sissy said. “We can’t stand most of ‘em.”
“It’s true,” Jimbo added. “If it wasn’t for the fact we had to work with them every day, we wouldn’t bother. There’s nothing more annoying than elves.”
Tell me about it, the figure thought. “Unfortunately, you’re going to have to get used to the idea.” He finished laying out the sharp, cutting things and moved – danced – across the room, to where the black sheet hid whatever it was the black sheet hid. “You should consider yourselves very lucky, as you are the first two elves to lay eyes upon my most marvellous creation.”
“It’s a very lovely sheet,” Sissy said. “Black’s my third favourite colour, after topaz and mauve.”
“Ah,” the figure said, reaching up and stroking the corner of the sheet with long, slender fingers. “It is nice, isn’t it? I have it in green, too, and I…wait a minute, this isn’t about the sheet.”
“I thought it was about the sheet,” Jimbo said. “This is all very confusing.”
“I don’t think he’s the full ticket,” Sissy said. “One minute he wants to talk about the sheet, the next he doesn’t.” To the dark shape with his face buried in his palm, she said, “Have you ever been seen by a professional?”
“Look, can we just all stop talking for a moment? I’ve got a splitting headache, and I really thought this would go much smoother.” The abductor sighed, and after a few seconds, he said “Right. Lady and gentleman, I give you—”
“Is this about the sheet?” Jimbo said.
“For fuck’s sake,” the figure said, yanking the sheet away from the thing it covered. “It’s about this…not the sheet…nothing to do with the bastard sheet…” He poked and prodded at the crude sketch that had been etched onto the whiteboard. “This, this, this!”
What followed could only be described as an awkward silence. It was the kind of silence that cou
ld be heard in doctor’s surgeries across the universe, the kind of silence that no-one wanted to break, but someone always, inevitably, did.
“What is it?” Jimbo asked, tilting his head sideways and staring at the rudimentary drawing. He could make out limbs…lots of limbs, and beards…lots of beards, and even an antler or two. If it had been drawn by an elf-child, the parent of said child would refuse to put it up on the fridge door.
“I think it’s one of those arty-farty cubism thingamabobs,” Sissy said. “I liked it better with the sheet on it.”
“This,” the figure said, poking at the drawing so hard that he broke a nail, “is a masterpiece. It is a marvel of modern-day surgery. It is history in the making. It is—”
“A waste of good marker-ink,” Jimbo said.
“A waste of good ma…no!” The beast was losing his temper. Straightening up, he began pacing back and forth across the room. “He thinks he’s so high and mighty up there in his workshop, walking around as if he owns the place. Ho-ho-fucking-ho! Well, not anymore. The time has come for a revolution. The time has come for Santa to suffer. The time has come for—”
“Drawing lessons?” Sissy said.
“I will kill you where you lie,” the shrouded figure said. Sissy, sensing he wasn’t the type of maniac to throw threats around at random, shut up. “You, my little elf friends, are about to become the first pieces in this meaty jigsaw puzzle.” He walked across the room, selected a blade from the vast array laid out on the table, and tested its sharpness with his finger. “Before we begin, are either of you allergic to anything and/or are vegetarian?”
Jimbo shook his head. “I once had a funny turn after eating a piece of calendar chocolate, but don’t we all?”
The figure growled. “Then let’s make a start. Which one of you wants to be at the front?”
7
“So, what you’re saying,” Santa said, easing back into his throne and regarding Finklefoot with no small amount of suspicion, “is that you found nothing. That these elves have somehow simply ceased to exist. Is that correct?”
Finklefoot shrugged. He had arrived back at the workshop tired and breathless, and now he was facing the Xmas inquisition. He really wasn’t in the mood for it. “They’re not at home,” he said. “I checked everywhere.”
Santa stroked his beard. “Did you check the chimney?” he said. “People get stuck up the chimney all the time.” He was, of course, speaking from experience.
“They weren’t in the chimney,” Finklefoot said. I hope they weren’t in the chimney, he thought…
“Maybe they killed each other,” Mrs Claus said, sidling up to the great throne and wrapping a long and sensual leg around its arm.
“Yes,” Finklefoot said. “And then buried each other in the back yard.” His sarcasm went straight over the stripper’s head, but Santa’s frown suggested he got it just fine.
“This is most troublesome,” Santa said, forcing a mince pie between his moustache and his beard. Two chews later, he said, “Has this ever happened before?”
Finklefoot cast his mind back as far as he could. “There was that one time when Rat and Gizzo went missing.” He remembered it well, for it caused quite a stir at the time.
“Ah, yes. Remind me again; where did you find them?”
“Locked in the liquorice warehouse,” Finklefoot said. “Been there all weekend, too, hadn’t they?”
“Yes, yes, I remember.” Santa huffed, impatiently. “Ate their way through quite a lot, if my memory serves me correctly. Little fuckers.”
“Do you want me to check the liquorice warehouse?” Finklefoot said, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do.
“No, I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Santa. “I would have heard from Hattie if she’d opened up this morning only to find a couple of engorged, black-lipped elves running amok.”
Hattie Quim was the chief-of-operations over at the liquorice factory, and The Fat Bastard was right. If she’d found Jimbo and Sissy, she would have already been in touch, no doubt with a few stern words and a “keep your feckin’ workshop in order!’.
“Well, if there’s nothing else,” Finklefoot said, backing away from the throne. “I really must be getting on with—”
“We’ll go look for them together,” Santa said, pushing his huge, wobbly form into some sort of neat arrangement, or as neat as was possible with such a cumbersome shape. “Finklefoot and Santa, just like old times.”
“We’ve never done this before,” Finklefoot said. “And I really have to get back to—”
“Nonsense!” Santa boomed. His wife clenched her breasts to prevent them from vibrating. “Elves don’t just go missing. As your boss and superior—”
Pretty much the same thing, Finklefoot thought but daren’t say.
“—I’m ordering you to accompany me on this quest to find Sissbo. We can’t have our elves scared of walking the streets at night. This is The Land of Christmas, where joy and laughter are spread like wildfire and chlamydia. We will find those missing elves, and we will parade them in front of the entire workshop before clocking-off time today, or my name’s not Kris Kringle, and your name’s not Feebleford…”
“Finklefoot, sir.”
“Right. The first place we’re going to check is the stables.” Santa took a long, hard slug of brandy and hissed, exhaling his alcohol- and mince-pie-infused breath over Finklefoot. “For all we know, Blitzen’s had another titty-fit and rendered them both unconscious.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Mrs Claus said, draping herself suggestively over the recently-vacated throne. With her husband gone, she was free to do whatever she so desired, which meant a couple of the boys from the shop-floor would be in for a treat before lunchtime.
“No, my little angel,” Santa said, looming over her like some unstable tower made out of jelly and hair. “You just sit there and look sexy until I get back.” He kissed her on the nose. “If you need anything, and I mean anything, just get one of the elves to do it.”
Oh she will, thought Finklefoot. You can bet your fat ass that she will.
“I really don’t think I’m cut out for this detective malarkey,” Finklefoot said, hoping for a last-minute exoneration. “I don’t even have a gimmick.”
“You’re an elf,” Santa said. “How much more of a gimmick do you need?”
And so they left the office, and then the workshop, and then the workshop grounds, for the stables were kept a few miles away, where the smell of reindeer shit couldn’t hurt anyone’s nostrils.
8
“You won’t get away with this!” Jimbo said. Well, that’s what he’d meant to say, but the way he’d been stitched to his wife’s backside prevented it from coming out like that. “Hmph hmph hmhmhmph ish!”
“Ooh, that tickles,” Sissy said. “And not in a good way. Can you not do that, Jimbo?”
They were both on hands and knees, their ligaments cut to prevent them from standing. Jimbo’s face was wedged into his wife’s rear; only his wide and frightened eyes were visible above the crack. To be quite frank, both had had better mornings.
The hooded figure wiped his bloody hands on his apron and grinned. The operation had gone better than he’d expected. After all, he was working from a drawing that could have been a Michael J. Fox doodle. Still, he had no need for the sketch. The masterpiece was ingrained in his mind, tattooed on his brain like a…brain tattoo.
“Excellent!” the figure said. “See! I told you it wouldn’t hurt, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Sissy said. “But you didn’t tell me that you were going to stitch my husband’s head to my asshole.”
“Surprise!” the figure laughed. “Would you rather it was the other way around? I can always unpick the stitches and start from scratch.”
“To hell with that!” Sissy said, tottering on one knee. “We had curry yesterday.”
“Then quit whining and get used to your new configuration.” He walked across the room, picked up a cli
pboard, and began to flip pages. The pages were, of course, all blank, but flipping them and staring down at them intently was something that came with the job. You weren’t qualified as a surgeon if you couldn’t handle a clipboard.
“Why are you doing this?” Sissy whined, forgetting that she’d just been ordered not to.
“It’s a long story,” the figure said. Actually, it wasn’t. Like ‘Truths From a Politician’s Mouth: An Autobiography’, it was a very short story, but he couldn’t be bothered to go into it. Besides, it was none of her business. If he told her, they’d all want to know, and that would ruin the surprise when the time finally came to scream it from the rooftops.
“Is it Santa?” she pressed.
“Hmph, humph!” Jimbo interjected.
“No, I will not shut up!” Sissy screeched. “If you’re going to be hanging out of me like an elfish tapeworm for the rest of my damn life, I want to know why!” To the figure, who looked so smart and…genuine, as he flipped through the pages attached to his clipboard, she said, “It’s Santa, isn’t it? The Fat Bastard’s done something to piss you off? Well, join the club, you hooded freak. Nobody likes him, not even his wife. Do you see us going around, abducting people in the dead of night, cutting them up and sewing them back together in the wrong order?”
“Hmpherrrrr!”
“Will you stop talking, Jimbo. I can feel every breath on my kidney, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“Both of you pipe down,” the maniac said. “Nothing you say will save you. The wheels are already in motion, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get…actually, I was going to say better, but they’re just going to get worse. Sorry about that.”
Sissy did something that she’d been trying to hold in. Behind her, Jimbo gagged.
“Now, I have a little surprise,” the lunatic said. “Wait here.” He popped out through the door at the end of the room, sticking his head back momentarily to add, “Oh, that’s right, you can’t go anywhere. Well, stay anyway,” before disappearing again.