Santa Claws

by Gabriela Harding

  Santa Claws

  A Dark Tale of Christmas

  Gabriela Harding

  Copyright © 2016 Gabriela Harding

  Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, eventsand incidents are either the products of the author’s imaginationor used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: books@troubador.co.uk

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 9781 78589 4817

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Zach

  and

  In loving memory of Pops

  “It all begins and ends in your mind.

  What you give power to has power over you.”

  leon brown

  Contents

  Prologue

  A Year Later

  1. Pickles and Pawns

  2. Call Me Anaconda

  3. Cranberry Sauce with a Twist

  4. Devastating News

  5. Good-Bye, Dad

  6. Christmas Eve

  7. Dwarves and Dogsleds

  8. Bleak Sleeping Quarters

  9. Teddy and the Sinister Kitchen

  10. Mulled Blood and Ice Holes

  11. Georgie

  12. The Forbidden Bakery

  13. Midnight Meeting

  14. Santa’s Sanctuary

  15. A Narrow Escape

  16. Tonraq’s Tale

  17. An Intruding Visitor

  18. The Mighty Mermaid

  19. Snowstorm in a Globe

  20. The Garrotting

  21. Santa’s Toy Inferno

  22. Fish-flavoured Crisps and Reindeer Stock

  23. The Hidden Quarters

  24. The Reception

  25. Florence

  26. Axius and Oskar Claus

  27. Mousetrap

  28. Nearly Hanged

  29. Flaubert

  30. Hospital Ward

  31. Reindeer Barbecue

  32. I Spy

  33. The Box

  34. Ellesmere Island

  35. She’s dead…

  36. Santa Steak

  37. A Guest for Dinner

  38. Back from the Dead

  39. Secrets

  40. More Secrets

  41. Alfrid’s Story

  42. Unlucky Escape

  43. A Wet Christmas

  44. Bombshell

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  No one but Old Woolly would sit on a park bench when it was so cold, so dark and so late, on Christmas Eve. He was reading a paper under the faint light of the streetlamp. A particular article had caught his interest.

  A five year old was taken to hospital with a fractured rib after she was found unconscious next to her ‘Hug-me-back’ three foot tall teddy bear. Her injuries were likened to those received in a car crash. ‘We liked the Hug-me-back bear since we saw it advertised on CBeebies’, Genoa Scarlett, Alicia Scarlett’s mother, told reporters. ‘I thought it’d be nice for her to have a teddy that cuddles her back. We didn’t expect anything like this.’ The bear has since been removed from the property. The manufacturers, a small foreign company, were not open to comment.

  Lightning flashed, and the first drops of rain pattered on Old Woolly’s newspaper. He folded it carefully and stuck it in his pocket. On his right, he could see people moving inside the houses where tasteful Christmas decorations were taped to the glowing windows.

  Old Woolly snuffled, peering at the trickle of rain caught in the light of the streetlamp. He chuckled. It almost looked like a shower. Been too long since he had one of them –showers– none of those geezers will ever know, nor the girl who was reading by the window, or the man playing chess in the kitchen, or the old couple watching television on the sofa, how useful a newspaper can be when you haven’t a place to rest your head.

  From a brightly lit house came the notes of a piano, and a child’s voice singing a carol:

  “Silent night

  Holy night…”

  Yes, the night was silent all right. Silent as a grave. And it was bleeding cold, too. The drone of the voice might have put him to sleep if it wasn’t so cold.

  He started slowly down the pathway, groaning as the rainwater stung the bruised and battered skin through the ripped fabric of his trousers. He looked up at the sky, allowing the coolness to run over his face, where a good eye and an eye with a white milky film concealed its true colour, sat together like two mismatched buttons.

  Pouring down again, this Christmas. As if it wasn’t enough that the air had a wintry bite to it, a bite so sharp he didn’t know if he would still be alive tomorrow. Ahead of him, the thicket of trees and bushes looked like nothing more than a darker darkness, a black hole that might swallow him up. He listened to the whispering of the rain, a sound like the hiss of a thousand snakes. The night was pitch-dark, with no moon: better this way, because to Old Woolly the moon always looked like a bright yellow cheese, and his guts were rumbling with hunger. He shuffled down the winding path in the dark, towards the darker-than-night darkness. All around him, the park was silent, the ground dusted with the silver light of the stars.

  He was under the bridge when he thought he saw the glimmer of a light in the undergrowth. The murmur of urgent voices floated over to him. He edged closer, moving aside a branch with dripping leaves for better sight.

  “What if it kills them?” said the voice of a woman.

  “Don’t get squeamish now, Frida,” answered a heavily accented voice. “You sound like you haven’t killed before.”

  A third voice laughed.

  Killed? Old Woolly’s heart thumped. He could see the shadows silhouetted against the fabric of the tent, two adults and a child. Outside, they had made a fire, which was now dying in a thin wisp of smoke. The gleaming coals seemed to wink at him through the darkness and the rain. A tent and a fire – it was just what Old Woolly needed in this miserable weather.

  The woman spoke again. “This is different. It’s too easy to get the dose wrong.”

  “Enough. I have a question for you. Why isn’t he dead?”

  “I gave you enough arsenic capsules to kill an elephant,” the accented voice broke in.

  “It’s risky. His parents…um…I should go, get back before anyone notices I’m gone.”

  The man yanked the woman’s head back and stared her in the eye. Instead of breaking free, she placed her hand on his cheek.

  Old Woolly heard a rustling sound in the undergrowth behind him.
He stepped back, his foot snapping a twig with a sound like the crack of a broken bone. A squirrel skittered on the ground, the small furry body sending a shiver of disgust through him. Or it might have been a rat. Rats swam the waters of River Brent, feeding on the corpses of foxes and other pests.

  And then a phone inside the tent beeped. Moments later, he heard the zip on the front of the tent open. He froze, his hand in midair.

  A man crept out of the tent and stood a little bent at the shoulders, like a feline ready to spring. Old Woolly didn’t expect him to be so tall.

  “That was Hinrik,” he said addressing the two people who were left in the tent. “He says there’s someone out there right now, listening to every word we say.”

  Atop the bridge, the 20:39 Heathrow Connect train whooshed past, screeching and whistling loud enough to drown out any scream coming from the forest. But there were no screams. Old Woolly had barely had enough time to look back and see the man’s blue eyes as he raised the sickle. The next moment, Wooly’s good eye blinked at his own decapitated body, watching himself being dragged over to the fire, and he saw the child’s buckteeth and the large knife he held in his hand, before clouding over in death.

  A Year Later

  1. Pickles and Pawns

  It was mid-December. The dark had fallen since early afternoon and now a blue veil speckled with stars trembled above the houses. Bunny Park with its high arched bridge and old-fashioned benches was deserted in the silvery moonlight. Frost gave the pathway slithering downhill and over the river a milky, eerie glint. On the ridge of the hill, the uprooted oak lay silently, its branches trimmed off, like the body of a beheaded serpent. From the bushes came the high-pitched barking of foxes. In the high trees the owls hooted, flapping their wings.

  Honey sat at her desk, dreamily turning the pages of a heavy book that her father had given her. The lamp spilled a warm golden light onto the brownish pages that smelled of insects and mould from years spent in the cellar. And, although Honey had never smelled mice, she was sure the book smelled of them, too. The Three Musketeers. What a waste of energy. It was so ridiculous she wanted to laugh out loud. And yet, since she had long finished all the books in the house, for tonight it had to do. After a while she closed the dog-eared tome and, sighing, placed a marble angel on top. It was at these moments, when she was off from school and stuck all day long with tedious Teddy and Dad making his horrible pickles downstairs, that she missed Mum the most. If Mum was there, they would sit huddled together in the rocking chair, wrapped in woollen blankets, sipping hot chocolate and reading aloud a book of Honey’s choice. Mum would even let her peek into her collection of horror novels. Not only that, but Mum was writing her own book, too. A real book, not like Dad’s, stories of knights and kings from a million years ago. Dad’s books were always so proper.

  The whole house reeked of vinegar. Honey had carefully placed a thick scarf under the door to keep her room airtight. Even so, the sharp smell crept up the stairs and squeezed through unseen cracks, filling every corner with its deadly odour. Dad seemed to be oblivious to the fact that the smell of vinegar made her feel faint.

  She got up. The room was pleasantly warm. It was rather dark, too. The light bulb hidden in the purple hibiscus flower on the ceiling had gone off ages ago, and Dad had not bothered to replace it. In the shadows, the hole in the paper hibiscus was a blind eye socket, dark, empty and creepy. Kitty, perfectly camouflaged by the stripy quilt on the bed, stretched and yawned, revealing a pink mouth with a black palate and an incomplete set of yellow teeth. The walls were covered in shelves full of books, their multicoloured spines glowing in the soft light. She brushed her hand against her favourite ones, first Roald Dahl’s Matilda, The Twits, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mister Fox, then Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the only books recommended by Dad that she actually enjoyed (the American slang was funny), and her exciting books on survival: How to survive in extreme weather, How to Survive a Wild Animal Attack and How to Survive on a Desert Island. Pity she was never going to find out. All these books made her realise the monotony of her own life, and left her hungry for adventure, a hunger only her mother, who had believed the worst thing in the world was boredom, understood.

  Honey wondered what was for dinner tonight. Not more of those insipid fish cakes! Dad bought them from the local supermarket every week. She couldn’t even smell them anymore without feeling queasy.

  Opening the door, she stepped barefoot into the dimly lit hallway. A mushroom-shaped lamp projected a complicated web of lights and shadows in every possible geometrical shape on the carpeted floor. The shapes stretched onto the walls and crawled up to the high ceiling, trembling and overlapping into a totally different pattern when the door closed. A triangle of light settled on the face of a Haitian woman sitting on a bed of leaves in a painting that had hung on the landing for as long as Honey could remember. The whole house was sprinkled with reproductions of Mum’s favourite paintings. It felt as if she was still there and might appear at any moment from behind a door. First the rustle of her silk gown, then her steps, her arms holding a pile of freshly-washed clothes. Mum liked to take her on a tour of the paintings, giving her their history, explaining the hidden meanings, things that lay behind the surface. “Paintings,” she’d said, “are wicked. None of them are what they seem. There is always more to them than meets the eye.”

  A cherry-coloured carpet, thin and bristly like a hairless dog, spread tightly on the landing and down the curved staircase. She was about to slide down the banister when she saw her brother coming out of his room.

  “Yo, Teddyo!” she called out.

  “My name’s not TEDDYOOO! Stop calling me names!!”

  “Got it, Teddo.”

  “Shut up!”

  He gave a frustrated groan, and a second later the slammed bathroom door made the paintings rattle in their frames. Honey waited a few moments, then tiptoed over to the bathroom and gently lifted the cat flap. She saw her brother’s legs, his pyjama trousers rolled around his ankles.

  “Go away!!” he roared.

  Honey gave him the finger before clicking the flap shut and sliding down the banister, cackling loudly.

  At the bottom of the stairs the stench was overwhelming. She held her breath. Through the hot vapours of boiled vinegar she detected a slight whiff of actual food.

  Dad was humming a tune, moving around from the cooker to the sink then to the worktop and back again wearing one of Mum’s aprons and a chef’s hat. She stifled a laugh. What in the world…? In the middle of the spacious kitchen with the floor designed to look like a chess board stood a large black and white table surrounded by wooden chairs shaped to look like pawns. In fact, everything in the kitchen resembled a chess piece: the rubbish bin was a white horse, while the recycle bin was a black horse. The fridge with the round freezer at the top looked like the King’s crowned head. The set of glasses were all bishops. The cutlery had black and white handles.

  On the table stood jar upon jar filled with pickled herbs and vegetables, from gherkins to chillies and baby pumpkins, pressing against the glass like people crowded in a train with their faces glued to the window. The jars were covered with cellophane, so tightly tied with colourful elastic bands that you’d almost expect the poor trapped legumes to gasp for air.

  Honey hated pickles. She thought they were as sad and useless as mummies. When Miss Ferguson taught them about the Egyptians, she was fascinated by the care shown to, well, to put it bluntly, just a bunch of dead people, pharaohs or no pharaohs. Weren’t they people, after all, just like her, just like Miss Ferguson? All that scooping out the insides and wrapping in bandages was fine, but was it going to bring them back to life? Certainly not. And, in the end, even if they were still there in three thousand years, they just looked weird, with sunken cheeks and earthen skin and a rotten smell about them. Just l
ike pickles.

  “Good evening, madame!” Dad greeted her cheerfully. Next to him on a chair sat two bulging bags, a green one for vegetable peels and a brown one full of half-rotten leftovers. Dad was a recycle freak. He was always going on about the planet’s resources and what would happen to it in three hundred years if we didn’t recycle. As if, in three hundred years’ time, when none of them would be alive even in memory, this would make any difference to them.

  “I said, good evening, madame,” Dad repeated.

  “Hey,” Honey mumbled back.

  Honey could only guess the reason for this sudden change of attitude. It wasn’t like him to forgive so easily. It wasn’t like any adult, unless they were a bit bonkers or they loved you so little they overlooked your worst mistakes, simply because they couldn’t be bothered to worry about you. Was that the case? “Dad!” she wanted to scream, “I smashed Teddy’s angel yesterday. Remember? I threw it down the stairs! You know, the angel that Mum gave him. FOR. HIS. BIRTHDAY. You didn’t even punish me, for God’s sake. You just told me ‘Don’t do it again.’ And I won’t, because guess what? Now there is no angel to break!” She looked at him, humming away like he didn’t have a care in the world, taking peeks at his iPhone in the pocket of his apron. Honey knew he was checking his Fantasy Chess, a weekly competition organised by Dad with his chess mates. That was another thing about Dad. He was totally in love with chess.

  “Crikey! Mickey won again this week. Three times in a row, that is. Mind you, Darryl wasn’t in very good shape. I can’t believe he didn’t see that knight there, why, it was staring him in the face…” he mumbled.

  “Dad,” Honey said, taking a clothes peg from a basket under the sink and clipping it on her nose. Hint, hint. “What’s for supper?”

  Dad stared at her, showing no reaction to the awkward decoration on her nose. Worse, he nodded at it, as if this was a particularly attractive piece of jewellery that he approved of. He cleared his throat, wiping his vinegar-crinkled fingers on his apron. “Tonight, Mademoiselle Raymond, we have…gherkin stew and pickled egg salad!”