Santa Claws

by Gabriela Harding

  Someone killing their snowman – it made him want to punch, kick and scream.

  “Oww, that was my nose, you moron!”

  Honey’s voice, loud and clear. Fresh memories hopped up and down in his head, like popcorn in a pan.

  Only last night, Honey had been so alive. And yet, now she could be the thing dying at his feet…

  As if in answer to this spooky thought, a door slid open.

  Knife in hand, a bloodstained apron reaching down to his knees, the child stared at Teddy while a flurry of paint flakes snowed down to the floor. Even if his size made Teddy look like a giant in comparison, the boy had a robust build, with broad shoulders, a strong neck and a massive head on top of which he wore a dirty chef’s hat. He blinked from a pair of deep-set, slanted black eyes, a little too close together under the two furry swellings that must have been his eyebrows. At first Teddy thought he was baring his teeth at him, but then he realised that the long, yellow incisors overlapped his lower lip, giving him the look of a very old rabbit. His arms were bulky. His legs, thin as sticks, seemed unable to hold the impressive weight of his torso.

  He wasn’t a child. He was a dwarf.

  “So you’re the boy from London, eh? I keep telling him stop bringing these spoiled town boys. Why, I’d be surprised if you knew a kittiwake’s egg from a tern’s. You town boys have to be taught everything, even how to make a fish-head soup, I tell him. But he says no, I bring what I can, do with what you have or I’ll have your head in my soup. Ha! Ha, hah! What do you say to that? Now, get dressed quickly boy. We have Master’s breakfast to prepare. Make him wait, and he’ll eat us instead!”

  The dwarf had a funny accent. Saliva sprayed from his mouth with every word, maybe because he kept running his teeth over his braces, and the bib tied around his fat neck was damp with spittle. He threw a bundle of clothes on the floor.

  “What’s your name?” Teddy asked as the dwarf was sliding the door back.

  The dwarf seemed amused by the question.

  “My name? Ha! Ha, ha! People don’t ask me that often. I’m usually called Midget. So just call me that.”

  “Midget? Oh, I know. Midgetism is a birth defect.”

  “Dwarfism, London brain. And who said it’s a defect? Being a midget, I mean. It’s beautiful. If I wasn’t a midget, then I couldn’t work in a circ… Ok, call me Sir then. Ha. Or Chef. No! My name is Black Russian. That was my Mum’s favourite cocktail. So she named me after it. Ha, ha! No one calls me that. Now, get moving. Look how you’ve made me talk. You London boys are crafty. Always find a way to get out of working. Get a move on! You have a dozen puffin eggs to poach and not a minute to spare.”

  “Black Russian? That’s racist!”

  “Whatever. Now, get going. Humph. Racist. Next thing you’ll start lecturing me about child labour and animal cruelty, I bet. I know you lot. Get a move on!” He gestured to the pile of clothes. “Hurry, before I beat those crazy London ideas out of you!”

  Teddy’s eyes grew wide. The echo of the slammed door rung in his ears, and the words he was about to say froze in his throat.

  He dressed in the warm clothes he found in the dwarf’s bundle, adding layer after layer after layer. The woollen socks and the fur lined boots felt great on his aching feet, but when he tried to walk, he realised he was trotting around like a penguin.

  Teddy’s heart pumped with excitement. Blood, fur boots, and a dwarf? This was a real adventure – Honey would love…He shook the blanket, as if expecting to find his sister hiding under it. Then, his eyes fell on the sack. His hands shaking, he untied the string, bracing himself for the worst…

  “Hurry up, boy!” Black Russian shouted. “I haven’t got all winter!”

  So Teddy, taking one last look at the trail of blood on the wall, slid open the door, revealing the strangest kitchen he had ever seen (he sometimes went with Mum to deliver birthday cakes, so he’d seen plenty of filthy and creepy kitchens). But this beat even Mrs Rachelle’s kitchen at Westwood Terrace, built below street level, the one with a personalised vegetable lift that spoke to the old lady in a jerky voice: ‘One kilogram of carrots, descending’, or ‘One pound of pumpkin peels, going up’, and the pet piglet that waited for the peels to devour them.

  There was pleasant warmth all around, and comforting cooking noises, like on the Saturday mornings when he walked into his own kitchen to find a tray of homemade biscuits, muffins or pancakes waiting for him on the table. Well, Saturdays of before. Now, mornings at Chess Cottage were pretty grim. The kitchen was cold and draughty, the floor full of crumbs, unwashed pots and pans in the sink.

  A cauldron where a murky brew simmered was chained to a hook above the fire, the light of which illuminated the high cavernous walls. Tails, eye balls and even a clawed paw, popped out from the bubbling soup, and Teddy’s stomach tightened to a knot. Jarred fish, clams and prawns, some dried and preserved, others squirming in the oily water, stacked the numerous shelves, decorating the room along with various gruesome kitchen utensils. Surely those tongs were much better at removing an elephant’s wisdom teeth than turning bacon on the grill, and that meat chopper would look better in the hands of an evil murderer than on a knife rack.

  Talking of knives…

  Knives of all sizes, shapes, and types, surrounded a human shape drawn with chalk on a wooden board. Teddy remembered the night at Circus of Ice, when he had screamed so much while the knife-thrower’s knives whistled through the air that the next day his throat was sore. He remembered the tents and the caravans and the woman on the wheel and the man with golden hair sprouting from his balaclava.

  That was their last family outing, Teddy thought with sadness. And he had spent the entire time eating caramel popcorn.

  In each of the steely blades Teddy saw his terrified reflection. Fish writhed on crumbles of ice on the worktop. Three old dwarves, wearing stripy chef aprons, stood on stools, mechanically severing fish heads as they chatted to each other. It was this noise that had woken Teddy.

  The knives not only reflected Teddy’s face in a hundred narrow, distorted ways, but also the cold grey light coming from outside. Behind the steamy windows, it was snowing. It was too light to be night and too dark to be day, a bit like when the shadows of evening begin to fall over the houses and streets of London.

  It was sort of dull and sort of gloomy. Candles burned around the kitchen inside glass jars or empty bottles, like peculiar indoor mushrooms.

  A delicious smell of smoke drifted from the logs in the fire. Teddy moved closer to a wall and peered at the jars. There were jars in their cupboards at home, mostly filled with Mum’s jams and chutneys and Dad’s disgusting pickles, but these were nothing of the like. They weren’t the sort of boring jars you found on the shelves of supermarkets. In them, all sorts of creatures floated in oily water. The snails, slugs and cockroaches appeared to be dead, while the mice, frogs and fish stared at him with beady, pleading eyes. There were clams and oysters, mussels and crabs, and even what looked like a tight knot of animal tongues.

  “Hi,” Teddy said, waving to a fat frog who watched him from inside a chilli oil bottle, and jumped when it blinked at him.

  The frog couldn’t have been squeezed inside through the narrow neck of the bottle, so it must have been thrown in when it was still a tadpole. Growing up in chilli oil was worse than anything he could imagine.

  Teddy wished the midget would use his very sharp dagger to put the fish and the frog out of their misery, but Black Russian was busy cracking a block of ice with it.

  “What’s in the pot?” Teddy found himself asking.

  Without stopping what he was doing, without even looking at him, the dwarf answered:

  “Just our regular broth.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, seal and all that. I added some of my own ingredients, of course. I am a great chef, and I kn
ow how much a little bear meat can flavour a food. That, and human eyes.”

  “Human eyes?! Where do you get human eyes from?”

  “From nosy brats like you who ask too many questions,” snapped the dwarf. “Now, his Iciness always has poached puffin eggs with a pint of fresh seal blood for breakfast. These puffins are hard to catch, so some days he has fulmar eggs instead. F-u-l-m-a-r. Not that you would know. He can’t always tell the difference, but don’t push your luck. The blood is a dirty job, so I’ll do it. Trust someone to do a dirty job – that’s me.” He grinned. “You just do the eggs, London boy. Oh, and he likes a freshly baked baguette, too. You’ll have to run to the bakery and get it. Make sure it’s well crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. You’re lucky to be helping in the kitchen, you know. The factory… Here at least you can eat the scraps, and no one will notice.”

  “Scraps? I thought only pigs ate scraps.” Pigs, like Mrs Rachelle’s pet piglet who wagged his curly tail while waiting for the vegetable lift to bring the pumpkin peels to his upstairs pen.

  Black Russian frowned. “Pigs, and children in Santaville, you ungrateful brat!” he shook his dagger at Teddy.

  “Santaville?” Teddy’s eyes widened. “Is this… Santaville? Like…Santa’s Santaville? Santa Ville?”

  “You got that right. A good chef, my boy, doesn’t throw anything away. Ever heard of the Aleuts? Nomads of Alaska. My distant relatives. Skilled in using every part of a seal or whale – yes, whale – even the bones. They use the bones for making needles or to stab each other in the eye.” He cackled. “Only pigs eat scraps! Ah, my boy, how sweet a potato peel can taste when you haven’t eaten in days.”

  Teddy wanted to ask if potato peels were what he was going to have for breakfast, but the dwarf might have forced him to eat some, and he wasn’t yet as hungry as that. Black Russian handed him a basket of eggs.

  “Poach them,” he commanded. “And make sure the yolks are perfectly golden and that there’s no gloopy bits, otherwise Master will give your hair an egg shampoo.”

  Miserably, Teddy looked at the eggs. They were big, white and freckled, buried in snow. He wished he would see them sizzling in a pan. He imagined the creamy yolk flowing on a slice of buttered toast…

  “Wait! One more question, please. Who is this Master?” The question Teddy really wanted to ask regarded the whereabouts of his sister, but he sensed this was a line of inquiry he wasn’t going to get much help with, not at the moment anyway.

  “Why, Santa Claus of course!” Black Russian yelled from the top step of a ladder. He was trying to reach a pair of gigantic tongs that hung from a hook in the ceiling, but the mischievous tool kept slipping out of his grasp. The chef stretched and stretched towards it, tilting the ladder dangerously sideways. Every time, just as his fingers curled around it, the tongs would slip from him, swinging to the opposite direction, twisting around and around and around.

  “He is our ruler,” Black Russian explained, panting with exhaustion. His eyes were fixed on the tool that dangled on, slower and slower, as if he wanted to make it stop moving by the power of his stare. He extended his hand towards it… “If he is happy, then we are allowed to exist, and we are here to serve him. Or else, kaput!”

  The midget groaned in frustration as the tongs slipped from his hand yet again. He brushed his fingers (hairy and looking more like toes) across his neck, imitating the movement of a knife slicing his throat, and at that exact moment the ladder, arching under his weight, crashed to the ground, sending the chef feet up over the kitchen counter. The crumbled ice flew everywhere, extinguishing a few of the mushroom-candles, sounding like hail on the closed window, and scattering on the floor. A few ice granules even found their way down the neck of Teddy’s jumper. The dwarves squealed. A large fish sailed through the air, landing straight in the pot of broth. It popped to the surface several times, its mouth open, before the furious bubbles swallowed it up.

  The chef’s hat spun through the kitchen, finally stopping on Teddy’s head. Black Russian glared at him, his hands on his hips. His wispy hair was wild and he was spitting ice. He didn’t look like a chef at all, not without his puffy hat. A hand came out of his pocket with a small fish. For a moment he watched it wriggle in his palm, then, to Teddy’s horror, he ate it alive.

  “Okay, Chef,” the midget said with mock reverence, “let’s see what you can do.”

  He pressed his heavy palm over his own hat on the boy’s head, nearly knocking him down as he pushed past.

  Teddy shivered, this time not with cold, but with the terrible truth that revealed itself to him with every passing moment. So, Santa Claus was a legend after all. There was no kind old man flying around from home to home in his sleigh pulled by reindeers. No one left presents under Christmas trees for good children. Actually, the real Santa was worse than anyone could imagine.

  Who would drink seal blood?

  Who would have a small boy make him breakfast?

  Who would, he thought miserably, looking at the frog-in-the-bottle, pickle a living frog in chilli oil?

  “I’m sorry, little one,” he whispered as Black Russian snatched the bottle and cracked it on the side of the cauldron as if it were an egg, licking his lips as the frog slipped into the broth.

  “Chilli frog flavour is always added towards the end of cooking, that’s the secret,” the chef said, mixing the thick concoction with a large spoon.

  And Teddy couldn’t help thinking of Grandma Florence, seeing as she liked frog legs so much, and he wondered if she had any chilli-frogs in her very French kitchen down in Côte d’Azur, France, where she was probably headed to this very morning, happy to be rid of the two spoiled brats she was meant to babysit over Christmas.

  10. Mulled Blood and Ice Holes

  Honey was exhausted. For the first part of the morning, the weather was calm and the children carried the heavy ice blocks easily, but now the blizzard raged. In the distance, ice sheets floated on the iron-grey sea.

  Cone-shaped icebergs drifted from sight with every gust of wind, and black clouds shrouded the sky like a murder of crows.

  Down the path, a dark-coloured tent stood beside the half-igloo, a grotesque construction that made Honey think of an abandoned well, filling rapidly with the ever-falling snow.

  All she could make out through the two holes in her face mask was a whirlpool of snowflakes and the overdressed dwarves, their whips trailing behind them like gruesome tails.

  It wasn’t until she heard a voice, muffled by her fleece mask, that she realised she’d flopped down on the ice block in exhaustion.

  “If you don’t get up, you’ll get frostbite in your legs. You can’t sit on ice!”

  “Watsinak!” The guard flicked out her whip, which hissed through the air like a flying snake. “Watsinak!” the guard barked again, staring at Honey through her furry hood.

  The procession of children staggered past like zombies, sagging under the weights. There was a mention of the masks in her How to survive in extreme weather book – they were vital for surviving in places where winter wasn’t kind. Further ahead, the guards beckoned them over like sinister lollipop ladies, the word ‘Watsinak’ whooshing through the air as sharp as their whips.

  ‘If I hear another ‘Watsinak,’ thought Honey, ‘I think I’ll die of sound pollution.’

  At break, the children gathered in the shelter of the tent, where the dwarves spooned a hot, cinnamon flavoured drink into cups.

  “Mmm.” Honey found herself drooling at the sight of the spiced cider.

  “How do you like your blood?” the girl next to her asked conversationally, sneaking a few chocolate squares out of her pocket. “Mine has to be really sweet. It takes the edge off.”

  “Blood?!” Honey drew back from the portable cooker, where a pot of thick dark liquid, cinnamon sticks and fruit peel swimming in it, bubbled
. She pulled a face as the dwarves dipped their cups and spooned second helpings.

  “Watsinak!” one of the guards said, closing her eyes.

  “Watsinak, watsinak,” the second replied, nodding her large head and smacking her lips.

  “Dwarf women are forbidden to use speech under the rule of Santa Claws, so they have to say everything by “watsinak,” the girl, whose name was Fern, explained.

  “Is there really a Santa Claus?” Honey asked dubiously.

  “CLAWS. Not Claus. See that building over there?”

  Fern pointed towards a grim looking warehouse through the square plastic window of the tent. “That’s the toy factory. That’s where we all work. We make horrible toys to give to children all over the world. Toys that bite, rocking horses that throw you, swearing dolls, and teddy bears that die if you don’t play with them day and night. Oh, and there is the baby who doesn’t say ‘Mamma’ but ‘Die, Mamma’.” Just like the doll that laughed in the night, thought Honey. Or like the finger-biting train tracks.

  “It sounds like child slavery to me,” she said indignantly. Then a thought occurred to her: “They don’t expect me to…I’ve never worked before! Especially in a factory!”

  “You don’t have to do a lot of work,” a freckled boy, whose front teeth were as yellow as two slabs of cheese, said reassuringly.

  “Yeah, there are machines for everything: boring machines, sewing machines, and, what do you call them, lathes…”

  “It sounds…boring…and noisy,” Honey answered, eyeing the dwarves who seemed to have become slightly drunk with the blood, and they were now downing drinks with their arms linked through one another’s.