Santa Claws

by Gabriela Harding

  “We get food for our work,” a child whose blue eyes and pig nose reminded Honey of her brother, explained. “We get warm clothes, and shelter. And, once every year, there’s a feast.”

  “Oh, tell me about it,” Honey sneered. “What do you get to eat? Black pudding? Roasted reindeer antlers?”

  “Well, Santa sets his sledge on fire, and if you haven’t tried barbecued reindeer…”

  Honey wasn’t listening. For a moment she thought she saw Teddy at the back of the tent, but when the boy turned around, she had the unpleasant feeling you have when you realise someone is not who you thought. Sometimes when Honey finished school her heart leapt with joy when she spotted Mum as the lady in white waiting in the playground, only to recoil in horror when the woman turned around and she remembered that Mum was gone.

  It was the same now. However the boy was familiar, and not because he looked a little like Teddy.

  “Stop scratching your eyehole, you lump,” Erasmus barked at the black-haired girl who was making squeaky sounds with her fingers under her eye patch.

  “It itches.”

  “Maybe you’re growing another eye. Your gums itch when you’re growing teeth.”

  “Eyes don’t grow back, chicken head. If you lose one, it’s lost forever.”

  “I wish I had stopped that dog…but,” the girl swallowed, her other eye suddenly fearful.

  “We know. Santa’s wolf swallowed it, slurped it down like an oyster!”

  “Like a mussel!”

  “A slug!”

  “A snail!”

  “Husky dogs are not meant to be aggressive.”

  “Dogs are only as bad as their owners. And Santa does experiments on them…”

  As she listened to the chatter around her, Honey’s thoughts wandered to Grandma Florence, alone with Kitty in Chess Cottage, and Dad, who couldn’t be contacted on the Isle of Wight. He had said so himself in his diary: no means of communication other than post. How guilty he’d feel when he found out what had happened – and he deserved to feel guilty, too. It served him right for leaving his children home alone so he could celebrate Christmas with his girlfriend.

  The wind blew from the sea, the ice sheets clashing into each other with a sound like distant thunder.

  Honey noticed the boggy icicles on her mittens.

  The boy next to her noticed them, too.

  “Wait until you go to the toilet. You have to dig a hole in the snow. By the time your poop hits the ground, it’s already frozen. That’s how many explorers died, you know. I’m Erasmus. Nice to meet you.”

  Honey blushed. The boy extended his grubby hand to her, and she wondered whether it was dried blood or just dirt under his fingernails.

  “That’s not true. He’s making things up to scare people,” said the girl with jet-black hair and an eye patch.

  “How would you know, Scarface? Aren’t you still in nappies?”

  “I’m Honey,” Honey said in a tiny voice. “I have no idea what I’m doing here. It’s Christmas, and…and… I’m making an igloo!”

  “Better than school, if you ask me. You learn real life skills. And it’s Boxing Day, by the way. Not Christmas.”

  “Boxing Day?” Could she have slept an entire day? Gosh. She’d never spent Christmas Day sleeping. Usually, she helped Mum cook the turkey, ate sweets, opened her presents and tried not to tease Teddy, although the year before last she couldn’t resist spreading some chilli chutney on his scones and sprinkling salt on his fat slice of Christmas cake.

  But this was different. This was worse than anything. Teddy wasn’t here. Nor were her parents. She even missed her ridiculous grandparents, one of the first signs of brain damage. Or hypothermia.

  “Survival skills. Building an igloo might come in helpful if you’re stuck out there on the ice,” Erasmus explained.

  “Yeah, because that’s likely to happen in London.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re the new arrivals,” said the boy who looked like Teddy. Honey winced at the sound of his voice, so different from her brother’s. It was like listening to a bad musical note when you know how the real one should sound.

  Honey shivered in the sudden blast of ice particles that tossed the flap of the tent and frosted the children’s faces. The ice felt like crushed glass on her skin.

  Erasmus was still talking when the whip swished through the air and the black leather strip lashed his face.

  The children gasped. On Erasmus’ cheek, a pink swelling had appeared, like a worm buried in his skin.

  “Watsinak!” The guard flicked her whip, but when the boy spoke to her in a foreign language, she fell silent.

  “What did you tell her?” inquired Honey.

  “I told her that if she uses the dog whip on us again, I’ll tell on her. She uses illegal speech in the dormitory. And the other day I saw her drinking blood with the chef. At midnight.”

  “What were you doing out at midnight?” the dark-haired girl exclaimed. “Really, some people are looking for trouble…”

  “Well, there were some weird sounds coming out of the toilet, so…”

  “What sounds?”

  “Like…something was moving down there, and when I looked down, it was all black, but then, it blinked…”

  “Were they kissing?” Fern grinned.

  “Don’t be disgusting, Fern! Who would kiss Midget? He has braces!”

  “It was during their working hours. And they were talking. That’s against the rules.”

  “I take it the language you used is your mother tongue? What is it?” Honey asked.

  “Inuit. Or, Eskimo-Aleut.”

  “It sounds…interesting.”

  Erasmus nodded. “Yes, it’s an old language of the far North…”

  His voice trailed off in the wind which was now raging wildly, making the tent swell like a sail at sea. Honey saw the factory looming on the horizon, a dark dot in the whirlpool of white. Somewhere in that gaunt building, there must be a phone she could use to get help, or some sort of vehicle that could take her back to civilization. Somewhere in there was her brother.

  And suddenly Honey knew what she had to do. The thought of Teddy, who might be somewhere alone and frightened, maybe even injured after a perilous trip, gave her the courage to slip out into the blinding storm. The second she stepped out, she yelped in pain: her face seemed to split into a million pieces. She quickly put her mask on, breathing the air that burned her lungs, so cold it felt hot – just like when she held an ice cube, but this was different, it was like plunging into a pool full of them, glacial and biting, sleety and nippy, numbing…

  Honey had barely made a few steps when she heard Erasmus shout. Through the vortex of snow, his fuzzy shape called out to her, then a flap of the tent wrapped itself around him and a new flurry of snowflakes whisked him out of sight.

  She walked and walked, but walking through snow was like walking through water. Every step was heavy, her calf muscles ached, her lungs burned. But with every step she took, she was closer to the factory.

  She was twenty steps away…ten… five…

  Before her, the barred windows and the ice-caked door were suddenly within reach, when Honey heard a snapping sound. A lightning-shaped crack was growing on the ground, splitting further and further apart, until the water beneath, dark like liquid tar, was all she could see. She held her breath even before her body slipped soundlessly into the hole.

  The water was icy and the sensation of having been swallowed by a giant, cold-blooded animal made her stomach lurch. She thrashed about, her body heavy as lead as it fell through the terrifying darkness, like in her nightmares. She was blind. She was deaf. And she felt as if she was separating from her senses, so that she no longer fe
lt cold, or pain…

  And yet, her mind was surprisingly clear. There had been a chapter in her ‘How to Survive in Extreme Weather’ book about falling through ice. Honey didn’t pay much attention to it, seeing that the only way she could ever fall through ice in London was when Dad filled up the inflatable pool in the garden with ice cubes on hot days, but now the words came to her with extreme precision, as if she’d only read them yesterday:

  If you ever find yourself in the unlikely situation of falling through ice, the first step is to hold your breath, which Honey had already done, almost without realising.

  The second step was to keep a cool head, something Honey felt she had also achieved, since her head felt as cool as a frozen turnip. Well, what the book meant of course was that you have to keep calm, something that had always been very hard for Honey, but in these conditions panic was her worst enemy. She had two to five minutes before her body went into shock and lost all coordination and strength to pull itself out.

  Step number three – get that head out of the water! Honey knew that the hole was darker when covered by snow and lighter where it was under thin ice, so she slipped out of the heavy parka and pushed her head up. After a few gentle nudges the ice gave way, and she emerged like a chick cracking out of an egg.

  Taking a few hasty breaths, Honey hurried to step number four, and stretched her arms flat, knowing it would be boring and painful to wait for them to freeze and stick to the ice, but the more of her body that was out of the waterwater, the less likely she was to die from hypothermia.

  But then, just before she tried to remember what the next step would be, she felt herself slipping back down. She was back in the silky darkness, her mask slipping away from her face…

  And, when the underwater world mysteriously came alight, like a glass room from the London Aquarium, she saw something else, too.

  A shark.

  A real shark.

  A shark with bared fangs and a pointed fin sticking out of its back. There was only one purpose, to kill, written in the monstrous black eyes with no pupils, and this powerful want seemed to flow out of the shark’s eyes like poison, invading her body cell by cell along with the ice cold water.

  As liquid filled her lungs and her head spun slower and slower like a broken down windmill, she felt a sharp object touch her back. Oh no. The shark was beginning to eat her. She was being tossed around like a ragdoll, and in the last few seconds before she lost consciousness, she realised that one of her arms was missing.

  The arm was floating away in the current, alongside a small crab, which appeared to have closely escaped capture, because it was bleeding and it seemed to be missing part of its shell. The crab was familiar. So familiar, in fact, that Honey kept her eyes focused on it, until she understood with a start that it was no crab at all. It was a hand.

  Her hand.

  And everything went snow-white, which, Honey thought, must be the very colour of death.

  11. Georgie

  Teddy stared at the eggs, a cold shiver of fear prickling the hairs at the back of his neck. How on earth was he going to…do that to them? How was he going to punch them? He didn’t even know what that meant and didn’t dare ask the chef, who would just get angry and moan about how he didn’t know anything because he was just a London boy.

  His only experience with cookery was baking chocolate muffins at school – (that was easy because they all did it together. Even Miss White helped; though she was way better at eating cakes than making them … just like Teddy) – but nothing that involved fiddly things to be done to eggs!

  He removed one of the spotted eggs from the basket, where the snow had all but thawed in the warmth of the kitchen.

  “Just drop them in boiling water. Remember to crack them first and take off the shell.”

  Teddy swivelled around. A small girl was kneeling on the floor, sweeping up the dirt, egg shells and fish heads with a tiny brush.

  “I’m Georgie,” she said, picking up a fish eye off the floor and munching it as if it were a peanut. Yak! Was everyone going to carry on eating yucky stuff in front of him today? Teddy’s stomach turned, protesting with a wave of nausea that brought the contents of his last meal – Grandma’s roasted quail – to his throat. Georgie was so thin that it was obvious she lived on scraps. Was that what Black Russian had meant by scraps – fish eyes?!

  The girl winked at him. She couldn’t have been much older than him and she knew all about cooking eggs. Amazing.

  “Where did you learn this? Egg punching?”

  Georgie winked again, and again. Then she shrugged. She had deep black rings under her eyes, one of which was white and scarred, and the other so tired Teddy thought it was going to fall asleep any second.

  “It was one of the dogs,” she sighed. “It attacked me one day when it escaped from the shelter. I’m lucky it didn’t suck my eye out, that Chinese girl…”

  Dogs? No one said anything about dogs. The truth was Teddy had always wanted a dog, the kind of dog that sits at your feet and puts its head down when you click your fingers. Not the type that sucks out your eyes like spaghetti.

  “I’m sorry,” said Teddy. He coughed, aware that time was slipping fast, and the chef would be back any minute. “How do you know how to punch eggs? Did you learn in school?”

  Georgie winked again, and again. Tears leaked from her bad eye, but she wasn’t crying. In fact, it could have been… might have been…pus.

  “It’s poach, not punch. And I don’t go to school anymore.” She shrugged.“I help in the kitchen. Poaching eggs is nothing. Reindeer pie is hard – the pastry must be just right and the meat soft and tender.”

  “Reindeer pie?! Who would eat that?”

  “Why, Santa Claws of course. It’s his favourite meal. You’ll see. The Reindeer Barbeque is only a few days away – I’ve been waiting for it all year!”

  “Barbecue…what? Do I have to go, too? It sounds disgusting,” Teddy said.

  He couldn’t think of anything worse than eating reindeer, which was a type of horse, a type of…pet. Teddy even had a stuffed reindeer in his bed at home!

  “Aren’t reindeers supposed to be, er, magical? Well, kind of…sacred? Because of Santa and Christmas and…” but he already knew the answer from the scorn on Georgie’s face.

  “Everyone has to go. By then you’ll be so hungry you would eat Santa’s hat with a pinch of salt,” she chuckled. “Santa made it a national celebration so no one has to work. Brilliant, eh?”

  “Indeed,” replied Teddy, who by then realised something was seriously wrong with Georgie, so it was perhaps best not to cross her. Brainwashed, he suspected. Georgie was as brainwashed as if you had taken out her brains and put them in the dishwasher.

  “So, I’m going on a diet? Bonus! At least, there won’t be anything nice to eat, so no temptations, right?”

  Georgie glared at him and began to walk away, but then Teddy remembered, the eggs, what was it she’d said he had to do…? Just drop them in boiling water, and then crack them…no, crack them first…

  He cleared his throat. “Reindeer Barbecue is, er, – a bank holiday?”

  “More like, a New Year’s break,” Georgie replied morosely. She was watching Teddy with more suspicion now.

  “So all the reindeers go on the barbeque?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sounds, well…” Teddy wanted to say something nice, something to make Georgie willing to show him the ‘egg-poaching’ business, but, before he could stop himself, the word flew out of his mouth… “gross! Really! Reindeers pull Santa’s sleigh through the sky! I’ve seen it, on Christmas cards! On TV! In books! They pull…”

  “Ah, pulled reindeer, now that’s delicious, pulled reindeer in a bun…”

  “No, no! What I mean…” Teddy sighed. “Pulled reindeer in a bun.” Teddy slumped to t
he floor. “I’m so stupid!” he groaned. “And I lost £50, too!”

  “You don’t need money here,” Georgie said darkly.

  Teddy ignored this. “Honey was right…that’s my sister…well, half-right anyway. More right than me. She always says that if something is too good to be true, then…it’s probably not. So…so reindeer meat is all you can have? Are there no hot dogs or pork sandwiches? Or chicken burgers?” Teddy licked his lips, fantasies of food popping in his mind: roast chickens in gravy puddles, crispy duck meat with rice pancakes, chocolate cake and thick chocolate custard. He was actually quite hungry. The fish-head mush suddenly smelled okay to him.

  Georgie laughed. “Where do you think you are, McDonald’s? This is The North Pole!”

  “The North Pole?” Teddy’s eyes were wide with shock. Had they travelled all the way here in one night?

  “Yes, silly. Don’t you remember anything?”

  “Well, there was someone sitting in Mum’s chair…”

  Teddy shuddered. That laughter. That voice. The Santa Claus mask and the red and white hood.

  “I think I was kidnapped,” he said.

  “Well, good morning. Of course you were kidnapped. How else would you get here?” Georgie sighed. “I don’t remember anything, either. But I saw the sledge. You know, the sledge he travels in. I saw the dogs, too.”

  The back of Teddy’s neck was throbbing. He ran his fingers over the lump there: it felt like a stab wound. Did Santa…stab them? Is that how the darkness came?

  “I don’t think I can eat Santa’s reindeers, you know. Even if Santa is…bad. That’s just wrong!” Although…reindeer meat couldn’t possibly taste worse than horse meat. And horse meat couldn’t be worse than lamb or beef. It would be stringy and succulent and caramel-brown…

  “They say it tastes like venison. That’s deer meat.”

  “I know what venison is. My mum’s a chef.”

  “It’s food. Keeps you alive. Besides, if you don’t like reindeer, there are plenty of other things you can try. There’s even an ermine-confit-brioche stall and everything.”