However, he was tired, and still hungry, and he wouldn’t have minded poaching some eggs for himself, so he began to open drawers and search the shelves of the fridge for some grub. Apart from a few chunks of unappetising dark meat, and some bottles of a red liquid that he doubted very much was cranberry juice, he found nothing.
“Lazing about, are you, London boy?” said Georgie as she passed him, rushing to open the door to a dwarf who walked in with two buckets of squirming fish. “Lazy bums will not last in Santaville!”
“I’m not lazy, I’m just looking for something to eat,” said Teddy, but soon realised there wasn’t anything nice to eat in this gruesome kitchen, not even the broth where, just as he was about to spoon some into his mouth, a large grizzly claw surfaced.
“How about some walrus fat on toast?” offered Georgie.
“Er, how about some butter?” said Teddy hopefully.
“Can’t touch Santa’s butter. Rules,” Georgie answered, handing Teddy a disgusting looking chunk of bread topped with a grey layer of something greasy. He held his breath and gulped it down, thinking he would much rather eat Grandma’s stinky French cheese, or Dad’s slimy boiled asparagus, or even his pickled sprouts…
And, as he ate, it dawned on him that there was no Santa and no Christmas and his annoying sister had always been right about adults being sneaky and the world being a messed-up place.
Still, how else could he have gotten here but through magic? This was the North Pole, where it snowed a lot. The elves were meant to decorate windows with mistletoe and help Santa organise his post. Only, there were no elves, just rude dwarves who ate seals raw and barbecued reindeers. No elves and no presents and no Santa.
But at least there was…snow.
Teddy pulled the curtain aside and, turning his nose up at the jar of maggot-topped cheese on the windowsill, watched the dance of the snowflakes. They were round and more beautiful than London snowflakes. The faded stain in the horizon, a dark backdrop for the snowfall, must have been the toy factory.
A factory where children ate scraps…Suddenly, Teddy had a thought. If they were kidnapped to use as child slaves, they would be more valuable alive than dead. If this was the North Pole, the journey would have been costly and dangerous, so keeping them alive would be important to their captors.
With a sudden burst of intuition, Teddy knew his sister was alive – hungry, cold, and tired, just like him – but alive.
And, of course, the corridor where Black Russian vanished just minutes ago was a secret passage to the factory.
Teddy knew what he had to do. Taking one last look at the busy kitchen to make sure no one was watching, he disappeared behind the cupboard and down the stone staircase. It was dark and after only a few steps he knew he should have searched the drawers for a light, but it was too late now – he wouldn’t be able to find his way back up. The lower he went, the more vile the reek was. He couldn’t see a thing, but he could sense that there was something out there, something which lived in the dark. He heard the sound of wings, flapping above his head.
“Who’s there?” Teddy shrieked, but only a croak replied.
He gulped. “Honey?”
Honey…Hooney…Hooooney! the echo shouted back at him, and Teddy broke into a run. The floor felt soft and slippery, like the tongue of a giant animal, and the sharp stalactites hanging from the ceiling could well have been fangs.
Teddy held his hand tight over his nose and mouth to stop himself from retching and, just as he was beginning to regret starting on this adventure, the tunnel ended, and he found himself before a rustic flight of stairs with tinsel twisted around the rails. At the end of the stairs, on a narrow landing bathed in gold light, was a door.
He climbed the stairs, leaving sticky footprints behind him. On the door, under an inky pane of glass, was a notice, and on the wall, a framed photograph. His heart skipped a beat.
The old man captured in the photo was smiling, leaning on a sleigh loaded with presents, and holding the reins of six chocolate-brown reindeers. His beard was long and white like a sliver of cotton wool. Next to it was another frame, and beside it, another, and another. The photographs filled the walls of this second corridor, the way pictures fill every bit of space in art exhibitions, showing two identical men fighting each other with spears, knives and fists, until finally there was only one photograph left.
Teddy barely had time to register that the man sitting in the sleigh now had a somewhat different expression, that the mound of presents behind him was on fire, and the reindeers were nothing but a pile of bones and antlers in the snow. In their place, a pack of dogs bared their fangs at the camera in a sinister sort of smile, their eyes as red as the man’s buckled coat, as red as the mound in the snow that Teddy realised with horror was a bundled up man…
A scraping sound made him jump. Footsteps shuffled nearby; very quickly, Teddy opened the door, crouched behind it and pulled it shut as quietly as he could. In a few moments a large shadow eclipsed the panel of glass.
Teddy wished he had not left those wet footprints on the landing, because the door burst open, flattening him against the wall; for a moment, Teddy felt like the giant squashy ball on his bedroom ceiling.
He held his breath, and it was almost with relief that he listened to a key turning in the lock. Teddy waited for the footsteps to die out before taking a deep breath.
Phew. He had been so close. He wiped cold sweat from his forehead.
But then he realised he wasn’t safe at all. If he was locked inside this room, then it was only a question of time until he was found.
Alone in a locked room was not how Teddy wished to spend the Christmas holidays.
He thought of Dad on the Isle of Wight with his new girlfriend, eating turkey with roast potatoes and horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding with gravy. His stomach rumbled. It felt like eons since he’d eaten the warm brownie and drank the glass of milk, not counting the walrus fat on toast which tasted more like burned rubber than food.
The room was windowless and a long, rectangular table with chairs sat in the middle. Papers were scattered around an old, crumpled map.
There was not a single cookie or biscuit in sight, just a carafe of water and a tray full of empty glasses. Drawing himself up on his knees, Teddy filled a glass with the icy cold water. As he slurped it greedily, his eyes fell on a sheet of paper. Through the bottom of the glass, he read the black, curly letters.
Committee Meeting
Time: Midnight
Leader: Axius Claus (Santa Claws)
Objective: Execution of Oskar Claus (Santa Claus)
Date: 30 December
Everyone Welcome
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Teddy’s eyes grew wide.
Santa Claus?
Santa Claws?
Execution?!
30th of December?!
Curiously, he bent over to examine the strange sketches on the table, and he soon realised that he was looking at different torture devices: a spiky wheel, a noose and a strangling chair – the Garrote vil.
Half an hour later, sweat poured down his face as he tried the door for the twentieth time. It was firmly locked and would not budge, no matter how hard Teddy tried to bewitch the lock with a spell he had read in a book. He was trapped. Defeated, he went back to the table, and began to read the crumpled paper.
It was a map, with a lot of sea on it. In the sea was a small shape like a sandwich nibbled all around, and a bright red dot – Grise Fiord – and there was a larger kidney bean shape, labelled Greenland.
“We’re in Greenland,” thought Teddy. He didn’t have the faintest idea where Greenland was. It sounded like a fairy tale name, so it could just as well have been in Wonderland. Or…Winterland!
There were words on the map that Teddy could barely read, Qaanaaq, Oodaak and S
avissivik, and more ordinary names like Norway, Iceland and United Kingdom. This was a map of the world.
A loud noise came from the landing and Teddy saw with horror that the panel of glass on the door was obscured once more by a passing shadow. He scurried under the table, where he curled up, ice cold fear flowing through him. It was only then that he saw it, glinting on the carpet before him, and Teddy smiled a wide smile as he picked it up and held it tight between his fingers.
14. Santa’s Sanctuary
Teddy was out of breath running down the twisting corridors with no idea of where he was going or what he doing. He zoomed up and down spiraling flights of stairs, turned corners and knocked over Christmas-tree lamps as he made his way through narrow archways and shredded curtains that clung to him like many-legged insects.
The paintings on the walls, winter landscapes from around the world, whooshed past him the way trees whoosh past a speeding car, and he thought of Mum and her all-year-round Christmas decorations. After all, it was Mum who taught him to pick a lock, when she was delivering a cake and realised she’d lost Mrs Cox’s key.
Surely, he was as far as he could possibly be from the creepy tunnel and the even creepier meeting room… Teddy felt his lungs burning; he leant against a wall to catch his breath…
And then, with a very loud click, and a heart-wrenching screech, and a shuffling sound, the wall swiveled backwards, swallowing Teddy, and snapped closed again. In the silent corridor, apart from his muddy footprints, a soft rattle as the painting of a rather pretty snow-capped mountain clattered gently in its frame, and a very thin crease on the pale green wall, there was no trace of him left.
Teddy was behind the wall, fighting for balance. For a few seconds, he moved dizzily around…Then he steadied himself and, his limbs aching, his heart pounding, he glanced around at the peculiar surroundings.
At first he thought he was in a forest full of fireflies, and not the bedroom where fairy lights dotted every corner.
“A Christmas tree explosion,” muttered Teddy. The room really looked as if a giant fully decorated Christmas tree had blown into a million shreds of coloured ribbon and tinsel, and baby Christmas trees had grown all over the place the way worms grow back when you break them.
The secret entrance in the wall closed with a faint thud. It was now a hall stand where several pairs of holly-print long johns hung hideously from pegs. Reindeer antler chandeliers threw a rainbow of lights across the scrubbed wooden floor. A large bed on lacquered reindeer hooves with a headboard made of antlers sat in the middle of this unusual chamber. The lamps on each of the bedside tables were sinister skulls with candles inside, the red wax flowing gorily out of the eye and mouth holes.
A distant murmur, like that of a waterfall, came from the walls, as if the room was bristling up in the presence of an intruder.
Teddy walked over to the bed where, on the snow white sheet…
“Eew!” He picked up the furry eye mask. “Santa has a girlfriend!”
He didn’t know much about girls and, as Honey loved to point out, he wasn’t an expert in romance, but it wasn’t rocket science that, in a windowless room during polar winter, a girl would only wear a blindfold to avoid seeing something even more disturbing than bright sunlight, or, Teddy thought wittily, to camouflage against the sheets if that something was in a bad mood…
Teddy threw the mask away with a flick of his wrist and walked around the strange place, careful to take his boots off and tie them around his neck by their smelly laces so as to make as little noise as possible. The room was beautifully furnished, from the trees of all sizes, decorating the shelves and lining the walls, to the roaring fire, and the one-legged dummy in a Christmas tree dress, sitting impeccably on a stand as in a shop window. Glitzy jewels – bracelets, necklaces, and brooches – glinted on the branches, and around the headless torso hung various white scarves. The dummy looked like the bride from hell.
Fat red mushrooms peeped over the edge of skull-shaped flower pots, covered in white dots.
“Teenage mushrooms,” Teddy grinned. The dots looked a lot like the pimples under Honey’s bushy fringe.
He gave the hall stand a shove, but the wall wouldn’t budge, – and since Teddy didn’t want to be near Santa’s extra-large long johns anymore than was necessary, and you certainly couldn’t open a wall with a pin, he moved away and began examining the room. He wished he had some idea about what to do next. He wished he could borrow, even for a few instants, Honey’s brilliant brain; she always knew what to do even in the most treacherous situation, and Teddy was certain that having a bright sister could sometimes be the very difference between life and death, between winning and losing…
Honey always won, but now Teddy was alone, and he wasn’t clever, or brave, or ruthless, nor did he possess any of the other characteristics of great leaders. As a matter of fact, he was…safe, and, actually, boring. The truth was, he’d rather be in bed with a mug of cocoa and his PlayStation than going on an adventure.
He should’ve never made that bet…
His sister had once read aloud a proverb warning that ‘whilst in Rome, one must act as the Romans,’ and then she explained, importantly, that this doesn’t mean you ought to eat until you’re sick or brush your teeth with powdered mouse brains, which are things Romans did to pass the time. ‘Whilst in Rome, one must act as the Romans’ simply meant that a person couldn’t always do what they pleased and they sometimes had to adjust to a situation, even if it was the last thing they wanted, as the last thing Teddy wanted was to open and close drawers in the room a villain shared with a girlfriend who was without a doubt as evil as he. Mum always said that it’s no use crying over spilled beans, too, which meant that once made, mistakes were very, very difficult to put right.
But even so, Teddy couldn’t help wondering what his life would be now if he hadn’t agreed, yet another time, to one of Honey’s perilous schemes, as he was inspecting the shelves and cupboards and boxes of what was, without a doubt, Santa Claws’ sanctuary. He was just staring in bewilderment at a rather battered cookbook entitled Poisonous Recipes from the Heart of the Caribbean, when a tiny squeak froze him to the spot.
“Squeak! Squeak!”
Three things happened at once – whatever was squeaking squeaked again, Teddy’s heart leapt up and down, and he was startled by yet another sound.
Or rather, the absence of a sound.
In the flash of a horrible moment, he realised that the gurgle of water wasn’t coming from the walls at all, but from the rectangle of light at the far end of the room, and that it was quite an ordinary sound.
The sound of a running shower.
Which had stopped.
“Squeak!”
Teddy peeped under the heavy bedspread, and there, in the dusty darkness…
“Squeak!”
…was a cage with a tiny animal. A bright white creature, its fur strikingly similar to that of the mask Teddy found on the bed.
“Please!” Teddy saw the silent plea in the black, beady eyes as if etched in blood.
“I let the baby squirrel die,” Teddy said under his breath, “but you’re lucky, little one.”
He knew he had to move fast, hide somewhere before the bathroom door opened; his hand shaking, he picked up the tag tied to the animal’s leg and read it in the faint glow of the skull lamp, while footsteps pattered in the bathroom, the noise of an electric toothbrush buzzed away, and the seconds slipped fast.
Polar ermine-confit-brioche
By Benito Sanchez
Serve with:
A goblet of red wine to friends
A touch of Amanita Muscaria to enemies
(Amanita Muscaria is a blood-red, deadly mushroom native of Siberia. Whoever eats it turns into a psychopath before slowly dying from a brain-frying fever. Tip: add to food after preparation, because parboil
ing removes the poison)
Preparation time: 2 hours
Complexity: Medium
Tip: the ermine must be alive when skinned.
Ingredients:
Five spicy shallots
A bottle of seal blood
Dried herbs
Salt and pepper
The ermine is to be clubbed (stun only) and skinned and roasted over a slow fire…
“Squeak!”
Teddy opened the cage and the furry animal scuttled under his jumper. He patted the tiny bump, and was tiptoeing across the room back to the hall stand, when something caught his eye.
“Yuck!” He picked the object up with one finger, holding it at arm’s length – the way he would hold anything belonging to a girl. “This is awesome!” The nightgown was soft and shiny, so shiny Teddy saw his reflection in the ripples of luxurious fabric, with snowflake patterns on the green stockings, twisted around the antler headboard like spooky stalks.
“This would look great on Miss White,” Teddy muttered.
“No, it would look stupid, actually, but Honey would think it’s a brilliant joke…hmm, I’d have to pocket it, though, which really is stealing, but since I was stolen – I mean kidnapped – it wouldn’t count, would it, if I stole something whilst I was being stolen myself, from the person who stole me…”
The fabric glided over his fingers like water, feeling cold and warm at once, giving Teddy the sensation of eating something finger-licking yummy. He had his hand on it for only a few seconds, but enough to miss the bathroom door opening. Teddy’s heart dropped as the wedge of bright light grew on the dark floor, and he held his breath. Then, almost at the same time he smelled the strawberry toothpaste, he heard the sounds – pop, pop, pop – as if a dozen bottles of wine were uncorked at once, and the room was immersed in darkness. Only the two skulls, and the flames in the hearth, glowed eerily.
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