Santa Claws

by Gabriela Harding

“What on earth was that, Frida?” boomed a bodiless voice.

  Several heavy tomes dropped to the floor as a bookshelf flew open – Teddy heard their hard spines hitting the ground one after another. Light – proper, golden light – flooded the room. Curled up in his hiding place, Teddy didn’t make a sound although he nearly gasped as a dark shadow obscured the keyhole. “No wonder,” the voice barked. “Your stockings yanked the fairy lights out of the sockets! Had enough of your fairy lights, and your mess…oh, blimey! My dinner’s escaped, too…this is going to be a rubbish Christmas! I was looking forward to a bit of ermine on toast…”

  Teddy’s heart thumped, but strangely, he felt less afraid with the warm ball of fur close to his skin. He’d always wanted a pet, and he didn’t particularly like cats ever since he’d seen Kitty bite the head off a mouse while it was still alive. And anyway, Kitty was Honey’s…this, he thought, running his hand over the ermine’s soft body, was perfect…but first, he had to get them both out of there and for now he was…well, pretty much trapped.

  He was sitting on a stinky washing basket, a bundled up fir tree tickling his face. Above him, the sharp metal runners of a sledge glinted like knives. The sledge was taking most of the space, leaving Teddy no choice but to sink deeper and deeper in the sea of unwashed socks. The place was so crammed someone could knock something over just by taking a breath, so he kept very still.

  Teddy listened to the sharp opening of cupboards, the rough sliding of drawers, and the rustle of papers and clothes as their contents were tipped all over the room.

  He thought quickly. What did he know about Santa? He drank blood. He ate reindeers. And he liked… secret doors. So, if Teddy loved hidden passages, he would make one right here, in this cupboard…and in that very moment, his eyes having adjusted perfectly to the darkness, he saw the iron latch of a trapdoor at his feet.

  “Oh yeah!” he whispered, reaching for the latch through a hole in the laundry basket. At the same time, a shelf above him toppled dangerously, threatening to spill an array of mismatched objects over his head: Teddy made out a set of rusty keys, the left half of a broken pair of scissors, and the dismembered head of a blonde doll. “No!” he whispered. “Stop! Stay there!” he pointed a finger upwards, muttering a spell… “Abracapagoma-boo-arghhhh!” Teddy yelped in pain as something heavy clattered over his hand and down to the floor.

  Something that started to sing in a hoarse, creepy voice:

  “Jingle bells, jingle bells

  Jingle all the way

  Oh what fun it is to ride

  In a one horse open sleigh…oh…oh…oh

  …ey!”

  The song died off in a weak croak, followed by a total and most unnerving silence, a silence made worse by the dripping of a distant tap.

  “Need to replace the batteries on this one, Frida,” said the cold voice Teddy dreaded most in the world. His heart frozen, his tongue heavy, his mind spinning, Teddy looked up at the Father Christmas puppet, held tight in the grip of black leather gloves. The puppet’s red eyes flickered on its disfigured face, where someone had cut off the nose, clipped the tips of its ears, and sliced a wide rainbow smile on its plastic cheeks. “We have a pest situation. Something even worse than rats – why, it’s a little girl…”

  “I’m not a girl!” Teddy cried. “And I’m not a pest!” Sticking his hand through the hole in the basket, Teddy pulled the latch, and a dark draughty hole, like the mouth of a well, opened beneath him. The basket was slipping down…

  Just as a scream was forming in his throat, the gloved hand grabbed his collar. He was now close enough to see the woman in the room, a frightening Santa Claus mask stuck to her face and framed by her disgusting wet hair – so close he could look into the man’s bloodshot eyes and smell his brandy breath, see his teeth, strong and huge like rocks, bared in a grin, close enough to have his bristly beard pressed over his nose and mouth like murderous seaweed. “Take this, you big hairy bully!”

  “Aaargh!” Abruptly, Santa let go of Teddy’s collar, and the boy slid down the dark toboggan in the washing basket.

  “Aaargh!” Teddy’s yell echoed back, as he travelled through the bumpy hole, clenching his teeth. The ermine clawed his chest; his heart was drumming; he was quite breathless; and then…he had landed with a splash on something stinky and slimy, Santa’s socks and boxer shorts raining down after him. He looked up and saw that the laundry basket was stuck in the chute. He’d been falling down an old, blocked chimney.

  “Nice,” Teddy thought, rubbing his slimy hands on a glow-in-the-dark sock. The sock was one of those musical, cheap socks sold around Christmas in pound shops, and was miserably coughing a Christmas tune.

  Teddy was sitting on a surface that was wet, cold and soft all at once. It felt like – yuck! – a mountain of giant slugs.

  “Well done, Blanche!” He clicked his fingers, and the ermine clambered out of his jumper, its white fur spotted with blood. “What a bite!”

  The name Blanche had occurred to him on the spot. It meant ‘white’ in French. Only after he congratulated Blanche did he get a good look around him…

  Brick walls rose left and right in the cavernous room. Iron hooks with large slabs of smoked meat hung from the shadowy ceiling.

  Teddy swallowed. He loved smoked sausages, smoked ham and smoked bacon. Saliva squirted into his mouth.

  “Dried fish? Pancetta? Crunchy crackling?” he said to himself, imitating the baker’s voice. His hand was hovering in midair, undecided between the different shapes of smoked meat, when a loud scraping noise made him go rigid with fear. Teddy ducked away from the strip of light falling on the pantry floor, where a mouse scurried out of sight.

  The door opened, and it felt like winter itself was blowing its icy breath towards him. A swarm of angry snowflakes stormed in, settling on the pieces of meat like a dusting of maggots.

  “Straight from the heart, he says, don’t take it from anywhere else…but why on ice he’s treating those brats to blood, I am clueless…”

  Black Russian’s heavy frame appeared in the light, moving closer and closer to Teddy, who was sitting on a large pile of dead seals, their black eyes staring into nothing, their bloody fangs bared. And then, with a sudden spurt of inspiration, Teddy snatched the seal skin hanging from a nail and pulled it over his head. It wasn’t too bad. It was a bit like wearing Grandma’s onesie.

  But it was…rather hot.

  Very hot.

  He was sweating.

  He lay on his belly next to the other seals, wishing he had hidden behind the barrels instead, but he hadn’t noticed them in the dark.

  Black Russian held a large knife in one hand and a torch in the other. He shone the torch greedily over the seals.

  “One that isn’t so long dead that the blood is dry…hmm, how about this chubby one here, no, the fat ones don’t have much blood, oh dear, look at those whiskers, I don’t like the whiskery ones either, they bring bad luck…”

  After much grunting and spitting, he chose a medium-sized seal and, as he was dragging it along the dirty stone floor, he stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Someone there?” He pointed the torch to the giant barrels.

  The answer was a loud, rude, whistling snore.

  Black Russian flicked his torchlight to the nearest barrel, where a female dwarf slept on a pile of furs, her chest rising up and falling with every breath.

  “Having a kip, are you, my love? Wakey, wakey!” he screeched, poking the rotund body with the tip of his boot. The female choked on a particularly rattling snort, jolting awake.

  “Just a quick cat nap, chef. You won’t snitch, will you?”

  “Not if you give me a kiss!”

  “That can be arranged…”

  Before she could finish her sentence Black Russian lifted her to her feet and snogged her. Te
ddy retched.

  “Need to fasten those braces better,” she said, spitting out Black Russian’s braces on the floor. “I don’t need to know what you’ve had for lunch!”

  “Well, it’s the usual, you know, I’m a man of habit, and my mother always said a good bowl of broth lines up the stomach…”

  “I’ll give you a hand with the seal, if you’re quick,” the female said, flicking the icicles off her parka. “There’s a dead girl out there I need to see to – meat for the sharks tonight, I suppose.”

  “A dead girl?” she suddenly had Black Russian’s attention.

  A dead girl? She also had Teddy’s.

  “The girl from London. Sugar or something, her name is. Inquisitive little wretch. She sneaked out of the tent at break, imagine, and fell into an ice hole, which wasn’t any less than she deserved, and when they took her out, she was dead…”

  Honey!

  “Frida’ll go mad,” Black Russian’s voice, Teddy thought, was trembling. “Are you sure, Eska? If this is true, we’re all doomed. That girl…”

  “Did you hear something?”

  An uncontrollable sob had popped out from Teddy’s mouth. Honey was dead! It just didn’t seem real! He had so much to say, so many things to apologise for! He had to tell her sorry for putting a spider in her mouth when she slept, and for the time when he fiddled with the rubber lining on the shower door and she was stuck inside, and Mum and Dad had to wear blindfolds as they tried to get her out, and for when he locked Kitty’s cat flap and she had a big juicy poo on Honey’s new rug, and…and…he owed her £50! How could she be dead?

  Teddy was so engrossed in his thoughts he didn’t realise he was being lifted up, and carried over to the table with a sharp iron spike and a bucket underneath, nor did he remember seeing the drawing of this torture instrument in the meeting room.

  “This seal feels lighter than usual,” Black Russian was saying.

  “The thin ones have the most blood,” his companion replied.

  And then Teddy knew what the table was for. The spike would go through his heart, and his blood would drain in the bucket until he was as dry as the seal skin.

  Until he was dead.

  Dead, just like his sister.

  “No,” he shouted, wriggling and kicking. “I’m not a seal! I’m a boy!”

  Black Russian and the other dwarf stood still.

  “It’s still alive,” growled Black Russian.

  “And it’s not a seal,” his friend snarled.

  The next moment, Teddy was standing in the middle of the pantry, tears and sweat streaming down his face, the skin lying at his feet, slashed to shreds by Black Russian’s sharp knife.

  “It’s that bloody kitchen help,” barked the chef.

  The female said nothing as Black Russian grabbed Teddy and hung him up like a slab of smoked meat. His jumper gathered up around his neck, and Teddy heard the fabric ripping on the iron hook. Oh no, he thought, as Blanche’s furry tail tickled his stomach.

  “Nasty little thief, you are.” Teddy cracked one eye open. Black Russian was holding the ermine by the end of her tail, the way you might hold a mouse to stop it from reaching up and biting you. “You’ll still make a nice confit, eh? And after grinding your bones, you filthy little spy, I’ll use them to make the dough for the brioche. Ground bones brioche – there’s a new dish for my cookery book. Don’t worry,” he grinned, “I’ll smear some amanita muscaria on you so you won’t feel the pain. Ermine and human, now I always say those flavours go well together…”

  Cackling horribly, the dwarf pulled another knife from a rack and began sharpening the two together. A shower of sparks erupted in the air like fireworks – and Teddy thought he heard a grunting sound, like someone choking.

  “Eska, fix the table…Eska? Hmm, she might be getting the marinade, you’ll taste good pickled in chili oil…Eska, is that you?”

  A body was blocking the entryway, shining a light in Black Russian’s eyes. He covered his face with his arm, squinting.

  “Eska?” He took a few steps towards the door. “In the name of ice!” he gasped.

  It was still dark, as dark as in a cave, but still, on the frosted floor, Eska’s body lay in a pool of blood, her eyes staring into nothing, as empty of life as the seals’.

  15. A Narrow Escape

  Opening her eyes, for the second time that day, Honey didn’t know whether it was night or day or if she was dead or alive. Everything hurt – her throat, chest, and ears. Her face felt crusty, the skin flaking off, just as she knew it would in the less severe cases of frostbite, when the damage was like sunburn.

  “Is she dead?” This voice came to her as though through ripples of water, the words vibrating like currents. Her eardrums felt like burst blisters, and something warm trickled down her neck. Honey heard sounds: a hiss, a cough, a crunch. All around her, she sensed bright lights – the lanterns and lamps keeping the children company at night. So, the day must be drawing to an end, and she’d been unconscious for most of it. Just as well, she thought, as it appeared the igloo had been built well enough without her contribution. Before her fluttering eyelids, the honeycomb wall, where the reflections of the flames cast by the portable cooker leapt up and down like shadow puppets, shifted in and out of sight. Just like the strange, dancing lights in the underwater grotto.

  “Can you hear me? Can you tell me the date?” said another voice.

  “That’s not fair. She’s new – she can’t tell a kittiwake’s egg from a stone…”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  It was then, when the man raised his palm, sticking three fingers so close to her face Honey thought he might poke her in the eye, that she saw how much like a crab his hand looked.

  A crab. Adrenaline flooded her blood, like in the dream where she fell through the floor into a bottomless pit. She didn’t even have to close her eyes to see that arm again, drifting in the underwater current, the threads coming off the ripped sleeve like gruesome tentacles.

  The sleeve was black.

  Black?

  But wasn’t her parka… red? Bright red, Honey’s favourite colour? Astonished, she stared at her black and blue, heavily bandaged, but otherwise, quite intact, fingers – the fingers on the hand floating away like a bloody crab only hours back.

  The hand meant to be missing.

  Honey got up slowly, watching the other children scrambling to a different room through a round, low hole. Apart from aching in weird places, she was quite okay. She couldn’t have spent longer than a few minutes underwater, and yet, it was obvious from the way her body responded with pain to all the outside stimuli, that her life had been in mortal danger. A strip of her red parka, still clasped in the harpoon’s hook, hung on the wall as a gruesome reminder of what could have been.

  Her hand was unpeeled from the frozen surface like a sticker. It hurt just to think of it. Were bits of her skin still there, the way bits of her Winnie-the-Pooh sticker still dotted the wall of her bedroom? Lucky her arm had been stuck to the edge of the ice hole all along, or she’d be at the bottom of the ocean by now. Dismembered, dead, and nibbled at by fish.

  The severed limb, then, might be a hallucination induced by hypothermia, something she thought she saw.

  “Good morning, all.”

  Honey was hit by a new sensation of déjà-vu at the sight of the man who spoke, to her relief, perfect English. He wasn’t holding a whip, either. Even better, the retarded dwarves who only said one word were nowhere in sight. She blinked, taking in the broad shoulders, the long arms, and the rich wavy hair, the colour of her name – honey. The hair and beard made him look like a real explorer, one who had run out of shaving foam and razors.

  “As you know, a slight inconvenience this morning delayed our chores. Because of this, our afternoon lessons were cancelle
d. Now, I suggest we forget this little incident and do some revision before supper.”

  “Too late to be revising now – we’re done doing the thing! Theory sucks!” whined a small angry boy.

  The man ignored him. “We are revising a very important chapter from our manual, North Pole for Dummies, the chapter about igloo building.”

  “As I said!”

  “Little incident?” Rong, the one-eyed Chinese girl, cried. “You call that a ‘little incident’? She could be…”

  “Dead, if she hadn’t thought of the genial ‘frozen arm’ trick.”

  Honey felt very smug. Mum would be proud of her, being so clever. Dad would be proud, too. For a fleeting moment, she pictured this tall man as her father: making her eggs in the morning, checking her school books, and popping his flour dusted face round her door to announce tea was ready. She couldn’t see him teaching at Cuckoo School, though, where he’d look more like the feral caretaker than a teacher, but at least she wouldn’t have to put up with the explosions of giggling behind Mr Raymond’s back as he slid on yet another banana peel in the playground.

  “Today, children, you built an igloo from scratch. Now, what do we know about igloos? Elton?”

  “There are three types of igloo,” said a boy whose grubby hand was in the air before the teacher finished talking. “Small, intermediate and large. The small are used for hunting, the middle sized have only one room and the big ones are made out of small ones and tunnels.”

  “Quite right. Now, can anyone tell me what’s the best snow for constructing an igloo? Yes, Clementine?”

  “Go on, Clementine.”

  “Johann, be quiet.”

  “Yes, Johann. Be quiet.”

  “Shut your face.”

  “Silencio.”

  “The best snow to use is snow blown by the wind. We use snow for its amazing insulating properties.”

  “Bravo, Clementine.” The children burst into mock applause.

  “Boring. Who cares about igloos? It’s killing I want to learn. ‘Shooting seals for dummies’, right, sir? Or ‘How to kill a walrus in three easy steps’, how about it?”