20. The Garrotting
The throne stood alone against the swirling snowfall. At first, Honey didn’t know what it was doing there. She just looked on like everyone else, holding tight to her brother’s hand, as if the faintest gust of wind might take him away. Life was like that, she thought. Like wind that could fly away with your possessions. Like a snowball that rolls and rolls and you never know where it will stop.
They followed the trail of voices to a spot outside the kitchens. Honey noticed the windows covered in ice-webs, and the trails left by a snowmobile in the fresh snow.
Once again, she wondered what the chair was doing there. You sometimes saw broken furniture in the gardens of the people who didn’t bother to take it to the tip, those who hoped it would be picked up by a person in need instead, thus serving a nobler cause. But, looking at the padlocked footrests and the neck ring, Honey had to eliminate any noble purposes from the uses of this instrument. In her opinion, there was nothing noble about execution tools. Her skin exploded in goose bumps, as if the belts attached to the armrests didn’t brush against the powdered ground, but against her own skin.
The dwarf was squirming as she was being carried over to the chair. Honey’s heart beat faster. She could feel her blood pumping, hot behind her ears. As a toddler, Teddy would put up a fight whenever Mum stuffed him in his highchair. Maybe he’d thought the highchair was an execution tool.
The man worked quickly and efficiently, handling the prisoner as if she was, indeed, a boisterous toddler. First, the iron ring was closed around her neck with a sickening click. Then, the woman’s trembling hands were tied behind her back with a piece of rope. The executioner twisted a metal handle, making the ring close tighter and tighter around the woman’s throat.
As he didn’t wear a facemask, the man’s wrinkled flesh was slapped repeatedly by the fierce wind, but he didn’t seem to care. Honey noticed that his skin didn’t break down in droplets of blood, the way hers had when she first stepped out uncovered into the bitter cold. Suddenly something crystallised in Honey’s brain. A memory. The moment when Santa’s mask slipped to the side to reveal the ugliest face in the world.
The ring in the executioner’s snotty nose was a mini version of the iron ring around the victim’s neck. His pure white beard floated in the wind, as did his red fur-trimmed coat held together with a buckled belt.
The children were silent.
Where was Fridrik? The realisation of what was about to happen washed over Honey like a bucket of scalding water. Any time now, the woman’s neck would snap. Already, her eyes resembled overgrown onion bulbs as they bulged out of their sockets, and her complexion had taken on a purplish tinge. Then she remembered, it was Fridrik who brought the woman here in the first place. Fridrik was just following orders, like the rest of them.
Honey had to distract the man. But what if she did? One word, that’s all it took. One word, spoken at the wrong time, could be the difference between life and death. If she said something, she could be sitting on that chair next. Her own neck would make that sound – a sound like the crunch of pork crackling.
SNAP.
It was over. The woman’s head fell limply on her shoulder.
Honey gasped. Her hands flew to her mouth. She’d never been one for public displays of grief, but now she wept silently, as if this death had killed something in her, too. Frozen solid teardrops rolled down her cheeks.
Erasmus retched.
“It’s him,” Honey whispered between sniffles. “The man who took us.”
“It is him,” agreed Teddy, “and you can’t imagine what else I found out.”
A small person ran out of the kitchen and sank to her knees by the murdered woman.
“No!” the dwarf wailed. “Nooooooooooooo!”
“That’s Black Russian,” said Teddy, “He’s the cook.”
“Black Russian?” Honey wiped the tears away with the back of her mitten. “What kind of name is that?”
“His mum’s favourite cocktail,” Teddy answered, and suddenly remembered the drawings in the meeting room. “Hey, I know what that chair is. It’s a garrotte vil.”
“Of course.” A bright light had switched on in Honey’s brain. “The garotte vil was the most popular instrument for executions in Spain. Mum had a book about the Inquisition, remember? The tribunal of the church that punished unbelievers.”
“And witches. Do you know that book on torture, the one Dad locked in his desk? That’s where I first saw the garotte vil. Now I remember.”
“Mum picked the lock with her hair clip.” Honey found herself smiling under her mask.
“Out of the way, midget,” snarled Santa in a voice colder than the cold outside. “I was informed she had been using speech. This is illegal and the punishment for breaking laws in Santaville is death. Or did you think I’d give her a bloody medal?”
Honey shivered. Sentenced to death because you used speech? It was appalling, unfair and yet, pretty common. She supposed that, in one way or another, people were always punished for speaking too freely. It always got her in trouble at school, or with her parents, and journalists always died for telling true stories. Speaking your mind just wasn’t safe.
“That’s why they only said Watsinak. Because they weren’t allowed to say anything else.”
“Watsinak means Move or Don’t move in Inuit. Depending on the tone of your voice. Even so, it’s hard to say everything in only one word,” explained Erasmus. “Anyway, what a shame. She and the cook were due to get married at the Reindeer Barbecue.”
“But I just saw him kissing someone else in the pantry,” said Teddy. “Then she was dead, too. This is the second murder I’ve seen today. The first was bloodier. Maybe someone put a spell on the chef. Whoever kisses him dies.”
“I thought our school rules were tough, but in Santaville they’re just insane,” sobbed Clementine, her eyelids stuck together with frozen tears.
“At school we get warnings for talking in class. Imagine if that was used for detention,” Zachary said, pointing to the chair.
“I don’t want to imagine anything,” snapped Honey. “I want to use all my imagination to understand what’s going on.”
“I hope you’ve a lot of imagination, then,” Fern replied bitterly.
As she watched the woman’s lifeless body being dragged away to feed the dogs, Honey felt her heart fill with doom. The days when Christmas meant fairy lights, roast turkey and mince pies were over, and with every horror she witnessed those days seemed to be floating further and further away. Honey felt she was reaching for happy memories in the same way a blind person might reach for objects in a haunted room, where they moved and spun around out of her grasp.
Their heads bowed, the little prisoners walked over to the factory through the snowfall, like a team of defeated surgeons leaving an operating theatre where death triumphed once more in the wide-eyed body left behind.
21. Santa’s Toy Inferno
Watching executions straight after breakfast can give you a bad tummy, particularly if you had a dodgy breakfast, thought Honey, holding her stomach as she entered the factory through the heavy iron doors. Her footsteps rung in a room with barred windows. Wow. This was even more of a prison than the dormitory. Honey didn’t know much about factories, but they had to be horribly dull. Prisons – real prisons – were cooler. She smiled remembering the fat man with a fake moustache and doughnut crumbs all down the front of his shirt who Grandma Florence took her to visit years ago. Grandfather Flaubert’s disguises were as bad as a red fish trying to hide in a glass bowl.
It smelled of paint and burnt plastic, and the noise was everywhere. Like the low purr of a working fridge, it whirred constantly, and Honey stood there, feeling like a bottle of ketchup ready to explode. She felt sorry for the contents of fridges all over the world, tomatoes and eggs and ham, having to si
t in the dark listening to the growl of the fridge’s bowels. Why, it was like having been eaten but not yet dead, and every time the door opens and light comes, you beg to be the next thing sentenced to a quick and painless death on the chopping board. Even worse, the echo of laughter floated in the high ceilings, breaking into a million blood-curdling chuckles that buzzed around the factory like invisible evil fairies. Honey fought the impulse to flail her arms about, as if she was under attack by a swarm of angry wasps.
The guards were back. They patrolled the aisles displaying the same self-importance, armed with baseball bats and fire extinguishers. Dad had once said that small people like to surround themselves with even smaller people, and Honey thought that this could explain the natural distaste the dwarves felt for bigger and more shapely creatures like children.
Honey hung her parka by a blackboard where various tasks were written neatly in chalk:
Moulds (manually)
Milling machines
Heat engines
Trimming and polishing
Boring machines
The children signed their names near the task they chose to perform. Jerry offered her the stub of chalk.
“Hmm,” Honey pretended to think. The truth was she had no idea what anything on the list was. She wasn’t ticking anything that had the word ‘manually’ next to it. Her hand was healing nicely, but forcing it would be a push. Trimming and polishing – that was Mum’s job. Honey lacked the talent and skill to make things look anything but a mess – she was her father’s daughter in this. Even if she couldn’t see cows anywhere, milling had to mean milking. Could polar mammals be milked? Of course, where else did the dinner milk come from? Her stomach flipped over. Bear milk and executions. No wonder she had cramps.
Boring machines would, naturally, be boring. How about the heat engines? Heat sounded good. As she was scribbling down her name, Honey noticed most of the children had already signed theirs, leaving barely any space for her at all.
“Is my picture really on milk bottles? And my parents offering a reward?” Jerry took the chalk from Honey’s hesitant hand and wrote his name against trimming and polishing.
Honey was surprised at the question. “I’m sorry,” was all she could say. “Do you miss home?”
“I don’t even remember it.” Jerry shrugged. “The drugs they gave me did something to my brain. Maybe it was a double dose or something. I just remember bits. It’s annoying.”
“Watsinak!” The guards had recovered their zest, and paraded in their dull grey overalls with the name Santa’s Toy Inferno Ltd stamped on the chest. Erasmus strolled over, wearing the same uniform and holding a similar piece of clothing out for Honey. She put it on, grateful for a little extra warmth. From the pocket she extracted a pair of grubby goggles. She tried them on: it was like seeing the world through the bottom of a blood splattered camera lens.
“How do I look?” Teddy sneaked up behind her in his new work outfit. “Hey, stop, that’s ticklish!” In his pocket Blanche squeaked desperately.
“You better keep that safe,” hissed Honey, who hadn’t been at all pleased when her brother boasted about stealing the ermine from Santa’s bedroom. “Or you’ll be executed for theft. What are you thinking of feeding it? Your toes? They’re carnivores you know.”
Honey gasped, clasping her hands over her mouth, while her brother’s eyes filled with unspeakable dread. It was too late. Honey wished she could suck her words back like a string of stray spaghetti that was dangling down her chin. The two siblings looked at each other. Honey knew, by gazing deep in her brother’s eyes, that the word still held the same dark meaning for him as it did for her.
“Nah.” Teddy was the first to blink back to reality, and patted the tiny bump on his stomach. “She’s got nine lives, like cats. First, I got her away from the cage, didn’t I? Then, when Black Russian saw the dead body, she bit him and got away. It was dead easy. Fridrik knows I have it. He even got me down from the hook. The chef was going to cook me for dinner.”
“I’d have loved to eat you.” Erasmus smacked his lips. “Juicy boy roast stuffed with ermine.”
“Bet you would, cannibal!” Rong booed, jumping around in overalls and goggles.
It crossed Honey’s mind that, in these strange outfits, the children looked like pupils about to start a science experiment. The experiment would be a lot more dangerous than any regular school lab demonstration, nothing like colour-changing liquids or making slime. And it was much more than a science project – more like the sinister tests some callous scientists did on animals. Or children.
“Oi! Did you like it so much in the bear’s mouth that you want another go?”
“Snitch and coward!”
“Shut up!”
“Erasmus, just ask her out,” sighed Nico.
“Yes,” smirked Mirabelle. “Ask her out, Erasmus.”
“A romantic sledge ride.” James giggled.
“Yes!” cried Johann. “You could both go for a swim in an ice-hole! Naked!”
The children guffawed.
“Shut up!” Erasmus roared.
“Oh, let him be.” Clementine shook her head. “He likes the London girl.”
“Honey! Honey! He likes Honey!” the children chanted.
“Hey, be quiet! No I don’t! I’m just being friendly!”
More laughter.
“Watsinak!”
Honey flinched as the tip of a baseball bat crashed down on a metal table by the window. The sound reverberated around the room, the bars rattling against the glass. Glumly, Honey followed the line of children down to the heart of the factory, where the metal monsters awaited. There was a tool that looked like a paper guillotine, and another like a dentist’s drill, and one like a ship’s cockpit chewed off by sharks. The worst of all were the heat engines, which, Honey saw with growing horror, were narrow steamy rooms like solarium beds where lots of pipes glistened in the dark. Just put a foot wrong in there, and you’re burned to a crisp for sure. Back home, even the simplest thing came with instructions, and you certainly couldn’t lose your arm by mishandling an egg slicer, or using a kettle or a hose. Here, you had to work out everything yourself, by pressing the wrong buttons and risking your life, and who knew what the punishment for not doing your work in the factory was?
Honey and Teddy sat down on rusty metal benches, and Erasmus, holding a clipboard and pen, started the briefing.
“The machine tools make shapes called moulds,” Erasmus began, gesturing towards an aisle where children were already sewing, polishing doll limbs or painting plane wings in bright colours. “The melted plastic is then poured into the moulds to make the parts of a doll.”
He grabbed a creepy Barbie doll from a basket and twisted its arms and legs around to demonstrate. “For that you need a special pressure machine, or the melted plastic won’t fill the tiniest holes in the moulds.” He ran his finger over the doll’s little toes, hardly bigger than the head of a pin. “Once you’ve done that you have to remove the excess plastic by filing and polishing.” He nodded to a group of children who, armed with files the size of kitchen knives worked at smoothing edges. “Now, the same happens for other toys like planes, trains, helicopters. You can either pour them into moulds or make them on special machines called lathes.” He pointed to the horrid guillotines. “Other parts, triangular or square, can be made on machine tools called milling machines. The holes are done by boring machines or milling machines, and now we’d better get to work, or we’ll still be here at midnight.”
Honey and Teddy looked at one another, and then back at the monstrous instruments. Honey swallowed hard.
What if the boring machine bored holes in their hands instead of the wheels and wings?
And what if the pressure machine poured the melted plastic over their feet instead of into the moulds?
&n
bsp; What if the milling machine severed their fingers rather than shaping the parts of a toy?
Why hadn’t they attended a health and safety meeting, so they could be taught how to protect themselves?
“Honey, look!” Teddy showed Honey a row of identical dolls. The metal claw of a mini crane plonked blonde wigs on their bald heads. A sinister cackle floated out of their hair.
“The dolls laugh when you brush their hair,” explained Fern, placing a piece of metal under a drill that repeatedly beat down on it like a robotic woodpecker. “Some can swear, but they’re out of stock. They’re awesome. They swear in every language and dialect in the world. You just download them. The funniest is the Tok Pisin dialect of Papua New Guinea, it sounds like an enchantment…”
“I like those that spit better,” said Johann.
“How about this?” Zachary slipped the teat of a baby bottle in the open mouth of a doll. The doll clamped down on it, made a gagging sound, and spat out the teat. Zachary laughed. “Just don’t put your finger in their mouth. It doesn’t say it in the instructions, though.”
“That’s horrible!” said Honey. “Who would buy this?”
“People who hate their kids. Plenty of them around.”
Or kids who hate their parents, thought Honey darkly, imagining, for the fraction of a second, Anaconda’s scream of agony as a baby doll spat out her severed thumb.
The dolls cackled away. Just like… the laughing doll! That doll chucked away to some corner of the cellar. The train tracks that scarred Teddy’s fingers, the freaky doll – it all made sense.
“Meet the Crushing Bear.” Fern had her arms around a teddy the size of a small house. “He breaks your ribs when you give him a cuddle – relax, he’s out of batteries – and Bad Beauty, the rocking horse that throws you to the ground when you mount it. Complete with a bolting mechanism, sensors for movement, and four different speeds. Guaranteed to break your neck. Yee – ha!”
“I’d like to see you on that horse,” said Rong, squinting at a reel of thread with her good eye.
Santa Claws Page 18