Santa Claws kicked back his chair. “You?” he spat.
“Yes, me. You weren’t expecting me, I gather? Am I not invited to taste a little hangikjöt and hákarl? I imagine you taught your dwarves to cook just the way our mother did, may Ice rest her soul forever.”
“Hangikjöt is Icelandic smoked lamb,” Erasmus said. “Hákarl is shark meat – cured shark meat. Fresh shark is poisonous.”
Honey had a sudden, disturbing thought. What if everything today had been… poisoned? In the second World War, children in concentration camps were tricked into shower rooms and gassed. Was that why she was feeling lightheaded? The room spun as if she was hanging upside down on a slowly turning wheel. Any minute now, she would be sick. The voices of the two men rung deep in her ears, both far and close, as if in a dream.
“Oh, but welcome. Please, have a seat. Where are my manners?” Claws pointed to the garrotte vil. “The chair of honour was cleaned especially for this occasion. Would you like a glass of Bennivín to go with your seat?”
Claws grinned, and Honey saw he was holding a carafe filled with a clear, strong smelling liquid.
Oskar’s fingers rubbed at his wild, white beard.
“Black Death. Very funny. I accept.”
His brother snapped his fingers at a stout, moustachioed dwarf who was standing close by and he hurried over with a Schnapps glass – the thin, heavy bottomed kind that Grandma Florence used for her liquor when she didn’t drink straight from the bottle. Claws filled it, and the dwarf took it over to Oskar, who downed it in one gulp.
When he was finished, he smacked his lips. “Bennivín. Black Death. I missed it. A long time has passed, hasn’t it, since you locked me in that draughty loft, with only the ghosts of mice for company.”
“Ghost mice?” Teddy gasped.
“Eew, disgusting,” Rong shuddered.
Oskar walked over to his brother, pacing slowly and purposefully. His eyes never left his face. Claws’ eyes darted from the harpoon to the door. To Honey’s satisfaction, he looked like a cornered rat.
Oskar edged closer and closer. Honey crossed her fingers tight. The children’s and dwarves’ heads snapped from one twin to the other, as if they were following a tennis match.
The evil twin grinned, his silver plated teeth glinting horribly. Outside, the wind howled, and the room went a little darker.
“What’s going on?” Honey whispered.
“It’s the storm,” Erasmus whispered back. “The generators will freeze up.”
“Great. So now we’ll be alone in the dark with a psychopath and some crazy dwarves.”
Oskar smiled. Any second now, the harpoon would spin through the air…
And yet, something was wrong. Honey could feel it in the pit of her stomach. She could taste it in her mouth, a sour, metallic taste of dread. On either side of the aisle the machines sat silently under their white covers. They looked as if they would never again whirr and buzz on a normal factory day.
Claws leapt up from his throne. The skull bells tinkled. And then, as the dwarves yelped with excitement, and the children squealed in horror, he threw himself into an elastic, feline sprint, something quite spectacular for a man of his age and build. One moment he was towering over everyone, the ripped tinsel tangled in his hair and fairy lights flickering grotesquely in his beard, and the next, he had mounted his brother and pinned him down to the floor. He grunted through his teeth as he slapped the old wrinkled face. The punches he threw at his chest made Oskar wheeze for breath. Honey screamed.
As the men wrestled, the seconds felt like hours. For a while, Oskar had managed to keep hold of the harpoon gun, despite his brother’s attempts to disarm him. Honey looked away as the twins crashed skulls with sickening cracking sounds.
“Did you see that? He’s got the gun!” Jerry yelled.
“What? No! NOOOO!”
Honey blinked in disbelief. In the flash of a second, the weapon had switched sides. It was dangling in the wrong brother’s hands.
Her heart was drumming deafeningly. The fight became soundless. The spectators were now a silent crowd moving their lips in gasps, cheers and wails, as her blood pumped louder and louder, gurgling in her head with the sound of a waterfall. When Honey’s hearing returned with a pop, she heard the shuffling of Oskar’s body on the dirty floor as Claws dragged him over his own snowy footprints.
She was hit by a sudden jolt of déjà vu. This had happened before, but when? She’d never seen snowy footprints on a wooden floor…or had she? It felt like watching a muted, black and white film: the colours faded, so did the memories, and there was a strange familiar ring to the noises she heard.
Why didn’t Oskar put up a fight? Why did he not protest? Was Claws so much stronger than him? Were Oskar’s bones too brittle from not exercising in so long?
And then, the force bigger then her, the force that inhabited her body and mind, the force that even Dad feared, tingled in the tips of her fingers. Her eyes filled with blood.
“No!” Honey threw herself at her kidnapper with her fists. “Let go of him! Teddy, help!”
They jumped on the man’s back, scratching his head, kicking and pulling his hair. Claws’ hands were tightened around his brother’s neck, and she noticed something. Not only were his hands young and smooth, they were also much whiter than his face. Confused, she paused for a second, before tugging at his face a tad harder. Honey’s heart skipped a beat. Her fingers were stuck to something gelatinous. Was old flesh so jelly-like? So…stretchy? So…? Honey peered in horror at her hand where, glued to the tips of her fingers, was a bundle of gummy skin.
His face had come off, and it now hung in her hand like a dead mollusc.
38. Back from the Dead
The face hung in a thin strip of skin, rolled up like a pancake. The soft and hideous flesh was peeled off, and Honey knew with a sudden pang of fear that it was a mask. The kind of mask burglars used, a modern version of the stocking over the head. An expensive stocking made of real skin.
The wig was pulled off, too, and thrown at the dwarves, who fought silently over it. Black Russian won, and the wig sat over his chef’s hat like a ridiculous trophy.
Lastly, Santa Claws spat out a pair of dentures, and a set of dazzling white teeth gleamed at the terrified children.
“No.” Honey drew back. She could see the golden locks spilling down on the broad shoulders, damp with sweat, like the feathers of a duckling emerging from an egg.
“Fridrik? I don’t understand.” Teddy blinked once, twice.
“That might be because you’re a bit thick, son, just like that French parrot who calls himself your dad.”
“Do you think we fooled anyone?” said Oskar, his fingers pinching at his mask, until it rolled into his fist, a gooey, sticky ball of skin.
The room turned quiet. Thick snowflakes fell behind the dark windows, in the light spilling from the outdoor lamps. A door screeched open. For a moment, the howl of the wind was like a wolf in the dark, and then the door was firmly closed.
THUMP.
A woman’s silhouette came into view at the far side of the factory. She was partly immersed in shadow, but her voice cracked through the air like a whip.
“You could have fooled me.”
Honey felt as if she was on the spinning wheel, that night at the circus, and a thousand knives had stabbed her at once, squeezing out her breath.
The woman was wearing white. Fur and diamonds sparkled on her gown, and snow crystals fell at her feet as she walked.
“Snædis?” Teddy recoiled when a waft of perfume tickled his nose. It was a perfume he knew, the scent that lingered on the cushions of Chess Cottage for months after Mum’s death.
Memories popped into Honey’s mind. Blood was flowing on the windows of the ship. They were sailing on a sea of blood.
<
br /> She stepped back.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” Mum edged closer. Behind her, the two Santas were taking off their fake bellies. “Don’t you want to know the end of the story?” She clasped a stripy notebook in her hands. “I’ve given it a name.”
“You’re dead,” Honey breathed.
The sparkles on Mum’s dress were like a million stars twinkling at once on a very small sky. Embroidered with diamonds and white sapphires, sewn with gold thread and goose down, this gown had cost Dad a fortune in Paris. After a long battle, the insurance company gave him a fat cheque, not before he sold his car to cover the ongoing payments. Had the insurance company given him the money a week before, his beloved Chevrolet would still be in the garage.
“Merry Christmas, darling.”
A present wrapped in shiny paper was in her hand, tied with a snowflake ribbon. Honey crossed her arms on her chest. Mum’s smile faded. She ripped the paper apart herself. The embroidered scarf slithered out of it, soft as water.
“I finally finished it.” She blinked from her heavy, white eyelashes.
“Mum, what are you…what are you doing here?” Honey blurted out. “You look…”
“Alive,” Teddy finished for her.
“It’s a long story,” she sighed, ruffling Teddy’s hair. She sat gracefully on the chair Black Russian pulled out for her. “Let’s start with the beginning.” The two Santas smiled. Even without their masks, they were identical. “Let’s see. We’ve been apart for a year, but you don’t look happy to see me. Aren’t you glad to see me, puppets? Aren’t you relieved to know it was all a game?”
“I don’t understand.” Teddy winced when the gloved fingers stretched out to touch him. In the poor light, they looked like tentacles.
“Don’t understand what, pet?”
“We’re not relieved.” Teddy drew back.
“I can explain. Give me a hug and I’ll tell you everything.”
Teddy shook his head. “Tell first.”
“All right then.” Tears glittered in Mum’s eyes. Tears of rage, Honey knew. Those tears that spilled on her cheeks when her crème brulée didn’t settle, or when her peach zabaglione looked more like the contents of a toddler’s potty than a sophisticated Italian dessert.
Fridrik wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Here’s your hug, darling.”
Mum snuggled into him. His voice was different, too. There was no warmth in it anymore. How did he manage to transform his voice, his accent? Was he a ventriloquist?
“You must have guessed by now that I’m a ventriloquist,” said Fridrik, in a voice that sounded spookily like Honey’s. “Ventriloquism,” he continued, this time in Teddy’s voice, “is a magnificent skill in which a person manipulates his or her voice so that it appears that the voice is coming from elsewhere, usually a puppet. In some isolated cases, and only when the ventriloquist is extremely gifted, he can make his voice sound like the voice of another person, either real or imaginary.”
Honey gasped. “That’s why Oskar’s voice sounded so young. He isn’t a ventriloquist. You are.”
Fridrik rolled his eyes. “Bingo.” He gave Mum a look. “Thinking she could figure it out – I shouldn’t have worried.”
“She can be a bit slow,” admitted Mum.
“Well, she doesn’t get that from me.”
“So Fridrik wasn’t real?”
“I. AM. FRIDRIK. This,” he said, sticking the mask so close to Teddy’s face he could taste the salty sweat on it, “was a product of your imagination, dummy. His voice, though, was real. I’m real.”
“I told you they were easy to trick,” purred Mum.
A hundred questions swirled in Honey’s mind, but she couldn’t voice them. Her words were trapped in her throat, prisoners like herself.
The young Oskar swept past her, and instantly she knew why the rope hadn’t left a mark on his neck. The neck was fake, too, as fake as the old, wrinkled face. He was identical to Fridrik, from the slightly curved nose and bushy ginger eyebrows to his height and build. His smile, however, wasn’t as confident as his twin’s.
On the other side of the windows, the blizzard roared and howled and shook the building. The garrotte-vile shuffled across the floor and the stools jiggled madly. With a pop, another light went out, leaving one side of the room in complete darkness.
On the dining table, piled with rubbish, the long knives glinted among the bones and disembowelled ermines like swords on a battlefield. Outside, the dogs howled, snarled and rattled their chains. Snow and hail pounded on the roof.
“Isn’t that lovely?” Mum smiled, watching the star-shaped snowflakes sticking to the glass. “In London, I had to buy stupid winter decorations all year long. It was the only way I could keep the winter alive.” She sighed. “I wore white to remind myself where I belonged.”
She started drawing circles on the stripy notebook, something Mum always did when she was upset. Mum practised cutting perfect circles out of kneaded dough with the tip of her knife.
Fridrik took Mum’s hand and kissed her wrist. “Did you know that you can only draw a perfect circle if you are insane?”
“Speculation,” Honey muttered, trying to keep her eyes from the large, ugly scars on her mother’s skin. It was then, seeing the scars on her wrist, that she remembered her dream – the dream where the bloody arm fumbled blindly through the cat flap, and where Dad’s eyes pulsed in his head like bloated leeches. The dream where he watched her falling.
“If you talk back to me one more time, young lady, I shall throw you to the sea lions.” Fridrik laughed. A small remote appeared in his hand, he pointed forwards, something sizzled and crackled…and a thin arrow of light shot through his fingers at the same time that the noise of a thousand saucers shattering at once rumbled around the room. The children squeezed their eyes shut, the dwarves clapped their hands over their ears, and, with a disturbing sensation of vertigo that made Honey feel as if she had suddenly and unexplainably taken flight, the floor vaulted and slid from under their feet like a sea at low tide. Only the children weren’t standing on wet sand on a beach, but on another floor, made entirely of glass. Honey blinked, terrified. Beneath her feet was the most peculiar aquarium she had ever seen.
A wave of nausea brought the contents of her stomach to her throat. Noises – the ripple of bodies swimming in the dark – came from below. With another flick of the remote, the aquarium lit up. Hundreds of fairy lights twinkled in the water.
“Good, lights are working,” said Fridrik, as the body of a shark swam under him like a large, grey, slimy tongue licking at his boots.
“This was here all along?” Jerry dropped on his hands and knees, his face radiant in the light.
“This explains it. The noises I heard in the toilet.” Erasmus shuddered.
The shark opened its mouth, giving Honey a fresh pang of vertigo. She was being sucked into the spiral staircase of its throat, a circle growing tighter and tighter, blending into one distant black dot.
“Of course it has,” said Fern, watching a horned fish swimming past. “What on earth is that?”
Erasmus swallowed. “People talked about this in my village. I thought it was a myth..I mean, this is…crazy!” Man, I am scared of heights. Oh, and that’s a narwhal. You know, a long-toothed whale.”
“I thought that was a horn,” Rong said.
“No it’s not. It’s a canine.”
“Yuck.”
“The Arctic Cemetery.” Rong flinched away from the dead body with a hollow cheek, eyeballs flowing out of its sockets like jelly fish.
“Wow,” Fern whistled.
“We had a view of the aquarium from our quarters,” smiled Mum. “That’s what I call a room with a view. Living at the North Pole can give you insomnia, and for that the best therapy is watching underwater lif
e.”
“You mean underwater murder. We saw a human arm in there. I didn’t know keeping dead children as pets was one of your hobbies,” Honey said.
“She would have died of the infection, Honey-bun. It was a mercy killing.”
“Long ago, this was a scientific base for one of the most corrupt governments in the world.” Fridrik strode across the glass floor. Honey winced every time his heavy boots thumped against the glass. “It was, of course, used for illegal experiments such as shark inbreeding to create more vicious sharks, and terminally ill people having gills implanted to see how long they could live underwater. Nasty experiments. Then it became the headquarters of I Spy, an international organisation of espionage. And then,” Fridrik threw his hands in a theatrical gesture, “it got out of hand, was abandoned, and it very conveniently turned into our rubbish bin.” He grinned, tapping his foot at the small, rather intact corpse of a dwarf floating between shards of ice. “Thumbelin had been with us for over a decade, and – can you believe it? He tried to turn us in to the police at Savissivik heliport. Luckily, the police very kindly handed him back to us. Leaders tolerate incompetence far more than disloyalty. I am an exception, of course, because I tolerate neither.”
Or because you’re not a leader, Honey thought.
“He still looks like himself because the sharks are well fed,” smirked Mum. “But tomorrow there won’t be anything left of him at all.”
“And why are the sharks well fed?” the other twin, who had been sitting quietly in the shadows, spoke. “Because we feed them every explorer and enthusiast who happen to stumble upon Santaville every now and then.”
The trio cackled, as the sharks swarmed like giant, slippery snakes.
“Murderers,” Honey said through her teeth.
“So that’s where Jackson ended up,” muttered Johann.
“Whoa,” whispered Rong. “The pool from hell.”
Fridrik clapped his hands. “Well, darling, let the confessions begin before we start the executions. Enjoy your bedtime stories, little ones, because they will be your last.”
Santa Claws Page 27