“How about the stink? And the spikes?”
“We deposited the leftover food in that corridor. That’s our garbage dump. Talking of rubbish, is it true that in London foxes eat it? Frida said she couldn’t leave a single bag out at night or it would be ripped apart by foxes! Imagine! All your rubbish everywhere for everyone to see! Our polar vulpes lagopus – polar foxes – would never stick their royal noses into dumps.”
“Not a problem if you haven’t got any dubious things in your rubbish.” Grandma narrowed her eyes at the dwarf.
“Fridrik didn’t want rubbish spoiling the environment, that right, boss? The spikes were his spears, kept there safely for the hunting season.”
“We had fun with that photo shoot,” remembered Hinrik. “We used seal blood to smear on my face. Frida took the photographs – photography is another of her hobbies.”
“And I think you should stick to photography, darling. This novel writing business is too stressful. I crashed my skidoo straight into the island police thinking about it. You saw it, Midget. Thing is, we were running out of time… out of money, too. Ah, I see the spy is out cold,” he chuckled, pointing to the garotte vil where Grandma seemed to have fainted.
“My friends from the circus,” Hinrik said.
“Circus of Ice.” A dwarf made a grotesque pirouette and bowed.
“We’ll pack the day after tomorrow, and go back to touring the world,” added another, twirling around.
“If childhood wasn’t a form of retardation, boss, the Raymond brats would remember me from the night in London.” Black Russian’s tobacco breath was on Honey’s face, and the smell took her back in time. The giant, luminous tents appeared before her eyes and she heard the jolly circus music echoing from the parked caravans.
Teddy gasped. “I remember you now. You were reading someone’s palm, and there…there was a pumpkin…”
Honey remembered the carved pumpkin, hovering in mid-air between the dwarf and the woman in the tent. Her head spun. Tiny lights played before her eyes. In the shadowy corner, Grandma stirred.
“Do you really think the sight of knives could make me leave a show?” Mum laughed through her tears. Honey blinked, and the dark amphitheatre with the wheel where the knives landed millimetres from a woman’s body spread before her eyes. In a moment, it was gone. “I was brought up in a harsh place, Honey. Nothing like the sheltered childhood you had. I killed my first ram when I was ten. It was hard for us after Father died at sea…Mother said I was good with a knife, so I did all the dirty jobs. I butchered and skinned reindeer, and I scaled and gutted fish. I always had a bloodstained knife in my apron, as those who came knocking on our door to try their luck with Mother soon found out. They never returned.”
“Why, becauz they were dead?” Grandma had woken up.
Mum sighed. “I wept that night. Seeing your father after so long!”
She was right. How many times did Honey see her decapitating lobsters on the kitchen table – and her hands never even shook?
“Your mother was the best knife juggler in the world when we first started Circus of Ice,” said Hinrik. “She could throw a knife with her teeth. She did things with a knife I’ve never seen before.”
“She had plenty of practice, having dizmembered her own dead mother,” Grandma chuckled. “Excuse me, can I have my drink now?”
Hinrik ignored her.
“I miss my knife collection, Honey. The Shogun. Greg gave it to me for our anniversary.”
Fridrik and Mum locked eyes.
“Anniversaries,” Fridrik spat, running his fingers through his stubble. “Just the kind of thing an idiot like Gregoire Raymond would celebrate.”
“Hiz name iz Gregory!” shouted Grandma, so forcefully that her dentures slipped halfway out of her mouth. “And yes, my son is an idiot. An idiot to celebrate anniversaries with her. I tried to tell him…” Her voice broke and, to Honey’s surprise, she began to sob.
“Can someone give the old hag her drink,” Fridrik ordered. “It’ll keep her quiet for a while. I can’t stand the wailing of women.”
“Boss, why don’t we just kill her? The sharks look like they could do with a snack.”
Pure dread shot through Honey when she realised what Black Russian was hinting at: Grandma, ripped apart by sharks before their eyes.
“Indeed, why not…” Fridrik peered at the frozen windows through the darkness. “Did you come here alone, Raymond?”
“Why, oui. I mean yes,” breathed Grandma.
“Really, Florence?” Mum laughed. “All the way from the heliport? You used a satellite phone? Please…you can barely tell your left from your right.”
“We’ll soon find out.” Fridrik strode down the aisle to the door, followed by his army of dwarves.
And, with one last look at the chair of death, he pulled open the door.
The savage wind tossed away the dust cloths. The machines shook and rattled. Black Russian peeled a dusty sheet from his face and sneezed.
“Is anyone there?” Mum gathered the cloak around herself, shivering.
Hinrik felt Grandma’s pockets. “Aha.” A grin of triumph on his face, he extracted the small bottle of amber-coloured liquid. “Tequila, product of Mexico, 1987.” He finished the bottle in one long swig.
“All clear!” Fridrik called. “If anyone was here, they’d be dead by now anyway.”
The door slammed and he strode back up the aisle, his eyebrows, beard and moustache covered in frost, like a huge gingerbread man powdered with icing sugar. “The dogs are dead,” he said.
Mum jumped up. “No! Oh Fridrik, what are we going to do? We don’t have skidoos for everyone!”
“We have dwarves, and we have children. They can pull us along.”
For the first time that night, the dwarves didn’t burst into laughter and applause at something Fridrik said.
“So tell us why you left the circus that night.” Honey knew she had to play for time. She knew her granddad was outside – she had seen his shadow in the window. And if he was gone, he would come back with help. He had to.
Mum gave a deep sigh. “Everything reminded me of Fridrik. I thought it was him in the arena…I went out for a breath of fresh air, and then his hand was on my mouth, and he was dragging me away.”
“We saw you,” Honey whispered. “I saw you hugging him.”
Fridrik helped himself to a new bottle of Brennívin. “I don’t normally drink so much on a mission, but this is a special occasion.”
“I was outside when you came out and saw your mother with boss,” the dwarf chirped, taking a cigarette from his vest pocket and lighting it. It smelled revolting, the same smell as when she stumbled out of the circus tent on that starless November night. A presence hovered at the periphery of her sight, and the prickly sensation of being watched was cold on her back. “You saw me, didn’t you, pretty?” Black Russian unzipped his parka, revealing a long, bristly snake of hair. “Only I was wearing a fake beard then. This was made from the hair of our victims.”
“But you were in the tent…weren’t you?”
“Ah, cherie, by then, the tent had been rolled up and prepared for its new use – a sack for kidnapping enfants, I mean, children,” explained Grandma.
“What?”
“That’s why the sack was so rough,” Honey murmured.
“Because fortune telling is not your sole talent, is it now…Benito?”
Black Russian’s mouth fell open, and saliva dripped onto his cigarette. It sputtered and hissed.
Grandma sat up straighter in her chair, trying her best to look dignified.
“This is Benito Sanchez, everyone. Before he joined Hinrik’s troupe, he had an entirely differente career. Maybe you realise he has foreign accent – ah, oui, he iz from Puerto Rico, where he work as an under
cover exterminator for the Mafia. He was a chef in a top notch restaurant, La Tortura, where he killed politicians by inserting poison capsules in their food. Politicians are pest, I agree, especially in corrupt countries, but everyone deserves a quick and painless death. He waz clean-shaven then, and his teeth weren’t as long – in South America you can even have horns implanted, let alone fangs – but, Arctic dwarf, my toffee! I remember it clearly, it was my very first mission…” She shook her head as if to get rid of the bad memory. “Alors, he’d been running away from the law. We had enough evidence against him to send him to the gallowz – one of our agents worked undercover – as a cleaning man, no less, he found me passed out in that fridge…”
“The gallows?” Honey was horrified. “Isn’t that illegal?”
Grandma smiled. “Not when you work for the Mafia and you kill some of the heads by mistake. Benito was getting so many orders, he messed them all up and killed some of his own bossez. Often, gangsters are involved in politics, so it was easy to get confused. He served a rabbit entrecote so full of cyanide it was all black inside.”
“Eeew,” chorused the children.
“Benito Sanchez!” exclaimed Teddy. “You wrote Poisonous Recipes! You wanted to skin Blanche alive!”
“You told us you worked as a science technician before you became a chef,” said Mum.
“You showed me your science degree,” Hinrik snarled. “That’s why I employed you at the circus.”
“A clown doesn’t need a degree in science!” shouted Honey. “This is just stupid!”
“Speaking of poisons, I found your arsenic capsules, ma cherie.” Mum blanched. “Imagine, they were in Greg’s omega fish oil tablet jar.”
“How on earth did you find them?” Mum said through her teeth.
“Every time I waz in the bathroom – and I waz there often, imagine – my poison detector went crazy. Naturalement, you wouldn’t be keeping rat poison in a beauty jar, so I knew something fishy was going on.”
Black Russian nodded. “Arsenic is a sophisticated poison, not as deadly as the plant wolfsbane, which kills at touch, or as tasty as belladonna berries.” He chuckled. “I decorated my ice creams with those berries. You only need ten to guarantee certain death. Sweet death, I call them.”
“You tried to poison Dad?” Teddy said in disbelief.
“Why didn’t you tell us, Grandma?”
“Because she would have to tell you all about herself,” Mum snapped.
Clementine’s voice made them jump. It was shaking. “How about us? Can we go back home now?”
“So you can tell everyone about us?” snapped Fridrik. “This, children, was your last supper. You will, after all, last longer if you’ve eaten. Once Florence is dead, a dogsled will take you into the wilderness, and you will experience the wonderful demise of freezing to death. Don’t worry, hypothermia is painless. On the other hand, you might be eaten by animals. That would hurt.”
“Or fall into an ice hole,” said Erasmus. “Who are all those people in the Arctic Cemetery, then? You can tell us now, we’re gonna die, anyway.”
Fridrik glanced at the aquarium. The sharks appeared bored, swimming through shreds of human flesh.
“People. Explorers, detectives. Asking too many questions.” He shrugged. “The sharks had to be fed.”
“Wow,” Johann said. “So that’s why our dinners were so stringy. ‘Cause of all the beards.” He flinched under Fridrik’s glare. “That was a joke.”
Honey felt sick. So, her real father was a criminal. The prospect of spending the rest of her life on this island with Fridrik Helgarsson made her skin crawl. But getting away? It seemed an impossible mission. Her parents and uncle were armed and they had torture devices. Honey hadn’t missed the sick pleasure in Hinrik’s eyes as he’d pushed Grandma down on that awful chair.
“I’ll put my family on a boat, cross the bay and head to Qaanaaq, the remotest and coldest village in the world,” Fridrik said.
Honey shuddered. “How did you bring us here, Mum?” She still felt a little weird about calling Mum Mum, but she knew she had to play along. The mother whom she loved and who loved them was dead – this was her ghost, the other mother who hurt them.
Mum looked at Fridrik, asking for approval. He nodded. “Your father pretended to kidnap you on Christmas Eve,” she said.
“Pretended to kidnap us? You mean he kidnapped us. And he’s not our father.”
“No. I mean yes. He put you in a sack and dropped it in the back of our car. A stolen police car. The window was broken from the bullets the police fired at us when we stole it.”
“It was me you heard moving in the bushes that night,” said Fridrik. “You made it easy for me, too. I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw you’d left the patio door unlocked.”
“We called for help, and you didn’t help us.”
“We worked quickly. The shot had been ready beforehand, and we injected you with Gamma Hydroxybutyrate, a coma inducing recreational drug. Teddy fought back. That’s why he got that lump at the back of his neck.”
Teddy rubbed the lump. “You didn’t. Inject me!” he cried.
“You call putting children in a coma recreational?” exclaimed Grandma.
“We did our homework,” said Fridrik. “And we had Midget, who was masterful at mixing potions. You don’t think we’d hurt our own children now, do you?”
“Who would think that?” Grandma laughed.
“The majority of people who ingested this drug, or who have been injected with it, recover instantaneously without any long-term effects. In fact, come to think of it, it was even romantic. A modern, domestic Romeo and Juliet.”
“We boarded different flights,” explained Mum, her fingers playing with her hair. For the first time, Honey was happy with the rough, mousy tufts that made her look as little as possible like her natural parents. Poor Teddy, though, he was a small version of Fridrik. “I put Teddy in a wheelchair. I told the airport staff that my son had brain damage. He was hardly ever awake. I showed them two fake passports, and I boarded the plane. It was as easy as ever to fool the officials.”
“The one who haz brain damage iz you,” breathed Grandma, and Hinrik twisted the handle of the garrotte vil until her voice was a feeble croak.
“Honey was asleep in a wheelchair, too. We were lucky. No one asked any awkward questions.” Fridrik’s speech was a little slurred after the bottle of Brennivín. He lit a cigar, flicking the match over his shoulder, where it landed in a box of dismembered doll limbs. Bodiless heads rose out from between firework sticks.
“Well, you always were popular with the ladies,” Mum purred. “You made those customs girls melt like ice creams.” She leant over to Fridrik, and kissed him.
“How about the other children? How did they get here?” Honey was sick at the thought of having been unconscious in the hands of someone like her father.
“I baked cakes for the neighbours, remember, and sometimes they would give me a set of keys for me to get in to prepare a cake for a birthday party. I always made sure I kept a copy of those keys. I kept a piece of play dough or blue tac in my pocket, and always took a mould. I cut those keys out myself. I did a locksmith course in prison, you see, and had my own workshop in the cellar.”
“I remember you,” Clementine called out. “You’re the lady with the chef’s hat at my birthday party!”
“I,” said Hinrik “let myself in late at night, put the kids to sleep, and brought them here. Some were so tiny they could fit in a suitcase. No one ever guessed a thing.”
“The work of a genius!” exclaimed Eska.
“And you brought them here in this joke of a factory. When waz last time you had a health and safety check?” Grandma’s face was turning purple. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead.
Erasmus stood up. “So the S
chool of Arctic Arts was fake, too? Everything we learned?”
“You’re free to put your arctic arts into practice once you are in the wild by yourself,” laughed Fridrik.
In the darkness, a spark glowed, just a flicker at first. Then, the spark grew into a flame, spreading on the floor like a carpet of fire, climbing over the chairs and the machines. Flames enveloped the factory in seconds. It was no longer dark, but light as day, and Honey saw the faces wild with panic, and the bottles of Brennívin burning before shattering into pieces. She dodged from the blast of shards coming her way, dozens of tiny comets with fiery tails.
One by one, the machines exploded, turning the place into a chaos of dust and smoke. Later, when Honey remembered the events of that night, she would allow them to roll around her head in slow motion. In reality, she couldn’t be sure what really happened. She only recalled snippets of movement, sound and sight that she caught through the thick clouds of smoke. She saw Fridrik running to the door through the raging fire, the dwarves on each other’s shoulders, trying to walk about like a many headed monster, the children hiding. Honey didn’t know if they managed to make it out of the building: the aquarium was shattering into pieces with the noise of a thunderstorm.
Bloody water flooded the floors. Dead bodies gushed down the aisles. Bits of burning wood drifted on this boiling river, carrying the table with the leftovers and a few empty bottles for a few moments before the pit swallowed them. The water in the aquarium worked like a natural extinguisher, putting the fire out. The structure of the underwater cage stretched everywhere like agiant octopus. Broken glass hung over the pit like rock faces above a gorge, sharp and slippery. Honey found a muddy terrestrial pathway, and made her way through eyeballs, fingers and regurgitated fish. She saw Johann’s head vanishing in a black frothy whirlpool. Sharks thrashed about in the shallow water, their fangs bared, dying. With a last spurt of strength, Honey reached the door, the only thing in the room that was left intact. Up on the wall, she saw the smoking black holes, and the ripped uniforms fluttering in the wind like death flags. Her legs shivering, she stood up and walked along a metal bridge, barely wide enough for her. She reached for the handle, and then she felt something at her feet. It was her mother’s hand. She was hanging above the pit, her wet dress billowing in the current above the hellish gorge.
Santa Claws Page 31