The Claus Effect

by David Nickle

  Emily remembers…

  She closed her eyes and for just a second behind her lids Emily saw a place like a giant iron cathedral, so dark and heavy that the tundra petalled up around it and the sky bent down to touch its smoking stacks. The inside of her skull was lit with blowtorch light that stuttered randomly from the tall square-paned windows, and to her ears there grew a deep, submerged rumbling like a swelling of the earth itself, overlaid with trip-hammer snaps and biting saw-shrieks.

  The Mill. Even after all this time Santa’s Toy Mill drew Emily back to its memory, by sheer gravity.

  Copyright © 1997 by David Nickle and Karl Schroeder

  Cover art copyright © 1997 by Verne Busby

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author and publisher, except by a reviewer or academic who may quote brief passages in a review or critical study.

  Tesseract Books and the Books Collective acknowledge the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing programme.

  Editor for the Press: Michael Skeet

  Inside design and typesetting by Compass Rose Communications.

  Printed in Canada at Priority Printing, Edmonton on 50 pound offset white with covers of Cornwall Cover. Thanks to Kim Smith and Daana Downey at Priority Printing.

  Published in Canada by Tesseract Books, an imprint of The Books Collective, 214-21, 10405 Jasper Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 3S2. Telephone (403) 448 0590.

  Tesseract Books are distributed in Canada by H.B. Fenn & Co., 34 Nixon Road, Bolton, Ontario L7E 1W2. Telephone 1-800-267-FENN, and in the US by Koen Book Distributors Ltd., 10 Twosome Drive, P.O. Box 600, Mooretown, NJ 08057

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Schroeder, Karl, 1962-

  The Claus effect

  ISBN 1-895836-35-2 (bound)— ISBN 1-895836-34-4 (pbk.)

  I. Nickle, David, 1964- II. Title.

  PS8587.C52C52 1997 C813'.54 C97-910608-7

  PR9199.3.S37C52 1997

  Dedication

  David Nickle: For Karen Fernandez, for love and support.

  Karl Schroeder: To my family, who taught me how to laugh.

  Acknowledgements

  Michael Skeet and Lorna Toolis, who made us fix “The Toy Mill” before they bought it for Tesseracts 4; and Michael again, who made us fix The Claus Effect before Tesseract Books got its hands on it; the members of the Cecil Street Writer’s Group, for their interesting comments; and Rankin-Bass, who made writing this book so desperately necessary.

  Contents

  1991: PROLOGUE

  1983: THE TOY MILL

  I. Emily Gets Her Wish

  II. A Night to Remember

  III. A Matter of Correspondence

  IV. Christmas Dinner

  V. Best of the Season

  1991: THE CLAUS EFFECT

  Up Periscope!

  Blue-light Special

  White-out!

  A Seaton Christmas

  Arctic Peril

  The Bottom of Things

  “Let’s call this Emily…”

  Two for Lithuania!

  Operation “Best of the Season”

  Mayhem at Murmansk

  Just Like Old Times

  A Desperate Plan

  The Claus Effect

  BONUS

  Epilogue

  1991:

  Prologue

  From orbit, the line through the ice might have been mistaken for one of the snaking gas pipelines that scar the white snows of the high arctic.

  The line was about the right width, and it was nearly long enough. It must have glittered fiercely in late October or November, in the days when the sun was still setting. All such light was long gone before Cadet Lieutenant Neil Nyman stepped into the trench to trace the line’s formidable length.

  Breath making a frost in his throat, he paused and savoured the vision in his image-starved mind. From high orbit, he might have seen a tracery of gold across the frozen ice plains, the sunlight caught for a long, arctic instant in its cross-section, an illusory shaft of fire, nestled in the deep blues and purples of growing northern shadow. The green, shattered faces of ice on the trench’s walls reflected a hint of that glory now, in the more modest glow of Neil’s U.S. Navy-issue flashlight beam.

  He moved south along the deepening path, which undulated with a kind of liquidity and in places even extended in murky scaffolds over his head, so that the trench nearly became a tunnel.

  A tunnel melted and refrozen, marking the searing passage…

  The passage of what?

  Neil kept his face covered against the tongue-peeling cold of the arctic night. The face-cover, like the parka, snow-pants, boots and gloves that also he wore, was white as the driven snow, and covered everything but his eyes. The cold was painfully intense, but at the moment his curiosity was even more powerful—how and when had this perfectly straight trench appeared, just fifteen kilometres south of the DEW line? It was ominous that it lay less than a half-day’s march from Neil’s current home, Station Black Ice.

  He squinted, then his eyes widened, and he switched off the flashlight to see if what he thought he’d seen was true.

  A little light winked, far down the trench where perspective made the walls converge into a dark point. As he watched the light flickered again.

  “Jesus,” he muttered—although through the face-protector, it sounded more like “Meevuf.”

  Neil broke into a run. He kept the flashlight dark and at his side, so as not to lose sight of the faint spark, and his breath became stale and damp in his face-cover, and the branches of frost on his goggles mutated into vast trunk and root networks. He ran, but as he approached the end of the trench, the spark became harder to see.

  By the time he finally stumbled and fell into a broader crater of ice where the trench ended, he had lost sight of it altogether.

  He hauled himself up next to a triangular monolith of ice near the crater’s bottom, and stared.

  “Mug,” he said through his face-protector.

  Frustration, suffocation and hypothermia had caught up with Neil, so he yanked the face-protector away.

  “Fu—” he began, as he pulled the goggles from his eyes. “Meevuf,” he finished, as the unfiltered arctic air froze the soft tissues in his throat and mouth, and he saw with unfiltered vision the thing at the trench’s end.

  It was gigantic—big as a Chinook helicopter, massive as an Abrams tank, shaped a bit like both. Half the thing was melted, candle-wax in steel, and although none of it gave off any light, it did gleam a bit in the starlight. Neil could feel his eyes freezing, his tongue growing numb, but before he put the goggles back on he flicked on the flashlight. He played the beam over bent pistons; valves that temperatures and forces of unguessable magnitude had stretched and curled into screaming mouths; a great cauldron-belly of a furnace, torn along its side to reveal the edges of a dark mystery within; and the snaggle-toothed blade of a circular saw that poked above everything else, like the rising crest on a big lizard’s spine. His footsteps crunched as he stepped closer, and looking down, he saw that he was standing not on ice, but on shattered glass—it flashed red and green, extending around him in a great, iridescent lawn. Here and there among the shards he saw little glass spheres, the size of golf balls.

  He would have sworn they were Christmas tree ornaments.

  And it’s only six days before Christmas, he thought suddenly. How long had this thing been here?


  He knelt and examined the drifted snow. This part of the arctic was dry; before dropping him off here, his Northern Survival instructor had shown Neil how to count time in certain kinds of arctic ice by measuring its layers, like rings in a tree. He split a small berg of hard snow that had grown over some of the glass balls, and shined the flashlight against the exposed pith of ice. He counted the thin lines of grey—pollution carried here annually all the way from Detroit, Sudbury and Archangelsk, or even farther south.

  There were eight layers.

  Neil sat back, stricken with memory. Eight years ago his life had changed forever.

  It was six days until Christmas, the first Christmas Neil had ever spent alone. And it was exactly eight Christmases since…

  “Unca Augusus ca’,” he said aloud.

  Eight years since Uncle Augustus came.

  Neil wasn’t aware of the cold as he buckled up the face-cover and lowered the blinding goggles again. Christmas of 1983. Eight years ago, but he remembered it like it was yesterday.

  Christmas of 1983…Home, in Birmingham Michigan, with Mom and Dad, a phone call from Nana down in North Carolina, and of course…

  Uncle Augustus.

  If he could have smiled around his frozen cheeks, laughed through the frosted cilia in his lungs, Neil would have.

  1983…Now that had been a Christmas.

  1983:

  The Toy Mill

  I. Emily Gets Her Wish

  The Man in the Moon’s smile began to slip. It turned into a leer. Then, breaking from the rim of the moon came a shape of crystalline hardness, led by eight bobbing points. Emily, perched straddling the peak of her auntie’s home with the cold shivering through her spine, counted those points three times, and whispered aloud:

  “Comet, Cupid, Donner, Vixen.” She mouthed the rest of the verse, to hide that she didn’t remember the other names.

  The procession cut behind a black smear of cloud, and Emily scrambled higher on the roof, her back pressed against the frozen brick of the chimney. The winter air made a frost in her throat and she clutched her pink parka over her chest. The sleigh was gone. She’d missed it—if it ever had been there.

  Emily turned away, filled with a deep and despairing sense of abandonment. The moon turned darker.

  Iron runners hissed past inches above her head, and a breath of stratospheric cold made her shiver. For a moment all she could see was the swollen underbelly of the sleigh, like the black bottom of a cauldron. Then the thing was landing, with unctuous delicacy, on the virgin snow of the roof.

  The ski tracks began near enough to Emily that she could touch them, and that is what she did, even though they steamed with a black substance like the burnt drippings from an overcooked roast. The tracks were wider than her hand, and packed down so hard as to make the snow into a sheet of perfect, polished ice.

  At the ends of those tracks, great iron skis whose ends spiralled four times glowed with tiny red embers from treetops brushed too closely, and creaked around the thick rivets that held the sleigh together.

  She couldn’t see the reindeer for the bulk of the sleigh. But Emily could clearly see her own tracks through the deep wet snow of the roof; they were the only disturbance in its blued perfection other than the tracks of the sleigh.

  She forced herself to stand up, and cautiously sidled around the edge of the sleigh. The roof was steep here and she wanted to hold the sleigh for support, but she was afraid to touch it.

  Her heart in her mouth, she peered up the steep side of the monstrous car and said, “Santa?”

  For a moment nothing happened. Then, a creaking sound like frozen leather, and a hand whiter than the moon appeared, to clutch the rail of the sleigh.

  It seemed as though the entire rooftop swayed, but it was only a shifting of runners on the sharp-peaked roof. The fingers, long and dextrous as only a toymaker’s can be, bent back at the third joint with the effort of movement. Santa Claus grew over the rail like a thunderhead over mountaintops.

  His hair was whiter than his flesh. Thick whorls of ice embedded his beard in icicles like a January cataract. More separated the thick hairs of his eyebrows into individual daggers, pushed back by the yuletide winds of the stratosphere so that they swept down to meet at the bridge of his narrow, blue-tinged nose. Wisps of pale hair scattered from beneath his red cap, over his small pink ears. His eyes were tiny too, pink-rimmed and black at their iris; and looking, searching the eaves troughs, the darkened windows, the empty playground three streets down, questing hungrily and never blinking once in an endless quest for girls and boys.

  “Ahem,” said Emily in her politest voice.

  Santa’s little eyes narrowed even more, but still he didn’t see her. He leaned out a long way from the sleigh, his breath coming in slow steady rasps like a dry bellows. Finally Emily screwed up her courage and reached up to pluck his sleeve.

  He jerked back like a puppet, and his eyes widened impossibly as he saw her. For a second she thought he was angry, then maybe no, he was scared. But breaking past all those things came a kind of smile. It sent the icicles around his mouth into a macabre dance.

  “Oooh,” he said at last. “A child.”

  His voice was a high tenor, with breathy overtones. Emily could not see how such a vast and disordered bulk could produce a voice like that.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Well.” He raised a trembling hand to clink the strands of his beard. “Well. Indeed. Yes, hello, hello, little thing. You are a little thing, aren’t you?”

  “Santa,” she said with all of her eight years’ determination, “I want to be an elf.”

  He didn’t answer, just stared at her.

  A wind curled up from the street below, sending a twist of cutting snow into Emily’s eyes. A tiny part of her was crying, the same part that had cried when she was six, when her parents went away and Auntie told her she could have the room with the grandfather clock that had stopped.

  “I want to be an elf, Santa,” she repeated, and stomped her foot on the frozen rooftop.

  “Please!”

  There was another shudder from inside the sleigh, and Santa gave a lurch and rose five more feet over the house of Emily’s aunt. He gripped the sleigh’s rim with a white knuckled fist.

  In his other hand, he held a box, wrapped in blue shiny paper with a ribbon so red that it could only have been spun by elfs. Santa Claus lifted that arm high, and suddenly bent at his waist so that his face was inches from Emily’s.

  Ice crumbled in crystalline avalanches as his smile widened and his narrow tongue darted across his blue, thin lips.

  “A child,” he breathed, sending a frosty wind at Emily that made her blink. “Yes, a good, good child, a child who is never naughty; never ever bad. Only one thing for this child.”

  Santa pulled away from Emily and his great head whipped towards the front of the sleigh, to the unseen reindeer.

  “Isn’t that right, Rudolph!?” he shrieked. Emily clapped her hands over her ears and nearly lost her balance.

  And then, as fast as the echoes of Santa’s cackling cheer died in the neighbourhood, the shiny-wrapped box was trembling before Emily, Santa’s right hand gripping it carefully so as not to damage the wrapping. His face hovered five inches behind it, and his tiny black eyes watched her with wide anticipation. The ice-bound eyebrows twinkled invitingly. The box, Emily saw, was doll-sized.

  “No,” she said firmly, and repeated her request slowly—in case Santa were hard of hearing:

  “I! Want! To! Be! An! Elf!

  “Please!”

  He looked puzzled. Then he drew the present back, and with hurried, savage movements, tore the box up. He dangled a limp doll in front of her face, eyeing her with fixed concern over the back of his hand.

  Emily shook her whole head, and her upper body too for good measure.

  “Doesn’t want the dolly,” muttered Santa through an uncomprehending frown. “Don’t want the dolly?” He tugged at his bear
d. Then with a quick decisive movement he stuffed the doll into a fold of his great red coat.

  “Where’s the, where—” He turned and scrabbled about in the back of the sleigh. “Aha. Here.” He brought out an ornate snuff box and opened it. Taking out a pinch of powder, he tossed it at Emily.

  Golden, shimmering dust settled about her with a sound like tinkling chimes.

  “There. Saalaa, kaboom. You’re an elf now.” He turned away and grabbed the reins. Then he looked back.

  Tears rolled down Emily’s cheeks. She looked up at him resentfully.

  “What?” he said, taken aback.

  “I said, I want to be an elf. I want to go to the North Pole and make toys and sing with the other elfs and see the reindeer and Rudolph and his nose and all the toys and be Christmas all year round!” she wailed. Then she was past words.

  “You want be my elf?” Santa stroked his beard, and a thoughtful glint appeared in the outside corner of his left eye. Santa’s uncertain lips twitched back into a smile. “Make toys? Go away—” he sniggered wetly through his nose, “—go away…with Santa?”

  Emily thought of her auntie and her room with the silent clock that loomed all night long, and about long division and detentions. “I want to be an elf,” she repeated.

  “All right then,” he bellowed, and, reaching down with a long, branch-like arm, hoiked her over his lap into the seat beside him.

  Emily fought to right herself as he drew up the reins and flipped them mightily. “Gowan!” he screamed.

  She heard the sound of tiny hooves scrabbling in the deep snow. Emily righted herself in time to see eight impossibly tiny reindeer, hauling with all their might, fall in pairs off the edge of the roof.

  With a crunch of iron against ice, the sleigh fell. Emily screamed as the ground rushed up—then they were plummeting not down, but sideways between the tall houses. They continued to fall, higher and higher, into the sky.

  II. A Night to Remember