by David Nickle
Despite the cutting wind and the barrenness of the plain, Emily was warm with curiosity and anticipation as she approached the place. It was only as she neared the door itself that she realized hers were the only footprints leading here.
“Perhaps I’m the first guest,” she said to herself, and knocked. No one opened the door, but she thought she heard a faint voice, bidding her enter. Emily hoisted the iron latch and let herself in.
“Hello?” She unwrapped herself from her scarf, and turned to close the door. Then she raised her head to look at the party scene.
After her months in the greyness of the Mill, Emily had hoped for brightness and warmth here, among the reindeer at Christmas. And, indeed, it was bright; candles glowed everywhere: on side tables, in sconces in the walls, on wagon-wheel chandeliers and the long, long dinner table. They even flickered in unsteady ranks along the floor itself. And it was warm; a dry, pressing warmth that Emily felt in her sinuses.
The dinner table had been set for at least thirty. It was a great slab of wood, wide enough to sleep on. All along both sides were high chairs and low chairs, thrones and stools, with place-settings before each.
All were empty.
As Emily took her first steps into the room, a vapour of dust rose up around her. She sneezed, and along the table-top, a wave of dust rose, tingled in mid-air for a moment, then settled down again onto the still, pale plates and saucers.
“Come in, child,” said a dry, listless voice. A figure at the far end of the table moved. Emily gasped.
It was a woman. A tall, stately creature, she sat in the lesser of two vast thrones at the head of the table. The lunar oval of her face held empty sadness. Dried mistletoe tangled her grey hair. Her green gown shimmered with highlights from the candle flames, except on her shoulders where it was dull with dust. On the table before her were a plate full of withered unidentifiable things, and a gold goblet overflowing with mold.
When she spoke, her eyes fell half-shut with a terrible weariness. “I have heard, child, of the work you have done for the Claus.”
“Who are you?” Emily stepped carefully around the stalagmites of wax dotting the floor. “Am I early for the party?”
“You are…on time,” said the ethereal woman. “I am Mrs. Claus.”
Emily stopped, thunderstruck. She had approached to within a few feet of the woman. Now she could see that the throne next to Mrs. Claus’ was as dusty and old as any alongside the table. A fork had been jammed into the arm of the throne, and stood like a single mute protester on the silent lawn of the upholstery.
“I…I’m honoured to meet you, Ma’am.” Emily remembered to curtsy. “Will…will Mr. Claus be joining us for dinner?”
“No…” A kind of animation entered the woman’s eyes. “No. Sit down here.” A delicate hand rose from her lap to point to a stool at her right hand. Emily sat.
“No one will be joining us, Emily,” sighed Mrs. Claus. “No one will come.” She seemed to withdraw into herself, gazing out over the silent place settings. Then, as if unbidden, words came from her lips.
“You have done an evil thing, dearest Emily. Long are the years that silence and peace have reigned here. Long has it been since the Claus has troubled us.” She blinked slowly. “The Claus is not a messenger of good. Perhaps once…before the rot of years took their toll upon him, things were different. Although even I, I must confess, can barely recall.” Mrs. Claus’ hands trembled in the dust of her lap. “Now as his great sleigh takes to the sky, it flies not on the faerie-dust of good will, but is driven by the engines of his wrath. His gifts are wholly malicious, Emily. Or so…he has believed.”
She turned her dull eyes towards Emily. “For many decades I have kept from the Claus the knowledge that his efforts have failed. He did not know that the children of the world welcomed his visits. I told him the letters contained complaint, that the children of the world begged him not to continue his cruel dispensation. Now you have told him the truth.”
Emily thought about the letters Santa had told her to find. The ones whose young authors wished their parents dead, or for their schools to be swallowed up by cyclones.
Mrs. Claus bent forward, her sad, dark eyes wide. “Do you understand,” she whispered, almost inaudibly, “what Claus is going to do with the truth?”
Emily did not, but she was afraid of how she would feel if she did. She looked down and kicked her feet.
“Something must be done,” Mrs. Claus continued in her whisper. “For the first time in centuries, more is at stake than even Christmas.”
V. Best of the Season
Emily wore a fuchsia-dyed, ermine-lined greatcoat to the Christmas Inspection, and although it kept much of the arctic chill from her narrow elfish bones, she shivered as the doors to Claus’ administration building opened and she filed along with the nineteen other supervisory elfs outside, across the ice-strangled courtyard and into the Toy Mill proper.
As they arrived they were led to a raised podium, decorated with bright red velvet and green crepe-paper streamers. Emily was at once struck by the difference between the Toy Mill she had entered nearly a year ago and the one in which she now sat.
Where previously scaffolding, ductwork, deafening, sparking machinery had dominated every imaginable view, now every spot was hung with dark, impenetrable curtains. A year ago, the lighting was flickering and sporadic, but now fresh new fluorescents hummed brilliantly overhead, the new light not altogether flattering to the upturned faces of the assembled elfs. The air smelled not of oil and ozone and rusty water, but something else that made Emily’s nose wrinkle. It smelled like fresh pine, or soap.
A spotlight came on, and swept its luminous circle across the crowd and up the nearest wall. As it moved, a loudspeaker crackled deafeningly. The walls shook as a giant finger tapped thunderously on a microphone.
“Welcome!” Claus boomed through the Toy Mill. “Welcome all, welcome to the Twenty-first Century!”
A collective “Oooooh” rose up from the assembled elfs.
Emily followed the spotlight to where it stopped, at a catwalk three storeys up. There it oscillated back and forth, until it finally speared a lone figure, made tiny by the distance.
Claus, wearing a neat white shirt and narrow blue tie underneath his yellow smoking jacket, leaned forward and squinted through the light at the thing his Toy Mill had become. In one hand, he held his cigar, in the other a glittering cordless microphone.
“Wishes,” thundered Claus into his microphone. “Who would have thought, eh elfs? Who would have thought that the key to our recovery, yes, to our very salvation, could be based upon so simple a principle?”
At that, Claus snapped his fingers and Emily very nearly lost her hearing. The echoing had not yet died when a well-dressed elf handed Claus a clipboard with a wide sheaf of paper on top.
“I should have thought of it long ago,” said Claus, his eyes scanning down the first of 152 pages on the clipboard—it had been 151, but Emily had seen that the 152nd was added this morning.
“Give the children what they want, and that shall be their undoing! What a principle! What a motto, eh? And we’ve put it to work for us, haven’t we elfs?” Santa snapped his fingers again, and this time the curtains that covered the Toy Mill began to part.
“Look now, upon the fruits of our labours,” said Santa, as the needle-pointed, serrated-edged totality of the Toy Mill’s GNP was revealed. “It has taken us a year, and I would say we have worked harder and faster at it this year than in our entire three hundred years of production. By hell, I wouldn’t even be able to remember where each of these were to go, even what they all are, I’ve seen so many requisitions cross my desk this year!”
The mass of toys was certainly daunting, and Emily wouldn’t have believed Santa Claus could fit them all onto a hundred sleighs if she hadn’t flown with him a year ago. The toys had been stacked in the same categories she had divided the wishes into. There were the Animals, horses and dogs and cats and babie
s, what seemed like a million babies, all drugged and stacked in cords like firewood; Machinery, filled with monster trucks and Sherman tanks and bazookas and chainsaws, guns and knives and hand grenades.
Situations contained objects that were harder to identify, but Emily knew their significance. There was a rack of glass ampoules, filled with a neurotoxin developed in July by the Toy Mill’s R&D wing to leave no trace in an autopsy—Claus would deliver those personally, injecting brothers, sisters, former best friends and even parents depending on the specified wishes of the good little girls and boys. And Emily could make out the larger containers, in a portable refrigeration unit. In September, R&D had developed an incurable strain of syphilis, but there were strict rules as to the temperature of its storage. They had been about to develop an inoculant, but little Albert’s wishes did not include immunity for himself, so the project had been filed away with the World Peace serum, abandoned in late November as too difficult for this year.
Claus went through them all, wish by wish. “Lot 543,” he would call, and an elf would bring forward the weaponry or the twitching zombie of a recently deceased parent or the working submarine with four torpedo tubes. Claus would inspect it carefully from his perch, sometimes ordering the elf to turn it upside down or around backwards so he could be certain the wish matched specifications. Then he would read off the next lot number.
Finally, he came to the bottom of the list.
“Lot 10761,” said Claus. There was an uncomfortable silence. Claus repeated himself.
“Lot 10761, I said.”
Still nothing. Claus tapped the microphone again. “Did you hear me?” he roared. “Where is my last wish?”
There was movement among the elfs then. Emily saw it before Claus did, because the woman below stayed shrouded in relative darkness until she had risen. When the spotlight hit her, Mrs. Claus was at her full height, towering over the assembled elfs like a twisted Halloween tree. She wore a fuchsia greatcoat like Emily’s, and she held a small black metal box in her hand.
“By the thunder of hell’s reindeer!” Santa’s eyes were wide red orbs. “What brings the moribund back from perdition!”
Mrs. Claus spoke, but she was drowned out by the shrieking feedback that followed Claus’ shocked outburst. She repeated herself.
“The final lot,” she said, her own voice filling the mill only by its own power, “is on its way. You need not fear, Claus. It will be here before it is needed.”
Santa’s elfs began a worried muttering amongst themselves. The loudspeaker hissed and crackled with Claus’ sputtering rage.
“What do you mean with this, woman?” Claus sneered. “Do you think you can come begging to me, now in my moment of greatest triumph?” He gestured with his cigar, a trail of embers underlining his contempt. “Back to the stables, hag, with the other sows.”
Mrs. Claus shook her head. “You were always too slow, Claus. Even when it’s spelled out for you, you just can’t keep up.”
Claus was about to say something, but Mrs. Claus pressed a button on her box.
“Here’s your final lot,” she said. “It’s for a little girl named Emily. You’ll find her Christmas wish destructive enough, I’d wager.”
The Toy Mill rocked with a distant explosion.
Claus went pale under the spotlight. “What is this?” he roared. “What Christmas wish is this?”
“The one you missed, Claus,” said Mrs. Claus. “Once again, you were sloppy. And again, you stopped reading the wish lists that came across your desk, in your eagerness to fulfil them all. So it was easy to add one last wish…” Her voice was lost in a thunderous whump that shook the mill and brought a shower of dust down from the ceiling. Claus looked up with alarm.
Emily could contain herself no longer. She broke free from the crowd and ran to the open space below Santa’s catwalk. “I wish your Christmas would never happen!” she yelled at him. “I wish it would all just stop! And I wish you would never, ever get to have Christmas your way again!”
The lights flickered and went out. Another explosion rocked the mill, and a tongue of blue flame licked through a sudden rent in the wall above Claus.
“By the blighted wastes ’neath Satan’s sphincter!” Spittle trailed like broken scuds to the Toy Mill floor. “Woman, you are my undoing!”
The elfs panicked as one. Eyes rolling, they broke into frenzied motion, racing for the giant rolling doors to the outside. Emily cowered in the darkness, listening to the shrieking and continuing blasts, until a light hand descended on her shoulder.
Mrs. Claus led Emily out into the red-lit night. The mill collapsed, eaten from its heart by multi-coloured fires. The insensate machinery tore free of its moorings, smashing blindly through wall and pillar, window and cable. As the ceiling collapsed, great gouts of smoke poured out from ground level.
Emily and Mrs. Claus ran across the tarmac. Elfs were scattering away in all directions.
A low ominous rumbling sound began. A weird flickering blue glow reflected across the frozen landscape. Emily stopped, pulling free of Mrs. Claus, and turned to look.
The core of the mill turned into a pillar of electric fire, like the northern lights set loose. A fierce wind picked up, blowing into the heart of the fire. And silhouetted by the glare, his long crooked shadow darting across the snow at her, was Claus.
He battled against the hurricane, taking step after tortured step to follow Emily. His frozen eyes flashed with northern blue and his mouth opened in a noiseless scream. His greatcoat flapped out behind him like a raven’s wings.
Over Emily’s head, Mrs. Claus said, in tragic resignation, “Oh, Claus.”
Claus slipped, and slid back ten feet. He grabbed a spire of ice, but it snapped in his hand. For just a moment, he stood poised, his icy hair flaring up around him like lightning.
“Merry Christmas,” he bellowed, “Merry Christmas, you ungrateful bastards!”
And then the vortex had him, and he was swept into flailing snow, and burning blue light, and was gone.
Mrs. Claus turned away, a single gilded tear sliding down her cheeks.
But Emily could not look away from the sight. For the Toy Mill had been her home, terrible as it was, and now it was gone.
Mrs. Claus touched Emily’s chin, and lifted it up so that their gazes met. Mrs. Claus’ eyes held a measured kind of triumph, but their weariness was in no way diminished by that fact. The old woman’s lips quivered like shreds of ribbon in a breeze.
“So young,” she whispered. “So young.”
Mrs. Claus held Emily’s face in such a way for a long time. The explosions had finished, the wind was dead, and thick white flakes began to fill the polar air. But they were not snowflakes—Emily didn’t even have to put her tongue out to know that. They were ashes; and if Emily and Mrs. Claus stood there for long, they might well be buried in them.
Wordlessly, Emily took Mrs. Claus’ hand and led her back to the reindeer stables.
Emily was sick for Christmas, and had to stay in bed the whole day through. Her Auntie hadn’t time to buy her presents. Emily had only arrived back from the North Pole Christmas Eve, and it was all Auntie could do to take her inside, call the doctor and tell the police that Emily had come back. The police had wanted to talk to Emily, but Auntie had put her foot down—“Not until after Christmas,” she’d said, “and that’s final.” Then Auntie had given Emily a great big hug, and put her to bed, and made her hot soup that was the best soup Emily had ever tasted.
Auntie spent most of Christmas Day with Emily in the room with the grandfather clock that didn’t work, and went to bed only after Emily had seemed to fall asleep.
But Emily was only pretending. When her Auntie had shut off the light and closed the door, Emily crept over to her window and looked out.
The moon was in a quarter-phase, and cloud patterned the sky like paper on a child’s bedroom wall. If a sleigh ever crossed such a sky, it would do so empty of toys, and fly so quietly that Emily would never k
now it had passed.
1991:
The Claus Effect
Up Periscope!
“Merry Christmas, you ungrateful bastards!”
With those five words, a forty-ounce bottle of barely-metabolized bourbon in his belly, and a dusty red Santa Claus suit that was missing the moustache, Augustus Nyman III burst into his brother’s house and in so doing changed his nephew Neil’s life forever.
Neil and his parents were celebrating the 1983 Christmas at home, and they were happy for it. Christmas was a time for family, Neil’s father had said, but too much of family was like too much of plum pudding—it could turn a fine meal into a lead weight.
Of course, there was more to Neil’s father and his family than just over-rich Christmas desserts. For a long time, Neil’s father and Granddad had only spoken through Neil’s mother, who acted as interpreter on Granddad’s monthly long-distance calls from Kentucky “To see how the boy’s doing.” And there was the unmentionable feud that had kept his father and uncle from speaking, even through an interpreter, for a year longer than nine-year-old Neil had lived.
So Uncle Augustus’ arrival was without precedent. If Neil had been younger, he might have thought that Santa Claus really was running late this year, really did have to take a dirty old Detroit taxicab to make all his rounds, and really had thought that Neil had asked for tube socks and not a mountain bike. If Neil had been younger, he wouldn’t have known what “bastards” meant either.
“Are we being robbed?” he asked his mother as Augustus staggered through the dining room, nearly capsizing the service table with the turkey on it, and exited into the kitchen.
“No dear,” she had simply responded, her hand clutching his a little tighter as the refrigerator door sucked open, and something heavy fell from it. “That’s your Uncle Augustus.”