by David Nickle
“He had orders to be outside,” said Mr. Lockhardt.
“That means nothing.” Mr. Beland squinted and surveyed the landscape the five submarines had perforated. The towers stood in a rough circle, the black spines of the submarines barely penetrating the ice.
“One way or another,” said Mr. Lockhardt, “he won’t last long on this night.”
Mr. Beland smiled wanly. “I suppose that’s a good thing.” He paused, flared a wooden match on his thumbnail and with it set his pipe alight. “Do you know it’s only a week to Christmas?” he asked, to no one in particular.
Somewhere in the frozen air, a bell tinkled.
Mr. Lockhardt nodded. “The time has come, Beland. Open your missile tubes.”
Stars vanished in a black streak as Mr. Beland gave the order. Mr. Lockhardt looked up in time to see one of the searchlights briefly intersect an immense whip, curling back to snap, a hundred feet in the air. A high cackle, not merry at all, drifted down over the submarines like a falling party streamer.
Mr. Lockhardt nodded. The Claus was preparing to land.
No more crew emerged from the five American submarines, much to Neil’s chagrin. He was buried to his nostrils in snow and ice, and he really needed some assistance to get free. But the only person who had stepped down from the submarines was too far away to spot Neil without some signal—and Neil’s mouth was just now blocked with a solid chunk of ice as big as a frozen turkey. He couldn’t even whisper.
Another rumbling sound rose up to Neil’s right. For a moment, he was afraid there would be more submarines coming up through the ice, but this sound was different. In the shifting light, Neil could see the giant metal hatches of two of the submarines’ missile tubes lifting. They might have been manhole covers, but these hatches were bigger than any man Neil had ever seen.
Briefly Neil wondered if he were about to witness an ICBM launch. But before he could dwell too long on that possibility, the sled arrived.
It circled twice overtop the submarine towers, eight reindeer dragging the black-iron cauldron in a furious arc. It landed in a terrible cloud of snow and ice, red-hot runners that curled twice sinking into the melting frost.
A cackling filled the air, and with a pained clicking of joints, the gaunt, red-cloaked apparition that held the reigns rose.
He stood, Neil thought, nearly as high as the towers of the Sturgeon-class submarines that surrounded him. The man in the sleigh lifted his arms, which were impossibly thin and long, and it seemed to Neil as though lights, flickering and grasping, spread from his fingers into the sky. His winter-white beard made a bone-shearing crunch as he lifted his head to survey the assembled submarines. Shards of ice fell to the floor of his sleigh and shattered.
“Ha,” said the enormous driver.
“Ha ha ha ha ha!”
Mr. Beland climbed down the frozen metal rungs and jumped nimbly to the more-solid ice alongside the U.S.S. Frankenmuth. The sleigh was thirty yards away, but he could feel the huge man’s breath from here. It was as cold as the arctic wind, incalculably foul. Mr. Beland sucked on his pipe, licked his lips, and approached the Claus.
Beland had performed as Team Liaison Officer with the Claus only twice over the past eight years; the last time had been in 1988, just a week after George Bush and little Danny Quayle had given Beland’s Pentagon bosses what one of them had termed “the best Christmas present of all” and kept the Democrats out of the White House.
Still, when the time had come, Beland had delivered their list, same as every year, and same as every year it had consisted entirely of requests.
Floodlights from the five submarines converged on the Claus’ sleigh, illuminating him from every angle so that not a millimetre of his papery flesh stood in shadow. His thick, whorled brows rose and the lid around his single, beady eye stretched round. His mouth made a line of blood within the cataract of his beard, then broke into a broad and hideous grin. His teeth, Mr. Beland noted wryly, were in worse condition than the President’s.
“Ooooooh,” crooned the Claus, as he always did at the beginning of the Pentagon’s yearly visit, “a child.”
Beland did not contradict him. When you were as old as the Claus, even Bob Dole wouldn’t be much more than a youngster. The thought made Beland shudder.
The Claus lifted a long finger to his face and scratched absently under the frilly red-and-white patch that covered the bottomless pit of his left eye socket. “Yesss,” he said. “A little, mewling, detestable child. Oh how you’ve grown since last Christmas, little boy. Why, you’re positively enormous this year, aren’t you, you wee, squirming, formless pinworm of a baby…”
Mr. Beland raised his hand to interrupt—from past experience, he knew the Claus could go on for almost an hour like this unless the Liaison Officer took control of the situation. “Let’s talk turkey,” he said, taking on the flat and vaguely dangerous monotone he had cultivated over his years in the profession.
“Turkey indeed,” said Claus. “Cut to the chase, hmm?”
“Only one matter of business this year,” said Mr. Beland, removing a manifest from his breast pocket.
Claus’ eye narrowed until it seemed to disappear in a flat plane of dead-white flesh beneath his brow. “Another launch, boy?”
“That is correct, sir,” said Mr. Beland.
Claus snatched the manifest before Mr. Beland could say more. From the breast pocket of his own greatcoat, Claus snatched a monocle and held it to his eye as he scanned the fanfold-printout of the Pentagon’s Christmas list. “Humm,” he muttered. “Five, hmm five Black Globe Class Surveillance Satellites…launched in geosynchronous orbit over…hum hmm, yes, yes…such and such yes…” Claus lowered his monocle and looked Mr. Beland in the eye. He did not smile.
“Have you been a good boy this year?”
Mr. Beland folded his hands behind his back. “You have your list.”
“Indeed I do, you impertinent garden slug, indeed I do. What did your mother teach you, boy? Manners, eh?”
“My superiors have deposited a sum of three billion dollars into your Bermuda account. I trust—”
Claus leaned forward over the edge of his sleigh, towering high over Beland’s head.
When the Claus spoke, it was with the roar of a January gale. “You trust too much, little boy!” His eye blazed. “That sum is paltry, boy, it is not sufficient!”
Mr. Beland suppressed a shiver. Not sufficient. Christ in a hand-cart, what was the old demon after? The President would be fighting an election in less than a year. He’d been lucky with Irangate, but depending on what the Claus wanted…Mr. Beland could be taking orders from President Jesse Jackson this time next year.
“What,” he said, struggling to keep his monotone in line, “would you gauge as sufficient, sir?”
“Heh heh, good.” Claus pressed his fingers together over the manifest and beamed down at Beland. “Good boy. Always aiming to please…The Claus is a reasonable man, boy…All he wants is a little look at those, hum, Black Globe spy satellites you’re so anxious to fill the sky with.”
“That’s not all, though,” said Beland, “is it Mister Claus.”
“Raise the satellites!” cried Claus. “Let me take a look at them!”
A low hydraulic hum filled the air and from the missile bay of each submarine rose what at first resembled the nose-cone of an ICBM—a clean, flat-black cylinder that tapered to a rounded point. But there was no rocket supporting it; only an oiled steel platform, that stopped rising at a point exactly three millimetres above the frozen deck of its submarine.
“Tell me about these satellites,” said Claus. He had climbed out of his sleigh and moved off to the side of the U.S.S. Buffalo. Another of Mr. Beland’s colleagues, Mr. Roland, drew his thick brows together in a frown as he looked down from the submarine tower.
“They’re primarily surveillance satellites,” said Mr. Beland. “Very advanced. Their cameras are capable of resolving the subscript on a U.S. defence contract from
a geosynchronous orbit of 22,000 miles.”
“Bunk,” said Claus quietly.
The arctic chill suddenly cut through Mr. Beland’s agency zen training and he wrapped his parka tighter around his neck. “I b-b-beg your pardon, sir?”
“That,” repeated Claus in the mildest of tones, “is the biggest load of bunk you’ve tried to feed me all day. I have seen the file on the Black Globe system, little baby-drool. Each of these satellites is equipped with an experimental particle-beam weapon capable of disintegrating the subscript on a U.S. defence contract or anything else, from whatever orbit I decide to place it in.”
Mr. Beland looked up at Mr. Roland. The other man disappeared over the lip of the submarine tower.
“Three billion,” said Claus, “is an adequate cash compensation for my generous efforts over the years. But this satellite—” his knuckles rapped twice against the satellite’s carbon fibre composite casing with a hollow metal-on-metal sound “—this satellite is mine!”
Claus had not phrased it as a question, but Mr. Beland was about to answer him anyway when the great festive fellow suddenly bent down.
“My my,” he said, hands scrabbling spider-like around his feet. “What have we here?”
The Claus’ fingers were tight like surgical clamps around Neil’s shoulders as he lifted him from the jumble of ice and snow at the U.S.S. Frankenmuth’s base.
“Hello now little man.” The Claus’ breath smelled of herring and tobacco; Neil was close enough to the Claus’ face to see the white frills on the edge of his eyepatch flutter in the arctic air. The white ermine around his long red cap was plastered to his scalp with sooty tendrils of ice. And despite how his smile broadened, Neil could not see the Claus’ gum-line overtop his curling, crooked teeth. Neil thought again of Uncle Augustus, their first meeting and the Santa suit, but the memory scurried off in terror almost as soon as it appeared.
At once, Claus’ grip released and Neil fell with a crunch to the snow at his feet. Cautiously, feeling for broken bones, Neil got to his feet. The Claus had turned to the Captain.
“This rendezvous-point was supposed to be secured,” said the Claus quietly. “You know, little boy, that is one thing I always insist on.”
The thin man glanced down at Neil briefly. “I’m aware of the conditions you set, sir,” he answered.
Claus smile widened. “It is lucky we won’t be dealing again, you and I. See that my cheque clears, give me the satellite…” he turned to look at Neil “…and deal with this little witness. Then our accounts will be equal.”
The other paused for a moment. Finally he spoke. “The cheque has already cleared. Take your satellite.” He opened his parka, revealing the oiled butt of an antique Browning automatic. He looked at Neil.
“Good boy,” Claus crooned. “Y’know what’s good for you.”
Neil had just decided that what injuries he’d taken in the fall weren’t enough to prevent him from making a break for it when the man’s hand closed around his arm.
“Come on, son,” he whispered, and half-led, half-dragged Neil around the bow of the U.S.S. Buffalo. Behind them, the Claus was already lifting the Black Globe satellite from its platform and stuffing it into an enormous rust-coloured sack.
Beyond the circle of submarine towers, the world was darkness. Neil only looked back once, to see the bright searchlights casting the submarine towers into sharp, Stonehenge-like relief. But as quickly as he turned, his captor whipped his arm and forced him to look ahead.
“Don’t look back,” he said. “The less you see, the better.”
A sudden rage boiled up in Neil then. “What the hell difference does it make? You’re going to kill me with that thing one way or another.”
The man snorted. “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” With a painful snap, the man threw Neil onto the snow. He pulled the Browning from its holster and pointed it at Neil where he lay sprawled on his back. “I apologize for this. When this rendezvous was arranged, Checkpoint Black Ice was abandoned. We only found out West Point was using it as a detention hall thirty minutes before zero hour. Then it was too late.”
His captor’s generous lips tightened and he straightened his gun arm. Neil resolved not to wet himself, no matter what happened. He shut his eyes, and prayed.
When the gun fired, the explosion was the loudest sound Neil had ever heard.
Cautiously, Neil opened his eyes. His captor still stood there, but the gun was back in its holster. Now he was holding something else—it was yellow, the size of a walkie-talkie but with no antenna.
“This is a global positioning unit,” he said. “It’ll give you your position in longitude and latitude accurate to within twelve feet. Take it.”
Hands shaking, Neil reached up and took hold of the yellow box. It was heavy, but there was a nylon strap on the side of it. The man rhymed off a set of co-ordinates and repeated them.
“Walk until you reach those co-ordinates. It shouldn’t take you more than a day.”
“Wh-what’s at those co-ordinates?”
He rubbed his face. “Not what. Who. Amoco Jones, an old friend of mine. Those are the co-ordinates of his winter whaling camp. When you get there, tell him Umberto sent you.”
“Are you…Umberto?”
“No,” said the man. “That’s not my name.” And without another word, he turned and walked back to the circle of towers.
All five of the satellites together were too large for the Claus to fit into his sleigh, but the sack held them well enough, so Claus strapped the entire assembly over the back. It wasn’t the first time…by the bleeding gums of Satan’s wife, it wasn’t the first time old Claus had filled his sleigh to the bursting and set out for a jolly old Christmas flight.
It had been a while, though. Eight years, old man. Not really a long time, he told himself; not in the scheme of a lifetime that spanned centuries. But long enough. Long enough, by hell.
Claus had really been on the verge of things in those days, on the verge of realizing his destiny to put the correct word to it. And learning the true desires of children the world over—the dark, secret desires that hag of a wife had been keeping from him, all these centuries—well, it had opened the world for him.
“The world!” cried Santa as his eight terrified reindeer gathered themselves into the old familiar double-line before the sleigh. “The world! By Hell!”
The words echoed impotently amid the submarine towers. All the Americans had gone back inside; once Claus had alighted to the sky, they would give those preposterous commands to dive! and sound those alarms that always reminded Claus of a plumbing problem more than anything to do with submarines.
That hag of a wife had taken it from him…and that brat, that little girl Emily who had infiltrated—infiltrated! the very word put Claus into a hot rage—Claus’ North Pole Toy Mill operation and brought it down in flames.
Emily.
Claus reached down around his feet and drew up the thirty-foot length of bullwhip. Taking the reins in one hand, he let the whip out to its full length over the side of the sleigh. Then, simultaneously drawing back on the reins, Claus raised the whip over his head, and with a snap more terrible than any thunderclap, he shrieked to the night and the trembling reindeer:
“Gowan!”
The runners of Santa Claus’ sleigh bumped twice against the uneven surface of the ice as the reindeer’s tiny hooves scrambled against the dark. Claus sent the whip twitching once more before him. “Faster damn you! Work for a day in your lives!” Snap! “The sky, you imbecilic herbivores!” Snap! “Up!” Snap! “On with you!”
The sleigh fell sharply into the arctic sky.
The air grew thinner, the higher the Claus and his reindeer climbed. As they passed through the diminishing layer of ozone, Claus inhaled for a final time, leaving a hole nearly a kilometre in diameter in his wake. And then the whip ceased to snap! as Santa’s sleigh passed into the hard vacuum of near-earth orbit.
Still the Cl
aus drove his reindeer onward, closer to the heavens. In his single remaining eye, the Claus could feel blood vessels burst and haemoglobin boil; the flesh as it pulled away from his skull in a mute standoff with the forces of explosive decompression; and the bone-shattering cold that permeated empty space in the Earth’s gigantic shadow.
The Claus went to work, as he never had before. Over China, Brazil, Africa, and Western Europe; all of these he placed a Black Globe, prying open the launch casing with the steak knife he always carried with him and fiddling with the perfect black sphere until its lenses and weaponry were aligned…just so. Three times he had to take the sleigh back into the atmosphere to suck off another square kilometre of ozone, and three times he returned to space.
Then, with his last molecules of air, he drove his sweating, bubbling reindeer on one final mission, with his own, final satellite in tow. He had a map in the side-pouch of the sleigh, but he did not need it to find the exact location for the fifth Black Globe satellite.
Strapping the bullwhip around his waist and fastening it to the runners, Claus took hold of the nose-cone and kicked off into space. At another time, he might have taken pleasure in the sensation of freefall, chained to nothing, the very stars within his grasp. But tonight, the Claus had other pleasures on his mind.
Santa Claus unpacked the last Black Globe particle-beam satellite and positioned it, with all the precision and care of a master toy-maker, directly over Emily’s house.
Blue-light Special
The adult world should have been completely excluded from Christmas. When Emily was younger, it had been. Christmas was bright colours, banners and carols, the warmth of family.
Emily sighed, and took one last look through the doorway of her Auntie’s home before closing it. She could just see a corner of the living room past the arch that separated it from the front hall. It was that corner that cradled the Christmas tree this year.
Emily and her Auntie had spent the previous evening decorating the tree, and now she thought they’d done too good a job of it. For the first time since she’d started at ValueLand, she didn’t want to go to work. The tree was a thing of beauty, with its tiny beaming bulbs of red and green light, and a thousand little reflections from the decorations liquid as syrup on the walls. Tinsel wavered once in a gust of air from the open door, caressing the bows of the presents jumbled underneath. There were so many of those, it brought Emily’s heart to her mouth—not, as it might have years ago, in horror; or, a few years before that, in greedy anticipation. It was just that, in so many ways, Emily could scarcely believe it, this marvellous home she’d found here.