by David Nickle
Krampus shut his eyes, and as he did it seemed as though the layout of the complex unfolded before him, an intricate web of corners through which he could bend and run like quicksilver. He clenched his fists, joints cracking like twigs, as he mapped the journey before him. It was not far, he concluded. Not far at all.
Krampus opened his eyes and turned, intending to dive into the corridor of the room’s northeast corner. Instead, he froze mid-stride.
The elf with the Skorpion machine pistol had had plenty of time to aim, and the barrel of the weapon was pointed directly at the spot between Krampus’ eyes.
“Move, thin one, and fyyl ye’r dyume,” drawled the elf. With his other hand, he reached for a walkie-talkie to call in reinforcements.
The tunnel from the castle cut into the complex at a spot that neither Neil nor Emily could place. The corridor here had a curved white ceiling, too low to stand straight in, and was lit with dim red lights.
“They use these kind of lights in submarines,” Neil explained as the two of them squinted first one way, then the other. “The red’s supposed to make it easier.”
Emily couldn’t see how, but she didn’t want to encourage Neil to talk about his stupid West Point education in military trivia any more than he already had. They may have taught a lot of things at West Point, but social skills certainly wasn’t one of them.
“That’s what I hear, anyway,” continued Neil lamely.
“Never mind that,” said Emily. “We’re at the top of the complex now. Whether we’re going after the nukes or after Krampus, we’re going to have to head down.”
“But which way down?” said Neil. “There’s two.”
Emily threw up her hands. “Do you know scissors and paper?”
“Scissors cut paper wrap stone.” Neil nodded. “My Uncle Augustus showed me—”
“Good for him.” Emily made a fist. “Ready?”
Neil smiled, and made a fist too. “Ready,” he said.
It took three sessions, but finally paper wrapped stone and they headed down the corridor to the left. It took what seemed like several minutes before they came across anything resembling a door. What they finally found was, oddly enough, an old submarine hatch recessed in the wall, which Neil opened with a flourish. Beyond the door, there was a shaft with metal rungs set into the wall. When Neil offered to go first, Emily did not object.
As she mounted the rungs herself, Emily found the unease that had begun when Krampus had left them was growing more pronounced. Krampus had disappeared into the narrow ventilation shaft virtually unarmed—even the flashlight he’d found in the cache was too large for the tiny passage. Santa Claus, on the other hand, had at his disposal the might of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. She was finding herself less and less confident that Krampus could win the day, and more and more certain that he couldn’t win a game of craps against the Claus.
“Ow!”
Belatedly, Emily realized that Neil had stopped climbing, and she’d stepped on one of his hands.
“Sorry,” she replied.
“Don’t worry,” muttered Neil. “It’s only a fifty-metre drop. Look, I’ve found another hatchway.”
This one emerged into more familiar territory—a corridor similar to those surrounding Cell Block One. The lighting was the more familiar yellow flicker of the bulk of the complex, and the ceilings were squared and high enough to stand straight underneath. They would have to move carefully from here—Emily was willing to bet the ranch this corridor was regularly patrolled.
At ValueLand, Mitchell had occasionally ordered his staff to remain after-hours for what he called “war games.” The idea, he said, had been to give the security personnel experience on both sides of the fence—“Hunters and hunted,” Mitchell would intone, the flashlight under his chin throwing his acne-scarred face into an almost lunar relief. “We are often the hunters, so seldom the hunted. That fact alone is what makes us weak.”
Emily had spent more than one night as “hunted,” and imagined that she had become rather good at avoiding Mitchell’s “patrols:” whether they were through Ladies’ Wear, the Returns department or the cafeteria, they had a smell to them.
“Get back,” Emily hissed as a similar smell filled her nostrils. They had progressed barely a dozen yards beyond the hatchway, and ducked into a doorway just as a phalanx of elfs appeared at the opposite end of the corridor.
“Only two of them are armed,” whispered Neil. “We should be able to—”
Emily silenced him with a look. The door was set into an alcove, and when Emily tried it, she found it was locked. Great. They might not have a choice but to confront the elfs—and even with only two of them armed, that confrontation would either end in gunfire or their surrender.
It had been so much easier at ValueLand—whenever things looked sticky for her there, Mitchell would obligingly send one of his patrols into an ambush. But this wasn’t ValueLand.
Neil was running his hands around the lock. “If only there was some way to get at the hinges,” he muttered. “A crowbar, maybe.” He bent to peer into the lock.
The band of elfs was nearly upon them. It was now or never, thought Emily; they had to take a chance.
Neil had unwound a paper clip he’d picked up from somewhere, and was poking nervously at the lock with it. Emily reached over his head and rapped smartly on the door.
Neil jerked in surprise, dropping the paper clip. At the same time, a voice from the other side of the door said, “Whoozit?”
“It’s me,” Emily said in Pole-ish.
The latch clicked, and the door swung inward. Emily and Neil pushed hard and jumped inside, slamming it shut behind them in time to hear one of the elfs in the corridor say, “Thar they is!”
They found themselves looming over a very small elf with a clipboard in his hands; he backed slowly away holding it up like some sort of medieval shield. He seemed to be alone in this room, which was a storage space filled with grey metal shelving units, disturbingly like the ones at ValueLand. They seemed to hold office supplies.
“Dyuumed,” wailed the elf as he flung aside the clipboard and ran down an aisle. Neil started after him.
“What are you doing?” Emily shouted. “He’s no threat!”
“Must be another door,” he shot back. Reluctantly, she followed him. When they reached the back wall of the small room it became obvious there was no other entrance; the elf had ducked around the end of a set of shelves and raced back to the door. Neil cursed; Emily rolled her eyes.
They heard the click of the door opening, then a gabble of excited elfish voices. Emily groaned. “Now what?”
“We can still take ’em,” Neil growled. He rummaged hectically through the white boxes on the nearest shelf. “Just need something to—aha!” He grabbed some pale bottles and passed two to Emily.
“What do I do with this?” She watched him twirl the caps off two bottles and set them carefully on the floor, aimed at the end of the aisle they were in.
Five elfs came charging around the corner, one holding a pistol high in trembling hands. Another hoisted a walkie-talkie up to his face, and started to bellow “We ha’um trapped in—”
Neil stomped on his two bottles of powdered copy toner. A great cough of black spewed out, totally covering the elfs. Curls of smoky darkness rose to the ceiling and washed back down the aisle to Neil and Emily. Not giving them time to recover, Neil dove into the darkness, swinging another bottle like a club. Emily stood fastidiously back from the cloud and listened to the screams of elfish anguish and hollow boinking sounds Neil’s club made as he felled his opponents. When it was all over, he emerged from the cloud grinning, totally blackened except for his teeth. He brandished a pair of walkie-talkies. “Look what I got!”
“Report, report!” squawked one of receivers. “Whar are ye?” “We can listen in on them now,” he said unnecessarily as he handed one to her.
“What about the guns?” she asked.
Neil sobered.
“Somewhere…in there,” he said, indicating the swirling blackness at the end of the aisle. “I’ll go and look.”
“No, no time,” she said. “Listen.” She waggled the walkie-talkie. “They know we’re somewhere on this level. They’ll be here any second!” She raced for the door.
“Wait!” Neil had spotted something on one of the shelves. Emily bounced impatiently from foot to foot as he stretched and brought it down.
“My GPS!” he said brightly, brandishing something yellow that looked like a sports Walkman with a thyroid problem.
“Oohh, come on!” They left the storage room and ran down the hall—but Neil was now leaving a trail of sooty fog behind him, not to mention the great black footprints that led conspicuously back to the storage room.
They paused, puffing, in the middle of a long corridor with a tangle of pipes that ran along the ceiling. Over the walkie-talkies, they could hear a large force of elfs discovering their trail.
“Well, now what?” said Emily. “We have to get that stuff off you.”
“Yeah. There! That’s how,” he said, pointing at a stairwell that led down halfway along the hall. A small, peeling sign above it said “POOL” in Cyrillic.
“Great! Let’s go.” They made it to the stairwell just as the first of the elfs rounded the far corner. A bullet whizzed over Emily’s shoulder as they clattered down the metal steps.
It was dark down here, and stank of mildew. The air had a dank, used quality, like the exhalation of some great beast. They were forced to slow down because they couldn’t see, and kept tripping over soft unidentifiable things that blocked the corridor here and there. Neil turned on his flashlight, but to Emily’s relief didn’t let the beam tarry anywhere long.
As they proceeded, Emily found she was less and less enthusiastic about taking a bath in the POOL at the end of this mess. It was finally Neil who pointed out that their pursuers had evidently given up.
“Turn up the walkie-talkie,” said Emily.
The device squealed and crackled for a moment, and Neil set about twisting its knobs until thin elfish voices asserted themselves over the electric din.
“I’m nit gowin doon thar, oover.”
“Will if ye’re nit gowin doon, thin I’m nit either, oover.”
“Will I’m repartin’ the two a’ ye if ye din’t gow doon thar richt noo, oover.”
“I din’t think the two a’ ’em evin wint doon thar, over.”
“Ye’re jist sayinat, a’cause ye din’t want ’a go near a PYULE, oover.”
“Will de ye wint ’a go near a PYULE? Over.”
“I think we lost them,” said Neil.
“I think that’s obvious,” said Emily. “I wonder why they’re so scared of the PYULE. POOL, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” said Neil, bringing his flashlight beam up from the floor, “but we’re about to find out.”
The flashlight beam illuminated a broad set of double doors, which were mottled in equal measure by rust and a blue-black substance that had settled very much like a creeping vine. The sign overtop was similarly obscured, but neither Emily nor Neil had any doubt as to what it would read. From within, Emily heard a sound like a soaking-wet mattress falling against bathroom tiles.
“Suddenly,” said Emily, “I don’t feel so dirty anymore.”
Neil nodded in agreement. “We’ll find a washroom,” he said. “They must have washrooms in here somewhere.”
The two of them went farther down the hall, pausing only occasionally to jab the flashlight beam back when one or another of them thought they heard something.
“So what’s that yellow thing good for?” asked Emily.
“What?” Neil looked down at his belt. “Oh, the GPS. It’s called a Global Positioning System. It uses, um, satellites and computers and stuff to help you find your position.”
“Our position? What’s that mean? Will it be able to tell us where we are right now?”
“I don’t know if it’s still working. Hang on.” Neil wiped some of the toner off the machine’s readout. He turned a switch, and his face was suddenly illuminated by a dim green light. Neil squinted. “Sixty-three degrees, forty-nine minutes north, thirty-three degrees, thirty-eight minutes east—” Neil looked up, his face lit from below like Mitchell’s during training “—elevation, nine hundred and fifty metres! Next question, please.”
Emily crossed her arms. “Where does that put us in relation to the Claus?”
“That,” said Neil, “I can’t tell you as easily.”
“Great,” said Emily, throwing up her arms now. “We’ve got satellites, we’ve got computers, and we’ve still got no idea where we are!”
“Well maybe if the Claus had a GPS too, we could track him. What do you want, Emily? The world on a platter?” Suddenly, Neil frowned. “Hang on a second. I think I hear something up ahead.”
Emily was about to say something else, but before she did, she heard it too—a shout, as distinctive an indication as any.
“The Claus,” she whispered.
“Let’s go,” said Neil.
For the second time, Neil’s flashlight came up against a door. This one was in better shape, and when Emily tried it, it opened easily onto bright light, and the grinding sounds of Christmas underway.
Emily shut the door quickly, and when she re-opened it, she and Neil made their way on hands and knees out onto the upper gangway of the Claus’ Christmas hangar.
Nine elfs had piled through the door of the security office and at least three more were jockeying for position in the corridor outside before the elf with the Skorpion deemed his force sufficient to move Krampus. As they shuffled him through the narrow doorway, Krampus counted upwards of six machine pistols, a revolver and an antique German Luger in the hands of his captors. Based on his long experience with the Claus’ minions, Krampus would otherwise have not thought twice about confronting them. But with these weapons of the modern world…Krampus could not afford to bear such wounds as they would inflict, if he were to defeat the Claus this night.
“Diddawn,” said Skorpion as they marched into the corridor. The other elfs began to take a formation around Krampus, and he found himself smiling at it. Once, Claus’ “helpers” had been forest-dwellers, whose pea-sized brains held barely enough wit to remind them to gather a store of nuts and berries for the winter months. Now, they marched in formation and waved their weapons over their heads like American film actors.
“You are short-sighted creatures as ever, I see,” said Krampus as they stopped in front of a wide, blue-painted door.
“Qwee-iet ye’re squee-lin’ voice,” snarled Skorpion. “Save it fer ’a Claus.”
“Oh indeed,” said Krampus as the door opened on a deep stairwell. “I am saving much for that one.”
Skorpion spared Krampus a wary glance, then turned to the others. “Brimg ’im doon!” he shouted. “Doon ’a the Claus!”
Three abreast, the elfs and Krampus filed into the stairwell. The floor and stairs were made of a steel grillwork that Krampus twice nearly slipped through, and the stairs extended up three or four flights and down as far as the eye could see. Once all were inside, the door swung shut with unambiguous finality.
“Well well, Mister Twig,” said Skorpion. “Now ye’ll fyyl ye’re dyume, assuredly.”
“Will I, tiny elf?” Krampus’ voice was the only sound in the shaft that didn’t cast an echo, and as such, it was the most unsettling. The other dozen elfs in the stairwell looked about uneasily, like kindergarten children who had mistakenly wandered into the staff room during a disciplinary hearing. Only Skorpion, with his machine pistol in front of him, could manage a credible glare at Krampus’ wide, yellow eyes.
Krampus continued. “I have felt my doom, as you say, for seventy years. Trapped was I, in a cage of my own making. Much,” he finished, “as you find yourself now.”
Skorpion stomped his foot, making a rattling sound that reverberated down the shaft. “Enough, ye skye-wiggley varmint! D
oon ye go!” Skorpion nudged in the vicinity of Krampus’ torso with his gun.
Krampus didn’t move. “Down,” he said, “to where?”
“Eehyah?” wondered one of the other elfs. “Wots ’e mean?”
“Only,” answered Krampus, moving one thin leg between two of the elfs to his rear, “that I do not see any handle, nor even a keyhole, on this side of the door.”
As one, the elfs looked to where Krampus pointed. As they began to scream, he withdrew his arm and stepped away. Krampus smiled. It was so—the Claus’ stupid minions had locked themselves in a stairwell. As the chorus of their screams reached a crescendo, Krampus backed into the northeast corner. When they turned and began firing their guns, he was already gone, sliding downward like a fireman on his pole.
Sailing down, Krampus allowed himself to laugh. Elfs! The vile little forest-rats would be the Claus’ downfall. Krampus, after all, had survived these years, these many battles, with only his own wits, his own powers to protect him. Elfs were always cheap labour; and cheap labour, Krampus learned long ago, betrays its masters with, if not its ingratitude, then its incompetence.
When Krampus judged he had descended far enough, he set his elbows against the walls and twisted into the joint between wall and landing. Moving laterally, it was an easy thing to bend through the locked fire door and into the corridor. Gratefully, he noted that the chatter of small-arms fire and lamentations of the elfs were quite inaudible from outside the stairwell.
Krampus resisted the temptation to unfold himself from the corner and make the rest of the journey on foot. Stretching forth, he crossed the remaining corridor in a breath, and paused barely a heartbeat at the doors that led to the hangar. The door here was sealed also, but he had only a little difficulty negotiating the thin baffles and corners. It was like entering a wicked baby’s nursery Christmas Eve. Mein Gott! thought Krampus. He could almost feel the stiff wooden cane in his hands.
A caning. Oh, Claus. You are in for such a caning as will shake the world to its very core.