by David Nickle
And his fingers had grown.
Neil could swear that each digit was at least half-an-inch longer than it had been before. And at their tips, Mr. Beland’s neatly clipped fingernails had gone black—ten identical blood-blisters, presaging who knew what kind of transformation down the road.
“Permission—” Neil swallowed and tried again. “Permission to speak candidly, sir.”
The eyes regarded Neil suspiciously. “Granted,” rumbled Mr. Beland.
Neil backed against the crenel as he spoke. “I could not help but notice that the light in your breast pocket has spread to your eyes, sir.”
“What’s your point, Cadet Lieutenant?”
Now how to put this…“Um, you don’t look so good, sir,” tried Neil.
Mr. Beland bent low until his elongating nose nearly touched Neil’s forehead. “What’s that, boy?”
Neil couldn’t answer, and for a moment he was sure Mr. Beland was about to pick Neil up and toss him over the edge of the tower. It might well have been on Mr. Beland’s mind, but at the last instant, he drew himself back, turned his face to the sky and opened his mouth wide enough to hurt.
“Ha!”
The section of the tower just behind Mr. Beland fell away in the aftershocks of the sound. Neil covered his ears: it was like standing near an artillery firing range.
“Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Stonework crumbled against the laughter. Neil stumbled forward as the crenel he’d been leaning against slipped an inch, then pitched into the night. A fireball from the hangar silhouetted Mr. Beland with a light so bright that for a moment even his eyes were invisible, and a blast of heat from that combined with Mr. Beland’s mirth to nearly send Neil back over the edge. Finally the fit passed.
“Haha!” Neil could see the bones in Mr. Beland’s hands as he wiped his brilliant red eyes, patted the third eye—Claus’ eye—over his heart.
“That’s rich, boy,” he chortled. “I don’t look so good, do I? Well I’ve been through a lot this past day in the service of my country. You’d be a little rough around the edges too.”
Mr. Beland’s hair turned from steel-grey to bone-white as he spoke, in a quivering brushstroke from root to tip. Neil thought about pointing this out, then thought better of it. Pretty soon, Neil wouldn’t be talking to Mr. Beland at all.
He’d be talking to the Claus.
The laughter had loosened rivets on the sleigh and nearly sent the reindeer spinning off their course. Emily clutched her ribs and winced as she craned her neck to see over the reindeer antlers. Neil wasn’t alone on the tower-top, that was clear.
But the only thing that made a noise like that laugh was the Claus. And Emily had seen him disintegrated to his component atoms just minutes before.
Emily hefted the Claus’ immense whip and let it uncurl over the side of the sleigh. The two hindmost reindeer—she could never remember their names—eyed Emily uneasily over their foam-flecked backs.
“Do not worry it’s not for you!” she screamed reassuringly. “But something is down there and we have to be prepared!”
Her ribs ground agonizingly as the whip dragged out behind the sleigh to its full length and the reindeer banked hard into a tight corkscrew around the tower. If she looked up, she could see the rotating tableau of two figures facing one another on the crumbling rooftop. The smaller one—Neil, unless Emily missed her guess—was shading his eyes against the laser-red light that came from the eyes of the larger one.
Emily gritted her teeth and raised the whip. The pain in her ribs was nearly enough to make her faint, but she didn’t let it. With a flick of her wrist, she sent the whip twitching towards the middle of the sleigh’s corkscrew—as near as she could manage to the source of the terrible crimson light.
Mr. Beland shrieked and clutched at his chest as the sleigh and reindeer circled the tower. They were moving so fast it made Neil dizzy, and he was barely able to duck as the Claus’ long bullwhip snapped back across the remaining tower top. Cautiously, Neil glanced up over the crenels to get a better look at the sleigh.
It was moving fast—so quickly that both reindeer and sleigh had actually banked onto their sides, like rocks in a whirling sling. Neil couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as though the circle was tight enough that the lead reindeer’s shiny nose nearly touched the enormous bag of nuclear warheads hanging off the sleigh’s rear.
And Neil was sure he could make out Emily, drawing the bullwhip back for another shot at Mr. Beland. Neil ducked back down.
“My eye!” Mr. Beland drew his hand away from his now-dark chest. “Where in the name of Christmas is my eye!”
Instead of an answer, Mr. Beland was greeted with another flick of Santa Claus’ whip. This one caught him straight across the shoulders, and sent him stumbling forwards, stopping just short of the fissure. He fumbled for his sidearm.
When the whip came again, it missed Mr. Beland entirely and smacked against the roof at his feet. The sound was like a snapping femur.
Mr. Beland pulled the auto-pistol from his belt just as the stone underneath him gave way. The embers in his two remaining eyes darkened as he slipped down into the arctic night. Neil could hear the crashing of the stonework, but he heard no cry from the former American spook.
“Too much Christmas spirit in that one,” muttered Uncle Augustus, in a cautious foray from the corner of Neil’s mind where he’d been hiding.
“Shut up,” snarled Neil.
The reindeer broke their impossibly tight circle and banked wide around the tower. Neil waited, trembling with the cold and adrenaline, as the sleigh started back for him.
They flew in silence on Christmas Eve.
Emily drove the reindeer south and east, away from the frozen ruins of Russia, across Germany and England and finally over the ocean. The sack of warheads bobbed behind them as they flew, but when Neil moved to cut them loose over the Atlantic Emily stopped him with a glare. By sunrise Christmas Day, they were over Newfoundland. By the time they reached Emily’s home-town in Southern Ontario, it was late morning.
Neil didn’t ask what they were doing landing in the empty, snow-swept shopping mall parking lot. He stayed in the sleigh while Emily approached the roped-off husk that had once been the mall’s northern-most anchor tenant. It was a ValueLand—Neil supposed it was the ValueLand where Emily had worked security.
He watched as she limped up to the yellow police line and peered over it, to the boarded-up windows with signs advertising a “GRAND RE-OPENING IN 1992” plastered over them like wrapping paper. Emily turned away after a moment and came back to the sleigh.
“Do you think you’ll go back to work there when it re-opens?” asked Neil as Emily lifted up the reins.
“Are you going back to West Point?”
Neil thought about that. He thought about his Uncle Augustus, and how sometimes he would make a phantom M-16 in his hands, shoot at the crows on telephone lines with it. He could almost hear his Uncle’s voice at the memory: There is nothing better than the honour born of combat. Never let your buddy down. Take a bullet for a friend, but give three of your own back to the bastard that tried to shoot him. This is the best God-damned country in the world, and there’s nothing better to do than prove that to those sonofabitch Communists with the business-end of your M-16.
“No,” he finally answered. “I’m feeling pretty disillusioned about the whole thing, if you want the truth.”
Emily flicked the reins—gently—and the sleigh lifted into the sky. “Meeting Santa Claus can really wreck your outlook.”
The sleigh flew low over the rooftops of a subdivision. The snow in their eaves was blindingly bright in the thin winter light. In the distance, Neil could make out another scorch-mark in the real estate, and as they drew nearer he saw that it was the remains of a house, now just blackened earth sandwiched between two enormous infill homes. Emily’s Auntie’s house? he wondered, but again didn’t ask. They circled it twice, but did not land.
“Who was that w
ith you on the top of the tower?” asked Emily.
“He said his name was Mr. Beland,” said Neil. “He’s a spy. Was a spy,” he corrected.
“He scared the hell out of me,” said Emily. “He was more than a spy.”
The sleigh lifted again, leaving the panorama of scorched earth and silent Christmas Day suburbia far below.
“He tried to kill you!” blurted Neil suddenly. “With the Black Globe! That was his mission, he told me!”
Emily appeared to consider this, then surprised Neil by just nodding. Shell shock, thought Neil sagely. She must be in shell shock. Hell, who wouldn’t be? Neil wasn’t exactly feeling himself this Christmas either.
“I used to think,” said Emily finally, “that Santa Claus was what was what was wrong with Christmas. After I met him the first time, that is. Now, I’m not so sure.”
Neil nodded in agreement. “There are worse things in the world than Santa Claus, and that’s saying a lot.” He regarded Emily through the freezing mist of a low cloud. “How are your ribs?”
“They’re sore, Mom,” said Emily, a friendly sneer in her voice. “Don’t worry. I’ll see a doctor tomorrow—you can wait forever in Emergency Christmas Day, and we’ve still got work to do.”
“Work?”
Emily glanced meaningfully at the nuclear arsenal in the back of the sleigh.
“Oh,” said Neil.
“I’ve been thinking about this since we left the mountain. We can’t exactly give them back to the Russians—they’ll just turn them over to the next embodiment of evil that shows up with a big enough cheque. The Americans are no better—no offense.”
“None taken,” said Neil.
“Ditto for Great Britain, France, Israel, the Germans, or any of the Arab states. Or even, I’m sad to say, Canada.”
“Australia might be safe.”
Emily looked at Neil. “You can never tell,” she said ominously.
“Maybe,” said Neil, “we should just hang onto them for awhile. Until we can find someone we can trust.”
“That could be a long wait,” said Emily.
Neil grinned. “We’re young.”
“Not that young,” said Emily as she banked the sleigh away from its bearing on the North Pole, toward the warmer climes of Florida, maybe the Bahamas. “Not anymore.”
About the Authors
David Nickle was born in 1964. He lives and works in Toronto, which is less than half-way to the North Pole. His stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Tesseracts 4 and 5, and so far all four volumes of the Northern Frights anthology series, as well as magazines such as On Spec and Transversions. One story of his, “The Sloan Men,” was filmed as a part of the cable TV series, The Hunger. He works as a political reporter for a chain of Toronto community newspapers.
Karl Schroeder was born in 1962 and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. Since moving to Toronto in 1986 he has had fiction published in three of the Tesseracts anthologies, as well as On Spec magazine, Figment and the Barnes and Noble anthology A Horror A Day. He was president of SF Canada in 1996-97, and has twice been nominated for the Aurora Award (winning with David Nickle for “The Toy Mill” in 1993). As a boy Karl would stand in his back yard on -30 degree nights and watch the stars, imagining all the wonders he might see up there if those pesky northern lights weren’t in the way. He never did see Santa.
Nickle and Schroeder are busy planning what to do with the coal they get in their stockings this Christmas.
Bonus
Apparently excised from the 1997 Tesseract Books edition of The Claus Effect, following is the “Epilogue” as published in the 2014 Chizine edition of The Claus Effect.
Epilogue
The 1992 sun first touched Murmansk at half past February; but the touch was fleeting, a noontime sally from the southern horizon that cast long, yellow beams across the mottled tundra of northern Russia. It would be gone within the hour.
From the shadow of the mountainside where Olga and her team of Cossacks perched resting, the factories and shipyards of Murmansk appeared iridescent, with roofs of hammered gold, cranes and telephone wires spun from golden threads. All that was missing was onion-topped church towers and thick-bottomed windmills—otherwise, Olga might have mistaken sooty old Murmansk for the fabled Kiev of her grandmother’s recollections.
“I don’t know about you Olga, but I get colder every minute I sit still.”
Olga turned to Dmitri, who was wedged in a rock chimney perhaps three metres above her.
“You’re very anxious, Dmitri,” she said. “Too anxious. Enjoy the light while it’s here. Try rubbing your hands together to keep warm.”
“I’ll fall off the mountain,” protested Dmitri.
Little Mikhail cut in from his spot, a narrow ledge higher still up the mountainside. “Well look at it this way: the place you end up after that, you won’t have to worry about the cold.”
Olga smirked. They were like old women, Dmitri and Mikhail. She often found herself wondering how they’d been in the Red Army, before they joined with Olga and others like her to revive the old Cossack uniform. They were good soldiers, Olga gave them that; but Dmitri’s whining and Mikhail’s sarcasm wouldn’t exactly have qualified as survival traits in the old Soviet military machine.
They must have been very different men then, simply to have stayed alive. We all had to be different, Olga thought. Even now, we take a little risk whenever we let our true natures show.
“Seriously, Olga,” said Dmitri. “We shouldn’t waste this light mooning over a pretty view. We’re up here to do a job.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Olga squinted up past Dmitri, beyond Mikhail. The brief daylight made the peak into a shadowy presence that loomed before them. It wasn’t the very top of the mountain, but from where they sat the ruined castle walls that perched atop the windswept rock might as well have been. And in the terms set by their goals, the castle was the peak. From there, with luck they would have to climb no farther.
“Let’s get moving,” said Olga, and with no visible reluctance turned her back on the glowing vista. When next she looked, the February sun had long ago retreated and Murmansk was once more bereft of gold.
Olga would have liked to have climbed the mountain a month ago, but her fellow Cossacks forbade it. Spotters were reporting avalanches of snow and rock almost daily in the wake of the explosions, and as far as Olga was concerned, the clubbing she’d received from the American spy Christmas Eve had sent her inner ear into a tailspin that hadn’t relented for nearly three weeks. She would never survive the climb, they told her—not with the avalanches and her concussion to contend with. Deep inside Olga knew they were right.
But questions burned at her through her convalescence. Just what had been going on in that mountain December 24, 1991? It was no secret that the Army was still using the old missile silos in there for some purpose or another: the Cossacks had spotted too much traffic for the base to be abandoned. The lights in the sky, the explosions that followed…the American Stealth Bomber pilot who had brained her with her own rifle…
Just what was going on at Murmansk? And whatever it was, why weren’t Olga and her Cossacks in on it?
As soon as the spotters and the medic had allowed, Olga put together an expedition. The ground-level installations were buried under tonnes of snow and ice, so the only point of penetration seemed to be through the peak—plans of the complex showed a connecting tunnel to the old castle two-thirds of the way up the mountain. Based on the spotters reports, that structure was at least partially intact.
They reached the castle’s plateau at 1500 hours, barely an hour after sunset. Olga swore under her breath as she swung her flashlight over the jumbled landscape of ruined masonry and cracked timbers. Nearly the entire structure had collapsed—only the tower remained standing, a three-storey high decoy that gave strength to the lie that this structure had somehow survived.
“So which way to the tunnel?” asked Dmitri, a little too inno
cently. “Didn’t you say it was hidden somewhere in the great hall?”
“I think that we are standing in the great hall right now,” said Mikhail helpfully. He leaned against the three-foot-high remains of an archway.
“Well at least Olga has her view.” Dmitri gestured to the north, where lights from the Murmansk seaport glittered against a backdrop of velvet black.
“You’re lucky I’m too tired to shoot straight,” said Olga as she unslung the rifle from her shoulder and clipped the flashlight to its barrel. “Come on, let’s see if we can get inside what’s left of this tower.”
“It will be out of the wind,” commented Mikhail as he followed. “Dmitri should like that, don’t you think?”
They set up camp in what had once been the tower’s ground floor. Nothing higher seemed sturdy enough, and while the floor was cracked and uneven, it was made of stone and could support a small fire. Olga didn’t know how long it would take them to find an entrance to the complex, but however long it took, that would be the length of their stay.
Once the camp was ready, Olga and the Cossacks spent maybe three hours digging through the rubble to no great effect before they finally collapsed with exhaustion. Olga decreed they could rest for the night and in the spirit of leadership-by-example, she volunteered to take the middle watch. Dmitri drew the first watch, and nodding wearily leaned against the stonework. “Pleasant dreams, the both of you,” he said as he scratched his beard and peered off into the darkness.
Olga fell asleep instantly. It seemed as though she was woken almost as quickly.
“My watch already?—” she began, but stopped as Dmitri put his finger to his lips.
We are being watched, he mouthed.
Olga slid her Tokarev out of her waistband. From where? she asked with her eyebrows. Dmitri made a quick gesture to indicate nearly the entire plateau. Olga saw that Mikhail was already awake, his own sidearm out and ready. She slid out of her sleeping bag and, making sure to keep the gun out of sight, moved away from the fire and into the shadows of the tower. Mikhail and Dmitri did the same. Her hand gripped tight around the Tokarev’s stock as they waited in silence for the watchers to reveal themselves.