Mrs. Claus and the Santaland Slayings

by Liz Ireland

  “All I’m saying is that Christopher deserves to cut loose a little, like a normal kid. And he wants to see you happy again, too.”

  She bit her lip, seeming to consider my words, but then her gaze hardened again. “Don’t worry about Christopher and me. The happiest day of my life will be when he turns twenty-one and Nick has to step aside. If Nick makes it that long.”

  What was she implying? “Is that some sort of threat? Nick is looking forward to that day, too.” We’d talked about moving back to Oregon most of the year once his responsibilities here were over. It was still ten—now more like nine—years away.

  “Nick can’t get away with things forever.”

  Lucia was right. Crazy as a bedbug.

  I left Tiffany in her Ice Capades museum of a room. In the hallway, my phone let out a “Fa-la-la-la-la” jangle in my pocket. I flipped it open and glanced at the screen. The preview of a new text message flashed:

  D. SPROAT: I WON’T FORGET THIS.

  I sank against the shiny gray wall and heaved a breath, letting the warm cello sounds floating down the corridor soothe my taut nerves. Forget what? What was Damaris fuming about now?

  I’d just been thinking about retiring to Oregon as a light at the end of the snow tunnel. A text from Damaris Sproat was a timely reminder that there were crazy people everywhere.

  I was punching in the first number of my PIN to phone my friend Claire when someone called out.

  “Hey there!”

  I looked down the long, dark hall. “Hello?”

  No answer, although I thought I could hear the sounds of someone running. An elf, probably, hurrying about his or her business.

  I glanced back down at my phone screen, which had gone black again. I pressed the start button and began keying in my PIN again.

  “Hey there!”

  The voice, enthusiastic and beckoning, drew me down the hallway, past the room where Christopher’s music lesson was taking place. An irregular corner led to the front section of the castle on the right, and on the left it joined up with the Old Keep.

  “Hey there!”

  Of course the person shouting was in the Old Keep. I took a breath, walked cautiously to the old winding staircase foyer, and peered down.

  Was someone trapped in the cellar? I couldn’t see anyone. “Hello?”

  I cautiously descended a few steps.

  “Hey—!”

  This time the shout was cut off, almost as if the person calling out had had a door slammed on them.

  I hurried down and paused in the dank corridor to look around. I hadn’t forgotten about the wooly rats. I whipped out my cell phone and turned on its flashlight, studying the narrow passage. There was a wine cellar down here, part of Jingles’ bailiwick. All the rooms were locked, as far as I knew. But today one of the oak-and-iron doors stood slightly ajar. I eyed it anxiously.

  “Hello?” I called out again.

  No answer.

  A cold knot formed in my chest, as if some unknown terror lurked on the other side of that door. Don’t be silly. This wasn’t Transylvania; it was Santa’s castle at the North Pole. A few rodents were about all there was to be afraid of.

  I straightened and walked toward the open door. If someone was in distress, I was doubly foolish for being afraid of my shadow. The door opened with a push—albeit also with an ominous creak—and I stepped inside.

  The stone floor was so cold I could feel the chill through the soles of my shoes. My breath puffed in front of me in the illumination of the phone’s light. And then I started to see the eyes.

  Glassy eyes. Dead-looking stares. I turned in a circle; I was surrounded by faces. Bodies too, but it was the faces that leapt out at me—porcelain, plastic, wood, cloth—doll faces. Scary old dolls in tattered dresses with outstretched arms and dead stares. Clown dolls that had probably launched a million nightmares and a couple of Stephen King books. A baby doll with a face painted as a Pierrot. Marionettes with rictus grins hanging from the ceiling. A Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist dummy lay in a box as if it were a coffin.

  I forced myself to breathe. Dolls. Just dolls. Old, creepy dolls, but—

  Click, click, click—

  I barely had time to register the noise behind me, like a winch being turned. I pivoted just in time to see a man leaping out at me, holding a knife.

  “Hey there!”

  Shrieking, I dropped my phone and ran. Without a flashlight, I stumbled into a pile of what looked like knock-off Raggedy Anns with messy yarn hair. Scrambling, I got to my feet and shot toward the sliver of dim light coming through the door. I hurtled up the stairs, not even realizing I was still yelling until I plowed right into someone’s chest.

  It was Nick.

  “Oh, thank goodness!” I threw my arms around him. “Someone tried to kill me.”

  His arms around me loosened and he drew back, studying my face. “Who?”

  “That demon down there!”

  His expression screwed up in disbelief. “Was it a person or an elf?”

  “I don’t know, but he had a knife!”

  Nick let me go, turned, and took a step down. I gripped his shoulder to stop him. “Don’t—he’s deranged. Send Jingles.”

  Nick laughed. “I won’t tell Jingles you volunteered him for demon slaying.”

  “I mean, send anybody else.”

  Christopher appeared at the top of the stairs next to his music tutor, Mr. Merriman. Merriman was a basketball-shaped elf in a dark green velvet suit and black booties with Pilgrim buckles. Thick spectacles perched over beady eyes.

  “What’s going on, Uncle Nick?” Christopher asked.

  “April saw something down here.”

  “Can I go with you?” Christopher hopped down several stairs.

  I stopped him with my outstretched arm. “Don’t. There’s a maniac down there. With a knife or something. He attacked me.”

  “Right here in the castle?” Mr. Merriman exclaimed. “Good heavens!”

  Christopher ducked under my arm and ran down to join Nick. Groaning, I followed at a safe distance. Even more reluctantly, Mr. Merriman fell into line behind me, holding his cello bow in front of him like a sword. Much good it would do him against the knife-wielding fiend.

  When we reached the door, there was more light coming from inside. Nick had found the bare bulb hanging from a ceiling timber and pulled the chain.

  All the dolls were still staring at me. So was my would-be assassin.

  Nick pivoted toward me. “Is this who jumped out at you?”

  My attacker was a jack-in-the-box. A large one, but still . . . a toy. The papier-mâché head was attached to a narrow spring-loaded body. The toy wore a shiny jester’s cap, and in his hand was a stick bearing a miniature copy of his head, also in motley. The knife that had terrified me.

  My fear ebbed, quickly overwhelmed by a tide of embarrassment.

  Christopher howled with laughter. “You were screaming bloody murder because of a jack-in-the-box?”

  “It looked different in the dark,” I said weakly. The light had been bad.

  Even the cowardly cello instructor eyed me with equal parts pity and mirth.

  “Hey, April,” Christopher taunted. “Boo!”

  He tossed an old troll doll at me and I caught it one-handed. Handball had given me good reflexes. If only it could have had lasting beneficial effects on my eyesight, or my courage.

  Nick leveled a shaming stare at his nephew.

  “What is this place?” I asked, before Nick could scold the kid for teasing me, which I richly deserved.

  “It’s rather creepy,” Mr. Merriman said, shoving his glasses up his nose as he inspected the Pierrot baby doll I’d noticed before.

  Super creepy. I was finally beginning to breathe easier and look around the room objectively. There were boxes piled up to the ceiling against one wall and other stacks of various heights elsewhere. Some boxes had been opened, some overturned. I saw a few dolls that looked as if they’d been shredded b
y an animal. Could rats do that?

  “Why are all these dolls down here?” I asked.

  “It’s the doll cellar,” Nick said. “Where the outdated ones are stored.”

  There were an awful lot of them. I wondered if selling them online would be permissible, although the postage cost from the North Pole alone might discourage buyers. Unless Nick could just toss them off his sleigh Christmas night, like Santa does in—

  “Wait a second.” I frowned. “So these toys are misfits?”

  “I guess you could call them that,” Nick said.

  “So why not send them . . .?”

  Nick’s eyes went wide—the facial equivalent of flapping his hands in warning that I was about to say something very stupid.

  Mr. Merriman, unfortunately, picked up on my unspoken blunder. “Good heavens, you aren’t one of those people who think there’s actually an Island of Misfit Toys!”

  “It’s like when I wanted to go to school at Hogwarts.” Christopher bleated out a laugh. “Only I was eight.”

  My face burned. “Is it really so outlandish?”

  The three of them exchanged anxious looks on my behalf, which was rich. I was living in a land so fantastical I couldn’t even tell my best friend about it for fear she’d think I’d gone off my rocker, yet I was the crazy one for believing one little part of the Christmastown myth. Right.

  “Toys are inanimate, April,” Nick said.

  And reindeer are wild animals, and elves are tree-dwelling cookie bakers on TV commercials.

  Mr. Merriman nodded. “Nothing animated here except a jack-in-the-box.”

  As I leaned down to pick up my phone where I’d dropped it, I took another look at the creature who’d scared me so. He was silent now, as if to make my mistake seem all the more foolish. What, or who, had wound him up? “When I was upstairs, I heard the thing calling, ‘Hey there!’ at—well, not at me, obviously. I didn’t know that at the time, though.”

  “That’s what he’s programmed to say,” Nick said, not understanding.

  “But why was he working five minutes ago but not now?”

  “Maybe he has a wonky battery,” Christopher said. “Sometimes I think one of my electronics has run down, but then I turn it on and it’ll work for a minute.”

  Nick nodded, then raised a brow at me. See? his expression seemed to say. Even an eleven-year-old has a more rational brain than yours.

  Would I sound paranoid if I mentioned the footsteps I’d heard from the hallway? Probably—I couldn’t even say for sure where they’d come from. Even without jibbering about mysterious footsteps, I sensed that I’d already sunk a little in the estimation of the three people in the room.

  “I don’t really believe toys are alive,” I insisted.

  Christopher snorted. I so wanted to beg him not to tell Lucia about this. Martin, either. But of course he was going to tell both of them. He’d probably be spreading this tale all over the castle. What kid could resist?

  Something in the corner caught my eye. One of those chalkboards on an easel had been set up—a long time ago, probably. Someone had drawn up two columns: “Naughty” and “Nice.” I squinted, unable to make out everything in the shadowy light.

  Bored now, the others headed for the door.

  “You coming, April?” Nick asked.

  “In a minute,” I said. “I’ll lock up when I’m done.”

  He looked perplexed. “I thought you’d want to get out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Christopher said. “You were screaming so loud we thought somebody was killing you.”

  So did I.

  “I’ll just tidy up a bit,” I said. “Hate to leave a room in disorder.”

  Christopher piped up with the enthusiasm of a kid who’d just figured out a legit way to skip out on schoolwork. “I can help.”

  “You’ve got another few bars of Bach to master, young man,” Mr. Merriman said, pointing toward the door with his cello bow.

  Dragging his feet, Christopher moaned, “Back to Bach.” He laughed at his wordplay and followed his teacher.

  Nick lingered with me. “What’s caught your eye now?”

  I turned on my phone light, aimed it at the blackboard, and then began to pick my way over to it. “Look at this.”

  Naughty: Nice:

  Chris

  Nick Lucia

  Amory

  Martin

  Though all the lettering had faded over time, I could still tell that Lucia’s name, under “Nice,” had been gone over several times to make it stand out.

  “Not hard to guess who was playing Santa that day,” Nick said.

  I imagined a diminutive Lucia stuck inside on a blizzard day, coming down to this room to hide or just play by herself. Instead of reindeer, she would have been able to herd old dolls and boss them to her heart’s content. Her captive audience.

  “What’s all this stuff being saved for?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s just where overflow got shoved at one point, generations ago, and no one bothered to clear it out. Most families have a jumble closet or an overstuffed attic, don’t they?”

  “Not with creepy dolls and demonic jack-in-the-boxes.”

  Nick’s reply was cut off by the ringing of his phone. “Nick Claus,” he answered. As he listened, letting out a series of increasingly distressed grunts, I studied my nemesis, Mr. Jack-in-the-Box, with his frozen smile and his shiny cheeks. He was silent now, and still as stone. What had set him off?

  Or who.

  Nick hung up the phone, a worried look on his face.

  “Trouble?” I asked.

  “Someone at the Workshop warehouse misplaced a carton of Candyland.”

  “An emergency, then.” Five-year-old me would have thought so, at least.

  As we shut the door on the storage room, an ice rat skittered past and dived into a pile of boxes. I swallowed a shriek. Lucia’s poison obviously hadn’t worked.

  I remembered the last time I’d run through this door screaming in terror. Nick had been right at the top of the stairwell.

  “What were you doing here?” I asked as we climbed the stairs. “It seems a strange coincidence that we both happened to be in the Old Keep.”

  He smiled distractedly. “I was looking for you, actually. I thought I had an hour free, and hoped we might be able to have a little time together to grab a coffee or something.”

  “I was hoping that, too,” I said. “I have something I want to talk to you about. It might not be something you want to go into, though.” In fact, I knew it wasn’t. Especially right now. Hard to discuss the details of a fateful snow monster hunt and his brother’s death when his mind was occupied with Candyland.

  “I’ll see you at dinner,” he said.

  We went our separate ways. I was still mulling over all that had happened in the doll cellar. First the jack-in-the-box had frightened me, and I’d run out of the room and up the stairs and collided with Nick. Then Christopher and Mr. Merriman had appeared. They were just down an adjacent hall, so it made sense that they’d heard me yell.

  Another person had been down that same hallway, too, and was bound to have heard me. Tiffany. But she hadn’t come running, or even walking. Strange that she would be so incurious about shrieks of terror happening so close to her own bedroom, and so close to where her son was.

  Unless she’d understood exactly what was going on down there.

  Chapter 16

  The next time I went down into Christmastown for band rehearsal, I felt as if I were the most popular person in Santaland.

  “Hey there!” people called out to me along the street.

  Everyone seemed to be smiling at me. Smiles were contagious, and I grinned and waved back at them all. The good cheer felt like a promising change from the tension I’d sensed lately, especially from elves. Perhaps the march for Giblet didn’t mean all of Christmastown would turn against the Clauses.

  A snowman on the edge of a playground hailed me as I passed and nearly dislocat
ed his midsection slipping down a snowbank. “Hey there.”

  Snowmen didn’t usually waste their energy moving just to greet someone.

  “Hello,” I replied warily, though I tried to shake off the uneasy feeling. Nothing weird about a snowman saying hello.

  The air of Christmastown was crisp and redolent with cinnamon, which wafted out of half the storefronts. Groups of young elves scampered and tumbled everywhere during morning recess from school, and a one-man band stood on the corner playing “Jingle Bells” with all the bells and whistles and drums at his command.

  In the band hall, Smudge grinned at me as we were setting up the percussion. “Hey there!” he said brightly.

  It all made sense then.

  I dropped my triangle. “Very funny.”

  I’d underestimated the gossip grapevine. Word of my making a fool of myself had traveled faster than a reindeer relay, and now I was the grown woman who mistook jack-in-the-boxes for ax murderers and who learned geography from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

  Never mind that there were red-nosed reindeer all around us. Oh no, I was the crazy one.

  “Don’t listen to them.” Juniper sidled by me with her euphonium. “Everybody gets punchy in mid-December.”

  “December’s a sort of catchall excuse around here,” I grumbled.

  “An excuse for what?” Martin asked, slipping between Juniper and me. He grinned. “Hey there.”

  “Not you, too.” I leveled a withering stare on him. “We’re relations. You’re supposed to be on my side.”

  “I am, I am.” He winked at Juniper. “Anyone in the family that makes me seem less like the family dunce has my eternal gratitude.”

  Juniper’s mouth dropped open. “How can you say that!” Before I could thank her for sticking up for me, she finished in a rush, “No one would ever think you were a dunce, Martin.”

  I cleared my throat. Friendship versus Infatuation? Infatuation wins.

  Martin laughed at my expression. “Thanks, Juniper. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in hours.”

  “I meant it. Everyone thinks you’re clever.”

  Martin didn’t seem to know what to do in the face of perfect sincerity and admiration. But I could tell he found it irresistible. Who wouldn’t?