Rise of the Miser: Claus, #5

by Tony Bertauski

  “What are those?”

  “The helpers. They do the decorations and build the buildings and do the repairs and pretty much everything she wants them to do. They were born to serve.” He leaned in and whispered, “I was born to run.”

  “But their feet...”

  “It’ll make sense. Once you see the inside.”

  The train made another loop. The whistle blew and steam rose up.

  “Inside?”

  He shook his head. “Not now.”

  What could possibly be the purpose of those feet? They were abnormal. Freakish. They could barely walk. And if they swam, they’d float like beach balls or sink like cannonballs.

  A song began to buzz.

  It was a distant, nasally tune coming from outside. Their beards were too thick to see their lips moving. The fat-footed helpers were singing something that sounded like “Deck the Halls.”

  They look like elves.

  “How could it be snowing,” she said, “inside that building?”

  “Anything is possible.” He tugged her sleeve and crept through the shadows. The elves were unloading boxes from the miniature locomotive. Cris pulled her by the arm. Just before they reached the next hallway, a sudden gust of wind battered the lobby window with pellets.

  A swarm of gnats hovered outside.

  “Are they looking for us?” she whispered.

  “They know when you’re awake.”

  He was off again. No jumping jacks this time. He was sprinting down the hall and she couldn’t keep up. The doors were lined up on both sides like a dormitory. All of them were closed except for one.

  Cris was inside.

  The room was clean and orderly. If this was where he slept, he was to be complimented on a well-made bed. The sheet was stiff and smooth. The pillow not even dented. With his finger to his lips and a silent shhh, he slid the dresser from the corner and pulled on the strange glove. There was no trapdoor, no treasure chest hidden beneath it, but when he waved his hand, the floor began to shimmer.

  Then evaporated.

  There was now a hole in the corner. Steel rungs were anchored in the earthy wall. It breathed a salty breath that was cool and noisy. He climbed inside. The shag of blond hair popped back up. She’d come this far. Why not climb into the earth with him?

  It was a short climb into a dark, cramped space. The walls were damp and drippy and the tunnel blew her hair off her ears. His glove was iridescent and shimmered off the wet walls. When she looked up, the opening had closed. She assumed it must look like a floor again.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Before me,” his voice echoed, “there were others.”

  He took her hand. His steps were much more confident than hers. He’d done this before, but she couldn’t see the floor and only a few feet ahead of them.

  “Where are we going?”

  He stepped onto something and helped her up. It bobbed under her weight and settled. It felt like a glider, but there wasn’t a handlebar to hold. He turned his back to her and put her hands on his waist. The frayed ends of the headband dangled in her face.

  “You’ll see.”

  The glider lifted up and a white light filled the tunnel. His glove was hot and beaming, specks of light flashing on the rough-hewn walls. The tails of his headband fluttered on her cheeks and her belly filled with butterflies. They were moving.

  She clutched his hips.

  His laughter carried over the wind in her ears and the noisy breath of the tunnel. She buried her forehead between his shoulder blades and felt the glider tip as their weight shifted into a turn.

  With her eyes closed, she couldn’t judge their speed, but it had filled her legs with ice. Her arms ached with tension and her fingers dug into his flesh. She shouted for him to slow down. She wasn’t impressed. Fear had grabbed her by the throat and still he laughed. He leaned into a turn and then continued straight. When it finally slowed, her face was flush and dry.

  Kandi shoved him into the dead-end wall. “That wasn’t safe!”

  She was struggling to catch her breath. The air was dense and her chest was tight. The noise of the tunnel was loud. It sounded like the ocean, but they were surrounded by earthen walls lit up by his weird glove.

  “If you play it safe, what do you get?”

  “Your sixteenth birthday.”

  “Why do you want that?”

  “Because I don’t want to die.”

  “We’re all dying. Nothing you can do about that.”

  She took three steps back down the tunnel, but it was dark without the glove. Still, she could feel her way back. Before that ride, the day had felt like an adventure. Now it was suicidal. She wasn’t signing up for serious injury. Disciplined, maybe. Parental disappointment, perhaps. Not maiming. She could walk to the resort by nightfall and still be in one piece.

  The tunnel suddenly roared.

  It was followed by bright light, but not the shimmering kind. It was warm and natural.

  It was sunlight.

  The dead-end was gone, replaced by blue sky and white birds. Like the hole in the floor, the wall disappeared. Now he stood on the edge, his headband snapping in the wind.

  He held out his hand.

  She shuffled next to him. There was no land beyond the edge, no step to take. It was ocean as far as she could see, a breeze blowing the hair from her face. He nudged her closer and leaned out. The icy fear that had filled her legs now pulled her stomach down to her toes.

  It was a straight drop.

  They were standing in the side of a cliff. Waves battered rocks with showering explosions. Kandi leaned against the wall, moisture seeping through her shirt. This tunnel led to a long and final drop, and he was so close to the edge. His foot was more than halfway over the edge. She clutched the wall behind her.

  He leaned out and looked down. “You’re missing the view.”

  “I can see it from here.”

  He was so close and didn’t care. One slip, a crumble of stone or a change in the wind would take him on a great ride to the bottom. He leaned out farther. Her stomach clutched. She was trapped against the wall, unable to grab him, too afraid to shout. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he stepped away, the dead-end was back.

  She melted on the ground. “Why did you bring me here?”

  He didn’t answer her, just put his arms around her and lifted her up. Her legs had liquefied. She leaned against him to keep from turning into a puddle.

  “I’ll go slow,” he said. “I promise.”

  They returned to the glider. This time, she wrapped her arms around his chest and pressed her cheek against his back. There were no steep turns. The wind hardly blew. When the glider finally stopped, the exit didn’t open in a bedroom with a waiting dresser.

  Kandi climbed out of the ground and into the jungle. She walked on cold feet and numb legs, eager to warm them in the sun. He followed her above ground. The waves were breaking nearby. The beach wasn’t far.

  “Do something for me?” he said. “Play some checkers today.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  He slipped between two palms. Like that, he was gone. No goodbye or Merry Christmas. Kandi wondered if she would wake on the beach. Tunnels and elves and a hand-shaped scar were the ingredients of an afternoon nap, but her arms and legs were freshly scratched and bloody.

  There was something strange across her arm where he’d grabbed her. Earlier, he had cut his thumb. She thought he had accidentally smeared her with blood. It was still sticky, but it wasn’t blood.

  It was gray.

  KANDI

  22

  “Where have you been?” her dad said.

  “I was on the beach,” she said. “I had to go back for my phone.”

  That wasn’t a lie. She had been on the beach and she did go back for her phone. That was why she had missed his texts. The messages started out innocent—You hungry?—and finished a bit more like Why aren’t you answering?

  Ther
e were also ten unanswered calls.

  “Where we going?” She noticed the tool bag. It was the small one.

  “You’re not coming with me, not until I figure out a few things.”

  He touched his face and brushed his temple. Now they were both hiding something. His footsteps were slow and heavy. He hefted the tool bag over his shoulder with a sigh. If the bags under his eyes got any bigger, he could just pack his equipment on his face.

  “We can go home, you know,” she said. “Give back the money and let her find someone else.”

  A few minutes ago, he would have had to drag her off the island. There was too much left to discover. But the weights he’d shouldered since arriving were beginning to crush him.

  He put his arm around her and kissed her forehead. “You getting bored?”

  “No. It’s just, you haven’t slept and—”

  “I just woke up. There are a few things to work out and then it will feel more like Christmas. All right?”

  His smile was weak but valiant. The skin on his neck was loose. They’d only been there a few weeks and he already looked ghostly. His habit of avoiding food when he fell into hyperfocus was legendary. It was little sleep and no eating until things got worked out.

  Or something broke.

  “At least come back for dinner,” she said. “The miser will understand.”

  He frowned. “Miser?”

  “That’s her name.” She looked up, waiting for a sweet, angry voice to chime. A cloud of gnats looked back. They see you when you’re sleeping.

  He kissed her on the forehead and told her not to worry. He’d be back for dinner. She almost believed him. If she was reading his thoughts correctly—and she had a master’s degree in reading her dad’s moods—he was worried about her.

  And something much bigger.

  HE WENT BACK TO THE tower.

  That was what her phone said. She was tempted to call him or text, to ask what he was doing in the tower. The answer would be no, but at least she would know he was there.

  And not here.

  She changed the settings on her phone so it wouldn’t go to sleep and propped it on a pillow. As long as his location stayed in the tower, it was open season with the sat laptop.

  The history hadn’t changed.

  He hadn’t searched a website since she’d last been on. Unless, of course, he was erasing his tracks too, but there would be no reason to do that unless he suspected her of being on it. She would’ve heard about that.

  She opened the blog post about Jerri Mitchell and Avocado, Inc.’s success in biotech advancements.

  It was easy to find more history on Jerri’s rise to biotech fame. She had joined the company at the beginning of its inception, when co-owners Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge started it. They were quickly hailed as innovative and ground-breaking in the field of artificial intelligence and robotic enhancement. After Jacob died and Eb’s disappearance, she had taken over the leadership and steered the company in a new direction.

  The company became the leader in biotechnology.

  Their impact was global. Avocado cured diseases, saved lives and reduced suffering in the world. Jerri was loved by her employees and investors. She was the face of Avocado, but her personal life was the world’s best kept secret. No one knew what she did at home.

  Unlike her sister.

  Heather was Avocado’s lead scientist with several breakthrough discoveries on synthetic stem cells. A list of accomplishments accompanied her résumé—awards, recognitions, standards of excellence, and humanitarian aid.

  But she rarely stayed home.

  She was an adventurer, a self-admitted adrenaline junkie. A risk-taker to the extreme. Athletic, she ran track and field in college while earning a PhD in physics and biomedical research. There were blogs that featured her standing on Mount Everest, ice climbing frozen waterfalls, free climbing the Thimble in South Dakota, and spelunking an underground river in Puerto Princesa.

  She also did water missions in India and aided Doctors without Borders in Syria. She was accompanied by her son on most of the trips. There was a photo of them smiling on a beach.

  Then something happened.

  The woman who never turned down an interview was never seen in public again. No more globetrotting or mission trips to aid the needy. She closed the gates on her ranch. Avocado offered no explanation for her behavior, simply asked that the media respect her privacy.

  Rumors were that she moved her staff out of her lab, but no one would confirm it. Alone, she was said to work for days at a time. No one had access to her research. Not even her sister.

  Arguments ensued. The stock value dropped.

  In a company that worked harmoniously for decades, discord finally appeared, and no one knew why. A shake-up was coming. Heather was still employed but no longer the lead scientist. It wouldn’t be long before her sister would cut her loose.

  But she didn’t have to.

  The explosion happened on Christmas Eve. It was an oddity that defied explanation by experts. It was more of an implosion. Employees described the experience as a subterranean detonation. They thought it was a Southern California earthquake. But pictures didn’t rattle off desks and walls didn’t crack. It was over as soon as it started.

  And it left a deep, deep hole.

  A guard described a bright light inside the windows of Heather’s lab. The walls began to glow and then melted. Steel, concrete, stone and everything inside the building turned to liquid and trickled into the ground. All traces of Heather and her research vanished into a soupy magma that crystalized into a hole with glass walls. The event was still memorialized today.

  A pond called Glassy Bottom.

  The mystery of Heather’s death and what she was doing was unknown to even her sister. Jerri Mitchell rarely spoke about it until the day she died. There was only one instance when she mentioned Heather by name. Heather, who never married, who had a fatherless son by means of artificial insemination, didn’t share Jerri’s last name.

  Heather Miser.

  Kandi noticed a final paragraph that mentioned her son. He was missing, too.

  There was no mention if he had accompanied her to the lab that day, although guards testified she had come to the lab alone. It was dark when the accident happened. What alarmed Kandi wasn’t so much their disappearance as the picture of her son. She grabbed her phone and took a picture of the screen.

  The accident happened twenty years ago.

  SHE WAS LIGHT-HEADED.

  Adrenaline fumes teased her tired muscles. When she approached the end of B wing, the heaviness of reality condensed around her and fear reintroduced itself to her stomach. She eased to a stop outside the festive doors. For the first time, Sandy wasn’t there to stop her.

  And there was no music.

  She stepped off the glider with newborn legs. The silence was a menacing ghost. She got back on the glider and begged her dad to leave. It only took one more look at her phone, the photo of Heather Miser’s son, and she rapped the secret knock.

  The doors swung open.

  More silence oozed out of the room. The tree was freshly decorated with looping strands of popcorn. The presents were tightly wrapped and piled high. The smell of cookies was nowhere to be found. When Sonny didn’t come out to greet her, she tapped on the glass and called his name.

  She hit it harder.

  Her voice echoed down the hall. Something was wrong. She’d felt it the moment she’d snapped the picture on the laptop. It was a photo of Sonny from twenty years ago. He looked exactly like he did today. And now he was gone.

  So was her carving.

  He had done it for her as a gift and placed it on an altar. Her face, expertly carved from a block of wood, had been looking at her the last time she visited. Everything was still in the room except for the carving.

  “He’s gone.”

  Sandy startled her. She slid to the floor with her back to the glass. Her heart hammered her head; her breath roare
d in her ears. The sandman was there.

  His sense of humor was not.

  Kandi held up the phone. Sandy slowly nodded. When she caught her breath, she said slowly and definitively, “Tell me about the others.”

  MISER

  23

  It was midday.

  The sun was high and the humidity stifling. Yet Naren didn’t ride in a cart or hurry his approach. The miser watched him from her third-story window, his steps measured and fully present. He moved naturally, like a branch on a tree, a feather on a wing. No pretension in his movements, no self-congratulatory thoughts. Empty and present, no one would notice him.

  But the miser did.

  She had followed him for quite some time. He was demure when presented with accolades, original in his approach and innovative among his peers. She’d followed his reluctant rise through Silicon Valley and his sudden fall from grace.

  She had her eye on him from day one.

  He was a married man, not one to stray. Emotionally unavailable to his lovely wife, the smart ones always were. But not to his daughter. Fatherhood appealed to him, and his daughter looked up to him. It was easy for them. There was always a favorite parent.

  His wife was jealous.

  But bad things happened to good people, too. God did roll dice, the miser had always decided. If there were winners, there were losers. Naren was both. He was caught in an elaborate plan of the universe, one that demanded great loss and sadness. He didn’t deserve it.

  Many don’t.

  Shortly after he proved a groundbreaking achievement, he hid in Alaska. The miser was smart, but she wasn’t omnipotent. She knew why he was hiding but not what he had planned to do in Alaska. But after so many years, it was clear that he had no plan at all.

  He was simply hiding.

  The miser didn’t expect that. A brilliant mind such as his couldn’t go to waste, despite what he did to himself. Perhaps he believed that he’d chosen to come to the island. The illusion of free will is a convincing one. He’d come because she wanted him to come. And he would stay for the same reason.