Rise of the Miser: Claus, #5

by Tony Bertauski

  The snow melted.

  Wings unfurled on their backs. They weren’t nearly large enough to give them flight. They were just for show, really. The miser should have dragons leading her sleigh.

  They had the look.

  Long ago, when she first created her poopies, she hadn’t thought of them as leading her sleigh. They were just experiments, really. They kept her company, kept her from exploding from time to time.

  But when Sonny escaped the first time, she made some changes. She altered their metabolism so they could do that. They stalked the island for her, sniffed out the runaways and dragged them back.

  Tonight, though, they’d pull her sleigh.

  “My babies.”

  The helpers threw the reins over their backs and strapped them to the sleigh. The miser pulled on the magic glittery glove and reached into the bag. She imagined an object and pulled it out.

  A red scarf.

  The spirit of Christmas had overcome her. Her son was next to her and Christmas in front of them. She slid the hood off her head. Her hair sprang out like a fiery dandelion. The glow from her face turned the surrounds orange.

  A collective groan passed through the helpers.

  They’d never seen her in the wild before. No one had, really. She didn’t expect a reaction. The squatty doers should’ve cheered, not half-gasped. It hurt her feelings, if she was honest. But tonight was a good night and there were feelings to spare. She’d deal with them later.

  Only the black-clad serious ones remained next to her.

  She threw the scarf around her neck. Santa had his hat, she would have a scarf. Pretty soon, the world would sing songs about the jolly, skinny miser with the trailing scarf.

  She looked at the ceiling.

  “Are you kidding me? How long does it take to open a door?”

  The sky hatch was still moving. They could make the leap, but it would be tight. If she didn’t make it around the world, it would be the helpers’ fault. She was quickly using up her goodwill.

  Everyone could feel it.

  Still, nervousness never left her. She felt it in her belly like popping firecrackers. The longer she waited, the louder they blew. Everyone was watching and waiting, and the sky hatch was still opening.

  “Come on.” She snapped the reins. “You can fit through it, let’s go.”

  Mr. Goody and Ms. Doody looked back. Their nostrils flared and their wings flapped like delicate sails. Their bellies began to swell. Their helium furnaces were cooking. They looked like hippos after Christmas dinner.

  The miser raised her hand. “Merry, merry, everyone!”

  Something flashed.

  She felt it deep in her belly, a lightness in her chest and head. She was excited and dehydrated. The helpers had moved out of the way except for those creepy little serious ones. What would happen if she passed out during the flight? No one would be there, and Sonny didn’t know how to return the sleigh. The poopies were rookies. They couldn’t find their way to the other end of the island.

  The sky hatch locked open. She held the reins tightly. Her inflated, dragon-faced poopies were crouched, and the helpers were holding hands, and Naren and Nicholas stood side by side. Her son was by her side. It was now or never.

  She snapped the reins.

  There was an explosion of snow. The wind stung her eyes. She fell back in the seat and hugged her son. We’re doing it. Finally, we’re doing it.

  If only she had looked down. Christmas might have turned out much different.

  Nicholas’s footprint was missing.

  MISER

  36

  The world was a blur.

  Sky all around, the moon a big disc smiling down on the curved planet.

  Despite the energy bubble shielding the sleigh from frigid temperatures and wind shear, the miser’s eyes were teary. The only things tighter than her knuckles were Sonny’s arms around her waist.

  Her ribs hurt.

  His eyes were squeezed shut, face buried in the thick folds of her special cloak. Her long, red scarf snapped behind them. She wanted to put her arm around him, encourage him to look at the blazing scene around them, but she couldn’t let go of the reins.

  This was a roller coaster without rails.

  What did she expect? Speeding through the troposphere behind two beastly dragons wasn’t exactly a stroll around the island. It was a terrifying thrill ride. She couldn’t bring herself to let out her new and patented Christmas laugh. The miser was afraid to even open her mouth.

  She might scream.

  She had imagined children hearing the hee-hee-hee in their beds, their heads filling with dreams of all the new and shiny things she’d leave under the trees. They would remember who made them happy and what she sounded like. A new Santa was in town, one lighting the sky with a fiery tale. Onlookers might suspect a comet.

  The miser is coming to town.

  She had two lists to fill. One with good names, the other with duds. She didn’t know who lived in what houses. The bag would decide. She just had to visit the tree and reach inside and out would come the appropriate gift. If the kids were really, really bad... well, they would get whatever came out.

  The new Christmas slogan.

  She had endless presents in a bottomless bag and an eternal amount of time squealing from the timesnapper. But did she have the strength and patience? Exhaustion already sat heavily on her shoulders. Sonny squeezed harder.

  She could barely breathe.

  Mr. Goody and Ms. Doody clawed at the clouds. The ocean turned to land where lights blurred like the stars above. Muscles bunched on their shoulders and down their backs; their long tails snapped like kites in a tornado. Their chests heaved with great snorts as they snapped at passing clouds. Long strings of saliva oozed from their black lips and painted the front of the sleigh.

  She had no idea where they were or if they knew what they were doing. The reindeer, she imagined, took Nicholas where he needed to go. These idiots were chasing clouds shaped like rabbits.

  “Land already!”

  The words had barely passed her lips when the descent began. It was more of a free fall. Sonny squeezed a whimper out of her. Her stomach was in her throat as they plunged toward the ground, butts rising off the seats. Ms. Goody’s bow flapped madly on her thick, scaly neck. The miser pulled desperately on the reins. No wonder Nicholas didn’t answer Sonny’s request to ride in the sleigh.

  This wasn’t merry or jolly.

  The last detail the miser saw before closing her eyes was the crest of low-lying mountains. She held the reins as the seat returned to their bottoms and jostled beneath them. The snorts grew louder before their claws thundered on solid ground. Grassy earth scraped beneath the rails. The miser let go and hugged her son.

  They jerked to a stop.

  One heavy thud was followed by another. When she opened her eyes, the beasts lay in a thick patch of grass. Their tongues rolled between their fanged lips, foam gathering in the corners. Beyond, a dark house stood beneath a full moon.

  “We made it.” She shook her son. “We’re here.”

  She had to pry his hands apart. He opened one eye, then the other. The first house they would grace was sort of depressing. Dead strands hung from the roof. Not a single ornament glimmered. The place looked haunted. Or forgotten.

  Definitely naughty list.

  “I don’t want to go,” he muttered.

  She was slightly relieved. After that landing, she wasn’t going to make it around the world. Twenty houses, she thought. We’ll do twenty houses. Maybe they would get used to flying at the speed of light. Or not. Either way, twenty was fair.

  “Okay, all right.” She kissed his forehead. “Stay here.”

  He wasn’t going anywhere. The poopies would protect him. At the very least, they’d drown a stranger in slobber. Twenty houses was already looking like a stretch.

  So did getting home.

  The miser scooped a smaller bag out of the bigger one. Her legs shook like
a bowl of holiday pudding; her hands felt sorry. She braced herself on the sleigh until her knees stiffened. The poopies rolled their eyes.

  “Don’t get up.”

  They didn’t lift their heads. Even if they landed on the roof, she wasn’t going down the chimney. That ridiculous tradition ended tonight. The miser was going through the front door. Or the back door, either way. No sense in getting all sooty when seven billion houses waited.

  This is going to take forever.

  With the little sack in hand, she drudged through the tall grass. By the time she reached the back door, twenty houses had been whittled down to three.

  A silhouette of a sad tree appeared in the pale moonlight.

  She touched the sliding door with a shiver. A withered wreath was on the ground. Something familiar pressed down on her. It felt like stress urging her to turn around, to jump in the sleigh and return to the island. Give the reins back to the fat man. Why did she want this job in the first place? Sonny waved from the sleigh.

  That’s why.

  When she stepped inside, a familiar smell grew heavy inside her chest. It was musty. Ears perked, she took tiny steps like a reluctant criminal. The walls were mostly windows that offered views of the surrounding landscape. From the big room she could see the sleigh. The poopies were nestled in the meadow. Her son sat patiently in the front seat. She waved again, but he didn’t see her.

  The Christmas tree was twigs.

  The ghostly remnants of needles dusted the floor. Ornaments clung to the barren branches. It seemed pointless to reach in the sack. The stupid poopies had brought her to an abandoned house. This wasn’t going to be the first stop of her maiden voyage. She needed something big and extravagant, somewhere with lots of names on the good list. She turned around.

  The sack suddenly grew heavy.

  It swelled with something wide and square, the corners pushing against the velvety fabric. She hesitated. Maybe it was anticipating the next stop. Certainly not this one. She reached inside and felt the dry surface of a box. It wasn’t gift wrapped when she lifted it out. A photo of the contents was pasted on the lid.

  A checkerboard.

  “Mother?”

  The miser’s legs liquefied. She stumbled into a wall while clutching the box. The voice was sudden and shaky. Sonny was still in the sleigh. A light spilled from another room. The miser made to escape.

  A pot clattered. “I’ll get that.”

  It was a different voice this time. The familiarity of it turned her legs into clods of ice. She froze in the central hallway. The floor swayed dreamily.

  A yellow light escaped through the crack of a doorway. Somewhere else, the clatter of kitchenware echoed. She felt it bang against her head like someone was swinging pans inside her brain.

  “You’re going to work?” someone said from the kitchen. “Now?”

  The miser began to shiver. The person was elderly, but her voice was firm and scolding.

  “You haven’t slept,” she continued. “And it’s Christmas.”

  A refrigerator began chewing ice. Cubes spilled into a cup as a shadow passed through the beam of light. The miser dropped the box. Plastic checkers bounced at her feet. Farther down the hallway, next to the front door, flickering light was tossed from an open door.

  The miser waited to be caught.

  Another person came from the kitchen. This one shuffled past the back door. Silvery hair was tied on top of her head. Her frayed slippers scratched the floor.

  “Gail.”

  The name leaped from the miser’s lips as easily as she might remember what day it was. Gail was a live-in caretaker. With a cup in one hand, she pushed a bedroom door open. Once webby and dusted, the hallway was now awash in warm light. The floor was shined and the furniture freshly decorated with garland and flickering candles.

  The house was alive.

  “Shh-shh,” Gail said. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  The bedroom door was nearly closed again. Through the sliver of light, the miser saw the old woman pass the cup toward a bed. Machines reported technical beeps. The sounds pricked her awareness like scary stories she wished to forget. When they stopped, she turned to flee.

  It was the next voice that stopped her.

  “It’s late, I know. I’m sorry.”

  She felt the words in her throat. It was strange, as if someone else’s breath was in her chest, swelling and singing through her. The sound was foreign and familiar at the same time. It came from the room near the front door.

  “It’s got to be tonight. I know, I know, but there’s no time. It has to be now.”

  The miser moved past the bedroom and hugged the shadows. The person was hunched over a desk. Someone was staring at her from a computer.

  “I’ll initiate the final sequence... I know, I know. You understand, there’s no time. There’s no point in waiting, it’ll be too late.”

  The person on the computer answered.

  “You’ve done this already,” she answered, “but I don’t have the same luxury as you; I’ve destroyed everything you’ve done for me. No one will ever know your secret.”

  “Mother?” the sickly voice called.

  She looked out from the office. Her face was hidden in shadows, but the person on the computer was fully on display. His hair was black, his complexion dark. His brown eyes were sunken beneath thick eyebrows.

  “Naren?” the miser whispered.

  The woman slammed the laptop closed and rushed from the office with a briefcase over her shoulder. The miser pushed against the wall and held her breath. The woman’s red hair was short. Her eyes were heavy. The miser’s legs disappeared this time. She slid to the floor. Her brain was burning.

  The walls tilting.

  The woman went to the bedroom. The door remained open this time as she went to an elevated bed. Gail fiddled with controls and the bed began to rise. A frail little boy turned his head. She pushed damp hair from his forehead and kissed him.

  The miser felt the heat on her lips.

  He was burning with fever. The sheets were damp, his shirt heavy with perspiration. The woman pressed her forehead against his. A song rose in her throat, one without words. It hummed in the miser’s head. She felt the tug of the boy’s hand on the woman’s sleeve, his grasp falling away as he closed his eyes.

  “I’ll be back for you.”

  Full-scale panic suddenly attacked the miser. The entire house rotated. Up was down and sideways was a circle. The miser watched the surreal scene unfold from the floor that was now the ceiling, watched the woman hurry to the front door and gently close it.

  Something was coming for the miser.

  She recognized the woman. She knew who the boy in the bed was, why she knew Gail’s name.

  Her memories finally caught her.

  IT WASN’T FAIR.

  He was just a child. She was an expert in biotechnology—a scientist who could build a new heart or repair a broken bone—yet there was nothing she could do for him. Her son needed more than the fabricated organs.

  She needed help.

  What she wanted to do was unprecedented and ill-advised. The risks too great. But she knew one person who would understand, someone she had met at a conference who struggled with the same ethical questions.

  Naren was reluctant.

  But she was persistent. Eventually, they shared their deepest secrets. He never admitted to his experimentation, but she knew what he’d done and he stopped denying it. That was when he began to help. The Christmas she left in the middle of the night with the end bearing down, she had promised to return. She never came back.

  But someone did.

  That night she went to the lab. It was her wing at Avocado, Inc. Only one person was in the facility that late. The guard didn’t question her when she passed through the front gate. He was accustomed to her hours. Even on Christmas.

  She remembered shaking. That wasn’t something she normally did. Pressure didn’t rattle her, but desperation had a fi
rm grip. It swung her around like a rag doll. She felt it pulsing in her forehead as she woke the lab up. Her peers didn’t know what she was doing with her research.

  Not even her sister.

  They didn’t know she’d experimented on her own body in preparation for this night. She had replaced so many of her own organs with the synthetic versions that she had become more artificial than organic. Eventually, she replaced them all. She’d started the conversion with synthetic flesh.

  Naren’s claim to fame.

  He had sabotaged his discovery, afraid the military would capitalize on his indestructible synthetic skin cells. But he had given her the secret. She would need it for this to work and had experimented on herself before moving forward with her work.

  A sheet was draped over a table.

  A body lay beneath it, his arms tucked at his sides. The lamps warmed his complexion. She was tempted to poke it, as if he were just sleeping. This was the night she would start the final sequence. Sonny needed another body, one that wasn’t sick.

  This one was brand new.

  The lab grew warmer. She stared down at the boy’s face, pushing the blond hair from his forehead. He was still room temperature. If he opened his eyes, they would be blue and empty. Now was the time to put life behind them.

  Maybe she knew, somewhere deep down, what was about to happen. Why didn’t she bring Sonny with her that night? If she was going to transfer him into this body, why leave him sleeping at home and promise to come back for him?

  This body was new and perfect and would never die. I’ll make you a body that doesn’t hurt, one that doesn’t get sick or tired. A body for my sweet boy.

  She sat beneath the lamps until the body warmed up. She left his side to monitor the metrics. It would take several hours to wake up the dormant cells. Until now, the body had been a rubber doll. While it baked, she would go home to get her son. She would bring him back and lay him on the table next to it. He would wake up on Christmas morning with something Santa Claus couldn’t bring him.