Claus: The Trilogy

by Tony Bertauski

  A plane slowly crosses the blue sky.

  Mr. Frost feels the sun rise above the trees. Light spreads across his shoulders. He reaches for the back of his neck, his fingers crawling through the short mop of coarse hair. No more itching.

  No Freeda. No Janack. No root.

  The end.

  His memories are spotty. Mr. Frost had fed them to Max, where they were stored in a root imbedded between the fox’s shoulder blades.

  “May I ask where the blue elven’s body is?” Templeton asks.

  “Janack?”

  “Do you know of another blue elven?”

  Mr. Frost smiles. “It’s still in the wishing room, beneath the leaves.”

  “You expended all that energy to hide the body?”

  “In case Sura went inside the wishing room; I didn’t want her to see it. She’s been through enough.”

  They watch the celebration work its way toward them. Mr. Frost is no longer hunched over. The light is working wonders.

  “What do you think happened?” Templeton asks.

  “You mean how did he die?”

  “I suppose.”

  Mr. Frost scratches his chin. “The wishing room provided Jack his deepest desire, but not so much what he wanted. It was what he needed. He reconnected with his mother, like he did the last time. I suspect that he transformed in that moment. Maybe he even realized he was stuck in the wishing room instead of actually resting in his mother’s arms.”

  “Then why didn’t he leave?”

  “He didn’t want to, Templeton. He preferred to die in the dream.”

  “Do you think he suffered in the end?” Templeton asks.

  “I hope not.”

  “Well, let’s not be rash. Perhaps he deserved a little suffering. After all…” Templeton doesn’t finish the obvious thought. “Speaking of the blue elven, shall we go back to the wishing room and awaken the last body?”

  “Mmm… perhaps we can enjoy this moment a while longer without it.”

  Mr. Frost takes Templeton’s arm, urging him forward. “He has much to atone for, Templeton. Let’s not waste time.”

  They start the slow journey back to the wishing room. Mr. Frost asks Templeton to first pass through the center. They circle around the garden to sit on the bench. The statue is still in shambles. Perhaps he’ll replace it with something else.

  “You were a great elven.” Templeton sits next to him. “I believe you will be an even better man.”

  “Let’s hope so, Templeton.”

  They rest a bit longer before returning to the wishing room.

  To awaken the last human body.

  J A C K

  South Carolina

  2034

  The tickets are green and scarlet.

  They’re hard to come by at a reasonable price, but the chance to see Frost Plantation only comes on Christmas Eve. Shelly tucks the ticket into her back pocket. She’ll keep it with the tickets from the last two events. Not many people can say they’ve been there three times.

  Shelly knows people in high places.

  The event started at six o’clock. It’s almost midnight. Mr. Frost is finishing his annual telling of The Tale of Frost, a story that’s become somewhat famous. “A Yarn for the Modern Day” Time Magazine called it. The story’s not true, of course, but watching Mr. Frost tell it makes you wonder.

  The great room has a domed ceiling that’s three stories high, with long windows radiating from the center like spokes, the stars glittering inside the elongated panes, the moon fully lit in the northern glass. A Christmas tree—one worthy of Times Square—is near the north wall, with gifts wrapped in shiny, red paper and fat, green bows.

  May and Jonah sit to the left of the tree, hands folded on their laps. Templeton stands on the right, stiff as plaster, with their white dog, Max, at his side.

  Mr. Frost performs in front of the tree.

  Children—sitting on cushions that soften the marble floor—enclose the short, skinny man as he waves his arms and raises his voice for an hour, eliciting belly-clutching laughter and, soon, tissue-worthy tears.

  At first, the children are transfixed by the gifts, wondering which one has their name on it. Mr. Frost soon makes them forget about the presents.

  Shelly started volunteering at the horse therapy program when she started college. After four years of assisting Sura, they expanded its reach across the state of South Carolina. The Frost Plantation’s Telling of the Tale Extravaganza tickets have always been distributed to charities, such as the horse therapy program. Shelly buys hers, of course. It’s a privilege.

  She leans on the doorway opposite the Christmas tree. She can’t see much, but it doesn’t matter, she just wants to hear it. Besides, the people in front of her are seeing it for the first time. It’s a performance that’s never been recorded and not because people haven’t tried. All attempts come back blank. Rumor has it that there’s a reward to the first hacker who can do it and, so far, it remains unclaimed.

  The kids are slack-mouthed. Mr. Frost is telling the part where Joe walks out of the wishing room. Shelly’s favorite part.

  “Of course, it’s all made up,” Sura once told her. “My dad’s been telling the Tale since we were little. He just added the part about Joe when we got married. Something for the grandkids.”

  Sura and Joe are sitting to the right of Templeton, listening like the story is new to them, too. Hallie, blonde with blue eyes, sits on Joe’s lap, and Sunni, hair as red as a stop sign, sits on Sura’s crossed legs. Riley, their third child, must be with her friends. If the tale was true and Joe and Sura really are clones, well, then their kids sure aren’t.

  “Hey.”

  Shelly jumps at the sound of her husband’s voice. “Where have you been?”

  “Shhh.” His face is scratched. “I got to show you something.”

  “No. This is the best part.”

  “You got to see this.”

  Her eyes become circles. Henry knows what that face means, but it only makes him smile.

  “Why didn’t Santa save you?” a kid asks Mr. Frost.

  The crowd erupts with laughter. Mr. Frost responds, “Why, he was busy, of course. It was Christmas!”

  Another burst of laughter.

  “You won’t regret this,” Henry says. “I swear.”

  “It’s almost over, just wait.”

  “It just can’t wait,” he says too loudly, on purpose. “Now or never.”

  He never got like this.

  Shelly looks up, thinking. He knows this look, too—that she’ll give in because she doesn’t want to have a whispering argument that’s not too whispery.

  “This better be good.”

  He pulls her out of the crowd that happily fills her vacancy. The hall is wide and tall, archways rising up to the ceiling. Mr. Frost’s voice follows them down the hardwood.

  An elaborate chandelier hangs above the massive doors strewn with garland and origami ornaments folded by children. There’s a room to the right where a fire crackles in a wide fireplace, and a large painting of the family hangs above the hearth. Shelly knows almost all of them.

  Dirt falls off Henry’s shoes. It’s also smudged on his knees. He pulls open the front door and rushes her down the steps.

  “We got to hurry.” He walks at a pace just short of running.

  “Tell me,” she whines.

  “Shhh.”

  They cross the paved driveway, where a few people mill about, waiting for story time to end so they can get good seats on the night’s final trolley tour around the plantation. The miniature train goes through the trees and near the old rice fields, around the live oak grove and past the guest houses. Jonah, the conductor, retells the story, pointing out where Sura woke up with the helpers on Christmas morning. Occasionally, guests see flashes of bright hats in the trees like little helpers are following.

  The lake—where the story’s first plantation house was built and, as the tale goes, disappeared—is glassy. The new
house is on the northern end and facing south just in front of the live oak grove, the mossy branches reaching over it.

  “All right.” Henry slows down when every living soul is far behind them. “I started poking around because I’ve heard the story, like, a hundred times.”

  “You’ve heard it three times.”

  “Feels like a hundred. Anyway, I thought I’d look around where the original house was supposed to be.”

  “The story’s made up, Henry.”

  He makes a face. “Yeah, I know. Converting matter to energy could evaporate the solar system. Even a high school physics teacher knows that, duh.”

  She smiles.

  “I just thought it’d be more fun to pretend like it was real. And guess what?”

  “You found a helper.”

  “Even better.”

  They reach the end of the lake, where an overgrown hedge reaches across a leafy archway. Henry quickly pulls her through the entrance.

  The boxwoods are still neatly trimmed and the camellias are loaded with white blooms. “Seafoam,” Sura once told her. A fountain trickles in the center where the tarnished form of a mother, her long braid down her back, comforts her son. Both are as round as cherubs. That’s where Jack lay in his mother’s arms, thinking he was in the garden when he was still inside the wishing room, where his body painlessly died in the South Carolina “heat.”

  Water dances over them.

  “The garden,” Shelly says. “This isn’t a secret.”

  “I started thinking.” Henry pulls her to the left, following the path. “The story talks about the wishing room on the north end of the garden, but there’s no entrance.”

  “Because it’s made up.”

  They walk halfway down the north side.

  “Or they let it grow closed,” he says.

  The hedge is solid. There’s no hint of an opening, just a wall of thorny firethorn. Henry gets on his knees.

  “I’m not going in there,” Shelly says.

  He pushes through the bushes, disappearing like a rabbit. He holds open a hole from the inside. And despite what she just said, her body is tingling. Her heart, racing. What if…

  No one is in the garden, no one will see. She’ll make it quick. She scurries through the hedge. It’s thicker than she thought and, for a moment, considers backing out.

  She emerges in a dark tunnel. The branches arch overhead and twigs crisscross along the walls, like someone keeps it from collapsing.

  “Oh my God,” she utters, slack-mouthed like the children.

  Henry uses his phone as a light and takes her hand, guiding her to the dead end. “I thought—”

  “It’s right there.” Shelly points.

  Even in the darkened passageway, she sees his expression of mock surprise. His hand tightens.

  “I listen to the story,” she says. “I know how it goes.”

  Henry sinks his arms into the dense growth and, rather easily, parts them like curtains.

  And there it is.

  The wishing room.

  A small, circular opening is carved in the overgrown forest. The walls are just as thick as the tunnel, the ceiling much higher but just as dense. The ground is soft with leaves that crunch. Shelly drags her hand along the outside, imagining what it would be like if it worked. Would she be on the beach with her grandmother before she died? Or hiking with the family on Grandfather Mountain? Would the wishing room know her innermost desires, and would the North Star glitter white, red, and green?

  “Wow,” is all she can say.

  “Yeah,” Henry says in a told-you-so kind of way. “But that’s not the best part. I figured maybe they just keep it like this for idiots like me. Then I found this.”

  He pulls wisteria vines—thick as mooring line—to the side. He aims the phone at the curved surfaces hidden beneath. Shelly kneels down, touching them to make sure they’re real.

  Glass tanks.

  The surfaces are tinted green with moss and algae, rough with grime. It’s how the tale ends. Joe is reborn in one of the tanks Mr. Frost stashed in the wishing room because that’s the only place Freeda couldn’t see. He doesn’t remember much when he comes out, but he remembers Sura. True love never forgets.

  The other tank is where Mr. Frost was incubated. A human body. Max is an Arctic fox in the tale. Mr. Frost used the special food to transfer his memories into his beloved pet, where they were stored in a special root imbedded just beneath the Arctic fox’s skin. When the time came, Max carried them to the wishing room, where they were uploaded to a glass tank, where they were passed into a human body still green with hair.

  “You think these are from the tale?” she asks.

  “Heck yeah, they are. And maybe they just put them here, but it’s a trip. Right?”

  “Anything in them?”

  Henry pries at a crease and the front of one opens, the inside filled with spiderwebs. “Nothing but arachnid condos.”

  “What’s that?”

  Henry pulls at the vines to her left. There’s another tank tucked a little farther back, this one just as filthy as the others. The door is wide open.

  “A third one,” he says.

  “There’s not a third one in the tale.”

  Maybe Henry’s right; they just put this stuff back there to give the tale life when people go snooping. What am I thinking? The tale isn’t true. There’s no such thing as elven, Jack Frost, and incubators. Of course this is a goof.

  “Look.” Henry plants his foot for leverage and pulls the vines back even further. “Is that another one?”

  Shelly takes his phone and crawls deeper. A fourth tank is back there. Unlike the others, the door is sealed shut. She stands on her knees, the branches snagging her shirt. The surface is covered with algae and grime, but if she holds the light close enough, she can see the fauna inside like an upright terrarium.

  Shelly gets to her feet and presses the phone against the rounded top. She can see a form inside. It has the vague shape of shoulders and a round head with wild strands of grassy foliage spraying around it. Shelly often wondered why the tale only had two tanks: one for Mr. Frost and the other for Joe.

  “You don’t think that’s…” she says.

  “What?” Henry says.

  What if Sura died? Wouldn’t he have prepared for that?

  A train whistles.

  Shelly jumps out with a short scream. Her heart is about to pound through her sternum. They laugh childishly. Henry helps her up.

  “What was it?” he asks.

  “Just another tank, but it’s closed.”

  “Three open and one closed. What do you think the closed one was for?”

  She shakes her head. If she says it out loud, it’ll sound stupid. If she says it, it’ll dispel the magic bubbling in her stomach.

  “Two open for Mr. Frost and Joe, but what about the other open one?” Henry says.

  “Yeah,” she says. “No one ever said anything about that, either. Everyone was safe.”

  “I know what it is.” Henry snaps his fingers and points at Shelly’s expectant expression. “It’s a tall tale.”

  She smacks his arm. It’s more fun if they pretend it’s real.

  They sneak back out as quickly as they broke in. Henry exits first. He holds the hedge open. Shelly rushes through on her hands and knees, scratches already burning.

  There are voices just outside the garden. Just in time.

  “Come on,” Henry says. “We can catch the trolley if we hurry.”

  They rush out the exit, still laughing like children, when they run into a man and child, frightening them as much as they scare themselves. The man falls to one knee, but the little girl hangs onto his hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” Henry exclaims, helping him up. “We were trying to catch the trolley.”

  “Quite all right.” The man is short and slight, couldn’t weigh more than a ten-year-old. The moon shines off his bald head. He brushes himself off, smiling.

  “You a
ll right?” Shelly asks the girl, and then recognizes her. “Are you Riley?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I know Sura. She’s your mother, right? I’m Miss Shelly.”

  She clings to the man’s arm and doesn’t care about her mom’s friend.

  The whistle blows again.

  “You better hurry,” the little man says.

  “I’m so sorry.” Henry pulls Shelly away. “Merry Christmas!”

  The little man nods. “Merry Christmas.”

  Shelly waves. The little girl doesn’t wave back, but Shelly hears her say something just before they’re out of range. She hears something that, later that night when she’s lying in bed, will give her cause to smack Henry on the arm and tell him that she knows who was in the third tank.

  The little girl says, “Who was that, Uncle Janack?”

  FLURY

  Journey of a Snowman

  The Arctic

  1881

  Malcolm Toye fell.

  He had seen nothing but ice for days, wandering the Arctic in search of the men that brought him this far north. Their ship crushed by the ice, they had struck out on foot, dragging boats over frozen snow and through open leads of water until landing upon Bennett Island. Ravaged by frostbite and scurvy, no one should’ve lived. But they continued south, and that’s when Malcolm had become separated.

  With rifle in hand, he had given chase to what he thought was a wounded seal, but had slipped into the icy water. Soaked and numb, he returned to camp to find that the men had already moved on. Shortly after, snow began to fall, and he was eternally alone.

  And now he had fallen for the last time.

  He couldn’t feel his legs. He was certain that if a miracle occurred and the men found him, he would lose his feet to frostbite. At the very least, his toes.

  It was a foolish journey, but men like Malcom Toye had always pursued such folly. The North Pole called to him, dared him to conquer it. He was eager to join the expedition, see parts of the world very few had witnessed with their own eyes. Only the dubious tales of explorers existed about the endless sheet of ice that topped the world. He wanted to be one of the first men to ever see it.