Claus: The Trilogy

by Tony Bertauski

  But then he hears it. The door closes.

  Oliver waits.

  He begins shivering again, thinking of the warmth of the garage. If it doesn’t open, if he’s locked out, how long will he be stuck outside? And what if the back door is locked? He hadn’t thought of that. He cups the orb to his face, but the heat doesn’t transfer like a hot coal.

  Oliver comes out of hiding.

  Without hesitating, he turns the doorknob, and like all those other times, it opens. He’s greeted with warm, dry air.

  He opens his coat and paces around, letting the chills settle. The triangular blocks are wedged against the car’s wheels. The engine is quiet, not ticking as if it were cooling from a long drive. Or even a short one. Oliver touches the driver door, realizing he’s in view of the house. If Grandmother were to look out the kitchen window, she’d see him opening the door.

  The leather is warm.

  There’s nothing special about the dashboard. The speedometer and radio and gears are exactly where they should be. He considers pushing buttons. Maybe the radio raises a secret door. But the chocks against the wheels won’t let it roll anywhere, and there’s no key in the ignition.

  The ignition!

  That’s the weird thing, the one weird thing about the car. It’s not a slot for a standard key but a square. Like something for a small cube.

  The corner of the footlocker is visible. He crawls under the workbench with his phone lit up, pulling the old coat out and pushing items aside. He finds the key in the corner and holds it up. The cube casts a blue glow like distilled moonlight.

  With the orb in one hand and the key in the other, a current flows through his arms like positive and negative posts of a battery. Somewhere in the middle, right around his heart, the current chases the chill out of his chest.

  Oliver climbs back into the driver’s seat. The cube is no longer glowing but rather shining. The light streams between his fingers. And the ignition is glowing, too. The key gravitates toward it, pulling harder the closer it gets. It nearly slips from his fingers. The cube falls into the square hole.

  Click.

  He’s thrown into the steering wheel as the car tips forward. For a moment, it felt like it was falling. A blinding light sears his vision, explodes inside his head. His ears ring.

  The car begins rolling.

  He can’t see where he’s going—he can’t see anything—but the car is picking up speed. He’s soaring downhill. Hair whipping across his forehead, Oliver latches onto the steering wheel as his stomach rises into his throat.

  The car levels out. Images form in his visual whiteout.

  A tunnel.

  The walls are solid and gray—concrete, maybe—and curved like it was bored from the earth. Bands of light encircle the tunnel at intervals like he’s flying down a particle collider. His hair snaps around his ears, and tears stream down his cheeks, but the engine isn’t running, and none of the needles on the dashboard have moved. Oliver still has both hands on the steering wheel.

  He’s dropped the orb.

  The tunnel begins to cool about the same time the car slows. The air feels heavy. Ahead is a steel wall. Oliver throws both feet on the brakes, but the car stops on its own. Oliver strains to see the outline of a door directly ahead. He rubs his eyes, head still thumping.

  He clears his throat. The sound echoes behind him where alternating bands of light and dark vanish into the distance. How far did I go?

  He went straight for quite some time, but how far and how deep? Time gets distorted when you have a death grip on a steering wheel. But there’s a bigger question.

  How am I going to get back?

  This could be a one-way ride. There’s not enough room to turn the car around. Besides, he didn’t drive it. The thing moved on its own and stopped, too.

  Something thuds on the floor mat. The orb rolls against his boot. He dropped it when the rollercoaster began. He sweeps it up and gets out. The sound of the door closing echoes deeper in the tunnel.

  The dead-end wall is dull gray, the surface smooth and hard. At one time it might have been polished. The door is nothing more than an arching seam. What he thought was a doorknob is a spherical indention. Nothing to grab or turn. He reaches for it, his fingers brushing the inner surface.

  “Ow!” He jerks his hand back, fingertips tingling.

  It didn’t exactly shock him, but there was some sort of charge inside it. At the same time, the orb begins vibrating. The indention in the door isn’t smooth like he thought. There are imbedded lines that rotate and merge and divide into various designs.

  Oliver holds the orb next to it.

  Like the ignition pulled the blue-cubed key when it neared, the hemispherical indention grabs the orb and sucks it snugly inside, turning and shifting.

  Pop.

  The seal around the door jolts. The orb spits into his hand. Intense light seeps out. Oliver covers his eyes and steps back. The door swings away from him, opening into a larger room. Light bursts down the tunnel, and Oliver turns away to keep his retinas from frying.

  He feels the light in his bones.

  It’s a higher form of tingling, similar to the orb.

  He should be running away, screaming for help or, at the very least, struggling to breathe. But his heart isn’t even thumping. He feels stronger. No, not stronger. There’s an absence of quivering in his belly. He doesn’t feel the weight on his chest, the lump in his throat, the weakness in his spine. He feels so present.

  No fear.

  That’s what it is. He’s not scared.

  The light’s intensity seems to diminish, or maybe he’s adjusted. Oliver slowly turns toward the doorway. The room is a large dome, another hemispherical shape with equally burnished surfaces. He’s seen this before. It was on one of the plans he pulled out of the filing cabinet in the garage.

  Unlike the outer wall facing the car, these walls inside the dome are covered with wires and pipes snaking around like circuitry on a motherboard, sinking into random ports, each pulsing in synchronized rhythm. Somewhere beyond the wall, above the dome, water trickles.

  Not circuits. Arteries.

  They all reach the apex of the dome some twenty feet above him where a large metal post is attached.

  The post, anchored into the shiny floor, gleams like newly forged steel, reflecting distorted images of the circuits and objects around the perimeter. There’s a thin rod in front of the post, about the diameter of bamboo and pointed. Suspended inches above the needle-tip is a metallic sphere about the size of an overinflated basketball. The complex design of etched lines glow on its perimeter as it hovers in midair—a supersized version of the orb humming in his hand.

  The elven sphere.

  Each step closer to the sphere makes his bones sing louder. He stops a few feet away when his teeth vibrate; he tastes metal. He holds up the wooden orb, comparing the etchings. The metal sphere is different than the one in his hand. Is this Flury, or another abominable? Why does Grandmother come here every night?

  If this is where she comes.

  It is. This is it. He feels it.

  His bones feel like forged iron, his skin like impenetrable fabric, his muscles like cords of steel. The weird feeling that hovers over him, the one from the threat of blood sugar imbalance, feels nonexistent. This is where she comes to stay young. She bathes in this room like a fountain of youth.

  This is what makes her about one hundred and fifty years old.

  He tries to get closer, reaching for the floating sphere, but a force repels him. The energy is too intense, pulsing inside the bones in his hand. Would it dissolve him if he grabbed it? Maybe that’s what the metal glove is for.

  He can’t touch it. That’s what one of the journals said, humans can’t touch a sphere or it will…what? Suck their skin dry? Erase them?

  He can’t remember.

  The rest of the room is a mad scientist’s lab: workbenches cluttered with scattered parts and stacks of tools and crackling lights. The
re doesn’t seem to be a light source, as if the walls are glowing. Water drips.

  A small puddle is near his boot. He follows it to a bundle of conduit—veins or arteries or whatever they are—snaking across the dome’s ceiling.

  Pockets are set in the wall above the workbenches. Inside each one is a sphere similar to the super sphere, smaller in size and dull. While there are etchings, each one unique, they lack the glimmer and pulsing light. Oliver doesn’t feel any life when he raises his hand over one of them, pulling it out of its display.

  It’s cold and heavy.

  There are dozens of them, all lifeless metal spheres of various sizes. None are wood. Some of the pockets, however, are empty. He puts the cold, dead sphere back and trips over a plastic bucket filled with dented, scratched orbs. These are smaller, about the size of the wooden orb, but all metal. He finds an empty bucket next to it and, on a whim, slides it over the puddle.

  The next drip thuds the bottom.

  For the first time since arriving, his heart jumps with fear. The door is closed and sealed. But it’s not the same door he entered. The dome is disorienting. The super sphere is on the other side of the post. The entrance is across from it, the door still open. The car is waiting.

  This is another door. And another lock.

  He didn’t bring his phone. It’s impossible to know the time, but he left the house about midnight. It’s already late.

  The orb fits snugly in the lock.

  The door pops open, releasing a gush of cool air. Inside, a steel spiral staircase twirls up into the darkness, the quality dull like the walls of the dome. Oliver looks up, then steps back. Stepping into a lighted dome is one thing, climbing into the unknown is another.

  Every instinct tells him to return to the car. Maybe if he puts it in reverse or inserts the key again, it’ll take him back. He would’ve done just that—in fact, he might’ve run through the tunnel had the orb not hummed in his fist, sending a jolt through his chest. Warmth spills through him, relieving him of tension.

  His boot lands on the first step and sends a clang into the darkness.

  The railing quivers in his hand.

  One step at a time, he pulls himself into the unknown, clenching the metal rail with one hand, the orb with the other.

  The heavy, cool air becomes colder. The light is below him, but he can see his breath. There’s a dim light above. He continues his ascent. To the light, he thinks. Just to the light.

  But the light, like the lab, doesn’t emit from a source but rather glows from the walls. He reaches up and scratches the metal surface. Below, the light reflects off the railing and bottom steps. He starts to descend—he’d kept his promise, after all—when he notices the steps above him have ended.

  The top.

  There’s nothing there.

  He feels around for a depression or knob, but the staircase appears to end at nothing. Perhaps, he thinks, this was a future project. His sweeping hand drags over a series of bumps.

  The silence is broken.

  The wall moves, and damp, earthy scents rustle his hair. Outside, the tunnel is dark. There’s a dim opening several yards ahead. He takes a tentative step. Outside, the walls are no longer metal but crumble like clay. Roots dangle from the ceiling.

  Foliage thrashes ahead.

  Oliver takes a few more steps, waits and listens. He can see the trees beyond the opening and hear rushing water. There’s something familiar about the smells and sounds, but it’s not until he passes the L-shaped branch extending from the wall that he recognizes it.

  The hobbit house.

  The car went across the field. Of course it did. He didn’t feel any turns, and it’s pointed directly north. Once he put the key in, it dropped through a tunnel and raced underground. But why so far?

  Debris showers the opening.

  A cascade of leaves and snow whump down.

  Oliver jumps back.

  Among the twigs and sooty debris, something spherical catches the moonlight. It’s a sphere!

  He steps closer, but the pile begins to rise. Two legs raise the mass of dirty snow. Oliver backs up a step, then two. One of the legs—leaves falling from it—plods forward. The body undulates; broken branches, rocks and rotten wood ooze to the surface.

  Arms extend.

  Oliver turns for the staircase. He hears the sticks scratch the wall and leaps three steps at a time, spinning around the center pole as he descends. Above him, the door slams. Thuds echo down the spiral staircase chamber.

  The thing hammers the other side.

  Oliver jumps off the bottom step and collapses. The pounding fades. He curls against the wall, the orb cupped against his pounding chest.

  The car is waiting.

  The sphere hovering above the pointed rod vibrates through him but offers no confidence as he passes. He’s prepared to run down the tunnel if that’s what it takes. It would only take ten or twenty minutes.

  He’d run an hour if he had to.

  He slips into the driver’s seat and turns the key. The car begins to move in reverse. Oliver watches the door close as it shrinks into the distance. It only takes minutes before he feels the ramp leading up to the garage. The floor lifts into place and the chock blocks slide under the wheels.

  Oliver sits quite still, watching the house through the window, waiting for the kitchen light to turn on or the back door to slam.

  His arms and legs are numb.

  His head, spinning.

  Now it makes sense why the concrete on that side of the garage is a slightly different color, why there are never any tracks outside the garage.

  The back door to the house is unlocked.

  Oliver turns the knob very slowly, knowing every click will echo. He closes it even slower. Tossing his boots and coat in the mudroom, he stops in the kitchen. If he hadn’t stopped in the kitchen or dropped his things in the mudroom, maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe nothing bad would’ve happened and Christmas, a month away, would’ve passed without incident and no one would get hurt and everyone would be happy.

  But standing at the open refrigerator with a carton of orange juice in his hand, he hears someone behind him. It’s not the footsteps that give the person away. In fact, he didn’t really hear anything.

  He felt it.

  “What are you doing?”

  A month ago, if Grandmother had done exactly that, sneaking up behind him, the orange juice would’ve ended up on the ceiling. Instead, he pours a swallow into a glass and, after a sip, says, “Sugar a little low.”

  Grandmother watches him rinse the glass and place it in the sink. Oliver leaves her in the kitchen, wishing her goodnight. His steps make very little sound as he works his way up to the third floor and slips into bed. Staring at the ceiling, thinking about the jilted reality he’s entered, he doesn’t worry about whether Grandmother will see the snow on his boots or notice the distorted footsteps leading to the garage. He only thinks about the things in the woods and those pockets on the dome wall that contain spheres. It’s the empty ones he thinks about as sleep falls on him. He knows where the missing ones are.

  And why Grandmother doesn’t let him stay out after dark.

  F L U R Y

  twenty-seven

  “You sure?” Cath had shaved the sides of her head and dyed them green.

  “Positive,” Oliver says. “I like closing.”

  “All right.”

  He wipes down the counters while Cath looks through her handbag. She finds a tube of lipstick and applies a thick coat of bright red, popping her lips in a small mirror. This goth queens celebrates Christmas.

  Only a week had passed since Thanksgiving. The stalks of dried corn and all the hand-turkeys Ms. Megan’s kids cut out and taped to the window have been replaced with ornaments and garland. Red and green strands of lights flash in the window; traditional Christmas music plays.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah.” Oliver moves the miniature tree to wipe the counte
r. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t seem fine.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “Fine.” It takes another twenty seconds and half a dozen cuss words for Cath to find her keys. “Merry Christmas, O.”

  The bell rings and the door slams.

  Oliver turns the chairs and makes another pass over the counter. Cath rarely leaves the café once, always forgetting something. This time, she doesn’t return.

  A Christmas miracle.

  He drapes the damp rag on the counter and makes the last two cups of coffee for the night. Sliding them on a round table in the back corner, he leans back and lets the caffeine lift him from a long day.

  He pulls the orb from his pocket.

  It rolls across the table, gravitating to the other coffee mug. The wood never discolors in his pocket. Lint never wedges inside the etchings. He palms it, feeling the comforting warmth vibrate through his arm.

  Molly’s aunt passed away over Thanksgiving. Oliver got the text when he returned from Grandmother’s. She would be staying in Illinois another week. “How’d things go at the property?” she had texted.

  “Tell you later.”

  Bing Crosby is crooning when the bell rings again.

  Molly slips inside.

  Pausing at the unlocked door, she gives a short wave, the stiff-fingered kind that makes Oliver’s heart thump. Her boots thump on the old wood floor. When Oliver stands up, she jumps into his arms.

  She smells like Molly.

  Bing Crosby is done singing when they finally let go.

  “I missed you.” A thick stocking cap hides her eyes.

  He pulls her close again. It’s clear how much he missed her.

  They sit at the table, pulling their chairs closer. He asks about her family, the trip, and the weather. The talk is small and the pauses long. Their mugs are half empty when he says it.

  “I found it.”

  “Tell me.”

  It takes longer to get started than he expected. He’d been holding it in all week, and now the details are stuck. Emotions swell in his throat, and for the longest time he rolls the orb between his fingers. She covers his hand and gently squeezes.