Claus: The Trilogy

by Tony Bertauski

Oliver-Grandfather.

  Together, they’re becoming an abominable.

  And the gray slush surrounds them, gives them strength. As they fill the room, the cold torrent of partially melted snow cages Flury. The snowman eludes the super sphere’s gravitational pull, cradling Oliver’s limp and empty body in his arms.

  Rage fills Oliver.

  It pours into his being from the outside of his consciousness, radiating from Grandfather’s awareness. It contaminates Oliver’s mind as if they were one and the same. It fills him with seething anger, bitter vengeance. The urge to strike, to destroy, to fight the burning pain. He’s consumed with the urge to crush Flury, to slurp him up like the streaming snowthings that have given themselves to the super sphere’s vortex.

  The amorphous gray slush spreads around the dome’s perimeter. The empty space shrinks. The rage grows hotter. Flury will be digested in the pit of Grandfather’s rage. The snowman risked his life; he came here to save Oliver. Flury doesn’t know that his body is an empty husk.

  I’ll never walk again. Never kiss again. Never feel.

  He’ll be trapped in the super sphere forever. And ever.

  Feed that, Grandfather’s thoughts ring. Give your sadness to the anger; let it burn the ashes of grief.

  The gelatinous slurry snatches Flury’s leg. The snowman eludes the grasp by reforming his malleable body, but Oliver’s flaccid body hinders his ability to elude the closing predator.

  Grandfather’s laughter echoes within the inner space. He’s toying with the snowman, making him pay for locking him out of the dome all these years, for making him age in the cold wilderness.

  It’s just the beginning of the old man’s trail of revenge.

  Oliver relies on the memory of what it felt like to close his eyes and take a deep breath. He calms his thoughts. Outside his circle of awareness, Grandfather continues laughing.

  Oliver concentrates.

  He forms a thought, a single action. He protects it, hides it. He nurtures it with all his being, gives it purpose. He doesn’t think about anything else, doesn’t contemplate the consequences, what it will do to his own fleshly body. Oliver simply gives the thought all his strength. All his love.

  Because he can’t let Grandfather do this.

  Because he won’t give in to the fury.

  When all of his intention fills this thought, he lets it go. It travels throughout the super sphere and into the gray body, quivering throughout the cold slurry. The slushy body that envelopes the super sphere is Oliver’s body, too.

  And he tells it what to do.

  Grandfather hears it, but it’s too late.

  The thought directs the slush to part near the ceiling and expose the hole. Water begins dumping inside. The grip on Flury loosens. With Oliver’s fleshly body safely tucked against his snowy chest, Flury bolts toward the ceiling and buries his fist in the gushing hole.

  The floodgate opens.

  Earth and water crash down.

  F L U R Y

  thirty-two

  Utter darkness.

  No pain, no pressure. Just utter darkness.

  Oliver moves with thoughts through the stillness. Despite the crushing earth that lay all around, it’s not until he remembers his body is gone that panic sets in.

  What am I if I have no body?

  The super sphere is his body now, but he’s not the only one inside it. Other thoughts are out there in the darkness. Grandfather’s thoughts have wrapped around him, pushed him aside, enclosed him in a tiny corner of the sphere. Oliver can’t feel the smothering weight of the soil, but he can taste the bitter thoughts that imprison him.

  The anger. The rage.

  It trickles like an elixir, feeds the vengeance he’s nurtured for a hundred years. And now that he’s in the sphere, it infects everything. Grandfather’s mind flexes and roars.

  The fury is out.

  What is he avenging?

  Beyond the echoes of Grandfather’s thoughts, somewhere outside the confines of the super sphere, water trickles. A thousand rivulets are wicking through the soil. The super sphere is packed deep underground. Buried somewhere near is the angry swarm of orbs. Somewhere there are the dead orbs that once made up the snowthings.

  Flury, too.

  I’m dead.

  His body has been crushed beneath a million tons of soil. Yet he feels no different in the inner space of the super sphere than he did in his flesh. How long will he survive inside it?

  Forever.

  Panic and fear ripple through the inner mind space.

  If he could run, he would race away. If he could dig, he would climb out of this grave. But he’s trapped.

  The water continues to trickle toward the super sphere.

  Oliver feels the strange weird of low blood sugar. Impossible, since he has no body. Hyperventilating, maybe? He’s not breathing. He’s pretending to breathe. It brings him comfort, breeds familiarity. He counts ten breaths and starts over.

  Again and again.

  When his thoughts cease to race, he reaches out like he did before, attempts to connect with the super sphere, to feel it like it is his body. If the trickling water continues to gravitate toward it, maybe he could climb. Maybe he could bring his fleshly body to the surface and breathe life into it.

  Flury, too.

  Grandfather has taken precautions. Oliver feels through the dark, his thoughts reaching out like appendages, but Grandfather’s essence is everywhere, creating walls that contain Oliver, imprison him, keep him from interfering again.

  Walls of pain and suffering.

  He wants the world to feel his pain. He wants to be understood. Wants the world to hear him.

  The earth moves.

  A subtle quake rumbles through the dark. It feels like the soil is settling around them, packing tighter against the super sphere. It happens again.

  This time the super sphere moves.

  We’re rising.

  It’s small jumps at first, but each successive attempt lightens the world around them. The trickling water is in the super sphere’s gravitational field. Grandfather is building another body. He’ll climb out of the earth. He’ll find revenge.

  Oliver spins through the dark. Grandfather’s memories disorient him like a house of mirrors.

  I can’t stop him.

  The rage is too great, the fury too potent. The old man has stoked this furnace for a century; it’s too hot. Oliver can’t possibly beat him.

  So he begins digging through the old man’s memories.

  The most recent ones are saturated with loneliness. It’s the years he spent on the property with only his snowthings and his thoughts. At night, he roamed the property, sending the snowthings digging through the earth to crack through the dome.

  Flury always there to stop them.

  When Oliver and his mom arrived, Grandfather knew his opportunity had come. He swept the entry road with the snowthings, had them dust the trails from the snow in the morning, and arranged for the footlocker to be found. Grandmother was helpless to stop him.

  The world trembles.

  The super sphere is rising faster. The surface is near. A cold sensation leaks through his thoughts. Darkness turns gray.

  Then light.

  Snow.

  Water and fog are poor substitutes. The super sphere was built for snow, to gather it, to pack it. To be it. The water, having served its purpose, falls from the super sphere as the snow begins to swirl.

  The world comes into focus.

  The three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision is restored. Images appear in the pale moonlight. Trees are toppled, and the river diverted. A whirlpool eddies below the fallen tree that served as Oliver’s footbridge to the hobbit house. The stone chimney has toppled.

  The sound of a locomotive begins to wail.

  Oliver looks to the sky, expecting to see military jets, but the sound is all around. Snow is sliding across the ground and out of the trees.

  Limbs snap, and tree trunks sway.
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  The howling continues.

  A torso. Legs. Arms.

  He’s building a body.

  Oliver dives back into Grandfather’s memories. He tunnels beneath the hardened thoughts of recent past, digs deeper into his life. The memories are calcified and brittle. It takes great effort to push past the years of lonely bitterness. Back in time, he goes.

  The birth of Mom and Aunt Rhonnie.

  Late nights in the lab.

  Building the house.

  As the world outside the sphere continues to quake, Oliver digs past burning memories of hate and anger and finds the softer underlying memories.

  Pain and sorrow.

  He had escaped the North Pole. He travelled with a companion back home to find the woman he’d survived to see, the woman that kept him alive through all the isolation in the North Pole. He yearned to see the woman whose photo was tucked into the locket, the woman he wrote to in his journals. His most dearest was waiting for him at the end of this long and impossible journey.

  The woman that kept him alive.

  My love.

  He arrived to find an abandoned house. The furniture and belongings were covered in dust and rat droppings. Spider webs filled the corners. His heart broke cold. He thundered through the house, opened doors, cried her name. Fear had never gripped Malcolm Toye like it did that day. And when he found her, he fell on his knees.

  She was in the backyard.

  Malcolm Toye collapsed on the soft ground. A crudely assembled cross was askew in a mound of earth. Letters were scrawled into the wood.

  Here lies Gayle Toye. Died of a broken heart.

  Scarlet fever had claimed her life, he later discovered. It did not matter. His sorrow was unquenchable. His rage, endless.

  He would never see his love again.

  And he blamed the elven.

  Had they not saved him, he would be united with his love in death. Had they released him, he would have returned sooner. They were to blame for his pain and suffering.

  All of it.

  Grandfather, the monstrous snowman, thunders through the forest. He doesn’t bother pushing trees out of the way; he walks through them. The trunks crack like fireworks. They reach the open field. Beyond is the windmill.

  And the house.

  Rage radiates through the air like waves of heat. The snow is inhaled from the field, swirling into Grandfather’s body. The legs become thicker, the arms stronger. The chest swells.

  Grandfather roars.

  The windows on the house shatter.

  Oliver’s awareness is ringing. He tries to find a place for Grandfather’s memories as they merge into his awareness. The sadness, the agony, is torture. But a question continues to rise.

  If the woman he loved died, then who is Grandmother?

  There are three vibrating houses that finally come together as Oliver’s focus returns. Snow swirls in the distance. A small storm has gathered at the back steps of the house. Someone is coming for them.

  Flury! He made it out!

  Oliver can’t see through the shattered windows. There’s no candlelight, no movement. No way to tell if anyone has stayed.

  He hopes not.

  Flury barrels across the field. Grandfather lifts his arms, casting moonlit shadows, and claps at the pesky snowman. Flury eludes the crushing blow and crushes Grandfather’s knee.

  The world tips.

  Before Flury can deliver another strike, Grandfather rebuilds the leg and swats him. Flury tumbles across the field, his shiny orb temporarily dislodging from his chest. The snowman returns from the trees for another charge. The hopeless battle resumes.

  Something moves at the house.

  Someone descends the back steps. The movement is slow and careful. Her hands are folded over her stomach.

  Grandmother.

  Her path is clear.

  No. No, no, no, no, no!

  Grandfather doesn’t notice the old woman. He catches Flury in his right hand and squeezes, but the snowman’s orb slips between his fingers. Grandfather stomps the orb, and the earth rumbles like an approaching storm. He picks up his foot, expecting to see the pest flattened.

  Flury’s orb jettisons away.

  Grandfather, fueled by hate, anger and revenge, begins to inhale again. This time it’s not the snow he’s drawing upon. Flury, still a naked orb with no snow to build his body, begins to slow before escaping into the trees.

  Grandfather’s going to absorb him.

  Oliver turns his thoughts away and, once again, drives into Grandfather’s memories. The deeper he goes, the softer they become. The emotions become like magma, warm and sticky.

  Dense.

  Oliver sinks deeper, letting the underlying emotions, the foundation of Grandfather’s hatred, saturate his awareness and begins lifting it out of the depths. The memories have been buried so deep, packed away so that he would forget the pain.

  Oliver brings it out of his subconscious for Grandfather to see.

  Sadness, powerlessness. Aloneness.

  There’s so much of it.

  It gushes to the surface like a tapped well, spewing through the hardened layers of hatred and bitterness. Sadness flows into the outer banks of Grandfather’s mind.

  The snowy titan hesitates.

  Grandfather’s thoughts turn toward Oliver. He feels the unearthed grief, the unresolved sorrow he buried all those years ago. For a moment, he seems curious to find so much, to discover that these memories have been the fuel driving the hatred, that his fear of being swallowed by his sadness drove him into anger.

  And then he sees Grandmother.

  The rage returns.

  Oliver is scalded by an influx of vengeful thoughts. All the blame is focused on the old woman. Grandfather bats Flury deep into the forest and takes a giant step.

  The ground trembles.

  Grandmother falls to her knees.

  Grandfather towers over the feeble old woman. Images of hate flit through Oliver’s vision. Grandfather seeks to quench the ancient itch of revenge.

  Oliver turns deeper into the old man’s memories. The thoughts become hot. They boil like tar. There’s one last wellspring of emotion he hasn’t reached, a gold mine that’s been feeding the hatred all these years, baking it into a hardened crust on which the old man has feasted until it was all he knew.

  The old man lifts his colossal arms.

  Grandmother gets to her feet.

  With snow dusting her coat, she stares up. Her expression is a foreign one; a look that’s never appeared in Oliver’s presence. It’s open and compassionate. Fearless.

  Loving.

  Flury emerges from the trees, but it’s too late. The giant fists come arching down. The wind whistles. Grandfather howls.

  And then Oliver reaches the bottom of his hidden feelings.

  He finds the thoughts underlying Grandfather’s mind, the pit of his emotions—the unresolved depth of his being. It is the foundation that supports everything he’s become, a pool of resources buried deeply and soundly. Oliver feels it explode from hiding, feels it fill Grandfather’s mind.

  Fear.

  Underneath all the hate is fear.

  Perhaps if he’d reached it a second or two earlier, it would’ve made a difference. The lethal arms soften and slow, but they can’t be stopped. The momentum carries them to the ground.

  Grandmother disappears beneath their crushing weight.

  A plume of snow swallows the sky.

  Everything rings white.

  F L U R Y

  thirty-three

  Snow falls.

  The engorged snowflakes flutter to the earth until the world is white.

  The sound of Oliver’s footsteps is soft and muffled. Mesmerized by winter’s hypnotic dance, he’s mildly surprised to discover he has hands and legs. His fleshly body is back.

  Am I still in the super sphere?

  The trees are gone.

  The landscape is flat and white, the air choked with snow.


  He starts in the direction that feels like home, but nothing ever materializes, no matter where or how far he goes. Despite the isolation, he’s filled with peace. No panic or fear, no tension or worry. Just a peaceful world, wherever he is.

  Even the distant rumble of thunder doesn’t shake him.

  A darkened blot forms on the horizon. The house? When it grows larger, wobbling as it nears, he’s certain it’s not the house. The person is as short as she is wide. A long braid of hair is slung over her shoulder. What he thought were snowshoes look more like wide boots.

  Those aren’t boots…they’re her bare feet!

  She waddles close enough to see her blue-green eyes, the snow squelching under each footstep. She’s not even half his height.

  “Who are you?” Oliver asks.

  Her brow protrudes in concentration, staring through him.

  “What’s happening?” he asks. “Where am I?”

  “You are still inside.”

  “The super sphere? But…how did my body get here?”

  “Your thoughts have crystallized.” Her fingers are short and fat. “Thoughts can be quite convincing.”

  He’s seen her before. She’s in one of the pictures along the stairwell, between the second and third floor. She was on the end of the pier, who he thought was a child the first time. She’s the elven. Those are her clothes in the attic.

  Something else is familiar.

  “Are you my imagination?” he asks.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She pauses again, letting him explore the strange sense of familiarity. It’s the way she’s looking at him. The way the wrinkles bunch around her lips. Her eyes are blue, but green around the pupils. No one has eyes like that, except…

  “Grandmother?”

  She blinks heavily. Nods once.

  “I…I don’t understand.”

  “Of course not. No one would.”

  He thinks maybe his thoughts have made her appear shrunken, that she’s a delusion. But just because your delusion tells you this is real doesn’t make it so.

  “Why do you look like that?”

  “This is my true nature. The North Pole was my home.” She opens her arms.

  “You’re elven? I…I don’t…”