by Heide Goody
“Come on!” Dave took her hand and they ran.
Esther ran on feet that felt suddenly sluggish. She registered Dave was talking to her. His words were fading in and out.
“Dave, I feel a bit funny.”
“What?”
She tried to make the words fit the light-headed detachment she was experiencing. “Woozy, a bit dreamy.”
The chaos in the market was fading behind them. Everything was fading.
Esther stumbled. The snow was powdery soft beneath her feet. It looked surprisingly inviting. “Maybe a nap would help.”
“No, no,” he said and held her upright. “Back to the shop, it’s just over there. We can hole up for a few minutes. Stay with me, Esther.”
***
59
Gerd came to inspect the crackers Newton and Guin had made. She was not alone.
The two elves with her didn’t exactly look older or more senior than her – all the elves looked like underfed children, albeit ones who had undergone some ill-advised cheek-lift and eye-tightening plastic surgery from a doctor with very poor Google reviews. However, there was something in their stiff posture and pompous manner that marked them out as higher up the chain of command than Gerd. One even had a wisp of white beard on his chin.
As the elves approached, Newton stepped back respectfully, hands behind his back. Guin wondered if this was because Newton had watched a lot of bake off TV shows and knew how the contestants acted when the judges walked back in, or because his hands were covered in a sticky fluffy mass of crepe paper and glue that no amount of picking could shift.
Gerd and the elders regarded the five crackers critically. Guin listened attentively. She was tired and frightened (she recognised this and had confided as much in Wiry Harrison) but she was picking up snippets of the elves’ language each time she heard them.
The elders prodded and closely regarded the crackers before pulling them. The first one exploded with far too big a bang, making Guin’s ears ring, setting fire to the paper wrapping and knocking the spectacles off Gerd’s head.
“Ut mikið!” she yelled. “Ut mikið, yer daft ha’peth!”
The children cowered. Newton positioned himself protectively in front of Guin, which she found both comforting and irritating.
The other four crackers didn’t crack quite so catastrophically and the three judges peered critically over the contents. In the search for knick-knacks to go inside the crackers, the barrels of odds and ends had offered Guin slim pickings. She suspected their contents came from the pockets and bags of all the humans the elves had kidnapped over the years, and the good stuff was long gone. The four toys were the knob of a car gearstick, a golf ball on which Guin had drawn a smiley face, a broken pencil, and fish cut out from an old sweet wrapper, stuffed into an envelope and optimistically labelled Fortune-telling fish.
Gerd took it out of its envelope and stared at it furiously.
“You put it in your hand,” Guin explained “How it moves tells you what your future holds.”
Gerd laid it flat in the palm of her tiny hand. The fish did nothing.
“It’s sleeping at the moment,” said Guin.
Gerd spat in contempt. One of the elders pulled out a joke Newton had written.
“Hver did góð kong Wenceslas…?”
“Good King Wenceslas,” said Newton helpfully.
The elder tried again. “How did góð kong Wenceslas like his pizza?”
The other elder shrugged. “Eg na ekki. Hver ði góður kong Wenceslas els og pizza?”
The first peered at the answer. “Deep pan, crisp and even.”
The elves did not laugh. Newton gave them a deliberate and pathetically fake laugh. “Oh, that’s a good one. That one will have the family rolling on the floor.”
Embarrassed for him, Guin felt compelled to join in. “Oh, yeah. Really good.”
The elder swept the crackers onto the floor dismissively.
“You should read the others,” said Newton, his voice wobbling with nerves. “The one about baby Jesus’s weight is a killer.”
The elves shouted and argued amongst themselves. They were talking too quick for Guin to follow, but she imagined they were arguing whether to kill the pair of them or keep them as slaves. Guin should have been terrified, maybe her overtired mind had reached peak scaredness and had no more fear to give. She found her attention drawn to the beard of the shouting elder. His chin glistened wetly: glue. The beard was stuck on, like a theatre performers. That was interesting.
The argument was coming to some sort of heated conclusion but Guin could not work out which viewpoint was winning. An elder whipped out a curvy knife and bounded over to Newton and Guin. She dropped to her knees and bowed her head.
“All hal góra skeggi,” she said.
She didn’t die so that was something. She reached up and pulled Newton down beside her. “All hal góra skeggi,” she repeated for him.
“Er, yes,” Newton trembled. “All hal—”
“—Góra skeggi.”
“Yes. That.”
Moments passed. The ringing in Guin’s ears from the first cracker explosion filled the silence. Still they did not die. There was the soft padding sound of the elders leaving the room and then Gerd shouted for them to get up and follow her.
Guin and Newton were herded out, down the corridor and out to a recess in the large central cavern. With threats and the application of many granny knots, Gerd tied them with frayed rope to a thick pipe running up the wall before leaving them there. The ground was covered with hay and muck and soft rotting material.
“What was all that about?” said Newton.
“I think we passed the audition,” said Guin. She considered the filthy floor, and the weariness filling her body. “I don’t want to sit on this.”
Newton crouched down. “Come sit on my knee if you like.”
Guin gave him a long look. “Doesn’t matter how you say that, it sounds creepy.”
“I’m just trying to be a good stepbrother.”
“You’re not my stepbrother yet.”
He took a deep breath, like he was trying to quell an unpleasant feeling. “We will get out of here. We will find my mum and your dad. We’ll run away – maybe take Blinky with us—”
“We’re not taking the zombie reindeer.”
“Zombies deserve love too.”
“Not happening, Newton,” she said.
“We’ll all run away. Mum and dad will get married. It’ll be a lovely wedding and embarrassing as hell, and then we’ll all live in a big house together – with separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the house, don’t worry – and we’ll be able to happily ignore each other for ever after. What do you say?”
Guin waggled a finger in her ear. “Didn’t hear any of that. I think that cracker explosion has affected my hearing.”
“It’ll wear off soon.”
“I went deaf for a whole term when I was seven,” she said.
“Did you?”
“Pardon?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Was that a joke?”
“Pardon?” she said and against her better judgement and mood, found herself smiling a fraction.
“Snakkur!” said Gerd, returning with two large and dirty bowls. She presented one to Newton and the other to Guin. The two bowls were not the same. Newton’s contained several steaming hotdog sausages. Guin’s was filled with something dark green and damp. It looked like the seaweed starter from a Chinese restaurant soaked in a layer of misty gravy.
“What’s this?” she said. “Hver it það? I have allergies you know.”
Gerd ignored her and walked off.
“You can have one of my sausages if you like,” said Newton.
She shook her head. “I didn’t like the one I had in the market. It tasted funny.”
Newton munched on a sausage. “They don’t quite taste like any normal meat,” he conceded. “But that’s hotdogs for you, right?”
Guin pinched up a f
ragment of the soggy green stuff and sniffed it. She couldn’t smell it above the overwhelming oily petrol scent in the air. She looked at the pipe they were tied to and, cautiously, wiped at a droplet that had trickled from a leaky joint.
“Petrol,” she said.
“Or something like it,” said Newton. “They’re pumping a lot of it through here. Your dad would have a health and safety fit about it.”
Guin tried some of the food. It tasted a bit like cabbage, a bit like snot and a bit like leather but mostly it tasted like grass.
“Why give us different food?” she wondered. Not knowing the answer to her own question, added, “Did you see that the elf’s beard was glued on?”
“Glued on?”
“Like he’s pretending to be Santa. And this ‘All hail the big beard’ stuff. It’s like…” Guin hummed. She half-remembered something she’d read in a book once about islanders in the Pacific or somewhere who had seen white people – probably Americans – come along with their planes and their equipment. And how the white people had radioed down planes and supplies of food and such from the sky. So when the white people had gone, the islanders thought if they made pretend radio sets from bamboo stalks and coconut shells, the gods would send down food from the sky because that’s how the world appeared to work. She only half-remembered it, and it was probably from a book written by a white person – probably an American – so it probably wasn’t true anyway, but still…
“You think these elves actually have a plan?” she said. “Or are they just—”
“Going through the motions?” said Newton, starting on his third sausage.
Guin squatted down, rested the food bowl on her knees and pulled out the copy of Little Folk in European Folklore by Dr Alexander and turned to the last page she had been reading. She had just reached a section further detailing fairy children and changelings, and decided to read it while eating. Dr Alexander subscribed to the view that the idea of changelings – faeries put in the place of elf-stolen babies – was used in past times to explain why some children were born with disabilities, or autism. Guin wondered, not for the first time, if her dad should get her tested for autism. Her dad had already told her quite clearly he did not believe she had autism, although Gun was certain if they got her tested, and she tried really hard, she could get a diagnosis. The section on changelings was long (and included such pointlessly difficult words as ‘victualise’, ‘cerebrate’ and ‘kineticism’) but the food was quite unappetising, so Guin reached the end of the section just as she finished eating.
At that moment, there was a shout from outside in the cavern. It was human, and familiar sounding.
“I am coming! There is no need to hold my hand, little man. I don’t know where you have been and there is far too much touching for my liking these days. We wouldn’t have half the problems in the world today if people would just keep their hands to themselves.”
It was Mrs Scruples, the hotel woman. She was walking into the cavern, surrounded by a large number of elves.
“She’s still alive,” said Newton, surprised.
“Doesn’t deserve to be,” said Guin.
The elves were shaking snow off themselves and had clearly just come in from outside. There was a wild, unhappy energy about them, like they were angry about something. There was one with a stuck-on white beard at the head of the group. His clothes were ragged and burned and smeared with blood.
“I think there’s been trouble in town,” said Guin.
“That’s Baccarat or Backrub or something,” said Newton, nodding towards the white bearded one. “Your dad and me stuck him in a trouser press.”
“No wonder he’s angry,” said Guin.
***
60
Dave elbowed open the door of the charity shop, led Esther inside and sat her on the floor out of sight of anyone looking through the window.
“Tell me how you feel funny, Esther,” he said.
“Just want to sleep,” she murmured.
“No, Esther, you need to stay awake. It’s really important.”
“It might be where it bit me.”
“What?” He looked her over, saw the tear on her sleeve and pulled it up. There was a shallow cut, little more than a row of teeth marks that had barely broken the skin.
Dave leaned forward, sniffing. “Fruity breath.”
“S’my new nickname?” she mumbled.
“It seems as though you might have excessively high blood sugar.”
“Candy canes,” said Esther and then giggled.
Dave had his first aid pack with him and he checked the contents. There was nothing for hyperglycaemia.
“I won’t be a minute,” he whispered in her ear. “There’s a pharmacy next door. I need to see if I can get in there. Jesus, Esther, please hang on in there.”
She was barely responsive.
He went to the back door of the charity shop. There was a key inside the lock. He opened the door and eased himself partially through, taking a good look around before committing himself to going fully outside. He was in a yard, with bins, and a gate at the far end. The next door along had to belong to the pharmacy. He tried the door, naturally it was locked. A brief search of the yard revealed a half-brick being used as a gate stop. He took off his elf top, muffled the brick in it, and punched in the glass of the door.
He slipped inside the pharmacy and looked around for their refrigerator. A few minutes later he had several bottles of insulin, a blood test meter, some hypodermic needles and syringes. He slipped back through the yard and into the charity shop.
He ran a blood test on a drop of blood from her thumb, to see if his suspicions were correct. They were: her blood sugar was dangerously high. He loaded up a syringe with insulin, pulled down the waistband of her trousers a little and injected into her buttock.
***
61
Mrs Scruples, all the while talking on such diverse subjects as how draughty the cave was, what the elves could be doing to make the place more homely, and how prudent she was to have insured her now demolished home for more than it was worth, was manhandled (or elf-handled, Newton thought) into the centre of the cavern and onto a raised area.
“Yes, yes, my wee folk,” she said. “This is all well and good, but where is my husband?”
There was something entrancing about the way the elves slowly circled the raised area in unison. Newton recalled watching a David Attenborough documentary in which a pod of dolphins circled round a mass of fishes, herding them into a tighter and tighter ball in preparation for the kill. Even the soft and silky tones of Sir David couldn’t disguise the menace in the dolphins’ orchestrated actions. Newton saw the spoons – bent, battered, blunt and rusted spoons – the elves carried. He had initially assumed it was dinnertime for everyone in the cavern; now he was not so certain.
He chewed on the last of his hotdogs as the inevitable slowly unfolded.
“I have been a good and faithful servant,” Mrs Scruples was telling the elves. “I have kept your secrets and provided you with the … materials you needed for your work. And, yes, though I do say so myself, I believe I have helped you better yourselves. Although I can see more than a few of you still need to learn how to use a handkerchief and— Ah!”
The “Ah!” was at the sight of a man strolling into the cavern from a tunnel entrance. He was old, red-faced, with a straggly silver comb-over and mutton chop whiskers. He wore a tweedy suit over a bright yellow waistcoat. He looked like an extra from a non-specific period drama, a mild-mannered middle class chap who ought to have a name like ‘Cholmondeley-Warner’ or ‘Rutherkins’ but was, of course, the much-mentioned and absentee Mr Scruples.
“Donald! Donald!” called Mrs Scruples. It wasn’t the heartfelt call of a wife to her one true love. It was more the sound of a mistress calling her dog to heel. “Donald! Stand up straight and greet me!”
Donald wasn’t standing up straight. He moved with a strange rolling gait, his arms flapping with a fluid
motion, like he was walking in time to a mellow reggae tune only he could hear. There was also a slack look on his face.
“Is he drunk?” whispered Newton.
“No,” said Guin.
“He looks like he’s had a stroke.”
“No, not that either,” she said.
“What’s the matter with him?” said Mrs Scruples. “Donald! Wake up, man. Look at me.”
Mrs Scruples’ head turned towards her, and kept turning. Ninety degrees, a hundred and eighty, further—
“Donald!”
The old man’s head wobbled and popped off, dropping to the floor with the lower half of an elf poking out through his neck.
“Bloody hell,” whispered Newton.
Mr Scruples came apart entirely. Torso and legs parted company; buttons and zips opened and at least five elves jumped out of the artfully reconstructed Donald Scruples.
“It’s a suit,” said Newton.
“Not quite,” said Guin.
“Where’s the real Mr Scruples?”
“You’re looking at him.”
In the central area, Mrs Scruples was doing a fine impression of Edvard Munch’s Scream. “Donald! Donald! Get up! Don’t do this!”
The elves thought it was all hilarious. They continued to circle Mrs Scruples, gradually drawing closer. Some waved their handkerchiefs at her mockingly; far more were waving their spoons.
“Are they going to eat her?” said Newton. Even at a distance he could see the wide-eyed shock on Mrs Scruples’ face. She turned and saw Newton and Guin, peering out of their alcove cell.
“Them!” she screeched. “Take them! They’d make far better material. Much more elastic skin. Oil of Olay can only do so much. You don’t want me. You don’t want me!”
“I think I know what’s going to happen,” said Newton.
Guin tutted. “Took your time, didn’t you?”
“You shouldn’t look,” he said. But it was too late.
The beardy elf, Bacraut, leapt at the old woman, aiming at her midriff with his spoon. It wasn’t a sharp spoon but an edge doesn’t need to be sharp if it’s directed with sufficient force. Mrs Scruples didn’t manage a scream, producing a wounded, worn out sigh: the kind of noise a dying sofa would make if sofas could scream or, indeed, die.
