Candy Canes and Buckets of Blood

by Heide Goody

Thoughts of medical matters made him check for his first aid kit. It was attached to his belt, with dressing, antiseptics and a dozen insulin shots inside it. He’d probably need those again before the night was through.

  He wriggled along the track as far as he dared, then rolled off, looking around to see where he was. It was darker here, but he could make out a side cavern up ahead. He couldn’t be far from where Guin and Esther’s boy had crash-landed. They might have gone to hide in there.

  He crawled forward on his belly, keeping to the shadows. When he made it round a corner, he stood, carefully. The side cavern’s roof was lower and it stretched deep into the hillside. Boxes – Christmas boxes, shiny and tied with ribbon – were stacked in rows, extending as far back as he could see.

  Now he came to think about it, the entire hill had to be hollow. How could Catheter have imagined it would be safe to build houses here, when the whole place was riddled with caves?

  “Guin!” he stage whispered. “You here? Newton! Guin!”

  ***

  74

  When she fell from the doomed reindeer, Guin landed heavily on her backside, jarring her spine and knocking all sensation from her bum . She immediately leapt up and ran for cover. While Newton yelped over in one direction, and his mum could be heard shouting aggressively from another, Guin did her best to shake off her own pursuers.

  In her pocket, Tinfoil Tavistock heartily approved. The juvenile quadruped pointed out it was like that old joke about running away from a bear. She didn’t need to be able to run faster than the bear; she just needed to be faster than the other people the bear was chasing.

  Guin would have argued she wasn’t abandoning Newton or the others, rather she was regrouping and preparing to lead the retaliation. Or she would have done, if she hadn’t been sprinting for her life: dodging and weaving around piles of boxes to shake off the main crowd of pursuers. As she ran into a familiar side tunnel, she could hear the shouts of outrage fading into the distance.

  She recognised the first door she came to. It was the toy workshop. She slipped inside, grateful the place was empty, and bolted the door behind her.

  As she got her breath back, she took Tinfoil Tavistock out of her pocket so she could explain clearly how and why, despite the fact she appeared to be selfishly fleeing for her life, she was actually making a tactical decision.

  Tavistock – oh, so simplistic Tavistock – said it was not okay to leave loved ones behind, even if one of them was a bumbling and annoying teenage boy. Guin was swift to explain the situation was far more complex than that, and she didn’t expect someone like Tavistock to understand.

  On the workbench, Starfish Eglantine, the plush toy she’d created earlier in the night regarded her with its many eyes as though to say, “Oh, yeah?”

  Guin tutted. She didn’t like it when her imaginary friends ganged up on her.

  ***

  75

  Through various twists and turns, jumping at sudden sounds and occasionally cowering for his life, Newton eventually found himself in a corner of the reindeer cave. He hunkered out of sight while elves busied themselves, taking Scromdir and Bitber and Dancer and Rudolph and whatever their names were out of their pens to be harnessed up.

  Over the crackly tannoy, an elf announced something. Newton did not speak elf apart from the universal greeting “All hal góra skeggi!” and he didn’t plan on learning any. However, the words coming over the tannoy had a clipped and measured rhythm, a sort of “The rebel base will be in range in ten minutes” kind of cadence. Something was very much afoot.

  Two elves entered, herding limping Blinky between them. They were arguing. From his hiding position by a vacant reindeer stall, Newton could see much gesturing towards Blinky’s missing leg. Blinky did not seem to be in much discomfort from the lack of a leg. She looked from elf to elf as they bickered, and then she ate one of their hats.

  The elf shrieked in frustration, grabbed its half-eaten hat from her mouth and stomped away. The other, having won the argument but not gained much from it, irritably led the hobbling reindeer past the hidden Newton, through an opening, and returned, moments later, Blinky-less.

  Newton had a mental image of what he needed to do. The simple version was find his mum, Guin and Dave and get the hell out of elf-central, in that order. A priority list based on personal familiarity, some deep-rooted chivalric sexism (that he really didn’t feel comfortable with) and a nameless thing he saw as a sort of Newton Woollby Personal Vulnerability Scale. However, the list wasn’t a simple line. Newton’s complex and over-thought mental image took into account what he imagined other people’s priorities would be. He was probably near the top of his mum’s, possibly on a par with and in danger of being over-taken by Dave (which he stiffly thought was all fine and proper). Dave’s would have Guin and Esther vying for top spot. Guin’s… Well, Guin’s priorities were unclear. Newton wouldn’t have gone so far as to call her selfish but she certainly wasn’t the kind of girl ruled by big-hearted selflessness. So Newton’s priority list was an odd sort of web in which he featured at the bottom because, well, it was his duty to put others first, but in which he was also raised up by his mum’s love for him. One in which Guin was generally of middling importance, but given a super boost by Dave’s affections for his daughter and the simple fact she was a child. All of them bumped and bumbled around in the web.

  Animals did not figure in that particular web. Newton loved animals, generally more than he did most people, but they didn’t appear in this current real-time crisis priority web. Blinky’s fate was notionally unimportant. Blinky was not in the web; she was off to one side. Separated. With a big fluffy cloud drawn around her in pen. And little stars, or possibly rainbows, in highlighter.

  Blinky was unimportant, but Newton needed to know what had happened to her.

  With elves focused on getting nearly a hundred zombie reindeer into harnessed teams, it was easy for him to slip out of his position and into the side tunnel Blinky had been taken down. The tunnel ran for some distance, alongside various thick pipes that stank of petrol, before it came out in a poorly lit service chamber.

  Blinky was tied up beside a pit. She three-leggedly hobbled round to face Newton. He charitably decided the wild look on her face was a greeting between old friends.

  “I wondered what they’d done to you.” He reached out with gentle hands. Blinky – playful as ever – tried to rip off his fingers. She missed as she over-balanced and stumbled on her three legs.

  “I think,” said Newton. “we might need to change your name. Should it be Limpy or Wonky?”

  ***

  76

  Esther quickly discovered a way of moving through the small tunnel vents, a sort of bent-kneed frog-like super-crouch that allowed her to scuttle along efficiently. She’d also discovered a small string of battery-powered fairy lights which she’d wrapped around her head for light. She must have looked like a weird halo-wearing frog-saint or the world’s cheapest R2-D2 fancy dress effort.

  Within minutes of entering the vent tunnels, she realised there was a complex warren of them. They looped between the main caverns, doing their own thing in between. She got the hang of navigating them by looking out for the fairy lights. Where there was a direct passage between the larger caverns there was very often a string of lights she could follow.

  As she approached an opening into a larger cavern, she smeared dirt onto her face for camouflage. She leaned out to see what was happening. Despite having humans running willy-nilly through their nest, the elves seemed mostly focused on their work. In the biggest cavern Esther had yet seen, a large-scale operation was underway. It wasn’t just large: it was colossal.

  There were lots of shipping containers. Except they had been crudely fashioned into open-top containers. All of them had sled-like runners welded to their sides, but were presently being transported along the elf’s miniature railway line, on relatively tiny carriage beds hidden beneath the containers’ bulk. The place was clearly the h
ub of whatever was being planned, a focus of operations. The containers were being lashed together with some sort of enormous harness. It appeared to be made from metal, wood, leather and various other materials. Esther was well-acquainted with upcycling and re-use. It looked very much as if someone had taken fence posts, traffic lights and every imaginable type of street furniture, and fashioned them together to make a wonky shell to connect all the sled-containers. It gave the entire thing the look of a colossal segmented insect: a centipede in plate armour.

  Together, the train of containers formed a single sleigh, a giant parody of Father Christmas’s sleigh at that.

  The armoured sheets along its sides had been indifferently painted in red, and fashioned into a wonky scalloped shape. At the front of the massive vehicle (which was at least a hundred feet long) was a place for the driver to sit: a scrolled front end twenty feet high. All of these facets were clues to the enormous vehicle’s cultural origins, but the monstrous thing had as much in common with the traditional Santa’s sleigh as … a wooden sailing boat with a ten-storey Caribbean cruise liner. No – it was like comparing a sailing boat to a giant cruise liner that had sunk in a storm, been raised up again, and repaired by medieval blacksmiths who had no notion of boat design. It was a gigantic travesty of a sleigh, a bloated and unnatural tumour-growth copy.

  Esther wanted to think this industrial monstrosity was a solid metaphor of what had happened to Christmas in this age of selfish commercialism, but witty socio-political metaphors weren’t going to help rescue the family.

  One thing that did puzzle her about the sleigh was how on earth the elves expected it to move. True, it currently sat on rails, but the railway line was miniscule, monorail thin compared to its bulk, and there was no engine at the front. There were stubby metal wings on the side, and four great barrels that might have once been aeroplane turbines, although it was hard to tell beneath the mass of fuel pipes and brackets covering them. At the back was another cluster of cylinders, salvaged perhaps from jet planes, or some dodgy space programme. Even with the mass of engine parts. Esther could not believe they alone could give the vehicle sufficient lift. They looked like they would drag it down with their weight, not move it along.

  If this was supposed to be Father Christmas’s vehicle then it would traditionally be pulled by reindeer. She thought about the sorry specimen Guin and Newton had ridden on. It would take hundreds of those creatures to move the thing.

  Shaking her head at the insanity of the elves’ endeavour, she backed along the duct, and down one of the narrower spurs of pipe. Through a grille in the floor she saw she was over a corridor tunnel, and a quieter one at that. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life crawling around like a wise-cracking, follicly-challenged New York detective. At some point, she’d have to get out, arm herself, find her family and maybe sabotage an elf sleigh along the way. Plus, Pilates or no Pilates, this sort of undignified crouch was starting to do her back in. She lifted away the grille, poked her head out to check the coast was clear, and wriggled through feet first.

  Only superficially gouging her ribs on the narrow opening, she dropped to the ground. No elves in sight.

  She moved swiftly along the corridor. Some of the doors she passed were marked with signs hinting at what lay on the other side. Many were scrawled with Nordic runes of some sort, and she sort of wished she could spend time studying the language and culture of these ancient peoples. Only sort of, because mostly she wanted to smash their faces in for what they had done to her little family, or would-be family. Some doors also featured little wood and pokerwork symbols. She found one marked with a crossed hammer and saw: a workshop of some sort surely. Workshops equalled tools. Tools equalled weapons.

  Esther tried the door. It appeared to be locked. She rattled the handle to make sure.

  ***

  77

  The door to the toy workshop rattled and shook.

  Guin made sure the bolts were securely in place. The door rattled a second time. She listened out for sounds of elf chatter, for indications they were going to try and break in or raise the alarm. She heard nothing. There was silence.

  On the bench, Starfish Eglantine regarded her haughtily. You are running away, said Eglantine.

  “I’m not running away,” Guin told her.

  You’re a coward.

  “It’s okay to be a coward,” she said. “Being scared is normal. People who are scared and run away are the ones who survive. My dad told me that.”

  I’m scared all the time, said Tavistock.

  “And I’ve got to look after Tavistock here,” said Guin.

  Tavistock is just a piece of screwed up tinfoil, said Eglantine.

  I am, agreed Tavistock.

  You are trapped in a dangerous place, said Eglantine. You’ve got nowhere to run away to.

  Guin pulled a face. “Yes, but—”

  But? said Eglantine.

  “What can I do? There’s hundreds of them and only one of me.”

  There was a voice over the echoing and crackling public address system. “Taskepta stelör bairnsk að hefjá fifttán mínútur.”

  “Project something-something in something minutes?” said Guin.

  They’re up to something, said Eglantine. These elves have a plan.

  “What plan?”

  What would your plan be if you were stuck somewhere alien, where you were surrounded by hostile idiots and with no friends?

  Guin thought. She didn’t have to think much. It was a fair description of every day she had to spend at school. Tinfoil Tavistock didn’t have to think much either.

  Hide, said Tavistock without hesitation.

  “I’d make my own friends,” said Guin, looking at Tavistock.

  I don’t think these elves are planning on hiding for much longer, said Eglantine. Do you?

  Guin thought about the things in the elf lair that just hadn’t made sense. The on-going preparations, the piles of present-like boxes, the vast number of reindeer in the pens. Were the elves planning on launching their own Christmas mission, to visit all the children in the world?

  Were the elves going out on a colossal diplomatic mission to make friends?

  What do you think? said Eglantine.

  ***

  78

  “You are a good girl, aren’t you?” said Newton as he cautiously petted Wonky Blinky.

  Newton peered down into the pit. It was several metres across but it was hard to tell how deep it was, it being almost filled to the lip by reindeer parts. Severed legs and decapitated heads nestled among less identifiable chunks of flesh, organs and hide.

  “Oh, heck,” Newton whispered.

  Much of the reindeer mix was still, very much as diced deer ought to be, but throughout the pile various bits of undead reindeer wiggled and crawled. Mouths moved, hoofs kicked, flanks rippled, and a length of severed reindeer spine was trying to crawl out of the pit. Newton could feel his knees weakening and the vomit rising in his throat.

  “Okay, man, don’t go to pieces,” he said, turning to Blinky to see if she appreciated this grim quip.

  Blinky’s reaction was unclear. However Newton did see an elf fast approaching him across the cavern from a stout door he had not previously seen it guarding. It ran at him, waving a flinty-tipped spear and yelling something unintelligible that Newton severely doubted was, “Here! I would like to present you with a gift of this lovely spear! Can we be friends?”

  Newton tripped in surprise, spinning away from the pit edge and avoided a skewering. He found himself grabbing the spear shaft and, with no real effort on his part, flipping the elf up into the air like a pole-vaulter. The elf-guard came down, squealing, into the pit of reindeer bits. The elf yelled. A reindeer spine wrapped itself around him. A nearby head, sensing food, bit down on the elf’s arm. The elf screamed for a second, then something powerful from beneath the surface layer latched onto it and dragged it down, silencing it utterly.

  “Nasty.” Newton turned to Blinky. “The
y weren’t planning on recycling you in there, were they?”

  Blinky affectionately tried to bite off Newton’s face.

  “Well, I won’t let them, old girl,” he said. “I think you should come with me.”

  He crouched at the pit edge and, avoiding a very active loop of undead intestine, reached down and snagged up a leg. It kicked and jerked in his hand and generally tried to pull his arm from its socket.

  “There,” he grunted, standing up. “This will—”

  He was holding a hind leg. Blinky was missing a foreleg. A left foreleg.

  “Hang on.”

  Newton crouched again and fished around. He narrowly avoided the snapping teeth of a severed head, but did come up with a left foreleg.

  “Let’s try this.” He positioned the leg against Blinky, regarding it critically. “It’s a bit long but it will definitely do.”

  Blinky’s various body parts were stitched together with a wiry white thread. Newton looked around. If this was the location of the pit of body parts then…

  “Ah.” The door that the now deceased elf had been guarding across the cavern had a letterbox opening in it. Threaded through was a length of white material.

  “Potentially promising. Ow!” Blinky bit him on the shoulder. “Knock that off. I’m going to get some thread and sew your new leg on, you ungrateful creature. Maybe I’ll – stop it! – get a nose bag and put it over your face, Hannibal Lector-style.” With a tut and an eye roll for Blinky, he went to get thread.

  “Best foot forward,” he said to her, waving the wriggling limb.

  Newton had revised his plan: get some thread, sew on Blinky’s leg, find mum, Guin and Dave (in whatever order the complex web of his priorities deemed appropriate) and then get the hell out of Christmas town.

  As he neared the door, he saw that there was a pair of scissors hanging on a chain next to the door. The white threads poking through the letterbox opening were soft to the touch, slightly greasy, like—