Candy Canes and Buckets of Blood

by Heide Goody

  “Is this hair?”

  ***

  79

  The elvish voice was making another announcement over the PA. Guin wished she understood the language of the elves a little better.

  You will soon enough, said Eglantine.

  The starfish was right. Guin was certain some horrible, possibly irreversible transformation had come over her. She felt the tops of her ears, which were well on the way to becoming properly pointed elf-ears.

  “Is that how they ‘make’ friends?” she mused unpleasantly.

  Tinfoil Tavistock made it quite clear that she didn’t want Guin to turn into an elf. Guin agreed. Bullied and rejected at school or not, she preferred to stay as a girl.

  Then she had an idea.

  If she was undergoing some sort of elf transformation, surely she could use it to her advantage? Guin ran to the bins full of clothing remnants and found a red jumper sleeve that, with minor alterations, would make a passable elf hat. She tied off the cuff end, turned it into a floppy pom-pom with some pinking shears and pulled the hat down on her head, making sure she pushed her hair out of sight.

  She allowed her ears to pop out, fairly sure she made a passable elf at a glance. She rootled through the clothing bins to find the gaudiest, elfiest clothes she could, slipping on some children’s leggings and a stupid little jacket.

  Going to try and escape in disguise? said Eglantine dismissively.

  “I’m not going to try to escape,” said Guin. “Not without my family.”

  Eglantine scoffed.

  “Watch,” said Guin.

  If she was to help the family she needed to be more than just a decent elf facsimile. She needed to become a bona fide elf, preferably one that was respected. Guin was convinced the beard was a symbol of power amongst the elves, so she searched for something beardy. She went to the toy-making workshop, striding purposefully and hoping that Gerd wouldn’t be there. Her disguise certainly wouldn’t fool anyone who had seen her up close.

  She searched through the supplies. They’d used some sort of stuffing when they made their toy creations. It wasn’t the normal, snowy-white kapok you’d get from a craft supplier: something much smellier and organic-looking. It had probably been recycled from past victims. Guin reckoned she could tease beard-like strands from it. She sorted out the best bits, along with some glue to stick them onto her chin.

  She wished she had a mirror to check how she looked, but elves didn’t seem to be big on personal grooming. Instead she decided to practise her strutting. If she was to be an important elf she needed to master the art of posturing like the most arrogant of them.

  She marched from one side of the workshop to the other, realising there was a problem. Every self-important dictator that she’d ever seen on the news combined their strutting with a narrative of some sort. While her elf language skills were improving all the time, she was not up to delivering a villainous monologue.

  She tried again. She marched across the workshop making expansive gestures, punctuating her movements with the occasional “Pah!” and other dismissive non-words. It was probably as good as it was going to get. She shoved Elsa Frinton’s Little Folk in European Folklore book under her shirt for safekeeping and made to leave.

  As she unbolted the door ready to put her elf impersonation skills to the test, Eglantine said she wasn’t going to fool anyone.

  “At least, I’m doing something,” she told the starfish. “I’m going to get my family and, if I can, stop those elves from doing … whatever it is they’re doing.”

  Eglantine sneered, pointing out she was almost certainly doomed to fail.

  “I don’t need that kind of negativity,” said Guin.

  In Guin’s pocket, Tinfoil Tavistock did some little quadruped cheerleading and threw in some bold, Go, Guin!s to boot.

  “Okay, a bit too much positivity,” said Guin and stepped outside.

  ***

  80

  Dave crept through the hall of Christmas presents. “Guin?” he hissed. “Guin? Are you here? It’s me!”

  He paused. Adding “It’s me!” to the end of a sentence really added nothing. He gave up on the whisper-shouts and explored the room silently.

  Between the stacks of Christmas presents were various workbenches, equipped with the means to make … he dreaded to think. There were boxes of eyes and ears on the bench. Human eyes and human ears. They weren’t real, but they were unpleasantly soft and malleable. Behind a bench was a massive roller dispenser on which hung a huge roll of peachy-pink material. He reached out and tugged on it. It was like sheets of skin. Artificial skin, he hoped. On the rear wall drooping faces sagged from hooks.

  “Okay, you’re creepy.”

  He picked one up, unable to help himself. It was like a peeled baby face. What was it made from? If the elves had a 3D printer that built models from stuff out of a waste food bin, they would look like this. It even smelled rotten, glistening with a sweaty sheen. Dave wondered if they were hung up to dry. He remembered the elf-baby thing that had surprised him in the market. He dropped the face and wiped his hands in disgust.

  Components and materials to make little people.

  There was a shout from the hall entrance. A team of elves had entered but were not looking his way. One of them gestured to a wheeled pallet laden with boxes. Together, the elves wheeled it away.

  Lots of little boxes. Weird human body parts.

  “Yeah, this ain’t normal,” Dave said, adding it to the long list of not normal things he’d encountered in the last twenty-four hours.

  He turned to the nearest stack of boxes and pulled down a Christmassy one. It was heavy, with an uneven weight. He’d seen one just like it earlier, but couldn’t recall where. He put it on the workbench, untied the bow (feeling momentarily guilty because it was only Christmas Eve morning and not the right time to open a present) and lifted away the snug cardboard lid.

  He pushed aside the shredded paper cushioning the contents. He gasped at the face staring up at him. It was a reasonable copy of a human baby’s face, but looked as though someone had taken it out of the mould before it was properly set. The features sagged and oozed in a flesh-coloured nightmare. Lips melted to the left while the nose was oddly flattened and twisted. It was the eyes that held his attention, though. Cold, dead eyes that blended the hollow emptiness of a doll with the soul-sucking malice of the elves themselves. He reached out a trembling hand and moved more of the packaging. It wasn’t just a face, there was a body attached.

  It was a toy baby. A toy baby made from badly formed mush.

  “You’re enough to give any child nightmares, mate,” muttered Dave.

  From nowhere, he remembered something Newton had said back in the hotel room, when the elves had first attacked. He had been babbling nervously about the elves in the market and said something about the baby Jesus in the town nativity open and close its eyes.

  “You one of them dolls that can open and close its eyes, eh?” said Dave.

  Then he recalled where he’d seen a box like this before. Bacraut had brought one onto the stage in the market square, before performing his elaborate mime for the amusement of his underlings.

  The baby in the box blinked at Dave and grinned.

  Dave dropped the box with a scream.

  ***

  81

  The workshop marked with the hammer and saw sign was locked but, a few doors down, Esther found something just as interesting. It was a workshop, filled with benches and masses of papery and sparkly materials, and a pervasive sooty aroma. They looked as though they were to make Christmas crackers. A small piece of paper caught her eye and she picked it up. It was a cracker joke. Her breath hitched as she recognised Newton’s handwriting.

  How did Good King Wenceslas like his pizza?

  She didn’t even need to read the punchline. She put it aside with a sigh and wondered if he’d been here recently. Surely, he would be writing jokes only if someone had forced him to.

  “Or
maybe not,” she said. She knew her boy.

  She moved along the bench and found the tattered remains of a textbook. She read it with interest, as it seemed to contain incomplete instructions for some sort of rudimentary explosive. She opened a chest and hit pay dirt.

  “Well hello, silver nitrate!” she said, holding up a jar. “And nitric acid, and ethanol. I wonder what I’m supposed to do with you.” She put the jars down onto the bench and stared at the book. It did not contain any helpful hints.

  “I suppose,” she said thoughtfully, “there’s only a small number of ways to combine three substances. Maybe this is one of those times when I just need to wing it.”

  She dragged a stool across and took an empty dish down from a shelf. “Let’s try.”

  ***

  82

  Guin heard a sharp crack of an explosion from the direction of the workshops, but she didn’t break her stride.

  The workshop elf, Gerd, appeared through a doorway, looking stricken, and headed towards the noise. Guin put her hands on her hips and made the angriest non-verbal noise she could manage. She stuck out her chin and tried to convey as much meaning as she could with her harrumph of disgust. Something like “Why are you running round like an idiot just because there’s explosions and bangs going on?”

  Gerd muttered an elvish apology and rushed away. Guin was pleased. If she could fool Gerd (even though she was clearly panicking), she could probably fool the other elves.

  She moved on, wanting to find the epicentre of the activity. She needed an audience for her new role. “All hal góra skeggi,” she said to herself.

  The next cavern was a small one, with tunnels leading away in several different directions. It seemed to be some sort of junction-cavern. At its centre was an elf in brown overalls, distributing clipboards to a queue of workers.

  Guin decided if she was to work her way up the food chain she should take on this supervisor. She marched up to the head of the queue and pushed aside the elf who was next in line. She pointed at her beard with meaning; the elf drifted away without a word. She faced the supervisor and stared hard at him. She brought a hand up and stroked her beard in an ostentatious way. He cringed and dropped to his knees, cowering in subservience.

  “All hal góra skeggi,” Guin said quietly.

  “All hal góra skeggi,” shouted the supervisor elf, and all of the elves in the queue, really putting their hearts into it: with raised-arm salutes and small whoops of enthusiasm.

  Guin knew that she couldn’t leave it there. She faced all of them and raised her arms above her head. “All hal góra skeggi!” she shouted.

  They replied again, hollering as loudly as they could, punching the air in excitement. Guin recognised the sentiment: in her mind hearing the chant “fight, fight, fight,” that could sometimes be heard in an unsupervised playground. She felt mounting dread: clearly she had issued some sort of bid for supremacy.

  And she realised the bid for supremacy was not between her and the supervisor elf . She heard the crowd muttering “Bacraut!, Bacraut!” The chief elf himself was approaching!

  She held her head high and maintained an attitude of mute superiority. Her fingers found Tinfoil Tavistock in her pocket. Tavistock believed in her.

  ***

  83

  The doll was alive! The baby with the ugly melted face packed in shredded paper in a Christmas box on a pile of similar boxes was very much alive!

  When Dave dropped the box the baby thing had rolled out. It certainly was no human baby, and not just because of its hideous face. Its limbs were too spindly, its manner too co-ordinated. Human babies, dolls or real, did not hiss and try to claw people to death.

  It charged at Dave with sinister nimbleness. Dave tried to shoo it away with his foot, but the thing was determined.

  “Nice baby, nice baby,” Dave whimpered. “Go to sleep. It’s beddy-byes.”

  He tried, for no sane reason, to recall any lullabies he once knew. It had been years since he had needed to use any. What he really needed was a weapon, and there were none to hand.

  He threw a box of eyes at the creature as he backed away. The baby thing slipped and slid on them momentarily. Dave threw a bunch of ears at it. They had even less effect.

  He was about to pull down sheet after sheet of rolled skin, with the vague plan of wrapping the thing in it until was immobile, but the opportunity passed. The baby thing latched onto his lower leg and began to climb.

  Dave swatted at it. The thing bit his finger. He snatched his hand away, and the face came with it. “Oh, God!” he burbled.

  Beneath the baby face was an elf, a small one, but a vile ugly hate-filled elf nonetheless. It licked his blood from its lips and, discarding its encumbering nappy, resumed its climb. It had bitten him, and Dave knew what effect an elf bite had had on Esther. In fact, he could feel (assuming it wasn’t just panic setting in) wooziness already coming over him.

  With one hand on the elf’s forehead to keep it back, Dave fished for his first aid kit with the other. The zip sprang open and the contents began slipping out. Dave managed to grab a prepped insulin syringe and, with a medical negligence that would have got him fired from his day job, jabbed it in his own thigh.

  Pulling it out, the next course of action seemed natural. He was being climbed by a malevolent pixie, and he had a sharp object in his free hand. He stabbed the elf in the arm.

  Afterwards, Dave could only assume the elf had a bad reaction to the insulin. If the bite of an elf induced a dangerous sugar-rush, perhaps their own blood sugar levels were entirely different to humans. The elf dropped immediately from Dave’s leg and began dancing on the floor in squealing circles. It’s arm fizzed and melted like chocolate on a hot windowsill. It barely had time to notice the loss of its limb before the remnants of the insulin reached the rest of its body. It sagged, its legs gave way. Its horrified face sank into the sticky cavity of its collapsing body. Finally it pooled on the floor in a brown-pink puddle, like a gallon of toffee sauce. The smell reminded Dave of the lingering smell from an empty tin of car sweets.

  “Sweet mother of—”

  Dave checked his first aid kit and the items he had dropped on the floor. He had five full doses of insulin left. Just a droplet had utterly splaticated that one. That was the good news.

  It was a reasonable assumption each of the boxes contained an elf-baby, and each pile contained hundreds of boxes. That was the bad news.

  And the piles… The elves had been carting them out for some time, taking them somewhere to be loaded and shipped out. Thousands of elf-babies being sent out into the world, but for what reason?

  A word rose in his mind, something Guin had mentioned at the dinner table last night: changelings.

  “Oh, crap.”

  ***

  84

  Bacraut the elf stood in front of Guin. “Eretta el fáskorun?” he scoffed. “Gekki ség haf besta skeggi?”

  Guin knew her best bet was to keep her mouth shut and try to assert her dominance with body language. She had the advantage of being taller than Bacraut, so she sneered down her nose at him and thrust her beard right in his face, drawing imaginary circles in the air with her chin and jabbing it for emphasis.

  He spluttered with annoyance. His tiny fists balled at his sides as he unleashed a stream of abuse. Guin had a pretty good handle on the language of the elves, but this rapid-fire profanity would have been recognisable in any language.

  Guin cast her mind across the kind of coolness she had never possessed or craved, but had often observed. The kind of dismissive sass American pop stars could channel so well. She pursed her lips and conjured the nonsense phrases in her mind, letting her eyebrows and head-waggles do the talking.

  Don’t mess with me sugar.

  Talk to the beard.

  Put a ring on it.

  It seemed to be working. Bacraut was definitely losing his composure. He visibly quivered with rage. He closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them again he looked m
ore focussed. He strutted up and down, with some beard moves of his own. He tried the head-waggle, but it didn’t really work for him. Guin wondered if elves had a different sort of neck joint to humans. He was a good beard-jabber though. He worked up a rhythm and created a kind of duck-walking dance move, his chin leading the way like an exotic bird. Guin thought back to the ancient pop videos her dad liked to watch and realised that Bacraut was moving like Mick Jagger.

  When it was time for Guin to move, she had a new idea. This time her entire display was based around her beard remaining still while her head and the rest of her body moved around it. These moves owed more to Loony Tunes cartoons than pop videos, but she was certain she pulled it off. Her chin remained stationary while her body scooted off to the sides, kicking and hip-swaying to an unmistakeable rhythm. Her face was inscrutable while her body did the work.

  The circle of elves shrieked with delight.

  Bacraut was clearly outclassed. He seemed to be out of ideas. He reverted to the angry screaming again, making the other elves shrink away in fear. Then he stood upright, a thought coming to him. He faced Guin with a look of blazing malevolence. He stood tall and wound his finger into his beard, corkscrewing it right in and then tugging sharply. The challenge was clear: whose beard could withstand being pulled?

  Guin wasn’t happy at this. She had no idea whether Bacraut’s beard was real or not, and even if it wasn’t, there was a good chance his was stuck on more securely, or he wouldn’t have suggested it. She was prepared to fake a small tug at her own beard, but she had a pretty good idea of what would follow. The next step would be pulling each other’s beards, or inviting someone else to do so. She needed to de-rail this train of thought before it went any further.

  Several ideas collided in her mind. The elves clearly held the beard in great esteem. Christmas seemed to be their life, or religion, or whatever. It was the power of Santa that she was essentially evoking.