by Heide Goody
***
101
A light appeared in the jet cylinder directly in front of Dave’s face. A slow, lazy, stupid part of his brain thought it was a pretty light; a nice orange glow. Fortunately, a quicker and cleverer part of his brain leapt in and made him slip into the gap between cargo containers before the jet roared into life, sending out a super-heated column of air. A third part of his brain, quick but perhaps too busy scoffing at the first part of his brain, made him grab onto some support before the container accelerated.
There was loud and screeching and shunting as the train, originally pulled by reindeer at the front, was now being pushed by jets from the rear. The whole vehicle accelerated beyond walking speed into a respectable run. If it didn’t tear itself apart on take-off, it might actually get up to flying speed. Dave wasn’t sure how he felt about flying speed.
He climbed between rattling carriages and crested the top of the foremost container.
Ahead, the leading edge was heading towards a tunnel that was just tall enough and wide enough to let the vehicle through without decapitating Father Christmas or ripping off the bolted on additions to the side of the craft. He looked back. His heart leapt as he saw Esther awkwardly making her way across the tops of the container vehicles.
“Christ,” he whispered, seeing her pick a way over piles of elf-baby boxes. She might as well be trying to tiptoe across the eggs of velociraptors, or aliens, or whatever horror they best equated to. Eggs that were absolutely ready to hatch.
There was a shout behind him: a half-second warning of attack. He whirled, immediately leapt upon by a trio of elves. As they grabbed him, he lost his footing. All four of them fell through the ropes and webbing between carriages. Dave snagged on a rope, stopping his fall. Two of the elves clung on. The third fell onto the rails and with a thump was gone from sight.
“Get off me, you idiots,” yelled Dave as though it might have some effect. “It’s dangerous to mess about on trains.”
One elf, fallen against a chain in an awkward position, was fighting to free his knife. The other was attempting to throttle Dave with hands too small for the job. Dave’s groping fingers found one of his insulin syringes. He stabbed the would-be throttler. Jabbering in panic as it started to melt, the creature fell away. The remaining elf had finally drawn its knife. It swung at Dave.
He booted it hard. It nearly flew out of the side of the gap but clung onto Dave’s shoe.
He angled his leg round. Without proper consideration for his foot, he presented the dangling elf to the roaring jet flame. For an instant, its lower half was alight, like a marshmallow over a campfire. Then it was gone, whipped away by the jet’s power, leaving Dave with a smoking hot foot.
***
102
Watching the elves trying to storm the accelerating sleigh, Guin saw a bundle of fire fly out from the vehicle’s side some distance back. Was that an elf?
The moment it touched the ground, flames sprang up around it. The floor all across the cavern had smelled sort of petrol-y. Now it didn’t just burn;:it exploded.
Elves that had been cheering and waving their hats were now running and bursting into flame. Guin’s attention flicked to all manner of pipes and barrels around the cavern. If the fire reached any fuel containers, either in the cavern or worse, on board the sleigh—
“Faster!” she yelled to Newton.
“We are!” he shouted back.
There was a sucking whoop of air as they plunged into the tunnel. The yellow glow of the blazing cavern was replaced by the gloom and streams of fairy lights in the tunnel. Enclosed, the clatter of undead reindeer hoofs and the rattle of the godawful sleigh on its tracks were amplified.
“—meant to be a silent night!” Newton shouted.
Guin didn’t hear the beginning of that joke. She assumed it wouldn’t have been worth the bother.
“I’m going to find our parents!” She climbed up past Father Christmas and into the gap, no more than three or four feet high, between the top of the sleigh and the rock roof.
Towards the rear, the fire was an orange halo, making a silhouette of the train. It sort of looked like it was chasing them.
***
103
The fire was chasing them, Esther noted. The exploding fireball that had taken out the cavern was now racing to overtake the sleigh. Boxes in the rearmost container were steaming as the pursuing flames cooked them.
Wherever the bomb was (she was sure it was much further forward) it was too late to look for it.
She staggered forward and leaped the gap between the carriages and threw herself down just as the last portions of the train plunged into the tunnel. She didn’t pause to collect herself. She didn’t wait. She crawled forward over a sea of uneven cardboard boxes as fast as she could.
As she reached the front of the next carriage, something reared up through the gap. She punched it in the face as it stabbed her in the shoulder.
“Ow!” said Dave with feeling.
“Ow!” she replied. She looked at her shoulder. In the light from passing fairy lights, she could see there was a syringe stuck in it. Dave was suddenly contrite and pulled it out.
“Ow!” she said again.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s only insulin.”
“That wasn’t the problem,” she said, kissing him fiercely because it seemed absolutely the right thing to do. “Why insulin?” she said.
“It makes the elves go squish.”
“Is that a medical term?”
They looked at each other.
“There’s a bomb on this sleigh,” she said’
At the same moment he said, “The boxes are full of changelings.”
They exchanged looks and said, “What?” simultaneously.
“I was trying to blow the sleigh up,” Esther explained.
“With us on it?”
“I didn’t know at the time. Changelings?”
“Yes. They’re—” He pointed behind her. “Those.”
Elves in hideous baby disguises rose up from the rear container carriages. Tired of being cooked alive by the encroaching flames, perhaps. Esther didn’t know if their disguises had been hideous from the start or whether the fire had melted them. Either way, the dozens of creatures stalking towards them, crouching a little to avoid the tunnel roof, looked nothing like actual babies. Noses drooped. Eyeballs slid down cheeks.
Esther stared. “Are those … brown baby elves?” She would have used some form of ethnically appropriate description, but there weren’t many clues to latch onto.
“They’re going to drop changelings all over the world,” said Dave. “Got to blend in.”
“But that’s wildly racist,” she said, appalled.
Dave made the kind of noise that would normally had ended with him pointing out yes, it was wildly racist, but the racism in this situation was perhaps a lesser issue than the greater elf-changeling-horror. Esther would have been forced to point out that racism needed challenging wherever it appeared, regardless of context. There was no time for such a conversation, and she was enraged.
Rage lent her a casual bravery, she raised her hand and with careful fingers (she didn’t want to lose her fingers or her hand or her life) felt out for the next band of fairy lights they passed under. Her fingers snagged a row. There was enough grip in her hands and momentum in their passing for her to pull the wiring down. Pinging the lights from whatever nails and hooks held them in place, before the wire was ripped from her grasp.
The string of lights, swinging low, scythed along the train roof and through the approaching changelings. Several were ripped in half. Most were scooped up and hauled off the roof of the train and into the pursuing fireball.
“Man!” said Dave. “That was—”
“I’m sorry you had to see that. It’s just—”
“Yeah, yeah. Racism. I get it. Now, you were mentioning a bomb.”
“Wrapped up like a present. Tartan bow.”
“And
you made it?”
She heard the disbelief in his voice. “I followed the instructions!”
“Oh, right,” he said. “We’d best find it then.”
***
104
Guin crawled over container roofs towards the rear of the train. The noise around her, now including the whirling shrieking jet turbines, was deafening. If they survived this situation, she’d be able to play the “I’m sorry I didn’t hear, I was deafened” card for several years to come.
Against this constant howl it was hard to tell, but she thought she heard booms and bangs from deeper within the hillside. Was that the train shaking, or the whole cave system?
The train burst out of the tunnel and into the storage cavern where she and Newton had been tied up and tried to escape on the miniature train. Guin hoped the train had been moved off the track or else this journey was going to end quickly and nastily.
She was distracted by the view across the cavern. From other tunnels gouts of exploding gas and fuel burst into the cavern, consuming stacked market stalls, piles of supplies and hundreds of hanging sausage links. Elves tried to flee the cataclysm but had no chance of outrunning the flames.
Her view of the destruction was whipped away from view as the sleigh re-entered a tunnel. The final tunnel before they were outside.
An elf, its hat scorched (the pom-pom still smouldering) charged at her over the container roof. She tried to rise to meet it, but there wasn’t enough room for her to stand without braining herself on the ceiling. In this space, being short was an advantage.
The elf cackled, seeing her disadvantage and swung its knife. Guin fell onto her back. The elf came at her. She caught it in the belly with her feet and rolled onto her shoulders, lifting the elf up until it made contact with the ceiling. It fell away in a mushy mess.
There were some advantages to being taller.
***
105
Up ahead, reindeer stumbled and crashed against obstacles in the tunnel. Newton saw more than a couple of severed zomdeer legs go flying, but the herd kept going, hauling both sleigh and their fallen comrades along.
There was a change in the air buffeting Newton’s face. He realized they were outside, fairy lights in the tunnel replaced by stars in a cold winter sky. He could see barely any distance ahead. There was the shape of trees, the slope of a hillside below him, and the suspicion the railway track still carrying the sleigh would run out in a matter of seconds.
“Up! Up!” he pleaded with the reindeer and shook the reins.
“Uppa! Uppa!” shouted Santa above him. “Flúg mi hreindýrum! Flúg!”
The reindeer responded better to his commands than to Newton’s. He could feel the power flowing through the reins now: whatever magic powers Santa’s beard provided. The leading edge of reindeer were no longer galloping through snow but curving up through the air, pushing through the upper branches of the trees above the town of Alvestowe.
***
106
As the carriage beneath him rocked and lifted, Dave shouted out to Esther to hold on. She’d gone ahead to the next container to look for the bomb, while he searched this one. Boxes tumbled about around him. If the bomb’s components were as delicate as Esther had claimed, he was surprised it hadn’t gone off yet. Not that he was doubting her bomb-making skills, particularly if was following instructions. Especially if they were authentic instructions (and Dave felt that O-level Chemistry textbooks would be very authentic indeed).
A violent noise made him look back. The last two containers had not yet been lifted off the ground. Reaching the end of the railway line, they bounced and scraped along the forest floor, bucking and twisting and throwing parcels and awakened elf-changelings everywhere.
This sight alone should have been enough to arrest anyone’s attention but Dave’s was drawn further back to the tunnel and the hillside. Pillars of flame and exploding debris shot out of the tunnel mouth and from sinkholes all across the mountain. In the grey pre-dawn, they were flashes of white and orange against the gloom. The boom of explosions was swiftly superseded by the sound of a cavern-riddled, snow-covered hillside collapsing in on itself. As ancient geological structures caved in, boulders were flung into the air, the whole forest shuddered and the thick layer of snow gave up its grip on the hillside and began to flow down towards the town.
“Avalanche!” he yelled.
***
107
Esther had to brace herself as the container she was crossing tilted upwards at a sharp angle.
They were flying! They were actually bloody flying!
It was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. She made a quiet mental note to appreciate being present at this ancient annual ritual when she had enough wherewithal and calm to appreciate such things.
Behind and below them, an avalanche of snow and rock swept over the town. The United Kingdom rarely had sufficiently high peaks or deep snowfall to make such things possible, but it appeared a catastrophic explosion underground was just the ticket to bring white death to rural England. In the low light, she saw the destruction of the town as silhouettes of black against white.
The avalanche swept around the church. Moments later, the tower spire tilted and fell. The wall of snow powered on into Alvestowe, tearing down alleys and streets, slicing through the brickwork and doors of houses which had stood for centuries. The marketplace, along with the nativity, the rides and the remaining stalls, was demolished in an instant. The cascade rolled on down the hill to the river gorge. Gone were the shops. Gone was Mrs Scruples’ horrible hotel. Gone were the riverside barns and, she guessed, the remains of Dave’s car. The old humpbacked bridge, the only route into the town, buckled under the snow and rock as the avalanche dashed itself against the far side of the shallow gorge.
Gone, all gone.
Esther felt a genuine sense of loss at the destruction of such a beautiful little town. The people – the humans – had either left at the close of the market or been turned into sausages long ago, but the death of the town itself was still a crying shame. And yet, she reminded herself, with the cave system gone and the town destroyed, the only elves left were the ones on this sleigh.
Ahead and flapping erratically was a blur of red and blue feathers. It was King Leopold of Belgium, Mrs Scruples’ parrot. It flew in a desperate panic in a southerly direction, driven off into the winter morn.
“Sorry!” Esther yelled to it.
She thought she heard it squawk something back. It was indecipherable and probably too rude to repeat.
***
108
The reindeer’s flightpath levelled out without much intervention from Newton. He was a terrible judge of distances but guessed they were at least a hundred metres above the ground. The landscape ahead of them, frosty fields cut through with winding roads, whipped by at speed. Either dawn had arrived without him realizing, or height had given them a sneak peek over the curvature of the earth. There was definitely light in the sky, and they were flying into the sunrise: east. South-east. Ish.
The reindeer, getting into their stride, were running hard and still accelerating.
If Father Christmas really did fly all around the world in one night then he would have to travel at several hundred miles an hour. Newton wouldn’t want to be at the exposed front end if and when that happened.
Newton shouted back as loud as he could. “You all right back there? Mum? Guin?”
There was no reply. He hardly expected one. He’d have to go and look.
“Flying is always thirsty work,” shouted Santa from above him. “Would anyone happen to have a cup of mead on them?”
Newton looked up, prepared to give another polite and apologetic “No” to the severed head. As he did, he saw two elves climbing down from their Santa-steering positions, finally aware there was an interloper on board.
“Ah,” said Newton. “Now, can we just talk about this?”
“Friends! Friends!” called Santa. “Let’s di
scuss this over a drink, eh?”
The nearest elf dropped on Newton. He grabbed it and the pair of them rolled in the foot well.
***
109
The sleigh bucked in the air as it flew, the loosely-coupled containers rolling in a wave.
At the top of each arc, Guin had to hold on to something solid to avoid being lifted into the air by her own momentary weightlessness. She would have shouted at Newton to keep the thing steady, but she guessed she’d be no better at steering the thing than him.
They were racing over the English countryside, flying into the on-coming dawn. They zipped over a motorway and, for a few seconds, the countryside beneath them was replaced by the greys, red and greens of a still-sleeping town. Far ahead, electricity pylon towers marched across their path, frozen giants strung with heavy wires. Surely, Newton had spotted those?
One thing at a time, she told herself. Once she was happy her dad and Esther were on board she could go forward and give Newton all the advice he needed.
At the top of another wave, she clung to the fuel pipe on the side of the container. All the boxes and bags in the container beneath her lifted off the ground for a second. Her stomach flipped as gravity momentarily lost its hold on her. It was a disconcerting feeling. In her pocket, Tinfoil Tavistock gave a whoop of joy. This was both uncharacteristic and unhelpful. Guin suspected her brain was more than a little out of sorts.
Gravity resumed, Guin continued heading back along the sleigh. Blurred in the buffeting wind, she saw indistinct, moving shapes. That one did look like Esther. She looked like she was rummaging through the parcels. Whatever for? Was Guin’s dad down there?
“I’ve found it!” came a wind-whipped shout from even further back.
