The Human Santapede

by Adam Millard

  “Harumph ergh,” Jimbo said, shaking his head and, subsequently, Sissy’s backside.

  “Yes, he’s definitely a few knives short of a cutlery drawer,” said Sissy. “I wonder what he’s got against The Fat Bastard. I mean, Santa has a strange way of pissing people off, but this guy…well, this guy’s holding quite a grudge.”

  “Hmph,” Jimbo opined, rolling his eyes.

  “Santa might have slept with the dude’s missus?” Sissy repeated. “No, I don’t think so. He’s punching above his weight as it is with that slut of his. He wouldn’t dare cheat on her. They’re crazy in love.”

  “Hermph!” Jimbo said.

  “She’s fucking most of the elves at the workshop, including the ugly ones from the guitar-stringing crew?” Sissy didn’t – couldn’t – believe such a ridiculous allegation. Maybe her husband was hallucinating; he had, after all, lost a lot of blood, and inhaled a fair amount of gas. She wouldn’t believe a muffled word that passed his lips until they were out of there, separate once again.

  Suddenly, something thumped just beyond the door. It was all Sissbo could do to stay on their knees.

  “Now, don’t give me any shit, you red-nosed cunt,” the voice of the maniac hissed. A second later the door flew open, and the hooded beast came in. At the end of his arm was a hand, and in that hand were a set of reins, and at the end of those reins was what looked like a very reluctant reindeer with a nose so bright, The Fat Bastard could have used it to see through fog – if he was so inclined and if the sleigh didn’t have headlights.

  “Rudolph!” Sissy gasped.

  “Rmph,” Jimbo concurred.

  “Now, he’s either going on your face,” he told Sissy, “or his backside.” He pointed at Jimbo.

  Sissy shook her head. “This must be some kind of nightmare. I’ll wake up in a minute, covered in sweat and…you know what? Put the damn reindeer on Jimbo’s ass.”

  “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmph!” Jimbo whined.

  What the fuck is going on in here? Rudolph thought, almost certain that the man at the end of the reins didn’t know who he was, or how much trouble he was going to be in for kidnapping Santa’s most infamous sleigh-puller.

  “Very well,” the hooded beast said, tugging the recalcitrant reindeer across the room. It was hard work; like shifting a fridge that had been standing in the same place for several centuries. Once the creature’s ligaments were cut, though, it would be plain sailing.

  This is going terribly well, thought the lunatic. It was shaping up to be the best Christmas ever.

  10

  The stables were a mess when Finklefoot and The Fat Bastard arrived. Stables are not known for their excessive cleanliness at the best of times, but these were so bad, even the reindeer looked ashamed. There was hay where there shouldn’t have been, and the walls had been sprayed with a thick coating of magical deer faeces, though it wasn’t so magical when it was dripping down the fixings.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” Santa said, glancing around at the moseying reindeer and the mess they’d made.

  Finklefoot frowned. “Looks like a stable,” he said, “but slightly messier.” He couldn’t help but feel as if they were wasting their time down here. They should have been in the village, where there was a whole lot more of nothing to be seen.

  “What’s that song?” Santa said. “You know? The one about the reindeer?” He looked perplexed, as if he’d just been given a Rubik’s Cube with only three sides.

  “Ah, I know the one that you mean,” Finklefoot said, nodding. “That annoying one about the bullies.”

  “That’s the one!” Santa said, clicking his fingers. “What does that go like again?”

  “Da-da-da-da-da-da,” Finklefoot said. It sounded like no song he’d ever heard before, but he was working though the lyrics in his head, and that was what mattered. “Da-da-da-da-da. Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen…”

  Santa grinned. “Da-da-da-da-da…Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen.”

  They both sang the last part together, though sang was perhaps not the right word for it. “But do you recall…the mast famous reindeer of all! Rudolph the—”

  “Where the fuck is Rudolph!?” Santa bellowed.

  Finklefoot glanced around the stables. They all looked the same to him. It was like trying to pick Happy Feet out of a colony of penguins. But wasn’t there something different about Rudolph? Something that made him stand out?

  “Is Rudolph the one with the gammy leg?” Finklefoot said.

  “No, that was Olive. We had her put down three decades ago.” Santa moved amongst the reindeer. He looked absolutely mortified. “Rudolph’s the one with the bloody great big red nose, and she’s not here.”

  Now Finklefoot was even more confused. “She? What kind of name is Rudolph for a lass?”

  “No-one knows whether it’s a boy or a girl,” Santa said, grabbing Vixen by the head and then pushing him/her away again. “We don’t have access to Wikipedia up here. I’ve always thought it a bit of an odd name for a doe. It doesn’t make it any easier that both males and females grow antlers. I mean, it’s as if God is intentionally trying to confuse me.”

  “Wow, you learn something new every day,” Finklefoot said, though he doubted it would prove useful information any time soon.

  “She’s not here! Rudolph’s not fucking here!” Santa was frantic, moving from one reindeer to the next. “A couple of elves going missing, I could probably deal with, but people are going to notice if I’m flying over the cities next week with only eight shagging reindeer.”

  Finklefoot removed his pointy hat, scratched his head, and said, “Maybe this Rudolph character got tired of being coerced. Is it possible that your most famous reindeer has, for want of a better word, absconded?”

  Santa gasped. “How dare you! My reindeer are extremely happy here.” At the opposite side of the stable, Blitzen, Donner, and six other reindeer shook their heads. “No, this is the work of our kidnapper. They’ve taken Rudolph! Oh, my poor, poor Rudolph!” It was all very melodramatic, like something from a daytime soap-opera. All that was missing was the cheesy background music and fake tears.

  It had the desired effect, though, and Finklefoot suddenly felt as if he should say something. “Who wrote that song, anyway?”

  “What?” The Fat Bastard frowned.

  “The song,” Finklefoot said. “The one about the reindeer. Who wrote it? I mean, shouldn’t you guys be getting royalties, or something?”

  “Come on,” Santa said, marching across the stables with renewed vigour. “We’ve got a reindeer rustler to find.”

  Not to mention an elf-abductor, Finklefoot thought. Something very bad was happening, and it was happening a week before the big day, when it would hurt them the most.

  Somebody was trying to ruin Christmas…

  And for once, it had nothing to do with him.

  11

  “Have yourseeeeeelf a meeeeeeerry little Christmas,” the hooded maniac sang as he peeled the flesh away from the elf’s buttocks. “Let your arse be light.” He laughed. The elf, Jimbo, did not, for he was far too busy shrieking and sobbing and wondering what was going to be left of his derriere once the lunatic had finished with it. He liked his bottom; he’d grown quite attached to it over the centuries. Strange how one doesn’t truly realises how important one’s anatomy is until it’s being flayed from one’s personage.

  “Oh, calm down,” Sissy called back across her shoulder. Her husband ceased screaming and rolled his eyes. “Honestly, I’ve never heard anything like it.” To their abductor she said, “Don’t suppose you have any of that numbing cream, do you? That stuff they use for tattooing wimps? Jimbo’s never been very good when it comes to pain. I once had to talk him through a bout of wind. Poor git thought he was dying.”

  “Unfortunately,” the figure said, making an incision just next to Jimbo’s crack, “I ran out of numbing cream last week. I had a tricky splinter. Your husband’s just going to have to
man up and take it like an elf.”

  “Did you hear that, Jimbo?” Sissy said. “No pain relief. I’d suggest biting your lip but your mouth’s a little too far inside me and OW! You little bastard!”

  In the corner of the room, tethered to a vending machine, of all things, Rudolph whinnied and chuffed. He’d got the gist of what was going on, and he didn’t like it one bit. His nose, usually bright and red and at least two-hundred watt, was now dark and soft and about as illuminating as a set of Vauxhall Velox headlights in a mine-shaft.

  “Don’t worry, Rudy,” the dark figure said, dropping a lump of severed flesh into a kidney-shaped bowl. “This is what you’ve been waiting for. You’re the most famous of the reindeer, and for what? For helping Santa out on a foggy night? Not much of a legacy, if you ask me, so I’m going to make you famous for something else, something truly remarkable.”

  I’d rather you didn’t, Rudolph thought.

  “You’re going to be the only reindeer in The Human Santapede! Won’t that be something to tell your grandkids, huh?”

  “Wait a minute,” Sissy said. “Did you just call it a human Santapede?”

  Coughing, the maniac said, “Indeed I did.”

  “But so far you’ve got a couple of elves and a reindeer, and you plan to put Santa at the front?”

  The figure already knew where this was going, but decided to play along anyway. “That’s right.”

  “But we’re not human. Santa’s, technically, not human, and I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but Rudolph is about as far from human as you can get. It’s the antlers, you see. They’re a dead giveaway.”

  The shrouded figure grimaced. He had wondered how long it would be before someone noticed the flaw in his plan. “I’m fully aware that the species involved aren’t necessarily human…”

  “And yet you decided to stick with the name anyway?” Sissy shook her head and clicked her tongue. Behind her, Jimbo did the same. “Surely The Inhuman Santapede would make more sense.”

  “Well, I did consider that for a moment,” the lunatic said. “But it didn’t have quite the same ring to it.”

  “But it makes more sense.”

  “But it sounds wrong!”

  “Yes, but people are going to see us, aren’t they? They’re going to see us, and stand back and go ‘What’s it called?’ and another will say ‘Oh, it’s The Human Santapede,’ and then someone will say, ‘But it doesn’t have any humans in it,’ and then another will say, ‘Hey, he’s bloody right. All I see is elves and reindeer and The Fat Bastard, none of which are human,’ and then they’ll all just walk away, because no-one likes a cheap display.”

  “Have you quite finished?”

  “Yes,” Sissy said. After ten seconds of silence – during which time many cogs and wheels turned and whirred in her head – she added, “You could always put the ‘In’ part in brackets. I mean, The (In)Human Santapede still doesn’t make much sense, but at least it’s not—”

  “Look, I’ve already decided,” the figure said, untethering Rudolph and dragging the poor beast unceremoniously across the room. “You start putting brackets in things, you’re just going to make things worse. That’s why Meat Loaf songs are terrible.”

  “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Sissy said.

  “Hmph, smph!” Jimbo groaned.

  “Okay, I’ll ask him,” Sissy said. “Mr Madman? My husband would like to know if you were going to be removing the reindeer’s antlers before you attached it to his arsehole.”

  “Tell your husband that I was considering it, but then his wife mocked my choice of name, and now I’ll be leaving the antlers right where they are.”

  Sissy sighed. “Hubbie, it’s time to man up.”

  Jimbo began to cry.

  12

  There are certain things that love does to a man, things that turn him to jelly or render him stupid. So when Santa returned to the office to discover his wife dressing and a trio of breathless elves leaving – without making eye contact, of course – he thought nothing of it. Finklefoot, on the other hand, was not in love with Mrs Claus, and therefore knew exactly what had just happened.

  “Ah, darling!” Mrs Claus said as she rolled her stockings up. “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon. I was just instructing a couple of the elves from the RC department on how sensitive the steering controls should be on those new fifteen inch Porsches.”

  “That’s good,” Santa said, slumping into his throne. The throne practically called out for help beneath him. “You’re doing a fantastic job, Jessica. Keep up the good work.”

  Mrs Claus smiled; Finklefoot grimaced as he noticed the elf pube protruding from her front teeth. As she limped across the room – elves have notoriously large penises, despite being small everywhere else – she regarded Finklefoot with something akin to disgust, as if she couldn’t trust an elf that didn’t find her attractive. The fact of the matter was, Finklefoot found her just as attractive as the other elves; he just didn’t want sloppy eight-hundred-and-fifty-seconds.

  “I take it you didn’t find the missing elves,” she said, pulling a clear heel onto her left foot.

  “Not only that,” Santa said, “but some thieving bar steward has taken Rudolph.”

  “Taken who?” Jessica Claus knew less about the reindeer than even her husband. If you were to ask her the difference between a reindeer and a normal deer, she would say the latter came with umbrellas.

  “Rudolph,” Santa said. “The Red-Nosed Reindeer. You remember all those years ago when we had that bit of fog?”

  “Oh, that one,” Mrs Claus said. “Well, why would they take that one? I mean, is there a black market for glowing noses?”

  “Maybe we’re missing something,” Finklefoot said, edging toward the door. It seemed to be the start of a habit, and if past edgings were anything to go by…

  “That’s why I want you to look into it,” Santa said, stroking his beard before wedging a large piece of Christmas pud between it. Lord knows where he’d got it from.

  “But I’ve already told you,” Finklefoot said, incredulous. “I’m not a private investigator. I’m just a foreman. A foreman with a shitload of work to do, so if you don’t mind…”

  “A promotion,” Santa said, so suddenly that he almost choked on a mouthful of currants. Finklefoot stopped moving and started listening. “How would you like to be my second-in-command? Huh? I’ve always thought highly of you. We could be like the dynamic duo. Batman and Robin, Starsky and Hutch—”

  “Wallace and Grommit,” Mrs Claus sneered. To her husband she said, “I thought I was your second-in-command.” She looked positively humiliated. It was a look, Finklefoot thought, that suited her very well.

  Santa grinned sheepishly. “You can both be my second-in-command,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you can never have too many.”

  “What are the perks?” Finklefoot was genuinely intrigued.

  “Well, I’ll have to write up a whole new set of perquisites for you, since most of my wife’s bonuses are of a sexual nature, but I shall make it worth your while, and you’ll never have to work overtime again.”

  “My wife and I would like a bigger house,” Finklefoot said. “Away from the rest of the village. Neither of us are anti-neighbour, but we’re both a little sick of being woken at five in the morning to the chirpy, high-pitched sounds of ‘Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go’.”

  “I think that can be arranged,” said The Fat Bastard.

  “Don’t let him hold you to ransom,” Mrs Claus said, massaging her husband’s plentiful shoulders. “One minute they want a bigger house, the next you’re calling them Sir and shining their shoes.”

  “And I want all of my crew, and my wife, to have next year off.”

  “Sounds do-able,” Santa said. “Nobody really likes dolls, anyway. One year without them is hardly going to make a difference.”

  “And if I find out what’s happening here, I want a song.”

  “What
?”

  “See,” Mrs Claus said. “Now he wants a fucking song.”

  “It’s only fair. Rudolph got one for saving Christmas, and that was ages ago. I want a song about how I solved this mystery. I want Elton John to write it, and I want it to be Christmas number one for the next three years running, and played on human radio for the next hundred years or so.”

  “What if Elton John’s busy?” Santa said.

  “Then Barry Gibb will do, so long as he doesn’t actually sing it. I don’t want it to be remembered as ‘that high-pitched song about that brave elf’.”

  Santa stood, walked across the room, and poured a large brandy. Though it sounded like three very quick actions, it actually took three minutes, by which time Finklefoot had grown very tired of the intense glower from Mrs Claus.

  “Okay. You can have whatever you want.” Santa ran a hand over his clammy, bald head. “I just want this solved quickly and discreetly. If news of this gets out to the other elves there will be a national panic. Before you know it, we’ll have a whole village of anxious elves, and anxious elves do not a great toymaker…erm, make, or something like that.”

  Finklefoot smiled, unsure if he’d got himself a good deal or not. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with this a moment ago, and now he was spearheading it. Now he knew how most American presidents felt.

  “Then I’m going to need a way to keep in touch with you,” the elf said. There was a very good chance things were about to get dangerous, and if things were about to get dangerous, Finklefoot wanted to be able to notify The Fat Bastard at the drop of a hat.

  “Jessica, be a darling and have Scrat bring up one of his walkie-talkie sets,” Santa said.

  “Anything in particular?” Mrs Claus said to Finklefoot. “You strike me as a Hello Kitty fan.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Santa. “Just get one up here, pronto!”