by Adam Millard
“What is it?” Mrs Claus asked, stepping toward her husband and the miniature thingamabob he held in his hand. “Is that a dart?”
Suddenly, Mrs Claus screeched. Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open to reveal an already swollen tongue. She reached around and yanked something from her ass, which turned out to be another dart, identical to the one Santa had just pulled from his neck.
“What’th going on,” she said, though her tongue was inflating at an incredible rate. She knew those would be her last words for a while.
Santa dropped to his knees, though not in despair. He just couldn’t control his legs any more. Luckily, as a fat man, he had plenty of padding over his kneecaps, and so didn’t do too much damage. The wooden floor beneath him, however, splintered immediately, spiderwebbed out to where eight nervous reindeer watched with absolute fascination. “I think we’ve been poithoned,” he said. “The dartth…thereth thomething in the dartth.” He dropped the dart, with its none-too-friendly flight, and watched as it rolled across the stable floor, coming to a halt only when it met a giant, black boot.
Mrs Claus joined her husband on the floor, completely paralysed. She landed awkwardly – one boob out, the other pushed up against her left ear – and, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t roll over to see why The Fat Bastard’s eyes were so wide, his mouth trembling with horror, his frown so deep.
“No,” Santa said. “Thith can’t be—“
“Well it is, you fat sonofabitch,” a voice growled. Mrs Claus thought she recognised it, but her tongue had become so distended in her mouth that everything sounded…wrong. “How are my drugs working for you? Hm?”
Santa dropped to the left, like a toppled statue, and remained there, inert and ineffectual. “Thatuthiththu,” he said, though even he didn’t know what it was meant to be.
“Just relax,” the voice hissed as it circled the fallen Clauses. “You’re going to start feeling very sleepy, and when you wake up…ooh, when you wake up, you’re going to be so impressed with what I’ve been working on.”
Santa’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. He was losing it, losing touch with reality, which was a remarkable state of affairs given what he did for a living. The dart’s contents, whatever the hell they were, had reduced him to a slobbering, slumbering wreck in less than twenty seconds.
“You should feel honoured,” the voice said, though it was fuzzy now, as if it was coming to them through several gallons of water. “This is going to make one hell of a Christmas card, one for all the family, one that can be treasured year after year…”
Santa huffed. It was almost impossible to breathe, now. Just then, the walkie-talkie on his buckle hissed and crackled, and then the voice of his second-in-command (or at least one of them) came through loud and clear.
“I think it’s Krampus!” the voice said.
“He thinks it’s me!” Krampus said, leaning down and snatching the walkie-talkie from The Fat Bastard’s belt. “Who is this?” he said, speaking into the walkie-talkie.
There was a slight pause – as Krampus had anticipated – and then a tiny, shaky voice said, “Who is this?”
Krampus sighed. He’d played a lot of tedious games in his lifetime, including the week-long poker tournaments with the rest of the Companions, but this game…this game was never going to take off the same way, say, Monopoly had.
“I asked you first,” Krampus said, watching as Santa and Mrs Claus drifted slowly, and inexorably, into unconsciousness. Krampus had time to wonder if Mrs Claus was cold in her get-up before the small, timorous voice said:
“Can you put The Fat Bastard on, please? I promise, I’m not trying to sell anything.”
Krampus laughed, and it was a terrible laugh. It was the kind of laugh one associates with Bond villains and tax-dodging politicians; the kind of laugh that created gooseflesh out of thin air. “Your boss is…how should I put it…? Otherwise engaged.” Krampus pressed another button on the walkie-talkie, for he was not to be trusted with buttons of any shape or size. “What does this one do?” he said.
“Oh, you’ve pushed the Green Goblin button,” the voice said. “You might not be able to hear it at your end, but you sound just like the…you know what? It doesn’t matter. What do you mean by ‘otherwise engaged’?”
Krampus, proving once again that he was nothing if not capable of multi-tasking, dropped Santa Claus’s feet. “I mean,” he said, “that he can’t come to the phone right now because he’s a little bit unconscious.”
Silence…
More silence…
A crackle, and then a soupcon of nothingness, before the voice returned. “Krampus,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
Krampus had hogtied Mrs Claus – and not just because she liked it – and was dragging her across to the open sack he’d laid out on the floor. “You’re remarkably good at this. I’m looking for a few good elves. How would you like to be part of something truly unique?”
“I wouldn’t,” said the voice. “What have you done with them all? What have you done with Rudolph? And Santa?”
Krampus stuffed The Fat Bastard into a sack (it was a very large sack, the heavy-duty kind you use for garden waste) and pulled the drawstring, cutting off his pudgy captive’s snoring, or at least muting it a little. “Don’t worry,” Krampus said. “Nobody is dead yet.” Maybe, once the reindeer pushed out a shit, that would all change…
“Why are you doing this? This is The Land of Christmas. People don’t go around kidnapping other people. We’re not Mexicans.”
“Are we still using that joke?”
“Can you think of a better one?”
As a matter of fact, Krampus couldn’t. And why should he? It wasn’t his job to come up with such things. Instead, he slung the two sacks across his shoulder – needless to say, one of them was a helluva lot heavier than the other, meaning he walked with a lopsided gait, and almost ended up in with the remaining reindeer.
“What are you going to do with them?” the voice asked. “It’s not Christmas policy to negotiate with terrorists.” Not that there was any government in place to spearhead such negotiations. Whoever had set up the system all those years ago really hadn’t put much thought into it, at all.
“I’m going to stitch them together,” Krampus said. “I’m going to stitch them arse to mouth so that they are one long, singular organism. It’s what shall be forever known as…The Human Santapede.” He sniggered as he said it. Such a great name…such a brilliant idea…
There was a pause; Krampus could almost hear miniature cogs rotating as his fellow communicator turned the information over in his head. “Wouldn’t it be an Inhuman Santapede?” the voice cropped up. “I mean, if you wanted to be really pedantic about it.”
“I’m toying with the idea of brackets,” Krampus said. “I don’t know how it will…look, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that this Christmas is not going to happen. 2014 will be the year of the Krampus, and the year that Santa shat into the faces of those that revere him so foolishly.”
“But don’t you see!” the voice pleaded, “that by killing Christmas, you are, in fact, killing yourself? Don’t you have homes to visit, too? Children to disappoint and terrify? Without Christmas, you are nothing…all of us…we’re nothing!”
Krampus trundled away from the stables, his cargo swinging behind him like Adolf’s ball-bag. “You will be nothing,” he hissed into the walkie-talkie. “I will be the creator of The Human Santapede—”
“Yeah, I’m not feeling that name at all. What does it sound like with brackets?”
“Look, I don’t have time for this,” Krampus said. “It’s snowing like a motherfucker again, and I’m carrying a fat saint and his whore-devil wife—”
“You’ve got Jessica, too!?” the voice gasped.
“Of course I have,” Krampus said. “When I came up with the idea of sewing hundreds of elves together, she was the first thing I thought of. Funny that, isn’t it?”
“Not rea
lly.” The voice sounded bored, now, as if its owner had a million-and-one things it would rather have been doing than conversing with a maniacal Companion. “You’ll never get away with this, Krampus, and even if you do, you’ll never work in this town again!”
Krampus sighed. “Promises, promises,” he slithered. “Well, must dash. These mouths and arseholes aren’t going to stitch themselves together.” And with that, he dropped the Spiderman walkie-talkie and crushed it beneath one heavy boot. Two would have just been overkill…
He whistled a tuneless ditty – nothing remotely Christmas-y – and went about his work like the consummate professional he was turning out to be.
*
Finklefoot stared down at the walkie-talkie in the only way he could: as if it had just called him a dirty midget. Krampus was behind the disappearances, and now he had The Fat Bastard and Mrs Claus.
He was going to do horrific things to them. Things that only a sick mind could come up with. A Human Santapede? A string of grotesque, malformed elves all sewn together to form one gruesome creature…?
“Well this,” Finklefoot said, shaking his head and trying his damnedest not to pass out, “is a bit of a clusterfuck.”
As understatements went, it was up there with Mumbai is not the cheapest place in the world to live and Cannibalism is frowned upon in most societies.
20
The workshop had come to a grinding halt as far as work was concerned, which was always the case whenever Santa and his wife left the building. A couple of the braver elves had ventured outside for a quick smoke, while a couple of the more suicidal elves were up in The Fat Bastard’s office, raiding his brandy supply. Bodies – some partially inebriated – ambled aimlessly from one station to another, striking up conversation with whoever would listen. It was a rare occurrence, and one that might not be repeated this side of the big day, and so it was no surprise that people were making the most of it. How did the old adage go? A change is as good as a rest? Well, the workshop had certainly changed in the hour or so since Santa’s departure, so much so that several of the elves had fallen asleep at their tables.
“Shall I change the music?” Gizzo shouted down from the first-floor mezzanine. His question was answered with a thousand sighed yeses. After eighteen-thousand repetitions, any song is bound to get on your nerves.
“Won’t Santa know we were in his office if we change the music?” Rat asked, and a damn fine question it was, too.
“Are you kidding me?” Gizzo said. “He’s been at the sherry all day. He wouldn’t know if we changed the tape to Metallica.” He rushed across the landing and slipped into The Fat Bastard’s office. Rat followed, as rats are wont to do, and watched as his colleague located the boom-box and switched the tape. After a moment of hissing, the opening chords to Bobby Helms’ Jingle Bell Rock seeped out through the speakers across the workshop, much to the satisfaction of the workers below. It wouldn’t last. Come next year, they would be screaming out for a different song.
“Come on,” Rat said. “If we get caught in here, he’ll have our guts for garters. This time tomorrow, we’ll be dressed as leprechauns in the human world, selling marshmallow cereal in some overcrowded shopping mall.”
Gizzo shrugged. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” They walked out onto the mezzanine and down the steps. “My great-grandfather was a leprechaun for years. Says it was the best thing that ever happened to him, and he doesn’t even like green.”
Rat was about to retort when he noticed a kerfuffle amongst the workers. Someone was pushing through the crowd, tearing their way through the sea of half-drunken elves to get to…them?
“Is that Finklefoot?” Gizzo said.
Rat nodded. “Eager to get back at it, I suppose,” he said. “You know what he gets like when he’s away from his station for too long.” They had once watched their foreman squeeze three shifts into two, just to please The Fat Bastard. It was little wonder that Finklefoot had very few friends, inside and outside of the workshop. Joseph Fritzl had more buddies than Finklefoot, and the way he was careening through the half-cut elves, he’d have even less by the end of the day.
Rat and Gizzo arrived back at their station a few seconds before Finklefoot. Shart was putting the finishing touches to an extremely unattractive doll. It was, Shart thought, the kind of doll that serial killers possessed to enact vengeance upon the humans that ended their killing spree.
Finklefoot gasped for air. He was plastered with snow and, as it melted, steam rose up all around him. It took him quite a while to get his words out, and when he did, the three members of his gang wished he hadn’t bothered.
“What do you mean, ‘Santa’s been kidnapped’?” Shart said, popping the final leg into the hideous doll’s socket. “This isn’t Mex—”
“Can we not do the Mexico joke again?” Finklefoot interrupted. “Once is fine, but now we’re starting to sound racist.”
“We wouldn’t want to come across as racist,” Rat said. “I mean, we’re not Irish.”
“So, why would anyone kidnap Santa?” Gizzo said, removing his little green hat and scratching at the bald patch beneath.
“It’s Krampus,” Finklefoot said, staring down at the ghastly doll in Shart’s hand. “Is that thing meant to look like that?”
Shart nodded. “I think so.” Though it did look extraordinarily creepy, but wasn’t that true of some newborn kids? Most, in fact.
“Why would Krampus kidnap The Fat Bastard?” Rat asked.
“Keep your voice down,” Finklefoot whispered. “The last thing we need is unnecessary panic. You see, it’s not just Santa that’s been abducted. Krampus has Jessica, too, and Rudolph, as well as fifty of Hattie Hermann’s lot…”
“Holy shit!” Shart said. “That’s baaaaaaaad!”
It was bad, but it would be far worse if the rest of the workshop found out about it. Many of them had relatives over at the liquorice factory. Finklefoot knew for sure that Ahora’s sister worked there, rolling up the Catherine wheels. There would be chaos if news got out that Krampus had lost his mind and intended to surgically attach elf, reindeer, and fat saint to form a Human Santapede.
“He’s going to stitch them all together,” Finklefoot said, grimacing at the very thought of such irreverent behaviour.
“To make some sort of (In)Human Santapede?” Shart said, frowning.
“Oh, so that’s what the brackets sound like,” Finklefoot said. “Yeah, that’s exactly what he’s going to do. I don’t know what’s pushed Krampus over the edge, but he’s determined to ruin Christmas this year, and it’s up to us to stop him.”
There was a collective sigh as Shart, Rat, and Gizzo looked at anything that wasn’t their foreman. To make eye-contact was to accept that they’d heard him, and that was just…silly.
“Boys, I can’t do this on my own,” Finklefoot said, giving the last word a syllable or two more than it required. “If Christmas doesn’t happen, that’s it for us. It’s not like Valentine’s Day. We can’t just miss a year and hope that no-one notices. If Krampus succeeds, The Land of Christmas will shrivel up like a dick in an ice-bath. And then, when it’s all shrivelled and small, it will vanish completely. If you hadn’t noticed, there’s more than a bit of magic swirling around here, and what do you think will happen to that magic if Christmas doesn’t happen?”
Shart shrugged. “I’m thinking ‘nothing good’,” he said.
“Exactly. Who knows what will become of us. Perhaps we’ll just cease to exist, like Amelia Earheart or that kid actor from ET. Maybe we’ll explode, or implode, or both at the same time.”
“Maybe we’ll go to heaven and be given seventy virgins a piece,” Rat said, smiling slightly.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Finklefoot said. “This is The Land of Christmas, not fucking Narnia. Besides, how many elf virgins do you know?”
“We are an incredibly horny race,” Shart said. “I’m horny right now.” He glanced down at the ugly doll he’d been working on a moment a
go. Horny? Yes. Desperate? No.
“The point is,” Finklefoot said, trying to remember if there was one, “that if we don’t do something to stop Krampus, everything we know and love is going to suffer. We’ve all had our issues with The Fat Bastard over the years, but does he deserve this? Does Jessica Claus deserve this?”
Shart glanced at Rat, who turned to Gizzo, who in turn simply shrugged. “I don’t suppose we’re going to get danger-pay for this?” he said.
“Or pay?” Shart added.
“We’ll get so much more than pay,” Finklefoot said. “We’ll be revered across the Land. We’ll be celebrated wherever we go. We’ll be treated like royalty.” He hoped that last part wasn’t true, for the stories he’d heard about royalty always culminated in a jolly good beheading.
“We want a song,” Shart said, straightening up. “Something that’ll be played every Christmas in the human world. And Elton John has to write it, and it has to start playing in malls across America in October; that way it gets three whole months, which is plenty long enough to become embedded in consumers’ heads for the rest of their lives.”
Finklefoot smiled. “I’m sure that can be arranged,” he said. “And if Elton can’t do it, I’ll get Barry Gibb.”
“As long as he doesn’t sing it,” Rat said. “We want it to be catchy, but not annoying.”
“So, do we have a deal?” Finklefoot regarded each of his gang with optimism. “You boys going to help save Christmas, rescue The Fat Bastard, and put an end to Krampus’s madcap plan?”
“Like we’ve got anything better to do,” Gizzo said.
“Just give me five minutes,” Shart said, running for the toilet block and pulling at his dungarees zipper as he went. “I wasn’t lying when I said I was horny.”
