The Claus Effect

by David Nickle

  Six-fifteen. It was daylight outside now…How long had she been unconscious? She vaguely remembered a rag being pressed to her face, a sense of wooziness, then a slide into the darkness. How long had she been in that dark?

  If she could get free, she’d find out soon enough.

  If she couldn’t…

  Emily steeled herself with the grimmest of truths. If she couldn’t get free, and if she fell into the clutches of Claus himself, she was probably as good as dead.

  Little Albert and Captain Blood came out of the bushes directly south of the Yates cottage entirely by mistake. Albert had made a point of remembering his father’s words as close to the letter as he could: do not play among the cottages to the north, but only to the south; avoid the dwarfs, or the unpleasant people, or perhaps both. Do not go skiing this winter, under any circumstances.

  And while Captain Blood may have had no conception of which direction was north, south, east or west, Albert had made a point of knowing better. Mr. Seaton had forbade any northern adventure on the part of the children, and so Captain Blood and Albert Seaton made their way determinedly south.

  For the most part, the pair kept to the old ski trail, which of course had not been broken but was easy enough to sight as they passed. Occasionally, they came upon a cottage, all shut up and asleep for the winter months. With each house, Albert became more and more pleased about his newfound aptitude for directions. When his father returned from fixing the fire problem in the city store, he would report on his success with this new skill.

  It wasn’t until he was out of sight of all the cottages that he saw the skiers.

  He and Captain Blood were resting for a moment against the stump of a birch tree, and it was Captain Blood who first caught the scent. The dog hunkered down low and began to growl, and the panic spread to Albert like measles in a preschool.

  “What, boy?” said Albert. Captain Blood’s growl turned into a whimper, and he looked down, towards the lake.

  “What, boy?” Albert’s first thought was unpleasant dwarfs, but it occurred to him that just as likely was one of those black bears that father always made jokes about. Or it could be both! Albert began to feel quite dreadful.

  Then he saw them.

  There were five skiers, all moving with lithe swishing motions along a stretch of flat snow on the very edge of the bank. Each appeared quite thin and fit, in even better shape than Albert’s father who worked out at the gym twice a week when he had time.

  Albert didn’t think they were dwarfs, but he wasn’t sure about the unpleasant part. He wasn’t sure at all…

  Suddenly, the skier in front stopped and pointed with his ski pole. Directly at Albert.

  “Gottenhimmel!” shouted the second skier, a woman with black hair tied back under her orange and green toque.

  “Die kind!” bellowed the fourth, this one a man wearing ear muffs, whose hair was cut so short he was practically bald.

  Albert screamed and ran. Captain Blood began barking furiously and bounded after him. Albert had no idea if he were being followed, but as soon as Captain Blood caught up Albert clambered on the dog’s back and shouted:

  “Giddyup!”

  Captain Blood took off through the trees like a shot. Albert hung on as best he could, and shut his eyes during the very worst parts. When he opened them again, there they were:

  North. Worse than north in fact.

  Albert and Captain Blood were in the front yard of the Yates cottage, and the unpleasant dwarfs who now lived there were just getting out of their van.

  Emily had managed to wiggle forward in the van to a point where she could see the driving team and watch them at work. In spite of herself, she was fascinated: the teamwork involved in the operation of a large and ungainly motor vehicle by tiny unlicensed elfs was a thing to behold.

  It took a total of four elfs to operate the automatic-transmission panel van. There were two pedal men—one who toiled on the pedals himself, rather like a coal man on an old steam locomotive; and a second, who worked more or less in a supervisory position, sitting on the back of the chair and shouting instructions to his partner below. Then there was the navigation team; again, one who worked for the most part in a supervisory capacity, this time giving orders to the wheel man, who actually sat on the dashboard facing backwards. The supervisor—who also changed gears from drive to reverse when circumstances required—sat on the back of the driver’s seat and shouted instructions to the wheel man as various obstructions and obstacles presented themselves. The long drive was a cacophony: “Hit ye brake pidil!” “Tayrn a ye richt! Ye richt!” “Sayrry.” “Give ’er soom geas!”

  Emily suspected that they could have made do with one less engineer, but she wasn’t about to say anything, certainly not under the circumstances.

  “Giddop.”

  The van crunched to a halt, and Sylerphayne prodded Emily with his toe.

  “I can’t get up unless you untie me,” said Emily, and indicated the huge ball of packing tape the elfs had wrapped around her ankle. Sylerphayne regarded it uncertainly and called to the front. Another elf came back, this one armed with a big police revolver.

  “Trye anyffin’ an’ ye’ll be sayrry,” he croaked, and pointed the gun at Emily’s head.

  Sylerphayne went to work on Emily’s ankles with his bowie knife, and eventually she was able to pull one leg free. He wouldn’t take the tape off the other leg, though, and it clung to Emily’s ankle in a huge, crumpled ball.

  “Now giddop.” Sylerphayne poked at her with the point of the knife this time. Emily cringed back and stiffly pushed herself to her feet. The side door to the van slid open and Emily squinted at the brightness of the daylight.

  There was snow everywhere, and trees. In the midst of a copse of pine trees, a tiny boy riding an enormous sheepdog stared back at her with wide, terrified eyes.

  Almost immediately, he prodded the dog and they disappeared amid the trees and underbrush of the awful Christmas scene.

  Emily swore under her breath.

  Mr. Seaton was able to conclude matters at the ValueLand sooner than he had expected, and that evening he flew up in Nightingale, his treasured Piper Club single engine. When Mrs. Seaton’s motorcar pulled into the driveway back from the airport, a crowd of children rushed out to welcome their father back to his Seaton Christmas. Mr. Seaton was still wearing his woollen overcoat and work suit, so he looked a little out of place amid the crowd of bluejeans and oversized Christmas sweaters, but he gave each one of them in turn an enormous hug, and told each how he missed them. However, when he had set Haephasia down, Mr. Seaton looked around the darkening lot and said with some puzzlement, “I’ve said hello to everyone now, except for little Albert. I hope he’s not too angry with me for running off.”

  “Albert’s in his room,” said twelve-year-old William.

  “He won’t come out,” said William’s older sister Jennifer-Mae.

  “Perhaps dear,” said Mrs. Seaton, quietly drawing her husband away from the children, “you had best go have a word with him.”

  Upstairs, little Albert lay curled in a tiny ball on his bunk bed. Mr. Seaton folded his scarf over his arm and sat down on the bedside.

  “Now how’s my little Albert,” said Mr. Seaton. “Does he have a hug for his old dad?”

  Albert sat up and gave his father a hug.

  “Hello Daddy,” said Albert. “Did you have an agreeable trip to the city?”

  “An agreeable—?” Mr. Seaton laughed. “Yes, my boy…Most ‘agreeable.’ Everything’s sorted out, at least as well as can be expected. And see?” He leaned back and spread his arms. “Not so much as singed. Didn’t I tell you the fire would be well out by the time I got there?”

  “Yes Daddy.”

  “Well it was. But I’ve told you all about my trip, now tell me what you’ve been up to whilst I was off doing grown-up things.”

  Albert didn’t answer at first.

  “Oh come now,” prompted Mr. Seaton, “it can’
t have been all that dull.”

  “I saw some skiers,” said Albert, looking at his hands.

  “Some skiers!” exclaimed Mr. Seaton. “Well! Perhaps I was wrong to think that one cottage full of disagreeable little people was enough to spoil a whole Christmas of skiing. How many skiers were there?”

  Albert frowned. “Five,” he said. “I think.”

  “Five skiers.” Mr. Seaton said. “Well! We can’t let them have all the fun. Can we Albert?”

  “I beg your pardon, Daddy?”

  “I think,” said Mr. Seaton, “that unless anyone has anything terribly important on their itinerary, tomorrow we shall spend the day skiing. All the way ’round the lake.”

  “All the way, Daddy?”

  Mr. Seaton smiled and stood. He offered Albert his hand. Albert took it, but Mr. Seaton noted the boy was still a little pensive. If he were anyone else’s boy, Mr. Seaton might have suspected he was holding something back. But he wasn’t anyone else’s boy, and Mr. Seaton felt again the warm glow of pride and love that had first come upon him at young Albert’s christening. Albert was a Seaton man. And Seaton men had nothing to hide.

  “Come, Albert,” said Mr. Seaton. “We’ll go downstairs and make the announcement together.”

  Emily counted a total of nineteen elfs in the cottage, and they were armed with everything from Swiss army knives and baseball bats to AK-47s. Most of them were gathered waiting for Emily in the main room, whose walls were lined with hunting trophies and heavily shellacked handicrafts. The elfs had moved an enormous coffee table made from a single slice of treetrunk next to the fireplace, and it appeared to be serving as a command table. There was an elf standing behind it, the points of his ears painted a fiery orange by the sputtering fire behind him. His hair was slicked back with bacon grease, and as Emily was brought in he set down the cellular telephone he was talking on and regarded her. The rest of the elfs fell silent.

  “Wyll, wyll, wyll,” said the greaseball. “If it hayn’t Em’ly the Elf.”

  “I’m not an elf,” said Emily, “I had that fixed. And I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  The elf stepped around the table. He was wearing a tiny flak jacket and carried at his side what Emily recognized from her security training as a Skorpion machine pistol. Its stubby barrel clattered over the cottage’s slightly-warped floorboards as the elf walked.

  “Me nam hayn’t impoort’nt. Boot Y’ll tell ye anyhoo.” The elf stopped so close that Emily could have punted him into the fire if she weren’t worried about the hail of gunfire that his eighteen henchmen would bring down on her. “Y’m Fellwither. Ye din’t syym t’ r’mimber me. Do ye?”

  Emily shook her head. “I’ve never seen you.”

  Fellwither smiled, revealing a raw red gap where his two front teeth should have been. “Ye widdn’t hae. Back in the ild days, Y wis th’ elf in charge o carrispendences.”

  “The elf in charge of correspondence?”

  The elf’s eyes narrowed and he fingered the safety on his Skorpion. “The elf whose job ye tik.”

  “You were the elf responsible for administering that mess?” Emily recalled the stacks of unopened letters, hundreds of feet high, that had rotted in the correspondence hall when she arrived at the Toy Mill. It had taken her months to put that place in order.

  “Aye,” said Fellwither. “Ye robbed me, Emily. But noo…Noo ye’re nae longer the Claus’ faverit. An’ when I deliver ye…Then things’ll change.”

  “Deliver me?” Emily stomped her foot, and the room was filled with the sound of sliding bolts and clicking hammers. She looked around uneasily at the hairtrigger elfs. The ball of tape fell off her ankle.

  “Deliver me,” said Emily more quietly, “where? To the pole?”

  Fellwither began to laugh. It was an asthmatic, pallid sound, and before long the other elfs joined in.

  “The Pole?” Fellwither wheezed. “The Pole? Ye dinna ken anythin’ do ye Emily?” He turned to Sylerphayne and the others who had brought her.

  “Lock ’er oop,” he ordered. “I dinna wint t’ see this one ’till tamara.”

  The Seatons were all up before the sun. Filled with a scrumptious breakfast of home-made blueberry waffles and Canadian back bacon, they set out with the first glints of daylight to circumnavigate Lake Voltaire.

  Mr. Seaton led the group, which consisted not only of Mrs. Seaton and the seven Seaton children. Also along for the day were odd old Winifred and her Sri Lankan husband; James, a quiet if long-haired boyfriend of Jennifer-Mae’s who wanted to play guitar in a rock and roll band; and Mrs. Seaton’s old school chum Agatha Shelby-Wicks, who only last spring had signed her divorce papers and felt uncomfortable spending her first Christmas alone in her new Rosedale apartment.

  “We’ll set out south,” said Mr. Seaton, who in truth was still uneasy about the dwarfs who had taken over the Yates cottage. And so all thirteen skiers started off between two large tamarack trees along the Seatons’ southern property line.

  Emily was locked in a second-storey bedroom with an old iron bedframe, a lumpy spring mattress and a wool blanket that was too small for anything but an intimate picnic. There was also a night table similar to the coffee table downstairs, a wall-clock whose face was another heavily shellacked slice of a tree-branch, and a ceiling light whose glow was mottled by the scores of dead insects that had gathered in its bowl-shaped shade. The door was locked by a heavy bolt on the outside. Before they left her, Emily managed to convince Sylerphayne to cut the tape around her hands.

  By morning, she had formulated a plan.

  “Hello!”

  Mr. Seaton waved at the five skiers with his pole as they made their way north along the shore of Lake Voltaire. One of them looked up and waved back.

  “Gutten morgen,” the man replied.

  “Gutten morgen!” Mr. Seaton shouted back, then said to the children: “These people are from Germany, my dears. Fortunately, I recall a few words of that language I picked up in my youth hostelling years. I shan’t be a moment.”

  When Mr. Seaton called again, it was in German:

  “It…is…a good day…for skiing!”

  “Yes, it is,” replied the German skier.

  “Have…you been…at Lake Voltaire…long?” asked Mr. Seaton.

  “No,” replied the German skier.

  “Those…are lovely…white snowsuits…you are wearing,” commented Mr. Seaton. “You…blend right in…with the snow…Did you buy them…in Muskoka?”

  “No,” answered the skier again. “You will please excuse us, sir.”

  “Quite right,” said Mr. Seaton. “The day…is still…ahead.”

  “Goodbye sir.” The skiers started to move on.

  “Be…careful…of the dwarfs!” Mr. Seaton shouted after them. The skiers stopped for a moment and looked back. “They don’t…appreciate…visitors.”

  The Seatons waved as the Germans continued on their way.

  The German skiers stopped behind an enormous rise of bedrock that they had scouted out the morning before. It was just at the Yates’ southern property line, and it had the double advantage of shielding both sight and radio signals from any sentries in the Yates’ cottage. Gunther, the operation’s leader, raised the antenna on the Blaupunkt walkie-talkie and reported in while his team checked their weapons over, one final time.

  “This is Tiger Team final transmit before Operation Vacation commencement,” said Gunther. He did not bother to press the receive button: the backup team was under orders not to transmit, in case the enemy were monitoring signals. “Target is in sight—” he glanced farther up the rock, where Ilsa had climbed with her binoculars. She gave him a thumbs-up “—and conditions are optimal. Rendezvous time is unchanged. Over and out.”

  Ilsa slid back down the rock. “There’s one sentry. I can see the top of his cap over the porch railing.”

  Gunther nodded to Lars. The barrel-chested Swede was hefting his prized carbon-fibre hunting crossbow, checking the tens
ion on the braided steel bowstring and the charge on the bow’s laser targeting scope. A quiver of steel bolts gleamed at his side.

  “This will kill a man through an inch of plywood,” said Lars.

  “Wait until we’re in position,” said Gunther. He dropped the Blaupunkt into his satchel and hefted his own weapon, a gleaming blue-black Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. As he spoke, he removed a silencer from one of the combat snowsuit’s pockets and screwed it onto the gun’s short barrel.

  “Everybody knows what to do,” he said simply. “We won’t have much time before backup arrives, so let’s fan out.”

  That morning, Emily caught two elfs under the mattress. She had propped up the misshapen old thing directly in front of the door, and waited patiently behind it until she heard the bolt on the other side slide free. Without hesitating, Emily pushed the door open, flung the mattress forward and immediately leaped on top of it. There were two satisfyingly muffled squeals, and a third shout from behind the door. An elf Emily didn’t recognize came around the side of it with an unwieldy .44 Magnum revolver that he was holding as though it were a rifle.

  Emily was prepared, though, and as he tried to aim it she brought the heavily-shellacked wall-clock up underneath the gun’s enormous barrel. The Magnum went off into the ceiling, the recoil throwing the elf that fired it against the wall hard enough to stun him. Without a thought, Emily jumped off the mattress, scooped up the most powerful handgun in the world and clubbed its previous owner over the head with its handle.

  Plaster rained down on the squirming mattress, and Emily thought briefly about firing a couple of rounds into it. No, she decided. I haven’t killed anyone yet.

  Not even, as it happens, the Claus.

  Emily left the two elfs to disentangle themselves and made for the stairs along the narrow hallway.