The Claus Effect

by David Nickle

  “I also destroyed him!” said Emily. “I saw it happen!”

  “No Emily. You made him angry. You destroyed his treasured Toy Mill, for which he will never forgive you. And you may have caused him some other injuries as well. But more to the point, he is once again free in the world, with knowledge. And in spite of the recent activities of his elfish underlings, we have no idea where he is right now.”

  “So how do you fit into this?”

  “In all the time that the Claus has been toiling in ignorance at the top of the world, I have been toiling under my own deplorable ignorance,” said Krampus, his eyes lowering. “Frau Claus was all too successful in subverting her demonic husband’s madness into goodness; and soon, Claus—or Frau Claus rather—had taken the midwinter feast as her own. Over the centuries, I became bored…and depressed. I watched the world around me first build up and then degenerate. For a time I continued to carry out my geas, but it became increasingly less satisfying. The children of the new wealthy cared not a whit for the sticks they found in their boots, for the Claus would fill their stockings regardless of their behaviour; and the children of the impoverished mill workers were glad for their sticks, mistaking them for the toys they had never seen. I thought of only giving sticks to the good children, and when that thought occurred to me I knew it was time to forget King Elton’s entreaty. It was about then that I chanced upon a bent and much-underscored copy of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Here, I thought, was a balance of punishment and reward that could really be enacted in a world far removed from the worries of Pictish kings and their unruly brats, where entire classes of people moved in unequal and frequently colliding orbits around the sun of profit. And so, when the time came, I ventured to the land of the czars and joined the revolution that brought them down. It has been seventy years, Emily.” Krampus leaned forward. Its quick breaths tickled Emily’s nose like fly wings. “Seventy years of blindness.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Emily, pushing back into her chair and wishing it would recline.

  “I should have been watching, Emily. Watching Claus, not the lazy East Germans and their crumbling society as that foolish man Brezhnev ordered me to. But I will not make that mistake again.”

  “Good,” said Emily. Krampus’ breath smelled of old fruitcake. “Now why did you bring me to this mine?”

  “Since the reunification, I have been bringing together my old Securitat friends with some new ones I have made in the German government. Together, we have contacted the United Nations. And, with the secret resolution that was passed just last night, in the wake of the incident at Lake Voltaire, a special task force has been formed. They are meeting in Lithuania, and they wish to speak with you. We are certain that Claus is up to something, more dangerous than anything he has ever attempted before. It is more than just revenge against yourself, Emily. I fear it is revenge against the very world.”

  “And you want me to help you.”

  Krampus held its breath as it spoke. “I think you know as well as I that you really have no choice in the matter.”

  Heinrich was waiting for Emily at the roundhouse. “Ha! Back so soon! You must be hungry after all your exertion.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Emily.

  Heinrich chose to ignore the sarcasm in Emily’s voice and climbed into the cart. “This time,” he said as the electric motor hummed to life, “you open your own door. We are comrades now, so you are no longer a guest. Are you hungry, fraulein?”

  As she climbed into the passenger seat of the cart, Emily realized that she wasn’t just hungry, she was famished—she hadn’t had anything but a muffin and a cup of coffee before leaving the hotel. She nodded. “You could say that,” she said.

  “Good.” Heinrich looked at his Rolex. “It is half-past three, but the commissary is under orders to remain open late today.”

  “I thought you said I wasn’t a guest anymore,” said Emily as the cart started up the cut.

  Heinrich smiled. “True enough. But we can make allowances for the first day on the job.”

  The commissary shared a cavern with the task force’s living quarters and an off-limits suite of rooms that Heinrich described only as “Ops.” Emily thought the entire level was actually deeper than Krampus’ den, but Heinrich assured her this was not the case. “We are now only 300 metres below the earth’s surface,” he said. “Krampus lives nearly a kilometre down. Don’t worry, Emily. You’re not the first one to be fooled by the switchbacks.”

  The two stepped off the roundhouse and Heinrich nodded at the blue-uniformed guard who climbed into the driver’s seat to bring the cart back to the surface.

  As the cart’s hum diminished, Emily marvelled at the chamber. Unlike Krampus’ room, the floor in here was made of metal plates, and brushed-steel walls gleamed in the checkerboard light of the fluorescents installed above the metal-grill ceiling. At the far end of the room, a lone technician sat at an array of television screens, behind a panel of thick glass. It all somehow reminded Emily of the ValueLand Security Training School in Brampton, in theme if not particulars.

  “Through here.” Heinrich took Emily’s arm and guided her past the guard to an opening door. Smells wafted out that made Emily’s mouth water.

  “We do keep ourselves well-fed,” said Heinrich as the door closed behind them. “It is, after all, the yule season.”

  “And how,” breathed Emily. The commissary was a room longer than it was wide, with a single table running its length. It was decorated in the manner of the ValueLand Accounting Office, with inexpensive crepe-paper streamers, red plastic baubles painted to look like glass, and fake holly wreaths. But where the ValueLand office was also festooned with cardboard cut-out Santa Clauses in tiny sleighs that always made Emily queasy, this place had no similar substitute.

  Heinrich took Emily to the counter at the commissary’s far end. Emily grabbed a tray and immediately began filling it—roast beef sliced as thick as Emily’s thumb; baby carrots and corn in a delicate butter sauce with parsley; a baked potato wrapped in searingly-hot tinfoil, with four pats of butter and a little steel cup of sour cream; seven items from a salad bar with twenty-seven to choose from; and a steaming mug from one of four pots of flavoured coffees. Until Emily actually stood before the feast, she hadn’t known how hungry she truly was.

  “The last time I ate properly was on the plane,” explained Emily between mouthfuls as they sat together in the otherwise empty commissary.

  Heinrich nodded gravely. “In our business, we take our meals where and when we can.”

  Emily gulped back her Bavarian Cream coffee and scooped out another forkful of baked-potato. “Why aren’t you eating?” she asked.

  “I only want to make sure there is enough left over when the day shift comes off duty in another hour.” Heinrich’s face broke into a grin. “Ha! You are eating enough for both of us, fraulein.” Emily swallowed, nodding. The food wasn’t only nourishing her, but warming her too. It seemed to be removing a cold so fundamental that Emily could only detect it by its absence. Eight years past, when she had spent her year at the Claus’ Toy Mill, the warmth in her had felt similar. But this was no elf-magic, independent of the laws of the world; it was food, stuff of the earth, fuel for an entirely wholesome warmth.

  Emily felt her eyelids droop, and she jerked her head back just in time to keep her face from falling into the remains of the carrots.

  “A long day, eh fraulein?” Heinrich put a strong hand on Emily’s arm. “If you like, I can show you to your quarters now. We can save the rest of this for later.”

  “No, no,” Emily heard herself saying as her vision blurred and the sound of her breathing became like a gale inside her head. “No I will be fine leave it here.”

  This time, it was Heinrich who stopped Emily from falling into her dinner. She must, Emily supposed as the world blackened and she fell into unconsciousness, have been more tired than she…had…

  previously…

  imagined.

  Heinric
h stayed in Emily’s room for a moment after the two Israeli attendants left. It would have been easy enough, Heinrich realized, to leave the work to one of the Israelis—the tall one, Moishe, was a certified medic and both were fully briefed on this phase of Operation Best of the Season. It would have been so easy. Heinrich made a sour face and reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, removed the instrument.

  Sometimes, he reflected as he pulled back the covers from Emily’s feet, ease is not what is called for. Sometimes we must take the difficult path, and face our choices like men.

  They had not removed Emily’s socks, and Heinrich was reluctant to do so now. So he searched patiently until he found a thin spot, over her left great toe.

  Heinrich nodded, satisfied, and removed the instrument’s cap. The three thin prongs underneath gleamed like starpoints in the dim light.

  I am sorry, Fraulein. Heinrich set the points against the thin cotton of the sock. Although he knew the injection would be quite painless, nevertheless Heinrich shut his eyes as he pushed the instrument’s plunger.

  “Let’s call this Emily…”

  After they put him in his cell, an elf had brought Neil a big bowl of borscht and a tumbler of vodka. He couldn’t remember anything after that. His Rolex had stopped, which was pretty surprising; perhaps it was more surprising that he still had it, the way the jailor had been fingering it earlier.

  He sat up, and his head started to pound. His leg ached a little, but he couldn’t actually tell how badly he’d been hit. Sometime during his sleep they’d taken off his snowsuit and bound up his wound, and it now had a tight compression bandage on it under the grey coveralls they’d dressed him in. He thought he could walk, but decided to wait until his head settled down before trying.

  Buck up, my boy, he heard Uncle Augustus say. We’ve been in worse jams than this one.

  Well, no, he thought. Actually, we haven’t.

  He put his head in his hands and groaned.

  The cell was carved out of solid rock, like everything in this place, and it was cold. There was a single metal-frame bed with no mattress, just bare springs, and one high-wattage light bulb behind a stout wire cage over the door. He’d squinted at the bulb just before the borscht had taken hold, and seen that its wattage was marked in Cyrillic characters.

  His trip here had been quite confusing. The Claus had taken some kind of Great Circle route in the low stratosphere, and Neil kept passing out from lack of oxygen. The great shabby figure whipping on his reindeer seemed not to need air, or rest, though he wheezed mightily every now and then and at those times the wind would whistle discordantly through the bullet-holes in his ribcage. Neil could do little save hang on to the gunwales of the sleigh and try not to be airsick.

  Finally they had dropped in a kind of swaying, falling-leaf motion through several banks of cloud and into the air above a large, snow-bound port city. A teeming shipworks stuck out into the ice-choked harbour. They sailed silently over the glittering towers and red-lit smokestacks and away into wild countryside, to drop eventually within the high, barbed fencing of some kind of compound on the slopes of a mountain. Ahead, Neil could make out the dark outlines of a medieval fortress, halfway up the mountain’s snow-etched slope.

  The sleigh did not touch ground, but hovered in the air while a massive concrete cap, feet thick, slowly rotated away from a vertical red-lit shaft leading down into the earth. The reindeer minced in tight circles, and they spiralled down underground.

  After that it was a blur of elfish faces and long halls, elevators and glimpses of long rooms lined with acoustic tile, and finally this cell, the borscht, and oblivion.

  Charklin the jailor took his duties seriously. It was his habit to pace up and down the long row of cells, to stop at each one and unsling the stool he kept hung over one shoulder, then to climb on the stool, push back the little metal view-slot, and examine the interior of the cell carefully; then to climb down and go on to the next one, and the next, until he had inspected them all. Then he would take a break. Ten minutes, no more. Then it was back to inspection.

  It was particularly important that he do his inspection with diligence and thoroughness tonight, because there was finally a prisoner in one of the cells.

  As he returned from an inspection, momentarily happy that things were stable in his cell block, but seriously thinking of cutting his rest break in half just to be sure, he heard the obscene blatt of the telephone in his office. He hurried in, unslung the stool and put it behind the desk, climbed on it, stretched his entire body across the blotter and hauled the antique Bakelite receiver off its hook.

  “Cell Block One Reparting,” he barked into the set.

  “Yawp, this be Central here,” said a voice on the other end.

  “Yes, Sar, Good, Sar,” he said crisply. “All Priz’ners Safely Accounted For As a 10:06:09, Sar.”

  “Claus wants ’em down in the theatre. Stat,” said the voice.

  “Oh.” Charklin frowned. “Yes. Imditely. Understid. Priz’ner Transfer Commencin in,” he checked his Bulova, “Two Mints. Mark!”

  “Ciao, yawm,” said the voice, and hung up.

  Charklin tried to quash his disappointment. The prisoner was to be moved! He had only been here eighteen hours, that was only thirty-six inspections, and the jailor had been able to take only sixteen pages of notes on his behaviour (mostly snoring punctuated by the occasional cough) and had only been able to take eight good photos through the inspection slot. It was hardly enough for a decent report.

  Oh, well. He climbed down off the stool, slung it over his shoulder and stumped out the door. At least this was a chance to do a genuine Prisoner Transfer. Charklin had been itching to do one of those for years.

  “Prisoners, Sound Off!” squawked the jailor.

  Neil looked carefully to his left, then his right. He was the only living soul in this corridor, excepting the jailor himself. He cleared his throat.

  “Sound Off!” insisted the jailor. He closed one eye and scowled at Neil, bobbing on his heels. He barely came up to the cadet’s waist, but he seemed to believe he was much larger; the trait reminded Neil of certain Chihuahuas he’d known.

  “One,” said Neil tonelessly. The sound echoed off into the empty corridors and cells.

  The jailor inspected his clipboard intently. After a while he nodded briskly, slapped the clipboard under his arm and said, “Prisoners, Right Face!” Neil turned. Pleased, the jailor inspected his notes again, then said, “March!” Neil marched.

  He was led out of the cell block and down several flights of metal stairs. Cyrillic signs were posted here and there; he supposed they meant things like ‘No Smoking’ and ‘Men’s Room ⇒’.

  In all likelihood he could have made a break for it, but Neil was a bit demoralized at the moment. And his head still hurt. So he followed the jailor, eyes fixed on the tiny stool that bumped rhythmically against the little guy’s rump as he walked.

  Eventually they wound up at a blank door in a long white corridor whose ceiling was lined with asbestos-wrapped pipes. Two elfs with Walther PPK pistols waited there.

  “Prisoner Transfer To Educational Media Room Completed 10:21:05, Sir!” barked the jailor, the effort required to project each syllable making his whole torso shake.

  “We c’n see that,” drawled one of the armed elfs. “Gowan, back t’yer closets, ya hairball.”

  The jailor chose to ignore them. Saluting perfectly, he turned on his heel and quick-stepped away, the bouncing stool making a counterpoint to his plodding feet.

  “Get,” snapped an elf, waving his Walther at the door. Neil pushed the door open, and stepped into semi-darkness.

  The educational media room was one of the most loathed locations in Claus’ new complex. All elfs were required to spend some time there each week, being re-indoctrinated into an ideology they all knew by heart—a process quite unnecessary since neither did they know what ideology was, nor were any of them aware that any ideology other than Claus’ existed.
So they were constantly being reminded of things they already knew, and told not to question ideas they thought were beyond dispute anyway. It was enough to make even the most fanatical have doubts.

  Tonight’s mandatory audience herded into the theatre disconsolately, then made a rush for the back seats. They ignored the prisoner sitting front row centre, some out of contempt for anybody so stupid as to put himself that close to the action, and some out of suspicion that he was some kind of plant who would try to involve them in the show.

  This theatre had originally been built to hold emergency press conferences in time of war, and had once had Soviet crests on each wall and a beautiful red tasselled curtain (made in neighbouring Archangelsk) with a profile of Lenin on it. The machine-oil odour of Brezhnev nostalgia still lingered in the halls outside and was no less strong here, but the entire complex (numbering some two hundred rooms, four underground hangars, a power plant and swimming pool and fifty missile silos set into a low mountain a little drive away from the submarine pens on the coast) had been vacant for years. Local farmers had begun to use the silos for storing grain, and at first the kids from the nearby town would sneak in with their dates or to smoke, occasionally getting lost and having to be dragged out by irritated Red Army guards. Eventually a kind of culture developed about the place, including variants of hide-and-seek, unwritten rules about necking in the missile tubes, and legends of monsters still inhabiting the swimming pool, which had been sealed off but never drained, and seemed to have sprouted a case of mildew of world-scientific significance. A farmers’ market grew up at the top level, in a beautiful hangar built into the side of the mountain under the old fortress, with a spectacular view of rolling hills to the south.