The Claus Effect

by David Nickle

  Krampus emerged into the light of the hangar all at once. He was so taken with anticipation that he slipped from the corner and lay in full view for the barest instant. Hastily, Krampus rolled onto his knees and clicking and wheezing made his way behind a stack of barrels.

  He would have to be more careful. For what seemed like the hundredth time, Krampus pulled his enthusiasms back into check and cautiously peered over the top of the barrels.

  He was on the ground level of the hangar, as he’d intended, and while this brought him closer to his quarry, it did make visibility difficult. Directly in front of him, two giant ICBMs blocked most of his view of the Claus’ sleigh—all he could see was the curling of a single runner and the mangy hindquarters of one of the Claus’ reindeer. It was only when Krampus shut his eyes and listened that he could tell for certain that the Claus was still in the hangar.

  “You!” shouted the Claus from some distant gangway. “Stop dawdling! Get…get…get over here! I said, you!”

  Krampus strained to hear as the Claus muttered something unintelligible. “You, by damn!” he finally shouted. “You think old Claus can’t catch you with one eye! Well think again! Ha ha!”

  Krampus smiled. Still a cyclops, so Claus. You fight at a handicap.

  Still smiling, Krampus cast about for a suitable cane. It would have to be just so for this work, neither too long nor too light; not so bright that it drew the eye, nor so black that the gleam of a light was lost in it; its end neither splintered nor smooth. Krampus’ eye finally lit upon the perfect device, in a glass case by the wall nearest the right-hand ICBM. It would require modification, but to do so would be a task not insurmountable.

  Taking the corner, he slid over to the case, opened it with a twist of his thumb. Removing the axe-head from its handle was scarcely more difficult, and by now Krampus knew the caning enchantment well enough that he only had to whisper it and pass his fingers once to finish the job. Krampus left the fire hose for later, and this time eschewing corners, made his way directly to the hangar’s centre.

  “Look,” hissed Emily, pointing at the far end of the hangar. Way down there, under the harsh glaze of light thrown by pitiless arc lamps, the abstract figure of a man had appeared. Krampus.

  He stretched up to his full height, spindling ever so slightly at the knees like a paper cut-out, and, raising a black staff or cane of some kind over his head with a majestic sweep, called out “Claus! Your time is nigh!”

  Claus had been crooked over his sleigh, engaged in tying a lavender ribbon around the business end of an anti-tank missile. He straightened, ancient vertebrae creaking, and snarled “Nigh? What the hell is that?”

  “It is the voice of your nemesis,” said Krampus as he strode out into the center of the hangar floor. “It is time to atone for your misdeeds.”

  Claus blinked sleepily at him. “Oh. It’s just you.” He turned back to tying the bow.

  If it were possible, Krampus whitened even more than his usual parchment colour. His yellow lamp-eyes widened. “Do not attempt to bluster your way out of your doom,” he cried. He swung the cane down, and the floor of the hangar cracked beneath it. The boom echoed spectacularly from the catwalks, walls and ceiling.

  Claus straightened, pressed both hands into the small of his back so that his vertebrae crackled like a van der Graaf geberator. “Are you still here?”

  Krampus looked at the end of his cane, at the Claus, and he let his eyes narrow again. “Ignore at thy peril, Claus.”

  Now, Santa Claus did turn. He grinned at his old adversary, and let out a sharp, low laugh. “Thy? What in perdition’s name is thy? The last time I heard anyone say thy was…” a long finger curled a moist strand of beard “…the last time I saw you! Krampus, isn’t it?”

  Krampus stepped forward, bobbing the cane back and forth into the palm of his hand. “Do not mock me, Claus. This has been long in coming.”

  The Claus frowned at him. “You’ve lost weight,” he said mildly.

  Krampus snapped straight, let out a prim “Oh!” sound, and swung the cane in a quick whistling arc.

  Santa was no longer there. He had danced to one side, great coat swirling, and watched in amusement as the cane struck the floor where he had been standing. “I was going to say, it looks good on you.

  “Anyway, your methods are obsolete. Do you really think you can beat me with a cane?”

  “It is what you deserve.”

  “It would have made sense a hundred years ago,” said the Claus, in a reasonable tone. “A hundred years ago, it would have hurt.” He shook his head sadly. “Ah, what’s happened to you? The times have changed, Krampus. Why haven’t you?”

  “Eternal truths never change. Right and wrong never change.” Krampus’ voice rang through the hangar. He seemed to draw strength from his own words.

  “But they do. They have. What did you think to do here? Fight me? It’s far too late for that, you know.” He turned and walked away.

  Emily blinked. For an instant, Krampus had seemed to…well, fade. Or maybe he was becoming thinner, harder to make out against the bright-edged shadows of the hangar.

  It only lasted a second. “Stop!” Krampus ran after him, raised the cane again, and dealt a sharp blow to the very top of Claus’ head. The sound was like snare drum being tapped.

  “Ow!” Claus glared at him.

  “Oh-ho,” said the Claus as they began to circle each other. He twitched the whip in his hand. “What’s the matter, Krampus? Is that the best you can do? All the fight knocked out of you?—Just like your Soviet masters?”

  “I no longer work for the Revolution,” whispered Krampus. He was limping. “The Revolution…was a failure.”

  “’Zat so? I heard they fired you.” The Claus sniggered jovially, bobbing his head in demented cheer. “Too creepy for the new world order, I guess. Where can you go now, Mister Twigs? Who are you going to work for? The world has no place for self-righteous prudes like you.”

  “That is not your concern,” said Krampus primly. He feinted, but Claus’ whip flicked out and sparks flew as the two weapons touched. Under the impact, Krampus’ fingers slipped from the cane, and for the barest instant it tumbled from his grasp. But he was quick, and caught it again as he stepped backwards. “We are here to deal with you.”

  The Claus didn’t bother to answer this time—instead, he raised his whip and brought it down in an arc that left a trail of ozone in its wake. Krampus was barely quick enough to avoid it. The whip cracked again, and again, and then both Krampus and the Claus were gone from Emily and Neil’s field of view.

  “Ha! Hold still, you sanctimonious bastard!” Snap! “Hold still!”

  And then there was a cracking sound, and then a scream, and then a low crunching sound that Emily had not heard for nearly eight years.

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  “What?” asked Neil.

  “They’ve found a chimney.”

  It wasn’t a chimney—it was more of a drain-pipe, a miniature sewer really. But as far as the Claus was concerned, the principle was the same. He had been about to deliver his death blow to Krampus—poor, cornered, Krampus—when the old demon had pulled what he must have imagined was his trump card. The drain opened at the base of the wall, and that was where Krampus had disappeared, his cane clattering to the floor behind him.

  Ha! Did he really think the Claus that stupid, that lacking in resources, that such a simple manoeuvre would work? That was what spending your lifetime slaving for an inefficient, totalitarian political regime did for you—sapped you of imagination, made you underestimate.

  “Underestimate me.” The words hissed out between Claus’ already snapping teeth. “I’ve gone down chimneys that look like a urethra next to this chasm, boy. I’ll be on your tail, there’s no escaping, not that way.”

  And with that, Santa Claus entered the pipe. It wasn’t much different than the chimneys he visited—where there would normally have been soot, here there was water; where there was
brick, here there was ceramic; and where there was gravity…

  Here there was will. And hate, born of centuries of animosity. This last drove the Claus forward through the narrow aperture more surely than the mass of a thousand Earths.

  As ever, he screamed as his bones shattered to fit through the eight-inch-diameter tube. Vertebrae popped and pulverized, ribs splintered into lung and liver, and his skull mashed and crumpled, like an eggshell sucked whole through a straw. The Claus screamed.

  “It’s a new age, Krampus!” Claus shrieked into the dark ahead of him. “People don’t count anymore. Things count! Glorious, pretty, plastic-wrapped and be-ribboned things. And people know this. They want the pretty things I can give them, tho’ they know, the darlings, that soon enough they’ll be gone, but the things will still be there, squatting like contentedly-fed cats on the mass graves of their owners. And pretty soon, Krampus, pretty soon the people themselves are going to want to be things too, and we’ll be more than happy to oblige them then, won’t we?” He leered into the darkness. “Soon every boy and girl in the world will be a commodity, and then what a field day I’ll have!”

  The voice ahead of him sounded weak, distant. But the resolve had not lessened.

  “Then why kill them, eh Claus? Why do you give them nuclear weapons for their Christmas presents?”

  “Oh stop talking for once in your parsimonious little lifetime and listen!” Claus shrugged his boneless shoulders against the edges of the sewer and propelled himself on. “It’s all about the free market! The free market, you microcephalic relic of a bygone era! Free market! Do they teach you about that in your state-run schools and your proletariat support groups?”

  “Have you in fact thought anything of your plan through?”

  The Claus felt his blood boil as it haemorrhaged through his near-liquefied body. Had he thought it through? “Have I thought it through? By the flaming gardens of Lucifer! What do you take me for!” Ahead, the Claus thought he could see the glint of wire, bent into the shape of feet. “I have planned this operation to the last detail!”

  “And when it is finished? Where will your free market be when you have finished this mad gambit?”

  Claus knew what was happening. Krampus was trying to confuse him. Just like that time in 1562, when the old coot came up with some cockamamie story about the Earth moving around the Sun and had nearly managed to decapitate him in the ensuing seconds. “Hold still, you little weasel. I’ve almost got you—” He reached a long, ropy arm around two corners, up a long pipe and sploosh through a sink trap. His fingertips were teased by the retreating tail of Krampus’ tuxedo. Almost…almost…

  Krampus popped up out of the sink the Claus could see above him. “Damn you!”

  With a low hollow sucking sound that would have made a septic-tank cleaner blanche, the Claus reared up out of the sink to find Krampus, all angles, staggering along the tiled wall of a men’s room. “Why are you running?” he persisted. “You know I’m right.”

  “You are,” gasped Krampus, “and will ever be—” He was beginning to fade again.

  “Right!” Pride swelled in the Claus’ chest, helping to puff him out to his normal size. He felt the jigsaw pieces of his skull arrange themselves in something approaching their old order; his arms twirled themselves straight as his vertebra hauled the rest of his skeleton into place.

  Krampus gasped and slid under the men’s room door. Staggering forward, Claus slammed it open to find himself once again in the hangar.

  Under the harsh light of the halogen lamps, Krampus seemed unreal. His golden eyes were transparent, and his body so thin that when he turned sideways he disappeared. The elfs around the sleigh were staring at him in awe.

  “You must be stopped,” gasped Krampus, and stepped forward for one final attack. The Claus stood his ground. He could have used his whip (which would have been fun); he could have drawn Krampus toward the old KGB paper-shredder in the corner and disposed of him there. Mere weapons, however, would not have been enough to keep Krampus down. Only one thing could, the Claus told himself. That one thing was the simple fact of the Claus’ rightness.

  So he let Krampus recover his cane, let him approach, and when the old boy raised it high with his trembling, thread-thin arms, the Claus looked him straight in the eye, and said, “No one cares.”

  Krampus stopped, but only for a second. So Claus went on.

  “No one cares if they’re bad or good,” he said. “No one cares if they get good grades in school, if they’re nice to their little baby brothers and sisters, if they swallow their mothers’ barbiturates and have to have their stomachs pumped. Their lives don’t change if they smoke cigarettes or break into daddy’s liquor cabinet or start the family mini-van and drive it into the middle of the road.”

  Krampus stopped again, and his eyes trembled as he struggled to pull the end of the cane from the floor. It is wrong.

  The Claus grinned—his teeth were nearly, but not quite, back in their places. Wrong. Krampus had said it, but no one would hear it.

  “No one cares,” said the Claus again.

  There was a final clattering as the axe-handle fell to the floor of the old Soviet missile hangar. The Claus picked it up, and snapped it across his newly-reknitted thigh-bone.

  A Desperate Plan

  Light…Mr. Beland could have kissed it where he found it, embedded in the snow over his prison. Trapped under God knew how many tons of snow and ice, in a cave not much larger than the men’s room on a 747, Mr. Beland had come to a new respect for the role that illumination played in maintaining a man’s sanity. The single light-stick in his flight suit had turned out to be a dud, and his custom-made elephant-tusk cigarette lighter was back in Seattle: Mr. Beland had finally decided to take his doctor’s advice and cut back on the pipes. Just as well, he had told himself near the beginning of his predicament: a flame would just use up valuable oxygen.

  That had been at the beginning. After working on the escape tunnel for about seventeen minutes, he found himself passing the time flipping through his mental rolodex for one or another of the C.I.A. wet boys he knew to send after that sonofabitch doctor of his. With every armload of snow he moved aside, the darkness seemed to weigh heavier. Who knew what was hiding in the back of the cave—in the closet, under the bed—waiting for Mr. Beland to fall asleep?

  Mr. Beland had moved about five cubic metres of snow when he spotted the light. It was a small source, maybe the size of a golf ball, and it made a red halo—a warm, pulsating crimson that even through the snow cast enough light that Mr. Beland could see the shadow of his hands. Mr. Beland carefully scraped the snow away from around the source, drawing his own face closer as he did so, as if to drink water from an oasis pool.

  Once the snow was clear, Mr. Beland reached gingerly into the hole he’d dug and plucked free the tiny white sphere. It was soft, like a rubber ball, and one side was decorated with concentric circles. The light came from the innermost circle, an LED-red that Mr. Beland took a familiar comfort in. It was rather attractive, actually. Once he got out of here, Mr. Beland might even have it appraised. For now, though, there was work to be done. The work, thought Mr. Beland, of staying alive.

  By his estimation, Mr. Beland had another fourteen minutes before the oxygen ran out in the cave. He sat back for a moment and calculated. Over the past seventeen, he’d moved five cubic metres…That meant that before he dropped dead, he’d be able to move…Mr. Beland calculated.

  “Ah, to hell with it.” Mr. Beland set the light down on the floor of the cave and set about moving more snow.

  Who would have thought those midgets would be able to move so fast? Mr. Beland had to admit he’d underestimated them from the word go. It wasn’t a mistake he’d repeat a second time. Hell, he might just get out of here for no better reason than to call them to a rematch.

  Best two out of three, boyos.

  Neil’s heart was still pounding, even after Emily had shut the door to the hangar and they’d both che
cked the corridor leading up into the mountain for elf patrols. They were safe for the time being, he knew. But that safety was strictly temporary—Krampus, for all the weird powers in that cane of his, had failed to bring down Santa Claus.

  “Well it looks as though it’s up to us now.”

  “Right.” Emily had crossed her arms, her fingers dancing a worried jig on her elbows. “Up to us.”

  “Maybe if we captured some real weapons…”

  Emily interrupted with a derisive snort.

  “Oh come off it,” she said. “Real weapons don’t work on Claus. You saw what happened down there.”

  Neil scratched at his peachfuzz beard. “Now just a minute, little lady.” Neil ducked and Emily’s fist cut the air inches past his ear. “Guns don’t work, and neither do axe handles. But we’ve got a bigger weapon.”

  “What weapon is that?” said Emily sarcastically. “Those nukes downstairs, maybe?”

  Neil shook his head. “Not downstairs. Upstairs. Way upstairs.”

  Emily’s eyes narrowed.

  “The Black Globe?”

  Neil was mildly surprised to find himself actually swaggering as he bent to peer along the corridor. “All we have to do is get to the control console again up in that tower. Then the minute Claus’ sleigh takes off, bam!” Neil swung his fist. “We zap him.”

  “Great plan, Mr. Bond. But how do you plan on targeting it?”

  Neil hoisted the GPS. “This could be a start. If we were to put this in Claus’ sleigh…”

  “Good idea,” said Emily, and snatched the unit before he could finish. “You go up to the tower, secure the console, and I’ll contact you once I’m at the sleigh. Then I’ll read off the co-ordinates, you can lock onto them and blow Claus and the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union to smithereens. Good. Sounds like a plan.”

  “Now just a minute…” Neil had barely caught up with himself, let alone Emily.

  “We’re going to have to time this, though,” said Emily quickly. “Here’s what you’ll do.”