The Claus Effect by The Claus Effect # (v5.0)

Author:The Claus Effect # (v5.0)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771483421
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2014-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

VII: “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, snowbound 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

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