Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates (2 page)

The second thing, which filled him with dread, was the arrival of a new child at his facility. He employed many children, but this boy was no ordinary orphan. He would require special attention, heightened vigilance, and intense scrutiny. Viggo wished he could refuse to take the child in, but you didn't say no to the Orphan Disposal Agency, not if you knew what was good for you.

From his perch, Viggo had a bird's-eye view of everything that happened below. Under the watchful eyes of the guards, the orphans laboured to produce the product that made Viggo rich: Caribou Blue cheese. Sitting in his comfortable chair, gazing down like a god from his lofty mountaintop as the children sweated and slaved, he felt important. Viggo decided to engage in his favourite pastime. He leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and daydreamed about himself.

In his favourite daydream he stood at the podium looking out over a sea of adoring faces. Years of tireless work had finally brought him to this moment. He was about to receive the highest honour of the cheese maker's profession: the Cheese Maker of the Year Award. In his mind he rehearsed what he would say as the chairman of the Cheese Board handed him the Golden Cheese Wedge, symbol of dairy excellence. A daydream still, but it would soon be a reality if Viggo stuck to his plan.

Viggo had invested his entire life in the pursuit of cheese mastery. The road had been long and arduous. After twelve years studying at the University of Trondheim School of the Milky Arts and then a four-year apprenticeship with Lars Porgengrister in the Bulgarian Highlands, Viggo was ready to go out on his own. His goal: to create the most beautiful, rare, and powerful of cheeses. It took him years of experimentation and failure, but he'd finally hit on “the” cheese: Caribou Blue.

He developed Caribou Blue from the milk of the caribou.
⁴
The caribou is a finicky animal, difficult to milk and completely impossible to train. To obtain the milk, Viggo had to approach them at night while they slept (they sleep standing up), attach high-speed milking machines, and get as much of the precious milk as possible before the creatures woke up. His body had been covered with hoof-shaped bruises during those early experiments until he finally perfected his technique.

The secret of Caribou Blue lies in the introduction of a very special, genetically engineered mould that produces
a bluish-green marbling effect similar to Stilton or Roquefort.
⁵
Viggo created this mould himself by crossing several different strains in a laboratory. He'd used standard cheese moulds, moulds found only in Tibetan caves, and even moulds that he found under his own toenails until finally he had a strain of intense aquamarine colour and pungent odour. In its finished state, Caribou Blue could be consumed only in very small quantities. Eating too much of it or even spending a long time in close proximity could lead to blindness, paralysis or, in extreme cases, death.
⁶
Just one taste of the magnificent cheese, however, could yield a sense of wild euphoria or even induce hallucinogenic visions!
⁷
No one had ever eaten more than three ounces of Caribou Blue and survived.

Having perfected his product, Viggo built a factory on the remote shores of Hudson's Bay with easy access to the migrating caribou herds and with water transport close at hand. Now all he had to find was a cheap, ready workforce. He solved his labour needs in an ingenious but heartless way: by turning part of the factory into a dormitory for orphaned children. Not only did he have a ready supply of children to labour in the dangerous cheese factory,
children that no one cared about or wanted, but he also received tax incentives from the government for running a charitable organization. A vile, contemptible, heartless plan but one well suited to Viggo's vile, contemptible, heartless personality.

Viggo looked down at the children sweating below. Each one was delivered for his use by a shadowy organization called the Orphan Disposal Agency. Viggo had first contacted the ODA a few years before and they were only too happy to provide a number of fit orphans, gathered from around the world, perfect for Viggo's uses. The children ranged in age from three to fourteen. They were strong, healthy, and had the spirit already crushed out of them. Oh, there was the odd rebellious one, but Viggo found that the threat of an imaginative punishment was enough to keep even the most obstinate child in line. The sheer isolation of Viggo's operation also went a long way to ensure obedience and deter escape. The best part was that when a child grew to the difficult age of fourteen, the ODA took them away and provided a young replacement.

Viggo never questioned where the children went after the Orphan Disposal Agency removed them. He didn't want to know. Besides, the ODA wasn't the kind of organization one questioned. The children were terrified of the grey-suited agents with their goggles and gloved hands. Viggo had to admit that even he himself was a bit frightened of them.

Viggo located his factory on the border between the Canadian province of Manitoba and the Territory of Nunavut in a miserable little town called Windcity. Windcity got its name from the fact that it was officially the windiest town in the world. For a hundred and eighty-two and one-half days of the year a gale-force wind drove down
from the Arctic Circle, causing every building in the town to lean southeast at a sixty-degree angle. On the other hundred and eighty-two and one-half days the gale-force wind shifted and blew northwest, causing the houses to change their slant to sixty-eight degrees in the opposite direction. The people adapted to the slant by wearing special clogs indoors that had one sole twice as thick as the other, allowing them to walk more or less naturally at an angle.
⁸

Living in the windiest town in the world had other hazards. Walking through the streets could be perilous. Citizens who lost their footing could find themselves blown like tumbleweeds across the tundra, stopping only when they ran up against a building in Churchill sixteen hundred kilometres to the south.
⁹
Or, if they were less lucky and the wind was blowing northwest, they would never be seen again. The town council erected ropes throughout the streets linking all the buildings so that people could haul themselves along in relative safety. The wind was so powerful some days that it wasn't unusual to see people pulling themselves hand over hand to the supermarket, their bodies parallel to the earth. (One happy by-product of the activity was that Windcity had won the world Tug-o-War championships fourteen years running.
¹⁰
) Finally, as a safety precaution, two long nets
were strung across the north and south sides of town to catch anyone whose hands slipped.

On top of the vicious winds, the terrain for hundreds of kilometres around the town was featureless, frozen tundra. Not so much as a single tree stood upright to break the monotonous landscape. Any child trying to escape the orphanage was sure to succumb to the desolate climate. The only possible hope for escape was to stow away on one of the cargo ships that docked infrequently in the harbour to bring supplies in and ship the cheese out. Ruthless, vicious dogs, part wolf and hungry for child flesh, patrolled the harbour. The dogs themselves were beaten and starved by the cruellest of Viggo's guards.

You might ask why a town would be situated in such an inhospitable place. The answer is simple: propellers! Windcity was founded to take advantage of the powerful winds for the burgeoning propeller industry. When airplanes were invented, a place was needed to experiment and produce the propellers required to keep planes flying. Entrepreneurs flocked to the site to make their fortune.
¹¹
The jet plane eventually spelled the end for the propeller industry, however, and the people began to drift away.

By the time Viggo arrived looking for cheap space to house his cheese production business, the town was practically deserted. Only two people actually lived there any more: a widow named Mrs. Francis and an old man
named Mr. Nieuwendyke who believed he was a cat. Viggo took possession of a huge brick building that had once been a propeller factory. He installed windmills (made from leftover propellers) to provide him with all the free electrical power he needed to run the operation. The wind also blew the cheesy fumes harmlessly away. Well, not exactly harmlessly: all the grass for half a mile turned black and died.

Everything Viggo needed to make his cheese was in place. He had a building. He had machinery. He had a steady supply of raw materials. And, thanks to the ODA, he had a workforce.

If the children arriving on the doorstep of the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory had deluded themselves into thinking they might have a happy life, they were cured of their fantasies when they saw the place. The building was a huge, square, redbrick hulk. Viggo had spared all expense in making it homey. The front door was a vast steel affair that added to the overall prison atmosphere. All the dormitory windows were of the frosted variety, with wires meshed through the filthy glass for safety reasons. The windows on the factory floor were bricked up to prevent impurities from getting into the cheese and children from climbing out. As a result, the children never saw the sun in the entire time they lived in Windcity. The cafeteria had sun lamps installed to provide the children with vitamin D. They were effective but totally cheerless.

Sour-faced guards marched the new orphans off the boat and through the deserted town, clinging to the guide rope. It was an eerie trek through the empty streets and derelict buildings. The wind howled through the eaves, moaning sorrowfully. The factory loomed over the tilted town, lit up with searchlights and strung with razor wire.

An electrified fence surrounded the building, sparking ominously as bits of loose debris rolled against the chain links.

The new children marched through the front gate, through the service doors, and into the processing room. Each was given a breathing mask, a pair of overalls, a toothbrush, and a towel. Thus equipped, the miserable new conscripts trudged into the dormitory.

The children all slept in one huge room in row after row of lumpy cots. They all shared one bathtub, taking turns having baths once a week. The lights in the dormitory ran on a timer. They came on for two hours between shifts in the factory, while one crew was waking up and the other was going to bed. The lights were fluorescent, cold, and stark and throwing into relief the dormitory's dreary misery.

The hundred children were divided into two shifts of fifty. One shift worked from nine in the morning to seven at night. Then both shifts ate breakfast/supper, which consisted of oatmeal porridge and whey. The breakfast/supper lasted one hour, after which the first shift had an hour of free time and then went to bed while the second shift worked from eight in the evening to seven in the morning. Then came the meal of whey and oatmeal porridge and the working day started all over again, with the night shift sleeping and the day shift working. The day and night shift children hardly knew each other, and that was the way Viggo liked it. Friendships could only distract the children from their work.

To administer to the orphans' day-to-day needs, Viggo hired the aforementioned local widow, Mrs. Francis. Her husband had died many years before in a rabid owl
attack,
¹²
leaving her to fend for herself. She was a shy, chubby woman who was often pink in the face from exertion. Viggo suspected she was too kind to her charges (Viggo believed in beatings and harsh discipline), but since the choices were limited in Windcity
¹³
he suffered her bouts of affection for the children and her requests for better food and warmer clothes.

Viggo's grand scheme seemed to be coming together just fine. He had installed the specialized equipment. He had trained the children. He had negotiated with the native people,
¹⁴
whom he trained in the milking technique, for a steady supply of the caribou milk essential to the cheese-making process. Finally, the operation was up and running.

Caribou Blue became an overnight critical success with cheese connoisseurs around the world. The
Sydney Herald
called it “a delightful assault on the nostrils and the palette.” The
New York Times
food critic wrote, “Caribou Blue is a wake-up call. In his laboratory Viggo Schmatz has created the Frankenstein's monster of cheeses! Let it terrorize the village of your taste buds!” The
London Times
said simply, “Caribooya! What a cheese.”

Viggo was riding high. Orders were pouring in. He could charge what he wanted for his product and everyone would pay. And no one questioned his methods (apart from Mrs. Francis) as long as he continued to produce the fabulous cheese. He even had his picture on the cover of
Fortune
and
Cheesers Monthly
. The world was in the palm of his hand.

And so Viggo leaned back and imagined what the Golden Wedge might look like on the shelf above his desk. He could envision the cheering crowds as he accepted the award. He could see himself stepping to the podium, taking the shining prize from the hands of the chairman of the Cheese Board …

A rap on the door of his office jarred him out of his daydream. Viggo started, almost falling over backwards in his chair. At the door, one of the guard foremen stood waiting. All the guards came from the same agency, and were chosen for the ugliness of their facial features.
¹⁵
The man at the door had a face that looked as if someone had dropped a bag of hammers onto it from a great height. Viggo stood up and stalked across to the door, flinging it open on the cringing guard. Immediately, the powerful smell of the cheesing floor wafted over him.

“Well?” barked Viggo.

“Uh, sorry, sir,” Hammerface stammered. He held his stocking cap in his hands and wrung it nervously. “They're here.”

Chapter 2

“Follow me,” Viggo demanded. He snatched a breathing mask from a hook on the wall by the door. Pulling it over his face, he started down the stairs to the factory floor with Hammerface trailing after him.