North Pole Reform School (17 page)

CHAPTER 23

“Luke, Mistletoe, it’s time to see Santa!” Tinsel
squeals happily as she opens the door. “It’s graduation day!”

We know it’s graduation day. First thing this morning,
Tinsel came to collect Joe and took him to see Santa. He didn’t return.

“Joe has graduated,” Tinsel announced merrily when she came
to collect Emily and Hugo for their graduation ceremony. “He has been sent home
to his family to share a nice Christmas with them for a change.”

We trudge across to Santa’s headquarters in the snow. “Hugo
and Emily graduated with honours,” Tinsel tells us. “They’re even going to stay
in touch. Turns out they don’t live far from each other. Isn’t that nice? Your
turn next!”

“Anyone would think you’d be glad to see the back of us,”
Luke mutters.

“Of course not, but it’s always nice to see a successful end
to another reform group.”

“Well, I’ll be glad to get out of here,” he says. “No
offence or anything.”

She grins at him. Clearly she
will
be glad to see the back of us.

Inside, we’re summoned to approach Santa. He sits at an
antique-looking wooden desk with Mrs Claus standing at one side of him. Navi waits
on the other side, and Tinsel directs us to stand in front of the desk before
joining him.

“Ho, ho, ho,” Santa says, but it doesn’t sound like a laugh.
It sounds like a bored guy who hates his job.

“Luke Wyatt. Mistletoe Bell. It’s graduation day,” Santa
says. “At least, it
was
graduation day, until I
read your case files this morning.”

“What?” Luke glares at him.

“You two are charged with attempting to start a coup.
Against me, no less. How dare you?”

“What?” It’s my turn to ask.

Santa reads from the papers in front of him. “Putting
naughty children on the nice list, encouraging the letter writer to betray me—”

“That hardly counts as betrayal,” Luke interrupts him.

“Interrupting Santa,” Santa continues. “Harassing the Elf
and Safety advisor—”

“We didn’t harass him—”

“Further interrupting of Santa. We’ve even got reports of
you actively encouraging the zombies.”

“We didn’t encourage them. One tried to eat us.”

“Which it wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t been poking the
glass. Trying to break out, no doubt.”

“No, we—”

“This is extremely unreformed behaviour.” Santa glares at
us. “Therefore, you will not be graduating today. You have let down yourselves
and your fellow classmates, who have completed their stay and are currently on
their way home to enjoy Christmas with their families. It is the twenty-second
of December. Thanks to your horrendous behaviour during your stay here, you
will now not get to enjoy Christmas with your families. So I hope you are
pleased with yourselves to have let them down too. You will now stay here until
you can learn to behave properly. Given your track record, I predict that to be
sometime around July.”

“Santa, if I may,” Tinsel starts to say.

“This case is closed. You will not graduate. I am Santa and
my word is the law. You will not argue with me.”

“Oh, yes I bloody well will,” Luke says. “You can’t do this
to us. You have no right. You—”

“Navidad, your wand.” Santa holds his open hand out to Navi.

“Santa, no,” Navi protests.

“
Your wand
!” Santa bellows,
and Navi meekly puts the candy-cane in his hand.

“You, my boy, need to learn some manners. Part elf too.
You’re a disgrace.”

With that, Santa aims the candy-cane at Luke and a bolt of
bright red sparks hits him square in the chest.

“Luke!” I shriek as he flies backwards across the room. I
start to go to him.

“Move and you’re next, girlie,” Santa tells me.

“I’m fine,” Luke mutters, getting to his feet.

“Of course you are. I only hit you with the elf bolt. Next
time it will be the human bolt, and you won’t be getting up for days after
that,” Santa growls. “You pair are pathetic. You think you can come here and
start a revolution. You really think the elves like you more than they like me?
Hah! I’m Santa. Everyone loves me. Everyone!”

He storms from the room, and Mrs Claus casts us an
I’m sorry
glance but follows him out timidly.

“Bloody hell. Luke, are you okay?” I run to his side.

“Fine. That fucking burns though.” He rubs at his chest.

“He can’t do that to us, can he?” I turn to Tinsel and Navi,
who have come over to take us back to our quarters with sad looks on their
faces.

“He’s Santa,” Navidad says. “He can do as he pleases.”

“Yes, and he damn well knows it,” Luke says. “This is
ridiculous. I can’t stay here.”

“You have no choice, dear boy. If Santa hasn’t signed the
graduation form then you cannot leave.”

“But we can’t stay,” I add. “We’ve done everything you asked
of us. We didn’t try to start a coup or whatever he thinks. The only thing we
did was encourage Jingle to write his own name on his letters, and we read
through the naughty and nice cases and put them on the correct list.”

“Santa doesn’t see it that way. He thinks you’re trying to
start a riot. He knows he isn’t very popular amongst the elves and he sees you
as trying to start the fire that turns them against him.”

“We haven’t done anything wrong. The only reason the elves
don’t like him is because he’s a total bastard.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Tinsel says. “Santa is supposed to be in the
job for the love of Christmas. This Santa is only in it for the power. We made
a mistake in hiring him last year, we can see that now, but we have no cause to
fire him. He would bring an unlawful dismissal lawsuit bigger than an avalanche
down on our heads if we even tried.”

“I can’t stay.” Luke is still rubbing over his chest where
the bolt hit.

I grab his hand and pull it away. “Stop it, you’ll make it
worse.”

He gives me a soft smile and keeps hold of my hand instead
of dropping it as I thought he would.

He squeezes it as we walk back towards our quarters.

Tinsel and Navi stop at the door. “Tomorrow Santa has to do
a trial run with the reindeer and the sleigh. Most of the elves will be
occupied with that, so I’m not sure what your schedule will be. Someone will
come to get you in the morning. Probably Jingle would like your help again,
especially now that Emily has left.”

“I’m sorry about this,” Navi says. “I genuinely did think
you’d graduate today. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three left will.”

“I think you’ve both done really well here,” Tinsel says
kindly. “Better than I expected when you first came. But I’m afraid we can’t
fight Santa. He’s the boss.”

“He’s a bad boss,” Luke mutters. “He probably beats Mrs
Claus, did you think of that?”

“If you’re in charge of hiring and firing, surely you must
be able to do something? Can’t you get rid of him for job unsuitability or
something?” I ask.

“There’s no such thing, Mistletoe,” Tinsel says kindly.
“He’s here to stay now, at least until he does something unforgivably wrong or
decides to retire.”

“Yeah, I can see that happening,” Luke grunts. “Power-hungry
bastard.”

They send us in and Wenceslas waves us sadly back up to our
room.

The door locks behind us with a menacing click.

CHAPTER 24

No one comes to get us the next morning. In fact,
everything is suspiciously quiet. Luke and I are sitting on the sofa watching
Christmas with the Kranks
for lack of anything else to
do. It’s strange without Emily, Joe, and Hugo here too. Things are quiet.

“Maybe they forgot that we’re still here,” Luke says.

Suddenly there is a flurry of activity. An alarm starts
shrieking out across the village, so loud that we have to cover our ears. I run
to the windows, but they’re still covered by a snowdrift.

“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! ALL ELVES REPORT TO SANTA HEADQUARTERS
IMMEDIATELY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

It’s a loudspeaker, the voice of an elf blasting across the
village.

“Something’s wrong,” I say to Luke.

“Jeez, you think?”

“MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

“Hey, Mis, the door is open.” Luke has gone to try the
handle of the door to our quarters and found that it swings open in front of
him. It’s never been unlocked before.

“Come on,” he says, and I follow him.

“Hey, Wenceslas,” Luke shouts as we run down the stairs.

The desk is empty. Wenceslas is nowhere to be seen. In all
the days we’ve been here, I have never seen that desk empty.

When Luke goes to try the front door, we find it’s open too.
The siren is still shrieking out and a voice is still shouting.

“MAYDAY! ALL ELVES REPORT TO SANTA HEADQUARTERS IMMEDIATELY!
ALL ELVES TO SANTA HEADQUARTERS IMMEDIATELY!”

When we step out into the snow, it’s enough to send a shiver
down my spine. The village is empty. It’s like a ghost town. There’s no music
playing. There are no elves. Even the Christmas lights are switched off.

“This is like bloody
Silent Hill
,”
Luke says as he looks around.

“Where is everyone?” I ask.

“Well, I’d guess that they’ve all gone to Santa
Headquarters, wouldn’t you?”

“Should we go too?”

“I don’t… Mis, look around. If we want to escape, now is the
time to do it.”

“You’re saying we should leave?”

“I’m saying that Santa’s on a sleigh run. The top of the
dome is probably open. I’m saying there is no one around to stop us. If
Wenceslas isn’t on the desk, then I’m betting Winter isn’t in the stables. We
could take a reindeer and get out of here. Right now.”

“Luke…”

“No more questions. No more ‘Eh, Santa’s got to sign the
graduation form, oh and by the way, Santa
hates
you.’ No more elves. We could do it. We could go now.”

“MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

The siren blasts out as I think about what he’s saying. He’s
right. This is probably the one and only time we will have a chance of
escaping. Santa does hate us. Santa might not sign the graduation form until
July. He might not sign it ever.

But what about the elves?

“Something’s wrong, Luke,” I say again. “We can’t just leave
them. It could be serious.”

“There are like, three thousand of them. I’m sure they can
deal with it.”

“No. No, this is wrong. Something is happening. Something
bad. They don’t start shouting mayday and sounding alarms for no reason. Maybe
we can help. I’m going to Santa Headquarters. Please, will you come?”

Luke rolls his eyes in defeat. “Can’t blame a guy for
trying.”

I grin at him and we make our way through the empty streets
and go into the building we came out of yesterday.

If we thought the empty streets were creepy, this is worse.
Every elf in the entire village is standing in the foyer. The door clatters
shut behind us and at least a thousand pairs of eyes turn our way.

Tinsel and Navidad are standing at the top of the staircase,
and beside them is Noelle, fiddling with a TV screen.

Garland, the maintenance army elf is near the back of the
crowd, and he makes his way over to us.

“Morning, my little cucumbers,” he says.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re not sure yet. All we know is Santa’s in trouble.”

“Winter has not yet returned,” Tinsel announces. “We’re
trying to establish a link with the sleigh camera. Everyone stay calm until we
have some further information.”

“Where’s Winter gone?” Luke hisses to Garland.

“He’s taken Rudolph Jr and gone out to look for Santa.”

“Where’s Santa?”

“If only we knew,” Garland mutters.

Navidad is on the phone where he’s standing next to Tinsel.
“Oh no. Oh no. This is very bad. Very, very, bad.” He shakes his head sadly.

“What?” One of the elves shouts.

“I’m hearing of stockings stuffed with reindeer body parts
and half-eaten hamsters,” he tells us before turning his attention back to the
phone. “Oh no. What was that? A dog, you say?”

Navi turns back to us. “It would appear that Santa has
changed his eating habits from milk and cookies to family pets.”

“What?”

I hear the word
zombies
sweep
through the crowd of elves.

“Yes!” Noelle bangs the table in victory. “I’ve got a link
to the sleigh cam!”

“Why is it black?” Tinsel asks her.

“It’s broken or switched off,” Noelle says. “Bear with me.
Now I’ve got a link, I might be able to rewind the footage.”

“This is dreadful,” Navi says as he hangs up the phone.
“This is worse than nine monkeys with machine guns. They’ve lost track of him
now, but they reckon he’s been breaking into houses and eating the pets. Stockings
stuffed with half-eaten gerbils and reindeer legs left under the tree. I’ve
never heard anything like it.”

“I knew it was a mistake to let him fly that low. We should
have been more forceful,” Tinsel adds.

“Oi!” Luke shouts. “What the bloody hell is going on?”

“No need to shout, Mr Wyatt.”

“We’ve missed the beginning. What’s happened?” he asks.

“We believe Santa may have been bitten by a zombie,” Tinsel
tells us. “He’s taken the sleigh out for a trial run, but as you know the
zombies have been particularly enthusiastic lately. When Santa saw them, he
decided to fly the sleigh down to scare them away before continuing on the run.
We lost contact with him soon after, and now we’ve got these reports coming in
from our task force on the ground. Winter has been sent to find him.”

“Got it!” Noelle shouts. She rewinds the tape, and a
black-and-white picture of the sleigh fills the screen.

“I’ll show them buggering zombies!” Santa shouts from the
grainy picture. The sleigh is flying low and Santa is jumping up and down and
shaking his fist. “You think you can mess with me, zombies? I am the great
Santa Claus! Get away from my land! Take your stinking, rotting flesh away from
my property!”

“It’s the equivalent of the old man shouting ‘get off my
lawn’, isn’t it?” Luke whispers in my ear.

I laugh despite the situation, and about a hundred elves fix
me with a death glare.

We watch the screen in horror as Santa whips the reindeer
and the sleigh lifts higher into the air, ready for the rest of the flight.
Santa is completely oblivious, but the camera can see that he is not alone in
the sleigh. A zombie is climbing in over the backseat.

“It must have clung to the bars at the bottom of the
sleigh!” Tinsel gasps in shock.

Santa doesn’t see the zombie until its teeth are in his
neck. He jumps up and shouts, clawing the zombie from his body. He launches it
from the sleigh and clamps a hand over his neck. Even in black and white, we
can see as the blood starts to pour through his fingers.

Noelle fast-forwards through the footage. Santa fans himself
and looks ill. He starts whipping the reindeer again until they start to
descend and land on a flat roof.

“That was an unscheduled landing,” Navi comments.

That’s when all hell breaks loose. Santa jumps from the
sleigh. I recognise Dasher as the reindeer nearest to him. Santa bites him on
the thigh and rips a large chunk of flesh from the reindeer, and Dasher rears
up in shock. Santa stands there thoughtlessly munching the flesh. He moves on
to Prancer next, biting his neck until the reindeer falls down. Santa then
grabs hold of his leg and rips it away from his body. There is a collective
gasp from the elves as the flesh tears. Santa stands there and chews the leg
like he’s munching on a chicken drumstick.

“Oh my goodness,” Tinsel says. “Noelle, fast-forward
please.”

She does and we watch in fast-forward as the remaining
reindeer panic and try to get away, but are unable to lift both the sled and
the dead weight of their two friends. Santa goes to the reindeer one by one and
kills them, oblivious to their frantic struggles. He eats various body parts
and throws them on the roof when he is done, then returns to the sleigh and
wipes his mouth. He picks up an empty sack and fills it with the discarded,
half-eaten reindeer body parts and then disappears down a chimney. When he
comes back up, his sack is decidedly emptier-looking, and his mouth and beard
are covered in blood again. He comes back to the sleigh and throws the sack in.
His dead eyes focus on the camera, and Santa, who doesn’t look much like Santa
anymore, looks directly at us. He smiles a bloody grin and raises a hand. His
hand smacks into the camera, and the picture fizzes then goes black.

“Well, I never…” Navi says.

A sense of shock settles over the army of elves. You could
hear a pin drop in the crowded foyer.

Wind rushes in as the door clatters shut.

“Bad news,” Winter says, pulling a pair of gloves off as he
comes in. “Santa has been on a rampage. The reindeer are dead. Santa has now
been arrested and taken to a secure mental facility. He won’t be a problem
anymore. Unfortunately, he won’t be Santa anymore either.”

“Oh no,” Tinsel says. “Oh no.”

“What are we going to do?” One of the elves shouts.

A wave of panic spreads through the crowded foyer. “It’s
Christmas Eve tomorrow,” the elves say. “We’ll never find a Santa in time.”

“This is truly a disaster.” Tinsel looks at Navidad in
shock. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. You’re right. We will never find a
replacement Santa in that time. It took us months to find him, and now look what’s
happened.”

“Why can’t you do it?” Luke shouts, trying to be heard above
the din. “You and Navi are in charge. You know what you’re doing. Why don’t you
fill in for Santa for one night?”

“It doesn’t work like that, dear boy,” Navi shouts back.
“Only humans can be Santa Claus.”

If I thought the wave of panic was bad, this is worse. It’s
like the world changes to slow motion. A thousand pairs of elf eyes swivel and
land on us. A thousand elf faces light up in recognition.

“He can do it!” someone cries. “He’s human!”

Luke, I realise. They’re talking about Luke.

Luke grabs hold of my arm. “Back away slowly,” he hisses to
me. “We can still make a run for it.”

“Luke Wyatt.” Tinsel points her candy-cane wand at him.
“Don’t even think about it. Come up here, please.”

Luke shakes his head.

“Luke…”

“REFORM! REFORM! REFORM! REFORM!” The elves start chanting.

“Fuck me,” Luke mutters.

Winter is still behind us, and he gives Luke a gentle shove.
“Go on.”

Luke stumbles forward but doesn’t loosen his grip on my arm.
He drags me with him through the crowd, and elves push and shove us from every
direction.

Eventually we make it to the bottom of the stairs with
minimal bruising.

“Luke, dear boy.” Navidad beams at him. “You’re our only
hope. Without you, Christmas will be cancelled.”

“No way,” Luke says. “I can’t do it. I hate Christmas,
remember? You brought me here for ruining Christmas, and now you want me to be
Santa?”

“The ultimate reform, I think you’ll agree?” Tinsel
addresses the crowd of elves rather than us.

A cheer goes up.

“What I don’t understand is why you don’t have a contingency
plan for this?”

“Well, who really expects Santa to turn into a zombie the
day before Christmas Eve?” Navi asks him.

Fair point, I think.

“Give us a minute,” Tinsel says to the rest of the elves.
She comes down the stairs and joins Navidad, who is standing next to us. I
assume she thinks this is going to be a private chat, with only approximately a
thousand elves listening in. We already know how good their hearing is.

“Luke, listen to me, please,” Tinsel says. “We will never
find a Santa on this short notice. He has to be thoroughly checked out and
assessed for job suitability, not to mention the training he has to go through.
It took us months to find this one, and we realise we made a mistake. Never
mind the diabolical time frame. We don’t want to choose wrongly again. And we
will never in a million years find a man with the ability to fly around the
world on a sleigh in less than twenty-four hours time.”

“What makes you think I can do it?”

“You’ve spent the past few weeks learning how it’s done. You
know how things work in the North Pole. You know how the sleigh flies. You know
the reindeer. And most importantly, you know how much Christmas means to the
children. If you don’t do this, there will be no Christmas this year.”

“Tinsel, guys, look, I…” Luke glances at me. “I can’t do
this.”

“I want Luke to do it,” a voice in the crowd says.

We look around and see that it’s Jingle from the post
office. “I think Luke would be the best Santa we’ve ever had.”

“I agree,” shouts Garland.

Peppermint and Eggnog from the toy factory step forward.
“He’s got elf blood. He’s one of us anyway.”

“Luke would be a fantastic Santa,” Poinsettia from N and N
headquarters says. “He truly cares about the children.”

“And he cares about the elves too!” Jingle shouts.

“I can’t…”

“With all due respect,” Winter says gruffly. “If Luke is
going to do this, then Mistletoe must go with him. The reindeer like her a lot
more than they like him. I doubt they’d fly for him alone. Telling them we’ll
replace them with horses is not the way to get them on side.”