Candy Canes and Buckets of Blood Read online

  He raised his eyebrows. “You like them. Aren’t they a bit—?”

  “Teutonic,” suggested Newton.

  “Good word,” said Dave, impressed. “I was going to say kitsch.”

  “I know,” said Esther, “but they’re so—” She scrunched up her face and waggled her fingers closely together to somehow indicate the tiny, intricate nature of things.

  “Cuckoo clocks it is then,” said Dave.

  “I wanted a go on the ride,” said Guin, pointing at the carousel.

  “You’ve not finished your hotdog.”

  She passed it to her dad. “It’s too big and it tastes funny.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Carousel, Newton?”

  “No, thank you,” said Newton.

  “It’s not like riding a real horse, is it?” said his mum, patting his arm.

  Newton liked real horses but he always thought there was something sinister about carousel ones, with and their fixed, sharply painted mouths, and cold eyes.

  “I can watch Guin while you two go and look at cuckoo clocks,” he said.

  “Thanks, dude,” said Dave.

  “We’re just down there,” said Newton’s mum.

  Dave dug in his pocket and gave Guin some change. He remembered the hotdog he’d been given, looking briefly around for a bin, before deciding to eat it instead.

  ***

  8

  Guin took her dad’s money and ran to the carousel. The earlier crowds at the market had thinned and there was no queue. Guin found a horse with a purple saddle and the name Pokus painted in jolly script across its bridle. A man came round to collect the money. He walked with a wobbly gait, never looking in the direction he was going. Guin guessed if you spent all day working on a spinning carousel, you would end walking with a wobbly gait.

  She handed over the coins and when the pipe organ struck up, held on tightly. The mechanical pipe organ had little figurines on the front, one with a conductor’s baton, another with a pair of cymbals. As the carousel started to turn, she watched them and their precise little movements.

  More interesting still, far more interesting than being on a jiggling wooden horse, was the mechanism above her head. Guin watched the rotating crankshafts and arms and daydreamed what she could make from components such as these.

  However, several circuits of looking up made her feel queasy and Guin had to look down, focus on the world beyond the carousel mechanism before her hotdog made a unpleasant encore. Her dad and Esther had already wandered off. There was Esther’s son, Newton, standing by the nativity scene. He saw her looking and gave her a wave. Next turn round, he pulled a silly face at her. She scowled and determined not to look next time.

  Snow was falling steadily now and it was a blurry screen against the wooden stalls and lights of the market. Through it, Guin caught a glimpse of long hair, big glasses and a hat with furry earflaps. It was the woman who had knocked her to the ground earlier. Guin felt a surge of anger. The bump had been an accident but that didn’t matter. Guin was eleven and bearing grudges took little effort at that age.

  The woman was still walking round with her nose in a book! She wasn’t even looking at the stalls! Guin tutted. People had no right to go wandering blindly around Christmas markets, not buying stuff and being a general hazard. The woman should buy something or go home.

  Angry though she was, Guin couldn’t help but wonder what was so interesting about a book that could hold the woman’s attention completely. Guin suddenly wanted to know. The curiosity was threatening to overcome her anger, which made her angrier still. There was nothing an angry mind hated more than having its anger reasonably eroded by a more positive emotion.

  ***

  9

  Newton gave up trying to catch Guin’s eye. She was too busy staring at something else. Whatever it was, she didn’t look happy about it, but what did he know? Guin had a furiously private intensity about her. Maybe that expression was her version of sheer delight.

  Newton looked at the nativity figures. The scene in front of him was fairly traditional: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus in the manger (this one so thoroughly swaddled in blankets that its ugly little face and staring eyes were barely visible), shepherds, three wise men, various donkeys and sheep and something that couldn’t decide if it was meant to be a horse or a deer or even a camel. The story of Christmas was one he’d had repeated to him, performed to him, had performed in so often that he hardly ever stopped to think about its meaning.

  It was mostly, he reflected, the story of a holiday slash business trip gone wrong. Joseph had to go to Bethlehem. This was complicated by his wife being pregnant with a baby that they knew wasn’t his. Their accommodation plans had fallen through and they’d ended up staying somewhere appalling. The wise men had only turned up because they’d been reading cryptic messages in the stars. The shepherds didn’t even have a choice; they’d been bullied into attending by an angel while they were in the middle of their night shift. Even the animals were probably wondering what these people were doing in their barn and why there was a baby in their food trough.

  It was, thought Newton, a story without a single happy moment. Less a story than a collection of anecdotes which, if they happened to modern Brits, would have them phoning consumer watchdog programmes or trying to get compensation from their travel company.

  The Virgin Mary certainly looked pissed off, almost cross-eyed in her fury. Or maybe she, like Guin, had an odd way of expressing happiness.

  ***

  10

  “Cuckoo clocks!” said Esther, arms spread.

  “So, I see,” said Dave.

  They pressed forward under the shallow eaves of the stall to be more out of the briskly falling snow. The side walls and back of the stall were crowded with intricately carved clocks – chalet house shapes, covered with carved trees and fruits and animals, pine cone weights dangling on long chains beneath. On tiny balconies and in tiny doorways, varnished figures stood, some fixed, some poised to spring out at the chiming of the hour.

  “I don’t like them,” said Dave.

  “Why not?” said Esther.

  “I don’t know. They always look … sinister to me.”

  She looked up at him and smiled.

  He kissed her on the forehead. “I look at them and all that super detailed carving and I think ‘that’s what happens when you’re cooped up all winter with snow piled outside your door and nowhere to go.’”

  “Really?”

  “Cabin fever as an art form.”

  She shrugged. “I guess people did need something to keep them occupied through the winter months.”

  He looked back the way they’d come. “They’ll be all right together?”

  “Newton will keep an eye on her.”

  “I’m more concerned about him,” said Dave. “No, I meant long term. Them. Us. A new life.”

  Esther gave him a reassuring hug. “Taking it slow. Let’s see how Christmas goes, all four of us at your place. And if that works out…”

  “Oh, crap.”

  She pulled away. “You don’t want it to work out?”

  Dave patted his coat pockets before putting a hand in each.

  “What?” said Esther.

  “Keys. Car keys.”

  He took out his wallet to check the inside pocket. He looked inside the carrier bag of mulled wine.

  “When did you last have them?” asked Esther.

  “Definitely in the car.”

  “Obviously.”

  He shot her a tetchy took. “I had them at the car. I went into that pocket to buy pretzels and mulled wine. I might have…” He mimed a hand out of pocket action and then looked round as though the keys might magically be on the ground somewhere nearby.

  “Maybe fallen out near one of those stalls,” she said. “Let’s go look.”

  He held out his hands. “You stay here. The kids will come to you. I’ll go check.” He sighed. “Buggeration,” he said and hurried off.

  ***
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  11

  The carousel slowed to a stop. The automaton conductor gave a final jerk of his baton. The cymbal player froze a centimetre from one final clang. Guin slid off Pokus the horse and down the wooden steps. Newton stood staring glumly at the nativity scene.

  The woman with the heavy book trudged past Newton, each oblivious of the other. The woman had something dangling from the fingertips of the hand supporting the book. It was a five-pointed star, but no Christmas decoration. Even from a distance, Guin could see it was constructed from twigs and string, neatly bound and tightly secured.

  The woman stopped to check something in her book, glanced at the dangling star, then seemed to stare at the ground in search of something before slowly moving on.

  That was curious. Guin decided to follow her. “I’m here,” she said to Newton as she passed.

  “Good. Good,” he said, still looking at the carved nativity. “Have fun?”

  “Sure,” she said. The book woman was moving off through the crowd. “I’m just going to look at something for a minute.”

  “Okay,” said Newton.

  In the crowd, following the book woman was difficult. Guin was not tall and the afternoon shoppers pressed in closely, but glimpses of that flappy-eared hat drew her on. She saw the woman, cut away from the stalls and down a side route. However when Guin reached where the woman had been, she was gone. There was just a set of footprints in the settling snow.

  Guin hesitated because she was not an idiot.

  She knew she had wandered off from Newton, but reasoned she hadn’t gone far and she knew the way back. If she got into any trouble of the ‘stranger danger’ variety, she wasn’t afraid to scream for help. She put her hand in her pocket, felt the reassuring shape of Wiry Harrison, and followed the footprints.

  They led up a dark and narrow alley between two houses. Here the snow had only fallen in a narrow strip down the centre of the alleyway. Above, the sheer white sky was a thin line between rooftops.

  There was thump and a muffled sound up ahead. Guin pressed on. At the top of a short flight of steps, the alley joined onto a path which ran behind the houses. On the far side was a wall and a shadowy wood. The footprints went right. Among them were smaller, wedge-shaped depressions, like animal prints, or holes melted in the snow. They followed the book woman’s footprints, and so did Guin.

  She wondered what the new prints were, and was so focused on them she didn’t see the book and the star on the ground until she’d almost stepped on them. The book lay open on the ground, collecting snowflakes in its pages. The star made of twigs and string lay next to it, like it had been dropped.

  Guin turned about. The woman had gone. There were no people in sight at all. The footprints in the snow continued for a couple of steps before becoming confused and oddly spaced. Then they became a pair of gouged lines in the snow.

  “That’s weird,” she said to Wiry Harrison. She picked up the book and the star.

  ***

  12

  Newton had looked at the nativity scene far longer than its crude artistry demanded, but there was something peculiar about it that bothered him. He couldn’t work out what. It wasn’t the stern expressions on the people’s faces. It wasn’t the animal that couldn’t decide if it was meant to be a horse or a deer or even a camel. When it struck him, he had quite a start.

  The ugly baby Jesus’s eyes were closed. They had been open. He was sure they had been open.

  “Hey, Guin,” he said, turning. “This baby. Its eyes—”

  He continued to turn, eyes scanning the thinning crowds. His brain told him to not panic even before he realised he was panicking.

  “Guin!” he called.

  He dashed to the nearest stall, then the next and the next. He turned to the carousel and watched it go round half a dozen times before he could admit she wasn’t on it. He saw the carousel man watching him and gave him a desperate look which he foolishly hoped would cause the man to leap into action and produce the girl like a rabbit from a hat.

  “Guin!”

  People looked at him as he called out.

  “It’s short for Guinevere,” he told one, which wasn’t a useful thing to say. He added, “She’s about this big. Pale looking. Bright coloured mittens,” which was moderately better.

  He pulled out his phone, the automatic response in a moment of alarm. He would call his mum. She would never forgive him but he had to call her.

  The phone had no signal. They were out in the wilds, snow closing in thickly. No signal.

  “Guin!”

  He ran down the nearest lane of stalls.

  ***

  13

  Dave retraced his steps to stalls where he might have dropped his keys. They were not at the hot dog stand. The floppy-limbed woman at the pretzel stall shook her head when Dave asked if any keys had been handed in. The man at the mead stall, who had been so encouraging this morning, now seemed to struggle understanding English. Many of the day visitors had left and Dave was able to kick through the snow around the stalls with little fear of bothering others. But the snow was now falling fast and although the market stalls’ overhanging roofs kept the worst of the snow away, it had been building up millimetre by millimetre for some time. He was not going to just see the car keys lying around somewhere.

  Cursing himself, Dave continued to retrace his steps, away from the market and back down towards where they’d parked the car. It was possible he had dropped them the moment they’d parked. It was even conceivable that he’d left them in the ignition all day long.

  Dave didn’t think he was old enough to be so forgetful. He wasn’t the kind to wonder where his glasses were, only to discover they were on his head – he didn’t wear glasses for one thing – but finding he’d left the keys in the car would be a win at this point.

  There was the hiss of brakes and he pressed himself against a wall as a coach full of departing day-trippers trundled past the narrow pavement, its headlights on full beam. It was not even four o’clock but night fell quickly in midwinter and the snow, whilst catching and reflecting the light from the lampposts and Christmas lights, obscured any dying daylight.

  With night falling and the weather closing in, they’d need to be away soon.

  ***

  14

  Holding the homemade twig and string star and the book, Guin followed the rapidly disappearing trail in the snow and wondered where the woman had gone to.

  It was possible she had simply dropped her book. People dropped things all the time. Guin had once found a whole box of buttons and beads in the park near their house. She’d collected tools, old toys and odds and ends which no sensible person would deliberately leave behind.

  But this was definitely just weird.

  She held onto Wiry Harrison for moral support. Out of all her creations, Wiry Harrison was definitely the best for moral support. Tinfoil Tavistock was made of flimsier materials and had distracting issues of her own. Tim the Robot was made of sterner stuff but he was really only a child, very unworldly. The others, Bertie O’Cork, Scampious and Cliptoria had varying qualities but, when you needed a dose of bravery, Wiry Harrison was the one you should turn to.

  “Just a little way,” she said, under her breath, “and then we’ll go back and find Newton.”

  She walked on. The path behind the houses ran up to a drystone wall and a narrow gate leading into a churchyard. There was something on the ground by the wall: a flat shape draped over the wall. It was hard to make out in the gloom.

  Guin made towards it. The shape began to move, sliding slowly over the wall. Guin hurried.

  When she got close enough to see what it was, she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Dangling from the top of the low wall was what appeared to be an arm-length glove. It was a peachy pink, skin coloured. It wasn’t an actual human arm: it was floppy and rubbery and quite lifeless. But if it wasn’t an arm-length glove, in a perfectly realistic skin tone, what was it?

  There was somethi
ng else: fat and round on the ground in front of the wall. Guin recognised that.

  As she hurried closer, the arm-glove slid away over the wall as though pulled from the other side. The hand bit seemed to wave goodbye before disappearing. Guin crouched by the fat round object. It was a big winter hat with furry earflaps. She picked it up. There was something red and sticky on the brim.

  Guin heard voices on the other side of the wall. No, not voices exactly, but high-pitched chittering chattering noises that were very much like speech. She stepped closer. Between the top of the low wall and the sweeping boughs of the trees there was only a black-green darkness.

  “Hello?” she called.

  There was no reply.

  “You left your hat here,” she said to the darkness.

  There was nothing for several seconds and then “Villast, útlendingur.”

  The voices sounded close, like they were just over the wall, down by the mossy trunks of the nearest trees. Guin leaned nearer.

  ***

  15

  Esther leaned close to the cuckoo clock stall as the snow came down in thick, tangled clumps. There was still virtually no wind but there had to be a point at which heavy snowfall automatically became a blizzard. Wherever that point was, surely they were close to it. She pulled her collar about her neck and continued to look at the range of clocks.

  She wasn’t sure cuckoo clocks were the way to go but she was confident Dave would enjoy a creative hobby if the right one could be found for him.

  “So, are all these clocks hand-carved?” she asked the old man behind the stall.

  The old man grunted ambiguously. He was packing clocks away in wooden crates lined with straw. It was late; the fairground rides still turned and there were still people drinking and eating but this man had probably sold his last cuckoo clock of the year. And it was the last day of the Christmas market. Esther supposed the clocks that went unsold would resurface in this market or another next year.