Chapter 37 — In Which The Spy Nearly Kills Peter with a Booby Trap
Jumeau jumped and spun around as though Peter were behind her and not in front of her.
“Hey, Jumeau!” Peter shouted over the wind.
Jumeau spun around again towards the window. Peter pulled it open and the heat of the workshop came spilling out onto his coveted flesh.
“Oh! Peter! Yes! Hello indeed!” She pulled her witch hat onto her head and wiped the Christian hexes off the glass. Her fingers were stiff and did not squeak on the window, but rather clicked and clattered.
“What are you doing?”
“Me? Oh, I’m just tying my bootlaces!”
Peter leaned in through the window and looked down at the Jumeau’s feet. The porcelain traitor wasn’t wearing boots, but shoes, and they had no laces, only a single brass buckle.
“What laces?” Peter asked.
Jumeau looked down mechanically at her shoes, then looked back up and laughed like an insane person.
“Ah! You know— laces, buckles… same thing! Semantics, Peter! Semantics! Are you taking good care of your flesh? I hear dry air is not good for human lips. My lips are not affected by the weather, but I like to use chap-stick anyway! Here!”
Jumeau patted her chest and her pantaloons in a robotic search, and then presented him with a plastic tube like she was a magician making something appear from nowhere. Peter accepted it, but did not thank her for it. Jumeau then climbed out the window, and her doll jointed limbs were long and spindly like a demon. Had she always been this freakishly tall, he wondered?
“Did you hear what I was saying?” she whispered darkly.
“No.”
“And the drawings in the glass? Did you see those?”
“What drawings?” Peter asked.
Jumeau laughed deranged and girlishly— glad to be off the hook. And Peter laughed too— at how gullible she was. Together they were a couple of giggling idiots, mirroring each other’s giddiness. Neither of them felt the slightest amount of danger despite both looking into the eyes of their would-be-killer. Not when each of them believed the other had been fooled.
“Wow! I was really worried that you were listening! I was going to be in so much trouble!”
Peter smiled. “Why? Were you saying something bad?”
Porcelain dolls cannot sweat, but they do blink erratically when caught in a lie— or at least Jumeau did. What a shame that Peter was going to have to kill this girl before he could destroy her at a game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Her poker face was transparent as a crystal ornament with a Christmas light shining right through.
“At what hour do you believe you will return, Peter? Hmmm?” Jumeau asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Go back inside.”
“Yes! I will! The cold, you see, it does not affect me, but being outdoors is very dangerous! Many beasts and crevasses are outside! Do take care!”
Peter returned to Santa and the others looking at Jumeau’s chap-stick and deciding against putting his own lips against the waxy substance, just in case. He was eager to grab his .50 Cal and smiling at the thought of blasting Jumeau’s head into tiny bits.
“I’m gonna kill her,” Peter said to himself. “I’m gonna fudging kill her.”
He chucked the chap-stick off into the wintery night. Darkness swallowed it whole. Then, without warning, a magnificent fireball cracked the night apart with the sound of blood and thunder. The shockwave threw Peter down into a snowbank. Elves and Santa covered their pretty little heads and turned away from the furnacey blast of heat and light. When all was smoke and darkness again, and the sky echoed with remnants of the explosion, chunks of ice and snow rained down upon them.
“What the hell was that?” Yuzuka shouted.
“Peter, are you okay?”
He hopped onto Santa’s sledge and said, “Hey, Jumeau’s the spy.”
“What?”
“Jumeau. I just saw her praying over there. She’s a Christian. She’s the spy. She’s just tried to kill us.”
“That’s impossible. Jumeau’s a doll.”
“Well, she’s a Christian doll and she’s working for the Holy Spirit.”
“No, Peter. Jumeau’s been here at the North Pole for hundreds of years. She’s our friend. She’s always been on the nice list.”
Santa turned and saw Jumeau waving goodbye to them all. Santa smiled and waved back.
“Look, at least promise me you’ll keep a close eye on her. We need to be sure she isn’t communicating with anyone outside the workshop.”
Santa took out her antique walkie-talkie and it crackled to life. Held against her head, it was like she spoke into a milk carton. Yechdel’s voice electronically twisted through the other end, and Santa asked her to follow Jumeau for the day and report any strange behavior.
“Thank you,” Peter said.
As Yukina hitched the last of the reindeer to the sledges, gently stroking their snouts and testing the security of their muzzles, Peter looked out into the frigid snowlands and saw several other fawnlings. They were in their topless, semi-human form, prancing and pawing about.One by one they tilted their great antlers down and somersaulted through the snow. Peter watched as they did it again and again, and then he said to Yukina, “What the hell are they doing?”
Yukina looked, shrugged, and said, “Reindeer games.”
One reindeer, skinnier than the others, followed after the rolling girls, but whenever she got close they would prance away to another hill and resume their game without her. Peter recognized the shunned pipsqueak as Rurirorera. Time and time again, she prepared to tumble through the snow like the others, only to be turned away and ignored. Even though the reindeer girls were quite far away, he could see the frustration on Rurirorera’s face bordering on tears. He got off the sledge to go intervene when Santa called him back, “Peter, we’re going now.”
“Dammit,” Peter said under his breath. He made a note that when he got back he would have to take care of this.
Now, dash away, dash away, dash away all! Six sledges launched off in a frenzy of high-speed driving through terra incognita. Hear those sleigh bells jingling— ring ting tingling too! Reindeer hooves thundered like a storm of frantic heartbeats. Peter always thought the stereotypes about women drivers were unfounded sexism, but as the sledges criss-crossed one another’s paths, grazing the rear view mirrors, he began to suspect there was some truth in that misogyny. Nothing will make you rethink preconceived notions like an imminent death. The girls went bucking and skidding over icy crevasses, with complete disregard for the tensile strength of their vehicles as well as physics in general. Petrified, he wondered if the sledges would hold together amid the careening and over-corrections, or if everything would break apart and fling riders and all in a horrible Christmas themed Challenger disaster. Little did he know, in elf culture it was good form to depart the workshop in a burst of speed. If the girls didn’t feel the blood dragging to the back of their brain, it was a poor performance to the onlookers in the workshop. But these nuances were lost on Peter.
Where is this mysterious place Santa is taking Peter? What could be so important they would need to brave the wilderness of the arctic? These questions must be answered in the next chapter.