by Matt Haig
Somehow, with great effort, I managed to get to my feet. Gripping both sides of the sleigh, I looked over and realised to my horror that we were heading straight for the place we were told to avoid – the Wooded Hills.
I looked behind and could hardly see the other sleighs. Elfhelm was like a little colourful toy village disappearing into the distance.
‘Oh no, oh no, oh no.’
I leaned over the side, desperately trying to grasp hold of the leather reins that were whipping about like over-excited snakes.
‘Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.’
It was useless. I couldn’t grab them. I saw Captain Soot clawing his way over Blitzen’s back, towards his neck.
‘No, Captain! No. This way. Come to me. Come on. Please, Captain. Please!’
It was no good saying ‘please’ to a cat. It was no good saying anything to a cat, really. A cat is a cat. But what else could I do?
It seemed that Blitzen was almost trying to gallop away from Captain Soot. Which was quite a difficult thing to do, as Captain Soot was attached to his back.
I looked down at the ground. We were very high. Higher than the trees that we were flying over. And very far away from Elfhelm, now. In fact, it was nowhere to be seen. We were probably miles away.
‘Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.’
‘Blitzen!’ I shouted one last time at the crazed reindeer. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s . . .’
I had an idea.
It was a totally stupid idea, but it was the only one I had.
I had to get control of Blitzen. And I couldn’t get control of him from the sleigh. That was absolutely impossible now that I didn’t have the reins.
No. The only way I could get control of Blitzen, and the reins, and grab hold of Captain Soot, was to jump from the sleigh onto the reindeer’s back.
So I reached the front of the sleigh and put my left foot on the dashboard, right on top of the Barometer of Hope, which was now at its lowest setting of all: ‘Actually Not Much Hope At All’. Then I held on to the small front rail just above the dashboard as I brought my other foot up.
The cold wind was blasting my face with a ferocious force, whipping my hair back in a straight line behind me.
‘All right,’ I told myself. ‘Come on, Amelia. You can do this. Captain Soot did it. But Captain Soot is a cat, and a cat who is very good at jumping and also very good at landing. Oh, come on. Stop arguing with yourself. Just do it. JUST DO IT!’
I did it.
I jumped through the air and landed with a bump just above Blitzen’s bottom. This caused the reindeer to buck in the air like a wild bull, as he tried to fling me off.
‘Blitzen!’ I said, as my face smashed into his back. ‘Blitzen, what are you doing? It’s me, Amelia!’
And it was then that he seemed to understand, and he became a little less wild and crazy, and at last his air gallop began to slow to a canter.
‘Good boy, Blitzen. Good boy.’
Now I had a choice. I could either reach for Captain Soot or grab hold of the reins.
In that moment, I went for the reins.
It was the wrong choice.
You see, the moment I had hold of the reins was also the moment Captain Soot lost his grip.
‘Oh no!’
I quickly reached out to catch Captain Soot but only managed to touch the white tip of his tail before he began to fall, fast through the air, towards the trees below.
‘Captaaaain!’
I got a tight hold of the reins, and pulled them low, which I knew – as Kip had told me – was the way to make a reindeer start to descend and prepare for landing.
‘Low, Blitzen! Low! Low! Low!’
I think Blitzen knew what he had done. I don’t think until that moment he realised there had been a cat on his back. He had just known there was something on him and he hadn’t liked it one little bit. But now he seemed to understand that it wasn’t just anything. He knew it was my cat and that it was important to me, and that it was probably therefore important to Father Christmas, and if there was one thing a reindeer – especially Blitzen – hated more than anything, it was upsetting Father Christmas. So Blitzen was now diving fast through the air, faster than gravity, towards Captain Soot.
The sleigh was slowing us down so I unclipped the straps that attached it to the reindeer and it went whizzing off behind us.
Then I saw him.
A tiny black speck, getting bigger as we sped towards him, faster than he was falling.
He was level with the top tips of the highest spruce trees on the hills. But the dark green branches wouldn’t slow or cushion his descent as he was too far away, directly between the trees.
‘Faster, Blitzen! Fast as you can! As fast as magic!’
I wished Father Christmas was there. If Father Christmas had been there, he would have been able to do some drimwickery and stop time. But then, if Father Christmas had been there none of this would have happened in the first place.
Captain Soot.
He was right there.
I could see him, spinning wildly through the air, his tail flapping like a loose rein.
I reached my arms low and grabbed Captain Soot before he hit the ground as Blitzen swooped through the air in a U-shape, jerking fast upwards so we didn’t all crash.
‘It’s all right, Captain! I’ve got you! You’re safe now! We’re alive! Somehow we’re alive!’
The relief flooded through me like warm milk. And just as Blitzen was slowing to make a gentle landing on the forest floor, there was an incredibly loud noise behind us which broke our happiness.
Smash!
I turned to see the sleigh, the gleaming Blizzard 360, smashed into a smoking pile of rubble on the forest floor.
‘OH NO.’
The Hole
e landed, and as I held on to Captain Soot I climbed off Blitzen.
When I was safely on the ground, I patted the reindeer. ‘I’m sorry, Blitzen. Captain Soot was just scared. Are you all right?’
Blitzen looked at Captain Soot in my arms and made a funny kind of truffling sound.
‘I’ll take that as a yes. Come on, we had better find the sleigh and inspect the damage.’
We walked through the trees. I could feel Captain Soot’s heart beating incredibly fast so, although I was cross with him for nearly killing us all, I gave him a little kiss on his head and stroked him.
I heard something fluttering over my head and looked up to see a boy pixie with shimmering silvery see-through wings smiling at me mischievously. He darted down like a bird towards me and whispered in my ear.
‘Once upon a time, there was a paper bird . . .’ he said, with a voice as smooth as silk. ‘Flying out of a hole and into the light . . .’
‘Paper bird?’
‘Birds, I should have said. Paper birds, yes. Or words. Please may I have some words?’
Then the boy pixie giggled.
‘Words?’
‘Yes, words. I like words. Like burrow. That is a good word.’
‘I know lots of words,’ I told him as I stopped walking and tugged Blitzen’s reins for him to do the same. I looked at the pixie. His wings shone like glass, and the sun glinted off them. ‘But I am just going over to see my sleigh.’
The pixie flew around me and then ended up hovering in exactly the same spot. There were several species of pixie who lived in the Wooded Hills, but this particular type was a Flying Story Pixie. I had seen a whole bunch of them before, the night I first met Father Christmas. Flying Story Pixies, as their name suggested, were pixies who flew around the forest telling stories to other pixies and to anyone else they would come by.
They fed on words the way bears feed on honey and were always on the hunt for new ones, exotic words, with which to spice up their stories.
‘But I am just going over to see my sleigh,’ the Flying Story Pixie repeated, screwing his little nose up as
if tasting something he didn’t like. He tried it again. ‘But I am just going over to see my sleigh. I must say that these are very ordinary words you have given me.’
‘I’m sorry but I just had a bit of a disaster.’
‘I’m sorry but I just had a bit of a disaster. Hmmm. Yes, that’s better. Disaster is a good word. It’s not as good as catastrophe. Or calamity. Or impossible. Which is an elf swear word. I love saying it, especially to elves. Impossible. Impossible. They get so annoyed.’
‘Listen, I’m really enjoying this conversation but the thing is I really need to go and see my sleigh.’
The Flying Story Pixie smiled and clapped his hands. ‘Yes. That is the perfect example of impossible. Because, let’s face it, it is impossible. I just flew over the sleigh and I can tell you that it is very broken indeed.’
‘Well, anyway, I’d better go and see.’
I walked away.
The pixie looked sad. ‘Please . . . please just give me one word that I have never heard before.’
I tried to think. I realised he wasn’t going to fly away and leave me alone until I actually gave him a new word.
He looked at Captain Soot in my arms. ‘What is that?’ he asked.
Captain Soot hissed up at him.
‘This is a cat.’
‘Cat? Cat? Cat! That is a brilliant word. Cat. Cat. Thank you very much. I have never heard that word before. I have never seen a cat before.’
‘I don’t think you get many of them around here,’ I said as I placed Captain Soot on the ground. ‘Anyway, it was good to talk. Bye.’
The pixie took the hint and darted away through the trees. Blitzen, Captain Soot and I walked over to the sleigh. Or what was left of the sleigh.
The pixie had been right.
It really was in a state.
‘This can’t be happening,’ I said.
The dashboard was smashed. There was a crack right through the Barometer of Hope and the dial was spinning round and round. Springs were sticking out of everywhere. The seat had become totally detached and was lying half out of the sleigh. The main body had a giant crack running all the way through it. The whole thing was almost split in two. This was a disaster. Only a few minutes ago I had been having the absolute time of my life and now I felt sick.
‘Oh, Blitzen, what are we going to do?’
Blitzen didn’t know. He lowered his head to the ground and made the truffling sound again, but this time it sounded worried.
I looked around at the forest. The trees were tall and dark. I had absolutely no idea where we were. Pretty soon it was going to be evening. Then we’d be in real trouble. But if I arrived in Elfhelm without the sleigh I’d be in real trouble too.
‘All right, Blitzen. There’s only one thing we can do. I’ll attach the harness back on you and then we’ll have to walk back as you pull the sleigh. No galloping. No flying. We don’t want to do any more damage.’
I almost cried when I said that. After all, it didn’t look like it was actually possible to do any more damage to the sleigh.
So I strapped the sleigh harness onto Blitzen and then I picked up Captain Soot, who was shaking with cold, and we began to walk.
We walked and walked and walked. I heard distant birdsong and the occasional flutter of a pixie up ahead and saw bright red toadstools growing out of the ground. The cool air smelt of pine. The trees seemed to reach the sky. Their branches blocked out the sun. Everywhere was so thick with shade that the shadows appeared as real and solid as the trees that caused them. And it felt like the forest went on for ever.
But that wasn’t the main thing that worried me. The thing that worried me was how weird it was here. I began to hear a noise. A kind of humming. The humming got louder and louder. I wondered where it was coming from. And then I realised it was coming from all around. There were flowers, tall turquoise flowers, suddenly everywhere. And when I bent down to have a look at them the humming grew louder still. It was a deep, quite scary humming noise. The closer I got to them, the louder the flowers became.
‘There once was a flower,’ said a voice from above, ‘that hummed every hour.’
I looked up.
A female Flying Story Pixie was sitting in a tree, eating berries.
Then I turned back to the turquoise flower I was closest to.
‘And once a girl sniffed it like a rose. And it spat on her – right on her nose.’ She sighed. ‘They are Spitting Flowers. If you get too close they will—’
And just at that minute the flower I was closest to spat a horrible, stinking bright blue spray of flower juice on my face.
‘Ah, I love a story with a happy ending,’ laughed the Flying Story Pixie as she fluttered away. ‘You have ten seconds before it kills you.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t worry! I was joking. It’s actually five seconds.’
Frantically I wiped the spray off my face and from Captain Soot’s fur with my sleeve. I looked into Captain Soot’s eyes and whispered, ‘Sorry, Captain, I’m so sorry, you’ve been the best cat ever.’ And I waited to die. But five seconds passed and then ten seconds and then a minute and I was still breathing. And so was Captain Soot. I hugged him close. ‘Yes!’ I said, ‘we’re alive, we’re alive.’ Captain Soot miaowed, as if it was no big deal, and we carried on walking.
There were other strange things in the forest. In fact, there were only strange things. There was a two-headed squirrel. We saw a group of miniature four-eyed bears, as small as mice, who tried to climb up Blitzen’s legs to attack him. And then we met the weirdest thing of all. At first it looked like a perfectly ordinary pine tree, but the bark on the trunk blinked open a pair of eyes. Then, below them a hole opened into a mouth.
‘You are lost, aren’t you?’ it said.
I staggered back in shock, clutching Captain Soot. ‘You’re a talking tree.’
‘Yes, well observed. I’m the Talking Tree,’ the tree said with a sigh. ‘But you are lost, aren’t you?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Everyone is lost here.’
‘Yes, well, we’re not really lost. We know where we are going. We just don’t entirely know how to get there.’
‘That,’ said the tree, who seemed an arrogant kind of tree, ‘is the definition of lost.’
‘Well, I suppose so, but there’s no need to be so . . . Okay, yes, I need to get back home.’
The tree smiled. It was a strange smile, which was really the only kind of smile trees knew how to do. ‘Home is not a place, as every tree knows. You take home with you, wherever you go.’
‘That’s a nice riddle. Thanks. But I really need to get to Elfhelm.’
The tree exhaled. It was taking its time. Talking very slowly. ‘You are a very odd-looking elf.’
‘I’m not an elf.’
‘Then why do you want to go to Elfhelm?’
‘Because I live there.’
‘Oh, and I’m a daisy.’
‘No, really, I live there. Please, do you know the way?’
Blitzen was nudging my shoulder, trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t paying attention. Or at least I wasn’t until I felt something twist around my ankle. I looked down and could hardly believe my eyes. A root from the tree had come out of the ground and was coiling around my leg. And now it was trying to drag me towards the mouth of the tree.
‘So sorry,’ said the tree. ‘It’s really nothing personal.’
Blitzen bit hard into the root that had hold of me. The root quickly uncoiled, and I stepped back as the tree let out a howl of pain.
We hurried away from the Talking Tree, and carried on walking. I wanted desperately to be out of the forest, even though I knew Kip was going to be furious about the sleigh.
We walked another mile or so, past more Spitting Flowers, and stones covered in purple moss, but no more Talking Trees.
I kicked a pine cone and saw it disappear into something very strange that filled the forest path ahead of us.
&n
bsp; A hole.
A crooked dark circle, blacker than the shadows, in the ground.
I got closer to it as Blitzen dragged the sleigh around it. I stood right next to the edge and stared down. The hole was probably as wide as the sleigh itself. Maybe a bit wider.
It was dark down there. It reminded me of the darkness of chimneys. I wondered why there would be a big hole in the middle of a forest. Maybe it was the trolls. Or maybe it was rabbits. It looked too big to have been created by a rabbit, but then I remembered Columbus’s geography lesson where he had talked about the Easter Bunny and the large rabbits in the Land of Hills and Holes. But it was meant to be a very long way away. Maybe it was created by another creature. A creature I had never heard of. It almost seemed to be made from the forest itself. From the weight of shadows. Whatever, it was quite scary being there. I leant over and thought I could see something in the dark. A fast-moving shadow.
I jumped back.
I hesitantly peeped over the edge again.
Nothing. Just darkness.
I stepped back and a twig snapped underneath my feet. I jumped and nearly dropped Captain Soot. ‘Sorry, Captain. Come on, let’s go,’ I said.
We left the hole behind and headed through the forest, down a long wooded slope.
Captain Soot was fidgeting in my arms, looking this way and that.
‘Calm down, Captain. It’s all right. Surely we’re not far off now.’
But he wasn’t calming down.
His head was jerking to and fro, like a bird. He had spotted something on the ground. Before I had time to hold him tighter, he jumped out of my arms and darted beneath Blitzen’s legs.
I ran after him, and soon I saw a small wooden cottage with yellow walls and a yellow roof. It was even smaller than an elf’s house, and they are pretty small. My head was probably level with the chimney. Captain Soot was heading straight towards the house, and just as he was close to it, the door opened and he disappeared inside, fast as a bullet.
‘Great,’ I said to myself.
Turning around I saw that Blitzen was slowly dragging the sleigh towards me. It creaked and groaned as it travelled over the rough sloping ground.