by Matt Haig
The only one.
The only one.
The only one.
I wanted to head back inside and climb up the chimney and stay there for ever.
‘Yes,’ said Father Vodol to the whole crowd, many of whom were busily reading lies about me in the Daily Truth. ‘You are right, I suppose. She is the only one. The only pure human in Elfhelm. And the very worst of all of you. And we know Christmas is nearly upon us, but she is not welcome here.’
‘She has nowhere else to go.’
I could hardly think straight. I just kept staring at all the elf eyes looking up at me. Some of them had friendly sympathetic faces and some had unfriendly faces, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t make a tiny difference. I was not one of them. I couldn’t dance like them or do maths like them or make toys like them or ride sleighs like them. Eventually, they’d all turn on me. Maybe even Father Christmas would turn on me. The longer I stayed living with Father Christmas and Mary – Mother Christmas – the longer there would be talk and whispers and gossip, and the gossip would grow.
I had to get out of there.
I couldn’t live in a chimney.
There was no escape, so long as I was in Elfhelm.
‘There is nothing more to say,’ said Father Christmas, ‘or to see. It is very nearly Christmas, and that is what we should focus on. Amelia is a good person. I know it as much as I know anything. If you choose to see the good in someone, you will see it shine back. And so it is with her.’
With that, he took my hand, marched us back into 7 Reindeer Road and closed the door quietly.
The Letter Catcher
hat night while Father Christmas and Mary were sleeping, I put on as many clothes as I could, and my warmest boots, and I went downstairs to Captain Soot, who was in his basket licking a front paw. I picked him up, filled my pockets full of berries and gingerbread, and crept out of the house as quietly as a mouse.
I left a note on the kitchen table: ‘I am heading back to the human world. I belong there. Please don’t look for me. Amelia.’
I slipped along Reindeer Road in the dark, seeing the silhouettes of sleeping reindeer, and – even though it was night and a bit scary – I went the quiet way via Quiet Street and Very Quiet Street. I passed the exceptionally small cottage with the black door and one tiny window that belonged to Father Vodol, then crossed quickly over the Street of Seven Curves, heading fast and straight towards Very Big Mountain.
Captain Soot was trembling from the cold. I tucked him inside my coat and held him close.
I began to climb the mountain. It was hard work. My feet sank deeper and deeper into the snow.
‘It’s all right,’ I kept on saying to Captain Soot, but I knew it wasn’t at all.
I had no plan other than to keep walking south. Once upon a time, when he was just a boy called Nikolas, Father Christmas had walked all the way from the middle of Finland, from near the small town of Kristiinankaupunki, and he had made it to Very Big Mountain before he’d collapsed in the snow. But I wouldn’t have to go that far. All I had to do was make it to the first village or town on the other side of the mountain. Someone would surely help a child on their own.
And I had a cat. People like cats.
My legs felt heavier than pine trunks. Now the snow was nearly over my knees. The stars in the sky above me blurred with the tears in my eyes. Eventually I reached the top of the mountain. In front of us, in the dark, I could see miles and miles of forest.
‘There,’ I told Captain Soot, whose head was peeping out from between two coat buttons. ‘That’s the human world. That’s where we belong.’
Captain Soot gave me a quizzical look.
‘All right, I know you aren’t a human,’ I told him. ‘But the human world is the cat world. Humans and cats belong together. Well, humans belong with cats. Maybe not the other way around.’
Captain Soot snuggled back into the warmth of my coat.
Then, suddenly, I heard a voice, calling out in the dark. I looked around. The voice wasn’t coming from behind me. It was coming from slightly higher up, right at the pointed peak of the mountain.
‘Hey! You there! What are you doing?’
It was a high-pitched voice. An elf voice. Oh no.
I struggled to see in the dark but whoever it was was coming closer. Despite his short legs and despite the deep snow, he was fast. He seemed to be a very acrobatic elf, like someone you would find at a circus. He didn’t so much step through the snow as hop and skip and leap over it. Then he finished with a massive triple somersault and landed on a rock that was sticking out of the snow, right in front of me.
The elf had a broad smiling face and wore a long hat – even longer than a normal elf hat – with a thick furry brim. It was a special hat – a snow hat – made for the kind of elf who expected to be outside a lot. I also noticed he had a massive rucksack on his back.
‘You must be the human girl!’ he said.
Uh-oh, I thought. Here we go. Another elf who believes Father Vodol’s lies.
‘Just leave me alone, okay? You stay with the elves. I’m going back to the humans where I belong.’
The elf kept smiling, even though his eyes looked a little sad. ‘Well, okay, but I thought it would be nice to have a chat. Because it’s quite lonely up here, on top of Very Big Mountain, with no one to talk to. You see, elves generally like company. Conversation. Hanging around in crowds. You’ve probably noticed.’
I thought of all those elf eyes staring at me when I had been standing on the doorstep. ‘Yes, yes, I’ve noticed that . . . but the truth is I wouldn’t be much fun to talk to right now.’
The elf pressed his finger to his chin. ‘Well, what about now? I mean, you said right now. But the thing with nows is that they are all different. Now. Now. Now. There is always a different now happening, if you think about it. This now is different to that now, which is different to that now – the one where I just said now. The trick is to know how to catch them.’
I was confused. This was a very confusing elf. But I supposed it was better to be confused than horrendously SAD in capital letters, which was how I had been feeling before I’d felt confused.
‘Do you know what isn’t hard to catch, though?’
‘What?’ I asked.
The elf was suddenly jumping into the air – diving, doing another somersault – right over my head. When he landed on the snow, even though the snow was very deep, he hardly made an impact. He had perfected the art of the light landing.
And then he held up something in front of me. Something white in the moonlight.
An envelope. ‘Letters!’ he said. ‘Letters are easy to catch. Well, for me. It’s my job you see.’
‘You’re the Letter Catcher?’
‘Yes, I am. All the letters that humans write and send to Father Christmas make their way here. They float through the wind, pushed along by the wishes they contain, and there are thousands every day. From all over the world. And they all make it here, to Very Big Mountain, because . . .’ Just as he was saying this, he spotted another letter flying past his face, and he reached out and grabbed it. ‘My name is Pippin. Pip for short. Pleased to meet you.’
‘I’m Amelia.’
‘Amelia. Amelia. A-ME-LI-A. It sounds nice. It sounds like a . . .’
Captain Soot suddenly peeped out from my coat.
Pippin jumped in the air in shock. ‘Aaagh! You’ve got two heads! No one told me human children have two heads!’
‘This is a cat,’ I said.
‘A what?’
‘A cat. He belongs on the south side of the mountain. Like me.’
Pippin placed the two letters in his rucksack. ‘But what about Father Christmas and Mother Christmas? You live with them now, don’t you?’
I sat down on the rock sticking out of the snow. I nodded. ‘I did, but it hasn’t really worked out.’
‘Why? Is Father Christmas cross with you?’
‘No, but he should be.’
‘Why?’
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br /> And so, right there, on top of Very Big Mountain, with the whole of Finland spread out in front of me, I told Pippin everything. And about my plan to return to the world of humans.
‘So you were always happy there? In the human world?’
I shook my head. ‘No, not always. Not even often. But at least I belonged there. At least I didn’t get anyone into trouble but myself. The elves don’t want me here.’
‘That’s not true. Lots of elves want you here. I was so excited when I found out that a real-life human child was living in Elfhelm. It was amazing.’ And then he looked up into the sky and behind him. ‘Oh, that’s peculiar.’
‘What is?’
‘Look at the sky. Look at the Northern Lights.’
I stared up at the faint billowing green waves of light in the sky, sprinkled like magic dust. ‘They’re there every night, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, but not like this. Normally they fill the whole sky and are bright, illuminating the whole of Elfhelm. But they’re dimmer tonight. They’re hardly there at all.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means there isn’t as much magic in the air. Which is probably why there are fewer letters reaching here than normal.’
I didn’t really understand what this meant, but as I stared down the snowy Finland side of the mountain I noticed something land in the snow nearby. Another letter. Pippin had noticed it too.
‘That is even peculiar-ier. I know that isn’t a word, but if it was, it would be it.’
‘Why?’ I wondered. ‘What’s so weird? I thought you said letters fly up here all the time.’
He nodded. ‘Yes! They do, they fly up here. Not down there. Ever since Christmas the letters have been making it right to the top of the mountain. In the old days, two years ago, it was a different story, but recently things have been going super well. Sometimes I even have to jump up higher than the mountain to catch them.’
He jumped up high, with his right arm stretched up into the sky, to show me what he was talking about.
Pippin then stared at the letter below him. ‘There’s another one. Look, just beyond it.’
He leapt down – no somersault this time – and hopped and ran through the snow, picking up both letters.
He came back up to where I was still sitting, opened one of the letters and read it out.
Dear Father Christmas,
My name is Elias. I live in the town of Linköping in the country of Sweden. I would very much like a pack of cards for Christmas, so I can play games with my sister, who has been very poorly recently. Thank you for coming to visit us last year. We loved the spinning top and the bouncing balls. Our year has been so much more magical simply knowing you came and will visit again. So thank you a million times.
Very best wishes,
Elias (aged nine)
As Pippin was reading I thought of the letter I had once written to Father Christmas, when I had lived at 99 Haberdashery Road in London. I remembered thanking him and telling him all about Captain Soot – he sometimes steals sardines from the fishmonger and gets into fights with street cats – and then I had got on with the main business of the letter. The wishing part. I had asked for four things:
A new brush for sweeping chimneys
A spinning top
A book by Charles Dickens (my favourite author)
For my mother to get better
Of course he couldn’t do anything about the fourth one. That was the whole problem. That made me angry with him for a while, before I understood that magic has to have limits for it to be magic. Before I worked out that magic doesn’t take away all the bad things – it just makes it easier to get through the bad things knowing that life can contain magic, and that it will contain it again.
I was thinking all this as Pippin folded the letter and tucked it back inside the envelope. He was looking worried.
‘Sweden,’ he said. And he kept saying it, almost as a question. ‘Sweden? Sweden? Sweden?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘The letter was from Sweden.’
‘And?’
‘Well, Sweden is close. There is Finland and then there is Sweden. The countries are joined together. Letters from Sweden are always the highest.’
Then he looked at the back of the other envelope. ‘Norway.’
He placed his rucksack on the ground and looked at all the envelopes, sometimes opening one to read the address on the letter itself. ‘Finland . . . Finland . . . Norway . . . Finland . . . Sweden . . . Russia . . . Finland . . . Finland . . . Sweden . . .’
‘Well, what’s the matter?’ I asked, Captain Soot purring warmly as he slept inside my coat.
Pippin, whose face was made for smiling, was not smiling. ‘The matter is that not one single letter here comes from over a thousand miles away. Not even from over five hundred miles away.’ He dug really deep into the rucksack and pulled out some more. ‘Ah, this one is from India. And this one is from America. And this one is from Scotland. That’s more like it . . . But those letters from far away were from hours ago. None of the letters arriving now are from any of those places. They’re from nearby countries. They don’t need as much magic to get here. So, if letters from far away can’t get here now, it means something is happening. I think there’s an energy crisis.’
‘An energy crisis?’
‘A hope crisis. A diminishing of now’s. That’s why the letters aren’t getting here. And why the ones that do aren’t reaching the top of the mountain. It’s why the Northern Lights are fading . . .’
‘But what’s caused it?’
‘I don’t know. Something recent. Tonight. And it’s serious, because you know what today is? It’s Christmas Eve Eve. All the letters have to get here by tomorrow.’ He looked around, then up at the sky, then towards the dark forests of Finland, then back to the small dots of cottages in Elfhelm, before his big eyes turned to me. ‘You.’
‘What?’
‘It’s because of you.’
I felt sad. ‘You see? I told you I didn’t belong there.’
Pippin was shaking his head and wagging his finger at the same time. ‘No, no, no. Don’t you get it? You have it the wrong way around. The hope levels rose when you arrived here. And they are diminishing because you’re leaving. Think about it. If you go now, Father Vodol wins. He’ll get his revenge. A lot of elves will believe what he tells them. They’ll think human children are evil. Even the workshop elves might start to think it. And as soon as they think that, they’ll not want to work for Father Christmas. And if they don’t work for Father Christmas, then poor little Elias from Linköping and all the other millions of children around the world won’t have any presents in their stockings – or magic in their lives.’
I thought about this. And as I thought, Pippin took some gingerbread out of his pocket and broke it in two and offered some to me.
‘I am telling you,’ he said, between crunches, ‘that if you went down that mountain and never came back here, the Northern Lights would fade. And there would be no letters to catch.’
‘Well, that would be good for you.’
Pippin choked on his gingerbread. He shook his head and jumped to his feet. ‘Are you kidding me? This is the best job in the world. Sure, it can be lonely sometimes, but I am literally catching dreams. I am the bridge between two worlds. I am making Father Christmas happy. Before I was a letter catcher I worked in media sales.’
‘Media sales? What’s that?’
‘Ugh! It was the most deadly boring job in the whole of Elfhelm. It was for the Daily Snow. Back when it was full of lies – when Father Vodol ran it. Anyway, Father Vodol is a very greedy elf. He wanted to fill the newspaper with adverts, so it used to be my job to wander up and down the Main Path, going into all the shops – Mother Mayhem’s Music Shop and Clogs! Clogs! Clogs! and Red & Green and Magic Books – and I’d get them to buy adverts in the newspaper. But the trouble was Father Vodol used to want them to sign these things called contracts, and
elves aren’t very good with contracts, so they’d sign them because it seemed like a fun thing to do, you know, writing their signatures in big letters – I used to carry lots of multi-coloured pens in my pocket – but they didn’t know what they were signing. For instance, the Figgy Pudding café ended up agreeing to a whole year’s worth of adverts. They closed down because they owed Father Vodol all their money . . . Now, of course, the Daily Snow hardly has any adverts at all, because Noosh is a nice elf and she doesn’t believe in people signing their names on pieces of paper that they don’t understand. She wants to make money from people buying the newspaper, but no one seems to want to buy it.’
‘Because she wants to tell the truth.’
‘Yes.’
Captain Soot woke up and I fed him a little crumb of gingerbread.
‘But how can I stay if everyone hates me?’ I asked.
‘Well, you are not the only one everyone has hated, you know. When I worked in media sales, all the elves hated me too. I would try and cheer them up with acrobatics. I would spin and flip and somersault down the Main Path, but they didn’t care so long as I had contracts in my hand. And they didn’t care that I had little elves at home to feed. But then, when I started working for Father Christmas, he saw a different Pippin. He saw the good in me, and he saw my leaping and acrobatics and he knew just the job for me.’
‘Letter catching.’
‘Exactly. But if you leave, there won’t be any need for a letter catcher. There won’t even be a need for a Toy Workshop or for Father Christmas. You could save him. You could save us all from Father Vodol taking over again. If you leave now, I guarantee that just after Christmas Father Vodol will be Leader of the Elf Council again. And all the happiness of Elfhelm will be gone – this time for ever. And no human child will have a Christmas present ever again.’
Captain Soot licked his lips. He liked gingerbread. I stroked him as I tried to think. ‘But what can I do? He can write whatever lies about me he wants. If I stay, then I’ll be the most unpopular person ever to live here. And, if Father Vodol takes over, he will open up Elfhelm prison again and probably lock me up. And he might lock Father Christmas and Mary up too, simply for being humans.’