by Brian Hodge
“No – no – no – no-no-no!” The old codger lifted himself to his feet with great aguish and effort. “I did a terrible thing – they’re gonna get me for it – I gotta get outta here.” He started backing away with a stumbling, lame stagger. “Gotta get outta here.”
“Wait!” Greenie was intrigued all of a sudden. He had to know. He shivered and raised his hands in deference to the geezer. “The nightmares. What was it? What was it ya did?”
The old man swallowed his agony as he backed away, his yellow, sagging eyes widening like shiny Buffalo nickels. “I killed him.”
“Killed who?”
The answer came out on one tortured breath between sobs, right before the old coot turned and fled. “I killed Santa Claus.”
For one long thunderstruck moment, the two hobos watched in silence as the ancient stranger whirled and trundled away into the swirling veils of snow.
In those days, very few souls had any clue that the source of the great tribulations gripping the land at that time actually began before the stock market crash of 1929. In fact, the troubles began way up north, far, far above the brutal, blasted ice fields of the Northwest Territories. At that time, the Queen Elizabeth Islands were even meaner than they are today, which is saying something, because even now you’d be a fool to make your way north of the McClintock Channel. And if you did, you’d want to bring along a boxcar full of firewood and provisions because the wind is a wild beast up there. It can chew through steel and drive a person insane with its constant shrieking refrain. And if you were mad enough to cross the Parry Channel, and travel even further north, all the way to the end of Point Eureka, what you would find is the land plunging away into the alabaster mists of hell. The horizon line vanishes and the average temperature dips to sixty-five below zero, and the nights go on forever. And even back then, before the Industrial Age had infected the Great White North with its cancer, the Inuit and the Lapps and the Samis had long ago left these angry ice shelves to the polar bear and the walrus, and only the heartiest of those creatures survived, hunkering down beneath that rime of endless ice, eking out a living on lichens and frozen moss. So it comes as no surprise that very few mortal souls – if any – had ever glimpsed the nameless community that lay on the edge of Ellesmere Island.
If you blinked as you passed it — or if perhaps you looked away for a moment — you might miss it, despite its immense length and breadth. It ranged along a five-mile stretch of glacier-land and it radiated a kind of otherworldly corrosion. A line of magnificently ornate chimney spires — once grand and colorfully striped, huffing the smoke of magical production lines — now bordered the colony like skeletal remains, all dead-cold and desiccated. The candy-cane columns along the northern edge of the village now stood scorched and blackened with neglect. The windows of the once-whimsical workshops were shuttered, the holly trees shriveled and dead, the ice sculptures of angels and snowmen and gingerbread boys burnished by the winds into featureless stalagmites. Even the great south gate with its festive lintel of carved marble bells and Yule logs, its holiday tympanum rising nearly fifty meters into the gray sky, now stood dark and covered with a patina of decay. In just over a year, the magic village had transformed into a gothic ruin.
It was almost inconceivable that only thirteen months earlier – in the wake of the terrible event — a pair of figures emerged from that same great south gate in search of the man responsible for all this misery.
Moving like ghosts through the ashen haze of the ice field, the twosome wore caribou skins and ermined-trimmed parkas, and carried packs laden with weapons dismantled into unrecognizable components, and spoke very few words to each other. An observer – had there been one around at that point to observe – might have misjudged this pair’s collective stature. The arctic light and space can play tricks on the senses. But upon close and prolonged scrutiny, one would be forced to conclude that these two individuals were either children or dwarves. Trudging with snow-shoes through the unforgiving crust, communicating with hand-signals and nods, they looked both fragile and relentless against the gelid winds. They moved with the purpose of salmon spawning.
It took them nearly three months to negotiate the Northwest Territories, ultimately crossing into the land to which they believed the man had fled. Others had found the death scene in the wilderness of British Columbia, the magical team strewn across a barren snowfield, their awful carcasses burned beyond recognition. Now it was up to these two diminutive bounty hunters to bring balance back to the world.
The twosome rode a dog sled across Bathurst Island, and then slipped into the cargo hold of a whaling ship crossing Viscount Melville Sound, riding all the way to Hudson Bay without speaking a single word to each other. Once the ship had docked in northern Quebec, the twosome set out on foot once again, acquiring a kayak in Nunavik, and portaging between the frozen rivers when necessary, moving unseen among the indigenous villages, invisible to all but the most gifted children and scattered herds of reindeer.
It is a little known fact that reindeer are the only mammals on earth – other than certain children — that are able to see elves.
By the time the twosome reached Ottawa, it was nearly spring. The pair hadn’t taken nourishment for many weeks, and they were near death. When they reached the northern trunk of the Canadian Pacific Railway, they hopped a freight bound for Toronto and searched for sustenance in the shadows of the cattle cars. Elves subsist upon sugar and dairy products, so it was a stroke of luck, in the moldering hay and shit, that they found a life-saving Hereford.
“What if we never find him?” ventured the younger of the two sprites, as he tugged the udders in the dark, filling a rusty, faded Eight-O-Clock coffee can. At a youthful one-hundred-and-two-years-old, and the youngest member of the Special Forces, Shamus the Elf was always full of questions.
“We’ll find him alright,” the older elf grunted, wiping the milk from his dark face. “Action must be taken, Laddie. Justice must be served.”
The older elf went by the name of Dooley and was as grizzled as a pixie can be, with dark, parchment-like skin, and the eyes of a jackal. Contrary to fairy tales and folk stories, not all Christmas elves are adorable. There are sanitation worker elves with oily skin and nasty dispositions. There are demented elves relegated to retirement homes. And there are the elves of the special-forces – the fixers, the secret police – who operate underground, in the back channels. Shamus and Dooley were the skip-tracers of the Special Unit, the most skilled of all the gnomes.
“But Dooley, how in the name of cinnamon sticks will we do it?” Between gulps of the tepid milk, Shamus twitched and frowned at the conundrum. “Why, he could be anywhere in the lower forty-eight.”
“Shamus –”
“He could have changed his name. For all we know, he could already be –”
“That’s quite enough, Shamus!”
“But how, Dooley?”
The older elf did not reply. He merely turned and gazed through the slats of the cattle car as the train wended through the deep blue Ontario twilight.
The elder sprite did not know it then but he and his comrade were about to become part of an infamous misadventure that would span more time than either elf could imagine in their darkest dreams.
Nearly eighteen months had passed since the incident in the hobo jungle. After fleeing the scene, the amnesiac wandered aimlessly eastward without plan or purpose. Eastward toward no particular destination, toward no fixed point. All he wanted was to evade the faceless, shapeless pursuers on his tail, the invisible hellhounds, the little ones. Traveling mostly at night, the half-mad old man in rags and tears stumbled from back alley to vacant lot, skid row to deserted farm, moving in the general direction of the Midwest, living off scraps from garbage heaps and church missions, the guilt a malignant tumor in the pit of his soul, eating him alive. He passed through shanty-town and slum, squatters’-camp and godforsaken ghetto. It was the spring of 1931, and the Depression had set in like a fever that
wouldn’t break. To add insult to injury, a horrible drought had gripped the country for over a year now. Farms had dried up, crops wilting away, rivers and streams shriveling like hardened arteries. The very soil cracked and fissured as though a consumptive disease had infected the land.
On the border of Indiana, on the 15th of May, the old man ran across his first Hooverville.
Named for Herbert Hoover, the recalcitrant U.S. president, who believed that relief should be left to the private sector, and the answer to all the torments of the damned was to do nothing, Hoovervilles came in all shapes and sizes, but they all shared the same garish scent of human degradation. Victims of foreclosures and bankruptcies – entire families with nary a pot in which to piss – would huddle in giant makeshift tent-cities, cobbled together with spit and spoor. This one, the one outside Crawfordsville, Indiana — the one upon which the amnesiac stumbled that terrible May night — was immeasurably huge. As far as the eye could see, thousands of downtrodden and diseased huddled in reeking sheds and shacks clinging to the edge of a half-mile-long dry river-bed.
Overcome with a dawning horror, the amnesiac fled into the darkness of a fallow bean field that night, and he kept on fleeing, and fleeing, as fast as his cadaverous old legs would carry him, as though he could outrun the horrible realization spreading through his marrow: he made this happen. He brought this on the world, and now the world was dying. And all he had to show for it was a devouring guilt and a recurring nightmare that showed him over and over, like a hellish nickelodeon, how he had destroyed the sleigh, the eight tiny reindeer, and the driver, in a paroxysm of fiery rage.
A few miles south of Muncie his ancient limbs finally gave out. He collapsed in the overgrown brambles of a deserted farm, and prayed for death to finally come and take him away. He had tried to kill himself on more than one occasion since waking up in the snows of British Columbia nearly three years ago. Once in a fetid alley outside Portland he tried to hang himself by fixing a tow-rope to a fire escape trestle. The trestle had broken under the scant weight of his bones and sent him plunging into a Dumpster. A few months later, alone in a freight car somewhere in Nebraska, he had tried to open his wrist with a broken Jax beer bottle but he was so emaciated he couldn’t even find a vein.
When the sheriff’s deputies finally found him in that barren field outside Muncie, he was as close to death as he had yet come, and the boys had to carry him away in a horse cart. They took him to a welfare hospital in Fort Wayne for observation. His weight was down to a mere hundred-and-two pounds, and he was dangerously anemic. They tried to nurse him back to health but he refused nourishment of any kind. And when he was finally able to speak, his delirious tale convinced the doctors that he belonged in a sanitarium.
The Howard Phillips Eldritch Inebriate Asylum in Cleveland, Ohio, was where the amnesiac made his temporary home for the next seven months. He was fed intravenously for a time, and they talked to him every morning for sixteen weeks, and he never changed his story.
“Let me ask you again, John,” the doctor with the Coke bottle glasses and clipboard said to the old man early one gray January morning. ‘John’ as in John Doe. Which is all they could think of calling the old gent. The doctor was sitting on a wooden schoolroom desk in a desolate white chamber lined with barred windows. The hyena yelps of the insane echoed out in the hallway, and the air smelled of disinfectant and vomit. Outside the filthy windows, a dry winter wind coughed against the glass. “When you say they’re coming to get you, whom are you referring to exactly?”
The old man, skin and bones now, his flesh the color of stale bread, his skeletal fingers clutched together in his lap like a phalanx of ivory, sat on a folding chair staring at the scarred parquet floor. “I told the other doctor already, I told him about a hundred thousand times, the little ones, the elves is what I told him.”
“Elves.”
The old man twitched but didn’t look up. He had been in the asylum for over six months now – shuffling the hallways, mumbling to himself, writhing through sleepless nights, just waiting for the inevitable — but had yet to elaborate on the nature of the elves for any of the physicians. On this dismal January morning, however, the old man was for some reason feeling inordinately expansive. “Well they ain’t what you’d call regular elves.”
The doctor wrote something on his clipboard and then looked up. “By ‘regular’ you mean the ones in Santa’s workshop? Building toys and such?”
“They’re in my dream,” the old man muttered into the floor. “They’re the soldiers, the guards, the mean ones.”
“Santa’s soldiers?”
“Yep.”
“Santa needs an army?”
The old man shrugged. “You’d be surprised, this day and age.”
The doctor wrote some more. “John, I have to ask you this again: Why you?”
The old man swallowed air and looked at the doctor. “You just want to hear me say it again, don’t ya. Like yer lookin’ in on a freak show.”
“This business about you killing Kris Kringle?” the doctor ventured.
The old man shook his head, looked back at the floor. “Look around you, Doc. Take a gander outside. You see any holiday cheer out there? You think there’s any Christmas left in this world?”
The doctor rubbed his mouth. “Can you tell me again about the dream?”
A pained sigh. Then the words come out on puffs of anguished, noxious breath. “I’m climbing outta the sleigh after I made it crash, I don’t – I don’t exactly know how I did it, why I did it, how got there — but I killed the old man and climbed out of the sleigh cuz the sleigh’s on fire and the reindeer… “ The old man’s voice broke then, tumbled like a house of cards, and the sobbing started up again. “They’re all dead – they’re burned – and then I’m running – horrible, horrible – all them reindeer — burning cuz of me.”
“Okay. All right.” The doctor rose, recognizing the signs. “That’s enough for today, John.” The doctor went over to the door, unlocked it, cracked it open and called for the orderlies.
They took the old man back to his room and locked him inside, and for another few endless days they observed him without bothering him or talking to him much.
It was late the next Sunday afternoon, after dinner, after the hospital had quieted down and the second shift nurses had all come on the clock to play their card games and drink their Chase and Sanborn and gossip their gossip, that the old man heard the first faint noises of elves on the roof. It was almost as though they had been summoned by the amnesiac’s interview earlier that week, as though the old man had tempted fate by giving the doctors a deeper insight into the nature of these killer elves.
The old man stiffened on his bunk suddenly like a weather vane, his skinny neck craning and cocking as he listened. His room – or his cell, as he had come to think of it – was on the fourth floor of the sanitarium, the top-most story. The building’s roof was directly overhead, and right then the old man could hear the faint padding of tiny humanoid footsteps along the tarpaper rooftop.
Lurching out of bed, the amnesiac hobbled over to the door in his stained white gown. “Hey nurse?! – Hey there nurse! – Anybody there?!” The old man pounded his knotty fist on the door, his sagging, bony ass visible and jiggling out the back of his gown.
The viewing slat slid open, revealing the face of a middle-aged nurse in cats-eye glasses. “Sir, you’re not due for your medication until –”
“Nurse, please, I’m having – I’m – I’m having pains in my chest —!”
The lock clicked, and the door began to swing open, when the old man suddenly shoved with all his might.
The force of the door bursting open – as well as the shock of it – sent the poor nurse pin-wheeling backward. She banged into a desk, sending coffee cups and paper flying, as the old man lunged out the open doorway and into the corridor with fists clenched and eyes bright with alarm. “THEY’RE HERE! BY GOD THEY’RE HERE!”
For a moment the ol
d man froze with indecision, gazing up and down the deserted corridor, the sudden roar of glass breaking in some nearby room making him start, followed by the scream of a patient. The old man scurried away from the noise, his bare feet padding on cold linoleum, moving toward the north end of the hallway, toward the great arched window over-looking the fire escape.
He didn’t look back, he didn’t look over his shoulder, but had he looked — had he found the courage to look — he would have seen the oddest sight: doors opening along the corridor, nurses and orderlies coming out of rooms, eyes wide and shifting back and forth, oblivious to the intruders appearing only inches away from them, birthing themselves from a laundry dumbwaiter near the nurse’s desk at the opposite end of the hall like two unformed blackened fetuses. The elves hopped onto the tile with preternatural nimbleness.
“There he is Shamus!”
One of the intruders let out a cry that was heard only by the old man at the far end of the hallway, as he clawed at the latch on that filthy window, his palsied hands seizing up, his lungs heaving for air, his heart racing, as he prayed for deliverance. All the remaining souls on the fourth floor at that moment – nurses, orderlies, an intern named Dr. Malachi Toombs – heard only the strange clanging of invisible wind chimes, or at least that’s the effect the elf’s cry had on their auditory nerves. An elf’s voice is incomprehensible – even at high volumes – to an adult.
At last the old man got the window latch open, and managed to yank up the sash and punch the screen open. He squeezed his slender bones through the gap and out into the winds of January, which engulfed the precipice. Dizziness coursed through his malnourished brain and he clutched at the wrought iron for purchase and tried not to look down at the vertigo-inducing drop. Traffic noises wafted up at him, and the light and space of a dying city blurred in his vision, as the intruders closed in behind him.