Christmas Carol & the Shimmering Elf

by Robert L. Fouch

  “Never mind that now,” Grandmother said. “You need to talk to him.”

  “What do I say?” My stomach had twisted into a giant pretzel. If the shimmering, traitorous “weasel” of an elf was the only one who could help us go back and fix everything, the world as I once knew it depended on this moment. Depended on me.

  “Tell him who you are as calmly as you can,” Grandmother said. “Don’t accuse him of anything. Just state your case. Build his trust. Ray will go with you.” She turned to him. “Let Carol do the talking, OK?” Ray nodded. She turned back to me. “Are you ready?”

  “I guess.” The three of us snuck close. It wasn’t difficult because of all the ice structures to hide behind. Only the soft crunch of the snow under our feet made any sound. The elf seemed lost in his own world. As we drew closer, step by icy step, I realized he was talking aloud, looking up at the mother and child sculpture, as if he were having a conversation with them. I thought of my friend Ramon, the Defender we’d lost on our rescue mission to the Dominican Republic. When we returned from our trip, all of us devastated by the loss, Santa had a memorial stone erected out past the reindeer barn. Sometimes I’d talk to Ramon, or to his stone anyway. I hoped he was somewhere listening. It made me feel better to believe he was. This struck me as the same sort of thing, the elf talking to loved ones no longer around. His wife and son?

  About twenty feet away, Grandmother stopped us behind a large ice house. She gave me a nudge and I approached the shimmering elf from behind, Ray at my heels. I was about five feet from him when the elf finally realized he had an intruder. He jumped off the bench and spun to face me. He started to make a portal, but I yelled, “Wait!” He shimmered, and it seemed to stagger him like a punch. When I saw up close what was happening, the blood rushed to my head and I thought I might faint. Ray took in a sharp breath and stepped back.

  The elf’s face changed. Actually, his whole body changed. He was a bent old wrinkled elf, much like Grandmother, when he suddenly shifted into a young, handsome elf, strong and tall, with flowing silver hair. Then he shifted again, this time into middle age, his face morphing with his body. “Who are you?” he yelled, his hands poised to create a portal. I started to answer and he shifted once more, this time so dramatically I stepped back next to Ray. Our shoulders touched and I felt him trembling. The elf was now a child, sweet-faced and innocent, despite the fierce scowl he directed at us. “I said who are you?” he repeated in the high-pitched voice of a young elf.

  “My name is Carol,” I answered. A thought occurred to me, maybe a way for him to trust me. They call me Christmas Carol, I said telepathically. The elf looked startled. I come from the world that used to exist.

  He shimmered back into an elderly version, though not quite as old this time. What do you want from me? I didn’t do it. He did.

  I knew who he was, but there was no use pointing out that my uncle never could have done what he did without the elf’s help, or that the elf shouldn’t have been messing with time in the first place. I know he did, I answered, trying to sound sympathetic. The Supreme Leader is my uncle.

  The elf’s eyes widened. He shimmered into a middle-age version. I wondered how many versions of him there were. You’re . . . Carol.

  That’s what I said.

  He told me you were ungrateful, that you turned on him and tried to destroy everything he created.

  “He lies!” I shouted, striding forward. “He betrayed me! He betrayed everyone!”

  The elf shrank from my fury and I forced myself to take a breath. My face burned so hot, I imagined I could melt his entire winter world with just a look. “He said he would help me,” the elf whimpered. “He said he could bring them back.” He glanced at the ice sculpture. The female elf was beautiful, with long flowing hair that sparkled as ice. The child looked a lot like the young version of the elf.

  “He lies,” I said again. The elf hung his head and cried. Even though I knew the awful things he’d done, even though I’d seen the evidence of his betrayal, I felt sorry for him. He was pathetic. I put my arms around him. He flinched and tried to pull away. But I held tight.

  “What happened to them?” I asked. He shimmered and shifted as my arms embraced him. Such a strange sensation.

  The elf was young and vibrant again, probably about the same age as the female in the sculpture. He wiped his cheeks. He looked disgusted with himself.

  “He lost them,” came my grandmother’s voice. She stepped from her hiding place. “He played around with forces he should have left alone and he lost them.”

  “You!” The elf’s face transformed again, not into a younger or older version, but into rage. He backed away, but I grabbed his hand. He turned old again, and feeble, and I gripped him hard.

  “Please, wait,” I said. “We need your help.”

  “I’m done helping anyone,” he snapped. “No one’s ever helped me get them back.” He was young again, and strong, and he yanked away from me. A portal appeared before him.

  “I’ll find them,” I shouted in desperation. “I know I can. And you’ll be a family again.” The elf’s portal crackled, and he looked at me with a glimmer of something in his eyes. Hope?

  “I don’t know, Carol,” Grandmother said. “It’s dangerous. Bad enough you have to go back in time at all.”

  The elf leaned toward his portal, ready to bolt. “How will you find them? You’re just a child.”

  I crossed my arms and glared. “I’m sick of people saying that. I’m a Defender of Claus who saved Santa. And I have elf blood, too. If anyone can do it, I can.”

  “And why should I trust you?” he asked. “You’re with the elf who had me expelled from the kingdom.”

  “You brought that on yourself,” Grandmother snapped. “You know that.”

  “I just wanted to find them.”

  “And look what that’s gotten you. Look at the terrible world you created.”

  The elf said nothing. He looked longingly at the portal, the reflection of it making his eyes seem like they were on fire. There was anguish in every feature of his shimmering face. “I’ll do it!” he finally said. “Let’s do it right now.”

  “No way!” I responded. “Only after you’ve helped us.” The elf certainly hadn’t shown he could be trusted. And who knew how long it would take to find his family, or if I even could. But I would try if he helped us change things back. I would keep my promise. The elf hung his head again. The portal vanished. He slumped back on the bench and looked up at the ice sculpture. “Please find them,” he whispered. “Please.”

  The way he traveled back in time surprised me. I expected some sort of elaborate elven magic. I guess it technically was. But to achieve the magic, the elf had built a machine that looked like a huge ray gun.

  “You know how you make a portal by forming a circle with your hands and concentrating on your destination?” he asked. The elf’s mood had changed for the better. He seemed excited to demonstrate how the machine worked, like a mad scientist showing off a discovery, blind to the fact it might destroy the planet.

  “Yes,” Grandmother and I answered in unison. Ray said nothing. He seemed overwhelmed. I sure couldn’t blame him for that.

  “Well, I figured out that if you make a spiral instead, smaller and smaller, over and over again, you can drill a hole through time.”

  “How do you control where you go?” I asked.

  “Ah, now that’s the trick,” the elf said. He shimmered into the kid version of himself. As weird as it was seeing him change, I was getting used to it. “It’s not an exact science. The first time I managed to travel back, I thought I’d failed. Nothing changed. Then I saw an earlier version of myself coming home from the toy factory after a day of work. I’d gone back an hour.” The elf powered up the machine, which shimmied and coughed, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. After a loud crack that sounded like a car backfiring, the contraption hummed like an electric powerline, throbbing slightly, as if it had a heartbeat.

/>   “What happened to your family?” I had been trying to work up the courage and wondered if I should even ask. But if I was going to try and find them, I needed to know.

  The elf dropped his head. He was elderly now, beaten down by his long life. “We lost the child,” he said softly. “A terrible accident. I wanted to go back and prevent it. And after countless tries, it worked. My wife and I went and got him. Can you imagine the joy of being reunited with someone you lost?” I thought of my mother, who had died when I was five. How wonderful it would be to have her embrace me once again. That kind of temptation would be difficult to resist. “But when I tried to send them back to the present, they vanished. I don’t know what happened. I’ve been looking for them since.”

  He shimmered into his youthful, strong self. Ray spoke up behind me, the sound of his voice making me jump again. “Why does that keep happening to you?”

  The elf didn’t answer. He glanced at Grandmother, who glared at him. The elf slumped his shoulders. He looked like a little kid who’d finally admitted to his mom that he’d broken her favorite vase. “It’s why I was exiled. I refused to stop searching for them. And to go back so many times, there are . . .” He seemed to be trying to come up with the right word. “Consequences. For elves in particular.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Every time he goes back, he merges with the version of himself that exists in that time period,” Grandmother said. “Two versions of the same elf can’t exist at the same time.”

  It made sense now, how he kept shimmering into so many variations of himself. “How many times have you gone back?”

  The elf hesitated, glancing at Grandmother once more, as if he’d broken a whole shelf full of vases.

  “How many?” she asked sternly.

  “Ninety-eight.”

  “Good heavens!” Grandmother said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “If I can’t find my family, I don’t care about living,” the elf said.

  “You have other children,” Grandmother said.

  “They don’t speak to me after I was exiled.” He scowled at Grandmother. “Thanks to you.”

  “Don’t you dare put that on me, you miserable old elf!” Grandmother stormed over to him. “I’m not the one who messed around with time and caused such a disaster.” The red-faced elves stood nose to nose. I honestly thought she might slap him.

  “It’s not fair!” he shouted. “I couldn’t bear losing them.”

  “OK, OK,” I said, stepping between them. “He made a mistake. You can understand why he did it. Right, Grandmother?”

  She breathed like an angry bull but took a step back. “Everyone loses people. He’s no different from the rest of us. It’s the way of things, and no one should fool around with that.”

  “But what about when I reversed time to save Santa and the Defenders?” I asked. Grandmother said nothing to that. “He understands what he’s done,” I said softly. “He’s learned his lesson. Haven’t you?” The elf nodded, a bit unconvincingly. “We need you to send us back to the same time you sent my uncle. We need to undo what he did.”

  The elf was still angry. “Why should I care what happened to the rest of the world? The world never cared about me.”

  “Baloney,” Grandmother said.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. I did the same to the shimmering elf. “Do you know what happened to the elf kingdom?” I asked him.

  “I don’t care,” he snapped.

  “My uncle destroyed it. It’s wrecked.”

  The elf shrugged. “Your girls were there,” Grandmother said. “Who knows what happened to them or where they are.”

  The elf squirmed and pulled away from me. “They were dead to me a long time ago.”

  I held out my cane and began to make a portal, concentrating on making one so big he could see the entire elf kingdom, or what was left of it. He cringed when the crumbling ice and splintered tree appeared. “This is what I want to fix. And then I’ll help you. I can make a portal stronger than any other elf and my cane focuses that power. If anyone can find your wife and son, I can.”

  “How do I know you won’t trick me? The more I think about it, the more I think you’re just using me for what you want and I’ll never see you again.”

  “Not everyone’s a traitorous weasel like you,” Grandmother snapped, and she was in his face once more.

  Grandmother! I said telepathically. You’re not helping. I gently pulled her back and kept my hand on her shoulder. “I promise I’ll help you,” I said. “I will find them.”

  “Send them back,” Grandmother said. “You can trust her.”

  The elf clenched his jaw so tight I thought his face might crack. He glared at Grandmother but finally said, “OK.”

  At first I was relieved. Then something Grandmother said registered in my brain. “Wait, what do you mean send them back? You mean us. The three of us.”

  Grandmother looked away. “I can’t go, dear. Merging with my younger self like that, I think it would kill me.”

  “But I need you,” I said. “I can’t do this alone.”

  She pointed to Ray. “That’s why I asked him to come. And you two will be fine since you didn’t exist during the time period your uncle went back to.” She glanced questioningly at the elf.

  “They would be OK,” he said.

  “So it’s settled then,” Grandmother said. “You will help Ray and Carol go back, and Carol will help find your family when she’s undone all this damage.”

  The shimmering elf hadn’t actually agreed to the plan—and neither had I, for that matter—but Grandmother had a knack for getting her way. She glared hard at the elf, who shimmered into the elderly version, and at last, he nodded. Ray and I were headed back in time.

  CHAPTER 7

  1851

  It’s pretty weird when someone sitting right in front of you says, “Go find me.” But that’s what Grandmother told me I needed to do once Ray and I traveled through time and arrived at our destination. “She’ll help you.”

  “But you, um, she won’t even know me,” I argued. Again, sooooo weird, my Earlier Grandmother not even knowing who I am. And my Now Grandmother telling me to go find my Earlier Grandmother to seek help. I really thought my head might explode. “What do I say to her?”

  “Hmm. That’s a good point.” She thought about it, lightly tapping her foot in the artificial snow. Ray sat in silence, clenching and unclenching his fists as he watched the elf fiddle with the machine. He probably hadn’t bargained on time travel when he agreed to help. “Tell her that Santa forgives her,” Grandmother said.

  I wrinkled my brow. “What does that mean?”

  “It has to do with something I’ve . . . we’ve, never told anyone.”

  “What?”

  Grandmother smiled, but it was a sad smile, one of regret. “We all have our secrets, dearest. You don’t need to know all of mine.” I suppose it didn’t matter as long as Earlier Grandmother knew what I was talking about, but I was beyond curious.

  We were traveling to December 20, 1851, two days before my uncle had been sent back by the shimmering elf. When the elf told us the date Uncle Christopher requested, Grandmother’s eyes grew wide with recognition.

  “You remember that time?” I asked.

  “Like it was yesterday.”

  “How do you remember some random day almost 270 years ago?” I asked.

  Grandmother rolled her eyes. “We need to add more math to your schooling, dear. It’s 170 years.”

  “Oh, right. But how do you remember that?” I didn’t say what I was thinking: When you couldn’t even remember what block the mean elf lived on. Thank goodness I’d learned to protect my thoughts from other elves.

  “You don’t forget the time you recruited the very first Defender,” Grandmother said. “Santa’s coming to find me on December 22, and you need to be in Seneca Village when he arrives. Just remember that name.”

  Ray sat forward, his eyes aglow.
“We get to meet Santa?” The absolute joy on his face made me smile. He looked like a little kid on Christmas Eve, imagining Santa and his reindeer landing on the roof.

  “Yes, Ray, you get to meet Santa,” Grandmother said, smiling along with me.

  “But if Santa was mad at you, why did he come?” I asked.

  Grandmother looked pained. “He needed an elf who knew the lives of humans,” she said. “I was his only option.” The shimmering elf glanced at her and snorted.

  “For what?” I asked.

  The elf stopped working on his machine. “She became the Defender hunter,” he said, shifting from a child to an elderly version.

  “Hunter’s the wrong word,” Grandmother said, frowning. “I’d say recruiter. And I had to make up for . . .” she cut herself short. “Santa or I would sense them, and I would track them down and bring them back. Only if they were willing, of course. Sort of like Mr. Winters did for you, Carol. Santa needed them for his plan, his vision of what he’d become.”

  My mind raced. Grandmother had helped create the Defenders of Claus! “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” I asked, exasperated.

  “Didn’t seem important.”

  “Not important?! You’re responsible for the Defenders of Claus!” Then my thoughts leaped to something else, something terrible. “Wait, if Santa still exists in this world but the Defenders don’t, and you were the one who found them, that means . . .” I hesitated, hardly able to bear the idea.

  “What?” Ray asked. Grandmother looked away.

  “The Supreme Leader targeted her,” the shimmering elf said. “And by the way things turned out, I’d say he must have gotten her.” He laughed, and it was all I could do to keep from firing a North Pulse right at his stupid shimmering head.

  “You’re a jerk,” I said.

  “She got me kicked out of the kingdom,” he hissed. “What do I care? And how was I supposed to know what your crazy uncle was going to do? You think he shared his plans with me?”