by David Nickle
The stars stood still above them, as Emily and Santa flew the world over. Emily had never been happier. It was a Christmas of frantic scrambling down chimneys behind Santa, whose great skeleton snapped and crunched to fit the tiniest aperture, some of which were too narrow for even Emily to pass. At the bottom of the larger chimneys, Emily watched Santa as his bones knitted and he painfully lurched to the base of a glittering tree and spewed gifts there from a great sack of green burlap that undulated with shifting boxes. Each box he would then arrange with a meticulous care, whispering, “A truck Jimmy Thorne, see how you like that,” or “You thought I’d finished with you after last year’s dollhouse, Jacqueline Jones,” and a terrific cackle over a pink-wrapped box bigger than Emily. And then it would be the next house.
Now the houses were all behind them. The runners drew white contrails like cuts across the deep blue sky, and she dreamily traced those lines away and over the horizon, thinking of the vast web of such lines she and Santa had made over the entire globe.
The forests fell behind, replaced with glimmering ice. The sleigh careered over a range of saw-toothed mountains, then into a deep valley of black tundra patched with snow. At the centre of this bowl rose a vast building.
“The North Pole!” shrieked Santa, sending his whip twitching over the raw, foaming backs of his reindeer. The sleigh rocked as the reindeer scrambled madly against the frozen air, and for a moment they were all Emily could see, their wide and terror-struck eyes twisting in their emaciated sockets.
“No!” Santa bellowed, whipping again. “Down! To the Pole!
“Down to the Toy Mill!”
The reindeer disappeared as they arched downwards, and Emily felt a roller-coaster lurch as the massive sleigh descended into freefall. Emily clutched at Santa’s deep red greatcoat and stared ahead, down at Santa’s workshop.
The building filled Emily’s vision. Seven great smokestacks, black as the tundra where the fumes had cooked the brickwork, grew like spikes from the structure, which itself sprawled under green metal roofing into long and labyrinthine additions. Tarmac lots surrounded the buildings. The sleigh levelled out, and one of the smokestacks suddenly loomed before them. Above, a plume of soot climbed high into the arctic night and a volcanic rumbling grew louder by the second.
“Damn you!” Santa screamed and his whip cracked like a thunderbolt. “Up!” Snap! “Higher!” Snap! “Away!”
The sleigh was enveloped in black smoke. It got into Emily’s eyes and made her cry, but when she breathed in for another sob it became impossible even to weep. The blackness passed, and she blinked away the filth.
The runners hit hard against tarmac with a butcher-shop crunch. There were in a space bounded by high walls, at the top of which ice-choked green metal eaves frowned over dark windows. Higher still, the aurora borealis sputtered and died.
The sleigh skidded to a halt in a shower of blue sparks, describing a twisting half-circle around the stationary reindeer and pulling three of them to the ground. There was a terrible shrieking, and then silence broken only by the distant hum of machinery.
Santa Claus leaned close to Emily and grinned a ghastly grin into her eyes.
“Welcome to the North Pole, little elf.” He giggled in a small and girlish voice. “Merry Christmas, yes. Merry, merry Christmas.”
With a frantic scrambling and pattering of small feet, a mob of elfs surrounded the sleigh. Santa reared high in his seat, and glared at them.
The crowd parted and three of the elfs approached. One held a shabby blue towel; Santa grabbed it and mopped his face, where the icicles were starting to droop. The second elf held out a fat brown cigar and the third a blue silk smoking jacket.
With a flourish Santa threw aside his great coat, blinding Emily. She pushed the smelly cloth away, and Santa reappeared, wrapped in blue. He bent and touched the end of his cigar to one of the smoking runners. Then, contentedly, he drew a deep breath and exuded a vast miasma of gritty grey smoke.
Santa Claus swatted his three helpers away with a broad arc of his palm, making even Emily duck involuntarily. But Santa’s arm wheeled back and he snatched one of Emily’s new ears between two fingers. He took a long, choking drag on his cigar and grinned down at her. Smoke rolled from his nostrils as he spoke.
“Well, little elf. Christmas year ’round, eh? Ha ha! Christmas year ’round is just what you’ll get!”
Santa turned to the other elfs, who were backing surreptitiously clear of his impressive reach. He snarled at them. “Yes, elfs! Move off, back to work! One new elf doesn’t mean long lunches for you lot! No, no, no! Back to the lines! Back to the shifts, by damn!”
The elfs, who had been moving that way anyway now turned and ran, their thin, bent legs carrying them in terrified sprints. Santa clamped his teeth around his cigar and strode in the opposite direction, dragging Emily behind him. They made a jog to the left between a pair of tall buildings, walked down a narrow alleyway choked with icicles as wide as Emily and finally emerged in a wide courtyard. This was lined with sheet-metal huts protruding from the brickwork. At the end was a wall with a single, gigantic doorway.
The roar of the mill was deafening.
Santa quickened his pace, pausing only once to drop his spent cigar, and soon they were at the door. “Christmas all the time!” Santa bellowed as the door swung open. His cackling was cut short by a tide of oily smoke. Emily held the greatcoat to her face, but it did little good. Through tears and acid coughs, she beheld the Toy Mill.
Dazzling light and knife-edged shadows cut through a vast space filled with huge machines in rows, like headstones. Coils of cable drooled down from catwalks festooned with pipes and valves. The catwalks crossed and recrossed, up and up in successive layers until they were hidden in darkness, a great iron spiderweb.
“This is it!” Santa waved proudly. “Your new home! What do you think of it, eh little elf?”
“It’s dreadful.”
“Yes!” The melting icicles in Santa’s beard sparkled in the radiance of his glowing pride. “And it’s just what you wanted!”
III. A Matter of Correspondence
The letters had been separated into boxes, which were labelled by the age and nationality of their young authors. They rose in mountainous, teetering stacks beyond the rafters of Warehouse 12. Sometimes, one of those stacks would begin to wobble, and from the celestial gloom above a dozen or more boxes would plummet, bursting like ill-bound volumes on the cracked cement floor and spewing their multi-coloured contents through the narrow canyons. Some of those canyons were all but impassable, blocked to twice the height of an elf with jaggedly torn envelopes and the crayoned, pencilled and—rarely—neatly typed lists.
“Put her to work!” Santa had screamed into the dark as he clutched the brass door handles and pulled the great metal-wrapped doors shut on the Correspondence Hall.
“Are all the letters from all the boys and girls in the world here?” Emily asked, wide-eyed, of the dark elf who led her deep into the maze.
“Yawm,” drawled the elf. It darted a suspicious look at her. “Ah-whee, that’s em innit.”
“What?”
“Twirl yer gams, miss Hoitee toitee.” The elf grabbed a long-handled broom up from the floor. “Sortenem’s the way.”
She clutched the broom, staring at the concrete labyrinth that stretched off into smog-hazed distance. “Please, mister elf, are my letters here? Did Santa read them?”
“Read?” The elf wrapped his wizened lips around the word as though he had never heard it before. “Who reads?” He made brisk shoving motions with his hands. “Sortem. Day, month, time, pla’. Sortem all.” He made the shovelling motion again.
“You mean he didn’t see my letters?” she asked tremulously. “He didn’t read them?”
“Readem? Ach-eh, wot daftness be ye onit?”
Pouting, Emily dragged the broom along the floor, looking back every two or three steps at the elf. He tapped his foot impatiently, and after a while she stoppe
d looking back.
Emily shovelled the fallen paper into heaps, which other elfs picked over, tossing the correspondence into boxes that, paradoxically, were passed up to the tops of the stacks again. The operation seemed endless.
She gamely tried to keep up. After all, Emily was an elf now, and that was a very special and important thing to be. And elfs were industrious, and never ever tired. But she did tire, and the letters blurred together before her eyes. She tried to stop reading all the letters that she swept up. But even after the lists, the painstaking explanations of why Donnie or Sue or Millie had been good this year, all faded together into one big “Please!” in her mind, she kept seeing the words, over and over:
Dear Santa.
“Dear Santa,” said the boys and girls of America. “Dear Santa,” said England. “Dear Santa, Dear Santa, Dear Santa,” said all the little children of the world. The words swirled around her; they were piled into quivering ziggurats above her, sprawled into a swelling maze in which, finally, she was lost.
Emily stopped pushing her broom, sat down, and began to cry.
Who did read these letters, anyway? The elfs here didn’t—Emily had begun to doubt they could speak properly, let alone read. And Santa? Emily tried to remember the last time Santa Claus had brought her something she’d asked for, and found that she couldn’t. The only time he’d done anything she wanted was when she’d demanded it, face to face.
Emily wiped the tears from her eyes. “That’s the problem,” she said aloud. “Santa doesn’t know!”
A heap of letters rustled beside her and the elongated soot-damaged face of an elf appeared. He glanced only briefly at Emily before hefting a watermarked carton to his shoulder and shuffling indifferently into the dark. Emily didn’t care. “Santa doesn’t know,” she repeated. “He doesn’t know what girls and boys really want! That’s why it’s so dreadful at the North Pole!”
Emily continued with similar exclamations for the remainder of her shift, but for all the gravity of her revelation, she did not sit idle. She scrabbled through the papers on the floor in search of an intact box, and although she could not find one entirely undamaged, she was able to repair one of the broken ones with the help of the tape gun that dangled from her tool belt. Then she set about filling her new box with letters.
The elfs in the Correspondence Hall didn’t try to stop her as she reached up and pulled down the brass handle on the great doors. Perhaps, thought Emily, they are secretly with me. As the doors opened and a whirl of wind-borne ice slipped inside, Emily turned to her co-workers as they huddled together in the gloom.
“Don’t fear!” she shouted. “Santa will make things right!”
And then she turned with her box and stepped into the chill. Behind her, the great doors creaked shut.
Santa’s quarters were on the roof of the Mill. There, amid an expanse of drifted snow, squatted a high-peaked penthouse with gargoyled corners and tall, jaded glass windows. The arctic night cradled it and the whole Mill in icy greyness. Emily dragged the box up to the tall, bronze door of the building and tried to knock. Her tiny fist made no sound on the metal.
The door did respond to her push, though. She slipped gratefully into the dark warmth of Santa’s Penthouse. She dusted the snow from her boots and said, timidly, “Santa?”
Firelight glowed through a wooden archway. Emily put the box down by the arch and looked through it.
Santa’s vast living-room was lit solely from the fireplace. Silhouetted elfs heaped logs bigger than themselves onto the fire, which was already spilling out onto the stone hearth. The heat was blistering.
A corpulent white bath tub had been wheeled to within a foot of the fire. Santa, wreathed in suds, reclined in the tub, shooting jets of smoke up from his cigar.
“More wood!” he bellowed, sweeping one arm over the high side of the tub. The elfs avoided him adroitly, and ran for the wood box.
“Santa?” Emily asked timorously.
He frowned, glanced over, and said, “Zounds, elf! Aren’t you working?” Sudsy bubbles rose from behind his head, to be withered into ash by the incandescent flames.
Emily bravely brought the box out. “Santa, there’s something I think you should know.”
“Nonsense.” He sank slowly down, until only his cigar and eyes appeared above the rim of the tub. “I have no reason to know anything.”
“These letters.” She held them up. “Have you read them?”
“Read them? What an idea.” He crossed his eyes to look at the tip of his cigar. “What do they have to do with me?”
“They—it’s because—” Emily wiped away a tear, and sniffled. He hadn’t read them! “Because Santa, these are all the letters from all the boys and girls of the world, and they’re all about what all the boys and girls want for Christmas!”
“Is that so?” His eyes slid half-closed. He dropped lower in the tub. “Never really thought about it, I guess.” His eyes opened a bit. “What they want? What do you mean, what they want?”
“Santa!” Emily put her hands on her hips. She couldn’t believe this. “Every girl and boy writes letters to Santa at Christmastime—”
“I know. It’s such a nuisance.”
“But they’re telling you that they’ve been good all year, and they’re asking you for presents!”
“Really?” His eyes opened wide, flicking suds away. He propped his chin on his hand, frowning and puffing madly. “Never would have thought…”
“But Santa! What did you think all these letters were?”
“Show me.” One hand appeared, fingers snapping, above the mountain of suds. Emily moved closer to the blasting heat, and stretched out to hand him a letter. Santa held the paper up.
“Dear Santa,” he read aloud. “From Billy. Who in hell is Billy? Um um, ‘I have been very very good’—have you, Bill my boy?—um, um…‘I wish I had a truck…I wish…’” Santa squinted and sloshed forward so that he loomed like a vulture over the letter. “By the Devil’s flaming anus!” Santa sat up suddenly, splashing water everywhere. Blinding steam hissed up around him.
“‘I wish my sister was dead!’”
Santa’s red, bedraggled face emerged from an inferno of crackling flame and billowing steam. His gaze was beatifically calm. “Emily my good girl, I think you’re on to something.”
IV. Christmas Dinner
Emily did not see Santa Claus for some time after their fateful meeting, but that is not to say that his gratitude was unfelt.
“No more, my sweet pernicious little elf, will you crouch over your broom with no dreams to move you beyond your station,” he had crooned, eyes half-closed and a towel concealing the bulk of his white, mottled skin. “Your sweeping-up days are behind you, now that you are at the helm of our mighty design, oh yes oh my oh yes. Your only task now, oh Emily mine, is to find me—” as he spoke, Claus bent and snatched from a steaming puddle the soaked and fast-streaking requests of angry young Billy “—find me more like him!” Santa shook the letter over Emily’s head, and she ducked back as Claus repeated: “More like him!” She was out the door and beyond the arch in no time. “Do y’ hear me, Emily! More! By Christmas, by Christ!
“More!”
Starting back into work at the Correspondence Hall, Emily couldn’t help but feel as important as Santa seemed to think she was. She started as Executive Elf In Charge of Correspondence at half past January, and by February she thought she was already beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. At least that is what she told the elfs she had alphabetizing the stacks and repairing the scaffolding: “We are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, people. Soon it will be Christmas the way it was meant to be.”
By a quarter to March, Emily and her three assistants began compiling her first quarterly report for Santa. Emily had made her elfs separate all of the gift requests into categories: Animals, which included such things as ponies, doggies, kitties and baby brothers and sisters, as well as more exotic pets such as boa con
strictors and Nile crocodiles; Machinery was a broad category including automobiles, aircraft, munitions ranging from pellet guns to M-16s and AKMs, and chainsaws; and then there was the broader-still category that she had simply dubbed Situations. This last one often gave Emily an upset stomach. Billy’s final Christmas wish fit the category, as did a plethora of others. One little boy named Albert wanted his whole town to catch incurable syphilis because he had been excluded from marching in the Santa Claus parade—“Let their noses rot off and see how they like that then,” Albert had written in his awkward, boyish scrawl.
There were over fifty requests from little girls to be changed into mice or birds; a hundred and twelve little boys who wanted their driver’s license; and thousands, tens of thousands it seemed, of requests from orphaned little girls and boys to have their dead parents returned to them.
But upset stomach or no, Emily pressed on. She worked through March, April, May, all the summer months and much of the autumn with scarcely a wink of sleep. Yet as far as she could tell, she didn’t need sleep. Not when the true spirit of Christmas was at stake.
It wasn’t until five to December that she was called away from her high, sloped desk. She did not get a very good look at the elf who brought the notice, nor did she recognize the script on the single milky-white card proffered to her so mysteriously. Though it was unsigned, the words on the card were unmistakable, and they buoyed her spirit every time she reread them.
A Christmas dinner would take place, the first of December, at the reindeer stables. And Emily, it appeared, had been invited.
On the appointed evening, Emily made her way to the stables. She knew in a general way where they were, but had never been to them because her responsibilities kept her so busy. To get to them, she had to pass through the darkest pulsing foundries of the Mill, past shrieking boilers and pounding triphammers, and up out into the vast, cold wasteland of the Pole.
Much of the land around the Mill consisted of tarmac runways periodically covered and unmasked again by twisting dunes of snow. At the end of the longest runway, a brave stand of spruce trees sprang from the tundra. Like sickly guards, they encircled a long low building of gingerbread construction. A thin coil of smoke came from the stout stone chimney above one end of the stable. Lights shone in the windows there.