by Matt Haig
‘The Truth Pixie is right. Father Christmas is the kindest man of all,’ Amelia told the trolls.
The Truth Pixie, after a gentle nudge from Noosh, carried on saying what she had to say. ‘It’s true. Father Christmas is good. And he does a very good thing, trying to make the human world a little less miserable. That doesn’t put any of us in any danger. Humans are too busy thinking of themselves to come and bother us. The Flying Story Pixies are telling you lies. I don’t know why they are doing this, but every pixie I know is talking about it. They are making you look even more foolish than you already are. Which is pretty foolish, to be honest.’
‘Liar!’ said Thud, thumping his foot on the ground and shaking the valley, so that snow shook off the craggy hills and mountains all around.
‘She no’ be lying,’ said Joe as he scratched his bottom matter-of-factly. ‘She be a Truth Pixie.’
Urgula pointed a giant, sofa-sized warty finger at Amelia and Mary. ‘But them be hu-mans.’
Amelia took a deep breath and stepped forward in the snow. ‘We were saved. Father Christmas saved us, because we were in trouble. That’s why we’re here. And he saved you too, and I really think you should try being a bit grateful, rather than being such big bullies.’
Little Mim clapped his hands at this. He liked Amelia already.
Urgula leant forward and breathed on Amelia. Amelia tried not to be sick, because troll breath was even worse than Mr Creeper’s had been. Like cabbages mixed with goat poo and shoe sweat.
‘You be brave, hu-man girl,’ said Urgula.
‘Thank you. Can we go now? It’s just that Father Christmas has a lot of presents to give out.’
And just at that moment a Flying Story Pixie came and whispered something in Urgula’s ear and Urgula bashed the pixie away. ‘Be gone, pixies! Be in our ears no more!’ And the pixie sped and tumbled through the air and disappeared in the dark somewhere above the Wooded Hills.
As this happened, Noosh stepped forward in the snow. She cleared her throat and looked up at Urgula, the largest troll in existence. Her grey face was a quarter of a mile above her. Noosh pulled out her notebook.
‘Excuse me, Supreme Troll leader, I am a journalist for the Daily Snow – it’s a newspaper, like The Ug on Sunday – and I have a question.’
Urgula stared down at the elf, the way you might stare down at something stuck on your shoe. She didn’t really care about newspapers. Even the troll newspaper, The Ug on Sunday, was something she’d only read once. (To be fair The Ug on Sunday was the same every week – a large stone tablet saying ‘TROLLS BE BEST’.)
‘What be your question?’
‘My question be . . . I mean, my question is . . . why didn’t you attack the Daily Snow building last year? Your trolls demolished the whole of Elfhelm but they didn’t touch the Daily Snow.’
Urgula thought. This took quite a long time. Her face looked in pain, and it probably was, as thoughts give trolls very bad headaches.
‘We be not attackin’ Daily Snow because the Word Master be a good man.’
‘Who is the Word Master?’ asked Noosh.
Urgula shook her head. ‘The Word Master at The Daily Snow. That’s what they call him.’
‘They? Who are they?’ asked Noosh.
Noosh noticed that the Flying Story Pixies were now flitting away from the trolls, and heading back towards the Wooded Hills of pixie territory. Urgula had noticed this too, and she reached out and grabbed one of them. It was a boy pixie in silver clothes. Noosh had seen this pixie before. That very morning, in Vodol’s office. The Flying Story Pixie had been at the window. Then she saw something in her mind. A memory from last Christmas Eve. Father Vodol’s footprints in the snow, coming from the Wooded Hills and not the Daily Snow. Father Vodol had always hated Christmas. And he’d been jealous of Father Christmas ever since he’d taken over his role as Leader of the Elf Council.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ the pixie squeaked at the troll one thousand times his size. It was like looking at someone holding the smallest piece of silver tinsel. ‘Why you be whispering in our ears . . . Tell truth before I be eating you.’
‘For words. The Word Master wanted us to do it. And then he gave us good words. Long words. Words we didn’t know.’
‘That sounds like the truth,’ said the Truth Pixie, as she began to walk home.
Noosh remembered the Flying Story Pixies she captured as a child and that long word Father Topo had given it as an apology – ‘miscellaneous’.
‘The Word Master?’ It all made sense to Noosh now. ‘Father Vodol. Father Vodol loves words.’
Father Christmas stared at Noosh. ‘Did he send you here today?’
Noosh nodded. ‘Yes.’
Urgula looked sad in the moonlight. A big fat troll tear fell from her cheek and the stone landed right next to Amelia. She let the pixie go. ‘We be wrong. But we be sorry. We be punishing the Word Master.’
Father Christmas shook his head. ‘No, no. Don’t you worry about the Word Master, I mean Father Vodol. The Elf Council will deal with him. All we ask is that you leave us in peace and don’t go listening to any Flying Story Pixies in future. Now, we’ve got quite a lot of work to do before morning, so . . .’
Urgula nodded. Thud looked disappointed. Then Father Christmas and the others ran across the rocky landscape and back to the sleigh. Amelia got there first, and Captain Soot wriggled out of the infinity sack where he was hiding.
‘I’ve just met some real-life trolls,’ Amelia said to Captain Soot. ‘And seen some pixies. And look, here are some elves. This is Noosh and this is . . .’
Noosh rubbed her son’s hair as they sat in the back of the sleigh. ‘He’s called Little Mim.’
Captain Soot miaowed and stroked his head against Little Mim. He was nearly as tall as the little elf. Horse-sized, Amelia thought.
‘You look rather strange,’ miaowed Captain Soot to Little Mim. ‘But I like you.’
‘Hello,’ said Little Mim, to Amelia now, smiling. ‘How old are you?’
‘How old do you think I am?’ Amelia asked.
Little Mim looked Amelia up and down. She was very tall. ‘Four hundred and eight?’
Amelia laughed. Mary laughed too. ‘I’m not even going to ask him how old he thinks I am!’
Then Amelia told Noosh that she wanted to be a writer too, like Charles Dickens. And Noosh went a bit red and covered her son’s large ears because ‘Dickens’ sounds quite rude if you are an elf.
Mary and Father Christmas sat in the front. The clock was on the dot of Last Chance Before Morning.
Blitzen and Donner were turning their heads towards Father Christmas, waiting for his word. ‘Let’s fly, my deers!’
And so they did.
Home
ather Christmas picked up the phone and spoke to Father Topo who had been patiently waiting for news at the Toy Workshop headquarters.
Amelia listened and smiled, still hardly able to believe that she was overhearing Father Christmas talking to an elf on something called a telephone, while also flying through night clouds on a sleigh. ‘They’re safe, Father Topo . . . Yes . . . Yes, really! Tell Humdrum right away . . . It was Father Vodol’s doing, so we’ll deal with him at tomorrow’s Elf Council meeting, but right now we’ve got some work to do.’
And so it was that Father Christmas took Mary and Amelia and Noosh and Little Mim around the world delivering all the toys. The Barometer of Hope was glowing full force and so were the Northern Lights. Amelia had never seen anything so magical as flying through that wonderful, hope-fuelled light show.
‘This is . . .’ And then she realised there was no word to describe how amazing it was. The sight felt beyond words.
Father Christmas turned and smiled. ‘This is what hope looks like. You help do this. You help make this happen. Just by believing in magical things.’
And so they travelled the world. North, South, East and West. The thing about the world, Amelia realised, is that it really was
very big. And there were a lot of children. And a lot of cats sleeping on rooftops that Captain Soot was fascinated by. (The largest challenge of the night was keeping Captain Soot inside the sleigh.)
When she wasn’t keeping Captain Soot out of mischief she would pull out presents from the infinity sack – each one perfectly wrapped up – and try to guess what they were, with Little Mim. A ball. A spinning top. A cuddly toy. A book. Chocolate money. A globe. A satsuma.
While Father Christmas was flying over Paris, Amelia drifted off to sleep on the back seat, but if she’d been awake she would have seen Mary take Father Christmas’s hand and squeeze it tight.
‘You are a wonderful man,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever get lonely, away from other humans?’
‘Sometimes, yes,’ said Father Christmas as they flew over the shimmering Palace of Versailles. ‘It will be nice to have some human company.’
‘So is it all right if we stay with you, then? I mean, it will take some getting used to . . . All those elf creatures, with their pointy ears and big eyes. So, I know this is a bit forward, but I think we’d like to stay with a human at first. If you are a human?’
Father Christmas’s face grew red with merriment. ‘I’m a human with added drimwickery. Just like you.’
‘So can I do magic now?’
‘You could do magic before, my dear. I felt magic the first time I looked at your twinkling eyes.’
Mary wasn’t into romantic words. So she punched Father Christmas on the arm. ‘You charmer!’ she said, but then had to hold onto that arm because Father Christmas had nearly fallen out of the sleigh.
‘Anyway,’ said Father Christmas, ‘of course you can stay. My house is the only one in Elfhelm that you’d be able to fit through the door of without a squeeze.’
‘Charming!’ giggled Mary as Blitzen and Donner dipped in the air, ready to lead the other reindeer and the sleigh towards every child’s bedroom in Paris.
‘Now,’ said Father Christmas, after a few thousand more stops. ‘Amelia, how do you fancy riding this sleigh? Seeing as you’ve saved Christmas twice now.’
‘Well, it wasn’t just me this year. I think Noosh and Mary played a part too.’
Noosh punched her hand into the air. ‘The girls who saved Christmas!’
‘Girls?’ said Mary. ‘I’m fifty-eight years old!’
So Amelia climbed into the front as Father Christmas explained the dashboard to her. The clock, the Barometer of Hope, the button that stopped time and the one that started it. Amelia saw that the time was now ten minutes past ‘Very Close to Morning’. ‘Elf time,’ explained Father Christmas. ‘They don’t do numbers.’ He handed her a copy of his own book, Sleighcraft. ‘See, Amelia, Mr Dickens isn’t the only writer, you know.’
Amelia was a natural, Father Christmas noted, as the reindeer responded well to every tug of the reins. All right, so she very nearly caused the sleigh to crash into Loch Ness in Scotland, but that was only because she was startled by the sight of a large monster poking its head and long neck up into the air.
‘Once you know anything is possible, you see all kinds of things,’ explained Father Christmas.
By the time they reached Finland in the small town of Kristiinankaupunki, Amelia could land carefully almost anywhere. She did so on top of a small roof with a tiny chimney. Father Christmas breathed in the cold air. He looked around.
‘See those woods over there,’ he said, pointing into the darkness towards dark trees touching the sky like a brush in a chimney.
‘Yes,’ said Amelia.
‘A boy called Nikolas used to live there. In a tiny cottage with his woodcutter father. He had nothing but an old turnip-doll and a pet mouse for company. He was a skinny, raggedy little thing. And once, when his aunt came to look after him, he was made to sleep outside in the freezing cold. But in a way he had everything. Because he believed in magic. Really believed that anything was possible.’
‘I’d have liked that boy,’ said Amelia.
‘Me too,’ said Mary, squeezing Father Christmas’s hand. And after delivering toys to the seventeen children of Kristiinankaupunki, Amelia flew them back north to Elfhelm. She had no idea how her life was going to be, or how a human child was going to fit in, but she imagined it was going to be a lot better than the workhouse. And as she landed to the sound of cheering elves back on Reindeer Field, a smile slowly crept onto her face and kept growing.
‘Why isn’t it freezing?’ she asked.
Father Christmas shook his head. ‘It’s elf weather. It’s only as cold as you want it to be.’
Father Christmas noticed that the Truth Pixie was there with her new boyfriend, the Lie Pixie. A small male pixie wearing green, and with dark hair and dark eyes. He was handsome. He was probably the most handsome pixie in existence. The Truth Pixie had very recently settled her differences with him, because he gave the very best compliments. The Truth Pixie’s pet mouse Maarta popped out of her yellow pocket, but on seeing the black cat with a white tip on its tail quickly hid again.
Little Mim jumped up and down with excitement, knowing he was about to see his father. And he was. Humdrum was running through the crowds towards the sleigh needing to see Little Mim and Noosh for himself.
Noosh and Little Mim saw the bespectacled elf who they loved more than any other and both jumped out of the sleigh to hug him.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Noosh.
‘I’m sorry too, Papa,’ said Little Mim.
‘You’re alive! That’s all that matters!’ Humdrum was so excited he hugged them and picked his wife and son off the ground but – not being the strongest of elves – he fell backwards into the snow, with Noosh and Little Mim on top of him.
‘Ho ho ho!’ chortled Father Christmas. ‘Now go, and have a merry Christmas!’
‘MERRY CHRISTMAS!’ shouted Little Mim, who just liked saying those words.
Father Christmas could see Father Vodol lurking at the back of the crowd. He would deal with him at tomorrow’s Elf Council meeting. Right now, it was Christmas Day, and he needed to show Mary and Amelia their new home. But just as he trod onto the snow, he heard a low rumble. The elves looked at each other fearfully.
‘Oh no!’ gasped Humdrum. ‘It’s the trolls!’
‘No,’ said Father Christmas, realising that this time it really was his stomach. ‘I’m just a bit hungry.’
And elf laughter filled the air.
‘Well, luckily, we have made a very big Christmas dinner!’ said Coco, the chef.
‘Ho ho ho!’ said Father Christmas, stepping aside so the others could get off the sleigh.
‘So here we are,’ said Mary with a chuckle as she looked out at the small elf buildings lit by the pink sunrise. ‘Our new home.’
‘Home,’ said Amelia, softly, to herself. It was ridiculous, the idea that she could make a home living here, alongside elves and Father Christmas. She remembered what her mother had once told her, about how life was like a chimney. You sometimes needed to struggle through the dark to reach the light. As she looked around at the small snow-covered buildings she thought this might finally be it.
This was the light.
And so she gently took hold of Captain Soot and stepped out of the sleigh and into the magical possibility of her future.
Acknowledgements
I don’t have elves or a workshop but I do have lots of people I need to thank, who helped make this book the thing it is.
I must say a MASSIVE THANK YOU in capital letters to the following very good people:
Chris Mould, obviously, for his marvellous and magical illustrations.
Francis Bickmore, my brilliant editor, for knowing which bits to take out and which bits we need more of and for letting me write the kind of books I want to write.
Clare Conville, my agent, for her wisdom and brilliance.
Rafi Romaya for all her design skills.
Jamie Byng, Jenny Todd, Jenny Fry, Neal Price, Jaz Lacey-Campbell, Vicki Rutherford, Andrea Joyce, Car
oline Clarke, Lina Langlee, Alan Trotter, Jo Dingley, and the ‘Production Elves’ and all the team at Canongate for their massive support.
Carey Mulligan and Stephen Fry for lending their voice magic to the Christmas audiobooks.
Andrea Semple, the human I love and live with, for her sharp-eyes, her Ninja reading and editing skills, and for far, far too many things to mention here.
My children Pearl and Lucas, for being the reasons I write these books.
All my family and friends.
All the lovely readers who I have met or been in touch with over the years.
All the people who have supported my last Christmas book, such as Simon Mayo, Jeanette Winterson, Francesca Simon, Jenny Colgan, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Amanda Craig, Tom Fletcher, and Tony Bradman.
Oh, and of course, thanks to Father Christmas for being Father Christmas.
Thank you all!
Also by Matt Haig
A Boy Called Christmas
Echo Boy
To Be A Cat
The Runaway Troll
Shadow Forest