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A sugar plum bounced out of the dark.
It looked like a purple bouncy ball, the kind Claus had left for little Mindy Malhelm in Columbus, Ohio. It was joined by another one. Pretty soon a horde of them were jumping up and down, their bellies bulging and squishing.
They were joined by a pack of cookies.
Big, round discs that spun like quarters. Dollops of chocolate chips twirled in one direction then another, mingling with the sugar plums and pairing off. They didn’t have appendages and they didn’t have faces, either. But they were stuck to each other, one pressed against another.
Then they danced.
The ballroom performance included partner changes and dips and chocolate chip cookies twirling in the air. Snow-tipped conifers emerged from the dark, their branches burdened and sagging. The cookie-plum couples swung in and out of them.
The North Star was smiling.
The old faithful that had guided so many sailors across oceans held its post in the sky. Even Claus had used it when technology failed him. It flickered white then pink. Pretty soon, it glowed red.
The ballroom dancers vanished. The trees, too.
A familiar ache cursed his back. It had been some time since he’d felt the dull pain radiate through his hips. He needed a cushion in his sleigh. He wasn’t a young man anymore.
He wasn’t in his sleigh.
I’ve fallen off a roof, he thought. Jessica won’t be happy.
The last time he’d had such an accident was in Denver, Colorado. The weather was nasty that year. The reindeer were having a time keeping their course steady. The sleigh was all over the place, turning on its side as they skipped from town to town. It was the only time he’d felt motion sick.
He was dizzy.
Roofs were sheets of ice. A gust of wind threw him off balance as he emerged from a chimney. He dropped into a snowdrift headfirst. Lucky. The reindeer watched him pull himself out with a string of lights.
There were no lights this time.
Wherever he was, he was stuck. The inside of his head was stuffy and numb. He began rocking side to side and gained momentum. He reached a tipping point then went over the edge. He thought he’d thrown himself off a roof.
The fall was short.
But the landing was hard. He rolled free of a blanket and struck the hard edge of a brick chimney. Claus looked up to see stars. The North Star was among them, a white twinkling beacon, once again. He sat up and saw city lights in a valley.
And a chair.
It was wide and cushioned and positioned next to the chimney. This did not make sense any more than sugar plums foxtrotting with chocolate chip cookies.
I’ve hit my head.
There was no other explanation. His head was stuffy and his belly ached. If he had fallen while in the timesnap, that could be a problem. But the reindeer would revive him if that happened. They would drag him to the sleigh and carry him home.
But the reindeer were gone.
He got to his feet and puffed out thick, white clouds. His nose and cheeks were numb. He huffed into his thick mittens, not remembering when he put them on but also not remembering a chair on the roof. This was North Pole weather, the kind that would freeze water before it hit the ground. But there weren’t houses on the North Pole.
Not like this.
He walked to the far side of the roof, his toes almost as cold as his nose. The streetlights laid a grid across the valley. This was a sight he never grew tired of seeing: coming over the horizon to see twinkling lights in a sleepy town. The toes of his black boots hung over the edge.
He looked over his belly and something very hard hit his head. He stumbled back. His stocking cap slid back and the bitter wind bit the lobe of his ear. It felt like a tree branch. When he looked up, there were no overhanging limbs or even trees.
Just the cold, black night.
So strange was this that he expected the sugar plums to come marching out with their chocolatey partners, but the night remained calm and silent. Once again, he stepped to the edge of the roof. His breath escaped in billowing clouds, but now it seemed to stop in midair and disperse outwards. With his mittened hand, he reached out carefully, slowly. As the town slept below and the North Star kept watch, he touched something quite odd.
The air was solid.
“Are you cold?” a voice called.
Claus jumped back instead of falling forward or hitting his head on the mysterious wall of space. The voice was as sweet as gumdrops.
“I’m sure you’re quite warm,” it continued, “in your special red suit all trimmed in white and that bowl full of jelly in your jolly good belly. A large man does quite well on the North Pole, girded with insulation and a cheery outlook. I know you like it frosty, but I’ll admit it’s a bit chilly even for you. I covered you with blankets. You’re welcome, Nicholas.”
Nicholas.
He was slightly nauseous and a little dizzy and a wee bit more than frosty. But it wasn’t the weather that was giving him fits or the reclining chair on the roof or the strange hardness of space. He hadn’t been called by his birth name in quite some time. He had been Nicholas Santa back when he was just a man.
Before he’d become Santa Claus.
“I apologize for the cold. You know, no matter how much you plan, something is bound to go wrong at the least convenient time. You’re here and now this happens, and you’d think with everything I can do, I could at least fix it, but I’m not perfect!”
There was an audible sigh. Claus tried to follow the voice, but it was like locating a snowflake. He tried to recall his last memory, the last moment before he woke up. He was on his practice run in Colorado. It was the first day of December. Or was he thinking of last year?
“Where am I?”
“I know, it’s weird to have a recliner on the roof. You don’t see that every day, but I thought it would be easier for you to wake up to familiar surroundings. You do love the roof life. But if one second you’re crawling out of a chimney and then next second you’re here... well, if you think about it, you were there one second and here the next.”
He imagined whoever was speaking leaned closer.
“I have a timesnapper, too.”
Claus went back to the recliner. He needed something to keep him from falling. The cushions were cold and stiff. The blankets were already frozen into rigid folds. Two hundred years ago, when he was Nicholas Santa, when he trekked into the North Pole with his wife and son, he’d stumbled onto the elven and their long-hidden existence. It had been difficult to absorb that new reality.
This was shaping up in the same way.
“It’s a bit of a shock. I get it. It’s like having the sleigh yanked out from under you, and now everything’s different. You’re not special, Nicholas. You’re still human, mostly. We all are.”
She was admitting to something he couldn’t understand.
“It’s not that hard, the timesnapper. Not really. It’s a physics problem and I’m a nerd. You wouldn’t understand. The elven would. They’ve been around long enough to know how everything works.”
Crystals had formed on his mustache. His white, curly whiskers were knotted with icy beads. He pulled his stocking cap over his eyebrows and covered his ears. This cold was dangerous, even for an elven.
He didn’t know where he was or why, but he took comfort in the obvious. The person responsible for this was female. She was smart. She knew about the North Pole. And she didn’t want to bring him harm.
She covered me in blankets.
“Whoever you are”—he spoke to the North Star—“it’s very cold out here. I won’t last long.”
She laughed. Something he said was funny, something he didn’t understand.
“You’re not ready for the sun,” she said. “Not yet.”
“What do you want?”
There was a long pause. The wind picked up. He hunched over to make himself smaller and conserve body heat. Snow swirled around him. He noticed the roof didn’t have shingles. It was hard and shiny.
“What do I want, what do I want?” she said. “Don’t you know, Nicholas? Didn’t you get my letter, the long list of things I wanted you to bring me?”
“What’s your name?”
“Be honest, don’t tell a lie. You don’t read them, do you? And don’t tell me you speed-read because that’s not really reading. That’s skimming and you know it, and I bet you don’t even do that. Tell the truth now, Nicholas.”
He shook his head and pulled his coat over his cheeks.
“It’s not what I want. It’s what I need.”
The wind suddenly died. An angry funnel of snow fell like a snow globe after a violent shake. It rested on his shoulders. Her chuckle was colder than shaved ice.
“I know all about your toys and gadgets. The elven carve homes in the ice and your technology keeps you from the rest of the world, but I know, Nicholas. I know more than you because I’ve been watching for a very long time. The elven have lived there for thousands of years, but time is running out. The polar ice is thinning. How much longer do they have?”
A sinking feeling turned over in his stomach. An orange glow began to haunt the horizon. The sun is rising.
Whether it was a practice run or Christmas morning, he’d always returned to the North Pole before morning. But he’d always been within the protection of the timesnapper. He’d never watched the sun rise from a roof.
His steamy breath vanished.
The morning’s rays were warm on his cheeks and stung his nose. He could feel the warmth through his coat. Feeling so lost, he hadn’t considered the obvious.
“What... what day is it?”
“They know you’re missing, your precious elven and sweet, sweet Jessica. And soon enough they’ll know why.”
The orange glow turned red. Claus walked toward it. Each step chased the bitter cold from his bones. He undid one of the buttons on his coat and swiped the hat from his head.
He was standing near the edge of the roof, but it wasn’t a roof. It looked more like a floor. He put out his hand, reaching for the sun. Like before, it thudded against hard thin air. This time, he slid it side to side. It was slightly curved.
The sun wasn’t rising.
The glow hovered in space like a magical window. Inside the flaming red light that brought sweat to his brow was a dark image.
It’s very cold out here, he had said. And the woman chuckled. It was very cold, that was true. But he wasn’t outside. This is a room.
“Merry, merry, Nicholas.”