The Christmas Chronicles (12 page)

One day at the height of this Christmas popularity, Dasher ventured out from Castle Noël with Anna on his back. It was high summer and they were on their way to post the latest List Protocols at the foot of the Straight Road. “Care for a little gallop, Anna?” Dasher had asked. Both knew it was a foolish question. In a moment they were racing like the wind down the Road just for the sheer pleasure of speed. Anna’s snow-white hair streamed out behind her, and Dasher’s silver flanks gleamed in the hot sun. They were not paying strict attention. Velocity and wind and laughter were the only things on their minds.

And that’s how it happened.

“Look out!” Anna cried suddenly. A thick gray fog loomed straight ahead. Dasher dug his hoofs into the hard-packed earth of the Road (it was summer, remember, so no ice), but he could not stop in time. He plunged straight into the fog. It was viscous and clammy, and it made his mind reel. In his confusion, it seemed to him that the world dropped away beneath him. He tried to fly but found himself unable to and fell like a stone off the Road. The malevolent wetness followed him to the ground and
engulfed him. Anna pitched off Dasher’s back as he fell, sailed clear of the heavy damp cloud, and landed with a sickening thud at the foot of a larch tree on the ground below the Road.

Back at Castle Noël, Klaus looked up abruptly from his work. He sensed that something was very wrong. He leaned out a window. “Comet!” he called out anxiously to the fastest of the Eight Flyers.

A few moments later the two were thundering out from Castle Noël toward the Straight Road. They lighted on it with a bang of all four wheels of the light carriage Comet was pulling and sped down its broad track. Klaus urged Comet to go just a bit faster, and the swift reindeer summoned every ounce of speed he could muster. And then, abruptly, Klaus and Comet encountered the impossible: a jagged edge and empty air. The last thirty feet of the Straight Road were gone. They had simply disappeared. Anna and Dasher had missed seeing the precipice because it had been obscured by the gray fog, now nowhere to be seen. Comet nimbly took flight just before his hoof struck the edge and sailed safely to the ground below.

For a moment Klaus just sat in the carriage, transfixed by the carnage of the broken Road, too appalled to move. How could this have happened? Then he heard a low
moan and, looking for its source, he saw Anna, inert beneath the larch tree. He ran to her with a cry and, gathering her in his arms, carried her back to the carriage and laid her gently across the seat. “Dasher,” she murmured. Klaus looked wildly around, but could not see the reindeer anywhere. “Over there,” Anna whispered, gesturing toward the shattered Road. She winced sharply, because that arm was broken, and then fell mercifully into unconsciousness.

And then Klaus saw Dasher, half-covered in rubble. He was lying on his side, one back leg twisted at a sickening angle. In a flash, Klaus was at his side, pulling broken pieces of the Road off him, cradling his head in his lap. “Dasher!” he sobbed, and kissed his face. “We’ll get you home, great heart. Don’t worry. You’ll be all right!” But Dasher could not reply. Nor could he hear what his old friend was saying. His eyes, wide open as though fixed on some terrifying object, were sightless. And his mind was filled with horror.

“I
t was Rolf Eckhof, of course,” said Saint Nicholas.

The Green Council was meeting in the Great Hall of Castle Noël. Anna was there, her arm in a sling, but
otherwise none the worse for her harrowing experience. Klaus sat close beside her, his hand on hers.

“But it was … it was just a sort of cloud, wasn’t it, Anna?” asked Klaus. “That’s what you said.”

“It never touched me,” Anna said. “And yet, I felt such despair, such hopelessness …” She shuddered, and Klaus put his arm around her. “I cannot speak of it,” she murmured.

Klaus looked up at the Council. “How can a gray cloud be Rolf Eckhof?” he asked.

“I don’t know that there is much of Rolf Eckhof left,” Saint Abigail said. She sighed. “Mostly there is just a fog now. More an ‘it’ than a person. That can happen to a soul consumed by envy and hatred.”

“It is a demon!” said Saint Babukar. Then he pounded the table with an ebony fist. “And it is your enemy! It broke the Straight Road—your only way into the world. Think if it had destroyed it all!”

“Yes,” said Nicholas. “You would have been shut out of the world forever, Klaus.”

Klaus sat back and pondered the enormity of what this demon had almost accomplished. No more Christmas Eve deliveries. Ever. Everything that Castle Noël and the True North—and Anna and the Eight Flyers and Klaus himself—stood for, wiped out.

“Poor Rolf Eckhof,” Anna said for the second time in her life. “It will be ages before he can be healed.”

At that moment Saint Farouk hurried in and took his place at the table with a worried expression on his face. “Well, well,” he said. “I have done all I can for poor Dasher.”

“Will he be all right?” Klaus asked anxiously.

“His leg will mend, surely,” Farouk said. “But I cannot recall him from the dreadful place his soul walks. He was in that terrible fog so long.” He shook his head sadly.

“I thought those who Tarry could not be harmed,” Klaus said.

Anna held up her damaged arm. “Apparently we can,” she said ruefully.

“We are swimming in uncharted waters, I’m afraid,” Saint Nicholas said.

They all looked at each other around the table. No one had an answer to what was happening.

“But one thing is certain,” Nicholas continued. “The demon is bent on your destruction.” He spread his hands on the table. “Indeed, that is all its life is now, I suspect: an unquenchable desire to make everyone as miserable as it is.” He glanced at Anna. “It will strike at everyone and everything you love. It will strike at Christmas.”

Elves repaired the Straight Road and the Green Council severed the tie that had tethered it to a fixed place in the Black Forest for so long. From that hour, its entire length was drawn up beyond the circles of the world. Now it touches the earth only in December and only where belief in Christmas is strongest. Wherever in the world the love of Christmas burns brightest, there the Straight Road will touch down. Meanwhile the demon that had been Rolf Eckhof roams the earth searching for it, and if it finds it, then the Road must be snatched up quickly or the demon will complete its work of destruction and shut Klaus out of the world forever.

Just before the Green Council departed, Saint Farouk took Klaus aside. “I do not know what will happen to Dasher,” he said. “He is in a dark place. Maybe he will not find his way out.”

“Oh,” Klaus said. He could find no more words.

Farouk gripped his arm. “Your love for him is great,” he said. “So have courage, my friend. There may be more for you to discover.”

All through the autumn, Klaus tried hard to concentrate on organizing that year’s Christmas preparations, but Anna could tell that his heart was not in it, and she knew the reason why: his deep worry over Dasher. Every day
Klaus spent hours sitting beside the reindeer where he lay, mute and unmoving, in his stable. There was a look of horror that never left Dasher’s large brown eyes. “Where are you, old friend?” Klaus whispered into the reindeer’s ear again and again. “Come back to us,” he pleaded. But it was no use. Dasher did not come back.

And one day, just as the first snow fell in the pine forests of the True North and ice began to film the lake, Dasher closed his eyes, and Klaus felt him slipping even further away into darkness. From then on he would not leave him even for a moment. He forsook all pretense of preparing for that Christmas. He refused utterly, despite much urging, to name a new lead reindeer. And when Anna brought his meals to him at Dasher’s side, he turned aside from them because for the first time in his life he had no appetite. Quietly, Anna took the reins of Christmas preparations. She organized the completion of that year’s toy making and list checking. She studied the maps and charts for the annual deliveries, essential now that Dasher would not be leading the team. She gathered weather reports from around the world for Christmas Eve and even prepared to drive the sleigh. Klaus did not inquire about any of it. He had no care for anything but Dasher, whom he continually stroked and called by name: “Dasher. Dasher. Come back.”

Late one weary December night, when Anna had joined Klaus in his vigil, she finally said to her husband, “Dasher Tarries for you. You must let him go.”

“No!” Klaus cried, and clung to the reindeer.

“I also love him. He was mine before he was yours. But this life is not all, Klaus,” Anna said. “Let him go to better pasturage.”

Then Klaus knew that what his wife said was true. And so he whispered in Dasher’s ear, “Great heart, I speak to you spirit to spirit. Your work here is done. You need no longer Tarry. Go in peace.” And he released his hold on the beast.

At this Dasher opened his eyes, and the horror left them, replaced by a solemn joy. He lifted his great antlered head a little and looked at Anna and then at Klaus. “Be of good cheer!” he said to them. And died.

Klaus and Anna clung to each other and wept because they knew how much they would miss their friend and could only guess how long they would be parted from him. Then, arm in arm—Anna’s good arm, of course—they walked out into what was left of the night. They were quiet, as one is after a momentous event, and took comfort in each other’s silence.

A large full December moon hung in the velvet sky. The night was chilly, but not too cold as long as they clung to each other. They drifted past the castle, down to the lake, shining like a sheet of silver beneath the moon.

“Remember when you made me build him a house?” Klaus asked. “And it was really for you?”

“And remember how he wouldn’t step one hoof into it?” Anna replied.

In spite of themselves, they chuckled at the good memory of their friend. And Anna observed that though Klaus was sad, a sweet acceptance had come to him. And by that she knew that he would heal and be whole again.

But down by the lake, something was stirring. It stepped out from the shadow of a tree into the full moonlight. Klaus and Anna stood transfixed. It used a little hoof to break the thin ice at the lake’s edge and bent down to drink. Then it raised its head and looked straight at Anna and Klaus. It was smaller than the beasts they were accustomed to, but it was, without question, a reindeer. And from its tail to the very tip of its nose, which was glistening in the moonlight, it was bright scarlet red.

“Be of good cheer!” it called happily to Saint Anna and Saint Klaus.

T
he Eight Flyers were stamping the ground, blowing steam, ready to depart for their long Christmas Eve flight. From the sleigh Klaus looked up to the front of the line. It was strange to see the small scarlet reindeer hitched beside Dancer in the lead traces. His scant spread of antlers scarcely came to the larger reindeer’s shoulder. Could this jolly little fellow really take Dasher’s place? Klaus swallowed hard. He missed seeing his steady, greathearted friend leading the team.

The moment of Dasher’s passing was etched into his heart. So, too, were his last words: “Be of good cheer!”

Those had also been the first words the scarlet reindeer had said when he and Anna first glimpsed him by the lake in the moonlight later the same night. “Be of good cheer!” he had said. His voice was light and clear and seemed on the verge of bubbling over with mirth. “You know you will see your beloved again.”

“Not for a long time,” Klaus had replied sadly.

The little reindeer had come and rubbed against him for comfort. “That will make the meeting all the merrier,” he said, “just as when you and Anna see each other again after a long Christmas Eve. My name is Ranulf. I have been sent to help. May I?” Klaus heard in Ranulf’s question the echo of what he himself had said to those who had suffered losses from the Black Death so many years before; of what the Elves had asked to do on his and Anna’s first day in the True North; and what Anna herself had done by establishing the vital institutions of the True North.
Helping is Magic,
he thought;
and Magic is really just a kind of helping.
He looked into the little reindeer’s eyes, which were a remarkable emerald green, and saw behind them an outsized soul. “You are most welcome,” he said.