Chapter 1: The Elf Delivers Bad News
The knock came at midnight.
Not a polite tap, not the hesitant rap of a neighbor. This was a thunderous, door-shaking pound that echoed through the silent, dark house like a trunk being dropped from a great height. Ellie Finch, who had been halfway through a lukewarm cup of tea and a spreadsheet, jumped so hard the tea slopped onto her leggings.
“What the hell?”
She padded to the front door, her silk robe—a gift from her sister that felt absurdly luxurious for a Tuesday—pulled tight. Lately, nothing fit right. Her hips ached, her back felt constantly sore, and her favorite jeans had been relegated to the back of the drawer with a silent promise to “start Monday.” She’d blamed the holidays, the stress, turning thirty-eight. Peri-menopause, maybe. A secret, shameful part of her had wondered if it was just the steady, crushing creep of a life that had become smaller than she’d planned.
She peered through the peephole.
A swirl of wind-driven snow. The porch light glared on a pristine, untouched expanse of white on her welcome mat. No footprints. Not a single one.
The pounding shook the door again, right at eye level.
“Fine, fine, I’m coming!” She yanked the door open, a sharp rebuke on her lips.
It died there.
The cold hit her first, a living thing that stole her breath. It carried the clean, frozen scent of pine from the woods behind her house, and underneath it, something else—ozone, maybe, like the air after a lightning strike. And cinnamon.
On her doorstep stood a man who wasn’t a man. He was maybe four feet tall, crammed into a moth-eaten peacoat several sizes too large. His face was a topographic map of wrinkles, his eyes the color of tarnished pennies, peering out from under a shock of wild, white hair that defied the swirling wind. He held a carved wooden staff that looked older than the town.
“Eleanor Finch?” His voice was the sound of gravel being crushed under a boot.
“Who’s asking?” She pulled her robe tighter. It was straining across her chest in a way that was new and deeply annoying.
“Bartholomew Bellweather. But you’ll call me Bart. Everyone does, usually with a string of expletives in front of it.” He sniffed, his gaze traveling from her slippers to her confused face. “Congratulations, meatbag. You’re the least qualified Santa Claus in eight centuries.”
Ellie blinked. She heard the words. They just didn’t assemble into anything that made sense. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Santa. Claus. Red suit. Reindeer. Too much eggnog. The whole tedious song and dance.” He shouldered past her into the entryway, tracking in not a single drop of meltwater. He looked around her modest home with palpable disdain. “Bit of a fixer-upper, isn’t it? The last one had a workshop in the Alps. Very majestic.”
A laugh, brittle and sharp, escaped her. “Get out. Right now. Before I call the police and tell them there’s a deranged little person in a Christmas cosplay breakdown on my porch.”
Bart turned, and the jaded boredom in his eyes was replaced by something infinitely older and wearier. “Check your mail, Eleanor. Formal letter. Ivory parchment, wax seal, the whole ridiculous rigmarole. Arrived today.”
She hadn’t checked her physical mail. She paid bills online. The stack of catalogs and flyers was on the side table by the door. Her eyes fell on it. On top of the pile of Bed Bath & Beyond coupons and political circulars was a thick, creamy envelope. The address was written in a flowing, copperplate hand. The seal was a stylized ‘C’ encircled by what looked like holly leaves, pressed into blood-red wax.
Her fingers, gone strangely cold, fumbled it open.
To the Esteemed Eleanor Finch,
By the Unfathomable Machinations of the Yuletide Genesis and the Sacred (and Woefully Unpredictable) Thread of Christmas Spirit, you have been Identified as the Prime Vessel for the forthcoming Incarnation of the Santa Claus Entity.
Your physical assimilation has, according to our logs, already commenced. Please refer to Appendix A for likely symptoms (unexplained weight gain primarily in the mid-section, increased facial hair growth, profound cravings for mince pies and brandy, et cetera).
Your designated Familiar, Bartholomew Bellweather, will arrive at the zero hour to facilitate your orientation. Resistance, while traditional, is ultimately futile and terribly melodramatic.
Yours in Perpetual Winter,
The North Pole Administrative Committee (NPAC)
Ellie’s vision tunneled. The words swam. Unexplained weight gain. Facial hair. The aching hips. The robe that wouldn’t close.
“This… this is a joke.” The paper trembled in her hand. “A sick, elaborate joke from my sister. Did Marcy put you up to this? How much did she pay you?”
Bart was examining her bookshelf, pulling out a John Grisham paperback with two fingers as if it were a dead rodent. “Your sister couldn’t afford my hourly rate, and I don’t do pranks. I do logistics. And damage control.” He tossed the book onto the sofa. “The transformation picks its host based on a… let’s call it a resonance. A spark. You, Eleanor Finch, certified public accountant, lover of spreadsheets and quiet evenings, apparently have a latent resonance for unchecked festive generosity. The last guy was a forklift operator from Winnipeg. Nice fellow. Terrible at logistics.”
A deep, visceral shudder rolled through Ellie’s body. It started in her lower back, a wave of heat and pressure that felt like her spine was being gently, insistently inflated. She gasped, bending over. The silk of her robe gave with a sickening rrrrip at the seams under her arms.
“Ah,” Bart said, without looking. “Right on schedule. The third phase. The spread.”
“What… is happening?” Her voice was a strained whisper. The heat was spreading through her abdomen, a feeling of immense, inexorable fullness. The belt of her robe, now comically short, dug into the expanding flesh.
“You’re becoming.” Bart finally turned, watching with a clinical detachment that was somehow worse than horror. “The Vessel accommodates the Spirit. The Spirit, for the record, is quite round. Jolly, they call it. It’s mostly just dense.”
“Make it stop!” She commanded, straightening up. Or trying to. Her center of gravity was different. She felt vast. Solid. The room seemed smaller. A profound, specific craving for raisins and suet flashed through her mind and was violently rejected.
“Can’t. It’s metaphysical. Like a tsunami wearing a fur-trimmed coat.” He leaned on his staff. “There’s more. Brace yourself. The facial hair is always a shock.”
“The wh—”
It began as an intense itch, a prickling tide racing from her cheekbones down her jawline, across her upper lip, down her neck. She scrabbled at her face, her fingers encountering not skin, but a soft, wiry, rapidly proliferating texture.
“No. No, no, no, no—”
She stumbled toward the hallway mirror, her new bulk making the movement a clumsy waddle.
The reflection that stared back was not her own.
Her face, her clever, sharp-featured face with its sprinkle of freckles, was still there, but now framed by, then engulfed by, a burgeoning cascade of hair. It was white. A pristine, snowy white. It sprouted from her pores in velvety tufts, coiling and thickening as she watched in abject horror. It grew down her cheeks, fused into magnificent, woolly sideburns, and erupted from her chin in a lavish, curling wave.
She watched it happen. She felt it happen. Each individual follicle singing as it extruded another inch of soft, alien fiber.
She opened her mouth to scream. A sound emerged, but it was not her sound. It was deep. Resonant. A seismic rumble that started in her newly augmented belly and vibrated through the very foundations of the house.
“HO HO—”
She clapped her hands over her mouth. The beard, now a good eight inches long and gloriously full, was silky against her fingers.
The sound that escaped between her fingers this time was her own, shrill and laced with pure panic.
“—what the FUCK?!”
The last word echoed in the sudden, brittle silence. The itch had stopped. The expansion had ceased. She stood there, panting, a giantess in a torn silk robe, her hands buried in a beard that belonged in a nature documentary about mountain goats.
From the living room, Bart clapped slowly, three times. The sound was dry and sarcastic.
“Excellent. The traditional first words. A classic.” He hobbled over, looking up at her. There was, for the first time, a flicker in those tarnished-coin eyes. Not quite sympathy. Recognition, maybe. “Welcome to the rest of your life, Ellie. Such as it is.”
Somewhere, far above the roof, muffled by snow and cloud, came a faint, melodic jingle. It was not a sound you could hear with your ears alone. It vibrated in the new, hollow space behind her sternum.
Bart heard it too. He sighed, a world of exhausted centuries in the sound.
“Sleigh’s warming up,” he said. “We’ve got nineteen days till the big ride. You need to learn to fly it, manage a global logistics operation with zero margin for error, and interface with approximately seven hundred and eighteen million children. Psychologically.” He turned and walked back toward the door, his staff tapping on the hardwood. “I’d offer you a drink, but you’re now technically a corporate entity. Liability nightmare.”
Ellie stared at the mirror. The woman—the being—in it stared back, bewildered, terrified, and absurdly, magnificently bearded.
The jingling faded.
In the sudden, ordinary quiet of her house, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator, a single, clear thought cut through the panic.
I am going to need a much bigger robe.