Santa’s Little Helper Part 1

I've been promising to share my Christmas story - here it is, with a twist - SURPRISE!

Dusty was awake, wide awake. She lay in her bed trying to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come and to top it all off, to make sure that she wasn’t going to sleep any time soon, she had the rhythm of a poem going around in her mind. It was just starting to really annoy her because she knew the poem – or at least part of it – but the words just wouldn’t come to her.

Then the first line seemed to just arrive and along with it came a sense of satisfaction because she’d finally remembered it.

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The self-satisfied feeling left her as she wondered one other thing... what on earth had prompted her to think of that poem? It was something that her mother had read to her either on Christmas eve or Christmas night, she thought. No, it would have been Christmas eve, a bedtime story for an excited little six year old girl. A tear slipped from her eye as she remembered her mother and she wiped it away before it reached the pillow.

In the darkness, Dusty remembered that last Christmas and more tears followed the first one. There were too many to catch before they soaked into the pillow, so after a short time, she stopped trying.

The next lines of the poem came to her and she thought of the tradition her grandparents still kept to. Her stocking, a large, fluffy bed sock, was hung up at the side of the hearth in the kitchen. The ritual was always the same, a cup of hot chocolate before bed and then the stocking or sock was produced and it was pinned to the wooden mantle shelf away from the fire of course, just as it had been since she came to live with them after her mother, their daughter, had been murdered.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
in hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

There was only her stocking, her grandparents loved to spoil and indulge her, especially at this time of year. Dusty knew that they felt a certain amount of guilt at how they had treated their daughter when they found out she was pregnant and Dusty thought that they had made up for their initial disappointment and mistrust since then but that wouldn’t stop them treating their only grandchild to everything she could ever want – and a lot more things besides.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.

Dusty muttered in the darkness of her room: “Now where did that line come from?” She thought it must be her overactive brain dredging up the poem from her distant past that had put the line in her head.

And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

“I wish I could settle my brain.” She spoke out loud; she was frustrated and knew that sleep wouldn’t be arriving whilst the poem was running through her mind like it was. Dusty sat up in bed and thought about the poem.

The next line wouldn’t come. She knew that she knew it but it was evading her. At one point she thought it was coming, she had an image of someone at a window but before the words could form, they scattered and were lost.

Then she heard a noise outside, it sounded as though there was something large rooting about in the bins on the front yard but that couldn’t be right, her granddad had put the bins in the garage for the Christmas period, there wasn’t going to be a collection over the Christmas break, so they may as well be in a more convenient place.

Dusty got out of bed and went to her window. The next lines of the poem arrived in her head just as she pulled back her curtain:

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

Though there had been weeks of heavy snow the previous year around this time, this Christmas was proving to be one of the mildest in her lifetime and when she opened the curtains to see what was disturbing the peace outside, Dusty had the shock of her life. There had been a massive snowfall in the half an hour since she had gone to bed and another couple of lines of the poem popped into her head.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.

Dusty was beginning to become concerned. This wasn’t normal. An unexpected and un-forecasted snowfall and a phantom Christmas rhyme rattling around in her brain. Something wasn’t right. Dusty waited and sure enough, the next line was in her head. It seemed as though someone was reciting the poem and she just couldn’t shut it out.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
but a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.

Dusty pressed her nose to the glass and looked up into the sky. There were no clouds, but millions of bright twinkling stars.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
and he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

What was going on? Dusty was beginning to get worried. She could remember the next lines of the poem and those were the only lines that had not been put in her head. She had a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach and she closed her eyes and wondered if she was going mad. Then she spoke the next words that were in the poem out loud, she spoke quiet yet clear but it didn’t seem to matter that her grandparents might hear her, she knew for almost absolute certainty that they would not.

"Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! on, on Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"

As she shouted the last instruction, there was a crashing noise above her head and she ducked by instinct. As she watched through the window, the long shadow of a sleigh and the animals that pulled it passed over the house and became more than a shadow, it seemed to fill out, become more substantial and become real!

The sleigh made a bad landing, the animals seemed to be all alright as they skidded and slewed to a stop in the snow but the sleigh bounced off a few trees before it juddered to a halt on the driveway outside Dusty’s window.

When the flurry of snow had settled a little, Dusty could see something odd in the sleigh. There was the figure of a man and he was waving a beautiful, magnificent and glowing sword. He was fighting with something. Dusty couldn’t believe her eyes; she turned to grab her boots and pulled them on. She didn’t bother with the stairs or the doors; she opened the window and just before she clambered out, she leaned over her desk and grabbed something, then she leaped onto the porch roof to slide down it and land in the snow – the surprisingly deep snow – then she ran to the sleigh to see what the man was fighting with.

It was a horrible little thing. It was black, green, yellow and purple, the same colours as a healing bruise and it was just as attractive. It had sharp, uneven and broken teeth and claws instead of fingers and toes. Its ears were pointed and the snarling sounds that were coming from it sounded very much as though it were a little dog trying to growl through a throat full of phlegm.

Dusty shuddered, she knew what the creature was; she’d seen goblins before. She could hear the sword whizzing through the air as the man swung it and each time it caught one of the goblins, there was a sizzle as it cut through its body and then a weird and musical ‘plink’ sound. Dusty almost smiled at the sound but the man was beginning to struggle with the sheer weight of numbers, so she unfurled her unicorn rope and threw it over a bunch of the creatures. Instead of the singular ‘plink’ as when the sword dispatched one, she managed to get three or four and the noise was similar to pebbles being dropped into a pool – ‘plinkplinkplink’.

The man was still struggling on the sleigh with a swarming morass of the goblins because as soon as he ‘plinked’ one out of existence, one more took its place with another ‘plink’ as it winked into this realm. Dusty understood then, she realised that they weren’t doing as well as she had thought at first. She had assumed that each ‘plink’ noise was one goblin gone but only half of the ‘plinks’ were goblins going, the other half were goblins arriving.

Dusty set to work in earnest then. She lassoed three, four, five at a time but she didn’t stop to relish the sound of them ‘plinking’ out of existence, she was on to the next group and the next. Soon the goblins were dwindling in numbers and the sleigh driver was beginning to get the better of them rather than becoming bogged down as he had been.

When the last of the goblins that were on the front of his sleigh was cut in half with his sword, he picked up the reins in his sword hand and reached down to grab Dusty by the collar of her dressing gown, to yank her off her feet as the sleigh began to move. He dumped her unceremoniously on the seat by his side, slapped the reins and they were jerked back into the seat by the acceleration.

As they took off and the acceleration evened out, he turned to her and said: “Take my sword and get rid of the rest of them, they are hiding around the back. Be careful though, their bite is deadly, even to demons.”

Dusty did as she was told and took the sword. She was at once amazed at the feel of it, she could tell that it was sharper than any blade she had ever encountered and she had an irresistible urge to test just how sharp it was. She looked back and saw that the driver was right; there were more of the goblins behind them. She took hold of the sword properly and gave it a practice swing and then she was upon the goblins, scything through them without effort it seemed. The sword was doing all the work. She knew that if she held this sword, she could go all day and all night in battle and never feel weary.

The blade shone with an eerie blue glow, brighter than the stars above their transport and each time she killed a goblin, to accompany the ‘plink’, the sword gave that blue light an extra bright glint.

When she was satisfied that there were no more goblins to kill – and she checked twice, because she wanted there to be more to kill – she sat at the side of the man that had become her battle comrade and said: “Hi, I’m Dusty.”

He looked at her and a huge grin appeared on his face. “I know who you are, sweetness. I’m Santa, I know all the good boys and girls.”

“You’re not Santa!” Dusty said, she was still grinning from the delight of the victory. “You’re not fat or hairy enough to be Santa!” She found that she had to shout a little so as to be heard over the sound of the rushing air.

At her comment, the driver laughed. It was a deep and humour-filled laugh and Dusty wondered if she could be wrong. The man was skinny, almost emaciated. His green robes were voluminous around him as though he didn’t belong to them – and she wondered why she had thought it that way around, he didn’t belong to them.

His hair was white, as was his beard but both were cropped quite short and his beard was styled, “Santa doesn’t sport a goatee!” She said and laughed along with him.

The poem that had been whirling around in her head seemed to be being recited now. Instead of the words being inside her head, she could now hear them and she noticed that Santa was reciting them in a quiet voice too. Dusty wondered where the words were coming from.

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St Nicholas too.

“Yeah, the toys,” she said in a distracted tone. “Where are the toys?”

“Ahh, I never gave out toys, Dusty. That was never me. I give out different gifts.”

They were coming to a large town and Dusty hoped that her questions would all be answered soon.

The sleigh pulled up on the roof of a house and Santa got out. He didn’t disappear down the chimney as Dusty was expecting, but instead he took a long staff from the side of the sleigh. It was a gnarled and old branch but it was straight and it looked to be extremely tough and hard. Then it started to glow and sparkles and sparks began to spin around the knobbed top of it. The sparkles and sparks swirled around as though they were caught up in a miniature whirlwind. Then the whirlwind began to expand and grow. It grew wider and larger but the density of the sparkles didn’t diminish and then Santa tossed the staff up into the air, just like a majorette in a marching band would but the effect was far grander, more explosive than any baton. As the staff spun in the air, suspended by what Dusty could only assume was magic, the sparks and sparkles were flung far and wide. Dusty saw them as they landed on houses and gardens, cars and even one lone passerby. He didn’t seem to see the sparks landing on his coat but as they sunk into the heavy fabric, he straightened his back, pushed out his chest and seemed sprightlier than he had moments before.