“Who?” Jemma asked, but her guide was silent as they walked through ice tunnels that were sometimes so narrow that Jemma could reach up and put a hand on the ceiling, and sometimes so wide that Jemma couldn’t see the walls let alone the ceiling, until they came to a round wooden door. The Unity extracted from its pocket a key made of little Santas. It opened the door and waved Jemma through.
She found herself in the middle of Santa’s workshop. It was much busier than she thought it should be, given that Santa was already out in the world delivering presents. But all the elves were still working furiously. Indeed, most of them looked sad and tired. When she asked why the elves were all still working, her guide told her that it was for her, that all the presents they were making were for her. “If you don’t want them, then all you have to do is say the word,” said the Unity. Jemma was silent.
They climbed up many stairs, flights of five or ten steps set into the walls, or passing through the walls, but always rising, up toward the top of the workshop. The elves looked sadder and more haggard the farther they climbed, but the presents they worked on were ever more sublime. On what Jemma thought might be the ninth floor she found a pair of emaciated elves dressed only in little barrels painstakingly sewing her name in gold into the vapors of a small cloud.
“Oh, oh!” Jemma called out. “Is that the cloud that I asked for?” The elves looked up at her briefly with dark, empty eyes before returning to their work.
“Stupid girl,” said the Unity of Santa. “What does it look like, a pony?”
“Sorry!” Jemma said, suddenly afraid that all the wonders she’d passed would be denied her.
“There’s no sorry here,” it said. They’d come to another door, bigger than the first, and colored a deeper red. The Unity of Santa kicked it, so hard that a few of the constituents were knocked from the hat, and fell to catch hands and join with the long ropes of Santas who were its hair. It thrust Jemma into a long room, full of torchlight and reeking, Jemma thought, of winter — pine and berries and smoke and the bright sting of cold air. Jemma realized she could feel her nose again. She put her hand on it.
“Yes, hello!” A woman at the far end of the room, seated in a wooden throne, was putting her hand to her nose just as Jemma was doing. “Hello! Is this what you do to greet a body? I think I like it better than waving.”
“I was just checking to see if my nose was there.”
“It certainly is,” said the lady. She was dressed in a red velvet robe trimmed in white fur, and berries were caught up in her great loops of hair. On closer inspection, the berries seemed to Jemma to be growing from her hair, not just resting in it. As plain as the mouth below it. “Do you know who I am, little girl?”
“Mrs. Claus,” Jemma said, though not sure about that, because this lady was black, and Jemma’s mother had told her, when Jemma asked specifically if Mrs. Claus or Santa himself might be black, that it was a frank impossibility and an absurd thought, and had furthermore denied the blackness of Jesus, Nefertiti, and the Queen of Sheba.
“Clever girl,” she said. She leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs, flashing shiny boots that ran up to her thighs. “Do you know why you are here?”
“To get my presents?”
“Just that? There’s more, if you’re smart enough. Here it is: all that you have seen is nothing at all compared to what I can give you, if you answer the question I’ll pose. But if you get the question wrong then you get nothing, and then you must pay a terrible price. Too terrible even for me to speak of just yet.”
“Would I get a pony?” Jemma asked, “If I answer the question?”
“Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a thousand ponies. Will you answer my question?”
Jemma looked at the lady, and at the Unity of Santa, and back down the hall through the door to the workshop. She knew her brother would scold her for seeking the bird in the bush, but she did it anyway, imagining herself riding a pony that was made of a thousand ponies, a Unity of pony.
“Okay,” Jemma said slowly. Mrs. Claus stood up and walked down the marble steps that led up to her throne. She stopped on the last one and bent over Jemma, her hair swinging close enough that Jemma could tell how it smelled like moss.
“Very well,” she said. “Tell me, child, what has Santa got under his hat?”
Jemma folded her arms and ducked her chin and began to think hard. Air? That would be the sensible answer. An elf? He might just keep one there. An apple? That was possible, but not particularly likely. His hair? That was even more sensible, but Jemma thought she had a better answer.
“His head,” she said.
“No, child,” Mrs. Claus said, looking a little shocked at Jemma’s answer. “World peace. World peace. That’s what’s under his hat. Haven’t you been listening to your brother?”
“I have been,” Jemma said. “All night long.”
Mrs. Claus sighed. “A liar, too,” she said sadly. “Well, off with her head then.”
“Are you talking about me?” Jemma asked.
“Off with her head!” Mrs. Claus shouted. She jumped up and down on the steps as Jemma backed away, then drew out a long-handled axe from beneath her robe. She shook it and pointed it at Jemma, but never swung. “Off with her head!” she said again, her voice echoing in the hall. At her last words the Unity of Santa fell apart, dissolving from the head down, every member tumbling down to the floor to run at Jemma on little feet. Jemma fled. Out the door, past all the elves working in alcoves on her presents. Now they were all sharpening bits of coal, which they threw at her, only one in all nine floors proving herself a good shot. Jemma rubbed her sore forehead as she ran along the ice toward the boat, looking back just once at the swarm of Santas behind her. The boat was drifting away but she made a long leap and landed next to he brother. Then she was on her back again under the mist, listening to her brother snore beside her. She thought she was awake, or that her night visitation had ended, but then she saw them from the corners of her eyes, innumerable little hats rising over the sides of the boat, followed shortly by the pale fat Santa faces in their beards. They only spoke to her, and did not lift a finger to harm her. “The Spirit will visit you next,” they said.
She waited for the next visitor for what seemed like a whole hour before she realized that the mist was making a sighing noise, or rather that it was speaking very quietly in a voice that was like a person sighing quietly. She peered at the mist and saw a face there, fat like Santa’s face, but sadder. “I am the Spirit of Santa,” it said. “Come away with me.”
“Okay,” Jemma said, feeling quite trusting despite how poorly she had been treated by Mrs. Claus. It wasn’t that the Spirit was not spooky — it was quite spooky — but Jemma felt safe and not afraid. The feeling like parts of her body were missing had given way to a rubbery feeling. She felt sure that if she curled herself into a ball she could bounce to the ceiling, and was sure that her rubber neck would be proof against an axe.
The spirit settled on her, cold and wet. When it lifted she was in a graveyard. She remembered this part from the book, and quickly went in search of her own tombstone to see when she was going to die. “Will nobody miss me?” she asked the spirit excitedly, but it was quiet. She found names on the tombstones — Annabelle; Corky; Pooh the Third; Mrs. Beasley; Shenandoah — but hers was nowhere.
“Who is buried here?” she asked.
“All forgotten!” the spirit sighed. It rose up in the air and threw out its arms and legs, and began to bleed away from its tips, fingers and toes rarefying into a thinner mist that spun out into threads that drifted over every grave. “No one remembers them!” the Spirit moaned, and sank its tendrils into the ground.