Santa Claus's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

The red nose lit the whole yard. Santa stood by the sleigh and stared at the glow spreading over the snow. He had the power to finish the run. He also had a lantern no child could miss. He needed a way to cross the sky without a single upturned face catching the light. Jinglebert chewed his lip. "We could fly high. Above the clouds." "Clouds break," Santa said. "One gap and they see us." He looked at the rooftops, then at the lit windows below. Every landing would expose them. A voice rasped from the dark behind the stable. "You're all doing this wrong." A green shape stepped into the red light. Santa knew him. The Grinch had tried to steal Christmas from this town once, hauled every gift up his mountain, and given it all back by dawn. His stained red coat still hung off his shoulders. He grinned with too many teeth. "Come to ruin it again?" Santa said. "Come to fix it." The Grinch spat in the snow. "I know how to move through a town unseen. I did it in one night. Nobody woke. Nobody looked up, because I never went up." He pointed a crooked finger at the glowing reindeer. "Your problem is the sky. So stay off it." "The sleigh needs the sky," Santa said. "Not between houses." The Grinch crouched and dragged his claw through the snow. He drew a row of rooftops, close together. "You land once, on the edge of town. Then you go roof to roof on foot, down the chimneys, the old way. The sleigh waits dark in one spot. The bright beast never crosses open air over the houses." Santa studied the scratched lines. The reindeer could set down once in shadow, away from windows. On the ground, moving low between the gabled homes, no glow would climb to the sky. He thought of the frozen pond he had passed, the skaters gone home, the ice black and empty at the town's edge. Open space. No windows facing it. "The pond," Santa said. "I land the team there. The glow sits over bare ice. No child above it." He looked at the Grinch. "Then I walk the gifts in." The Grinch shrugged. "Slower. But they won't see your beacon dragging across their bedrooms." Santa flew the team to the pond. He set the runners down on the far ice, where no home looked out. The red nose burned bright over empty snow and threw no light on any window. He hitched the team to wait in the dark hollow by the reeds. Then he filled his sack and climbed the first roof on foot. The sky stayed empty. The town slept. But the Grinch stayed by the sleigh, grinning, with the whole loaded team and the glowing reindeer left in his keeping. Santa stood on the rooftop and looked back at the thief guarding everything he had to deliver.