The Elf-5 and Santa's Secret Machine: A Mini Adventure from Before Santa Met Denby



  A Lucky Bat Book

  The Elf-5 and Santa’s Secret Machine

  (A Mini Adventure from Before Santa Met Denby)

  Copyright 2011 by G.Z. Sutton

  All rights reserved

  Cover by Wolfgang Price, Jessie Hilgenberg and Judith Harlan

  Published by Lucky Bat Books

  Table of Contents

  The Elf-5 and Santa’s Secret Machine

  (An Incredible Mini Adventure of Santa and Denby)

  Excerpt of Santa Dog: The Incredible Adventures of Santa and Denby (Book One)

  About the Author

  The Elf-5 and Santa’s Secret Machine

  Up on the North Pole Floe,

  where magic warms the hearts and hands of all who live there,

  where food is abundant and candy healthy,

  the North Pole, Santa’s North Pole,

  is a winter wonderland.

  It was the arrival of the Elf-5 (later named the L-5 when the reindeer complained of how hard it was to say Elf-5 six times fast), with their technology, engineering, and just big old genius, that turned the old-fashioned village of Santa and his elves into a North Pole winter wonderland. Before the L-5, the whole community would have to up and move from ice floe to ice floe as the weather changed.

  Back then toys were simple. Corn-husk dollies and simple games of stone and bark could be made with the tools an elf could carry. But as the world changed and became more complicated, so did the toys.

  Santa had just started to worry

  about keeping up and making toys

  that moved

  and dolls that talked

  when two elves — unlike any he’d ever seen before — knocked on his igloo door. They’d come by sky, unbothered by cold, hang-gliding in from parts unknown. Their names were Elfox and Elfred.

  Elfox spoke English with a New York accent. Elfred only spoke German. Yet they seemed to communicate just fine. These elves, they brought their own kind of magic with them.

  Santa’s modern village – with all its gadgets and gizmos – was created the day Elfox chained the ice to the sea floor and Elfred created a unique water system that removed the salt from the sea water (the salt turned out to be wonderful on pretzels) and allowed the ice to stay thick and in one piece all year long, every year.

  From the sky, the North Pole looked like just another floating sheet of ice. From the water, it looked like just another glacier. So successful was the camouflage of Santa’s village at keeping the village invisible to the rest of the world that polar bears, ringed seals and arctic foxes often made the floe a vacation spot. Birds such as the Snow Bunting and Northern Fulmar left the ships they so often followed to take a rest on the huge mass of ice that floated but never shrank and never moved more than just with the sway of the ocean.

  Just a few months after Elfox and Elfred arrived, Elfaus swam in from Turkey, followed closely by Elfonzo who dropped by parachute from a Peruvian plane on its way to Nova Scotia. These two new elves treated Elfox and Elfred like long-lost brothers, and the four worked together as if of one mind.

  Elfaus and Elfonzo found ways to simplify the anchoring of the ice floe and lighten its load. They also began the first wave of more complicated toys.

  They taught the other elves,

  the Old Guard, as Santa called them,

  how to make dolls from cloth and hay,

  how to carve horses and trains from wood,

  how to make leather balls that would bounce.

  But it wasn’t until Elfong – the last of the Elf-5 elves – came ashore one day, dropped from the back of a Chinese whale who claimed no magic but had no business being so far north, that the L-5 became one. Santa knew as soon as he saw the five working that they were special together. Separate, they were still interesting, still unlike any other elves, but when together, they were astounding.

  Elfox was stocky and spoke loudly. He wore only black from his boots to his sweater to his knitted cap, except for a pair of rainbow suspenders. He brought knowledge of how to make more colorful toys and how to amplify sound.

  Elfred loved to argue with Elfox, his German accent clipping along with Elfox’s New York speed. He was short, even shorter than Elfox, but narrow, with huge feet he pampered with dainty purple slippers. He brought a keen mind for innovation and taught the elves to work with metal and plastic.

  Elfaus had jet black hair that swooped up and over the top of his head as if he where forever leaning into the wind. When he spoke, everyone listened. He brought a whole world of new tastes for the bakers, cooks, and candy-makers at the Pole.

  Elfonzo lacked the confidence of the other L-5. He was quiet and fidgety, always checking the many tools in the many pockets of his snow-white jumpsuit. He showed everyone how to work with electricity and how to turn complicated wiring into fun new toys. He stayed on top of every new kind of toy and gave regular reports to Santa and Mrs. Claus.

  Elfong was tallest of the five. He looked as if he were built from wooden blocks and branches and might yell at any minute, though he never did. He dressed in green and red stripes from head to toe. He helped speed up production with his elf-helper equipment, so that all the village could take more time to play and laugh. He also taught the reindeer how to tell jokes.

  The L-5 ideas and hard work led to the Rotation Room and Santa’s ability to slow down time so he could get presents to every good boy and girl — in just one night! But this is another of Santa's secrets, so only the L-5 know how it works.

  The L-5 elves went away from time to time and always returned with new wonders and new methods of toy-making. They loved to show everyone else what they’d learned.

  But maybe most importantly, they made Santa smile.

  Over the years, the L-5 upgraded a big house, adding levels and workrooms and laboratories. This became their home and their base of operations and where they spent the most time. But as the decades passed into centuries and the Rotation Room needed more and more upkeep and attention, the L-5 began to split their duties.

  Sometimes Elfox and Elfong would spend long hours

  in the Rotation Room,

  while Elfaus and Elfonzo experimented in the lab

  and Elfred tested new equipment.

  Then a few weeks later they’d all switch.

  Each was part of the whole.

  Sometime in the late 1980s, another elf came along. Alton. He arrived in a dinghy, cold and wet from the rough seas. He’d been a stowaway on a cargo ship carrying parachute pants and bangle bracelets from Japan to the United States and other ports of call. It had taken him more than a year to finally get close enough to the North Pole to set out on his own.

  Something in Alton’s elf brain was drawn to the North Pole, like the needle of a compass. All elves felt that pull at one time or another. Some ignored it, keeping busy in their own lands; others grew numb to it as they made lives in big cities with tall towers and paved streets that made the pull harder to feel. But many, like Alton, simply couldn’t resist and would make their way to Santa.

  Alton had felt the pull from a very young age, but his mother told him the stories of Santa were a myth, a story to convince young elves to be good. “It’s not real,” she said more than once. “These stories, these fantasies, they come from the old world. Make-believe rewards for being stupid. What matters is this land, this life. Fit in, make your way, stop dreaming of a fat man with endless presents and psychic powers.”

  Alton’s father would sometimes take
him aside, say, for a walk through town, or a drive to the shops. Alone, he would tell Alton about cousins who had made the trek and sent back treasures, proof that the big man in red was real. Real and waiting at the top of the world for any elves willing to make the journey. There, he said, they would be met with cheers and celebration as if the entire North Pole had been waiting for them. “Santa has created a world there where elves are loved and needed and live right out in the open. At the North Pole, nobody pretends to be anything they’re not. Everyone is loved. Everyone succeeds.”

  Alton’s mother also talked a lot about success. Though her version of success was firmly planted in the human world. There, where she lived and worked, magic was only used to pass for human. Success was counted in coins and paper, and father never seemed to have enough of either.

  By the time Alton was barely in his 11th decade of life, mother left. Where she went, no one ever knew. But father said she was surely following the gleam of gold. He never went after her. Instead, his gaze was pulled north more and more often.

  By his 12th decade, Alton was clearly an adult and sure Santa was real. What else would have kept his father waiting for Christmas every year? What else would have made him seek out news of all the relatives who had gone before? What else would have driven him to make the dangerous trek himself? And leave he did: Alton's father left to search for a way to get to Santa's village.

  When Alton, too, left the only town he’d ever known, the one where people only knew him as a short stocky builder of model airplanes for movies, he told himself he was leaving in search of Santa. Surely, that man would understand his brilliance, understand that his awesome brain was better used in making real things than models. But once he arrived at the North Pole, his father was nowhere to be found. Alton didn’t search any further. Just as his father had let his mother go, Alton let go of his father.

  Santa was real. Alton was with him. But those facts did not shine any light into the darkness of his loneliness.

  Santa, for all his jovial noise and his rosy cheeks and sparkly eyes, was lonely too. Alton could see it in a way only someone else lonely could see. He thought that if he could fix that, lighten that darkness in Santa’s spirit, that it would lighten his own. But no matter what creation Alton brought, the big man never seemed to light up.

  Harnesses for the reindeer that would increase flight speed.

  A shield that blocked any radar, video, photographic or even heat-sensing equipment

  from registering the North Pole community.

  Grand new ovens for baking and high capacity twirlers

  for candy canes and taffy.

  Alton created as fast as he could.

  But he could never catch up to the L-5.

  Santa’s favorites.

  Just because they looked a little weird, talked a little different, shone a little brighter … Alton hated the special treatment they got.

  He hated their big house.

  He hated the private meetings they had with the Clauses.

  He hated the applause they got when they unveiled a new contraption.

  But mostly he hated the way they left.

  And came back.

  The rest of the elves lived forever on the ice. But the L-5, they traveled the world, using the reindeer as their own personal transportation. Only during the last rush of Christmas, when the darkness settled over the Pole, only then were the L-5 grounded and working as hard as the rest of the community.

  Alton hated that no one else seemed to notice.

  Alton was in his 13th decade when he began to get the feathery itch of a great idea. He’d been desperate for one. It had been years since he’d come up with a reindeer homing device that would always lead the team back home no matter the weather. That had been a great invention. It had even landed him a meeting with the big man himself. Mrs. Claus had announced at dinner that he was a very smart elf.

  Alton had never felt so proud.

  He wondered if somewhere his father would hear about it.

  He wondered if his father was still searching for the North Pole.

  Or had he given up long ago, taken a job on a ship or

  become landlocked once again.

  One day! Alton always thought. One day, Santa would come to Alton, sensing the darkness they both held, the loneliness, and they would become friends and Alton would be taken into the big house, where he’d sip hot cocoa in front of the fire with the Clauses as they talked of plans for the coming year.

  (Then he would be able to look into Santa’s big book and find his father. Even in the privacy of his own thoughts, Alton wouldn’t admit this was what he truly wanted. He couldn’t bear to even consider it, so great was his fear of failing.)

  There had to be an invention so grand that Santa would see Alton’s worth. An invention bigger than the Rotation Room, more dazzling than anything the L-5 could come up with.

  That day had to come.

  It was midway through his 14th decade that Alton thought he understood his shimmer of an idea. It came to him after a Christmas where high winds had shaken a batch of presents form Santa’s sleigh and the whole operation had almost been found out. Indeed, if not for Alton’s shield over the North Pole, blocking prying eyes and clever technology, the Russians would have followed the clues from presents to Pole.

  By the following Christmas, Alton had created the Sleigh Shield. Not only did it deflect any attempts to identify or track Santa and his reindeer; it also stabilized the sleigh so that no winds could tip it, no rains could drench it, no snow could freeze it. It allowed Santa to move quickly, quietly and safely through the Christmas Eve sky.

  Santa declared

  the Sleigh Shield brilliant.

  The Clauses had Alton to their home

  for dinner.

  There was chatter of the L-5 becoming the L-6. Rumors swirled like early snow. But elf rumors were about as solid as new snow on a windowsill.

  Alton finally had the respect he had so desired, but he was more alone than ever. He ate with the other elves, played all the North Pole games, but Santa never seemed to see the kindred spirit Alton knew he was. And Alton never saw the big book.

  The decades wore on and Alton grew less and less interested in inventions. He spent most of his time just keeping running the things he’d already created. Maintenance mode. Talk of the L-6 dwindled and died without Alton even noticing. He had grown used to his loneliness.

  The North Pole community still treated him like a very important elf, but he’d long ago stopped feeling like one.

  The idea of being

  Santa’s friend

  faded

  away

  (along with the plan of finding his father).

  One year, when the wizard Charvat Blair made her annual trip to see what was needed at the Pole, Alton overheard her talking of the room in which Santa kept the big book. It was a room Alton had unknowingly created decades earlier. A room that shielded the book from the elves the same way the floe was shielded from the world.

  Alton didn’t even care.

  Alton lost track of the decades. More than a few had slipped by when one night, all of Santa’s elves were hard at work. The L-5, especially were busy. It was the Christmas rush and Alton was having what he thought was a private conversation. He didn't see Elfonzo at first.

  Elfonzo was the kind of elf who showed up where folks least expected him.

  On top of the roof of Rudolph’s marzipan stable,

  between a polar bear and a seal at the edge of the ice,

  in the rafters of the great hall.

  Once he had even been found in the Great Duct of the Rotation Room right before the rotational wane began. Luckily for him, Elfong had heard him mumbling and stopped the wane before the steam that filled the Great Duct boiled Elfonzo like a Peruvian peanut.

  Wherever Elfonzo was, he always looked surprised when someone found him. Not that he was hiding, just that he got so engrossed in his project
s he forgot the rest of the world could still see him. Startled, Elfonzo would count the tools in the many pockets of his overalls, fiddling with each to make it settle just so. He always seemed to be looking at his tools. His tools or his feet. And he always seemed to be talking to himself, even when he was talking to someone else.

  As a member of the elite L-5, Elfonzo could get away with his eccentricity without being teased or yelled at. His were the brains that brought lights to the North Pole, turning it from a charming village to a winter wonderland. He strung lights from the houses, the trees, the roof tops. He lit the windows and doors and fences of every house. Green and red and gold and silver and blue and white, all the glowing colors came out at night and stayed lit for all the months of darkness, thanks to Elfonzo. He seemed to have some grand plan, some signal he was sending with all those lights, but no one could ever find the rhyme to his reason.

  This day, Elfonzo was beneath the cabinets in the carving room, spending his day in the closed room looking for ways to re-enforce the cabinet structure so that longer pieces of wood could be pushed down the assembly line.

  “I understand,” he heard someone say. It sounded like Alton.

  “Of course I can. I am the most important elf here.” It was definitely Alton.

  “You continue to —“

  Elfonzo couldn’t hear who Alton was talking to. He crawled out to ask him.

  “I don’t care what they say at Talon. What do they know? It’s summer there? They can’t possibly understand …”

  Elfonzo rounded the corner and smiled at Alton.

  Alton glared back. “Stop eavesdropping.”

  “I wasn’t,” Elfonzo said, surprised by the accusation

  “You’re always skulking around, trying to get in everyone’s business.”

  Elfonzo was confused. He didn’t even know how to skulk. Had never even tried. “I was just …”

  “Save it for the candy stripers,” Alton said with a mean smile. “What are you doing here?”

  Elfonzo looked around. “I was making the line stronger. Then I was going to check on the sleigh shield. Is it ready?’