Chapter 57 – In Which the Holy Spirit Pushes Peter’s Shit In & Demands the Surrender of Christmas

Peter whistled to himself, trotting down a flight of stairs and smiling at each pretty elf who strut by. The golden haired girls chirped good morning, waved hello, smiled, and one of them even spanked him as she walked past. All in all, it was shaping up to be another perfect day in the North Pole— if you forgot about all that apocalypse business looming over everything. But nothing sweeps the end of the world to the back of the mind quite like Christmas. Economic collapse? Nuclear war? The dead walking the face of the Earth? Can’t you see I’ve got string lights to put on the roof?

He cut through the gift factory, busier than ever in the final crunch before Christmas, with electronics sweeping down conveyor belts in double time. And like Marty McFly, he yoinked a banana board and even hitched a ride off a passing forklift. The forklift certified elf scolded him— “That’s dangerous!”— and swatted at his hand until he skated off to the next room. But this didn’t dampen his mood. No, the mood dampener was soon to come, and it would be so damp— balls deep in dampness, it would be like Peter’s mood was clinched by the throat and held underwater.

A commotion came from the drawing room. Ordinarily nothing went on here except maybe a few elves would lounge on a sofa during their break, puffing away at pipes and inhaling the fragrance of Christmas. Or sometimes an elf would shuffle the ornaments on the tree to her liking, which would then be shuffled by another elf a few hours later, and so on, in a passive-aggressive decorating frenzy that went on all month long. But for whatever reason a mass of long-legged nymphettes had piled into the room and surrounded something mysterious, and each passing moment more and more of them gravitated towards the curiosity. Peter pushed his way through the crowd while listening to their comments— “What is it?” “How ugly!” “Is it a doll house?” “Who would play with such an awful toy?”

What Peter found in the middle of the drawing room was a nativity scene, a crusty scale replica of a Bethlehem manger, with the robed figures of Joseph and Mary frozen in adoration of an empty crib. The three magi, Caspar, Balthazar, and Melchior, like Moorish wizards, bore their strange gifts of incense and gold in hand. Cows and lambs, prone and docile, with their creepy, misshapen faces upturned toward a winged angel hung on the ceiling.

“It’s a nativity scene,” Peter said. “It’s a common Christmas decoration.”

“I’ve never seen this kind of decoration before!” an elf said.

“That’s because it’s Christian.”

The crowd gasped. A shocked, “No!” cried out. A few prayers to Odin were muttered.

“What’s that thing?” An elf pointed at the angelic figure.

Peter picked it up and looked it over as if there might be a message written on its back.

“This is the Holy Spirit. He’s here to announce that Jesus is born.”

“Jesus?! I hate that guy!” an elf hissed.

“And where’s Jesus?”

“You don’t put him in the crib until Christmas. He should be around here somewhere.” Peter searched behind the manger for the carving of baby Jesus, but that little slippery bastard would not be found that day. The search was cut short when the candles were snuffed by a phantom breath. The room fell in and out of darkness like a dying heartbeat. Horrified elves cried out and clung trembling to their nearest friend as blindness hiccuped over their crystalline eyes. The fireplace, merry and bright, spewed spectral black flames that offered no warmth nor light.

An ominous miasma of midnight mass filled the room, as if the dreaded Christians had come with carols of death.

“Peter look!”

A cute elf, pale with terror, pointed a fearful finger to his wrist, and when he looked down he saw a loose thread from his sleeve had come to life. His sweater unraveled as if the yarn were one endless spaghetti noodle, slurped away by an invisible force. Second by second, yard by yard, Peter’s sleeve unseamed itself to nothing. The elves parted way and beheld the magically disappearing sweater as it reeled out the door and away into the workshop. Peter watched with wide wonderment as sweater turned to crop top turned to a single sleeve, then to wholly unspooled, until Peter stood sweaterless, thinking he would miss his cableknit friend.

Invisible hands seized Peter’s feet and flipped him onto the ground. He was about to pick himself back up when he launched like a roller coaster through the crowd of elves, too fast and sudden to enjoy a single upskirt. Gravity turned sideways. It wasn’t that he was being pulled— he was falling— falling as if the whole building had turned sideways— his body canon balling off door jambs as he slid away into the toy factory. And all the elves just stood around dumbfounded. Hands reaching out to grab onto something— anything, he took hold of a conveyor belt stilt and stopped himself. But it was not easy! He gripped with all the might in his skinny teenage arms.His body defied gravity and levitated sideways.

“Help!” he shouted.

Then he felt it again— invisible hands gripping at his ankles and calves and tugging him.

“Help! Someone help! Holy shit!”

The crowd of elves ran out into the factory but by then Peter’s fingers had been pried free and he was dragged across the floor, rolling onto his stomach and then his back. A forklift puttered across the room before him, its industrial rubber wheels no less dangerous in their crushing power than a steamroller. He flipped onto his stomach and slammed his hands down on the floor to try and get some grip, to throw himself out of the forklift’s path. An elf dropped a tray of cookies and nose dived at Peter, knocking him away from the forklift. They tumbled together but then were ripped apart. In the logistics bay a group of elves saw Peter flying towards them, but were unable to dodge, and Peter plowed into their legs as if they were a bunch of sexy bowling pins.

Yuzuka grabbed an oldM1 Garand and tossed it to Peter. He caught it, and the firearm was just long enough to catch him from falling through a final doorway. Below him the icy wilderness of the North Pole stretched out forever. He gripped onto the rifle for dear life. A tsunami of elves ran to his rescue.

“Someone close the door!” Peter shouted. “Close the door!”

But all was in vain! The wooden rifle snapped in half, and he tumbled out into the snow, and that was when Peter’s afterburners kicked on. At a hundred miles an hour he rocketed out into the darkness, out over crevasses and ice and towards mountainous glaciers. And right when he thought he would splatter against those towers of ice, he careened into the air, and flew higher and higher, through clouds, and through the aurora itself. The reindeer dashed out of the stables and took off to the sky, they raced after him at mach reindeer speeds, but by the time they reached the glaciers, they could follow no further, for Peter had pierced the heavens, ruptured the atmosphere’s hymen, and tore through the Earth’s gravity into space.

“Space!” he shouted.

Through the inky darkness, without a spacesuit, without a way of breathing, Peter tumbled from the Earth until that planet of swirling clouds and oceans fell away to a pinprick of blue. Faster and faster Peter flew— ripping through the solar system. Pluto bid a toodle-loo, and then he smacked into the golden hunk of garbage that was Voyager 1. The milky way itself, that great spiraling cloud of our cosmos, twirled away. Peter had left everything behind. All the pretty girls in the entire world, mortal and immortal, were lost to him. His heart knocked against his ribs in bloodcurdling existential terror.

I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. Shouldn’t he be dead? Frozen solid? Blood boiling in the vacuum of space? Lungs exploded? Like that ginger dork Arnold from that traumatic episode of The Magic School Bus? Oh, if only I could reach my intangible narrator hand from these pages and slap you in the mouth! I would! This is where you draw the line? You were onboard for the sexy kudere Santa Claus girlfriend, the mice girls with the magic shrinking glitter, the shape shifting reindeer satyrs, the Biblically accurate angels, the gingerbread man holocaust, the colossus penguin, but now you’re going to cross your arms, pout, and complain about scientific accuracy? This is the problem with readers nowadays. Can’t even suspend your disbelief for a story about Santa Claus stopping the Christmas Apocalypse. Shame on you. For shame!

And then everything was calm. In zero gravity he hung suspended, adrift and alone in the vacuum of the universe, hyperventilating— as one often does when hurled to the remotest corners of existence without so much as a snorkel. Here was the domain of the theoretical, every unobservable thing which must exist to hold the fabric of reality together. Einstein-Rosen bridges, quantum thingamabobs, dark matter, supermassive rigmaroles, to name but a few. A nebula painted the dawn of genesis before him, like an ethereal cloud of stars and space dust. And like clouds, with their ever-shifting Rorschachian patterns resembling pretty horses, white elephants, and colossal can-can dancers, the nebula too, whenviewed a certain way, took on a familiar shape— a shape far less cuddly and friendly than our idle imaginations normally conjure.

A celestial light pulsed like a heartbeat upon an event horizon. From the endless death of infinity breathed life— a life too tremendous and powerful to imagine. This dark formation twisted up from the cosmos, like a massive figure rising from a galactic ocean of quasars and solar systems. This nebulous Giga Chad, glittering and terrible as the night, larger than our entire Milky Way, turned to face Peter. But there would be no square chin, no smug smile, no perfectly symmetrical God-like face for Peter to behold. For no head rested upon its intergalactic shoulders. Yet this decapitated elder God still turned towards him, turned and revealed that within its cavernous neck stump laid a great blue eye, its barren pupil wreathed in eternity. Each insignificant crypt of its iris housed entire galaxies, with all the unfathomable swirling orbits of celestial bodies as mere as atoms. The Holy Spirit had come.

“PETER. SURRENDER OR PERISH.”

“I surrender!” Peter threw his hands up. “I surrender!”

“DO YOU THINK THIS IS A GAME?”

“No! Not at all!”

“DO YOU LIKE DEATH?”

“No! I hate dying! Dying’s the worst!”

“YOU THINK YOU CAN DEFEAT ME WITH RIFLES AND BULLETS?”

“Honestly, no. I told the elves it was ridiculous but they don’t listen to me!”

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“YOU WILL RETURN TO THE NORTH POLE, AND YOU WILL TELL SANTA CLAUS TO SURRENDER BEFORE CHRISTMAS EVE.”

“Okay! Sounds good!”

“IF YOU DO NOT CONVINCE HER TO SURRENDER TO THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, THE CHRISTMAS APOCALYPSE WILL COMMENCE. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.”

“Final warning. Got it!”

“PETER. YOU ARE SO INCREDIBLY SMALL, AND PATHETIC, AND WEAK.”

Peter felt that comment was uncalled for.

“Okay…?”

“REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU DOUBT MY MERCY!”

The headless trinity reached across the universe, a hand glowing with the charged energies of the big bang rushed towards Peter, curled up, and then flicked him like a ladybug off a shirt. Screaming like a roller coaster connoisseur, Peter shot through the intergalactic abyss at velocities no speedometer, no spectrometer, nor any spirometer could measure, his mortal flesh protected by the divine mercy of the Holy Spirit. He body slammed the Voyager-1 into glitter, tumbled back to the Milky Way, back to our solar system, and back to Earth. Fire ignited as Peter plunged through the atmosphere, belly flopped through the aurora, and rushed towards the snowy icelands of the North Pole. Death welcomed Peter with morbid visions of skydiving fuckups— bone crushing, organ splattering LiveLeak gore. In seconds he would surely resemble a drop-kicked cherry pie. His tombstone would read ‘Here lies Peter. He saw, he simped, he got ghosted.’