When a magician (second class) chooses to do Christmas duty in the City of London, it's because he's hoping for a nice, quiet, seasonal time, not for ancient magic to break loose and the enchanted city to be filled with ghosts, monsters, wonder and danger. Not on his watch. Not when he's going to have to deal with it all on his own. That would be an all too magical Christmas.
An All Too Magical Christmas is a seasonal adventure story of magic, mayhem and mystery told in 24 instalments. It is written by Tobias Sturt and read aloud by Jon Millington.
Incident report YUL-XX/12
Section Twenty
Before I go on, I just want to make something clear. From here on in my story, things get a little odd. Alright, things were already a little odd. A lot odd, to be honest. I suppose what I mean is that I get a little odd. From this point on my memory gets hazy and my motives and decisions even hazier. Even crazier.
Assuming you have read this far and not just skipped ahead to the good bit, you will know that this day had not been the usual day for a duty Magician for the City of London. The usual day does not involve mouse armies and wild hunts, enchanted toy shops and goblin markets. It does not involve having your wand stolen by a goose, all your spells stop working and the city filled with wild and uncontrollable magic. You might begin to wonder whether the stress might be getting the better of me. Perhaps I was starting to crack.
I will frankly admit it had been trying. To say the least. It had been trying, bewildering, infuriating and very, very tiring. But it wasn’t that making me crazy. It was him.
Now, I’m sure by the time that this report reaches you, the Ministry of Workings will have dangled from it copious explanatory footnotes and appendices, debating this and positing that, questioning assertions and asserting questions, trawling through tradition and fossicking in folklore. They will have opinions about who or what the old magic might have plucked forth to sit down in the middle of the city that night.
But for the sake of this report, that man, the man sitting on the London Stone in the middle of the Guildhall courtyard, the huge man with the big white beard and the big hairy chest and the big toothy grin, that man: I’m just going to call him Father Christmas.
It’s the only way I can think to describe him: to make you do all the work. I want you to conjure up every wild, thrilling hope and dream you ever had about Christmas and then cram it into the image of a man.
I want you to smell the spices in the air, the sugar, the fresh oranges and the preserved ginger, the meat on his plate and the punch in his cup. I want you to see his broad face, ruddy in firelight, dancing in candlelight, twinkling in the reflected light of tinsel and gold. I want you to hear him sing, good and loud, with a laugh in it, that sets the table on a roar.
But I want you to sense how in the sweetness of cinnamon there is the sharpness of cloves. See how the shadows dance too. Hear how the laughter descends into a deep, bass merriment, enfolding and comforting, a serious happiness. How the voices join together now in a choir, wide and clear and sonorous, how, at the heart of the jollity there is a profound mystery: the high darkness of church gables in a carol service, the quiet stillness of a snowbound forest, the whisper of the northern lights over the lonely stones on a midnight island.
See the ranks of children seated at the tables bent around him leaning forward all eager and enthralled, at the centre of it: him, like a weight had been sat down on reality, bending it out of shape. Christmas, and him the Father of it all.
Sat on the London Stone.
Oh, I wish it noticed that, swept up in the glory of it all, I did not neglect my duty; for I have not yet, to my certain knowledge, to this very day, stopped being an idiot.
So there I was, standing under the trees at the end of the Guildhall square, staring at the thing I had been searching for this whole time, and suddenly realised that I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. Here I was, there it was, and in between me and it were a horde of screaming children and one very large, very overwhelming and almost certainly very magical man.
At that moment a young woman came walking into the firelight from the shadows. She was dressed in a long blue coat, embroidered all over with bright red and yellow reindeer, wolves and ravens, with a fur hat on her head from under which long braids of silvery white hair hung down her back. She walked with an odd step, a kind of rolling limp and, looking down, I realised that it was because she had one foot significantly larger than the other.
“Silence!” she called out, and despite all the hubbub and music her voice cut through all of it, clear and strong, “Silence for the pudding!”
“Peace for the pudding!” boomed Father Christmas and roared with laughter, “Pudding and presents!”
Presents. Now there was a thought. I suddenly had a very clear idea of what I wanted for Christmas.
After the silence that had followed the young woman’s announcement the table had broken out into an even more furious uproar at the mention of pudding and, especially, presents. And there was movement everywhere. Small figures came darting out of the woods about the square, their naked tails looped up over their arms like waiter’s napkins and their sharp little noses twitching. The mice! All dressed up in green and red, pointed hats and pointed shoes, for all the world like grotto elves in a store toy department. They were clearing the tables, I realised, nipping in and out between the screaming, antic children, flashing and tinkling as they snatched up plates and glasses and cutlery.
And then someone brushed past me, another mouse elf, coming in the other direction carrying a stack of bowls. Now another one with spoons, and now one with little pots of brandy butter. I looked behind me to see where they were coming from and glimpsed, through the trees, the bright light of an open doorway, with mice streaming out of it, carrying clean crockery to the tables.
Then one of the mice carrying the dirty plates came pushing past in the other direction and I followed it. I had an idea.
Inside the door was a huge scullery, full of mice scurrying to and fro, between the big sinks on one side, heaped with gleaming bubbles, and the drying racks on the other, where they were grabbing arm fulls of bowls almost as soon as they were put back there clean. And in the middle of the room, the centre of an eddy of nervous hands, a small group of mice staggered this way and that under the weight of a great gold platter on which balanced a massive Christmas pudding.
This way they staggered, and the plate tipped and the pudding began to roll and more hands shot out to steady it and so that way they lurched and the pudding tipped again and a great gasp went up as more mice dashed to grab it and…
“Need a hand?” I said, reaching in.
Which was when I discovered that the platter was indeed big and the pudding was indeed heavy and no wonder the mice had been struggling with it, but what better way was there to get myself into the middle of this party in time for presents that bringing in the pudding? So I hoisted it as high as I could and took and unsteady step forward, an agitated gaggle of mice bunching around me and getting underfoot as I staggered to the door and stumbled forward into the forest.
Which was when the pudding opened his black shiny currants of eyes and, in a voice sozzled with brandy, said;
“Ooh, this is a fun ride! Where are we going?”
An All Too Magical Christmas #20