Upon Peter’s return to the workshop, the alarms were un-rung, and the SWAT team of elves breathed a sigh of relief and un-donned their tactical apparel. There would be no rescue party to re-abduct Peter from the clutches of the Snow Witch. And so the day went on as scheduled, with Peter at the gun range, practicing his idiotic 360° no scopes under Yuzuka’s watchful eye, and learning the secret art of teabagging and flossing over the corpses of his enemies— “Peter, this is a matter of life and death. Now floss,” the elven Achilles said as she shook her hips and swung her arms to and fro.
While Peter was out and about the workshop he spied in the corner of a corridor a mouse trap. He looked at its small wooden frame and the deadly spring in the center. Its peanut butter bait was untouched. At once he remembered the cute mouse girl with her coal black hair and black cocktail dress. The thought of her adorable, petite body mangled under the snapping jaw of the trap, twisted something inside of him. He picked up the trap and carefully eased the jaws shut without it snapping into his fingers. Down the hall he spied another identical mouse trap, also empty, and deactivated it.
And then for the next few hours Peter swept up and down each room of the workshop, searching for every deadly mousetrap in the factory. He cleared every hallway of the east and west wings of the building. He crawled under the conveyor belts of the toy assembly rooms, and removed them from each stair landing. He cleared them away from the little mouse holes in the walls.
When his arms were full with a mountain of peanut butter traps, he tossed them into the nearest fireplace with an angry fwoosh! and then set out again. He found them in pantries stocked full of gingerdough, sugar, and chocolate. He found them in the laundry room, where elves all in white like surgeons folded freshly dried linens. He found them around the greenhouse, where gardener elves planted and harvested fresh pumpkins and carrots. He found them at the blacksmith’s, where elves forged katanas and crossbows for psychotic little boys and girls. And they were all incinerated. There would be no dead mice while Peter was around.
He had circled round and round the workshop until he reached the kitchen. Here, where an army of elven girls in tall paper hats diced and chopped, braised and marinated, baked and flambéd, Peter had hit the jackpot of mousetraps. They were everywhere. On the floor. On the counters. Under tables. Encompassing refrigerators. Within cabinets. It was the epicenter of a mouse holocaust. But luckily every trap he found was empty. There were no little mouse girl bodies for him to mourn. No tiny Viking funerals need be held. He was halfway through the kitchen when he heard a voice say, “Uh excuse me. Hi. Yes. What are you doing in my kitchen?”
Peter looked up at the uniformed elf before him, the double breasted jacket buttoned shut like a naval officer. Her apron battle scarred with streaks of flour and jelly. Her forehead wrinkled angrily at Peter’s disruption, but softened to a mild annoyance when she recognized him.
“Hi,” Peter said. “You’re… Yu…?”
“Chef Yuika.” She crossed her arms as if posing for an episode of Iron Chef. “Master elf in charge of cookies and sweets.”
“Aaaah! Someone ordered a sandwich and now I have to make it! This is the hardest job in the world!” A pipsqueak sized elf squeezed past Peter and Yuika. He could only make out her white hat and stainless steel tub before she disappeared into the menagerie of cooks.
“What are you doing— Where’s the chocolate sauce?! It should’ve been here ten bloody minutes ago!— What are you doing with my mousetraps?”
“These traps are old. I’m replacing them.”
“Oh. Brilliant. Lovely. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And when are the new traps arriving?” A sous chef floated by with a giant wooden spoon and without saying a word brought it to Yuika’s lips. She sampled a little and said, “More molasses,” and the chef and spoon disappeared back to the stove with a “Yes, Chef!”
“I’ll bring the new traps in as soon as I collect all the old ones.”
“Thank you. That’s very thoughtful. I’m a little busy— If that bloody chocolate sauce isn’t here in ten seconds I’m going to stop being so holly jolly, I swear on it!— but maybe if you come down here at another time I can cook something very personal for you.”
“That would be—”
“Put out that fire! Put it out! Use the extinguisher! It’s right there!”
“—nice.”
Yuika didn’t wait another second, she was off into the kitchen as white clouds of snow engulfed an oven to snuff out a raging inferno.
“The chocolate sauce! Fuck!”
And Peter resumed his quest to rid the workshop of every mousetrap, collecting great armfuls and dumping them into the trash. After much wandering and climbing and descending every flight of stairs in the North Pole, and getting his finger snapped more than once, he decided he was done, and went into the assembly line for toys. He collected things to create a new, humane mouse trap: buckets, sticks, bottles, wire coat hangers, hot glue guns. The elven girls watched him go about his business with confused looks, and there was a massive gap in skill as he worked among the metallurgist elves. They clanged and forged and cold rolled iron and silver and gold into every imaginable item from car frames to jewelry, beating sparks into the air like fireworks, while Peter hunched over on the floor with his plastic and wooden things, gluing them together, his tongue stuck out in concentration.
An elf put down her welding torch, lifted her deep-sea-diving-like mask to expose her pretty sooted and sweating face, and she said, “What’s that?”
“It’s a mousetrap.”
“It looks like a bucket with a stick.”
“Well it is.” And Peter showed her how the dowel that bridged over the bucket spun.
“And the bottle with a funnel?”
“That’s also a mousetrap.”
She pat Peter on the head and in a patronizing tone said, “At least you tried.”
Peter’s dumb human hands were not nimble enough to cobble together more than five mouse traps. No comparison at all to the fifty thousand he must have incinerated. He loaded them with bait, mostly cold cuts, and put them in random places around the workshop. Time flies when you’re building contraptions to ensnare little mouse girls, and it was well past midnight when Peter had finished. He tuned in for the night and tucked himself under the covers of his big fluffy bed in his cozy Amish bedroom, blew out some candles, laid his head back in his pillow, and closed his eyes to fall off into a dream world.
But there were no dreams to be had, because immediately he was besieged with a deluge of twinkling wind chimes and harp strings. Horrible, tranquil, fluttering, harp music! An ethereal blue light conjured from some magical bullshit realm into his room. Its cold and beautifully bizzaro glow swirled in spirographic patterns like fairies after they’ve had a few too many thimbles of fuzzy navels. A real girls-night-out, DUI, and donuts in the parking lot of fairy dust. Sensing something was amiss, Peter opened his eyes and— to his horrible Christmas surprise— found a glittering nocturnal visitor hung above his bed.
Now this sickly sweet, sugar-on-top, Disney princess knockoff was as fair as any teenage boy could hope to encounter late at night, but have you ever believed that you were all alone, only for a person to silently materialize beside you? It doesn’t matter how golden her tresses are, or how antebellum her fairy godmother hoopskirt is, or how bleach white her perfect smile is— there is no goddamn way to break and enter into someone’s bedroom in the middle of the night without giving them a heart attack! It’s impossible! So Peter caught only a glimpse of this maniacal pixie magic, happy thoughts, Glenda the Good Witch felon, before he felt the jolt of car batteries and jumper cables thunderbolting him awake. He kicked the bedsheets off and crashed open the door, screaming, “Help! Santa! Help!”
The glowing spirit was taken aback by Peter’s terrified greeting, and tried to calm him down with many hurried whispers and shushes, but he was dashing down the corridor screaming. Until suddenly Peter felt his entire body squeezed, his legs frozen as if tied together, and some invisible force yanked him back through the dark corridor and into his room, and the door slammed shut.
“Good morrow, Peter!” the spectral girl said with received pronunciation. “That’s quite a set of lungs you’ve got there!”
Her voice immediately disarmed him. No one who sounded like Mary Poppins could be dangerous. Little did he know about Shadow Poppins, the umbrella toting demon nanny who sang children to death— but that’s another story. He put his hand over his chest as if it would slow his pounding heart.
“Holy shit. Did you have to wait until all the lights were off to do that?”
“It’s more dramatic that way, don’t you think?” She twirled her finger in the air and created a cyclone of glowing, magic fairy dust.
Peter laid down on the bed as the ghost princess lounged in the air, slowly turning in zero gravity, her eyes locked on him as she giggled softly. She had the voice of a happy-go-lucky lunatic. Everywhere she drifted she was followed with glitter, bubbles, and sparkling light, like a human disco ball. Although how spirits can preform these particle effects is beyond the knowledge of this narrator.
“I don’t want to be rude but can we talk tomorrow? I almost got raped by a Snow Witch, and then I spent the rest of the day destroying mouse traps, and I’m very tired.”
“I’m sorry, Peter, but I can only appear at the stroke of one.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“Because I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“Ah, that’s why.”
“Come and take my hand. I will show you Christmases of old.”
Peter held out his hand and then quickly pulled it away. “Wait, can I get some lotto numbers before we go?”
“Now’s not the time to be thinking of money. You need to think on how you’ve spent your life celebrating Christmas. Or not celebrating.”
“Okay, but can we make it quick? I’m very tire—”
No sooner did Peter touch the Ghost of Christmas Past’s dainty hand then he was suddenly pulled into a kaleidoscopic vortex of shifting glass ornaments, fractal patterns of snowflakes, and in this endless tunnel of light and wind there was a quantum clamor of church bells.