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As he crawled into the home of the South Korean First Secretary of the Embassy to China, he felt the weakness overcome him.  The word ‘draugr’ occurred to him with no clear connection.  Having picked up the habit in his deployment to Washington, the Secretary had a Christmas tree, and Santa walked up to it and reached his hand out as though to caress the artificial needles.  His shaking arm wouldn‘t - couldn’t - stretch that far.  He fell down, and for the first time in over a millennium, he closed his eyes on the job.

While he lay on the floor, in his own subjective time, his heart slowed and then stopped.  And then, miraculously, his eyes opened again, glassy and as blank as a shark’s, fixed on a red ornament hanging from the tree.  The diplomat’s child, a young girl, was lying on the couch a few feet from the tree, where the diplomat and his wife had left her safely bundled the night before.   Santa walked over, looking at the child in her purple pajamas, jet-black hair framing an angelic face.  He opened his mouth and, bending over, greedily began to gobble.  The girl, sucked into Santa’s time-stream by his proximity, awoke, scrunched her face in pain and terror and opened her mouth to scream.  Instead, her face went slack and a thin trail of blood dribbled from her nostril down her cheek, more red then the brown stains that ringed her pajamas around Santa’s munching face.

When the flesh was cold it held no more interest for Santa.  He made his way back to his sleigh, the centuries of ingrained habit perfectly guiding him - a muscle memory beyond that of any mortal athlete.  The almost interminable night hung out before him with all the world’s different weather and peoples and towns and cities.  Another phantom memory came to him, despite his almost dormant forebrain.  It was the word ’smorgasbord.’

In Delhi he ate children while their parents slept soundly a few feet away, a microsecond passing for them in objective time.  In Moscow, he bit into a frightened blond boy who woke quickly enough to grab the icon of St. Vladimir he slept with and hold it up impotently before Santa’s teeth sank into the side of his neck.  By this time, of course, Santa was quite a mess.  His face was ineffably grimed and caked with blood and gristle, and his teeth were wearing, despite the ludicrous, conditioned attempts to brush his teeth as he had done to clean the milk and cookies of previous years.

In Johannesburg he ate the twins of an alcoholic neurologist and then visited a shantytown.  In Vienna, he paid a visit to the home of a moderately successful actress who, lacking children, had two dachshunds fitted with red bows and waiting for their presents from Father Christmas.  She had promised her little liebschens special treats the next day, holding them to her thickening flanks as surrogates for lovers or prodigy.  Santa ate the belly of one, but the other had rolled away under an armchair and was safe from his attentions while Santa tried to suck its companion’s warm guts that had been trapped in his beard.

In Edinburgh he stopped at the home of a famous chef and devoured his children, without preparation or seasoning.  Then Ireland, Iceland, the Azores, the Inuit of Greenland - and of course, there was not enough left of his mind to consider the irony of that.  Through his odyssey his reindeer were as unmolested by him as a trucker’s big rig would be, and, despite any of the magic that attended him, they were not intelligent enough to really understand the nature of the change in their master, white beard turned ruddy brown, blue eyes with a cataract-tinged pallor beyond all normalcy.

In Newfoundland, he ate the child of a taxidermist and then he stared at a moose head for quite a long while.  He stroked the antlers just once before returning to his mission.

In Chesapeake, Virginia, just minutes before in objective time, a first time father had put his child to bed and then, after a nervous second check, had gone to the bathroom.  Fattish, bearded, spectacled Billy peered into the mirror with a mixture of pride and inadequacy and wondered what a Santa he would make.  In the child’s blue room Santa shambled towards the sixth-month old infant’s crib, tripping on the gore and torn intestines that issued from the hole in his abdomen.  Lacking the digestive system of the living, pent-up gas had blown out his famed belly thousands of miles earlier, long before the mere concentration of meat he had gobbled down had an opportunity to.  Maggots had appeared in the flesh of his open stomach, eating away as though to make room for more.  He picked up the infant, who looked at him and cooed.  Santa bit into it, losing another canine, and with broken teeth and gum he ate and sucked until the flesh lost its interest for him.  Then he went west west west up and down the meridians, Ontario, Chicago, Mexico City, Santiago, Easter Island, Vancouver all opening its children to him in a great Christmas feast that could neither satisfy him nor fill him.

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