Santa Claus (p. 4)

The North Pole compound following the blaze had obviously become a vast departure from the young Santos Nikklos' original dream. Santos increased his already reclusive habits, practically becoming a hermit. Secluded in his house, he suffered from chronic obsessive paranoia, fueling his delusions with a combination of ouzo and prescription drugs. His psychopathic needs were tended to by the faithful Klaus, now his sole aide and fraud "santa." Although he had ties to a number of supremacist factions, Klaus was named Chief of Operations for Santas Workshop and North Pole Inc. The position was nearly meaningless. North Pole Inc. had ceased its distribution operations, having lost its Mattell contract after the fire. It had immediately become obvious that the few straggling laborers that Klaus scrounged up would be unable to fulfill Mattell's remaining negligible production orders. Not only that, but the toy industry had found that labor and distribution from Chinese dissident camps was more cost-effective than that provided by psychotic slave elves deep in the Arctic.

With no North Pole assets to speak of, Santos tried to postpone the inevitable. His "money-saving downsizing" efforts continued, first with his refusal to deliver toys to any region he deemed a high-crime neighborhood, or as having a depressed economy, using these phrases to describe all urban areas. While avoiding places with a poorer population, he also avoided upscale dwellings, claiming problems with security measures these families might have installed.

Census reports from 1980 show that only one in thirty thousand households worldwide were visited by Santos that year. And after the massacre in 1982, that number dropped substantially.

Even if one's house remained on his list, his paranoid insanity had resulted in his taking measures to prevent being seen. The famous gilded red sleigh which once delighted so many children was painted with a light- and radar-absorbent black stealth coating, and the war toys research had yielded a small stockpile of new high-tech "smart" presents which he could fire down chimneys, targeting one's tree without even stopping on the roof of the house.

Even as it was severely curtailed, nobody is really certain why Santos continued his Giveaway program at all. North Pole LLC was effectively shut down, and at this point the only rationale for his promotional program was simple obsession. During bankrupcy proceedings in 1983, Santos named Klaus the President of Santas Workshop, mainly to make the toady stooge deal with the paperwork involved in dissolving the company while Santos himself hid safely away in his house.

The visionary Flying White reindeer ranch suffered a similar fate. Most of the reindeer had been set free during the Silent Night bloodbath, to fly in seldom-seen groups in the wild. The remaining animals didn't fare so well. Purina had stopped manufacturing Reindeer Chow, and to pay off the overdue bill, Purina's attorneys forced Santos to sell all but five of his reindeer to zoos and laboratories. The remaining five animals were kept together in the compound, but incidents of neglect and abuse by some of the compound's trustees became known to a number of animal rights organizations. A resulting legal action by the World Wildlife Fund eventually closed the ranch for good. Klaus, as Santos' delegate, supposedly negotiated a deal in 1985 to keep these five animals from being destroyed, trading them to Anheuser-Busch in exchange for a pair of aging Clydesdales. Under strict ASPCA supervision, these horses could have enabled Santos to perform extremely limited — and earthbound — Christmas duties for another few years. But Santos, hidden away in his house, never used the Clydesdales. It's unknown if he ever saw them at all.

The North Pole is long abandoned. Somewhere in this snowy expanse, if you know where to look, is a long, low line of rocks — the ruins of an immense stone wall. In the distance of this vast icy landscape, harsh winter winds blow through a few pieces of broken wood jutting up from the permafrost. These ruins are the only remains of the North Pole compound. They are what's left of Santos' dilapidated house and one empty reindeer stable, the last structures to fall to ruin, piece by piece disappearing into the relentless wind. Scorched bits of rubble that mark the locations where the toy factory and other stables were burned down are no longer visible, covered over by years of light, blowing snow. The elf barracks, never sturdy in their construction, were long ago blown away by the howling wind. The entire area is an empty and desolate Arctic plain.

No Flying White reindeer has been seen in decades. Anheuser-Busch denies ever owning or quartering any reindeer, and zoologists, knowing the infirmity of these animals, have calculated the odds of their survival in the wild against the conditions at the Pole. The Aeroblanc species of caribou is presumed extinct.

Klaus, Santos' henchman, went into hiding for years, living under assumed names in Eastern Europe and sheltered by a variety of revolutionary extremist factions. Hunted by numerous law-enforcement entities, he was finally captured in Cypress by agents of the Israeli Mossad, and sent to detainment and interrogation at an undisclosed location. To put it simply, his whereabouts remain unknown.

Santos Nikklos grew completely irrational, despising everything pertaining to elves, toys, and Christmas. For two years after the Silent Night slaughter that was the catalyst for the end, he would emerge to make a token effort, staggering drunkenly through the season. He had become an unkempt wreck and lost most of his mind. Out of the quintet of neglected, underfed reindeer, he would hitch his flat-black sleigh to the strongest remaining pair, and make a brief, wandering pass over a few hundred houses, firing off "smart" presents of pre-packaged underwear and store-bought fruitcakes.

By 1986, the reindeer were gone, and he missed his annual journey altogether. He would never make his Christmas rounds again. He spent most of his time in an ouzo-fueled catatonia during the end of that year and throughout 1987. The reindeer stables and the toy factory were gone. His childhood dream and family fortune had disappeared. And his mind was completely removed from reality.

Early in January of 1988, after missing his second Christmas journey, he walked out of the ruins of his house with the same gun that he and Klaus had used to kill so many elves, and shot himself in the head.

Santos was found in his ubiquitous red suit, on a hill behind the last remaining stable, with a note reading, in part, that he was "...waiting for the reindeer to come home."