The Incomplete Olaf
A haunting tale of ice and dark magic.
It was a crisp, clear December afternoon and the last leaves of autumn were scattered on the sidewalk leading up to the public library. The air here was pleasantly still and not quite sharp enough to bite red into the cheeks of the patrons. Dappled sunlight cutting through the sparse clouds cast a dull sort of sheen over the area, making the air seem thin and sickly. The air inside the library, however, was warm and stale, filled with the spiced scent of paper and plastic and staticky carpet. Like most libraries, the dim fluorescent lights filled the space with a peculiar fragility that caused patrons, without knowing why, to speak in subdued whispers, as if afraid to wake a great beast.
In a sparse staff room in the back of the library, the fragile air turned tough and stalwart, fortified by the warm smell of coffee and the lively buzz of the refrigerator. It was here in the tiny staff room where Val crouched over a sticky vinyl table cutting misshapen circles into cardboard with a sharp box cutter. She had volunteered to make an Olaf cutout to decorate the children’s section of the library, following the success of the new Frozen movie. She was very quickly regretting it. She huffed impatiently, as the box cutter snagged on an intractable bit of cardboard, and so she tugged on it harder. The box cutter stuttered jaggedly through the tough part of the cardboard and ripped through the other side too quickly, cutting the edge of Val’s pointer finger.
“Ow, ow, ow,” she gasped, dropping the offensive tool and peering faintly at the injured finger.
She quickly moved over to the first aid kit on the wall to get a bandage for the wound and, in her haste, did not notice the small speck of red that had formed on the cardboard. Preoccupied with her injury, she did not see the way the coppery red spot turned an icy blue that glimmered and swelled before melting unfathomably into the brown cardboard. As it was, she returned to her craft project with her finger bandaged, completely unaware of the dark magic she had awoken, swirling beneath the layers of cardboard and felt, waiting to become real.
It only took Val a couple more hours to put most of the snowman’s body together, gluing white felt to cardboard and attaching the pieces to each other. Now, she was working on assembling the face into something resembling an adorable animated snowman and not a soulless abomination. It wasn’t going well. With just the eyebrows and a gaping black mouth, Olaf looked far more demonic than Val had intended. Huffing in frustration, she looked back at the reference image on her phone. Maybe adding the teeth would help. She cut out a rectangle of white felt and pasted it at the top of the snowman’s mouth.
It didn’t help. In fact, the incomplete Olaf appeared even more haunting and unnatural than it had a few seconds ago. But there was something fascinating about it at the same time. If she looked closely, Val could almost feel herself being dragged into the chasmic and all-consuming dark of the monster’s void mouth. She could sense something pulsing in that darkness, some great incomprehensible magic.
A loud crash from the library startled Val out of her trance. She got to her feet and scrambled to check on it. She hoped it wasn’t a fallen bookcase, but it certainly sounded loud enough. If someone was hurt, there would be an awful lot of paperwork. As she moved to the door of the staff room, there was a rustling behind her and a curious flash of white. But, too worried about the crash, she did not turn around as she exited the staff room. The empty staff room settled into the eerily fragile silence of a place waiting for its living things to return. It could happen any moment now, even though they had only just left, for living things are terribly hard to predict. Especially those infused with such dark magic.
When Val emerged into the library, something was very wrong. The air was paper thin and silent, and the lights were all off. Outside, though she could swear it was only 3 pm, the sky was pitch black and roiling with thunderclouds. There was no one in the library, in fact someone must have closed up. Perhaps, for the storm? Why didn’t anyone warn her? It was very strange, and a pit of fear formed in Val’s stomach. She flicked on the flashlight from her phone and walked through the library looking for the source of the sound.
As she walked through the aisles of books, shining the harsh white light down the rows and looking for shelves out of place, she noticed the air becoming even more thin and icy. She let out a shaky breath and the steam of it sparkled and refracted in the harsh light. She moved towards the back wall to check the thermostat, but found it frozen, embedded in ice so thick that she could not even see the screen.
There was a flash of white in the corner of her eye and the feeling of cold breath on the back of her neck. The air moved strangely past her ear, a whisper that almost sounded like an unearthly voice. It sounded as if it could have said something like “I like warm hugs,” but the sound of it was buried under so much buzzing static that Val clutched her hands to her ears in pain. Suddenly, it was gone, replaced instead with a painful silence, a hollowness that pervaded the space where the beast had been only seconds before.
Hesitantly, Val lowered her hands from her ears and turned around. The library was dark and empty, the frigid air still fragile but intact. Slowly, she made her way back to the staff room. She would finish her cardboard Olaf and then go home. There were only a few more things to do with it anyway.
When Val entered the small staff room, the air was fearful and quivering. The pleasant buzzing from the fridge was replaced with a pulsing silence. On the sticky vinyl table, the incomplete Olaf waited for her expectantly, pretty much exactly as she left him. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders and sat back down at the table to make some eyes out of the white and black felt. For some unknown reason, she did not glance once at the incomplete Olaf while she made these eyes. But she could see him in the corner of her eye, his soulless, gaping mouth twisted strangely into a smirk.
She focused on finishing the eyes and then attaching them to the snowman just above his smirking void mouth. Only then did she really look at him, his eyes were as black as his mouth and just as soulless and unseeing. She shuddered. Perhaps this was good enough for now. She would go home and put the finishing touches on it in the morning. As she moved toward the door, some ineffable instinct possessed her to grab the orange box cutter. She could hear movement in the library, but she could not bring herself to turn and look at the table where the incomplete Olaf surely waited. It was just cardboard.
In the library, Val rushed towards the door, the box cutter held tight in two white-knuckled hands. But, when she got to the sliding doors at the front, nothing happened. She huffed in fear and frustration, briefly transfixed by the plume of steam that rose in front of her as her breath met the frigid air. A power outage would explain this dreadful cold, she thought. With the box cutter still held out in front of her, she made her way to the emergency exit and removed one hand from her weapon to yank the door open. Except, it would not budge. She looked closely at the door and found that the latch mechanism was completely frozen over and the ice was spreading out to encompass the handle, and then the door itself was encased in it.
There was an awful rustling behind her, and she whipped around with the box cutter slashing through the air. For a moment, there was nothing but the silent library. Then, he was there, standing a few feet away, bathed in the darkness pouring from his own demonic mouth. And that overwhelming static sound was back. It didn’t seem to come from the beast himself, but rather from the walls of the library. It echoed and buzzed around Val’s head like a swarm of enraged flies and, even as she shut her eyes in pain, they spoke in one voice.
“I like warm hugs” they hissed and the pain of it was unbearable; the words themselves tried to burrow into her brain.
As the incomplete Olaf glided toward her, Val opened her eyes and froze in fear. The beast was moving swiftly, as if eager to consume his prey. His gaping mouth came ever closer and closer to her until, suddenly, it stopped. Val looked down to see that her quivering hands were still wrapped around the box cutter and the box cutter was embedded in Olaf’s face, protruding out like a great big carrot nose. In panic, Val released the box cutter and Olaf stumbled back, the dark receding back into him. There was an awful swelling of the static, and Val fell to the ground in pain.
“I’ve been impaled,” the looming walls buzzed and echoed incessantly.
Then, it was over; the terrible buzzing dissipated and was replaced by the library’s normal fragile silence. The icy air was suddenly warm and filled with the scent of paper, which was now perhaps slightly damp. Val stood slowly on trembling legs and moved carefully over to where the beast fell. But he was gone. Slightly panicked, Val ran into the staff room only to find the cardboard Olaf complete and sitting on the sticky vinyl table. Where he had previously been impaled, there was now a knobby, orange felt nose. She could not remember making that or attaching it. And, distressingly, the orange box cutter was missing. Feeling the warmth and light return to the room, however, she decided that was a problem for another day. And so, she exited the library through the sliding doors and left Olaf in that small staff room. There, he pulsed with barely contained dark magic, now forever trapped behind a carrot nose.
*The character of Olaf belongs, of course, to Disney.
**All photos of the Olaf cutout were provided, with permission, by Valerie Werner, who made him. These events may or may not be true.
© Sav Miller 2019
