CASE FILE 005

WRITTEN · SAME SOURCE AS CASE FILES 001–004

Subject Log

{{Q4.2 OPENING}}

It's called H.E.A.R.T. — Household Emotional Attachment Retention Trials — and until Tuesday I had never heard of it.

It was waiting for me in a plain envelope with no return address: a two-page memo, a one-page log, and three photographs clipped to the back of the log. On top was one more sheet, typed in capitals. One line.

"THEY SHOULD HAVE THEIR OWN COPIES."

The 2024 demand was typed in capitals. So is a great deal of mail. I'm noting it. I'm not concluding anything from it.

I don't know who "they" are. I have a guess. So, I'd imagine, do you.

Both documents are on North Pole letterhead. I can't authenticate North Pole letterhead. There's no registry to check it against, and the one party who could confirm it doesn't answer mail. I'll come back to that.

What I can do is tell you what's in them.

The memo is from the Office of Santa Claus. The signature is redacted. The office isn't. Most of the rest is blacked out too, and not by me. What's left reads like someone explaining a project to himself.

The premise is simple. Children name their stuffed animals, talk to them, give them birthdays and fears, and believe in them without reservation. The memo says that belief is real. That it accumulates. That it doesn't stop when the child stops. It just has nowhere to go.

The project was an attempt to give it somewhere.

The paragraph that explains why is blacked out, all of it. It's the longest redaction in the document.

He was careful about where his subjects came from — only toys already outgrown and set aside. Boxed, donated, unclaimed. "Nothing is to be taken from a child who still wants it." Whatever else this was, it wasn't theft. He was specific about that, and I believe him.

He was also specific that staff, including reindeer, were not to be informed. I have not informed the reindeer. It isn't my place.

The log is one page. Six lines.

001 through 004 came first. Three of those four are rabbits, and they are not dressed for December — pastel, sprinkles, rainbow ears. Whatever this project is, it didn't start at Christmas.

001 "arrived with an unexplained secondary organism" and "did not separate." 002 showed "no measurable response." 004 showed a "cognitive response," and according to the notes it re-sorted its shelf overnight.

003 isn't a rabbit. It's a fish, with rainbow scales, and it's the first line on the page where something moved: "Motor response observed." It was never removed. It was watched where it was, in a household, where it was "repeatedly recovered from standing water." The cause, the log says, was never determined.

Which household, the log doesn't say.

005 has no description, no source, no finding and no photograph. Every field is blacked out but one, and that one is a stamp: RESTRICTED — DO NOT DEPLOY. Every other line on the page has a picture beside it, or had one. That one never did.

I don't know what 005 is. I'm not going to guess in print.

006 is a gingerbread.

Source: redacted. Finding: "First success." Status: "Not on shelf."

I've spent four weeks calling it Cookie. Its file calls it 006.

The log ends at 006.

The memo says one more thing about 006. It says 006 "has exceeded every threshold set for this program," and that pending review it is to be regarded as — and then a redaction about one word long.

Under that there are three addenda. Each is dated. Each date is redacted.

Review postponed.

Review postponed.

Review postponed.

That's the end of the memo.

Now the photographs.

For two weeks I've refused to explain how Cookie was in a room in Arizona and a house in Colorado on the same night. I said I wouldn't invent an answer. I didn't have to. It came in the envelope.

Three gingerbreads. Same face. Same icing trim, same buttons, same paw pads. I've had the single shots for most of a week and I can't tell you which is which. I don't believe anyone could.

And none of them is the one on the tape. Go back to the close-up after the seam. The one on the tape has a loop at the top of its head. None of these do.

So it was never two of Cookie. It was Cookie — and these.

Now go back to Colorado with that in mind. Nothing gingerbread appears anywhere in the Colorado footage. Something set that camera down, pointed it at a door, and never once stepped in front of it. And a border collie who notices everything noticed nothing he thought was worth his time.

There was never only one.

I want to be honest about what that costs. Every time I've written "Cookie" about something that happened off camera — in Colorado, before the tape, after it — I assumed there was one. I can't assume that anymore. Neither can you.

And there's one thing I can't get past. The log has a single entry at 006. The photographs have three more. Either the log is incomplete, or somebody other than the person who kept it knows how this is done.

One line in the memo I keep coming back to. Item five: subjects are to be "kept on a shelf, warm and dry, and spoken to daily."

Last week you heard a recording lay out an order: a name, then a shelf, then a box. This document runs it backwards. Everything in it came out of a box. It went onto a shelf. It got a number instead of a name. And somebody spoke to it every day.

I don't know yet whether that's the opposite of what Cookie described, or the same thing done kindly. I'd like to.

Before publishing any of this, I did what I'd do for anyone named in a story. I wrote to Santa and asked for comment.

I sent it the way this family sends him everything: care of Mr. Graybill, Brad. Mr. Graybill confirmed it was forwarded. He had no further comment.

Santa did not respond.

For the record, that makes three. A tape addressed "TO: SANTA" on Christmas Eve 2024, with a demand on the end of it. An appeal the following Christmas, with item forty-seven in it. And my letter, last week. Nothing anyone has sent him about Cookie has ever been answered.

I want to be fair to him, because this file makes it easy not to be. Nothing in it was taken from a child who wanted it. Everything in it was kept warm and spoken to. He was careful about who this would cost — right up until the thing he made sent him a tape.

And he postponed the review. Three times.

So I'll put it to you the way the evidence puts it to me. He built this. He got the demand. He said nothing. I'd like to know whether you still trust him.

And there's a line in that log with nothing on it. I'd like to know what you think goes there.

Case File 005, updated.