NOS4A2 A Novel

TRIUMPH

ONE ETERNAL CHRISTMAS EVE





Christmasland


THE WRAITH LED HER DOWN THE MAIN BOULEVARD, GUMDROP Avenue. As the car eased along, Charlie Manx bopped on the horn, three times and then three times again: da-da-da, da-da-da, the unmistakable opening bars of “Jingle Bells.”

Vic followed, shivering uncontrollably now in the cold, struggling to keep her teeth from banging together. When the breeze rose, it sliced through her shirt as if she wore nothing at all, and fine grains of snow cut across her skin like flecks of broken glass.

The tires felt unsteady on the snow-slick cobbles. Gumdrop Avenue appeared dark and deserted, a road through the center of an abandoned nineteenth-century village: old iron lampposts, narrow buildings with gabled roofs and dark dormer windows, recessed doorways.

Except as the Wraith rolled along, the gaslights sprang to life, blue flames sparking in their frost-rimed casements. Oil lamps lit themselves in the windows of the shops, illuminating elaborate displays. Vic rumbled past a candy store called Le Chocolatier, its front window showing off chocolate sleighs and chocolate reindeer and a large chocolate fly and a chocolate baby with the chocolate head of a goat. She passed a shop called Punch & Judy’s, wooden puppets dangling in the window. A girl in a blue Bo-Peep outfit held her wooden hands to her face, her mouth open in a perfect circle of surprise. A boy in Jack-Be-Nimble short pants held an ax smeared luridly with blood. At his feet were a collection of severed wooden heads and arms.

Looming behind and beyond this little town market were the attractions, as lifeless and dark as the main street had been when they entered. She spied the Sleighcoaster, towering in the night like the skeleton of some colossal prehistoric creature. She saw the great black ring of the Ferris wheel. And behind it all rose the mountain face, a nearly vertical sheet of rock frosted in a few thousand tons of snow.

Yet it was the vast expanse above that grabbed and held Vic’s attention. A raft of silver clouds filled fully half the night sky, and gentle, fat flakes of snow drifted lazily down. The rest of the sky was open, a harbor of darkness and stars, and hanging pendant in the center of it all . . .

A giant silver crescent moon, with a face.

It had a crooked mouth and a bent nose and an eye as large as Topeka. The moon drowsed, that enormous eye closed to the night. His blue lips quivered, and he issued a snore as loud as a 747 taking off; his exhalation caused the clouds themselves to shudder. In profile the moon over Christmasland looked very much like Charlie Manx himself.

Vic had been mad for many years but in all that time had never dreamed or seen anything like it. If there had been anything in the road, she would’ve hit it; it took close to ten full seconds to prise her gaze free from it.

What finally caused her to look down was a flicker of motion at the periphery of her vision.

It was a child, standing in a shadowed alley between the Olde Tyme Clock Shoppe and Mr. Manx’s Mulled-Cider Shed. The clocks sprang to life as the Wraith passed them, clicking and ticking and tocking and chiming. A moment later a gleaming copper contraption sitting in the window of the Cider Shed began to huff, chuff, and steam.

The child wore a mangy fur coat and had long, unkempt hair, which seemed to indicate femininity, although Vic could not be entirely sure of gender. She—it—had bony fingers tipped with long, yellow fingernails. Its features were smooth and white, with a fine black tracery under the skin, so that its face resembled a crazed enamel mask, devoid of all expression. The child—the thing—watched her pass by, without a word. Its eyes flashed red, as a fox’s will, when reflecting the glow of passing headlights.

Vic twisted her head to peer back over her shoulder, wanting another look, and saw three other children emerging out of the alley behind her. One appeared to be holding a scythe; two of them were barefoot. Barefoot in the snow.

This is bad, she thought. You’re already surrounded.

She faced forward again and saw a rotary directly ahead, which circled the biggest Christmas tree she had ever seen in her life. It had to be well over one hundred twenty feet tall; the base of the trunk was as thick as a small cottage.

Two other roads angled off the great central rotary, while the remaining portion of the circle was lined by a hip-high stone wall that overlooked . . . nothing. It was as if the world ended there, dropping away into endless night. Vic had a good look as she followed the Wraith partway around the circle. The surface of the wall glittered with fresh snow. Beyond was an oil slick of darkness, coagulated with stars: stars rolling in frozen streams and impressionistic swirls. It was a thousand times more vivid, but every bit as false, as any sky Vic had ever drawn in her Search Engine books. The world did end there: She was looking out at the cold, fathomless limits of Charlie Manx’s imagination.

Without any warning, the great Christmas tree lit all at once, and a thousand electric candles illuminated the children gathered around it.

A few sat in the lowest branches, but most—perhaps as many as thirty—stood beneath the boughs, in nightdresses and furs and ball gowns fifty years out of date and Davy Crockett hats and overalls and policeman uniforms. At first glance they all seemed to be wearing delicate masks of white glass, mouths fixed in dimpled smiles, lips too full and too red. Upon closer inspection the masks resolved into faces. The hairline cracks in these faces were veins, showing through translucent skin; the unnatural smiles displayed mouths filled with tiny, pointed teeth. They reminded Vic of antique china dolls. Manx’s children were not children at all but cold dolls with teeth.

One boy sat in a branch and held a serrated bowie knife as long as his forearm.

One little girl dangled a chain with a hook on it.

A third child—boy or girl, Vic could not tell—wielded a meat cleaver and wore a necklace of bloodied thumbs and fingers.

Vic was now close enough to see the ornaments that decorated the tree. The sight forced the air out of her in hard, shocked breath. Heads: leather-skinned, blackened but not spoiled, preserved partially by the cold. Each face had holes where the eyes had once been. Mouths dangled open in silent cries. One decapitated head—a thin-faced man with a blond goatee—wore green-tinted glasses with heart-shaped, rhinestone-studded frames. They were the only adult faces in sight.

The Wraith turned at an angle and stopped, blocking the road. Vic dropped the Triumph into first gear, squeezed the brake, and came to a halt herself, thirty feet away from it.

Children began to spread out from beneath the tree, most of them drifting toward the Wraith but some circling behind her, forming a human barricade. Or inhuman barricade, as the case might be.

“Let him go, Manx!” Vic shouted. It took all her will to keep her legs steady, shaken as she was from a mixture of cold and fear. The sharp chill of the night stung her nostrils, burned her eyes. There was no safe place to look. The tree was hung with every other grown-up unfortunate enough to find his or her way to Christmasland. Surrounding her were Manx’s lifeless dolls with their lifeless eyes and lifeless smiles.

The door of the Wraith opened and Charlie Manx stepped out.

He set a hat on his head as he rose to his full height—Maggie’s fedora, Vic saw. He adjusted the brim, cocked it just so. Manx was younger than Vic herself now, and almost handsome, with his high cheekbones and sharp chin. He was still missing a piece of his left ear, but the scar tissue was pink and shiny and smooth. His upper teeth protruded, sticking into his lower lip, which gave him a characteristically daffy, dim-witted look. In one hand he held the silver hammer, and he swung it lazily back and forth, the pendulum of a clock ticking away moments in a place where time did not matter.

The moon snored. The ground shook.

He smiled at Vic and doffed Maggie’s hat in salute to her but then turned to look upon the children, who came toward him from beneath the branches of their impossible tree. The long tails of his coat swirled around him.

“Hello little ones,” he said. “I have missed you and missed you! Let’s have some light so I can look at you.”

He reached up with his free hand and pulled an imaginary cord dangling in the air.

The Sleighcoaster lit up, a tangled thread of blue lights. The Ferris wheel blazed. Somewhere nearby a merry-go-round began to turn, and music rang out from invisible speakers. Eartha Kitt sang in her dirty-sweet, naughty-nice voice, telling Santa what a good girl she had been in a tone that suggested otherwise.

In the bright carnival lights, Vic could see that the children’s clothes were stained with dirt and blood. Vic saw one little girl hurrying toward Charlie Manx with open arms. There were bloody handprints on the front of her tattered white nightgown. She reached Charlie Manx and put her arms around his leg. He cupped the back of her head, squeezed her against him.

“Oh, little Lorrie,” Manx said to her. Another, slightly taller girl, with long, straight hair that came to the backs of her knees, ran up and embraced Manx from the other side. “My sweet Millie,” he said. The taller girl wore the red-and-blue uniform of a Nutcracker, with crossed bandoliers over her thin chest. The girl had a knife stuck into her gold belt, its bare blade as polished and shiny as a mountain lake.

Charlie Manx straightened up but kept his arms around his girls. He turned to look at Vic, his face tight, shining with something that might’ve been pride.

“Everything I have done, Victoria, I have done for my children,” Charlie said. “This place is beyond sadness, beyond guilt. It’s Christmas every day here, forever and ever. Every day is cocoa and presents. Behold what I’ve given my two daughters—the flesh of my flesh and the blood of my blood!—and all these other happy, perfect children! Can you really give your son better? Have you ever?”

“She’s pretty,” said a boy behind Vic, a small boy with a small voice. “She’s as pretty as my mother.”

“I wonder how she’ll look without her nose,” said another boy, and he laughed breathlessly.

“What can you give Wayne besides unhappiness, Victoria?” Charlie Manx asked. “Can you give him his own stars, his own moon, a rollercoaster that rebuilds itself every day in new hoops and loops, a chocolate shop that never runs out of chocolates? Friends and games and fun and freedom from sickness, freedom from death?”

“I didn’t come to bargain, Charlie!” Vic yelled again. It was hard to keep her gaze fixed on him. She kept glancing from side to side and fighting the urge to look over her shoulder. She sensed the children creeping in around her, with their chains and hatchets and knives and necklaces of severed thumbs. “I came to kill you. If you don’t give my boy back to me, all this will have to go. You and your children and this whole half-wit fantasy. Last chance.”

“She’s the prettiest girl ever,” said the little boy with the little voice. “She has pretty eyes. Her eyes are like my mom’s eyes.”

“Okay,” said the other boy. “You can have her eyes, and I’ll get her nose.”

From off in the dark under the trees came a crazed, hysterical, singing voice:

In Christmasland we’ll build a Snowgirl!

And make believe that she’s a silly clown!

We’ll have lots of fun with Missus Snowgirl

Until the other kiddies cut her down!

The little boy tittered.

The other children were silent. Vic had never heard a more terrible silence.

Manx put his pinkie to his lips: a fey gesture of consideration. Then he lowered his hand.

“Don’t you think,” he said, “we should ask Wayne what he wants?” He bent and whispered to the taller of his two girls.

The girl in the Nutcracker uniform—Millie, Vic thought—walked barefoot to the rear of the Wraith.

Vic heard scuffling to her left, snapped her head around, and saw a child, not two yards away. It was a plump little girl in a matted white fur coat, open to show she wore nothing beneath except a filthy pair of Wonder Woman panties. When Vic looked at her, she went perfectly still, as if they were playing some demented game of Red Light, Green Light. She clutched a hatchet. Through her open mouth, Vic saw a socket filled with teeth. Vic believed she could discern three distinct rows of them, going back down her throat.

Vic looked back at the car, as Millie reached for the door and opened it.

For a moment nothing happened. The open door yawned with luxuriant darkness.

She saw Wayne grip the edge of the door with one bare hand, saw him put his feet out. Then he slid down from the seat and out onto the cobblestones.

He was gape-mouthed with wonder, looking up at the lights, at the night. He was clean and beautiful, his dark hair swept back from his terribly white brow and his red mouth opened in an amazed grin—

And she saw his teeth, blades of bone in sharp, delicate rows. Just like all the others.

“Wayne,” she said. Her voice was a strangled sob.

He turned his head and looked at her with pleasure and amazement.

“Mom!” he said. “Hey! Hey, Mom, isn’t it incredible? It’s real! It’s really real!”

He looked over the stone wall, into the sky, at the great low moon with its sleeping silver face. He saw the moon and laughed. Vic could not remember the last time he had laughed so freely, so easily.

“Mom! The moon has a face!”

“Come here, Wayne. Right now. Come to me. We have to go.”

He looked at her, a dimple of confusion appearing between his dark eyebrows.

“Why?” he said. “We just got here.”

From behind him Millie put an arm around Wayne’s waist, spooning against his back like a lover. He twitched, looking around in surprise, but then went still as Millie whispered in his ear. She was terribly beautiful, with her high cheekbones and full lips and sunken temples. He listened intently, eyes wide—then his mouth widened to show even more of his bristling teeth.

“Oh! Oh, you’re kidding!” He looked at Vic in astonishment. “She says we can’t go! We can’t go anywhere because I have to unwrap my Christmas present!”

The girl leaned in and began to whisper fervently into Wayne’s ear.

“Get away from her, Wayne,” Vic said.

The fat girl in the fur coat shuffled a few steps closer, was almost close enough to plunge the hatchet into Vic’s leg. Vic heard other steps behind her, the kids moving in.

Wayne gave the girl a puzzled, sidelong look and frowned to himself, then said, “Sure you can help unwrap my present! Everyone can help! Where is it? Let’s go get it, and you can tear into it right now!”

The girl drew her knife and pointed it at Vic.





Beneath the Great Tree


WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY, VICTORIA?” MANX ASKED. “LAST CHANCE? I think this is your last chance. I would turn that bike around while you still can.”

“Wayne,” she called, ignoring Manx and meeting her son’s gaze directly. “Hey, are you still thinking in reverse like your grammy told you? Tell me you’re still thinking in reverse.”

He stared at her, blankly, as if she had asked him a question in a foreign language. His mouth hung partly open. Then, slowly, he said, “.Mom ,hard it’s but ,trying I’m”

Manx was smiling, but his upper lip drew back to show those crooked teeth of his, and Vic thought she saw the flicker of something like irritation pass across his gaunt features. “What is this tomfoolery? Are you playing games, Wayne? Because I am all for games—just so long as I am not left out. What was that you just said?”

“Nothing!” Wayne said—in a tone of voice that suggested he genuinely meant it, was as confused as Manx. “Why? What did it sound like I said?”

“He said he’s mine, Manx,” Vic said. “He said you can’t have him.”

“But I already have him, Victoria,” Manx said. “I have him, and I am not letting him go.”

Vic slipped the backpack off her shoulder and into her lap. She unzipped the bag, plunged a hand in, and lifted out one of the tight plastic sacks of ANFO.

“So help me if you do not let him go, then Christmas is over for every f*cking one of you. I’ll blow this whole place right off this ledge.”

Manx thumbed the fedora back on his head. “My, how you cuss! I have never been able to get used to such language out of young women. I have always thought it makes a girl sound like the lowest sort of trash!”

The fat girl in the fur coat took another shuffling half step forward. Her eyes, set back in small piggy folds, flashed red in a way that made Vic think of rabies. Vic gave the bike a smidge of gas, and it jumped forward a few feet. She wanted to put a bit of distance between her and the children closing in on her. She turned the ANFO over, found the timer, set it for what looked like about five minutes, pressed the button to start it running. In that instant she expected a final annihilating flash of white light to wipe away the world, and her insides squeezed tight, preparing for some last, rending burst of pain. Nothing of the sort happened. Nothing happened at all. Vic was not even sure it was running. It didn’t make a sound.

She held the plastic pack of ANFO over her head.

“There’s a shitty little timer on this thing, Manx. I think it’ll go off in three minutes, but I could be wrong a minute or two in either direction. There’s a whole bunch more in this sack. Send Wayne to me. Send him now. When he’s on the bike, I turn it off.”

He said, “What do you have there? It looks like one of those little pillows they give you on an airplane. I flew once, from St. Louis to Baton Rouge. I will never do that again! I was lucky to get off alive. It bounced the whole way, as if it were on a string and God was playing yo-yo with us.”

“It’s a bag of shit,” Vic said. “Like you.”

“It’s a— What did you say?”

“It’s ANFO. An enriched fertilizer. Soak this shit in diesel and it’s the most powerful explosive this side of a crate of TNT. Timothy McVeigh destroyed a twelve-story federal building with a couple of these. I can do the same to your entire little world and everything in it.”

Even across a distance of thirty feet, Vic could see the calculation in his eyes while he thought it through. Then his smile broadened. “I don’t believe you’ll do that. Blow yourself up and your son, too. You’d have to be crazy.”

“Oh, man,” she said. “Are you just figuring that out?”

His grin faded by degrees. His eyelids sank, and the expression in his eyes turned dull and disappointed.

He opened his mouth then and screamed, and when he did, the moon opened its one eye and screamed with him.

The eye of the moon was bloodshot and bulging, a sac of pus with an iris. Its mouth was a jagged tear in the night. Its voice was Manx’s voice, so amplified that it was nearly deafening:

“GET HER! KILL HER! SHE CAME HERE TO END CHRISTMAS! KILL HER NOW!”

The ledge shook. The branches of that enormous Christmas tree flailed at the darkness. Vic lost her grip on the brake, and the Triumph jerked forward another six inches. The backpack full of ANFO slithered out of her lap and fell onto the cobblestones.

Buildings shuddered beneath the shouting of the moon. Vic had never experienced an earthquake before and could not catch her breath, and her terror was a wordless thing that existed below the level of conscious thought, below the level of language. The moon began to scream—just scream—an inarticulate roar of fury that caused the falling snowflakes to whirl and blow about madly.

The fat girl took a step and threw the hatchet at Vic, like an Apache in a Western. The heavy, blunt edge clubbed Vic in her bad left knee. The pain was transcendent.

Vic’s hand came off the brake again, and the Triumph lunged once more. The backpack was not left behind, however, but was dragged along behind the Triumph. A strap had caught on the rear foot peg, which Lou had put down when he climbed on the bike behind her. Lou Carmody, as always, to the rescue. She still had the ANFO, even if it was out of reach.

ANFO. She was even now holding one package of ANFO, clutched to her chest with her left hand, the timer presumably ticking away. Not that it actually ticked, or made any sound whatsoever to suggest that it was working.

Get rid of it, she thought. Somewhere that will show him how much damage you can do with these things.

The children surged at her. They rushed from beneath the tree, pouring onto the cobblestones. She heard the soft pattering of feet behind her. She looked around for Wayne and saw the tall girl still holding him. They stood beside the Wraith, the girl behind him with an arm gently encircling his chest. In her other hand was her crescent-shaped knife, which Vic knew she would use—on Wayne—before letting him go.

In the next instant, a child leaped, throwing himself at her. Vic yanked the throttle. The Triumph bolted forward, and the child missed her entirely, crunched into the road on his stomach. The backpack full of ANFO skipped and bounced over the snowy cobbles, hung up on that rear peg.

Vic gunned the bike straight at the Rolls-Royce, as if she meant to drive right into it. Manx grabbed the little girl—Lorrie?—and shrank back toward the open door, the protective gesture of any father. In that gesture Vic understood everything. Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.

She pushed down on the brake, clenching her teeth against the stabbing, ferocious pain in her left knee, and twisted the handlebars, and the bike was slung around, almost a hundred eighty degrees. Behind her was a line of children—a dozen of them, running up the road after her. She gave it gas again, and the Triumph came screaming at them, and almost all of them scattered like dry leaves in a hurricane.

One of them, though, a willowy girl in a pink nightdress, crouched and remained in Vic’s path. Vic wanted to blow right through her, run her the f*ck down, but at the last moment Vic gave the handlebars a twist, trying to veer around her. She couldn’t help herself, couldn’t drive into a child.

The bike wobbled dangerously on the slippery rocks and lost speed, and suddenly the girl was on the bike. Her claws—they were, really, the claws of an old crone, with their long, ragged fingernails—grabbed Vic’s leg, and the girl hauled herself up onto the seat behind her.

Vic accelerated again, and the bike leaped forward, speeding up as it flung itself around the rotary.

The girl on the bike behind her was making noises, choked, snarling sounds, like a dog. One hand slipped around Vic’s waist, and Vic almost shouted at the cold of it, a cold so intense it burned.

The girl gripped a length of chain in the other hand, which she lifted and brought down on Vic’s left knee, as if she somehow knew exactly what would hurt most. A firecracker went off behind Vic’s kneecap, and she sobbed and shoved her elbow backward. The elbow struck the girl in her white face with its crackling enamel skin.

The girl cried out—a strangled, broken sound—and Vic glanced back and her heart gave a sick lurch in her chest and she promptly lost control of the Triumph.

The girl’s pretty little-girl face had deformed, lips stretching wide, becoming like the mouth of a flukeworm, a ragged pink hole encircled with teeth going all the way down her gullet. Her tongue was black, and her breath stank of old meat. She opened her mouth until it was wide enough for someone to put an arm down her throat, then clamped her teeth on Vic’s shoulder.

It was like being brushed by a chainsaw. The sleeve of Vic’s T-shirt and the skin beneath were torn into a bloody mess.

The bike went down on its right side, hit the ground in a spray of golden sparks, and slid screeching across the cobblestones. Vic did not know if she jumped or was thrown, only that she was already off the bike and tumbling, rolling across the bricks.

“SHE’S DOWN, SHE’S DOWN, CUT HER, KILL HER!”

the moon screamed, and the ground shook beneath her, as if a convoy of eighteen-wheelers were thundering past.

She was on her back, arms flung out, head on the stones. She stared at the silvered galleons of the clouds above her (move).

Vic tried to decide how badly she was hurt. She could not feel her left leg at all anymore (move).

Her right hip felt abraded and sore. She lifted her head slightly, and the world swooped around her with a nauseating suddenness (move move).

She blinked, and for an instant the sky was filled not with clouds but with static, a charged flurry of black and white particles (MOVE).

She sat up on her elbows and looked to her left. The Triumph had carried her halfway around the circle, to one of the roads branching off into the amusement park. She stared across the rotary and saw children—perhaps as many as fifty—streaming toward her through the dark in a silent run. Beyond them was the tree as tall as a ten-story building, and beyond that, somewhere, were the Wraith and Wayne.

The moon glared down at her from in the sky, its horrible, bloodshot eye bulging.

“SCISSORS-FOR-THE-DRIFTER! SCISSORS-FOR-THE-BITCH!”

bellowed the moon. But for an instant he flickered out of sight, like a TV caught between channels. The sky was a chaos of white noise. Vic could even hear it hissing.

MOVE, she thought, and then abruptly found herself on her feet, grabbing the motorcycle by the handlebars. She heaved her weight against it, crying out as a fresh jolt of withering pain passed through her left knee and her hip.

The little girl with the flukeworm mouth had been thrown into the door of a shop on the corner: Charlie’s Costume Carnival! It—she—sat against the door, shaking her head as if to clear it. Vic saw that the white plastic sack of ANFO had, somehow, wound up between the girl’s ankles.

ANFO, Vic thought—the word had achieved the quality of a mantra—and she leaned over and grabbed the backpack, still tangled on the rear peg. She slipped it loose, hung it on her shoulder, and put a leg over the bike.

The children running at her should’ve been screaming, or war-whooping, or something, but they came on in a silent rush, pouring out of the snowy central circle and spilling across the cobblestones. Vic jumped on the kickstart.

The Triumph coughed, did nothing.

She jumped again. One of the pipes, which was now broken loose and dangled over the cobblestones, puffed some watery exhaust, but the engine made only a tired, choked sound and died.

A rock hit the back of her head, and a black flash exploded behind her eyes. When her vision cleared, the sky was full of static again—for a moment—then blurred and re-formed as clouds and darkness. She hit the kick-starter.

She heard sprockets whirring, refusing to engage, going dead.

The first of the children reached her. He did not have a weapon of any kind—perhaps he was the one who had thrown the rock—but his jaw unhinged, opening into an obscene pink cavern filled with row upon row of teeth. He fastened his mouth on her bare leg. Fishhook teeth punctured meat, caught in muscle.

Vic shouted in pain and kicked out with her right foot, to shake the boy loose. Her heel struck the kick-starter, and the engine erupted into life. She grabbed the throttle, and the bike hurtled forward. The boy was yanked off his feet, flung to the stones, left behind.

She looked over her left shoulder as she raced down the side road toward the Sleighcoaster and the Reindeer-Go-Round.

Twenty, thirty, perhaps forty children sprinted down the road behind her, many of them barefoot, their heels whacking on the stones.

The child who had been tossed into the doors of Charlie’s Costume Carnival was sitting up now. She bent forward, reaching out for the white plastic sack of ANFO by her feet.

There was a white flash.

The explosion caused the air to ripple and warp with heat, and Vic believed for a moment that it would lift the bike off the road and fling it into the air.

Every window on the street exploded. The white flash became a giant ball of flame. Charlie’s Costume Carnival caved in and slid apart in an avalanche of flaming brickwork and a snowstorm of glittering, pulverized glass. The fire belched out across the street, picked up a dozen children as if they were sticks, and tossed them into the night. Cobblestones erupted from the road and launched themselves into the air.

The moon opened its mouth to cry out in horror, its one great eye bulging in fury—and then the shockwave hit the false sky and the whole thing wobbled, like an image reflected in a fun-house mirror. The moon and stars and clouds dissolved into a field of white electrical snow. The blast carried down the street. Buildings shuddered. Vic inhaled a lungful of burned air, diesel smoke, and powdered brick. Then the wavering repercussions of the blast faded and the sky flickered back into being.

The moon screamed and screamed, sounds almost as loud and violent as the explosion itself.

She sped past a hall of mirrors, past a waxwork, and on to the brightly lit and rotating carousel, where wooden reindeer pranced in place of horses. There she grabbed the brake and brought the bike to a fishtailing halt. Her hair was frizzled from the heat of the explosion. Her heart slugged in her chest.

She looked back toward the debris field that had been the market square. She needed a moment to register—to accept—what she was seeing. First one child, then another, then a third emerged from the smoke, coming down the road after her. One of them was still smoking, hair charred. Others were sitting up across the street. Vic saw a boy thoughtfully brush glass out of his hair. He should’ve been dead, had been picked up and thrown into a brick wall, every bone in his body should’ve been smashed into chips, but there he was, getting to his feet, and Vic found that her weary mind was not entirely surprised by this development. The children caught in the explosion had been dead even before the bomb detonated, of course. They were not any more dead now—or any less inclined to stop coming after her.

She swung the backpack off her shoulder and checked its contents. She hadn’t lost any. Lou had wired timers into four of the packs of ANFO, one of which was now gone. There were a couple other sacks of the ANFO, down toward the bottom, that had no timers on them at all.

Vic slung the bag back over her shoulder and rode, past the Reindeer-Go-Round and on another few hundred yards to the rear of the park and the great Sleighcoaster.

It was running empty, carts made to look like red sleighs diving and roaring past on the rails, swooping and rising into the night. It was an old-fashioned rollercoaster, of the sort that had been popular in the thirties, made entirely of wood. The entrance was a great glowing face of Santa Claus—you walked in through his mouth.

Vic pulled out a sack of ANFO, set the timer for five minutes, tossed it in between Santa’s gaping jaws. She was about to take off when she happened to look up at the rollercoaster and saw the mummified bodies: dozens of crucified men and women, their skin blackened and withered, eyes gone, their clothes filthy, frozen rags. A woman in pink leg warmers that screamed 1984 had been stripped to the waist; Christmas ornaments dangled from her pierced breasts. There was a shriveled man in jeans and a thick coat, with a beard that brought to mind Christ, sporting a holly wreath instead of a crown of thorns on his head.

Vic was still staring up at the corpses when a child came out of the dark and stuck a kitchen knife into the small of her back.

He could not have been older than ten, and his cheeks were dimpled by a sweet, lovely smile. He was barefoot, wore overalls and a checked shirt, and with his golden bangs and serene eyes he was a perfect little Tom Sawyer. The knife was buried to the hilt, sinking into muscle, the springy tissue beneath, and perhaps perforating an intestine. She felt a pain unlike any she had ever experienced, a sharp and blessed twinge in her bowels, and she thought, with real surprise, He just killed me. I just died.

Tom Sawyer pulled the knife back out and laughed gaily. Her own son had never laughed with such easy pleasure. She did not know where the boy had come from. He seemed to have simply appeared; the night had thickened and made a child.

“I want to play with you,” he said. “Stay and play scissors-for-the-drifter.”

She could’ve hit him, elbowed him, kicked him, anything. Instead she gave the bike throttle and simply roared away from him. He stepped aside and watched her go, still holding the blade, wet and shiny with her blood. He was still smiling, but his eyes were puzzled, brow furrowed with confusion, as if he were wondering, Did I do something wrong?

The timers were imprecise. The first sack of ANFO had been set to go off in what she estimated was five minutes but had taken closer to ten. She had set the timer on the Sleighcoaster ANFO just exactly the same and should’ve had plenty of time to reach safe distance. But when she was less than a hundred yards away, it erupted. The ground buckled beneath her, seemed to roll like a wave. It felt as if the air itself were cooking. She drew a breath that was hot enough to sear her lungs. The bike staggered forward, the baking wind hammering at her shoulders, at her back. She felt a fresh, sharp twinge of pain in her abdomen, as if she were being stabbed all over again.

The Sleighcoaster collapsed in on itself like a shattering, roaring heap of kindling. One of the carts came free of the tracks and blazed through the night, a flaming missile that soared through the darkness and slammed into the Reindeer-Go-Round, smashing the white steeds to flinders. Steel screamed. She looked back just in time to see a rising mushroom cloud of flame and black smoke as the Sleighcoaster toppled.

She looked away, got the bike going again, weaving around the smoking head of a wooden reindeer, a rack of shattered antlers. She cut down another side street, one she believed would lead her back to the rotary. There was a bad taste in her mouth. She spit blood.

I am dying, she thought, with surprising calm.

She hardly slowed at the foot of the grand Ferris wheel. It was a beautiful thing, a thousand blue will-o’-the-wisp lights aligned along its hundred-foot spokes. Cabins roomy enough for a dozen people each, with black-tinted windows and gaslights glowing inside, rotated dreamily.

Vic fished out another sack of ANFO, set the timer for five minutes, more or less, and hooked it upward. It caught in one of the spokes, close to the central hub. Vic thought of her Raleigh Tuff Burner, the way the wheels had whirred and how she loved the autumn light in New England. She was not going back. She was never going to see that light again. Her mouth kept filling with blood. She was sitting in blood now. The stabbing sensation came in the small of her back again and again. Only it didn’t hurt in any conventional sense. She recognized what she was feeling as pain, but it was also, like childbirth, an experience bigger than pain, a feeling that something impossible was being made possible, that she was about to complete some enormous undertaking.

She rode on and soon arrived back at the central rotary.

Charlie’s Costume Carnival—a solid cube of flame, barely recognizable as a building—stood on the corner sixty or seventy yards away. On the other side of the great Christmas tree was the parked Rolls-Royce. She could see the glow of its high headlights beneath the branches. She did not slow but rode straight at the tree. Vic slipped the backpack off her left shoulder. She reached into it, her other hand on the throttle, found the last sack of ANFO with a timer, twisted the dial, and pushed the button to start it running.

The front tire skipped over a low stone curb, and she thumped up onto snow-dusted grass. The darkness congealed into shapes, children rising up before her. She was not sure they would move, thought they would hold their ground and force her to plow through them.

Light rose around her, a great flash of reddish brilliance, and for an instant she could see her own shadow, impossibly long, rushing ahead of her. The children were illuminated in a ragged, uneven line, cold dolls in bloodstained pajamas, creatures armed with broken boards, knives, hammers, scissors.

The world filled with a roar and the shriek of tortured metal. Snow whipped around, and children were knocked to the dirt by the shockwave. Behind her the Ferris wheel erupted outward in two jets of flame, and the great circle crashed straight down, dropping from its struts. The impact shook the world and knocked the sky over Christmasland back into an agitation of static. The branches of the immense fir tree clawed at the night with a kind of hysteria, a giant fighting for its life.

Vic sailed beneath the wild and flailing boughs. She flipped the backpack out of her lap, chucked it in against the trunk—her Christmas gift for Charles Talent Manx.

Behind her the Ferris wheel rolled into town with a great reverberating sound of iron grinding against stone. Then, like a penny that has rolled along a table and lost its momentum, it tilted to one side and fell upon a pair of buildings.

Beyond the toppled Ferris wheel, beyond the ruin of the Sleighcoaster, an enormous shelf of snow, loosed from the peaks of the high, dark mountain, began to crash down upon the back of Christmasland. For all the deafening roars of explosions and collapsing buildings, there had been no sound yet like this. It was somehow more than sound, was a vibration felt as deep as bone. A blast of snow hit the towers and quaint shops at the back of the park. They were annihilated. Walls of colored rock blew outward before the oncoming avalanche and were promptly covered over. The rear of the town collapsed into itself and vanished in a roiling surf of snow, a tidal wave deep enough and broad enough to swallow Christmasland whole. The ledge beneath shook so hard that Vic wondered if it might snap off the side of the mountain, drop the whole park into . . . what? The emptiness that waited beyond Charlie Manx’s pinched little imaginings. The narrow canyons of the roads filled with a flash flood of snow, high enough to consume everything before it. The avalanche did not fall upon Christmasland so much as erase it.

As the Triumph carried her across the rotary, the Wraith came into sight. It stood covered in a fine film of brick dust, engine rumbling and headlights glowing through air filled with fine particulate matter, a billion grains of ash, snow, and rock swirling on the hot, spark-filled wind. Vic glimpsed Charlie Manx’s little girl, the one named Lorrie, in the passenger seat of his car, peering out the side window into the sudden darkness. The lights of Christmasland had, in the last few moments, blinked out, all of them, and the only illumination that remained was the hissing white static above.

Wayne was by the open trunk of the car, twisting himself this way and that to be free of the girl, the one named Millie. Millie clutched him from behind, one arm reaching around his chest to hold a fistful of his filthy white T-shirt. In her other hand was that curious hooked knife. She was trying to pull it up to stick it through his throat, but he had her wrist, kept the blade down and his face turned away from its questing edge.

“You need to do what Daddy wants!” she was screaming at him. “You need to get in the trunk! You have fussed long enough!”

And Manx. Manx was moving. He had been at the driver’s-side door, shoveling his precious Lorrie into the car, but now he strode across the uneven ground, swinging his silver hammer, looking soldierly in his legionnaire’s coat, which was buttoned to the neck. Muscles bunched at the corners of his jaw.

“Leave him, Millie! There isn’t time!” Manx hollered at her. “Leave him and let’s go!”

Millie sank her flukeworm teeth into Wayne’s ear. Wayne screamed and thrashed and snapped his head, and the lobe of his ear parted company with the rest of his face. He ducked and made a funny corkscrewing motion in the same instant and came right out of his T-shirt, leaving Millie holding an empty, blood-streaked rag.

“Oh, Mom! Oh, Mom! Oh—” Wayne shouted, which was the same thing backward as it was forward. He took two running steps, slipped in the snow, went down on all fours in the road.

And dust swirled in the air. And the darkness shook with cannonades, blocks of stone falling into more stone, a hundred fifty thousand tons of snow, all the snow Charlie Manx had ever seen and ever imagined, came crashing toward them, flattening everything before it.

Manx stalked on, six strides from Wayne, already lifting his arm back to drop his silver hammer on Wayne’s lowered head. It had been designed for crushing skulls, and Wayne’s would be child’s play.

“Get out of my way, Charlie!” Vic hollered.

Manx half turned as she blew past him. Her slipstream grabbed and spun him, sent him staggering back on his heels.

Then the last of the ANFO, the backpack of it, exploded beneath the tree and seemed to take the entire world with it.