by Joe Hill
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 fucking 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 fuck 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 mot
orcycle 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.