The phone rang. Vic yelped as if someone had grabbed her, looked around at it. Her face batted against the yellow polka-dot streamers hanging from the ceiling.
Only they weren’t streamers at all. They were strips of flypaper, with dozens of withered, dead fly husks stuck to them. There was bile in the back of Vic’s throat. It tasted sour-sweet, like a frappe from Terry’s gone bad.
The phone rang again. She grabbed the receiver, but before she picked it up, her gaze fixed on the child’s drawing taped directly above the phone. The paper was dry and brown and brittle with age, the tape gone yellow. It showed a forest of crayon Christmas trees and the man called Charlie Manx in a Santa hat, with two little girls, grinning to show a mouthful of fangs. The children in the picture were very like the thing in the backyard that had once been a child.
Vic put the phone to her ear.
“Help me!” she cried. “Help me, please!”
“Where are you, ma’am?” said someone with a childlike voice.
“I don’t know, I don’t know! I’m lost!”
“We already have a car there. It’s in the garage. Go get in the backseat, and our driver will take you to Christmasland.” Whoever was on the other end of the line giggled. “We’ll take care of you when you get here. We’ll hang your eyeballs from our big Christmas tree.”
Vic hung up.
She heard a crunch behind her, whirled, and saw that the little boy had slammed his forehead into the window. A spiderweb of shattered glass filled the pane. The boy himself seemed uninjured.
Back in the foyer, she heard Manx force the front door open, heard it catch against the chain.
The child pulled his head back, then snapped it forward, and his forehead hit the window with another hard crunch. Splinters of glass fell. The boy laughed.
The first yellow flames licked out of the half-open oven. They made a sound like a pigeon beating its wings. The wallpaper to the right of the oven was blackening, curling. Vic no longer remembered why she had wanted to start a fire. Something about escaping in a confusion of smoke.
The child reached through the shattered windowpane, his hand feeling for the bolt. Jagged glass points scraped his wrist, peeled up shavings of skin, drew black blood. It didn’t seem to bother him.
Vic swung the frying pan at his hand. She threw herself into her swing with her whole weight, and the force of the blow carried her straight into the door. She recoiled, stumbled backward, and sat down on the floor. The boy jerked his hand outside, and she saw that three of his fingers had been smashed out of true, grotesquely bent the wrong way.
“You’re funny!” he shouted, and laughed.
Vic kicked her heels, sliding backward on her ass across the cream-colored tiles. The boy stuck his face through the broken windowpane and waggled his black tongue at her.
Red flame belched out of the oven, and for a moment her hair was burning on the right side of her head, the fine hairs crinkling and charring and shriveling up. She swatted at herself. Sparks flew.
Manx hit the front door. The chain snapped with a tinny, clinking sound; the bolt tore free with a loud crack. She heard the door smash into the wall with a house-shaking bang.
The boy reached through the broken window again and unlocked the back door.
Burning strips of flypaper fell around her.
Vic shoved herself up off her ass and turned, and Manx was on the other side of the batwing doors, about to step into the kitchen. He looked at her with a wide-eyed and avid fascination on his ugly face.
“When I saw your bike, I thought you would be younger,” Manx said. “But you are all grown. That is too bad for you. Christmasland is not such a good place for girls who are all grown.”
The door behind her opened . . . and when it did, there was a feeling of all the hot air being sucked out of the room, as if the world outside were inhaling. A red cyclone of flame whirled from the open oven, and a thousand hot sparks whirled with it. Black smoke gushed.
When Manx swatted through the batwing doors, coming for her, Vic shied away from him, squirming out of reach and ducking behind the big bulky Frigidaire, stepping toward the only place that remained to her, into
The Pantry
SHE GRABBED THE METAL HANDLE OF THE DOOR AND SLAMMED IT shut behind her.
It was a heavy door, and it squalled as she dragged it across the floor. She had never moved such a heavy door in all her life.
It had no lock of any kind. The handle was an iron U, bolted to the metal surface. Vic grabbed it and set her heels apart, her feet planted on the doorframe. A moment later Manx yanked. She buckled, was jerked forward, but locked her knees and held it shut.
He eased off, then suddenly pulled again, a second time, trying to catch her napping. He had at least seventy pounds on her, and those gangly orangutan arms of his, but with her feet braced against the doorframe her arms would come out of their sockets before her legs gave.
Manx stopped pulling. Vic had an instant to look around and saw a mop with a long blue metal handle. It was just to her right, within arm’s reach. She pushed it through the U-shaped door latch, so the mop handle was braced across the doorframe.
Vic let go and stepped back, and her legs wobbled, and she almost sat down. She had to lean against the washing machine to keep her feet.
Manx pulled the door again, and the mop handle bashed against the frame.
He paused. When he pulled at the door the next time, he did so gently, in an almost experimental way.
Vic heard him cough. She thought she heard childlike whispering. Her legs shook. They shook so forcefully that she knew if she let go of the washing machine, she’d fall over.
“You have got yourself in a tight spot now, you little firebug!” Manx called through the door.
“Go away!” she screamed.
“It takes a lot of brass to break into a man’s house and then tell him to git!” he said. But he said it with good humor. “You are scared to come out, I suppose. If you had any sense, you would be more scared to stay where you are!”
“Go away!” she screamed again. It was all she could think to say.
He coughed once more. A frantic red firelight glimmered at the bottom of the door, broken by two shadows that marked where Charlie Manx had placed his feet. There was another moment of whispering.
“Child,” he said to her, “I will let this house burn without a second thought. I have other places to go, and this hidey-hole has been burned for me now, one way or another. Come out. Come out or you will smother to death in there and no one will ever identify your burnt remains. Open the door. I will not hurt you.”
She leaned back against the washing machine, gripping the edge with both hands, her legs wobbling furiously, almost comically.
“Pity,” he said. “I would’ve liked to know a girl who had a vehicle of her own, one that can travel the roads of thought. Our kind is rare. We should learn from one another. Well. You will learn from me now, although I think you will not much care for the lesson. I would stay and talk longer, but it is getting a trifle warm in here! I am a man who prefers cooler climes, to be honest. I am so fond of winter I am practically one of Santa’s elves!” And he laughed again, that whinnying shit-kicker laugh: Heeeeee!
Something turned over in the kitchen. It fell with such an enormous crash that she screamed and almost leaped up onto the washing machine. The impact shook the whole house and sent a hideous vibration through the tiles beneath her. For a moment she thought the floor might be in danger of caving in.
She knew from the sound, from the weight, from the force of it, what he had done. He had gripped that big old fridge, with the sloopy bathtub styling, and overturned it in front of the door.
VIC STOOD A LONG TIME AGAINST THE WASHING MACHINE, WAITING for her legs to stop shaking.
She did not, at first, really believe that Manx was gone. She felt he was waiting for her to throw herself against the door, hammering against it and pleading to be let out.
She cou
ld hear the fire. She heard things popping and cracking in the heat. The wallpaper sizzled with a crispy fizzling sound, like someone pitching handfuls of pine needles into a campfire.
Vic put her ear to the door, to better hear the other room. But at the first touch of skin to metal, she jerked her head back with a cry. The iron door was as hot as a skillet left on high heat.
A dirty brown smoke began to trickle in along the left-hand edge of the door.
Vic yanked the steel mop handle free, chucked it aside. She grabbed the handle, meant to give it a shove, see how far she could push it against the weight on the other side—but then she let go, jumped back. The curved metal handle was as hot as the surface of the door. Vic shook her hand in the air to soothe the burned feeling in her fingertips.
She caught her first mouthful of smoke. It stank of melted plastic. It was so filthy-smelling she choked on it, bent over coughing so hard she thought she might vomit.
She turned in a circle. There was hardly space in the pantry to do more than that.
Shelves. Rice-A-Roni. A bucket. A bottle of ammonia. A bottle of bleach. A stainless-steel cabinet or drawer set into the wall. The washing machine and the dryer. There were no windows. There was no other door.
Something glass exploded in the next room. Vic was aware of a gathering filminess in the air, as if she stood in a sauna.
She glanced up and saw that the white plaster ceiling was blackening, directly above the doorframe.
She opened the dryer and found an old white fitted sheet. She tugged it out. Vic pulled it over her head and shoulders, wrapped some fabric around one hand, and tried the door.
She could only barely grip the metal handle, even with the sheet, and could not press her shoulder to the door for long. But Vic flung herself hard against it, once, and again. It shuddered and banged in the frame and opened maybe a quarter of an inch—enough to let in a gush of vile brown smoke. There was too much smoke on the other side of the door to allow her to see anything of the room, to even see flames.
Vic drew back and pitched herself at the door a third time. She hit so hard she bounced, and her ankles caught in the bedsheet, and she fell sprawling. She shouted in frustration, threw off the sheet. The pantry was dirty with smoke.
She reached up, gripped the washing machine with one hand and the handle of the stainless-steel cabinet with the other. But as she pulled herself to her feet, the door to the cabinet fell open, hinges whining, and she crashed back down, her knees giving out.
She rested before trying again, turned her face so her brow was pressed to the cool metal of the washing machine. When she shut her eyes, she felt her mother pressing one cool hand to her fevered forehead.
Vic reclaimed her feet, unsteady now. She let go of the handle of the metal cabinet, and it clapped shut on a spring. The poisonous air stung her eyes.
She opened the cabinet again. It looked into a laundry chute, a dark, narrow metal shaft.
Vic put her head through the opening and looked up. She saw, dimly, another small door, ten or twelve feet up.
He’s waiting up there, she knew.
But it didn’t matter. Remaining in the pantry wasn’t an option.
She sat on the open steel door, which swung down from the wall on a pair of taut springs. Vic squirmed her upper body through the opening, pulled her legs after her, and slid into
The Laundry Chute
VIC WAS, AT SEVENTEEN, ONLY FORTY POUNDS HEAVIER AND THREE inches taller than she had been at twelve, a skinny girl who was all leg. But it was tight inside the chute just the same. She braced herself, back to the wall, knees in her face, feet pressing to the opposite side of the shaft.
Vic began to work her way up the shaft, pushing herself with the balls of her feet, six inches at a time. Brown smoke wafted around her and stung her eyes.
Her hamstrings began to twitch and burn. She slid her back up another six inches, walking up the shaft in a hunched, bent, grotesque sort of way. The muscles in the small of her back throbbed.
She was halfway to the second floor when her left foot slipped, squirting out beneath her, and her ass dropped. She felt a tearing in her right thigh, and she screamed. For one moment she was able to hold herself in place, folded over with her right knee in her face and her left leg hanging straight down. But the weight on her right leg was too much. The pain was too much. She let her right foot slide free and fell all the way back to the bottom.
It was a painful, ungraceful fall. She clouted into the aluminum floor of the shaft, spiked her right knee into her own face. Her other foot banged through the stainless-steel hatch and shot back into the pantry.
Vic was, for a moment, dangerously close to panic. She began to cry, and when she stood up in the laundry chute, she did not try to climb again but began to jump, and never mind that the top was well out of reach and there was nothing in the smooth aluminum shaft to grab. She screamed. She screamed for help. The shaft was full of smoke, and it blurred her vision, and midscream she began to cough, a harsh, dry, painful cough. She coughed on and on, did not think she would ever stop. She coughed with such force she almost threw up and in the end spit a long stream of saliva that tasted of bile.
It was not the smoke that terrified her, or the pain in the back of her right thigh, where she had definitely yanked a muscle. It was her certain, desperate aloneness. What had her mother screamed at her father? But you’re not raising her, Chris! I am! I’m doing it all by myself! It was awful to find yourself in a hole, all by yourself. She could not remember the last time she had held her mother: her frightened, short-tempered, unhappy mother, who had stood by her and put her cool hand to Vic’s brow in her times of fever. It was awful to think of dying here, having left things as they were.
Then she was making her way up the shaft again, back to one wall, feet to the other. Her eyes gushed. The smoke was thick in the chute now, a brownish, billowing stream all around her. Something was terribly wrong in the back of her right leg. Every time she pushed upward with her feet, it felt as if the muscle were tearing all over again.
She blinked and coughed and pushed and wormed her way steadily up the laundry chute. The metal against her back was uncomfortably warm. She thought that in a very short time she would be leaving skin on the walls, that the chute would burn to the touch. Except it wasn’t a chute anymore. It was a chimney, with a smoky fire at the bottom, and she was Santa Claus, scrambling up for the reindeer. She had that idiot Christmas song in her head, have a holly jolly fucking Christmas, going around and around on endless loop. She didn’t want to roast to death with Christmas music in her head.
By the time she was close to the top of the chute, it was hard to see anything through all the smoke. She wept continuously and held her breath. The big muscle in her right thigh shook helplessly.
She saw an inverted U of dim light, somewhere just above her feet: the hatch that opened on the second floor. Her lungs burned. She gasped, couldn’t stop herself, drew a chestful of smoke, began to cough. It hurt to cough. She could feel soft tissues behind her ribs rupturing and tearing. Her right leg gave, without warning. She lunged as she fell, shoving her arms at the closed hatch. As she did, she thought, It won’t open. He pushed something in front of it, and it won’t open.
Her arms banged through the hatch, out into beautifully cool air. She held on, caught the edge of the opening under her armpits. Her legs dropped down into the chute, and her knees clubbed the steel wall.
With the hatch open, the laundry chute drew air, and she felt a hot, stinking breeze lifting around her. Smoke gushed out around her head. She couldn’t stop coughing and blinking, coughing so hard her whole body shook. She tasted blood, felt blood on her lips, wondered if she was coughing up anything important.
For a long moment, she hung where she was, too weak to pull herself out. Then she began to kick, digging her toes against the wall. Her feet clanged and banged. She could not grab much purchase, but she did not need much. Her head and arms were already through the ha
tch, and getting out of the chute was less a matter of climbing, more a thing of simply leaning forward.
She tipped herself out and onto the shag carpet of a second-floor hallway. The air tasted good. She lay there and gasped like a fish. What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.
She had to lean against the wall to get to her feet. She expected the entire house to be filled with smoke and roaring fire, but it was not. It was hazy in the upstairs hallway, but not as bad as it had been in the chute. Vic saw sunshine to her right and limped across the bushy 1970s-era carpet, to the landing at the top of the stairs. She descended the steps in a stumbling, controlled fall, splashing through smoke.
The front door was half open. The chain hung from the doorframe, with the lock plate and a long splinter of wood dangling from it. The air that came in was watery-cool, and she wanted to pitch herself out into it, but she did not.
She could not see into the kitchen. It was all smoke and flickering light. An open doorway looked into a sitting room. The wallpaper on the far side of the sitting room was burning away to show the plaster underneath. The rug smoldered. A vase contained a bouquet of flame. Streams of orange fire crawled up cheap white nylon curtains. She thought the whole back of the house might be in flame, but here in the front, in the foyer, the hallway was only filled with smoke.
Vic looked out the window to one side of the door. The drive leading up to the house was a long, narrow dirt lane, leading away through the trees. She saw no car, but from this angle she could not see into the garage. He might be sitting there waiting to see if Vic would come out. He might be down at the end of the lane watching to see if she would run up it.
Behind her, something creaked painfully and fell with a great crash. Smoke erupted around her. A hot spark touched her arm and stung. And it came to her that there was nothing left to think about. He was waiting there or he wasn’t, but either way there was no place left for her to go except