Bing stared at him with woolly eyes. He felt as if he had not slept in days, and it was a minute-by-minute struggle to keep from sinking back into his leather seat and slipping away into unconsciousness.
“I think I’m going to fall asleep,” Bing said.
“That’s all right, Bing,” Charlie said. “The road to Christmasland is paved in dreams!”
White blossoms drifted down from somewhere, flicked across the windshield. Bing stared at them with dim pleasure. He felt warm and good and peaceful, and he liked Charlie Manx. The fires of hell are not hot enough for a man—or woman!—who would hurt his children. It was a fine thing to say: It rang with moral certainty. Charlie Manx was a man who knew what was what.
“Humma hum hum hum,” Charlie Manx said.
Bing nodded—this statement also rang with moral certainty and wisdom—and then he pointed at the blossoms raining down onto the windscreen. “It’s snowing!”
“Ha!” Charlie Manx said. “That is not snow. Rest your eyes, Bing Partridge. Rest your eyes and you will see something.”
Bing Partridge did as he was told.
His eyes were not closed long—only a single moment. But it was a moment that seemed to go on and on, to stretch out into a peaceful eternity, a restful sleeping darkness in which the only sound was the thrum of the tires on the road. Bing exhaled. Bing inhaled. Bing opened his eyes and then jolted upright, staring out through the windshield at
The Road to Christmasland
THE DAY HAD FLED, AND THE HEADLIGHTS OF THE WRAITH BORED into a frozen darkness. White flecks raced through the glare, ticked softly against the windshield.
“Now, this is snow!” Charlie Manx cried from behind the steering wheel.
Bing had snapped from drowsiness to full wakefulness in a moment, as if consciousness were a switch and someone had flicked it on. His blood seemed to surge, all at once, toward his heart. He could not have been more shocked if he’d woken to find a grenade in his lap.
Half the sky was smothered over with clouds. But the other half was plentifully sugared with stars, and the moon hung among them, that moon with the hooked nose and broad, smiling mouth. It considered the road below with a yellow sliver of eye showing beneath one drooping lid.
Deformed firs lined the road. Bing had to look twice before he realized they were not pines at all but gumdrop trees.
“Christmasland,” Bing whispered.
“No,” Charlie Manx said. “We are a long way off. Twenty hours of driving at least. But it’s out there. It’s in the West. And once a year, Bing, I take someone there.”
“Me?” Bing asked in a quavering voice.
“No, Bing,” Charlie said gently. “Not this year. All children are welcome in Christmasland, but grown-ups are a different case. You must prove your worth first. You must prove your love of children and your devotion to protecting them and serving Christmasland.”
They passed a snowman, who lifted a twig arm and waved. Bing reflexively lifted his hand to wave in return.
“How?” he whispered.
“You must save ten children with me, Bing. You must save them from monsters.”
“Monsters? What monsters?”
“Their parents,” Manx said solemnly.
Bing removed his face from the icy glass of the passenger window and looked around at Charlie Manx. When he had shut his eyes a moment earlier, there had been sunlight in the sky and Mr. Manx had been dressed in a plain white shirt and suspenders. Now, though, he had on a coat with tails and a dark cap with a black leather brim. The coat had a double line of brass buttons and seemed like the sort of thing an officer from a foreign country might wear, a lieutenant in a royal guard. When Bing glanced down at himself, he saw he also wore new clothes: his father’s crisp white marine dress uniform, boots polished to a black shine.
“Am I dreaming?” Bing asked.
“I told you,” Manx said. “The road to Christmasland is paved in dreams. This old car can slip right out of the everyday world and onto the secret roads of thought. Sleep is just the exit ramp. When a passenger dozes off, my Wraith leaves whatever road it was on and slides onto the St. Nick Parkway. We are sharing this dream together. It is your dream, Bing. But it is still my ride. Come. I want to show you something.”
As he had been speaking, the car was slowing and easing toward the side of the road. Snow crunched under the tires. The headlights illuminated a figure, just up the road on the right. From a distance it looked like a woman in a white gown. She stood very still, did not glance into the lights of the Wraith.
Manx leaned over and popped the glove compartment above Bing’s knees. Inside was the usual mess of road maps and papers. Bing also saw a flashlight with a long chrome handle.
An orange medicine bottle rolled out of the glove compartment. Bing caught it one-handed. It said HANSOM, DEWEY—VALIUM 50 MG.
Manx gripped the flashlight, straightened up, and opened his door a crack. “We have to walk from here.”
Bing held up the bottle. “Did you . . . did you give me something to make me sleep, Mr. Manx?”
Manx winked. “Don’t hold it against me, Bing. I knew you’d want to get on the road to Christmasland as soon as possible and that you could see it only when you were asleep. I hope it’s all right.”
Bing said, “I guess I don’t mind.” And shrugged. He looked at the bottle again. “Who is Dewey Hansom?”
“He was you, Bing. He was my pre-Bing thing. Dewey Hansom was a screen agent in Los Angeles who specialized in child actors. He helped me save ten children and earned his place in Christmasland! Oh, the children of Christmasland loved Dewey, Bing. They absolutely ate him up! Come along!”
Bing unlatched his door and climbed out into the still, frozen air. The night was windless, and the snow spun down in slow flakes, kissing his cheeks. For an old man (Why do I keep thinking he’s old? Bing wondered—he doesn’t look old), Charles Manx was spry, legging ahead along the side of the road, his boots squealing. Bing tramped after him, hugging himself in his thin dress uniform.
It wasn’t one woman in a white gown but two, flanking a black iron gate. They were identical: ladies carved from glassy marble. They both leaned forward, spreading their arms, and their flowing bone-white dresses billowed behind them, opening like the wings of angels. They were serenely beautiful, with the full mouths and blind eyes of classical statuary. Their lips were parted, so they appeared to be in midgasp, lips turned up in a way that suggested they were about to laugh—or cry out in pain. Their sculptor had fashioned them so their breasts were pressing against the fabric of their gowns.
Manx passed through the black gate, between the ladies. Bing hesitated, and his right hand came up, and he stroked the top of one of those smooth, cold bosoms. He had always wanted to touch a breast that looked like that, a firm, full mommy breast.
The stone lady’s smile widened, and Bing leaped back, a cry rising in his throat.
“Come along, Bing! Let’s be about our business! You aren’t dressed for this cold!” Manx shouted.
Bing was about to step forward, then hesitated to look at the arch over the open iron gate.
GRAVEYARD OF WHAT MIGHT BE
Bing frowned at this mystifying statement, but then Mr. Manx called again, and he hurried along.
Four stone steps, lightly sprinkled in snow, led down to a flat plane of black ice. The ice was grainy with the recent snowfall, but the flakes were not deep—any kick of the boot would reveal the smooth sheet of ice beneath. He had gone two steps when he saw something cloudy caught in the ice, about three inches below the surface. At first glance it looked like a dinner plate.
Bing bent and looked through the ice. Charlie Manx, who was only a few paces ahead, turned back and pointed the flashlight at the spot where he was looking.
The glow of the beam lit the face of a child, a girl with freckles on her cheeks and her hair in pigtails. At the sight of her, Bing screamed and took an unsteady step back.
She was as pale a
s the marble statues guarding the entrance to the Graveyard of What Might Be, but she was flesh, not stone. Her mouth was open in a silent shout, a few frozen bubbles drifting from her lips. Her hands were raised, as if she were reaching up to him. In one was a bunch of red coiled rope—a jump rope, Bing recognized.
“It’s a girl!” he cried. “It’s a dead girl in the ice!”
“Not dead, Bing,” Manx said. “Not yet. Maybe not for years.” Manx flicked the flashlight away and pointed it toward a white stone cross, tilting up from the ice.
LILY CARTER
15 Fox Road
Sharpsville, PA
1980–?
Turned to a life of sin by her mother,
Her childhood ended before it began.
If only there had been another
To take her off to Christmasland!
Manx swept his light around what Bing now perceived was a frozen lake, on which were ranked rows of crosses: a cemetery the size of Arlington. The snow skirled around the memorials, the plinths, the emptiness. In the moonlight the snowflakes looked like silver shavings.
Bing peered again at the girl at his feet. She stared up through the clouded ice—and blinked.
He screamed once more, stumbling away. The backs of his legs struck another cross, and he half spun, lost his footing, and went down on all fours.
He gazed through the dull ice. Manx turned his flashlight on the face of another child, a boy with sensitive, thoughtful eyes beneath pale bangs.
WILLIAM DELMAN
42B Mattison Avenue
Asbury Park, NJ
1981–?
Billy only ever wanted to play,
But his father didn’t stay.
His mother ran away.
Drugs, knives, grief, and dismay.
If only someone had saved the day!
Bing tried to get up, did a comical soft-shoe, went down again, a little to the left. The ray of Manx’s flashlight showed him another child, an Asian girl, clutching a stuffed bear in a tweed jacket.
SARA CHO
1983–?
39 Fifth Street
Bangor, ME
Sara lives in a tragic dream,
Will hang herself by age thirteen!
But think how she will give such thanks,
If she goes for a ride with Charlie Manx!
Bing made a gobbling, gasping sound of horror. The girl, Sara Cho, stared up at him, mouth open in a silent cry. She had been buried in the ice with a clothesline twisted around her throat.
Charlie Manx caught Bing’s elbow and helped him up.
“I’m sorry you had to see all this, Bing,” Manx said. “I wish I could’ve spared you. But you needed to understand the reasons for my work. Come back to the car. I have a thermos of cocoa.”
Mr. Manx helped Bing across the ice, his hand squeezing Bing’s upper arm tightly to keep him from falling again.
They separated at the hood of the car, and Charlie went on to the driver’s-side door, but Bing hesitated for an instant, noticing, for the first time, the hood ornament: a grinning lady fashioned from chrome, her arms spread so that her gown flowed back from her body like wings. He recognized her in a glance—she was identical to the angels of mercy who guarded the gate of the cemetery.
When they were in the car, Charlie Manx reached beneath his seat and came up with a silver thermos. He removed the cap, filled it with hot chocolate, and handed it over. Bing clasped it in both hands, sipping at that scalding sweetness, while Charlie Manx made a wide, sweeping turn away from the Graveyard of What Might Be. They accelerated back the way they had come.
“Tell me about Christmasland,” Bing said in a shaking voice.
“It is the best place,” Manx said. “With all due respect to Mr. Walt Disney, Christmasland is the true happiest place in the world. Although—from another point of view, I suppose you could say it is the happiest place not in this world. In Christmasland every day is Christmas, and the children there never feel anything like unhappiness. No, the children there don’t even understand the concept of unhappiness! There is only fun. It is like heaven—only of course they are not dead! They live forever, remain children for eternity, and are never forced to struggle and sweat and demean themselves like us poor adults. I discovered this place of pure dream many years ago, and the first wee ones to take up residence there were my own children, who were saved before they could be destroyed by the pitiful, angry thing their mother became in her later years.
“It is, truly, a place where the impossible happens every day. But it is a place for children, not adults. Only a few grown-ups are allowed to live there. Only those who have shown devotion to a higher cause. Only those who are willing to sacrifice everything for the well-being and happiness of the tender little ones. People like you, Bing.
“I wish, with all my heart, that all the children in the world could find their way to Christmasland, where they would know safety and happiness beyond measure! Oh, boy, that would be something! But few adults would consent to send their children away with a man they have never met, to a place they cannot visit. Why, they would think me the most heinous sort of kidnapper and kiddie fiddler! So I bring only one or two children a year, and they are always children I have seen in the Graveyard of What Might Be, good children sure to suffer at the hands of their own parents. As a man who was hurt terribly as a child himself, you understand, I’m sure, how important it is to help them! The graveyard shows me children who will, if I do nothing, have their childhoods stolen by their mothers and fathers. They will be hit with chains, fed cat food, sold to perverts. Their souls will turn to ice, and they will become cold, unfeeling people, sure to destroy children themselves. We are their one chance, Bing! In my years as the keeper of Christmasland, I have saved some seventy children, and it is my feverish wish to save a hundred more before I am done.”
The car rushed through the cold, cavernous dark. Bing moved his lips, counting to himself.
“Seventy,” he murmured. “I thought you only rescue one child a year. Maybe two.”
“Yes,” Manx said. “That is about right.”
“But . . . how old are you?” Bing asked.
Manx grinned sidelong at him—revealing that crowded mouthful of sharp brown teeth. “My work keeps me young. Finish your cocoa, Bing.”
Bing swallowed the last hot, sugary mouthful, then swirled the remnants. There was a milky yellow residue there. He wondered if he had just swallowed something else from the medicine cabinet of Dewey Hansom, a name that sounded like a joke or a name in a limerick. Dewey Hansom, Charlie Manx’s pre-Bing thing, who had saved ten children and gone to his eternal reward in Christmasland. If Charlie Manx had saved seventy kids, then there had been—what? Seven pre-Bing things? The lucky dogs.
He heard a rumbling: the crash, rattle, and twelve-cylinder whine of a big truck coming up behind them. He looked back—the sound was rising in volume with each passing moment—but could see nothing.
“Do you hear that?” Bing asked, unaware that the empty lid of the thermos had slipped from his suddenly tingling fingers. “Do you hear something coming?”
“That would be the morning,” Manx said. “Pulling up on us fast. Don’t look now, Bing, here it comes!”
That truck roar built and built, and suddenly it was pulling by them on Bing’s left. Bing looked out into the night and could see the side of a big panel truck quite clearly, only a foot or two away. Painted on the side was a green field, a red farmhouse, a scattering of cows, and a bright smiling sun coming up over the hills. The rays of that rising sun lit foot-high lettering: SUNRISE DELIVERY.
For an instant the truck obscured the land and sky, and SUNRISE DELIVERY filled Bing’s entire visual field. Then it rolled rattling on, dragging a rooster tail of dust, and Bing flinched from an almost painfully blue morning sky, a sky without cloud, without limit, and squinted into
The Pennsylvania Countryside
CHARLIE MANX ROLLED THE WRAITH TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD and put it int
o park. Cracked, sandy, country road. Yellowing weeds growing right up to the side of the car. Insect hum. Glare of a low sun. It could not be much later than seven in the morning, but already Bing could feel the fierce heat of the day coming through the windshield.
“Wowser!” Bing said. “What happened?”
“The sun came up,” Manx said mildly.
“I’ve been asleep?” Bing asked.
“I think, really, Bing, you’ve been awake. Maybe for the first time in your life.”
Manx smiled, and Bing blushed and offered up an uncertain smile in return. He didn’t always understand Charles Manx, but that only made the man easier to adore, to worship.
Dragonflies floated in the high weeds. Bing didn’t recognize where they were. It wasn’t Sugarcreek. Some back lane somewhere. When he looked out his passenger window, in the hazy golden light, he saw a Colonial with black shutters on a hill. A girl in a crimson, shiftlike flower-print dress stood in the dirt driveway, under a locust tree, staring down at them. In one hand she held a jump rope, but she wasn’t leaping, wasn’t using it, was just studying them in a quizzical sort of way. Bing supposed she hadn’t ever seen a Rolls-Royce before.
He narrowed his eyes, staring back at her, lifting one hand in a little wave. She didn’t wave back, only tipped her head to the side, studying them. Her pigtails dropped toward her right shoulder, and that was when he recognized her. He jumped in surprise and banged a knee on the underside of the dash.
“Her!” he cried. “It’s her!”
“Who, Bing?” Charlie Manx asked, in a knowing sort of voice.
Bing stared at her, and she stared right back. He could not have been more shocked if he had seen the dead rise. In a way he had just seen the dead rise.
“Lily Carter,” Bing recited. Bing had always had a good mind for scraps of verse. “‘Turned to a life of sin by her mother, her childhood ended before it began. If only there had been another to take her off to . . .’” His voice trailed away as a screen door creaked open on the porch and a dainty, fine-boned woman in a flour-dashed apron stuck her head out.