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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.”