NOS4A2(191)

His father put a hand on his leg, and Wayne opened his eyes and looked at him. Lou had slid down out of the truck but reached back into the cab to set a big hand on his knee.

“It’s okay,” his father said. “This is all right, Wayne. You’re safe.”

Wayne nodded—but his father misunderstood him. He wasn’t afraid. If he was trembling, it was with nervous excitement. The other kids were so close, waiting for him to come back and dream into existence a new world, a new Christmasland, with rides, and food, and games. It was in him to do this. It was in everyone. He needed something, some tool, some instrument of pleasure, of fun, that he could use to tear a hole out of this world and into his own secret inner landscape.

Wayne felt the metal head of the hammer against his hip and looked at it and thought, Maybe. Take the hammer and bring it down on the top of his father’s head. When Wayne imagined the sound it would make—the deep, hollow knock of steel against bone—he tingled with pleasure. Take it to the center of Tabitha Hutter’s pretty, round, smart, smug, bitch-cunt face, smash her glasses, smash the teeth right out of her mouth. That would be fun. The thought of her pretty full lips rimmed with blood gave him a frankly erotic charge. When he was done with them, he could go for a walk in the woods, back to the cliff face, where the brick tunnel to Christmasland had been. Take the hammer and hit the rock, swing the hammer until the stone split, until there was a fissure he could squeeze himself into. Swing that hammer until he cracked the world open, made a space for him to crawl through, back into the world of thought, where the children waited.

But while he was still thinking it over—fantasizing about it—his father removed his hand and took up his hammer.

“Oh, what is this about?” Tabitha Hutter said under her breath, and undid her seat belt and got out on her side.

The wind soughed through the pines. Angels swayed. Silver globes refracted the light in brilliant, polychromatic sprays.

Lou stepped off the road, picking his way down the embankment. He lifted his head—he had just one chin now, and it was a good one—and turned his wise-turtle stare on the ornaments in the branches. After a time he picked one down, a white angel blowing a gold trumpet, set it on a rock, and smashed it with the hammer.

There was a momentary squall of feedback amid the static on the radio.

“Lou?” Tabitha asked, coming around the front of the truck, and Wayne thought if he slid behind the wheel and put it in drive, he could run her down. He imagined the sound of her skull striking the grille and started to smile—the idea was quite amusing—but then she moved on into the trees. He blinked rapidly, to clear aside this awful, lurid, wonderful vision, and jumped down out of the truck himself.

The wind rose, tossed his hair.

Lou found a glitter-spackled silver ornament, a globe as big as a softball, tossed it in the air, and swung the hammer like a baseball bat. The glittery sphere exploded in a pretty spray of opalescent glass and copper wire.

Wayne stood close to the truck, watching. Behind him, through the loud roar of the static, he heard a children’s choir singing a Christmas song. They sang about the faithful. Their voices were far away but clear and sweet.

Lou crushed a ceramic Christmas tree and a china plum sprinkled with gold glitter and several tin snowflakes. He began to sweat and removed his flannel coat.

“Lou,” Tabitha said again, standing at the top of the embankment. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because one of these is his,” Lou said, and nodded at Wayne. “Vic brought most of him back, but I want the rest.”

The wind screamed. The trees lunged. It was a little frightening, the way the trees were beginning to pitch back and forth. Pine needles and dead leaves flew.

“What do you want me to do?” Tabitha asked.

“Bare minimum? Don’t arrest me.”

He turned away from her, found another ornament. It was crushed with a musical tinkling.

Tabitha looked at Wayne. “I’ve never been one for just doing the bare minimum. You want to help? Looks like fun, doesn’t it?”

Wayne had to admit it did.

She used the butt of her gun. Wayne used a rock. In the car the Christmas choir rose and swelled, until even Tabitha noticed it and pointed an uneasy, wondering glance back at the truck. Lou ignored it, though, continued crushing glass holly leaves and wire crowns, and in a few moments the white noise rose again in a roar, burying the song.

Wayne smashed angels with trumpets, angels with harps, angels with hands folded in prayer. He smashed Santa, and all his reindeer, and all his elves. At first he laughed. Then, after a while, it wasn’t as funny. After a while his teeth began to ache. His face felt hot, then cold, then so cold it burned, icy-hot. He didn’t know why, didn’t give it much in the way of conscious thought.

He was raising a blue chunk of shale to smash a ceramic lamb when he saw movement at the upper edge of his vision and lifted his head and spied a girl standing by the ruin of the Sleigh House. She wore a filthy nightgown—it had been white once but now was mostly rust-colored from smears of dried blood—and her hair was in tangles. Her pale pretty face was stricken, and she was crying silently. Her feet were bloody.

“Pomoshch,” she whispered. The sound of it was almost lost in the whistling wind. “Pomoshch.” Wayne had never heard the Russian word for “help” before but understood well enough what she was saying.