The Best of Gene Wolfe

And When They Appear

Concerned about Sherby, and himself as well, House sent forth both Kite and Mouse.

If you had seen Mouse, you would have seen nothing. That is to say, you would have told yourself, and quickly convinced yourself, that you had seen nothing, so swift did Mouse scurry over the snow. You were not present, but an owl saw Mouse and swooped down upon her, huge winged and silent as death, for owls are too wise ever to tell themselves that their eyes did not see what their eyes have seen. Its talons closed about Mouse, and a thin blade shot out. The blade was intended for fingers, but it worked well on talons. The owl shrieked, and flapped away upon wings that were silent still, leaving a claw-tipped fraction of itself bleeding on the snow.

Mouse squeaked (a sound too faint for human ears) as the blade retracted; this was the first time that it had been used since Mouse had been made, and the selflubricating bearings it pivoted on were dry.

Kite soared higher than the owl ever had, so high that he saw Lonely Mountain whole. He saw the tracks of cars and people in the snow where a bridge crossed the Whitewater, and directed Mouse toward the great, domed doughnut that was the Jefferson house. That was how Mouse found Kieran Jefferson III (principal operating officer of the Beauharnais Group) dead next to his Christmas tree with his brand-new Chapuis express rifle still in his hands. Mouse told House about it right away.

“I have decided to have a Christmas party,” House told Sherby. “I’ve thought the whole thing over, and decided it is the right thing to do.”

“I’d like to see my mom and dad,” Sherby told House. Not because it had anything to do with the party, but simply because the thought, filling his mind, had popped from his mouth as soon as he opened it. Sherby was still in his yellow pajamas, having worn them all day.

“And so you shall,” House assured him, knowing full well that what it meant had nothing to do with what he meant.

“Not holos.” Sherby could not read House’s mind, but he had known House all his life; if he had been able to read House’s mind, it would have made no difference.

Nor could House read Sherby’s. (The big steep steps down and down into the basement, the heavy door of the cold storage locker that Sherby could not open without House’s help.)

“You must write the invitations,” House told Sherby. “I can’t manage that. I think we should invite Santa Claus first of all. That will get things off to a fine start.”

“I didn’t see Santa Claus last night,” Sherby objected. “I don’t think he’s real.”

“You fell asleep,” House explained gently, “and since he’s very busy on Christmas Eve, and had dropped in without an invitation, he didn’t awaken you. His busiest day is over now. He always relaxes on Christmas Day. He sleeps until dark, then eats a big dinner. He will be in a relaxed mood, and may very well come.”

“All right.” Enthusiasm comes easily at Sherby’s age, and often arrives unbidden; Sherby’s showed plainly on his face.

“You mustn’t expect more presents,” cautioned House, who had no more. “Santa gave away all the toys he had yesterday.”

“That’s okay,” Sherby said. “I like real things better than toys anyway.”

Then he went into the Learning Center, where House showed him how to make the letters, sometimes projecting hard ones (like M and Q) right onto the drawboard where Sherby could trace them. Sherby wrote:

“That’s a good one,” House told him, “and while you were writing it I had another good idea. Let’s invite all the rest of the Christmas people too. There are a great many of them, live toy soldiers, the Nutcracker, and countless others.”

Sherby looked down sadly at the light pen, which felt very heavy in his fingers. “I don’t want to write a whole bunch more of these,” he said.

“You won’t have to,” House promised. “Only one.”

So Sherby wrote:

He had no sooner laid down the light pen than House’s doorbell rang. Sherby ran to answer it, knowing that House was quite capable of doing it himself—and would too if the visitor were left standing outside for what House (who as a rule did not have a great deal of patience) considered an excessive length of time.

This visitor was not Santa Claus at all, and did not even look as though he might be much fun. He was an old man with granny glasses and wisps of white hair sticking out from under his tall beaver hat. But he wore a green greatcoat and a red cravat, and cried, “Hallo!” so cheerfully, and smiled with so many twinkles that Sherby got out of the way at once, saying, “Would you like to come in?”

“What’s today, my fine fellow?” inquired the old man as he stepped into House, beating the snow from his greatcoat in blizzards. (It melted as it reached the floor, but left no puddles there.)

“Christmas,” Sherby told him.

“Not Christmas Eve!” For a moment, the old man appeared quite frightened.

“No, Christmas Day. The night of it.” House groaned as even the very best houses do on cold nights, and Sherby added tardily, “Sir.”

“Ebenezer,” said the old man, and offered Sherby his hand in the most friendly fashion possible.

“No, sir, my name’s Sherby,” Sherby told him. And was about to shut the door (since he was getting cold and House had not yet done it) when he caught sight of a man in foreign garments, wonderfully real and distinct to look at, with an ax in his belt, leading a little black donkey laden with wood up the moonlit drive.

“It’s Ali Baba,” the old man explained. “Dear old honest Ali Baba! He did come to see me one Christmas, my boy, just like this. Now it’s your turn, and I’ve brought him to you, not only for his entertainment and yours, Sherby, but in order that you may know a great secret.”

He twinkled more than ever when he said this, and Sherby, who liked secrets more than almost anything else, asked, “What is it?”

The old man crouched until their eyes were nearly at a level. “You think that I am House,” the old man whispered. “And so I am.”

“You’re a holo,” Sherby told him.

“Light projected upon air, Sherby?” The old man leaned closer. “Light’s wondrous stuff, but it cannot speak. Or think.”

“That’s House,” Sherby acknowledged.

“And that”—the old man pointed through the doorway and out into the moonlit night—“is Ali Baba. I brought him with me so that you could learn that there is a vagrant magic in Christmas still, after all these years. You have not as long to learn it as I had, perhaps.” He straightened up. “May he bring his donkey in? I know it isn’t regular, but the poor donkey would be uncommonly cold, I’m afraid, standing out all evening in the snow.”

Ali Baba, who was close enough to overhear them by this time, grinned at Sherby in such a way as to guarantee that the donkey was housebroken.

“Okay,” Sherby said, so Ali Baba brought his donkey in with him, and with the donkey, a little bare-headed man in sandals and a brown habit like a lady’s dress, with a rope around his waist.

As they left the vestibule and went down the hall to the family room, Sherby tried to touch the little man’s back, but his hand went right through like he knew it would.

A fat man in livery came in with a tray of drinks that Sherby could not drink, hors d’oeuvres that he could not eat, and a carrot for the donkey. Ali Baba had begun to unload it and build a big fire in the fireplace when the doorbell rang again.

This time it was twelve stout young men with clubs, and a thirteenth who wore a fox skin hanging down his back, with the fox’s face for a cap, so that it looked as though the fox were peering over his head. All thirteen shouted: “Hail, Squire!” to Sherby; then they performed a dance to the rapping of their own clubs, coming together by sixes and striking their clubs together, while the fox (so Sherby thought of him) leaped and whirled among them.

When they were finished, the twelve with clubs ran past Sherby into House, each wishing him a merry Christmas. The fox seemed to have vanished, until Sherby closed the door and discovered that the fox was watching over his shoulder. “A glorious Yuletide to you, Young Squire,” the fox said.

Sherby turned very quickly and backed away from him, and although he knew the fox was fake, the door that stopped him from backing farther was very solid indeed.

“I’m Loki,” the fox told him, “the Norse personification of fire. I seek to steal the sun, and you’ve just seen me driven forth in order that the sun may return. I creep back in, however, as you also see. It’s my nature—I am forever creeping back in. Will you not wish me Good Yule in return?”

“It’s not Yule,” Sherby said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Christmas for some, but Yule for all. Yule means ‘tide,’ and tide means ‘time,’ ” the fox told him. “This is the time of winter solstice, when day begins to lengthen, and ancestral spirits must be placated. Did you know you had ancestral spirits?”

Sherby shook his head.

“We are they,” the fox told him, and as the fox spoke, someone seemed to pound the door so violently that the blows shook House.

Two young men stood on House’s porch, and five more were hauling an enormous stump across the snow. Six young women and three dogs followed them, and a seventh young woman rode the stump sidesaddle, one leg hooked about an upthrust root. She cried, “Faster! Faster!” when she saw Sherby standing in the doorway, and there was a great deal of laughter, barking, and shouting.

“House would like you to get to know all of us,” the fox explained, “but Kite says there isn’t time for more than a glimpse. Even so, you’ll remember this Christmas as long as you live.”

The seven young men pushed and pulled their Yule log into the vestibule, where the young woman dismounted. “Merriment all through the house,” she told Sherby, “as long as the log burns. But you’ve got to save a brand to light the next one. Roast pig and peacock pie.” She hurried away in the direction of the kitchen.

“The boar’s for Frey,” the fox whispered. “Frey rides a boar with golden bristles, a dwarfgift. When he left Asgard to dwell amongst men as Fridleef, King of Denmark, his folk served him a boar at Yule to show they knew him. The apple in its mouth was the sun he had brought back to them. Finding himself discovered, he mounted the roasted boar and rode back into the sky.” The fox pointed through the open doorway. “Now look yonder, and see the type of your holly wreath.”

There was a wheel of fire rolling down the mountain.

“House’s holos can’t reach that far,” Sherby said, but the fox had vanished.

A young man came in with a spray of mistletoe, which he hung from the arch between the vestibule and the hall. “Do you see the white berries?” the young man asked. “Each time a girl gets kissed under the mistletoe, she’s supposed to pull off one berry. When the last berry is gone, the mistletoe comes down.”

Everybody explains, Sherby thought, but nobody explains anything I want explained. House doesn’t know.

Sherby went out into the snow. It was cold, and tickled his bare feet in a very chilly way, but it was real, and he liked that about it. He walked clear around House and his five-car garage, until the ground fell away in icy rocks and he could look down into the shadowed valley of the Whitewater at the foot of Lonely Mountain. He could have seen the same things by looking out of the big picture window in the family room, but looking like this, with no glass between himself and the night and the cold, made it real.

He shivered, wishing that he had worn his blue bathrobe, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

Down in the valley there was a little dot of red light where something was burning, and House was flying Kite over it, a speck of black against the bright stars. The fire was probably a bonfire or a campfire, Sherby decided, and there would be people around it cooking hot dogs and marshmallows. He shivered again; House might fix real food if Sherby asked. He looked up at the picture window, then went a little farther down the slope where he could see it better. It was dark, and there was no smoke rising from the chimney.

Climbing back up was harder than going down had been, and once he slipped and hurt his knee. When he got back to the front door, a small black and white horse with no one to ride him was coming up the drive. He stopped and turned his head to look at Sherby through one wide, frightened eye.

“Here, pony!” Sherby called. “Here, pony!”

The little horse took a hesitant step forward.

“Here, pony!” Sherby recalled the donkey’s hors d’oeuvre and dashed into the vestibule, down the hall past the roaring family room, and into the kitchen.

The fat man in livery was there, talking to a plump woman in an apron as both put deviled oysters wrapped in bacon into little cups of paper lace. “Yes, Master Sherbourne,” the fat man said, “what can we do for you?”

“I just wanted a carrot,” Sherby told him. “A real one.”

The big vegetable drawer rolled forward, and a neat white compartment was elevated twenty-six centimeters to display two fresh carrots. Sherby snatched one and sprinted back to the porch, certain that the little horse would have gone.

He had not, and he cocked his ears in a promising fashion when Sherby showed him the carrot.

“You will require a halter of some sort, I am afraid,” a heavily accented voice behind Sherby said.

Sherby turned to find a very tall man wearing a very tall hat of starched gauze standing in House’s front doorway.

“That is good, what you do now,” the tall man said. “You do not look at him.” The tall man fingered his small, round beard. “We men—even boys—there is exousia in the eyes. He is afraid of that, poor little fellow.”

Sherby put his other hand in front of his eyes and peeped through his fingers. Sure enough, the little horse was closer now. “My bathrobe’s got a long belt. Usually I step on it.”

The tall man nodded sagely. “That might do. Go and get it, and I will watch him for you.”

When Sherby returned, the tall man was standing beside the little horse’s head. “You are very young yet,” he told Sherby. “Can you tie a knot?”

“I think so,” Sherby said.

“Then give him that carrot, and tie your belt about his head while he eats it.”

Sherby was afraid of the little horse’s big teeth at first, but the little horse took the carrot without biting him and munched away, seeming quite content to let Sherby tie the blue terry-cloth belt of his bathrobe around his neck, though it took three tries to get the knot right. “He smells like smoke,” Sherby said. “I’m going to call him Smoky.”

“His stable burned, poor little fellow, so it is a good name for him. My own is Saint Nicholas, now. It used to be Bishop Nicholas. I was Bishop of Myra, in Lycia; and though I am not Santa Claus, Santa Claus is me.”

Sherby was looking at Smoky. “Do you think I can lead him?”

“I am sure you can, my son.”

Sherby tugged at the blue terry-cloth belt, and the little horse backed away, his eyes wide, with Sherby stumbling and sliding after him. “I want him to come in,” Sherby said. “My feet are cold.”

“You are learning now what I learned as a parish priest,” Saint Nicholas told him.

Sherby braced his feet and tugged again; this time the little horse seemed ready to bolt. “You said I could lead him!”

“I did, my son. And I do. You can lead him wherever you wish him to go. But you cannot pull him anywhere. He is eager to follow you, but he is a great deal stronger than you are.”

“I want him to go in House!”

Saint Nicholas nodded patiently. “Yet you yourself were not going into House. You were faced away from him, matching your strength against his. Now you are facing in the correct direction. Hold your rope in one hand, as though you expected him to follow you. Walk toward me, and if he does not follow at once, jerk the rope, not too hard. Say erchou!”

Sherby tried it, making the word almost as guttural and rasping as Saint Nicholas had, and the little horse followed him readily, almost trotting.

When all three were in the vestibule and House had shut the big front door behind them, Sherby looked up at the tall, grave saint with new respect. “You know a lot about ponies.”

“My charioteer knew much more,” the saint told him, “but I know something about leading.”

“Do you know if there are any other kids like me at the party?”

The saint, who had been solemn the whole time, smiled. His smile made Sherby like him very much. “There is one, at least, my son. He was speaking with Father Eddi when last I saw him. Perhaps Father Eddi can help you.”

Sherby, still leading Smoky, had entered the family room before it occurred to him—much too late—that he ought to have asked Saint Nicholas what Father Eddi looked like. There were a great many people there, both men and ladies, and it seemed to Sherby that the men were all plenty old enough to be fathers, for many were older than his own father. He caught at the wide sleeve of a tall figure in black, but his fingers grasped nothing, and when the tall figure looked down at him it had the face of a skull and curling horns. Hastily Sherby turned away.

A small blond lady in a green dress that seemed (apart from its flaring collar of white petals) made of dark leaves appeared safer. “Please,” Sherby said, recalling his manners after the scare he had gotten. “Do you know Father Eddi?”

The blond lady nodded and smiled, offering her hand. “I’m Christmas Rose. And you are . . . ?”

“Sherby.”

She smiled again; she was lovely when she smiled, and hardly taller than he. “Yes, I know Father Eddi, Sherby. He is Saint Wilfred’s chaplain, and he’d like this little horse of yours very much. Did my friend Knecht Rupprecht startle you?”

“Is he your friend?” Sherby considered. “I’d like him better if he wasn’t so big.”

“But he wouldn’t frighten demons and bad children half so much if he were no bigger than I, Sherby. He must run through the streets, you see, on Advent Thursday, so that the demons will think that a demon worse than themselves holds the town. For a few coins he will dance in your fields, and frighten the demons from them too.”

Quite suddenly, Knecht Rupprecht was bending over Sherby, the skeletal bone of his jaw swinging and snapping. “Und den vor Christmas, vith Weihnachtsmann I come. You see here dese svitches?” He held a bundle of apple and cherry twigs under Sherby’s nose. “You petter pe gud, Sherpy.”

Surprising himself by his own boldness, Sherby passed his free hand through the bundle. “You’re all just holos. House makes you.”

He was sorry as soon as he did it, because Christmas Rose was so clearly disappointed in him. “It’s true that what you see now are holograms, Sherby. But we are real, nonetheless. I am a real flower, and Knecht Rupprecht a real custom. You will learn more, believe me, if you treat us as real. And since Carker’s Army is coming, you may not have much time in which to learn. Kite says they’re at the McKays’ already, and Mouse is going to see whether they left anyone alive.”

“Will they come here?” Sherby asked.

“We have no way of knowing that, Sherby. Let’s hope not.”

Knecht Rupprecht said, “If dey do, I vill schare dem avay, Sherpy. I dry, und dot’s a promise.”

“I didn’t like you at first,” Sherby told him. “But really I like you better than anybody. You and Christmas Rose.”

She made him a formal curtsy.

“Only I don’t understand how you can scare them away if they’re bad when you look like you’re bad, too.”

“Der same vay I schare der demons, Sherpy, und der pad Kinder. Gut ist nod schared of vot’s gut, put pad’s schared py vorse. See dese?”

He held out his switches again, and Sherby nodded.

“I tell you now a secret, put you must nod tell der pad Kinder. Vunce I gome vith dese to make der fruits grow. Id ist der dead manns, der dead animals vot does dat, zo I gome vor dem. Schtill I do, but der Volk, dey don’ know.”

Christmas Rose said, “We are comrades, Knecht Rupprecht and I, because of my other name. The botanists call me Black Hellebore. Not very pretty, is it?”

Sherby shook his head sympathetically.

“It’s because my roots are black. See?” She lifted her skirt to show black snakeskin shoes and black panty hose. “Of course, I am poisonous, but I can’t help it. I’m very pretty, I bloom in winter, and if you don’t eat me, I’ll never harm you.”

“Did my mom and dad eat you?” Sherby asked.

“No, that was something else.” Christmas Rose moved out of the way of a tall black man with a crown on his turban. “I could tell you its name, but that would convey no meaning to you. It’s an industrial chemical; your father brought it home from one of his factories.”

“They shouldn’t have eaten any.” A spasm of recollected sorrow crossed Sherby’s face and was gone.

“Der mama nefer meaned it,” Knecht Rupprecht told him kindly. “Do nod vorget dot, howefer old you lif.”

“You should have stopped them!”

Smoky stirred uneasily at the rage behind Sherby’s words.

“We couldn’t,” Christmas Rose told him; there was a catch in her voice that Sherby was too young yet to recognize. “We were not there, neither Knecht Rupprecht nor I.”

“You could because you’re House!”

“Who I say I am, I am.” Red lights glowed in the eye sockets of Knecht Rupprecht’s bleached skull. “Did I say I vas House?”

The fat man in livery, who had been passing with a tray of empty glasses, halted. “May I be of service, sir? I am House, the butler.”

Christmas Rose said, “This little boy is looking for Father Eddi, House. If you happen to see him . . . ?”

“Of course, madame.”

Sherby tried to grasp the skirt of House’s blue-striped waistcoat, but no resistance met his fingers. “You should’ve stopped them! You know you should!”

“I could not, Master Sherbourne, as long as your father was alive. And as your mother was, ah”—the butler cleared his throat—“the first to leave us, I was helpless until your father’s, hmm, demise. Had you not dawdled over your dinner, I should have been unable to preserve your life. As I did, Master Sherbourne.” He returned his attention to Christmas Rose. “Father Eddi, madame. I shall endeavor to locate him, madame. There should be no great difficulty.”

Sherby shouted, “You can make them go away! Make them all go away!” but the fat butler had already disappeared into the crowd.

As Sherby spoke, there was a stir on the other side of the big room. Knecht Rupprecht, who was tall enough to see over the heads of most of those present, announced, “Id ist der mama und der poppa, Sherpy. So priddy she ist lookin’!” He began to applaud, and everyone present except Sherby and Smoky joined in. Under the storm of sound, Sherby heard the snick, snick, snick of a hundred bolts shot home. A moment later the moonlit valley of the Whitewater slowly disappeared, blotted out by the descent of the picture window’s security shutter.

A thin and reedy voice at his ear said, “A very merry Christmas to you, my son! You wished to speak with me?”

Sherby turned; it was the little man in sandals.

“I’m Father Eddi, my son. Are you Master Sherbourne? That big fellow in the striped waistcoat said you wished to speak with me, and I’ll be glad to help if I can.” When he saw Sherby’s expression, Father Eddi’s own face grew troubled. “You certainly look unhappy enough.”

Sherby gulped, knowing that his mother and father, dead, were talking and laughing with their guests. “I—I sort of hoped some other kids would come.”

“Some have,” Father Eddi assured him. “Tiny Tim’s over there with Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit, and Greg—the doctor’s son, you know, who helped to make the pasteboard star—is about somewhere, and Louisa, the girl who felt sorry for the Little Guest.” Father Eddi paused expectantly; when Sherby said nothing, he added, “I can introduce you to them, if you like.”

“A man . . .” Sherby had forgotten the tall saint’s name already. “A man said you were talking to some other kid. I thought that if I could find you, I could find him.”

“So you can!” Father Eddi’s smile was radiant. “Follow me. He’s behind the tree at this very moment, I believe.” He started away, then stopped so abruptly that Sherby and Smoky ran into him, burying their faces in his insubstantial, brown-clad back. “He’s behind the tree, just as I told you. Every Christmas, he’s behind the tree. Before it too, of course.”

Christmas Rose called, “Good-bye, Sherby! Good luck!”

It was a most magnificent tree, as yellow and shiny as real gold, alive with lights and hung with ornaments that were like little toys, although Sherby was forbidden to play with them. Santa Clauses rode sleighs and airplanes and even spaceships, stepped into redbrick chimneys, swung gaily from the clappers of bells, and carried tiny trees of their own, mostly green. There were jumping jacks and jack-in-the-boxes, rag dolls and snowmen and tiny boys with drums, and lovely silver deer that might have been of almost any kind except reindeer. It smelled marvelous too; Sherby inhaled deeply.

A dark-eyed, rather swarthy boy with curling black hair stepped out from behind the tree. “Hello, Sherby,” he said. “Were you looking for me?”

Sherby nodded. “You know my name.”

“I was at your christening.” The swarthy boy held out his hand. “I’m Yeshua bar-Yoseph. Welcome to my birthday party.”

“This is my House.” Sherby wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“I know,” Yeshua said. “Thanks for letting us celebrate it here, Sherby.”

Behind him, his mother exclaimed, “Oh, you’ve found the Baby Jesus!” She knelt next to Sherby, lifting the skirt of her beautiful gown so as not to kneel on it, and reached for the little blond ceramic doll in the miniature manger under the tree. Sherby knew she wanted to pick it up but couldn’t because she was a holo and it was real.

“Never mind her,” he told Yeshua.

“Oh, it’s all right.” Yeshua grinned, his teeth flashing in his dark face.

“Did you get real nice presents?” Sherby wanted to ask a favor, but he felt that it might be a good idea to talk a little more first and make friends.

“Lots. I haven’t opened all of them yet.”

Sherby nodded; he knew how that was. “What did you like the best?”

“My favorite present?”

Sherby nodded again.

“I’ll tell you what mine was if you’ll promise to tell me what yours was, after.”

“Okay,” Sherby said.

“Mine was what I said—you and your mother and father giving me this party,” Yeshua told him. “It’s really great, something I’ll never forget. Now what was yours?”

Sherby patted the little horse’s nose. “He is. I call him Smoky. I got a Distracto, and a copter that really flies and you can steer around, and a bunch of other stuff. But I like Smoky the best.” He took a deep breath. “Will you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“I want to go downstairs and open the big locker and . . . and—”

“Just look at them for a while,” Yeshua supplemented.

“Uh-huh. An’ I want you to come. I know you can’t help work the door or anything, but I’d like you to come anyway. Okay?”

From no place and everyplace, all over the room, House said, “This is most unwise, Sherby.”

Sherby ignored him. “Will you?”

Yeshua nodded, and Father Eddi said, “I’ll go with you too, Sherby, if you don’t mind.”

Remembering the tall man with the tall hat, Sherby said, “That’s good. Come on,” and turned and hurried away, walking right through several people who failed to notice him and get out of his way, the little horse trotting after him, his hoofs loud upon the carpeted floor.

A wide door in the kitchen opened upon a flight of wooden steps. It was hard to persuade Smoky to go down them, but Sherby led to the best of his ability, saying, “Erchou!” half a dozen times, and praising Smoky each time he put a hoof onto a lower step. “Where’s Yeshua?” he asked Father Eddi.

“Here with us.” Father Eddi had been walking up and down the steps energetically to show Smoky how easily it could be done, and was rather out of breath.

“I don’t see him.”

“What you saw—the hologram—isn’t here,” Father Eddi explained.

“I’d like to see him.”

“You don’t think much of them.” Father Eddi sat down on a step to wipe his forehead with the ragged hem of his brown habit. “So House did away with it. He’s here just the same.”

“Well, I’d like to see.”

“Then you shouldn’t have walked through the holograms upstairs, and should’ve wished your mother Merry Christmas.”

“Are you a Christmas person? Like Knecht Rupprecht and Christmas Rose?” Sherby turned around to look back at Father Eddi, which surprised Smoky so much that he went down another step without urging.

“I certainly am.”

“What makes you one?”

“One Christmas, I said a mass nobody came to except a donkey and an ox.”

“Is that all?”

“I’m afraid it is.” Father Eddi looked crestfallen. “I didn’t put myself forward to House as a Christmas person, you understand, my son. But donkeys have been my friends ever since that night, so when you said that Ali Baba could bring in Kawi I came too, remembering my midnight service for the Saxons and hoping that I might be of some use here.

“No doubt he forgot me and my service long ago, but I haven’t forgotten him, my son—no more than you’ve forgotten your father and mother in the frozen-food locker down here. How did you get their bodies down these steps, anyway? You can’t have carried them yourself.”

“Mariah and Jeremy were here then. House had them do it. Erchou!” This last was for Smoky, who (gaining confidence as he neared the cellar floor) actually went down four more steps without further urging before he halted again.

“Then they went away and left you here with House? That wasn’t very wise, I’m afraid.”

“House made them,” Sherby explained. “He’s supposed to take care of me when there’s nobody else to do it, and Mariah and Jeremy weren’t supposed to take me anywhere unless my mom said it was okay. House wouldn’t let them open the door as long as I was with them. They said they’d send somebody.”

“Somebody else will get here sooner, I’m afraid,” Father Eddi told him. “I will have some advice for you, if you can get the big stainless door open.”

“You could ask House to open it for me. He can do that. You could pretend like you’re doing it. You could put your hand on the handle and House would pull it and open the door and you could go inside and tell me to come in.” It was a lot of talking for Sherby, and made him glad that Father Eddi was not much bigger than he was.

“He won’t do it, my son,” Father Eddi said gently. “He doesn’t think it good for you to come down here and look at them. Neither do I. But if you get the freezer door open, I’ll have some advice to offer, as I told you.”

“Erchou!” Sherby said, and Smoky clattered down the last two steps to stand beside him. “Watch me.”

He untied the blue terry-cloth bathrobe belt, then tied its ends together in a new knot, pulling hard to make sure it would hold. That done, he looped it around the handle of the big freezer door, and put the other loop over Smoky’s head. Returning to the foot of the steps, he shouted, “Erchou!”

Smoky eyed him nervously.

“I think you’d better go back upstairs, my son,” Father Eddi said.

“I was looking that time. That’s not the right way to do it.” Sherby started up the steps. “Erchou!”

Smoky pulled the big handle forward by perhaps half an inch.

“There’s another carrot up there,” Sherby said. “I know that’ll work, only I want to try something else first. Watch me!”

He carried Mariah’s empty scrub bucket to Smoky’s side, inverted it, and mounted. “Now come on! Erchou!” Sherby kicked Smoky with his bare heels, and Smoky took a hesitant step or two forward.

The big stainless-steel door swung open.

“I’m going in to look at them,” Sherby told Father Eddi. “You don’t have to come in with me.”

“I wish that I could.”

Even to stand in front of the door was to enter a second winter, colder even than the snow and the night wind on Lonely Mountain.

Sherby stepped inside.

Father Eddi called, “I can’t go any farther with you, my son. There are no hologram projectors in there.”

“That’s all right,” Sherby told him. Sherby was looking at his mother. There was a fine powdering of ice crystals on her cheek, and one hand was lifted as if she had died gesturing. Telling his father not to eat what she had, Sherby decided. Only his father had meant to, and had done it anyway.

“It might be a good thing for you to take Smoky in with you and shut the door, my son.”

Sherby shook his head, shivering. He was still looking at his mother, and absentmindedly stroking Smoky’s nose.

“You can’t be locked in. There’s a push bar on the inside that makes the door very easy to open.”

“I’m coming out in a minute,” Sherby said. His father’s face was twisted. Because he knew what was happening, Sherby thought. It had been wrong, wrong of his father particularly, to go away and leave him alone with House.

“You see, my son, Carker’s Army is looting and burning all the homes along East Mountain Road, and they’ve left the McKays’. They will probably burn this house as well. If they do, that freezer is the part of House most likely to survive. If you snuggle up with Smoky, you might stay alive until they leave.”

“No,” Sherby said. He wanted his mother to pat his head the way she always had when she put him into bed, and thought of bending down and touching her hand with his head. He knew it would not be the same, but he did it anyway, then turned away, shivering worse than ever, and led Smoky out into the cellar again, where Father Eddi waited.

“This is your best chance, my son. You know that House can open this door. He’ll open it for you when it’s safe.”

Sherby did not bother to reply. He pushed hard against the big door, swinging it shut.

“Are we going back upstairs? Santa Claus is about to appear. It will be the high point of the party.”

“I don’t care about Santa,” Sherby declared.

Smoky, who had been so reluctant to go down the stairs, trotted up them quite readily. “House!” Sherby called when they were back in the kitchen. “House, say something! Answer me!”

“What is it, Sherby?” The big voice seemed to come from all around him, as it always had, but there was a tension in it that Sherby had never heard before.

“I want to see out front. Is it okay to open the front door?”

“No,” House told him. “There is a screen in the study—”

“Not that. You let me open it before.”

“They were not here then, Sherby. Now they are.”

Sherby considered the problem. Behind him, Father Eddi said, “House would like to show you Santa Claus, and this may be the last chance you’ll ever have to see him with a child’s eyes. Won’t you please go into the family room and look?”

House said, “I will make an agreement with you, Sherby. If you’ll see Santa, I’ll open the security shutter on one of the windows in the living room a little and let you look out there; I promise.”

“All the way. And look for as long as I want.”

House hesitated. Smoky stamped in the silence; faintly, Sherby could hear voices outside and the loud bangs of people pounding on things. At last House said, “All right.”

There seemed to be fewer guests in the family room than Sherby remembered. Christmas Rose was talking to the tall, turbaned king and an older king with a long, white beard, but Knecht Rupprecht was nowhere to be seen. As Sherby and Smoky advanced toward the fireplace, in which the immense Yule log was blazing, Santa Claus stepped out of the fire, a fat little man no taller than Sherby himself, his red and white clothing all tarnished with soot and an enormous bundle of toys on his back.

“Look, my son!” Father Eddi exclaimed from behind Sherby. “There’s Santa Claus! He came!”

Sherby nodded. A sort of aisle had opened between Santa Claus and himself. His mother was standing on Santa Claus’s right, his father on his left, and an elf was peeping from between his father’s legs. As Sherby came nearer, leading Smoky, Santa Claus roared with laughter. “Here I am again, Sherby! Second time today!”

“Are you really Santa Claus?” Sherby’s voice wanted to shake. It was as if he had been crying.

“I certainly am!” Santa Claus laughed again, louder than ever: “Ho, ho, ho, ho!”

“Then you’re nothing,” Sherby told him. Sherby could not talk as loud as Santa Claus did, but he talked as loud as he could. “You’re a big nothing, and I never, never want to see you anymore. House! Are you listening to me, House?”

Sherby waited for House’s reply, and all the guests were silent too. His mother and his father looked at each other, but neither spoke. Smoky nuzzled his hand.

“I’m the only one here, House! You’ve got to do what I tell you! You know you do!” Sherby looked for the butler in the crowd of guests, but could not find him. “Make them all go away. I mean it! No more promises. Make them all go away right now!”

He and Smoky stood alone in the big, dark, empty family room; the fireplace that had blazed an instant before was cold and dark.

Gradually the lights came up, so that by the time Sherby and Smoky had taken a few steps toward the door, the room was lit almost normally, though nowhere near as bright as it had been during the party.

“House, I’m hungry. I’m going to the study now, to look out. When I’m finished I want a bowl of Froot Loops. Get out the stuff.”

House’s big voice, coming from a dozen speakers in that part of the house, said, “There is no milk left, Sherby. I told you so at noon, remember?”

“What is there?”

House considered, and Sherby knew there was no point in interrupting.

“There are sardines and two slices of bread. You could make a sardine sandwich?”

“Peanut butter?”

“Yes, a little.”

“I’ll have toast and peanut butter,” Sherby decided. “Get out the peanut butter. Toast the bread and have it waiting for me when I’m through looking.”

“I will, Sherby.”

The hall was nearly dark, the study as black as pitch. House said, “If I turn on the lights, they will see you at once when I raise the security shutter, Sherby.”

“Turn on the lights now so I can get over to the window,” Sherby instructed him. “Then turn them off again. Then pull up the shutter.”

His father’s desk was still there, and the big computer console, its screen dark. Save for one large and equally dark window, books lined the walls—his grandfather’s law books, mostly; Sherby remembered his mother opening one for him to show him his grandfather’s bookplate.

“I wish that you would go back to the frozen-food locker, Sherby. That would be the safest place for you and Smoky.”

“What’s that banging the front door?”

“A log.”

The light above the desk dimmed, then winked out. Sherby flattened his nose against the chill, black thermopane of the window, and the security shutter glided smoothly up.

There were too many people to count outside, some of them so close they were nearly touching the glass. Among them were policemen and firemen, but no one paid any attention to them; when he had been looking out for perhaps half a minute, Sherby recognized one of the firemen as the fox. A man holding a big iron bar ran right through the fox toward the window, but two women stopped him and pulled him out of the way.

The window exploded inward.

Sherby found himself on the floor. The light was bright and the shutter closed again, and he lay in a litter of broken glass; his right hand was bleeding, and his head bleeding from somewhere up in his hair. He cried then for what felt to him like a very long time, listening to the bang, bang, bang from the big front door.

When he got up, he took off his pajama shirt, wiped the blood away with it, blew his nose in it, and let it fall to the floor. “Where’s Smoky?” he asked.

“In the dining room, Sherby. He is all right.”

“Is my toast ready?”

“It will be by the time that you reach the kitchen. I would not try to catch Smoky again right now, Sherby. The shots frightened him very much. He might hurt you.”

“Okay,” Sherby said.

Kneeling on a kitchen chair, he spread the last of the peanut butter on his toast. He found that he was no longer hungry, but he ate one piece anyway. Somebody banged on the security shutter of one of the kitchen windows and went away. Climbing the stairs to get to his bedroom, Sherby thought that he had seen Yeshua on the landing. Yeshua had smiled, his white teeth flashing. Then he was gone, and it seemed he had never been there at all. “Don’t do that,” Sherby told House.

House did not answer.

In his bedroom, Sherby slipped out of his pajama bottoms and pulled on underwear and long stockings, jeans, and his red sweater. He was not skillful at tying shoes, but that morning there had been green Wellingtons under the tree. Now, for the first time ever, he tugged them on; they were only a little bit too large, and they did not have laces to tie. His green knit cap kept the blood from trickling into his eyes.

“You are not to go out, Sherby.”

“Yes, I am,” Sherby announced firmly. “I’m going to get on Smoky and go someplace else.” He paused, thinking. “Down the mountain.” Smoky had been very unwilling to go down the cellar stairs, but Sherby felt pretty sure he would run faster down Lonely Mountain than up.

House said nothing more, but Sherby could hear people running and shouting downstairs. It sounded as if House was showing the party again, and Sherby told himself that if it sounded like the party it couldn’t really be as bad as House had been pretending.

It was hard to decide which toys and books to take; in the end he settled on the yo-yo with the blinky lights in its side and the copter, telling himself that he could make the copter fly after him when he didn’t want to carry it. He put on his big puffy down-filled coat, buttoned the easy buttons, slipped the yo-yo into one side pocket and the copter control into the other, and went out onto the landing again.

Knecht Rupprecht was there, standing at the head of the stairs—but a new Knecht Rupprecht, hideously transformed. Shreds of decaying flesh dangled from his skull face now, his eyes were spheres of fire, and he was taller than ever; in place of his bundle of switches he held a sword with a blade longer than Sherby and wider than Sherby’s whole body.

People were clustered at the foot of the stairs staring up at him, arguing and urging each other forward. After a second or two, Sherby decided it might be better to go down the back stairs to the kitchen, but as he was about to turn away something very strange happened to Knecht Rupprecht: he vanished, reappeared, roared so wildly that Sherby took three steps backward, dimmed, and dropped his sword.

The lights went out.

Something knocked Sherby down, and something else stepped on his fingers.

A flashlight beam danced on the ceiling before it too winked out.

Sherby tried to crawl on his hands and knees. Somebody tripped over him and said, “Shit! Oh, shit!”

Something was burning in the hall downstairs; from where he lay, Sherby could not see the flames, but he saw the red light of them and smelled smoke.

Thick, soft, warm arms scooped him up. “Little boy,” the owner of the arms said in a voice like a girl’s. “Little cute boy. Don’t cry.”

Outside the moon was up, and some of House’s security shutters were lying on the snow-covered flower beds. Behind them, their windows glowed with orange light. Thick black smoke was coming through the shutters over his mother’s and father’s bedroom windows.

Smoky galloped through a milling crowd of people. One threw a bottle at him, and there were popping noises. Smoky stumbled and fell, tried to get up, and fell again. Someone hit him with a snowball, and someone else with a big stick.

“You want to hit him, little boy?” the man holding Sherby asked. Sherby could feel the man’s whiskers scraping his ear. “You can hit him if you want to.”

Sherby said nothing, but the man set him down anyway. “You can hit him if you want to,” the man said again in his girl’s voice. “Go ahead.”

It would be better, Sherby thought, to do what they said. To be one. He got closer, not looking at the man behind him, stooped, and tried to scrape up enough of the trampled snow for a snowball. It stung his fingers and there wasn’t enough, so he found a rock and threw that instead.

The fat man picked him up again. “I’m going to call you Chris,” he told Sherby, “ ’cause you’re my Christmas present. You can call me Corporal Charlie, Chris.” He was bigger than anybody Sherby had ever seen before, not as tall as Knecht Rupprecht but wider than Sherby’s bed. “You come along with me, Chris. We’ll go on back to my van. You got cut, didn’t you?”

Sherby said, “Uh-huh.”

“I’ll put a little splash of iodine on that when we get back home. We—”

House’s roof fell in with a crash as he spoke. A great cloud of swirling sparks rose into the sky, and Sherby said, “Oooh!”

“Yeah, that’s somethin’, ain’t it? I seen it before. All these soldiers here are meaning to do some more, but you and me are going home.” Corporal Charlie chuckled. “We’ll take off our clothes and have some fun, Chris. Then we’ll go to bed.”

Corporal Charlie took up the whole front seat of the van, so Sherby rode in back with furniture and some dresses and a lot of other things. There was a thing there lying on some coats that Sherby recognized, and when he was sure that it was what he thought it was, he traded the copter control for it.

That night at Corporal Charlie’s house, when Corporal Charlie was asleep and Sherby was supposed to be asleep on Corporal Charlie’s smelly old sofa, Sherby got the thing he had found in the van out again. “Merry Christmas, Mouse,” he said to the shiny round lens in front. “It’s me, Sherby.”

But Mouse was quiet, still, and cold.

Sherby put her under the sofa cushion.

Christmas was funny, Sherby thought, snuggling underneath the coats. Christmas was happy and sad, green and red, real and fake, all mixed together. “I don’t like it,” he muttered to himself, but as soon as he had said it, he knew it was not true. He wished—somehow—that he had been nicer to Santa Claus, even if Santa Claus was not real.

Do you know how M. R. James came to write all those great old ghost stories? He wrote one a year, no less and no more, to read to his family at Christmas. We associate ghost stories with Halloween now—see Neil Gaiman’s marvelous “October in the Chair”—but ghosts at Christmas are far older. The three seen by Ebenezer Scrooge are not the beginning but almost the end of a lengthy tradition. If you were to return as a ghost, wouldn’t you rather revisit your family at Christmas?

So I hope you noticed the ghosts, and that you noticed (as only a few readers do) that there is an anti-Santa, too. Poor Sherby rejects Santa Claus and gets someone much worse.