“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.”