"Stevie!" he whispered. He was afraid to look in the pale light of dawn, half expecting to find blood running down the wall from the upper bunk. "Stevie, wake up!"

Jeff heard a sharp indrawn breath. "Jeff! Santa didn't get us."

They both started laughing. "Come on, let's go see."

They tumbled out of bed, then spent ten minutes dismantling the barricade of toys and small furniture they had placed in front of the door. The house remained still and quiet around them. Nothing was stirring, not even a mouse.

Jeff glanced at the dining room table as they crept into the living room. The cookies were gone. The milk gla.s.s had been drained dry.

Jeff looked for a contorted red-suited form lying in the corner-but he saw nothing. The Christmas tree lights blinked on and off; Mom and Dad had left them on all night.

Stevie crept to the Christmas tree and looked. His face turned white as he pulled out several new gift-wrapped boxes. All marked "FROM SANTA."

"Oh, Jeff! Oh, Jeff-you were wrong! What if we killed Santa!"

They both gawked at the presents.

"Jeff, Santa took the poison!"

Jeff swallowed and stood up. Tears filled his eyes. "We have to be brave, Stevie." He nodded. "We better go tell Mom and Dad." He shuddered, then screwed up his courage.

"Let's go wake them up."

Kevin J. Anderson has written forty-nine national and international bestsellers and has over twenty-three million books in print worldwide in thirty languages. He has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Readers' Choice Award. He is best known for his highly popular Dune novels and h.e.l.lhole, written with Brian Herbert, his numerous Star Wars and X-Files novels, and his original science fiction epic, The Saga of Seven Suns. He has also written comics and produced and wrote two rock CDs as companions to his nautical fantasy trilogy, Terra Incognita.

Find out more at www.wordfire.com and www.wordfirepress.com.

What is your best, funniest, or darkest holiday-season memory?

It was the first Thanksgiving that my sister's in-laws were celebrating with our family. My mother wanted to make a good impression on the Kanes, who were from an upscale town in Connecticut. Our town was pretty nice too, but we lived on a dairy farm, and my mother didn't want our new relations to think we were hokey or "backwoods" in our ways.

Everyone was getting along, socializing in the open kitchen area while Mom mashed yams. She glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye. Mom discreetly waved my father over to her side.

"Paul," she whispered, "I think I just saw a mouse over by the refrigerator. Do something!"

My father has always been a man of action, and he moved quickly. Grabbing a fork off of the meticulously laid-out table, he crouched down in the far corner of the kitchen. He waited...waited...then jabbed underneath the fridge in a flash. Dad proudly held up his fork, which now had an impaled, squealing mouse on the end of it.

My sister and I clapped. My brother-in-law complimented Dad on having the reflexes of a cat. And my sister's in-laws, along with my mother, no longer had an appet.i.te for Thanksgiving dinner.

-Stacey Longo.

www.staceylongo.com.

TINSEL.

by John Boden.

Avery stood on the stoop as the wind and snow swirled around him. His cheeks were raw yet hot, even in this weather. The frigid sting of the cold was welcome.

He slipped the key into the lock, and with a turn, he was inside. Leaning back against the door, he drew a deep breath. The house still smelled like Marie, that faint flowery smell of her shampoo, the powder-diffused tang of sweat emanating from the recliner. He took a slow visual tour of the living room and basked in all the memories there-the basket beside the chair, the crossword puzzle book that still lay open to the page she was working on when she had the stroke, the barrister bookcase...

They were in their twenties when she spotted the bookcase from across the parking lot at the flea market. Dark mahogany, etched gla.s.s in the pull doors...it was beautiful. Over the years, her nimble fingers must have danced countless times over every nick and sc.r.a.pe along its aged veneer.

"How much?" she had asked that day, with her bubbly giggle so lovely.

The man behind the counter removed the cigarette from his cracked lips to answer: "Two hundred. That's an antique."

Avery held out his hand, Marie took it, and they made to walk away.

"I can take a hundred, just so I don't gotta lug the d.a.m.n thing back on the truck."

They stopped and smiled at one another, proud of their charade's success.

"Sold!"

Now it sat in the corner of the living room, as it had for these last fifty years. Half a century worth of books and gewgaws. Worn, pulp paperbacks and hardcovers had long ago filled it to capacity. The piece now stood nearly hidden behind stacks of books and magazines.

Avery sighed and dropped his wool coat on the floor. "Hang it up, Ave," he could almost hear Marie holler as he went to the kitchen.

Fifty-seven years with the woman. A lifetime.

They had met when he was twenty. Marie a clerk at the Save-U-Mor, and Avery a long-haired hood who worked at The Sound Pound, a record shop next door. When shopping, he would make a point of going to her register, telling her stupid jokes. She pretended not to find him amusing. He asked her out but made it sound like she was doing him a favor. She accepted but disguised it as a pitiful gesture.

They saw Night of the Living Dead and had a great time, so they went out again. Love notes clipped to timecards, under windshield wipers, roses on car seats. He once gave her a bottle of rain. With Marie, a mundane trip to the grocery store was a loving adventure. The years fluttered by like birds.

Until now.

Avery heated up a can of chicken soup, and set a steaming bowl of it down on the only clear spot on the dinner table. Staring ahead, he slowly sipped the broth.

All the mail from the week-bills, junk mail, newspapers-sat in a heap beside him. There were pencils and pens, a pile of clipped coupons, a roll of paper towels, a dismantled cuckoo clock he had been fixing for the last three years, a Mason jar full of pennies. He shook his head and smiled. "How ever did you tolerate me, woman?"

Sipping golden broth, it was hard to get it past the lump in his throat.

They had been watching Jeopardy when the stroke hit.

"What is Pygmalion?" she had uttered, followed by a strange noise.

Avery sat with his nose in one of his old pulps. "What?" he responded to the question he a.s.sumed she must have asked him. No answer came. After a few minutes, he looked over and saw her slumped in the chair, breathing fast and heavy, her face drawn on one side. Her blue eyes, wide and full of panic, fixed upon him. She whimpered like a child.

"My G.o.d," he said, and jumped for the phone.

In the hospital, he had sat in the uncomfortable chair and watched her wane, a beautiful picture fading before his eyes. With their gnarled fingers intertwined, he reminisced about their courtship, their wedding day, how divine she had looked in her dress, and how he had made that silly face when they raised their toast because he hated the taste of alcohol. But most importantly, how very lucky he was. He whispered about the birth of their son, and how beautiful she had been while she carried him, and how blessed he was to have spent every one of the last 20,805 days with her as his wife. He told her how much he loved her, no less than one hundred times.

Small sighing breaths were the only response from Marie, until even they disappeared on that fifth day.

Avery recalled all of this as he stood at the sink and washed the soup dish.

He began the long process of filling baggies with warm water from the tap. It had been a long week-the longest he would ever endure-and he was dog-tired, but it needed to be done. The window over the sink steamed up as he did so. He turned each baggie upside down to ensure the seal wouldn't leak, and then one by one placed them gently into the storage tote by his feet.

The Christmas decorations Marie had wanted him to put up last weekend were now sitting in a pile beside the dining-room table. He had only managed to get a single strand of sliver tinsel looped along the bannister. The light reflected on it like tears.

The tote weighed heavy on his old bones-his cross to bear-as he carried it upstairs.

Aside from a few days here and there when he was away on business, or Marie was visiting her sister, Avery had not slept alone in all the time they'd been married. He wasn't sure he could do it now.

He pulled back the covers and stared at Marie's indentation in the mattress. She always slept in the same position, curled up like a question mark. His arthritic fingers touched the spot where her shape remained, and he sobbed quietly. He slowly removed the baggies from the tote, and placed them into the impression of her. From the hook on the bathroom door, he took her bathrobe and covered the baggies, tucking it under each one.

In the dim light of the bedroom, Avery removed his clothing and turned off the bedside lamp. He draped an arm over the warm shape where Marie had once slept, where he felt her now sleeping. He breathed in the smell of soap and sweat and familiarity.

Just before sleep pulled him down, something lightly brushed his tear-streaked cheek. Avery imagined one of Marie's silver strands of hair, decorated in his tears, like tinsel.

John Boden resides in the shadow of Three Mile Island, with his wonderful wife and sons. He works as a baker by day and writes when he can. His work has appeared in print and online at Everyday Weirdness, Weirdyear, Twisted Dreams Magazine and 52 St.i.tches, Vol. 2, and is forthcoming in Black Ink Horror #7. He has bad-a.s.s sideburns.

What is your best, funniest, or darkest holiday-season memory?

The Central Texas Christmas flood killed twelve people and ruined 43 million dollars' worth of property. Lake Travis rose 33 feet over the s.p.a.ce of four days. My family lived out in the area around Driftwood, Texas, with the only way to or from our house and the houses of our neighbors being a low water crossing over a creek that runs about half the year and dries away to isolated deep puddles in most summers.

Before it started raining there was a railing that ran between three limestone-and-concrete pillars on either side of the little bridge over the creek, and each pillar was topped with a lantern that came on at dusk with an automatic timer. It had a kind of fairy bridge look to it.

I was eleven and I had the kind of fever where a parent plows through stop signs to get their kid to the hospital faster. My mother had been home with us when it started raining, but my father worked at an office in Austin. I never saw it, but I always envision him driving to the edge of the creek and prowling back and forth in the rain like some kind of animal behind the bars of a cage, with my mother on the other side shouting to him. He drove back into town and managed to find our family doctor-after hours, I believe-in the middle of a flood.

However he did it, he managed to bring back antibiotics, put them in a bag with a rock for extra weight, and throw them across what had transformed from a half-dry creek bed into twenty-five foot wide rush of white water that covered our little bridge entirely.

I don't remember much of Christmas that year. Mostly I remember the big tub in my parents' bathroom, falling asleep and waking again up to my chest in tepid water for what seemed like hours while my mother tried to break the fever, light from candles on the counter and lightning when the power was out, and the gray sky like a monochrome photograph of egg-crates the way the thunderstorms get around here.

It's only now that I'm grown up that I can appreciate how terrifying it all must have been for my mother. And for my father, pacing the other side of the water.

I was told then, though I've never seen information to back it up, that our little crossing was one where people died in the flood. The other children reported that two young women had tried to drive a sedan across it and had been swept, car and all, downstream.

Neither survived. There were gory details about tree branches and ripped metal that were very likely just us children trying to scare each other. To this day I couldn't tell you what I got that Christmas, or what we did, but I do distinctly remember the bridge. All six pillars were gone, but the three upriver still had the electrical wires that had lit the lanterns, strung out and stretched in the direction of the current, with bits of concrete and stone still attached to them like some giant had been flossing its teeth.

In the years that followed we spent a lot of time swimming in that creek, once it had returned to its proper, non-murderous size.

Sometimes I would dive down in the deepest bits with my eyes open to look for bits of the car.

They never restored the bridge.

-Leslianne Wilder.

www.lesliannewilder.blogspot.com.

ONE GOOD TURN.

by Robert J. Duperre.

For Dorian Prior, the antic.i.p.ation was paramount. The rush he felt while standing in the open air, the breeze rushing past his ears, the scent of smoldering wood filling his nostrils, his fingers clenching and unclenching in his pockets. His heart beat incessantly, pounding against his chest like a caged beast.

Yes, the antic.i.p.ation ruled over all else.

He hid in the shadows behind a line of low-standing shrubs, staring at the house, waiting as the lights brightening each window went out, one by one. He pressed the b.u.t.ton on the side of his watch, illuminating its face, and checked the time. Eleven seventeen. In nine minutes, all would be dark save the glow of the television from the picture window in the front of the house. Thirty-five minutes after that and it would officially be Christmas Day. The second phase was about to begin.

This moment had been eleven months in the making. Eleven months since Dorian fled Elk City, Oklahoma, after spending a month locked away in his hotel room, scouring the news channels, watching the public outcry against his Purge. The Purge was what he lived for. For the last twenty years he crisscrossed the country, searching for acceptable subjects for his annual cleanse. From California to Ma.s.sachusetts to Washington to Georgia, each Christmas morning he offered one lucky family the chance to see innocence in a new light. Now it was Mercy Hills, Connecticut who would receive his gift, the residents of 87 Sumner Avenue to be specific.

The first time he Purged, he'd been twenty-two years old. He'd grown up in Brownington, Vermont, a land of dirt roads, farms, and giant lakes. While most of the townsfolk lived in run-down trailers-which clashed with the expensive cars parked in their gravel driveways-his parents owned a large white farmhouse, set up on a hill with a clear view of Mount Pisca out the northern windows. He hated his home because other people hated him for living in it-his father had made a fortune granting high interest, sure-to-be-defaulted loans to poor farmers, and even more from confiscating their lands after they failed to pay their debts and selling it to real-estate developers. In Brownington and neighboring towns, the Priors were hated, considered worse than parasites, though neither his mother nor father seemed bothered by that while they looked down on the common folk from their castle on the hill.

Dorian was a neglected child. His mother was distant, spending her life fastened to the couch in the living room, staring at the blaring television with empty eyes, while tranquilizers infested her bloodstream. No matter how much Dorian tried to connect with her, the most he received was a shrug in reply.

His father, on the other hand, paid a little too much attention to him. Most of that attention came from cracks of his belt as he lashed his young son for the slightest of misdeeds. As Dorian came to learn, Beauregard Prior had never wanted a boy. It was young girls that captured his fancy, who lured him in with their large eyes, their rosebud lips, the promise of their coming womanhood.

Dorian was eight when he first saw his father with one of them. It was Christmas morning, presents were stacked beneath the tree, his mother was pa.s.sed out in bed, and he found his father in the bas.e.m.e.nt, dressed in a bright red Santa suit, groveling at the feet of a naked schoolgirl two years Dorian's senior. She had blonde hair tied into twin braids, and her hairless flesh glimmered in the faint bas.e.m.e.nt light. He recognized her as Fabian Rogers, one of the stars of the youth softball team his father coached. She'd been staying in their spare room on the ground floor as a favor to her mother, a single parent, who worked the overnight shift at the hospital in Newport. Dorian watched as Fabian skittered to the side, covering herself, taunting his father with her tear-filled eyes, her quivering lips, her little girl scents. He watched his father take her, heard her screaming, listened to Beauregard tell her afterward that he would evict her mother and put them on the street if she ever told.

In that moment Dorian understood the grand lie; the secret, dark flower every young girl hid under the disguise of their innocence.

Yet he knew it wasn't their fault. They'd simply been born that way, much as he'd been born with the ability to see through the lie to the monster lurking beneath. They needed help. They needed their innocence restored. They needed to be purged.

When his parents died in a car accident when Dorian was twenty, he inherited everything. He hired a childhood acquaintance, Jason Betts, to watch the estate, and funded his travels with his substantial trust fund. Then he traveled to nearby Lowell, where he knew Fabian lived, now twenty-something, with a young daughter of her own.

On Christmas Eve of that year, the very first Purge took place.

The wind howled, bringing him back to the present. He checked his watch again. Two minutes to midnight. The sound of the television inside the house lowered. Almost time.

He'd been watching the residence of Paul and Margaret Baker since February. It was unusual for him to pursue a married couple, but fate had been kind to him this time around. Just like all recipients of the Purge, they worked the graveyard shift at a hospital-the emergency room to be specific. Five days a week, they left their house at 9:25 in the evening and returned at 10:45 in the morning, rushing into the house, covering their eyes from the day's brightness, appearing beaten and tired. Emergency room employees were Dorian's preferred targets, as tragedy never took a holiday, which meant their schedules would never change.

Paul and Margaret had two daughters-sixteen-year-old Grace and seven-year-old Bethany. Grace was the built-in babysitter, watching her sister while her parents were at work. Dorian felt blessed; if he had traveled to this town only a few years earlier, it was possible either one of the parents wouldn't be working. That or he'd have to deal with a childcare professional, which meant he most likely would've had to find a less ideal recipient of his gift than the adorable and deceitful Bethany Baker.

Two minutes ticked by, and Dorian crept from his hiding spot. He tiptoed over the frost-covered lawn, tracing a line around the side of the house. He slung his bag over his shoulder, noticing its emptiness, and approached the window on the side of the garage. He knew the lock on that window had been broken-he'd done so himself three days earlier, while the family was out shopping-and he also knew the door inside that garage was kept unlocked. Reaching up with his hands, swathed in white cotton gloves, he pushed the window open, stepped up on the stool he'd brought, and slithered through the opening.

The heavy suit he wore always made climbing through windows harder than it needed to be, but the effect his outfit had on the children outweighed the negatives.

His booted feet landed on concrete with a soft thud. He reached behind him, slid the window closed, and snuck through the garage, moving cautiously, not wanting to b.u.mp into a stray tricycle or knock over a stack of empty cans.

The door to the inside creaked slightly as he pushed it open. He paused, listening for signs of movement, but heard only the m.u.f.fled backbeat of music. Closing the door, he advanced down the hall, heading for the living room, which was surrounded by the azure glow of the television set. His foot discovered a loose board, and it groaned. He paused once more, heard nothing, and kept on his way.

In the living room he discovered Grace, eyes closed, slouching on the couch, remote control dangling from her limp hand. The television opposite her, nestled into an old, beat-up entertainment center, flashed images of long-haired, tattooed men screaming. The oddly quiet sound of crunching guitars drifted across the open s.p.a.ce, a.s.saulting his ears with its stifled aggression.

Dorian skulked around the couch, making sure to keep his feet on the area rug instead of the hardwood floor, and crouched down in front of the sleeping girl. With one hand he removed the serrated blade from his thick black belt; with the other, he covered the girl's mouth. Her eyes snapped open and she stared at him, bleary and confused, as if she thought she was still in the grips of a dream.