He Sees You When You're Sleeping

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping

by Jack Thrift

8,886 words


Three days to Christmas, and the children, so boisterous over the summer, were now subdued and nervous, twitching at the smallest sounds: the squeak of chalk against the blackboard, the creak of a chair from a student shifting his weight, the distant cough and roar of lorry engines beside the cafeteria’s loading docks. Among these students sat a boy named Henry. He was small and frail – pale skin stretched over bones. His eyes, deep sunken and bloodshot, flitted about restlessly, pausing only to investigate the dark corners and any shadows passing under the door.

When the bell rang, the children scooped up their books and streamed into the halls, but Henry remained seated. His teacher, a young woman named Gwen who’d only lived in Goat’s Head since the summer, had told him she wanted to speak with him after class. She watched him now from her desk, as the children streamed by her. She knew quite a bit about Henry. A sad case. Nice boy, that one, but oh-so-quiet; and no wonder, considering all he’d had to endure.

Once all the other students had cleared the room, Gwen stood, smoothed her skirt with the flat of her hands, and checked up and down the hallway before closing the door. She sat down at a desk beside Henry, who turned his attention to the windows. Outside, blackbirds wheeled in and out of drafts against a backdrop of iron-gray clouds.

“Hey, kiddo,” Gwen said. When he gave no response, she snapped her fingers beside his ear. “Hello?”

He blinked and looked at her.

“You OK?” she asked.
         
He nodded.
         
“Want to talk?”
         
“I think I have to go home.” As he made to gather his things, she put a hand on his shoulder, gently pressing down, till the tension eased out of him.
         
“Let’s talk.”
         
He paused. “OK.”
         
“Scary time, huh?”
         
“I’m not scared,” Henry said.
         
“Sure. I know.”

“I mean it.”

“Yeah, you’re not scared. I get it.”

Henry looked out the window.
         
“Christmas though, right?” Gwen said with a nervous chuckle.
         
Henry said nothing.
         
“You’ve been a good boy this year?”
         
Henry looked at the surface of his desk and gave the tiniest of shrugs.
         
“Henry,” she said.
         
“What.”
         
“Have you been a good boy?”
         
“Um.”
         
“Hey.” She dipped her head to catch his eye.
         
“Yeah. I’ve been good.”
         
“Good.”
         
“But…”
         
She waited for him to continue. “Hey, Henry? But what?”
         
He swallowed, winced. About to cry, she thought.
         
“Caleb was good,” he said.
         
“I’m sure he was.”
         
“A lot better than me.”
         
“Well. Who’s to say – ”
         
“And look what good it did him.” His eyes filled up. When he blinked, the tears spilled over and raced down his cheeks.
         
“You want to know something, Henry?” Gwen said, “I think boys have a tendency to idolize their older brothers to the point that they can’t see their defects. Yes, Caleb was good. OK. But maybe not as good as you think.”
         
Henry sniffed. She could tell she was losing him. She groped for something to get him talking.

“I think I can help you Henry. I really do. Tell me what you know. About Caleb. About when Caleb got taken. I know you were there when it happened. If you tell me about it, maybe I can help you and you won’t have to carry this burden all on your own.”
         
Henry shook his head. “I can’t.”
         
“You’ll feel so much better when you do. You can trust me.”
         
He opened to his mouth to speak, then closed it again, his throat working up and down as he swallowed. He was about to crack; she could see it. Then some object, probably a bird, hit one of the windows hard enough to crack it. The sound make them both jump, and while her attention was diverted, Henry grabbed his things and bolted out of the room. Gwen thought about chasing him, but decided now was not the time. She still had a few days till Christmas to get him talking. And talk he must. Gwen believed that fate had brought her here to Goat’s Bend, this squalid little nowhere town where she’d spent the last four miserable months of her life. She’d always believed that she was meant for something big, something bold and important, but could never lay a finger on what it might be. Recently, that had changed; things had grown clearer. This ambiguous notion of her destiny had taken shape, and she felt that soon it would be within reaching distance. And somehow, improbably, this fragile boy named Henry was the key.

*  *  *

After the final bell, Gwen stood outside the school’s main entrance and watched the last few stragglers filing out the doors. She smoked a cigarette and adjusted her scarf.  The wind was at her back, and it was freezing. Too cold to be lingering about like this, she thought, her eyes tracking a few isolated snowflakes as they drifted down, fat and lazy, till slipstreams around the traffic snatched them off course.

At last the man she’d been waiting for, Mr. Keenan, who taught Latin and classic literature, came hobbling out. He braced himself on his cane, locked the door behind him, and cast an irritated glance at the sky, as if holding it responsible for the nasty weather. Gwen took a last drag of her cigarette and flicked it aside, then fixed a smile on her face and strode toward him.

“Mr. Keenan.” She waved a hand over her head. Mr. Keenan turned toward her. Old age had curved his spine, and he seemed to suffer from a chronic stiff neck, so that he was always turning his whole body rather than just his head when looking around. “Mr. Keenan? A word?”

Mr. Keenan shot a cuff and checked his watch, making a show of his annoyance. “What is it, Mrs. Featherstone?”

“It’s Miss Featherstone. But call me Gwen.”

He said nothing.

“Uh.” Momentarily thrown by his brusque manner, she took a deep breath to regain her composure. “I’d like to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“It’s...well, something delicate. Something I was hoping I could ask you” – she looked around and dropped her voice – “in private.”

To her surprise, the sour expression on Mr. Keenan’s face softened, replaced by something that couldn’t quite be called warmth but was close. Outwardly he was a cranky old man, she thought, but on the inside he was lonely.

“I supposed I have a minute or two,” he said. “Let’s go to my office. I could use a brandy.”

In his office, Mr. Keenan poured a few splashes of blackberry brandy into each of two snifters and handed one to Gwen. She tilted the glass just enough to wet her lips as Mr. Keenan eased himself behind his desk in a large wingback chair that made him look comparatively dwarfish. His office was enormous and dark as a cave, with books piled on every available surface and stacked on the floor in precarious towers.

“So, then,” he said. “Is it advice you’re needing? You being a new teacher and all, I imagine it’s all rather intimidating here. Well, you’ve come to the right person. I’ve taught at this school for forty-seven years, and I know all the ins and outs of – ”

“Thank you, but this isn’t to do with the school.”

His bushy eyebrows dropped low, obscuring his eyes. “Oh?”

“It’s, well...” She chuckled. “Hoo boy. Here goes. Promise not to get mad.”

A hint of irritation crept back into Mr. Keenan’s face.

“It’s about a man,” Gwen said.

“A man? What man?”

“A bad man. A man who isn’t really a man at all.”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“I’m speaking of Hans Klaus.”

He said nothing for a moment. “Hans Klaus.”

She nodded.

Mr. Keenan sat up and leaned forward, planting his elbows on the desk, and for almost a full minute, the only sound in the room came from the ticking of some unseen clock and the wind whistling under the building’s eaves. “Why on earth would you want to ask me about such a thing?”

“Well, for one, you’re one of the town’s oldest residents. You know a lot of things, as you yourself just acknowledged. Plus, you were around when Hans Klaus was murdered.” She lowered her voice, almost whispering. “And actually? From what I’ve heard? You were more than just around. You took part in it.”

“How dare you.” He said it softly.

“For reasons I can’t get into, Mr. Keenan, I think I can help.”

“Help what?”

“Help the children.”

“You can’t help. Believe me.”

“And when I look at you,” she went on, ignoring him, “I see an old man at the end of his life who probably has some things he’d like to get off his chest.”

“The answer is no.”

“I you don’t help me, I’ll take my questions to the children. They’ll speak to me. I’m their teacher. They trust me.”

“That’s an awful thing to say. These children are going through enough right now without having to worry about answering the questions from some – ”

“It is awful, Mr. Keenan, You’re right. That’s just the right word for it. But I’ll do anything to be the one to save these children.” She thought about what she just said and amended herself: “I’ll do anything to save them. Even if that means making them suffer in the short term.”

“You’re serious. You really would.”

She nodded.

Mr. Keenan cursed and looked away from her, swiveling in his chair so he didn’t have to move his neck. “What are your damned questions?”

“I want you to tell me everything you know about Hans Klaus. Let’s start with that.”

He was looking out the window, and most of his face was hidden behind one of the wings of his chair. “If you want to know about him, I supposed I should begin with when he came here, to Goat’s Bend.”

*  *  *

The residents of Goat’s Bend, by and large, were insular people, suspicious of outsiders. This perhaps owed more to the isolating effects of the land that surrounded them than to the idiosyncrasies of its people. The town lay in a depressed pocket within the Great Sawtooth Mountains, like a coin in the palm of a claw, and the few routes that connected Goat’s Bend to the outside world were considered treacherous, packed with villainous gypsies, wolves with a taste for human flesh, and sundry spirits and beasts. Most people born in Goat’s Bend spent their whole lives there, without ever venturing beyond the town’s limits.

One day twenty years ago, a stranger arrived. It was late fall, and he’d journeyed by sleigh and reindeer. His name was Hans Klaus. He was a big, bearded man with a ruddy face and a thunderous laugh.

True to form, the people of Goat’s Bend regarded this new arrival warily and from a distance. He’d come here alone and in late fall, though summer was widely considered to be the only time of year when such travel was even remotely safe. For him to have come here when he did suggested a level of desperation, as if he was running from something. Sordid rumors as to the man’s history grew and flourished. Nobody was outright rude to Klaus, but neither were there any friendly gestures, any offerings of welcome.

Within a few months of his arrival, Klaus commissioned the building of a mansion in the Queen Anne style to be built in the hills outside of town, and out of this project it became known that Klaus was extravagantly rich and uncommonly generous. Word of his liberal spending habits quickly spread through town and contributed to a shift in attitude among the townspeople from mistrust to curiosity and on to cautious acceptance. By the end of his first year in Goat’s Bend, he’d managed to endear himself to practically all those who’d first shunned him. He began attending town assemblies, where he sat alone in the back, quiet and respectful of the proceedings. The town’s coffers had recently all but emptied because of a protracted battle with cholera that had taken many lives, and several desperately needed public improvements projects had to be deferred for lack of funds. But here and there in these town meetings, Klaus stepped in to contribute from his own wallet. Through his munificence, the derelict Samson Bridge over the Nightingale River was renovated and reopened for pubic use. In addition, the government ministry buildings around the town’s main square were restored and enhanced with mansard roofs and a four-sided clock tower that together gave the area a heretofore absent charm.

But if there was one quality above all others that won Klaus the unbridled admiration of nearly everyone in town, it was his work with children. He seemed to care greatly for them. He doted on them constantly, especially the less fortunate ones whom many considered to be well on their way developing a life of crime. And the children, they loved him too. At least, that’s how it looked. The children followed him everywhere he went, his personal retinue of devotees, singing songs with him, petting his reindeer, and taking rides beside him in his sleigh. He was always giving the children treats from oversized pockets of his red coat, or pulling them onto his lap and whispering in their ears.

One year in a town meeting, Klaus made a motion to create a special day for the children, a day when the good ones would be rewarded with gifts. He suggested Christmas. Till then, Christmas had been just another religious holiday in Goat’s Bend, the same as it was in most other places. There were the rites and ceremonies, the prayers and hymns – a typical day of staid religious observance, in other words. But Klaus wanted to turn Christmas into something joyous and celebratory, and since by now he’d become a man of respect and influence, his suggestion met with universal approval. In the years that followed, Christmas evolved into the day children looked forward to more than any other. It was really quite wonderful, everyone agreed. And since Christmas rewarded children who were well behaved, there was an additional benefit in the decrease in the rate of juvenile delinquency. Klaus’s supporters grew in number. There were even those who began to regard the man as a kind of miracle worker. They began to refer to him as “Saint Klaus.”

But there were others in town who saw things a bit differently. These few were able to look around all of the seemingly wonderful gifts Klaus had bestowed on Goat’s Bend and perceive something disturbing in Klaus’s interest in children. Beyond a healthy interest, they whispered among themselves. What they saw seemed to strike an intuitive chord in them: something wasn’t right. And it wasn’t just a hunch, either. They’d made observations. They’d noticed that many of the children who spent time alone with Klaus came back...well, altered somehow. With stunned and haunted expressions. When asked what had transpired between the man and them, the children invariably were at a loss, their memories of the event blacked out. Concerns arose among parents, some of whom began telling their children not to go off anywhere alone with Klaus, or to avoid him altogether. But many months went by without anyone doing anything about their suspicions. After all, it wasn’t as if there was any proof that Klaus was doing anything untoward with their children. Allegations of nefarious activities with minors could ruin a man’s reputation and should never be raised unless there is sufficient evidence to do so – or so the thinking went. Plus, look at all the good Klaus had brought to Goat’s Bend. Without him, the town would lose its greatest benefactor.

Meanwhile, there came about in Goat’s Head another development that was as chilling as it was baffling. Late at night, children had begun to scream in their sleep. It would start with one child screaming or howling or moaning, a sound that traveled through the night and induced answering screams from other children, the sounds rising discordantly like the chorus of howling coyotes, a sound so powerful in its anguished depths that it shattered windows and caused clocks to stop. Anyone hearing these dolorous and plaintive cries would stop in their tracks and tremble, perhaps cross themselves and say a quick prayer. In the mornings, when the children were asked what manner of nightmare had produced such cries, they drew a blank. They simply couldn’t remember. When pressed, some of them spoke of a vague sense of evil they felt had entered their lives, though they couldn’t point to what this evil specifically derived from.

Then things got worse. Children began to go missing. Just a couple at first, over a two month period. Then a few more. Then more yet. And all the while, the cloud of suspicion continued to gather over Hans Klaus. It was lost on no one that the children who’d gone missing just so happened to be among those who’d spent time alone with him. As part of their investigation, the police posted a tip line anyone could call with information that might be useful in finding the missing children and catching the predator responsible. Calls immediately flooded into the station, the overwhelming majority of them suggesting the authorities should investigate Klaus. But the police sat on these tips. By now, Klaus had forged connections in all reaches of local government. He’d put up a great deal of campaign money for the mayor during his bid for re-election, and many conjectured that the mayor had leaned on the chief of police to leave Klaus alone.

Eventually, an incident arose that couldn’t be ignored or rationalized away. A shepherd living in the rolling hills outside of town had taken his daily jaunt to the Nightingale River to gather cooking water, and as he filled his buckets he witnessed Klaus on horseback galloping across a bridge in the direction of the Black Forest with something squirming under his arm. The shepherd hid and saw that it was a child Klaus was carrying. Once Klaus was gone, the man went directly to the police, recounting the incident and describing the boy, and when the next day it was learned that a child meeting the boy’s description had disappeared the previous night, word spread high and low through town.  By midday, a posse of deputies and town elders raided Klaus’s house. Nothing was found inside, and Klaus, under temporary arrest in a paddy wagon just outside his house, proclaimed it all an outrage. For several hours, it looked as though the search would prove fruitless. Desperate, the chief of police called for his crew to go around town rounding up any hunting dogs known to be owned by private citizens, and when the crew came back with a scraggly lot of mutts, none of which could properly be called a game dog, the chief dejectedly ordered the dogs to be let loose on the property. Nobody expected anything to come of it. But within minutes, one of the dogs began digging in a rose garden on the east side of Klaus’s property, and soon other dogs joined in the digging. At length, a crowd gathered around the dogs. One of the deputies, a young man who fancied himself a gardener, pointed out that the roses looked to be newly transplanted, and several heads nodded in agreement, pondering the ominous implications. One of the dogs, after digging a deep hole, stuck its snout into the dirt and tugged at something and came out holding in its mouth an object encased in a scrap of clothing. A bone, one man declared, a goddamned femur! Around the site, a frenzied commotion broke out. Men grabbed what shovels were available, while others dug their bare hands. The excavation went well on into the night. Spotlights and torches were brought in to help the recovery process. In the end, sixteen skeletons were found. All of them were about the same size, small, having once belonged to children.

There was no arrest, no trial. Instead, the men at the scene formed a de facto tribunal. They dragged Klaus out of the wagon and beat him roundly, till he was limp and spitting out teeth, then let him rest a few minutes before laying into him again. After an hour of this, Klaus confessed to all of his alleged crimes, and the men on the scene unanimously voted for a sentence of death. The chief of police pleaded with the men to let him take Klaus to jail and have him stand a proper trial, but nobody listened. Instead, they bound Klaus’s ankles with rope and dragged him twelve miles behind their horses over rough terrain. They took him through the Black Forest and all the way to the base of the Great Sawtooth Mountains, where they continued to pummel him with their fists and boots through the afternoon and into the early evening. When they were through, Klaus no longer resembled anything human. He looked more like a heap of slaughterhouse scraps, but somehow he was still alive, his breath bubbling through the holes where his nose had been. Instead of putting him out of his misery, the men left Klaus in this condition, allowing the circling vultures to swoop down and pick him over till there was nothing left but bones and sinew. On their way back to town, the men stopped to discuss what they’d done and how they’d carry forward from here. They all acknowledged that certain people in town might take a dim view on their vigilantism and agreed that they should work out a story that put them in a less culpable light. Back in town, they told others that Klaus had confessed on his own to the abductions and killings, without the duress of torture, and that he’d fled the scene and was killed when his own horse tripped over an exposed root. Their story reeked of absurdity, and nobody around town believed it. But since the general, implicit view on the matter was that Klaus had suffered nothing less than what he deserved, the men’s story went unchallenged. These men were considered heroes. For a while, anyway.

One of them was John Keenan.

“All my life I’ve believed in the rule of law,” Mr. Keenan told Gwen. He grunted and sipped his sherry. His hand was shaking. “Without it, everything is chaos. But something happened to me that day. Seeing those little skeletons being pulled from the dirt...I guess you could say that something inside me snapped.”

“So...you regret what you did?” Gwen asked.

“No. Not at first. For a while I was convinced I’d done the right thing. Still, what I’d participated in had changed me. One cannot torture a man the way we tortured Klaus without the experience scarring his soul.”

He poured more brandy into his glass, filling it to the top this time. When he made to refresh Gwen’s glass as well, she waved him off. “The regret came later,” he said, “when I learned that Klaus had transcended death. Had I known...well, but I didn’t, did I?”

“How did Klaus do it?” Gwen asked.

“Rise from the dead? Nobody knows for sure, but it’s reasonable to assume that there’d been some terrible entity with us that day in the hills, most likely a demon, drawn to us by the suffering and violent death of Klaus, the way bugs are drawn to a flame. And this demon, it breathed some kind of foul life back into Klaus. Ever since...” He trailed off.

“Ever since,” she concluded for him, “Hans Klaus has continued killing children.”

“And always on the same day of every year, in the wee morning hours of Christmas morning. He comes to town and snatches children from their homes, makes off with them. Does unspeakable things. And then, a few days later, he drops their bones down the chimney of the child’s family.”

“And nobody has tried to stop him?”

“Of course we tried. Lord knows. We searched the forests and mountains for him, we consulted seers and gypsies. For years on Christmas Eve, we posted hundreds of townspeople as sentries around the town’s perimeter, hoping to catch Klaus during his comings and going. But...” He shook his head sadly. “Nothing ever came of it.”

“Maybe it’s the sewers,” Gwen said, thinking out loud. “Maybe he uses the underground tunnels to get around unseen.”

“We thought of that. Don’t you think we’d have thought of that?”

“How should I know?” she said with a defensive shrug.

Mr. Keenan sighed. “Anyway, a consensus has it that Klaus comes from neither the streets nor the sewers, but rather from above.” He pointed at the ceiling. “A few have even claim to have seen him descend from the night sky in his sleigh, a team of flying reindeer pulling him.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“In times like these, I call nothing ridiculous,” Mr. Keenan said with a condescending huff.

Gwen decided to leave it there and move on. “Do you ever wonder why he hasn’t come after you or the other men who killed him?”

“But don’t you see? That wouldn’t be his way. Truth is, I wish he would. I would gladly trade my life for the lives of the children he’s taken, past and future. But by letting me live, he ensures that all my moments are plagued with guilt. I live every day with the knowledge that the actions of me and a few other men led to the nightmare existence in which our children suffer. It a burden you can’t imagine. Of the other men who participated in Klaus’s death, two have taken their own lives. Another drank himself to death. The way I cope is by teaching children and by looking after them, doing whatever I can to keep them safe and healthy while they are here at school. It isn’t much, but the notion that I play a positive role, however modest, in their lives is what I cling to, what keeps me going.”

Gwen took this in with a slow nod of her head. “One thing I don’t understand, Mr. Keenan. Why would anyone want to have children here, knowing the risks? And for that matter, why wouldn’t anyone with children move somewhere far away?”

“I can only speculate. There are hundreds of children in Goat’s Bend, you see, and every year Klaus murders two or three – five at the most. More children than that die every year from consumption. I suppose if a man and wife wanted children badly enough they’d be willing to play the percentages. As to why nobody with children tries to flee, that’s an easy one. Klaus won’t let any child leave town. Every attempt to do so, no matter how clandestine, has ended in the bloody death of all those involved. He has eyes everywhere, it seems. A number of people believe the trees are his spies.”

Gwen considered this silently.

“Now, are we about done here, Miss Featherstone?” Mr. Keenan asked.

“Almost,” she said. “I’m curious whether anyone has any idea where Klaus can be found.”

“Found?”

“When he’s not snatching children in Goat’s Bend. Where does he go?”

“Obviously, we don’t know. If we did, we’d have gone there already.”

“But there must be some idea. Some theory.”

Mr. Keenan sucked a tooth, hesitating. “A year ago, right before Christmas, a boy named Caleb was taken by Klaus. There were a couple of things about it that made this stand out from the other abductions. One, it happened a few days before Christmas instead of on the day itself which hadn’t happened before; and two, there was a witness. His brother Henry. Henry saw it happen. But for whatever reason, Klaus let him go. Since then the poor child has kept mostly silent on the particulars surrounding his brother’s abduction. The general feeling around town is that the crime was one of opportunity. In other words, the boys must have accidentally stumbled upon Klaus. But nobody has been able to persuade Henry to give up the location where it happened. He seems to have blocked it out of his memory.”

“Or maybe not. Perhaps...it’s all an act.”

“Come again?”

“Maybe he just doesn’t feel like talking about it.”

“No. I know Henry. I know his family. He’d never hold back on something that important.”

Gwen spent a moment or two reflecting on everything Mr. Keenan had told her. Most of it she’d already heard. In the past few weeks, she had visited local taverns where she’d persuaded drunken men to tell her everything they knew about Hans Klaus, which is how Henry’s name had come to her attention. By a stroke of luck, Henry happened to be in one of the classes she taught.

“And now, Miss Featherstone, your time is up.” Mr. Keenan stood up. “I’ve answered your questions. I will speak no more on the matter.” He paused. “But let me give you some advice. Forget we had this conversation. Never mention it to anyone. You’ll find that others here won’t be as calmly receptive as I have been.”

“Of course,” Gwen said distractedly, her thoughts already projecting forward, to what she planned to do from here.

“There is also the belief in Goat’s Bend that it is bad luck to even mention the name Hans Klaus,” Mr. Keenan told her. “That those who speak of him tend to draw his attention. Which is something you don’t want.”

“Then why are you mentioning it?”

“Because I want him to come to me. I want the chance, slender though it may be, to confront him and do everything in my power to kill him.”

“OK. I’ll take it into advisement.” Gwen grabbed the arms of her chairs, about to stand. “Anything else?”

“One more thing,” he said, and an aching sadness elongated his face. “As long as you live here, never, ever have children.”

*  *  *

Gwen’s talk with Mr. Keenan had succeeded in expanding her knowledge of Klaus, confirming some of the rumors she’d heard, refuting others, and offering new insights. But ultimately it did little to further her mission. What was needed right now was action, and for that she needed Henry. She had to get alone somewhere and find out what he knew. To force it out of him if she had to. By lunchtime of the following day, she had an idea of how to make that happen.

It came to her as she sat at the long table in the cafeteria where the teachers ate their lunches, when the principal leaned in and told teachers in a conspiratorial whisper that there was going to be a locker search this afternoon and they should be prepared for some commotion in the halls.

Gwen found herself smiling. It seemed fate was once again stepping in to guide her. Locker searches occurred sporadically and entailed staff looking through the students’ lockers to determine if any of them was carrying weapons or drugs. Having a locker search today presented her with the opportunity she’d been looking for.

During recess period, Gwen went to the teacher’s lounge and found a knife in one of the drawers. It wasn’t particularly menacing-looking as far as knives go, but it would do. Surreptitiously, she slipped the knife into her purse, and then she headed for the main office, where she found the book that kept the records showing which student was assigned to which locker. When the busybody receptionist asked her what she was doing, Gwen told her to mind her own business and stared her down till the girl meekly backed off.

Halfway through eighth period, the sound of lockers doors banging open and shut filled the halls. For a second Gwen could hardly breathe. She realized what she’d done to Henry and felt a stab of guilt. It quickly passed. A woman who worked in the school’s office stepped into Gwen’s class and motioned for Gwen to join her in the hall. Gwen went out and shut the door behind her and tried to look confused and concerned. In a grave tone, the woman told Gwen that a knife had been discovered in Henry’s locker. Gwen’s expression turned to one of shock, her fingertips at her throat. She had to remind herself not to overdo it.

“My goodness. Henry?” Gwen said. “Are you certain?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So what does this mean? What happens to him?”

“Mandatory suspension,” the woman said with a fatalistic shrug.
         
“Surely not,” Gwen said. “Can’t we make an exception in Henry’s case, given all he’s been through?”
         
She persuaded the woman to watch her class, while she, Gwen, went to the principal’s office to plead her case. “Let me handle this,” she asked him. “I’ll keep Henry for detention this afternoon. I’ll talk to him. He and I already have a rapport.”

Dr. Orton agreed with her that given the boy’s history, Henry’s possession of the knife probably pointed more toward a concern for self-preservation than any intent to hurt a teacher or fellow student. Given that, he agreed to make an exception in Henry’s case and allow Gwen to keep him for detention.

Henry, of course, was stunned by the news that a knife had been found in his possession. Gwen and a guidance counselor had pulled him out of class to give him the news. Henry swore up and down the knife wasn’t his.

“If I were you, young man,” the guidance counselor observed, “I’d be thanking my lucky stars that you have Miss Featherstone for a teacher. Otherwise, you’d’ve been suspended for sure.”

Henry hung his head miserably.

At the end of the period, the students left the classroom and Gwen waited at her desk, nodding at the ones who told her goodbye. Soon she was alone with him.

Henry had an inwardly collapsed look about him, slouching with his arms hanging to his sides, his ears leveled with his shoulders. Glancing at him, Gwen felt a twinge of remorse, an echo of the guilt she’d felt earlier in the day when she’d slipped the knife through the vent in his locker. The difference now was that her guilt was aimed forward and not backward; not for what she’d done to him but for what she was about to do.

“Come here, Henry,” Gwen said. He mumbled something, and she told him to speak up.

“It wasn’t my knife,” he repeated.

“Well, either way, you’re stuck here with me for the hour, and I for one would like to use the time productively. Come here.”

This time he did as she said. Gwen stood and motioned at the door with her head. She led him out of the classroom and down the hall, which was packed with students at their lockers, stuffing their book bags with materials they’d need for homework. Soon – in ten minutes or so – the halls would be deserted. This time of year, the sun set early behind the rim of western mountains, and students and faculty tended to scramble to get home before that could happen. Nobody wanted to be outdoors in the dark this time of year.

At the end of the hall, Gwen pushed through the crash bar of the double doors and stepped into the freezing air of the courtyard, her hand gripping Henry’s shoulder.

“Where are we going?” Henry asked.
         
She was steering him toward the far end of the courtyard, where the school’s monolithic bell tower loomed above them. Struggling to keep up with her, Henry repeated his question. She said, “There,” and pointed to the belfry six stories above them. Henry’s shoulder went rigid under her fingers. At the oaken doors at the base of the tower, Gwen produced a master key, prayed it would work on the lock, and blew a breath of relief when it did. Henry asked what they were doing here, and she ignored him.

They ascended the stairs, which rose in a series of wooden steps, landings, and switchbacks to the school’s bell tower. Along the way, Gwen heard small squeaking noises, which she took to be either mice or bats, probably the latter. Every available surface seemed to be draped with spider webs. The slit windows here and there on their way up were filmed over with grime, so that only a meager, jaundiced light made it through. By the time they reached the top of the stairs, Gwen was winded, but not so much as Henry, whose malnourished body was trembling from overexertion.

The stairs seemed to dead-end at the ceiling, but Gwen, feeling around above her, made out the shape of a trapdoor and found the latch to unlock it. She heaved with her shoulder, and the door swung open with a rusty-hinged squeal and went its full arc and before crashing against the floor. Above her there was a plank ceiling and a wooden beam, spongy with rot, that had once presumably held the tower’s bell, now absent. She came out into the open and filled her lungs with clean, cold air, then reached down and hauled Henry up with her.

The belfry was open on all sides, the roof above them supported by pillars at each corner. Gwen approached the balustrade and looked down at Goat’s Bend, the buildings uniformly gray and bristling with spires, the streets laid out in complex, fingerprint-like arrangements of concentric curves and whorls. The Nightingale River, with its turgid waters gushing beneath covered bridges, bisected the town and wound through the misty, alluvial valley beyond, where Gwen could make out the spectral shapes of farmhouses, ramshackle and forlorn. Farther out, past a gray mist that shrouded the foothills, was the fabled Black Forest, from this distance just a smudge of black. And beyond that stood the encompassing barrier known as the Great Sawtooth Mountains. Somewhere out there, Gwen thought, either in the forest or in the foothills of the mountains, was the place where Henry and his brother had run into Klaus. All she needed was for Henry to point with his skinny little finger and say, “There. That’s where it happened.”

“Why are we doing up here?” Henry asked, shivering.

Gwen bent down to look Henry in the eye. “I want to talk to you Henry. It may be difficult for you, but it’s very, very important. Do you understand?”

Henry shrugged uncomfortably.

“I want you to tell me where it happened,” she said.

“Where what happened?”

Gwen sighed. She remembered Mr. Keenan’s warning about the danger inherent in discussing Klaus. How simply mentioning his name could conjure him. This in mind, she said, “You know what I’m talking about. Don’t play games with me.”

Henry backed away from her, but she grabbed a wad of his shirt and pulled him back.

“Don’t even think about it.” She froze, startled by her own sudden ferocity, and then let him go. “Talk to me.”

“I don’t – ”

“Yes, you do. You know. You were with your brother the day he was taken by...by you-know-who. You know where you were when it happened.” She swept an arm at the view around them. “Point it out to me.”

Henry began to cry. “I can’t.”

Gwen grabbed his jaw and tilted his head back, bringing her face in close to his. “This whole thing, kid, it’s bigger than you or I. And yet we have the power between the two of us to do something. Maybe even to put an end to all the suffering.” She smiled and nodded imploringly. “Wouldn’t you like that? To be a hero?”

Henry sniffed. “No.”

Gwen laughed. “Come on, now. Everyone wants to be a hero. Think what the people of this town will do for us if we save them from their monster. They will love us forever, unconditionally. They’ll give us whatever we want. They’d build statues in our honor.”

“I don’t care,” Henry said.

Gwen smirked at him, shook her head, and looked over the balustrade, straight down at the ground. They were five, six stories high. Far below, a lone, three-wheeled motor cart cut across the school’s campus, belching dark exhaust, its single cyclopean headlight spraying a fan of yellow light ahead of it. The security guard, she thought. Making his rounds. She stepped back so he wouldn’t see her. She’d have a hell of a time trying to explain why she’d brought one of her students up here.

“It’s not easy to open up about your past,” Gwen said, still looking at the street. “Believe me, I realize that. You probably feel guilty about what happened to your brother, like maybe you could have done something to save him.” She looked at him. “True?”

Henry crossed his arms and looked away.

“So I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “I’ll tell you something about my past that nobody knows. Something which, if it got out, could potentially ruin my reputation.”

Now he looked at her.

“A few years ago, I discovered I was adopted,” she told him. “The woman who raised me informed me on her deathbed. It seems that just after I was born, my father – my real father – was accused of some pretty horrible crimes, and he fled the city, leaving my mother with no way to support me. So she took me to an orphanage. When I was adopted, I was given a new name.”

“What...did your father do?” Henry asked warily. “What horrible things?”

“I don’t know specifically. I just know it involved children.” Gwen crossed her arms, then uncrossed them. She’d never told anyone this. “He was very rich, my father, and very powerful. He had connections in the police department, and one day they warned him that he was about to be arrested. So he fled. Came here, to Goat’s Bend. He must have thought it was far away and isolated enough that he’d never be discovered by his pursuers. But, see, my father had a problem. A compulsion, an addiction – whatever you want to call it. And here in this new town, he couldn’t suppress the urge to start doing the same horrible things to children he’d done in the place he’d come from, and so he continued doing them. And finally it caught up with him.”

Henry’s face had blanched. He looked bewildered, but behind his eyes there was a dawning realization.

“I spent two years trying to track my father down,” Gwen said. “I think it’s fate that brought me here.” She squatted down in front of Henry. “I think I can end this nightmare, Henry. He’s my father. I can talk to him. I think this is what I was brought into this world to do.”

Henry shook his head.

“Listen carefully to me. We’re not going anywhere till you tell me what I want to know.”

Henry began to sob. “You don’t understand.”

“Then explain.”

“You can’t just go and find him.” He sniffed and wiped his nose. “He’s everywhere.”

She looked askance at him. “What do you mean?”

“He’s everywhere,” he said again. “He watches us all the time.”

“Watches who?”

“Us. Children. He’s always there. He knows when we’re sleeping and when we’re awake. He knows when we’re talking about him. He knows everything. He knows you and I are up here talking about him right now. That’s why we need to leave. We’re in danger.”

“We’ll leave as soon as you tell me where I can find him.”

“You’re not listening to me. He’s watching us right now. Don’t you feel that?” Henry glanced around anxiously. “I can feel it.”

Gwen had to fight the urge to threaten the boy. She pictured herself dangling him by the ankles over the balustrade.

“How about this? Let me get you started,” Gwen said. “Last year you were walking through the woods with your brother. You crossed paths with Klaus. What happened?”

“He... was just there,” he said, “All of the sudden.”

“OK. And what did he do?”

“I don’t – ”

Gwen slapped him. It wasn’t hard, but it stunned them both. Henry’s hand went to his cheek, where she’d hit him. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, and it took all of her willpower to refrain from doing it. She had his attention now; he knew she was serious.

“Keep going, he was suddenly just there,” Gwen reminded him. “What happened next?”

“He said...”

“Yes?”

“He told us he was going to eat one of us,” Henry said. “He said we had to choose which of us it would be. He said if we couldn’t decide, he’d eat us both.”

Just then a particularly cold wind blew through. It was strong enough to shock the air out of Gwen’s lungs and blow Henry’s hair back, and then a shadow passed over them. Accompanying all of this was a strange jingling sound.

“Go on,” Gwen said, a trace of panic entering her tone. She grabbed Henry by the shoulders and shook him. “Keep talking.”

“Caleb, my brother, he told Klaus to take him. And Klaus turns to me and asks if I that suited me.” He began sobbing. “And I said yes.”

“But if you hadn’t, he’d have eaten you both. You did the right thing.”

He wasn’t hearing her. “I said it so fast, I couldn’t take it back.”

Gwen heard a crash that came from the school’s grounds. She looked over the balustrade and saw the security guard’s cart lying on its side. Its headlight flickered and winked out. There was no sign of the security guard.

“Where can I find him, Henry?” She turned back to him. “Let’s make it so he can’t ever hurt another child again.”

“I don’t know!”

Before Gwen could argue with him there was a banging noise from somewhere below, inside the tower. Henry opened his mouth in a silent scream and threw his hands over his mouth.

“Stay put,” Gwen said.

She approached to the trapdoor and went to her knees and peered down. But in the waning daylight the inside of the tower was impenetrable with gloom. “Hello?” she called down.

Nothing.

“It’s him,” Henry said.

“Don’t be silly.” She stood and brushed the dirt off the front of her skirt. “I must have failed to shut the door properly down there. What we heard was the wind batting it about.”

“No,” Henry said.

“Stop it, Henry.” She sighed and shook her head at herself. “I don’t mean to be curt. But one way or another you will tell me what I need to hear.”

Henry stared at her and remained silent. From down below came another sound, a creaking and then a dull thud. Then another thud. Then another.

Footfalls.

“Oh, God,” said Henry.

Gwen looked again into the dark abyss. “Is there somebody down there?” she bellowed, a crack in her voice belying her tone of authority. “Answer me!”

The thuds continued. No doubt about it now – someone was coming up the stairs.

“Why won’t they answer me?” Gwen asked herself.

“It’s him.”

“Shut up.” Gwen squeezed her eyes shut. “Sorry. Just...stop saying that. OK?”

But then a thought occurred to her. So what if it was Klaus down there? Wasn’t that what she wanted? Well, not quite; she’d wanted it to be she who found him, not the other way around – but wasn’t this pretty much the same?

Gwen and Henry stared into the black hole at their feet, listening to the coming of whomever or whatever it was whose footfalls made such shuddering sounds, like little bombs going off, reverberating through the empty shaft of the tower. She thought she saw something stirring in the darkness and leaned in closer, squinting, and in the next second a stream of bats erupted through the opening. Gwen yelled and pedaled backwards, her arms wrapped around her head. The bats were tiny, like peach pits with wings, and there were hundreds of them. But within a few seconds, the bats were gone, moving in a receding cloud. Tentatively, she approached the hole, and now she could hear another sound: breathing. Wet and raspy. And now something more: a low sort of chuckling, if that was what it was. It sounded like “Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho-o-o-o...” She swung the trapdoor closed with the toe of her shoe.

Henry started breathing loud and fast. A spreading patch of wetness went down the leg of his trousers. Seeing this, Gwen wanted to shove the boy over the balustrade, the disgusting little brat. It was a monstrous thought, and one she instantly regretted, but it stayed with her. She had to clasp her hands behind her back lest they spring forth on their own and send Henry tumbling to his demise.

The footfalls grew closer and closer, till, just below the trapdoor, the sounds stopped. Gwen and Henry had both backed up and now stood at the far balustrade, eyes fixed on the square door. There was no way to lock it from this side. Henry whimpered.

Nothing happened. Then the door flew tearing away from its hinges. In the vacant square of darkness, a hand came up, fingers curling around the lip of opening. The hand was enormous, the size of a dinner plate, and red as a boiled roast. A putrid, gassy odor like spoiled meat clouded over them. Another hand joined the first. From beneath those hands came a grunting noise, after which the figure below them thrust itself through the opening.

Gwen lost the ability to speak. She watched stunned and mute as the great hulking body of Klaus stood to its full height, towering over her, so tall he had to stoop beneath the ceiling. When she saw his face, she had to look away.

“Father,” she said, and swallowed, summoning the speech she’d been practicing. “It is I, your daughter. Gwen. I’ve been searching for years for you, and now I’ve found you.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve crossed seas, marches over mountain ranges – ”

“Have you been a good little girl?” Klaus asked her.

“What?” She felt her mouth go dry.

“Have you been a good little girl?” Gwen felt his baritone voice in her chest.

“I...yes. I have.”

Klaus took a step toward her. Henry shrank into a quivering ball on the floor.

“Would you like a treat?” Klaus asked.

Gwen couldn’t decide how to answer him.

“Did you hear me, girlie?” he asked.

“Yes,” she managed to say. “And no, I don’t want a treat. I’m trying to tell you I’m your daughter. Your long lost – ”

“Open your hand.”

She glanced at his face. The skin was blue and black, in stiff patches that were sewn together crudely with thread, like the stitching of a baseball. And he was covered with flies. They kept circling him and landing on him, circling and landing. As she took in his face, a shiny centipede emerged from the stitches below his eye and scuttled down his face and into his mouth, where Klaus crunched it between his teeth and swallowed. Gwen held out her palm.

“A treat,” Klaus said. His hand went into the pocket of his red coat and emerged as a fist, holding something.

Gwen’s hand began to tremble. Klaus dangled his fist above it for several seconds more, and then he splayed his fingers, dropping a load of teeth and hair into Gwen’s palm.

With a howl of revulsion, Gwen stumbled backward, flinging her hand violently and casting teeth in all directions.

Klaus chuckled: “Ho, ho, ho, ho-o-o-o-o.”

Gwen held her hand in front of her face. She thought, No! This isn’t how it was supposed to happen!

Klaus came at her then, backing her into a corner. Gwen cringed and realized she had peed herself.

“Don’t you know me?” she asked in a quaking voice. “Can’t you see that I’m your daughter?”

Klaus looked at Henry, who sat wide-eyed with his mouth gaping. “Well, well. You again.”

Henry hid his face behind his hands.

“Choose, boy,” Klaus said. “The girl or you. Or I’ll take you both.”

Henry didn’t hesitate. He pointed at Gwen.

Klaus grinned at her. “I was hoping he’d say that, pretty one. Oh, I was.”

“I’m not a girl,” Gwen said. “I’m a grown woman. Your daughter, for Christ’s sake!” She pointed at Henry. “Take him! He’s just a boy! He’s who you want!”

“You and me are gonna have some fun, little flower,” Klaus told her. “Well, fun for me. You?” He chuckled. “I don’t think you’ll like it so much.”

He reached a hand inside his red coat and produced a filthy white sack. The stains on the sack looked like blood.

“Get in,” he said.

When Gwen hesitated, Klaus pulled the sack over her head and down her body, then grabbed her by the ankles and slung her upside down over his shoulder. Klaus whistled, and Gwen, too shocked to scream or even put up a struggle, heard the sound of sleigh bells.

Those would be the reindeer, she thought. 

The End.