Tracy
Tracy barely fit into the crawl space above the ceiling. When she first spotted the hatch, she assumed it was like her attic back home, large enough for her to walk through without ducking her head. Instead, Tracy found it difficult to even crawl. The floor was made up of narrow strips of plywood with nothing but the drywall of the ceiling and fluffy white insulation on either side of it. Tracy had no choice but to follow the path laid out by the boards. Because of the pipes and cables running across that path, she had to sometimes stretch out on her belly and wriggle herself through like a snake.
Also, it was very, very dark. She heard skittering all around her and wondered if she was hearing birds and squirrels, which would have been okay with her, or roaches and rats, which were not.
She was still wearing E. Higgens' coat. That made it harder to get through the tight spaces where she had to squeeze beneath the overhead support beams, but if she was going to escape, she was taking the coat as evidence. Maybe the computer files had finished uploading to her zip drive, maybe not, but she wasn't going home empty handed.
That was another problem, getting home. Her new plan involved getting to the loading bay and sneaking back on Santa's sleigh. She had gotten a good look at her Santa's picture on the computer and was sure she could figure out which one was him. His entire route was pretty close to her house. Ideally, she'd be able to get off close enough to walk home. If not, maybe she could call Ellen. She hadn't counted on Santa's crew being so uncooperative. Then again, she'd counted on Santa being real.
That was what made her head spin. For all of her life, heck, for all of her parents' and grandparents' lives, and on back for centuries, the Santa Commission had told them one thing above all else: that Santa was real.
But he wasn't. He was just some guy in a suit who never remembered a single Christmas Eve. He was worse than department store Santas. At least they knew the truth of what they were.
The dust in the crawl space tickled Tracy's nose. She lifted her hand to her face and discovered that her cheeks were wet, and it wasn't from her outburst back in the computer room. She had set out to find the truth behind Santa. Where she'd expected to find rocket engines and fireproof clothing, she found instead something very different. And a lot more upsetting.
Who were Beth and Phil? What kind of people worked for someone who wiped minds? That wasn't science. It was science fiction. She half expected little robot elves with red eyes to come marching through the crawl space chanting, “You are mine! You are mine!”
At the very moment she pictured herself being carted off by an army of tiny robots, something skittered to her right, and she jumped. She squinted in the dark, but when the sound faded away and she realized no robots were coming for her, she breathed out a sigh of relief and moved on.
At least, she tried to. The hem of her coat caught on an exposed nail. She shoved her hand beneath her leg to unsnag herself, and as she adjusted her weight, the board beneath her slipped, and the nail scraped her thigh.
“Mmph!” She stifled a cry. Her leg throbbed in pain. How many ways could she injure herself in one night?
The answer came immediately as she rolled away from the nail, off of the board, and onto the ceiling. The drywall gave way beneath her, and she crashed down into a very strange room.