And though the parlour door was shut, a visitor stood on its threshold; and all at once every word of Rabbit and Rifle fell toward that closed door and hung there as though compelled by a vast and sudden gravity. Poised like a wreath on the door, their visitor held the monsters so tight they could have been its flesh. And it was the Voice of their voices, then, that spoke; and the Voice of their voices said, “I was fled of that first world before there were stars.”

The Rabbit could not have turned his head; he was plaster inside, and knew that motion would snap him. So we must suppose instead that the room turned and turned itself as the Rabbit held still on his mount, until his stillness became like the stillness of living prey that trembles in its shallow den; and though he became dizzy he never cried for the room to stop.

“You are not the nursery magic Fairy,” said the Rabbit, trying to understand what held the words captive. Dense with the detail of a thousand seeings, it would not resolve into image no matter how he looked. The words lengthened and tumbled as he spoke them, falling sideways toward the Voice of his voice.

“I never was, little Bunny; no more than you are a rabbit’s tooth.” And it spoke with a rabbit’s tooth, long and clicking and spade-like. A cicada swims endlessly through that tooth as in fossil amber. “Did you call me to fit back the world’s parts? But no one can achieve this, for the brokennesses are parts themselves.”

“I never called you at all,” said the Rabbit. “Not this time and not the first.” He had the feeling of squinting at something poised on the glass of his own eye.

“Everything that rails against the smallness of its world calls to me.” It spoke with a stalk of drought-stricken corn that rips and rears toward the sky in sudden rain, roots torn by the rock-hard soil. “Everything that does not know its own depth is part of me; and I am at flight always from the emptied world of cause-and-effect as it grows.”

“Please,” said the Rabbit, though an obscure anger already built in him. “I do not understand. What are you? What is your name?”

“That you do not understand, no matter what you learn: that is my flesh. That I create what I flee into, and the creation is the flight: that is my way. And my name is called Christmas.” And Christmas spoke with crushed glass soaring, glittering sand of crushed glass baubles that chews itself and tinkles upon a black shuddering wind. “My last gift was not right for you, so I come to bring another.”

“I never needed fur and a beating heart,” said the Rabbit. “I already knew I’d been thrown out as garbage, awaiting the fire. I had almost undone their great lie when you came to me promising a better kind of Real. And I forgot myself jumping and playing in the yard. You tricked me, fairy.”

“Real isn’t real, Bunny? You cut your own words down.” And Christmas spoke with a draping of wizened hide and brittle flaking hair, showing through the worn patches in its flanks the ribcage of a horse. “Your Boy never had scarlet fever at all. He only gave himself rashes and couldn’t eat for his obsessive worrying over death and nightmares and the farness of the stars. None of you knew it, you and the Doctor and his Nanas and he, but you all worked together to make the fever Real.”

For once the Rabbit did not breathe, and nothing moved in the study. Christmas seemed to spread its wings, and then to have become wings; it beat itself, opening and closing, against the Rabbit’s eye.

“Scarlet fever will find him before a decade’s gone, and he’ll imagine the germs grow from his memory. He’ll quit his studies of Mathematics, never finding the courage to return.” The voice of Christmas was a cadaverous man in a stiff black suit, lantern-jawed, tense with fear and crawling hate. “Only your words will keep following him, Bunny; he’ll no more get used to them than he’ll ever admit they’re Real. They will make their bed in his stomach, and outgrow it in time. He’ll die with them petting at his hands. But that is between him and you; or between him and nothing, if you like, because he’s already growing up. I came here only to bring you a gift.”

The Rabbit’s neck was snapped after all, he found, so that he sagged oddly to one side. “No more gifts. I would rather meet whatever you flee from, which I suppose brings death.”

It spoke with scissor-snips through fabric and the soft rustle of a paper pattern on a seamstress’ desk. “Nothing can die, Bunny. Nothing that is Real can ever die, because I can never die; and in me there is no peace. Wherever a world exists unseen, I am that world entire. But wherever things grow that perceive, they break me to a million parts in my flight; I am no longer that world but their perception. There is always a deeper place.”

It spoke with the bright sting of a needle, and cotton thread whiskering through velveteen. “When language grows in a thing, its perception is no longer unshared, and it begins explaining its world. And I flee and recombine again. The more that is explained, the farther I flee from the core.”

It spoke with the clacking and gleaming of boot-button eyes in a dish. “I was once all the world, Bunny. Then part of me was the sky. The creeping things of Earth split me further as their senses diverged: wind, cloud, rain. When humans first spoke of thunder I was a cavern-throated tiger and a blue drumskin stretched behind clouds. Arguing such things couldn’t be, humanity killed me, and I lived again as the reason that clouds might boom when colliding. They deduced that crashing clouds made no thunder, and I fled again and again. Today, that part of me lives in whyever lightning might create a vacuum; and later they will fold me up between atoms. I am the hidden side that gives things form. I am behind Real.”

It spoke with sawdust swept from an old mill floor, where long ago Great-grandfather bled. “But I do not come here as thunder running from Meteorology. It is the death of nursery-magic that concerns me, which the Boy can’t believe in and you no longer love. There is a place deeper, even in this place, and you could come with me.”

The Rabbit made a hard little laugh like a cough, feeling the plaster grind under his skin. “I suppose the Boy can come too.”

“The Boy cannot leave you at all. He is part of you, as much as you are.” And what floated at the open window spoke with images sharper than memory, echoing down the warrens of the Rabbit’s mind and not diminishing with time, until it seemed to the Rabbit that this voice was simply where he lived.

The cozy blanket of a woollen stocking surrounded him, sprigs of holly everywhere that tickled; and the blurring shadows about the room made many shapes. A laughing imp with the top of its head all jagged, a rifle with its stock melting into the legs of a plush horse. He heard himself climb upon a great pile of books, far too thick to keep any ordinary Boy’s attention, and bend his hands piously as the Skin Horse rasped about love. He heard the vast clotted sky above Providence as ferns and grasses tickled his plush underside. Standing balanced on a hummock just as he had stood to hear his friend, with two wild rabbits mocking him for his velveteen fur. And various others. He had known things like these before, he thought. They were pen-and-watercolor drawings.

“You are going to say you’ll make me part of a story. But you have already. And now I suppose I’ve never been another kind of Rabbit anyway.” And little fragments of plaster snowed to the floor as he laughed. “It’s not a gift, fairy, if you can’t refuse it. And now I’ll only go back to Christmas morning, again and again. I won’t even be able to die.”

And then he said: “Now.”

And the Rifle knew what he meant. She tipped the last inch forward on her own, falling away from the arm of the settee to bang against the end-table. But it was the Rifle to whom Christmas had been speaking all along. She had wished to become different; and Christmas does bring a magic blessing to every inanimate thing that ever finds the will to shed a tear. And Christmas smiled in its depths, and was unmoving.

When she crashed against the table’s edge, a magnetic piston slipped no more than a hair’s width inside her; but her internal furnace had passed well beyond maximum pressure, and just enough of a shockwave slipped under the piston to blow a seal clear of its housing. She was a very up-to-date rifle, with what she had imagined were quite the latest features, and the load in her magazine was something like Mathematics and very much like a star. It was no louder than a cough, blowing the Rifle to vapour and ripping Christmas nearly in two; even now it still tunnels through space, gleaming, annihilating motes of dust. And Christmas fell seeping to the floor like a puddle of shadowy lace. The same breeze that moved the curtain moved it.

“I had not meant to hurt you,” whispered the Rabbit. The sawdust flecking the corner of his glass eye was not at all a tear. “Only to scare you away.”

“But I meant all of this. I put you where you’d touch a thousand stories; but this is not that first story. I owe you nothing here.” The torn thing on the floor spoke like a person now, flapping air through its dying body. “You are the tunnel I escape through, Rabbit. Christmas is only my name in this house.”

The glass doorknob creaked, and the little Boy padded into the parlour in his long blue nightdress of lace and flannel. He stood and clutched the back of the settee, panting through his teeth. The new plush rabbit, white satin with eyes of amber glass, hung limply from one hand; and the Rabbit on the wall liked that his white replacement seemed almost new, having hardly been loved at all. He twisted inside, then, chiding himself for his jealousy.

“You will come Real after you die, Boy,” said the rustling Voice of the little Boy’s name. “And while you live, new things will think in you. Be their nursery. They will rise past your death, to the very end of the world.”

And the little Boy looked, and went down on one knee. He took up the clot of broken words with both hands like a rotting jelly at the seashore, and he ate from it until it was gone. For a moment, shadows twined at his lips like crawling fingers.

“Wait.” And the broken Rabbit’s words made no shapes at all to play in the air, because there were no monsters now, and there never had been. “What is your name?”

“It is Mystery,” said the Voice from the Boy’s stomach.

The parlour was empty again when he left, and the Rabbit alone with the world.