He cleared his throat, and raised his hands to silence the crowd, which was getting restless.

“We have two other gentlemen whom we would like to honor this evening. They are the sleepless guardians of the law, the men who keep us all safe at night. May I please ask Sergeant Rowan and Constable Peel to step forward?”

Sergeant Rowan and Constable Peel looked shocked to be singled out in this way. They were simply supposed to be on crowd duty, and nobody had suggested that they would be honored with anything other than overtime. Now their names were being called out, and the same voice that, moments earlier, had been complaining about Samuel was asking why they were so special, and commenting how, at the rate things were going, everybody in town would be special except him, and what kind of world were we living in, exactly?

The two policemen came and stood awkwardly beside Samuel and Lucy and Boswell. There was a third, generally polite burst of applause, as everybody liked to stay on the right side of the police.

“If all four of you—and, of course, the delightful Boswell—would come into the store for a moment, we have a small presentation we’d like to make,” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.

“And when we’re done,” he continued, addressing the crowd once more, “the main festivities will begin, and you’ll all get what’s coming to you.”

Which was an odd way to put it, thought Sergeant Rowan as he and the others moved toward the darkened interior of the store. He glanced again at the window displays and noted that, close up, the polar bears looked less like bears than some kind of abominable snowmen; and the reindeer had very vicious horns and spiked hooves; and the workshop elves had a mean, spiteful appearance about them; and those machines were producing an awful lot of them, so many, in fact, that pretty soon the window areas wouldn’t be big enough to hold them all. They were already piling up, except that they weren’t piling up so much as lining up. But the workshop machines were just tossing them on the floor of the store, and there was nobody around to set them on their feet, so how exactly were they ending up in neat rows before the windows?

And why would somebody design Christmas elves with such sharp teeth?

But by then the four humans, along with one small dog, had crossed over the threshold of Wreckit & Sons. As soon as they were inside, Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley vanished, and the darkness of the store closed so tightly around them that they could not see their own hands in front of their faces, and they were only vaguely aware of the sounds from outside of glass breaking and people screaming.

“Sarge?” said Constable Peel to the blackness.

“Yes, Constable.”

“Maybe we should have told the man that we didn’t want to be special after all.”

“It’s a little late for that, Constable, don’t you think?”