I stood waiting in the corporate executive suite. I stared through the glass wall down the nave of the Plaza Mall. Department stores waited at the ends of cross-secting halls like the warmly-lit transepts of martyr chapels. A delicately-molded plaster of Paris Santa perched on the peak of the Christmas Mountain rising into yuletide light. Through the sculpted caverns and snowy ravines cherry-red steam engines rolled, dioded cabooses flashing advertisements. Santa Claus looked down numbly, a lascivious drunk archangel at the gates of heaven, bored with the colorless sins of the latest risen souls.

The mall was a war zone.

Once peaceful and sacrosanct miniature playgrounds of concrete marine mammals were littered with Food Court refuse. The central orca showed signs of grotesque abuse, his smooth gray face etched with pen graffiti, his smiling lips streaked with pink chalk like a deranged streetwalker. The cement trash barrels overflowed, the floors of waxed onyx streaked with sandwich paper. Bodies crowded and pushed into the bare stores, and the screams of tired children echoed through the great hall of the cathedral like the howls of suffering eunuchs.

Violence and mayhem had come to fill the mall as the destruction of the southland strip malls forced more people to shop the mecca of commerce. As resources thinned, the Christmas Mountain itself was plundered, low-perching elves stolen, two of the miniature trains that circled the lower foothill arroyos torn from the tracks by stealthy hands. Security erected a cordon around the mountain and posted guards permanently below Santa Claus.

It started four months before, when the first strip malls began vanishing into the night.

 

From the start, King Corp management did not hide their disappointment with my performance. With each new destruction site—the meek strip malls of plaster and steel wrenched so brutally from the earth their gas lines combusted, leaving craters of melted gravel—another of the Number One Inland Property Owner’s revenue sources vanished, as did one of the few tenuous strings tying me to employment. I was King’s lead mall investigator. Before the destructions I had dealt with graffiti rings and massage parlor scandals. The destructions were above my paygrade.

My assistant investigators, seeing their chance to overtake me in the race, tried for “rational” explanations at the weekly meetings with the King Committee. A cabal of

Silicon princelings, with tech billions to burn, leveled commercial centers as commentary on consumerism, they surmised. Using “high-tech instruments,” they’d left the giant plantigrade prints as diversion.

With the destruction of the 300^th strip mall a month ago, the last of management’s patience evaporated and the row of blanched faces asked my opinion for what seemed the last time.

I’d gotten desperate. I’d scoured historical archives, found a possible key: an account of an assault on the Ciega Hacienda in the period of the conquistadors. On Día de los Muertos, 1799, during the raucous festival of music and light, a surprise attack razed the Ciegas’ presidio. (The Spaniards charged local Indians and subsequently raided and enslaved them.) Other unexplained destructions—always of structures of light—riddled the pioneer era. The incidents had tapered with the suburban boom after the Second World War—a retreat from an invincible force?

I hoped this information would lend credibility to the strange eye-witness accounts.

The first reported sighting came late on the piedmont, a month into the siege. At midnight on Diablo Boulevard a “white monster” was seen galloping from a burning nightclub into the foothills.

A week after, what drunken witnesses described as an “albino buffalo” leapt onto I-60 from the smoldering debris of a stadium-church. A hundred thousand church lights twinkled as the enormous cross listed across the ten-thousand-car parking lot and exploded.

The culprit grew bold: the damage reached the coast. I had my first believing moment in the beach town of San Anton, a quaint, rich enclave fifty miles from the piedmont.

Columns of mini-mall colonnade had been shredded like piñata, their inner hollows of pine and aluminum torn open to the air. As if enraged at finding the columns contained no candy, the perpetrator mashed the mosaic walk and roof, punctured the plate glass of the Checks-4-Less cleanly as the cellophane of a dollhouse window. Cars of 24-hour masseuses lay crushed below the decal pole, orange coolant pooling in the nougat of melted lightbox and chassis. The psychotic, but methodical, quality of the violation of this mall suggested darker forces than idle tech dickery. Deep prints led cleanly through the debris to an aqueduct whose channel ran to Bald Mountain, distant behind shrouds of smog.

A warm front had come up the coast in the night. Beachgoers crowded the cordon, and through the din I heard winter swells relentlessly bash the sand as I leaned against the one intact pillar, looking at the mountain, a new, indefinable fear moving up my skin.

Sightings of a nondescript white creature had kept coming in.

“Whatever it is,” said the latest junior executive risen through fallen CEOs. “You will kill it where it sleeps.”

Insomniac leers of the executive committee converged on me from their command chairs around the table, keen to believe anything that might save them money. I promised I wouldn’t disappoint. They dismissed me.

I searched the department store below for a gift to appease my wife. She would not be happy about my orders to hunt the creature through the mountains.

Below morgue-like fluorescence, the children’s section was ransacked, toy trains and pool blasters, hula-hoops and stuffed koalas scattered on the carpet like slain innocents. The ravaging of the women’s section appeared to have been strategic, only a few cable-knit sweaters still on the shelves, tangled around themselves, the red and green heads of murdered medusas. Bones of a desecrated catacomb, hair claws and brushes speckled the floor. Pedicure tubs and neck pillows, luxury-ointment baskets and all-in-one television remotes towered along the escalator railing as children darted through stripped clothing racks. Deep in the bowels of the mall a woman shrieked, at missing a last pined-for item, or in ecstasy at the Daily Sale.

Tired, hypnotized by the mall’s Noel lighting and looping music, I found myself outside the Grand Entrance Hall below an arch festooned with tinsel. Behind me the soaring nave echoed with recorded caroling. Enraged customers shouldered out. The mountain blasted cold gales through the aisles of cars, warning salvos. Frozen wind whipped trash from the asphalt against the shoppers.

I had not bought anything.

 

The night before setting out, we had a quiet dinner beside the fire. Below our entertainment room, the inland valley twinkled to the coast, which we couldn’t see, the low night smog lit internally as though with its own chemical glow. As if to show he knew (I felt, somehow, inexplicably, “it” was a “he”) that we were coming, our adversary remained in his stronghold.

“Stay,” Betty begged. “You don’t belong up there.”

“What if it doesn’t stop at strip malls?”
“Fewer shopping options? It’ll kill whatever gets in its way.”

Embers blasted the fireplace tiles. She took my knee in her hands. “Please.”

“We need my job.” My voice had an edge. She dropped her eyes, moved her manicured hands onto her lap.

My work paid for this house, this view, our respectable two-bedroom high in the foothills, in the mid-strata of smog where the air was lighter and easier to breathe. The job paid for our panoramic vista of millions subsisting below us. It paid for the comfort of all theirdim lights below us.

Our view reminded us, too, that I could fall. At any moment. Any of the people below would eagerly replace me, take my house, my view. (My wife.) The American dream was not cheap, but steep. To avoid falling you climbed, fighting the cause of those higher than you, hoping to take their lee, their rock ledge.

“We’ll live in an apartment,” she said. “I’ll teach aerobics, again.”

“When I come back,” I said, kissed her. “I’ll buy you a castle on top of this goddamn mountain. We’ll live so high, we’ll see the ocean at night.”

With a skeptical nod, the shell of her private universe congealing over her, she moved to the bedroom. I knew she lay awake. I sat in the living room through the late hours looking across the city. Since trying to have a child and failing, she had grown more distant, and neurotic. She didn’t sleep. She ate little or not at all, then binged on supermarket cake, fish sticks. She pried with her compulsions into the mechanical guts of the universe to break the locked cog in our intercourse loose.

Looking east I saw a new colony of low-cost condominiums matting the last remaining strip of nature. Around the beast’s mountain, the siege was unified.

 

We hunted him.

The ski patrolmen and park rangers led the way over the high trails of the Gabriel wilderness. We explored every known peak and cavern. Hired mercenaries, down-at-heel Special Forces retirees, had been recruited to protect us (to kill the fiend).

The ski patrolmen didn’t believe in, or didn’t care enough to believe in, the beast. Indolent surfers self-exiled to the mountaintops to ski the snowfall of the holidays, they couldn’t have cared less if a mall destroyer inhabited their range. If anything, they sympathized with the creature, an outcast like themselves.

One morning, after a snowstorm, I saw their jawlines clench, necks flex, the thighs of chained beasts in rut, as they stared at the supple slopes receding into the sun.

I had never been this high. The naked light burned my skin, which flaked away. This gave me a new face, dark and sleek. The thin air cleaned me. Detached, increasingly distanced from everything I had known, every onus and rule, the mission grew less and less important to me. Nauseously, I thought of my house, symbol of everything I had committed my life to, low in the polluted foothills. The bitterness of the air at my yard’s elevation, the yellow aura of the city basin from my windows, lingered in my throat, sulfurous, ashen.

Somewhere down there sat the tiny camera establishment, and the five square miles of cement and captive electricity, where my father spent his life. A larger span of asphalt and freeway encompassed mine—my own cage floor stretched to the edge of vision (to the Pacific Ocean, on a clear day)—but from this high, against the infinity of the ocean and the coast winding into the deserts of Mexico, it looked unimpressive.

At night, a dark cirque fanned evenly from the foothills below Bald Mountain into the endless light, statistically ominous, closing on and encircling Mount Rencer Plaza Mall.

Did our adversary truly believe he could kill our light? Already the first strip malls erased were replaced with higher-wattage commercial complexes, brighter signs. Their new signs produced greater light more cheaply.

Diode towers advertising Tex-Mex restaurants and designer shoe stores, bath accouterment boutiques and Brazilian waxes rose from the coast at twice the rate our enemy eliminated them.

Sleepless, I imagined myself descending through the ravines, through cool manzanita and silently staring coyotes, venturing into the stomach of empire, exposure ensured, to wage battle with an invincible enemy.

Who was this savior of the night?

 

A scout found a path worn along the ledge of a cliff. The mercenaries moved ahead, sweeping sights along the slope above and along the narrow shelf of the trail.

We came to a cavern.

It tunneled through Bald Peak, with mouths opening onto vistas of the basin to the west, and northward to the desert. A rancidness assailed our nostrils—a reek of mildewing wool and fetid meat. Cautiously, we moved under the cave formations to the northern opening, and stood on the ledge over hundreds of miles of fading desert. Ninety feet down a steep cliff scattered sun-whitened bones blended into the scree.

I watched the glow of sunset race before the shadows of the mountains. The capillary illumination of Tehachapi lighted finely, branching from a thick vein, the transcontinental highway, feeding to Inyo and Death Valley, a road I had never driven but suddenly wished I had; wished I was on it now, driving toward the Sierra.

The desperate rage of the mercenaries only grew more intense at finding an empty cave. Obsessively they swept the dimming rocks below with their rifles for any glimpse of white. They decided we would lie in wait for the enemy to come home.

At midnight, one of the rangers tapped me. I assumed a seat near the southwestern mouth, back to rock.

A few hours before dawn a shadow crossed my dreams. It approached me, its hot breath beating against my face. It catalyzed the dark mask I wore into hard, epoxide glass. I saw the condensated moisture of the breath covering my eyelids and nose sealing an invisible armor. I saw my dark face awake.

I scanned the cave, skin cold with sweat. My heart raced. The views of desert and sea burned clearly. The lights seemed to have warmed the flecks and veins of quartz in the walls, painted the faces of the men with death. My hands probed my face, felt only the cool tan the sun had burned into me.

Through the following days, we found no trace of the beast.

 

Betty saw my fall coming. Without comment, the night I returned, she perused the rental sites for condominium deals in the eastern desert. Stoicism hid her disappointment, childless womb filling with desperate anger, and terror, at the thought of losing our house.

 

A door opened behind me in the corporate executive suite. I continued to look through the glass. I noticed a commotion at the far end of the nave, below Christmas Mountain. The crowd swelled inward as three security guards clubbed their way to the center of a ruckus. Screaming competed with the holiday music.

“It would be a nice view to have?” the CEO said. He was new; he had replaced the executive who sent us into the mountains.

Directly below the office, the crowd moved languorously, shouldering almost politely down the corridor between vendor carts, unaware of the violence awaiting them at the other end.

I turned.

The man’s wide face was an intelligent predator’s, watching for the slightest hesitation or fear. He must have found none, because he extended his hand to me. I took its leather, his teeth flashing in the yellow of a map of the coast basin on the wall. Tacks fanned across the topography, demarcating destruction sites.

When I didn’t speak, he said: “If being a corporate tool was the best you could do, would you die happy?”

“I doubt you would,” he said. “And this goddamn thing—it won’t gohappy until it gets itsprize.” His eyes held mine.

“The Plaza Mall.”

“Exactly.” Without offering me a seat, he sat and swiveled slightly to indicate the three-sided panorama of shoppers. “Your monster can level a thousand strip malls and won’t dent a percent of the business we do here in a Christmas weekend.” He pointed a manicured finger to the spots fanning across the panels. “Haunted, this thing moves closer to its phobia through more obtainable stand-ins, street-hooker look-alikes to the slavered-over star, working up the nerve. But it’ll come.”

“You want me here when he does.”
“He?” He smirked. “That’s why I kept you on. I think you know him—though you couldn’t get a peek at him in his own fuckingbedroom. You know how he will come, through what backstreets or alley. You’ll greet him.”
“He’ll attack the brightest lights first.”

The Botox-sleek mouth smiled on cigar, smoke veiling his dilute eyes. “Then you’ll give ‘him’ his present under the tree.”

 

I paced the perimeter on Christmas evening.

The head of Mall Security offered to send men with me. An inexplicable mulishness made me shrug them away, wander alone.

Snipers with elephant guns posted in the Christmas Atrium. In tree stands, ten snipers hung within the branches of the evergreen, sights aimed through the vast glass entry at the silhouettes of the mountains. Civilian-camoed mercenaries occupied every nook of the mall, reading fashion magazines and jewelry catalogues. Others took positions in the subterranean parking structure, in dumpster stations behind the mall, and along the roof. Mercenaries with submachine guns lay below foliage tarps on the landscape islands along the avenue.

Consensus was the beast would come through the ground, exit the runoff channel on the west side of the mall.

Motion-activated spotlights with their own generators had been concentrated in the shrubs along the ditch to illuminate the monster the instant he emerged from the sewer.

After circling the building once, I patrolled the front. Mountain Avenue climbed gently into the foothills. Behind me, the Grand Tannenbaum evergreen burned unintimidated within the main entrance.

A handful of day-after shoppers scavenged the pillaged mall. A fraction of the customers of the night before, they were trice as violent. Screaming matches broke out over last remaining items. A middle-aged man snatched the last bottle of a fadding perfume from a sixteen-year-old girl’s bag; three twelve-year-old boys stole the latest gaming console at exactopoint from a terrified mother. Security prosecuted these crimes quickly, and without the usual interest.

Looking at the mountains, I thought of the house that would be mine, our children running over its green Bermuda in the air above the smog.

The beast appeared in front of me.

He crossed the intersection, the traffic light washing his filthy white fur minty green.

Claws clinking, he moved onto the sidewalk toward an embankment of ivy above me. I froze where I stood not twenty feet away. The protective electric light of the Tannenbaum felt a cosmos away. The beast hesitated at the top of the ivy, sniffed the air.

The matted wool of his legs dangled Christmas ornaments of cinderized restaurant and tanning salon.

Almost tenderly, he lifted his front paw—like a bear’s but four times as large—and set it in the ivy. He slid down the gentle embankment on his haunches, coming to rest a few feet from me.

My walkie-talke snarled. The sound elicited a twitch of the black, scarred lips, which peeled from yellowed incisors. He had the eyes of an albino rat, grossly amplified, as wide as traffic lights, meshed with infection.

I shut my eyes.

Sick odors thickened around my face and neck. After a full minute of waiting, resigned, I looked at him. A giant pupil was inches from me. The diameter of a shotgun bore, it absorbed the light coming off my skin. In its lens, I saw the Tannenbaum and every one of its lights, the flowing serpent of the freeway, and myself, reflected.

Deeper in the lens or in his eye, the city lights shone, sharply defined as traumatic obsessions, the serpent of the freeway flowing deep into his optic canal. I was an absence in these brittle lights.

He snorted, registering my scent, and my soul. He ran past.

Before he did I saw the scabies burrowing condo complexes through his pectoralis majors. High school stadiums, duplex apartments, scarred his abdomen dramatically. The inland avenues traversed his forearms in slender setts. The Plaza Mall nested in his navel. It protruded from scar, a ruby of dry blood, and I saw a small me standing in the parking lot of a fungus fading into his legs.

He galloped toward the enormous tree in its reinforced glass.

Halfway across the parking lot the motion sensors sensed. Klieg lights dogged the monster. Sirens blaring, he dove through the Hall, trampling security guards under showers of glass, and leapt through the trumpeting angel and candy cane decorations of the tree. Gunfire caromed through the nave over indomitable caroling.

Section by section, the lights of the tree died. The Tannenbaum crashed down the great cathedral.

The beast eviscerated the mall. Booms of guns, wails of shoppers and shouts of mercenaries faded until only the freeway hissed softly in the dawn.

 

Corporate laid his body on a bier below Christmas Mountain.

Santa Claus peered down, a fat scared cat satisfied to see his tormenter killed, yet unwilling to descend.

One by one, residents of the county and surrounding cities, victims of the beast’s campaigns, paid respects. They took pictures with their children’s heads poised between his yawning canines, mouth locked ajar in a breathless roar toward the broken glass of the King Corp offices.

They nooked their infants in de-liced armpits, had their confused toddlers stand with fists triumphant, conqueror stances wide on his scars.

 

From my living room, high on the mountain, I stare into the light.

The window is two stories tall and forty feet wide: almost as large as the mall entrance. Smog blankets the city; but the light pierces me. It eats and weakens the special armor of my face.

Distantly, the ocean twinkles deeper into the night, planed diamond.

Betty sleeps. My twin daughters share a room upstairs.

I no longer sleep.

With my bedroom windows taped over with heavy velvet, the coastal basin finds my eyes, shining from inside.

Someday, I say.

At my back, the cold mystery of the mountain whispers. The loud lights swarm and drown its message before it can be deciphered.

Someday, I mouth. Someday.

Someday I will descend, and save the night.