In a small, out-of-the-way corner of the Nexus, a child sat and shivered in the cold of an unrelenting breeze. Snow fell upon him, collecting around his too-thin boots and tattered trouser-legs. He hugged himself miserably in the unprotecting lee of a stone church and listened, rapt, as those inside sang carols. The music of the big pipe organ transported him to another place. To a time that had never been in his short life. To a warm, happy, safe place.
A little further down the alley, three men huddled over a fire raging in a big oil drum, feeding it carefully with anything they could find that would burn. There was precious little of that, as the midnight hour drew close. They passed a bottle, the only cheer they knew on this bleak night. One of them hummed along with the music. The others listened in silence, but smiled faintly.
A woman and her newborn child huddled in a cardboard box, her three slightly-older children close around her. The infant was silent, looking up at the world with unfocussed, unnourished eyes. The mother's head hung down nearly to his face. Tears dripped upon the piece of rag she had found to wrap him, and froze into little white spots. Her oldest child, a girl, looked up at the beautiful colors of the window opposite them in the church wall. It showed a golden-haired being with large white wings and a circle of bright light about its head, bending down over a child in a wooden crate. An angel. Her angel. Her lips moved in silent prayer to the only deity she had ever known.
At the farthest end of the alley, just as the first stroke of midnight chimed from the clock tower two streets away, a circle of light began to shimmer. It grew in size and brightness, like a hole opening in the fabric of the plywood barrier. As a crack opened, bright light poured through, bathing the alley in the warm, golden glow of a hearth fire. The crack widened to the size of a doorway, thrown wide and inviting.
Everyone stared. Even the trio of mongrel whelps who had been tussling over a bare bone stopped to look up at the light. The old men backed away from the barrel. The little boy stood up on numb feet, stumbling backward, wondering if he should run. The mother began to weep openly and her children, all but the oldest, wailed in terror.
The clock continued to chime. A voice filled the alley.
"Fear not. I bring you glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all peoples. For unto you was born this day, in the City of David, a Savior."
The little girl stood up. She smiled. Ignoring the grasping tug of her mother's hand upon her long skirt, she started to walk toward the light. Toward the silhouetted figure who stood in the center of that light, arms outstretched.
"Come," said the voice, low and full of music, as the last stroke of midnight hung upon the air. "It is Christmas. Come and find rest, and food, and warmth...and a home."
The silhouette stepped aside as the little girl walked through unquestioning. Through into a huge, warm, light-filled room filled with music and food and laughter and...
...Christmas.
The others followed, into a very private, very secret sector of Nexus, where only the unwanted of good heart could come, but where they could live out their days in peace and plenty. Other doors from other sectors glimmered in other walls. Others joined them, wide-eyed and wondering and joyous. All were greeted and ushered in to what they needed most urgently. As they warmed themselves and filled their bellies, they began to smile, and then to sing, and finally to laugh.
As the dawn came up outside the stone church, now quiet and empty, a man stood in the alley and looked up into the brightening sky. His long coat and thick muffler guarded him against the cold, which seemed not so bitter now. He glanced over his shoulder at the blank plywood wall at the end of the alley, and smiled. Then he looked at the angel window. "Thank you for letting me share this gift, Mannon," he said softly.
And he walked off into the dawn, humming an old French carol.
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