“You did this!” Yule screamed. “It was you!”

He spun the Doctor away from the stairs, shoving him against the muraled wall without ever releasing the old man's wrists. His heart was pumping too much blood, hot blood – to his hands and eyes. His fingers burned with the blood. His vision was doused in blood. He wanted to wring the old fucker's neck. He wanted to crush that scrawny neck beneath his boot's heel.

But Yule hesitated before his hands could find Doc's throat. This wasn't right. He wasn't mad at Doc; he was vexed with himself. Suddenly Yule became aware that the mural was watching him. From Atlanta, from the long-lost nursery he'd replicated best as memory would allow, from the wife and boy he'd resurrected in paint – he felt one thing only:

Disappointment.

And then he heard Emma calling him completely back from his blood's rage.

She cried, “Yule!”

He released Doc's wrists. He took a step back. Doc slid down the wall till he was sitting on the floor.

The old man eyed Yule queerly, asking, “Did you hear that?”

There are times in dreaming when the impossible becomes too pervasive. The dream is broken. The dreamer commands the farce himself then, becoming a lucid participant in his mind's illusions.

That was the sense washing over Yule. This had all been a dream and was nearly concluded. Nothing so preposterous could be real. That was not his dead wife calling his name. He wanted to shut his eyes, but could not.

Beyond the cracked window pane some movement drew him. At last he blinked. He crushed against the wall to have a better look.

Directly out yonder, straight across the road – there was Misty. She was waving her arms, jumping up and down in her whore-skirt and bandages. Somehow, she had become trapped upon the bordello's balcony.

She was calling to his silhouette in the porthole, “Yule! Yule! Yule!”

“This is not a dream,” Yule said aloud. The Doctor crawled against the mural to regain his feet. Alongside Yule, he peered out across the thoroughfare.

“I disagree,” Doc said. “This is some fucking nightmare.”

“Reckon that's the truth,” Yule sighed. The babe made a supremely gleeful noise. It manipulated the air with its little fingers, silently stroking the keys of an invisible piano.

“How can we help them?” the Doctor wondered, but Yule was at a loss.

The road below was reacting to Misty's cries. Out there the shamblers appeared to be ankle-deep in quicksand. With their blood-smeared faces upturned they groaned mournfully. Misty was out of reach and it hurt them. Over and over, like men begging to be rescued, they opened and clenched their fists for a rope from the balcony. Their digits were all tipped in red. Yule saw yellowish stands of sinew dangling from their clutches. Suddenly the swell of the moaning road diminished. All at once, the shamblers began chomping compulsively. The clockwork click-clack of their empty bites echoed up-and-down the thoroughfare.

The rhythm of their jaws made them overexcited. Suddenly, they forget their Misty fixation. Still chattering, they roamed the road circuitously, bumping into one another, growling, and then doubling back like hens caught in a coop. Others came crawling out of the bordello's broken window to join the aimless parade. Ghouls were closing in from both ends of the thoroughfare. Yule saw a woman's leg, one of Madame's girls, still clad in a black stocking to the point where it was severed. Two fiends fell upon it simultaneously, tugging till it tore apart at the knee socket.

Marooned on the balcony directly above the shambling mob was Misty – and Yule saw the Sheriff trapped there too, as well as a third person of indeterminable gender; either a feller in a gown or a lady who had somehow grown a beard. The three of them were some miserable company, stranded like victims of an inferno, waiting for the fire brigade to come and rescue them.

“The fire brigade,” Yule whispered. Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck were pin-sized bolts of lightning. Down at the foot of the stairs, amidst his incomplete works, was one invention he had actually finished: the telescoping ladder he’d built for the fire brigade.

Emma whispered gently from Heaven, reminding him he was then and had always been a “Carpenter Savant.”

Yule smiled. The Doctor was staring at him with his eyes and jaw quivering. Yule gripped him by the shoulders and the old man's tremors ceased.

“I have a plan,” Yule promised.

The contraption at the foot of the stairs had been devised some months earlier. Yule had observed a fire brigade struggling with an unwieldy, cumbersome ladder. As a consummate problem-solver and a carpenter savant, he was inspired to fashion a solution in the manner he knew best: by hammer and saw.

The invention was thrice-folded: a trio of runged wooden lengths – each a ladder in its own right. Ropes bound the three segments together, running along the edges and winding over noduled pulleys. The creation could collapse upon itself to be stowed, folding small enough to fit easily in the bed of the fire brigade's coach, but at the cranking of a lever the whole apparatus would telescope to its full extension. Each of the three slats were better than a horse's length. Further, Yule had possessed such foresight that he attached a pair of brackets and a padded belt. A member of the brigade could strap himself in the harness and thus become the fulcrum of a great lever, employing physics in a way which would allow a solitary man to erect the tall ladder even by his lonesome.

“Carpenter Savant,” Yule whispered, echoing his dead wife. He smiled and shook his head at the mysterious movements of the Lord. “Come with me, Doc – downstairs, and quickly.”

They shimmied down the stairs at once. The dog came eagerly after.

Yule's plan was the same as his invention – in three parts. First, the door to the showroom should be barricaded so that no blood-frenzied lepers could shamble in from the road and interrupt the subsequent steps. Toward that end he and the Doc worked together, stacking half-finished furnishings abut the doorway; an un-shuttered armoire, a heavy-footed table-base and its unattached top, the evidence of Yule's old lazy streak. Looking at the barricade they had erected, Yule was more than a smidgeon grateful for those slothful tendencies. The bulwark might have been lacking bricks if he'd only favored work a few times over whiskey.

When the door was barred adequately, Yule implemented the next step of his plan. He hurried to his invention, bending his knees to lift the ladder-contraption, and wobbled up the stairs with it hoisted against his thighs.

“Sherwin, I ought ask ye – the fuck is that?”

“It is a ladder which will extend to the length of three,” Yule explained. He laid the invention flat on the loft's floor. “And I intend to employ it as a draw-bridge of sorts.”

“Come again?”

“Trust me.” Before Doc could say anything more, Yule added, “And do go on downstairs. By the door is mine ax – and a heavy sledge, too. Fetch them both while I make ready this rescue.”

Even this was a part of Yule's plan – this moment stolen alone with his mural. Of course, he was never really alone when he was beside the mural. Stroking the slats of his weird ladder, he smiled at Long-Lost Emma. In paint she smiled back. Mayhap it was her way of speaking to him from the hereafter and finally releasing him, but he reckoned rather it was more likely her way of telling him that, as a muralist, Yule made a better carpenter. She always did have the sharper of their wits. Yule laughed out loud. Then Doc was standing beside him with the ax and the sledge and panting, just the same as the dog.

“Were you talking to someone?”

“Do please pass me the sledge,” Yule answered, ignoring the question. He took up the heavy implement, lifting the head till the handle was parallel his waist. With a wink and a nod he told Doc, “Ye best stand clear now.”

Yule took a whole breath and held it. Then he raised the hammer high above his head and brought it to bear against the mural. He’d built this wall, so he knew its least firm points. The first blow loosened the whole façade from its base. Dust puffed up from crevices which had tightly constrained the sediment since the structure's inception, floating to the floor like flakes of the Color. Yule swung the sledge once more and Dude barked and growled – and so did the damned upon the road below. Doc was bitching too, but Yule could hear only the echoes of the mural's destruction. He bashed the wall.

The head of the sledge punched clear through and peppered the hungry flock below. Through the fissure, Yule saw splinters circling downward like one-winged birds, intermittently flashing their painted surfaces and showing images of Emma and their lost child. Below, the shamblers stared up from darkened sockets, eyes and blood-sopping mouths, all of them craning to suss with their ghoulish senses the source of the thunderous sounds.

Across the way Misty clapped her hands and cheered. At first Yule was too lost, hypnotized by her, to notice the shattering of glass from downstairs. Only when Doc cried out did he realize the showroom had been breached. Down below, he heard the damned slithering in through the windows like so many Alpha-Maggots.

There was nothing left but to pray the barricade he and Doc had erected between the showroom and the workshop would buy them enough time. Though his shoulders and wrists and spine were screaming, Yule swallowed the ache and kept at the loft's demolition.

He tensed from the arches of his feet up through his trunk, out along his arms, and hammered a chunk of the facade loose. A wooden gunfight erupted as dowels popped and snapped free. A hunk of plywood dangled, fastened by only a few stubborn pegs along the header – and Yule slammed the hammer against the portion's center, cleaving it from the structure. As it fell, Yule barely kept his balance. The weight of the sledge nearly dragged him down likewise.

“Sherwin, you shit-brained lunatic!” hollered the Doc. “This ain't no kind of plan! Get back from that ledge!”

Yule closed his eyes. He struck a blind blow against the remaining facade. He drew the hammer back once more and opened his eyes for a final gander. Then he drove it hard against the crease where the roof joined the wall – and the whole hefty remainder of the panel crashed out onto the thoroughfare.

Yule released the sledge and it banged against the loft's floor – but, around him, it was no longer his loft. Now it was a cavern, looking out over the thoroughfare. Across the swarming road, Misty flapped her arms at the railing.

“Yule!” she cried and, beside her, the Sheriff stood with his jaw gaping.

Yule cupped his hands to his mouth. “Top of the morning to ye!” He cried. He turned to the Doctor and found him pale and disoriented. The old man was still holding the ax and muttering to himself. “You can set that aside,” he said. “It won't be necessary – but do please help me on with this harness.” He gestured to his slatted invention which was still lying on the floor. Then he turned back and hollered across the thoroughfare, “Misty, stand clear!”

Yule hoisted his invention to the ruptured loft's edge and fitted the padded belt around his waist. Lifting the apparatus so that it protruded from the landing at the proper forty-five degree angle, he strained to hold it steady, but by leaning and tilting backward, bracing the ladder against his shins while rocking onto his heels, the belt absorbed some of the burden. He gripped the crank, turning it with every inch of nerve he had left.

A pulley rotated, ropes slithered – and the mechanism unfurled. The center-section slid out and up, extending, ratcheting and pulling the top-most portion along with it. Misty gasped as it telescoped its reach further, high above the thoroughfare. Yule grunted and forced the crank through its circuit despite the burning in his bicep. The ladder stretched up and onward and the center segment clicked into place. He kept at the revolutions and the ropes dragged the final length to the contraption's pinnacle. The whole configuration nodded. When he was sure he could not muster another turn of the crank, Yule felt the last extension fasten into position. He could bear no more. He ceased his struggle against the ladder's natural momentum and its descent jerked him forward. At last, it came plummeting down as he had described: the same way a draw-bridge ought – but a mite more swiftly. Its far extreme cracked and bounced against the balcony's railing. For an anxious moment Yule worried it might break in the middle, but then it held fast and he was lying face down on the ladder, peeking straight between the rungs. Down there, soulless gore-fiends raked the air and groaned for his blood. Behind him, in the space which had once been his loft, the baby was cooing. He had damn near forgotten.

“Gadzooks!” exclaimed the Lawman over yonder.

Misty was shrieking, “Yule!”

Dude barked in answer because he knew her and recognized her voice – and then Yule felt the Doctor helping him out of the harness. Once unfastened, Yule shimmied backward off the ladder.

He called across the road to let the refugees know, “All is well and according to plan!”

Crouching at the loft's edge, Yule inspected the impromptu bridge and his chest was warmed by pride. His invention stretched adequately across the expanse with some overlap at either side. Furthermore, it appeared firm and unlikely to snap despite having been built to ascend rather than cross. Yule Sherwin reckoned he was a bonafide hero.

“Come along now!” he yelled across the slavering thoroughfare. “Get ye across it! Be measured and do not look down!”