I'm no poltergeist. I'm not mad at anybody. OK, well, so, that's a lie. I'm pretty steamed about being stuck between heaven and hell, and I'm ticked off about getting killed before the prime of my life (at least I assume the prime was still ahead of me, seeing how nonprime the years I actually lived through seemed to be). So how was I going to move anything?

It was Nick who showed me how. Once I realized he'd been right about my seeing the living, I looked him up and he kind of took me under his wing, he and a few of his elves -- who are not little and not cute, they're just dead people like me -- and showed me the work they do.

It isn't just at Christmas, though Christmas is for them like tax time is for accountants. All through the year, Nick and his gang are watching out for children. They'll pick a kid -- almost at random, or so it seems to me, though maybe there's some system in it, some signs they look for -- and they just follow, watching. Most kids, their life is OK. Sure, they get yelled at, spanked, ignored, ridiculed, the normal stuff that makes life interesting, but most of them, somebody loves them, somebody's looking out for them, somebody thinks they're pretty good to have around. You can live through a lot of hard times, if you've got that.

There are other kids, though. Two kinds. Bullies and victims. And Nick's on the look out for both. The victims, they break your heart. The ones that are getting tortured or beaten, there's not much we can do for them. The rage in the person hurting them, that's a powerful force, it matches any wish we can come up with, and then on top of that they've got bodies, which pretty much makes us helpless. What Nick's gang does in those cases is, they try their best to make it obvious to other living people what's going on.