[3] A limited edition version of the book was released through Subterranean Press, featuring the novella Wraith that was cut from the manuscript as well as an alternate ending.

[5] In 1986, eight-year-old Victoria "Vic" McQueen discovers that she can find lost items by riding her Raleigh Bike through a particular covered bridge near her home in Massachusetts, which will transport her to the location of whatever she is seeking.

In order to prevent people from thinking her crazy or a liar, Vic must come up with excuses to explain how she is able to find items.

On one such trip, Vic travels to an Iowa library where she meets Maggie Leigh, a librarian with a stutter who can use Scrabble tiles to gain information about future events.

Meanwhile, the man Maggie warned about, Charles Talent Manx III, kidnaps children across the country in the Rolls-Royce.

Manx takes the children he abducts to a mysterious amusement park called "Christmasland" where they can purportedly be happy forever.

Manx arrives at the same station to purchase gas and is captured by the police after he attacks Vic and kills a soldier coming to her aid.

By 2008, Vic has entered into a relationship with Lou and has given birth to a son, Bruce Wayne Carmody, and develops a successful series of children's books.

Vic begins to be harassed by phone calls from Christmasland's vampire children, who chastise her for Manx's arrest and threaten to target Wayne.

As Vic takes an old Triumph motorcycle for a test drive and discovers that it can enter the Shorter Way, Manx and Bing kidnap Wayne, who manages to contact Lou.

Instead, the police suspect Vic in the disappearance of her son, and FBI psychologist Tabitha Hutter is assigned to psychoanalyze her.

Despite a cell phone trace that shows Wayne traveling toward Christmasland, on a severely distorted map of the United States, Hutter does not believe Vic's story.

While Vic sleeps, Maggie finds a message in the tiles - "When the angels fall, the children go home" - and leaves a copy for her.

Narrowly avoiding capture by local police, Vic takes the Shorter Way to reach her father's house, where Lou has already arrived.

She is wounded in the fight but succeeds in destroying Christmasland with the explosives and escapes with Wayne via the Shorter Way to reach Lou.

Lou and Hutter take him to the burned-out ruin of the Sleigh House and begin smashing the Christmas ornaments hung in the trees there.

As they do so, many of Manx's victims emerge into the real world, still of childhood age and with their humanity fully restored as predicted by Maggie's message in the library.

Charles Manx, discussing the concept of "inscapes" and secret places, refers to the Treehouse of the Mind (from Horns) and Craddock McDermott (from Heart-Shaped Box).