NOS4A2 A Novel

SLEIGH HOUSE

1996





Haverhill


VIC BENT, GRABBED A PIECE OF SHALE, AND FLUNG IT UNDERHANDED out onto the bridge. It hit the wood with a bang, skipped and bounced. There was a faint rustle of movement from above. The bats.

It seemed a sturdy enough hallucination. Although maybe she had also hallucinated the piece of shale.

There were two ways to test the bridge. She could roll forward another twelve inches, put the front tire on it. If it was imaginary, she might be able to throw herself back in time to keep from falling.

Or she could just ride. She could shut her eyes and let the Raleigh carry her forward toward whatever waited.

She was seventeen and unafraid and liked the sound of the wind rustling the ivy around the entrance of the bridge. She put her feet on the pedals and rode. She heard the tires bumpety-thump up onto the wood, heard the planks knocking beneath her. There was no sensation of drop, no ten-story plunge into the arctic cold of the Merrimack River. There was a building roar of white noise. There was a twinge of pain in her left eye.

She glided through the old familiar darkness, the flicker of the static blizzard showing in the gaps between boards. She was already a third of the way across and at the far end could see a dingy white house with an attached garage. The Sleigh House, whatever that was.

The name held no meaning for her and didn’t need to. She knew, in an abstract sense, what she was riding toward, even if she didn’t know the specific where.

She had wanted to find some trouble, and the Shorter Way Bridge had never steered her wrong.





The Other End of the Bridge


INSECTS MADE A SAWING NOISE OFF IN THE HIGH BRUSH. IN NEW Hampshire, spring had been a cold, mucky slog, but here—wherever here was—the air was warm and breezy. At the edge of her vision, Vic saw flashes of light, glimmers of brightness out in the trees, but in those first few moments she didn’t give it any thought.

Vic slipped off the bridge and onto firmly packed dirt. She braked to a stop, put her foot down. She turned her head to look back into the bridge.

The Shorter Way had settled among trees, to one side of the house. It stretched back and away through the hardwoods. When she peered through it, she saw Haverhill on the other end, green and shadowy in the last light of afternoon.

The house, a white Cape Cod, stood alone at the end of a long dirt lane. The grass grew waist-high in the yard. Sumac had invaded from the trees, growing in bunches as tall as Vic herself.

The shades were drawn behind the windows, and the screens were rusted and bellied out, and there was no car in the drive and no reason to think anyone was home, but Vic was immediately afraid of the place and did not believe that it was empty. It was an awful place, and her first thought was that when the police searched it, they would find bodies buried in the backyard.

When she had entered the bridge, she had felt like she was soaring, as effortlessly as a hawk carried on an updraft. She had felt she was gliding and that no harm could come to her. Even now, standing still, she felt like she was moving, sailing forward, but the sensation was no longer pleasant. Now it felt like she was being pulled toward something she didn’t want to see, to know about.

From somewhere came the faint sound of a TV or a radio.

Vic looked back again at the bridge. It was only a couple feet away. She exhaled deeply, told herself she was safe. If she was seen, she could wheel the bike around, get back into the bridge, and be gone, before anyone had time to so much as shout.

She got off the bike and began to walk it forward. With each soft crunching footfall, she felt more sure that her surroundings were real, not a delusion engineered by Ecstasy. The radio sounds grew in volume by subtle degrees as she approached the cottage.

Looking out into the trees, Vic saw those glimmering lights again, slivers of brightness hung in the surrounding pines. It took a moment to make sense of what she was seeing, and when she did, she held up and stared. The firs around the house were hung with Christmas ornaments, hundreds of them, dangling from dozens of trees. Great silver and gold spheres, dusted with glitter, swayed in the drifting pine branches. Tin angels held silent trumpets to their lips. Fat Santas put chubby fingers to their mouths, advising Vic to proceed quietly.

As she stood there looking about, that radio sound resolved into the bluff baritone of Burl Ives, encouraging all the world to have a holly jolly Christmas, and never mind it was the third week of March. The voice was coming from the attached garage, a dingy building with a single roll-up door and four square windows looking into it, milky with filth.

She took one baby step, then a second, creeping toward the garage in the same way she might creep out onto a high ledge. On the third step, she looked back to make sure the bridge was still there and that she could get into it in a hurry if she had to. She could.

Another step, and a fifth, and then she was close enough to see through one of the grimy windows. Vic leaned her Raleigh against the wall, to one side of the big garage door.

She pressed her face up to the glass. The garage contained an old black car with a small rear window. It was a Rolls-Royce, the kind of car Winston Churchill was always getting out of in photographs and old films. She could see the license plate: NOS4A2.

That’s it. That’s all you need. The police can track him down with that, Vic thought. You have to go now. You have to run.

But as she was about to step away from the garage, she saw movement through the rear window of the old car. Someone sitting in the backseat shifted slightly, wiggling to find a more comfortable spot. Vic could dimly see the outline of a small head through the foggy glass.

A child. There was a child in the car—a boy, she thought. The kid had a boy’s haircut.

Vic’s heart was by now beating so hard her shoulders shook. He had a child in his car, and if Vic rode back across the Shorter Way, maybe the law would catch up to the man who owned this old ride, but they would not find the kid with him, because by then he would already be under a foot of dirt somewhere.

Vic didn’t know why the child didn’t scream or let himself out of the car and run. Maybe he was drugged or tied up, Vic couldn’t tell. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t getting out unless Vic went in there and got him out.

She drew back from the glass and took another look over her shoulder. The bridge waited amid the trees. It suddenly seemed a long way off. How had it gotten so far away?

Vic left the Raleigh, went around to the side of the garage. She expected the side door to be locked, but when she turned the handle, it popped open. Quavering, high-pitched, helium-stoked voices spilled out: Alvin and the Chipmunks singing their infernal Christmas song.

Her heart quailed at the thought of going in there. She put one foot over the threshold, tentatively, as if stepping onto the ice of a pond that might not yet be safely frozen over. The old car, obsidian and sleek, filled almost all the available space in the garage. What little room was left was jammed with clutter: paint cans, rakes, ladders, boxes.

The Rolls had a roomy rear compartment, the back couch done in flesh-toned kidskin. A boy slept upon it. He wore a rawhide jacket with buttons of bone. He had dark hair and a round, fleshy face, his cheeks touched with a rose bloom of health. He looked as if he were dreaming sweet dreams; visions of sugarplums, perhaps. He wasn’t tied up in any way and didn’t look unhappy, and Vic had a thought that made no sense: He’s fine. You should go. He’s probably here with his father and he fell asleep and his father is letting him rest, and you should just go away.

Vic flinched from the thought, the way she might’ve flinched from a horsefly. There was something wrong with that thought. It had no business in her head, and she didn’t know how it had got there.

The Shorter Way Bridge had brought her here to find the Wraith, a bad man who hurt people. She had gone looking for trouble, and the bridge never pointed her wrong. In the last few minutes, things she had suppressed for years had come surging back. Maggie Leigh had been real, not a daydream. Vic really had gone out on her bike and retrieved her mother’s bracelet from Terry’s Primo Subs; that had not been imagined but accomplished.

She tapped on the glass. The child did not stir. He was younger than her, twelve or thereabouts. There was a faint, dusky wisp of hair on his upper lip.

“Hey,” she called to him in a low voice. “Hey, kid.”

He shifted, but only to roll onto his side so his face was turned away from her.

Vic tried the door. It was locked from the inside.

The steering wheel was on the right side of the car, the side she was already on. The driver’s-side window was rolled most of the way down. Vic shuffled toward it. There wasn’t much space between the car and the clutter piled against the wall.

The keys were in it, the car running off the battery. The face of the radio was lit a radioactive shade of green. Vic didn’t know who was singing now, some old Vegas dude, but it was another one about Christmas. Christmas was almost three months in the rearview mirror, and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was nearly summer. It was like a clown in the rain, with his makeup running.

“Hey, kid,” she hissed. “Hey, kid, wake up.”

The boy moved slightly, and then he sat up and turned around to face her. Vic saw his face and had to bite back a cry.

It wasn’t anything like the face she had seen through the rear window. The boy in the car looked close to death—or beyond death. His face was lunar in its paleness, except for the hollows of his eyes, which were bruise-colored. Black, poisoned veins crawled beneath his skin, as if his arteries were filled with ink, not blood, and erupted in sick branches at the corners of his mouth and eyes and in his temples. His hair was the color of frost on a windowpane.

He blinked. His eyes were shiny and curious, the one part of him that seemed fully alive.

He exhaled: white smoke. As if he stood in a freezer.

“Who are you?” he asked. Each word was a new puff of white vapor. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Why are you so cold?”

“I’m not,” he said. “You should go. It isn’t safe here.”

His breath, steaming.

“Oh, God, kid,” she said. “Let’s get you out of here. Come on. Come with me.”

“I can’t unlock my door.”

“So climb into the front seat,” she said.

“I can’t,” he said again. He spoke like one sedated, and it came to Vic that he had to be drugged. Could a drug lower your body temperature enough to make your breath steam? She didn’t think so. “I can’t leave the backseat. You really shouldn’t be here. He’ll come back soon.” White, frozen air trickled from his nostrils.

Vic heard him clearly enough but didn’t understand much of it, except for the last bit. He’ll come back soon made perfect sense. Of course he was coming back—whoever he was (the Wraith). He wouldn’t have left the car running off the battery if he weren’t going to be back soon, and she had to be gone by the time he returned. They both did.

She wanted more than anything to take off, to bolt for the door, tell the kid she would come back with police. But she could not go. If she ran, she would not just be leaving a sick and abducted child behind. She would be abandoning her own best self, too.

She reached through the window and unlocked the front door and swung it open.

“Come on,” she said. “Take my hand.”

She reached over the back of the driver’s seat, into the rear compartment.

He looked into her palm for a moment, his gaze thoughtful, as if he were attempting to read her future, or as if she had offered him a chocolate and he was trying to decide whether he wanted it. That was the wrong way for a kidnapped child to react, and she knew it, but she still didn’t pull her hand back in time.

He gripped her wrist, and she screamed at his touch. His hand, blazing against her skin, was as bad as pressing her wrist to a hot frying pan. It took her an instant to register the sensation not as heat but as cold.

The horn sounded with a great blast. In the confined space of the garage, the noise was almost too much to bear. Vic didn’t know why it went off. She hadn’t touched the steering wheel.

“Let go! You’re hurting me,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

When he smiled, she saw that his mouth was full of little hooks, rows of them, each as small and delicate as a sewing needle. The rows of them seemed to go all the way down his throat. The horn sounded again.

The boy raised his voice and shouted, “Mr. Manx! Mr. Manx, I caught a girl! Mr. Manx, come see!”

Vic braced a foot against the driver’s seat and threw herself backward, thrusting hard with her leg. The boy was yanked forward. She didn’t think he was going to let go—his hand felt as if it were fused to her wrist, his skin frozen to hers. But when she drew her hand back across the rear divider, into the front seat, he released her. She fell back into the steering wheel, and the horn went off again. Her fault this time.

The boy hopped up and down on the rear seat in excitement. “Mr. Manx! Mr. Manx, come see the pretty girl!” Vapor extruded from his nostrils and mouth.

Vic dropped out of the open driver’s-side door and onto the concrete. Her shoulder hit a mess of stacked rakes and snow shovels, and they fell over on top of her with a crash.

The horn went off again and again, in a series of deafening blasts.

Vic shoved the lawn tools off her. When she was on her knees, she looked at her wrist. It was hideous, a black burn in the rough shape of a child’s hand.

She slammed the driver’s-side door, took one last glance at the boy in the backseat. His face was eager, glistening with excitement. A black tongue lolled out of his mouth and rolled around his lips.

“Mr. Manx, she’s running away!” he screamed. His breath frosted over the window glass. “Come see, come see!”

She picked herself up and took one clumsy, off-balance step back toward the side door to the yard.

The motor that ran the electric garage door roared to life, the chain overhead pulling it up with a grinding clatter. Vic caught herself, then began going back, fast as she could. The big garage door rose and rose, revealing black boots, silver-gray trousers, and she thought, The Wraith, it’s the Wraith!

Vic lurched around the front of the car. Two steps led up to a door that she knew would open into the house itself.

The knob turned. The door eased back onto darkness.

Vic stepped through and pushed the door shut behind her and began to move across





A Mudroom


WHERE DIRT-SCUFFED LINOLEUM WAS PEELING UP IN ONE CORNER.

Her legs had never felt so weak, and her ears were ringing from a scream that was stuck in her head, because she knew that if she screamed for real, the Wraith would find her and kill her. About this there was no doubt in her mind—he would kill her and bury her in the backyard, and no one would ever know what had become of her.

She went through a second inner door and into





A Hallway


THAT RAN ALMOST THE ENTIRE LENGTH OF THE HOUSE AND WAS CARPETED in green wall-to-wall shag.

The hall smelled like a turkey dinner.

She ran, not bothering with the doors on either side of her, knowing they would only open into bathrooms and bedrooms. She clutched her right wrist, breathing through the pain.

In ten paces the hall arrived at a little foyer. The door to the front yard was on the left, just beyond a narrow staircase climbing to the second floor. Hunting prints hung on the walls. Grinning, ruddy-faced men held up bunches of dead geese, displaying them to noble-looking golden retrievers. A pair of swinging batwing doors opened into a kitchen on Vic’s right. The smell of turkey dinner was stronger here. It was warmer, too, feverishly warm.

She saw her chance, saw it clear in her mind. The man called the Wraith was entering through the garage. He would follow her through the side door and into the house. If she bolted now, rushed across the front yard, she could reach the Shorter Way on foot.

Vic lunged across the foyer, banging her hip on a side table. A lamp with a bead-trimmed shade wobbled, almost fell.

She grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and was about to pull it open when she saw the view through the side window.

He stood in the yard, one of the tallest men she had ever seen, six and a half feet at least. He was bald, and there was something obscene about his pale skull, crawling with blue veins. He wore a coat from another era, a thing with tails and a double line of brass buttons down the front. He looked like a soldier, a colonel in the service of some foreign nation where an army was not called an army but a legion.

He was turned slightly away from the house and toward the bridge, so she saw him in profile. He stood before the Shorter Way, one hand on the handlebars of her bike.

Vic couldn’t move. It was as if she had been injected with a paralytic. She could not even force her lungs to pull air.

The Wraith cocked his head to one side, the body language of an inquisitive dog. In spite of his large skull, his features were weasel-like and crowded close together in the center of his face. He had a sunken chin and an overbite, which gave him a very dim, almost feeble look. He looked like the sort of rube who would say every syllable in the word “ho-moh-sex-shu-al.”

He considered her bridge, the vast length of it reaching back into the trees. Then he looked toward the house, and Vic pulled her face from the window, pressed her back flat against the door.

“Good afternoon, whoever you are!” he cried. “Come on out and say how do! I will not bite!”

Vic remembered to breathe. It was an effort, as if there were restricting bands strapped around her chest.

The Wraith shouted, “You dropped your bicycle in my yard! Wouldn’t you like it back?” After a moment he added, “You dropped your covered bridge in my yard as well! You can have that back, too!”

He laughed. It was a pony’s whinny, heeeeee-eee! It crossed Vic’s mind again that the man might be feeble.

She shut her eyes and held herself rigidly against the door. Then it came to her he hadn’t said anything for a few moments and that he might be approaching the front of the house. She turned the bolt, put the chain on. It took three tries to get the chain in place. Her hands were slippery with sweat, and she kept losing her grip on it.

But no sooner had she locked the door than he spoke again, and she could tell by his voice that he was still standing out in the middle of the overgrown yard.

“I think I know about this bridge. Most people would be upset to find a covered bridge sitting in their front yard, but not Mr. Charles Talent Manx the Third. Mr. Charlie Manx is a man who knows a thing or two about bridges and roads turning up where they do not belong. I myself have driven some highways that don’t belong. I have been driving for a long time. You would be surprised if you knew how long, I bet! I know about one road I can only get to in my Wraith. It isn’t on any map, but it is there when I need it. It is there when I have a passenger who is ready to go to Christmasland. Where does your bridge go? You should come out! We sure do have a lot in common! I bet we will be fast friends!”

Vic decided then. Every moment she stood there listening to him was one less moment she had to save herself. She moved, pushed off from the door, raced down the foyer, batted through the batwing doors and into