NOS4A2 A Novel

The Kitchen


IT WAS A SMALL, DINGY SPACE WITH A YELLOW FORMICA-TOPPED TABLE in it and an ugly black phone on the wall, under a sun-faded child’s drawing.

Dusty yellow polka-dot streamers dangled from the ceiling, hanging perfectly motionless in the still air, as if someone had thrown a birthday party here, years ago, and had never entirely cleaned up. To Vic’s right was a metal door, open to reveal a pantry containing a washer and dryer, a few shelves of dry goods, and a stainless-steel cabinet built into the wall. Beside the pantry door was a big Frigidaire with sloopy bathtub styling.

The room was warm, the air close and stale. A TV dinner baked in the oven. She could envision the slices of turkey in one compartment, mashed potatoes in another, tinfoil covering the dessert. Two bottles of orange pop stood on the counter. There was a door to the backyard. In three steps Vic was there.

The dead boy watched the rear of the house. She knew he was dead now, or worse than dead. That he was a child of the man Charlie Manx.

He stood perfectly still in his rawhide coat and jeans and bare feet. His hood was pushed back to show his pale hair and the black branches of veins in his temples. His mouth was open to show his rows of needle teeth. He saw her and grinned but did not move as she cried out and turned the bolt. He had left a trail of white footprints behind him, where the grass had frozen at the touch of his feet. His face had the glassy smoothness of enamel. His eyes were faintly clouded with frost.

“Come out,” he said, his breath smoking. “Come on out here and stop being so silly. We will all go to Christmasland together.”

She backed away from the door. Her hip bumped the oven. She turned and began pulling open drawers, looking for a knife. The first one she opened was full of kitchen rags. The second held whisks, spatulas, dead flies. She went back to the first drawer, grabbed bunches of hand towels, opened the oven, and threw them in on top of the turkey dinner. She left the oven door parted a crack.

There was a frying pan on the stove. She grabbed it by the handle. It felt good to have something to swing.

“Mr. Manx! Mr. Manx, I saw her! She’s being a goof!” the boy shouted. Then he yelled, “This is fun!”

Vic turned and plunged through the batwing doors and back to the front of the house. She peered through the window by the door again.

Manx had walked her bicycle closer to the bridge. He stood before the opening, considering the darkness, head cocked to one side: listening to it, perhaps. Finally he seemed to decide something. He bent and gave the bicycle a strong, smooth shove out onto the bridge.

Her Raleigh rolled across the threshold and into the darkness.

An invisible needle slid into her left eye and back into her brain. She sobbed—couldn’t help herself—and doubled over. The needle withdrew, then slid in again. She wanted her head to explode, wanted to die.

She heard a pop, like her ears depressurizing, and the house shuddered. It was as if a jet had screamed by overhead, breaking the sound barrier.

The front hall began to smell of smoke.

Vic lifted her head and squinted out through the window.

The Shorter Way was gone.

She had known it would be, the moment she heard that hard, piercing pop! The bridge had collapsed into itself, like a dying sun going nova.

Charlie Manx walked toward the house, the tails of his coat flapping. There was no humor in his pinched, ugly face now. He looked instead like a stupid man, set upon doing something barbaric.

She glanced at the stairs but knew if she went up there, she would have no way back down. That left the kitchen.

When she stepped through the batwing doors, the boy was at the rear door, his face up against the glass of the window set into it. He grinned to show his mouthful of delicate hooks, those fine rows of curving bones. His breath spread feathers of silvery frost across the pane.

The phone rang. Vic yelped as if someone had grabbed her, looked around at it. Her face batted against the yellow polka-dot streamers hanging from the ceiling.

Only they weren’t streamers at all. They were strips of flypaper, with dozens of withered, dead fly husks stuck to them. There was bile in the back of Vic’s throat. It tasted sour-sweet, like a frappe from Terry’s gone bad.

The phone rang again. She grabbed the receiver, but before she picked it up, her gaze fixed on the child’s drawing taped directly above the phone. The paper was dry and brown and brittle with age, the tape gone yellow. It showed a forest of crayon Christmas trees and the man called Charlie Manx in a Santa hat, with two little girls, grinning to show a mouthful of fangs. The children in the picture were very like the thing in the backyard that had once been a child.

Vic put the phone to her ear.

“Help me!” she cried. “Help me, please!”

“Where are you, ma’am?” said someone with a childlike voice.

“I don’t know, I don’t know! I’m lost!”

“We already have a car there. It’s in the garage. Go get in the backseat, and our driver will take you to Christmasland.” Whoever was on the other end of the line giggled. “We’ll take care of you when you get here. We’ll hang your eyeballs from our big Christmas tree.”

Vic hung up.

She heard a crunch behind her, whirled, and saw that the little boy had slammed his forehead into the window. A spiderweb of shattered glass filled the pane. The boy himself seemed uninjured.

Back in the foyer, she heard Manx force the front door open, heard it catch against the chain.

The child pulled his head back, then snapped it forward, and his forehead hit the window with another hard crunch. Splinters of glass fell. The boy laughed.

The first yellow flames licked out of the half-open oven. They made a sound like a pigeon beating its wings. The wallpaper to the right of the oven was blackening, curling. Vic no longer remembered why she had wanted to start a fire. Something about escaping in a confusion of smoke.

The child reached through the shattered windowpane, his hand feeling for the bolt. Jagged glass points scraped his wrist, peeled up shavings of skin, drew black blood. It didn’t seem to bother him.

Vic swung the frying pan at his hand. She threw herself into her swing with her whole weight, and the force of the blow carried her straight into the door. She recoiled, stumbled backward, and sat down on the floor. The boy jerked his hand outside, and she saw that three of his fingers had been smashed out of true, grotesquely bent the wrong way.

“You’re funny!” he shouted, and laughed.

Vic kicked her heels, sliding backward on her ass across the cream-colored tiles. The boy stuck his face through the broken windowpane and waggled his black tongue at her.

Red flame belched out of the oven, and for a moment her hair was burning on the right side of her head, the fine hairs crinkling and charring and shriveling up. She swatted at herself. Sparks flew.

Manx hit the front door. The chain snapped with a tinny, clinking sound; the bolt tore free with a loud crack. She heard the door smash into the wall with a house-shaking bang.

The boy reached through the broken window again and unlocked the back door.

Burning strips of flypaper fell around her.

Vic shoved herself up off her ass and turned, and Manx was on the other side of the batwing doors, about to step into the kitchen. He looked at her with a wide-eyed and avid fascination on his ugly face.

“When I saw your bike, I thought you would be younger,” Manx said. “But you are all grown. That is too bad for you. Christmasland is not such a good place for girls who are all grown.”

The door behind her opened . . . and when it did, there was a feeling of all the hot air being sucked out of the room, as if the world outside were inhaling. A red cyclone of flame whirled from the open oven, and a thousand hot sparks whirled with it. Black smoke gushed.

When Manx swatted through the batwing doors, coming for her, Vic shied away from him, squirming out of reach and ducking behind the big bulky Frigidaire, stepping toward the only place that remained to her, into





The Pantry


SHE GRABBED THE METAL HANDLE OF THE DOOR AND SLAMMED IT shut behind her.

It was a heavy door, and it squalled as she dragged it across the floor. She had never moved such a heavy door in all her life.

It had no lock of any kind. The handle was an iron U, bolted to the metal surface. Vic grabbed it and set her heels apart, her feet planted on the doorframe. A moment later Manx yanked. She buckled, was jerked forward, but locked her knees and held it shut.

He eased off, then suddenly pulled again, a second time, trying to catch her napping. He had at least seventy pounds on her, and those gangly orangutan arms of his, but with her feet braced against the doorframe her arms would come out of their sockets before her legs gave.

Manx stopped pulling. Vic had an instant to look around and saw a mop with a long blue metal handle. It was just to her right, within arm’s reach. She pushed it through the U-shaped door latch, so the mop handle was braced across the doorframe.

Vic let go and stepped back, and her legs wobbled, and she almost sat down. She had to lean against the washing machine to keep her feet.

Manx pulled the door again, and the mop handle bashed against the frame.

He paused. When he pulled at the door the next time, he did so gently, in an almost experimental way.

Vic heard him cough. She thought she heard childlike whispering. Her legs shook. They shook so forcefully that she knew if she let go of the washing machine, she’d fall over.

“You have got yourself in a tight spot now, you little firebug!” Manx called through the door.

“Go away!” she screamed.

“It takes a lot of brass to break into a man’s house and then tell him to git!” he said. But he said it with good humor. “You are scared to come out, I suppose. If you had any sense, you would be more scared to stay where you are!”

“Go away!” she screamed again. It was all she could think to say.

He coughed once more. A frantic red firelight glimmered at the bottom of the door, broken by two shadows that marked where Charlie Manx had placed his feet. There was another moment of whispering.

“Child,” he said to her, “I will let this house burn without a second thought. I have other places to go, and this hidey-hole has been burned for me now, one way or another. Come out. Come out or you will smother to death in there and no one will ever identify your burnt remains. Open the door. I will not hurt you.”

She leaned back against the washing machine, gripping the edge with both hands, her legs wobbling furiously, almost comically.

“Pity,” he said. “I would’ve liked to know a girl who had a vehicle of her own, one that can travel the roads of thought. Our kind is rare. We should learn from one another. Well. You will learn from me now, although I think you will not much care for the lesson. I would stay and talk longer, but it is getting a trifle warm in here! I am a man who prefers cooler climes, to be honest. I am so fond of winter I am practically one of Santa’s elves!” And he laughed again, that whinnying shit-kicker laugh: Heeeeee!

Something turned over in the kitchen. It fell with such an enormous crash that she screamed and almost leaped up onto the washing machine. The impact shook the whole house and sent a hideous vibration through the tiles beneath her. For a moment she thought the floor might be in danger of caving in.

She knew from the sound, from the weight, from the force of it, what he had done. He had gripped that big old fridge, with the sloopy bathtub styling, and overturned it in front of the door.


VIC STOOD A LONG TIME AGAINST THE WASHING MACHINE, WAITING for her legs to stop shaking.

She did not, at first, really believe that Manx was gone. She felt he was waiting for her to throw herself against the door, hammering against it and pleading to be let out.

She could hear the fire. She heard things popping and cracking in the heat. The wallpaper sizzled with a crispy fizzling sound, like someone pitching handfuls of pine needles into a campfire.

Vic put her ear to the door, to better hear the other room. But at the first touch of skin to metal, she jerked her head back with a cry. The iron door was as hot as a skillet left on high heat.

A dirty brown smoke began to trickle in along the left-hand edge of the door.

Vic yanked the steel mop handle free, chucked it aside. She grabbed the handle, meant to give it a shove, see how far she could push it against the weight on the other side—but then she let go, jumped back. The curved metal handle was as hot as the surface of the door. Vic shook her hand in the air to soothe the burned feeling in her fingertips.

She caught her first mouthful of smoke. It stank of melted plastic. It was so filthy-smelling she choked on it, bent over coughing so hard she thought she might vomit.

She turned in a circle. There was hardly space in the pantry to do more than that.

Shelves. Rice-A-Roni. A bucket. A bottle of ammonia. A bottle of bleach. A stainless-steel cabinet or drawer set into the wall. The washing machine and the dryer. There were no windows. There was no other door.

Something glass exploded in the next room. Vic was aware of a gathering filminess in the air, as if she stood in a sauna.

She glanced up and saw that the white plaster ceiling was blackening, directly above the doorframe.

She opened the dryer and found an old white fitted sheet. She tugged it out. Vic pulled it over her head and shoulders, wrapped some fabric around one hand, and tried the door.

She could only barely grip the metal handle, even with the sheet, and could not press her shoulder to the door for long. But Vic flung herself hard against it, once, and again. It shuddered and banged in the frame and opened maybe a quarter of an inch—enough to let in a gush of vile brown smoke. There was too much smoke on the other side of the door to allow her to see anything of the room, to even see flames.

Vic drew back and pitched herself at the door a third time. She hit so hard she bounced, and her ankles caught in the bedsheet, and she fell sprawling. She shouted in frustration, threw off the sheet. The pantry was dirty with smoke.

She reached up, gripped the washing machine with one hand and the handle of the stainless-steel cabinet with the other. But as she pulled herself to her feet, the door to the cabinet fell open, hinges whining, and she crashed back down, her knees giving out.

She rested before trying again, turned her face so her brow was pressed to the cool metal of the washing machine. When she shut her eyes, she felt her mother pressing one cool hand to her fevered forehead.

Vic reclaimed her feet, unsteady now. She let go of the handle of the metal cabinet, and it clapped shut on a spring. The poisonous air stung her eyes.

She opened the cabinet again. It looked into a laundry chute, a dark, narrow metal shaft.

Vic put her head through the opening and looked up. She saw, dimly, another small door, ten or twelve feet up.

He’s waiting up there, she knew.

But it didn’t matter. Remaining in the pantry wasn’t an option.

She sat on the open steel door, which swung down from the wall on a pair of taut springs. Vic squirmed her upper body through the opening, pulled her legs after her, and slid into