NOS4A2 A Novel

The Laundry Chute


VIC WAS, AT SEVENTEEN, ONLY FORTY POUNDS HEAVIER AND THREE inches taller than she had been at twelve, a skinny girl who was all leg. But it was tight inside the chute just the same. She braced herself, back to the wall, knees in her face, feet pressing to the opposite side of the shaft.

Vic began to work her way up the shaft, pushing herself with the balls of her feet, six inches at a time. Brown smoke wafted around her and stung her eyes.

Her hamstrings began to twitch and burn. She slid her back up another six inches, walking up the shaft in a hunched, bent, grotesque sort of way. The muscles in the small of her back throbbed.

She was halfway to the second floor when her left foot slipped, squirting out beneath her, and her ass dropped. She felt a tearing in her right thigh, and she screamed. For one moment she was able to hold herself in place, folded over with her right knee in her face and her left leg hanging straight down. But the weight on her right leg was too much. The pain was too much. She let her right foot slide free and fell all the way back to the bottom.

It was a painful, ungraceful fall. She clouted into the aluminum floor of the shaft, spiked her right knee into her own face. Her other foot banged through the stainless-steel hatch and shot back into the pantry.

Vic was, for a moment, dangerously close to panic. She began to cry, and when she stood up in the laundry chute, she did not try to climb again but began to jump, and never mind that the top was well out of reach and there was nothing in the smooth aluminum shaft to grab. She screamed. She screamed for help. The shaft was full of smoke, and it blurred her vision, and midscream she began to cough, a harsh, dry, painful cough. She coughed on and on, did not think she would ever stop. She coughed with such force she almost threw up and in the end spit a long stream of saliva that tasted of bile.

It was not the smoke that terrified her, or the pain in the back of her right thigh, where she had definitely yanked a muscle. It was her certain, desperate aloneness. What had her mother screamed at her father? But you’re not raising her, Chris! I am! I’m doing it all by myself! It was awful to find yourself in a hole, all by yourself. She could not remember the last time she had held her mother: her frightened, short-tempered, unhappy mother, who had stood by her and put her cool hand to Vic’s brow in her times of fever. It was awful to think of dying here, having left things as they were.

Then she was making her way up the shaft again, back to one wall, feet to the other. Her eyes gushed. The smoke was thick in the chute now, a brownish, billowing stream all around her. Something was terribly wrong in the back of her right leg. Every time she pushed upward with her feet, it felt as if the muscle were tearing all over again.

She blinked and coughed and pushed and wormed her way steadily up the laundry chute. The metal against her back was uncomfortably warm. She thought that in a very short time she would be leaving skin on the walls, that the chute would burn to the touch. Except it wasn’t a chute anymore. It was a chimney, with a smoky fire at the bottom, and she was Santa Claus, scrambling up for the reindeer. She had that idiot Christmas song in her head, have a holly jolly f*cking Christmas, going around and around on endless loop. She didn’t want to roast to death with Christmas music in her head.

By the time she was close to the top of the chute, it was hard to see anything through all the smoke. She wept continuously and held her breath. The big muscle in her right thigh shook helplessly.

She saw an inverted U of dim light, somewhere just above her feet: the hatch that opened on the second floor. Her lungs burned. She gasped, couldn’t stop herself, drew a chestful of smoke, began to cough. It hurt to cough. She could feel soft tissues behind her ribs rupturing and tearing. Her right leg gave, without warning. She lunged as she fell, shoving her arms at the closed hatch. As she did, she thought, It won’t open. He pushed something in front of it, and it won’t open.

Her arms banged through the hatch, out into beautifully cool air. She held on, caught the edge of the opening under her armpits. Her legs dropped down into the chute, and her knees clubbed the steel wall.

With the hatch open, the laundry chute drew air, and she felt a hot, stinking breeze lifting around her. Smoke gushed out around her head. She couldn’t stop coughing and blinking, coughing so hard her whole body shook. She tasted blood, felt blood on her lips, wondered if she was coughing up anything important.

For a long moment, she hung where she was, too weak to pull herself out. Then she began to kick, digging her toes against the wall. Her feet clanged and banged. She could not grab much purchase, but she did not need much. Her head and arms were already through the hatch, and getting out of the chute was less a matter of climbing, more a thing of simply leaning forward.

She tipped herself out and onto the shag carpet of a second-floor hallway. The air tasted good. She lay there and gasped like a fish. What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

She had to lean against the wall to get to her feet. She expected the entire house to be filled with smoke and roaring fire, but it was not. It was hazy in the upstairs hallway, but not as bad as it had been in the chute. Vic saw sunshine to her right and limped across the bushy 1970s-era carpet, to the landing at the top of the stairs. She descended the steps in a stumbling, controlled fall, splashing through smoke.

The front door was half open. The chain hung from the doorframe, with the lock plate and a long splinter of wood dangling from it. The air that came in was watery-cool, and she wanted to pitch herself out into it, but she did not.

She could not see into the kitchen. It was all smoke and flickering light. An open doorway looked into a sitting room. The wallpaper on the far side of the sitting room was burning away to show the plaster underneath. The rug smoldered. A vase contained a bouquet of flame. Streams of orange fire crawled up cheap white nylon curtains. She thought the whole back of the house might be in flame, but here in the front, in the foyer, the hallway was only filled with smoke.

Vic looked out the window to one side of the door. The drive leading up to the house was a long, narrow dirt lane, leading away through the trees. She saw no car, but from this angle she could not see into the garage. He might be sitting there waiting to see if Vic would come out. He might be down at the end of the lane watching to see if she would run up it.

Behind her, something creaked painfully and fell with a great crash. Smoke erupted around her. A hot spark touched her arm and stung. And it came to her that there was nothing left to think about. He was waiting there or he wasn’t, but either way there was no place left for her to go except





Out


THE YARD WAS SO OVERGROWN IT WAS LIKE RUNNING THROUGH A tangle of wire. The grass made snares to catch her ankles. There was really no yard to speak of, only an expanse of wild brush and weeds, and forest beyond.

She did not so much as glance at the garage or back at the house, and she did not run for the driveway. She didn’t dare test that long straight road, for fear he might be parked along it, spying for her. Instead she ran for the trees. She did not see that there was an embankment until she was going over it, a three-foot drop to the forest floor.

She hit hard on her toes, felt the back of her right thigh grab with a painful force. She crashed into a drift of dry branches, struggled free of them, and dropped onto her back.

The pines towered above her. They swayed in the wind. The ornaments that hung in them twinkled and blinked and made flashing rainbows, so it was as if she had been lightly concussed.

When she had her breath back, she rolled over, got on her knees, looked across the yard.

The big garage door was open, but the Rolls-Royce was gone.

She was surprised—almost disappointed—at how little smoke there was. She could see a steady gray film rising from the rear of the house. Smoke spilled from the open mouth of the front door. But she could not hear anything burning from here and could not see any flame. She had expected the house to be a bonfire.

Then Vic was up and moving again. She could not run, but she could hurry in a limping jog. Her lungs felt baked, and every other step there was a fresh ripping sensation in the back of her right thigh. She was less aware of her innumerable other hurts and aches: the cold burn on her right wrist, the steady stabbing pain in her left eyeball.

She stayed parallel to the drive, keeping it fifty feet off on her left, ready to duck behind brush or a tree trunk if she saw the Rolls. But the dirt lane led straight and true away from the little white house, with no sign of the old car, or the man Charles Manx, or the dead boy who traveled with him.

She followed the narrow dirt road for an uncertain period. She had lost her usual sense of time passing, did not have any idea, then or later, how long she made her way through the woods. Each moment was the longest single moment of her life until the next. It seemed to her later that her staggering escape through the trees was as long as all the rest of her childhood. By the time she saw the highway, she had left her childhood well behind her. It smoldered and burnt to nothing, along with the rest of the Sleigh House.

The embankment leading up to the highway was higher than the one she had fallen down, and she had to climb on her hands and knees, grabbing clumps of grass to hoist herself up. As she reached the top of the slope, she heard a rat-a-tat buzzing sound, the whine and blast of an approaching motorcycle. It was coming from her right, but by the time she found her feet, it was already past, big guy in black on a Harley.

The highway ran on a straight line through forest, beneath a confusion of stormy clouds. To her left were lots of high blue hills, and for the first time Vic had a sense of being somewhere high up herself; in Haverhill, Massachusetts, she rarely gave a second thought to altitude, but now she understood that it wasn’t the clouds that were low but herself that was high.

She reeled out onto the blacktop, chasing the Harley, shouting, and waving her arms. He won’t hear, she thought; there was no way, not over the rowdy tear of his own engine. But the big man looked back over his shoulder, and the front wheel of his Harley wobbled, before he straightened out and swerved to the side of the highway.

He didn’t have a helmet on and was a fat man with beard on both of his chins, his brown hair curled at the nape of his neck in a luxuriant mullet. Vic ran toward him, the pain stabbing her in the back of the right leg with each step. When she reached the motorcycle, she did not hesitate or explain herself but threw one leg over the seat, getting her arms around his waist.

His eyes were amazed and a little frightened. He had black leather gloves with the fingers snipped off and a black leather jacket, but the coat was unzipped to show a Weird Al T-shirt, and from this close she could see he was not the grown-up she had first taken him for. His skin was smooth and pink beneath the beard, and his emotions were almost childishly plain. He might’ve been no older than her.

“Dude!” he said. “Are you all right? You been in an accident?”

“I need the police. There’s a man. He wanted to kill me. He trapped me in a room and set fire to his house. He’s got a little boy. There was a little boy, and I almost didn’t get out, and he took the boy with him. We need to go. He might come back.” She was not sure any of this made sense. It was the right information, but it seemed to her she had arranged it poorly.

The bearded fat man goggled at her, as if she were speaking to him frantically in a foreign tongue—Tagalog, perhaps, or Klingon. Although as it turned out, if she had addressed him in Klingon, Louis Carmody probably would’ve been able to translate.

“Fire!” she shouted. “Fire!” She stabbed a finger back in the direction of the dirt lane.

She could not see the house from the highway, and the faint wisp of smoke that rose over the trees might’ve been from someone’s chimney or a pile of burning leaves. But it was enough to break him out of his trance and get him moving.

“Hold the f*ck on!” he cried, his voice cracking, going high-pitched, and he gave his bike so much throttle that Vic thought he was going to pop a wheelie.

Her stomach plunged, and she squeezed her arms around his gut, so the tips of her fingers could almost-but-not-quite touch. She thought he was going to dump it; the bike weaved dangerously, the front end going one way, the back end going the other.

But he straightened it out, and the center white line began to flick by in machine-gun staccato; so did the pines to either side of the road.

Vic dared one look back. She expected to see the old black car lurching up out of the dirt road, but the highway was empty. She turned her head and pressed it into the fat kid’s back, and they left the old man’s house behind, riding toward the blue hills, and they were away and they were safe and it was over.