NOS4A2 A Novel

The Yard


WHEN BING SAW MR. MANX SPRAWL ACROSS THE HOOD OF THE car, he felt it as a kind of physical jolt, a sensation of recoil. He had felt much the same thing travel up his arm the day he had fired the nail gun into his father’s temple, only this was a slam of recoil into the very center of his being. Mr. Manx, the Good Man, was stabbed in the face, and the bitch was coming at him. The bitch meant to kill him, a thought as unimaginable, as horrible, as the sun itself blinking out. The bitch was coming, and Mr. Manx needed him.

Bing gripped the can of Gingersnap Spice, pointed it in the boy’s face, and blasted a hissing stream of pale smoke into his mouth and eyes—what he should’ve done minutes ago, what he would’ve done if he hadn’t been so awful mad, if he hadn’t decided to make the boy watch. The kid flinched, tried to turn his face, but Bing held him by the hair and kept spraying. Wayne Carmody shut his eyes and clamped his lips shut.

“Bing! Bing!” Manx screamed.

Bing screamed himself, desperate to be out of the car and moving, and aware at the same time that he had not dosed the boy well. It didn’t matter. There was no time, and the boy was in the car now, couldn’t leave. Bing let go of him and dropped the can of Gingersnap Spice into one pocket of his tracksuit jacket. His right hand was pawing for the pistol in the other pocket.

He was out then, slamming the door behind him and pulling out the big oiled revolver. She had on a black motorcycle helmet that showed only her eyes, wide now, seeing the gun in his hand, seeing the last thing she was ever going to see. Three steps away at most, right in his kill zone.

“Bing Bing,” he said, “time to do my thing!”

He had already begun to apply pressure on the trigger when Mr. Manx pushed himself up off the hood, putting himself right in the way. The gun went off, and Manx’s left ear exploded in a spray of skin and blood.

Manx screamed, clapped his hand to the side of his head where raggedy pieces of ear now hung from the side of his face.

Bing screamed, too, and fired again, into the mist. The sound of the gun going off a second time, when he wasn’t prepared for it, startled him so badly that he farted, a high squeak in his pants.

“Mr. Manx! Oh, my God! Mr. Manx, are you all right?”

Mr. Manx dropped against the side of the car, twisting his head around to look at him.

“Well, what do you think? I have been stabbed in the face and my ear is shot to pieces! I am lucky my brains are not running down the front of my shirt, you dumbbell!”

“Oh, my God! I am such an a*shole! I didn’t mean it! Mr. Manx, I would rather die than hurt you! What do I do? Oh, God! I should just shoot myself!”

“You should shoot her is what you should do!” Manx yelled at him, dropping his hand from the side of his head. Red strings of ear dangled and swung. “Do it! Shoot her already! Put her down! Put her down in the dirt and have done with it!”

Bing wrenched his gaze away from the Good Man, his heart slugging in his chest, ka-bam-bam-bam like a piano pushed down a flight of stairs in a great crash of discordant sound and slamming wood. His gaze swept the yard and found McQueen, already on the run, loping away from him on her long brown legs. His ears were ringing so loudly he could hardly hear his own gun as it went off again, flame shredding through the ghost-silk of the fog.





Logan Airport


LOU CARMODY CLEARED SECURITY AND STILL HAD AN HOUR TO kill, so he hit Mickey D’s in the food court. He told himself he would get the grilled chicken salad and a water, but the air was full of the hungry-making odor of french fries, and when he got to the cash register, he heard himself telling the pimply kid he wanted two Big Macs, large fries, and an extra-large vanilla milkshake—the same thing he’d been ordering since he was thirteen.

While he was waiting, he looked to his right and saw a little boy, no more than eight, with dark eyes just like Wayne’s, standing with his mother at the next register. The boy stared up at Lou—at Lou’s two chins and man tits—not with disgust but with a strange sorrow. Lou’s father had been so fat when he died that they had to pay for a special-order coffin, a f*cking double-wide that looked like a dinner table with the lid shut.

“Just make it a small milkshake,” Lou told his server. He found himself unable to look at the boy again, was afraid to see him staring.

What shamed him was not that he was, as his doctor said, morbidly obese (what a qualifier, “morbidly,” as if at a certain point, being overweight were morally similar to necrophilia). What he hated, what made him feel squirmy and ill inside, was his own inability to change his habits. He genuinely could not say the things he needed to say, could not order the salad when he smelled french fries. The last year he had been with Vic, he knew she needed help—that she was drinking in secret, that she was answering imaginary phone calls—but he could not draw the line with her, could not make demands or issue ultimatums. And if she was blasted and wanted to screw him, he could not say he was worried about her; all he could do was clap his hands to her ass and bury his face in her naked breasts. He had been her accomplice right until the day she filled the oven with telephones and burned their house to the ground. He had done everything but light the match himself.

He settled at a table designed for an anorexic dwarf, in a chair only suitable for the ass of a ten-year-old—didn’t McDonald’s understand their clientele? what were they thinking, providing chairs like this for men like him?—pulled out his laptop, and got on the free Wi-Fi.

He checked his e-mail and looked at cosplay honeys in Power Girl outfits. He dropped in on the Millarworld message boards; some friends were debating which color Hulk should be next. Comic dorks embarrassed him, the dumb shit they argued about. It was obviously gray or green. The other colors were stupid.

Lou was wondering if he could look at SuicideGirls without anyone walking by and noticing when his phone began to hum in the pocket of his cargo shorts. He lifted his rear end and began to dig for it.

He had his hand on it when he tuned in on the music playing over the airport sound system. It was, improbably, that old Johnny Mathis song “Sleigh Ride.” Improbable because Boston was roughly as temperate as Venus on that particular afternoon in July; it made Lou sweat just looking outside. Not only that—the airport sound system had been rocking something else right up until the moment the phone rang. Lady Gaga or Amanda Palmer or something. Some cute lunatic with a piano.

Lou had his phone out but paused to look at the woman at the next table, a MILF who bore a scant resemblance to Sarah Palin.

“Dude,” Lou said, “you hear that?” Pointing at the ceiling. “They’re playing Christmas music! It’s the middle of the summer!”

She froze with a forkful of coleslaw halfway to her bee-stung lips and stared at him with a mixture of confusion and unease.

“The song,” Lou said. “You hear that song?”

Her brow furrowed. She regarded him the way she might’ve regarded a puddle of vomit—something to avoid.

Lou glanced at his phone, saw Wayne on the caller ID. That was curious; they had just been texting a few minutes ago. Maybe Vic was back from her ride on the Triumph and wanted to talk to him about how it was running.

“Never mind,” Lou said to Almost Sarah Palin, and waved a hand in the air, dismissing the subject.

He answered.

“What up, dawg?” Lou said.

“Dad,” Wayne said, his voice a harsh whisper. He was struggling not to cry. “Dad. I’m in the back of a car. I can’t get out.”

Lou felt a low, almost gentle ache, behind his breastbone, in his neck, and, curiously, behind his left ear.

“What do you mean? What car?”

“They’re going to kill Mom. The two men. There’s two men, and they put me in a car, and I can’t get out of the backseat. It’s Charlie Manx, Dad. And someone in a gasmask. Someone—” He screamed.

In the background Lou heard a string of popping sounds. His first thought was firecrackers. But it wasn’t firecrackers.

Wayne cried, “They’re shooting, Dad! They’re shooting at Mom!”

“Get out of the car,” Lou heard himself say, his voice strange, thin, too high. He was hardly aware he had come to his feet. “Just unlock the door and run.”

“I can’t. I can’t. It won’t unlock, and when I try and get in the front seat, I just wind up in the back again.” Wayne choked on a sob.

Lou’s head was a hot-air balloon, filled with buoyant gases, lifting him up off the floor toward the ceiling. He was in danger of sailing right out of the real world.

“The door has to unlock. Look around, Wayne.”

“I have to go. They’re coming back. I’ll call when I can. Don’t call me, they might hear it. They might hear even if I turn it to mute.”

“Wayne! Wayne!” Lou screamed. There was a strange ringing in his ears.

The phone went dead.

Everyone in the food court was staring at him. No one was saying anything. A pair of security cops were approaching, one of them with his hand resting on the molded plastic grip of his .45.

Lou thought, Call the state police. Call the New Hampshire State Police. Do it right now. But when he lowered the phone from his face to dial 911, it slipped from his hand. And when he bent to reach for it, he found himself grabbing at his chest, the pain there suddenly doubling, jabbing at him with sharp edges. It was as if someone had fired a staple gun into one tit. He put his hand on the little table to steady himself, but then his elbow folded and he went down, chin-first. He caught the edge of the table, and his teeth clacked together, and he grunted and collapsed onto the floor. His shake went with him. The wax cup exploded, and he sprawled into a cold, sweet puddle of vanilla ice cream.

He was only thirty-six. Way too young for a heart attack, even with his family history. He had known he would pay for not getting the salad.





Lake Winnipesaukee


WHEN THE GASMASK MAN APPEARED WITH HIS GUN, VIC TRIED TO backpedal but couldn’t seem to get a signal to her legs. The barrel of the gun held her in place, was as captivating as a mesmerist’s pocketwatch. She might as well have been buried in the ground up to her hips.

Then Manx stood up between her and the gunman and the .38 went off and Manx’s left ear tore apart in a red flash.

Manx screamed—a wretched cry, not of pain but of fury. The gun went off a second time. Vic saw the agitated mist swirl to her right, a very straight line of cleared air running through it to mark the passage of the bullet.

If you stand here one moment longer, he will shoot you to death in front of Wayne, her father told her, his hand in the small of her back. Don’t stand here and let Wayne see that.

She darted a look at the car, through the windshield, and her son was there, in the backseat. His face was flushed and rigid, and he was furiously swiping one hand in the air at her: Go, go! Get away!

Vic didn’t want him to see her running either, leaving him behind. All the other times she had failed him before were nothing to this final, unforgivable failure.

A thought lanced through her, like a bullet tunneling through mist: If you die here, no one can find Manx.

“Wayne!” she shouted. “I’ll come! Wherever you go, I’ll find you!”

She didn’t know if he heard her. She could hardly hear herself. Her ears whined, shocked into something close to deafness by the roar of the Gasmask Man’s .38. She could barely hear Manx yelling to Shoot her, shoot her already!

Her heel squeaked in the wet grass as she turned. She was moving at last. She lowered her head, grabbing at her helmet, wanting it off before she got where she was going. She felt comically slow, feet spinning furiously beneath her, going nowhere, while the grass bunched up under her in rolls, like carpet. There was no sound in the world but for the heavy drumming of her feet on the ground and her breath, amplified by the inside of the helmet.

The Gasmask Man was going to shoot her in the back, bullet in the spine, and she hoped it killed her, because she did not want to lie there sprawled in the dirt, paralyzed, waiting for him to shoot her again. In the back, she thought, in the back, in the back, the only three words her mind could seem to string together. Her entire vocabulary had been reduced to these three words.

She was halfway down the hill.

She yanked the helmet off at last, threw it aside.

The gun boomed.

Something skipped off the water to her right, as if a child had flung a flat stone across the lake.

Vic’s feet were on the boards of the dock. The dock heaved and slammed beneath her. She took three bounding steps and dived at the water.

She struck the surface—thought of the bullet slicing through the fog again—and then she was in the lake, she was underwater.

She plunged almost all the way to the bottom, where the world was dark and slow.

It seemed to Vic that she had, only moments before, been in the dim green drowned world of the lake, that she was returning to the quiet, restful state of unconsciousness.

The woman sailed through the cold stillness.

A bullet struck the lake, to her left, less than half a foot from her, punching a tunnel in the water, corkscrewing into the darkness, slowing rapidly. Vic recoiled and lashed out blindly, as if it could be slapped away. Her hand closed on something hot. She opened her palm, stared at what looked like a lead weight for a fishing line. The disturbed currents rolled it out of her hand, and it sank into the lake and only after it was gone did she understand she had grabbed a bullet.

She twisted, scissored her legs, gazing up now, lungs beginning to hurt. She saw the surface of the lake, a bright silver sheet high over her head. The float was another ten, fifteen feet away.

Vic surged through the water.

Her chest was a throbbing vault, filled with fire.

She kicked and kicked. Then she was under it, under the black rectangle of the float.

She clawed for the surface. She thought of her father, the stuff he used to blast rock, the slippery white plastic packs of ANFO. Her chest was packed full with ANFO, ready to explode.

Her head burst up out of the water, and she gasped, filling her lungs with air.

Vic was in deep shadow, under the boards of the float, between the ranks of rusting iron drums. It smelled of creosote and rot.

Vic fought to breathe quietly. Every exhalation echoed in the small, low space.

“I know where you are!” screamed the Gasmask Man. “You can’t hide from me!”

His voice was piping and raggedy and childish. He was a child, Vic understood then. He might be thirty or forty or fifty, but he was still just another of Manx’s poisoned children.

And yes, he probably did know where she was.

Come and get me you little f*ck, she thought, and wiped her face.

She heard another voice then: Manx. Manx was calling to her. Crooning almost.

“Victoria, Victoria, Victoria McQueen!”

There was a gap between two of the metal barrels, a space of perhaps an inch. She swam to it and looked through. Across a distance of thirty feet, she saw Manx standing on the end of the dock and the Gasmask Man behind him. Manx’s face was painted with blood, as if he had gone bobbing for apples in a bucket full of the stuff.

“My, oh, my! You cut me very well, Victoria McQueen. You have made a hash out of my face, and my companion here has managed to shoot off my ear. With friends like these! Well. I am blood all over. I will be the last boy picked at the dance from here on out, you see if I am not!” He laughed, then continued, “It is true what they say. Life really does move in very small circles. Here we are again. You are as hard to keep ahold of as a fish. The lake is a fine place for you.” He paused once more. When he began to speak again, there was almost a note of humor in his voice. “Maybe it is just as well. You did not kill me. You only took me away from my children. Fair is fair. I can drive off and leave you as you are. But understand that your son is with me now and you will never have him back. Although I expect he will call sometimes from Christmasland. He will be happy there. I will never hurt him. However you feel now, when you hear his voice again, you will see how it is. You will see it is better that he is with me than with you.”

The dock creaked on the water. The engine of the Rolls-Royce idled. She struggled out of the soggy, heavy weight of Lou’s motorcycle jacket. She thought it would sink straightaway, but it floated, looking like a black, toxic mess.

“Of course, maybe you will be inclined to come and find us,” Manx said. His voice was sly. “As you found me before. I have had years and years to think on the bridge in the woods. Your impossible bridge. I know all about bridges like that one. I know all about roads that can only be found with the mind. One of them is how I find my way to Christmasland. There is the Night Road, and the train tracks to Orphanhenge, and the doors to Mid-World, and the old trail to the Tree House of the Mind, and then there is Victoria’s wonderful covered bridge. Do you still know how to get there? Come find me if you can, Vic. I will be waiting for you at the House of Sleep. I will be making a stop there before I arrive in Christmasland. Come find me, and we will talk some more.”

He turned and began to clump back up the dock.

The Gasmask Man heaved a great unhappy sigh and lifted the .38, and the gun burped flame.

One of the pine boards above her head snapped and threw splinters. A second bullet zipped across the water to her right, stitching a line in the surface of the lake. Vic flung herself backward, splashing away from the narrow crack through which she had been spying. A third bullet dinged off the rusted stainless-steel ladder. The last made a soft, unremarkable plop right in front of the float.

She paddled, treading water.

Car doors slammed.

She heard the tires crunching as the car backed down across the yard, heard them thud over fallen fence rails.

Vic thought it might be a trick, one of them in the car, the other one, the Gasmask Man, remaining behind, out of sight, with the pistol. She shut her eyes. She listened intently.

When she opened her eyes, she was staring at a great, hairy spider suspended in what was left of her web. Most of it hung in gray shreds. Something—a bullet, all the commotion—had torn it apart. Like Vic, it had nothing left of the world it had spun for itself.