NOS4A2 A Novel

The Bedroom


VIC SAID SHE NEEDED TO REST, ASKED IF SHE COULD LIE DOWN FOR A while, and Hutter said of course and that she wasn’t going to do anyone any good by driving herself to collapse.

In the bedroom, though, Lou was the one who flung himself down on the bed. Vic couldn’t relax. She went to the blinds, picked them apart, looked out at the carnival in her front yard. The night was full of the chatter of radios, the murmur of male voices. Someone out there laughed softly. It was a wonder, to think that less than a hundred paces from the house it was possible for happiness to exist.

If any of the policemen in the street noticed her looking, they probably imagined she was gazing blankly up the road, hoping, pitifully, for a cruiser to come roaring down it, lights flashing, sirens splitting the air, her son in the backseat. Safe. Coming home. His lips sticky and pink with the ice cream the cops had bought him.

But she wasn’t looking at the road, hoping with all her heart that someone was going to bring Wayne back to her. If anyone was going to bring him back, it was her. Vic was staring at the Triumph, lying right where she had dropped it.

Lou was heaved on the bed like a beached manatee. When he spoke, he addressed the ceiling.

“Will you come stretch out with me for a while? Just . . . be here with me?”

She dropped the blinds and went to the bed. She put her leg over his legs and clasped herself to his side, as she had not done in years.

“You know that guy who looks like Mickey Rooney’s mean twin brother? Daltry? He said you were hurt.”

And she realized he hadn’t heard the story. No one had told him what had happened to her.

She told it again. At first she was only repeating what she told Hutter and the other detectives. Already the story had the quality of lines learned for a part in a play; she could recite them without thinking.

But then she told him about taking the Triumph for a short run and realized she didn’t have to leave out the part about the bridge. She could and should tell him about discovering the Shorter Way in the mist, because it had happened. Really happened.

“I saw the bridge,” she said quietly, lifting herself up to look into his face. “I rode onto it, Lou. I went looking for it, and there it was. Do you believe me?”

“I believed you the first time you told me about it.”

“You f*cking liar,” she said, but she couldn’t help smiling at him.

He reached out and put his hand on the swell of her left breast. “Why wouldn’t I believe you? It explained you better than anything. And I’m like that poster on the wall, in The X-Files: ‘I want to believe.’ Story of my life, lady. Go on. You rode across the bridge. Then what?”

“I didn’t ride across it. I got scared. Really scared, Lou. I thought it was a hallucination. That I was off my nut again. I slammed on the brake so hard that pieces came flying off the bike.”

She told him about turning the Triumph around and walking it off the bridge, her eyes shut and her legs shaking. She described how it had sounded in the Shorter Way, the shush and roar, as if she stood behind a waterfall. She said she knew it was gone when she couldn’t hear that sound anymore, and then it was a long walk back home.

Vic went on, telling how Manx and the other man were waiting for her, how Manx had come for her with his hammer. Lou was not a stoic. He flinched and twitched and cursed. When she told him about using the tappet key on Manx’s face, he said, “I wish’t you skullf*cked him with the thing.” She assured him she had tried her best. He thumped a fist into his own leg when she got to the part about the Gasmask Man shooting Manx in the ear. Lou listened with his whole body, a kind of quivering tautness in him, like a bow pulled to its limit, the arrow ready to fly.

He did not interrupt her, though, until she got to the part where she was running downhill for the lake, to escape them.

“That’s what you were doing when Wayne called,” he said.

“What happened to you at the airport? Really.”

“What I said. I got faint.” He rolled his head, as if to loosen his neck, then said, “The map. With the road to Christmasland. What is that place?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not in our world, though. Right?”

“I don’t know. I kind of think . . . I kind of think it is our world. A version of it anyway. The version of it that Charlie Manx carries around in his head. Everyone lives in two worlds, right? There’s the physical world . . . but there’s also our own private inner worlds, the world of our thoughts. A world made of ideas instead of stuff. It’s just as real as our world, but it’s inside. It’s an inscape. Everyone has an inscape, and they all connect, too, in the same way New Hampshire connects to Vermont. And maybe some people can ride into that thought world if they have the right vehicle. A key. A car. A bike. Whatever.”

“How can your thought world connect to mine?”

“I don’t know. But . . . but, like, if Keith Richards dreams up a song and then you hear it on the radio, you’ve got his thoughts in your head. My ideas can get in your head just as easily as a bird can fly across the state line.”

Lou frowned and said, “So, like, somehow Manx drives kids out of the world of stuff and into his own private world of ideas. Okay. I can go with that. It’s weird, but I can go with it. So get back to your story. The guy wearing the gasmask had a gun.”

Vic told him about diving into the water, and the Gasmask Man shooting, and then Manx talking to her while she hid under the float. When she was done, she shut her eyes, nestled her face into Lou’s neck. She was exhausted—beyond exhausted, really, had traveled to some new precinct of weariness. The gravity was lighter in this new world. If she had not been tethered to Lou, she would’ve floated away.

“He wants you to come looking,” Lou said.

“I can find him,” she said. “I can find this House of Sleep. I told you. I rode to the bridge before I f*cked up the bike.”

“Probably threw the chain. You’re lucky you kept it shiny side up.”

She opened her eyes and said, “You have to fix it, Lou. You have to fix it tonight. As fast as you can. Tell Hutter and the police you can’t sleep. Tell them you need to do something to take your mind off things. People react to stress in strange ways, and you’re a mechanic. They won’t question you.”

“Manx tells you to come find him. What do you think he’s going to do to you when you do?”

“He ought to be thinking about what I’m going to do to him.”

“And what if he’s not at this House of Sleep? Will the bike take you to him wherever he is? Even if he’s moving?”

“I don’t know,” Vic said, but she thought, No. She was not sure where this certainty came from, how she could know such a thing, but she did. She recalled, distantly, that she had gone looking for a lost cat once—Taylor, she thought—and was sure she had found him only because he was dead. If he had been alive and on the prowl, the bridge wouldn’t have had an anchor point to settle on. It could cross the distance between lost and found, but only if what was lost stayed put. Lou saw the doubt in her face, and she went on. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Manx has to stop sometime, doesn’t he? To sleep? To eat?” In truth, she wasn’t sure he needed either food or rest. He had died, been autopsied, had his heart removed . . . then got up and walked away whistling. Who knew what such a man required? Perhaps thinking of him as a man at all was operating from the wrong assumptions. And yet: He bled. He could be hurt. She had seen him pale and staggered. She thought at the very least he would need to recover himself, settle and slumber for a while, same as any wounded creature. His license plate was a joke or boast, nosferatu, German word for vampire—an acknowledgment, at some level, of what he was. But in the stories, even vampires crawled back to their coffins and shut the lid now and then. She pushed these ideas aside and finished: “Sooner or later he’ll have to stop for something, and when he does, I can get to him.”

“You asked me if I thought you were crazy, with all your stuff about the bridge. And I said no. But this? This part of it is pretty crazy. Using the bike to find your way to him so he can polish you off. Finish the job he started this morning.”

“It’s all we’ve got.” She glanced toward the door. “And, Lou, this is the only way we might—will—get Wayne back. These people can’t find him. I can. Are you going to fix it?”

He sighed—a great, unsteady exhalation of air—and said, “I’ll try, Vic. I’ll try. On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“When I get it fixed,” Lou said, “you take me with you.”





The St. Nicholas Parkway


WAYNE SLEPT FOR A LONG TIME—AN ENDLESS TIME OF QUIET AND peace—and when he opened his eyes, he knew that everything was all right.

NOS4A2 sped through the dark, a torpedo churning through the fathomless depths. They were rising through low hills, the Wraith hugging the curves as if it were on rails. Wayne was rising toward something wonderful and fine.

Snow fell in gentle, goose-feather flakes. The wipers went swop, swop, striking them down.

They passed a lone streetlamp in the night, a twelve-foot candy cane topped with a gumdrop, casting a cherry light, turning those falling flakes to feathers of flame.

The Wraith swept along a high curve that afforded a view of the vast tableland below, silver and smooth and flat, and at the far end of it the mountains! Wayne had never seen mountains like them—they made the Rockies look like homely foothills. The smallest of them had the proportions of Everest. They were a great range of stone teeth, a crooked row of fangs, sharp enough, large enough, to devour the sky. Rocks forty thousand feet high pierced the night, held up the darkness, pushed into the stars.

Above it all drifted a silvery scythe blade of moon. Wayne looked up at it, and away, and then looked again. The moon had a hooked nose, a thoughtfully frowning mouth, and a single eye closed in sleep. When it exhaled, a wind rippled across the plains and silvery beds of cloud raced through the night. Wayne almost clapped his hands in delight to look upon it.

It was impossible, though, to look away from the mountains for long. The pitiless, cyclopean peaks drew Wayne’s gaze as a magnet will draw iron shavings. For there, in a notch two-thirds of the way up the largest of the mountains, was a bright jewel, pinned to the side of the rock face. It shone, brighter than the moon, brighter than any star. It burned in the night like a torch.

Christmasland.

“You should roll down the window and try to grab one of those sugarflakes!” advised Mr. Manx from the front seat.

For a moment Wayne had forgotten who was driving the car. He had stopped worrying about it. It wasn’t important. Getting there was the thing. He felt a throb of eagerness to be there already, rolling in between the candy-cane gates.

“Sugarflake? Don’t you mean snowflake?”

“If I meant snowflake, I would’ve said snowflake! Those are flakes of pure cane sugar, and if we were in a plane, we’d be shredding cotton-candy clouds! Go on! Roll down a window! Catch one and see if I am a liar!”

“Won’t it be cold?” Wayne asked.

Mr. Manx looked at him in the rearview mirror, the laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes.

He wasn’t scary anymore. He was young, and if he was not handsome, he at least looked spiffy, in his black leather gloves and black overcoat. His hair was black now, too, slicked back under his leather-brimmed cap, to show the high, bare expanse of his forehead.

The Gasmask Man was asleep next to him, a sweet smile on his fat, bristly face. He wore a white marine uniform, with a breastful of gold medals upon it. A second glance, though, showed that these medals were in fact chocolate coins in gold-foil wrap. He had nine of them.

Wayne understood now that getting to go to Christmasland was better than going to Hogwarts Academy, or Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, or the Cloud City in Star Wars, or Rivendell in Lord of the Rings. Not one child in a million was allowed into Christmasland, only kids who truly needed. It was impossible to be unhappy there, in that place where every morning was Christmas morning and every evening was Christmas Eve, where tears were against the law and children flew like angels. Or floated. Wayne was unclear on the difference.

He knew something else: His mother hated Mr. Manx because he wouldn’t take her to Christmasland. And if she couldn’t go, she didn’t want Wayne to go either. The reason his mother drank so much was because getting smashed was the closest a person could ever get to feeling the way you felt when you were in Christmasland—even though a bottle of gin was as different from Christmasland as a dog biscuit was from filet mignon.

His mother had always known that someday Wayne would get to go to Christmasland. That was why she couldn’t stand to be around him. That was why she ran away from him for all those years.

He didn’t want to think about it. He would call her as soon as he got to Christmasland. He would tell her he loved her and that everything was all right. He would call her every day if he had to. It was true she sometimes hated him, that she hated being a mother, but he was determined to love her anyway, to share his happiness with her.

“Cold?” Manx cried, snapping Wayne’s thoughts back to the here and now. “You worry like my Aunt Mathilda! Go on. Roll the window down. Besides. I know you, Bruce Wayne Carmody. You are thinking serious thoughts, aren’t you? You are a serious little fellow! We need to cure you of that! And we will! Dr. Manx prescribes a mug of peppermint cocoa and a ride on the Arctic Express with the other kids. If you are still feeling in a glum mood after that, then there is no hope for you. Come on and roll down the window! Let the night air in to blow away the gloomies! Don’t be an old lady! It is like I am driving somebody’s grandmother instead of a little boy!”

Wayne turned to roll down the window, but when he did, he got a nasty surprise. His grandmother, Linda, sat next to him. He had not seen her for months. It was hard to visit with relatives when they were dead.

She was still dead now. She sat in a hospital johnny, untied so he could see her skeletal bare back when she leaned forward. She was sitting on the good beige leather seats with her bare ass. Her legs were scrawny and terrible, very white in the darkness, crawling with old black varicose veins. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of shiny, silver, newly minted half-dollars.

Wayne opened his mouth to scream, but Grammy Lindy lifted her finger to her lips. Shhh.

“.down it slow can you ,reverse in think you If .Wayne ,truth the from away you driving He’s,” she warned him gravely.

Manx cocked his head, as if listening for a noise he didn’t like under the hood. Lindy had spoken clearly enough for Manx to hear her, but he didn’t look all the way around, and his expression suggested he thought he had heard something but wasn’t sure.

The sight of her was bad enough, but the nonsense she spoke—nonsense that hovered maddeningly on the edge of meaning—sent a shock of fright through Wayne. The coins over her eyes flashed.

“Go away,” he whispered.

“.himself for youth your keep and behind soul your leave He’ll .snap you until ,band rubber a like out you stretch He’ll .soul own your from away you drive He’ll,” Grammy Lindy explained, pressing a cold finger into his breastbone every now and then for emphasis.

He made a thin whining sound in the back of his throat, recoiling from her touch. At the same time, he found himself struggling to make sense out of her gravely recited gibberish. He’ll snap you—he got that. Band rubber? No, that had to be rubber band. There it was. She was saying things backward, and on some level Wayne understood that this was why Mr. Manx could not quite hear her in the front seat. He could not hear her because he was going forward and she was running in reverse. He tried to remember what else she had said, to see if he could untangle her dead-woman syntax, but it was already fading away from him.

Mr. Manx said, “Roll down the window, little boy! Do it!” His voice suddenly hard, not as friendly as it had been before. “I want you to grab some of that sweetness for yourself! Hurry now! We are almost to a tunnel!”

But Wayne couldn’t roll down the window. To do so would have required him to reach past Lindy, and he was afraid. He was as afraid of her as he had ever been of Manx. He wanted to cover his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see her. He took short little gasping breaths, a runner on the last lap—and his exhalations smoked, as if it were cold in the back of the car, although it didn’t feel cold.

He peered into the front seat for help, but Mr. Manx had changed. He was missing his left ear—it was tatters of flesh, little crimson strings swinging against his cheek. His hat was missing, and the head it had covered was now bald and lumpy and spotted, with just a few silver threads combed across it. A great flap of loose red skin hung from his brow. His eyes were gone, and where they had been were buzzing red holes—not bloody sockets but craters containing live coals.

Beside him the Gasmask Man slept on in his crisp uniform, smiling like a man with a full belly and warm feet.

Through the windshield Wayne could see they were approaching a tunnel bored into a wall of rock, a black pipe leading into the side of the hill.

“Who is back there with you?” Manx asked, his voice humming and terrible. It was not the voice of a man. It was the voice of a thousand flies droning in unison.

Wayne looked around for Lindy, but she was gone, had left him.

The tunnel swallowed the Wraith. In the darkness there were only those red holes where Manx’s eyes belonged, staring back at him.

“I don’t want to go to Christmasland,” Wayne said.

“Everyone wants to go to Christmasland,” said the thing in the front seat that used to be a man but was not anymore, and maybe had not been for a hundred years.

They were fast approaching a bright circle of sunlight at the end of the tunnel. It had been night when they entered the hole in the mountain, but they were rushing toward a summery glare, and even when they were still a hundred feet away, the brightness hurt Wayne’s eyes.

He put his hands over his face, moaning in distress. The light burned through his fingers, growing ever more intense, until it shone right through his hands and he could see the black sticks of his own bones buried in softly glowing tissue. He felt that at any moment all that sunlight might cause him to ignite.

“I don’t like it! I don’t like it!” he shouted.

The car jolted and banged over pitted road, with enough force to dislodge his hands from his face. He blinked into morning sunlight.

Bing Partridge, the Gasmask Man, sat up and turned in his seat to look back at Wayne. His uniform was gone, and he wore the same stained tracksuit he’d been dressed in the day before.

“No,” he said, digging a finger in his ear. “I’m not much of a morning person either.”





Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania


SUN, SUN, GO AWAY,” THE GASMASK MAN SAID, AND YAWNED. “Come again some other day.” The Gasmask Man was silent for a moment and then said shyly, “I had a nice dream. I dreamed about Christmasland.”

“I hope you liked it,” Manx said. “The mess you have made of things, dreaming about Christmasland is all you will do!”

The Gasmask Man shrank down in his seat and put his hands over his ears.

They were in a place of hills and high grasses, beneath blue summer sky. A finger lake shone below them to the left, a long splinter of mirror dropped amid hundred-foot pines. The valleys caught patches of morning mist, but they would burn off soon enough.

Wayne rubbed his hands hard into his eye sockets, his brain still half asleep. His forehead and cheeks felt fevery. He sighed—and was surprised to see pale vapor issue from his nostrils, just like in his dream. He had not realized it was so cold in the backseat.

“I’m freezing,” Wayne said, although if anything he felt warm, not cold.

“These mornings can be very raw,” Manx said. “You will feel better soon.”

“Where are we?” Wayne asked.

Manx glanced back at him. “Pennsylvania. We have been driving all night, and you have been sleeping like a baby.”

Wayne blinked at him, perturbed and disoriented, although it took him a moment to figure out why. The pad of white gauze was still taped over the ruin of Manx’s left ear, but he had stripped off the bandage wrapped around his forehead. The six-inch slash across his forehead was black and rancid-looking, a Frankenstein scar—and yet it looked as if it had been healing for twelve days, not twelve hours. Manx’s color was better, his eyes sharper, bright with humor and goodwill toward men.

“Your face is better,” Wayne said.

“It is a little easier on the eyes, I guess, but I will not be entering a beauty contest anytime soon!”

“How come you’re better?” Wayne asked.

Manx thought about that for a bit, then said, “The car takes care of me. It is going to take care of you, too.”

“It’s because we’re on the road to Christmasland,” said the Gasmask Man, looking over his shoulder and smiling. “It takes your frown and turns it upside down, isn’t that right, Mr. Manx?”

“I am in no frame of mind for your rhyming idiocies, Bing,” Manx said. “Play Quaker Meeting, why don’t you?”

NOS4A2 drove south, and no one spoke for a while. In the silence Wayne took stock.

In his whole life, he had never been as scared as he had been the afternoon before. His throat was still hoarse from all the screaming he had done. Now, though, it was as if he were a jug, and every last drop of bad feeling had been poured out of him. The interior of the Rolls-Royce brimmed with golden sunlight. Motes of dust burned in a ray of brilliance, and Wayne raised a hand to swipe at them and watch them roil around, like sand whirling through water—

His mother had dived into the water to get away from the Gasmask Man, he remembered, and he twitched. For a moment he felt a jolt of yesterday’s fear, as fresh and raw as if he had touched a stripped copper line and been zapped. What frightened him was not the thought that he was a prisoner of Charlie Manx but that for a moment he had forgotten he was a prisoner. For a moment he had been admiring the light and feeling almost happy.

He shifted his gaze to the walnut drawer set below the seat in front of him, where he had hidden his phone. Then he glanced up and discovered Manx watching him in the rearview mirror, smiling just slightly. Wayne shrank back into his seat.

“You said you owed me one,” Wayne said.

“I did and I do,” Manx said.

“I want to call my mother. I want to tell her I’m all right.”

Manx nodded, eyes on the road, hand on the wheel. Had the car been driving itself yesterday? Wayne had a memory of the steering wheel turning on its own, while Manx moaned and the Gasmask Man wiped blood from his face—but this recollection had the shiny, hyperreal quality of the sort of dreams that come to people while they are incapacitated with a particularly bad flu. Now, in the bright, clear sunshine of morning, Wayne was not sure it had really happened. Also, the day was warming; he couldn’t see his own breath anymore.

“It is very right that you should want to call her and tell her you are well. I expect, when we get where we are going, that you will want to call her every day! That is just being considerate! And of course she will want to know how you are doing. We will have to ring her up as soon as possible. I can hardly count that as the favor I owe you! What sort of beast would not let a child call his mother? Unfortunately, there is no easy place to stop and let you call, and neither of us thought to bring a phone with us,” Manx said. He turned his head and looked over the divider at Wayne again. “I don’t suppose you thought to bring one, did you?” And smiled.

He knows, Wayne thought. He felt something shrivel inside him, and for a moment he was dangerously close to tears.

“No,” he said, in a voice that sounded almost normal. He had to fight to keep from looking at the wooden drawer at his feet.

Manx returned his gaze to the road. “Oh, well. It is too early to call her anyway. It is not even six in the morning, and after the day she had yesterday, we had better let her sleep in!” He sighed and added, “Your mother has more tattoos than a sailor.”

“‘There was once a young lady from Yale,’” said the Gasmask Man. “‘Who had verses tattooed on her tail. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, a duplicate version in braille.’”

“You rhyme too much,” Wayne said.

Manx laughed—a big, unrefined hee-haw of a laugh—and slapped the wheel. “That is for sure! Good old Bing Partridge is a rhyming demon! If you look to your Bible, you will see that those are the lowest sort of demon, but not without their uses.”

Bing rested his forehead against the window, looking out at rolling countryside. Sheep grazed.

“Baa, baa, black sheep,” Bing crooned softly to himself. “Have you any wool?”

Manx said, “All those tattoos on your mother.”

“Yes?” Wayne said, thinking that if he looked in the drawer, the phone would probably not be there. He thought there was an excellent chance they had removed it while he slept.

“Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I view that as an invitation to men of poor character to stare. Do you think she likes that sort of attention?”

“‘There once was a whore from Peru,’” whispered the Gasmask Man, and he giggled softly to himself.

“They’re pretty,” Wayne said.

“Is that why your father divorced her? Because he did not like her to go out that way, with her legs bare and painted, to distract men?”

“He didn’t divorce her. They never got married.”

Manx laughed again. “There is a big surprise.”

They had left the highway and had slipped out of the hills and into a sleepy downtown. It was a sorry, abandoned-looking place. Storefront windows were soaped over, signs in them saying For Rent. Plywood sheeting had been nailed up inside the doors of the movie theater, and the marquee read MER Y XMAS SUGAR EEK PA! Christmas lights hung from it, although it was July.

Wayne couldn’t stand not knowing about his phone. He could just reach the drawer with his foot. He inched his toe under the handle.

“She has a sturdy athletic look to her, I will give you that,” Manx said, although Wayne was hardly listening. “I suppose she has a boyfriend.”

Wayne said, “I’m her boyfriend, she says.”

“Ha, ha. Every mother says that to her son. Your father is older than your mother?”

“I don’t know. I guess. A little.”

Wayne caught the drawer with his toe and slid it back an inch. The phone was still there. He nudged it shut. Later. If he went for it now, they would just take it away.

“Do you think she is inclined to look favorably upon older men?” Manx asked.

It bewildered Wayne that Manx was going on and on about his mother and her tattoos and what she thought about older men. He could not have been more confused if Manx had begun to ask him questions about sea lions or sports cars. He couldn’t even remember how they had gotten on this particular subject, and he struggled to think it out, to run the conversation in reverse.

If you think in reverse, Wayne thought. Reverse. In. Think. You. If. Dead Grandma Lindy had been in his dream, and everything she said came out backward. Most of what she had said to him was gone now—forgotten—but that part of it came back to him with perfect clarity, like a message in invisible ink darkening and appearing on paper held above a flame. If you think in reverse, what? He didn’t know.

The car stopped at an intersection. A middle-aged woman stood on the curb, eight feet away. She was in shorts and a headband, jogging in place. She was waiting for her walk light, even though there was no cross traffic.

Wayne acted without thought. He flung himself at the door and banged his hands on the glass.

“Help!” he screamed. “Help me!”

The jogging woman frowned and looked around. She stared at the Rolls-Royce.

“Please help!” Wayne screamed, slapping the window.

She smiled and waved.

The light changed. Manx rolled sedately through the intersection.

To the left, on the other side of the street, Wayne saw a man in a uniform coming out of a doughnut shop. He wore what looked like a policeman’s cap and a blue windbreaker.

Wayne pitched himself across the car and banged his fists on the other window. As he did and the man came into focus, Wayne could see it was a postman, not a policeman. A podgy man in his mid-fifties.

“Help me! I’m being kidnapped! Help, help, help!” Wayne screamed, his voice cracking.

“He can’t hear you,” Manx said. “Or, rather, he does not hear what you want him to hear.”

The postman looked at the Rolls going by. He smiled and raised two fingers to the brim of his cap in a little salute. Manx drove on.

“Are you done making such a racket?” he said.

“Why don’t they hear me?” Wayne asked.

“It is like what they are always saying about Las Vegas: What happens in the Wraith stays in the Wraith.”

They were rolling out the other end of the little downtown, beginning to accelerate, leaving behind the four-block stretch of brick buildings and dusty storefronts.

“Don’t worry,” Manx said. “If you are tired of the road, we will be off it soon enough. I know I am ready for a break from all this highway. We are very close to where we are going.”

“Christmasland?” Wayne asked.

Manx pursed his lips in a thoughtful moue. “No. That is still a ways off.”

“The House of Sleep,” the Gasmask Man told him.





The Lake


VIC CLOSED HER EYES FOR A MOMENT, AND WHEN SHE OPENED THEM she was staring at the clock on the night table—5:59. Then the celluloid flaps flipped over to 6:00 A.M. and the phone rang.

The two things happened so closely together that Vic thought at first the alarm was going off, and she couldn’t figure out why she had set it for so early in the morning. The phone rang again, and the bedroom door clicked open. Tabitha Hutter peered in on her, eyes bright behind her round spectacles.

“It’s a 603 number,” she said. “A demolition company in Dover. You better answer. It’s probably not him, but—”

“It’s not him,” Vic said, and fumbled for the phone.

“I didn’t hear until late,” said her father. “And it took me a while to come up with your number. I waited as long as I could, in case you were trying to sleep. How are you, kid?”

Vic removed the phone from her mouth and said, “It’s my dad.”

Tabitha Hutter said, “Tell him he’s being recorded. All the calls to this number will be recorded for the foreseeable future.”

“Did you hear that, Chris?”

“I did. It’s okay. Anything they need to do. Christ, it’s good to hear your voice, kiddo.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know how you’re doing. I want you to know I’m here if you need me.”

“First time for everything, huh?”

He exhaled, a thin, frustrated breath. “I understand what you’re going through. I went through it, too, once upon a time, you know. I love you, girl. Tell me if I can do anything.”

“You can’t,” she said. “There’s nothing for you to blow up right now. It’s all blown up. Don’t call anymore, Dad. I’m in enough pain already. You just make it worse.”

She hung up. Tabitha Hutter watched her from the doorway.

“Did you get your cell-phone experts to try and locate Wayne’s phone? Was it any different from when you tried Find My iPhone? It can’t have been. If you had any new information, you wouldn’t have let me sleep.”

“They couldn’t locate his phone.”

“They couldn’t locate it? Or they traced him to the St. Nick Parkway, somewhere east of Christmasland?”

“Does that mean something to you? Charlie Manx had a house in Colorado. The trees around the house were hung with Christmas ornaments. The press gave it a name, called it the Sleigh House. Is that Christmasland?”

No, Vic thought automatically. Because the Sleigh House is in our world. Christmasland is in Manx’s inscape. The Manxscape.

Hutter had a hell of a poker face, watching Vic with an expression of studious calm. Vic thought if she told this woman that Christmasland was a place in the fourth dimension, where dead children sang carols and made long-distance phone calls, that Hutter’s expression wouldn’t change at all. She would continue to give Vic that cool, clinical look while police held Vic down and a doctor sedated her.

“I don’t know where Christmasland is or what it is,” Vic said, which was largely true. “I don’t understand why that’s coming up when you search for Wayne’s phone. Do you want to look at hammers?”

The house was still full of people, although they looked less like cops now, more like the Geek Squad from Best Buy. Three young men had set up laptops on the coffee table in the living room: a gangly Asian with tribal tattoos, a skinny kid with a red Jewfro and roughly a billion freckles, and a black man in a black turtleneck that looked like it had been snatched from Steve Jobs’s closet. The house smelled of coffee. There was a fresh pot brewing in the kitchen. Hutter poured Vic some and added cream and a spoonful of sugar, just the way Vic took it.

“Is that in my file?” Vic asked. “How I take my coffee?”

“The cream was in the fridge. You must use it for something. And a coffee spoon was sitting in the sugar jar.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Vic said.

“I used to go dressed as Holmes for Halloween,” Hutter said. “Had the pipe and the deerstalker cap and all the rest. What about you? What did you wear for trick-or-treat?”

“A straitjacket,” Vic said. “I’d go as an escaped mental patient. It was good practice for the rest of my life.”

Hutter’s smile flattened and went away.

She sat at the table with Vic and handed her the iPad. She explained how to swipe through the gallery to look at the different pictures of hammers.

“Why does it matter what he hit me with?” Vic asked.

“You don’t know what matters until after you’ve seen it. So you try to see everything.”

Vic swiped past sledgehammers, hardware-store hammers, croquet mallets.

“What the hell is this? A database dedicated to hammer murderers?”

“Yes.”

Vic glanced at her. Hutter’s face had returned to its usual bland state of impassivity.

Vic swiped through some more pictures, then paused. “This. It was this one.”

Hutter looked at the screen. On it was a picture of a foot-long hammer with a rectangular stainless-steel head, a crosshatched handle, and a sharp hook curving from the end.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Because of the hook. That’s the one. What the hell kind of hammer is that?”

Hutter pulled her lower lip into her mouth, then pushed back her chair and stood up. “Not one you buy at the hardware store. I have to make a call.”

She hesitated, one hand on the back of Vic’s chair.

“Do you think you’d be up for making a statement to the press this afternoon? We’ve had good play on the cable news channels. It has a lot of angles. Everyone knows the Search Engine stories, so there’s that. I’m sorry to say that a lot of them are talking about this as a real life-and-death game of Search Engine. A personal appeal for help will keep the story active. And awareness is our best weapon.”

“Has the press figured out that Manx also kidnapped me when I was a teenager?” Vic asked.

Hutter’s brow furrowed, as in thought. “Mm. No, they haven’t worked that out yet. And I don’t think you should mention it in your statement. It’s important to keep the media focused on the information that matters. We need people on the lookout for your son and the car. That’s what we talk about. Everything else is insignificant at best, a distraction at worst.”

“The car, my son, and Manx,” Vic said. “We want everyone on the lookout for Manx.”

“Yes. Of course.” She took two steps toward the door, then turned back and said, “You’ve been wonderful, Victoria. You’ve been very strong in a scary time. You’ve done so much I hate to ask for more. But when you’re ready, we’ll need to sit down today and I have to get the whole story in your words. I need to know more about what Manx did to you. It could greatly enhance our chances of finding your son.”

“I already told you what he did to me. I gave you the whole story yesterday. Bashed me with a hammer, chased me to the lake, drove off with the kid.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not making myself clear. I’m not talking about what Manx did to you yesterday. I’m talking about 1996. I’m talking about when he kidnapped you.”


HUTTER, VIC FELT, WAS A THOROUGH WOMAN. PATIENT AND SENSIBLE. She was, in her patient, sensible, thorough way, working toward the conclusion that Vic was deluded about Charlie Manx. But if she didn’t believe that Wayne had been taken by Manx, then what did she think had happened?

Vic had an awareness of threat she couldn’t quite isolate. It was like driving and suddenly knowing there was black ice under the tires and that any sudden movement might send the car spinning out of control.

I don’t doubt someone fought you, Hutter had said. I don’t think anyone doubts that.

And: You spent a month in a Colorado mental hospital, where you were diagnosed with severe PTSD and schizophrenia.

Sitting at the table with her coffee, in a state of relative quiet and stillness, Vic put it together at last. When it came to her, she felt a cool, dry sensation on the nape of her neck, a prickling across her scalp, the physical indicators of both wonder and horror; she was conscious of feeling both in equal measure. She swallowed some warm coffee to drive away the sick chill and its corresponding sensation of alarm. She made an effort to remain perfectly composed, going over it in her mind.

So. Hutter thought Vic had killed Wayne herself, in a psychotic fit. Killed the dog and then drowned Wayne in the lake. They only had her word that someone had fired a gun; no one had found so much as a single bullet, not a single casing. The lead had gone into the water, and the brass had stayed in the gun. The fence was smashed and the yard torn up, the only part of her story they couldn’t figure out yet. Sooner or later, though, they’d come up with an explanation for that, too. They’d invent something and force it to fit with the other facts.

They had her pegged as a Susan Smith, the woman from South Carolina who drowned her children, then told a whopping lie about how they’d been kidnapped by a black man, kept the nation whipped up in a frenzy of racial hysteria for about a week. That was why the networks weren’t talking about Manx. The police didn’t believe in him. They didn’t even believe that a kidnapping had occurred at all but were going along with that part of it for now, probably to cover themselves legally.

Vic swallowed the last of her coffee, put the cup in the sink, and stepped out the back door.

She had the backyard to herself. She walked through the dew-cool grass to the carriage house and looked through the window.

Lou was asleep on the floor, beside the motorcycle. The bike was in pieces, side covers off, chain hanging loose. Lou had a canvas tarp folded under his head as a makeshift pillow. His hands were covered in grease. There were black fingerprints on his cheek where he had touched his face in sleep.

“He’s been working in there all night,” said a voice from behind her.

Daltry had followed her out onto the lawn. His mouth was open in a grin to show a gold tooth. He had a cigarette in one hand.

“I’ve seen ’at. Plenty of times. ’S how people react when they feel helpless. You wouldn’t believe how many women will knit while they’re waiting in the emergency room to see if their kid is going to make it through lifesaving surgery. When you feel helpless, you’ll do just about any old thing to shut off your head.”

“Yeah,” Vic said. “That’s right. He’s a mechanic. It’s what he’s got instead of knitting. Can I have a cigarette?”

She thought it might steady her, smooth out her nerves.

“I didn’t see any ashtrays in the house,” he said. He pawed a package of Marlboros from his crummy coat, shook one out for her.

“I quit for my son,” she said.

He nodded, didn’t reply to that. He came up with a lighter, a big brass Zippo, with a cartoon of some kind stamped on the side. He flicked the starter, and it made crunchy noises and spit sparks.

“Almost out of fuel,” he said.

She took it from him and gave it a flick, and a little yellow flame wavered from the tip. She lit her smoke and shut her eyes and inhaled. It was like sliding into a warm bath. She looked up, sighing, and considered the cartoon on the side of the lighter. Popeye threw a punch. KABLOOEY, it said, in a burst of yellow shockwaves.

“You know what surprises me?” he asked while she pulled another long drag off the cigarette and filled her lungs with sweet smoke. “That no one has seen your big old Rolls-Royce. How does a car like that escape notice, is what I wonder. Ain’t you surprised no one has seen it?”

He watched her with bright, almost happy eyes.

“No,” she said, and it was the truth.

“No,” Daltry repeated. “You aren’t. Why is that, you think?”

“Because Manx is good at not being seen.”

Daltry turned his head and gazed out at the water. “It’s something. Two men in a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith. I checked an online database. You know there are fewer than four hundred Rolls-Royce Wraiths left in the entire world? There’s fewer than a hundred in the whole country. That’s a rare goddamn car. And the only person to see him is you. You must feel like you’re going crazy.”

“I’m not crazy,” Vic said. “I’m scared. There’s a difference.”

“I guess you’d know,” Daltry said. He dropped his cigarette in the grass and ground it out with his toe.

He had disappeared back inside the house before Vic realized she was still holding his lighter.