NOS4A2 A Novel

Shorter Way


VIC TAPPED THE REAR BRAKE WITH HER FOOT, AN AUTOMATIC GESTURE that did nothing. The motorcycle kept on, rolling almost to the entrance of the Shorter Way Bridge before she remembered the front brake and eased herself to a stop.

It was ridiculous, a three-hundred-foot-long covered bridge sitting right on the ground in the middle of the woods, bridging nothing. Beyond the ivy-tangled entrance was an appalling darkness.

“Yeah,” Vic said. “Okay. You’re pretty Freudian.”

Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t Mommy’s coochie; it wasn’t the birth canal; the bike wasn’t her symbolic cock or a metaphor for the sexual act. It was a bridge spanning the distance between lost and found, a bridge over what was possible.

Something made a fluttering sound in among the rafters. Vic inhaled deeply and smelled bats: a musty animal smell, wild and pungent.

All those times she had crossed the bridge, not once had it been the fantasy of an emotionally disturbed woman. That was a confusion of cause and effect. She had been, at moments in her life, an emotionally disturbed woman because of all those times she had crossed the bridge. The bridge was not a symbol, maybe, but it was an expression of thought, her thoughts, and all the times she had crossed it had stirred up the life within. Floorboards had snapped. Litter had been disturbed. Bats had woken and flown wildly about.

Just inside the entrance, written in green spray paint, were the words THE HOUSE OF SLEEP →.

She put the bike into first and bumped the front tire up onto the bridge. She did not ask herself if the Shorter Way was really there, did not wonder if she was easing into a delusion. The issue was settled. Here it was.

The ceiling above was carpeted in bats, their wings closed around them to hide their faces, those faces that were her own face. They squirmed restlessly.

The boards went ka-bang-bang-bang under the tires of the bike. They were loose and irregular, missing in places. The whole structure shook from the force and weight of the bike. Dust fell from the beams above in a trickling rain. The bridge had not been in such disrepair when she last rode through. Now it was crooked, the walls visibly tilting to the right, like a corridor in a fun house.

She passed a gap in the wall, where a board was missing. A flurry of luminous particles snowed past the narrow slot. Vic eased almost to a stop, wanted a closer look. But then a board under the front tire cracked with a sound as loud as a gun firing, and she felt the wheel drop two inches. She grabbed the throttle, and the bike jumped forward. She heard another board snap under the back tire as she lunged ahead.

The weight of the bike was almost too much for the old wood. If she stopped, the rotted boards might give way beneath her and drop her into that . . . that . . . whatever that was. The chasm between thought and reality, between imagining and having, perhaps.

She couldn’t see what the tunnel opened onto. Beyond the exit she saw only glare, a brightness that hurt her eyes. She turned her face away and spied her old blue-and-yellow bicycle, its handlebars and spokes hung with cobwebs. It was dumped against the wall.

The front tire of her motorcycle thumped over the wooden lip and dropped her out onto asphalt.

Vic glided to a stop and put her foot down. She shaded her eyes with one hand and peered about.

She had arrived at a ruin. She was behind a church that had been destroyed by fire. Only its front face remained, giving it the look of a movie set, a single wall falsely suggesting a whole building behind it. There were a few blackened pews and a field of smoked and shattered glass, strewn with rusting beer cans. Nothing beside remained. A sun-faded parking lot, boundless and bare, stretched away, lone and level, as far as she could see.

She banged the Triumph into first and took a ride around to the front of what she assumed was the House of Sleep. There she halted once more, the engine rumbling erratically, hitching now and then.

There was a sign out front, the sort with letters on clear plastic cards, that could be shifted around to spell different messages; it seemed more like the kind of sign that belonged in front of a Dairy Queen than in front of a church. Vic read what was written there, and her body crawled with chill.

THE NEW AMERICAN

FAITH TABERNACLE

GOD BURNED ALIVE

ONLY DEV1LS NOW

Beyond was a suburban street, slumbering in the stuporous heat of late day. She wondered where she was. It might still be New Hampshire—but no, the light was wrong for New Hampshire. It had been clear and blue and bright there. It was hotter here, with oppressive clouds mounded in the sky, dimming the day. It felt like thunderstorm weather, and in fact, as she stood there straddling the bike, she heard the first rumbling detonation of thunder in the distance. She thought that in another minute or two it might begin to pour.

She scanned the church again. There were a pair of angled doors set against the concrete foundation. Basement doors. They were locked with a heavy chain and a bright brass lock.

Beyond, set back in the trees, was a sort of shed or barn, white with a blue-shingled roof. The shingles were fuzzed with moss, and there were even some weeds and dandelions growing right from the roof. There was a large barn door at the front, big enough to admit a car, and a side door with just one window. A sheet of paper was taped up inside the glass.

There, she thought, and when she swallowed, her throat clicked. He’s in there.

It was Colorado all over again. The Wraith was parked inside the shed, and Wayne and Manx were sitting in it, waiting out the day.

The wind lifted, hot, roaring in the leaves. There was another sound as well, somewhere behind Vic, a kind of frantic, mechanical whirring, a steely rustle. She looked down the road. The closest house was a well-kept little ranch, painted strawberry pink with white trim so it resembled a Hostess snack cake, the ones with coconut on them. Sno Balls, Vic thought they were called. The lawn was filled with those spinning tinfoil flowers that people stuck in their yards to catch the wind. They were going crazy now.

A stubby, ugly retiree was out in his driveway, holding a pair of garden shears, squinting up at her. Probably a neighborhood-watch type, which meant if she wasn’t dealing with a thunderstorm in five minutes, she would be dealing with the cops.

She rode the bike to the edge of the lot, then switched it off, left the keys in it. She wanted to be ready to go in a hurry. She looked again at the shed, standing to one side of the ruin. She noticed, almost as an afterthought, that she had no spit. Her mouth was as dry as the leaves rustling in the wind.

She felt pressure building behind her left eye, a sensation she remembered from childhood.

Vic left the bike, began walking toward the shed on her suddenly unsteady legs. Halfway there she bent and picked up a broken chunk of asphalt, the size of a dinner plate. The air vibrated with another distant concussive roll of thunder.

She knew it would be a mistake to call her son’s name but found her lips shaping the word anyway: Wayne, Wayne.

Her pulse hammered behind her eyeballs, so the world seemed to twitch unsteadily around her. The overheated wind smelled of steel shavings.

When she was within five steps of the side door, she could read the hand-lettered sign taped up on the inside of the glass:

NO ADMITTANCE

TOWN PERSONNEL ONLY!

The chunk of asphalt went through the window with a pretty smash, tore the sign free. Vic wasn’t thinking anymore, just moving. She had lived this scene already and knew how it went.

She might have to carry Wayne if there was something wrong with him, as there had been something wrong with Brad McCauley. If he was like McCauley—half ghoul, some kind of frozen vampire—she would fix him. She would get him the best doctors. She would fix him like she had fixed the bike. She had made him in her body. Manx could not simply unmake him with his car.

She shoved her hand through the shattered window to grab the inner doorknob. She fumbled for the bolt, even though she could see that the Wraith wasn’t in there. There was room for a car, but no car was present. Bags of fertilizer were stacked against the walls.

“Hey! What are you doing?” called a thin, piping voice from somewhere behind her. “I can call the cops! I can call them right now!”

Vic turned the bolt, threw the door open, stood gasping, looking into the small, cool, dark space of the empty shed.

“I should’ve called the police already! I can have the whole bunch of you arrested for breaking and entering!” screamed whoever it was. She was hardly listening. But even if she had been paying close attention she might not have recognized his voice. It was hoarse and strained, as if he had recently been crying or was about to start. There on the hill it did not once cross her mind that she had heard it before.

She turned on her heel, taking in a squat, ugly man in an FDNY T-shirt, the retiree who had been out in his yard with hedge clippers. He still held them. His eyes bulged behind glasses with thick black plastic frames. His hair was short and bristly and patchy, black mottled with silver.

Vic ignored him. She scanned the ground, found a chunk of blue rock, grabbed it, and stalked across to the slanted doors that led to the basement of the burned church. She dropped to one knee and began to strike at the big brassy Yale lock that kept those doors shut. If Wayne and Manx weren’t in the shed, then this was the only place that was left. She didn’t know where Manx had stashed the car, and if she found him asleep down there, she had no plans to ask him about it before using this stone on his head.

“Come on,” she said to herself. “Come on and open the f*ck up.”

She banged the stone down into the lock. Sparks flew.

“That’s private property!” cried the ugly man. “You and your friends have no right to go in there! That’s it! I’m calling the police!”

It caught her notice then, what he was yelping. Not the part about the police. The other part.

She threw the stone aside, swiped at the sweat on her face, and shoved herself to her heels. When she rounded on him, he took two frightened steps back and nearly tripped over his own feet. He held the garden shears up between them.

“Don’t! Don’t hurt me!”

Vic supposed she looked like a criminal and a lunatic. If that was what he saw, she couldn’t blame him. She had been both at different times in her life.

She held her hands out, patting the air in a calming gesture.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I don’t want anything from you. I’m just looking for someone. I thought there might be someone in there,” she said, gesturing with her head back toward the cellar doors. “What did you say about ‘my friends’? What friends?”

The ugly little gnome swallowed thickly. “They aren’t here. The people you’re looking for. They left. Drove away a little while ago. A half an hour or so. Maybe less.”

“Who? Please. Help me. Who left? Was it someone in an—”

“An old car,” the little man said. “Like an antique. He had it parked there in the shed . . . and I think he spent the night in there!” Pointing at the slanted basement doors. “I thought about calling the police. It isn’t the first time there’s been people in there doing drugs. But they’re gone! They aren’t here anymore. He drove away a while ago. A half an hour—”

“You said that,” she told him. She wanted to grab him by his fat neck and shake him. “Was there a boy with him? A boy in the back of the car?”

“Why, I don’t know!” the man said, and put his fingers to his lips and stared into the sky, an almost comic look of wonder on his face. “I thought there was someone with him. In the back. Yes. Yes, I bet there was a kid in the car!” He glanced at her again. “Are you all right? You look awful. Do you want to use my phone? You should have something to drink.”

“No. Yes. I—thank you. All right.”

She swayed, as if she had stood up too quickly. He had been here. Wayne had been here and gone. Half an hour ago.

Her bridge had steered her wrong. Her bridge, which always led her across the distance between lost and found, had not set her down in the right place at all. Maybe this was the House of Sleep, this derelict church, this litter of charred beams and broken glass, and she had wanted to find this place, had wanted it with all her heart, but only because Wayne was supposed to be here. Wayne was supposed to be here—not out on the road with Charlie Manx.

That was it, she supposed, in a weary sort of way. Just as Maggie Leigh’s Scrabble tiles could not give proper names—Vic remembered that now, was remembering a lot this morning—Vic’s bridge needed to anchor either end on solid earth. If Manx was on an interstate somewhere, her bridge couldn’t connect. It would be like trying to poke a bullet out of the air with a stick. (Vic flashed to a memory of a lead slug tunneling through the lake, remembered slapping at it, then finding it in her hand.) The Shortaway didn’t know how to carry her to something that wouldn’t stand still, so it had done the next-best thing. Instead of leading her to where Wayne was, it had brought her to where Wayne had last been.

Lurid red flowers grew along the foundation of the strawberry pink house. It was set up the street and away from other houses, a place nearly as lonely as a witch’s cottage in a fairy tale—and in its own way as fantastical as a house made of gingerbread. The grass was neatly kept. The ugly little man led her around back, to a screen door that opened into a kitchen.

“I wish I could have a second chance,” he said.

“At what?”

He seemed to need a moment to think about it. “A chance to do things over. I could’ve stopped them from going. The man and your son.”

“How could you have known?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Did you come a long way?” he asked in his thin, off-key voice.

“Yes. Sort of,” she said. “Not really.”

“Oh. I see now,” he said, without the slightest trace of sarcasm.

He held the door open for her, and she preceded him into the kitchen. The air-conditioning was a relief, almost as good as a glass of cold water with a sprig of mint in it.

It was a kitchen for an old woman who knew how to make homemade biscuits and gingerbread men. The house even smelled a little like gingerbread men. The walls were hung with cutesy kitchen plaques, rhyming ones.

I PRAY TO GOD ON MY KNEES