NOS4A2 A Novel

The Sleigh House


LOU WAS AWAKE FOR CLOSE TO AN HOUR BEFORE HE HEARD A DRY, quiet crackling and saw little white flakes dropping into the dead leaves around him. He tipped his head back and squinted into the night. It had begun to snow.

“Lou?” Vic asked.

His neck was stiffening up, and it hurt to lower his chin. He looked over at Vic, lying on the ground to his right. She had been asleep a moment ago, but now she was with him, eyes open wide.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Is my mother still here?”

“Your mother’s with the angels, babe,” he said.

“The angels,” Vic said. “There’s angels in the trees.” Then: “It’s snowing.”

“I know. In July. I’ve lived in the mountains my whole life. I know spots where the snow stays year-round, but I’ve never seen the snow fall this time of year. Not even up here.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Right above Gunbarrel. Where it all started.”

“It started in Terry’s Primo Subs when my mother left her bracelet in the bathroom. Where’d she go?”

“She wasn’t here. She’s dead, Vic. Remember?”

“She was sitting with us for a while. Over there.” Vic lifted her right arm and pointed at the embankment above them. The tires from the motorcycle had torn deep gouges in the slope, long, muddy trenches. “She said something about Wayne. She said Wayne will still have a little time when he gets to Christmasland, because he’s been running himself backward. Two steps back for every two miles forward. He won’t be one of those things. Not yet.”

She was stretched out on her back, arms at her sides, ankles together. Lou had put his flannel-lined coat over her; it was so big it covered her to her knees, as if it were a child’s blanket. Vic turned her head to look at him. She had a vacuity of expression that scared him.

“Oh, Lou,” she said, almost tonelessly. “Your poor face.”

He touched his right cheek, tender and swollen from the corner of his mouth to the edge of his eye socket. He didn’t remember how he got that one. The back of his left hand was badly burned, a steady throb of pain—when they came to rest, the hand had been caught under the bike, a hot pipe pressed against it. He couldn’t stand to look at it. The skin was black and cracked and glistening. He kept it down by his side, where Vic couldn’t see it either.

It didn’t matter about his hand. He didn’t think he had much time left. That sensation of ache and pressure in his throat and left temple was constant now. His blood felt as heavy as liquid iron. He was walking around with a gun to his head, and he thought at some point, before the night was over, it would go off. He wanted to see Wayne again before that happened.

He had pulled her from the bike as they went over the embankment, managed to roll so she was under him. The bike glanced off his back. If the Triumph had hit Vic—who probably weighed a hundred and five pounds with a brick in each pocket—it probably would’ve snapped her spine like a dry twig.

“You believe this snow?” Lou asked.

She blinked and wiggled her jaw and stared into the night. Flecks of snow dropped onto her face. “It means he’s almost here.”

Lou nodded. That was what he thought it meant.

“Some of the bats got out,” she said. “They came out of the bridge with us.”

He suppressed a shiver, couldn’t suppress the feeling of his skin crawling. He wished she hadn’t mentioned the bats. He had caught a glimpse of one, brushing past him, its mouth open in a barely audible shriek. As soon as he looked at it, he wished he had not seen it, wished he could unsee it. Its shriveled pink face had been horribly like Vic’s own.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess they did.”

“Those things are . . . me. The stuff in my head. When I use the bridge, there’s always a chance some of them will escape.” She rolled her head on her neck to look at him again. “That’s the toll. There’s always a toll. Maggie had a stutter that got worse and worse the more she used her Scrabble tiles. Manx had a soul once, probably, but his car used it up. Do you understand?”

He nodded. “I think.”

“If I say some things that don’t make sense,” she said, “you have to let me know. If I start to seem confused, you straighten me out. Do you hear me, Lou Carmody? Charlie Manx will be here soon. I need to know you’ve got my back.”

“Always,” he said.

She licked her lips, swallowed. “Good. That’s good. Good as gold. What’s gold stays gold forever, you know? That’s why Wayne is going to be okay.”

A snowflake caught in one of her eyelashes. The sight of it struck him as almost heartbreaking in its beauty. He doubted he would ever see anything so beautiful again in his life. To be fair, he was not anticipating living beyond the evening.

“The bike,” she said, and blinked again. Alarm rose upon her features. She sat up, elbows resting on the ground behind her. “The bike has to be all right.”

Lou had pried it out of the dirt and leaned it against the trunk of a red pine. The headlight hung from its socket. The right-hand mirror had been torn off. It was missing both mirrors now.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“Well. I don’t know. I haven’t tried starting it. We don’t know what might’ve come loose. You want me to—”

“No. It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll start.”

The breeze blew the dusting of snow at a slant. The night filled with soft chiming sounds.

Vic lifted her chin, looked into the branches above them, filled with angels, Santas, snowflakes, globes of silver and gold.

“I wonder why they don’t smash,” Lou said.

“They’re horcruxes,” Vic said.

Lou shot a look at her, hard, worried. “You mean like in Harry Potter?”

She laughed—a frightening, unhappy sound. “Look at all of them. There is more gold and there are more rubies in these trees than there were in all of Ophir. And it will end the same here as it did there.”

“‘Oh, fear’?” he asked. “You’re not making sense, Vic. Come back to me.”

She lowered her head, shook it as if to clear it, then put a hand against her neck, grimaced in pain.

Vic looked up at him from beneath her hair. It shocked him—how suddenly like herself she seemed. She had that Vic smirk on her face and that look of mischief in her eyes that had always turned him on.

She said, “You’re a good man, Lou Carmody. I may be one crazy bitch, but I love you. I’m sorry about a lot of things I put you through, and I wish like hell you’d met someone better than me. But I am not sorry we had a kid together. He’s got my looks and your heart. I know which one is worth more.”

He put his fists on the ground and slid on his butt to be next to her. He reached her side and put his arm around her and hugged her to his chest. Rested his face in her hair.

“Who says there’s better than you?” he said. “You say things about yourself I wouldn’t let anyone else in the world get away with saying.” He kissed her scalp. “We made a good boy. Time to get him back.”

She pulled away from him to look up in his face. “What happened to the timers? The explosives?”

He reached for the backpack, a few feet away. It was open.

“I started work on them,” he said. “A little while ago. Just something to do with my hands while I waited for you to wake up.” He gestured with his hands, as if to show how useless they were when they were empty. Then he put his left mitt down, hoping she hadn’t noticed how badly it was burned.

The cuffs dangled from the wrist of his other hand. Vic smiled again, tugged on them.

“We’ll do something kinky with these later,” she said. Except she said it in a tone of inexpressible weariness, a tone that suggested not erotic anticipation but the distant memory of red wine and lazy kisses.

He blushed; he had always been an easy blusher. She laughed and pecked his cheek.

“Show me what you’ve got done,” she said.

“Well,” he told her, “not much. Some of the timers are no good—they got smashed while we were making our great escape. I’ve got four of them wired up.” He reached into the sack and removed one of the slippery white packages of ANFO. The black timer dangled close to the top, connected to a pair of wires—one red and one green—that went down into the tight plastic bag containing the prepared explosive. “The timers are just little alarm clocks, really. One hand shows the hour, the other shows when they’re set to switch on. See? And you press here to start them running.”

It made his armpits prickle with monkey sweat, just holding one of the slick packs of explosive. A f*cking Christmas-light timer was the only thing between the two of them and an explosion that wouldn’t leave even fragments.

“There’s one thing I don’t get,” he said. “When are you going to plant them? And where?”

He got to his feet and craned his head, looking either way, like a child about to cross a busy road.

They were in among trees on the sunken floor of the forest. The drive leading up to the Sleigh House was directly behind him, a gravel lane running along the embankment, a road barely wide enough to allow the passage of a single car.

To his left was the highway, where, almost exactly sixteen years before, a stringy teenage girl with coltish legs had come bursting out of the underbrush, her face blackened with soot, and been seen by a fat twenty-year-old on a Harley. At the time Lou had been riding away from a bitter argument with his father. Lou had asked for a little money, wanted to get his GED, then apply to state college and study publishing. When his father asked why, Lou said so he could start his own comic-book company. His father put on a puss and said why not use money as toilet paper, it would come to the same thing. He said if Lou wanted an education, he could do what he had done, and join the marines. Maybe lose some of the fat in the process and get a real haircut.

Lou took off on his bike so his mother wouldn’t see him crying. It had been in his mind to drive to Denver, enlist, and disappear from his father’s life, spend a couple years in the service overseas. He would not return until he was a different man, someone lean and hard and cool, someone who would allow his father to hug him but would not provide a hug in return. He would call his father “sir,” sit stiffly at attention in his chair, resist smiling. How do you like my haircut, sir? he might ask. Does it meet your high standards? He wanted to drive away and come back remade, a man his parents didn’t know. As it was, that was very much what happened, although he never got as far as Denver.

To his right was the house where Vic had nearly burned to death. Not that it was a house anymore, not by any conventional definition. All that remained was a sooty cement platform and a tangle of burned sticks. Amid the ruin was a blistered and blackened old-fashioned Frigidaire on its side, the smoked and warped frame of a bed, part of a staircase. A single wall of what had once been the garage appeared almost untouched. A door set in that wall stood open, implying an invitation to come on in, pull up some burned lumber, have a seat, and stay awhile. Broken glass silted the rubble.

“I mean . . . this isn’t, like, Christmasland, right?”

“No,” she said. “It’s the doorway. He probably doesn’t need to come here to cross over, but it’s easiest for him here.”

Angels held trumpets to their lips, drifted and swayed in the flecks of snow.

“Your doorway—” he said. “The bridge. It’s gone. It was gone by the time we hit the bottom of the slope.”

“I can get it back when I need it,” she said.

“I wish we could’ve brought those cops through with us. Led ’em right across. Maybe they could’ve pointed all those guns at the right guy.”

She said, “I think the less weight put on the bridge, the better. It’s an avenue of last resort. I didn’t even want to bring you across.”

“Well. I’m here now.” He still held a glossy package of ANFO in one hand. He slipped it gently back in with the others and hefted the backpack. “What’s the plan now?”

She said, “The first part of the plan is that you give those to me.” She took one strap of the backpack. He stared at her for a moment, the pack between them, not sure he ought to allow her to have it, then let go. He had what he wanted; he was here now, and no way she could get rid of him. She hooked it over her shoulder.

“The second part of the plan—” she started, then turned her head and looked toward the highway.

A car slid along through the night, the light of its headlamps stammering through the trunks of the pines, casting absurdly long shadows across the gravel drive. It slowed as it approached the turnoff toward the house. Lou felt a dull throb of pain behind his left ear. The snow fell in fat goose-feather flakes, beginning to collect on the dirt road.

“Jesus,” Lou said, and he hardly recognized his own strained voice. “It’s him. We aren’t ready.”

“Get back here,” Vic said.

She grabbed him by the sleeve and backpedaled, walking him across the carpet of dry, dead leaves and pine needles. The two of them slipped into a stand of birch trees. For the first time, Lou noticed their breath smoking in the moonlit-silvered night.

The Rolls-Royce Wraith turned onto the long gravel road. A reflection of the bone-colored moon floated on the windshield, caught in a cat’s cradle of black branches.

They watched it make its stately approach. Lou felt his thick legs trembling. I just need to be brave for a little while longer, he thought. Lou believed with all his heart in God, had believed since he was a kid and saw George Burns in Oh, God! on video. He sent up a mental prayer to skinny, wrinkled George Burns now: Please. I was brave once, let me be brave again. Let me be brave for Wayne and Vic. I’m going to die anyway, so let me die the right way. It came to him then that he had wanted this, had often daydreamed of it: a final chance to show he could lay aside fear and do the thing that needed to be done. His big chance had come at last.

The Rolls-Royce rolled past them, tires crunching on the gravel. It seemed to slow as it came abreast of them, not fifteen feet off, as if the driver had seen them and was peering out at them. But the car did not stop, merely proceeded on its unhurried way.

“The second part?” Lou breathed, aware of his pulse rapping painfully in his throat. Christ, he hoped he didn’t stroke out until it was all over.

“What?” Vic asked, watching the car.

“What was the second part of the plan?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, and took the other bracelet of his handcuffs and locked it around the narrow trunk of a birch tree. “The second part is you stay here.”





In the Trees


ON LOU’S SWEET, ROUND, BRISTLY FACE WAS THE LOOK OF A CHILD who has just seen a car back over his favorite toy. Tears sprang to his eyes, the brightest thing in the dark. It distressed her to see him nearly crying, to see his shock and disappointment, but the sound of the handcuff snapping shut—that sharp, clear click, echoing on the frozen air—was the sound of a final decision, a choice made and irreversible.

“Lou,” she whispered, and put a hand on his face. “Lou, don’t cry. It’s all right.”

“I don’t want you to go alone,” he said. “I wanted to be there for you. I said I would be there for you.”

“You were,” she said. “You still will be. You’re with me wherever I go: You’re part of my inscape.” She kissed his mouth, tasted tears, but did not know if they were his or her own. She pulled back from him and said, “One way or another, Wayne is walking away tonight, and if I’m not with him, he’s going to need you.”

He blinked rapidly, weeping without shame. He did not struggle at the cuffs. The birch was perhaps eight inches thick and thirty feet high. The bracelet of the cuff barely fit around it. He stared at her with a look of grief and bewilderment. He opened his mouth but couldn’t seem to find any words.

The Wraith pulled up to the right of the blasted ruin, alongside the single standing wall. It stopped there, idling. Vic looked toward it. In the distance she could hear Burl Ives.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

She reached down past the cuff to finger the paper hoop around his wrist; the one they had given him in the hospital, the one she had seen back in her father’s house.

“What’s this, Lou?” she asked.

“Oh, that?” he asked, and then made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “I passed out again. It’s nothing.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I just lost my father tonight, and I can’t lose you, too. If you think I’m going to risk your life any more than it’s already been risked, then you’re crazier than I am. Wayne needs his dad.”

“He needs his mother, too,” he said. “So do I.”

Vic smiled—her old Vic smile, a little rakish, a little dangerous.

“No promises,” she said. “You’re the best, Lou Carmody. You’re not just a good man. You are a real honest-to-God hero. And I don’t mean because you put me on the back of your motorcycle and drove me away from this place. That was the easy part. I mean because you’ve been there for Wayne every single day. Because you made school lunches and you got him to his dentist appointments and you read to him at night. I love you, mister.”

She looked up the road again. Manx had gotten out of the car. He crossed through his own headlights, and she had her first good look at him in four days. He wore his old-fashioned coat with the double line of brass buttons and tails. His hair was black and shiny, slicked back from the enormous bulge of his brow. He looked like a man of thirty. In one hand he held his enormous silver hammer. Something small was cupped in the other hand. He stepped out of the lights and into the trees, disappearing briefly into shadow.

“I have to go,” she said. She leaned in and kissed the side of Lou’s cheek.

He reached for her, but she slipped away and walked to her Triumph. She looked it up and down. There was a fist-size dent in the teardrop-shaped gas tank, and one of the pipes was hanging loose, looked like it might drag on the ground. But it would start. She could feel it waiting for her.

Manx stepped out of the woods and stood between the taillights at the rear of the Wraith. He seemed to look straight at her, although it didn’t seem possible that he could see her in the dark and falling snow.

“Hello!” he called. “Are you with us, Victoria? Are you here with your mean machine?”

“Let him go, Charlie!” she shouted. “Let him go if you want to live!”

Even at a distance of two hundred feet, she could see Manx beaming at her. “I think you know by now I am not so easy to kill! But come along, Victoria! Follow me to Christmasland! Let’s go to Christmasland and finish this thing! Your son will be glad to see you!”

Without waiting for a reply, he climbed in behind the wheel of the Wraith. The taillights brightened, dimmed, and the car began to move again.

“Oh, Jesus, Vic,” Lou said. “Oh, Jesus. This is a mistake. He’s ready for you. There’s got to be another way. Don’t do it. Don’t follow him. Stay with me, and we’ll find another way.”

“Time to ride, Lou,” she said. “Watch for Wayne. He’ll be along in a little bit.”

She put her leg over the saddle and turned the key in the ignition. The headlight flickered for a moment, dimly, then guttered out. Vic shivered steadily in her cutoffs and sneakers, put her heel on the kickstart, threw her weight down. The bike coughed and muttered. She leaped again, and it made a listless, flatulent sound: brapp.

“Come on, honey,” she said softly. “Last ride. Let’s bring our boy home.”

She rose to her full height. Snow caught in the fine hairs on her arms. She came down. The Triumph blasted to life.

“Vic!” Lou called, but she couldn’t look at him now. If she looked at him and saw him crying, she would want to hold him and she might lose her nerve. She put the bike in gear. “Vic!” he shouted again.

She left it in first while she gunned it up the steep, short slope of the embankment. The back tire fished this way and that in the snow-slippery grass, and she had to put a foot down on the dirt and push to get over the hump.

Vic had lost sight of the Wraith. It had circled the blasted wreck of the old hunting lodge and disappeared through a gap in the trees on the far side. She slammed the bike up into second, then third, accelerating to catch up. Stones flew from under the tires. The bike felt loose and wobbly on the snow, which had now accumulated to a fine dusting on the gravel.

Around the ruin, into high grass, and then to a sort of dirt track through the fir trees, barely wide enough to accommodate the Wraith. It was really just a pair of narrow ditches, with a mass of ferns growing in the space between.

The boughs of the pines leaned in above her, making a close, dark, narrow corridor. The Wraith had slowed to let her catch up, was only about fifty feet ahead of her. NOS4A2 rolled on, and she followed its taillights. The icy air sliced through her thin T-shirt, filled her lungs with raw, frozen breath.

The trees began to fall away on either side of her, opening into a rock-strewn clearing. There was a stone wall ahead, with an old brick tunnel set into it, a tunnel hardly wide enough to admit the Wraith. Vic thought of her bridge. This is his bridge, she thought. A white metal sign was bolted to the stone, next to the tunnel entrance. PARK IS OPEN EVERY DAY ALL YEAR-ROUND! GET READY TO SCREAM HIP-HIP SNOW-RAY, KIDS!

The Wraith slipped into the tunnel. Burl Ives’s voice echoed back down the brick-lined hole at her—a passageway Vic doubted had existed even ten minutes before.

Vic entered behind him. The right-hand pipe dragged on the cobbles, throwing sparks. The boom of the engine echoed in the stone-walled space.

The Wraith exited the tunnel ahead of her. She was close behind him, roaring out of the darkness, through the open candy-cane gates, past the nine-foot Nutcrackers standing guard, and into Christmasland at last.