Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  He leaned over the stool, both hands on its edge, and took a long, trembling breath—and smelled the Christmassy odor of gingerbread again. He almost flinched, the fragrance was so strong and clear.

  A stroke, he thought again. This was what happened when you were stroking out. The brain misfired, and you smelled things that weren’t there, while the world drooped around you, melting like dirty snow in a warm spring rain.

  He turned himself to face the door, which was not twelve paces away. The door to his studio hung wide open. He could not imagine how Giselle could fail to hear him shouting, if she was anywhere in the house. She was either outside by the noisy air conditioner or shopping or dead.

  He considered this array of possibilities again—outside by the noisy air conditioner, shopping, or dead—and was disquieted to find the third possibility not quite preposterous.

  He lifted the stool an inch off the floor, moved it forward, set it down, hobbled forward with it. Now that he was standing, the inside of his head was going light again, his thoughts drifting like goose feathers on a warm breeze.

  A song was running around and around in his head, stuck in an idiot loop. “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly—Perhaps she’ll die!” Only the song grew in volume, building and building until it no longer seemed to be inside his head but in the air around him, coming down the hall.

  “There was an old lady who swallowed a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,” sang the voice. It was high-pitched, off-key, and curiously hollow, like a voice heard at a distance, through a ventilation shaft.

  Sig glanced up and saw a man in a gasmask moving past the open door. The man in the gasmask had Giselle by the hair and was dragging her down the hall. Giselle didn’t seem to mind. She wore a neat blue linen dress and matching blue heels, but as she was hauled along, one of the shoes pulled loose and fell off her foot. The Gasmask Man had her long chestnut hair, streaked with white, wrapped around one fist. Her eyes were closed, her narrow, gaunt face serene.

  The Gasmask Man turned his head, looked in at him. Sig had never seen anything so awful. It was like in that movie with Vincent Price, where the scientist crossed himself with an insect. His head was a rubber bulb with shining lenses for eyes and a grotesque valve for a mouth.

  Something was wrong in Sig’s brain, something maybe worse than a stroke. Could a stroke make you hallucinate? One of his painted Huns had strolled right off his model of Verdun and into his back hallway, was abducting his wife. Maybe that was why Sig was struggling to stay upright. The Hun were invading Haverhill and had bombed the street with mustard gas. Although it didn’t smell like mustard. It smelled like cookies.

  The Gasmask Man held up a finger, to indicate he would be back shortly, then continued down the hallway, towing Giselle by the hair. He began to sing again.

  “There was an old lady,” the Gasmask Man sang, “who swallowed a goat. Just opened her throat and swallowed a goat. What a greedy bitch!”

  Sig slumped over the stool. His legs—he couldn’t feel his legs. He reached to wipe the sweat out of his face and poked himself in the eye.

  Boots clomped across the workshop floor.

  It took an effort of will for Sig to lift his head. It felt as if there were a great weight balanced on top of it, a twenty-pound stack of iron.

  The Gasmask Man stood over the model of Verdun, looking down at the cratered ruin, stitched with barbed wire. His hands on his hips. Sig recognized the man’s clothes at last: He wore the oil-stained jumpsuit of the air-conditioner repairman.

  “Little men, little men!” the Gasmask Man said. “I love little men! ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a-hunting, for fear of little men.’” He looked at Sig and said, “Mr. Manx says I’m a rhyming demon. I say I’m just a poet and didn’t know it. How old is your wife, mister?”

  Sig had no intention of answering. He wanted to ask what the repairman had done with Giselle. But instead he said, “I married her in 1976. My wife is fifty-nine. Fifteen years younger than myself.”

  “You dog, you! Robbing the cradle. No kids?”

  “Nr. No. I have ants in my brain.”

  “That’s the sevoflurane,” the Gasmask Man said. “I pumped it in through your air conditioner. I can tell that your wife never had kids. Those hard little tits. I gave ’em a squeeze, and I can tell you, women who have had babies don’t have tits like that.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you here?” Sig asked.

  “You live across the street from Vic McQueen. And you have a two-car garage, but only one car,” the Gasmask Man told him. “When Mr. Manx comes back around the corner, he’ll have a place to park. The wheels on the Wraith go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the Wraith go round and round, all day long.”

  Sig de Zoet became aware of a series of sounds—a hiss, a scratch, and a thump—repeating over and over. He couldn’t tell where they were coming from. The noise seemed to be inside his head, in the same way that the Gasmask Man’s song had seemed to be inside his head for a while. That hiss, scratch, and thump was what he had now, in place of thoughts.

  The Gasmask Man looked down at him. “Now, Victoria McQueen looks like she has a real set of mommy titties. You’ve seen them firsthand. What do you think of her tits?”

  Sig stared up at him. He understood what the Gasmask Man was asking but could not think how to reply to such a question. Vic McQueen was just eight years old; in Sig’s mind she had become a child again, a girl with a boy’s bicycle. She came over now and then to paint figurines. It was a pleasure to watch her work—painting little men with quiet devotion, eyes narrowed as if she were squinting down a long tunnel, trying to see what was at the other end.

  “That is her place across the street, isn’t it?” the Gasmask Man said.

  Sig intended not to tell him. Not to collaborate. “Collaborate” was the word that came to his mind, not “cooperate.”

  “Yes,” he heard himself say. Then he said, “Why did I tell you that? Why am I answering your questions? I am not a collaborator.”

  “That’s the sevoflurane, too,” the Gasmask Man said. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things people used to tell me after I gave ’em some of the sweet old gingerbread smoke. This one old grandma, like sixty-four years old at least, told me the only time she ever came was when she took it up the pooper. Sixty-four! Ugh, right? ‘Will you still need me, will you still ream me, when I’m sixty-four?’” He giggled, the innocent, bubbling laughter of a child.

  “It is a truth serum?” Sig said. It took a profound effort to verbalize this question; each word was a bucket of water that had to be laboriously drawn up from a deep well, by hand.

  “Not exactly, but it sure relaxes your intuitions. Opens you up to suggestion. You wait till your wife starts to come around. She’ll be gobbling my cock just like it’s lunch and she missed breakfast. She’ll just think it’s the thing to do! Don’t worry. I won’t make you watch. You’ll be dead by then. Listen: Where is Vic McQueen? I’ve been watching the house all day. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone home. She isn’t away for the summer, is she? That’d be a pain. That’d be a pain in the brain!”

  But Sigmund de Zoet didn’t answer. He was distracted. It had come to him, finally, what he was hearing, what was producing that hiss, that scratch, that thump.

  It wasn’t inside his head at all. It was the record he had been listening to, the Berlin Orchestra playing the Cloud Atlas sextet.

  The music was over.

  Lake Winnipesaukee

  WHEN WAYNE WENT TO DAY CAMP, VIC WENT TO WORK ON THE NEW book—and the Triumph.

  Her editor had suggested maybe it was time for a holiday-themed Search Engine, thought a Christmas adventure could be a big seller. The notion, at first, was a whiff of sour milk; Vic flinched from it reflexively, in disgust. But with a few weeks to turn it over in her mind, she could see how brutally commercial
such an item would be. She could picture, as well, how cute Search Engine would look in a candy-cane-striped cap and a scarf. It never once occurred to her that a robot modeled on the engine of a Vulcan motorcycle would not have any need for a scarf. It would look right. She was a cartoonist, not an engineer; reality could get stuffed.

  She cleared a space in a back corner of the carriage house for her easel and made a start. That first day she went for three hours, using her blue nonphotographic pencil to draw a lake of cracking ice. Search Engine and his little friend Bonnie clutched one another on a chunk of floating glacier. Mad Möbius Stripp was under there in a submarine crafted to look like a kraken, tentacles thrusting up around them. At least she thought she was drawing tentacles. Vic worked, as always, with the music turned up and her mind switched off. While she was drawing, her face was as smooth and unlined as a child’s. As untroubled, too.

  She kept at it until her hand cramped, then quit and walked out into the day, stretching her back, arms over her head, listening to her spine crack. She went into the cottage to pour herself a glass of iced tea—Vic didn’t bother with lunch, hardly ate when she was working on a book—and returned to the carriage house to think about what belonged on page two. She figured it couldn’t hurt to tinker with the Triumph while she mulled it over.

  She planned to bang at the motorcycle for an hour or so and then go back to Search Engine. Instead she worked three hours and was ten minutes late to pick Wayne up from camp.

  After that it was the book in the morning and the bike in the afternoon. She learned to set an alarm so she’d always be on time to get Wayne. By the end of June, she had a whole stack of pages roughed out and had stripped the Triumph down to the engine and the bare metal frame.

  She sang while she worked, although she was rarely aware of it.

  “No one sleeps a wink when I sing this song. I’m gonna sing it all night long,” she sang when she worked on the bike.

  And when she worked on the book, she sang, “Dad been driving us to Christmasland, just to ride in Santa’s sleigh. Dad been driving us to Christmasland, just to pass the day away.”

  But they were the same song.

  Haverhill

  ON THE FIRST OF JULY, VIC AND WAYNE PUT LAKE WINNIPESAUKEE in the rearview mirror and drove back to her mother’s house in Massachusetts. Vic’s house now. She kept forgetting.

  Lou was flying into Boston to spend the Fourth with Wayne and see some big-city fireworks, something he had never done before. Vic was going to spend the weekend going through the dead woman’s stuff, and trying not to drink. She had a notion to sell the house in the fall and move back to Colorado. It was something to talk about with Lou. She could work on Search Engine anywhere.

  Traffic was bad on 495. They were trapped on the road, under a headache sky of low, fuming clouds. Vic felt that no one should have to put up with a sky like that cold sober.

  “Do you worry much about ghosts?” Wayne asked while they were idling, waiting for cars in front of them to move.

  “Why? You creeped out about staying the night at Grandma’s? If her spirit is still there, it wouldn’t wish you any harm. She loved you.”

  “No,” Wayne said, his tone indifferent. “I know ghosts used to talk to you, is all.”

  “Not anymore,” she said, and finally traffic loosened up and Vic could ride the breakdown lane to the exit. “Not ever, kid. Your mom was screwed up in the head. That’s why I had to go to the hospital.”

  “They weren’t real?”

  “Of course not. The dead stay dead. The past is past.”

  Wayne nodded. “Who’s that?” he asked, looking across the front yard as they turned in to the driveway.

  Vic had been thinking about ghosts, not paying attention, and hadn’t seen the woman sitting on her front step. As Vic put the car into park, the visitor rose to her feet.

  Her visitor wore acid-washed jeans, disintegrating to threads at the knees and thighs, and not in a fashionable way either. She had a cigarette in one hand, trailing a pale wisp of smoke. In the other hand was a folder. She had the stringy, twitchy look of a junkie. Vic could not place her but was sure she knew her. She had no idea who the visitor was, but felt in some way she had been expecting this woman for years.

  “Someone you know?” Wayne asked.

  Vic shook her head. She was temporarily unable to find her voice. She had spent most of the last half year holding tight to both sanity and sobriety, like an old woman clutching a bag of groceries. Staring into the yard, she felt the bottom of the bag beginning to tear and give way.

  The junkie girl in the unlaced Chuck Taylor high-tops raised one hand in a nervous, terribly familiar little wave.

  Vic opened the car door and got out, came around the front to get between Wayne and the woman.

  “Can I help you?” Vic croaked. She needed a glass of water.

  “I hope s-ss-ss-sss—” She sounded as if she were hung up on a sneeze. Her face darkened, and she forced out, “So. He’s f-f-fuh-free.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Wraith,” Maggie Leigh said. “He’s on the road again. I think you sh-sh-should use your bridge and try to f-f-f-f-find him, Vic.”

  SHE HEARD WAYNE CLIMBING OUT OF THE CAR BEHIND HER, HIS DOOR thumping shut. He opened the rear door, and Hooper leaped from the backseat. She wanted to tell him to get back in the car but couldn’t without signaling her fear.

  The woman smiled at her. There was an innocence and a simple kindness to her face that Vic very much associated with the mad. She had seen it often enough in the mental hospital.

  “I’m s-s-ss-sorry,” the visitor said. “That wasn’t how I mm-mm-muh—” Now she sounded like she might be gagging. “—mmmMMmmeant to begin. I’m m-mm-mm—oh, God. Mmm-mm-mMMM-MAGGIE. Bad st-stammer. S-s-s-s-suh-suh—apologies. We had tea once. You s-scraped your knee. Long time ago. You weren’t much older than your s-s-suh-ss-ss—” She stopped talking, drew a deep breath, tried again. “Kid here. But I think you really m-must remember.”

  It was awful listening to her try to talk—like watching someone with no legs dragging herself along a sidewalk. Vic thought, She didn’t use to be so bad, while at the same time remaining convinced that the junkie girl was a deranged and possibly dangerous stranger. She found herself able to juggle these two notions without any sense of contradicting herself whatsoever.

  The junkie girl put her hand on Vic’s for a moment, but her palm was hot and damp, and Vic quickly pulled away. Vic looked at the girl’s arms and saw they were a battlefield of pocked, shiny scars: cigarette burns. Lots of them, some livid pink and recent.

  Maggie regarded her with a brief look of confusion that bordered on hurt, but before Vic could speak, Hooper barged past to poke his nose into Maggie Leigh’s crotch. Maggie laughed and pushed his snout away.

  “Oh, gee. You have your own yeti. That’s adorbs,” she said. She looked beyond the dog to Vic’s son. “And you must b-b-be Wayne.”

  “How do you know his name?” Vic asked in a hoarse voice, thinking a crazy thing: Her Scrabble tiles can’t give her proper names.

  “You dedicated your first s-ss-s—book to him,” said Maggie. “We used to have them all at the library. I was so suh-suh-sssssssspsyched for you.”

  Vic said, “Wayne? Take Hooper into the house.”

  Wayne whistled and clicked and walked by Maggie, and the dog shambled after. Wayne firmly shut the door behind both of them.

  Maggie said, “I always thought you’d write. You said you would. I wondered if I mm-mm-my-mm-my—might hear from you after M-M-Muh-MmmManx was arrested, but then I thought you wanted to put him behind you. I almost wrote you a few times, b-but first I worried your puh-p-puh-pp-p—I worried your folks would question you about me, and later I thought muh-mm-mm—perhaps you wanted to put m-me behind you as well.”

  She tried to smile again, and Vic saw she was missing teeth.

  “Ms. Leigh. I think you’re confused. I don’t know you. I can’t
help you,” Vic said.

  What frightened Vic most was her feeling that this was exactly backward. Maggie wasn’t the one who was confused—her whole face glistened with lunatic certainty. If anyone was confused, it was Vic. She could see it all in her mind’s eye: the dark cool of the library, the yellowing Scrabble tiles scattered on the desk, the bronze paperweight that looked like a pistol.

  “If you don’t know me, how come you know my last name? I didn’t mention it,” Maggie said, only with more stuttering—it took close on half a minute to get this sentence out.

  Vic held up a hand for silence and ignored this statement as the absurd distraction it was. Of course Maggie had mentioned her last name. She had said it when she introduced herself, Vic was sure.

  “I see you know quite a bit about me, though,” Vic continued. “Understand that my son knows nothing about Charles Manx. I’ve never talked to him about the man. And I’m not having him find out from . . . from a stranger.” She almost said a crazy person.

  “Of course. I didn’t m-muh-mm-mean to alarm you or s-s-suh-s—”

  “But you did anyway.”

  “B-b-buh-b-but, Vic.”

  “Stop calling me that. We don’t know each other.”

  “Would you prefer if I called you the B-B-Buh-Brat?”

  “I don’t want you to call me anything. I want you to go.”

  “B-b-but you had to know about Mm-Mm-Mmm—” In her desperation to get the word out, she seemed to be moaning.

  “Manx.”

  “Thank you. Yes. We have to d-d-d-decide how to d-d-deal with him.”

  “Deal with what? What do you mean, Manx is on the road again? He isn’t up for parole until 2016, and the last I heard he was in a coma. Even if he woke up and they did set him free, he’d have to be two hundred years old. But they didn’t cut him loose, because they would’ve notified me if they had.”

  “He’s not that old. Try a hundred and ffff-ff-f-f”—she sounded like she was imitating the sound of a burning fuse—“fifteen!”