Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  “I’m an FBI agent. My name is Tabitha Hutter. A lot of the guys in the office call me Tabby the Hutt.” She smiled slightly.

  “That’s funny. A lot of the guys in the place I work call me Jabba the Hutt. Only they do it because I’m a fat shit.”

  “I thought you were in Denver,” Hutter said.

  “Missed my flight.”

  “No shit,” said Daltry. “Something come up?”

  Hutter said, “Detective Daltry, I’ll conduct the Q and A, thank you.”

  Daltry reached into the pocket of his coat. “Does anyone mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes,” Hutter said.

  Daltry held the pack for a moment, staring at her, then put it back in his pocket. There was a bland, unfocused quality to his eyes that reminded Vic of the membrane that slid across a shark’s eyes right before he chomped into a seal.

  “Why did you miss your plane, Mr. Carmody?” Hutter asked.

  “Because I heard from Wayne.”

  “You heard from him?”

  “He called me from the car on his iPhone. He said they were trying to shoot Vic. Manx and the other guy. We only talked for a minute. He had to hang up, ’cause Manx and the other fellow were walking back to the car. He was scared, really scared, but holding it together. He’s a little man, you know. He’s always been a little man.” Lou bunched his fists up on the table and lowered his head. He grimaced, as if he felt a sharp twinge of pain somewhere in his abdomen, and blinked, and tears dripped onto the table. It came over him all of a sudden, without warning. “He has to be a grown-up, ’cause Vic and me did such a shitty job of being grown-ups ourselves.” Vic put her hands over his.

  Hutter and Daltry exchanged a look, hardly seemed to notice Lou dissolving into tears.

  “Do you think your son turned the phone off after he talked to you?” Hutter asked.

  “I thought if it had a SIM card in it, it didn’t matter if it was on or off,” Daltry said. “I thought you federal people had a workaround.”

  “You can use his phone to find him,” Vic said, her pulse quickening.

  Hutter ignored her, said to Daltry, “We can have that done. It would take a while. I’d have to call Boston. But if it’s an iPhone and it’s turned on, we can use the Find My iPhone function to locate him right now, right here.” She lifted her iPad slightly.

  “Right,” Lou said. “That’s right. I set up Find My iPhone the day we bought it for him, because I didn’t want him to lose the thing.”

  He came around the table to look over Hutter’s shoulder at her screen. His complexion was not improved by the unnatural glow of the monitor.

  “What’s his e-mail address and password?” Hutter asked, turning her head to look up at Lou.

  He reached out with one hand to type it himself, but before he could, the FBI agent took ahold of his wrist. She pressed two fingers into his skin, as if taking his pulse. Even from where she sat, Vic could see a spot where the skin gleamed and seemed to have a splash of dried paste on it.

  Hutter shifted her gaze to Lou’s face. “You had an EKG this evening?”

  “I fainted. I got upset. It was, like, a panic attack, dude. Some crazy son of a bitch has my kid. This shit happens to fat guys.”

  Until now Vic had been too focused on Wayne to give much thought to Lou: how gray he looked, how exhausted. But at this, Vic felt struck through with sudden, sick apprehension.

  “Oh, Lou. What do you mean, you fainted?”

  “It was after Wayne hung up on me. I kind of went down for a minute. I was fine, but airport security made me sit on the floor and get an EKG, make sure I wasn’t going to vapor-lock on them.”

  “Did you tell them your kid had been kidnapped?” Daltry asked.

  Hutter flashed him a warning look that Daltry pretended not to see.

  “I’m not sure what I said to them. I was sort of confused at first. Like, dizzy. I know I told them my kid needed me. I know I told them that. All I could think was I had to get to my car. At some point they said they were going to put me in an ambulance, and I told ’em to go . . . ah . . . have fun with themselves. So I got up and walked away. It’s possible a guy grabbed my arm and I dragged him a few feet. I was in a hurry.”

  “So you didn’t talk to the police at the airport about what had happened to your son?” Daltry asked. “Didn’t you think you could get here faster if you had a police escort?”

  “It didn’t even cross my mind. I wanted to talk to Vic first,” Lou said, and Vic saw Daltry and Hutter trade another glance.

  “Why did you want to talk to Victoria first?” Hutter asked.

  “What does it matter?” Vic cried. “Can we just think about Wayne?”

  “Yes,” Hutter said, blinking, looking back down at her iPad. “That’s right. Let’s keep the focus on Wayne. How about that password?”

  Vic pushed back her chair as Lou poked at the touchscreen with one thick finger. She rose, came around the corner of the table to look. Her breathing was fast and short. She felt her anticipation so keenly it was like being cut.

  Hutter’s screen loaded the Find My iPhone page, which showed a map of the globe, pale blue continents against a background of dark blue ocean. In the upper right corner, a window announced:

  Wayne’s iPhone

  Locating

  Locating

  Locating

  Locating

  Located

  A featureless field of gray blanked out the image of the globe. A glassy blue dot appeared in the silver smoothness. Squares of landscape began to appear, the map redrawing itself to show the location of the iPhone in close-up. Vic saw the blue dot traveling on a road identified as THE ST. NICK PARKWAY.

  Everyone was leaning in, Daltry so close to Vic she could feel him pressing against her rear, feel his breath tickling her neck. He smelled of coffee and nicotine.

  “Zoom out,” Daltry said.

  Hutter tapped the screen once, and again, and again.

  The map depicted a continent that somewhat resembled America. It was as if someone had made a version of the United States out of bread dough and then punched it in the center. In this new version of the nation, Cape Cod was almost half the size of Florida and the Rocky Mountains looked more like the Andes, a thousand miles of grotesquely tortured earth, great splinters of stone heaved up against one another. The country as a whole, however, had substantially shriveled, collapsing toward the center.

  Most of the great cities were gone, but other points of interest had appeared in their places. In Vermont there was a dense forest, built up around a place called ORPHANHENGE; in New Hampshire there was a spot marked THE TREE HOUSE OF THE MIND. A little north of Boston, there was something called LOVECRAFT KEYHOLE; it was a crater in the rough shape of a padlock. In Maine, around the Lewiston/Auburn/Derry area, there was a place called PENNYWISE CIRCUS. A narrow highway titled THE NIGHT ROAD led south, reddening the farther it went, until it was a line of blood trickling into Florida.

  The St. Nick Parkway was particularly littered with stopping points. In Illinois, WATCHFUL SNOWMEN. In Kansas, GIANT TOYS. In Pennsylvania, THE HOUSE OF SLEEP and THE GRAVEYARD OF WHAT MIGHT BE.

  And in the mountains of Colorado, high in the peaks, the point at which the St. Nick Parkway dead-ended: CHRISTMASLAND.

  The continent itself drifted in a sea of black, star-littered wastes; the map was captioned not UNITED STATES OF AMERICA but UNITED INSCAPES OF AMERICA.

  The blue dot twitched, moving through what should’ve been western Massachusetts toward Christmasland. But UNITED INSCAPES didn’t correspond exactly to America itself. It was probably a hundred fifty miles from Laconia, New Hampshire, to Springfield, Massachusetts, but on this map it looked barely half that.

  They all stared.

  Daltry took his hankie from his pocket, gave his nose a thoughtful squeeze. “Any of you see Candy Land down there?” He made a harsh, throat-clearing sound that was not quite a cough, not quite a laugh.

  Vic felt the kitchen go
ing away. The world at the edges of her vision was a distorted blur. The iPad and the table remained in crisp focus but were curiously distant.

  She needed something to anchor her. She felt in danger of coming unmoored from the kitchen floor . . . a balloon slipping out of a child’s hand. She took Lou’s wrist, something to hold on to. He had always been there when she needed something to hold on to.

  When she looked at him, though, she saw a reflection of her own ringing shock. His pupils were pinpricks. His breath was short and labored.

  In a surprisingly normal tone of voice, Hutter said, “I don’t know what I’m looking at here. Does this mean anything to either of you two? This curious map? Christmasland? The St. Nick Parkway?”

  “Does it?” Lou asked, staring helplessly at Vic.

  What he was really asking, Vic understood, was DO we tell her about Christmasland? About the things you believed when you were crazy?

  “No,” Vic breathed, answering all questions—spoken and unspoken—at the same time.

  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 fucking 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 skullfucked 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 fucked 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 sett
le 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.