Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  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 th
ere. 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.