Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  “My daughters brought little angels to mark the end of their journey,” Manx said in a distant, musing voice. “Take care of it, Wayne. Guard it as if it were your own life!”

  He clapped Wayne on the back and nodded toward the front of the car. Wayne followed his gaze . . . and saw that he was looking at the open glove compartment. At the phone.

  “Did you really think you were going to hide something from me?” Manx asked. “Here in this car?”

  It didn’t seem like the kind of question that required an answer.

  Manx crossed his arms tightly over his chest, almost as if giving himself a hug. He was smiling to himself. He didn’t look angry at all.

  “Hiding something in this car is as bad as putting it in the pocket of my coat. I am bound to notice. Not that I can blame you for trying! Any boy would try. You should eat those eggs. They will get cold.”

  Wayne found himself struggling not to cry. He threw his moon on the floor.

  “Here! Here! Do not be sad! I can’t stand for any child to be unhappy! Would it make you feel better to talk to your mother?”

  Wayne blinked. A single tear splatted on a greasy piece of bacon. The thought of hearing his mother’s voice set off a small explosion inside Wayne’s body, a throb of need.

  He nodded.

  “Do you know what would make me feel better? If you told me about this woman who brought all the news stories to your mother. If you will scratch my back, I will scratch yours!”

  “I don’t believe you,” Wayne whispered. “You won’t call her. No matter what I do.”

  Manx looked over the divider, into the front seat.

  The glove compartment snapped shut with a loud clack! It was so surprising that Wayne almost dumped his plate of eggs.

  The drawer beneath the front driver’s seat slid open all by itself, almost without sound.

  The phone rested in it.

  Wayne stared at it, his breathing shallow, effortful.

  “I have not told you a lie yet,” Manx said. “But I understand that you would be reluctant to trust me. Here is the thing: You know I will not give you the phone if you don’t tell me about your mother’s visitor. I will put it on the floor of this garage and back my car over it. That will be fun! To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil. Now, think if you did tell me what I want to know. One way or another, you will have learned something important. If I do not let you call your mother, you will have learned I am a big fat liar and you will never have to trust me again about anything. But if I do let you call her, then you will know I am as good as my word.”

  Wayne said, “But I don’t know anything about Maggie Leigh that you don’t know.”

  “Well, now you have told me her name. See! The learning process has already begun.”

  Wayne cringed, feeling he had just committed an unforgivable betrayal.

  “Ms. Leigh said something that frightened your mother. What was it? Tell me and I will let you call your mother right this instant!”

  Wayne opened his mouth, not sure what he was going to say, but Manx stopped him. He grabbed his shoulder then and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  “Do not go making up stories, Wayne! Our deal is off if you are not straight with me from the get-go! Twist the truth even a little and you will regret it!”

  Manx reached down and plucked a piece of bacon off the plate. One of Wayne’s teardrops glistened on it, a bright, oily gem. Manx bit off half and began to chew, teardrop and all.

  “Well?” Manx asked.

  “She said you were on the move,” Wayne said. “That you were out of jail and that Mom had to watch out. And I guess that’s what frightened my mother.”

  Manx frowned, chewing slowly, his jaw moving in an exaggerated way.

  “I didn’t hear anything else. Really.”

  “How did your mother and this woman know each other?”

  Wayne shrugged. “Maggie Leigh said she met my mother when she was a kid, but my mom said she had never met her before.”

  “And which of them do you think was telling the truth?” Manx asked.

  That one caught Wayne off guard, and he was slow to reply. “My . . . mother.”

  Manx swallowed his bite of bacon and beamed. “See. That was easy. Well. I am sure your mother will be glad to hear from you.” He began to lean forward to reach for the phone—then sank back into his seat. “Oh! There is one more thing. Did this Maggie Leigh say anything about a bridge?”

  Wayne’s whole body seemed to pulse in reaction to this question; a kind of tingling throb surged through him, and he thought, Don’t tell him that.

  “No,” he said, before he had time to think. His voice went thick and choked, as if his lie were a piece of toast that had momentarily jammed in his throat.

  Manx turned a sly, sleepy smile upon him. His eyelids sank to half-mast. He began to move, putting one foot out the open door, rising to go. At the same time, the drawer with the phone in it came to life, slamming shut with a loud bang.

  “I mean yes!” Wayne cried, grabbing him by the arm. The sudden movement upset the plate in his lap, turning it over, dumping eggs and toast on the floor. “Yes, all right! She said she had to find you again! She asked if she could still use the bridge to find you!”

  Manx paused, half in, half out of the car, Wayne’s grip still on his forearm. He stared down at Wayne’s hand with that look of dreamy amusement.

  “I thought we agreed you were going to tell the truth from the get-go.”

  “I did! I just forgot for a moment! Please!”

  “You forgot, all right. You forgot to tell me the truth!”

  “I’m sorry!”

  Manx didn’t seem upset at all. He said, “Well. It was a momentary lapse. Maybe I can still allow a phone call. But I am going to ask you one more question, and I want you to think before you answer. And when you do answer, I want you to tell me the truth, so help you God. Did Maggie Leigh say anything about how your mother would get to this bridge? What did she say about the bike?”

  “She . . . she didn’t say anything about the bike! No, I swear!” Because Manx had started to pull his arm free. “I don’t think she knew anything about the Triumph!”

  Manx hesitated. “The Triumph?”

  “Mom’s motorcycle. You remember. The one she was pushing up the road. She’s been fixing it for weeks. She works on it all the time, even when she should be sleeping. Is that the bike you mean?”

  Manx’s eyes had assumed a cool, remote quality. His face softened. He bit his lower lip with his little teeth. It was an expression that made him look feebleminded.

  “Huh! Your mother is trying to build a new ride. So she can do it again. So she can find me. You know, I wondered if she might be getting up to her old tricks as soon as I saw her pushing that motorcycle! And this Maggie Leigh—I imagine she has a ride of her own. Or she at least knows about those who travel on the other roads. Well. I have some more questions, but I am better off putting them to Ms. Leigh directly.” Manx’s hand slipped into the pocket of his greatcoat, drew out the photocopied news story about Nathan Demeter, and turned the sheet of paper so Wayne could look at it. Manx tapped the header on the old stationery:

  HERE PUBLIC LIBRARY

  HERE, IOWA

  “And Here is where to look for her!” Manx said. “It is a good thing it is on the way!”

  Wayne was breathing rapidly, as if he had just run a very long distance. “I want to call my mom.”

  “No,” Manx said, and jerked his arm free. “We had a deal. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. My ears are still stinging from that whopper you tried to slip by me! That was too bad. You will learn soon enough that it is pretty hard to pull the wool over my eyes!”

  “No!” Wayne screamed. “I told you everything you wanted to know! You promised! You said I’d have one more chance.”

  “I said maybe I would allow a phone call if you told me the truth about your mother’s bike. But you didn’t know anyt
hing, and anyway, I did not say I would allow this phone call today. I think we will have to wait until tomorrow. I think if you have to wait until tomorrow, you will learn a very valuable lesson: No one likes a big fibber, Wayne!”

  He shut the door. The lock banged down.

  “No!” Wayne screamed again, but Manx had already turned away, was walking across the garage, weaving between the tall green gas tanks toward the stairs to the loft. “No! It’s not fair!”

  Wayne dropped off the seat, onto the floor. He grabbed the brass handle of the drawer with his phone in it and pulled, but it didn’t budge, might as well have been nailed shut. He put one foot on the back of the divider between the front and the rear compartment and threw all his weight backward. His sweat-slippery hands came right off the handle, and he fell back into the seat.

  “Please!” Wayne screamed. “Please!”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Manx looked back at the car. There was an expression of weary tragedy on his face. His eyes were damp with sympathy. He shook his head, although whether in refusal or simply as a gesture of disappointment, it was impossible to tell.

  He pressed a button on the wall. The automatic garage door rumbled down. He flipped a switch and turned out the lights before going upstairs and left Wayne alone in the Wraith.

  The Lake

  BY THE TIME HUTTER WAS DONE WITH HER THAT AFTERNOON, VIC felt wrung out, as if she were recovering from a bout of stomach flu. Her joints were sore, and her back throbbed. She was desperately hungry but when presented with a turkey sandwich was almost overcome with an urge to vomit. She couldn’t even choke down a whole piece of toast.

  She told Hutter all the old lies about Manx: how he had injected her with something and put her in his car, how she had escaped him in Colorado at the Sleigh House. They sat in the kitchen, Hutter asking the questions and Vic answering them as best she could, while cops came in and out.

  After Vic had told the story of her kidnapping, Hutter wanted to hear about the years after. She wanted to know about the derangement that had led Vic to spend time in a mental hospital. She wanted to know about the time Vic burned her own house down.

  “I didn’t mean to burn the house down,” Vic said. “I was just trying to get rid of the phones. I stuck them all in the oven. It seemed like the simplest way to stop the phone calls.”

  “The phone calls from dead people?”

  “From dead kids. Yes.”

  “Is that the predominant theme of your delusions? Does it always revolve around dead children?”

  “Did. Was. Past tense,” Vic said.

  Hutter stared at Vic with all the affection of a snake handler approaching a venomous cobra. Vic thought, Just ask me already. Ask me if I killed my little boy. Get it out in the open. She met Hutter’s gaze without blinking or flinching. Vic had been hammered, shot at, nearly run over, institutionalized, addicted, had come close to being burned alive and had run for her life on several occasions. An unfriendly stare was nothing.

  Hutter said, “You might want to rest and freshen up. I’ve scheduled your statement for five-twenty. That should get us the maximum prime-time coverage.”

  Vic said, “I wish I thought there was something I knew—something I could tell you—that would help you find him.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” Hutter said. “Thank you. I have a lot of good information here.”

  Hutter looked away, and Vic imagined that the interview was over. But as she rose to go, Hutter reached for something leaning against the wall: some sheets of bristol board.

  “Vic,” Hutter said, “there is one other thing.”

  Vic stood still, a hand on the back of her chair.

  Hutter put the stack of bristol board on the table, turned so Vic could look at the illustrations. Her illustrations, the pages from the new book, Search Engine’s Fifth Gear, the holiday story. What she had been working on when she wasn’t assembling the Triumph. Hutter began to shuffle the big card-stock pages, giving Vic a moment to take in each picture, rendered in nonphotographic blue pencil, inked, then finished in watercolors. The paper rasped in a way that made Vic think of a fortune-teller shuffling a tarot deck, preparing to deal a very bad outlook.

  Hutter said, “I told you, they use the Search Engine puzzles at Quantico to teach students about careful observation. When I saw that you had part of a new book out in the carriage house, I couldn’t help myself. I’m stunned by what you’ve got on the page here. You really do give Escher a run for his money. Then I looked close and started wondering. This is for a Christmas book, isn’t it?”

  The urge to get away from the pile of bristol board—to shrink from her own drawings, as if they were photographs of skinned animals—surged inside her and then was smothered in a moment. She wanted to say she had never seen any of these pictures before, wanted to scream she didn’t know where they had come from. Both of these statements would’ve been fundamentally true, but she clamped down on them, and when she spoke, her voice was weary and disinterested.

  “Yeah. My publisher’s idea.”

  “Well,” Hutter said, “do you think—I mean, is it possible—that this is Christmasland? That the person who grabbed your son is aware of what you’ve been working on and that there’s some kind of connection between your new book and what we saw when we tried to track your son’s iPhone?”

  Vic stared at the first illustration. It showed Search Engine and little Bonnie, clasping each other on a shattered plate of ice, somewhere in the Arctic Ocean. Vic remembered drawing a mechanical squid, piloted by Mad Möbius Stripp, coming up through the ice beneath them. But this drawing showed dead-eyed children under the ice, reaching up through the cracks with bony white claws. They grinned to show mouths filled with delicate hooked fangs.

  On another page Search Engine hunted for a way through a maze of towering candy canes. Vic remembered drawing that—drawing in a sweet, lazy trance, swaying to the Black Keys. She did not remember drawing the children who hid in corners and side alleys, holding scissors. She did not remember drawing little Bonnie staggering about blind, her hands clapped over her eyes. They’re playing scissors-for-the-drifter, she thought randomly.

  “I don’t see how,” Vic said. “No one has seen these pages.”

  Hutter raced her thumb down one edge of the stack of paper and said, “It struck me as a bit surprising that you’d be drawing Christmas scenes in the middle of the summer. Try to think. Is there any chance what you’ve been working on could tie in to—”

  “In to Charlie Manx’s decision to pay me back for sending him to jail?” Vic asked. “I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty straightforward. I crossed him, and now it’s get-even time. If we’re all done, I’d like to lie down.”

  “Yes. You must be tired. And who knows? Maybe if you have a chance to rest, something else will come to you.”

  Hutter’s tone was calm enough, but Vic thought she heard an insinuation in this last statement, the suggestion that they both understood that Vic had more to tell.

  Vic didn’t know her own house. There were magnetic whiteboards leaning against the couches in her living room. One of them had a map showing the Northeast; another had a timeline written in red marker. Folders crammed full of printouts were stacked on every available surface. Hutter’s geek squad was squeezed together on the couch like college students in front of an Xbox; one of them was talking into a Bluetooth earpiece while the others worked on laptops. No one looked at her. She didn’t matter.

  Lou was in the bedroom, in the rocking chair in the corner. She eased the door shut behind her and crept to him through the dark. The curtains were drawn, the room gloomy and airless.

  His shirt was smeared with black fingerprints. He smelled of the bike and the carriage house—a not-unpleasant cologne. There was a sheet of brown paper taped to his chest. His round, heavy face was gray in the dim light, and with that note hanging off him he looked like a daguerreotype of a dead gunslinger: THIS IS WHAT WE DO TO OUTLAWS.

  V
ic looked at him, at first with concern, then alarm. She was reaching for his chubby forearm, to see if she could find his pulse—she was sure he wasn’t breathing—when he inhaled suddenly, one nostril whistling. Just asleep. He had dropped off to sleep in his boots.

  She drew her hand back. She had never seen him look so fatigued or so sick. There was gray in his stubble. It seemed somehow wrong that Lou, who loved comics, and his son, and boobies, and beer, and birthday parties, should ever get old.

  She squinted at the note, which read:

  “Bike still isn’t right. Needs parts that will take weeks to order. Wake me up when you want to talk about it.”

  Reading those four words—“bike still isn’t right”—was nearly as bad as reading “Wayne found dead.” She felt they were dangerously close to the same thing.

  Not for the first time in her life, she wished that Lou had never picked her up on his motorcycle that day, wished that she had slipped and dropped to the bottom of the laundry chute and smothered to death there, sparing her the trouble of dragging her ass through the rest of her sorry life. She would not have lost Wayne to Manx, because there would be no Wayne. Choking to death on smoke was easier than feeling what she felt now, a kind of tearing inside that never stopped. She was a bedsheet, being ripped this way and that, and soon enough would be nothing but rags.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, staring vacantly into the darkness and seeing her own drawings, the pages Tabitha Hutter had shown her from the new Search Engine. She did not know how anyone could look at such work and suspect her of innocence: all those drowned children, all those drifts of snow, all those candy canes, all that hopelessness. They were going to lock her up soon, and then it would be too late to do anything for Wayne. They were going to lock her up, and she couldn’t blame them in the slightest; she suspected Tabitha Hutter of weakness for not putting her in handcuffs already.

  Her weight creased the mattress. Lou had dumped his money and his cell phone in the center of the quilt, and now they slid toward her, came to rest against her hip. She wished there were someone to call, to tell her what to do, to tell her that everything would be all right. Then it came to her that there was.