by Joe Hill
“Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t worry!” he said. “It’s my mess. It’s my mess, and I’ll clean it up.” He bent and scooped up the envelopes in his big, knuckly hands. “Bing, Bing, you ding-a-ling. You made a mess of everything!”
It was a bad little song, and she wished he hadn’t sung it. It seemed like something someone would do in a dream beginning to go rotten around the edges.
She turned to the phone, a big, bulky thing with a rotary dial. Vic meant to pick up the receiver but then rested her head against the wall and shut her eyes instead. She was so tired, and her left eye hurt so fucking much. Besides. Now that she was here, she didn’t know who to call. She wanted Tabitha Hutter to know about the church at the top of the hill, the torched house of God (GOD BURNED ALIVE ONLY DEV1LS NOW) where Manx and her son had spent the night. She wanted Tabitha Hutter to come here and talk to the old man who had seen them, the old man named Bing (Bing?). But she didn’t even know where here was yet and wasn’t sure it was in her interest to call the police until she did.
Bing. The name disconcerted her in some way.
“What did you say your name is?” she asked, wondering if she could’ve heard him wrong.
“Bing.”
“Like the search engine?” she asked.
“That’s right. But I use Google.”
She laughed—a sound that expressed exhaustion more than humor—and cast a sidelong glance toward him. He had turned his back to her, was tugging something off a hook next to the door. It looked like a shapeless black hat. She had another glance at that old, dented green tank and saw that it wasn’t oxygen after all. The stenciling on the side said SEVOFLURANE, FLAMMABLE.
She turned away from him, back to the phone. She lifted the receiver but still didn’t know who she wanted to call.
“That’s funny,” she said. “I have a search engine of my own. Can I ask you a weird question, Bing?”
“Sure,” he said.
She glided her finger around the rotary dial without turning it.
Bing. Bing. Less like a name, more like the sound a little silver hammer would make hitting a glass bell.
“I’m a bit overtaxed, and the name of this town is slipping my mind,” she said. “Can you tell me where the hell I am?”
Manx had a silver hammer, and the man with him had a gun. Bang, he’d said. Bang. Right before he shot her. Only he said it in a funny, singsongy way, so it was less like a threat, more like a jump-rope rhyme.
“You bet,” Bing said from behind her, his voice muffled, as if he had a hankie over his nose.
She recognized his voice then. It had been muffled the last time she’d heard it and her ears had been ringing from gunfire but she recognized his voice at last.
Vic pivoted on her heel, already knowing what she would see. Bing wore his old-fashioned WWII gasmask again. He still held the garden shears in his right hand.
“You’re in the House of Sleep,” he said. “This is the end of the line for you, bitch.”
And he hit her in the face with the garden shears and broke her nose.
The House of Sleep
VIC TOOK THREE SMALL, STAGGERING STEPS BACKWARD, AND HER heels struck a doorsill. The only open door was the one into the basement. She had time to recall this before the next thing happened. Her legs gave way, and she fell straight back, as if to sit down, but there was no chair there. There was no floor either. She dropped and kept dropping.
This is going to hurt, she thought. There was no alarm in the idea; it was the simple acceptance of fact.
She experienced a brief feeling of suspension, her insides going elastic and strange. The wind swished past her ears. She glimpsed a bare lightbulb overhead and plywood sheeting between exposed beams.
Vic hit a stair, ass-first, with a bony crunch, and was flipped, as casually as someone might toss a pillow in the air. She thought of her father pitching a cigarette out the window of a moving car, the way it would hit the asphalt and sparks would fly on impact.
The next step she hit on her right shoulder, and she was thrown again. Her left knee clubbed something. Her left cheek struck something else—it felt like getting booted in the face.
Vic assumed when she hit bottom that she would smash like a vase. Instead she landed on a lumpy mound of plastic-wrapped softness. She slammed into it face-first, but the lower part of her body continued traveling, her feet pedaling madly in the air. Look, Mom, I’m doing a handstand! Vic remembered screaming one Fourth of July, staring at a world where the sky had become grass and the ground had become stars. She thudded to a stop at last, lying on her back on the plastic-wrapped mass, the staircase now behind her.
Vic stared back up the steep flight of steps, seeing them upside down. She could not feel her right arm. There was a pressure in her left knee that she believed would soon turn to excruciating pain.
The Gasmask Man came down the steps, holding the green metal tank in one hand, carrying it by the valve. He had left the pruning shears behind. It was terrible, the way the gasmask took his face away, replacing his mouth with a grotesque, alien knob and his eyes with clear plastic windows. A part of her wanted to scream, but she was too stunned to make any noise.
He came off the bottom step and stood with her head between his boots. It occurred to her too late that he was going to hurt her again. He lifted the tank in both hands and brought it down into her stomach, pounded the air out of her. Vic coughed explosively and rolled onto her side. When she got her breath back, she thought she would throw up.
The tank clanged as he set it down. The Gasmask Man collected a handful of her hair and yanked. The tearing pain forced a weak cry out of her, in spite of her decision to remain silent. He wanted her on all fours, and she obliged him because it was the only way to make the pain stop. His free hand slipped under her and groped her breast, squeezing it the way someone might test a grapefruit for firmness. He tittered.
Then he dragged. She crawled while she could, because it hurt less, but it didn’t matter to him whether it hurt or not, and when her arms gave out, he kept dragging, pulling her along by her hair. She was horrified to hear herself scream the word “Please!”
Vic had only confused impressions of the basement, which seemed less a room than a single long corridor. She glimpsed a washer and dryer; a naked female mannequin wearing a gasmask; a grinning bust of Jesus, pulling his robe open to show an anatomically correct heart, the side of his face browned and blistered as if he had been held in a fire. She heard a metallic, droning chime coming from somewhere. It went on and on without cessation.
The Gasmask Man stopped at the end of the hall, and she heard a steely clunk, and he slid aside a heavy iron door on a track. Her perceptions couldn’t keep up with the pace of events. A part of her was still back down the hallway, just catching a glimpse of that burned Jesus. Another part of her was in the kitchen, seeing the battered green tank leaning in the chair, SEVOFLURANE, FLAMMABLE. A part of her was up at the torched wreckage of the New American Faith Tabernacle, holding a rock in both hands and banging it down into a shiny brass lock, hard enough to throw copper sparks. A part of her was in New Hampshire, bumming a smoke off Detective Daltry, palming his brass lighter, the one with Popeye on it.
The Gasmask Man forced her to walk on her knees across the track, still yanking her by the hair. In his other hand, he dragged the green tank, SEVOFLURANE. That was what was making the chiming sound—the base of the tank rang softly and continuously as it was pulled across the concrete. It droned like a Tibetan prayer bowl, a monk rolling the hammer around and around the holy dish.
When she was over the track, he jerked her forward, hard, and she found herself on all fours once again. He planted his foot in her ass and shoved, and her arms gave out.
She went down on her chin. Her teeth banged together, and a blackness leaped up from every object in the room—the lamp in the corner, the cot, the sink—as if each piece of furniture had a secret shadow self that could be jolted awake, startle
d into flight like a flock of sparrows.
For a moment that flock of shadows threatened to descend upon her. She chased it back with a cry. The room smelled like old pipes, concrete, unwashed linens, and rape.
Vic wanted to get up, but it was hard enough remaining conscious. She could feel that trembling, living darkness, ready to come uncoiled and spring up all around her. If she passed out now, she would at least not feel him raping her. She would not feel him killing her either.
The door rattled and banged shut with a silvery clash that reverberated in the air. The Gasmask Man gripped her shoulder, pushed her onto her back. Her head rolled loosely on her neck, and her skull rapped the pitted concrete. He knelt over her with a clear plastic mask in one hand, contoured to fit over her mouth and nose. The Gasmask Man took her by the hair and pulled her head up to snap the mask over her face. Then he put his hand on it and held it there. Clear plastic tubing ran back to the tank.
She swatted at the hand clamping the mask to her face, tried to scratch his wrist, but he now wore a pair of heavy canvas gardening gloves. She couldn’t get at any vulnerable meat.
“Breathe deep,” he said. “You’ll feel better. Just relax. Day is done, gone the sun. God burned to death, and I shot him with my gun.”
He kept the one hand over the mask. With the other he reached back and twisted a valve on the tank. She heard a hiss and felt something cool blowing against her mouth, then gasped at a saccharine blast of something that smelled like gingerbread.
She grabbed at the tubing and wound it around one hand and yanked. It came out of the valve with a tinny pop. The tank hissed a visible stream of white vapor. The Gasmask Man glanced back at the green metal tank but did not seem perturbed.
“About half of them does that,” he said. “I don’t like it because it wastes the tank, but if you want to do things hard, we can do them hard.”
He ripped the plastic mask off her face, tossed it into the corner. She started to push her way up onto her elbows, and he drove his fist into her stomach. She doubled over, wrapping her arms around the hurt, holding it tightly, like a loved one. She took a big whooping breath, and the room was filled with the woozy-making fragrance of gingerbread-scented gas.
The Gasmask Man was short—half a foot shorter than Vic—and dumpy, but despite that he moved with the agility of a street performer, a guy who could play the banjo while strolling around on stilts. He picked up the tank in both hands and walked it toward her, pointing the open valve at her. The gas was a white spray as it came from the end of the valve but soon dispersed, became invisible. She gulped another mouthful of air that tasted like dessert. Vic crab-walked backward, pushing herself across the floor on hands and feet, sliding on her butt. She wanted to hold her breath but couldn’t do it. Her trembling muscles were starved for oxygen.
“Where are you going?” he asked through his gasmask. He walked after her with the tank. “It’s airtight in here. Anywhere you go, you still gotta breathe. I got three hundred liters in this tank. I could knock out a tent fulla elephants with three hundred liters, honey.”
He kicked one of her feet, knocking her legs askew, then pushed the toe of his left sneaker into her crotch. She choked on a cry of revulsion. Vic had a fleeting but intense sensation of violation. For one moment she wished the gas had already put her out, didn’t want to feel his foot there, didn’t want to know what was going to happen next.
“Bitch, bitch, go to sleep,” the Gasmask Man said, “Take a nap while I fuck you deep.” He tittered again.
Vic pushed herself back into a corner, thumped her head on the plastered wall. He was still walking at her, holding the tank, fogging the room. The sevoflurane was a white mist that made every object soft and diffuse at the edges. There had been one cot on the other side of the room, but now there were three, tightly overlapping one another, and they were half hidden behind the smoke. In the gathering haze, the Gasmask Man himself split in two, then came back together.
The floor was slowly tipping beneath her, turning into a slide, and at any moment she’d go whisking down it, away from reality and into unconsciousness. She kicked her heels, fighting to hold on, to hold fast in the corner of the room. Vic held her breath, but her lungs were filled not with air but with pain, and her heart was slamming like the engine of the Triumph.
“You’re here, and it’s all better!” the Gasmask Man shrieked, his voice delirious with excitement. “You’re my second chance! You’re here, and now Mr. Manx will come back and I’ll get to go to Christmasland! You’re here, and I’m finally going to get what’s coming to me!”
Images flickered rapidly through her mind, like playing cards shuffled by a magician. She was in the backyard again, Daltry thumbing his lighter, getting no flame, so she took it from him, and blue fire leaped from the starter on her first try. She had paused to look at the picture on the side of the lighter, Popeye throwing a roundhouse, and a sound effect, she couldn’t remember what. Then she visualized the warning on the side of the tank of sevoflurane: FLAMMABLE. This was followed by a simple thought, not an image but a decision. Take him with me. Kill this little turd.
The lighter—she thought—was in her right-hand pocket. She went to dig it out, but it was like reaching into Maggie’s bottomless Scrabble bag; it went on forever and forever and forever.
The Gasmask Man stood at her feet, pointing the valve down at her, holding the tank in both arms. She could hear the tank whispering to her, a long, deadly command to be silent: Shhh.
Her fingers touched a slab of metal, closed around it. She yanked her hand out of her pocket and held the lighter up between her and the Gasmask Man, as if it were a cross to ward off a vampire.
“Don’t make me,” she gasped, and tasted another mouthful of poison gingerbread smoke.
“Don’t make you what?” he said.
She flipped back the top of the lighter. The Gasmask Man heard it click, saw it for the first time, drew back a step.
“Hey,” he said, a note of warning in his voice. He took another step back, cradling the tank in his arms like a child. “Don’t! That isn’t safe! Are you crazy?”
Vic thumbed the steel gear. It made a harsh, scraping noise and spit a burst of white sparks, and for one miraculous moment it lit a ribbon of blue fire in the air. The flame unwound like a snake, the air burning, racing straight back at the tank. That faint white vapor, spraying from the valve, became a savage tongue of fire.
The sevoflurane tank was, briefly, a flamethrower with a short range, spraying flame from side to side as the Gasmask Man reeled away from Vic. He stumbled backward three more steps—inadvertently saving her life in the process. In the flaring light, Vic could read what it said on the side of the lighter:
KABLOOEY.
It was as if the Gasmask Man were pointing a rocket launcher at his chest and triggered it at point-blank range. It exploded through the bottom, a cannonade of white burning gas and shrapnel that lifted him off his feet and punched him back into the door. Three hundred liters of pressurized sevoflurane exploded all at once, turning the tank into a jumbo stick of TNT. Vic had no frame of reference for the sound it made, a great slam that felt like sewing needles stabbed into her eardrums.
The Gasmask Man struck the iron door almost hard enough to tear it off its track. Vic saw him crash into it through a blast of what seemed like pure light, the air glowing with a gassy brilliance that made half the room disappear for an instant in a blinding white flash. She instinctively lifted her hands to protect her face and saw the fine gold hairs on her bare arms crinkling and shriveling from the heat.
In the aftermath of the explosion, the world was changed. The room beat like a heart. Objects throbbed in time to the slamming of her pulse. The air was filled with a whirling golden smoke.
When she had entered the room, she’d seen shadows leaping up from behind the furniture. Now they were casting flashes of brightness. Like the tank of gas, they seemed to be trying to swell and erupt.
She felt a we
t trickling on her cheek and thought it was tears, but when she touched her face, her fingertips came away red.
Vic decided she ought to go. She got up and took a step, and the room slewed violently to the left, and she fell back down.
She took a knee, just like they told you to do in Little League when someone was hurt. Burning scraps fell through the air. The room lurched to the right, and she lurched with it, onto her side.
The brightness jumped up from the cot, the sink, flashed around the edges of the doorway. She had not known that every object in the world could contain a secret core of both darkness and light, needing only a violent shock to reveal one or the other. With each thump of her heart, the brightness brightened. She could not hear any sound except the ragged working of her lungs.
She breathed deeply the perfume of burned gingerbread. The world was a bright bubble of light, doubling in size before her, swelling, straining, filling her vision, growing toward the inevitable—
Pop.
CHRISTMASLAND
JULY 7–9
The St. Nicholas Parkway
NORTH OF COLUMBUS, WAYNE CLOSED HIS EYES FOR A MOMENT, and when he opened them, the Christmas moon was sleeping in the night above and either side of the highway was crowded with snowmen who turned their heads to watch the Wraith pass.
The mountains rose before them, a monstrous wall of black stone at the edge of the world. The peaks were so high it looked as if the moon itself might get snagged among them.
In a fold a little below the highest part of the highest mountain was a basket of lights. It shone in the darkness, visible from hundreds of miles away, a great glowing Christmas ornament. The sight of it was so exciting that Wayne could hardly remain in his seat. It was a cup of fire, a scoop of hot coals. It throbbed, and Wayne throbbed with it.
Mr. Manx had one hand loose on the wheel. The road was so straight it could’ve been drawn with a ruler. The radio was on, and a boys’ choir sang “O Come All Ye Faithful.” In Wayne’s heart was an answer to their sacred invitation: We are on our way. We are coming as fast as we can. Save a little Christmas for us.