Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  In 2009 Maggie had been charged with public endangerment for starting a fire in an abandoned building. She had drug paraphernalia in her possession at the time.

  In 2010 she had been arrested and charged with squatting and possession of heroin.

  In 2011 she was arrested for solicitation. Maybe Maggie Leigh could predict the future, but her psychic gift had not warned her to stay clear of the undercover cop in the lobby of a Cedar Rapids motel. She got thirty days for it. Later that same year, she was picked up again, but this time her destination was the hospital, not jail; she was suffering from exposure. In that article her “plight” was described as “all too frequent among Iowa’s homeless,” which was how Wayne found out she was living on the street.

  “You want to see her because she knew you were coming and she told my mom,” Wayne said finally.

  “I need to see her because she knew I was on the road and wanted to make trouble for me,” Manx said. “And if I do not have words with her, I cannot be sure she will not make trouble for me again. This is not the first time I have had to deal with someone of her ilk. I try whenever possible to avoid people like her. They are always nettlesome.”

  “People like her . . . You mean other librarians?”

  Manx snorted. “You are being coy with me. I am glad to see you recovering your sense of humor. I mean to say there are other people besides me who can access the secret shared worlds of thought.” He reached up and tapped his temple, to show where that world resided. “I have my Wraith, and when I am behind the wheel of this car, I can find my way onto the secret roads that lead to Christmasland. I have known others who could use totems of their own to turn reality inside out. To reshape it like the soft clay it is. There was Craddock McDermott, who claimed that his spirit existed in a favorite suit of his. There is the Walking Backwards Man, who has an awful watch that runs in reverse. You do not want to meet the Walking Backwards Man in a dark alley, child! Or anywhere else! There is the True Knot, who live on the road and are in much the same line of work as myself. I leave them be and they are glad to return the favor. And our Maggie Leigh will have a totem of her own, which she uses to pry and spy. Probably these Scrabble tiles she mentions. Well. She seems to have taken quite an interest in me. I guess if we are driving by, it would only be polite to pay a visit. I would like to meet her and see if I can’t cure her of her curiosity!”

  He shook his head and then laughed. That husky-hoarse caw of his was an old man’s laugh. The road to Christmasland could make his body young, but it couldn’t do anything about the way he laughed.

  He drove. The dotted yellow line stammered past on the left.

  Finally Manx sighed and went on. “I don’t mind telling you, Wayne, almost all of the trouble I’ve ever known started with one woman or another. Margaret Leigh and your mother and my first wife were all cut from the same cloth, and Lord knows there have been plenty more where they came from. Do you know what? All the happiest times in my life were times when I was free of the feminine influence! When I didn’t have to make accommodations. Men spend most of their lives being passed from woman to woman and being pressed into service for them. You cannot imagine the life I have saved you from! Men cannot stop thinking about women. They get thinking about a lady and it is like a hungry man thinking about a rare steak. When you are hungry and you smell a steak on the grill, you get distracted by that tight feeling in your throat and you quit thinking. Women are aware of this. They take advantage of it. They set terms, same as your mother sets terms before you come to dinner. If you don’t clean your room, change your shirt, and wash your hands, you aren’t allowed to sit at the dinner table. Most men figure they are worth something if they can meet the terms a woman sets for them. It provides them with their whole sense of value. But when you take a woman out of the picture, a man can get a little quiet inside. When there’s no one to bargain with, except for yourself and other men, you can figure yourself out. That always feels good.”

  “Why didn’t you divorce your first wife?” Wayne asked. “If you didn’t like her?”

  “No one did back then. It never even crossed my mind. It crossed my mind to leave. I even did leave a time or two. But I came back.”

  “Why?”

  “I got hungry for steak.”

  Wayne asked, “How long ago was it—when you were first married?”

  “Are you asking how old I am?”

  “Yes.”

  Manx smiled. “I will tell you this: On our first date, Cassie and I went to see a silent movie! It was that long ago!”

  “What movie?”

  “It was a horror picture from Germany, although the title cards were in English. During the scary parts, Cassie would hide her face against me. We attended the show with her father, and if he had not been there, I believe she would’ve crawled into my lap. She was only sixteen at the time, just a nub of a thing, graceful and considerate and shy. This is the way with many women. In youth they are precious gems of possibility. They shudder with feverish life and desire. When they turn spiteful, it is like a chick molting, shedding the fuzz of youth for darker feathers! Women often give up their early tenderness as a child gives up his baby teeth.”

  Wayne nodded and thoughtfully tugged one of his upper teeth out of his mouth. He poked his tongue at the hole where it had been, the blood oozing in a warm trickle. He could feel a new tooth, beginning to protrude where the old one had been, although it felt less like a tooth, more like a small fishing hook.

  He put the lost tooth in the pocket of his shorts, with the others. He had lost five teeth in the thirty-six hours he had been in the Wraith. He wasn’t worried about it. He could feel rows and rows of small new teeth coming in.

  “Later, you know, my wife accused me of being a vampire, just like you,” Manx said. “She said I was like the fiend in that first movie we saw together, the German picture. She said I was draining the life out of our two daughters, feeding off them. But here it is, so many years later, and my daughters are still going strong, happy and young and full of fun! If I were trying to drain the life out of them, I guess I did a poor job of it. For a few years there, my wife made me so unhappy I was about ready to kill her and me and the children, too, just to be done with it. But now I can look back and laugh. Have a peek at my license plate sometime. I took my wife’s horrid ideas about me and made a joke out of them. That is the way to survive! You have to learn to laugh, Wayne. You have to keep finding ways to have fun! Do you think you can remember that?”

  “I think so,” Wayne said.

  “This is all right,” Manx told him. “Two guys driving together at night! This is just fine. I don’t mind saying you are better company than that Bing Partridge. At least you do not feel the need to make a foolish song out of everything.” In a shrill, piping voice, Manx sang, “I love you, I love me, I love playing with my winkie-wee!” He shook his head. “I have had a number of long trips with Bing, and each was longer than the last. You cannot imagine what a relief it is to be with someone who is not always singing foolish songs or asking foolish questions.”

  “Can we get something to eat soon?” Wayne asked.

  Manx slapped the wheel and laughed. “I guess I spoke too quickly—because if that is not a foolish question, it is close to it, young Master Wayne! You were promised some sweet-potato fries, and by God I mean for you to have them. I have brought over a hundred children to Christmasland in the last century, and I have not starved one to death yet.”

  The diner of the fabled sweet-potato fries was another twenty minutes west, an installation of chrome and glass set in a parking lot the size of a football field. Sodium-vapor lights on thirty-foot-high steel poles lit the blacktop as bright as day. The lot was crowded with eighteen-wheelers, and through the front windows Wayne could see that every stool along the bar was occupied, as if it were twelve noon and not twelve at night.

  The whole country was on the watch for an old man and a child in an antique Rolls-Royce Wraith, but not one person in
the diner looked outside and took note of them, and Wayne was not surprised. He had by now accepted that the car could be seen but not noticed. It was like a channel on TV that was broadcasting static—everyone skipped right over it. Manx parked up front, nose-in to the side of the building, and it did not once occur to Wayne to try jumping or screaming or banging on the glass.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Manx said, and winked at Wayne before he climbed out of the car and made his way inside.

  Wayne could see through the windscreen and into the diner, and he watched Manx weave through the crowd bunched around the front counter. The TVs above the bar showed cars zooming around a racetrack; then the president behind a podium, waving his finger; then an icy blonde speaking into a microphone while she stood in front of a lake.

  Wayne frowned. The lake looked familiar. The picture cut, and suddenly Wayne was looking at the rental house on Winnipesaukee, cop cars parked along the road out front. There in the diner, Manx was watching the TV, too, his head tilted back to see.

  The picture cut again, and Wayne saw his mother coming out of the carriage house on the Triumph. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her hair whipped behind her, and she rode straight at the camera. The cameraman couldn’t get out of the way in time. His mother sideswiped him as she sped past. The falling camera offered a whirling view of sky, grass, and gravel before hitting the ground.

  Charlie Manx walked briskly out of the diner, got behind the wheel, and NOS4A2 glided back onto the road.

  His eyes were filmed over, and the corners of his mouth were pinched in a hard, disagreeable frown.

  “I guess we’re not going to have those sweet-potato fries,” Wayne said.

  But if Charlie Manx heard him, he gave no sign.

  The House of Sleep

  SHE DID NOT FEEL HURT; SHE WAS NOT IN PAIN. PAIN WOULD COME LATER.

  Nor did it seem to her that she woke up, that there was ever a single moment of rising to awareness. Instead the parts of her began, reluctantly, to fit themselves back together. It was long, slow work, as long and slow as fixing the Triumph had been.

  She remembered the Triumph before she even remembered her own name.

  Somewhere a phone rang. She heard it clearly, the brash, old-fashioned rattle of a hammer on a bell, once, twice, three times, four. The sound called her back to the world but was gone by the time she knew she was awake.

  The side of her face was wet and cool. Vic was on her stomach, on the floor, head turned to the side, cheek in a puddle. Her lips were dry and cracked, and she could not remember ever being so thirsty. She lapped at the water and tasted grit and cement, but the puddle was cool and good. She licked her lips to moisten them.

  There was a boot near her face. She could see the black rubber waffling on the sole and a dangling shoelace. She had been seeing this boot off and on for an hour now, registering it for a moment, then forgetting about it as soon as she closed her eyes again.

  Vic could not say where she was. She supposed she should get up and find out. She thought there was a good chance that the carefully fitted-together fragments of herself would collapse once more into glittering powder when she tried, but she didn’t see any way around it. She sensed that no one would be coming to check on her anytime soon.

  She had been in an accident. On the motorcycle? No. She was in a basement. She could see the stained concrete walls, the surface flaking away to show stone behind. She could make out a faint basement odor as well, partly obscured by other smells: a strong reek of seared metal and a whiff of fecal matter, like an open latrine.

  She got her hands under her and pushed herself up to her knees.

  It didn’t hurt as bad as she thought it would. She felt aches in her joints, in the small of her back, in her ass, but they were like the aches caused by flu, not like the aches of shattered bones.

  When she saw him, it came back to her, all of it, in a single piece. Her escape from Lake Winnipesaukee, the bridge, the ruined church, the man named Bing who had tried to gas her and rape her.

  The Gasmask Man was in two pieces, connected by a single fatty string of gut. The top half of him was out in the hall. His legs were just inside the door, his boots close to where Vic had been sprawled.

  The metal tank of sevoflurane had shattered, but he still held the pressure regulator that had been attached to the top, and some of the tank was attached to that—a helmet-shaped dome of twisted metal spikes. He was the thing that smelled like the ruptured septic tank, probably because his internal septic tank had in fact ruptured. She could smell his bowels.

  The room looked skewed, knocked crooked. Vic felt dizzy taking it all in, as if she had sat up too quickly. The bed had been flipped over, so she could see the underside of it, the springs and legs. The sink had come away from the wall, hung at a forty-five-degree angle above the floor, supported only by a pair of pipes, which had come loose from their braces. Water bubbled from a cracked joint, pooling upon the floor. Vic thought if she had dozed a while longer, there was an excellent chance she could’ve drowned.

  It took some doing to get to her feet. Her left leg didn’t want to unbend, and when it did, she felt a stab of pain intense enough to cause her to draw a sharp breath through clenched teeth. The kneecap was bruised in shades of green and blue. She didn’t dare put much weight on it, suspected it would fold under any real pressure.

  Vic took a last look around the room, a visitor to a grubby exhibit in some museum of suffering. No, nothing else to see here. Let’s move along, folks. We have some fabulous pieces to examine in the next room.

  She stepped between the Gasmask Man’s legs and then over him, being careful not to snag a foot on that low gut-string trip wire. The sight of it was so unreal she couldn’t feel ill.

  Vic maneuvered around the top half of his body. She didn’t want to look at his face and kept her eyes averted while she moved past him. But before she had gone two steps back the way she’d come, she couldn’t help herself and glanced over her shoulder.

  His head was turned to the side. The clear eyewindows showed staring, shocked eyes. The respirator had been punched backward to fill his open mouth, a gag made of melted black plastic and charred fiber.

  She made her way down the hall. It was like crossing the deck of a boat beginning to capsize. She kept drifting to her right and putting a hand against the wall to steady herself. Only there was nothing wrong with the hallway. Vic herself was the boat in danger of rolling over, sinking back down into a churning darkness. She forgot to go easy once and let her weight settle on the left leg. The knee immediately folded, and she threw out an arm, grabbing for something to support her. Her hand closed on the bust of Jesus Christ, his face charred and bubbled on one side. The bust sat atop a bookshelf crammed with pornography. Jesus grinned at her lewdly, and when she drew her hand away, it was streaked with ash. GOD BURNED ALIVE ONLY DEV1LS NOW.

  She would not forget about the left leg again. A thought occurred to her, random, not even entirely intelligible: Thank God it’s a British bike.

  At the base of the stairs, her feet caught on a mound of garbage bags, a plastic-wrapped weight, and she tipped forward and fell into it—for the second time. She’d landed on this same mass of garbage bags when the Gasmask Man had knocked her down the stairs; they had cushioned her fall and quite likely saved her from shattering her neck or skull.

  It was cold and heavy but not entirely stiff. Vic knew what was under the plastic, knew by the sharp raised edge of hip and the flat plane of chest. She did not want to see or know, but her hands tore at the plastic anyhow. The corpse wore a Glad-bag shroud, held tightly shut by duct tape.

  The smell that gushed out was not the odor of decay but worse in some ways: the cloying fragrance of gingerbread. The man beneath was slim and had probably been handsome once. He hadn’t decomposed so much as mummified, his skin shriveling and yellowing, the eyes sinking back into his sockets. His lips were parted as if he had died in the middle of uttering a cry, although that might’ve been an
effect of his flesh tightening and drawing back from his teeth.

  Vic exhaled; it sounded curiously like a sob. She put her hand on the man’s cold face.

  “I’m sorry,” Vic said to the dead man.

  She couldn’t fight it, had to cry. She had never been what anyone would call a crying woman, but in some moments tears were the only reasonable response. To weep was a kind of luxury; the dead felt no loss, wept for no one and nothing.

  Vic stroked the man’s cheek again and touched a thumb to his lips, and that was when she saw the sheet of paper, mashed up and shoved into his mouth.

  The dead man looked at her pleadingly.

  Vic said, “Okay, friend,” and plucked the paper out of the dead man’s mouth. She did it without any disgust. The dead man had faced a bad end here, had faced it alone, had been used, and hurt, and discarded. Whatever the dead man had wanted to say, Vic wanted to listen, even if she was too late for it to do any good.

  The note was written in smudged pencil, with a shaky hand. The scrap of paper was a torn shred of Christmas wrapping.

  My head is clear enuff to write. Only time in days. The essentials:

  • I am Nathan Demeter of Brandenburg, KY

  • Was held by Bing Partridge

  • Works for a man named Manks

  • I have a daughter, Michelle, who is beautiful and kind. Thank God the car took me, not her. Make sure she reads the following:

  I love you girl. He can’t hurt me too bad because when I close my eyes I see you.

  It is all right to cry but don’t give up on laughter.