by Joe Hill
“What are you smiling about?” Manx asked, his voice shuddering with hate. “You have nothing to smile about! You are going to be dead, and I am going to be alive. You could’ve lived, too, you know. For another day anyway. There were things I wanted to know . . . like who else you told about me. I wanted—Don’t you look away from me when I am talking to you!”
She had shut her eyes. She didn’t want to stare at his upside-down face from here on the ground. It wasn’t that he was ugly. It was that he was stupid. It was the way his mouth hung open to show his overbite and his crooked brown teeth. It was the way his eyes bulged from his skull.
He put his boot in her stomach. If there was any justice, she wouldn’t have been able to feel it, but there was no justice and never had been, and she screamed. Who knew you could hurt so bad and not pass out from it?
“You listen, now. You did not have to die like this! I am not such a bad fellow! I am a friend to children and wish no ill will on anyone except those who would try to stop my work! You did not have to line up against me. But you did, and look where it has got you. I am going to live forever, and so is the boy. We will be living the good life while you are turning to dirt in a box. And—”
She got it then. Strung the letters together, saw what they spelled. She got it, and she made a huffing sound, blowing a spray of blood on Manx’s boots. It was an unmistakable sound: the sound of laughter.
Manx scuttled backward half a foot, as if she had tried to bite him.
“What’s funny? What’s so funny about you dying and me living? I am going to drive away, and no one is going to stop me, and you are going to bleed to death here, and where is the big laugh in that?”
She tried to tell him. She moved her lips in the shape of the word. But all she could do was wheeze and spray more blood. She had lost all power of speech, and at this notion she felt a sweet tingle of relief. No more stammering. No more trying desperately to make herself understood while her tongue refused to cooperate.
Manx rose to his full height, kicking the letters as he stood, scattering them, scattering what they spelled, if you took the time to see how to put them together: TRIUMPH.
He walked quickly away, pausing only to collect her hat from the pavement, dust off the brim, and set it on his own head. A door slammed. The radio turned on. She heard the jingle of Christmas bells and a warm, male voice singing, “Dashing through the snow . . .”
The car jolted into gear and started to move. Maggie closed her eyes.
TRIUMPH: 45 points if you could line it up with the triple word and a double letter. TRIUMPH, Maggie thought. Vic wins.
Hampton Beach, New Hampshire
VIC PUSHED THROUGH THE DOOR INTO TERRY’S PRIMO SUBS, WHERE the air was warm and damp and heavy with the smell of onion rings broiling in the deep-fat fryer.
Pete was working the counter—good old Pete, his face badly sunburned, a line of zinc down his nose.
“I know what you’re here for,” Pete said, reaching under the counter. “I’ve got something for you.”
“No,” Vic said. “I don’t give a fuck about my mother’s bracelet. I’m looking for Wayne. Did you see Wayne?”
It confused her to find herself back in Terry’s, ducking under the ribbons of flypaper. Pete couldn’t help her find Wayne. She was angry with herself, wasting time here when she needed to be out there looking for her boy.
A police siren shrieked out on the avenue. Maybe someone had seen the Wraith. Maybe they had found her son.
“No,” Pete said. “It’s not a bracelet. It’s something else.” He ducked behind the cash register, then stood up and put a silver hammer down on the counter. There was blood and hair stuck to the business end.
Vic felt the dream drawing tight around her, as if the world were a giant cellophane bag and it was suddenly wrinkling and pulling in from all sides.
“No,” Vic said. “I don’t want it. That’s not what I came for. That’s no good.”
Outside, the police siren cut off with a strangled squonk!
“I think it’s good,” said Charlie Manx, his hand on the crosshatched handle. It had been Charlie Manx on the other side of the counter all along, Charlie Manx dressed like a cook, in a bloodstained apron and a cocked white hat, a line of zinc down his bony nose. “And what’s good stays good, no matter how many heads you split open with it.”
He lifted the hammer, and Vic screamed and threw herself back from him and right out of the dream, into
Real Life
VIC WOKE, AWARE THAT THE HOUR WAS LATE AND THAT SOMETHING was wrong.
She could hear voices, muted by stone and distance, could identify the speakers as male, even if she could not determine what they were saying. She smelled the faintest whiff of burned phosphorous. She had the muddled idea that she’d slept right through a commotion, sealed in the soundproofed sarcophagus fashioned by Maggie’s pharmaceuticals.
She rolled herself up to a sitting position, feeling she ought to get dressed and go.
After a few moments, she determined she was already dressed. She had not even removed her sneakers before falling asleep. Her left knee was a poisonous shade of violet and as fat as one of Lou’s knees.
A red candle burned in the darkness, reflecting an image of itself in the fish tank’s glass. There was a note over on the desk; Maggie had left her a note before going. That was thoughtful of her. Vic could see her .38-caliber paperweight, Chekhov’s gun, holding it down. Vic was hoping for instructions, a set of simple steps that would bring Wayne back to her, make her leg better, make her head better, make her life better. Barring that, just a note saying where Maggie had gone would be all right: “Ran to the Nite Owl for ramen and drugs will be right back xoxo.”
Vic heard the voices again. Someone kicked a beer can, not far away. They were moving toward her, they were close, and if she didn’t blow out the candle, they were going to wander into the old children’s wing and see the light shining through the fish tank. Even as this thought came to her, she understood that it was already almost too late. She heard glass crunching underfoot, boot heels moving closer.
She sprang up. Her knee collapsed. She dropped onto it, bit down on a scream.
When Vic tried to stand, the leg refused to cooperate. She stretched it out behind her with great care—shutting her eyes and pushing through the pain—and then dragged herself across the floor, using her knuckles and her right foot. What it saved in agony, it made up for in humiliation.
Her right hand grabbed the back of the rolling chair. Her left took the edge of the desk. She used the two to hoist herself up and sway forward over the desktop. The men were in the other room, right on the other side of the wall. Their flashlights had not yet swung toward the fish tank, and she thought it possible they had not observed the dim, coppery shine of the candle flame yet, and she bent forward to blow it out, then caught herself staring down at the note written on a sheet of Here Library stationery.
“WHEN THE ANGELS FALL, THE CHILDREN GO HOME.”
The paper was spattered with water stains, as if long ago someone had read this message and wept.
Vic heard one of the voices in the next room: Hank, we got a light. This was followed, a moment later, by a crackle of voices on a walkie-talkie, a dispatcher passing along a message in numbered code. There was a 10-57 at the public library, six officers responding, victim dead on the scene. Vic had bent to put out the candle, but “victim dead” stopped her. She leaned forward, lips pursed, but had forgotten what she’d intended to do.
The door behind her moved, wood scraping against stone, hitting some loose glass and sending it tinkling.
“Excuse me,” came the voice behind her. “Ma’am, could you step over here? Please keep your hands in full sight.”
Vic picked up Chekhov’s gun and turned around with it and pointed it at his chest. “No.”
There were two of them. Neither had his gun out, and she was not surprised. She doubted if most police officers unsnapped their holsters in
the line of duty even once in an average year. Chubby white boys, the both of them. The one in front pointed a powerful penlight at her. The other was stuck in the doorway behind him, still half in the children’s library.
“Ay!” squeaked the boy with the light. “Gun! Gun!”
“Shut up. Stay where you are,” she said. “Keep your hands away from your belts. And drop that flashlight. It’s right in my fucking eyes.”
The cop dropped it. It shut off the moment it fell from his hand, clattered across the floor.
They stood there, freckled and dumpy and scared, the candlelight rising and falling over their faces. One of them was probably coaching his son’s Little League team tomorrow. The other probably liked being a cop because it meant free milkshakes at McDonald’s. They reminded her of kids playing dress-up.
“Who’s dead?” she said.
“Ma’am, you need to put that gun down. No one wants to get hurt tonight,” he said. His voice wavered and cracked like an adolescent boy’s.
“Who?” she said, her voice choking up on her, wavering at the edge of a scream. “Your radio said someone is dead. Who? Tell me now.”
“Some woman,” said the guy in back, stuck in the doorway. The guy in front had raised his hands, palms out. She couldn’t see what the other guy was doing with his hands—probably drawing his gun—but he didn’t matter yet. He was jammed behind his partner, would have to shoot through him to get her. “No ID.”
“What color was her hair?” Vic cried.
The second man said, “Did you know her?”
“What color was her fucking hair?”
“It had orange sprayed into it. Like, orange-soda-colored. You know her?” asked the second cop, the one who probably had his gun out.
It was difficult to work the fact of Maggie’s death into her mind. It was like being asked to multiply fractions while suffering from a head cold—too much work, too baffling. Only a moment ago, they had been stretched out on the couch together, Maggie’s arm over her waist and her legs against the backs of Vic’s thighs. The heat of her had put Vic right to sleep. It amazed Vic that Maggie had slipped off to die someplace while Vic herself slept on. It was bad enough that only a few days before, Vic had yelled at Maggie, had cursed and threatened her. This seemed far worse, graceless and inconsiderate, for Vic to sleep peacefully while Maggie died somewhere out in a street.
“How?” Vic asked.
“Car, maybe. Looks like she got clipped by a car. Jesus. Just put the gun down. Put the gun down and let’s talk.”
“Let’s not,” Vic said, and turned her head and blew out the candle, dropping all three of them into
The Dark
VIC DIDN’T TRY TO RUN. MIGHT AS WELL TRY TO FLY.
Instead she stepped rapidly backward, around the desk and against the wall, keeping the cops in front of her. The blackness was absolute, was a geography of blindness. One of the cops shouted, stumbled in the dark. There was a scuffle of boot heels. Vic believed that the one in back had pushed the other out of his way.
She tossed the paperweight. It made a banging, sliding, rattling thud as it skidded away from her across the floor. Something for them to think about, confuse them about where she was. Vic began to move, keeping the left leg stiff, trying not to put much weight on it. She sensed rather than saw an iron bookshelf on her left and slipped behind it. Somewhere in the blind nightworld, a cop knocked over the broom leaning against the wall. It fell with a bang, followed by a yelp of fright.
Her foot found the edge of a step. If you ever need to get out in a hurry, stay right and keep going down the steps, Maggie had told her, Vic couldn’t remember when. There was a way out of all this darkness, somewhere at the bottom of an unguessable number of stairs. Vic descended.
She moved in a hop, and once her heel came down on a wet, spongy book and she nearly landed on her ass. Vic fell against the wall, steadied herself, and continued. Somewhere behind her she heard shouts, more than two men now. Her breath rasped in her throat, and it occurred to her again that Maggie was dead. Vic wanted to cry for her, but her eyes were so dry they hurt. She wanted Maggie’s death to make everything quiet and still—the way it was supposed to be in a library—but instead everything was bellowing cops and whistling breath and the knocking of her own pulse.
She hopped down a last short flight of steps and saw a slash of nighttime darkness standing out against the fuller, more complete darkness of the stacks. The back door stood partly open, held ajar by a chunk of rock.
Vic slowed as she approached it, expecting to peer out and see a festival of cops in the muddy field behind the library, but when she looked, there was no one. They were all on the far, eastern side of the building. Her motorcycle stood alone, close to the bench, where she had left it. The Cedar River bubbled and churned. The Shorter Way was not there, but then she hadn’t expected it to be.
She yanked the door open and ducked out under yellow tape, holding the left leg stiff, chugging along in her crooked hop. The sound of police scanners carried on the rich, damp heat of the night. She could not see the cop cars, but one of them had its party lights on, and the strobe flashed against the low, cloudy murk above the library.
Vic climbed onto the Triumph, threw the kickstand up, stomped on the starter.
The Triumph boomed.
The rear door of the library opened. The cop who came through it—tearing down the tape as he spilled outside—had his gun in both hands, pointed at the ground.
Vic turned the Triumph in a slow, tight circle, wanting the bridge to be there, spanning the Cedar River. It wasn’t. She was cruising along at less than five miles an hour, and that simply wasn’t fast enough. She had never found the Shorter Way going so slowly. It was a matter of speed and emptiness—shutting her head off and riding.
“You! Get off the bike!” the cop yelled. He began to jog toward her, pointing his gun off to one side.
She steered the Triumph up the narrow road that ran behind the library, banged it into second gear, and gunned it up the hill. The wind snatched at her bloody, matted hair.
Vic cycled up the back road and around to the front of the building. The library fronted a wide avenue, crowded with police cruisers, the night twitching with strobes. At the sound of her engine, men in blue turned their heads to look. There was a small crowd as well, held back by yellow sawhorses, dark figures craning their necks, hoping to see a little blood. One of the cruisers was parked right across the narrow road that looped behind the library.
You’re boxed in, shithead, she thought.
She wheeled the Triumph around, back the way she had come. The Triumph dropped down the pitch of the road as if it were dropping over a cliff. She threw it into third gear, continuing to accelerate. She rushed past the library, over on her left. She dived down toward that muddy half-acre field where Maggie had been waiting for her. A cop waited there now, next to Maggie’s bench.
Vic had the Triumph up to almost forty by now. She pointed it toward the river.
“Just work, you motherfucker,” she said. “I don’t have time for your bullshit.”
She banged it into fourth gear. Her lone headlight rushed across the blacktop, over the dirt, out onto the muddy brown turmoil of the river. She rushed toward the water. Maybe, if she were very lucky, she would drown. Better than getting fished out and locked up and knowing that Wayne was going to Christmasland and she couldn’t do a thing about it.
Vic shut her eyes and thought, Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it. They were perhaps the only true words of prayer she had ever been able to utter with all her heart. Her ears roared with the sound of her own blood.
The bike slammed up onto the muddy ground, punched across it toward the river, and then she heard wood hammering under the tires and the bike began to slew and slip. She opened her eyes, found herself shuddering through the darkness across the rotting old boards of the Shorter Way Bridge. At the other end was only darkness. The roaring in her ears was not blood at all but static. A storm of
white light whirled between the cracks in the walls. The whole lopsided bridge seemed to shudder around her under the weight of the bike.
She rushed past her old, cobwebbed Raleigh and was pitched out into damp, buggy, pine-scented darkness, her back tire clawing at soft earth. Vic planted her foot on the brake that didn’t work and grabbed reflexively at the brake that did. The bike turned sideways and slid. The ground was covered in a springy bed of moss, and the Triumph bunched it up under its tires like loose carpet.
Vic was on a slight embankment, out in the piney woods somewhere. Water dripped in the branches, although it was not actually raining. She kept the bike up while it did a sideways judder across the ground, then cut the engine, snapped down the kickstand.
She looked back into the bridge. At the far end, she could see the library and that freckled, whey-faced cop standing at the entrance to the Shorter Way. He rotated his head slowly, looking at the entrance to the bridge. In another moment he would step inside.
Vic squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head. The left eye hurt, as if it were a metal bolt being screwed into the socket.
“Go away!” she yelled, gritting her teeth.
There was a great clap of sound, as if someone had slammed an enormous door, and a shockwave of hot air—air that smelled like ozone, like a burned metal pan—was flung out at her, almost blew over the bike, and her with it.
She looked up. At first she could not see much through the left eye. Her vision out of that eye was obscured by blurred patches, like splashes of muddy water on a window. But from the other she could see that the bridge had popped out of existence, leaving behind tall pines, the reddish trunks glistening from a recent rain.
And what had happened to the cop at the other end? Vic wondered if he’d put a foot over the threshold—or stuck in his head. What happened if some part of him was over the edge, on the bridge?