Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  The Rolls-Royce Wraith turned onto the long gravel road. A reflection of the bone-colored moon floated on the windshield, caught in a cat’s cradle of black branches.

  They watched it make its stately approach. Lou felt his thick legs trembling. I just need to be brave for a little while longer, he thought. Lou believed with all his heart in God, had believed since he was a kid and saw George Burns in Oh, God! on video. He sent up a mental prayer to skinny, wrinkled George Burns now: Please. I was brave once, let me be brave again. Let me be brave for Wayne and Vic. I’m going to die anyway, so let me die the right way. It came to him then that he had wanted this, had often daydreamed of it: a final chance to show he could lay aside fear and do the thing that needed to be done. His big chance had come at last.

  The Rolls-Royce rolled past them, tires crunching on the gravel. It seemed to slow as it came abreast of them, not fifteen feet off, as if the driver had seen them and was peering out at them. But the car did not stop, merely proceeded on its unhurried way.

  “The second part?” Lou breathed, aware of his pulse rapping painfully in his throat. Christ, he hoped he didn’t stroke out until it was all over.

  “What?” Vic asked, watching the car.

  “What was the second part of the plan?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said, and took the other bracelet of his handcuffs and locked it around the narrow trunk of a birch tree. “The second part is you stay here.”

  In the Trees

  ON LOU’S SWEET, ROUND, BRISTLY FACE WAS THE LOOK OF A CHILD who has just seen a car back over his favorite toy. Tears sprang to his eyes, the brightest thing in the dark. It distressed her to see him nearly crying, to see his shock and disappointment, but the sound of the handcuff snapping shut—that sharp, clear click, echoing on the frozen air—was the sound of a final decision, a choice made and irreversible.

  “Lou,” she whispered, and put a hand on his face. “Lou, don’t cry. It’s all right.”

  “I don’t want you to go alone,” he said. “I wanted to be there for you. I said I would be there for you.”

  “You were,” she said. “You still will be. You’re with me wherever I go: You’re part of my inscape.” She kissed his mouth, tasted tears, but did not know if they were his or her own. She pulled back from him and said, “One way or another, Wayne is walking away tonight, and if I’m not with him, he’s going to need you.”

  He blinked rapidly, weeping without shame. He did not struggle at the cuffs. The birch was perhaps eight inches thick and thirty feet high. The bracelet of the cuff barely fit around it. He stared at her with a look of grief and bewilderment. He opened his mouth but couldn’t seem to find any words.

  The Wraith pulled up to the right of the blasted ruin, alongside the single standing wall. It stopped there, idling. Vic looked toward it. In the distance she could hear Burl Ives.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  She reached down past the cuff to finger the paper hoop around his wrist; the one they had given him in the hospital, the one she had seen back in her father’s house.

  “What’s this, Lou?” she asked.

  “Oh, that?” he asked, and then made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “I passed out again. It’s nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I just lost my father tonight, and I can’t lose you, too. If you think I’m going to risk your life any more than it’s already been risked, then you’re crazier than I am. Wayne needs his dad.”

  “He needs his mother, too,” he said. “So do I.”

  Vic smiled—her old Vic smile, a little rakish, a little dangerous.

  “No promises,” she said. “You’re the best, Lou Carmody. You’re not just a good man. You are a real honest-to-God hero. And I don’t mean because you put me on the back of your motorcycle and drove me away from this place. That was the easy part. I mean because you’ve been there for Wayne every single day. Because you made school lunches and you got him to his dentist appointments and you read to him at night. I love you, mister.”

  She looked up the road again. Manx had gotten out of the car. He crossed through his own headlights, and she had her first good look at him in four days. He wore his old-fashioned coat with the double line of brass buttons and tails. His hair was black and shiny, slicked back from the enormous bulge of his brow. He looked like a man of thirty. In one hand he held his enormous silver hammer. Something small was cupped in the other hand. He stepped out of the lights and into the trees, disappearing briefly into shadow.

  “I have to go,” she said. She leaned in and kissed the side of Lou’s cheek.

  He reached for her, but she slipped away and walked to her Triumph. She looked it up and down. There was a fist-size dent in the teardrop-shaped gas tank, and one of the pipes was hanging loose, looked like it might drag on the ground. But it would start. She could feel it waiting for her.

  Manx stepped out of the woods and stood between the taillights at the rear of the Wraith. He seemed to look straight at her, although it didn’t seem possible that he could see her in the dark and falling snow.

  “Hello!” he called. “Are you with us, Victoria? Are you here with your mean machine?”

  “Let him go, Charlie!” she shouted. “Let him go if you want to live!”

  Even at a distance of two hundred feet, she could see Manx beaming at her. “I think you know by now I am not so easy to kill! But come along, Victoria! Follow me to Christmasland! Let’s go to Christmasland and finish this thing! Your son will be glad to see you!”

  Without waiting for a reply, he climbed in behind the wheel of the Wraith. The taillights brightened, dimmed, and the car began to move again.

  “Oh, Jesus, Vic,” Lou said. “Oh, Jesus. This is a mistake. He’s ready for you. There’s got to be another way. Don’t do it. Don’t follow him. Stay with me, and we’ll find another way.”

  “Time to ride, Lou,” she said. “Watch for Wayne. He’ll be along in a little bit.”

  She put her leg over the saddle and turned the key in the ignition. The headlight flickered for a moment, dimly, then guttered out. Vic shivered steadily in her cutoffs and sneakers, put her heel on the kickstart, threw her weight down. The bike coughed and muttered. She leaped again, and it made a listless, flatulent sound: brapp.

  “Come on, honey,” she said softly. “Last ride. Let’s bring our boy home.”

  She rose to her full height. Snow caught in the fine hairs on her arms. She came down. The Triumph blasted to life.

  “Vic!” Lou called, but she couldn’t look at him now. If she looked at him and saw him crying, she would want to hold him and she might lose her nerve. She put the bike in gear. “Vic!” he shouted again.

  She left it in first while she gunned it up the steep, short slope of the embankment. The back tire fished this way and that in the snow-slippery grass, and she had to put a foot down on the dirt and push to get over the hump.

  Vic had lost sight of the Wraith. It had circled the blasted wreck of the old hunting lodge and disappeared through a gap in the trees on the far side. She slammed the bike up into second, then third, accelerating to catch up. Stones flew from under the tires. The bike felt loose and wobbly on the snow, which had now accumulated to a fine dusting on the gravel.

  Around the ruin, into high grass, and then to a sort of dirt track through the fir trees, barely wide enough to accommodate the Wraith. It was really just a pair of narrow ditches, with a mass of ferns growing in the space between.

  The boughs of the pines leaned in above her, making a close, dark, narrow corridor. The Wraith had slowed to let her catch up, was only about fifty feet ahead of her. NOS4A2 rolled on, and she followed its taillights. The icy air sliced through her thin T-shirt, filled her lungs with raw, frozen breath.

  The trees began to fall away on either side of her, opening into a rock-strewn clearing. There was a stone wall ahead, with an old brick tunnel set into it, a tunnel hardly wide enough to admit the Wraith. Vic thought of h
er bridge. This is his bridge, she thought. A white metal sign was bolted to the stone, next to the tunnel entrance. PARK IS OPEN EVERY DAY ALL YEAR-ROUND! GET READY TO SCREAM HIP-HIP SNOW-RAY, KIDS!

  The Wraith slipped into the tunnel. Burl Ives’s voice echoed back down the brick-lined hole at her—a passageway Vic doubted had existed even ten minutes before.

  Vic entered behind him. The right-hand pipe dragged on the cobbles, throwing sparks. The boom of the engine echoed in the stone-walled space.

  The Wraith exited the tunnel ahead of her. She was close behind him, roaring out of the darkness, through the open candy-cane gates, past the nine-foot Nutcrackers standing guard, and into Christmasland at last.

  TRIUMPH

  ONE ETERNAL CHRISTMAS EVE

  Christmasland

  THE WRAITH LED HER DOWN THE MAIN BOULEVARD, GUMDROP Avenue. As the car eased along, Charlie Manx bopped on the horn, three times and then three times again: da-da-da, da-da-da, the unmistakable opening bars of “Jingle Bells.”

  Vic followed, shivering uncontrollably now in the cold, struggling to keep her teeth from banging together. When the breeze rose, it sliced through her shirt as if she wore nothing at all, and fine grains of snow cut across her skin like flecks of broken glass.

  The tires felt unsteady on the snow-slick cobbles. Gumdrop Avenue appeared dark and deserted, a road through the center of an abandoned nineteenth-century village: old iron lampposts, narrow buildings with gabled roofs and dark dormer windows, recessed doorways.

  Except as the Wraith rolled along, the gaslights sprang to life, blue flames sparking in their frost-rimed casements. Oil lamps lit themselves in the windows of the shops, illuminating elaborate displays. Vic rumbled past a candy store called Le Chocolatier, its front window showing off chocolate sleighs and chocolate reindeer and a large chocolate fly and a chocolate baby with the chocolate head of a goat. She passed a shop called Punch & Judy’s, wooden puppets dangling in the window. A girl in a blue Bo-Peep outfit held her wooden hands to her face, her mouth open in a perfect circle of surprise. A boy in Jack-Be-Nimble short pants held an ax smeared luridly with blood. At his feet were a collection of severed wooden heads and arms.

  Looming behind and beyond this little town market were the attractions, as lifeless and dark as the main street had been when they entered. She spied the Sleighcoaster, towering in the night like the skeleton of some colossal prehistoric creature. She saw the great black ring of the Ferris wheel. And behind it all rose the mountain face, a nearly vertical sheet of rock frosted in a few thousand tons of snow.

  Yet it was the vast expanse above that grabbed and held Vic’s attention. A raft of silver clouds filled fully half the night sky, and gentle, fat flakes of snow drifted lazily down. The rest of the sky was open, a harbor of darkness and stars, and hanging pendant in the center of it all . . .

  A giant silver crescent moon, with a face.

  It had a crooked mouth and a bent nose and an eye as large as Topeka. The moon drowsed, that enormous eye closed to the night. His blue lips quivered, and he issued a snore as loud as a 747 taking off; his exhalation caused the clouds themselves to shudder. In profile the moon over Christmasland looked very much like Charlie Manx himself.

  Vic had been mad for many years but in all that time had never dreamed or seen anything like it. If there had been anything in the road, she would’ve hit it; it took close to ten full seconds to prise her gaze free from it.

  What finally caused her to look down was a flicker of motion at the periphery of her vision.

  It was a child, standing in a shadowed alley between the Olde Tyme Clock Shoppe and Mr. Manx’s Mulled-Cider Shed. The clocks sprang to life as the Wraith passed them, clicking and ticking and tocking and chiming. A moment later a gleaming copper contraption sitting in the window of the Cider Shed began to huff, chuff, and steam.

  The child wore a mangy fur coat and had long, unkempt hair, which seemed to indicate femininity, although Vic could not be entirely sure of gender. She—it—had bony fingers tipped with long, yellow fingernails. Its features were smooth and white, with a fine black tracery under the skin, so that its face resembled a crazed enamel mask, devoid of all expression. The child—the thing—watched her pass by, without a word. Its eyes flashed red, as a fox’s will, when reflecting the glow of passing headlights.

  Vic twisted her head to peer back over her shoulder, wanting another look, and saw three other children emerging out of the alley behind her. One appeared to be holding a scythe; two of them were barefoot. Barefoot in the snow.

  This is bad, she thought. You’re already surrounded.

  She faced forward again and saw a rotary directly ahead, which circled the biggest Christmas tree she had ever seen in her life. It had to be well over one hundred twenty feet tall; the base of the trunk was as thick as a small cottage.

  Two other roads angled off the great central rotary, while the remaining portion of the circle was lined by a hip-high stone wall that overlooked . . . nothing. It was as if the world ended there, dropping away into endless night. Vic had a good look as she followed the Wraith partway around the circle. The surface of the wall glittered with fresh snow. Beyond was an oil slick of darkness, coagulated with stars: stars rolling in frozen streams and impressionistic swirls. It was a thousand times more vivid, but every bit as false, as any sky Vic had ever drawn in her Search Engine books. The world did end there: She was looking out at the cold, fathomless limits of Charlie Manx’s imagination.

  Without any warning, the great Christmas tree lit all at once, and a thousand electric candles illuminated the children gathered around it.

  A few sat in the lowest branches, but most—perhaps as many as thirty—stood beneath the boughs, in nightdresses and furs and ball gowns fifty years out of date and Davy Crockett hats and overalls and policeman uniforms. At first glance they all seemed to be wearing delicate masks of white glass, mouths fixed in dimpled smiles, lips too full and too red. Upon closer inspection the masks resolved into faces. The hairline cracks in these faces were veins, showing through translucent skin; the unnatural smiles displayed mouths filled with tiny, pointed teeth. They reminded Vic of antique china dolls. Manx’s children were not children at all but cold dolls with teeth.

  One boy sat in a branch and held a serrated bowie knife as long as his forearm.

  One little girl dangled a chain with a hook on it.

  A third child—boy or girl, Vic could not tell—wielded a meat cleaver and wore a necklace of bloodied thumbs and fingers.

  Vic was now close enough to see the ornaments that decorated the tree. The sight forced the air out of her in hard, shocked breath. Heads: leather-skinned, blackened but not spoiled, preserved partially by the cold. Each face had holes where the eyes had once been. Mouths dangled open in silent cries. One decapitated head—a thin-faced man with a blond goatee—wore green-tinted glasses with heart-shaped, rhinestone-studded frames. They were the only adult faces in sight.

  The Wraith turned at an angle and stopped, blocking the road. Vic dropped the Triumph into first gear, squeezed the brake, and came to a halt herself, thirty feet away from it.

  Children began to spread out from beneath the tree, most of them drifting toward the Wraith but some circling behind her, forming a human barricade. Or inhuman barricade, as the case might be.

  “Let him go, Manx!” Vic shouted. It took all her will to keep her legs steady, shaken as she was from a mixture of cold and fear. The sharp chill of the night stung her nostrils, burned her eyes. There was no safe place to look. The tree was hung with every other grown-up unfortunate enough to find his or her way to Christmasland. Surrounding her were Manx’s lifeless dolls with their lifeless eyes and lifeless smiles.

  The door of the Wraith opened and Charlie Manx stepped out.

  He set a hat on his head as he rose to his full height—Maggie’s fedora, Vic saw. He adjusted the brim, cocked it just so. Manx was younger than Vic herself now, and almost handsome, with his high cheekbones
and sharp chin. He was still missing a piece of his left ear, but the scar tissue was pink and shiny and smooth. His upper teeth protruded, sticking into his lower lip, which gave him a characteristically daffy, dim-witted look. In one hand he held the silver hammer, and he swung it lazily back and forth, the pendulum of a clock ticking away moments in a place where time did not matter.

  The moon snored. The ground shook.

  He smiled at Vic and doffed Maggie’s hat in salute to her but then turned to look upon the children, who came toward him from beneath the branches of their impossible tree. The long tails of his coat swirled around him.

  “Hello little ones,” he said. “I have missed you and missed you! Let’s have some light so I can look at you.”

  He reached up with his free hand and pulled an imaginary cord dangling in the air.

  The Sleighcoaster lit up, a tangled thread of blue lights. The Ferris wheel blazed. Somewhere nearby a merry-go-round began to turn, and music rang out from invisible speakers. Eartha Kitt sang in her dirty-sweet, naughty-nice voice, telling Santa what a good girl she had been in a tone that suggested otherwise.

  In the bright carnival lights, Vic could see that the children’s clothes were stained with dirt and blood. Vic saw one little girl hurrying toward Charlie Manx with open arms. There were bloody handprints on the front of her tattered white nightgown. She reached Charlie Manx and put her arms around his leg. He cupped the back of her head, squeezed her against him.

  “Oh, little Lorrie,” Manx said to her. Another, slightly taller girl, with long, straight hair that came to the backs of her knees, ran up and embraced Manx from the other side. “My sweet Millie,” he said. The taller girl wore the red-and-blue uniform of a Nutcracker, with crossed bandoliers over her thin chest. The girl had a knife stuck into her gold belt, its bare blade as polished and shiny as a mountain lake.