NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
DEDICATION
To my mom—here’s a mean machine for the story queen
EPIGRAPH
Die Todten reiten schnell.
(For the dead travel fast.)
—“LENORE,” GOTTFRIED BüRGER
PROLOGUE:
SEASON’S GREETINGS
DECEMBER 2008
FCI Englewood, Colorado
NURSE THORNTON DROPPED INTO THE LONG-TERM-CARE WARD A little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.
She was coasting on autopilot, her thoughts not on her work. She had finally made up her mind to buy her son, Josiah, the Nintendo DS he wanted, and was calculating whether she could get to Toys “R” Us after her shift, before they closed.
She had been resisting the impulse for a few weeks, on philosophical grounds. She didn’t really care if all his friends had one. She just didn’t like the idea of those handheld video-game systems that the kids carried with them everywhere. Ellen Thornton resented the way little boys disappeared into the glowing screen, ditching the real world for some province of the imagination where fun replaced thought and inventing creative new kills was an art form. She had fantasized having a child who would love books and play Scrabble and want to go on snowshoeing expeditions with her. What a laugh.
Ellen had held out as long as she could, and then, yesterday afternoon, she had come across Josiah sitting on his bed pretending an old wallet was a Nintendo DS. He had cut out a picture of Donkey Kong and slipped it into the clear plastic sleeve for displaying photographs. He pressed imaginary buttons and made explosion sounds, and her heart had hurt a little, watching him make believe he already had something he was certain he would get on the Big Day. Ellen could have her theories about what was healthy for boys and what wasn’t. That didn’t mean Santa had to share them.
Because she was preoccupied, she didn’t notice what was different about Charlie Manx until she was easing around his cot to reach the IV rack. He happened to sigh heavily just then, as if bored, and she looked down and saw him staring up at her, and she was so startled to see him with his eyes open that she bobbled the sack of blood and almost dumped it on her feet.
He was hideous-old, not to mention hideous. His great bald skull was a globe mapping an alien moon, continents marked by liver spots and bruise-colored sarcomas. Of all the men in the long-term-care ward—a.k.a. the Vegetable Patch—there was something particularly awful about Charlie Manx with his eyes open at this time of year. Manx liked children. He’d made dozens of them disappear back in the nineties. He had a house below the Flatirons where he did what he liked with them and killed them and hung Christmas ornaments in their memory. The papers called the place the Sleigh House. Ho, ho, ho.
For the most part, Ellen could shut off the mother side of her brain while she was at work, could keep her mind away from thoughts of what Charlie Manx had probably done with the little girls and boys who had crossed his path, little girls and boys no older than her Josiah. Ellen didn’t muse on what any of her charges had done, if she could help it. The patient on the other side of the room had tied up his girlfriend and her two children, set fire to their house, and left them to burn. He was arrested in a bar down the street, drinking Bushmills and watching the White Sox play the Rangers. Ellen didn’t see how dwelling on it was ever going to do her any favors, and so she had taught herself to think of her patients as extensions of the machines and drip bags they were hooked up to: meat peripherals.
In all the time she’d been working at FCI Englewood, in the Supermax prison infirmary, she had never seen Charlie Manx with his eyes open. She’d been on staff for three years, and he had been comatose all that time. He was the frailest of her patients, a fragile coat of skin with bones inside. His heart monitor blipped like a metronome set to the slowest possible speed. The doc said he had as much brain activity as a can of creamed corn. No one had ever determined his age, but he looked older than Keith Richards. He even looked a little like Keith Richards—a bald Keith with a mouthful of sharp little brown teeth.
There were three other coma patients in the ward, what the staff called “gorks.” When you were around them long enough, you learned that all the gorks had their quirks. Don Henry, the man who burned his girl and her kids to death, went for “walks” sometimes. He didn’t get up, of course, but his feet pedaled weakly under the sheets. There was a guy named Leonard Potts who’d been in a coma for five years and was never going to wake up—another prisoner had jammed a screwdriver through his skull and into his brain. But sometimes he cleared his throat and would shout “I know!” as if he were a small child who wanted to answer the teacher’s question. Maybe opening his eyes was Manx’s quirk and she’d just never caught him doing it before.
“Hello, Mr. Manx,” Ellen said automatically. “How are you feeling today?”
She smiled a meaningless smile and hesitated, still holding the sack of body-temperature blood. She didn’t expect a reply but thought it would be considerate to give him a moment to collect his nonexistent thoughts. When he didn’t say anything, she reached forward with one hand to slide his eyelids closed.
He caught her wrist. She screamed—couldn’t help it—and dropped the bag of blood. It hit the floor and exploded in a crimson gush, the hot spray drenching her feet.