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“But he did spray something in my face,” Wayne said. “Something that smelled like gingerbread.”

“Just something to put your mind at ease. If Bing had used his spray properly, you would be resting peaceably already.” Manx cast a cool, disgusted look at his traveling companion.

Wayne considered this. Thinking a thing through was like moving a heavy crate across a room—a lot of straining effort.

“How come it isn’t making you two rest peaceably?” Wayne asked finally.

“Hm?” Manx said. He was looking down at his white silk shirt, now stained crimson with blood. “Oh. You are in your own pocket universe back there. I don’t let anything come up front.” He sighed heavily. “There is no saving this shirt! I feel we should all have a moment of silence for it. This shirt is a silk Riddle-McIntyre, the finest shirtmaker in the West for a hundred years. Gerald Ford wore nothing but Riddle-McIntyres. I might as well use it to clean engine parts now. Blood will never come out of silk.”

“Blood will never come out of silk,” Wayne whispered. This statement had an epigrammatic quality to it, felt like an important fact.

Manx considered him calmly from the front seat. Wayne stared back through pulses of bright and dark, as if clouds were fleeting across the sun. But there was no sun today, and that throbbing brightness was in his head, behind his eyes. He was out on the extreme edge of shock, a place where time was different, moving in spurts, catching in place, then jumping forward again.

Wayne heard a sound, a long way off, an angry, urgent wail. For a moment he thought it was someone screaming, and he remembered Manx hitting his mother with his silver mallet, and he thought he might be sick. But as the sound approached them and intensified, he identified it as a police siren.

“She is right up and at them,” Manx said. “I have to give your mother credit. She does not delay when it comes to making trouble for me.”

“What will you do when the police see us?” Wayne asked.

“I do not think they will bother us. They are going to your mother’s.”

Cars ahead of them began to pull to either side of the road. A blue-silver strobe appeared at the top of a low hill ahead of them, dropped over the slope, and rushed toward them. The Wraith eased itself to the margin of the road and slowed down considerably but didn’t stop.

The police cruiser punched past them doing nearly sixty. Wayne turned his head to watch it go. The driver did not even glance at them. Manx drove on. Or, really, the car drove on. Manx still hadn’t touched the wheel. He had folded down the sun visor and was inspecting himself in the mirror.

The bright-dark flashes were coming more slowly now, like a roulette wheel winding down, the ball soon to settle on red or black. Wayne still felt no real terror, had left that behind in the yard with his mother. He picked himself up off the floor and settled on the couch.

“You should see a doctor,” Wayne said. “If you dropped me off somewhere in the woods, you could go to a doctor and get your ear and head fixed before I walked back to town or anyone found me.”

“Thank you for your concern, but I would prefer not to receive medical treatment in handcuffs,” Manx said. “The road will make me better. The road always does.”

“Where are we going?” Wayne asked. His voice seemed to come from a distance.

“Christmasland.”

“Christmasland,” Wayne repeated. “What’s that?”

“A special place. A special place for special children.”

“Really?” Wayne pondered this for a time, then said, “I don’t believe you. That’s just something to tell me so I won’t be scared.” He paused again, then decided to brave one more question. “Are you going to kill me?”

“I am surprised you even need to ask. It would have been easy to kill you back at your mother’s house. No. And Christmasland is real enough. It is not so easy to find. You cannot get to it by any road in this world, but there are other roads than the ones you will find on a map. It is outside of our world, and at the same time it is only a few miles from Denver. And then again it is right here in my head”—he tapped his right temple with one finger—“and I take it with me everywhere I go. There are other children there, and not one of them is held against his or her will. They would not leave for anything. They are eager to meet you, Wayne Carmody. They are eager to be your friend. You will see them soon enough—and when you finally do, it will feel like coming home.”

The blacktop thumped and hummed under the tires.

“The last hour has seen a lot of excitement,” Manx said. “Put your head down, child. If anything interesting happens, I will be sure to wake you.”

There was no reason to do a thing Charlie Manx told him, but before long, Wayne found he was on his side, his head resting on the plump leather seat. If there was any more peaceful sound in all the world than the road murmuring under tires, Wayne didn’t know what it was.

The roulette wheel clicked and clicked and stopped at last. The ball settled into black.





The Lake


VIC BREASTSTROKED INTO THE SHALLOWS, THEN CRAWLED THE LAST few feet up onto the beach. There she rolled onto her back, legs still in the lake. She shook furiously, in fierce, almost crippling spasms, and made sounds too angry to be sobs. She might’ve been crying. She wasn’t sure. Her insides hurt badly, as if she had spent a day and a night vomiting.