NOS4A2(111)

“He ought to be thinking about what I’m going to do to him.”

“And what if he’s not at this House of Sleep? Will the bike take you to him wherever he is? Even if he’s moving?”

“I don’t know,” Vic said, but she thought, No. She was not sure where this certainty came from, how she could know such a thing, but she did. She recalled, distantly, that she had gone looking for a lost cat once—Taylor, she thought—and was sure she had found him only because he was dead. If he had been alive and on the prowl, the bridge wouldn’t have had an anchor point to settle on. It could cross the distance between lost and found, but only if what was lost stayed put. Lou saw the doubt in her face, and she went on. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Manx has to stop sometime, doesn’t he? To sleep? To eat?” In truth, she wasn’t sure he needed either food or rest. He had died, been autopsied, had his heart removed . . . then got up and walked away whistling. Who knew what such a man required? Perhaps thinking of him as a man at all was operating from the wrong assumptions. And yet: He bled. He could be hurt. She had seen him pale and staggered. She thought at the very least he would need to recover himself, settle and slumber for a while, same as any wounded creature. His license plate was a joke or boast, nosferatu, German word for vampire—an acknowledgment, at some level, of what he was. But in the stories, even vampires crawled back to their coffins and shut the lid now and then. She pushed these ideas aside and finished: “Sooner or later he’ll have to stop for something, and when he does, I can get to him.”

“You asked me if I thought you were crazy, with all your stuff about the bridge. And I said no. But this? This part of it is pretty crazy. Using the bike to find your way to him so he can polish you off. Finish the job he started this morning.”

“It’s all we’ve got.” She glanced toward the door. “And, Lou, this is the only way we might—will—get Wayne back. These people can’t find him. I can. Are you going to fix it?”

He sighed—a great, unsteady exhalation of air—and said, “I’ll try, Vic. I’ll try. On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“When I get it fixed,” Lou said, “you take me with you.”





The St. Nicholas Parkway


WAYNE SLEPT FOR A LONG TIME—AN ENDLESS TIME OF QUIET AND peace—and when he opened his eyes, he knew that everything was all right.

NOS4A2 sped through the dark, a torpedo churning through the fathomless depths. They were rising through low hills, the Wraith hugging the curves as if it were on rails. Wayne was rising toward something wonderful and fine.

Snow fell in gentle, goose-feather flakes. The wipers went swop, swop, striking them down.

They passed a lone streetlamp in the night, a twelve-foot candy cane topped with a gumdrop, casting a cherry light, turning those falling flakes to feathers of flame.

The Wraith swept along a high curve that afforded a view of the vast tableland below, silver and smooth and flat, and at the far end of it the mountains! Wayne had never seen mountains like them—they made the Rockies look like homely foothills. The smallest of them had the proportions of Everest. They were a great range of stone teeth, a crooked row of fangs, sharp enough, large enough, to devour the sky. Rocks forty thousand feet high pierced the night, held up the darkness, pushed into the stars.

Above it all drifted a silvery scythe blade of moon. Wayne looked up at it, and away, and then looked again. The moon had a hooked nose, a thoughtfully frowning mouth, and a single eye closed in sleep. When it exhaled, a wind rippled across the plains and silvery beds of cloud raced through the night. Wayne almost clapped his hands in delight to look upon it.

It was impossible, though, to look away from the mountains for long. The pitiless, cyclopean peaks drew Wayne’s gaze as a magnet will draw iron shavings. For there, in a notch two-thirds of the way up the largest of the mountains, was a bright jewel, pinned to the side of the rock face. It shone, brighter than the moon, brighter than any star. It burned in the night like a torch.

Christmasland.

“You should roll down the window and try to grab one of those sugarflakes!” advised Mr. Manx from the front seat.

For a moment Wayne had forgotten who was driving the car. He had stopped worrying about it. It wasn’t important. Getting there was the thing. He felt a throb of eagerness to be there already, rolling in between the candy-cane gates.

“Sugarflake? Don’t you mean snowflake?”

“If I meant snowflake, I would’ve said snowflake! Those are flakes of pure cane sugar, and if we were in a plane, we’d be shredding cotton-candy clouds! Go on! Roll down a window! Catch one and see if I am a liar!”

“Won’t it be cold?” Wayne asked.

Mr. Manx looked at him in the rearview mirror, the laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes.

He wasn’t scary anymore. He was young, and if he was not handsome, he at least looked spiffy, in his black leather gloves and black overcoat. His hair was black now, too, slicked back under his leather-brimmed cap, to show the high, bare expanse of his forehead.

The Gasmask Man was asleep next to him, a sweet smile on his fat, bristly face. He wore a white marine uniform, with a breastful of gold medals upon it. A second glance, though, showed that these medals were in fact chocolate coins in gold-foil wrap. He had nine of them.