NOS4A2(113)

“Who is back there with you?” Manx asked, his voice humming and terrible. It was not the voice of a man. It was the voice of a thousand flies droning in unison.

Wayne looked around for Lindy, but she was gone, had left him.

The tunnel swallowed the Wraith. In the darkness there were only those red holes where Manx’s eyes belonged, staring back at him.

“I don’t want to go to Christmasland,” Wayne said.

“Everyone wants to go to Christmasland,” said the thing in the front seat that used to be a man but was not anymore, and maybe had not been for a hundred years.

They were fast approaching a bright circle of sunlight at the end of the tunnel. It had been night when they entered the hole in the mountain, but they were rushing toward a summery glare, and even when they were still a hundred feet away, the brightness hurt Wayne’s eyes.

He put his hands over his face, moaning in distress. The light burned through his fingers, growing ever more intense, until it shone right through his hands and he could see the black sticks of his own bones buried in softly glowing tissue. He felt that at any moment all that sunlight might cause him to ignite.

“I don’t like it! I don’t like it!” he shouted.

The car jolted and banged over pitted road, with enough force to dislodge his hands from his face. He blinked into morning sunlight.

Bing Partridge, the Gasmask Man, sat up and turned in his seat to look back at Wayne. His uniform was gone, and he wore the same stained tracksuit he’d been dressed in the day before.

“No,” he said, digging a finger in his ear. “I’m not much of a morning person either.”





Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania


SUN, SUN, GO AWAY,” THE GASMASK MAN SAID, AND YAWNED. “Come again some other day.” The Gasmask Man was silent for a moment and then said shyly, “I had a nice dream. I dreamed about Christmasland.”

“I hope you liked it,” Manx said. “The mess you have made of things, dreaming about Christmasland is all you will do!”

The Gasmask Man shrank down in his seat and put his hands over his ears.

They were in a place of hills and high grasses, beneath blue summer sky. A finger lake shone below them to the left, a long splinter of mirror dropped amid hundred-foot pines. The valleys caught patches of morning mist, but they would burn off soon enough.

Wayne rubbed his hands hard into his eye sockets, his brain still half asleep. His forehead and cheeks felt fevery. He sighed—and was surprised to see pale vapor issue from his nostrils, just like in his dream. He had not realized it was so cold in the backseat.

“I’m freezing,” Wayne said, although if anything he felt warm, not cold.

“These mornings can be very raw,” Manx said. “You will feel better soon.”

“Where are we?” Wayne asked.

Manx glanced back at him. “Pennsylvania. We have been driving all night, and you have been sleeping like a baby.”

Wayne blinked at him, perturbed and disoriented, although it took him a moment to figure out why. The pad of white gauze was still taped over the ruin of Manx’s left ear, but he had stripped off the bandage wrapped around his forehead. The six-inch slash across his forehead was black and rancid-looking, a Frankenstein scar—and yet it looked as if it had been healing for twelve days, not twelve hours. Manx’s color was better, his eyes sharper, bright with humor and goodwill toward men.

“Your face is better,” Wayne said.

“It is a little easier on the eyes, I guess, but I will not be entering a beauty contest anytime soon!”

“How come you’re better?” Wayne asked.

Manx thought about that for a bit, then said, “The car takes care of me. It is going to take care of you, too.”

“It’s because we’re on the road to Christmasland,” said the Gasmask Man, looking over his shoulder and smiling. “It takes your frown and turns it upside down, isn’t that right, Mr. Manx?”

“I am in no frame of mind for your rhyming idiocies, Bing,” Manx said. “Play Quaker Meeting, why don’t you?”

NOS4A2 drove south, and no one spoke for a while. In the silence Wayne took stock.

In his whole life, he had never been as scared as he had been the afternoon before. His throat was still hoarse from all the screaming he had done. Now, though, it was as if he were a jug, and every last drop of bad feeling had been poured out of him. The interior of the Rolls-Royce brimmed with golden sunlight. Motes of dust burned in a ray of brilliance, and Wayne raised a hand to swipe at them and watch them roil around, like sand whirling through water—

His mother had dived into the water to get away from the Gasmask Man, he remembered, and he twitched. For a moment he felt a jolt of yesterday’s fear, as fresh and raw as if he had touched a stripped copper line and been zapped. What frightened him was not the thought that he was a prisoner of Charlie Manx but that for a moment he had forgotten he was a prisoner. For a moment he had been admiring the light and feeling almost happy.

He shifted his gaze to the walnut drawer set below the seat in front of him, where he had hidden his phone. Then he glanced up and discovered Manx watching him in the rearview mirror, smiling just slightly. Wayne shrank back into his seat.

“You said you owed me one,” Wayne said.

“I did and I do,” Manx said.