NOS4A2(115)

“Help!” he screamed. “Help me!”

The jogging woman frowned and looked around. She stared at the Rolls-Royce.

“Please help!” Wayne screamed, slapping the window.

She smiled and waved.

The light changed. Manx rolled sedately through the intersection.

To the left, on the other side of the street, Wayne saw a man in a uniform coming out of a doughnut shop. He wore what looked like a policeman’s cap and a blue windbreaker.

Wayne pitched himself across the car and banged his fists on the other window. As he did and the man came into focus, Wayne could see it was a postman, not a policeman. A podgy man in his mid-fifties.

“Help me! I’m being kidnapped! Help, help, help!” Wayne screamed, his voice cracking.

“He can’t hear you,” Manx said. “Or, rather, he does not hear what you want him to hear.”

The postman looked at the Rolls going by. He smiled and raised two fingers to the brim of his cap in a little salute. Manx drove on.

“Are you done making such a racket?” he said.

“Why don’t they hear me?” Wayne asked.

“It is like what they are always saying about Las Vegas: What happens in the Wraith stays in the Wraith.”

They were rolling out the other end of the little downtown, beginning to accelerate, leaving behind the four-block stretch of brick buildings and dusty storefronts.

“Don’t worry,” Manx said. “If you are tired of the road, we will be off it soon enough. I know I am ready for a break from all this highway. We are very close to where we are going.”

“Christmasland?” Wayne asked.

Manx pursed his lips in a thoughtful moue. “No. That is still a ways off.”

“The House of Sleep,” the Gasmask Man told him.





The Lake


VIC CLOSED HER EYES FOR A MOMENT, AND WHEN SHE OPENED THEM she was staring at the clock on the night table—5:59. Then the celluloid flaps flipped over to 6:00 A.M. and the phone rang.

The two things happened so closely together that Vic thought at first the alarm was going off, and she couldn’t figure out why she had set it for so early in the morning. The phone rang again, and the bedroom door clicked open. Tabitha Hutter peered in on her, eyes bright behind her round spectacles.

“It’s a 603 number,” she said. “A demolition company in Dover. You better answer. It’s probably not him, but—”

“It’s not him,” Vic said, and fumbled for the phone.

“I didn’t hear until late,” said her father. “And it took me a while to come up with your number. I waited as long as I could, in case you were trying to sleep. How are you, kid?”

Vic removed the phone from her mouth and said, “It’s my dad.”

Tabitha Hutter said, “Tell him he’s being recorded. All the calls to this number will be recorded for the foreseeable future.”

“Did you hear that, Chris?”

“I did. It’s okay. Anything they need to do. Christ, it’s good to hear your voice, kiddo.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know how you’re doing. I want you to know I’m here if you need me.”

“First time for everything, huh?”

He exhaled, a thin, frustrated breath. “I understand what you’re going through. I went through it, too, once upon a time, you know. I love you, girl. Tell me if I can do anything.”

“You can’t,” she said. “There’s nothing for you to blow up right now. It’s all blown up. Don’t call anymore, Dad. I’m in enough pain already. You just make it worse.”

She hung up. Tabitha Hutter watched her from the doorway.

“Did you get your cell-phone experts to try and locate Wayne’s phone? Was it any different from when you tried Find My iPhone? It can’t have been. If you had any new information, you wouldn’t have let me sleep.”

“They couldn’t locate his phone.”

“They couldn’t locate it? Or they traced him to the St. Nick Parkway, somewhere east of Christmasland?”

“Does that mean something to you? Charlie Manx had a house in Colorado. The trees around the house were hung with Christmas ornaments. The press gave it a name, called it the Sleigh House. Is that Christmasland?”

No, Vic thought automatically. Because the Sleigh House is in our world. Christmasland is in Manx’s inscape. The Manxscape.

Hutter had a hell of a poker face, watching Vic with an expression of studious calm. Vic thought if she told this woman that Christmasland was a place in the fourth dimension, where dead children sang carols and made long-distance phone calls, that Hutter’s expression wouldn’t change at all. She would continue to give Vic that cool, clinical look while police held Vic down and a doctor sedated her.

“I don’t know where Christmasland is or what it is,” Vic said, which was largely true. “I don’t understand why that’s coming up when you search for Wayne’s phone. Do you want to look at hammers?”

The house was still full of people, although they looked less like cops now, more like the Geek Squad from Best Buy. Three young men had set up laptops on the coffee table in the living room: a gangly Asian with tribal tattoos, a skinny kid with a red Jewfro and roughly a billion freckles, and a black man in a black turtleneck that looked like it had been snatched from Steve Jobs’s closet. The house smelled of coffee. There was a fresh pot brewing in the kitchen. Hutter poured Vic some and added cream and a spoonful of sugar, just the way Vic took it.