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Wayne dropped off the seat, onto the floor. He grabbed the brass handle of the drawer with his phone in it and pulled, but it didn’t budge, might as well have been nailed shut. He put one foot on the back of the divider between the front and the rear compartment and threw all his weight backward. His sweat-slippery hands came right off the handle, and he fell back into the seat.

“Please!” Wayne screamed. “Please!”

At the bottom of the stairs, Manx looked back at the car. There was an expression of weary tragedy on his face. His eyes were damp with sympathy. He shook his head, although whether in refusal or simply as a gesture of disappointment, it was impossible to tell.

He pressed a button on the wall. The automatic garage door rumbled down. He flipped a switch and turned out the lights before going upstairs and left Wayne alone in the Wraith.





The Lake


BY THE TIME HUTTER WAS DONE WITH HER THAT AFTERNOON, VIC felt wrung out, as if she were recovering from a bout of stomach flu. Her joints were sore, and her back throbbed. She was desperately hungry but when presented with a turkey sandwich was almost overcome with an urge to vomit. She couldn’t even choke down a whole piece of toast.

She told Hutter all the old lies about Manx: how he had injected her with something and put her in his car, how she had escaped him in Colorado at the Sleigh House. They sat in the kitchen, Hutter asking the questions and Vic answering them as best she could, while cops came in and out.

After Vic had told the story of her kidnapping, Hutter wanted to hear about the years after. She wanted to know about the derangement that had led Vic to spend time in a mental hospital. She wanted to know about the time Vic burned her own house down.

“I didn’t mean to burn the house down,” Vic said. “I was just trying to get rid of the phones. I stuck them all in the oven. It seemed like the simplest way to stop the phone calls.”

“The phone calls from dead people?”

“From dead kids. Yes.”

“Is that the predominant theme of your delusions? Does it always revolve around dead children?”

“Did. Was. Past tense,” Vic said.

Hutter stared at Vic with all the affection of a snake handler approaching a venomous cobra. Vic thought, Just ask me already. Ask me if I killed my little boy. Get it out in the open. She met Hutter’s gaze without blinking or flinching. Vic had been hammered, shot at, nearly run over, institutionalized, addicted, had come close to being burned alive and had run for her life on several occasions. An unfriendly stare was nothing.

Hutter said, “You might want to rest and freshen up. I’ve scheduled your statement for five-twenty. That should get us the maximum prime-time coverage.”

Vic said, “I wish I thought there was something I knew—something I could tell you—that would help you find him.”

“You’ve been very helpful,” Hutter said. “Thank you. I have a lot of good information here.”

Hutter looked away, and Vic imagined that the interview was over. But as she rose to go, Hutter reached for something leaning against the wall: some sheets of bristol board.

“Vic,” Hutter said, “there is one other thing.”

Vic stood still, a hand on the back of her chair.

Hutter put the stack of bristol board on the table, turned so Vic could look at the illustrations. Her illustrations, the pages from the new book, Search Engine’s Fifth Gear, the holiday story. What she had been working on when she wasn’t assembling the Triumph. Hutter began to shuffle the big card-stock pages, giving Vic a moment to take in each picture, rendered in nonphotographic blue pencil, inked, then finished in watercolors. The paper rasped in a way that made Vic think of a fortune-teller shuffling a tarot deck, preparing to deal a very bad outlook.

Hutter said, “I told you, they use the Search Engine puzzles at Quantico to teach students about careful observation. When I saw that you had part of a new book out in the carriage house, I couldn’t help myself. I’m stunned by what you’ve got on the page here. You really do give Escher a run for his money. Then I looked close and started wondering. This is for a Christmas book, isn’t it?”

The urge to get away from the pile of bristol board—to shrink from her own drawings, as if they were photographs of skinned animals—surged inside her and then was smothered in a moment. She wanted to say she had never seen any of these pictures before, wanted to scream she didn’t know where they had come from. Both of these statements would’ve been fundamentally true, but she clamped down on them, and when she spoke, her voice was weary and disinterested.

“Yeah. My publisher’s idea.”

“Well,” Hutter said, “do you think—I mean, is it possible—that this is Christmasland? That the person who grabbed your son is aware of what you’ve been working on and that there’s some kind of connection between your new book and what we saw when we tried to track your son’s iPhone?”

Vic stared at the first illustration. It showed Search Engine and little Bonnie, clasping each other on a shattered plate of ice, somewhere in the Arctic Ocean. Vic remembered drawing a mechanical squid, piloted by Mad M?bius Stripp, coming up through the ice beneath them. But this drawing showed dead-eyed children under the ice, reaching up through the cracks with bony white claws. They grinned to show mouths filled with delicate hooked fangs.