NOS4A2(135)

Manx had a silver hammer, and the man with him had a gun. Bang, he’d said. Bang. Right before he shot her. Only he said it in a funny, singsongy way, so it was less like a threat, more like a jump-rope rhyme.

“You bet,” Bing said from behind her, his voice muffled, as if he had a hankie over his nose.

She recognized his voice then. It had been muffled the last time she’d heard it and her ears had been ringing from gunfire but she recognized his voice at last.

Vic pivoted on her heel, already knowing what she would see. Bing wore his old-fashioned WWII gasmask again. He still held the garden shears in his right hand.

“You’re in the House of Sleep,” he said. “This is the end of the line for you, bitch.”

And he hit her in the face with the garden shears and broke her nose.





The House of Sleep


VIC TOOK THREE SMALL, STAGGERING STEPS BACKWARD, AND HER heels struck a doorsill. The only open door was the one into the basement. She had time to recall this before the next thing happened. Her legs gave way, and she fell straight back, as if to sit down, but there was no chair there. There was no floor either. She dropped and kept dropping.

This is going to hurt, she thought. There was no alarm in the idea; it was the simple acceptance of fact.

She experienced a brief feeling of suspension, her insides going elastic and strange. The wind swished past her ears. She glimpsed a bare lightbulb overhead and plywood sheeting between exposed beams.

Vic hit a stair, ass-first, with a bony crunch, and was flipped, as casually as someone might toss a pillow in the air. She thought of her father pitching a cigarette out the window of a moving car, the way it would hit the asphalt and sparks would fly on impact.

The next step she hit on her right shoulder, and she was thrown again. Her left knee clubbed something. Her left cheek struck something else—it felt like getting booted in the face.

Vic assumed when she hit bottom that she would smash like a vase. Instead she landed on a lumpy mound of plastic-wrapped softness. She slammed into it face-first, but the lower part of her body continued traveling, her feet pedaling madly in the air. Look, Mom, I’m doing a handstand! Vic remembered screaming one Fourth of July, staring at a world where the sky had become grass and the ground had become stars. She thudded to a stop at last, lying on her back on the plastic-wrapped mass, the staircase now behind her.

Vic stared back up the steep flight of steps, seeing them upside down. She could not feel her right arm. There was a pressure in her left knee that she believed would soon turn to excruciating pain.

The Gasmask Man came down the steps, holding the green metal tank in one hand, carrying it by the valve. He had left the pruning shears behind. It was terrible, the way the gasmask took his face away, replacing his mouth with a grotesque, alien knob and his eyes with clear plastic windows. A part of her wanted to scream, but she was too stunned to make any noise.

He came off the bottom step and stood with her head between his boots. It occurred to her too late that he was going to hurt her again. He lifted the tank in both hands and brought it down into her stomach, pounded the air out of her. Vic coughed explosively and rolled onto her side. When she got her breath back, she thought she would throw up.

The tank clanged as he set it down. The Gasmask Man collected a handful of her hair and yanked. The tearing pain forced a weak cry out of her, in spite of her decision to remain silent. He wanted her on all fours, and she obliged him because it was the only way to make the pain stop. His free hand slipped under her and groped her breast, squeezing it the way someone might test a grapefruit for firmness. He tittered.

Then he dragged. She crawled while she could, because it hurt less, but it didn’t matter to him whether it hurt or not, and when her arms gave out, he kept dragging, pulling her along by her hair. She was horrified to hear herself scream the word “Please!”

Vic had only confused impressions of the basement, which seemed less a room than a single long corridor. She glimpsed a washer and dryer; a naked female mannequin wearing a gasmask; a grinning bust of Jesus, pulling his robe open to show an anatomically correct heart, the side of his face browned and blistered as if he had been held in a fire. She heard a metallic, droning chime coming from somewhere. It went on and on without cessation.

The Gasmask Man stopped at the end of the hall, and she heard a steely clunk, and he slid aside a heavy iron door on a track. Her perceptions couldn’t keep up with the pace of events. A part of her was still back down the hallway, just catching a glimpse of that burned Jesus. Another part of her was in the kitchen, seeing the battered green tank leaning in the chair, SEVOFLURANE, FLAMMABLE. A part of her was up at the torched wreckage of the New American Faith Tabernacle, holding a rock in both hands and banging it down into a shiny brass lock, hard enough to throw copper sparks. A part of her was in New Hampshire, bumming a smoke off Detective Daltry, palming his brass lighter, the one with Popeye on it.

The Gasmask Man forced her to walk on her knees across the track, still yanking her by the hair. In his other hand, he dragged the green tank, SEVOFLURANE. That was what was making the chiming sound—the base of the tank rang softly and continuously as it was pulled across the concrete. It droned like a Tibetan prayer bowl, a monk rolling the hammer around and around the holy dish.

When she was over the track, he jerked her forward, hard, and she found herself on all fours once again. He planted his foot in her ass and shoved, and her arms gave out.