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Maggie’s whole face lit up: a child seeing a kite lift into the blue, blue sky.

“Oh, darn, V-V-V-Vic. You’re gonna muh-m-make me cry! What’s better in the whole world than words? Besides, you’re already doing s-s-something,” Maggie said. “You’re here. It’s so nice to have someone to talk to! Not that it’s m-m-m-much fun to talk to m-muh-mmme!”

“Shhh. You shush with that. Your stammer doesn’t bother me half as much as it bothers you,” Vic said. “The first time we met, you told me that your Scrabble tiles and my bike were both knives for cutting through the stitches between reality and thought. You had that right. That’s not the only thing they can cut. They wound up cutting both of us good. I know that my bridge—the Shorter Way—damaged me. In here.” She reached up and tapped her left temple. “I traveled across it a few times too many, and it put my mind out of joint. I’ve never been right. I burned down my home. I burned down my life. I ran away from both of the boys I love because I was scared of damaging them or not being enough for them. That’s what my knife did to me. And you’ve got this thing with your speech—”

“’S like I mmm-mm-managed to cut out my own tongue with my knife.”

“Seems like the only one who never winds up bleeding from using his psychic knife is Manx.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no, V-V-V-Vic! Muh-Muh-Manx has had it worst! He’s been bled completely dry!” Maggie lowered her eyelids, drawing a deep, luxurious lungful of smoke. The tip of her cigarette throbbed in the darkness. She removed the cigarette from her mouth, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then stabbed it into her own bare thigh, through one of the tears in her jeans.

“Jesus!” Vic shouted. She sat up so quickly that the room lurched hard in one direction and her stomach lurched hard in the other. She fell back against the armrest, overcome by dizziness.

“For the best,” Maggie said through clenched teeth. “I want to be able to talk to you. Not just sp-spray you with spit.” The breath spurted out of her in short, pained exhalations. “’S only way I can get my tiles to say anything anyhow, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. Was necessary. What were we saying?”

“Oh, Maggie,” Vic said.

“Don’t make a big deal. Let’s get to it, or I’ll have to do that again. And the m-m-more I do it, the less well it works.”

“You said Manx is bled dry.”

“That’s right. The Wraith makes him young and strong. It p-preserves him. But it’s cost him his ability to feel regret or empathy. That’s what his knife cut out of him: his humanity.”

“Yeah. Except it’s going to cut the same thing out of my son, too. The car changes the children Manx takes with him on his trips to Christmasland. It turns ’em into f*ckin’ vampires or something. Doesn’t it?”

“Close enough,” Maggie said. She rocked back and forth, eyes shut against the pain in her leg. “Christmasland is an inscape, right? A place Manx invented out of thought.”

“A make-believe place.”

“Oh, it’s a real place. Ideas are as real as rocks. Your bridge is real, too, you know. It isn’t actually a covered bridge, of course. The rafters, the roof, the boards under your tires—they’re stage dressing for s-s-something more basic. When you left the Gasmask Man’s house and came here, you didn’t cross a bridge. You crossed an idea that looked like a bridge. And when M-Muh-Manx gets to Christmasland, he’ll be arriving at an idea of happiness that looks like . . . I don’t know . . . Santa Claus’s workshop?”

“I think it’s an amusement park.”

“Amusement p-park. That sounds about right. Manx doesn’t have happiness anymore. Only amusement. It’s an idea of endless fun, endless youth, dressed up in a form his dumb little mind can understand. His vehicle is the instrument that opens the way. S-s-suffering and unhappiness provide the energy to run the car and open his p-passage to that puh-p-place. This is also why he has to take the kids with him. The car needs something he no longer has. He drains unhappiness from the children just like a B-movie v-v-vampire sucking blood.”

“And when he uses them up, they’re monsters.”

“They’re still children, I think. They’re just children who can’t understand anything except fun. They’ve been remade into Manx’s idea of childhood perfection. He wants kids to be f-f-ffforever innocent. Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence. The car takes what Manx needs and changes his passengers so they can live in his world of thought. It sharpens their teeth and robs them of their need for warmth. A world of pure thought would be pretty cold, I bet. Now, take your pill, Vic. You need to rest and get your strength back before you ride out of here to f-f-face him again.” She held out her palm with the tablet in it.

“Maybe I could use something. Not just for my knee. For my head,” Vic told her, and then winced at a fresh stab of pain in her left eyeball. “I wonder why I always feel it behind my left eye, whenever I use my bridge. Been like that since childhood.” She laughed shakily. “I wept blood once, you know.”

Maggie said, “Creative ideas form in the right side of the brain. But did you know the right side of your brain sees out from your left eye? And it must take a lot of energy to shove a thought out of your head and into the real world. All that energy zapping you right”—she pointed at Vic’s left eye—“there.”