NOS4A2(161)

She tried to tell him. She moved her lips in the shape of the word. But all she could do was wheeze and spray more blood. She had lost all power of speech, and at this notion she felt a sweet tingle of relief. No more stammering. No more trying desperately to make herself understood while her tongue refused to cooperate.

Manx rose to his full height, kicking the letters as he stood, scattering them, scattering what they spelled, if you took the time to see how to put them together: TRIUMPH.

He walked quickly away, pausing only to collect her hat from the pavement, dust off the brim, and set it on his own head. A door slammed. The radio turned on. She heard the jingle of Christmas bells and a warm, male voice singing, “Dashing through the snow . . .”

The car jolted into gear and started to move. Maggie closed her eyes.

TRIUMPH: 45 points if you could line it up with the triple word and a double letter. TRIUMPH, Maggie thought. Vic wins.





Hampton Beach, New Hampshire


VIC PUSHED THROUGH THE DOOR INTO TERRY’S PRIMO SUBS, WHERE the air was warm and damp and heavy with the smell of onion rings broiling in the deep-fat fryer.

Pete was working the counter—good old Pete, his face badly sunburned, a line of zinc down his nose.

“I know what you’re here for,” Pete said, reaching under the counter. “I’ve got something for you.”

“No,” Vic said. “I don’t give a f*ck about my mother’s bracelet. I’m looking for Wayne. Did you see Wayne?”

It confused her to find herself back in Terry’s, ducking under the ribbons of flypaper. Pete couldn’t help her find Wayne. She was angry with herself, wasting time here when she needed to be out there looking for her boy.

A police siren shrieked out on the avenue. Maybe someone had seen the Wraith. Maybe they had found her son.

“No,” Pete said. “It’s not a bracelet. It’s something else.” He ducked behind the cash register, then stood up and put a silver hammer down on the counter. There was blood and hair stuck to the business end.

Vic felt the dream drawing tight around her, as if the world were a giant cellophane bag and it was suddenly wrinkling and pulling in from all sides.

“No,” Vic said. “I don’t want it. That’s not what I came for. That’s no good.”

Outside, the police siren cut off with a strangled squonk!

“I think it’s good,” said Charlie Manx, his hand on the crosshatched handle. It had been Charlie Manx on the other side of the counter all along, Charlie Manx dressed like a cook, in a bloodstained apron and a cocked white hat, a line of zinc down his bony nose. “And what’s good stays good, no matter how many heads you split open with it.”

He lifted the hammer, and Vic screamed and threw herself back from him and right out of the dream, into





Real Life


VIC WOKE, AWARE THAT THE HOUR WAS LATE AND THAT SOMETHING was wrong.

She could hear voices, muted by stone and distance, could identify the speakers as male, even if she could not determine what they were saying. She smelled the faintest whiff of burned phosphorous. She had the muddled idea that she’d slept right through a commotion, sealed in the soundproofed sarcophagus fashioned by Maggie’s pharmaceuticals.

She rolled herself up to a sitting position, feeling she ought to get dressed and go.

After a few moments, she determined she was already dressed. She had not even removed her sneakers before falling asleep. Her left knee was a poisonous shade of violet and as fat as one of Lou’s knees.

A red candle burned in the darkness, reflecting an image of itself in the fish tank’s glass. There was a note over on the desk; Maggie had left her a note before going. That was thoughtful of her. Vic could see her .38-caliber paperweight, Chekhov’s gun, holding it down. Vic was hoping for instructions, a set of simple steps that would bring Wayne back to her, make her leg better, make her head better, make her life better. Barring that, just a note saying where Maggie had gone would be all right: “Ran to the Nite Owl for ramen and drugs will be right back xoxo.”

Vic heard the voices again. Someone kicked a beer can, not far away. They were moving toward her, they were close, and if she didn’t blow out the candle, they were going to wander into the old children’s wing and see the light shining through the fish tank. Even as this thought came to her, she understood that it was already almost too late. She heard glass crunching underfoot, boot heels moving closer.

She sprang up. Her knee collapsed. She dropped onto it, bit down on a scream.

When Vic tried to stand, the leg refused to cooperate. She stretched it out behind her with great care—shutting her eyes and pushing through the pain—and then dragged herself across the floor, using her knuckles and her right foot. What it saved in agony, it made up for in humiliation.

Her right hand grabbed the back of the rolling chair. Her left took the edge of the desk. She used the two to hoist herself up and sway forward over the desktop. The men were in the other room, right on the other side of the wall. Their flashlights had not yet swung toward the fish tank, and she thought it possible they had not observed the dim, coppery shine of the candle flame yet, and she bent forward to blow it out, then caught herself staring down at the note written on a sheet of Here Library stationery.

“WHEN THE ANGELS FALL, THE CHILDREN GO HOME.”