NOS4A2(175)

“Is my mother still here?”

“Your mother’s with the angels, babe,” he said.

“The angels,” Vic said. “There’s angels in the trees.” Then: “It’s snowing.”

“I know. In July. I’ve lived in the mountains my whole life. I know spots where the snow stays year-round, but I’ve never seen the snow fall this time of year. Not even up here.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Right above Gunbarrel. Where it all started.”

“It started in Terry’s Primo Subs when my mother left her bracelet in the bathroom. Where’d she go?”

“She wasn’t here. She’s dead, Vic. Remember?”

“She was sitting with us for a while. Over there.” Vic lifted her right arm and pointed at the embankment above them. The tires from the motorcycle had torn deep gouges in the slope, long, muddy trenches. “She said something about Wayne. She said Wayne will still have a little time when he gets to Christmasland, because he’s been running himself backward. Two steps back for every two miles forward. He won’t be one of those things. Not yet.”

She was stretched out on her back, arms at her sides, ankles together. Lou had put his flannel-lined coat over her; it was so big it covered her to her knees, as if it were a child’s blanket. Vic turned her head to look at him. She had a vacuity of expression that scared him.

“Oh, Lou,” she said, almost tonelessly. “Your poor face.”

He touched his right cheek, tender and swollen from the corner of his mouth to the edge of his eye socket. He didn’t remember how he got that one. The back of his left hand was badly burned, a steady throb of pain—when they came to rest, the hand had been caught under the bike, a hot pipe pressed against it. He couldn’t stand to look at it. The skin was black and cracked and glistening. He kept it down by his side, where Vic couldn’t see it either.

It didn’t matter about his hand. He didn’t think he had much time left. That sensation of ache and pressure in his throat and left temple was constant now. His blood felt as heavy as liquid iron. He was walking around with a gun to his head, and he thought at some point, before the night was over, it would go off. He wanted to see Wayne again before that happened.

He had pulled her from the bike as they went over the embankment, managed to roll so she was under him. The bike glanced off his back. If the Triumph had hit Vic—who probably weighed a hundred and five pounds with a brick in each pocket—it probably would’ve snapped her spine like a dry twig.

“You believe this snow?” Lou asked.

She blinked and wiggled her jaw and stared into the night. Flecks of snow dropped onto her face. “It means he’s almost here.”

Lou nodded. That was what he thought it meant.

“Some of the bats got out,” she said. “They came out of the bridge with us.”

He suppressed a shiver, couldn’t suppress the feeling of his skin crawling. He wished she hadn’t mentioned the bats. He had caught a glimpse of one, brushing past him, its mouth open in a barely audible shriek. As soon as he looked at it, he wished he had not seen it, wished he could unsee it. Its shriveled pink face had been horribly like Vic’s own.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess they did.”

“Those things are . . . me. The stuff in my head. When I use the bridge, there’s always a chance some of them will escape.” She rolled her head on her neck to look at him again. “That’s the toll. There’s always a toll. Maggie had a stutter that got worse and worse the more she used her Scrabble tiles. Manx had a soul once, probably, but his car used it up. Do you understand?”

He nodded. “I think.”

“If I say some things that don’t make sense,” she said, “you have to let me know. If I start to seem confused, you straighten me out. Do you hear me, Lou Carmody? Charlie Manx will be here soon. I need to know you’ve got my back.”

“Always,” he said.

She licked her lips, swallowed. “Good. That’s good. Good as gold. What’s gold stays gold forever, you know? That’s why Wayne is going to be okay.”

A snowflake caught in one of her eyelashes. The sight of it struck him as almost heartbreaking in its beauty. He doubted he would ever see anything so beautiful again in his life. To be fair, he was not anticipating living beyond the evening.

“The bike,” she said, and blinked again. Alarm rose upon her features. She sat up, elbows resting on the ground behind her. “The bike has to be all right.”

Lou had pried it out of the dirt and leaned it against the trunk of a red pine. The headlight hung from its socket. The right-hand mirror had been torn off. It was missing both mirrors now.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“Well. I don’t know. I haven’t tried starting it. We don’t know what might’ve come loose. You want me to—”

“No. It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll start.”

The breeze blew the dusting of snow at a slant. The night filled with soft chiming sounds.

Vic lifted her chin, looked into the branches above them, filled with angels, Santas, snowflakes, globes of silver and gold.

“I wonder why they don’t smash,” Lou said.

“They’re horcruxes,” Vic said.