NOS4A2(178)

“Oh, that?” he asked, and then made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “I passed out again. It’s nothing.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I just lost my father tonight, and I can’t lose you, too. If you think I’m going to risk your life any more than it’s already been risked, then you’re crazier than I am. Wayne needs his dad.”

“He needs his mother, too,” he said. “So do I.”

Vic smiled—her old Vic smile, a little rakish, a little dangerous.

“No promises,” she said. “You’re the best, Lou Carmody. You’re not just a good man. You are a real honest-to-God hero. And I don’t mean because you put me on the back of your motorcycle and drove me away from this place. That was the easy part. I mean because you’ve been there for Wayne every single day. Because you made school lunches and you got him to his dentist appointments and you read to him at night. I love you, mister.”

She looked up the road again. Manx had gotten out of the car. He crossed through his own headlights, and she had her first good look at him in four days. He wore his old-fashioned coat with the double line of brass buttons and tails. His hair was black and shiny, slicked back from the enormous bulge of his brow. He looked like a man of thirty. In one hand he held his enormous silver hammer. Something small was cupped in the other hand. He stepped out of the lights and into the trees, disappearing briefly into shadow.

“I have to go,” she said. She leaned in and kissed the side of Lou’s cheek.

He reached for her, but she slipped away and walked to her Triumph. She looked it up and down. There was a fist-size dent in the teardrop-shaped gas tank, and one of the pipes was hanging loose, looked like it might drag on the ground. But it would start. She could feel it waiting for her.

Manx stepped out of the woods and stood between the taillights at the rear of the Wraith. He seemed to look straight at her, although it didn’t seem possible that he could see her in the dark and falling snow.

“Hello!” he called. “Are you with us, Victoria? Are you here with your mean machine?”

“Let him go, Charlie!” she shouted. “Let him go if you want to live!”

Even at a distance of two hundred feet, she could see Manx beaming at her. “I think you know by now I am not so easy to kill! But come along, Victoria! Follow me to Christmasland! Let’s go to Christmasland and finish this thing! Your son will be glad to see you!”

Without waiting for a reply, he climbed in behind the wheel of the Wraith. The taillights brightened, dimmed, and the car began to move again.

“Oh, Jesus, Vic,” Lou said. “Oh, Jesus. This is a mistake. He’s ready for you. There’s got to be another way. Don’t do it. Don’t follow him. Stay with me, and we’ll find another way.”

“Time to ride, Lou,” she said. “Watch for Wayne. He’ll be along in a little bit.”

She put her leg over the saddle and turned the key in the ignition. The headlight flickered for a moment, dimly, then guttered out. Vic shivered steadily in her cutoffs and sneakers, put her heel on the kickstart, threw her weight down. The bike coughed and muttered. She leaped again, and it made a listless, flatulent sound: brapp.

“Come on, honey,” she said softly. “Last ride. Let’s bring our boy home.”

She rose to her full height. Snow caught in the fine hairs on her arms. She came down. The Triumph blasted to life.

“Vic!” Lou called, but she couldn’t look at him now. If she looked at him and saw him crying, she would want to hold him and she might lose her nerve. She put the bike in gear. “Vic!” he shouted again.

She left it in first while she gunned it up the steep, short slope of the embankment. The back tire fished this way and that in the snow-slippery grass, and she had to put a foot down on the dirt and push to get over the hump.

Vic had lost sight of the Wraith. It had circled the blasted wreck of the old hunting lodge and disappeared through a gap in the trees on the far side. She slammed the bike up into second, then third, accelerating to catch up. Stones flew from under the tires. The bike felt loose and wobbly on the snow, which had now accumulated to a fine dusting on the gravel.

Around the ruin, into high grass, and then to a sort of dirt track through the fir trees, barely wide enough to accommodate the Wraith. It was really just a pair of narrow ditches, with a mass of ferns growing in the space between.

The boughs of the pines leaned in above her, making a close, dark, narrow corridor. The Wraith had slowed to let her catch up, was only about fifty feet ahead of her. NOS4A2 rolled on, and she followed its taillights. The icy air sliced through her thin T-shirt, filled her lungs with raw, frozen breath.

The trees began to fall away on either side of her, opening into a rock-strewn clearing. There was a stone wall ahead, with an old brick tunnel set into it, a tunnel hardly wide enough to admit the Wraith. Vic thought of her bridge. This is his bridge, she thought. A white metal sign was bolted to the stone, next to the tunnel entrance. PARK IS OPEN EVERY DAY ALL YEAR-ROUND! GET READY TO SCREAM HIP-HIP SNOW-RAY, KIDS!

The Wraith slipped into the tunnel. Burl Ives’s voice echoed back down the brick-lined hole at her—a passageway Vic doubted had existed even ten minutes before.

Vic entered behind him. The right-hand pipe dragged on the cobbles, throwing sparks. The boom of the engine echoed in the stone-walled space.