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He had jogged alongside her, holding her hand. They were in the gravel parking lot of a general store, down the road from the ruin of Manx’s lodge. Later Wayne would learn that his mother and father had held their very first conversation in that parking lot.

“You’re okay, kiddo,” Vic said to him. She was smiling, although her face was spattered with blood and filth. There was an oozing wound over her right eyebrow, and she had a breathing tube stuck up her nose. “Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good, no matter how much of a beating it takes. You’re okay. You’ll always be okay.”

He knew what she was saying. She was saying he wasn’t like the children in Christmasland. She was saying he was still himself.

But Charlie Manx had said something different. Charlie Manx said blood didn’t come out of silk.

Tabitha Hutter had a first tentative sip of her coffee and glanced out the window over the kitchen sink. “Your dad has the truck out front. Grab a jacket in case it’s cold? We should go.”

“Let’s ride,” Wayne said.


THEY SQUEEZED TOGETHER INTO THE TOW TRUCK, WAYNE SITTING IN the middle. There was a time when all three of them wouldn’t have fit, but New Lou didn’t take up as much space as the old Lou. New Lou had a Boris Karloff–in–Frankenstein look, with gangly hanging arms and a collapsed stomach beneath the big barrel of his chest. He had Frankenstein scars to match, running up from under the collar of his shirt along the length of his neck and behind his left ear, where they had performed the angioplasty. In the wake of that and the gastric bypass, his fat had just melted away, like so much ice cream left in the sun. The most striking thing was his eyes. It didn’t make sense that losing weight should change his eyes, but Wayne was more aware of them now, more conscious of his father’s intense, questing gaze.

Wayne settled into place beside his dad, then sat up, to get away from something digging into his back. A hammer—not an autopsy mallet but just an ordinary carpenter’s hammer, the wooden handle worn. Wayne set it next to his father’s hip.

The tow truck climbed away from Gunbarrel, following switchbacks through old firs, rising steadily into a spotless blue sky. Down in Gunbarrel it was warm enough in the direct rays of the sun, but up here the tops of the trees swished restlessly in a chill breeze that smelled fragrantly of the turning aspens. The slopes were streaked with gold.

“And gold doesn’t come off,” Wayne whispered, but just look: Leaves were coming off all the time, whisking out across the road, sailing the breeze.

“What did you say?” Tabitha asked.

He shook his head.

“How about some radio?” Tabitha asked, and reached past him to turn on some music.

Wayne could not say why he preferred silence, why the idea of music made him apprehensive.

Through a thin crackle of static, Bob Seger expressed his fondness for that old-time rock and roll. He averred that if anyone put on disco, he would be ten minutes late for the door.

“Where did this accident happen?” Tabitha Hutter asked, and, Wayne noted distantly, there was a faint tone of suspicion in her voice.

“We’re almost there,” Lou said.

“Was anyone hurt?”

Lou said, “This accident happened a while ago.”

Wayne didn’t know where they were going until they passed the country store on the left. It wasn’t a store anymore, of course, and hadn’t been for a decade. The pumps remained out front, one of them blackened, the paint boiled off where it had caught fire the day Charlie Manx stopped for a fill. The hills above Gunbarrel had their share of abandoned mines and ghost towns, and there was nothing so remarkable about a lodge-style house with smashed windows and nothing inside except shadows and cobwebs.

“What do you have in mind, Mr. Carmody?” Tabitha Hutter asked.

“Something Vic wanted me to do,” Lou said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have brought Wayne.”

“Actually, I think maybe I shouldn’t have brought you,” Lou said. “I intend to tamper with evidence.”

Tabitha said, “Oh, well. I’m off this morning.”

He continued on past the general store. In half a mile, he began to slow. The gravel road to the Sleigh House was on the right. As he turned in, the static rose in volume, all but erasing Bob Seger’s grainy, affable voice. No one got good reception around the Sleigh House. Even the ambulance had found it difficult to send a clear message to the hospital below. Something to do with the contours of the shelf rock, perhaps. It was easy in the notches of the Rockies to ride out of sight of the world below—and among the cliffs and the trees and the scouring winds, the twenty-first century was revealed to be only an imaginary construct, a fanciful notion that men had superimposed on the world, of no relevance whatsoever to the rock.

Lou stopped the truck and got out to move aside a blue police sawhorse. Then they went on.

The tow truck rattled across the washboarded dirt road, easing down almost to the dooryard of the ruin. The sumac was reddening in the fall chill. A woodpecker assaulted a pine somewhere. After New Lou put the truck into park, there was nothing coming from the radio but a roar of white noise.

When Wayne shut his eyes, he could picture them, those children of the static, those children lost in the space between reality and thought. They were so close he could almost hear their laughter underneath the radio hiss. He trembled.