NOS4A2(28)

Vic saw a look of unhappy understanding cross Maggie’s face. She was staring at her tiles. Vic leaned forward and looked down at them. She just had time to read them before Maggie’s hand shot out and swept them away.

THE BRAT COULD FIND THE WRAITH

“What’s that mean? What’s the Wraith?”

Maggie gave Vic a bright-eyed look that seemed one part fright, and one part apology. “Oh, kittens,” Maggie said.

“Is that something you lost?”

“No.”

“Something you want me to find, though? What is it? I could help you—”

“No. No. Vic, I want you to promise me you aren’t going to go find him.”

“It’s a guy?”

“It’s trouble. It’s the worst trouble you can imagine. You’re, like, what? Twelve?”

“Thirteen.”

“Okay. S-s-s-ss-suh-suh—” Maggie got stuck there, couldn’t go on. She drew a deep, unsteady breath, pulled her lower lip into her mouth, and bit down, sank her teeth into her own lip with a savagery that almost made Vic cry out. Maggie exhaled and went on, without any trace of a stammer at all: “So promise.”

“But why would your Scrabble bag want you to know I could find him? Why would it say that?”

Maggie shook her head. “That’s not how it works. The tiles don’t want anything, just like a knife doesn’t want anything. I can use the tiles to get at facts that are out of reach, the way you might use a letter opener to open your mail. And this—this—is like getting a letter with a bomb inside. It’s a way to blow your own little self up.” Maggie sucked on her lower lip, moving her tongue back and forth over it.

“But why shouldn’t I find him? You said yourself that maybe I was here so your tiles could tell me something. Why would they bring this Wraith guy up if I’m not supposed to go looking for him?”

But before Maggie could reply, Vic bent forward and pressed a hand to her left eye. The psychic forceps were squeezing so hard the eye felt ready to burst. She couldn’t help it, made a soft moan of pain.

“You look terrible. What’s wrong?”

“My eye. It gets bad like this when I go across the bridge. Maybe it’s because I’ve been sitting with you for a while. Normally my trips are quick.” Between her eye and Maggie’s lip, it was turning out to be a damaging conversation for the both of them.

Maggie said, “The girl I told you about? With the wheelchair? When she first began using her wheelchair, she was healthy. It was her grandmother’s, and she just liked playing with it. But if she stayed too long in Crooked Alley, her legs went numb. By the time I met her, she was entirely paralyzed from the waist down. These things, they cost to use. Keeping the bridge in place could be costing you right now. You oughta only use the bridge s-s-sparingly.”

Vic said, “What does using your tiles cost you?”

“I’ll let you in on a secret: I didn’t always s-s-s-s-s-suh-suh-suh-stammer!” And she smiled again, with her visibly bloodied mouth. It took Vic a moment to figure out that this time Maggie had been putting her stammer on.

“Come on,” Maggie said. “We should get you back. We sit here much longer, your head will explode.”

“Better tell me about the Wraith, then, or you’re going to get brains all over your desk. I’m not leaving till you do.”

Maggie opened the drawer, dropped her Scrabble bag into it, and then slammed it with unnecessary force. When she spoke, for the first time her voice lacked any trace of friendliness.

“Don’t be a goddamn—” She hesitated, either at a loss for words or stuck on one.

“Brat?” Vic asked. “Starting to fit my nickname a little better now, huh?”

Maggie exhaled slowly, her nostrils flaring. “I’m not fooling, Vic. The Wraith is s-s-someone you need to stay away from. Not everyone who can do the things we can do is nice. I don’t know much about the Wraith except he’s an old man with an old car. And the car is his knife. Only he uses his knife to cut throats. He takes children for rides in his car, and it does something to them. He uses them up—like a vampire—to stay alive. He drives them into his own inscape, a bad place he dreamed up, and he leaves them there. When they get out of the car, they aren’t children anymore. They aren’t even human. They’re creatures that could only live in the cold s-s-space of the Wraith’s imagination.”

“How do you know this?”

“The tiles. They began telling me about the Wraith a couple years ago, after he grabbed a kid from L.A. He was working out on the West Coast back then, but things changed and he moved his attention east. Did you see the ss-s-story about the little Russian girl who disappeared from Boston? Just a few weeks ago? Vanished with her mother?”

Vic had. In her neck of the woods, it had been the lead news story for several days. Vic’s mother watched every report with a kind of horror-struck fascination; the missing girl was Vic’s own age, dark-haired, bony, with an awkward but attractive smile. A cute geek. Do you think she’s dead? Vic’s mother had asked Chris McQueen, and Vic’s father had replied, If she’s lucky.

“The Gregorski girl,” Vic said.

“Right. A limo driver went to her hotel to pick her up, but someone knocked him out and grabbed Marta Gregorski and her mother. That was him. That was the Wraith. He drained the Gregorski girl and then dumped her with all the other children he’s used up, in some fantasy world of his own. An inscape no one would ever want to visit. Like your bridge, only bigger. Much bigger.”