NOS4A2(39)

From somewhere came the faint sound of a TV or a radio.

Vic looked back again at the bridge. It was only a couple feet away. She exhaled deeply, told herself she was safe. If she was seen, she could wheel the bike around, get back into the bridge, and be gone, before anyone had time to so much as shout.

She got off the bike and began to walk it forward. With each soft crunching footfall, she felt more sure that her surroundings were real, not a delusion engineered by Ecstasy. The radio sounds grew in volume by subtle degrees as she approached the cottage.

Looking out into the trees, Vic saw those glimmering lights again, slivers of brightness hung in the surrounding pines. It took a moment to make sense of what she was seeing, and when she did, she held up and stared. The firs around the house were hung with Christmas ornaments, hundreds of them, dangling from dozens of trees. Great silver and gold spheres, dusted with glitter, swayed in the drifting pine branches. Tin angels held silent trumpets to their lips. Fat Santas put chubby fingers to their mouths, advising Vic to proceed quietly.

As she stood there looking about, that radio sound resolved into the bluff baritone of Burl Ives, encouraging all the world to have a holly jolly Christmas, and never mind it was the third week of March. The voice was coming from the attached garage, a dingy building with a single roll-up door and four square windows looking into it, milky with filth.

She took one baby step, then a second, creeping toward the garage in the same way she might creep out onto a high ledge. On the third step, she looked back to make sure the bridge was still there and that she could get into it in a hurry if she had to. She could.

Another step, and a fifth, and then she was close enough to see through one of the grimy windows. Vic leaned her Raleigh against the wall, to one side of the big garage door.

She pressed her face up to the glass. The garage contained an old black car with a small rear window. It was a Rolls-Royce, the kind of car Winston Churchill was always getting out of in photographs and old films. She could see the license plate: NOS4A2.

That’s it. That’s all you need. The police can track him down with that, Vic thought. You have to go now. You have to run.

But as she was about to step away from the garage, she saw movement through the rear window of the old car. Someone sitting in the backseat shifted slightly, wiggling to find a more comfortable spot. Vic could dimly see the outline of a small head through the foggy glass.

A child. There was a child in the car—a boy, she thought. The kid had a boy’s haircut.

Vic’s heart was by now beating so hard her shoulders shook. He had a child in his car, and if Vic rode back across the Shorter Way, maybe the law would catch up to the man who owned this old ride, but they would not find the kid with him, because by then he would already be under a foot of dirt somewhere.

Vic didn’t know why the child didn’t scream or let himself out of the car and run. Maybe he was drugged or tied up, Vic couldn’t tell. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t getting out unless Vic went in there and got him out.

She drew back from the glass and took another look over her shoulder. The bridge waited amid the trees. It suddenly seemed a long way off. How had it gotten so far away?

Vic left the Raleigh, went around to the side of the garage. She expected the side door to be locked, but when she turned the handle, it popped open. Quavering, high-pitched, helium-stoked voices spilled out: Alvin and the Chipmunks singing their infernal Christmas song.

Her heart quailed at the thought of going in there. She put one foot over the threshold, tentatively, as if stepping onto the ice of a pond that might not yet be safely frozen over. The old car, obsidian and sleek, filled almost all the available space in the garage. What little room was left was jammed with clutter: paint cans, rakes, ladders, boxes.

The Rolls had a roomy rear compartment, the back couch done in flesh-toned kidskin. A boy slept upon it. He wore a rawhide jacket with buttons of bone. He had dark hair and a round, fleshy face, his cheeks touched with a rose bloom of health. He looked as if he were dreaming sweet dreams; visions of sugarplums, perhaps. He wasn’t tied up in any way and didn’t look unhappy, and Vic had a thought that made no sense: He’s fine. You should go. He’s probably here with his father and he fell asleep and his father is letting him rest, and you should just go away.

Vic flinched from the thought, the way she might’ve flinched from a horsefly. There was something wrong with that thought. It had no business in her head, and she didn’t know how it had got there.

The Shorter Way Bridge had brought her here to find the Wraith, a bad man who hurt people. She had gone looking for trouble, and the bridge never pointed her wrong. In the last few minutes, things she had suppressed for years had come surging back. Maggie Leigh had been real, not a daydream. Vic really had gone out on her bike and retrieved her mother’s bracelet from Terry’s Primo Subs; that had not been imagined but accomplished.

She tapped on the glass. The child did not stir. He was younger than her, twelve or thereabouts. There was a faint, dusky wisp of hair on his upper lip.

“Hey,” she called to him in a low voice. “Hey, kid.”

He shifted, but only to roll onto his side so his face was turned away from her.

Vic tried the door. It was locked from the inside.

The steering wheel was on the right side of the car, the side she was already on. The driver’s-side window was rolled most of the way down. Vic shuffled toward it. There wasn’t much space between the car and the clutter piled against the wall.