NOS4A2(42)

The room was warm, the air close and stale. A TV dinner baked in the oven. She could envision the slices of turkey in one compartment, mashed potatoes in another, tinfoil covering the dessert. Two bottles of orange pop stood on the counter. There was a door to the backyard. In three steps Vic was there.

The dead boy watched the rear of the house. She knew he was dead now, or worse than dead. That he was a child of the man Charlie Manx.

He stood perfectly still in his rawhide coat and jeans and bare feet. His hood was pushed back to show his pale hair and the black branches of veins in his temples. His mouth was open to show his rows of needle teeth. He saw her and grinned but did not move as she cried out and turned the bolt. He had left a trail of white footprints behind him, where the grass had frozen at the touch of his feet. His face had the glassy smoothness of enamel. His eyes were faintly clouded with frost.

“Come out,” he said, his breath smoking. “Come on out here and stop being so silly. We will all go to Christmasland together.”

She backed away from the door. Her hip bumped the oven. She turned and began pulling open drawers, looking for a knife. The first one she opened was full of kitchen rags. The second held whisks, spatulas, dead flies. She went back to the first drawer, grabbed bunches of hand towels, opened the oven, and threw them in on top of the turkey dinner. She left the oven door parted a crack.

There was a frying pan on the stove. She grabbed it by the handle. It felt good to have something to swing.

“Mr. Manx! Mr. Manx, I saw her! She’s being a goof!” the boy shouted. Then he yelled, “This is fun!”

Vic turned and plunged through the batwing doors and back to the front of the house. She peered through the window by the door again.

Manx had walked her bicycle closer to the bridge. He stood before the opening, considering the darkness, head cocked to one side: listening to it, perhaps. Finally he seemed to decide something. He bent and gave the bicycle a strong, smooth shove out onto the bridge.

Her Raleigh rolled across the threshold and into the darkness.

An invisible needle slid into her left eye and back into her brain. She sobbed—couldn’t help herself—and doubled over. The needle withdrew, then slid in again. She wanted her head to explode, wanted to die.

She heard a pop, like her ears depressurizing, and the house shuddered. It was as if a jet had screamed by overhead, breaking the sound barrier.

The front hall began to smell of smoke.

Vic lifted her head and squinted out through the window.

The Shorter Way was gone.

She had known it would be, the moment she heard that hard, piercing pop! The bridge had collapsed into itself, like a dying sun going nova.

Charlie Manx walked toward the house, the tails of his coat flapping. There was no humor in his pinched, ugly face now. He looked instead like a stupid man, set upon doing something barbaric.

She glanced at the stairs but knew if she went up there, she would have no way back down. That left the kitchen.

When she stepped through the batwing doors, the boy was at the rear door, his face up against the glass of the window set into it. He grinned to show his mouthful of delicate hooks, those fine rows of curving bones. His breath spread feathers of silvery frost across the pane.

The phone rang. Vic yelped as if someone had grabbed her, looked around at it. Her face batted against the yellow polka-dot streamers hanging from the ceiling.

Only they weren’t streamers at all. They were strips of flypaper, with dozens of withered, dead fly husks stuck to them. There was bile in the back of Vic’s throat. It tasted sour-sweet, like a frappe from Terry’s gone bad.

The phone rang again. She grabbed the receiver, but before she picked it up, her gaze fixed on the child’s drawing taped directly above the phone. The paper was dry and brown and brittle with age, the tape gone yellow. It showed a forest of crayon Christmas trees and the man called Charlie Manx in a Santa hat, with two little girls, grinning to show a mouthful of fangs. The children in the picture were very like the thing in the backyard that had once been a child.

Vic put the phone to her ear.

“Help me!” she cried. “Help me, please!”

“Where are you, ma’am?” said someone with a childlike voice.

“I don’t know, I don’t know! I’m lost!”

“We already have a car there. It’s in the garage. Go get in the backseat, and our driver will take you to Christmasland.” Whoever was on the other end of the line giggled. “We’ll take care of you when you get here. We’ll hang your eyeballs from our big Christmas tree.”

Vic hung up.

She heard a crunch behind her, whirled, and saw that the little boy had slammed his forehead into the window. A spiderweb of shattered glass filled the pane. The boy himself seemed uninjured.

Back in the foyer, she heard Manx force the front door open, heard it catch against the chain.

The child pulled his head back, then snapped it forward, and his forehead hit the window with another hard crunch. Splinters of glass fell. The boy laughed.

The first yellow flames licked out of the half-open oven. They made a sound like a pigeon beating its wings. The wallpaper to the right of the oven was blackening, curling. Vic no longer remembered why she had wanted to start a fire. Something about escaping in a confusion of smoke.

The child reached through the shattered windowpane, his hand feeling for the bolt. Jagged glass points scraped his wrist, peeled up shavings of skin, drew black blood. It didn’t seem to bother him.