NOS4A2(46)

Then Vic was up and moving again. She could not run, but she could hurry in a limping jog. Her lungs felt baked, and every other step there was a fresh ripping sensation in the back of her right thigh. She was less aware of her innumerable other hurts and aches: the cold burn on her right wrist, the steady stabbing pain in her left eyeball.

She stayed parallel to the drive, keeping it fifty feet off on her left, ready to duck behind brush or a tree trunk if she saw the Rolls. But the dirt lane led straight and true away from the little white house, with no sign of the old car, or the man Charles Manx, or the dead boy who traveled with him.

She followed the narrow dirt road for an uncertain period. She had lost her usual sense of time passing, did not have any idea, then or later, how long she made her way through the woods. Each moment was the longest single moment of her life until the next. It seemed to her later that her staggering escape through the trees was as long as all the rest of her childhood. By the time she saw the highway, she had left her childhood well behind her. It smoldered and burnt to nothing, along with the rest of the Sleigh House.

The embankment leading up to the highway was higher than the one she had fallen down, and she had to climb on her hands and knees, grabbing clumps of grass to hoist herself up. As she reached the top of the slope, she heard a rat-a-tat buzzing sound, the whine and blast of an approaching motorcycle. It was coming from her right, but by the time she found her feet, it was already past, big guy in black on a Harley.

The highway ran on a straight line through forest, beneath a confusion of stormy clouds. To her left were lots of high blue hills, and for the first time Vic had a sense of being somewhere high up herself; in Haverhill, Massachusetts, she rarely gave a second thought to altitude, but now she understood that it wasn’t the clouds that were low but herself that was high.

She reeled out onto the blacktop, chasing the Harley, shouting, and waving her arms. He won’t hear, she thought; there was no way, not over the rowdy tear of his own engine. But the big man looked back over his shoulder, and the front wheel of his Harley wobbled, before he straightened out and swerved to the side of the highway.

He didn’t have a helmet on and was a fat man with beard on both of his chins, his brown hair curled at the nape of his neck in a luxuriant mullet. Vic ran toward him, the pain stabbing her in the back of the right leg with each step. When she reached the motorcycle, she did not hesitate or explain herself but threw one leg over the seat, getting her arms around his waist.

His eyes were amazed and a little frightened. He had black leather gloves with the fingers snipped off and a black leather jacket, but the coat was unzipped to show a Weird Al T-shirt, and from this close she could see he was not the grown-up she had first taken him for. His skin was smooth and pink beneath the beard, and his emotions were almost childishly plain. He might’ve been no older than her.

“Dude!” he said. “Are you all right? You been in an accident?”

“I need the police. There’s a man. He wanted to kill me. He trapped me in a room and set fire to his house. He’s got a little boy. There was a little boy, and I almost didn’t get out, and he took the boy with him. We need to go. He might come back.” She was not sure any of this made sense. It was the right information, but it seemed to her she had arranged it poorly.

The bearded fat man goggled at her, as if she were speaking to him frantically in a foreign tongue—Tagalog, perhaps, or Klingon. Although as it turned out, if she had addressed him in Klingon, Louis Carmody probably would’ve been able to translate.

“Fire!” she shouted. “Fire!” She stabbed a finger back in the direction of the dirt lane.

She could not see the house from the highway, and the faint wisp of smoke that rose over the trees might’ve been from someone’s chimney or a pile of burning leaves. But it was enough to break him out of his trance and get him moving.

“Hold the f*ck on!” he cried, his voice cracking, going high-pitched, and he gave his bike so much throttle that Vic thought he was going to pop a wheelie.

Her stomach plunged, and she squeezed her arms around his gut, so the tips of her fingers could almost-but-not-quite touch. She thought he was going to dump it; the bike weaved dangerously, the front end going one way, the back end going the other.

But he straightened it out, and the center white line began to flick by in machine-gun staccato; so did the pines to either side of the road.

Vic dared one look back. She expected to see the old black car lurching up out of the dirt road, but the highway was empty. She turned her head and pressed it into the fat kid’s back, and they left the old man’s house behind, riding toward the blue hills, and they were away and they were safe and it was over.





Above Gunbarrel, Colorado


THEN HE BEGAN TO SLOW DOWN.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

They had traveled less than half a mile down the highway. She looked back over her shoulder. She could still see the dirt road leading up to that awful house.

“Dude,” the kid said. “We, like, need to get us some help. They’ll have a phone right in here.”

They were approaching a pitted and cracked blacktop lane, leading off to the right, and at the corner of the intersection was a country store with a couple pumps out front. The kid ran the bike right up to the porch.

It died all of a sudden, the instant he flipped the kickstand down; he had not bothered to put it in neutral. She wanted to tell him no, not here, this was too close to the guy’s house, but the fat boy was already off and giving her his hand to help her down.