NOS4A2(5)

The Brat glided through flickering sunlight, beneath the overhanging boughs. She was close enough to 495 to hear it: the grinding roar of an eighteen-wheeler downshifting, the hum of the cars, and yes, even the rumbling blast of a motorcycle making its way south.

When she shut her eyes, she was on the highway herself, making good time, enjoying the feeling of weightlessness as the bike tilted into the curves. She did not note that in her mind she was alone on the bike now, a bigger girl, old enough to twist the throttle herself.

She’d shut the both of them up. She’d get the bracelet and come back and throw it on the bed between her parents and walk out without a word. Leave them staring at each other in embarrassment. But mostly she was imagining the bike, the headlong rush into the miles, as the last of the day’s light fled the sky.

She slipped from fir-scented gloom and out onto the wide dirt road that ran up to the bridge. The Shortaway, locals called it, all one word.

As she approached the bridge, she saw that the chain-link fence was down. The wire mesh had been wrenched off the posts and was lying in the dirt. The entrance—just barely wide enough to admit a single car—was framed in tangles of ivy, waving gently in the rush of air coming up from the river below. Within was a rectangular tunnel, extending to a square of unbelievable brightness, as if the far end opened onto a valley of golden wheat, or maybe just gold.

She slowed—for a moment. She was in a cycling trance, had ridden deep into her own head, and when she decided to keep going, right over the fence and into the darkness, she did not question the choice overmuch. To stop now would be a failure of courage she could not permit. Besides. She had faith in speed. If boards began to snap beneath her, she would just keep going, getting off the rotten wood before it could give way. If there was someone in there—some derelict who wanted to put his hands on a little girl—she would be past him before he could move.

The thought of old wood shattering, or a bum grabbing for her, filled her chest with lovely terror and instead of giving her pause caused her to stand up and work the pedals even harder. She thought, too, with a certain calm satisfaction, that if the bridge did crash into the river, ten stories below, and she was smashed in the rubble, it would be her parents’ fault for fighting and driving her out of the house, and that would teach them. They would miss her terribly, would be sick with grief and guilt, and it was exactly what they had coming, the both of them.

The chain-links rattled and banged beneath her tires. She plunged into a subterranean darkness that reeked of bats and rot.

As she entered, she saw something written on the wall, to her left, in green spray paint. She did not slow to read it but thought it said TERRY’S, which was funny because they had eaten at a place called Terry’s for lunch, Terry’s Primo Subs in Hampton, which was back in New Hampshire, on the sea. It was their usual place to stop on their way home from Lake Winnipesaukee, located about halfway between Haverhill and The Lake.

Sound was different inside the covered bridge. She heard the river, a hundred feet below, but it sounded less like rushing water, more like a blast of white noise, of static on the radio. She did not look down, was afraid to see the river between the occasional gaps in the boards beneath. She did not even look from side to side but kept her gaze fixed on the far end of the bridge.

She passed through stammering rays of white light. When she crossed through one of those wafer-thin sheets of brightness, she felt it in her left eye, a kind of distant throb. The floor had an unpleasant sense of give. She had just a single thought now, two words long, almost there, almost there, keeping time with the churning of her feet.

The square of brightness at the far end of the bridge expanded and intensified. As she approached, she was conscious of an almost brutal heat emanating from the exit. She inexplicably smelled suntan lotion and onion rings. It did not cross her mind to wonder why there was no gate here at the other end of the bridge either.

Vic McQueen, a.k.a. the Brat, drew a deep gulp of air and rode out of the Shorter Way, into the sunlight, tires thumpety-thumping off the wood and onto blacktop. The hiss and roar of white noise ended abruptly, as if she really had been listening to static on the radio and someone had just poked the power switch.

She glided another dozen feet before she saw where she was. Her heart grabbed in her chest before her hands could grab for the brakes. She came to a stop so hard, with such force, that the back tire whipped around, skidding across asphalt, flinging dirt.

She had emerged behind a one-story building, in a paved alley. A Dumpster and a collection of trash cans stood against the brick wall to her left. One end of the alley was closed off by a high plank fence. There was a road on the other side of that fence. Vic could hear traffic rolling by, heard a snatch of a song trailing from one of the cars: Abra-abra-cadabra . . . I wanna reach out and grab ya . . .

Vic knew, on first glance, that she was in the wrong place. She had been down to the Shorter Way many times, looked across the high banks of the Merrimack to the other side often enough to know what lay over there: a timbered hill, green and cool and quiet. No road, no shop, no alley. She turned her head and very nearly screamed.

The Shorter Way Bridge filled the mouth of the alley behind her. It was rammed right into it, between the one-story building of brick and a five-story-high building of whitewashed concrete and glass.

The bridge no longer crossed a river but was stuffed into a space that could barely contain it. Vic shivered violently at the sight of it. When she looked into the darkness, she could distantly see the emerald-tinted shadows of the Pittman Street Woods on the other end.