NOS4A2(62)

The Wraith didn’t slow as it approached the road but sped up, and if anything was coming from either direction, he would be T-boned at close to forty miles an hour. Of course, even if nothing was coming, the Wraith would shoot across the road, into the trees on the other side, and Nathan assumed he would be launched through the windshield on the recoil. The Wraith, like all the cars of its period, had no safety belts, not even lap belts.

The road was empty, and when the rear tires hit the blacktop, the wheel spun in Nathan’s hands, whirring so fast it burned his palms and he had to let go. The Wraith snapped around, ninety degrees to the right, and Nathan Demeter was flipped across the front seat and into the left-hand door, bashed headfirst into the iron frame.

For a time he didn’t know how badly he was hurt. He sprawled on the front seat, blinking at the ceiling. Through the passenger-side window, he could see the late-afternoon sky, a profoundly deep blue, with a feathering of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere. He touched a tender spot on his forehead, and when his hand came away he was looking at blood on his fingertips, as a flute began to play the opening bars of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

The car was moving, had clunked down through the gears to fifth all on its own. He knew the roads around his house, felt they were moving east along Route 1638 to the Dixie Highway. Another minute and they would reach the intersection and—and what? Blow right through it, maybe catch a truck coming north and be torn apart? The thought crossed his mind as a possibility, but he couldn’t feel any urgency attached to it, didn’t think the car was on a kamikaze mission now. He had in some dazed way accepted that the Wraith was operating of its own agency. It had business and meant to do it. It had no use for him, was maybe not even really aware of him, any more than a dog might be aware of the tick stuck in its fur.

He climbed up onto one elbow, swayed, sat up the rest of the way, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror.

He wore a red mask of blood. When he touched his forehead again, he could feel a six-inch gash traversing the upper curve of his scalp. He probed it lightly with his fingers and felt the bone beneath.

The Wraith began to slow for the stop sign at the intersection with the Dixie Highway. He watched, mesmerized, as the gearshift dropped from fourth to third, clunked down into second. He began to scream again.

There was a station wagon ahead of him, waiting at the stop. Three towheaded, chubby-faced, dimple-cheeked children were crammed into the backseat. They twisted around to look at the Wraith.

He slapped his hands on the windshield, smearing rusty red prints on the glass.

“HELP!” he screamed, while warm blood leaked down his brow into his face. “HELP HELP HELP ME HELP ME HELP!”

The children inexplicably grinned as if he were being quite silly and waved furiously. He began to scream incoherently—the sound of a cow in the abattoir, slipping in the steaming blood of those who went before.

The station wagon turned right at the first break in traffic. The Wraith turned left, accelerating so quickly that Nathan Demeter felt as if an invisible hand were pressing him back into his seat.

Even with the windows up, he could smell the clean, late-spring odors of mown grass, could smell smoke from backyard barbecues and the green fragrance of new-budding trees.

The sky reddened, as if it, too, were bleeding. The clouds were like tatters of gold foil stamped into it.

Absentmindedly, Nathan Demeter noted that the Wraith was handling like a dream. The engine had never sounded so good. So strong. He thought it was safe to say the beautiful bitch was fully restored.


HE WAS SURE HE DOZED, SITTING UP BEHIND THE WHEEL, BUT HE DID not remember nodding off. He only knew that at some point before it was fully dark, he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the Wraith was racing through a tunnel of whirling snow, a tunnel of December night. The front windows were blurred with his own bloody handprints, but through them he could see snow devils unspooling across the black asphalt of a two-lane highway that he didn’t recognize. Skeins of snow moving like living silk, like ghosts.

He tried to think if they could’ve gone far enough north while he slept to catch a freak spring snowstorm. He discarded the idea as idiotic. He weighed the cold night and the unfamiliar road and told himself he was dreaming, but he did not believe it. His own moment-by-moment tally of tactile experiences—throbbing head, face tight and sticky with blood, back stiff from sitting too long behind the wheel—was too convincing in its depiction of wakefulness. The car held the road like a panzer, never slipping, never wobbling, never slowing below sixty.

The songs played on: “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Silver Bells,” “Joy to the World,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Sometimes Demeter was aware of the music. Sometimes he wasn’t. No ads, no news, just holy choirs giving thanks to the Lord and Eartha Kitt promising she could be a very good girl if Santa checked off her Christmas list.

When he shut his eyes, he could picture his cell phone, sitting on the worktable in the garage. Would Michelle have looked for him there yet? Sure—as soon as she got home and found the garage door standing open and the garage itself empty. She would be, by now, out of her mind with worry, and he wished he had his phone, not to call for help—he believed he was well beyond help—but only because he would feel better if he could hear her voice. He wanted to call and tell her that he still wanted her to go to her prom, to try to have fun. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t scared of her being a woman—if he had any true anxiety, it had been about himself getting old and being lonely without her, but he didn’t think he was going to have to worry about that now. He wanted to tell her she had been the best thing in his life. He had not said that to her lately and had never said it enough.