NOS4A2(83)

“Even the part where you bicycled all the way to Iowa?”

“Across the Shorter Way Bridge.”

“And how long did it take to get from Massachusetts to the corn capital of America?”

“I don’t know. Thirty seconds? A minute, tops.”

“It took you thirty seconds to pedal from Massachusetts to Iowa? And that part didn’t feel imaginary?”

“No. I remember it all like it really happened.”

“Okay. Got you. Go on.”

“So like I said, this girl in Iowa, she had a bag of Scrabble tiles. She could pull letters out and line them up into messages. Her Scrabble letters helped her unlock secrets, in the same way my bicycle could help me find lost objects. She told me there were other people like us. People who could do impossible things if they had the right vehicle. She told me about Charlie Manx. She warned me about him. She said there was a man, a bad man with a bad car. He used his car to suck the life out of children. He was a kind of vampire—a road vampire.”

“You’re saying you knew about Charlie Manx before he ever kidnapped you?”

“No, I’m not. Because in this version of my life, he didn’t kidnap me at all. In this version of my life, I had a dumb fight with my mom, and then after, I used my bicycle to go looking for him. I wanted to find some trouble, and I did. I crossed the Shorter Way Bridge and came out at Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House. He did his best to kill me, but I got away from him and ran and met you. And the story I told the police, all that stuff about being locked in his trunk and being assaulted—that was just something I made up, because I knew no one would believe the truth. I could tell any story I wanted about Charlie Manx, because I knew that stuff he had really done was worse than any lie I could make up. Remember: In this version of my life, he’s not a dirty old kidnapper, he’s a f*cking vampire.”

She was not crying, but her eyes were wet and shiny, luminous in a way that made Fourth of July sparklers look chintzy and dull.

“So he sucked the life out of little kids,” Lou said. “And then what? What happened to them?”

“They went to a place called Christmasland. I don’t know where that is—I’m not sure it’s even in our world—but they get great phone service, because the kids there used to call me all the time.” She looked out at the children standing on the stone wall, Wayne among them, and whispered, “They were ruined by the time Manx drained the life out of them. Nothing left in them but hate and teeth.”

Lou shuddered. “Jesus.”

A small knot of men and women erupted into laughter nearby, and Lou glared at them. It didn’t feel as if any people in their general vicinity had any right to be enjoying themselves at this particular moment.

He looked at her and said, “So to recap: There’s one version of your life where Charlie Manx, a dirty ol’ f*ckin’ child murderer, kidnapped you from a train station. And you only barely got away from him. That’s the official memory. But then there’s this other version where you crossed an imaginary bridge on a psychically powered bicycle and tracked him down in Colorado all on your own. And that’s the unofficial memory. The VH1 Behind the Music story.”

“Yes.”

“And both of these memories feel true to you.”

“Yes.”

“But you know,” Lou said, eyeing her intently, “that the story about the Shorter Way Bridge is bullshit. Deep down you know it’s a story you told yourself, so you don’t have to think about what really happened to you. So you don’t have to think about . . . being kidnapped and all the rest of it.”

“That’s right,” Vic said. “That’s what I figured out in the mental hospital. My story about the magic bridge is a classic empowerment fantasy. I couldn’t bear the thought of being a victim, so I invented this vast delusion to make me the hero of the story, complete with a whole set of memories of things that never happened.”

He sat back in his chair, his motorcycle jacket folded over one knee, and relaxed, breathed deep. Well. That wasn’t so bad. He understood now what she was saying to him: that she had been through something awful and it made her a crazy person for a while. She had retreated into fantasy for a time—anyone would!—but now she was ready to put the fantasy away, to deal with things as they were.

“Oh,” Lou added, almost as an afterthought. “Shit. This kind of got away from what we were talking about. What does all this have to do with the woman who came to your house yesterday?”

“That’s Maggie Leigh,” Vic said.

“Maggie Leigh? Who the hell is that?”

“The librarian. The girl I met in Iowa, when I was thirteen. She tracked me down in Haverhill to tell me that Charlie Manx is back from the dead and coming after me.”


LOU’S BIG, ROUND, BRISTLY FACE WAS ALMOST COMICALLY EASY TO read. His eyes didn’t just widen when Vic told him she’d met a woman from her own imagination. They popped, making him resemble a character in a comic strip who has just had a swig from a bottle marked XXX. If there had been smoke jetting from his ears, the picture would’ve been complete.

Vic had always liked to touch his face and could only barely resist doing it now. It was as inviting as a rubber ball is to a child.

She had been a child the first time she kissed him. They both had been, really.