NOS4A2(99)

He turned and began to clump back up the dock.

The Gasmask Man heaved a great unhappy sigh and lifted the .38, and the gun burped flame.

One of the pine boards above her head snapped and threw splinters. A second bullet zipped across the water to her right, stitching a line in the surface of the lake. Vic flung herself backward, splashing away from the narrow crack through which she had been spying. A third bullet dinged off the rusted stainless-steel ladder. The last made a soft, unremarkable plop right in front of the float.

She paddled, treading water.

Car doors slammed.

She heard the tires crunching as the car backed down across the yard, heard them thud over fallen fence rails.

Vic thought it might be a trick, one of them in the car, the other one, the Gasmask Man, remaining behind, out of sight, with the pistol. She shut her eyes. She listened intently.

When she opened her eyes, she was staring at a great, hairy spider suspended in what was left of her web. Most of it hung in gray shreds. Something—a bullet, all the commotion—had torn it apart. Like Vic, it had nothing left of the world it had spun for itself.





SEARCH ENGINE

JULY 6–7





The Lake


AS SOON AS WAYNE FOUND HIMSELF ALONE IN THE BACKSEAT OF THE Wraith, he did the only sensible thing: He tried to get the f*ck out.

His mother had flown down the hill—it seemed more like flying than running—and the Gasmask Man lurched after her in a kind of drunken, straggling lope. Then even Manx himself started toward the lake, hand clutched to the side of his head.

The sight of Manx making his way down the hill held Wayne for an instant. The day had turned to watery blue murk, the world become liquid. Lake-colored fog hung thickly in the trees. The fog-colored lake waited down the hill. From the back of the car, Wayne could only barely see the float out on the water.

Against this background of drifting vapor, Manx was an apparition from a circus: the human skeleton crossed with the stilt walker, an impossibly tall and gaunt and ravaged figure in an archaic tailcoat. His misshapen bald head and beaky nose brought to mind vultures. The mist played tricks with his shadow, so it seemed he was walking downhill through a series of dark, Manx-shaped doorways, each bigger than the last.

It was the hardest thing in the world to look away from him. Gingerbread smoke, Wayne thought. He had breathed some of the stuff the Gasmask Man had sprayed at him, and it was making him slow. He scrubbed his face with both hands, trying to shake himself to full wakefulness, and then he began to move.

He had already tried to open the doors in the rear compartment, but the locks wouldn’t unlock no matter how hard he pulled at them, and the windows wouldn’t crank down. The front seat, though—that was a different story. Not only was the driver’s-side door visibly unlocked, the window was lowered about halfway. Far enough for Wayne to wriggle out, if the door refused to cooperate.

He forced himself off the couch and made the long, wearying journey across the rear compartment, crossing the vast distance of about a yard. Wayne grabbed the back of the front seat and heaved himself over and—

Toppled down onto the floor in the back of the car.

The rapid leaping motion made his head spinny and strange. He remained on all fours for several seconds, breathing deeply, trying to still the roiling disquiet in his stomach. Trying as well to determine what had just happened to him.

The gas that had gone up his snoot had disoriented him so that he hardly knew down from up. He had lost his bearings and collapsed into the backseat again; that was it.

He rose to try once more. The world lurched unsteadily around him, but he waited, and at last it was still. He drew a deep breath (more gingerbread taste) and heaved himself over the divider and rolled and sat up on the floor of the backseat once again.

His stomach upended itself, and for a moment his breakfast was back in his mouth. He swallowed it down. It had tasted better the first time.

Down the hill, Manx was speaking, addressing the lake, his voice calm and unhurried.

Wayne considered the rear compartment, trying to establish to himself how he had managed to wind up here again. It was as if the backseat went on forever. It was like there was nothing but backseat. He felt as dizzy as if he had just climbed off the Gravitron at the county fair, that ride that spun you faster and faster until centrifugal force stuck you to the wall.

Get up. Don’t quit. He saw these words in his mind as clearly as black letters painted on the boards of a white fence.

This time Wayne ducked his head and got a running start and jumped over the divider and out of the rear compartment and . . . back into the rear compartment, where he crashed to the carpeted floor. His iPhone leaped out of the pocket of his shorts.

He got up on all fours but had to grab the shag carpet to keep from falling over, was that dizzy and light-headed. He felt as if the car were moving, spinning across black ice, revolving in a great swooping, nauseating circle. The sense of sideways motion was almost overpowering, and he had to briefly shut his eyes to block it out.

When he dared to lift his head and look around, the first thing he saw was his phone, resting on the carpet just a few feet away.

He reached for it, in the slow-motion way of an astronaut reaching for a floating candy bar.

He called his father, the only number he had stored under FAVORITES, one touch. He felt that one touch was almost all he could manage.

“What up, dawg?” Louis Carmody said, his voice so warm and friendly and unworried, Wayne felt a sob rise into his own throat at the sound of it.