If you think in reverse, Wayne thought. Reverse. In. Think. You. If. Dead Grandma Lindy had been in his dream, and everything she said came out backward. Most of what she had said to him was gone now—forgotten—but that part of it came back to him with perfect clarity, like a message in invisible ink darkening and appearing on paper held above a flame. If you think in reverse, what? He didn’t know.
The car stopped at an intersection. A middle-aged woman stood on the curb, eight feet away. She was in shorts and a headband, jogging in place. She was waiting for her walk light, even though there was no cross traffic.
Wayne acted without thought. He flung himself at the door and banged his hands on the glass.
“Help!” he screamed. “Help me!”
The jogging woman frowned and looked around. She stared at the Rolls-Royce.
“Please help!” Wayne screamed, slapping the window.
She smiled and waved.
The light changed. Manx rolled sedately through the intersection.
To the left, on the other side of the street, Wayne saw a man in a uniform coming out of a doughnut shop. He wore what looked like a policeman’s cap and a blue windbreaker.
Wayne pitched himself across the car and banged his fists on the other window. As he did and the man came into focus, Wayne could see it was a postman, not a policeman. A podgy man in his mid-fifties.
“Help me! I’m being kidnapped! Help, help, help!” Wayne screamed, his voice cracking.
“He can’t hear you,” Manx said. “Or, rather, he does not hear what you want him to hear.”
The postman looked at the Rolls going by. He smiled and raised two fingers to the brim of his cap in a little salute. Manx drove on.
“Are you done making such a racket?” he said.
“Why don’t they hear me?” Wayne asked.
“It is like what they are always saying about Las Vegas: What happens in the Wraith stays in the Wraith.”
They were rolling out the other end of the little downtown, beginning to accelerate, leaving behind the four-block stretch of brick buildings and dusty storefronts.
“Don’t worry,” Manx said. “If you are tired of the road, we will be off it soon enough. I know I am ready for a break from all this highway. We are very close to where we are going.”
“Christmasland?” Wayne asked.
Manx pursed his lips in a thoughtful moue. “No. That is still a ways off.”
“The House of Sleep,” the Gasmask Man told him.
The Lake
VIC CLOSED HER EYES FOR A MOMENT, AND WHEN SHE OPENED THEM she was staring at the clock on the night table—5:59. Then the celluloid flaps flipped over to 6:00 A.M. and the phone rang.
The two things happened so closely together that Vic thought at first the alarm was going off, and she couldn’t figure out why she had set it for so early in the morning. The phone rang again, and the bedroom door clicked open. Tabitha Hutter peered in on her, eyes bright behind her round spectacles.
“It’s a 603 number,” she said. “A demolition company in Dover. You better answer. It’s probably not him, but—”
“It’s not him,” Vic said, and fumbled for the phone.
“I didn’t hear until late,” said her father. “And it took me a while to come up with your number. I waited as long as I could, in case you were trying to sleep. How are you, kid?”
Vic removed the phone from her mouth and said, “It’s my dad.”
Tabitha Hutter said, “Tell him he’s being recorded. All the calls to this number will be recorded for the foreseeable future.”
“Did you hear that, Chris?”
“I did. It’s okay. Anything they need to do. Christ, it’s good to hear your voice, kiddo.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know how you’re doing. I want you to know I’m here if you need me.”
“First time for everything, huh?”
He exhaled, a thin, frustrated breath. “I understand what you’re going through. I went through it, too, once upon a time, you know. I love you, girl. Tell me if I can do anything.”
“You can’t,” she said. “There’s nothing for you to blow up right now. It’s all blown up. Don’t call anymore, Dad. I’m in enough pain already. You just make it worse.”
She hung up. Tabitha Hutter watched her from the doorway.
“Did you get your cell-phone experts to try and locate Wayne’s phone? Was it any different from when you tried Find My iPhone? It can’t have been. If you had any new information, you wouldn’t have let me sleep.”
“They couldn’t locate his phone.”
“They couldn’t locate it? Or they traced him to the St. Nick Parkway, somewhere east of Christmasland?”
“Does that mean something to you? Charlie Manx had a house in Colorado. The trees around the house were hung with Christmas ornaments. The press gave it a name, called it the Sleigh House. Is that Christmasland?”
No, Vic thought automatically. Because the Sleigh House is in our world. Christmasland is in Manx’s inscape. The Manxscape.
Hutter had a hell of a poker face, watching Vic with an expression of studious calm. Vic thought if she told this woman that Christmasland was a place in the fourth dimension, where dead children sang carols and made long-distance phone calls, that Hutter’s expression wouldn’t change at all. She would continue to give Vic that cool, clinical look while police held Vic down and a doctor sedated her.
“I don’t know where Christmasland is or what it is,” Vic said, which was largely true. “I don’t understand why that’s coming up when you search for Wayne’s phone. Do you want to look at hammers?”
The house was still full of people, although they looked less like cops now, more like the Geek Squad from Best Buy. Three young men had set up laptops on the coffee table in the living room: a gangly Asian with tribal tattoos, a skinny kid with a red Jewfro and roughly a billion freckles, and a black man in a black turtleneck that looked like it had been snatched from Steve Jobs’s closet. The house smelled of coffee. There was a fresh pot brewing in the kitchen. Hutter poured Vic some and added cream and a spoonful of sugar, just the way Vic took it.
“Is that in my file?” Vic asked. “How I take my coffee?”
“The cream was in the fridge. You must use it for something. And a coffee spoon was sitting in the sugar jar.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Vic said.
“I used to go dressed as Holmes for Halloween,” Hutter said. “Had the pipe and the deerstalker cap and all the rest. What about you? What did you wear for trick-or-treat?”
“A straitjacket,” Vic said. “I’d go as an escaped mental patient. It was good practice for the rest of my life.”
Hutter’s smile flattened and went away.
She sat at the table with Vic and handed her the iPad. She explained how to swipe through the gallery to look at the different pictures of hammers.
“Why does it matter what he hit me with?” Vic asked.
“You don’t know what matters until after you’ve seen it. So you try to see everything.”
Vic swiped past sledgehammers, hardware-store hammers, croquet mallets.
“What the hell is this? A database dedicated to hammer murderers?”
“Yes.”
Vic glanced at her. Hutter’s face had returned to its usual bland state of impassivity.
Vic swiped through some more pictures, then paused. “This. It was this one.”
Hutter looked at the screen. On it was a picture of a foot-long hammer with a rectangular stainless-steel head, a crosshatched handle, and a sharp hook curving from the end.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Because of the hook. That’s the one. What the hell kind of hammer is that?”
Hutter pulled her lower lip into her mouth, then pushed back her chair and stood up. “Not one you buy at the hardware store. I have to make a call.”
She hesitated, one hand on the back of Vic’s chair.
“Do you think you’d be up for making a statement to the press this afternoon? We’ve had good play on the cable news channels. It has a lot of angles. Everyone knows the Search Engine stories, so there’s that. I’m sorry to say that a lot of them are talking about this as a real life-and-death game of Search Engine. A personal appeal for help will keep the story active. And awareness is our best weapon.”
“Has the press figured out that Manx also kidnapped me when I was a teenager?” Vic asked.
Hutter’s brow furrowed, as in thought. “Mm. No, they haven’t worked that out yet. And I don’t think you should mention it in your statement. It’s important to keep the media focused on the information that matters. We need people on the lookout for your son and the car. That’s what we talk about. Everything else is insignificant at best, a distraction at worst.”
“The car, my son, and Manx,” Vic said. “We want everyone on the lookout for Manx.”
“Yes. Of course.” She took two steps toward the door, then turned back and said, “You’ve been wonderful, Victoria. You’ve been very strong in a scary time. You’ve done so much I hate to ask for more. But when you’re ready, we’ll need to sit down today and I have to get the whole story in your words. I need to know more about what Manx did to you. It could greatly enhance our chances of finding your son.”
“I already told you what he did to me. I gave you the whole story yesterday. Bashed me with a hammer, chased me to the lake, drove off with the kid.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not making myself clear. I’m not talking about what Manx did to you yesterday. I’m talking about 1996. I’m talking about when he kidnapped you.”
HUTTER, VIC FELT, WAS A THOROUGH WOMAN. PATIENT AND SENSIBLE. She was, in her patient, sensible, thorough way, working toward the conclusion that Vic was deluded about Charlie Manx. But if she didn’t believe that Wayne had been taken by Manx, then what did she think had happened?
Vic had an awareness of threat she couldn’t quite isolate. It was like driving and suddenly knowing there was black ice under the tires and that any sudden movement might send the car spinning out of control.
I don’t doubt someone fought you, Hutter had said. I don’t think anyone doubts that.
And: You spent a month in a Colorado mental hospital, where you were diagnosed with severe PTSD and schizophrenia.
Sitting at the table with her coffee, in a state of relative quiet and stillness, Vic put it together at last. When it came to her, she felt a cool, dry sensation on the nape of her neck, a prickling across her scalp, the physical indicators of both wonder and horror; she was conscious of feeling both in equal measure. She swallowed some warm coffee to drive away the sick chill and its corresponding sensation of alarm. She made an effort to remain perfectly composed, going over it in her mind.
So. Hutter thought Vic had killed Wayne herself, in a psychotic fit. Killed the dog and then drowned Wayne in the lake. They only had her word that someone had fired a gun; no one had found so much as a single bullet, not a single casing. The lead had gone into the water, and the brass had stayed in the gun. The fence was smashed and the yard torn up, the only part of her story they couldn’t figure out yet. Sooner or later, though, they’d come up with an explanation for that, too. They’d invent something and force it to fit with the other facts.
They had her pegged as a Susan Smith, the woman from South Carolina who drowned her children, then told a whopping lie about how they’d been kidnapped by a black man, kept the nation whipped up in a frenzy of racial hysteria for about a week. That was why the networks weren’t talking about Manx. The police didn’t believe in him. They didn’t even believe that a kidnapping had occurred at all but were going along with that part of it for now, probably to cover themselves legally.
Vic swallowed the last of her coffee, put the cup in the sink, and stepped out the back door.
She had the backyard to herself. She walked through the dew-cool grass to the carriage house and looked through the window.
Lou was asleep on the floor, beside the motorcycle. The bike was in pieces, side covers off, chain hanging loose. Lou had a canvas tarp folded under his head as a makeshift pillow. His hands were covered in grease. There were black fingerprints on his cheek where he had touched his face in sleep.
“He’s been working in there all night,” said a voice from behind her.
Daltry had followed her out onto the lawn. His mouth was open in a grin to show a gold tooth. He had a cigarette in one hand.
“I’ve seen ’at. Plenty of times. ’S how people react when they feel helpless. You wouldn’t believe how many women will knit while they’re waiting in the emergency room to see if their kid is going to make it through lifesaving surgery. When you feel helpless, you’ll do just about any old thing to shut off your head.”
“Yeah,” Vic said. “That’s right. He’s a mechanic. It’s what he’s got instead of knitting. Can I have a cigarette?”
She thought it might steady her, smooth out her nerves.
“I didn’t see any ashtrays in the house,” he said. He pawed a package of Marlboros from his crummy coat, shook one out for her.
“I quit for my son,” she said.
He nodded, didn’t reply to that. He came up with a lighter, a big brass Zippo, with a cartoon of some kind stamped on the side. He flicked the starter, and it made crunchy noises and spit sparks.
“Almost out of fuel,” he said.
She took it from him and gave it a flick, and a little yellow flame wavered from the tip. She lit her smoke and shut her eyes and inhaled. It was like sliding into a warm bath. She looked up, sighing, and considered the cartoon on the side of the lighter. Popeye threw a punch. KABLOOEY, it said, in a burst of yellow shockwaves.
“You know what surprises me?” he asked while she pulled another long drag off the cigarette and filled her lungs with sweet smoke. “That no one has seen your big old Rolls-Royce. How does a car like that escape notice, is what I wonder. Ain’t you surprised no one has seen it?”
He watched her with bright, almost happy eyes.
“No,” she said, and it was the truth.
“No,” Daltry repeated. “You aren’t. Why is that, you think?”
“Because Manx is good at not being seen.”
Daltry turned his head and gazed out at the water. “It’s something. Two men in a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith. I checked an online database. You know there are fewer than four hundred Rolls-Royce Wraiths left in the entire world? There’s fewer than a hundred in the whole country. That’s a rare goddamn car. And the only person to see him is you. You must feel like you’re going crazy.”
“I’m not crazy,” Vic said. “I’m scared. There’s a difference.”
“I guess you’d know,” Daltry said. He dropped his cigarette in the grass and ground it out with his toe.
He had disappeared back inside the house before Vic realized she was still holding his lighter.
The House of Sleep
BING’S YARD WAS FULL OF TINFOIL FLOWERS, BRIGHTLY COLORED and spinning in the morning sunlight.
The house was a little pink cake of a place, with white trim and nodding lilies. It was a place where a kindly old woman would invite a child in for gingerbread cookies, lock him in a cage, fatten him for weeks, and finally stick him in the oven. It was the House of Sleep. Wayne felt sleepy just watching the foil flowers spin.
Up the hill from Bing Partridge’s house was a church that had nearly burned to the ground. Almost nothing of it remained except for the front façade, with its high pointed steeple, tall white doors, and sooty stained-glass windows. The back side of the church was a caved-in debris field of charred rafters and blackened concrete. There was a sign out front, one of those boards with movable letters, so the pastor could let people know the service schedule. Someone had been fooling with the letters, though, had written a message that probably did not accurately represent the views of the congregation. It read:
THE NEW AMERICAN
FAITH
TABERNACLE
GOD BURNED ALIVE
ONLY DEV1LS NOW
The wind rose in the huge old oaks, framing the parking lot around the scorched ruin of the church. Wayne could smell char, even with the windows rolled up.
NOS4A2 turned and eased up the driveway, toward a detached garage. Bing squirmed, digging in his pocket, and produced a remote control. The door rolled up, and the car rolled in.
The garage was a hollowed-out block of cement, cool and shady inside, with a smell of oil and iron. The metal odor came from the tanks. There were half a dozen green tanks in the garage—tall, rust-flecked cylinders with red stenciling on the side: FLAMMABLE and CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE and SEVOFLURANE. They were lined up like soldiers of some alien robot army awaiting inspection. Beyond the rows was a narrow staircase climbing to a second-floor loft.
“Oh, boy, time for breakfast,” Bing said. He looked at Charlie Manx. “I will make you the best breakfast you ever ate. Cross my heart and hope to die. The best. Just say what you want.”
“I want some time alone, Bing,” Manx said. “I want some time to rest my head. If I am not very hungry, it is probably because I am full up with all your prattle. Now, there are a lot of empty calories.”
Bing shrank. His hands crept toward his ears.
“Do not cover your ears and pretend you cannot hear me. You have been an utter disaster.”
Bing’s face wrinkled. His eyes shut. He began, hideously, to cry. “I could just shoot myself!” he cried.
“Oh, that is a lot of foolishness,” Manx said. “Anyway, you would most likely miss and put the bullet in me.”
Wayne laughed.
He surprised all of them, including himself. It had been like sneezing, a completely involuntary reaction. Manx and Bing looked into the backseat at him. Bing’s eyes streamed, his fat, ugly face distorted with misery. Manx, though—Manx watched Wayne with a kind of wondering amusement.