Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  Christmasland waited beyond the yard. The Sleighcoaster rumbled and crashed, and the children in the karts screamed and lifted their hands to the frozen night. The great Ferris wheel, the Arctic Eye, revolved against a backdrop of unfamiliar stars. All the candles were lit in a Christmas tree as tall as a ten-story building and as wide across as Bing’s own house.

  “MERRY GODDAMN CHRISTMAS, BING, YOU CRAZY THING!” hollered that great booming voice, and when Bing looked into the sky, he saw that the moon had a face. A single bulging bloodshot eye gaped from that starved skullface, a landscape of crater and bone. It grinned. “BING, YOU CRAZY MOTHERFUCKER, ARE YOU READY FOR THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE?!?”

  Bing sat up in bed, his heart pistoning in his chest—waking for real this time. He was so slicked with sweat that his G.I. Joe pajamas were sticking to his skin. He noticed, distantly, that his cock was so hard it hurt, poking through the front of his pants.

  He gasped, as if he had not awoken but surfaced, after a long time underwater.

  His room was full of the cool, pale, bone-colored light of a faceless moon.

  Bing had been swallowing air for almost half a minute before he realized he could still hear “White Christmas.” The song had followed him right out of his dream. It came from a long way off and seemed to be getting fainter by the moment, and he knew if he didn’t get up to look, it would soon be gone, and tomorrow he would believe he had imagined it. He rose and walked on unsteady legs to the window, for a look into the yard.

  An old car, at the end of the block, was easing away. A black Rolls-Royce with sideboards and chrome fixtures. Its taillights flashed red in the night and illuminated the license plate: NOS4A2. Then it turned the corner and disappeared, taking the joyful noise of Christmas with it.

  NorChemPharm

  BING KNEW THAT THE MAN FROM CHRISTMASLAND WAS COMING, well before Charlie Manx showed up to ask Bing to take a ride with him. He knew, too, that the man from Christmasland would not be a man like other men and that a job with Christmasland security would not be a job like other jobs, and on these matters he was not disappointed.

  He knew because of the dreams, which seemed to him more vivid and real than anything that ever happened to him in the course of his waking life. He could never step into Christmasland in these dreams, but he could see it out his windows and out his door. He could smell the peppermint and cocoa, and he could see the candles burning in the ten-story Christmas tree, and he could hear the karts bashing and crashing on the sprawling old wooden Sleighcoaster. He could hear the music, too, and how the children screamed. If you didn’t know better, you would think they were being butchered alive.

  He knew because of the dreams, but also because of the car. The next time he saw it, he was at work, out on the loading dock. Some kids had tagged the back of the building, had spray-painted a big black cock and balls, spewing black jizz on a pair of great red globes that might’ve been boobs but that looked, to Bing’s eye, like Christmas ornaments. Bing was outside in his rubber hazmat suit and industrial gasmask, with a bucket of diluted lye, to peel the paint off the wall with a wire brush.

  Bing loved working with lye, loved to watch it melt the paint away. Denis Loory, the autistic kid who worked the morning shift, said you could use lye to melt a human person down to grease. Denis Loory and Bing had put a dead bat in a bucket of lye and left it one day, and the next morning there had been nothing in there but fake-looking semitransparent bones.

  He stepped back to admire his work. The balls had mostly vanished to reveal the raw red brick beneath; only the big black prick and the boobs remained. As he stared at the wall, he saw, all of a sudden, his shadow appear, crisp, sharply delineated against the rough brick.

  He turned on his heel to look behind him, and the black Rolls was there: It was parked on the other side of the chain-link fence, its high, close-set headlights glaring at him.

  You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it. So it was with cars. Maybe you could not tell a Firebird from a Fiero, but when you saw a Rolls-Royce, you knew it.

  Bing smiled to see it and felt his heart fill with a rush of blood, and he thought, Now. He will open the door, and he will say, “Are you the young man, Bing Partridge, who wrote about a job at Christmasland?”—and my life will begin. My life will begin at last.

  The door did not open, though . . . not then. The man behind the wheel—Bing could not see his face past the brilliance of the headlights—did not call out or roll down his window. He flashed his high beams, though, in genial greeting, before turning the car in a wide circle, to point it away from the NorChemPharm building.

  Bing removed his gasmask, put it under his arm. He was flushed, and the cool, shady air was pleasant on his exposed skin. Bing could hear Christmas music trickling from the car. “Joy to the World.” Yes. He felt that way, exactly.

  He wondered if the man behind the wheel wanted him to come. To leave his mask, leave his bucket of lye, slip around the fence, and climb into the passenger seat. But no sooner had he taken a step forward than the car began to ease away up the road.

  “Wait!” Bing cried. “Don’t go! Wait!”

  The sight of the Rolls leaving him—of that license plate, NOS4A2, shrinking steadily as the car glided away—shocked him.

  In a state of dizzy, almost panicked excitement, Bing screamed, “I’ve seen it! I’ve seen Christmasland! Please! Give me a chance! Please come back!”

  The brake lights flashed. The Rolls slowed for a moment, as if Bing had been heard—and then glided on.

  “Give me a chance!” he shouted. Then, screaming: “Just give me a chance!”

  The Rolls slid away down the road, turned the corner, and was gone, left Bing flushed and damp with sweat and his heart clapping in his chest.

  He was still standing there when the foreman, Mr. Paladin, stepped out on the loading dock for a smoke.

  “Hey, Bing, there’s still quite a bit of cock on this wall,” he called. “You working this morning or are you on vacation?”

  Bing stared forlornly down the road.

  “Christmas vacation,” he said, but in a low voice so Mr. Paladin couldn’t hear him.

  HE HAD NOT SEEN THE ROLLS IN A WEEK, WHEN THEY CHANGED HIS schedule and he had to pull a double at NorChemPharm, six to six. It was ungodly hot in the storerooms, so hot that the iron tanks of compressed gas would sear you if you brushed up against them. Bing caught his usual bus home, a forty-minute ride, the vents blowing stinky air and an infant squalling the whole way.

  He got off on Fairfield Street and walked the last three blocks. The air was no longer gas but liquid—a liquid close to boiling. It streamed up off the softening blacktop and filled the air with distortion, so that the line of houses at the end of the block wavered like reflections bobbing in a pool of unsteady water.

  “Heat, heat, go away,” Bing sang to himself. “Boil me some other—”

  The Rolls sat across the street, in front of his house. The man behind the wheel leaned out of the right-hand window and twisted his head to look back at Bing and smiled, one old friend to another. He motioned with a long-fingered hand: Hurry up now.

  Bing’s own hand shot into the air helplessly in a nervous return wave, and he came on down the street in a jiggling fat man’s jog. It rattled him in some way, to find the Rolls idling there. A part of him had believed that eventually the man from Christmasland would come for him. Another part, however, had begun to worry that the dreams and his occasional sightings of The Car were like crows circling over something sick and close to collapse: his mind. Every step he took toward NOS4A2, he was that much more certain it would begin to move, to sail away and vanish yet again. It didn’t.

  The man in the passenger seat was not sitting in the passenger seat at all, because of course the Rolls-Royce was an old English car, and the steering wheel was on the right-hand side. This man, the driver, smiled benevolently upon Bing Partridg
e. At first glance Bing knew that although this man might have passed for forty or so, he was much older than that. His eyes had the soft, faded look of sea glass; they were old eyes, unfathomably old. He had a long, harrowed face, wise and kindly, although he had an overbite and his teeth were a little crooked. It was the sort of face, Bing supposed, that some people would describe as ferretlike, but in profile it also would’ve looked just fine on currency.

  “Here he is!” cried the man behind the wheel. “It is the eager young Bing Partridge! The man of the hour! We are overdue for a conversation, young Partridge! The most important conversation of your life, I’ll bet!”

  “Are you from Christmasland?” Bing asked in a hushed voice.

  The old or maybe ageless man laid a finger to one side of his nose. “Charles Talent Manx the Third at your service, my dear! CEO of Christmasland Enterprises, director of Christmasland Entertainment, president of fun! Also His Eminence, the King Shit of Turd Hill, although it doesn’t say that on my card.” His fingers snapped and produced a card out of thin air. Bing took it and looked down at it.

  “You can taste those candy canes if you lick the card,” Charlie said.

  Bing stared for a moment, then lapped his rough tongue across the card. It tasted of paper and pasteboard.

  “Kidding!” Charlie cried, and socked Bing in the arm. “Who do you think I am, Willy Wonka? Come around! Get in! Why, son, you look like you are about to melt into a puddle of Bing juice! Let me take you for a bottle of pop! We have something important to discuss!”

  “A job?” Bing asked.

  “A future,” Charlie said.

  Highway 322

  THIS IS THE NICEST CAR I HAVE EVER BEEN IN,” BING PARTRIDGE SAID when they were gliding along Highway 322, the Rolls riding the curves like a stainless-steel ball bearing in a groove.

  “It is a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith, one of just four hundred made in Bristol, England. A rare find—just like you, Bing Partridge!”

  Bing moved his hand across the pebbled leather. The polished cherry dash and the gearshift glowed.

  “Does your license plate mean something?” Bing asked. “En-o-ess-four-a-two?”

  “Nosferatu,” the man Charlie Manx said.

  “Nosfer-what-who?”

  Manx said, “It is one of my little jokes. My first wife once accused me of being a Nosferatu. She did not use that exact word, but close enough. Have you ever had poison ivy, Bing?”

  “Not in a long time. When I was little, before my father died, he took me camping and I—”

  “If he took you camping after he died, my boy, then you would have a story to tell! Here is my point: My first wife was like the rash you get from poison ivy. I couldn’t stand her, but I couldn’t keep my hands off her. She was an itch I scratched until I bled—and then I scratched it some more! Your work sounds dangerous, Mr. Partridge!”

  The transition was so abrupt that Bing wasn’t ready for it, needed a moment to register that it was his turn to talk.

  “It does?”

  “You mentioned in your letter your work with compressed gases,” Manx said. “Aren’t tanks of helium and oxygen highly explosive?”

  “Oh, sure. A guy in the loading bay snuck a smoke a few years ago, next to a tank of nitrogen with an open valve. It made a big shriek and went off like a rocket. It hit the fire door hard enough to smash it off its hinges, and the fire door is made of iron. No one died that time, though. And my crew has been accident-free for as long as I’ve been head man. Well—almost accident-free anyway. Denis Loory huffed some gingerbread smoke once, but that doesn’t really count. He didn’t even get sick.”

  “Gingerbread smoke?”

  “That’s a flavored mix of sevoflurane that we send to dentists’ offices. You can also get it unscented, but the little guys like the old gingerbread smoke.”

  “Oh? It’s a narcotic?”

  “It makes it so you don’t know what’s happening to you, yeah. But it doesn’t put you to sleep. It’s more like you only know what you’re told. And you lose all your intuitions.” Bing laughed a little, couldn’t help himself, then said, almost apologetically, “We told Denis it was disco time, and he started humping the air like John Ravolta in that movie. We just about died.”

  Mr. Manx’s mouth opened to show his little brown teeth in a homely and irresistible grin. “I like a man with a sense of humor, Mr. Partridge.”

  “You can call me Bing, Mr. Manx.”

  He waited for Mr. Manx to say it was all right to call him Charlie, but Mr. Manx didn’t. Instead he said, “I imagine most of the people who danced to disco music were under the influence of some kind of drugs. It is the only explanation for it. Not that I would call such silly wiggling a form of dance. More like rank foolishness!”

  The Wraith rolled into the dirt lot of the Franklin Dairy Queen. On blacktop the Wraith seemed to glide like a sailboat with the wind behind it. There was a sense of effortless, silent motion. On dirt Bing had a different impression, a feeling of mass and momentum and weight: a Panzer grinding the clay under its treads.

  “How about I buy us Coke-Colas and we will get down to brass tacks?” Charlie Manx said. He turned sideways, one gangly arm hung over the wheel.

  Bing opened his mouth to answer, only to find himself struggling against a yawn. The long, peaceful, rocking ride in the late-day sun had made him drowsy. He had not slept well in a month and had been up since 4:00 A.M., and if Charlie Manx had not turned up parked across from his house, he would’ve made himself a TV dinner and gone to bed early. Which reminded him.

  “I dreamed about it,” Bing said simply. “I dream about Christmasland all the time.” He laughed, embarrassed. Charlie Manx would think him quite the fool.

  Only Charlie Manx didn’t. His smile widened. “Did you dream about the moon? Did the moon speak to you?”

  Bing’s breath was pushed out of him all at once. He stared at Manx in wonder and, possibly, just a little alarm.

  “You dreamt about it because you belong there, Bing,” Manx said. “But if you want to go, you’ll have to earn it. And I can tell you how.”

  MR. MANX WAS BACK FROM THE TAKE-OUT WINDOW A COUPLE OF minutes later. He eased his lanky frame in behind the wheel and passed Bing a chill, sweating bottle of Coca-Cola, audibly fizzing. Bing thought he had never seen a bottle of anything look so good.

  He tipped back his head and poured the Coca-Cola down, swallowing rapidly, one gulp, two, three. When he lowered the bottle, it was half gone. He inhaled deeply—and then burped, a sharp, raggedy sound, loud as someone tearing a bedsheet.

  Bing’s face burned—but Charlie Manx only laughed gaily and said, “Better in than out, that’s what I always tell my children!”

  Bing relaxed and smiled shamefacedly. His burp had tasted bad, like Coca-Cola but also weirdly of aspirin.

  Manx spun the wheel and carried them out onto the road.

  “You’ve been watching me,” Bing said.

  “Yes, I have,” Charlie said. “Almost ever since I opened your letter. I was quite surprised to receive it, I admit. I have not had any responses to my old magazine ads in many a season. Still, I had a hunch, as soon as I read your letter, that you were one of my people. Someone who would understand from the get-go the important work I’m doing. Still, a hunch is good, but knowing is better. Christmasland is a special place, and many people would have reservations about the work I do for it. I am very selective about who I employ. As it happens, I am looking for a man who can act as my new head of security. I need a hum hum hum hum to hum hum hum.”

  It took Bing a long minute to realize he hadn’t heard the last part of what Charlie Manx was saying. The sound of his words had gotten lost in the drone of the tires on the blacktop. They were off the highway now, slipping along under the firs, through cool, piney shade. When Bing caught a glimpse of the rosy sky—the sun had slipped down when he wasn’t paying attention, and sunset had come—he saw the moon, as white as a lemon ice, drifting in the clear empty.


  “What did you say?” Bing asked, forcing himself to sit up a little straighter and rapidly blinking his eyes. He was dully aware that he was in danger of nodding off. His Coke, with its caffeine and sugar and refreshing fizz, should’ve woken him up but seemed to have had the opposite effect. He took a last swallow, but the residue at the bottom of the bottle was bitter, and he made a face.

  “The world is full of brutal, stupid people, Bing,” Charlie said. “And do you know the worst of it? Some of them have children. Some of them get drunk and hit their little ones. Hit them and call them names. Such folk are unfit for children—that’s how I see it! You could line them up and put a bullet in all of them—that would suit me fine. A bullet in the brain for each of them . . . or a nail.”

  Bing felt his insides turn upside down. He felt unsteady, so unsteady he had to put a hand on the dash to keep from tipping over.

  “I don’t remember doing it,” Bing lied, his voice hushed and trembling just slightly. “It was a long time ago.” Then he said, “I’d give anything to take it back.”

  “Why? So your father could’ve had a chance to kill you instead? The papers said before you shot him, he hit you so hard you suffered a cranial fracture. The papers said you were covered in bruises, some of them days old! I hope I do not have to explain to you the difference between homicide and fighting for your life!”

  “I hurt my mom, too,” Bing whispered. “In the kitchen. She didn’t do anything to me.”

  Mr. Manx didn’t seem impressed by this point. “Where was she when your father was giving you the old one-two? I take it she did not heroically attempt to shield you with her body! How come she never called the police? Couldn’t find the number in the phone book?” Manx exhaled a weary sigh. “I wish someone had been there for you, Bing. The fires of hell are not hot enough for a man—or woman!—who would hurt his children. But, really, I am less concerned with punishment than prevention! It would’ve been best if it simply had never happened to you at all! If your home had been a safe one. If every day had been Christmas for you, Bing, instead of every day being misery and woe. I think we can both agree on that!”