Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  Maggie grinned, and the dimples reappeared. She was, in her chubby-cheeked, bright-eyed way, more or less adorable. Like a punk-rock Keebler elf.

  “I’m the one who put the Scrabble tiles in there. I’m kind of nuts for the game. Now twice a month I’ve got to haul them out and run them in the wash. It’s a bigger pain in the ass than rectal cancer. Do you like Scrabble?”

  Vic glanced at Maggie’s earrings again and noticed for the first time that one was the letter F and the other was the letter U.

  “I’ve never played it. I like your earrings, though,” Vic said. “You ever get in trouble for them?”

  “Nah. No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of ssss-ssso much compressed wisdom. Check it out: I’m twenty years old, and I’m one of the top five SS-Scrabble players in the whole state. I guess that might say more about Iowa than it says about me.” She pasted the Band-Aid over Vic’s scrape and patted it. “All better.”

  Maggie crunched out her cigarette in a tin can half filled with sand and slipped away to pour the tea. She returned a moment later with a pair of chipped cups. One said LIBRARIES: WHERE SHHH HAPPENS. The other said DO NOT MAKE ME USE MY LIBRARIAN VOICE. When Vic took her mug, Maggie leaned around her to open the drawer. It was the drawer where a PI would’ve kept his bottle of hooch. Maggie came up with an old purple faux-velvet bag with the word SCRABBLE stamped into it in fading gold letters.

  “You asked me how I knew about you. How I knew you were coming. SSS-SS-SSS—” Her cheeks began to color with strain.

  “Scrabble? It has something to do with Scrabble?”

  Maggie nodded. “Thanks for finishing my sentence for me. A lot of people who sss-stammer hate that, when people finish their sss-sentences. But as we’ve already established, I enjoy being an object of pity.”

  Vic felt heat rise into her face, although there was nothing sarcastic in Maggie’s tone. Somehow that made it worse. “Sorry.”

  Maggie appeared not to hear. She planted herself in a straight-backed chair next to the desk.

  “You came across the bridge on that bike of yours,” Maggie said. “Can you get to the covered bridge without it?”

  Vic shook her head.

  Maggie nodded. “No. You use your bike to daydream the bridge into existence. And then you use your bridge to find things, right? Things you need? Like, no matter how far away they are, the thing you need is always right on the other s-ss-side of the bridge?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Only I don’t know why I can do it, or how, and sometimes I feel like I’m only imagining all my trips across the bridge. Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy. You’re creative! You’re a s-ss-ss-strong creative. Me, too. You’ve got your bike, and I’ve got my letter tiles. When I was twelve, I saw an old SS-Suh-Scrabble game in a garage sale, going for a dollar. It was on display, the first word already played. When I saw it, I knew I was s-ss-suh—had to have it. I needed to have it. I would’ve paid anything for it, and if it wasn’t for sale, I woulda grabbed it and run. Just being close to this Scrabble board for the first time threw a kind of shimmy into reality. An electric train turned itself on and ran right off its tracks. A car alarm went off down the road. There was a TV playing inside the garage, and when I saw the SSS-Suh-Scrabble set, it went crazy. It started blasting s-ss-suh—”

  “Static,” Vic said, forgetting the promise she had made to herself only a moment before, not to finish any of Maggie’s sentences for her, no matter how badly she stammered.

  Maggie didn’t seem to mind. “Yes.”

  “I get something like that,” Vic said. “When I’m crossing the bridge, I hear static all around me.”

  Maggie nodded, as if she found this the least surprising thing in the world. “A few minutes ago, all the lights blinked off in here. The power died in the whole library. That’s how I knew you were getting close. Your bridge is a short circuit in reality. Just like my tiles. You find things, and my tiles spell me things. They told me you’d be coming today and I could find you out back. They told me the Brat would ride across the bridge. They’ve been chattering about you for months.”

  “Can you show me?” Vic asked.

  “I think I need to. I think that’s part of why you’re here. Maybe my tiles have a thing they want to spell for you.”

  She undid the drawstring, reached into the sack and took some tiles out, dropped them clattering onto the desk.

  Vic twisted around to look at them, but they were just a mess of letters. “Does that say something to you?”

  “Not yet.” Maggie bent to the letters and began to push them around with her pinkie.

  “It will say something?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Because they’re magic?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything magic about them. They wouldn’t work for anyone else. The tiles are just my knife. Suh-s-something I can use to poke a hole in reality. I think it always has to be a thing you love. I always loved words, and Scrabble gave me a way to play with them. Put me in a Scrabble tournament, someone is going to walk away with their ego all slashed up.”

  She had by now shuffled the letters around to spell THE BRAT HAD LUNCH TO RIDE F T W T.

  “What’s F-T-W-T mean?” Vic asked, turning her head to see the tiles upside down.

  “Not a damn thing. I haven’t figured it out yet,” Maggie said, frowning and moving the tiles around some more.

  Vic sipped at her tea. It was hot and sweet, but no sooner had she swallowed than she felt a chill sweat prickle on her brow. Those imaginary forceps, clenching her left eyeball, tightened a little.

  “Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.”

  She bent her head once more and shifted the tiles around in a decisive way. Now they read, THE BRAT FOUND HER CHILD A RICH TWIT.

  “I don’t know any rich twits,” Vic said.

  “You also look a little young to be with child,” Maggie said. “This is a hard one. I wish I had another essss-s-s.”

  “So my bridge is imaginary.”

  “Not when you’re on your bike. Then it’s real. It’s an inscape pulled into the normal world.”

  “But your Scrabble bag. That’s just a bag. It’s not really like my bike. It doesn’t do anything obviously imposs—”

  But as Vic spoke, Maggie took up her bag, unlaced the strings, and shoved her hand in. Tiles scraped, clattered, and clicked, as if she were pushing her hand down into a bucket of them. Her wrist, elbow, and upper arm followed. The bag was perhaps six inches deep, but in a moment Maggie’s arm had disappeared into it up to the shoulder, without so much as putting a bulge in the fake velvet. Vic heard her digging deeper and deeper, into what sounded like thousands of tiles.

  “Aaa!” Vic cried.

  On the other side of the fish tank, the librarian reading to the children glanced around.

  “Big old hole in reality,” Maggie said. It now looked as if her left arm had been removed at the shoulder, and the amputation was, for some reason, capped by a Scrabble bag. “I’m reaching into my inscape to get the tiles I need. Not into a bag. When I say your bike or my tiles are a knife to open a s-s-slit in reality, I’m not being, like, metaphorical.”

  The nauseating pressure rose in Vic’s left eye.

  “C
an you take your arm out of the bag, please?” Vic asked.

  With her free hand, Maggie tugged on the purple velvet sack, and her arm slithered out. She set the bag on the table, and Vic heard tiles clink within it.

  “Creepy. I know,” Maggie said.

  “How can you do that?” Vic asked.

  Maggie drew a deep breath, almost a sigh. “Why can some people s-s-speak a dozen foreign languages? Why can Pelé do the over-his-head bicycle kick? You get what you get, I reckon. Not one person in a million is good-looking enough, talented enough, and lucky enough to be a movie s-s-star. Not one person in a million knew as much about words as a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins did. He knew about inscapes! He came up with the term. S-some people are movie stars, some people are soccer stars, and you’re a suh-s-strong creative. It’s a little weird, but so is being born with mismatched eyes. And we’re not the only ones. There are others like us. I’ve met them. The tiles pointed me toward them.” Maggie bent to her letters again and began to push them here and there. “Like, there was a girl I met once who had a wheelchair, a beautiful old thing with whitewall tires. She could use it to make herself disappear. All she had to do was wheel her chair backward, into what she called the Crooked Alley. That was her inscape. She could wheel herself into that alley and out of existence, but s-s-ss-still see what was happening in our world. There isn’t a culture on earth that doesn’t have stories about people like you and me, people who use totems to throw a kink into reality. The Navajo . . .” But her voice was sinking in volume, dying away.

  Vic saw a look of unhappy understanding cross Maggie’s face. She was staring at her tiles. Vic leaned forward and looked down at them. She just had time to read them before Maggie’s hand shot out and swept them away.

  THE BRAT COULD FIND THE WRAITH

  “What’s that mean? What’s the Wraith?”

  Maggie gave Vic a bright-eyed look that seemed one part fright, and one part apology. “Oh, kittens,” Maggie said.

  “Is that something you lost?”

  “No.”

  “Something you want me to find, though? What is it? I could help you—”

  “No. No. Vic, I want you to promise me you aren’t going to go find him.”

  “It’s a guy?”

  “It’s trouble. It’s the worst trouble you can imagine. You’re, like, what? Twelve?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Okay. S-s-s-ss-suh-suh—” Maggie got stuck there, couldn’t go on. She drew a deep, unsteady breath, pulled her lower lip into her mouth, and bit down, sank her teeth into her own lip with a savagery that almost made Vic cry out. Maggie exhaled and went on, without any trace of a stammer at all: “So promise.”

  “But why would your Scrabble bag want you to know I could find him? Why would it say that?”

  Maggie shook her head. “That’s not how it works. The tiles don’t want anything, just like a knife doesn’t want anything. I can use the tiles to get at facts that are out of reach, the way you might use a letter opener to open your mail. And this—this—is like getting a letter with a bomb inside. It’s a way to blow your own little self up.” Maggie sucked on her lower lip, moving her tongue back and forth over it.

  “But why shouldn’t I find him? You said yourself that maybe I was here so your tiles could tell me something. Why would they bring this Wraith guy up if I’m not supposed to go looking for him?”

  But before Maggie could reply, Vic bent forward and pressed a hand to her left eye. The psychic forceps were squeezing so hard the eye felt ready to burst. She couldn’t help it, made a soft moan of pain.

  “You look terrible. What’s wrong?”

  “My eye. It gets bad like this when I go across the bridge. Maybe it’s because I’ve been sitting with you for a while. Normally my trips are quick.” Between her eye and Maggie’s lip, it was turning out to be a damaging conversation for the both of them.

  Maggie said, “The girl I told you about? With the wheelchair? When she first began using her wheelchair, she was healthy. It was her grandmother’s, and she just liked playing with it. But if she stayed too long in Crooked Alley, her legs went numb. By the time I met her, she was entirely paralyzed from the waist down. These things, they cost to use. Keeping the bridge in place could be costing you right now. You oughta only use the bridge s-s-sparingly.”

  Vic said, “What does using your tiles cost you?”

  “I’ll let you in on a secret: I didn’t always s-s-s-s-s-suh-suh-suh-stammer!” And she smiled again, with her visibly bloodied mouth. It took Vic a moment to figure out that this time Maggie had been putting her stammer on.

  “Come on,” Maggie said. “We should get you back. We sit here much longer, your head will explode.”

  “Better tell me about the Wraith, then, or you’re going to get brains all over your desk. I’m not leaving till you do.”

  Maggie opened the drawer, dropped her Scrabble bag into it, and then slammed it with unnecessary force. When she spoke, for the first time her voice lacked any trace of friendliness.

  “Don’t be a goddamn—” She hesitated, either at a loss for words or stuck on one.

  “Brat?” Vic asked. “Starting to fit my nickname a little better now, huh?”

  Maggie exhaled slowly, her nostrils flaring. “I’m not fooling, Vic. The Wraith is s-s-someone you need to stay away from. Not everyone who can do the things we can do is nice. I don’t know much about the Wraith except he’s an old man with an old car. And the car is his knife. Only he uses his knife to cut throats. He takes children for rides in his car, and it does something to them. He uses them up—like a vampire—to stay alive. He drives them into his own inscape, a bad place he dreamed up, and he leaves them there. When they get out of the car, they aren’t children anymore. They aren’t even human. They’re creatures that could only live in the cold s-s-space of the Wraith’s imagination.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “The tiles. They began telling me about the Wraith a couple years ago, after he grabbed a kid from L.A. He was working out on the West Coast back then, but things changed and he moved his attention east. Did you see the ss-s-story about the little Russian girl who disappeared from Boston? Just a few weeks ago? Vanished with her mother?”

  Vic had. In her neck of the woods, it had been the lead news story for several days. Vic’s mother watched every report with a kind of horror-struck fascination; the missing girl was Vic’s own age, dark-haired, bony, with an awkward but attractive smile. A cute geek. Do you think she’s dead? Vic’s mother had asked Chris McQueen, and Vic’s father had replied, If she’s lucky.

  “The Gregorski girl,” Vic said.

  “Right. A limo driver went to her hotel to pick her up, but someone knocked him out and grabbed Marta Gregorski and her mother. That was him. That was the Wraith. He drained the Gregorski girl and then dumped her with all the other children he’s used up, in some fantasy world of his own. An inscape no one would ever want to visit. Like your bridge, only bigger. Much bigger.”

  “What about the mother? Did he drain her, too?”

  “I don’t think he can feed off adults. Only children. He’s got s-ss-someone who works with him, like a Renfield, who helps him with the kidnappings and takes the grown-ups off his hands. You know Renfield?”

  “Dracula’s henchman or something?”

  “Close enough. I know that the Wraith is very old and he’s had a bunch of Renfields. He tells them lies, fills them up with illusions, maybe persuades them they’re heroes, not kidnappers. In the end he always s-suh-sacrifices them. That’s how they’re of the most use to him. When his crimes are uncovered, he can shift the blame onto one of his handpicked dumb-asses. He’s been taking children for a long time, and he’s good at hiding in the shadows. I’ve put together all kinds of details about the Wraith, but I haven’t been able to learn anything about him that would really help me identify him.”

  “Why can’t you just ask the tiles what his name is?”

  Maggie bl
inked and then, in a tone that seemed to mix sadness with a certain bemusement, said, “It’s the rules. No proper names allowed in S-S-Scrabble. That’s why my tiles told me to expect the Brat instead of Vic.”

  “If I found him, found out his name or what he looked like,” Vic said, “could we stop him then?”

  Maggie slapped one palm down on the desktop, so hard that the teacups jumped. Her eyes were furious—and scared.

  “Oh, gee, Vic! Aren’t you even listening to me? If you found him, you could get dead, and then it would be my fault! You think I want that on my conscience?”

  “But what about all the kids he’ll take if we don’t do anything? Isn’t that also sending children to their . . .” Vic let her voice trail off at the look on Maggie’s face.

  Maggie’s features were pained and sick. But she reached out, got a tissue from a box of Kleenex, and offered it to Vic.

  “Your left eye,” she said, and held up the dampened cloth. “You’re crying, Vic. Come on. We need to get you back. Now.”

  Vic did not argue when Maggie took her hand and guided her out of the library, and down the path, under the shade of the oaks.

  A hummingbird drank nectar from glass bulbs hanging in one of the trees, its wings whirring like small motors. Dragonflies rose on the thermal currents, their wings shining like gold in the midwestern sun.

  The Raleigh was where they had left it, leaned against a bench. Beyond was a single-lane asphalt road that circled around the back of the library, and then the grassy margin above the river. And the bridge.

  Vic reached for her handlebars, but before she could take them, Maggie squeezed her wrist.

  “Is it safe for you to go in there? Feeling like you do?”

  “Nothing bad has ever happened before,” Vic said.

  “That’s not a very reassuring way to ph-ph-phrase things. Do we have an agreement about the Wraith? You’re too young to go looking for him.”

  “Okay,” Vic said, righting her bike, putting a leg over. “I’m too young.”

  But even as she said it, she was thinking about the Raleigh, remembering the first time she’d seen it. The dealer had said it was too big for her, and her father agreed, told her maybe when she was older. Then, three weeks later, on her birthday, there it was in the driveway. Well, her father had said. You’re older now, ain’tcha?