NOS4A2

Vic senses that the house is an evil place. She gets off her bike and walks toward the house as the sound of a radio grows louder. The fir trees are decorated with Christmas lights and tin angels, even though it is the third week of March. She looks in the window of the garage and sees a black Rolls-Royce with a boy in the back seat. Vic wonders why he is so passive. She goes into the garage and looks in the car window. The boy is awake and doesn’t look unhappy. It is as if he is in a trance. She is tempted to run, but then she remembers that the bridge always takes her where she needs to go. When the boy looks at her his skin is unnaturally pale, his hair is white, and there are black veins on his cheeks. He says she should leave and that it isn’t safe.

Vic reaches through the open front window and offers him her hand. She screams when he grabs her wrist because his hand is so cold. The horn sounds when he bumps against it and the boy smiles, revealing sharp teeth. He shouts for Mr. Manx. Vic pulls away from the car and her wrist is burned with the black imprint of the boy’s hand. He licks his lips, and she sees that his tongue is black as the garage door begins to open. Vic hurries up the small flight of steps into a mudroom.

She forces herself not to scream and goes into a hallway.

After 10 steps she reaches a foyer. She smells turkey as she looks at various hunting prints on the walls. She looks out the living room window and sees an unnaturally tall, bald man. He wears an old coat like a military uniform. He is holding the handlebars of her bike and blocks the bridge. She bolts the door when he asks if she wants her bike and her bridge back. Then, she goes to the kitchen, looking for an escape.

She sees the dead boy watching the back of the house. He calls for her to come out. Vic grabs a frying pan off the stove, lights the burners, and starts a fire. Manx is closer to the bridge. He shoves her bike into the bridge frame and her eye hurts suddenly. The Shorter Way—and the bridge—vanish. The phone rings as she sees that what she thought were party streamers are actually strips of flypaper, heavy with dead insects. On the refrigerator, she sees a child’s drawing: It shows Manx with two children that look like the boy.

The phone rings. She answers it and asks for help, only to hear a voice telling her to go to Christmasland in the car. The boy slams his head into one of the living room’s windows as Manx shoves against the front door, breaking the chain. Vic hits the boy’s fingers with the frying pan as he reaches inside, which makes him laugh. The fire she started singes her hair. Manx gets inside and says she is too old for Christmasland. She ducks into the pantry as he reaches for her.

Vic blocks the door with a mop handle. If she doesn’t get out soon, she will burn with the house. Manx says they have a lot in common as travelers, and that they should learn from each other. She hears a crash and realizes that he has tipped the refrigerator over in the kitchen, blocking the pantry door. The door is now too hot to touch, and she wonders if Manx has left to let her burn.

The plaster ceiling is turning black. Vic wraps her hand in a sheet, but the door is still too hot. She sees a cabinet and opens the door, revealing a laundry chute. She slides in.

Vic begins inching her way up, wedging herself against the walls of the chute, but she falls and severely injures a muscle in her thigh. She screams for help and starts to cough. She remembers her mother screaming at her father that she was raising Vic alone. She regrets how she treated her mother, especially if she won’t ever have a chance to make it right. However, Vic makes it to the second floor and slides out into a hallway, before running downstairs and out the front door.

Vic runs to the trees and falls down an embankment. Her torn thigh muscle hurts. When she looks back, the Rolls-Royce is gone. She goes through a narrow dirt road and experiences a moment of existential transformation: “[B]y the time she saw the highway, she had left her childhood well behind her. It smoldered and burned to nothing, along with the rest of the Sleigh House” (246).

On the highway, she waves down a biker and gets onto the back of his motorcycle. She explains about Manx but isn’t sure if the man understands her as they ride away from the house.

The biker slows half a mile away. His name is Louis Carmody—he will go by Lou for the remainder of the novel—and he wants to call for help at a country store. Inside, Lou tells the workers about the house. Later, Vic will think that her son, Bruce, who is three years away at that point, was conceived at that moment.

One of the customers is a soldier named Tom Priest. He and the other customers think Vic has been kidnapped. A man says the house sounds like “The Father Christmas Place” (256). Vic sees the Wraith pull up outside.

Two customers—Alan and a man Vic thinks of as Popeye—go out to the parking lot with Priest, who has a gun. Priest pushes Manx into the car and holds him as they hear a thump in the trunk. When Alan reaches into the window for the keys, the window rolls up on its own and traps his arm. The car door opens and knocks Priest away. Manx shoots gas from the nozzle over Priest and then sets him aflame with his lighter. A customer named Sam Cleary hits Manx with a fire extinguisher as Priest dies.

As an unwed mother in Colorado, Vic receives a call from Christmasland. She had come to Colorado for art school. After Lou saved her from Manx, she had sex with him as a thank you, but afterward he wanted a relationship. She liked him enough to try. Now she and Lou live in a trailer behind the garage where he works on custom auto detailing. Their son Wayne—his full name is Bruce Wayne Carmody, after Batman—uses a tire for a playpen. Vic thinks Lou and Wayne both deserve better than her and knows she will leave them one day.

Vic leaves the trailer and drives their Ford offroad, feeling as if the Shorter Way is nearby. She hates that she loves Wayne; it means she can’t run away from her life. When she gets home, the phone in the garage rings. She hears carolers on the call. Brad McCauley, the boy from the Wraith, says he’s calling from Christmasland. Brad says they have nothing to eat and want her to visit so they can use their sharp teeth on her.

When Vic calls the operator to see where the call originated from, there is no record of her receiving a call. When she talks to Lou later that evening, she tells him that he did a skull drawing wrong for the bike and offers to help. He accepts, and they work on it together.

In 2001, Bing learns that Manx is sick. Bing is now 53 years old and hasn’t worn the gasmask in years. Manx has been aging rapidly and won’t wake up, a rare condition the doctor calls “Werner Syndrome” (284). Bing knows that it is not really a coma: Manx simply doesn’t have the energy to wake up. Bing has wanted to write to Manx but knows it would draw attention to them.

Two days after Manx was sentenced for Priest’s killing, Bing received a package with the NOS4A2 license plates. Bing has performed nine missions for Manx, one short of gaining entrance to Christmasland. He fondly recalls tormenting and killing the children’s mothers in his basement after Manx took their children.

Bing returns to the church, but it is shuttered now. The church makes him feel guilty, but he tries to ignore his doubts and remembers that he and Manx are heroes. Sometimes he worries because the mothers never admitted that they were going to harm their kids. Manx had always said that they had to take the children before their parents could hurt them.

Bing lights two candles for Manx and asks God for a sign. A pigeon defecates in his mouth from the rafters above. Bing stumbles and puts his hand down on a used condom that was tossed on the floor. He goes home and returns with the gasmask, then burns down the church.

Whenever Vic paints, the phone is silent. She overworks herself to avoid the children from Christmasland. Whenever there is a lull, the phone rings, although no one else hears it. Frozen breath comes through the earpiece each time she answers.

The dead children say that Wayne should be with them. The terrorist attacks of September 11 distract Vic for a while. Afterward, she starts writing a picture book called Search Engine, then becomes obsessed with the work, which comprises increasingly complex puzzles for a robot to navigate. The writing keeps the phone from ringing, and when she sells the book, she makes enough money that her creditors stop calling as well.

Michelle Demeter’s father lets her drive the Wraith when she is 12 years old. The car is dilapidated at this point, but occasionally it plays Christmas music. Michelle likes the car, except for the hood ornament. Her father, Nathan, says the woman on the hood ornament is “the spirit of ecstasy” (305). Michelle tells her father she has decided that they’re going to Christmasland. It is 2006 and Nathan bought it at an auction. Soon, he plans to begin a full restoration of the Rolls-Royce.

Chapter 38 contains The New York Times review for Search Engine. The author of the review compares Vic’s books to a cross of an M. C. Escher print and Where’s Waldo? It describes the ingenuity of the puzzles, and the reasons why they are irresistible to children in particular.

Chapter 39 returns the story to the Prologue, reminding the reader that this is the day that the nurse gives Manx the blood bag before he escapes from the prison infirmary.

In October 2009, Lou says he is taking Wayne to his mother’s house for a while. He is worried about Vic. She keeps trying to get rid of the phone, tearing it out of the wall each time he replaces it. She obsesses over waiting for it to ring. She also took Lou’s cell phone apart, but he doesn’t know.

Vic doesn’t try to stop him. After he leaves, she cuts the phone lines with scissors, and then she broils the phones in the oven. She watches TV but changes each program whenever it shows a ringing phone. A plastic toy phone rings by her feet. When she answers, she hears a child named Millicent Manx. Vic throws the toy in the oven and leaves when the smoke alarm starts to beep, oblivious to the fact that she is only wearing underwear.

She goes to a bookstore and sees that they are promoting her fourth book. The phone calls began again when she had been writing the third book. The phone rings in the bookstore, even though it is two in the morning. Then phones begin ringing in the buildings on both sides of the street. Vic throws her whiskey bottle through a bike store window and the alarm starts. She takes a Raleigh bicycle and begins to ride, planning to find Manx in California and kill him. She hears sirens and sees a firetruck going toward her house.

In 2012, Nathan Demeter finishes the restoration on the Wraith. Michelle is 18 now, and they have a week until her prom. After she uses the car for the dance, Nathan plans on selling it. Before he can test drive it, the locks close and Christmas music blares from the radio. The key won’t turn. The garage door opens, and the car backs down the drive quickly, throwing him into the door. He sees another car and screams for help as the Wraith drives itself. Nathan passes out. When he comes to, hours later, he sees a man in a gasmask. The man is holding a cylinder that says, “GINGERSNAP SPICE AIR FRESHENER” (335). He opens the door and says this is where Nathan gets out.

A man named Hicks works security at a hospital. He has access to the morgue, and always takes a picture with interesting people who die. He poses them in ways that he thinks are funny, although they are usually sexual and morbid. His girlfriend, Sasha, tells him that there is a famous serial killer in the morgue. Sasha is a nurse at the same facility and keeps them supplied with drugs.

Manx is the body in the morgue. Hicks props the body up and puts the bone mallet in Manx’s hand. Then he takes the bone saw, holds it up, and poses with his arm around the body. He hears voices outside and pulls the sheet over himself. After the voices fade, he uses the bathroom, then returns to the morgue to make sure he put the tools back. Something clubs him in the stomach, then in the ear. When he wakes, a doctor and Sasha are leaning over him. His gun and his pants are missing. Hicks cries and believes he will lose his job.