Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
“A stroke.” It was not quite a question.
“Not a fall-down-and-kill-you kind of stroke. If he had another one of those, there wouldn’t be any question of it. He’d be dead. This was one of the little blow-outs. You don’t always know when he’s had one of the little ones. Especially when he gets like he is now, just starin’ at things. He hasn’t said a word to anyone in two months. He isn’t ever going to say a word to anyone again.”
“Is he at the hospital?”
“No. We can care for him just as well or better here. Me livin’ with him and Dr. Newland in every day. But we can send him to the hospital. It would be cheaper there, if that matters to you.”
“It doesn’t. Let ’em save the beds at the hospital for people who might actually get better in them.”
“I won’t argue you on that one. Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”
“So what are you going to do about him not eating? What happens now?”
This was met by a moment of silence. He had an idea that the question had taken her by surprise. Her tone, when she spoke again, was both gently reasonable and apologetic, the tone of a woman explaining a harsh truth to a child.
“Well. That’s up to you, not me, Justin. Doc Newland can poke a feedin’ tube in him and he’ll go on a while longer, that’s what you want. Till he has another little blowout and he forgets how to breathe. Or we can just let him be. He isn’t ever goin’ to recover, not at eighty-five years old. It’s not like he’s bein’ robbed of his youth. He’s ready to let go. Are you?”
Jude thought, but did not say, that he’d been ready for more than forty years. He had occasionally imagined this moment—maybe it was fair to say he’d even daydreamed of it—but now it had come, and he was surprised to find that his stomach hurt.
When he replied, though, his voice was steady and his own. “Okay, Arlene. No tube. If you say it’s time, that’s good enough for me. Keep me updated, all right?”
But she wasn’t done with him yet. She made an impatient sound, a kind of stiff exhalation of breath, and said, “Are you comin’ down?”
He stood at Danny’s desk, frowning, confused. The conversation had taken a leap from one thing to another, without warning, like a needle skipping across a record from one track to the next. “Why would I do that?”
“Do you want to see him before he’s gone?”
No. He had not seen his father, stood in the same room with him, in three decades. Jude did not want to see the old man before he was gone, and he did not want to look at him after. He had no plans to so much as attend the funeral, although he would be the one to pay for it. Jude was afraid of what he might feel—or what he wouldn’t. He would pay whatever he had to pay not to have to share his father’s company again. It was the best thing the money could buy: distance.
But he could no more say this to Arlene Wade than he could tell her he’d been waiting on the old man to die since he was fourteen. Instead he replied, “Would he even know if I was there?”
“It’s hard to say what he knows and what he doesn’t. He’s aware of people in the room with him. He turns his eyes to watch folks come and watch folks go. He’s been less responsive lately, though. People get that way, once enough lights have burned out.”
“I can’t make it down. This week isn’t good,” Jude said, reaching for the easiest lie. He thought maybe the conversation was over, and was prepared to say good-bye. Then he surprised himself by asking a question, one he hadn’t known was even on his mind until he heard himself speaking it aloud. “Will it be hard?”
“For him to die? Naw. When an old fella gets to this stage, they waste away pretty quick without bein’ hooked to the feed bag. They don’t suffer none.”
“You sure on that?”
“Why?” she asked. “Disappointed?”
5
Forty minutes later Jude drifted into the bathroom to soak his feet—size 14, flat arches, and a constant source of pain to him—and found Georgia leaning over the sink sucking her thumb. She had on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms with a cute pattern of tiny red figures that might’ve been hearts printed on them. It was only when you got close that you could see that all those tiny red figures were actually images of shriveled dead rats.
He leaned into her and pulled her hand out of her mouth to inspect her thumb. The tip was swollen and had a white, soft-looking sore on it. He let go of her hand and turned away, disinterested, pulling a towel off the heated rack and throwing it over his shoulder.
“Ought to put something on that,” he said. “Before it festers and rots. There’s less work for pole dancers with visible disfigurements.”
“You’re a sympathetic son of a bitch, you know that?”
“You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her as she stalked out. As soon as he said it, a part of him wished he could take it back. But he didn’t take it back. In their metal-studded bracelets and glossy black, dead-girl lipstick, they wanted harshness, the girls like Georgia. They wanted to prove something to themselves about how much they could take, to prove they were hard. That was why they came to him, not in spite of the things he said to them or the way he treated them but because of those things. He didn’t want anyone to go away disappointed. And it was just understood that sooner or later they would go away.
Or at least he understood it, and if they didn’t at first, then they always figured it out eventually.
6
One of the dogs was in the house.
Jude woke just after three in the morning at the sound of it, pacing in the hallway, a rustle and a light swish of restless movement, a soft bump against the wall.
He had put them in their pens just before dark, remembered doing this very clearly, but didn’t worry about that fact in the first few moments after coming awake. One of them had got into the house somehow, that was all.
Jude sat for a moment, still drunk and stuporous from sleep. A blue splash of moonlight fell across Georgia, sleeping on her belly to his left. Dreaming, her face relaxed and scrubbed of all its makeup, she looked almost girlish, and he felt a sudden tenderness for her—that, and also an odd embarrassment to find himself in bed with her.
“Angus?” he murmured. “Bon?”
Georgia didn’t stir. Now he heard nothing in the hallway. He slid out of bed. The damp and the cold took him by surprise. The day had been the coolest in months, the first real day of fall, and now there was a raw, clinging chill in the air, which meant it had to be even colder outside. Maybe that was why the dogs were in the house. Maybe they had burrowed under the wall of the pen and somehow forced their way in, desperate to be warm. But that didn’t make sense. They had an indoor-outdoor pen, could go into the heated barn if they were cold. He started toward the door, to peek into the hall, then hesitated at the window and twitched aside the curtain to look outside.
The dogs were in the outdoor half of the pen, both of them, up against the wall of the barn. Angus roamed back and forth over the straw, his body long and sleek, his sliding, sideways movements agitated. Bon sat primly in one corner. Her head was raised, and her gaze was fixed on Jude’s window—on him. Her eyes flashed a bright, unnatural green in the darkness. She was too still, too unblinking, like a statue of a dog instead of the real thing.
It was a shock to look out the window and see her staring directly back at him, as if she’d been watching the glass for who knew how long, waiting for him to appear. But that was not as bad as knowing that something else was in the house, moving around, bumping into things in the hallway.
Jude glanced at the security panel next to the bedroom door. The house was monitored, inside and out, by a collection of motion detectors. The dogs weren’t big enough to set them off, but a grown man would trip them, and the panel would note movement in one part of the house or another.
The readout, however, showed a steady green light and read only SYSTEM READY. Jude wondered i
Jude had a gun, but it was in his private recording studio, in the safe. He reached for the Dobro guitar leaning against the wall. Jude had never been one to smash a guitar for effect. His father had smashed his very first guitar for him, in an early attempt to rid Jude of his musical ambitions. Jude hadn’t been able to repeat the act himself, not even onstage, for show, when he could afford all the guitars he wanted. He was, however, perfectly willing to use one as a weapon to defend himself. In a sense he supposed he had always used them as weapons.
He heard one floorboard creak in the hall, then another, then a sigh, as of someone settling. His blood quickened. He opened the door.
But the hallway was empty. Jude plashed through long rectangles of icy light, cast by the skylights. He stopped at each closed door, listened, then glanced within. A blanket tossed across a chair looked, for a moment, like a deformed dwarf glaring at him. In another room he found a tall, gaunt figure standing behind the door, and his heart reared in his chest, and he almost swung the guitar, then realized it was a coatrack, and all the breath came rushing unsteadily out of him.
In his studio, at the end of the hall, he considered collecting the gun, then didn’t. He didn’t want it on him—not because he was afraid to use it but because he wasn’t afraid enough. He was so keyed up he might react to a sudden movement in the dark by pulling the trigger and wind up blowing a hole in Danny Wooten or the housekeeper, although why they would be creeping about the house at this hour he couldn’t imagine. He returned to the corridor and went downstairs.
He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should’ve reassured him but didn’t. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.
He couldn’t relax, but at the bottom of the stairs he pretended to, a charade he carried on for himself alone. He leaned the guitar against the wall and exhaled noisily.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he said. By then he was so ill at ease the sound of his own voice unnerved him, sent a cool, prickling rush up his forearms. He had never been one to talk to himself.
He climbed the stairs and started back down the hall to the bedroom. His gaze drifted to an old man, sitting in an antique Shaker chair against the wall. As soon as Jude saw him, his pulse lunged in alarm, and he looked away, fixed his gaze on his bedroom door, so he could only see the old man from the edge of his vision. In the moments that followed, Jude felt it was a matter of life and death not to make eye contact with the old man, to give no sign that he saw him. He did not see him, Jude told himself. There was no one there.
The old man’s head was bowed. His hat was off, resting on his knee. His hair was a close bristle, with the brilliance of new frost. The buttons down the front of his coat flashed in the gloom, chromed by moonlight. Jude recognized the suit in a glance. He had last seen it folded in the black, heart-shaped box that had gone into the rear of his closet. The old man’s eyes were closed.
Jude’s heart pounded, and it was a struggle to breathe, and he continued on toward the bedroom door, which was at the very end of the hallway. As he went past the Shaker chair, against the wall to his left, his leg brushed the old man’s knee, and the ghost lifted his head. But by then Jude was beyond him, almost to the door. He was careful not to run. It didn’t matter to him if the old man stared at his back, as long as they didn’t make eye contact with each other, and besides, there was no old man.
He let himself into the bedroom and clicked the door shut behind him. He went straight to his bed and got into it and immediately began to shake. A part of him wanted to roll against Georgia and cling to her, let her body warm him and drive away the chills, but he stayed on his side of the bed so as not to wake her. He stared at the ceiling.
Georgia was restless and moaned unhappily in her sleep.
7
He didn’t expect to sleep but dozed off at first light and then woke uncharacteristically late, after nine. Georgia was on her side, her small hand resting lightly on his chest and her breath soft on his shoulder. He slipped out of bed and away from her, let himself into the hall and walked downstairs.
The Dobro leaned against the wall where he had left it. The sight of it gave his heart a bad turn. He’d been trying to pretend he had not seen what he’d seen in the night. He had set himself a goal of not thinking about it. But there was the Dobro.
When Jude looked out the window, he spotted Danny’s car parked by the barn. He had nothing to say to Danny and no reason to bother him, but in another moment he was at the door of the office. He couldn’t help himself. The compulsion to be in the company of another human, someone awake and sensible and with a head full of everyday nonsense, was irresistible.
Danny was on the phone, craned back in his office chair, laughing about something. He was still in his suede jacket. Jude didn’t need to ask why. He himself had a robe over his shoulders and was hugging himself under it. The office was filled with a damp cold.
Danny saw Jude looking around the door and winked at him, another favorite ass-kissing Hollywood habit of his, although on this particular morning Jude didn’t mind it. Then Danny saw something on Jude’s face and frowned. He mouthed the words You okay? Jude didn’t answer. Jude didn’t know.
Danny got rid of whoever he was talking to, then rotated in his chair to turn a solicitous look upon him. “What’s going on, Chief? You look like fucking hell.”
Jude said, “The ghost came.”
“Oh, did it?” Danny asked, brightening. Then he hugged himself, mock-shivered. Tipped his head toward the phone. “That was the heating people. This place is a fucking tomb. They’ll have a guy out here to check on the boiler in a little while.”
“I want to call her.”
“Who?”
“The woman who sold us the ghost.”
Danny lowered one of his eyebrows and raised the other, making a face that said he had lost Jude somewhere. “What do you mean, the ghost came?”
“What we ordered. It came. I want to call her. I want to find some things out.”
Danny seemed to need a moment to process this. He swiveled partway back to his computer and got the phone, but his gaze remained fixed on Jude. He said, “You sure you’re all right?”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to see to the dogs. Find her number, will you?”
He went outside in his bathrobe and his underwear, to set Bon and Angus loose from their pens. The temperature was in the low fifties, and the air was white with a fine-grained mist. Still, it was more comfortable than the damp, clinging cold of the house. Angus licked at his hand, his tongue rough and hot and so real that for a moment Jude felt an almost painful throb of gratitude. He was glad to be among the dogs, with their stink of wet fur and their eagerness for play. They ran past him, chasing each other, then ran back, Angus snapping at Bon’s tail.
His own father had treated the family dogs better than he ever treated Jude, or Jude’s mother. In time it had rubbed off on Jude, and he’d learned to treat dogs better than himself as well. He had spent most of his childhood sharing his bed with dogs, sleeping with one on either side of him and sometimes a third at his feet, had been inseparable from his father’s unwashed, primitive, tick-infested pack. Nothing reminded him of who he was, and where he had come from, faster than the rank smell of dog, and by the time he reentered the house, he felt steadier, more himself.
As he stepped through the office door, Danny was saying into the phone, “Thanks so much. Can you hold a moment for Mr. Coyne?” He pressed a button, held out the receiver. “Name’s Jessica Price. Down in Florida.”
As Jude took the receiver, he realized that this was the first time he’d ever heard the woman’s full name. When he had put down his money on the ghost, he’d simply not been curious, although
He frowned. She had a perfectly ordinary sort of name, but for some reason it caught his attention. He didn’t think he had ever heard it before, but it was so inherently forgettable it was hard to be sure.
Jude put the receiver to his ear and nodded. Danny pressed the button again to take it off hold.
“Jessica. Hello. Judas Coyne.”
“How’d you like your suit, Mr. Coyne?” she asked. Her voice carried a delicate southern lilt, and her tone was easy and pleasant…and something else. There was a hint in it, a sweet, teasing hint of something like mockery.
“What did he look like?” Judas asked. He had never been one to take his time getting to the point. “Your stepfather.”
“Reese, honey,” the woman said, talking to someone else, not Jude. “Reese, will you turn off that TV and go outside?” A girl, away in the background, registered a sullen complaint. “Because I’m on the phone.” The girl said something else. “Because it’s private. Go on, now. Go on.” A screen door slapped shut. The woman sighed, a bemused, “you know kids” sound, and then said to Jude, “Did you see him? Why don’t you tell me what you think he looks like, and I’ll say if you’re right.”
She was fucking with him. Fucking with him.
“I’m sending it back,” Jude told her.
“The suit? Go ahead. You can send the suit back to me. That doesn’t mean he’ll come with it. No refunds, Mr. Coyne. No exchanges.”
Danny stared at Jude, smiling a puzzled smile, his brow furrowed in thought. Jude noticed then the sound of his own breath, harsh and deep. He struggled for words, to know what to say.
She spoke first. “Is it cold there? I bet it’s cold. It’s going to get a lot colder before he’s through.”
“What are you out for? More money? You won’t get it.”