Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Her last few letters were a truer picture of the place she’d been in mentally. They came on plain, ruled paper, torn out of a notebook, and her cursive was cramped, hard to read. Anna wrote that she couldn’t get any rest. Her sister lived in a new development, and there was a house going up right next door. She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When she tried to sleep at night, the hammers would start up again, just as she was drifting off, and never mind that there was no one over there. She was desperate to sleep. Her sister was trying to get her on a treatment plan for her insomnia. There were things Anna wanted to talk about, but she didn’t have anyone to talk to, and she was tired of talking to herself. She wrote that she couldn’t stand to be so tired all the time.
Anna had begged him to call, but he had not called. Her unhappiness wore on him. It was too much work to help her through her depressions. He’d tried, when they were together, and his best hadn’t been good enough. He’d given it his best, it hadn’t panned out, and still she wouldn’t leave him alone. He didn’t know why he even read her letters, let alone sometimes responded to them. He’d wished they would just stop coming. Finally they had.
Danny could dig them out and then make a doctor’s appointment for Georgia. As plans went, it wasn’t much, but it was better than what he had ten minutes before, which was nothing. Jude poured the tea, and time started up again.
He drifted with his mug into the office. Danny wasn’t at his desk. Jude stood in the doorway, staring at the empty room, listening intently to the stillness for some sign of him. Nothing. He was in the bathroom, maybe—but no. The door was slightly ajar, as it had been the day before, and the crack revealed only darkness. Maybe he had taken off for lunch.
Jude started over toward the window, to see if Danny’s car was in the driveway, then held up before he got there, took a detour to Danny’s desk. He flipped through some stacks of paper, looking for Anna’s letters. If Danny had found them, however, he’d tucked them somewhere out of sight. When Jude didn’t turn them up, he settled into Danny’s chair and launched the Web browser on his computer, intending to do a search on Anna’s stepdaddy. It seemed like there was something about everyone online. Maybe the dead man had his own MySpace account. Jude laughed—choked, ugly laughter—down in his throat.
He couldn’t remember the dead man’s first name, so he ran a search for “McDermott hypnosis dead.” At the top of Jude’s search results was a link to an obituary, which had appeared in last summer’s Pensacola News Journal, for a Craddock James McDermott. That was it: Craddock.
Jude clicked on it—and there he was.
The man in the black-and-white photograph was a younger version of the man Jude had seen twice now in the upstairs hallway. In the picture he looked a vigorous sixty, his hair cut in that same close-to-the-scalp military bristle. With his long, almost horsey face, and wide thin lips, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Charlton Heston. The most startling thing about the photograph was discovering that Craddock, in life, had eyes like any man’s eyes. They were clear and direct and stared into Forever with the challenging self-assurance of motivational speakers and evangelical preachers everywhere.
Jude read. It said that a life of learning and teaching, exploring and adventuring, had ended when Craddock James McDermott had died of a cerebral embolism at his stepdaughter’s home in Testament, Florida, on Tuesday, August 10. A true son of the South, he had grown up the only child of a Pentecostal minister and had lived in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, and later Galveston, Texas.
He was a wide receiver for the Longhorns in 1965 and enlisted in the service upon graduation, where he served as a member of the army’s psychological operations division. It was there that he discovered his calling, when he was introduced to the essentials of hypnosis. In Vietnam he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He was discharged with honors and settled in Florida. In 1980 he was wed to Paula Joy Williams, a librarian, and became stepfather to her two children, Jessica and Anna, whom he later adopted. Paula and Craddock shared a love built upon quiet faith, deep trust, and a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.
At this, Jude frowned. It was a curious sentence—“a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.” He didn’t even know what it meant.
Their relationship endured until Paula passed away in 1986. In his life Craddock had attended to almost ten thousand “patients”—Jude snorted at the word—using deep hypnotic technique to alleviate the suffering of the ill and to help those in need to overcome their weaknesses, work that his oldest stepdaughter, Jessica McDermott Price, carried on still, as a private consultant. Jude snorted again. She had probably written the obituary herself. He was surprised she hadn’t included the phone number for her service. Mention that you heard about us in my stepfather’s obit and receive 10 percent off your first session!!!
Craddock’s interest in spiritualism and the untapped potential of the mind led him to experiment with “dowsing,” the old country technique of discovering underground water sources with the use of a rod or pendulum. But it was the way in which he led so many of his fellow life travelers to discover their own hidden reservoirs of strength and self-worth for which he will be best remembered by his surviving adopted daughter and his loved ones. “His voice may have fallen silent, but it will never be forgotten.”
Nothing about Anna’s suicide.
Jude passed his gaze over the obit again, pausing on certain combinations of words that he didn’t much care for: “psychological operations,” “unexplored possibilities,” “the untapped potential of the mind.” He looked again at Craddock’s face, taking in the chilly confidence of his pale black-and-white eyes and the almost angry smile set on his thin, colorless lips. He was a cruel-looking son of a bitch.
Danny’s computer pinged to let Jude know that an e-mail had come through. Where the hell was Danny anyway? Jude glanced at the computer’s clock, saw he’d been sitting there for twenty minutes already. He clicked over to Danny’s e-mail program, which picked up messages for both of them. The new e-mail was addressed to Jude.
He flicked a glance at the address of the sender, then shifted in the chair, sitting up straight, muscles tightening across his chest and abdomen, as if he were readying himself for a blow. In a way he was. The e-mail was from [email protected].
Jude opened the e-mail and began to read.
dear jude
we will ride at nightfall we will ride to the hole i am dead you will die anyone who gets too close will be infected with the death on you us we are infected together we will be in the death hole together and the grave dirt will fall in on top of us lalala the dead pull the living down if anyone tries to help you i us we will pull them down and step on them and no one climbs out because the hole is too deep and the dirt falls too fast and everyone who hears your voice will know it is true jude is dead and i am dead and you will die you will hear my our voice and we will ride together on the night road to the place the final place where the wind cries for you for us we will walk to the edge of the hole we will fall in holding each other we will fall sing for us sing at our at your grave sing lalala
Jude’s chest was an airless place, stuck full of icy-hot pins and needles. Psychological operations, he thought almost randomly, and then he was angry, the worst kind of angry, the kind that had to stay bottled up, because there was no one around to curse at, and he wouldn’t allow himself to break anything. He had already spent a chunk of the morning throwing books, and it hadn’t made him feel better. Now, though, he meant to keep himself under control.
He clicked back to the browser, thinking he might have another glance at his search results, see what else he could learn. He looked blankly at the Pensacola News obituary one more time, and then his gaze fixed on the photograph. It was a different picture now, and in it Craddock was grinning and old, face lined and gaunt, almost starved, and h
Jude stood up so quickly, and with such sudden force, that Danny’s chair was flung back and toppled over. Then his hands were on the computer, under the monitor, and he lifted, heaving it off the desk and onto the floor. It hit with a short, high-pitched chirp and a crunch of breaking glass, followed by a sudden pop of surging electricity. Then quiet. The fan that cooled the motherboard hushed slowly to a stop. He had hurled it instinctively, moving too quickly to think. Fuck it. Self-control was overrated.
His pulse was jacked. He felt shaky and weak in the legs. Where the fuck was Danny? He looked at the wall clock, saw it was almost two, too late in the day for lunch. Maybe he’d gone out on an errand. Usually, though, he paged Jude on the intercom to let him know he was headed out.
Jude came around the desk and finally made it to the window with the view of the drive. Danny’s little green Honda hybrid was parked in the dirt turnaround, and Danny was in it. Danny sat perfectly still in the driver’s seat, one hand on the steering wheel, his face ashy, rigid, blank.
The sight of him, just sitting there, going nowhere, looking at nothing, had the effect of cooling Jude off. He watched Danny through the window, but Danny didn’t do anything. Never put the car in drive to leave. Never so much as glanced around. Danny looked—Jude felt an uneasy throb in his joints at the thought—like a man in a trance. A full minute passed, and then another, and the longer he watched, the more ill at ease Jude felt, the more sick in his bones. Then his hand was on the door and he was letting himself out, to find out what was wrong with Danny.
13
The air was a cold shock that made his eyes water. By the time he got to the side of the car, Jude’s cheeks were burning, and the tip of his nose was numb. Although it was going on early afternoon, Jude was still in his worn robe, a muscle shirt, and striped boxers. When the breeze rose, the freezing air burned his bare skin, raw and lacerating.
Danny didn’t turn to look at him but went on peering blankly through the windshield. He looked even worse close up. He was shivering, lightly and steadily. A drop of sweat trickled across his cheekbone.
Jude rapped his knuckles on the window. Danny started, as if springing awake from a light doze, blinked rapidly, fumbled for the button to roll down the glass. He still didn’t look directly up at Jude.
“What are you doing in your car, Danny?” Jude asked.
“I think I should go home.”
“Did you see him?”
Danny said, “I think I should go home now.”
“Did you see the dead man? What did he do?” Jude was patient. When he had to be, Jude could be the most patient man on earth.
“I think I have a stomach flu. That’s all.”
Danny lifted his right hand from his lap to wipe his face, and Jude saw it was clutching a letter opener.
“Don’t you lie, Danny,” Jude said. “I just want to know what you saw.”
“His eyes were black marks. He looked right at me. I wish he didn’t look right at me.”
“He can’t hurt you, Danny.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know.”
Jude reached through the open window to squeeze his shoulder. Danny shrank from his touch. At the same time, he made a whisking gesture at Jude with the letter opener. It didn’t come anywhere close to cutting him, but Jude withdrew his hand anyway.
“Danny?”
“Your eyes are just like his,” Danny said, and clunked the car into reverse.
Jude jumped back from the car before Danny could back out over his foot. But Danny hesitated, his own foot on the brake.
“I’m not coming back,” he said to the steering wheel.
“Okay.”
“I’d help you if I could, but I can’t. I just can’t.”
“I understand.”
Danny eased the car back down the driveway, tires grinding on the gravel, then turned it ninety degrees and rolled down the hill, toward the road. He watched until Danny passed through the gates, turned left, and disappeared from sight. Jude never saw him again.
14
He set out for the barn and the dogs.
Jude was grateful for the sting of the air on his face and the way each inhalation sent a stunned tingle through his lungs. It was real. Ever since he had seen the dead man that morning, he felt increasingly crowded by unnatural, bad-dream ideas leaking into everyday life where they didn’t belong. He needed a few hard actualities to hold on to, clamps to stop the bleeding.
The dogs watched him mournfully as he undid the latch to their pen. He slipped in before they could clamber out past him, and hunkered down, let them climb on him, smell his face. The dogs: They were real, too. He stared back at them, into their chocolate eyes and long, worried faces.
“If there was something wrong with me, you’d see it, wouldn’t you?” he asked them. “If there were black marks over my eyes?”
Angus lapped his face, once, twice, and Jude kissed his wet nose. He stroked Bon’s back, while she sniffed anxiously at his crotch.
He let himself out. He wasn’t ready to go back inside and found his way into the barn instead. He wandered over to the car and had a look at himself in the mirror on the driver’s-side door. No black marks. His eyes were the same as always: pale gray under bushy black brows and intense, like he meant murder.
Jude had bought the car in sorry shape from a roadie, a ’65 Mustang, the GT fastback. He’d been on tour, almost without rest, for ten months, had gone out on the road almost as soon as his wife left him, and when he came back, he found himself with an empty house and nothing to do. He spent all of July and most of August in the barn, gutting the Mustang, pulling out parts that were rusted, burnt out, shot, dented, corroded, caked in oils and acids, and replacing them: HiPo block, authentic cranks and heads, transmission, clutch, springs, white pony seats—everything original except for the speakers and the stereo. He installed a bazooka bass in the trunk, affixed an XM radio antenna to the roof, and laid in a state-of-the-art digital sound system. He drenched himself in oil, banged knuckles, and bled into the transmission. It was a rough kind of courtship, and it suited him well.
Around that time Anna had come to live with him. Not that he ever called her by that name. She was Florida then, although somehow, since he’d learned of her suicide, he’d come to think of her as Anna again.
She sat in the backseat with the dogs while he worked, her boots sticking out a missing window. She sang along with the songs she knew and talked baby talk to Bon and kept at Jude with her questions. She asked him if he was ever going to go bald (“I don’t know”), because she’d leave him if he did (“Can’t blame you”), and if he’d still think she was sexy if she shaved off all her hair (“No”), and if he’d let her drive the Mustang when it was done (“Yes”), and if he’d ever been in a fistfight (“Try to avoid them—hard to play guitar with a broken hand”), and why he never talked about his parents (to which he said nothing), and if he believed in fate (“No,” he said, but he was lying).
Before Anna and the Mustang, he had recorded a new CD, a solo disc, and had traveled to some twenty-four nations, played more than a hundred shows. But working on the car was the first time since Shannon had left him that he felt gainfully employed, doing work that mattered, in the truest sense—although why rebuilding a car should feel like honest work instead of a rich man’s hobby, while recording albums and playing arenas had come to seem like a rich man’s hobby instead of a job, he couldn’t have said.
The idea crossed his mind once more that he ought to go. Put the farm in the rearview mirror and t
The thought was so urgent, so demanding—get in the car and get out of here—that it set his teeth on edge. He resented being made to run. Throwing himself into the car and taking off wasn’t a choice, it was panic. This was followed by another thought, disconcerting and unfounded, yet curiously convincing: the thought that he was being herded, that the dead man wanted him to run. That the dead man was trying to force him away from…from what? Jude couldn’t imagine. Outside, the dogs barked in concert at a passing semi.
Anyway, he wasn’t going anywhere without talking to Georgia about it. And if he did eventually decide to light out, he would probably want to get dressed beforehand. Yet in another moment he found himself inside the Mustang, behind the wheel. It was a place to think. He’d always done some of his best thinking in the car, with the radio on.
He sat with the window halfway down, in the dark, earth-floored garage, and it seemed to him if there was a ghost nearby, it was Anna, not the angry spirit of her stepfather. She was as close as the backseat. They had made love there, of course. He had gone into the house to get beer and had come back, and she was waiting in the rear of the Mustang in her boots and no more. He dropped the open beers and left them foaming in the dirt. In that moment nothing in the world seemed more important than her firm, twenty-six-year-old flesh, and her twenty-six-year-old sweat, and her laughter, and her teeth on his neck.
He leaned back against the white leather, feeling his exhaustion for the first time all day. His arms were heavy, and his bare feet were half numb from the cold. At one time or another, he had left his black leather duster in the backseat. He reached for it and spread it over his legs. The keys were in the ignition, so he clicked the engine over to the battery to run the radio.