Heart-Shaped Box

by Joe Hill

  He wanted desperately to tell Anna to get out, to get downstairs and out of the house. He had a strong sense, though, that he could not shove himself into the scene before him without tearing through the soft tissue of the dream. And anyway, past was past. He couldn’t change what was going to happen now any more than he’d been able to save Bammy’s sister, Ruth, by calling her name. You couldn’t change, but you could bear witness.

  Jude wondered why Anna had even come upstairs, then thought that probably she wanted to throw some clothes in a bag before she left. She wasn’t afraid of her father and Jessica, didn’t think they had any power over her anymore—a beautiful, heartbreaking, fatal confidence in herself.

  “I told you to stay away,” Anna said.

  “You doin’ this for him?” Craddock asked. Until this moment, he had spoken with courtly southern inflections. There was nothing courtly about his voice now, though, his accent all harsh twang, a good ol’ boy with nothing good about him. “This all part of some crazy idea you have to win him back? You think you’re going to get his sympathy, you go crawlin’ off to him, with your sob story about how your pop made you do terrible things and it ruined you for life? I bet you can’t wait to boast to him ’bout how you told me off and shoved me down, an old man who cared for you in times of sickness and protected you from yourself when you were out of your mind. You think he’d be proud of you if he was standin’ here right now and saw you attack me?”

  “No,” Anna said. “I think he’d be proud of me if he saw this.” She stepped forward and spat into his face.

  Craddock flinched, then let out a strangled bellow, as if he’d caught an eyeful of some corrosive agent. Jessica started to haul herself to her feet, fingers hooked into claws, but Anna caught her by the shoulder and shoved her back down next to their stepfather.

  Anna stood over them, trembling, but not as furiously as she had been a moment before. Jude reached tentatively for her shoulder, put his bandaged left hand on it, and squeezed lightly. Daring finally to touch her. Anna didn’t seem to notice. Reality warped itself out of shape for an instant when his hand settled upon her, but he thought everything back to normality by focusing on the background sounds, the music of the moment: thum-thum-thum, rattle and hum.

  “Good for you, Florida,” he said. It was out before he could catch himself. The world didn’t end.

  Anna wagged her head back and forth, a dismissive little shake. When she spoke, her tone was weary. “And I was scared of you.”

  She turned, slipping out of Jude’s grasp, and went down the hall, to a room at the end. She closed the door behind her.

  Jude heard something go plink, looked down. His right hand was in the sock, soaked through with blood and dripping on the floor. The silver buttons on the front of his Johnny Cash coat flashed in the very last of the salmon-colored light of day. He hadn’t noticed he was wearing the dead man’s suit until just now. It really was a hell of a good fit. Jude had not wondered for one second how it was possible he could be seeing the scene before him, but now an answer to that unasked question occurred. He had bought the dead man’s suit and the dead man, too—owned the ghost and the ghost’s past. These moments belonged to him, too, now.

  Jessica crouched beside her stepfather, the both of them panting harshly, staring at the closed door to Anna’s room. Jude heard drawers opening and closing in there, a closet door thudding.

  “Nightfall,” Jessica whispered. “Nightfall at last.”

  Craddock nodded. He had a scratch on his face, directly below his left eye, where Anna had caught him with a fingernail as she tore off his glasses. A teardrop of blood trickled along his nose. He swiped at it with the back of his hand and made a red smear along his cheek.

  Jude glanced toward the great bay window into the foyer. The sky was a deep, still blue, darkening toward night. Along the horizon, beyond the trees and rooftops on the other side of the street, was a line of deepest red, where the sun had only just disappeared.

  “What’d you do?” Craddock asked. He spoke quietly, voice pitched just above a whisper, still tremulous with rage.

  “She let me hypnotize her a couple times,” Jessica told him, speaking in the same hush. “To help her sleep at night. I made a suggestion.”

  In Anna’s room there was a brief silence. Then Jude distinctly heard a glassy tink, a bottle tapping against glass, followed by a soft gurgling.

  “What suggestion?” Craddock asked.

  “I told her nightfall is a nice time for a drink. I said it’s her reward for getting through the day. She keeps a bottle in the top drawer.”

  In Anna’s bedroom a lingering, dreadful quiet.

  “What’s that going to do?”

  “There’s phenobarbital in her gin,” Jessica said. “I got her sleeping like a champ these days.”

  Something made a clunking sound on the hardwood floor in Anna’s room. A tumbler falling.

  “Good girl,” Craddock breathed. “I knew you had something.”

  Jessica said, “You need to make her forget—the photos, what she found, everything. Everything that just happened. You have to make it all go away.”

  “I can’t do that,” Craddock said. “I haven’t been able to do that in a long while. When she was younger…when she trusted me more. Maybe you…”

  Jessica was shaking her head. “I can’t take her deep like that. She won’t let me—I’ve tried. The last time I hypnotized her, to help with her insomnia, I tried to ask her questions about Judas Coyne, what she wrote in her letters to him, and if she ever said anything to him about…about you. But whenever I got too personal, whenever I’d ask her something she didn’t want to tell me, she’d start singing one of his songs. Holdin’ me back, like. I never seen anything like it.”

  “Coyne did this,” Craddock said again, his upper lip curling. “He ruined her. Ruined her. Turned her against us. He used her for what he wanted, wrecked her whole world, and then sent her back to us to wreck ours. He might as well have sent us a bomb in the mail.”

  “What are we going to do? There’s got to be a way to stop her. She can’t leave this house like she is. You heard her. She’ll take Reese away from me. She’ll take you, too. They’ll arrest you, and me, and we’ll never see each other again, except in courtrooms.”

  Craddock was breathing slowly now, and all the feeling had drained from his face, leaving behind only a look of dull, saturnine hostility. “You’re right on one thing, girl. She can’t leave this house.”

  It was a moment before this statement seemed to register with Jessica. She turned a startled, confused glance upon her stepfather.

  “Everyone knows about Anna,” he went on. “How unhappy she’s always been. Everyone’s always known how she was going to wind up. That she was going to slit her wrists one of these days in the bath.”

  Jessica began to shake her head. She made to rise to her feet, but Craddock caught her wrists, pulled her back to her knees.

  “The gin and the drugs make sense. Lots of ’em knock back a couple drinks and some pills before they do it. Before they kill themselves. It’s how they quiet their fears and deaden the pain,” he said.

  Jessica was still shaking her head, a little frantically, her eyes bright and terrified and blind, not seeing her stepfather anymore. Her breath came in short bursts—she was close to hyperventilating.

  When Craddock spoke again, his voice was steady, calm. “You stop it, now. You want Anna to take Reese away? You want to spend ten years in a county home?” He tightened his hold on her wrists and drew her closer, so he was speaking directly into her face. And at last her eyes refocused on his and her head stopped wagging back and forth. Craddock said, “This isn’t our fault. It’s Coyne’s. He’s the one backed us into this corner, you hear? He’s the one sent us this stranger who wants to tear us down. I don’t know what happened to our Anna. I haven’t seen the real Anna since I can’t remember when. The Anna you grew up with is dead. Coyne saw to that. Far as I’m concerned, he finishe
d her off. He might as well have cut her wrists himself. And he’s going to answer for it. Believe it. I’ll teach him to meddle with a man’s family. Shh, now. Catch your breath. Listen to my voice. We’ll get through this. I’m going to get you through this, same as I’ve got you through every other bad thing in your life. You trust in me now. Take one deep breath. Now take another. Better?”

  Her blue-gray eyes were wide and avid: entranced. Her breath whistled, one long, slow exhalation, then another.

  “You can do this,” Craddock said. “I know you can. For Reese, you can do whatever has to be done.”

  Jessica said, “I’ll try. But you have to tell me. You have to say what to do. I can’t think.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll think for both of us,” Craddock said. “And you don’t need to do anything except pick yourself up and go draw a warm bath.”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  Jessica started to rise again, but Craddock tugged at her wrists, held her beside him a moment longer.

  “And when you’re done,” Craddock said, “run downstairs and get my old pendulum. I’ll need something for Anna’s wrists.”

  At that he let her go. Jessica rose to her feet so quickly she stumbled and put a hand against the wall to steady herself. She stared at him for a moment, then turned in a kind of trance and opened a door just to her left, let herself into a white-tiled bathroom.

  Craddock remained on the floor until there came the sound of water rushing into the tub. Then he helped himself to his feet and stood shoulder to shoulder with Jude.

  “You old cocksucker,” Jude said. The soap-bubble world flexed and wobbled. Jude clenched his teeth together, pulled it back into shape.

  Craddock’s lips were thin and pale, stretched back across his teeth in a bitter, ugly grimace. The old flesh on the backs of his arms wobbled. He made his slow way down to Anna’s room, reeling a little—getting shoved down had taken something out of him. He pushed the door in. Jude followed at his heels.

  There were two windows in Anna’s room, but they both faced the back of the house, away from where the sun had gone down. It was already night in there, the room sunk into blue shadows. Anna sat at the very end of the bed, an empty tumbler on the floor between her sneakers. Her duffel bag was on the mattress behind her, some laundry hastily thrown into it, the sleeve of a red sweater hanging out. Anna’s face was a pleasant blank, her forearms resting on her knees, her eyes glassy and fixed on a point in the impossible distance. The cream-colored envelope with the Polaroid of Reese in it—her evidence—was in one hand, forgotten. The sight of her that way made Jude ill.

  Judas sank onto the bed beside her. The mattress creaked beneath him, but no one—not Anna, not Craddock—seemed to notice. He put his left hand over Anna’s right. His left hand was bleeding again from the puncture wound, the bandages stained and loose. When had that started? He couldn’t even lift the right hand, which was too heavy now and too painful. The thought of moving it made him dizzy.

  Craddock paused before his stepdaughter, bent to peer speculatively into her face.

  “Anna? Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice?”

  She went on smiling, did not reply at first. Then she blinked and said, “What? Did you say something, Craddock? I was listening to Jude. On the radio. This is my favorite song.”

  His lips tightened until there was no color in them. “That man,” he said again, almost spitting it. He took one corner of the envelope and jerked it out of her hands.

  Craddock straightened up, turned toward one of the windows to pull down the shade.

  “I love you, Florida,” Jude said. The bedroom around him bulged when he spoke, the soap bubble swelling so that it threatened to explode, then shrank again.

  “Love you, Jude,” Anna said softly.

  At this, Craddock’s shoulders jumped in a startled shrug. He looked back, wondering. Then the old man said, “You and him are going to be back together soon. That’s what you wanted, and that’s what you’ll get. I’m going to see to it. I’m going to put you two together just as soon as I can.”

  “Goddam you,” Jude said, and this time when the room bloated and stretched itself out of shape, he couldn’t, no matter how hard he concentrated on thum-thum-thum, make it go back the way it was supposed to be. The walls swelled and then sank inward, like bed linens hanging on a line and moving in a breeze.

  The air in the room was warm and close and smelled of exhaust and dog. Jude heard a soft whining sound behind him and looked back at Angus, who lay on the bed where Anna’s duffel bag had been only a moment before. His breathing was labored, and his eyes were gummy and yellow. A sharp-tipped red bone stuck through one bent leg.

  Jude looked back toward Anna, only to find that it was Marybeth sitting next to him on the bed now, face dirty, expression hard.

  Craddock pulled down one of the shades, and the room darkened some more. Jude glanced out the other window and saw the greenery at the side of the interstate, palms, rubbish in the weeds, and then a green sign that said EXIT 9. His hands went thum-thum-thum. The air conditioner hummed, buzzed, hummed. Jude wondered for the first time how he could still be hearing Craddock’s air conditioner. The old man’s room was all the way down the hall. Something began to click, a sound as repetitive as a metronome: the turn signal.

  Craddock moved to the other window, blocking Jude’s view of the highway, and he ran down that shade as well, plunging Anna’s room into darkness. Nightfall at last.

  Jude looked back at Marybeth, her jaw set, one hand on the wheel. The blinker signal flashed repetitively on the dash, and he opened his mouth, to say something, he didn’t know what, something like…

  41

  What are you doin’?” His voice an unfamiliar croak. Marybeth was aiming the Mustang at an exit ramp, had almost reached it. “This ain’t it.”

  “I was shakin’ you for about five minutes, and you wouldn’t wake up. I thought you were in a coma or somethin’. There’s a hospital here.”

  “Keep going. I’m awake now.”

  She swerved back onto the highway at the last moment, and a horn blared behind her.

  “How you doin’, Angus?” Jude asked, and peeked back at him.

  Jude reached between the seats and touched a paw, and for an instant Angus’s gaze sharpened a little. His jaws moved. His tongue found the back of Jude’s left hand and lapped at his fingers.

  “Good boy,” Jude whispered. “Good boy.”

  At last he turned away, settled back into his seat. The sock puppet on his right hand wore a red face. He was in dire need of a shot of something to dull the pain, thought he might find it on the radio: Skynyrd or, failing that, the Black Crows. He touched the power button and flipped rapidly from a burst of static to the Doppler pulse of a coded military transmission to Hank Williams III, or maybe just Hank Williams, Jude couldn’t tell because the signal was so faint, and then—

  Then the tuner landed on a perfectly clear broadcast: Craddock.

  “I never would’ve thought you had so much in the tank, boy.” His voice was genial and close, coming out of the speakers set in the doors. “You don’t have any quit in you. That usually counts for something with me. This ain’t usually, of course. You understand that.” He laughed. “Anyplace will do. You know, most people like to think they don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit,’ but it isn’t true. Most people, you put them under, put them under deep, maybe help ’em along with some good dope, sink them into a full trance state, and then tell them they’re burnin’ alive? They’ll scream for water till they got no voice left. They’ll do anything to make it stop. Anything you like. That’s just human nature. But some people—children and crazy folks, mostly—you can’t reason with, even when they’re in a trance. Anna was both, God love her. I tried to make her forget about all the things that made her feel so bad. She was a good girl. I hated the way she tore herself up over things—even over you. But I couldn’t ever really make her go all the way blank, even though it would’ve
saved her pain. Some people would just rather suffer. No wonder she liked you. You’re the same way. I wanted to deal with you quick. But you had to go and drag this out. And now you got to wonder why. You got to ask yourself. You know, when that dog in the backseat stops breathing, so do you. And it ain’t going to be easy, like it could’ve been. You spent three days livin’ like a dog, and now you have to die like one, and so does that two-dollar bitch next to you—”

  Marybeth thumbed the radio off. It came right back on again.

  “—you think you could turn my own little girl against me and not have to answer for it—”

  Jude lifted his foot and slammed the heel of his Doc Marten into the dash. It hit with a crunch of splintering plastic. Craddock’s voice was instantly lost in a sudden, deafening blast of bass. Jude kicked the radio again, shattering the face. It went silent.

  “Remember when I said the dead man didn’t come for talk?” Jude told her. “I take it back. Lately I been thinking that’s all he came for.”

  Marybeth didn’t reply. Thirty minutes later Jude spoke again, to tell her to get off at the next exit.

  They drove on a two-lane state highway, with southern, semitropical forest growing right up to the sides of the road, leaning over it. They passed a drive-in that had been closed since Jude was a child. The giant movie screen towered over the road, holes torn in it, offering a view of the sky. This evening’s feature was a drifting pall of dirty smoke. They rolled by the New South Motel, long since shut up and being reclaimed by the jungle, windows boarded over. They glided past a filling station, the first place they’d seen that was open. Two deeply sunburned fat men sat out front and watched them go by. They did not smile or wave or acknowledge the passing car in any way, except that one leaned forward and spat in the dirt.

  Jude directed her to take a left off the highway, and they followed a road up into the low hills. The afternoon light was strange, a dim, poisonous red, a stormy twilight color. It was the same color Jude saw when he shut his eyes, the color of his headache. It was not close to nightfall but looked it. The bellies of the clouds to the west were dark and threatening. The wind lashed the tops of the palms and shook the Spanish moss that straggled down from low-hanging oak branches.