The Bad Box

by Harvey Click

  “The day I was given tenure I came home with two bottles of champagne, but I couldn’t find her. All her things were here, her car was in the garage, but she was nowhere. At last I looked in the barn. She was in the haymow, hanging from a beam. Just a little over a year ago now.”

  Only the crickets spoke.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Puddles beside the road showed that it had rained earlier, but now the country sky was clear and glittering with stars. Angel sat in the front passenger seat of Matthew Hamelin’s old Dodge van. Though she had given him 24 hours to recover from his ordeal, he was driving very badly. Perhaps he always did. The van weaved precariously on the country road while the poet struggled to wedge his weak timbreless voice into the few pauses that punctuated the loud harangue issuing from Peter Bellman, who sat in the back and leaned his shaved head forward to bray like an ass in the driver’s ear.

  They were both insane, their brains melting down like wax, too weak for the single name that each one had learned. The deterioration of their minds caused them to behave like adolescent boys as they vied for Angel’s attention.

  She tried to ignore them so she could focus on the voice in her head. She had forgotten so much, roads and directions along with the rest of childhood’s debris, and she was depending on the voice more than her memory to navigate them along the narrow country roads. It spoke in words as well as images now, saying, “Follow the compass in your mind. I am the lodestone that draws you to me.”

  It was difficult to heed the voice with her two brain-damaged suitors arguing. Angel told them to shut up. They did for a minute, shamed like scolded dogs, but soon Bellman was at it again, leaning forward and braying tediously above the whispers in her mind.

  Name-bringers usually didn’t last long after they had done their job. She knew that one of her earlier helpers was in a mental institution, another in prison, a third dead by his own hand, another dead from a brain aneurysm. She had to make do with these two.

  “Shut up,” Angel said. “Turn right up here. Stay on the road.” The van had veered onto the grassy shoulder, a foot from the ditch.

  “Let me drive this fucking thing!” Bellman roared.

  They were close now, the voice growing clearer and Angel’s memory beginning to recognize this road, and she knew that a little farther up they would turn left, yes, there it was. She ordered Hamelin to turn, and with a rush of excitement and pain she recognized the road where she had lived as a child. Once as an adult she had gone to Mount Vernon with a name-bringer to dig up Gus Dietrick’s grave, but never had she returned to the house.

  They drove half a mile, and there it was, a few yards ahead on the left, the filthy old house falling to ruin and stinking of Grandpa, and the sight of it was deeply horrible and wonderful.

  “Slow down,” she said. “Turn out your lights.”

  The van coasted slowly past the ruin, the place of Gus Dietrick and the damp grave, the place of Angel’s death and her rebirth, the place where she had met him who had given her new life, who spoke even now in her head, saying, “My love, my love, you are close, be careful now, let nothing go wrong, let each step be perfect that brings you to me, let your feet not falter, let your mind not stray, let nothing cause you to fail.”

  “Slowly, quietly,” she said as they drifted beyond the Dietrick house. “Just a little farther.”

  The big house with the watchtower came into view on their right. About 100 yards before they got to it she saw the narrow weed-covered lane leading to the cemetery.

  “See that little lane?” she said. “Turn into it and drive to the grove of trees. Good. Turn off the motor. Now no one speaks, not a single word or I’ll kill you. Get out very quietly and ease the doors shut without a sound. Get the tools from the back. If anyone makes a noise I’ll kill him.”

  The two men did as they were told, fearing her as intensely as they worshipped her. They followed her with their tools into the little cemetery, stepping carefully over the iron fence that had fallen in the weeds.

  The voice in Angel’s head was almost mad with excitement now, saying, “I’ve waited so long, I cannot wait any longer!”

  She aimed her flashlight at the few old grave markers. “Here! Here!” the voice cried.

  It was just a mound overgrown with grass and weeds, no marker except for the lodestone that pulled her.

  “Dig,” she whispered.

  The two men set to work with their shovels. Amidst the brilliant stars, the moon was only a sliver, a sharp silver sickle hanging in the clear black sky. That was good. She could see lights burning in two of the windows of the big brick house. Probably the occupants were in bed this late despite the lights, but better the night was dark.

  The dirt was soft from the recent rain, and it piled up in mounds on either side of the grave. A dog began to bark in the distance across a field.

  “Hurry!” she whispered.

  Bellman started to say something, but Angel shushed him. She saw one of the lights in the house go out, and a few seconds later an upstairs window lit up.

  “Stop, don’t move,” she whispered.

  They all three stood still. The dog barked again and then howled like a wolf. The sharp sickle trembled over their heads. At last the upstairs light went out.

  “Dig!” she whispered.

  The voice in her head had ceased speaking, but she could hear it making sounds. It seemed to be weeping. A shovel hit wood, and the weeping ceased as if the suspense was too great even for weeping.

  At last the casket was uncovered, and the men struggled ineptly to get ropes underneath it. Then they scrambled out of the grave and stood at either end of the hole, straining clumsily with their ropes and puffing like clowns.

  “If you drop it, I’ll kill you both,” she whispered. “But first I’ll castrate you. I’ve done it before.”

  They pulled and strained, and when they finally got it above the ground, each one tried to move it to a different side of the hole. But they didn’t drop it, and at last it rested solidly on the grass.

  The voice in her head had started up again in a frenzy of weeping and screaming. She understood: after having stilled his panic for so long in the box, now that the moment was so near he had lost all control. Angel knew the panic; she had died with it swelling like a fist in her throat.

  The heavy casket lid was secured with many long screws made of dull metal that looked like lead but seemed to be as strong as steel. The men pried at it with the tips of their shovels while the voice howled and cried—but only in Angel’s head. The box itself was silent. Then the edge of the lid splintered and, with the loud groan of screws pulling from wood, it came open.

  She shone her flashlight into the coffin, and her heart sank. He was dead, dead beyond recovery. The voice in her head must have been her imagination.

  She touched the corpse’s face, its eyelids sunken, its blackened upper lip contracted in a rictus revealing long yellow teeth and black gums. The body looked like an emaciated mummy so shrunken that its rotting clothes were several sizes too big for it. The skin was dark gray and stiff beneath her fingers, but it felt slightly pliable like tough saddle leather, and as she looked closely she saw that the worms crawling across it hadn’t been able to penetrate it.

  “I’m here!” the voice screamed. “I’m alive! Give me the names!”

  Angel knelt, filled her lungs with air, and lowered her face into the coffin. She pressed her mouth against the grinning black lips and breathed through them the first word, a crackle of harsh consonants with strange vowels howling through them like wind through a broken window.

  She filled her lungs again, and forced the second word into the gaping, reeking mouth. The voice inside her head howled with pain as she forced in the third word and the fourth. At the fifth word she felt something stir, felt the stiff emaciated torso shift, heard appalling cries of agony in her head, and a lungful of putrid air groaned out of the cadaver’s throat.

  She filled her lungs, breathed th
e sixth word into the mouth stinking of death, and again it exhaled its pestilence back at her. As she breathed the final word into the mouth, all the pains of hell seemed to burst out in one shattering cry inside her head. The leathery chest seized and heaved, and a loud gurgling rattle issued from the corpse’s mouth.

  Baby Beddybye was coughing.

  Part Five: Bequeathing Seven Swords of Pain

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Angel lay in Matthew Hamelin’s bed with Baby Beddybye, kneading the ropy muscles beneath his leathery skin. Last night she had brought him to the poet’s apartment from the cemetery.

  He lay naked on his back, motionless except for the spasmodic jerking of his chest as he breathed, each breath a hoarse, rasping wheeze followed by a thick gurgling from deep inside his lungs.

  There was so little flesh left that she could plainly see his bones, and whatever flesh was left smelled like something dead. No longer dark gray, his skin had bloomed purple-blue, splotched in places with deeper purple, as if bruised from head to toe. His muscles were no longer stiff like dried wood, but rather like green saplings, and Angel could feel them give beneath her fingertips. Though they had shrunk to hard cables, she thought that he had once been burly and powerful, and she thought he would be again.

  His torso was marked with seven deep scars, four on his chest and three on his back. Six of them were shaped like crescent moons, but the scar carved above his heart was a deep ragged X. Angel had known of these seven stigmata only from whispers and dreams, and she wondered what they signified.

  Baby Beddybye was completely bald with a high impressive forehead, though now it was bony like a skull. A wiry gray beard covered his face. The rictus had relaxed from his upper lip, and his mouth was nearly closed now with only a glimpse of yellow teeth showing, but he was still unable to speak except with the voice in Angel’s head. The voice spoke rarely and only to direct her where and how to massage, and when she did so a painful groan would pour out of his throat, the breath still reeking of the grave.

  The voice spoke now. “I thirst,” it said, and she reached for the glass of cat’s blood and let some trickle into his mouth. The poet had brought the cat home late last night, and now he was out looking for another cat or a dog, anything with blood.

  It scarcely seemed possible that Baby Beddybye was here, lying in bed with her. For most of her life he had been merely a memory of a phantom. Angel’s mind went back to the last time she had seen him, under a storybook sky in a school playground that she now knew was only a place in her imagination, a place dreamt into being so she could forget that she was locked in the box.

  But she knew also that then even she had been imaginary, a figment of Darnell’s mind that he invented so that he wouldn’t be the one lying in that cramped darkness—a figment in her brother’s mind until the man beside her had miraculously made her real, somehow mixing the clay of her remains in the nearby coffin with the living spirit of Darnell in his box, and into that mixture breathing the Word that gave her life.

  “Lower,” the voice whispered in her mind. “There.” She dug with her fingers, and a groan rumbled out of Baby Beddybye’s throat.

  Angel remembered the cold blue sky and the warm jacket he had given her. She remembered his words: “I know one of your secrets.”

  She remembered swinging while she listened to his soft whisper: “You’re thinking about an ogre and a witch. What you’d like to do to them.”

  She had stopped swinging. “Now you haveta tell me a secret,” she had said.

  “I will, if you promise you will always be my friend.”

  “Okay.”

  “Forever and ever. You have to swear.”

  “I swear, cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Baby Beddybye had smiled. “Okay. Listen very, very carefully. I’m going to give to you a magic word. It will make you powerful.”

  He could give her only one word, he had said. A person could receive only one word directly from him because two words from his lips would overpower anyone’s mind. But as she got older, she would be able to gather more words, until she had all seven. She would have to find name-bringers to bring the words to her, one by one, one name-bringer for each word.

  To receive a word, each name-bringer would need to be locked in a box because all people locked in boxes are metaphysically (she hadn’t understood the word at the time) in the same dark place, lying side by side so to speak, so only in a box could name-bringers hear Baby Beddybye whispering in their ears.

  The instructions he taught her sounded not so different from dark fairy tales that her father had read to her, and not so different from the punishment that Grandpa had established as an ordinary part of her life. Nothing very strange.

  “You must promise,” he had said, “that when you have all seven words you will use them to help me, as I’m helping you today.”

  Angel promised. Baby Beddybye placed his beautiful manly lips on hers and breathed the word into her lungs. The blue sky darkened, a bitter wind swept over the playground, and thunder boomed. A bolt of lightning set a tree near the schoolhouse ablaze. Darnell’s mind screamed with outrage as a new mind was planted inside it, a mind that eventually would overpower and bury his.

  The wind eventually died down and the sky lightened, not to its childish storybook blue, but to a complex palette of hues, no longer a child’s sky. It was an adult’s sky now. The tree burning beside the schoolhouse crackled and hissed.

  “Now,” he had said, “what would you like to do to Grandpa?”

  “Break his heart!” Angel said at once. “Squeeze it like a balloon and make it pop.”

  Baby Beddybye had smiled, pleased with her wish. “It’s done,” he said. “You have just torn his heart in two. It has burst like a rotten tomato. Now, what about Grandma?”

  Angel had needed to think for a minute. “Put worms in her brain,” she said. “Big squirmy worms to eat her brain.”

  “There,” the voice said.

  She kneaded a softening, quickening muscle beneath the purple skin.

  Baby Beddybye groaned and his eyes sprang open, black and shiny like polished stones.

  ***

  Mathew Hamelin returned to his apartment, and Angel was surprised to see that he had a man with him, a bearded man with dirty clothes.

  “This is George,” the poet said. “I’m going to give him a hundred dollars to paint my bedroom.”

  “Show him the bathroom first,” Angel said. “He can have two hundred if he paints it too.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” George asked, staring at the naked emaciated purple-blue man wheezing on the bed.

  “He’s sick,” Angel said.

  “Boy, I’ll say,” George said. “I never seen nobody that sick. If it wasn’t I can hear him breathing, I’d say he was way past ready to bury. I won’t work ‘round sick people if they have anything catchy.”

  “Show him the bathroom,” Angel said.

  Hamelin led George to the bathroom, and while they stood with their backs to the doorway Angel slipped in behind him and slit his throat. George collapsed to the floor jerking and gurgling, blood spraying everywhere, and Angel said, “Get his throat over the tub, you fool.”

  The poet grasped him under the armpits from behind and struggled until his torso was leaning into the tub, his legs hanging out and still jerking. His precious blood was running down the drain while Angel searched for a stopper. Hamelin reached past her and plugged the drain hole with a wadded washrag.

  “Where did you find him?” Angel asked.

  “He was standing on a sidewalk with a sign that said, ‘Will work for food.’”

  “Well, I guess he’ll work as food instead.”

  “So what is he anyway?” Hamelin asked. “Is he a vampire? I mean, will we have to find blood for him from now on?”

  “No. He told me that once he’s recovered he’ll be able to eat normal food again.”

  “Well, if he’s not a vampire, just what is he?”
>
  “He’s your lord and master. That’s all you need to know.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The next day Baby Beddybye was able to take a few steps with Angel and Matthew Hamelin supporting him. His muscles seized up in spasms, his bones ached like rotten teeth, and his eyes throbbed as if nails were driven into his skull. He was naked because the scraping of fabric against skin would still be intolerable.

  He collapsed into a chair, ordered Hamelin out of the room, and looked at himself in a mirror. The purple was fading from his skin leaving behind the dark blue of an old bruise. He touched his beard; it looked as if it had grown for a month or longer in the tomb before the follicles had shut down.

  “Shave it off,” he told Angel, manipulating his tongue and lips with great difficulty. His vocal chords were still stiff as reeds, making his voice a harsh rasp. “It’s the hair of the grave. But get a bag and collect every tiny piece. Burn it when you’re finished.”

  The shaving cream felt like ice, but the razor felt like fire scorching his skin. He watched Angel closely, making certain she got every bit of the beard-filled lather into the sack. He wasn’t going to allow Charles Newman to get his treacherous hands on any scrap that came from his body.

  “I don’t even know your name,” Angel said.

  “The last name people knew me by was Isaac Stonebrenner,” he answered. “Henceforth those who must know anything about me will call me Jacob Stonebrenner. I’m going to become my own son. After I recover my treasure I’ll be able to pay very good money for impeccable identification to prove it.”

  “How long were you buried?”

  “Forty years. Since before you were born.”

  Stonebrenner watched this register on Angel’s face—impossible for her to grasp, impossible even for him.