Heart-Shaped Box

by Joe Hill

  Then his father was up, the sheet slithering off him. He moved more quickly than Jude expected, like a lizard, frozen in place one moment, then lurching forward, almost too quick for the eye to follow. He was naked, except for a pair of stained white boxers. His breasts were little trembling sacks of flab, furred with curling, snow-white hairs. Martin stepped forward, planted his heel on the heart-shaped box, crushed it flat.

  “Come here, son,” his father said, in Craddock’s voice. “Daddy’s going to show you how to shave.”

  And he snapped his wrist, and the razor flipped out of the handle, a mirror in which Jude was briefly able to see his own astonished face.

  Martin lunged at Jude, slashing at him with the straight razor, but Jude stuck out his foot, jammed it between the old man’s ankles. At the same time, he pitched himself to the side with an energy he didn’t know he had in him. Martin fell forward, and Jude felt the razor whicker through his shirt and the biceps beneath, with what seemed no resistance at all. Jude rolled over the rusted steel bar at the foot of his cot and crashed to the floor.

  The room was almost silent except for their harsh gasps for breath and the shrieking of the wind under the eaves. His father scrambled to the end of the bed and leaped over the side—spry for a man who had suffered multiple strokes and not left his bed in three months. By then Jude was crawling backward, out the door.

  He made it halfway down the hall, as far as the screen door that looked into the pigpen. The hogs crowded against it, jostling for the best view of the action. Their squeals of excitement drew his attention for a moment, and when he looked back, Martin was standing over him.

  His father dropped onto him. He cocked his arm back to slash the razor across Jude’s face. Jude forgot himself and drove his bandaged right hand up into his father’s chin, hard enough to snap the old man’s head back. Jude screamed. A white-hot charge of pain stabbed through his ruined hand and raced up into his forearm, a sensation like an electrical pulse traveling right through the bone, withering in its intensity.

  He caught his father flush and drove him into the screen door. Martin hit it with a splintering crunch and the tinny sound of springs snapping free. The lower screen tore clean out, and Martin fell through it. The pigs scattered. There were no steps below the door, and Martin dropped two feet, out of sight, hitting the ground with a dry thud.

  The world wavered, darkened, almost disappeared. No, Jude thought, no no no. He struggled back toward consciousness, like a man pulled deep underwater, churning toward the surface before he ran out of breath.

  The world brightened again, a drop of light that widened and spread, blurred gray ghost shapes appearing before him, then coming gradually into focus. The hall was still. Pigs grunted outside. An ill sweat cooled on Jude’s face.

  He rested awhile, ears ringing. His hand ringing, too. When he was ready, he used his heels to push himself across the floor to the wall, then used the wall to work his way up into a sitting position. He rested again.

  At last he shoved his way to his feet, sliding his back up the wall. He peered out the wreck of the screen door but still could not see his father. He had to be lying against the side of the house.

  Jude swayed away from the wall, sagging toward the screen door. He grabbed the frame to keep from falling into the pigpen himself. His legs trembled furiously. He leaned forward to see if Martin was on the ground with a broken neck, and at that moment his father stood up and reached through the screen and grabbed for his leg.

  Jude cried out, kicking at Martin’s hand and recoiling instinctively. Then he was a man losing his balance on a sheet of black ice, pinwheeling his arms foolishly, sailing back down the hall and into the kitchen, where he fell yet again.

  Martin pulled himself up through the torn screen. He crawled toward Jude, made his way to him on all fours, until he was right on top of him. Martin’s hand rose, then fell, a glittering silver spark falling with it. Jude brought up his left arm, and the straight razor struck his forearm, scraping bone. Blood leaped into the air. More blood.

  The palm of Jude’s left hand was bandaged, but the fingers were free, sticking out of the gauze as if it were a glove with the fingers snipped off. His father lifted the razor in the air to strike again, but before he could bring it down, Jude stuck his fingers in Martin’s glimmering red eyes. The old man cried out, twisting his head back, trying to get free of his son’s hand. The razor blade waved in front of Jude’s face without touching skin. Jude forced his father’s head back, and back, baring his scrawny throat, wondering if he could push hard enough to break the cocksucker’s spine.

  He had Martin’s head back as far as it would go when the kitchen knife slammed into the side of his father’s neck.

  Marybeth was ten feet away, standing at the kitchen counter, beside a magnetized strip on the wall with knives stuck to it. Her breath came in sobs. Jude’s father turned his head to stare at her. Air bubbles foamed in the blood that leaked from around the hilt of the knife. Martin reached for it with one hand, closed his fingers feebly about it, then made a sound, a rattling inhalation, like a child shaking a stone in a paper bag, and sagged to his side.

  Marybeth snapped another wide-bladed knife off the magnetic rack, then another. She took the first by the tip of the blade and chucked it into Martin’s back as he slumped forward. It hit with a deep, hollow thunk, as if she’d driven the blade into a melon. Martin made no sound at this second blow, aside from a sharp huff of breath. Marybeth started to walk toward him, holding the last knife in front of her.

  “Keep away,” Jude said to her. “He won’t lie down and die.” But she didn’t hear him.

  In another moment she stood over Martin. Jude’s father looked up, and Marybeth whacked the knife across his face. It went in close to one corner of his lips and came out a little past the other corner, widening his mouth into a garish red slash.

  As she struck at him, he struck at her, lashing out with his right hand, the hand that held the razor. The blade drew a red line across her thigh, above the right knee, and the leg buckled.

  Martin pitched himself up off the floor as Marybeth started to go down, roaring as he rose to his feet. He caught her in the stomach in an almost perfect flying tackle, smashed Marybeth into the kitchen counter. She slammed her last knife into Martin’s shoulder, burying it to the hilt. She might’ve pounded it into a tree trunk for all the good it did.

  She slipped to the floor, Jude’s father on top of her, blood still foaming from the knife planted in his neck. He slashed his straight razor toward her again.

  Marybeth grabbed her neck, clutching it weakly with her bad hand. Blood pumped through her fingers. There was a crude black grin dug into the white flesh of her throat.

  She slid onto her side. Her head banged the floor. She was staring past Martin at Jude. The side of her face lay in blood, a thick, scarlet puddle of it.

  Jude’s father dropped to all fours. His free hand was still wrapped around the base of the knife in his own throat, fingers exploring it blindly, taking its measure, but doing nothing to pull it out. He was a pincushion, knife in the shoulder, knife in the back, but he was interested only in the one through his neck, didn’t seem to have noticed the other pieces of steel sticking into him.

  Martin crawled unsteadily away from Marybeth, away from Jude. His arms gave out first, and his head dropped to the floor, his chin striking with enough force to make his teeth audibly click together. He tried to push himself up and almost made it, but then his right arm gave out, and he rolled onto his side instead. Away from Jude, a small relief. Jude wouldn’t have to look into his face while he died. Again.

  Marybeth was trying to speak. Her tongue came out of her mouth, moved over her lips. Her eyes pleaded for Jude to come closer. Her pupils had shrunk to black dots.

  He pulled himself across the floor, elbow over elbow, dragging himself to her. She was already whispering. It was hard to hear her over his father, who was making the cough-choking sounds again and kicking h
is heels loudly against the floor, in the throes of some kind of convulsion.

  “He’s not…done,” Marybeth said. “He’s comin’…again. He’ll never…be done.”

  Jude glanced around for something he could stick against the slash across her throat. He was close enough now so his hands were in the puddle of blood surrounding her, splashing in it. He spotted a dishrag hanging from the handle of the oven, pulled it down.

  Marybeth was staring into his face, but Jude had an impression of not being seen—the sense that she was staring right through him and into some unknowable distance.

  “I hear…Anna. I hear her…calling. We have…to make…a door. We have to…let her in. Make us a door. Make a door…and I’ll open it.”

  “Stop talking.” He lifted her hand and pressed the rolled-up dish towel against her neck.

  Marybeth caught at his wrist.

  “Can’t open it…once I’m on…the other…side. It has to be now. I’m gone already. Anna is gone. You can’t…save…us,” she said. So much blood. “Let. Us. Save. You.”

  Across the room Jude heard a fit of coughing, then his father gagging. He was choking something up. Jude knew what.

  He stared at Marybeth with a disbelief more intense than grief. He found his hand cupping her face, which was cool to the touch. He had promised. He had promised himself, if not her, that he would take care of her, and here she was, with her throat cut, saying how she was going to take care of him. She was fighting for each breath, shivering helplessly.

  “Do it, Jude,” she said. “Just do it.”

  He lifted her hands and put them against the dish towel, to keep it pressed to her open throat. Then he turned and crawled through her blood, to the edge of the puddle. He heard himself humming again, his song, his new song, a melody like a southern hymn, a country dirge. How did you make a door for the dead? Would it be enough just to draw one? He was trying to think what to draw with, when he saw the red handprints he was leaving on the linoleum. He dipped a finger in her blood and began to draw a line along the floor.

  When he judged he had made it long enough, he started a new line, at a right angle to the first. The blood on his fingertip thinned and ran dry. He shuffled slowly around, turning back to Marybeth and the wide, trembling pool of blood in which she lay.

  He looked past her and saw Craddock, pulling himself out of his father’s gaping mouth. Craddock’s face was contorted with strain, his arms reaching down, one hand on Martin’s forehead, the other on Martin’s shoulder. At the point of his waist, his body was crushed into a thick rope—Jude thought again of a great mass of cellophane, wadded up and twisted into a cord—which filled Martin’s mouth and seemed to extend all the way down into his engorged throat. Craddock had gone in like a soldier leaping into a foxhole but was hauling himself out like a man sunk to his waist in sucking mud.

  You will die, the dead man said. The bitch will die you will die we will all ride the nightroad together you want to sing la la la I’ll teach you to sing I’ll teach you.

  Jude dipped his hand in Marybeth’s blood, wetting it entirely, turned away again. There was no thought in him. He was a machine that crawled stupidly forward as he began to draw once more. He finished the top of the door, shuffled around, and started a third line, working his way back to Marybeth. It was a crude, meandering line, thick in some places, barely a smear in others.

  The bottom of the door was the puddle. As he reached it, he glanced into Marybeth’s face. The front of her T-shirt was soaked through. Her face was a pallid blank, and for a moment he thought it was too late, she was dead, but then her eyes moved, just slightly, watching him approach, through a dull glaze.

  Craddock began to scream in frustration. He had pulled all of himself out except for one leg, was already trying to stand up, but his foot was stuck somewhere in Martin’s gullet, and it was unbalancing him. In Craddock’s hand was the blade shaped like a crescent moon, the chain hanging from it in a bright, swinging loop.

  Jude turned his back on him once more and looked down at his uneven blood doorway. He stared stupidly at the long, crooked red frame, an empty box containing only a few scarlet handprints. It wasn’t right yet, and he tried to think what else it needed. Then it came to him that it wasn’t a door if there was no way to open it, and he crawled forward and painted a circle for a doorknob.

  Craddock’s shadow fell over him. Ghosts could cast shadows? Jude wondered at it. He was tired. It was hard to think. He knelt on the door and felt something slam against the other side of it. It was as if the wind, which was still driving against the house in furious, steady gusts, were trying to come up through the linoleum.

  A line of brightness appeared along the right-hand edge of the door, a vivid streak of radiant white. Something hit the other side again, a mountain lion trapped under the floor. It struck a third time, each impact producing a thunderous boom that shook the house, caused the plates to rattle in the plastic tray by the sink. Jude felt his elbows give a little, and decided there was no reason to stay on all fours anymore, and besides, it was too much effort. He fell to his side, let himself roll right off the door and onto his back.

  Craddock stood over Marybeth in his black dead man’s suit, one side of his collar askew, hat gone. He wasn’t coming forward, though, had stopped in his tracks. He stared mistrustfully down at the hand-drawn door at his feet, as if it were a secret hatch and he had come close to stepping on it and falling through.

  What is that? What did you do?

  When Jude spoke, his voice seemed to come from a long distance off, as by some trick of ventriloquism. “The dead claim their own, Craddock. Sooner or later they claim their own.”

  The misshapen door bulged, then receded into the floor. Swelled again. It seemed almost to be breathing. The line of light raced across the top of it, a beam of brightness so intense it couldn’t be looked at directly. It cornered and continued on down the other side of the door.

  The wind keened, louder than ever, a high, piercing shriek. After a moment Jude realized it wasn’t the wind outside the house but a gale wailing around the edges of the door drawn in blood. It wasn’t blowing out but being sucked in, through those blinding white lines. Jude’s ears popped, and he thought of an airplane descending too rapidly. Papers ruffled, then lifted off the kitchen table and began to swirl above it, chasing one another. Delicate little wavelets raced across the wide pool of blood around Marybeth’s blank, staring face.

  Marybeth’s left arm was stretched out, across the lake of blood, into the doorway. When Jude wasn’t looking, she had pulled herself over onto her side, reaching out with one arm. Her hand rested over the red circle he had drawn for a doorknob.

  Somewhere a dog began to bark.

  In the next instant, the door painted on the linoleum fell open. Marybeth should’ve dropped through it—half her body was stretched across it—but she didn’t. Instead she floated, as if sprawled on a sheet of polished glass. An uneven parallelogram filled the center of the floor, an open trap, flooded with an astonishing light, a blinding brilliance that rose all around her.

  In the intensity of that light pouring from below, the room became a photographic negative, all stark whites and flat, impossible shadows. Marybeth was a black, featureless figure, suspended upon the sheet of light. Craddock, standing over her, arms flung up to protect his face, looked like one of the victims of the atom bomb at Hiroshima, an abstract life-size sketch of a man, drawn in ash on a black wall. Papers still whirled and spun above the kitchen table, only they had gone black and looked like a flock of crows.

  Marybeth rolled over onto her side and lifted her head, only it wasn’t Marybeth anymore, it was Anna, and spokes of light filled her eyes, and her face was as stern as God’s own judgment.

  Why? she asked.

  Craddock hissed. Get away. Get back. He swung the gold chain of his pendulum in circles, the crescent blade whining in the air, tracing a ring of silver fire.

  Then Anna was on her feet, at the base of
the glowing door. Jude had not seen her rise. One moment she was prone, and in the next she was standing. Time had skipped, maybe. Time didn’t matter anymore. Jude held up a hand to shield his eyes from the worst of the glare, but the light was everywhere, and there was no blocking it out. He could see the bones in his hand, the skin over them the color and clarity of honey. His wounds, the slash in his face, the stump of his index finger, throbbed with a pain that was both profound and exhilarating, and he thought he might cry out, in fear, in joy, in shock, in all those things, in what was more than those things. In rapture.

  Why? Anna said again as she approached Craddock. He whipped the chain at her, and the curved razor at the end drew a wide slash across her face, from the corner of her right eye, across her nose, and down to her mouth—but it only opened a fresh ray of brilliance, and where the light struck him, Craddock began to smoke. Anna reached for him. Why?

  Craddock shrieked as she gathered him into her arms, shrieked and cut her again, across her breasts, and opened another seam in the eternal, and into his face poured the bountiful light, a light that burned away his features, that erased everything it touched. His wail was so loud Jude thought his eardrums would explode.

  Why? Anna said, before she put her mouth on his, and from the door behind her leaped the black dogs, Jude’s dogs, giant dogs of smoke, of shadow, with fangs of ink.

  Craddock McDermott struggled, trying to push her away, but she was falling backward with him, falling toward the door, and the dogs raced around his feet, and as they ran, they were stretched and pulled out of shape, unraveling like balls of yarn, becoming long scarves of darkness that wound around him, climbing his legs, lashing him about the waist, and binding the dead man to the dead girl. As he was pulled down, into the brightness of the other side, Jude saw the back of Craddock’s head come off, and a shaft of white light, so intense it was blue at the edges, slammed through and struck the ceiling, where it burnt the plaster, causing it to bubble and seethe.

  They dropped through the open door and were gone.