The Loveliest Dead

by Ray Garton

  “I got up earlier,” Mom said, “and his door was closed and the overhead light was on in here.”

  “How about this.” Dad shuffled over to the desk and turned on the squat lamp that stood on its corner. “We’ll leave that one on, okay? Will that do for now?”

  “Do I have to go back to bed?” Miles said.

  Mom said, “It’s after three o’clock in the morning.”

  “But it’s the weekend, there’s no school. Couldn’t I stay up and watch TV for a while?”

  Dad’s voice was firm. “No. Now go back to bed. You can leave that lamp on, but—” He went to the door and turned off the overhead light. “Not that one. And leave the door all the way open, if you want. Okay?” Dad scooped Miles up in his arms and carried him to the bed. He spotted the penlight on the floor, put Miles down on the bed, and picked it up, handed it to him. Miles twisted the head of the penlight to turn it off, then slipped it under his pillow.

  Dad frowned for a moment, turned to Mom, and said, “Go back to bed, honey, I’ll be there in a second.”

  Mom kissed the top of Miles’s head. “Go back to sleep, sweetheart.” Then she turned and left the room.

  Dad sat down on the edge of the bed. “You keep that light under your pillow?”

  Miles nodded. “He only comes in the dark. He doesn’t like the light.”

  “Come on, Tiger. It’s only a dream. There’s no man coming to your room. Okay?”

  To say yes would be dishonest, but to disagree with Dad would only drag it out.

  “You know that, right?” Dad said. “It’s just a bad dream.”

  Finally, Miles nodded once. It was no dream, but there was no point arguing.

  “Okay, big guy.” He kissed Miles’s cheek. “We’ve got work to do today, so we’re both going to need all the sleep we can get.” He stood and left the room, leaving the door wide open.

  The lamp on the desk was not quite bright enough to illuminate that section of the room where the voice had come from, where Miles had seen the fat man. He lay awake, staring at the spot for a long time. He started nodding off now and then, but jerked awake each time, eyes suddenly wide, watching. Miles finally dozed off as the first light of dawn began to seep through the windows.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Saturday, 9:17 a.m.

  The next morning was gray and drizzly. Jenna made buttermilk pancakes for breakfast. David was relieved that he did not have to go out job-hunting again. There were probably plenty of garages open on Saturday, but he needed the break. He was discouraged by his failure to find work, and it nagged at him.

  He was also bothered by the incident in the basement the previous evening. He had never seen jenna in such a state. She was usually so levelheaded, so unflaggingly reasonable about everything. But she had been convinced she’d seen Josh in the basement. It disturbed David. He was not a believer in things supernatural— but neither was Jenna, and the fact that she believed she was seeing Josh’s spirit, that he was somehow trying to contact her, was troubling.

  David and his older brother, Jerry, and younger sister, Karen, had been raised in Redding, where their parents had found religion when David was eight. Life had changed suddenly after that. Their parents stopped letting them watch television and read Bible stories to them instead of fairy tales and adventure stories. They went to Sunday school and church every week and prayer meetings on Wednesday nights. Worst of all was the constant prayer. His parents seemed to pray at the drop of a hat—first thing in the morning, before bed at night, before they left the house for any reason, and before each meal—and David and Jerry and Karen were expected to bow their heads and close their eyes and be still. Suddenly, they had to memorize Bible verses and learn Bible trivia and color in Bible coloring books. Dad, a successful landscapes and Mom, an office manager at a veterinary clinic, even changed the way they talked—suddenly, their conversations were peppered with phrases like “God willing” and “Praise Jesus” and “I felt the Holy Spirit.” David didn’t like the sound of that—Holy Spirit. He was skeptical of its existence, doubted anyone who said they “felt” it, and he would believe people were “moved” by it when he saw it happen with his own eyes (he’d imagined the Holy Spirit “moving” people by picking them up off the floor and levitating them around the room). When David asked his mother why they were doing everything differently, she had said, “Because we live for Jesus now, honey. Only people who live for Jesus go to Heaven, and you want to go to Heaven, don’t you?” David did not want to go to Heaven if it was going to be filled with the kind of people his parents had become.

  Jerry and Karen had grown into good churchgoing Christians, but David had fought it every step of the way, becoming the family’s sinful black sheep. He could not imagine that the creator of the universe, the creator of all living things, of life itself, required people to drop what they were doing and pray to Him every few hours, and to behave in a certain way so He wouldn’t throw them into a fiery pit, and to pass judgment on other people according to what they believed, or did not believe, about the creator. He came to the conclusion that there could not possibly be a God at all, because if there were and He saw what had been done on earth in His name, He would vaporize the planet in a heartbeat and start all over again.

  David did not stay in touch with his family. He often missed having a family to stay in touch with—he knew they would not respond if he called or wrote. His brother and sister sent Christmas cards every year, but that was all. His dad had let him know he’d been written out of the will years ago. That meant very little, because Dad was leaving most of his money to the church, anyway.

  After seeing what it had done to his family, David had spent his life steering clear of organized religion in any form. He saw no difference between people who believed in spirits and an afterlife and the religious fanatics who went door to door passing out their literature. They were all peddling the same thing—a better life after this one.

  David believed this was the only life anybody ever got. The life he and Jenna had made for themselves had not gone very well the last few years, but they had clung to each other instead of a belief in some better life to come, or the idea that their suffering in this life would only enrich the next. They had found their strength in each other, and they had endured so far.

  While he did not believe Jenna had seen anything like a ghost, he understood how she could think she’d seen Josh. The day before, while job-hunting in Arcata, David had to fight the urge to turn down a side street to follow a woman who’d been walking along the sidewalk with a little blond boy who looked, at first glance, exactly like Josh. It was not the first time something like that had happened since the move. He knew exactly how Jenna felt.

  “Chatanooga Choo-Choo” played on Grandma’s radio on the sill of the breakfast nook’s greenhouse window. The four of them ate breakfast in silence. They all looked tired, but Grandma seemed to be especially sluggish.

  “You feeling okay, Grandma?” David asked.

  She shrugged. “Just tired. It’s hard, you know... getting used to sleeping in a new place.”

  “Especially with our screamer, here,” Jenna said as she reached over and messed up Miles’s hair.

  “I thought I heard something going on up there early this morning,” Grandma said.

  David said, “Miles just had a bad dream. Happens to everybody.”

  Miles did not look up from his pancakes as he ate.

  After breakfast, David decided to change the lightbulbs over the basement stairway. As he picked up the long black Mag-Lite beside the back door and went into the laundry room, Miles joined him and asked, “Can I go down there with you, Dad?”

  “No, not now. Not until we’ve got plenty of light down there, and even then, I don’t want you going down these steps unless it’s with me or your mom, understood?”

  “‘Kay. Can I watch?”

  “Sure. Hold the lightbulbs for me.” He handed Miles a box of two bulbs.

  Miles stood in
the basement doorway as David went down the stairs. He went down into the basement to find something he could stand on to reach the bulbs. It was damp and smelled of mildew and moist earth. He was surprised how cold it was. It wasn’t a large basement, and it was crammed full of junk.

  “Another cleanup job,” David muttered as he passed the flashlight beam around, searching.

  Against a wall, he found a narrow wooden crate that looked like it was just the right height and size. He tried to lift the lid to see what was inside, but it was nailed shut. It was not very heavy, though, and it was sturdy enough. He picked it up and carried it two-thirds of the way up the stairs, bent down, and placed it on one of the steps. It fit perfectly. Standing a step above the crate, he tested it with one foot, then gripped the railing with one hand and stepped up on it. On the crate, he was able to reach the first bulb. He replaced the burnt-out bulbs in minutes. When he was done, he climbed back up the stairs and flipped the light switch.

  The lights came on for an instant, then sent two small explosions of sparks into the air with a pop and went out again.

  “Son of a bitch!” David said. He looked down at Miles. “You didn’t hear me say that. It’s not nice to talk that way, you know.”

  Miles laughed. “I know.”

  David sighed. “I wonder if it’s a problem with the wiring.” He went down the stairs with the flashlight in hand, stepped over the crate, then picked it up and carried it back down to the basement. He noticed again the drastic difference in temperature from the top of the stairs to the bottom. He tossed the crate down where he’d found it. It slammed against a stack of boxes and knocked them over.

  “Damn,” David muttered.

  He started to turn and go back up when he heard music playing. He frowned. It was a slow, plinking, off-key rendition of Brahms’s “Lullaby.” He found the source of the music with the flashlight. A filthy old brown teddy bear with a dark ribbon around its neck lay on the floor near the fallen boxes. Stuffing dangled from a couple holes in the bear’s torso and only one round black button-eye remained on its face. As the tune slowed down, footsteps clattered rapidly down the stairs.

  “David! That’s it! Do you hear it?”

  He looked up at Jenna, who stopped near the bottom of the stairs. “Be careful,” he said. “It’s just a toy.”

  She came off the stairs and hurried to his side, looking down at the bear. As she swept it up off the floor and held it in both hands, the music wore down and stopped. She turned it over to find a key sticking out of the back. Jenna turned the key a couple times and the music continued. She turned the bear face up again.

  “My God, David, this is the bear he was holding,” Jenna whispered. “Except... it looked like new. It was clean and had both eyes, the ribbon was a bright blue, and the stuffing wasn’t—”

  David looked up at Miles in the doorway and said, “Go check on Grandma, Tiger, see how she’s doing, okay?”

  Miles sighed, knowing full well he was being gotten rid of again. He said, “Okay,” and left.

  “Jenna, it’s just an old teddy bear that fell out of one of these boxes.”

  “Yes!” She looked up at him with round eyes, a few strands of her long blond hair dangling over her face. “That’s why he was down here, for the teddy bear. He knew it was down here, and he just wanted to find it and play with it, probably because we don’t have any of his toys here in—”

  He snatched the bear from her hands and said angrily, “Jenna, will you stop it!”

  She flinched, and the outer corners of her eyes crinkled.

  Quietly, he said, “You’re talking crazy.” He tossed the teddy bear down on the fallen boxes. “He’s gone, Jenna, and he’s not coming back. You’ve got to stop this, because I can’t take it, I really can’t. Do you understand? I feel bad enough as it is. If you keep this up, you’re gonna start to scare me, you know what I mean? We can’t afford any counseling right now. And I really don’t think we need it—I think we’re pretty normal, under the circumstances. But if you keep this up, you’re gonna tear me apart, okay? So please, you’ve got to—”

  “I’m sorry.” She put her arms around him. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

  He put an arm around her and they stood that way for a while. Then he said, “Come on, let’s go upstairs. It’s freezing down here.”

  “Aren’t you going to change the bulbs?”

  “I did. They blew out again as soon as I flipped the switch. I think there might be something wrong with the wiring.”

  Her tone was wary. “Something wrong with the wiring?”

  “Yeah, but don’t worry about it. We just won’t come down here until we—”

  “We’ll have an electrician take a look at the wiring, then.”

  “We can’t afford an—”

  “Mom will pay for it.”

  Mom will pay for it. David was beginning to hate those words. He needed to find a job before he started hating Jenna for saying them.

  “David, we don’t know anything about electrical wiring, and I’m going to be worried sick if I think there’s an electrical problem in this house.”

  “All right, all right. Talk to your mother about it.” He pushed her gently toward the stairs. “Go on. I’ll be up in a minute.”

  Jenna hesitated, stepped around him, and went over to the teddy bear on the dirt floor. She bent down to pick it up. “I’d like to take this and—”

  “No.”

  “But I just wanted to—”

  “No. The bear stays down here with the rest of this junk. After I clean up the garage, I’m going to come down here and throw all this stuff out.”

  Jenna took one last look around in the dark, then went upstairs.

  The breaker box was on the wall at the foot of the stairs. David opened it, turned the flashlight on it. It looked like a regular breaker box to him, but Jenna was right—he didn’t know any more about electrical wiring than she did.

  He turned and went to the center of the basement and aimed the light upward. There were exposed pipes overhead, and a chain dangled from a single light fixture hung from a cord without a bulb.

  He passed the light over the mess once again. Of the boxes that had toppled, a couple had broken open. Some toys and old magazines had spilled out onto the floor. An old wooden high chair was leaning against a stack of boxes near the corner. Its wood was splintered in places and its black paint was peeling like dead skin. Part of one leg was missing. But there was something odd about it. David stepped over to the chair. Six black leather straps dangled from it, three on each side, three with buckles.

  What kind of high chair has leather straps? he wondered.

  He reached down and pulled the high chair away from the stacked boxes. Old cobwebs clung between it and the boxes.

  David suddenly was overwhelmed by a deep feeling of growing horror. Like a current of electricity, it traveled up his arm from the chair itself and filled his entire body. Something about the chair felt so wrong, so corrupt, that he let it go, let it drop back against the boxes. He stumbled back a step, chest rising and falling with rapid breaths.

  The basement’s cold seemed to sink into his bones. The darkness around him appeared much darker, pressed in on him like a force.

  A couple more notes tinkled out of the teddy bear.

  David turned and hurried up the stairs, relieved to step into the light and relative warmth of the laundry room. Before closing the door, he looked down into the basement one more time. A shudder passed through him that he did not understand. He told himself that Jenna’s fantasy that Josh had appeared to her in the basement the night before had gotten under his skin. That was all.

  He was closing the basement door when he noticed an old surface bolt-lock on both the inside and outside, each about a foot above the doorknob. David slid the inside bolt back and forth in its track and was surprised by the smooth movement. He frowned at the locks, wondered why anyone would need to lock the basement door on either side.

&nb
sp; David closed the door and left the laundry room. It was time to get to work on the garage.

  Half an hour later, Jenna told David she had to do some grocery shopping, put on her coat, and left the house. The truth was, she simply wanted to be alone.

  Her mind had been racing ever since she’d seen the teddy bear in the basement. It was the same teddy bear she had seen the hooded toddler—stop thinking of him that way, she thought. Admit it, you think it’s Josh— carrying in the basement the night before, and it had played the same music she’d heard twice and traced to the basement. Jenna was unable to rid herself of the nagging certainty that it was all somehow significant, but it was a significance she did not yet understand. That was why she wanted to be alone—to think.

  David had been right, of course. Everything he’d said had made perfect sense. They were both thinking of Josh more than usual because they had moved to a new town, but their family was not intact. But even though she knew David had been right, she could not accept that she’d been wrong. No matter how reasonable David’s argument, it did not explain away what she had seen. The teddy bear in the basement made her feel certain she’d seen something. But she still did not understand it.

  Jenna pulled into the parking lot of the supermarket and parked the Toyota. She hadn’t written up a shopping list, but could think of a few things she needed to pick up. Grocery shopping relaxed her, and she needed to do something that would make her feel normal, because she did not feel that way right now. She had not felt normal since seeing that small figure standing at the end of the upstairs hallway.

  She pulled a shopping cart from the train of carts outside the store, wheeled it through the automatic doors, and began roaming the aisles. Her eyes scanned the shelves, but her mind was back in the dark, damp basement of their new house.

  If the small figure she had seen—first in the upstairs hallway, then in the basement—was Josh, why had he been carrying a teddy bear that was packed away with all the other junk down in the basement? It had been the same one, she had no doubt of that—the only difference was that the one Josh had carried had been like new, with shining black eyes, clean fur, and a bright blue ribbon around its neck. The one David had found—the very same teddy bear—was old, falling apart, missing an eye, and filthy.