Heart-Shaped Box with Bonus Material

by Joe Hill

  Jude was no longer sure why he had climbed into the car, but now that he was sitting, it was hard to imagine moving. From what seemed a long way off, he could hear the dogs barking again, their voices strident and alarmed. He turned up the volume to drown them out.

  John Lennon sang “I Am the Walrus.” Jude let his head rest on the back of the seat, relaxing into the pocket of warmth under his jacket. Paul McCartney’s slinky bass kept drifting away, getting lost under the low mutter of the Mustang’s engine, which was funny, since Jude hadn’t turned the engine on, only the battery. The Beatles were followed by a parade of commercials. Lew at Imperial Autos said, “You won’t find offers like ours anywhere in the tristate area. We’re pulling deals our competition can’t come close to matching. The dead pull the living down. Come on in and get behind the wheel of your next ride and take it for a spin on the nightroad. We’ll go together. We’ll sing together. You won’t ever want the trip to end. It won’t.”

  Ads bored Jude, and he found the strength to flip to another station. On FUM they were playing one of his songs, his very first single, a thunderous AC/DC ripoff titled “Souls for Sale.” In the gloom it seemed as if ghostly shapes, unformed wisps of menacing fog, had begun to swirl around the car. He shut his eyes and listened to the faraway sound of his own voice.

  More than silver and more than gold,

  You say my soul is worth,

  Well, I’d like to make it right with God,

  But I need beer money first.

  He snorted softly to himself. It wasn’t selling souls that got you into trouble, it was buying them. Next time he would have to make sure there was a return policy. He laughed, opened his eyes a little. The dead man, Craddock, sat in the passenger seat next to him. He smiled at Jude, to show stained teeth and a black tongue. He smelled of death, also of car exhaust. His eyes were hidden behind those odd, continuously moving black brushstrokes.

  “No returns, no exchanges,” Jude said to him. The dead man nodded sympathetically, and Jude shut his eyes again. Somewhere, miles away, he could hear someone shouting his name.

  “…ude! Jude! Answer me Ju…”

  He didn’t want to be bothered, though, was dozy, wanted to be left alone. He cranked the seat back. He folded his hands across his stomach. He breathed deeply.

  He had just nodded off when Georgia got him by the arm and hauled him out of the car, dumped him in the dirt. Her voice came in pulses, drifting in and out of audibility.

  “…get out of there Jude get the fuck…

  …on’t be dead don’t be…

  …leeeeeese, please…

  …eyes open your fucking…”

  He opened his eyes and sat up in one sudden movement, hacking furiously. The barn door was rolled back, and the sunshine poured through it in brilliant, crystalline beams, solid-looking and sharp-edged. The light stabbed at his eyes, and he flinched from it. He inhaled a deep, cold breath, opened his mouth to say something, to let her know he was all right, and his throat filled with bile. He rolled onto all fours and retched in the dirt. Georgia had him by the arm and bent over him while he horked up.

  Jude was dizzy. The ground tilted underneath him. When he tried to look outside, the world spun, as if it were a picture painted on the side of a vase, turning on a lathe. The house, the yard, the drive, the sky, streamed by him, and a withering sensation of motion sickness rolled through him, and he upchucked again.

  He clutched the ground and waited for the world to stop moving. Not that it ever would. That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it. He spat, wiped at his mouth. His stomach muscles were sore and cramped, as if he’d just done a few dozen abdominal crunches, which was, when you thought about it, very close to the truth. He sat up, turned himself to look at the Mustang. It was still running. No one was in it.

  The dogs danced around him. Angus leaped into his lap and thrust his cold, damp nose into his face, lapped at Jude’s sour mouth. Jude was too weak to push him away. Bon, always the shy one, gave Jude a worried, sidelong look, then lowered her head to the thin gruel of his vomit and covertly began to gobble it up.

  He tried to stand, grabbing Georgia’s wrist, but didn’t have the strength in his legs and instead pulled her down with him, onto her knees. He had a dizzying thought—the dead pull the living down—that spun in his head for a moment and was gone. Georgia trembled. Her face was wet against his neck.

  “Jude,” she said. “Jude, I don’t know what’s happening to you.”

  He couldn’t find his voice for a minute, didn’t have the air yet. He stared at the black Mustang, shuddering on its suspension, the restrained idling force of the engine shaking the entire chassis.

  Georgia continued, “I thought you were dead. When I grabbed your arm, I thought you were dead. Why are you out here with the car running and the barn door shut?”

  “No reason.”

  “Did I do something? Did I fuck it up?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, beginning to cry. “There must be some reason you’re out here to kill yourself.”

  He turned on his knees. He found he was still holding one of her thin wrists, and now he took the other. Her nest of black hair floated around her head, bangs in her eyes.

  “Something’s wrong, but I wasn’t out here trying to kill myself. I sat in the car to listen to some music and think for a minute, but I didn’t turn the engine on. It turned itself on.”

  She wrenched her wrist away. “Stop it.”

  “It was the dead man.”

  “Stop it. Stop it.”

  “The ghost from the hall. I saw him again. He was in the car with me. Either he started the Mustang or I started it without knowing what I was doing, because he wanted me to.”

  “Do you know how crazy that sounds? How crazy all of this sounds?”

  “If I’m crazy, then Danny is, too. Danny saw him. That’s why he’s gone. Danny couldn’t hack it. He had to go.”

  Georgia stared at him, her eyes lucid and bright and fearful behind the soft curl of her bangs. She shook her head in an automatic gesture of denial.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Help me stand.”

  She hooked an arm under his armpits and pushed off the floor. His knees were weak springs, all loose bounce and no support. No sooner had he come to his heels than he started to roll forward. He put his hands out to stop his fall and caught himself on the warming hood of the car.

  He said, “Shut it off. Get the keys.”

  Georgia picked his duster off the ground—it had spilled out of the Mustang with him—and threw it back in the driver’s seat. She coughed, waving her hands at the fog of exhaust, climbed into the car, and shut it off. The silence was sudden and alarming.

  Bon pressed herself against Jude’s leg, looking for reassurance. His knees threatened to fold. He drove her aside with his knee, then put his heel to her ass. She yelped and leaped away.

  “Fuck off me,” he said.

  “Whyn’t you leave her be?” Georgia asked. “The both of them saved your life.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Didn’t you hear them? I was coming out to shut them up. They were hysterical.”

  He regretted kicking Bon then and looked around to see if she was close enough to put a hand on. She had retreated into the barn, though, and was pacing in the dark, watching him with morose and accusing eyes. He wondered about Angus and glanced around for him. Angus stood in the barn door, his back to them, his tail raised. He was staring steadily down the driveway.

  “What does he see?” Georgia asked, an absurd thing to ask. Jude had no idea. He stood bracing himself against the car, too far from the sliding barn door to see out into the yard.

  Georgia pushed the keys into the pocket of her black jeans. She had dressed somewhere along the line and wrapped her right thumb
in bandages. She slipped past Jude and went to stand next to Angus. She ran her hand over the dog’s spine, glanced down the drive, then back at Jude.

  “What is it?” Jude asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. She held the right hand against her breastbone and grimaced a little, as if it were paining her. “Do you need help?”

  “I’m managing,” he said, and shoved off the Mustang. He was conscious of a building black pressure behind his eyeballs, a deep, slow, booming pain that threatened to become one of the all-time great headaches.

  At the big sliding barn doors, he paused, with Angus between himself and Georgia. He peered down the drive of frozen mud, to the open gates of his farm. The skies were clearing. The thick, curdled gray cloud cover was coming apart, and the sun blinked irregularly through the rents.

  The dead man, in his black fedora, stared back at him from the side of the state highway. He was there for a moment, when the sun was behind a cloud, so that the road was in shadow. As sunshine fluttered around the edges of a cloud, Craddock flickered away. His head and hands disappeared first, so that only a hollow black suit remained, standing empty. Then the suit disappeared, too. He stammered back into being a moment later, when the sun retreated under cover once more.

  He lifted his hat to Jude and bowed, a mocking, oddly southern gesture. The sun came and went and came again, and the dead man flashed like Morse code.

  “Jude?” Georgia asked. He realized he and Angus were standing there staring down the drive in just the same way. “There isn’t anything there, is there, Jude?” She didn’t see Craddock.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing there.”

  The dead man faded back into existence long enough to wink. Then the breeze rose in a soft rush and, high above, the sun broke through for good, at a place where the clouds had been pulled into strings of dirty wool. The light shone strongly on the road, and the dead man was gone.

  15

  Georgia led him into the music library on the first floor. He did not notice her arm around his waist, supporting and guiding him, until she let go. He sank onto the moss-colored couch, asleep almost as soon as he was off his feet.

  He dozed, then woke, briefly, his vision swimmy and unclear, when she bent to lay a throw blanket across him. Her face was a pale circle, featureless, except for the dark line of her mouth and the dark holes where her eyes belonged.

  His eyelids sank shut. He could not remember the last time he’d been so tired. Sleep had him, was pulling him steadily under, drowning reason, drowning sense, but as he went down again, that image of Georgia’s face swam before him, and he had an alarming thought, that her eyes had been missing, hidden behind black scribbles. She was dead, and she was with the ghosts.

  He struggled back toward wakefulness and for a few moments almost made it. He opened his eyes fractionally. Georgia stood in the door to the library, watching him, her little white hands balled into little white fists, and her eyes were her own. He felt a moment of sweet relief at the sight of her.

  Then he saw the dead man in the hallway behind her. His skin was pulled tight across the knobs of his cheekbones, and he was grinning to show his nicotine-stained teeth.

  Craddock McDermott moved in stop motion, a series of life-size still photographs. In one moment his arms were at his sides. In the next, one of his gaunt hands was on Georgia’s shoulder. His fingernails were yellowed and long and curled at the end. The black marks jumped and quivered in front of his eyes.

  Time leaped forward again. Abruptly Craddock’s right hand was in the air, held high above Georgia’s head. The gold chain dropped from it. The pendulum at the end of it, a curved three-inch blade, a slash of silvery brightness, fell before Georgia’s eyes. The blade swung in slight arcs before her, and she stared straight at it with eyes that were suddenly wide and fascinated.

  Another stop-motion twitch ahead in time and Craddock was bent forward in a frozen pose, his lips at her ear. His mouth wasn’t moving, but Jude could just hear the sound of him whispering, a noise like someone sharpening the blade of a knife on a leather strop.

  Jude wanted to call to her. He wanted to tell her to watch out, the dead man was right next to her, and she needed to run, to get away, not to listen to him. But his mouth felt wired shut, and he couldn’t produce any sound except for a fitful moan. The effort it took even to keep his eyelids open was more than he could sustain, and they rolled shut. He flailed against sleep, but he was weak—an unfamiliar sensation. He went down once more, and this time he stayed down.

  Craddock was waiting for him with his razor, even in sleep. The blade dangled at the end of its gold chain before the broad face of a Vietnamese man, who was naked save for a white rag belted around his waist, and seated in a stiff-backed chair in a dank concrete room. The Vietnamese’s head had been shaved, and there were shiny pink circles on his scalp, where he’d been burnt by electrodes.

  A window looked out on Jude’s rainy front yard. The dogs were right up against the glass, close enough so their breath stained it white with condensation. They were yapping furiously, but they were like dogs on TV, with the volume turned all the way down; Jude heard no sound of them at all.

  Jude stood quietly in the corner, hoping he would not be seen. The razor moved back and forth in front of the Vietnamese’s amazed, sweat-beaded face.

  “The soup was poisoned,” Craddock said. He was speaking in Vietnamese, but in the way of dreams, Jude understood just what he was saying. “This is the antidote.” Gesturing with his free hand at a massive syringe resting inside a black heart-shaped box. In the box with it was a wide-bladed bowie knife with a Teflon handle. “Save yourself.”

  The VC took the syringe and stuck it, without hesitation, into his own neck. The needle was perhaps five inches long. Jude flinched, looked away.

  His gaze leaped naturally to the window. The dogs remained just on the other side of the glass, jumping against it, no sound coming from them. Beyond them Georgia sat on one end of a seesaw. A little towheaded girl in bare feet and a pretty flowered dress sat on the other end. Georgia and the girl wore blindfolds, diaphanous black scarves made of some sort of crepelike material. The girl’s pale yellow hair was tied into a loose ponytail. Her expression was an unreadable blank. Although she looked vaguely familiar to Jude, it was still a long-drawn-out moment before it came to him, with a jolt of recognition, that he was looking at Anna, as she had been at nine or ten. Anna and Georgia went up and down.

  “I’m going to try to help you,” Craddock was saying, speaking to the prisoner in English now. “You’re in trouble, you hear? But I can help you, and all you need to do is listen close. Don’t think. Just listen to the sound of my voice. It’s almost nightfall. It’s almost time. Nightfall is when we turn on the radio and listen to the radio voice. We do what the radio man says to do. Your head is a radio, and my voice is the only broadcast.”

  Jude looked back, and Craddock wasn’t there anymore. In his place, where he had sat, was an old-fashioned radio, the face lit up all in green, and his voice came out of it. “Your only chance to live is to do just as I say. My voice is the only voice you hear.”

  Jude felt a chill in his chest, didn’t like where this was going. He came unstuck and in three steps was at the side of the table. He wanted to rid them of Craddock’s voice. Jude grabbed the radio’s power cord, where it was plugged into the wall, and yanked. There was a pop of blue electricity, which stung his hand. He recoiled, throwing the line to the floor. And still the radio chattered on, just as before.

  “It’s nightfall. It’s nightfall at last. Now is the time. Do you see the knife in the box? You can pick it up. It’s yours. Take it. Happy birthday to you.”

  The VC looked with some curiosity into the heart-shaped box and picked out the bowie knife. He turned it this way and that, so the blade flashed in the light.

  Jude moved to look down at the face of the radio. His right hand still throbbed from the jolt it had taken, was clumsy, hard to manipulate. He didn’t see a powe
r button, so he spun the dial, trying to get away from Craddock’s voice. There was a sound Jude at first took for a burst of static, but which in another moment resolved into the steady, atonal hum of a large crowd, a thousand voices chattering all together.

  A man with the knowing, streetwise tone of a fifties radio personality said, “Stottlemyre is hypnotizing them today with that twelve-to-six curveball of his, and down goes Tony Conigliaro. You’ve probably heard that you can’t make people do things they don’t want to do when they’ve been hypnotized. But you can see here it just isn’t true, because you can tell that Tony C. sure didn’t want to swing at that last pitch. You can make anyone do any awful thing. You just have to soften them up right. Let me demonstrate what I mean with Johnny Yellowman here. Johnny, the fingers of your right hand are poisonous snakes. Don’t let them bite you!”

  The VC slammed himself back into his chair, recoiling in shock. His nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed, with a sudden look of fierce determination. Jude turned, heel squeaking on the floor, to cry out, to tell him to stop, but before he could speak the Vietnamese prisoner whacked the knife down.

  His fingers fell from his hand, only they were the heads of snakes, black, glistening. The VC did not scream. His damp, almond-brown face was lit with something like triumph. He lifted the right hand to show the stumps of his fingers, almost proudly, the blood bubbling out of them, down the inside of his arm.

  “This grotesque act of self-mutilation has been brought to you courtesy of orange Moxie. If you haven’t tried a Moxie, it’s time to step up to the plate and find out why Mickey Mantle says it’s the bee’s knees. Side retired in order….”