Heart-Shaped Box with Bonus Material

by Joe Hill

  The program cut to video of Jude’s farmhouse, framed against a sky of dingy, featureless white. Police cruisers had parked haphazardly in the turnaround, and an ambulance stood backed up almost to the door of Danny’s office.

  Beutel continued to speak in voice-over: “Police are only beginning to piece together the picture of Coyne’s last days. But statements from those who knew him suggest he had been distraught and was worried about his own mental health.”

  The footage jumped to a shot of the dogs in their pen. They were on their sides in the short, stubbly grass, neither of them moving, legs stretched stiffly away from their bodies. They were dead. Jude tightened up at the sight of them. It was a bad thing to see. He wanted to look away but couldn’t seem to pry his gaze free.

  “Detectives also believe that Coyne played a role in the death of his personal assistant, Daniel Wooten, thirty, who was found in his Woodstock home earlier this morning, also an apparent suicide.”

  Cut to two paramedics, one at either end of a sagging blue plastic body bag. Georgia made a soft, unhappy sound in her throat, watching one of the paramedics climb backward into the ambulance, hefting his end.

  Beutel began to talk about Jude’s career, and they cut away to file footage of Jude onstage in Houston, a clip six years old. Jude was in black jeans and black steel-toed boots, but bare-chested, his torso glowing with sweat, the bearish fur on it plastered to his breast, stomach heaving. A sea of a hundred thousand half-naked people surged below him, a rioting flood of raised fists, crowd surfers tumbling this way and that along the flow of humanity beneath.

  Dizzy was already dying by then, although at the time almost no one except Jude knew. Dizzy with his heroin addiction and his AIDS. They played back-to-back, Dizzy’s mane of blond hair in his face, the wind blowing it across his mouth. It was the last year the band had been together. Dizzy died, and Jerome, and then it was over.

  In the file footage, they were playing the title song off their final album as a group, “Put You in Yer Place”; their last hit, the last really good song Jude had written, and at the sound of those drums—a furious cannonade—he was jolted free from whatever hold the television seemed to have over him. That had been real. Houston had happened, that day had happened. The engulfing, mad rush of the crowd below and the engulfing, mad rush of the music around him. It was real, it had happened, and all the rest was—

  “Bullshit,” Jude said, and his thumb hit the power button. The television popped off.

  “It isn’t true,” Georgia said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “It isn’t true, is it? Are we…are you…Is that going to happen to us?”

  “No,” Jude said.

  And the television popped back on. Bill Beutel sat behind the news desk again, a sheaf of papers clasped in his hands, his shoulders squared to the camera.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “You will both be dead. The dead pull the living down. You will get the gun, and she will try to get away, but you will catch her, and you will—”

  Jude hit the power button again, then threw the remote control at the screen of the television. He went after it, put his foot on the screen and then straightened his leg, shoved the television straight through the open back of the cabinet. It hit the wall, and something flared, a white light going off like a flashbulb. The flat-screen dropped out of sight into the space between cabinet and wall, hit with a crunch of plastic and a short, electrical, fizzing sound that lasted for only a moment before ending. Another day of this and there would be nothing left to the house.

  He turned, and the dead man stood behind Georgia’s chair. Craddock’s ghost reached around the back to cup her head between his hands. Black lines danced and shimmered before the old man’s eye sockets.

  Georgia did not try to move or look around, was as still as a person faced with a poisonous snake, afraid to do anything—even to breathe—for fear of being struck.

  “You didn’t come for her,” Jude said. As he spoke, he was stepping to the left, circling along one side of the room and toward the doorway to the hall. “You don’t want her.”

  In one instant Craddock’s hands were gently cradling Georgia’s head. In the next his right arm had come up to point out and away from his body: Sieg heil. Around the dead man, time had a way of skipping, a scratched DVD, the picture stuttering erratically from moment to moment, without any transitions in between. The golden chain fell from his raised right hand. The razor, shaped like a crescent moon, gleamed brilliantly at the end. The edge of the blade was faintly iridescent, the way a rainbow slick of oil is on water.

  Time to ride, Jude.

  “Go away,” Jude said.

  If you want me to go, you just have to listen to my voice. You have to listen hard. You have to be like a radio, and my voice is the broadcast. After nightfall it’s nice to have some radio. If you want this to end, you have to listen hard as you can. You have to want it to end with all your heart. Don’t you want it to end?

  Jude tightened his jaw, clamped his teeth together. He wasn’t going to answer, sensed somehow it would be a mistake to give any reply, then was startled to find himself nodding slowly.

  Don’t you want to listen hard? I know you do. I know. Listen. You can tune out the whole world and hear nothing but my voice. Because you are listening so hard.

  And Jude went on nodding, bobbing his head slowly up and down, while around him all the other sounds of the room fell away. Jude had not even been aware of these other noises until they were gone: the low rumble of the truck idling outside, the thin whine of Georgia’s breath in her throat, matched by Jude’s own harsh gasping. His ears rang at the sudden utter absence of sound, as if his eardrums had been numbed by a shattering explosion.

  The naked razor swayed in little arcs, back and forth, back and forth. Jude dreaded the sight of it, forced himself to look away.

  You don’t need to look at it, Craddock told him. I’m dead. I don’t need a pendulum to get inside your mind. I’m there already.

  And Jude found his gaze sliding back to it anyway, couldn’t help himself.

  “Georgia,” Jude said, or tried to say. He felt the word on his lips, in his mouth, in the shape of his breath, but did not hear his own voice, did not hear anything in that awful, enveloping silence. He had never heard any noise as loud as that particular silence.

  I am not going to kill her. No, sir, said the dead man. His voice never varied in tone, was patient, understanding, a low, resonant hum that brought to mind the sound of bees in the hive. You are. You will. You want to.

  Jude opened his mouth to tell him how wrong he was, said, “Yes,” instead. Or assumed he said it. It was more like a loud thought.

  Craddock said, Good boy.

  Georgia was beginning to cry, although she was making a visible effort to hold herself still, not to tremble. Jude couldn’t hear her. Craddock’s blade slashed back and forth, whisking through the air.

  I don’t want to hurt her, don’t make me hurt her, Jude thought.

  It ain’t going to be the way you want it. Get the gun, you hear? Do it now.

  Jude began to move. He felt subtly disconnected from his body, a witness, not a participant in the scene playing itself out. He was too empty-headed to dread what he was about to do. He knew only that he had to do it if he wanted to wake up.

  But before he reached the gun, Georgia was out of the chair and bolting for the door. He didn’t have any idea she could move, thought that Craddock had been holding her there somehow, but it had just been fear holding her, and she was already almost by him.

  Stop her, said the only voice left in the world, and as she lunged past him, Jude saw himself catch her hair in one fist and snap her head back. She was wrenched off her feet. Jude pivoted and threw her down. The furniture jumped when she hit the floor. A stack of CDs on an end table slid off and crashed to the floor without a sound. Jude’s foot found her stomach, a good hard kick, and she jerked herself into a fetal position. The moment after he’d done it, he didn’t know
why he’d done it.

  There you go, said the dead man.

  It disoriented Jude, the way the dead man’s voice came at him out of the silence, words that had an almost physical presence, bees whirring and chasing one another around the inside of his head. His head was the hive that they flew into and out of, and without them there was a waxy, honeycombed emptiness. His head was too light and too hollow, and he would go mad if he didn’t get his own thoughts back, his own voice. The dead man was saying now, You need to show that cunt. If you don’t mind me sayin’ so. Now get the gun. Hurry.

  Jude turned to get the gun, moving quickly now. Across the floor, to the desk, the gun at his feet, down on one knee to pick it up.

  Jude did not hear the dogs until he was reaching for the revolver. One high-strung yap, then another. His attention snagged on that sound like a loose sleeve catching on a protruding nail. It shocked him, to hear anything else in that bottomless silence besides Craddock’s voice. The window behind the desk was still parted slightly, as he had left it. Another bark, shrill, furious, and another. Angus. Then Bon.

  Come on now, boy. Come on and do it.

  Jude’s gaze flitted to the little wastebasket next to the desk and to the pieces of the platinum record shoved into it. A nest of chrome knife blades sticking straight up into the air. The dogs were both barking in unison now, a tear in the fabric of the quiet, and the sound of them called to mind, unbidden, their smell, the stink of damp dog fur, the hot animal reek of their breath. Jude could see his face reflected in one of those silver record shards, and it jolted him: his own rigid, staring look of desperation, of horror. And in the next moment, mingled with the relentless yawping of the dogs, he had a thought that was his own, in his own voice. The only power he has, over either one of you, is the power you give him.

  In the next instant, Jude reached past the gun and put his hand over the wastebasket. He set the ball of his left palm on the sharpest, longest-looking spear of silver and lunged, driving all his weight down onto it. The blade sank into meat, and he felt a tearing pain lance through his hand and into the wrist. Jude cried out, and his eyes blurred, stung with tears. He instantly yanked his palm free from the blade, then clapped his right hand and the left together. Blood spurted between them.

  What the fuck are you doin’ to yourself, boy? Craddock’s ghost asked him, but Jude wasn’t listening anymore. Couldn’t pay attention through the feeling in his hand, a sensation of having been deeply pierced, almost to the bone.

  I’m not through with you, Craddock said, but he was, he just didn’t know it. Jude’s mind reached for the sound of the barking dogs like a drowning man grasping at a life preserver, found it and clasped it to him. He was on his feet, and he began to move.

  Get to the dogs. His life—and Georgia’s—depended on it. It was an idea that made no rational sense, but Jude did not care what was rational. Only what was true.

  The pain was a red ribbon he held between his hands, following it away from the dead man’s voice and back to his own thoughts. He had a great tolerance for pain, always had, and at other times in his life had even willfully sought it out. There was an ache way down in his wrist, in the joint, a sign of how deep his wound was, and some part of him appreciated that ache, wondered at it. He caught sight of his reflection in the window as he rose. He was grinning in the straggles of his beard, a vision even worse than the expression of terror he’d glimpsed in his own face a moment before.

  Get back here, said Craddock, and Jude slowed for an instant, then found his step and kept on.

  He shot a look at Georgia on his way by—couldn’t risk a glance back to see what Craddock was doing—and she was still curled on the floor, her arms around her stomach and her hair in her face. She glanced back at him from under her bangs. Her cheeks were damp with sweat. Her eyelids fluttered. The eyes beneath pleaded, questioned, fogged over with pain.

  He wished there were time to say he hadn’t meant to hurt her. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t running, wasn’t leaving her, that he was leading the dead man away, but the pain in his hand was too intense. He couldn’t think past it to line words up into clear sentences. And besides, he didn’t know how long he’d be able to think for himself, before Craddock would get ahold of him again. He had to control the pace of what happened next, and it had to happen fast. That was fine. It was better that way. He had always been at his best operating in 5/4 time.

  He heaved himself down the hall, made the stairs and took them fast, too fast almost, four at a time, so it was like falling. He crashed down the last few steps to the red clay tiles of the kitchen. One ankle turned under him. He stumbled into the chopping block, with its slender legs and scarred surface stained with old blood. A cleaver was buried in the soft wood at one edge, and the wide, flat blade glinted like liquid mercury in the dark. He saw the stairs behind him reflected in it and Craddock standing on them, his features blurred, his hands raised over his head, palms out, a tent-revival preacher testifying to the flock.

  Stay, Craddock said. Get the knife. But Jude concentrated on the throbbing in the palm of his hand. It was the deep hurt of pierced muscle and had the effect of clearing his head and centering him. The dead man couldn’t make Jude do what he wanted if Jude was in too much pain to hear him. He shoved himself back from the chopping block, and his momentum carried him away from it and down the length of the kitchen.

  He hit the door into Danny’s office, pushed through it, and rushed on into darkness.

  19

  Three steps through the door, he pulled up, hesitated for a moment to get his bearings. The shades were drawn. There was no light anywhere. He could not see his way in all that darkness and had to move forward more slowly, shuffling his feet, hands stretched before him, feeling for objects that might be in his path. The door wasn’t far, and then he would be outside.

  As he went forward, though, he felt an anxious constriction in his chest. It was a little more work to breathe than he liked. He felt at any moment his hands would settle on Craddock’s cold, dead face in the dark. At the thought he found himself fighting not to panic. His elbow struck a standing lamp, and it crashed over. His heart throbbed. He kept moving his feet forward in halting baby steps, but he had no sense of getting any closer to where he was going.

  A red eye, the eye of a cat, opened slowly in the darkness. The speakers that flanked the stereo cabinet came on with a thump of bass and a low, empty hum. The constriction was around Jude’s heart, a sickening tightness. Keep breathing, he told himself. Keep moving. He’s going to try to stop you from getting outside. The dogs barked and barked, voices rough, strained, not far away now.

  The stereo was on, and there should’ve been radio, but there was no radio. There was no sound at all. Jude’s fingers brushed the wall, the doorframe, and then he grasped the doorknob with his punctured left hand. An imaginary sewing needle turned slowly in the wound, producing a cold flare of pain.

  Jude twisted the doorknob, pulled the door back. A slash opened in the darkness, looking out into the glare of the floodlights on the front of the dead man’s truck.

  “You think you’re something special because you learnt how to play a fuckin’ guitar?” said Jude’s father from the far end of the office. He was on the stereo, his voice loud and hollow.

  In the next moment, Jude became aware of other sounds coming from the speakers—heavy breathing, scuffling shoes, the thud of someone bumping a table—noises that suggested a quiet, desperate wrestling match, two men struggling with each other. There was a little radio play going. It was a play Jude knew well. He had been one of the actors in the original.

  Jude stopped with the door half open, unable to plunge out into the night, pinned in place by the sounds coming from the office stereo.

  “You think knowin’ how to do that makes you better than me?” Martin Cowzynski, his tone amused and hating all at the same time. “Get over here.”

  Then came Jude’s own voice. No, not Jude’s voice—he hadn’t bee
n Jude then. It was Justin’s, a voice in a slightly higher octave, one that cracked sometimes and lacked the resonance that had come with the development of his adult pipes. “Momma! Momma, help!”

  Momma did not say anything, did not make a sound, but Jude remembered what she’d done. She had stood up from the kitchen table and walked to the room where she did her sewing and gently closed the door behind her, without daring to look at either of them. Jude and his mother had never helped each other. When they needed it most, they had never dared.

  “I said get the fuck over here,” Martin told him.

  The sound of someone knocking into a chair. The sound of the chair banging against the floor. When Justin cried out again, his voice wavered with alarm.

  “Not my hand! No, Dad, not my hand!”

  “Show you,” his father said.

  And there came a great booming sound, like a door slamming, and Justin-the-boy-on-the-radio screamed and screamed again, and at the sound of it Jude pitched himself out into the night air.

  He missed a step, stumbled, dropped to his knees in the frozen mud of the driveway. Picked himself up, took two running steps, and stumbled again. Jude fell onto all fours in front of the dead man’s pickup. He stared over the front fender at the brutal framework of the brush guard and the floodlights attached to it.

  The front of a house or a car or a truck could sometimes look like a face, and so it was with Craddock’s Chevy. The floodlights were the bright, blind, staring eyes of the deranged. The chrome bar of the fender was a leering silver mouth. Jude expected it to lunge at him, tires spinning on the gravel, but it didn’t.