by Joe Hill
Bon and Angus leaped against the chain-link walls of their pen, barking relentlessly—deep, throaty roars of terror and rage, the eternal, primitive language of dogs: See my teeth, stay back or you will feel them, stay back, I am worse than you. He thought for an instant they were barking at the truck, but Angus was looking past him. Jude glanced back to see at what. The dead man stood in the door to Danny’s office. Craddock’s ghost lifted his black fedora, set it carefully on his head.
Son. You come on back here, son, the dead man said, but Jude was trying not to listen to him, was concentrating intently on the sound of the dogs. Since their barking had first disrupted the spell he’d been under, up in the studio, it had seemed like the most important thing in the world to get to them, although he could not have explained to anyone, including himself, why it mattered so. Only that when he heard their voices, he remembered his own.
Jude hauled himself up off the gravel, ran, fell, got up, ran again, tripped at the edge of the driveway, came crashing down on his knees once more. He crawled through the grass, didn’t have the strength in his legs to launch himself onto his feet again. The cold air stung in the pit of his wounded hand.
He glanced back. Craddock was coming. The golden chain dropped from his right hand. The blade at the end of it began to swing, a silver slash, a streak of brilliance tearing at the night. The gleam and flash fascinated Jude. He felt his gaze sticking to it, felt the thought draining out of him—and in the next instant he crawled straight into the chain-link fence with a crash and dropped to his side. Rolled onto his back.
He was up against the swinging door that held the pen shut. Angus banged into the other side, eyes turned up in his head. Bon stood rigidly behind him, barking with a steady, shrill insistency. The dead man walked toward them.
Let’s ride, Jude, said the ghost. Let’s go for a ride on the nightroad.
Jude felt himself going empty, felt himself surrendering to that voice again, to the sight of that silver blade cutting back and forth through the dark.
Angus hit the chain-link fence so hard he bounced off it and fell on his side. The impact brought Jude out of his trance again.
Angus.
Angus wanted out. He was already back on his feet, barking at the dead man, scrabbling his paws against the chain link.
And Jude had a thought then, wild, half formed, remembered something he had read yesterday morning, in one of his books of occultism. Something about animal familiars. Something about how they could deal with the dead directly.
The dead man stood at Jude’s feet. Craddock’s gaunt, white face was rigid, fixed in an expression of contempt. The black marks shivered before his eyes.
You listen, now. You listen to the sound of my voice.
“I’ve heard enough,” Jude said.
He reached up and behind him found the latch to the pen, released it.
Angus hit the gate an instant later. It crashed open, and Angus leaped at the dead man, making a sound Jude had never heard from his dog before, a choked and gravelly snarl that came from the deep barrel of his chest. Bon shot past a moment later, her black lips drawn back to show her teeth and her tongue lolling.
The dead man took a reeling step backward, his face confused. In the seconds that followed, Jude found it difficult to make sense of what he was actually seeing. Angus leaped at the old man—only it seemed in that instant that Angus was not one dog but two. The first was the lean, powerfully built German shepherd he’d always been. But attached to this shepherd was an inky darkness in the shape of a dog, flat and featureless but somehow solid, a living shadow.
Angus’s material body overlapped this shadow form, but not perfectly. The shadow dog showed around the edges, especially in the area of Angus’s snout—and gaping mouth. This second, shadowy Angus struck the dead man a fraction of an instant ahead of the real Angus, coming at him from his left-hand side, away from the hand with the gold chain and the swinging silver blade. The dead man cried out—a choked, furious cry—and was spun, staggered backward. He shoved Angus off him, clipped him across the snout with an elbow. Only no; it wasn’t Angus he was shoving, it was that other, black dog that dipped and leaned like a shadow thrown by candle flame.
Bon launched herself at Craddock’s other side. Bon was two dogs as well, had a wavering shadow twin of her own. As she leaped, the old man snapped the gold chain at her, and the crescent-shaped silver blade whined in the air. It passed through Bon’s front right leg, up around the shoulder, without leaving a mark. But then it sank into the black dog attached to her, snagged its leg. The shadow Bon was caught and, for one moment, pulled a little out of shape, deformed into something not quite dog, not quite…anything. The blade came loose, snapped back to the dead man’s hand. Bon yelped, a horrid, piercing shout of pain. Jude did not know which version of Bon did the yelping, the shepherd or the shadow.
Angus threw himself at the dead man once more, jaws agape, reaching for his throat, his face. Craddock couldn’t spin fast enough to get him with his swinging knife. The shadow Angus put his front paws on his chest and heaved, and the dead man stumbled down into the driveway. When the black dog lunged, it could stretch itself almost a full yard away from the German shepherd it was attached to, lengthening and going slim like a shadow at the end of day. Its black fangs snapped shut a few inches from the dead man’s face. Craddock’s hat flew. Angus—both the German shepherd and the midnight-colored dog attached to him—scrambled on top of him, gouging at him with his claws.
Time skipped.
The dead man was on his feet again, backed against the truck. Angus had skipped through time with him, was ducking and tearing. Dark teeth ripped through the dead man’s pant leg. Liquid shadow drizzled from scratches in the dead man’s face. When the drops hit the ground, they hissed and smoked, like fat falling in a hot frying pan. Craddock kicked, connected, and Angus rolled, came up on his feet.
Angus crouched, that deep snarl boiling up from inside him, his gaze fixed on Craddock and Craddock’s swinging gold chain with its crescent-shaped blade on the end of it. Looking for an opening. The muscles in the big dog’s back bunched under the glossy short fur, coiled for the spring. The black dog attached to Angus leaped first, by just a fraction of an instant, mouth yawning open, teeth snapping at the dead man’s crotch, going for his balls. Craddock shrieked.
Skip.
The air reverberated with the sound of a slamming door. The old man was inside his Chevy. His hat was in the road, mashed in on itself.
Angus hit the side of the truck, and it rocked on its springs. Then Bon hit the other side, paws scrabbling frantically on steel. Her breath steamed the window, her slobber smeared the glass, just as if it were a real truck. Jude didn’t know how she had got all the way over there. A moment ago she’d been cowering next to him.
Bon slipped, turned in a circle, threw herself at the pickup truck once more. On the other side of the truck, Angus jumped at the same time. In the next instant, though, the Chevy was gone, and the two dogs bounded into each other. Their heads audibly knocked, and they crashed down onto the frozen mud where the truck had been only an instant before.
Except it wasn’t gone. Not entirely. The floodlights remained, two circles of light floating in midair. The dogs sprang back up, wheeled toward the lights, then began barking furiously at them. Bon’s spine was humped up, her fur bristling, and she backed away from the floating, disembodied lights as she yapped. Angus had no throat left for barking, each roaring yawp hoarser than the one before. Jude noted that their shadow twins had vanished, fled with the truck, or had gone back inside their corporeal bodies, where they’d always been hiding, perhaps. Jude supposed—the thought seemed quite reasonable—that those black dogs attached to Bon and Angus had been their souls.
The round circles of the floodlights began to fade, going cool and blue, shrinking in on themselves. Then they winked out, leaving nothing behind except faint afterimages printed on the backs of Jude’s retinas, wan, moon-colored disks that
floated in front of him for a few moments before fading away.
20
Jude wasn’t ready until the sky in the east was beginning to lighten with the first show of false dawn. Then he left Bon in the car and brought Angus inside with him. He trotted up the stairs and into the studio. Georgia was where he’d left her, asleep on the couch, under a white cotton sheet he’d pulled off the bed in the guest room.
“Wake up, darlin’,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
Georgia rolled toward him at his touch. A long strand of black hair was pasted to her sweaty cheek, and her color was bad—cheeks flushed an almost ugly red, while the rest of her skin was bone white. He put the back of his hand against her forehead. Her brow was feverish and damp.
She licked her lips. “Whafuck time is it?”
“Five.”
She glanced around, sat up on her elbows. “What am I doing here?”
“Don’t you know?”
She looked up at him from the bottoms of her eyes. Her chin began to tremble, and then she had to look away. She covered her eyes with one hand.
“Oh, God,” she said.
Angus leaned past Jude and stuck his snout against her throat, under her jaw, nudging at it, as if telling her to keep her chin up. His great staring eyes were moist with concern.
She jumped when his wet nose kissed her skin, sat the rest of the way up. She gave Angus a startled, disoriented look and laid a hand on his head, between his ears.
“What’s he doing inside?” She glanced at Jude, saw he was dressed, black Doc Martens, ankle-length duster. At almost the same time, she seemed to register the throaty rumble of the Mustang idling in the driveway. It was already packed. “Where are you going?”
“Us,” he said. “South.”
RIDE ON
21
The daylight began to fail when they were just north of Fredericksburg, and that was when Jude saw the dead man’s pickup behind them, following at a distance of perhaps a quarter mile.
Craddock McDermott was at the wheel, although it was hard to make him out clearly in the weak light, beneath the yellow shine of the sky, where the clouds glowed like banked embers. Jude could see he was wearing his fedora again, though, and drove hunched over the wheel, shoulders raised to the level of his ears. He had also put on a pair of round spectacles. The lenses flashed with a weird orange light, beneath the sodium-vapor lamps over I-95, circles of gleaming flame—a visual match for the floods on the brush guard.
Jude got off at the next exit. Georgia asked him why, and he said he was tired. She hadn’t seen the ghost.
“I could drive,” she said.
She had slept most of the afternoon and now sat in the passenger seat with her feet hitched under her and her head resting on her shoulder.
When he didn’t reply, she took an appraising look at his face and said, “Is everything all right?”
“I just want to get off the road before dark.”
Bon stuck her head into the space between the front seats to listen to them talk. She liked to be included in their conversations. Georgia stroked her head, while Bon stared up at Jude with a look of nervous misgiving visible in her chocolate eyes.
They found a Days Inn less than half a mile from the turnpike. Jude sent Georgia to get the room, while he sat in the Mustang with the dogs. He didn’t want to take a chance on being recognized, wasn’t in the mood. He hadn’t been in the mood for about fifteen years.
As soon as Georgia was out of the car, Bon scrambled into her empty seat, curled up in the warm ass print Georgia had left in the leather. As Bon settled her chin on her front paws, she gave Jude a guilty look, waiting for him to yell, to tell her to get in the back with Angus. He didn’t yell. The dogs could do what they wanted.
Not long after they first got on the road, Jude had told Georgia about how the dogs had gone after Craddock. “I’m not sure even the dead man knew that Angus and Bonnie could go at him like that. But I do think Craddock sensed they were some kind of threat, and I think he would’ve been glad to scare us out of the house and away from them, before we figured out how to use the dogs against him.”
At this, Georgia had twisted around in her seat, to reach into the back and dig behind Angus’s ears, leaning far enough into the rear to rub her nose against Bon’s snout. “Who are my little hero dogs? Who is it? Yeah, you are, that’s right,” and so forth, until Jude had started to feel half mad with hearing it.
Georgia came out of the office, a key hooked over one finger, which she wiggled at him before turning and walking around the corner of the building. He followed in the car and parked at an empty spot, in front of a beige door among other beige doors, at the rear of the motel.
She went inside with Angus while Jude walked with Bon along a tangle of scrub woods at the edge of the parking lot. Then he came back and left Bon with Georgia and took Angus for the walk. It was important for neither of them to stray far from the dogs.
These woods, behind the Days Inn, were different from the forest around his farmhouse in Piecliff, New York. They were unmistakably southern woods, smelled of sweet rot and wet moss and red clay, of sulfur and sewage, orchids and motor oil. The atmosphere itself was different, the air denser, warmer, sticky with dampness. Like an armpit. Like Moore’s Corner, where Jude had grown up. Angus snapped at the fireflies, blowing here and there in the ferns, beads of ethereal green light.
Jude returned to the room. In the ten minutes it took to pass through Delaware, he had stopped at a Sunoco for gas and thought to buy a half dozen cans of Alpo in the convenience store. It had not occurred to him, however, to buy paper plates. While Georgia used the bathroom, Jude pulled one of the drawers out of the dresser, opened two cans, and slopped them in. He set the drawer on the floor for the dogs. They fell upon it, and the sound of wet slobbering and swallowing, harsh grunts and gasps for air, filled the room.
Georgia came out of the bathroom, stood in the door in faded white panties and a strappy halter that left her midriff bare, all evidence of her Goth self scrubbed away, except for her shiny, black-lacquered toenails. Her right hand was wrapped in a fresh knot of bandage. She looked at the dogs, nose wrinkled in an expression of amused disgust.
“Boy, are we livin’ foul. If housekeepin’ finds out we been feedin’ our dogs from the dresser drawers, we will not be invited back to the Fredericksburg Days Inn.” She spoke in cornpone, putting on for his bemusement. She had been dropping g’s and drawing out her vowels off and on throughout the afternoon—doing it sometimes for laughs and sometimes, Jude believed, without knowing she was doing it. As if in leaving New York she was also traveling away from the person she’d been there, unconsciously slipping back into the voice and attitudes of who she’d been before: a scrawny Georgia kid who thought it was a laugh to go skinny-dipping with the boys.
“I seen people treat a hotel room worst,” he said. “Worst” instead of “worse.” His own accent, which had become very slight over the years, was thickening up as well. If he wasn’t careful, he would be talking like an extra from Hee Haw by the time they got to South Carolina. It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there. “My bassist, Dizzy, took a shit in a dresser drawer once, when I wouldn’t get out of the bathroom fast enough.”
Georgia laughed, although he saw her watching him with something close to concern—wondering, maybe, what he was thinking. Dizzy was dead. AIDS. Jerome, who’d played rhythm guitar and keyboards and pretty much everything else, was dead, too, had run his car off the road, 140 miles an hour, hit a tree, and crushed his Porsche like a beer can. Only a handful of people knew that it wasn’t a drunk-driving accident, but that he had done it cold sober, on purpose.
Not long after Jerome cashed out, Kenny said it was time to call it a day, that he wanted to spend some time with his kids. Kenny was tired of nipple rings and black leather pants and pyrotechnics and hotel rooms, had been faking it for a while a
nyway. That was it for the band. Jude had been a solo act ever since.
Maybe he wasn’t even that anymore. There was his box of demos in the studio at home, almost thirty new songs. But it was a private collection. He had not bothered to play them for anyone. It was just more of the same. What had Kurt Cobain said? Verse chorus verse. Over and over. Jude didn’t care anymore. AIDS got Dizzy, the road got Jerome. Jude didn’t care if there was any more music.
It didn’t make sense to him, the way things had worked out. He had always been the star. The band had been called Jude’s Hammer. He was the one who was supposed to die tragically young. Jerome and Dizzy were meant to live on, so they could tell PG-13 stories about him years later, on a VH1 retrospective—the both of them balding, fat, manicured, at peace with their wealth and their rude, noisy pasts. But then Jude had never been good at sticking to the script.
Jude and Georgia ate sandwiches they’d picked up in the same Delaware gas station where Jude had bought the Alpo. They tasted like the Saran Wrap they’d come wrapped in.
My Chemical Romance was on Conan. They had rings in their lips and eyebrows, their hair done up in spikes, but beneath the white pancake makeup and black lipstick they looked like a collection of chubby kids who had probably been in their high-school marching band a few years earlier. They leaped around, falling into each other, as if the stage beneath them were an electrified plate. They played frantically, pissing themselves with fear. Jude liked them. He wondered which of them would die first.
After, Georgia switched off the lamp by the bed and they lay together in the dark, the dogs curled up on the floor.
“I guess it didn’t get rid of him,” she said. “Burning his suit.” No Daisy Duke accent now.
“It was a good idea, though.”
“No it wasn’t.” Then: “He made me do it, didn’t he?”
