Heart-Shaped Box with Bonus Material

by Joe Hill

  “W,” Georgia said. She was audibly short of breath. “H. A. T.”

  “What,” Jude said. The pointer went on finding letters, and Georgia continued calling them out: a K, an E. Jude listened, concentrating on what was being spelled.

  Jude: “Kept. You.”

  The planchette made a half turn—and stopped, its little casters squeaking faintly.

  “What kept you,” Jude repeated.

  “What if it isn’t her? What if it’s him? How do we know who we’re talking to?”

  The planchette surged, before Georgia had even finished speaking. It was like having a finger on a record that has suddenly begun to turn.

  Georgia: “W. H. Y. I….”

  Jude: “Why. Is. The. Sky. Blue.” The pointer went still. “It’s her. She always said she’d rather ask questions than answer them. Got to be kind of a joke between us.”

  It was her. Pictures skipped in his head, a series of vivid stills. She was in the backseat of the Mustang, naked on the white leather except for her cowboy boots and a feathered ten-gallon hat, peeking out at him from under the brim, eyes bright with mischief. She was yanking his beard backstage at the Trent Reznor show, and he was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from shouting. She was dead in the bathtub, a thing he hadn’t ever seen except in his mind, and the water was ink, and her stepfather, in his black undertaker’s suit, was on his knees beside the tub, as if to pray.

  “Go on, Jude,” Georgia said. “Talk to her.”

  Her voice was strained, pitched to just above a whisper. When Jude glanced up at Georgia, she was shivering, although her face was aglow with sweat. Her eyes glittered from deep in their dark and bony hollows…fever eyes.

  “Are you all right?”

  Georgia shook her head—Leave me alone—and shuddered furiously. Her left hand remained on the pointer. “Talk to her.”

  He looked back at the board. The black moon stamped on one corner was laughing. Hadn’t it been glowering a moment before? A black dog at the bottom of the board was howling up at it. He didn’t think it had been there when they first opened the board.

  He said, “I didn’t know how to help you. I’m sorry, kiddo. I wish you fell in love with anyone but me. I wish you fell in love with one of the good guys. Someone who wouldn’t have just sent you away when things got hard.”

  “A. R. E. Y. O….” Georgia read, in that same effortful, short-of-breath voice. He could hear, in that voice, the work it took to suppress her shivering.

  “Are. You. Angry.”

  The pointer went still.

  Jude felt a boil of emotions, so many things, all at once, he wasn’t sure he could put them into words. But he could, and it turned out to be easy.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The pointer flew to the word NO.

  “You shouldn’t have done that to yourself.”

  “D. O. N….”

  “Done. What.” Jude read. “Done what? You know what. Killed your—”

  The pointer skidded back to the word NO.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  Georgia spoke the letters aloud, a W, an H, an A.

  “What. If. I. Can’t. Answer.” The pointer came to rest again. Jude stared for a moment, then understood. “She can’t answer questions. She can only ask them.”

  But Georgia was already spelling again. “I. S. H. E. A….”

  A great fit of shivering overcame her, so her teeth clattered, and when Jude glanced at her, he saw the breath steam from her lips, as if she were standing in a cold-storage vault. Only the room didn’t feel any warmer or colder to Jude.

  The next thing he noticed was that Georgia wasn’t looking at her hand on the pointer, or at him, or at anything. Her eyes had gone unfocused, fixed on the middle distance. Georgia went on reciting the letters aloud, as the planchette touched them, but she wasn’t looking at the board anymore, couldn’t see what it was doing.

  “Is.” Jude read as Georgia spelled the words in a strained monotone. “He. After. You.”

  Georgia quit calling the letters, and he realized a question had been asked.

  “Yes. Yeah. He thinks it’s my fault you killed yourself, and now he’s playing get-even.”

  NO. The planchette pointed at it for a long, emphatic moment before beginning to scurry about again.

  “W. H. Y. R. U….” Georgia muttered thickly.

  “Why. Are. You. So. Dumb.” Jude fell silent, staring.

  One of the dogs on the bed whined.

  Then Jude understood. He felt overcome for a moment by a sensation of light-headedness and profound disorientation. It was like the head rush that comes from standing up too quickly. It was also a little like feeling rotten ice give way underfoot, the first terrible moment of plunge. It staggered him, that it had taken him so long to understand.

  “Fucker,” Jude said. “That fucker.”

  He noticed that Bon was awake, staring apprehensively at the Ouija board. Angus was watching, too, his tail thumping against the mattress.

  “What can we do?” Jude said. “He’s coming after us, and we don’t know how to get rid of him. Can you help us?”

  The pointer swung toward the word YES.

  “The golden door,” Georgia whispered.

  Jude looked at her—and recoiled. Her eyes had rolled up in her head, to show only the whites, and her whole body was steadily, furiously trembling. Her face, which had already been so pale it was like wax, had lost even more color, taking on an unpleasant translucence. Her breath steamed. He heard the planchette beginning to scrape and slide wildly across the board, looked back down. Georgia wasn’t spelling for him anymore, wasn’t speaking. He strung together the words himself.

  “Who. Will. Be. The. Door. Who will be the door?”

  “I will be the door,” Georgia said.

  “Georgia?” Jude said. “What are you talking about?”

  The pointer began to move again. Jude didn’t speak now, just watched it finding letters, hesitating on each for only an instant before whirring on.

  Will. U. Bring. Me. Thru.

  “Yes,” Georgia said. “If I can. I’ll make the door, and I’ll bring you through, and then you’ll stop him.”

  Do. You. Swear.

  “I swear,” she said. Her voice was thin and compressed and strained with her fear. “I swear I swear oh God I swear. Whatever I have to do, I just don’t know what to do. I’m ready to do whatever I have to do, just tell me what it is.”

  Do. You. Have. A. Mirror. Marybeth.

  “Why?” Georgia said, blinking, her eyes rolling back down to look blearily about. She turned her head toward her dresser. “There’s one—”

  She screamed. Her fingers sprang up off the pointer, and she pressed her hands to her mouth to stifle the cry. In the same instant, Angus came to his feet and began to bark from where he stood on the bed. He was staring at what she was staring at. By then Jude was twisting to see for himself, his own fingers leaving the planchette—which began to spin around and around on its own, a kid doing doughnuts on his dirt bike.

  The mirror on the dresser was tilted forward to show Georgia, sitting across from Jude, with the Ouija board between them. Only in the mirror her eyes were covered by a blindfold of black gauze and her throat was slashed. A red mouth gaped obscenely across it, and her shirt was soaked in blood.

  Angus and Bon bounded from the bed in the same moment. Bon hit the floor and launched herself at the planchette, snarling. She closed her jaws on the pointer, the way she might have attacked a mouse scampering for its hole, and it burst into pieces in her teeth.

  Angus hurled himself against the dresser and put his front paws on the top of it, barking furiously at the face in the mirror. The force of his weight rocked the dresser onto its rear legs. The mirror could be rotated forward and back, and now it swung back, tilting to show its face to the ceiling. Angus dropped to all fours, and an instant later the dresser did the same, coming down onto its wooden legs with a ringing crash. The mirror
swung forward, pivoting to show Georgia her own reflection once more. It was only her reflection. The blood—and the black blindfold—were gone.

  31

  In the late-afternoon cool of the room, Jude and Georgia stretched out together on the twin bed. It was too small for the both of them, and Georgia had to turn on her side and throw a leg over him to fit beside him. Her face nestled into his neck, the tip of her nose cold against his skin.

  He was numb. Jude knew he needed to think about what had just happened to them, but he could not seem to turn his thoughts back to what he’d seen in the mirror, back to what Anna had been trying to tell them. His mind wouldn’t go there. His mind wanted away from death for a few moments. He felt crowded by death, felt the promise of death all around, felt death on his chest, each death a stone heaped on top of him, driving the air out of him: Anna’s death, Danny’s, Dizzy’s, Jerome’s, the possibility of his own death and Georgia’s waiting just down the road from them. He could not move for the weight of all those deaths pressing down on him.

  Jude had an idea that as long as he was very still and said nothing, he and Georgia could stay in this quiet moment together indefinitely, with the shades flapping and the dim light wavering around them. Whatever bad thing that was waiting for them next would never arrive. As long as he remained in the little bed, with Georgia’s cool thigh over him and her body clasped to his side, the unimaginable future wouldn’t come for them.

  It came anyway. Bammy thumped softly on the door, and when she spoke, her voice was hushed and uncertain.

  “You all right in there?”

  Georgia pushed herself up on one elbow. She swiped the back of a hand across her eyes. Jude had not known until now that she’d been crying. She blinked and smiled crookedly, and it was real, not a smile for show, although for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what she had to smile about.

  Her face had been scrubbed clean by her tears, and that smile was heartbreaking in its easy, girlish sincerity. It seemed to say, Oh, well. Sometimes you get a bad deal. He understood then that she believed what they’d both seen in the mirror was a kind of vision, something that was going to happen, that maybe they could not avert. Jude quailed at the idea. No. No, better Craddock should get him and be done with it than Georgia should die gasping in her own blood, and why would Anna show them that, what could she want?

  “Honey?” Bammy asked.

  “We’re fine,” Georgia called back.

  Silence.

  Then: “You aren’t fightin’ in there, are you? I heard bangin’ around.”

  “No,” Georgia said, sounding affronted by the very suggestion. “Swear to God, Bammy. Sorry about the racket.”

  “Well,” Bammy said. “Do you need anything?”

  “Fresh sheets,” Georgia said.

  Another silence. Jude felt Georgia trembling against his chest, a sweet shivering. She bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing. Then he was fighting it, too, was overcome with a sudden, convulsive hilarity. He jammed a hand into his mouth, while his insides hitched with trapped, strangled laughter.

  “Jesus,” said Bammy, who sounded like she wanted to spit. “Jesus Christ.” Her tread moving away from the door as she said it.

  Georgia fell against Jude, her cool, damp face pressed hard to his neck. He put his arms around her, and they clutched each other while they gasped with laughter.

  32

  After dinner Jude said he had some phone calls to make and left Georgia and Bammy in Bammy’s living room. He didn’t really have anyone to call but knew that Georgia wanted some time with her grandmother and that they would be more themselves without him there.

  But once he was in the kitchen, a fresh glass of lemonade before him and nothing to occupy himself with, he found the phone in his hand anyway. He dialed the office line to pick up his messages. It felt queer, to be busy with something so entirely grounded in the ordinary after all that had happened in the day, from their run-in with Craddock at Denny’s to the encounter with Anna in Georgia’s bedroom. Jude felt disconnected from who he’d been before he first saw the dead man. His career, his living, both the business and the art that had preoccupied him for more than thirty years, seemed matters of no particular importance. He dialed the phone, watching his hand as if it belonged to someone else, feeling he was a passive spectator to the actions of a man in a play, an actor performing the part of himself.

  He had five messages waiting for him. The first was from Herb Gross, his accountant and business manager. Herb’s voice, which was usually oily and self-satisfied, was, in the recording, grainy with emotion. “I just heard from Nan Shreve that Danny Wooten was found dead in his apartment this morning. Apparently he hanged himself. We’re all dismayed here, as I’m sure you can imagine. Will you call me when you get this message? I don’t know where you are. No one does. Thank you.”

  There was a message from an Officer Beam, who said that the Piecliff police were trying to reach Jude about an important matter, and would he call back. There was a message from Nan Shreve, his lawyer, who said she was handling everything, that the police wanted to collect a statement from him about Danny, and he should call as soon as he could.

  The next message was from Jerome Presley, who had died four years ago, after he drove his Porsche into a weeping willow at just under a hundred miles an hour. “Hey, Jude, I guess we’re getting the band back together soon, huh? John Bonham on drums. Joey Ramone on backup vocals.” He laughed, then went on in his familiar, weary drawl. Jerome’s croak of a voice had always reminded Jude of the comic Steven Wright. “I hear you’re driving a souped-up Mustang now. That’s one thing we always had, Jude—we could talk cars. Suspensions, engines, spoilers, sound systems, Mustangs, Thunderbirds, Chargers, Porsches. You know what I was thinking about, night I drove my Porsche off the road? I was thinking about all the shit I never said to you. All the shit we didn’t talk about. Like how you got me hooked on your coke, and then you went and got straight and had the balls to tell me if I didn’t do the same, you’d throw me out of the band. Like how you gave Christine money to set herself up with her own place after she left me, when she ran off with the kids without a word. How you gave her money for a lawyer. There’s loyalty for you. Or how you wouldn’t make a simple fucking loan when I was losing everything—the house, the cars. And here I let you sleep on the bed in my basement when you were fresh off the bus from Louisiana and you didn’t have thirty dollars in your pocket.” Jerome laughed again—his harsh, corrosive, smoker’s laugh. “Well, we’ll get a chance to finally talk about all that stuff soon. I guess I’ll be seeing you any day. I hear you’re on the nightroad now. I know where that road goes. Straight into a fucking tree. They picked me out of the branches, you know. Except for the parts I left on the windshield. I miss you, Jude. I’m looking forward to putting my arms around you. We’re going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.”

  There was a clattering sound as Jerome took the phone from his ear and held it out so Jude could hear. What came through the line was a noise like no other Jude had ever heard before, alien and dreadful, a noise like the hum of flies, amplified a hundred times, and the punch and squeal of machinery, a steam press that banged and seethed. When listened to carefully, it was possible to hear words in all that fly hum, inhuman voices calling for Mother, calling for it to stop.

  Jude was primed to delete the next message, expecting another dead person, but instead it was a call from his father’s housekeeper, Arlene Wade. She was so far from his thoughts that it was several moments before he was able to identify her old, warbly, curiously toneless voice, and by then her brief message was almost done.

  “Hello, Justin, it’s me. I wanted to update you on your father. Hasn’t been conscious in thirty-six hours. Heartbeat is all fits and starts. Thought you’d want to know. He isn’t in pain. Call if you like.”

  After Jude hung up, he l
eaned over the kitchen counter, looking out into the night. He had his sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the window was open, and the breeze that drifted in was cool on his skin and perfumed with the smell of the flower garden. Insects hummed.

  Jude could see his father in his head: the old man stretched out on his narrow cot, gaunt, wasted, his chin covered in a mangy white bristle, his temples sunken and gray. Jude even half believed he could smell him, the rank bad sweat, the stink of the house, an odor that included but was not limited to chicken shit, pig, and the ashtray smell of nicotine absorbed into everything—curtains, blankets, wallpaper. When Jude had finally lit out of Louisiana, he’d been fleeing that smell as much as escaping his father.

  He had run and run and run, made music, made millions, spent a lifetime trying to put as much distance between himself and the old man as he could. Now, with a little luck, he and his father might die on the same day. They could walk the nightroad together. Or maybe they would ride, share the passenger seat of Craddock McDermott’s smoke-colored pickup. The two of them sitting so close to each other that Martin Cowzynski could rest one of his gaunt claws on the back of Jude’s neck. The smell of him filling the car. The smell of home.

  Hell would smell like that, and they would drive there together, father and son, accompanied by their hideous chauffeur, with his silver crew cut and Johnny Cash suit and the radio turned to Rush Limbaugh. If hell was anything, it was talk radio—and family.

  In the living room, Bammy said something in a low, gossipy murmur. Georgia laughed. Jude tilted his head at the sound and a moment later was surprised to find himself smiling in automatic response. How it was she could be in stitches again, with everything that was up against them and everything they’d seen, he couldn’t imagine.