Heart-Shaped Box with Bonus Material

by Joe Hill

He looked at what Arlene held in her hands, the sewing kit she was moving off the other cot. It was his mother’s old kit, a collection of thimbles, needles, and thread, jumbled in one of the big yellow heart-shaped candy boxes his father used to get for her. Arlene squeezed the lid on it, closing it up, and set it on the floor between the cots. Jude eyed it warily, but it didn’t make any threatening moves.

  Arlene returned and guided him by the elbow to the empty bed. There was a light on a mechanical arm, screwed to the side of the night table. She twisted the lamp around—it made a sproingy, creaking sound as the rusted coil stretched itself out—and clicked it on. He shut his eyes against the sudden brightness.

  “Let’s look at that hand.”

  She brought a low stool to the side of the bed and began to unwind the sopping gauze, using a pair of forceps. As she peeled the last layer away from his skin, a flush of icy tingling spread through his hand, and then the missing finger began, impossibly, to burn, as if it were crawling with biting fire ants.

  She stuck a needle into the wound, injecting him here, and here, while he cursed. Then came a rush of intense and blessed cold, spreading through the hand and into his wrist, pumping along the veins, turning him into an iceman.

  The room darkened, then brightened. The sweat on his body cooled rapidly. He was on his back. He didn’t remember lying down. He distantly felt a tugging on his right hand. When he realized that this tugging was Arlene doing something to the stump of his finger—clamping it, or putting hooks through it, or stitching it—he said, “Gonna puke.” He fought the urge to gag until she could place a rubber trough next to his cheek, then turned his head and vomited into it.

  When Arlene was finished, she laid his right hand on his chest. Wrapped in layer upon layer of muffling bandage, it was three times the size it had been, a small pillow. He was groggy. His temples thudded. She turned the harsh, bright light into his eyes again and leaned over for a look at the slash in his cheek. She found a wide, flesh-colored bandage and carefully applied it to his face.

  She said, “You been leakin’ pretty good. Do you know what type of motor oil you run on? I’ll make sure the amble-lance brings the right stuff.”

  “Check on Marybeth. Please.”

  “I was going to.”

  She clicked off the light before she went. It was a relief to be joined to darkness once more.

  He closed his eyes, and when they sprang open again, he did not know whether one minute had passed or sixty. His father’s house was a place of restful silence and stillness, no sound but for the sudden whoosh of the wind, lumber creaking, a burst of rain on the windows. He wondered if Arlene had gone for the amble-lance. He wondered if Marybeth was sleeping. He wondered if Craddock was in the house, sitting outside the door. Jude turned his head and found his father staring at him.

  His father’s mouth hung agape, the few teeth that were left stained brown from nicotine exposure, the gums diseased. Martin stared, pale gray eyes confused. Four feet of bare floor separated the two men.

  “You aren’t here,” Martin Cowzynski said, his voice a wheeze.

  “Thought you couldn’t talk,” Jude said.

  His father blinked slowly. Gave no sign he’d heard. “You’ll be gone when I wake up.” His tone was almost wishful. He began to cough weakly. Spit flew, and his chest seemed to go hollow, sinking inward, as if with each painful hack he were coughing up his insides, beginning to deflate.

  “You got that wrong, old man,” Jude told him. “You’re my bad dream, not the other way around.”

  Martin continued staring at him with that look of stupid wonder for a few moments longer, then turned his gaze to the ceiling once more. Jude watched him warily, the old man in his army cot, breath screaming from his throat, dried streaks of shaving cream on his face.

  His father’s eyes gradually sank shut. In a while Jude’s eyes did the same.

  43

  He wasn’t sure what woke him, but later on Jude looked up, coming out of sleep in an instant, and found Arlene at the foot of the bed. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. She was wearing a bright red rain slicker with the hood pulled up. Droplets of rain glittered on the plastic. Her old, bony face was set in a blank, almost robotic expression that Jude did not at first recognize and which he needed several moments to interpret as fear. He wondered if she’d gone and come back or not yet left.

  “We lost the power,” she said.

  “Did we?”

  “I went outside, and when I came back in, we lost the power.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There’s a truck in the driveway. Just settin’ there. Sort of no particular color. I can’t see who is settin’ in it. I started to walk out to it, to see if it was someone who could maybe drive somewhere and call emergency for us—but then I got scared. I got scared of who was in it, and I came back.”

  “You want to stay away from him.”

  She went on as if Jude had said nothing. “When I got back inside, we didn’t have power, and it’s still just some crazy talk radio on the telephone. Bunch of religious stuff about ridin’ the glory road. The TV was turned on in the front room. It was just runnin’. I know it couldn’t be, because there isn’t any power, but it was turned on anyway. There was a story on it. On the news. It was about you. It was about all of us. About how we was all dead. It showed a picture of the farmhouse and every-thin’. They were coverin’ my body with a sheet. They didn’t identify me, but I saw my hand stickin’ out and my bracelet. And policemen standin’ ever’where. And that yellow tape blockin’ the driveway. And Dennis Woltering said how you killed us all.”

  “It’s a lie. None of that is really going to happen.”

  “Finally I couldn’t stand it. I shut it off. The TV came right back on, but I shut it off again and jerked the plug out of the wall, and that fixed it.” She paused, then added, “I have to go, Justin. I’ll call for the amble-lance from the neighbors. I have to go…. Only I’m scared to try anddrive around that truck. Who drives the pale truck?”

  “No one you want to meet. Take my Mustang. The keys are in it.”

  “No thank you. I seen what was in the back.”

  “Oh.”

  “I got my car.”

  “Just don’t mess with that truck. Drive right over the lawn and through the fence if you have to. Do what you need to do to stay away from it. Did you look in on Marybeth?”

  Arlene nodded.

  “How is she?”

  “Sleepin’. Poor child.”

  “You said it.”

  “Good-bye, Justin.”

  “Take care.”

  “I’m bringin’ my dog with me.”

  “All right.”

  She took a sliding half step toward the door.

  Then Arlene said, “Your uncle Pete and I took you to Disney when you were seven. Do you remember?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “In your whole life, I never once saw you smile until you were up in them elephants, goin’ ’round and ’round. That made me feel good. When I saw you smile, it made me feel like you had a chance to be happy. I was sorry about how you turned out. So miserable. Wearin’ black clothes and sayin’ all them terrible things in your songs. I was sick to death for you. Wherever did that boy go, the one who smiled on the elephant ride?”

  “He starved to death. I’m his ghost.”

  She nodded and backed away. Arlene raised one hand in a gesture of farewell, then turned and was gone.

  Afterward Jude listened intently to the house, to the faint straining sounds it made in the wind and the splatter of the rain falling against it. A screen door banged sharply somewhere. It might have been Arlene leaving. It might have been the door swinging on the chicken coop outside.

  Beyond a feeling of gritty heat in the side of his face, where Jessica Price had cut him, he was not in great pain. His breathing was slow and regular. He stared at the door, waiting for Craddock to appear. He didn’t look away from the door until he h
eard a soft tapping sound off to his right.

  He peered over. The big yellow heart-shaped box sat on the floor. Something thumped inside. Then the box moved, as if jolted from beneath. It titched a few inches across the floor and jumped again. The lid was struck from within once more, and one corner was knocked up and loose.

  Four gaunt fingers slipped out from inside the box. Another thump and the lid came free and then began to rise. Craddock pulled himself up from inside the box, as if it were a heart-shaped hole set in the floor. The lid rode on top of his head, a gay and foolish hat. He removed it, cast it aside, then hitched himself out of the box to the waist in a single, surprisingly athletic move for a man who was not only elderly but dead. He got a knee on the floor, climbed the rest of the way out, and stood up. The creases in the legs of his black trousers were perfect.

  In the pen outside, the pigs began to shriek. Craddock reached a long arm back into the bottomless box, felt around, found his fedora, and set it on his head. The scribbles danced before his eyes. Craddock turned and smiled.

  “What kept you?” Jude asked.

  44

  Here we are, you and me. All out of road, the dead man said. His lips were moving but making no sound, his voice existing only in Jude’s head. The silver buttons on his black suit coat glinted in the darkness.

  “Yeah,” Jude said. “The fun had to stop sometime.”

  Still full of fight. Isn’t that somethin’? Craddock placed one gaunt hand on Martin’s ankle and ran it over the sheet and up his leg. Martin’s eyes were closed, but his mouth hung open and breath still came and went in thin, pneumatic whistles. A thousand miles later, and you’re still singin’ the same song.

  Craddock’s hand glided over Martin’s chest. It was something he seemed to be doing almost absentmindedly, did not once look at the old man fighting for his last breaths in the bed beside him.

  I never did like your music. Anna used to play it so loud it’d make a normal person’s ears bleed. You know there’s a road between here and hell? I’ve driven it myself. Many times now. And I’ll tell you what, out on that road there’s only one station, and all they play is your music. I guess that’s the devil’s way of gettin’ straight to punishin’ the sinners. He laughed.

  “Leave the girl.”

  Oh, no. She’s going to sit right between us while we ride the nightroad. She’s come so far with you already. We can’t leave her behind now.

  “I’m telling you Marybeth doesn’t have any part in this.”

  But you don’t tell me, son. I tell you. You’re going to choke her to death, and I’m going to watch. Say it. Tell me how it’s going to be.

  Jude thought, I won’t, but while he was thinking it, he said, “I’m going to choke her. You’re going to watch.”

  Now you’re singin’ my kind of music.

  Jude thought of the song he’d made up the other day, at the motel in Virginia, how his fingers had known where the right chords were and the feeling of stillness and calm that had come over him as he played them. A sensation of order and control, of the rest of the world being far away, kept back by his own invisible wall of sound. What had Bammy said to him? The dead win when you quit singing. And in his vision Jessica Price had said Anna would sing when she was in a trance, to keep from being made to do things she didn’t want to do, to block out voices she didn’t want to hear.

  Get up, the dead man said. Stop lazin’ around, now. You have business in the other room. The girl is waitin’.

  Jude wasn’t listening to him, though. He was focused intently on the music in his head, hearing it as it would sound when it had been recorded with a band, the soft clash of cymbal and snare, the deep, slow pulse of the bass. The old man was talking at him, but Jude found that when he fixed his mind on his new song, he could ignore him almost completely.

  He thought of the radio in the Mustang, the old radio, the one he’d pulled out of the dash and replaced with XM and a DVD-Audio disc player. The original radio had been an AM receiver with a glass face that glowed an unearthly shade of green and lit up the cockpit of the car like the inside of an aquarium. In his imagination Jude could hear his own song playing from it, could hear his own voice crying out the lyrics over the shivery, echo-chamber sound of the guitar. That was on one station. The old man’s voice was on another, buried beneath it, a faraway, southern, late-night, let’s-hear-it-for-Jesus, talk-all-the-time station, the reception no good, so all that came through was a word or two at a time, the rest lost in waves of static.

  Craddock had told him to sit up. It was a moment before Jude realized he hadn’t done it.

  Get on your feet, I said.

  Jude started to move—then stopped himself. In his mind he had the driver’s seat cranked back and his feet out the window and it was his song on the radio and the crickets hummed in the warm summer darkness. He was humming himself, and in the next moment he realized it. It was a soft, off-key humming, but recognizable, nonetheless, as the new song.

  Do you hear me talkin’ to you, son? the dead man asked. Jude could tell that was what he said, because he saw his lips moving, his mouth shaping the words very clearly. But in fact Jude could not really hear him at all.

  “No,” Jude said.

  Craddock’s upper lip drew back in a sneer. He still had one hand on Jude’s father—it had moved up over Martin’s chest and now rested on his neck. The wind roared against the house, and raindrops rapped at the windowpanes. Then the gust abated, and in the hush that followed, Martin Cowzynski whimpered.

  Jude had briefly forgotten his father—Jude’s thoughts pinned on the echoing loops of his own imagined song—but the sound drew his gaze. Martin’s eyes were open, wide and staring and horrified. He was gazing up at Craddock. Craddock turned his head toward him, the sneer fading, his gaunt and craggy face composing itself into an expression of quiet thought.

  At last Jude’s father spoke, his voice a toneless wheeze. “It’s a messenger. It’s a messenger of death.”

  The dead man seemed to look back at Jude, the black marks boiling in front of his eyes. Craddock’s lips moved, and for a moment his voice wavered and came clear, muted but audible beneath the sound of Jude’s private, inner song.

  Maybe you can tune me out, Craddock said. But he can’t.

  Craddock bent over Jude’s father and put his hands on Martin’s face, one on each cheek. Martin’s breath began to hitch and catch, each inhalation short, quick, and panicked. His eyelids fluttered. The dead man leaned forward and placed his mouth over Martin’s.

  Jude’s father pressed himself back into his pillow, shoved his heels down into the bed, and pushed, as if he could force himself deeper into the mattress and away from Craddock. He drew a last, desperate breath—and sucked the dead man into him. It happened in an instant and was like watching a magician pull a scarf through his fist to make it disappear. Craddock crumpled, a wad of Saran Wrap sucked up into the tube of a vacuum cleaner. His polished black loafers were the last thing to go down Martin’s throat. Martin’s neck seemed, for a moment, to distend and swell—bulging the way a snake will bulge after swallowing a gerbil—but then he gulped Craddock down, and his throat shrank back to its normal, scrawny, loose-fleshed shape.

  Jude’s father gagged, coughed, gagged again. His hips came up off the bed, his back arching. Jude could not help it, thought immediately of orgasm. Martin’s eyes strained from their sockets. The tip of his tongue flickered between his teeth.

  “Spit it up, Dad,” Jude said.

  His father didn’t seem to hear. He sank back into the bed, then bucked again, almost as if someone were sitting on top of him and Martin was trying to throw him off. He made wet, strangled sounds down in his throat. A blue artery stood out in the center of his forehead. His lips stretched back from his teeth in a doglike grimace.

  Then he eased gently down onto the mattress once more. His hands, which had been clutching fistfuls of the sheets, slowly opened. His eyes were a vivid, hideous crimson—the blood vessels h
ad erupted, staining the whites red. They stared blankly at the ceiling. Blood stained his teeth.

  Jude watched him for movement, straining for some sound of breath. He heard the house settling in the wind. He heard rain spitting against the wall.

  With great effort Jude sat up, then turned himself to set his feet on the floor. He had no doubt his father was dead, he who had smashed Jude’s hand in the cellar door and put a single-barreled shotgun to his mother’s breast, who had ruled this farmhouse with his knuckles and belt strap and laughing rages, and whom Jude had often daydreamed of killing himself. It had cost him something, though, to watch Martin die. Jude’s abdomen was sore, as if he had only just vomited again, as if something had been forced out of him, ejected from his body, something he didn’t want to give up. Rage, maybe.

  “Dad?” Jude said, knowing no one would answer.

  Jude rose to his feet, swaying, light-headed. He took a shuffling, old man’s step forward, put his bandaged left hand on the edge of the night table to support himself. It felt as if his legs might fold beneath him at any moment.

  “Dad?” Jude said again.

  His father jerked his head toward him and fixed his red, awful, fascinated eyes on Jude.

  “Justin,” he said, his voice a strained whisper. He smiled, a horrifying thing to see upon his gaunt, harrowed face. “My boy. I’m all right. I’m fine. Come close. C’mon and put your arms around me.”

  Jude did not step forward but took a staggering, unsteady step back. For a moment he had no air.

  Then his breath returned, and he said, “You aren’t my father.”

  Martin’s lips widened to show his poisoned gums and crooked yellow teeth, what were left of them. A teardrop of blood spilled from his left eye, ran in a jagged red line down the crag of his cheekbone. Craddock’s eye had seemed to drip red tears in almost just the same way, in Jude’s vision of Anna’s final night.

  He sat up and reached past the bowl of shaving lather. Martin closed his hand on his old straight razor, the one with the hickory handle. Jude hadn’t known it was there, hadn’t seen it lying behind the white china bowl. Jude took another step away. The backs of his legs struck the edge of his cot, and he sat down on the mattress.