The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

by Michael McDowell

  I opened the door wider. Then I remembered the box.

  ‘Hold on a minute.’ I hurried to the living room, picked it up and carried it to my bedroom. But the bedroom seemed too obvious, which was a strange thought to have, unless, like me, the only thing stronger than your trust in authority is your distrust of it. My apartment is small, and room-­wise, all that was left was the kitchen. The box didn’t fit in the oven, and hastily, I stowed it under the sink.

  ‘Something cooking?’ Michaels asked when I returned.

  ‘Cooking?’

  He motioned toward the kitchen. I was caught off-­guard.

  ‘You guys want coffee?’ I asked.

  They didn’t, and I ushered them into the living room. We all sat down, and under Michaels’ watchful eye, Neal began.

  ‘Again, our condolences.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We understand your father passed away unexpectedly. And rather fast.’

  For some reason that irked me. ‘He was twelve days in the hospital and eighty-­three years old. Is that fast?’

  ‘And of unknown causes.’

  ‘Like I said, he was eighty-­three.’

  ‘But not especially sick before he went into the hospital. Say a day or two before.’

  ‘No. Not especially.’

  He nodded in a knowing sort of way, then cleared his throat. ‘Forgive me for asking, but did you consider doing an autopsy?’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘Any particular reason why not?’

  In fact, the thought had crossed my mind, but only briefly. He was eighty-­three, after all.

  ‘I didn’t see how it would have helped.’

  ‘How about your mother? Was she interested?’

  I thought of her expression the day she came in and he didn’t recognize her, or anyone, the day he became delirious. How her face had crumpled, and her eyes had teared up, and she couldn’t speak, except in little sobs. And how after a minute she gathered herself and sat beside him, taking his hand in hers and speaking to him in a calm, reassuring, almost chatty, voice, reminding him who and where he was, affectionately chiding him for not knowing. The eleven days between his entering the hospital and his dying were for me a blur, but for my mother, I think, it was the opposite: time slowed to a crawl. She was not shocked or surprised when he died; she was relieved more than anything, both for his sake and hers. She had known him for more than forty years, and no autopsy would have enabled her to know him any better, or changed how she felt.

  ‘No. She wasn’t. Not at all.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Why is that interesting?’

  Michaels was quick to reply. ‘What Mr Neal means is, you can understand our interest. From a public health standpoint. Rapid death. Unknown cause.’

  ‘There is a cause. The cause was old age.’

  He regarded me for a few seconds, then inclined his head. ‘It gets the best of us. Why don’t we leave it at that.’

  ‘I do have another question,’ said Neal.

  I was beginning to grow impatient. Neal especially was getting on my nerves.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It has to do with his bones.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘We understand there was an irregularity.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Word gets around.’

  Michaels, sensing the tension, intervened. ‘Again, it’s a regulatory matter. The crematorium is required to inform us of any unusual occurrence.’

  I replied that it wasn’t that unusual. It had happened before.

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘That’s what the man said. Not often. But then my father didn’t always do things the conventional way.’

  It was a light-­hearted comment. I meant nothing by it, and Michaels let it slide. But Neal was the sort who saw meaning and motive everywhere.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I was joking.’

  He frowned, then gave a bogus laugh. ‘Oh. I see. Hah. You mean your father was conventional?’

  ‘Sometimes. Sometimes not.’

  ‘He was unpredictable?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘In the end. How would you describe him then?’

  ‘He was delirious.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what the hospital notes say.’

  ‘He wasn’t himself.’

  ‘Did he talk to you?’

  ‘He was babbling.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Nothing. It was nonsense.’

  ‘Could you understand it?’

  ‘Sometimes. Most of the time not.’

  He wasn’t satisfied with this. ‘Could you be more specific? You couldn’t understand the words? Or the words were put together in a way you didn’t understand?’

  ‘I don’t know. Both, I suppose.’

  He exchanged a look with Michaels. ‘Can you remember any of them? The words.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Did you recognize any? Had he said them before?’

  ‘Some of them. Sure.’

  ‘The ones you didn’t know.’

  ‘What’s this have to do with his bones?’

  ‘Bear with us for just a moment,’ said Michaels. ‘We’re almost done. Did any of the words sound foreign?’

  ‘I don’t remember. He mumbled a lot.’

  ‘Had he ever acted that way before?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘He never behaved unusually? Like, say, someone you didn’t know?’

  ‘A stranger,’ said Neal. ‘Did you ever think of your father like that?’

  I’d had enough, especially of him. ‘Do you have a father?’

  ‘Is that a yes or a no?’

  ‘It’s a question. If you don’t know the answer, maybe I can help.’

  ‘Let’s get back to his bones,’ said Michaels. ‘We’d like to have a look at them.’

  ‘Would you? And why is that?’

  ‘Because we’re public health officials.’

  ‘And it’s the law,’ said Neal, although the look he got from Michaels made me wonder if he’d made that up.

  ‘Why are you so interested? Is there some danger to the public? Some sort of health risk?’

  ‘We won’t know until we examine them.’

  ‘But what’s the likelihood? Really.’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  I suspected he could. Moreover, I began to feel the need to defend my father, as though his honor and integrity were at stake. Which was ironic, because of all his qualities these were the ones that he, and I, and nearly everyone who knew him, valued most.

  ‘They’ve cooked for a whole day at more than a thousand degrees. Is there anything you know of that survives that kind of heat for that long? Anything that could possibly harm anybody?’

  There was a pause. Somehow the word ‘harm’ changed the whole tenor of the conversation. Neal glanced at Michaels, who wore a grave expression, then at me.

  ‘If you don’t mind, we’d like a look.’

  ‘They’re not here.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  I had to think fast. ‘Somewhere else.’

  Lame? What can I say? Neal started to reply, but Michaels stopped him.

  ‘Can you arrange for us to see them?’ he asked.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow, say.’

  I wanted to get rid of these guys, and the quickest way, it seemed was to agree. Besides, I was out of snappy rejoinders. ‘Tomorrow it is.’

  ‘Excellent. We’ll see you in the morning.’

  What is it about health officials that leaves you feeling anxious, worried, vulnerable, agoraphobic, headachy, sick to your stomach, tight in the chest, sweaty, itchy and insecure? Bacteria in the food supply, pesticides in the water supply, smoke in the air supply, obesity, cigarettes, heart disease, ADD, depression . . . it’s a dangerous world out there, hazards everywhere, and these functionaries seem to
delight in reminding us of this, bludgeoning us with statistics and sharing, if not manufacturing, the most alarming trends. But how bad really is it? The people I see look like people I’ve seen all my life, only more of them, and, I have to say, on the whole they look better. Take my father, for example. He used to smoke, like nearly everyone his age, then he stopped. Then he got fat, like ex-­smokers do, then he got rid of the fat. He looked good when he was seventy, he looked good when he was eighty, and he looked pretty darn good for an eighty-­three year old, all the way up to the last two weeks of his life. A stranger? Yes, he was, in those final few days. And before? Who isn’t a stranger to some degree, even to his closest companions? I knew my father as a son, but what did I know of him as a husband, or a friend, or a son himself? What secrets did he have? And what thoughts and experiences that weren’t secrets at all, merely too pedestrian and numerous to mention, or too far in the past, too dim, to recall? Of course he was a stranger. On some level, we’re all strangers to each other. But I feared those men meant something more.

  After they left and I calmed down, I called my mother. Some friends were making a condolence call, so she couldn’t talk long. She asked how I was doing, which is how she starts every conversation, and I told her everything was fine.

  ‘How about you? How are you?’

  ‘Everyone’s being very nice,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’

  ‘Not too bad. I’m not eating much. I don’t have much of an appetite.’ There was a pause. ‘Why is that?’

  She sounded puzzled, as if she’d never known anyone who’d lost a loved one and heard them describe what it was like: the loss of appetite, the sleepless nights, the sudden and recurrent shock of being alone. In fact, she had paid countless condolence calls of her own and had many widowed friends.

  ‘Because your husband just died. People lose their appetite. It’s pretty normal.’

  ‘So I shouldn’t worry?’

  ‘Are you eating anything at all?’

  ‘Some soup. I had a piece of toast.’

  ‘Then no. You shouldn’t. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘But everybody’s bringing things. Chicken salad. Meatloaf. Lasagna. The food’s just piling up.’

  ‘But you like those things.’

  ‘I’m not hungry. But they keep bringing them anyway.’

  ‘You’ll be hungry later. You can freeze them.’

  ‘I’m not helpless. I can cook for myself.’

  ‘You might not feel like cooking.’

  I could see the look on her face. ‘It’s annoying. Just so you know. I didn’t die. Your father did.’

  Grieving, for my mother, was a relatively new condition, but being aggrieved was not. The latter for her was sometimes an expression of discontent but more often of worry, which itself was an expression of fear. What she feared most was losing something: her independence, her self-­control, someone she loved. In this case, she had lost all those things to one degree or another, and I did my best to reassure her. We made a date to see each other the next day, and I hung up, relieved, temporarily, to have avoided the subject of my dad.

  The fire situation worsened that afternoon. At one point there were a reported fourteen hundred blazes throughout the state. One would get contained, and a score of others would take its place. Forests were being consumed, homes destroyed, thousands upon thousands of firefighters mobilized, countless lives imperiled. The closest blaze to us was a scant twenty miles away, and the air outside my window had to be the epicenter of the smoke. I could barely see across the street. The sun was a blur, and the light was brown and eerie.

  This is how the world will end, I thought. Maybe it’s ending now. Not with a bang but in a slow, deepening, sunless shadow.

  I stayed inside and watched the news. I made some calls. I searched the Internet on the subject of bones: bone conditions, bone diseases, skeletons, burials, decomposition, cremation. I learned that in acromegaly the bones are unusually thick. And in something called osteogenesis imperfecta, unusually thin and fragile. I learned that the monks of a certain Catholic sect in Rome collected the bones of their brethren and made sculptures out of them. I learned many fascinating facts, but nothing that helped me in the matter of my father.

  His bones were still under the kitchen sink, an ignoble hiding place, but the living room was too exposed, and, call me squeamish, but I did not want them in the bedroom. So I left them where they were and said goodnight, paused, then said ‘I’m sorry about this, Dad’, paused again, then said ‘I miss you, Dad’, turned, turned back and said ‘I love you, Dad’, then went to bed.

  In the morning there were ashes everywhere: on the trees, on the cars, in the street. There was barely a county in the state that wasn’t on fire. The governor had declared a state of emergency. The President, bless his heart, sent condolences.

  I had decided, for the time being, to leave my father’s remains where they were. My mother, of course, had to be told, and I was thinking about that when the doorbell rang.

  It was Neal and Michaels again. I was non­plussed. I had called and left a message to cancel our date the night before.

  ‘Didn’t you get it?’ I asked.

  They frowned and looked at each other.

  ‘Did you get a message?’ Michaels asked Neal.

  Neal shook his head. ‘Did you?’

  Michaels shook his. ‘This is a bad time? It’s inconvenient?’

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ And he looked it.

  A moment passed.

  ‘When did you leave it?’ he asked.

  ‘Leave it?’

  ‘The message.’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘What number?’

  The air was burning my eyes. By the looks of things, theirs too. Common courtesy obliged me to invite them inside, which I did.

  ‘I don’t know. The number you gave me. The one on the card.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Neal.

  Michaels agreed. ‘Maybe you punched it in wrong.’

  ‘I’ve done that,’ said Neal. ‘Plenty of times.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as it looks. Those little pads. Those tiny little phones.’

  ‘It’s not easy at all. Anyone can make a mistake. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Not for a second. Please. Do me that favor.’

  ‘It’s not worth the trouble.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Stuff happens.’ He glanced at Neal. ‘Am I right?’

  Neal rolled his eyes. ‘You got to be kidding. All the time.’

  ‘Like yesterday.’

  Neal gave a nod. ‘Yesterday’s a case in point.’

  ‘You probably thought we were stringing you along.’

  ‘Lying to you.’

  ‘Lying’s strong, Larry.’

  ‘Misinforming you then. Not laying our cards on the table. Maybe you thought that.’

  ‘You didn’t trust us.’

  ‘You weren’t sure who we were or what to do. You suffered a tragedy. You’re trying to sort things out. You’ve got a lot on your mind. A lot of feelings. Some this way, some that.’

  ‘You didn’t trust yourself,’ said Michaels.

  ‘You had the bones, but you didn’t want to tell us. You thought it was disrespectful to your dad.’

  ‘You weren’t sure what to think. You wanted to help, but you didn’t want to do the wrong thing.’

  ‘That’s exactly right.’ Neal pointed a finger at Michaels, as if to single out his razor-­sharp intellect. ‘You hit the nail on the head, Mike. He wanted to help, just like he wants to help now.’ He turned the finger on me. ‘He wants to help, but he doesn’t want to make a mistake. Doesn’t want to blow it. Like before.’

  ‘With the phone. The wrong number.’

  ‘The phone, the information, the car, whatever.’

  ‘What about the car?’ I asked.

  He gave me a look.

  ‘The car,’ I repeated. ‘What’s wrong
with it?’

  He transferred his look to Michaels.

  ‘He’s asking about the car,’ said Michaels.

  ‘What about it?’

  Michaels shrugged and turned to me. ‘What’s the deal? Is something wrong?’

  ‘You said car.’

  He frowned. ‘No, sir. I did not.’

  ‘He did.’ I pointed at Neal.

  Michaels turned to him. ‘He said it was you.’

  Neal looked thoughtful. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t hear you right.’

  ‘It’s possible. Mistakes happen.’ He addressed me. ‘Can you hear me now?’

  ‘I heard you before.’

  ‘Say it. What you thought you heard. The word.’

  I was annoyed. This was ridiculous. ‘Car.’

  ‘Not this?’ He made a sort of gurgling in his throat, very brief and, I have to say, weird. Like water running over rocks, where sometimes you think you can almost make out words.

  ‘Larry, behave.’

  ‘Familiar?’ he asked.

  I felt like it should have been, but I shook my head.

  He looked disappointed.

  Michaels intervened. ‘Maybe you said cart. Or Carl.’

  ‘Who’s Carl?’ asked Neal.

  ‘Or card. Maybe card.’

  He scratched his head. ‘Coulda been that. Come to think of it, I was thinking about a card.’

  He reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet and slid a card out. He handed it to Michaels, who glanced at it before giving it to me. ‘Now please, don’t take this the wrong way.’

  Advice, naturally, that ensures you will.

  I looked at it, and my heart froze.

  Embossed on it, in large, no-­nonsense, steel blue letters were the three initials no one ever wants to see. Who among us is not guilty of something?

  The two of them watched me, waiting, it seemed, for some reaction.

  ‘You look worried,’ said Neal.

  Michaels nodded. ‘He does. I think he’s taking it the wrong way.’

  ‘You said not to.’

  ‘I did. But obviously we’re not communicating well. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I don’t talk with an accent?’