Heart-shaped box (19 page)

G
eorgia said she would do the talking,
and she put the fingers of her left hand next to his on the pointer—it was called the planchette, Jude remembered now. He looked up when he heard her draw a steadying breath. She shut her eyes, not as if she were about to go into a mystic trance but more as if she were about to leap from a high diving board and was trying to get over the churning in her stomach.

“Okay,” she said. “My name is Marybeth Stacy Kimball. I called myself Morphine for a few bad years, and the guy I love calls me Georgia, even though it drives me nuts, but Marybeth is who I am, my true name.” She opened her eyes to a squint, peeped at Jude from between her eyelashes. “Introduce yourself.”

He was about to speak when she held up a hand to stop him.

“Your real name, now. The name that belongs to your true self. True names are very important. The right words have a charge in them. Enough charge to bring the dead back to the living.”

He felt stupid—felt that what they were doing couldn’t work, was a waste of time, and they were acting like children. His career had afforded him a variety of occasions to make a fool out of himself, however. Once, for a music video, he and his band—Dizzy, Jerome, and Kenny—had run
in mock horror through a field of clover, chased by a dwarf dressed in a dirty leprechaun suit and carrying a chain saw. In time Jude had developed something like an immunity to the condition of feeling stupid. So when he paused, it wasn’t out of a reluctance to speak but because he honestly didn’t know what to say.

Finally, looking at Georgia, he said, “My name is…Justin. Justin Cowzynski. I guess. Although I haven’t answered to that since I was nineteen.”

Georgia closed her eyes, withdrawing into herself. A dimple appeared between her slender eyebrows, a little thought line. Slowly, softly, she spoke. “Well. There you go. That’s us. We want to talk to Anna McDermott. Justin and Marybeth need your help. Is Anna there? Anna, will you speak to us today?”

They waited. The shade moved. Children shouted in the street.

“Is there anyone who would like to speak to Justin and Marybeth? Will Anna McDermott say somethin’ to us? Please. We’re in trouble, Anna. Please hear us. Please help us.” Then, in a voice that approached a whisper, she said, “Come on. Do somethin’.” Speaking to the planchette.

Bon farted in her sleep, a squeaking sound, like a foot skidding across wet rubber.

“She didn’t know me,” Georgia said. “You ask for her.”

“Anna McDermott? Is there an Anna McDermott in the house? Could you please report to the Ouija information center?” he asked, in a big, hollow, public announcer’s voice.

Georgia smiled, a wide, humorless grin. “Ah, yes. I knew it was only a matter of time before the fuckin’-around would commence.”

“Sorry.”

“Ask for her. Ask for real.”

“It’s not workin’.”

“You haven’t tried.”

“Yes I have.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Well, it just isn’t workin’.”

He expected hostility or impatience. Instead her smile broadened even more, and she regarded him with a quiet sweetness that he instantly mistrusted. “She was waitin’ for you to call, right up to the day she died. Like there was any chance of that. What, did you wait a whole week, before moving on in your state-by-state tour of America’s easiest snatch?”

He flushed. Not even a week. “You might not want to get too hot under the collar,” he said, “considering you’re the easy snatch in question.”

“I know, and it disgusts me. Put! Your! Hand! Back on the mother-fuckin’ pointer. We are
not
done here.”

Jude had been withdrawing his hand from the planchette, but at Georgia’s outburst he set his fingers back upon it.

“I’m disgusted with the both of us. You for bein’ who you are and me for lettin’ you stay that way. Now, you call for her. She won’t come for me, but she might for you. She was waitin’ for you to call right to the end, and if you ever had, she would’ve come running. Maybe she still will.”

Jude glared down at the board, the old-timey alphabet letters, the sun, the moon.

“Anna, you around? Will Anna McDermott come on and talk to us?” Jude said.

The planchette was dead, unmoving plastic. He had not felt so grounded in the world of the real and the ordinary in days. It wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t right. It was hard to keep his hand on the pointer. He was impatient to get up, to be done.

“Jude,” Georgia said, then corrected herself. “Justin. Don’t quit on this. Try again.”

Jude. Justin.

He stared at his fingers on the planchette, the board beneath, and tried to think what wasn’t right, and in another moment it came to him. Georgia had said that true names had a charge in them, that the right
words had the power to return the dead to the living. And he thought then that Justin wasn’t his true name, that he had left Justin Cowzynski in Louisiana when he was nineteen, and the man who got off the bus in New York City forty hours later was someone different entirely, capable of doing and saying things that had been beyond Justin Cowzynski. And what they were doing wrong now was calling for Anna McDermott. He had never called her that. She had not been Anna McDermott when they were together.

“Florida,” Jude said, almost sighed. When he spoke again, his voice was surprising to him, calm and self-assured. “Come on and talk to me, Florida. It’s Jude, darlin’. I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I’m calling now. Are you there? Are you listening? Are you still waiting for me? I’m here now. I’m right here.”

The planchette jumped under their fingers, as if the board had been struck from beneath. Georgia jumped with it and cried out weakly. Her bad hand fluttered to her throat. The breeze shifted direction and sucked at the shades, snapping them against the windows and darkening the room. Angus lifted his head, eyes flashing a bright, unnatural green in the weak light from the candles.

Georgia’s good hand had remained on the pointer, and no sooner had it rattled back to rest on the board than it began to move. The sensation was unnatural and made Jude’s heart race. It felt as if there were another pair of fingers on the planchette, a third hand, reaching into the space between his hand and Georgia’s and sliding the pointer around, turning it without warning. It slipped across the board, touched a letter, stayed there for a moment, then
spun
under their fingers, forcing Jude to twist his wrist to keep his hand on it.

“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.