Heart-shaped box (5 page)

“Get rid of it,” Georgia said from the door.

H
is shoulders twitched in reflexive surprise.
He turned and looked. She was naturally pale to begin with, but now her face was bloodless, like polished bone, so she resembled a vampire even more than usual. He wondered if it was a trick of makeup before he saw that her cheeks were damp, the fine black hairs at her temples pasted down with sweat. She stood in pajamas, clutching herself and shivering in the cold.

“You sick?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Picture of health. Get rid of it.”

He gently set the snuff film back on the shelf. “Get rid of what?”

“The dead man’s suit. It smells bad. Didn’t you notice the way it smelled when you took it out of the closet?”

“It isn’t in the closet?”

“No, it isn’t in the closet. It was lying on the bed when I woke up. It was spread out right next to me. Did you forget to put it back? Or forget you took it out in the first place? I swear to God, it’s a surprise sometimes you remember to put your dick back in your pants after you take a piss. I hope all the pot you smoked in the seventies was worth it. What the hell were you doing with it anyway?”

If the suit was out of the closet, then it had walked out on its own.
There was no percentage in telling Georgia that, though, so he said nothing, pretended an interest in cleaning up.

Jude went around the desk, bent, and turned over the framed record that had dropped to the floor. The record itself was as busted as the plate of glass on top of it. He popped the frame apart and tipped it on its side. Broken glass slid with a musical clash into the wastebasket by his desk. He plucked out the pieces of his smashed platinum album—
Happy Little Lynch Mob
—and stuck them in the trash, six gleaming scimitar blades of grooved steel. What to do now? He supposed a thinking man would go and have another look at the suit. He rose and turned to her.

“Come on. You should lie down. You look like hell. I’ll put the suit away, and then I’ll tuck you in.”

He put his hand on her upper arm, but she pulled free. “No. The bed smells like it, too. It’s all over the sheets.”

“So we’ll get new sheets,” he said, taking her arm again.

Jude turned her and guided her into the hallway. The dead man was sitting two-thirds of the way down the corridor, in the Shaker chair on the left, his head lowered in thought. A drape of morning sunshine fell across where his legs should have been. They disappeared where they passed into the light. It gave him the look of a war veteran, his trousers ending in stumps, midway down his thighs. Below this splash of sunshine were his polished black loafers, with his black-stockinged feet stuck in them. Between his thighs and his shoes, the only legs that were visible were the legs of the chair, the wood a lustrous blond in the light.

No sooner had Jude noticed him than he looked away, did not want to see him, did not want to think about him being there. He glanced at Georgia, to see if she had spotted the ghost. She was staring at her feet as she shuffled along with Jude’s hand on her arm, her bangs in her eyes. He wanted to tell her to look, wanted to know if she could see him as well, but he was too in dread of the dead man to speak, afraid the ghost would hear him and glance up.

It was crazy to think somehow the dead man wasn’t going to notice
them walking past, but for no reason he could explain, Jude felt that if they were both very quiet, they could slip by unseen. The dead man’s eyes were closed, his chin almost touching his chest, an old man who had nodded off in the late-morning sun. More than anything Jude wanted him to stay just as he was. Not to stir. Not to wake. Not to open his eyes; please, not to open his eyes.

They drew closer, but still Georgia didn’t glance his way. Instead she laid a sleepy head on Jude’s shoulder and closed her eyes. “So you want to tell me why you had to trash the studio? And were you shouting in there? I thought I heard you shouting, too.”

He didn’t want to look again but couldn’t help himself. The ghost remained as he was, head tipped to the side, smiling just slightly, as if musing on a pleasant thought or a dream. The dead man didn’t seem to hear her. Jude had an idea then, unformed, difficult to articulate. With his closed eyes and his head tilted just so, the ghost seemed not so much to be asleep as to be
listening
for something. Listening for
him
, Jude thought. Waiting, perhaps, to be acknowledged, before he would (or could) acknowledge Jude in return. They were almost on top of him now, about to walk past him, and Jude shrank against Georgia to avoid touching him.

“That’s what woke me up, the noise, and then the smell—” She made a soft coughing sound and lifted her head to squint blearily at the bedroom door. She still didn’t notice the ghost, although they were crossing directly in front of him now. She came up short, stopped moving. “I’m not going in there until you do something about that suit.”

He slipped his hand down her arm to her wrist and squeezed it, shoving her forward. She made a thin sound of pain and protest and tried to pull away from him. “What the fuck?”

“Keep walking,” he said, and then realized a moment later, with a pitiful throb in the chest, that he had spoken.

He glanced down at the ghost, and at the same time the dead man lifted his head and his eyes rolled open. But where his eyes belonged was
only a black scribble. It was as if a child had taken a Magic Marker—a truly magic marker, one that could draw right on the air—and had desperately tried to ink over them. The black lines squirmed and tangled among one another, worms tied into a knot.

Then Jude was past him, shoving Georgia down the hallway while she struggled and whined. When he was at the door to the bedroom, he looked back.

The ghost came to his feet, and as he rose, his legs moved out of the sunlight and painted themselves back into being, the long black trouser legs, the sharp crease in his pants. The dead man held his right arm out to the side, the palm turned toward the floor, and something fell from the hand, a flat silver pendant, polished to a mirror brightness, attached to a foot of delicate gold chain. No, not a pendant but a curved blade of some kind. It was like a dollhouse version of the pendulum in that story by Edgar Allan Poe. The gold chain was connected to a ring around one of his fingers, a wedding ring, and the razor was what he had married. He allowed Jude to look at it for a moment and then twitched his wrist, a child doing a trick with a yo-yo, and the little curved razor leaped into his hand.

Jude felt a moan struggling to force its way up from his chest. He shoved Georgia through the door, into the bedroom, and slammed it.

“What are you doing, Jude?” she cried, pulling free at last, stumbling away from him.

“Shut up.”

She hit him in the shoulder with her left hand, then slugged him in the back with her right, the hand with the infected thumb. This hurt her more than it hurt him. She made a sick gasping sound and let him be.

He still held the doorknob. He listened to the corridor. It was quiet.

Jude eased the door back and looked through a three-inch opening, ready to slam it again, expecting the dead man to be there with his razor on a chain.

No one was in the hallway.

He shut his eyes. He shut the door. He put his forehead against it,
pulled a deep breath down into his lungs and held it, let it go slowly. His face was clammy with sweat, and he lifted a hand to wipe it away. Something icy and sharp and hard lightly grazed his cheek, and he opened his eyes and saw the dead man’s curved razor in his hand, the blue-steel blade reflecting an image of his own wide, staring eyeball.

Jude shouted and flung it down, then looked at the floor, but already it wasn’t there.

H
e backed away from the door.
The room was filled with the sound of strained breathing, his own and Marybeth’s. In that moment she was Marybeth. He couldn’t recall what it was he usually called her.

“What kind of shit are you on?” she asked, in a voice that hinted at a hillbilly drawl, faint but distinctly southern.

“Georgia,” he said, remembering then. “Nothing. I couldn’t be more sober.”

“Oh, the hell. What are you taking?” And that subtle, barely-there drawl was gone, receding as quickly as it had come. Georgia had lived a couple years in New York City, where she’d made a studied effort to lose her accent, didn’t like being taken for a cornpone hick.

“I got off all my shit years ago. I told you.”

“What was that in the hall? You saw something. What’d you see?”

He glared a warning at her, which she ignored. She stood huddled before him in her pajamas, her arms crossed under her breasts, hands tucked out of sight against her sides. Her feet were spread slightly apart, as if, should he try to move past her into the rest of the bedroom, she would block his way—an absurd prospect for a girl a hundred pounds lighter than he was.

“There was an old man sitting out in the hall. In the chair,” he said at last. He had to tell her something and didn’t see any reason to lie. Her opinion of his sanity didn’t trouble him. “We walked right by him, but you didn’t see him. I don’t know if you
can
see him.”

“That’s lunatic bullshit.” She said it with no special conviction.

He started toward the bed, and she got out of his way, pressed herself to the wall.

The dead man’s suit was spread neatly across his side of the mattress. The deep, heart-shaped box lay on the floor, the black lid resting next to it, white tissue paper hanging out. He caught a whiff of the suit when he was still four paces away from it and flinched. It hadn’t smelled that way when it first came out of the box, he would’ve noticed. Now it was impossible not to notice it. It had the ripe odor of corruption, something dead and spoiling.

“Christ,” Jude said.

Georgia stood at a distance, a hand cupped over her mouth and nose. “I know. I was wondering if there was something in one of the pockets. Something going bad. Old food.”

Breathing through his mouth, Jude patted down the jacket. He thought it very likely he was about to discover something in an advanced state of decomposition. It would not have surprised him to find that Jessica McDermott Price had stuffed a dead rat into the suit, a little something extra to go with his purchase, at no additional charge. Instead, though, he felt only a stiff square of what was maybe plastic in one pocket. He slipped it out for a look.

It was a photograph, one he knew well, Anna’s favorite picture of them. She had taken it with her when she left. Danny snapped it one afternoon in late August, the sunlight reddish and warm on the front porch, the day swarming with dragonflies and glittering motes of dust. Jude perched on the steps in a worn denim jacket, his Dobro over one knee. Anna sat beside him, watching him play, her hands squeezed
between her thighs. The dogs were sprawled in the dirt at their feet, staring quizzically up at the camera.

It had been a good afternoon, maybe one of the last good afternoons before things started to go bad, but looking at the photograph now brought him no pleasure. Someone had taken a Sharpie to it. Jude’s eyes had been marked out in black ink, covered over by a furious hand.

Georgia was saying something from where she stood a few feet away, her voice shy, uncertain. “What did he look like? The ghost in the hall?”

Jude’s body was turned so she couldn’t see the photograph, a lucky thing. He didn’t want her to see it.

He struggled to find his voice. It was hard to get past the unhappy shock of those black scribbles blotting out his eyes in the picture. “An old man,” he managed at last. “He was wearing this suit.”

And there were these awful fucking black scribbles floating in front of his eyes and they looked just like this,
Jude imagined telling her, turning to show her the snapshot at the same time. He didn’t do it, though.

“He just sat there?” Georgia asked. “Nothing else happened?”

“He stood up and showed me a razor on a chain. A funny little razor.”

On the day Danny took the picture, Anna was still herself, and Jude thought she’d been happy. Jude had spent most of that late-summer afternoon beneath the Mustang, and Anna had stayed close by, crawling under herself to pass him tools and necessary parts. In the photo there was a smear of motor oil on her chin, dirt on her hands and knees—an appealing, well-earned grime, the kind of filth you could take pride in. Her eyebrows were bunched up, a pretty dimple between them, and her mouth was open, as if she were laughing—or, more likely, about to ask him a question.
You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? What’s the best dog you ever owned?
Her with her questions.

Anna had not asked him why he was sending her away, however, when it was over. Not after the night he found her wandering the side of the highway in a T-shirt and nothing else, people honking at her as they
went past. He hauled her into the car and pulled back his fist to hit her, then slugged the steering wheel instead, punching it until his knuckles bled. He said enough was enough, that he was going to pack her shit for her, send her on her way. Anna said she’d die without him. He said he’d send flowers to the funeral.

So: She at least had kept her word. It was too late to keep his.

“Are you messing with me, Jude?” Georgia asked. Her voice was close. She was creeping toward him, in spite of her aversion to the smell. He slid the picture back into the pocket of the dead man’s suit before she could see. “Because if this is a joke, it sucks.”

“It isn’t a joke. I guess it’s possible I’m losing my mind, but I don’t think that’s it either. The person who sold me the…suit…knew what she was doing. Her little sister was a fan who committed suicide. This woman blames me for her death. I talked to her on the phone just an hour ago, and she told me so herself. That’s one part of this thing I’m sure I didn’t imagine. Danny was there. He heard me talking to her. She wants to get even with me. So she sent me a ghost. I saw him just now in the hall. And I saw him last night, too.”

He began to fold the suit, intending to return it to its box.

“Burn it,” Georgia said, with a sudden vehemence that surprised him. “Take the fucking suit and burn it.”

Jude felt, for an instant, an almost overpowering impulse to do just that, find some lighter fluid, douse it, cook it in the driveway. It was an impulse he immediately mistrusted. He was wary of any irrevocable action. Who knew what bridges might be burned along with it? He felt the slightest flicker of an idea, something about the awful-smelling suit and how it might be of use, but the thought drifted away before he could fix on it. He was tired. It was hard to pin a solid thought in place.

His reasons for wanting to hold on to the suit were illogical, superstitious, unclear even to himself, but when he spoke, he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for keeping it. “We can’t burn it. It’s evidence. My lawyer is going to want it later, if we decide to build a case against her.”

Georgia laughed, weakly, unhappily. “What? Assault with a deadly spirit?”

“No. Harassment, maybe. Stalking. It’s a death threat anyway, even if it’s a crazy one. There’s laws on that.”

He finished folding the suit and set it back in its nest of tissue paper, inside the box. He breathed through his mouth as he did it, head turned from the stink.

“The whole room smells. I know this is pussy, but I feel like I might yak,” she said.

He slipped a sideways look at her. She was absentmindedly clutching her right hand to her chest, staring blankly at the glossy black heart-shaped box. She had, until just a few moments before, been hiding the hand against her side. The thumb was swollen, and the place where the pin had gone in was now a white sore, the size of a pencil eraser, glistening with pus. She saw him looking at it, glanced down at herself, then up again, smiling miserably.

“You got a hell of an infection there.”

“I know. I been putting Bactine on it.”

“Maybe you ought to see someone about it. If it’s tetanus, Bactine won’t take care of it.”

She closed her fingers around the injured thumb, squeezed it gently. “I pricked it on that pin hidden in the suit. What if it was poisoned?”

“I guess if it had cyanide on it, we’d know by now.”

“Anthrax.”

“I spoke to the woman. She’s country-fried stupid, not to mention in need of some superior fucking psychiatric drugs, but I don’t think she would’ve sent me anything with poison on it. She knows she’d go to jail for that.” He touched Georgia’s wrist, pulled her hand toward him, and studied the thumb. The skin around the area of infection was soft and rotten and pruned up, as if it had been soaking in water for a long time. “Why don’t you go and set in front of the TV. I’ll have Danny book an appointment with the doctor.”

He let go of her wrist and nodded toward the door, but she didn’t move.

“Will you look and see if he’s in the hall?” she asked.

He stared for a moment, then nodded and went to the door. He opened it half a foot and peeked out. The sun had shifted or moved behind a cloud, and the hallway was in cool shadow. No one sat in the Shaker chair against the wall. No one stood in the corner with a razor on a chain.

“All clear.”

She touched his shoulder with her good hand. “I saw a ghost once. When I was a kid.”

He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t met a Goth girl yet who hadn’t had some kind of brush with the supernatural, who didn’t believe, with utter, embarrassing sincerity, in astral forms or angels or Wiccan spellcraft.

“I was living with Bammy. My grandmother. This was just after the first time my daddy threw me out. One afternoon I went in the kitchen to pour myself a glass of her lemonade—she makes real nice lemonade—and I looked out the back window, and there was this girl in the yard. She was picking dandelions and blowing on them to make them fly apart, you know, like kids do, and she was singing to herself while she was doing it. This girl a few years younger than myself, in a real cheap dress. I pushed up the window to yell out to her, find out what she was doing in our yard. When she heard the window squeak, she looked up at me, and that’s when I knew she was dead. She had these messed-up eyes.”

“How do you mean messed-up?” Jude asked. The skin on his forearms prickled and tightened, going rough with gooseflesh.

“They were black eyes. No, they weren’t even like eyes at all. It was more like…like they were covered over.”

“Covered over,” Jude repeated.

“Yes. Marked out. Black. Then she turned her head and seemed to look over at the fence. In another moment she hopped up and walked across the yard. She was moving her mouth, like she was talking to someone, only no one was there, and I couldn’t hear any words coming out of her. I could hear her when she was picking dandelions and singing to herself, but not
when she got up and seemed to be talking to someone. I always thought that was a strange thing—how I could only hear her when she sang. And then she reached up, like there was an invisible person standing in front of her, just on the other side of Bammy’s fence, and she was taking his hand.

“And I got scared all of a sudden, like got chills, because I felt something bad was going to happen to her. I wanted to tell her to let go of his hand. Whoever was taking her hand, I wanted her to get away from him. Only I was too scared. I couldn’t get my breath. And the little girl looked back at me one more time, kind of sad, with her marked-over eyes, and then she came up off the ground—I swear to God—and floated over the fence. Not like she was flying. Like she was being picked up by invisible hands. The way her feet dangled in the air. They bumped into the pickets. She went over, and then she was gone. I got the flop sweats and had to sit down on the kitchen floor.”

Georgia darted a look at Jude’s face, maybe to see if he thought she was being foolish. But he only nodded that she should go on.

“Bammy came in and cried out and said, ‘Girl, what’s the matter?’ But when I told her what I saw, that was when she got really upset and started crying. She sat down on the floor with me and said she believed me. She said I had seen her twin sister, Ruth.

“I knew about Ruth, who died when Bammy was little, but it wasn’t until then that Bammy told me what really happened to her. I always thought she got run over by a car or something, but it wasn’t like that. One day, when they were both about seven or eight—this was 1950-something—their mother called them in for lunch. Bammy went, but Ruthie stayed out, because she didn’t feel like eating and because she was just naturally disobedient. While Bammy and her folks were inside, someone snatched her out of the backyard. She wasn’t ever seen again. Except now and then, people at Bammy’s house spot her blowing on dandelions and singing to herself, and then someone who isn’t there takes her away. My mother saw Ruth’s ghost, and Bammy’s husband seen her once, and some of Bammy’s friends, and Bammy, too.

“Everyone who saw Ruth was just like me. They wanted to tell her not to go, to stay away from whoever was on the other side of the fence. But everyone who sees her is too scared by the sight of her to speak. And Bammy said she thought it wouldn’t ever be over until someone found their voice and spoke up. That it was like Ruth’s ghost was in a kind of dream, stuck repeating her last minutes, and she’ll be that way until someone calls out to her and wakes her up.”

Georgia swallowed, fell silent. She bowed her head, so her dark hair hid her eyes.

“I can’t believe the dead want to hurt us,” she said finally. “Don’t they need our help? Don’t they always need our help? If you see him again, you should try to talk to him. You should find out what he wants.”

Jude didn’t believe that it was a matter of if, only when. And he already knew what the dead man wanted.