Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“No. I can’t…I can’t come back, Jude. I was just calling to say I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I said anything about the ghost for sale. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

“Go to bed.”

“I can’t.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I’m out walking in the dark. I don’t even know where I am.”

Jude felt the back of his arms prickling with goose bumps. The thought of Danny out on the streets somewhere, shuffling around in the dark, disturbed him more than it should’ve, more than made sense.

“How’d you get there?”

“I just went walking. I don’t even know why.”

“Jesus, you’re drunk. Take a look around for a street sign and call a fuckin’ cab,” Jude said, and hung up.

He was glad to let go of the phone. He hadn’t liked Danny’s tone of spaced-out, unhappy confusion.

It wasn’t that Danny had said anything so incredible or unlikely. It was just that they’d never had a conversation like it before. Danny had never called in the night, and he’d never called drunk. It was difficult to imagine him going for a walk at 3:00 A.M., or walking so far from his home as to get lost. And whatever his other flaws, Danny was a problem solver. That was why Jude had kept him on the payroll for eight years. Even shitfaced, Danny probably wouldn’t call Jude first if he didn’t know where he was. He’d walk to a 7-Eleven and get directions. He’d flag down a cop car.

No. It was all wrong. The phone call and the dead man’s truck in the driveway were two parts of the same thing. Jude knew. His nerves told him so. The empty bed told him so.

He glanced again at the curtain, lit from behind by those floods. The dogs were going crazy out there.

Georgia. What mattered now was finding Georgia. Then they could figure out about that truck. Together they could get a handle on the situation.

Jude looked at the door to the hallway. He flexed his fingers, his hands numb from the cold. He didn’t want to go out there, didn’t want to open the door and see Craddock sitting in that chair with his hat on his knee and that razor on a chain dangling from one hand.

But the thought of seeing the dead man again—of facing whatever was next—held him for only a moment more. Then he came unstuck, went to the door, and opened it.

“Let’s do it,” he said to the hallway before he had even seen if anyone was there.

No one was.

Jude paused, listening past his own just slightly haggard breathing to the quiet of the house. The long hall was draped in shadows, the Shaker chair against the wall empty. No. Not empty. A black fedora rested in the seat.

Noises—muffled and distant—caught his attention: the murmur of voices on a television, the distant crash of surf. He pulled his gaze away from the fedora and looked to the end of the hallway. Blue light flickered and raced at the edges of the door to the studio. Georgia was in there, then, watching TV after all.

Jude hesitated at the door, listening. He heard a voice shouting in Spanish, a TV voice. The sound of surf was louder. Jude meant to call her name then, Marybeth—not Georgia, Marybeth—but something bad happened when he tried: His breath gave out on him. He was able to produce only a wheeze in the faint sound of her name.

He opened the door.

Georgia was across the room in the recliner, in front of his flat-screen TV. From where he stood, he couldn’t see anything of her but the back of her head, the fluffy swirl of her black hair surrounded by a nimbus of unnatural blue light. Her head also largely blocked the view of whatever was on the TV, although he could see palm trees and tropical blue sky. It was dark, the lights in the room switched off.

She didn’t respond when he said, “Georgia,” and his next thought was that she was dead. When he got to her, her eyes would be rolled up in their sockets.

He started toward her, but had only gone a couple of steps when the phone rang on the desk.

Jude could view enough of the TV now to see a chubby Mex in sunglasses and a beige jogging suit, standing at the side of a dirt track in jungly hill country somewhere. Jude knew what she was watching then, although he hadn’t looked at it in several years. It was the snuff film.

At the sound of the phone, Georgia’s head seemed to move just slightly, and he thought he heard her exhale, a strained, effortful breath. Not dead, then. But she didn’t otherwise react, didn’t look around, didn’t get up to answer.

He took a step to the desk, caught the phone on the second ring.

“That you, Danny? Are you still lost?” Jude asked.

“Yeah,” Danny said with a weak laugh. “Still lost. I’m on this pay phone in the middle of nowhere. It’s funny, you almost never see pay phones anymore.”

Georgia did not glance around at the sound of Jude’s voice, did not shift her gaze from the TV.

“I hope you aren’t calling because you want me to come looking for you,” Jude said. “I’ve got my hands full at the moment. If I have to come looking for you, you better hope you stay lost.”

“I figured it out, Chief. How I got here. Out on this road in the dark.”

“How’s that?”

“I killed myself. I hung myself a few hours ago. This road in the dark…this is dead.”

Jude’s scalp crawled, a trickling, icy sensation, almost painful.

Danny said, “My mother hung herself just the same way. She did a better job, though. She broke her neck. Died instantly. I lost my nerve at the last second. I didn’t fall hard enough. I strangled to death.”

From the television across the room came gagging sounds, as if someone were strangling to death.

“It took a long time, Jude,” Danny went on. “I remember swinging for a long time. Looking at my feet. I’m remembering lots of things now.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“He made me. The dead man. He came to see me. I was going to come back to the office and find those letters for you. I was thinking I could at least do that much. I was thinking I shouldn’t have bailed out on you like I did. But when I went in my bedroom to get my coat, he was waiting there. I didn’t even know how to knot a noose until he showed me,” Danny said. “That’s how he’s going to get you. He’s going to make you kill yourself.”

“No he’s not.”

“It’s hard not to listen to his voice. I couldn’t fight it. He knew too much. He knew I gave my sister the heroin she OD’d on. He said that was why my mother killed herself, because she couldn’t live knowing what I had done. He said I should’ve been the one to hang, not my mom. He said if I had any decency, I would’ve killed myself a long time ago. He was right.”

“No, Danny,” Jude said. “No. He wasn’t right. You shouldn’t—”

Danny sounded short of breath. “I did. I had to. There was no arguing with him. You can’t argue with a voice like that.”

“We’ll see,” Jude said.

Danny had no reply for that. In the snuff film, two men were bickering in Spanish. The choking sounds went on and on. Georgia still did not look away. She was moving just slightly, shoulders hitching now and then in a series of random, almost spastic shrugs.

“I have to go, Danny.” Still Danny said nothing. Jude listened to the faint crackle on the line for a moment, sensing that Danny was waiting for something, some final word, and at last he added, “You keep walking, boy. That road must go somewhere.”

Danny laughed. “You aren’t as bad as you think, Jude. You know that?”

“Yeah. Don’t tell.”

“Your secret is safe,” Danny said. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Danny.”

Jude leaned forward, gently set the phone back in its cradle. As he was bent across the desk, he glanced down and behind it and saw that the floor safe was open. His initial thought was the ghost had opened it, an idea he discarded almost immediately. Georgia, more likely. She knew the combination.