Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

Now, though, he was in the mood to score. He lugged her laptop back to the room, plugged in, and went online. He didn’t make any attempt to access his e-mail account. In truth, he wasn’t sure how to access his e-mail. Danny had a program all set up to reel in Jude’s messages from the Net, but Jude couldn’t have said how to get at that information from someone else’s computer. He knew how to Google a name, however, and he Googled Anna’s.

Her obituary was short, half the length her father’s had been. Jude was able to read it in a glance, which was all it merited. It was her photograph that caught his attention and gave him a brief hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach. He guessed it had been taken close to the end of her life. She was glancing blankly into the camera, some strands of pale hair blown across a face that was gaunt, her cheeks sunken hollows beneath her cheekbones.

When he had known her, she’d sported rings in her eyebrows and four apiece in each of her ears, but in the photo they were gone, which made her too-pale face that much more vulnerable. When he looked closely, he could see the marks left by her piercings. She’d given them up, the silver hoops and crosses and ankhs and glittering gems, the studs and fishhooks and rings she had stuck into her skin to make herself look dirty and tough and dangerous and crazy and beautiful. Some of it was true, too. She really had been crazy and beautiful; dangerous, too. Dangerous to herself.

The obituary said nothing about a suicide note. It said nothing about suicide. She had died not three months before her stepfather.

He ran another search. He tapped in “Craddock McDermott, dowsing,” and half a dozen links popped up. He clicked on the topmost result, which brought him to a nine-year-old article in the Tampa Tribune , from their living/arts section. Jude looked at the pictures first—there were two—and stiffened in his chair. It was a while before he could unlock his gaze from those photographs and shift his attention to the text beside them.

The story was titled “Dowsing for the Dead.” The slug line read: 20 years after Vietnam, Capt. Craddock McDermott is ready to lay some ghosts to rest…and raise some others.

The article opened with the story of Roy Hayes, a retired biology professor, who at the age of sixty-nine had learned to fly light planes and who had, one fall morning in 1991, taken an ultralight up over the Everglades to count egrets for an environmental group. At 7:13 A.M. a private strip south of Naples had received a transmission from him.

“I think I’m having a stroke,” Hayes said. “I’m dizzy. I can’t tell how low I am. I need help.”

That was the last anyone had heard from him. A search party, involving more than thirty boats and a hundred men, had not been able to find a trace of either Hayes or his plane. Now, three years after his disappearance and presumed death, his family had taken the extraordinary step of hiring Craddock McDermott, Captain U.S. Army (ret.), to lead a new search for his remains.

“He didn’t go down in the ’Glades,” McDermott states with a confident grin. “The search parties were always looking in the wrong place. The winds that morning carried his plane farther north, over Big Cypress. I put his position less than a mile south of I-75.”McDermott believes he can pinpoint the site of the crash to an area the size of a square half mile. But he didn’t work out his estimate by consulting meteorological data from the morning of the disappearance, or by examining Dr. Hayes’s final radio transmissions, or by reading eyewitness reports. Instead he dangled a silver pendulum above an outsize map of the region. When the pendulum began to swing rapidly back and forth, over a spot in south Big Cypress, McDermott announced he had found the impact zone.And when he takes a private search team into the Big Cypress swamp later this week, to look for the downed ultralight, he will not be bringing with him sonar, metal detectors, or hound dogs. His plan for locating the vanished professor is much more simple—and unnerving. He means to appeal to Roy Hayes directly—to call upon the deceased doctor himself to lead the party to his final resting place.

The article shifted to backstory, exploring Craddock’s earliest encounters with the occult. A few lines were spent detailing the more gothic details of his early family life. It touched briefly on his father, the Pentecostal minister with a penchant for snake handling, who had disappeared when Craddock was just a boy. It lingered for a paragraph on his mother, who had twice moved them across the country, after seeing a phantom she called “the walking-backwards man,” a vision that foretold of ill luck. After one such visit from the walking-backwards man, little Craddock and his mother departed an Atlanta apartment complex, not three weeks before the building burned to the ground in an electrical fire.

Then it was 1967, and McDermott was an officer stationed in Vietnam, where he was placed in charge of interrogating the captured elite of the People’s Liberation Army. He found himself assigned to the case of one Nguyen Trung, a chiromancer, who had reportedly learned his fortune-telling arts from Ho Chi Minh’s own brother and who had offered his services to a variety of higher-ups among the Vietcong. To put his prisoner at ease, McDermott asked Trung to help him understand his spiritual beliefs. What followed was a series of extraordinary conversations on the subjects of prophecy, the human soul, and the dead, discussions McDermott said had opened his eyes to the supernatural all around him.

“In Vietnam the ghosts are busy,” McDermott avers. “Nguyen Trung taught me to see them. Once you know how to look for them, you can spot them on every street corner, their eyes marked out and their feet not touching the ground. The living are often known to employ the dead over there. A spirit that believes it has work to do won’t leave our world. It’ll stay until the job is done.“That was when I first began to believe we were going to lose the war. I saw it happen on the battlefield. When our boys died, their souls would come out of their mouths, like steam from a teakettle, and run for the sky. When the Vietcong died, their spirits remained. Their dead went right on fighting.”

After their sessions had concluded, McDermott lost track of Trung, who disappeared around the time of Tet. As for Professor Hayes, McDermott believed that his final fate would be known soon enough.

“We’ll find him,” McDermott said. “His spirit is unemployed at the moment, but I’ll give him some work. We’re going to ride together—Hayes and I. He’s going to lead me right to his body.”

At this last— We’re going to ride together —Jude felt a chill crawling on the flesh of his arms. But that was not as bad as the peculiar feeling of dread that came over him when he looked at the photographs.

The first was a picture of Craddock leaning against the grill of his smoke-blue pickup. His barefoot stepdaughters—Anna was maybe twelve, Jessica about fifteen—sat on the hood, one to either side of him. It was the first time Jude had ever seen Anna’s older sister, but not the first time he’d ever looked upon Anna as a child—she was just the same as she’d been in his dream, only without the scarf over her eyes.