Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

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.

Angus hurled himself against the dresser and put his front paws on the top of it, barking furiously at the face in the mirror. The force of his weight rocked the dresser onto its rear legs. The mirror could be rotated forward and back, and now it swung back, tilting to show its face to the ceiling. Angus dropped to all fours, and an instant later the dresser did the same, coming down onto its wooden legs with a ringing crash. The mirror swung forward, pivoting to show Georgia her own reflection once more. It was only her reflection. The blood—and the black blindfold—were gone.

31

In the late-afternoon cool of the room,Jude and Georgia stretched out together on the twin bed. It was too small for the both of them, and Georgia had to turn on her side and throw a leg over him to fit beside him. Her face nestled into his neck, the tip of her nose cold against his skin.

He was numb. Jude knew he needed to think about what had just happened to them, but he could not seem to turn his thoughts back to what he’d seen in the mirror, back to what Anna had been trying to tell them. His mind wouldn’t go there. His mind wanted away from death for a few moments. He felt crowded by death, felt the promise of death all around, felt death on his chest, each death a stone heaped on top of him, driving the air out of him: Anna’s death, Danny’s, Dizzy’s, Jerome’s, the possibility of his own death and Georgia’s waiting just down the road from them. He could not move for the weight of all those deaths pressing down on him.

Jude had an idea that as long as he was very still and said nothing, he and Georgia could stay in this quiet moment together indefinitely, with the shades flapping and the dim light wavering around them. Whatever bad thing that was waiting for them next would never arrive. As long as he remained in the little bed, with Georgia’s cool thigh over him and her body clasped to his side, the unimaginable future wouldn’t come for them.

It came anyway. Bammy thumped softly on the door, and when she spoke, her voice was hushed and uncertain.

“You all right in there?”

Georgia pushed herself up on one elbow. She swiped the back of a hand across her eyes. Jude had not known until now that she’d been crying. She blinked and smiled crookedly, and it was real, not a smile for show, although for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what she had to smile about.

Her face had been scrubbed clean by her tears, and that smile was heartbreaking in its easy, girlish sincerity. It seemed to say, Oh, well. Sometimes you get a bad deal . He understood then that she believed what they’d both seen in the mirror was a kind of vision, something that was going to happen, that maybe they could not avert. Jude quailed at the idea. No. No, better Craddock should get him and be done with it than Georgia should die gasping in her own blood, and why would Anna show them that, what could she want?

“Honey?” Bammy asked.

“We’re fine,” Georgia called back.

Silence.

Then: “You aren’t fightin’ in there, are you? I heard bangin’ around.”

“No,” Georgia said, sounding affronted by the very suggestion. “Swear to God, Bammy. Sorry about the racket.”

“Well,” Bammy said. “Do you need anything?”

“Fresh sheets,” Georgia said.

Another silence. Jude felt Georgia trembling against his chest, a sweet shivering. She bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing. Then he was fighting it, too, was overcome with a sudden, convulsive hilarity. He jammed a hand into his mouth, while his insides hitched with trapped, strangled laughter.

“Jesus,” said Bammy, who sounded like she wanted to spit. “Jesus Christ.” Her tread moving away from the door as she said it.

Georgia fell against Jude, her cool, damp face pressed hard to his neck. He put his arms around her, and they clutched each other while they gasped with laughter.

32

After dinner Jude said he had some phone callsto make and left Georgia and Bammy in Bammy’s living room. He didn’t really have anyone to call but knew that Georgia wanted some time with her grandmother and that they would be more themselves without him there.

But once he was in the kitchen, a fresh glass of lemonade before him and nothing to occupy himself with, he found the phone in his hand anyway. He dialed the office line to pick up his messages. It felt queer, to be busy with something so entirely grounded in the ordinary after all that had happened in the day, from their run-in with Craddock at Denny’s to the encounter with Anna in Georgia’s bedroom. Jude felt disconnected from who he’d been before he first saw the dead man. His career, his living, both the business and the art that had preoccupied him for more than thirty years, seemed matters of no particular importance. He dialed the phone, watching his hand as if it belonged to someone else, feeling he was a passive spectator to the actions of a man in a play, an actor performing the part of himself.

He had five messages waiting for him. The first was from Herb Gross, his accountant and business manager. Herb’s voice, which was usually oily and self-satisfied, was, in the recording, grainy with emotion. “I just heard from Nan Shreve that Danny Wooten was found dead in his apartment this morning. Apparently he hanged himself. We’re all dismayed here, as I’m sure you can imagine. Will you call me when you get this message? I don’t know where you are. No one does. Thank you.”

There was a message from an Officer Beam, who said that the Piecliff police were trying to reach Jude about an important matter, and would he call back. There was a message from Nan Shreve, his lawyer, who said she was handling everything, that the police wanted to collect a statement from him about Danny, and he should call as soon as he could.

The next message was from Jerome Presley, who had died four years ago, after he drove his Porsche into a weeping willow at just under a hundred miles an hour. “Hey, Jude, I guess we’re getting the band back together soon, huh? John Bonham on drums. Joey Ramone on backup vocals.” He laughed, then went on in his familiar, weary drawl. Jerome’s croak of a voice had always reminded Jude of the comic Steven Wright. “I hear you’re driving a souped-up Mustang now. That’s one thing we always had, Jude—we could talk cars. Suspensions, engines, spoilers, sound systems, Mustangs, Thunderbirds, Chargers, Porsches. You know what I was thinking about, night I drove my Porsche off the road? I was thinking about all the shit I never said to you. All the shit we didn’t talk about. Like how you got me hooked on your coke, and then you went and got straight and had the balls to tell me if I didn’t do the same, you’d throw me out of the band. Like how you gave Christine money to set herself up with her own place after she left me, when she ran off with the kids without a word. How you gave her money for a lawyer. There’s loyalty for you. Or how you wouldn’t make a simple fucking loan when I was losing everything—the house, the cars. And here I let you sleep on the bed in my basement when you were fresh off the bus from Louisiana and you didn’t have thirty dollars in your pocket.” Jerome laughed again—his harsh, corrosive, smoker’s laugh. “Well, we’ll get a chance to finally talk about all that stuff soon. I guess I’ll be seeing you any day. I hear you’re on the nightroad now. I know where that road goes. Straight into a fucking tree. They picked me out of the branches, you know. Except for the parts I left on the windshield. I miss you, Jude. I’m looking forward to putting my arms around you. We’re going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.”