Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“Marybeth,” he said again. “It’s a dream. Shh . You’re all right. You’re all right now.”

The fog cleared from her eyes. Her body, which was clenched up and rigid, sagged, the tension going out of it. She gasped. He brushed back some hair that was stuck to the sweat on her cheek and was appalled at the heat coming off her.

“Thirsty,” she said.

He reached into the back, dug through a plastic bag of groceries they’d picked up at a gas station, found her a bottled water. Georgia unscrewed the top and drank a third of it in four big swallows.

“What if Anna’s sister can’t help us?” Georgia asked. “What if she can’t make him go away? Are we gonna kill her if she can’t make Craddock go away?”

“Why don’t you just rest? We’re going to be waiting awhile.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone, Jude. I don’t want to use my last hours on earth to murder anyone.”

“These aren’t your last hours on earth,” he said. He was careful not to include himself in that statement.

“I don’t want you to kill anyone either. I don’t want you to be that person. Besides, if we kill her, then we’ll have two ghosts hauntin’ us. I don’t think I can take any more ghosts after me.”

“You want some radio?”

“Promise me you won’t kill her, Jude. No matter what.”

He turned on the radio. Low on the FM dial, he found the Foo Fighters. David Grohl sang that he was hanging on, just hanging on. Jude turned the volume low, to the faintest of murmurs.

“Marybeth,” he began.

She shivered.

“You okay?”

“I like when you call me by my real name. Don’t call me Georgia anymore, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I wish you didn’t first see me takin’ my clothes off for drunks. I wish we didn’t meet in a strip club. I wish you could’ve known me before I started with that kind of thing. Before I got like I am. Before I did all the things I wish I could take back.”

“You know how people pay more money to buy furniture that’s been roughed up a little? What do they call it? Things that have been distressed? That’s because something that’s seen a little wear is just more interesting than something brand-new that hasn’t ever had a scuff on it.”

“That’s me,” she said. “Attractively distressed.” She was shivering again, steadily now.

“How you holding up?”

“Okay,” she said, voice trembling along with the rest of her.

They listened to the radio through the faint hiss of static. Jude felt himself settling, his head clearing, felt muscles he hadn’t known were knotted up beginning to loosen and relax. For the moment it didn’t matter what was ahead of them or what they would have to do come morning. It didn’t matter what was behind them either—the days of driving, the ghost of Craddock McDermott with his old truck and his scribbled-over eyes. Jude was somewhere in the South, in the Mustang, with the seat cranked back and Aerosmith on the radio.

Then Marybeth had to ruin it.

“If I die, Jude, and you’re still alive,” she said, “I’m gonna try to stop him. From the other side.”

“What are you talking about? You aren’t going to die.”

“I know. I’m just sayin’. If things don’t break our way, I’ll find Anna, and us girls will try and make him stop.”

“You aren’t going to die. I don’t care what the Ouija board said or what Anna showed you in the mirror either.” He had decided this very thing a few hours back down the road.

Marybeth frowned thoughtfully. “Once she started talking to us, it got cold in my room. I couldn’t stop shakin’. I couldn’t even feel my hand on the pointer. And then you’d ask Anna somethin’, and I’d just know how she was gonna answer. What she was tryin’ to say. I wasn’t hearin’ voices or anything. I just knew. It all made sense then, but it doesn’t now. I can’t remember what she wanted me to do or what she meant by bein’ a door. Except…I think she was saying that if Craddock can come back, so can she. With a little help. And somehow I can help. It’s just—and I got this loud and clear—I might have to die to do it.”

“You aren’t going to die. Not if I have any say in it.”

She smiled. It was a tired smile. “You don’t have any say in it.”

He didn’t know how to reply, not at first. It had crossed his mind already that there was one way he could assure her safety, but he wasn’t about to put it into words. It had occurred to him that if he died, Craddock would go away and Marybeth would live. That Craddock only wanted him, maybe only had a claim on this world as long as Jude was alive. After all, Jude had bought him, paid to own him and his dead man’s suit. Craddock had spent most of a week now trying to make Jude kill himself. Jude had been so busy resisting he hadn’t stopped to wonder if the price of surviving would be worse than giving the dead man what he wanted. That he was sure to lose, and that the longer he held out, the more likely he would drag Marybeth with him. Because the dead pull the living down.

Marybeth stared at him, her eyes a wet, lovely ink in the dark. He stroked the hair away from her forehead. She was very young and very beautiful, her brow damp with her fever sweat. The idea that her death should precede his was worse than intolerable, it was obscene.

He slid toward her, reached and took her hands in his. If her forehead was damp and too warm, her hands were damp and too cold. He turned them over in the gloom. What he saw was a nasty sort of shock. Both of her hands were pruned up, white and shriveled, not just the right one—although the right was more terrible, the entire pad of her thumb a glistening, rotted sore and the thumbnail itself gone, dropped off. On the surface of both palms, red lines of infection followed the delicate branches of her veins, down into her forearms, where they spread out, to etch diseased-looking crimson slashes across her wrists.

“What’s happening to you?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know. It was the story of Anna’s death, written on Marybeth’s skin.

“She’s a part of me somehow: Anna. I’m carryin’ her around inside me. I have been for a while, I think.” A statement that should’ve surprised but didn’t. He had sensed it, on some level, that Marybeth and Anna were coming together, merging somehow. He’d heard it in the way Marybeth’s accent had resurfaced, becoming so like Anna’s laconic, country-girl drawl. He had seen it in the way Marybeth played with her hair now, like Anna used to. Marybeth went on, “She wants me to help her back into our world, so she can stop him. I am the doorway—she told me that.”

“Marybeth,” he began, then couldn’t find anything else to say.

She closed her eyes and smiled. “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out. Actually. On second thought. Go ahead and wear it out. I like when you say it. The way you say all of it. Not just the Mary part.”

“Marybeth,” he said, and let go of her hands and kissed her just above the left eyebrow. “Marybeth.” He kissed her left cheekbone. She shivered—pleasantly this time. “Marybeth.” He kissed her mouth.

“That’s me. That’s who I am. That’s who I want to be. Mary. Beth. Like you’re gettin’ two girls for the price of one. Hey—maybe you really are gettin’ two girls now. If Anna’s inside of me.” She opened her eyes and found his gaze. “When you’re lovin’ me, maybe you’re lovin’ her, too. Isn’t that a good deal, Jude? Aren’t I one hell of a bargain? How can you resist?”

“Best deal I’ve ever had,” he said.

“Don’t you forget it,” she said, kissing him back.

He opened the door and told the dogs to get, and for a while Jude and Marybeth were alone in the Mustang, while the shepherds lay about on the cement floor of the garage.