Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

He heard one floorboard creak in the hall, then another, then a sigh, as of someone settling. His blood quickened. He opened the door.

But the hallway was empty. Jude plashed through long rectangles of icy light, cast by the skylights. He stopped at each closed door, listened, then glanced within. A blanket tossed across a chair looked, for a moment, like a deformed dwarf glaring at him. In another room he found a tall, gaunt figure standing behind the door, and his heart reared in his chest, and he almost swung the guitar, then realized it was a coatrack, and all the breath came rushing unsteadily out of him.

In his studio, at the end of the hall, he considered collecting the gun, then didn’t. He didn’t want it on him—not because he was afraid to use it but because he wasn’t afraid enough. He was so keyed up he might react to a sudden movement in the dark by pulling the trigger and wind up blowing a hole in Danny Wooten or the housekeeper, although why they would be creeping about the house at this hour he couldn’t imagine. He returned to the corridor and went downstairs.

He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should’ve reassured him but didn’t. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.

He couldn’t relax, but at the bottom of the stairs he pretended to, a charade he carried on for himself alone. He leaned the guitar against the wall and exhaled noisily.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he said. By then he was so ill at ease the sound of his own voice unnerved him, sent a cool, prickling rush up his forearms. He had never been one to talk to himself.

He climbed the stairs and started back down the hall to the bedroom. His gaze drifted to an old man, sitting in an antique Shaker chair against the wall. As soon as Jude saw him, his pulse lunged in alarm, and he looked away, fixed his gaze on his bedroom door, so he could only see the old man from the edge of his vision. In the moments that followed, Jude felt it was a matter of life and death not to make eye contact with the old man, to give no sign that he saw him. He did not see him, Jude told himself. There was no one there.

The old man’s head was bowed. His hat was off, resting on his knee. His hair was a close bristle, with the brilliance of new frost. The buttons down the front of his coat flashed in the gloom, chromed by moonlight. Jude recognized the suit in a glance. He had last seen it folded in the black, heart-shaped box that had gone into the rear of his closet. The old man’s eyes were closed.

Jude’s heart pounded, and it was a struggle to breathe, and he continued on toward the bedroom door, which was at the very end of the hallway. As he went past the Shaker chair, against the wall to his left, his leg brushed the old man’s knee, and the ghost lifted his head. But by then Jude was beyond him, almost to the door. He was careful not to run. It didn’t matter to him if the old man stared at his back, as long as they didn’t make eye contact with each other, and besides, there was no old man.

He let himself into the bedroom and clicked the door shut behind him. He went straight to his bed and got into it and immediately began to shake. A part of him wanted to roll against Georgia and cling to her, let her body warm him and drive away the chills, but he stayed on his side of the bed so as not to wake her. He stared at the ceiling.

Georgia was restless and moaned unhappily in her sleep.

7

He didn’t expect to sleepbut dozed off at first light and then woke uncharacteristically late, after nine. Georgia was on her side, her small hand resting lightly on his chest and her breath soft on his shoulder. He slipped out of bed and away from her, let himself into the hall and walked downstairs.

The Dobro leaned against the wall where he had left it. The sight of it gave his heart a bad turn. He’d been trying to pretend he had not seen what he’d seen in the night. He had set himself a goal of not thinking about it. But there was the Dobro.

When Jude looked out the window, he spotted Danny’s car parked by the barn. He had nothing to say to Danny and no reason to bother him, but in another moment he was at the door of the office. He couldn’t help himself. The compulsion to be in the company of another human, someone awake and sensible and with a head full of everyday nonsense, was irresistible.

Danny was on the phone, craned back in his office chair, laughing about something. He was still in his suede jacket. Jude didn’t need to ask why. He himself had a robe over his shoulders and was hugging himself under it. The office was filled with a damp cold.

Danny saw Jude looking around the door and winked at him, another favorite ass-kissing Hollywood habit of his, although on this particular morning Jude didn’t mind it. Then Danny saw something on Jude’s face and frowned. He mouthed the words You okay? Jude didn’t answer. Jude didn’t know.

Danny got rid of whoever he was talking to, then rotated in his chair to turn a solicitous look upon him. “What’s going on, Chief? You look like fucking hell.”

Jude said, “The ghost came.”

“Oh, did it?” Danny asked, brightening. Then he hugged himself, mock-shivered. Tipped his head toward the phone. “That was the heating people. This place is a fucking tomb. They’ll have a guy out here to check on the boiler in a little while.”

“I want to call her.”

“Who?”

“The woman who sold us the ghost.”

Danny lowered one of his eyebrows and raised the other, making a face that said he had lost Jude somewhere. “What do you mean, the ghost came?”

“What we ordered. It came. I want to call her. I want to find some things out.”

Danny seemed to need a moment to process this. He swiveled partway back to his computer and got the phone, but his gaze remained fixed on Jude. He said, “You sure you’re all right?”

“No,” he said. “I’m going to see to the dogs. Find her number, will you?”

He went outside in his bathrobe and his underwear, to set Bon and Angus loose from their pens. The temperature was in the low fifties, and the air was white with a fine-grained mist. Still, it was more comfortable than the damp, clinging cold of the house. Angus licked at his hand, his tongue rough and hot and so real that for a moment Jude felt an almost painful throb of gratitude. He was glad to be among the dogs, with their stink of wet fur and their eagerness for play. They ran past him, chasing each other, then ran back, Angus snapping at Bon’s tail.

His own father had treated the family dogs better than he ever treated Jude, or Jude’s mother. In time it had rubbed off on Jude, and he’d learned to treat dogs better than himself as well. He had spent most of his childhood sharing his bed with dogs, sleeping with one on either side of him and sometimes a third at his feet, had been inseparable from his father’s unwashed, primitive, tick-infested pack. Nothing reminded him of who he was, and where he had come from, faster than the rank smell of dog, and by the time he reentered the house, he felt steadier, more himself.

As he stepped through the office door, Danny was saying into the phone, “Thanks so much. Can you hold a moment for Mr. Coyne?” He pressed a button, held out the receiver. “Name’s Jessica Price. Down in Florida.”

As Jude took the receiver, he realized that this was the first time he’d ever heard the woman’s full name. When he had put down his money on the ghost, he’d simply not been curious, although it seemed to him now that it was the kind of thing he should’ve made a point to know.