Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

The misshapen door bulged, then receded into the floor. Swelled again. It seemed almost to be breathing. The line of light raced across the top of it, a beam of brightness so intense it couldn’t be looked at directly. It cornered and continued on down the other side of the door.

The wind keened, louder than ever, a high, piercing shriek. After a moment Jude realized it wasn’t the wind outside the house but a gale wailing around the edges of the door drawn in blood. It wasn’t blowing out but being sucked in, through those blinding white lines. Jude’s ears popped, and he thought of an airplane descending too rapidly. Papers ruffled, then lifted off the kitchen table and began to swirl above it, chasing one another. Delicate little wavelets raced across the wide pool of blood around Marybeth’s blank, staring face.

Marybeth’s left arm was stretched out, across the lake of blood, into the doorway. When Jude wasn’t looking, she had pulled herself over onto her side, reaching out with one arm. Her hand rested over the red circle he had drawn for a doorknob.

Somewhere a dog began to bark.

In the next instant, the door painted on the linoleum fell open. Marybeth should’ve dropped through it—half her body was stretched across it—but she didn’t. Instead she floated, as if sprawled on a sheet of polished glass. An uneven parallelogram filled the center of the floor, an open trap, flooded with an astonishing light, a blinding brilliance that rose all around her.

In the intensity of that light pouring from below, the room became a photographic negative, all stark whites and flat, impossible shadows. Marybeth was a black, featureless figure, suspended upon the sheet of light. Craddock, standing over her, arms flung up to protect his face, looked like one of the victims of the atom bomb at Hiroshima, an abstract life-size sketch of a man, drawn in ash on a black wall. Papers still whirled and spun above the kitchen table, only they had gone black and looked like a flock of crows.

Marybeth rolled over onto her side and lifted her head, only it wasn’t Marybeth anymore, it was Anna, and spokes of light filled her eyes, and her face was as stern as God’s own judgment.

Why? she asked.

Craddock hissed. Get away. Get back. He swung the gold chain of his pendulum in circles, the crescent blade whining in the air, tracing a ring of silver fire.

Then Anna was on her feet, at the base of the glowing door. Jude had not seen her rise. One moment she was prone, and in the next she was standing. Time had skipped, maybe. Time didn’t matter anymore. Jude held up a hand to shield his eyes from the worst of the glare, but the light was everywhere, and there was no blocking it out. He could see the bones in his hand, the skin over them the color and clarity of honey. His wounds, the slash in his face, the stump of his index finger, throbbed with a pain that was both profound and exhilarating, and he thought he might cry out, in fear, in joy, in shock, in all those things, in what was more than those things. In rapture.

Why? Anna said again as she approached Craddock. He whipped the chain at her, and the curved razor at the end drew a wide slash across her face, from the corner of her right eye, across her nose, and down to her mouth—but it only opened a fresh ray of brilliance, and where the light struck him, Craddock began to smoke. Anna reached for him. Why?

Craddock shrieked as she gathered him into her arms, shrieked and cut her again, across her breasts, and opened another seam in the eternal, and into his face poured the bountiful light, a light that burned away his features, that erased everything it touched. His wail was so loud Jude thought his eardrums would explode.

Why? Anna said, before she put her mouth on his, and from the door behind her leaped the black dogs, Jude’s dogs, giant dogs of smoke, of shadow, with fangs of ink.

Craddock McDermott struggled, trying to push her away, but she was falling backward with him, falling toward the door, and the dogs raced around his feet, and as they ran, they were stretched and pulled out of shape, unraveling like balls of yarn, becoming long scarves of darkness that wound around him, climbing his legs, lashing him about the waist, and binding the dead man to the dead girl. As he was pulled down, into the brightness of the other side, Jude saw the back of Craddock’s head come off, and a shaft of white light, so intense it was blue at the edges, slammed through and struck the ceiling, where it burnt the plaster, causing it to bubble and seethe.

They dropped through the open door and were gone.

45

The papers that had been swirlingabove the kitchen table settled with a faint rustle, collecting into a pile, in almost the exact same spot from which they’d risen. In the hush that followed, Jude became aware of a gentle humming sound, a deep, melodic pulse, which was not heard so much as felt in his bones. It rose and fell and rose again, a sort of inhuman music—inhuman, but not unpleasant. Jude had never heard any instrument produce sounds like it. It was more like the accidental music of tires droning on blacktop. That low, powerful music could be felt on the skin as well. The air throbbed with it. It seemed almost to be a property of the light, flooding in through the crooked rectangle on the floor. Jude blinked into the light and wondered where Marybeth had gone. The dead claim their own, he thought, and shivered.

No. She hadn’t been dead a moment ago when she opened the door. He did not accept that she could just be gone, no trace of her left on the earth. He crawled. He was the only thing moving in the room now. The stillness of the place, after what had just happened, seemed more jarring and incredible than a hole between worlds. He hurt, his hands hurt, his face hurt, and his chest tingled, a deadly icy-hot prickling, although he was fairly certain, if he was meant to have a heart attack this afternoon, it would’ve happened by now. Aside from the continuous humming that was all around him, there was no sound at all, except his sobs for breath, his hands scratching at the floor. Once he heard himself say Marybeth’s name.

The closer he came to the light, the harder it was to stare into it. He shut his eyes—and found himself still able to see the room before him, as if through a pale curtain of silver silk, the light penetrating his closed lids. The nerves behind his eyeballs throbbed in steady time with that ceaseless pulsing sound.

He couldn’t bear all the light, turned his head aside, kept crawling forward, and in that way Jude did not realize he had reached the edge of the open door until he put his hands down and there was nothing there to support him. Marybeth—or had it been Anna?—had hung suspended over the open door, as if on a sheet of glass, but Jude dropped like a condemned man through the hangman’s trap, did not even have time to cry out before plummeting into the light.

46

The sensation of falling — a weightless-sickfeeling in the pit of his stomach and the roots of his hair — has hardly passed before he realizes that the light is not so intense now. He lifts a hand to shade his eyes and blinks into it, dusty yellow sunshine. He makes it midafternoon and can tell somehow, from the angle of the sun, that he’s in the South. Jude is in the Mustang again, sitting in the passenger seat. Anna has the wheel, is humming to herself as she drives. The engine is a low, controlled roar — the Mustang has made itself well. It might’ve just rolled off the showroom floor in 1965 .

They travel a mile or so, neither of them speaking, before he finally identifies the road they’re on as State Highway 22 .