Black House

with her, trying one conversational gambit after another. None work. To make what is, under the circumstances, a fairly apt metaphor, she spits every lure. He sees that her empty eyes appear fixed on the creel sitting between them in the bottom of the boat. Blood is oozing through the wickerwork in fat red dribbles.

It’s nothing, just fishblood, he tries to assure her, but she makes no reply. In fact, Fred isn’t so sure himself. He’s thinking he ought to take a look inside the creel, just to be sure, when his pole gives a tremendous jerk—if not for quick reflexes, he would have lost it over the side. He’s hooked a big one!

Fred reels it in, the fish on the other end of the line fighting him for every foot. Then, when he finally gets it near the boat, he realizes he has no net. Hell with it, he thinks, go for broke. He whips the pole backward, just daring the line to snap, and the fish—biggest goddamned lake trout you’d ever hope to see—flies out of the water and through the air in a gleaming, fin-flipping arc. It lands in the bottom of the boat (beside the oozing creel, in fact) and begins thrashing. It also begins to make gruesome choking noises. Fred has never heard a fish make noises like that. He bends forward and is horrified to see that the trout has Tyler’s face. His son has somehow become a weretrout, and now he’s dying in the bottom of the boat. Strangling.

Fred grabs at it, wanting to remove the hook and throw it back while there’s still time, but the terrible choking thing keeps slipping through his fingers, leaving only a shiny slime of scales behind. It would be tough to get the hook out, in any case. The Ty-fish has swallowed it whole, and the barbed tip is actually protruding from one of the gills, just below the point where the human face melts away. Ty’s choking becomes louder, harsher, infinitely more horrible—

Fred sits up with a low cry, feeling as if he’s choking himself. For a moment he’s completely adrift as to place and time—lost in the slippage, we might say—and then he realizes he’s in his own bedroom, sitting up on his side of the bed he shares with Judy.

He notices that the light in here is much dimmer, because the sun has moved to the other side of the house. My God, he thinks, how long have I been asleep? How could I—

Oh, but here is another thing: that hideous choking sound has followed him out of his dream. It’s louder than ever. It will wake Judy, scare her—

Judy is no longer on the bed, though.

“Jude? Judy?”

She’s sitting in the corner. Her eyes are wide and blank, just as they were in his dream. A corsage of crumpled paper is protruding from her mouth. Her throat is grotesquely swelled, looks to Fred like a sausage that has been grilled until the casing is ready to pop.

More paper, he thinks. Christ, she’s choking on it.

Fred rolls himself across the bed, falls off, and lands on his knees like a gymnast doing a trick. He reaches for her. She makes no move to evade him. There’s that, at least. And although she’s choking, he still sees no expression in her eyes. They are dusty zeros.

Fred yanks the corsage of paper from her mouth. There’s another behind it. Fred reaches between her teeth, tweezes this second ball of paper between the first two fingers of his right hand (thinking Please don’t bite me, Judy, please don’t), and pulls it out, too. There’s a third ball of paper behind this one, way at the back of her mouth. He gets hold of this one as well, and extracts it. Although it’s crumpled, he can see the printed words GREAT IDEA, and knows what she’s swallowed: sheets of paper from the notepad Ty gave her for her birthday.

She’s still choking. Her skin is turning slate.

Fred grabs her by her upper arms and pulls her up. She comes easily, but when he relaxes his hold her knees bend and she starts to go back down. She’s turned into Raggedy Ann. The choking sound continues. Her sausage throat—

“Help me, Judy! Help me, you bitch!”

Unaware of what he is saying. He yanks her hard—as hard as he yanked the fishing pole in his dream—and spins her around like a ballerina when she comes up on her toes. Then he seizes her in a bear hug, his wrists brushing the undersides of her breasts, her bottom tight against his crotch, the kind of position he would find extremely sexy if his wife didn’t happen to be choking to death.

He pops his thumb up between her breasts like a hitchhiker, then says the magic word as he pulls sharply upward and backward. The magic word is Heimlich, and it works. Two more wads of paper fly from Judy’s mouth, propelled by a jet of vomit that is little more than bile—her intake of food over the last twelve hours amounts to three cups of coffee and a cranberry muffin.

She gives a gasp, coughs twice, then begins to breathe more or less normally.

He puts her on the bed . . . drops her on the bed. His lower back is spasming wildly, and it’s really no wonder; first Ty’s dresser, now this.

“Well, what did you think you were doing?” he asks her loudly. “What in the name of Christ did you think you were doing?”

He realizes that he has raised one hand over Judy’s upturned face as if to strike her. Part of him wants to strike her. He loves her, but at this moment he also hates her. He has imagined plenty of bad things over the years they’ve been married—Judy getting cancer, Judy paralyzed in an accident, Judy first taking a lover and then demanding a divorce—but he has never imagined Judy going chickenshit on him, and isn’t that what this amounts to?

“What did you think you were doing?”

She looks at him without fear . . . but without anything else, either. Her eyes are dead. Her husband lowers his hand, thinking: I’d cut it off before I hit you. I might be pissed at you, I am pissed at you, but I’d cut it off before I did that.

Judy rolls over, face-down on the coverlet, her hair spread around her head in a corona.

“Judy?”