down.”
“We haven’t calmed down. I can’t imagine someone being calm in these circumstances.”
“Well, since things got less goddamn crazy, then.”
“It doesn’t make sense, is all. How’d he get out of the house? Through the window? What the hell was he doing there? I won’t ask Jake to talk about it, but how did he… How did he do what he did to Ernie so fast?”
“Jake won’t know,” said Hammond. “He wasn’t there.”
“You saw?”
“No. Stands to reason if Jake had been there to see he’d be cut up just as much as his brother.”
She shook her head, eyes wide. “And the storm…”
“I don’t want to hear any more ghost story talk,” said Connelly. “He’s a man. I know more than anyone. I saw him scared not more than a day or two ago when I almost caught him and pulled the guts out of him. Ghosts aren’t scared.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said, and patted his arm. Connelly looked at it. She took it away but did not seem to have noticed that he had looked.
Hammond coughed and said, “I don’t know. I heard the craziest shit about him. One old woman told me he could make the night sing.”
“Sing?”
“Yeah. I asked her what it sang about, and if it was a waltz or a march or anything you could dance to, and she got mad as hell. Thought I was making fun of her. Which I was. Then she said he could make all kinds of things sing, if he wanted. He could take a bone and write on it and make it sing. Make it sing you nightmares which would make you sicker than a dog. Said it tainted the land, sort of like poisoning it.”
“Did you believe it?” asked Lottie.
Hammond snorted and laughed. “Hell no. Old lady was drunker than a boiled owl and had the French disease something fierce.”
“Oh.”
“Say, why are you after him?” asked Hammond. “You never told us.”
“I didn’t want to,” Lottie said.
“We told you why we were.”
“I never asked you to. I never heard Connelly tell his, either.”
“That’s right,” said Hammond, looking at him. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, either.”
“I’m doing this,” Connelly said. “All you need to know.”
“You two are terrible conversationalists,” said Hammond. “Here, let’s try again. Where are you from, Lottie?”
“Galveston. In Texas.”
“Huh. What’s that like?”
“Big. And pissed. Port cities usually are. Especially Texan port cities.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. Jews are a rarity in Texas.”
“Christ,” said Hammond. “How come everyone has to know I’m a Jew?”
“Because they’re a rarity.”
“Thanks,” said Hammond sarcastically. He stood and grabbed a blanket off the floor. “I’m going to get some damn sleep. I’m in favor of pulling the mattresses off the windows. They’re not doing any good.”
“Suit yourself,” said Lottie. “Make sure to put a blanket over your head as you sleep. I bet you could suffocate in this.”
Hammond sighed, nodded, and walked into the living room.
“How’s Jake?” Connelly asked her.
“Bad.”
“I never heard anyone scream like that. I hope I never do again.”
“How old are you, Connelly?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how old you are?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I never kept track.”
“How can you not keep track of something like that?”
“It never occurred to me to try.”
“Hammond’s just a boy.”
“He is.”
“And Pike’s an old man.”
“Yeah. He don’t act like one, though.”
“I wonder now,” said Lottie. “There’s got to be more than us. If there’s us there’s got to be more. How many? Dozens? Hundreds? How long has he been doing this?”
Connelly was silent for a while. Then he said, “It was your child, wasn’t it?”
Lottie flinched. She blinked, made as though to move away, then stopped. “Yes,” she said.
“I can tell.”
“How?”
“Don’t know. Just do. These folks, they lost a lot. They each lost their own. But parents grieve for their children in a special way. It’s a special kind of hurt. I don’t know if it has a name but you can see it in a face. It’s in yours. Suppose it’s in mine too.”
Lottie did not say anything. The wind clawed at the windows. She said, “It was my boy.”
Connelly sat and waited.
“I wasn’t a very good momma, I think,” she said softly. “He ran away when he was fourteen. I can’t blame him. I didn’t miss him at first but then I did. That was years ago.” She shut her eyes, breathed out. “Then I hear from a guy that heard from a guy that heard from a guy that he ran into trouble in Kentucky and he’s not alive anymore. Killed. Some damn fight. Some damn thing. A scarred fella who just had it in for him, they said. It’s a bad thing to lose a child but it’s worse if you never got to know them and you don’t even know where they’re buried or how. Hell, I’ve… I’ve never even been to Kentucky. I don’t know where he’s lying now or if there’s any peace in it. It isn’t right that a man can take that away from you, can do that to you. It isn’t right.”
“No,” said Connelly. “It isn’t. But it happened.”
“I heard something from a man south of here, down in Killeen. He said that when a woman’s heavy with child and she feels the first hurts from labor she’s got to take her first baby tooth and put it in a pot of dirt and put it on her windowsill. That way Mr. Shivers will pass that house over and leave that baby be.”
“I heard something similar,” said Connelly. “Coroners have to leave the teeth of men they find dead in alleys or ditches on their doorsteps or windowsills. As a signal. For him. People that die in the between places, in roads and switchyards. Those belong to Mr. Shivers.”
“You believe it?”
“No.” Then he considered it. “Though by now I’m willing to believe a lot of crazy shit I wouldn’t have thought twice about before.”
They sat together, not saying anything.
“Sometimes I wonder,” said Connelly. “I wonder what he sees when he opens his eyes in the morning. If he’s looking at the same place I’m looking at. Or if he sees something else.”
“He’s not a ghost,” Lottie said. “You said so yourself.”
“I did. I still believe it. When I first saw him, he was scared. Did I tell you that?”
“No.”
“He was. When he… When he first saw my daughter. He was scared. I was with her. Just walking her to school as any father would, but she was at that age where, you know, she wanted to show she was on her own, so I let her walk ahead of me. And as she did I saw him on the other side of the street. Pale fella who looked at the
