Heart-Shaped Box

dirt will fall in on top of us lalala the dead pull the living down if anyone tries to help you i us we will pull them down and step on them and no one climbs out because the hole is too deep and the dirt falls too fast and everyone who hears your voice will know it is true jude is dead and i am dead and you will die you will hear my our voice and we will ride together on the night road to the place the final place where the wind cries for you for us we will walk to the edge of the hole we will fall in holding each other we will fall sing for us sing at our at your grave sing lalala

Jude’s chest was an airless place, stuck full of icy-hot pins and needles. Psychological operations, he thought almost randomly, and then he was angry, the worst kind of angry, the kind that had to stay bottled up, because there was no one around to curse at, and he wouldn’t allow himself to break anything. He had already spent a chunk of the morning throwing books, and it hadn’t made him feel better. Now, though, he meant to keep himself under control.

He clicked back to the browser, thinking he might have another glance at his search results, see what else he could learn. He looked blankly at the Pensacola News obituary one more time, and then his gaze fixed on the photograph. It was a different picture now, and in it Craddock was grinning and old, face lined and gaunt, almost starved, and his eyes were scribbled over with furious black marks. The first lines of the obituary said that a life of learning and teaching, exploring and adventuring, had ended when Craddock James McDermott died of a cerebral embolism at his stepdaughter’s home and now he was coming lalala and it was cold he was cold Jude would be cold too when he cut himself he was going to cut himself and cut the girl and they would be in the deathhole and Jude could sing for them, sing for all of them—

Jude stood up so quickly, and with such sudden force, that Danny’s chair was flung back and toppled over. Then his hands were on the computer, under the monitor, and he lifted, heaving it off the desk and onto the floor. It hit with a short, high-pitched chirp and a crunch of breaking glass, followed by a sudden pop of surging electricity. Then quiet. The fan that cooled the motherboard hushed slowly to a stop. He had hurled it instinctively, moving too quickly to think. Fuck it. Self-control was overrated.

His pulse was jacked. He felt shaky and weak in the legs. Where the fuck was Danny? He looked at the wall clock, saw it was almost two, too late in the day for lunch. Maybe he’d gone out on an errand. Usually, though, he paged Jude on the intercom to let him know he was headed out.

Jude came around the desk and finally made it to the window with the view of the drive. Danny’s little green Honda hybrid was parked in the dirt turnaround, and Danny was in it. Danny sat perfectly still in the driver’s seat, one hand on the steering wheel, his face ashy, rigid, blank.

The sight of him, just sitting there, going nowhere, looking at nothing, had the effect of cooling Jude off. He watched Danny through the window, but Danny didn’t do anything. Never put the car in drive to leave. Never so much as glanced around. Danny looked—Jude felt an uneasy throb in his joints at the thought—like a man in a trance. A full minute passed, and then another, and the longer he watched, the more ill at ease Jude felt, the more sick in his bones. Then his hand was on the door and he was letting himself out, to find out what was wrong with Danny.

13

The air was a cold shock that made his eyes water. By the time he got to the side of the car, Jude’s cheeks were burning, and the tip of his nose was numb. Although it was going on early afternoon, Jude was still in his worn robe, a muscle shirt, and striped boxers. When the breeze rose, the freezing air burned his bare skin, raw and lacerating.

Danny didn’t turn to look at him but went on peering blankly through the windshield. He looked even worse close up. He was shivering, lightly and steadily. A drop of sweat trickled across his cheekbone.

Jude rapped his knuckles on the window. Danny started, as if springing awake from a light doze, blinked rapidly, fumbled for the button to roll down the glass. He still didn’t look directly up at Jude.

“What are you doing in your car, Danny?” Jude asked.

“I think I should go home.”

“Did you see him?”

Danny said, “I think I should go home now.”

“Did you see the dead man? What did he do?” Jude was patient. When he had to be, Jude could be the most patient man on earth.

“I think I have a stomach flu. That’s all.”

Danny lifted his right hand from his lap to wipe his face, and Jude saw it was clutching a letter opener.

“Don’t you lie, Danny,” Jude said. “I just want to know what you saw.”

“His eyes were black marks. He looked right at me. I wish he didn’t look right at me.”

“He can’t hurt you, Danny.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know.”

Jude reached through the open window to squeeze his shoulder. Danny shrank from his touch. At the same time, he made a whisking gesture at Jude with the letter opener. It didn’t come anywhere close to cutting him, but Jude withdrew his hand anyway.

“Danny?”

“Your eyes are just like his,” Danny said, and clunked the car into reverse.

Jude jumped back from the car before Danny could back out over his foot. But Danny hesitated, his own foot on the brake.

“I’m not coming back,” he said to the steering wheel.

“Okay.”

“I’d help you if I could, but I can’t. I just can’t.”

“I understand.”

Danny eased the car back down the driveway, tires grinding on the gravel, then turned it ninety degrees and rolled down the hill, toward the road. He watched until Danny passed through the gates, turned left, and disappeared from sight. Jude never saw him again.

14

He set out for the barn and the dogs.

Jude was grateful for the sting of the air on his face and the way each inhalation sent a stunned tingle through his lungs. It was real. Ever since he had seen the dead man that morning, he felt increasingly crowded by unnatural, bad-dream ideas leaking into everyday life where they didn’t belong. He needed a few hard actualities to hold on to, clamps to stop the bleeding.

The dogs watched him mournfully as he undid the latch to their pen. He slipped in before they could clamber out past him, and hunkered down, let them climb on him, smell his face. The dogs: They were real, too. He stared back at them, into their chocolate eyes and long, worried faces.

“If there was something wrong with me, you’d see it, wouldn’t you?” he asked them. “If there were black marks over my eyes?”

Angus lapped his face, once, twice, and Jude kissed his wet nose. He stroked Bon’s back, while she sniffed anxiously at his crotch.

He let himself out. He wasn’t ready to go back inside and found his way into the barn instead. He wandered over to the car and had a look at himself in the mirror on the driver’s-side door. No black marks. His eyes were the same as always: pale gray under bushy black brows and intense, like he meant murder.

Jude had bought the car in sorry shape from a roadie, a ’65 Mustang, the GT fastback. He’d been on tour, almost without rest, for ten months, had gone out on the road almost as soon as his wife left him, and when he came back, he found himself with an empty house and nothing to do. He spent all of July and most of August in the barn, gutting the Mustang, pulling out parts that were rusted, burnt out, shot, dented, corroded, caked in oils and acids, and replacing them: HiPo block, authentic cranks and heads, transmission, clutch, springs, white pony seats —everything original except for the speakers and the stereo. He installed a bazooka bass in the trunk, affixed an XM radio antenna to the roof, and laid in a state-of-the-art digital sound system. He drenched himself in oil, banged