He couldn’t find his voice for a minute, didn’t have the air yet. He stared at the black Mustang, shuddering on its suspension, the restrained idling force of the engine shaking the entire chassis.
Georgia continued, “I thought you were dead. When I grabbed your arm, I thought you were dead. Why are you out here with the car running and the barn door shut?”
“No reason.”
“Did I do something? Did I fuck it up?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” she said, beginning to cry. “There must be some reason you’re out here to kill yourself.”
He turned on his knees. He found he was still holding one of her thin wrists, and now he took the other. Her nest of black hair floated around her head, bangs in her eyes.
“Something’s wrong, but I wasn’t out here trying to kill myself. I sat in the car to listen to some music and think for a minute, but I didn’t turn the engine on. It turned itself on.”
She wrenched her wrist away. “Stop it.”
“It was the dead man.”
“Stop it. Stop it.”
“The ghost from the hall. I saw him again. He was in the car with me. Either he started the Mustang or I started it without knowing what I was doing, because he wanted me to.”
“Do you know how crazy that sounds? How crazy all of this sounds?”
“If I’m crazy, then Danny is, too. Danny saw him. That’s why he’s gone. Danny couldn’t hack it. He had to go.”
Georgia stared at him, her eyes lucid and bright and fearful behind the soft curl of her bangs. She shook her head in an automatic gesture of denial.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Help me stand.”
She hooked an arm under his armpits and pushed off the floor. His knees were weak springs, all loose bounce and no support. No sooner had he come to his heels than he started to roll forward. He put his hands out to stop his fall and caught himself on the warming hood of the car.
He said, “Shut it off. Get the keys.”
Georgia picked his duster off the ground—it had spilled out of the Mustang with him—and threw it back in the driver’s seat. She coughed, waving her hands at the fog of exhaust, climbed into the car, and shut it off. The silence was sudden and alarming.
Bon pressed herself against Jude’s leg, looking for reassurance. His knees threatened to fold. He drove her aside with his knee, then put his heel to her ass. She yelped and leaped away.
“Fuck off me,” he said.
“Whyn’t you leave her be?” Georgia asked. “The both of them saved your life.”
“How do you figure?”
“Didn’t you hear them? I was coming out to shut them up. They were hysterical.”
He regretted kicking Bon then and looked around to see if she was close enough to put a hand on. She had retreated into the barn, though, and was pacing in the dark, watching him with morose and accusing eyes. He wondered about Angus and glanced around for him. Angus stood in the barn door, his back to them, his tail raised. He was staring steadily down the driveway.
“What does he see?” Georgia asked, an absurd thing to ask. Jude had no idea. He stood bracing himself against the car, too far from the sliding barn door to see out into the yard.
Georgia pushed the keys into the pocket of her black jeans. She had dressed somewhere along the line and wrapped her right thumb in bandages. She slipped past Jude and went to stand next to Angus. She ran her hand over the dog’s spine, glanced down the drive, then back at Jude.
“What is it?” Jude asked.
“Nothing,” she said. She held the right hand against her breastbone and grimaced a little, as if it were paining her. “Do you need help?”
“I’m managing,” he said, and shoved off the Mustang. He was conscious of a building black pressure behind his eyeballs, a deep, slow, booming pain that threatened to become one of the all-time great headaches.
At the big sliding barn doors, he paused, with Angus between himself and Georgia. He peered down the drive of frozen mud, to the open gates of his farm. The skies were clearing. The thick, curdled gray cloud cover was coming apart, and the sun blinked irregularly through the rents.
The dead man, in his black fedora, stared back at him from the side of the state highway. He was there for a moment, when the sun was behind a cloud, so that the road was in shadow. As sunshine fluttered around the edges of a cloud, Craddock flickered away. His head and hands disappeared first, so that only a hollow black suit remained, standing empty. Then the suit disappeared, too. He stammered back into being a moment later, when the sun retreated under cover once more.
He lifted his hat to Jude and bowed, a mocking, oddly southern gesture. The sun came and went and came again, and the dead man flashed like Morse code.
“Jude?” Georgia asked. He realized he and Angus were standing there staring down the drive in just the same way. “There isn’t anything there, is there, Jude?” She didn’t see Craddock.
“No,” he said. “Nothing there.”
The dead man faded back into existence long enough to wink. Then the breeze rose in a soft rush and, high above, the sun broke through for good, at a place where the clouds had been pulled into strings of dirty wool. The light shone strongly on the road, and the dead man was gone.
15
Georgia led him into the music library on the first floor. He did not notice her arm around his waist, supporting and guiding him, until she let go. He sank onto the moss-colored couch, asleep almost as soon as he was off his feet.
He dozed, then woke, briefly, his vision swimmy and unclear, when she bent to lay a throw blanket across him. Her face was a pale circle, featureless, except for the dark line of her mouth and the dark holes where her eyes belonged.
His eyelids sank shut. He could not remember the last time he’d been so tired. Sleep had him, was pulling him steadily under, drowning reason, drowning sense, but as he went down again, that image of Georgia’s face swam before him, and he had an alarming thought, that her eyes had been missing, hidden behind black scribbles. She was dead, and she was with the ghosts.
He struggled back toward wakefulness and for a few moments almost made it. He opened his eyes fractionally. Georgia stood in the door to the library, watching him, her little white hands balled into little white fists, and her eyes were her own. He felt a moment of sweet relief at the sight of her.
Then he saw the dead man in the hallway behind her. His skin was pulled tight across the knobs of his cheekbones, and he was grinning to show his nicotine-stained teeth.
Craddock McDermott moved in stop motion, a series of life-size still photographs. In one moment his arms were at his sides. In the next, one of his gaunt hands was on Georgia’s shoulder. His fingernails were yellowed and long and curled at the end. The black marks jumped and quivered in front of his eyes.
Time leaped forward again. Abruptly Craddock’s right hand was in the air, held high above Georgia’s head. The gold chain dropped from it. The pendulum at the end of it, a curved three-inch blade, a slash of silvery brightness, fell before Georgia’s eyes. The blade swung in slight arcs before her, and she stared straight at it with eyes that were suddenly wide and fascinated.
Another stop-motion twitch ahead in time and Craddock was bent forward in a frozen pose, his lips at her ear. His mouth wasn’t moving, but Jude could just hear the sound of him whispering, a noise like someone sharpening the blade of a knife on a leather strop.
Jude wanted to call to her. He wanted to tell her to watch out, the dead man was right next to her, and she needed to run, to get away, not to listen to him. But his mouth felt wired shut, and he couldn’t produce any sound except for a fitful moan. The effort it took even to keep his eyelids open was more than he could sustain, and they rolled shut. He flailed against sleep, but he was weak—an unfamiliar sensation. He went down once more, and this time he stayed down.
