Heart-Shaped Box

and the truck was gone. The Mustang stood alone in the drive. Marybeth turned him and shoved him into motion again.

They started down the corridor, side by side, each holding the other up. Her hip caught a side table and overturned it, and it smashed to the floor. A phone that had been sitting on it toppled to the boards, and the receiver flew off the cradle.

At the end of the hall was a doorway, leading into the kitchen, where the lights were on. It was the only source of light they’d seen so far in the entire house. From the outside the windows had been dark, and once they were in, it was shadows in the front hall and a cavernous gloom waiting at the top of the stairs.

An old woman, in a pastel flower-print blouse, appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her hair was a white frizz, and her spectacles magnified her blue, amazed eyes to appear almost comically large. Jude knew Arlene Wade at a glance, although he could not have said how long it had been since he’d last seen her. Whenever it had been, she’d always been just as she was now—scrawny, perpetually startled-looking, old.

“What is this business?” she called out. Her right hand reached up to curl around the cross that hung at her throat. She stepped back as they reached the doorway to let them by. “My God, Justin. What in the name of Mary and Joseph happened to you?”

The kitchen was yellow. Yellow linoleum, yellow tile countertops, yellow-and-white-check curtains, daisy- patterned plates drying in the basket next to the sink, and as Jude took it all in, he heard that song in his head, the one that had been such a smash for Coldplay a few years before, the one about how everything was all yellow.

He was surprised, given the way the house looked from the outside, to find the kitchen so full of lively color, so well kept up. It had never been this cozy when he’d been a child. The kitchen was where his mother had spent most of her time, watching daytime TV in a stupor while she peeled potatoes or washed beans. Her mood of numb, emotional exhaustion had drained the color from the room and made it a place where it seemed important to speak in quiet voices, if at all, a private and unhappy space that you could no more run through than you could make a ruckus in a funeral parlor.

But his mother was thirty years dead, and the kitchen was Arlene Wade’s now. She had lived in the house for more than a year and very likely passed most of her waking hours in this room, which she’d warmed with the everyday business of being herself, an old woman with friends to talk to on the phone, pies to bake for relatives, a dying man to care for. In fact, it was a little too cozy. Jude felt dizzy at the warmth of it, at the suddenly close air. Marybeth turned him toward the kitchen table. He felt a bony claw sink into his right arm, Arlene grabbing his biceps, and was surprised at the rigid strength in her fingers.

“You got a sock on your hand,” she said.

“He got one of his fingers taken off,” Marybeth said.

“What are you doing here, then?” Arlene asked. “Shoulda drove him to the hospital.”

Jude fell into a chair. Curiously, even sitting still, he felt as if he were still moving, the walls of the room sliding slowly past him, the chair gliding forward like a car in a theme-park amusement: Mr. Jude’s Wild Ride. Marybeth sank into a chair next to him, her knees bumping his. She was shivering. Her face was oiled in sweat, and her hair had gone crazy, was snarled and twisted. Strands stuck to her temples, to the sweat on the sides of her face, to the back of her neck.

“Where are your dogs?” Marybeth asked.

Arlene began to untie the sock wound around Jude’s wrist, peering down her nose at it through the magnifying lenses of her glasses. If she found this question bizarre or startling, she showed no sign of it. She was intent on the work of her hands.

“My dog is over there,” she said, nodding at one corner of the room. “And as you can see, he’s quite protective of me. He’s a fierce old boy. Don’t want to cross him.”

Jude and Marybeth looked to the corner. A fat old rottweiler sat on a dog pillow in a wicker basket. He was too big for it, and his pink, hairless ass hung over the side. He weakly lifted his head, regarded them through rheumy, bloodshot eyes, then lowered his head again and sighed softly.

“Is that what happened to this hand?” Arlene asked. “Were you bit by a dog, Justin?”

“What happened to my father’s shepherds?” Jude asked.

“He hasn’t been up to takin’ care of a dog for a while now. I sent Clinton and Rather off to live with the Jeffery family.” Then she had the sock off his hand and drew a sharp breath when she saw the bandage beneath. It was soaked—saturated—with blood. “Are you in some kinda stupid race with your daddy to see who can die first?” She set his hand on the table without unwrapping the bandages to see more. Then she glanced at Jude’s bandaged left hand. “You missin’ any parts off that one?”

“No. That one I just gouged real good.”

“I’ll get you the ambulance,” Arlene said. She had lived in the South her whole life and she pronounced the word amble-lance.

She picked up the phone on the kitchen wall. It made a noisy, repetitive blatting at her, and she jerked her ear away from the receiver, then hung up.

“You crashed my phone off the hook in the hall,” she said, and disappeared into the front of the house to right it.

Marybeth stared at Jude’s hand. He lifted it—discovered he had left a wet red handprint on the table—and put it weakly back down.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

“Nowhere else to go.”

She turned her head, looked at Arlene’s fat rottie. “Tell me he’s gonna help us.”

“Okay. He’s going to help us.”

“You mean it?”

“No.”

Marybeth questioned him with a glance.

“Sorry,” Jude said. “I might’ve misled you a bit ’bout the dogs. Not just any dogs will do. They have to be mine. You know how every witch has a black cat? Bon and Angus were like that for me. They can’t be replaced.”

“When did you figure that out?”

“Four days ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was hoping to bleed to death before Angus went and croaked on us. Then you’d be okay. Then the ghost would have to leave you alone. His business with us would be done. If my head was clearer, I wouldn’t have bandaged myself up so well.”

“You think it’ll make it okay if you let yourself die? You think it’ll make it okay to give him what he wants? Goddam you. You think I came all this way to watch you kill yourself? Goddam you.”

Arlene stepped back through the kitchen doorway, frowning, eyebrows knitted together in a look of annoyance or deep thought or both.

“There’s somethin’ wrong with that phone. I can’t get a dial tone. All I do get, when I pick up, is some local AM station. Some farm program. Guy chatterin’ about how to cut open animals. Maybe the wind yanked down a line.”

“I have a cell phone—” Marybeth began.

“Me, too,” Arlene said. “But we don’t get no reception up in these parts. Let’s get Justin laid down, and I’ll see what I can do for his hand right now. Then I’ll drive down the road to the McGees and call from there.”

Without any forewarning she reached between them and snatched at Marybeth’s wrist, lifting her own bandaged hand for a moment. The wraps were stiff and brown with the dried bloodstains on them.

“What the hell have you two been doin’?” she asked.

“It’s my thumb,” Marybeth said.

“Did you try to trade it to him for his finger?”

“It’s just got an infection.”

Arlene set the bandaged hand down and looked at the unbandaged left hand, terribly white, the skin wrinkled. “I never seen any infection like this. It’s in both hands—is it anywhere else?”

“No.”

She felt Marybeth’s brow. “You’re burnin’ up. My God. The both of you. You can rest in my room, honey. I’ll