Heart-Shaped Box

HEART-SHAPED BOX

JOE HILL

Dedication

For my dad, one of the good ones

Epigraph

HOW MAY THE DEAD HAVE DESTINATIONS?

—Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire

BLACK DOG

1

Jude had a private collection.

He had framed sketches of the Seven Dwarfs on the wall of his studio, in between his platinum records. John Wayne Gacy had drawn them while he was in jail and sent them to him. Gacy liked golden-age Disney almost as much as he liked molesting little kids; almost as much as he liked Jude’s albums.

Jude had the skull of a peasant who had been trepanned in the sixteenth century, to let the demons out. He kept a collection of pens jammed into the hole in the center of the cranium.

He had a three-hundred-year-old confession, signed by a witch. “I did spake with a black dogge who sayd hee wouldst poison cows, drive horses mad and sicken children for me if I wouldst let him have my soule, and I sayd aye, and after did give him sucke at my breast.” She was burned to death.

He had a stiff and worn noose that had been used to hang a man in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, Aleister Crowley’s childhood chessboard, and a snuff film. Of all the items in Jude’s collection, this last was the thing he felt most uncomfortable about possessing. It had come to him by way of a police officer, a man who had worked security at some shows in L.A. The cop had said the video was diseased. He said it with some enthusiasm. Jude had watched it and felt that he was right. It was diseased. It had also, in an indirect way, helped hasten the end of Jude’s marriage. Still he held on to it.

Many of the objects in his private collection of the grotesque and the bizarre were gifts sent to him by his fans. It was rare for him to actually buy something for the collection himself. But when Danny Wooten, his personal assistant, told him there was a ghost for sale on the Internet and asked did he want to buy it, Jude didn’t even need to think. It was like going out to eat, hearing the special, and deciding you wanted it without even looking at the menu. Some impulses required no consideration.

Danny’s office occupied a relatively new addition, extending from the northeastern end of Jude’s rambling, 110-year-old farmhouse. With its climate control, OfficeMax furniture, and coffee-and-cream industrial carpet, the office was coolly impersonal, nothing at all like the rest of the house. It might have been a dentist’s waiting room, if not for the concert posters in stainless-steel frames. One of them showed a jar crammed with staring eyeballs, bloody knots of nerves dangling from the backs of them. That was for the All Eyes On You tour.

No sooner had the addition been built than Jude had come to regret it. He had not wanted to drive forty minutes from Piecliff to a rented office in Poughkeepsie to see to his business, but that would’ve probably been preferable to having Danny Wooten right here at the house. Here Danny and Danny’s work were too close. When Jude was in the kitchen, he could hear the phones ringing in there, both of the office lines going off at once sometimes, and the sound was maddening to him. He had not recorded an album in years, had hardly worked since Jerome and Dizzy had died (and the band with them), but still the phones rang and rang. He felt crowded by the steady parade of petitioners for his time, and by the never-ending accumulation of legal and professional demands, agreements and contracts, promotions and appearances, the work of Judas Coyne Incorporated, which was never done, always ongoing. When he was home, he wanted to be himself, not a trademark.

For the most part, Danny stayed out of the rest of the house. Whatever his flaws, he was protective of Jude’s private space. But Danny considered him fair game if Jude strayed into the office—something Jude did, without much pleasure, four or five times a day. Passing through the office was the fastest way to the barn and the dogs. He could’ve avoided Danny by going out through the front door and walking all the way around the house, but he refused to sneak around his own home just to avoid Danny Wooten.

Besides, it didn’t seem possible Danny could always have something to bother him with. But he always did. And if he didn’t have anything that demanded immediate attention, he wanted to talk. Danny was from Southern California originally, and there was no end to his talk. He would boast to total strangers about the benefits of wheatgrass, which included making your bowel movements as fragrant as a freshly mowed lawn. He was thirty years old but could talk skateboarding and PlayStation with the pizza-delivery kid like he was fourteen. Danny would get confessional with air-conditioner repairmen, tell them how his sister had OD’d on heroin in her teens and how as a young man he had been the one to find his mother’s body after she killed herself. He was impossible to embarrass. He didn’t know the meaning of shy.

Jude was coming back inside from feeding Angus and Bon and was halfway across Danny’s field of fire—just beginning to think he might make it through the office unscathed—when Danny said, “Hey, Chief, check this out.” Danny opened almost every demand for attention with just this line, a statement Jude had learned to dread and resent, a prelude to half an hour of wasted time, forms to fill out, faxes to look at. Then Danny told him someone was selling a ghost, and Jude forgot all about begrudging him. He walked around the desk so he could look over Danny’s shoulder at his computer screen.

Danny had discovered the ghost at an online auction site, not eBay but one of the wannabes. Jude moved his gaze over the item description while Danny read aloud. Danny would’ve cut his food for him if Jude gave him the chance. He had a streak of subservience that Jude found, frankly, revolting in a man.

“ ‘Buy my stepfather’s ghost,’” Danny read. “ ‘Six weeks ago my elderly stepfather died, very suddenly. He was staying with us at the time. He had no home of his own and traveled from relative to relative, visiting for a month or two before moving on. Everyone was shocked by his passing, especially my daughter, who was very close to him. No one would’ve thought. He was active to the end of his life. Never sat in front of the TV. Drank a glass of orange juice every day. Had all his own teeth.’”

“This is a fuckin’ joke,” Jude said.

“I don’t think so,” Danny said. He went on, “ ‘Two days after his funeral, my little girl saw him sitting in the guest room, which is directly across from her own bedroom. After she saw him, my girl didn’t like to be alone in her room anymore, or even to go upstairs. I told her that her grandfather wouldn’t ever hurt her, but she said she was scared of his eyes. She said they were all black scribbles and they weren’t for seeing anymore. So she has been sleeping with me ever since.

“ ‘At first I thought it was just a scary story she was telling herself, but there is more to it than that. The guest room is cold all the time. I poked around in there and noticed it was worst in the closet, where his Sunday suit was hung up. He wanted to be buried in that suit, but when we tried it on him at the funeral home, it didn’t look right. People shrink up a little after they die. The water in them dries up. His best suit was too big for him, so we let the funeral home talk us into buying one of theirs. I don’t know why I listened.

“ ‘The other night I woke up and heard my stepfather walking around overhead. The bed in his room won’t stay made, and the door opens and slams shut at all hours. The cat won’t go upstairs either, and sometimes she sits at the bottom of the steps looking at things I can’t see. She stares awhile, then gives a yowl like her tail got stepped on and runs away.

“ ‘My stepfather was a lifelong spiritualist, and I believe he is only here to teach my daughter that death is not the end. But she is eleven and needs a normal life and to sleep in her own room, not in mine. The only thing I can think is to try and find Pop another home, and the world is full of people who want to believe in the afterlife. Well, I have your proof right here.

“ ‘I will “sell” my stepfather’s ghost to the highest bidder. Of course a soul cannot really be sold, but I believe he will come to your home and abide with you if you put out the welcome mat. As I said, when he died, he was with us temporarily and had no place to call his own, so I am sure he would go to where he was wanted. Do not think this is a stunt or a practical joke and that I will take your money and send you nothing. The winning bidder will have something solid to show for their investment. I will send you his Sunday suit. I believe if his spirit is attached to anything, it has to be that.

“ ‘It is a very nice old-fashioned suit made by Great Western Tailoring. It has a fine silver pinstripe,’ blah-blah, ‘satin lining,’ blah-blah….” Danny stopped reading and pointed at the screen. “Check out the measurements, Chief. It’s just your size. High bid is eighty bucks. If you want to own a ghost, looks like he could be yours for a hundred.”

“Let’s buy it,” Jude said.

“Seriously? Put in a bid for a hundred dollars?”

Jude narrowed his eyes, peering at something on the screen, just below the item description, a button that said YOURS NOW: $1,000. And beneath that: Click to Buy and End Auction Immediately! He put his finger on it, tapping the glass.

“Let’s just make it a grand and seal the deal,” he said.

Danny rotated in his chair. He grinned and raised his eyebrows. Danny had high, arched, Jack Nicholson eyebrows, which he used to great effect. Maybe he expected an explanation, but Jude wasn’t sure he could’ve explained, even to himself, why it seemed reasonable to pay a thousand dollars for an old suit that probably wasn’t worth a fifth of that. Later he thought it might be good publicity: Judas Coyne buys a poltergeist. The fans ate up stories like that. But that was later. Right then, in the moment, he just knew he wanted to be the one who bought the ghost.

Jude started on, thinking he would head upstairs to see if Georgia was dressed yet. He had told her to put on her clothes half an hour ago but expected to find her still in bed. He had the sense she planned to stay there until she got the fight she was looking for. She’d be sitting in her underwear, carefully painting her toenails black. Or she’d have her laptop open, surfing Goth accessories, looking for the perfect stud to poke through her tongue, like she needed any more goddam…And then the thought of surfing the Web caused Jude to hold up, wondering something. He glanced back at Danny.

“How’d you come across that anyway?” he asked, nodding at the computer.

“We got an e-mail about it.”

“From who?”

“From the auction site. They sent us an e-mail that said ‘We notice you’ve bought items like this before and thought you’d be interested.’”

“We’ve bought items like this before?”

“Occult items, I assume.”

“I’ve never bought anything off that site.”

“Maybe you did and just don’t remember. Maybe I bought something for you.”

Jude said, “Fuckin’ acid. I had a good memory once. I was in the chess club in junior high.”

“You were? That’s a hell of a thought.”

“What? The idea that I was in the chess club?”

“I guess. It seems so…geeky.”

“Yeah. But I used severed fingers for pieces.”

Danny laughed—a little too hard, convulsing himself and wiping imaginary tears from the corners of his eyes. The sycophantic little suck-ass.

2

The suit came early Saturday morning. Jude was up and outside with the dogs.

Angus lunged as soon as the UPS truck ground to a halt, and the leash was yanked out of Jude’s hand. Angus leaped against the side of the parked truck, spit flying, paws scuffling furiously against the driver’s-side door. The driver remained behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope. Jude caught the leash and pulled on it, harder than he meant to. Angus sprawled on his side in the dirt, then twisted and sprang back up, snarling. By now Bon was in on the act, straining at the end of her leash, which Jude held in his other hand, and yapping with a shrillness that hurt his head.

Because it was too far to haul them all the way back to the barn and their pen, Jude dragged them across the yard and up to the front porch, both of them fighting him the whole time. He shoveled them in through the front door and slammed it behind them. Immediately they set to flinging themselves against it, barking hysterically. The door shuddered as they slammed into it. Fucking dogs.

Jude shuffled back down into the driveway, and reached the UPS truck just as the rear door slid open with a steely clatter. The deliveryman stood inside. He hopped down, holding a long, flat box under his arm.

“Ozzy Osbourne has Pomeranians,” the UPS guy said. “I saw them on TV. Cute little dogs like house cats. You ever think about getting a couple cute little dogs like that?”

Jude took the box without a word and went inside.

He brought the box through the house and into the kitchen. He put it on the counter and poured coffee. Jude was an early riser by instinct and conditioning. When he was on the road, or recording, he had become accustomed to rolling into bed at five in the morning and sleeping through most of the daylight hours, but staying up all night had never come naturally. On the road he would wake at four in the afternoon, bad-tempered and headachy, confused about where the time had gone. Everyone he knew would seem to him clever impostors, unfeeling aliens wearing rubber skin and the faces of friends. It took a liberal quantity of alcohol to make them seem like themselves again.

Only it had been three years since he’d last gone on tour. He didn’t have much interest in drinking when he was home, and was ready for bed most nights by nine. At the age of fifty-four, he had settled back into the rhythms that had guided him since his name was Justin Cowzynski and he was a boy on his father’s hog farm. The illiterate son of a bitch would have dragged him out of bed by the hair if he’d found him in it when the sun came up. It was a childhood of mud, barking dogs, barbed wire, dilapidated farm buildings, squealing pigs with their flaking skin and squashed-in faces, and little human contact, beyond a mother who sat most of the day at the kitchen table wearing the slack, staring aspect of someone who had been lobotomized, and his father, who ruled their acres of pig shit and ruin with his angry laughter and his fists.

So Jude had been up for several hours already but had not eaten breakfast yet, and he was frying bacon when Georgia wandered into the kitchen. She was dressed only in a pair of black panties, her arms folded across her small, white, pierced breasts, her black hair floating around her head in a soft, tangly nest. Her name wasn’t really Georgia. It wasn’t Morphine either, although she had stripped under that name for two years. Her name was Marybeth Kimball, a handle so simple, so plain, she’d laughed when she first told him, as if it embarrassed her.

Jude had worked his way through a collection of Goth girlfriends who stripped, or told fortunes, or stripped and told fortunes, pretty girls who wore ankhs and black fingernail polish, and whom he always called by their state of origin, a habit few of them cared for, because they didn’t like to be reminded of the person they were trying to erase with all their living-dead makeup. She was twenty-three.

“Goddam stupid dogs,” she said, shoving one of them out of her way with her heel. They were whisking around Jude’s legs, excited by the perfume of the bacon. “Woke me the fuck up.”

“Maybe it was time to get the fuck up. Ever think?” She never rose before ten if she could help it.

She bent into the fridge for the orange juice. He enjoyed the view, the way the straps of her underwear cut into the almost-too-white cheeks of her ass, but he looked away while she drank from the carton. She left it on the counter, too. It would spoil there if he didn’t put it away for her.

He was glad for the adoration of the Goths. He appreciated the sex even more, their limber, athletic, tattooed bodies and eagerness for kink. But he had been married once, to a woman who used a glass and put things away when she was done, who read the paper in the morning, and he missed their talk. It was grown-up talk. She hadn’t been a stripper. She didn’t believe in fortune-telling. It was grown-up companionship.

Georgia used a steak knife to slice open the UPS box, then left the knife on the counter, with tape stuck to it.

“What’s this?” she asked.

A second box was contained within the first. It was a tight fit, and Georgia had to tug for a while to slide the inner box out onto the counter. It was large, and shiny, and black, and it was shaped like a heart. Candies sometimes came in boxes like that, although this was much too big for candies, and candy boxes were pink or sometimes yellow. A lingerie box, then—except he hadn’t ordered anything of the kind for her. He frowned. He didn’t have any idea what might be in it and at the same time felt somehow he should know, that the heart-shaped box contained something he’d been expecting.

“Is this for me?” she asked.

She pried the lid loose and took out what was inside, lifting it for him to see. A suit. Someone had sent him a suit. It was black and old-fashioned, the details blurred by the plastic dry-cleaning bag pulled over it. Georgia held it up by the shoulders, in front of her body, almost as if it were a dress she was thinking of trying on but she wanted his opinion of it first. Her gaze was questioning, a pretty furrow between her eyebrows. For a moment he didn’t remember, didn’t know why it had come.

He opened his mouth to tell her he had no clue, but then instead heard himself say, “The dead man’s suit.”

“What?”

“The ghost,” he said, remembering as he spoke. “I bought a ghost. Some woman was convinced her stepfather was haunting her. So she put his restless spirit up for sale on the Internet, and I bought it for a grand. That’s his suit. She thinks it might be the source of the haunting.”

“Oh, cool,” Georgia said. “So are you going to wear it?”

His own reaction surprised him. His skin crawled, went rough and strange with gooseflesh. For one unconsidered moment, the idea struck him as obscene.

“No,” he said, and she flicked a surprised glance at him, hearing something cold and flat in his voice. Her smirk deepened a little, and he realized he had sounded…well, not frightened but momentarily weak. He added, “It wouldn’t fit.” Although, in truth, it looked as if the poltergeist had been about his height and weight in life.

Georgia said, “Maybe I’ll wear it. I’m a bit of a restless spirit myself. And I look hot in men’s clothing.”

Again: a sensation of revulsion, a crawling of the skin. She shouldn’t put it on. It unsettled him that she would even joke about it, although he couldn’t have said why. He wasn’t going to let her put it on. In that one instant, he could not imagine anything more repellent.

And that was saying something. There wasn’t much that Jude found too distasteful to contemplate. He was unused to feeling disgust. The profane didn’t trouble him; it had made him a good living for thirty years.

“I’ll stick it upstairs until I figure out what to do with it,” he said, trying for a dismissive tone—and not quite making it.

She stared at him, interested at this wavering of his usual self-possession, and then she pulled off the plastic dry-cleaning bag. The coat’s silver buttons flashed in the light. The suit was somber, as dark as crow feathers, but those buttons, the size of quarters, gave it something of a rustic character. Add a string tie and it was the sort of thing Johnny Cash might’ve worn onstage.

Angus began to bark, high, shrill, panicked barking. He shoved himself back on his haunches, tail lowered, rearing away from the suit. Georgia laughed.

“It is haunted,” she said.

She held the suit in front of her and waved it back and forth, walking it through the air toward Angus, flapping it at him, a bullfighter with cape. She moaned as she closed in on him, the throaty, drawn-out cry of a wandering haunt, while her eyes gleamed with pleasure.

Angus scrambled back, hit a stool at the kitchen counter, and knocked it over with a ringing crash. Bon stared out from beneath the old, bloodstained chopping block, ears flattened against her skull. Georgia laughed again.

“Cut it the fuck out,” Jude said.

She shot him a snotty, perversely happy look—the look of a child burning ants with a magnifying glass—and then she made a face of pain and shouted. Swore and grabbed her right hand. She flung the suit aside onto the counter.

A bright drop of blood fattened at the tip of her thumb and fell, plink, onto the tiled floor.

“Shit,” she said. “Fucking pin.”

“You see what you get.”

She glared, flipped him the bird, and stalked out. When she was gone, he got up and put the juice back into the fridge. Jude dropped the knife in the sink, got a hand towel to wipe the blood off the floor—and then his gaze caught on the suit, and he forgot whatever it was he’d been about to do.

He smoothed it out, folded the arms over the chest, felt carefully around. Jude couldn’t find any pins, couldn’t figure out what she’d stuck herself on. He laid it gently back into its box.

An acrid odor caught his attention. He glanced into the pan and cursed. The bacon was burnt.

3

He put the box on the shelf in the back of his closet and decided to stop thinking about it.

4

He was passing back through the kitchen, a little before six, to get sausages for the grill, when he heard someone whispering in Danny’s office.

The sound jumped him and halted him in his tracks. Danny had gone home more than an hour ago, and the office was locked, should’ve been empty. Jude tilted his head to listen, concentrating intently on the low, sibilant voice…and in another moment he identified what he was hearing, and his pulse began to slow.

There was no one in there. It was only someone talking on the radio. Jude could tell. The low tones weren’t low enough, the voice itself subtly flattened out. Sounds could suggest shapes, painted a picture of the pocket of air in which they’d been given form. A voice in a well had a deep, round echo, while a voice in a closet sounded condensed, all the fullness squeezed out of it. Music was also geometry. What Jude was hearing now was a voice clapped into a box. Danny had forgotten to turn off the radio.

He opened the door to the office, poked his head in. The lights were off, and with the sun on the other side of the building, the room drowned in blue shadow. The office stereo was the third-worst in the house, which was still better than most home stereos, a stack of Onkyo components in a glass cabinet by the water cooler. The readouts were lit a vivid, unnatural green, the color of objects viewed through a night-vision scope, except for a single, glowing, vertical slash of red, a ruby mark showing the frequency to which the radio was tuned. The mark was a narrow slit, the shape of a cat’s pupil, and seemed to stare into the office with an unblinking, alien fascination.

“…How cold is it going to get tonight?” said the man on the radio in a husky, almost abrasive tone. A fat man, judging by the wheeze when he exhaled. “Do we have to worry about finding bums frozen to the ground?”

“Your concern for the welfare of the homeless is touching,” said a second man, this one with a voice that was a little thin, reedy.

It was WFUM, where most of the bands were named after fatal diseases (Anthrax), or conditions of decay (Rancid), and where the DJs tended to be preoccupied with crotch lice, strippers, and the amusing humiliations that attended the poor, the crippled, and the elderly. They were known to play Jude’s music, more or less constantly, which was why Danny kept the stereo tuned to them, as an act of both loyalty and flattery. In truth, Jude suspected that Danny had no particular musical preferences, no strong likes or dislikes, and that the radio was just background sound, the auditory equivalent of wallpaper. If he had worked for Enya, Danny would’ve happily hummed along to Celtic chanting while answering her e-mails and sending faxes.

Jude started across the room to turn off the stereo but had not gone far before his step hitched, a memory snagging at his thoughts. An hour ago he’d been outside with the dogs. He had stood at the end of the dirt turnaround, enjoying the sharpness of the air, the sting on his cheeks. Someone down the road was burning a waste pile of deadfall and autumn leaves, and the faint odor of the spiced smoke had pleased him as well.

Danny had come out of the office, shrugging on his jacket, headed home. They stood talking for a moment—or, to be more accurate, Danny stood jawing at him while Jude watched the dogs and tried to tune him out. You could always count on Danny Wooten to spoil a perfectly good silence.

Silence. The office behind Danny had been silent. Jude could remember the crows going crawk-crawk and Danny’s steady stream of exuberant chatter, but not the sound of the radio coming from the office behind him. If it had been on, Jude thought he would’ve heard. His ears were still as sensitive as they’d ever been. They had, against long odds, survived all that he’d inflicted upon them over the last thirty years. By comparison, Jude’s drummer, Kenny Morlix, the only other surviving member of his original band, had severe tinnitus, couldn’t even hear his wife when she was yelling right in his face.

Jude started forward once more, but he was ill at ease again. It wasn’t any one thing. It was all of it. It was the dimness of the office and the glaring red eye staring out from the face of the receiver. It was the idea that the radio hadn’t been on an hour ago, when Danny had stood in the open office door zipping his jacket. It was the thought that someone had recently passed through the office and might still be close by, maybe watching from the darkness of the bathroom, where the door was open a crack—a paranoid thing to think and unlike him, but in his head all the same. He reached for the power button on the stereo, not really listening anymore, his gaze on that door. He wondered what he would do if it started to open.

The weatherman said, “…cold and dry as the front pushes the warm air south. The dead pull the living down. Down into the cold. Down into the hole. You will di—”

Jude’s thumb hit the power button, switching off the stereo, just as he registered what was being said. He twitched, startled, and stabbed the power button again, to get the voice back, figure out what the hell the weatherman had just been going on about.

Except the weatherman was done talking, and it was the DJ instead: “…going to freeze our asses off, but Kurt Cobain is warm in hell. Dig it.”

A guitar whined, a shrill, wavering sound that went on and on without any discernible melody or purpose except perhaps to drive the listener to madness. The opening of Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” Was that what the weatherman had been talking about? He’d said something about dying. Jude clicked the power button once more, returning the room to stillness.

It didn’t last. The phone went off, right behind him, a startling burst of sound that gave Jude’s pulse another unhappy jump. He shot a look at Danny’s desk, wondering who would be calling on the office line at this hour. He shifted around behind the desk for a glance at caller ID. It was a 985 number, which he identified immediately as a prefix for eastern Louisiana. The name that came up was COWZYNSKI, M.

Only Jude knew, even without picking up the phone, that it wasn’t really Cowzynski, M., on the other end. Not unless a medical miracle had transpired. He almost didn’t pick up at all, but then the thought came that maybe Arlene Wade was calling to tell him Martin was dead, in which case he would have to talk to her sooner or later, whether he wanted to or not.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Justin,” said Arlene. She was an aunt by marriage, his mother’s sister-in-law, and a licensed physician’s assistant, although for the last thirteen months her only patient had been Jude’s father. She was sixty-nine, and her voice was all twang and warble. To her he would always be Justin Cowzynski.

“How are you, Arlene?”

“I’m the same as ever. You know. Me and the dog are gettin’ along. Although he can’t get up so much now because he’s so fat and his knees pain him. But I’m not callin’ to tell you about myself or the dog. I’m callin’ about your father.”

As if there could be anything else she might call about. The line hissed with white noise. Jude had been interviewed over the phone by a radio personality in Beijing and taken calls from Brian Johnson in Australia, and the connections had been as crisp and clear as if they were phoning him from down the street. But for some reason calls from Moore’s Corner, Louisiana, came in scratchy and faint, like an AM radio station that’s just a little too far away to be received perfectly. Voices from other phone calls would bleed in and out, faintly audible for a few moments and then gone. They might have high-speed Internet connections in Baton Rouge, but in the little towns in the swamps north of Lake Pontchartrain, if you wanted a high-speed connection with the rest of the world, you souped up a car and got the fuck out.

“Last few months I been spoonin’ him food. Soft stuff he don’t have to chew. He was likin’ them little stars. Pastina. And vanilla custard. I never met a dyin’ person yet didn’t want some custard on their way out the door.”

“I’m surprised. He never used to have a sweet tooth. Are you sure?”

“Who’s takin’ care of him?”

“You are.”

“Well, I guess I’m sure, then.”

“All right.”

“This is the reason I’m callin’. He won’t eat custard or little stars or anything else. He just chokes on whatever I put in his mouth. He can’t swallow. Dr. Newland was in to see him yesterday. He thinks your dad had another infarction.”

“A stroke.” It was not quite a question.

“Not a fall-down-and-kill-you kind of stroke. If he had another one of those, there wouldn’t be any question of it. He’d be dead. This was one of the little blow-outs. You don’t always know when he’s had one of the little ones. Especially when he gets like he is now, just starin’ at things. He hasn’t said a word to anyone in two months. He isn’t ever going to say a word to anyone again.”

“Is he at the hospital?”

“No. We can care for him just as well or better here. Me livin’ with him and Dr. Newland in every day. But we can send him to the hospital. It would be cheaper there, if that matters to you.”

“It doesn’t. Let ’em save the beds at the hospital for people who might actually get better in them.”

“I won’t argue you on that one. Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”

“So what are you going to do about him not eating? What happens now?”

This was met by a moment of silence. He had an idea that the question had taken her by surprise. Her tone, when she spoke again, was both gently reasonable and apologetic, the tone of a woman explaining a harsh truth to a child.

“Well. That’s up to you, not me, Justin. Doc Newland can poke a feedin’ tube in him and he’ll go on a while longer, that’s what you want. Till he has another little blowout and he forgets how to breathe. Or we can just let him be. He isn’t ever goin’ to recover, not at eighty-five years old. It’s not like he’s bein’ robbed of his youth. He’s ready to let go. Are you?”

Jude thought, but did not say, that he’d been ready for more than forty years. He had occasionally imagined this moment—maybe it was fair to say he’d even daydreamed of it—but now it had come, and he was surprised to find that his stomach hurt.

When he replied, though, his voice was steady and his own. “Okay, Arlene. No tube. If you say it’s time, that’s good enough for me. Keep me updated, all right?”

But she wasn’t done with him yet. She made an impatient sound, a kind of stiff exhalation of breath, and said, “Are you comin’ down?”

He stood at Danny’s desk, frowning, confused. The conversation had taken a leap from one thing to another, without warning, like a needle skipping across a record from one track to the next. “Why would I do that?”

“Do you want to see him before he’s gone?”

No. He had not seen his father, stood in the same room with him, in three decades. Jude did not want to see the old man before he was gone, and he did not want to look at him after. He had no plans to so much as attend the funeral, although he would be the one to pay for it. Jude was afraid of what he might feel—or what he wouldn’t. He would pay whatever he had to pay not to have to share his father’s company again. It was the best thing the money could buy: distance.

But he could no more say this to Arlene Wade than he could tell her he’d been waiting on the old man to die since he was fourteen. Instead he replied, “Would he even know if I was there?”

“It’s hard to say what he knows and what he doesn’t. He’s aware of people in the room with him. He turns his eyes to watch folks come and watch folks go. He’s been less responsive lately, though. People get that way, once enough lights have burned out.”

“I can’t make it down. This week isn’t good,” Jude said, reaching for the easiest lie. He thought maybe the conversation was over, and was prepared to say good-bye. Then he surprised himself by asking a question, one he hadn’t known was even on his mind until he heard himself speaking it aloud. “Will it be hard?”

“For him to die? Naw. When an old fella gets to this stage, they waste away pretty quick without bein’ hooked to the feed bag. They don’t suffer none.”

“You sure on that?”

“Why?” she asked. “Disappointed?”

5

Forty minutes later Jude drifted into the bathroom to soak his feet—size 14, flat arches, and a constant source of pain to him—and found Georgia leaning over the sink sucking her thumb. She had on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms with a cute pattern of tiny red figures that might’ve been hearts printed on them. It was only when you got close that you could see that all those tiny red figures were actually images of shriveled dead rats.

He leaned into her and pulled her hand out of her mouth to inspect her thumb. The tip was swollen and had a white, soft-looking sore on it. He let go of her hand and turned away, disinterested, pulling a towel off the heated rack and throwing it over his shoulder.

“Ought to put something on that,” he said. “Before it festers and rots. There’s less work for pole dancers with visible disfigurements.”

“You’re a sympathetic son of a bitch, you know that?”

“You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her as she stalked out. As soon as he said it, a part of him wished he could take it back. But he didn’t take it back. In their metal-studded bracelets and glossy black, dead-girl lipstick, they wanted harshness, the girls like Georgia. They wanted to prove something to themselves about how much they could take, to prove they were hard. That was why they came to him, not in spite of the things he said to them or the way he treated them but because of those things. He didn’t want anyone to go away disappointed. And it was just understood that sooner or later they would go away.

Or at least he understood it, and if they didn’t at first, then they always figured it out eventually.

6

One of the dogs was in the house.

Jude woke just after three in the morning at the sound of it, pacing in the hallway, a rustle and a light swish of restless movement, a soft bump against the wall.

He had put them in their pens just before dark, remembered doing this very clearly, but didn’t worry about that fact in the first few moments after coming awake. One of them had got into the house somehow, that was all.

Jude sat for a moment, still drunk and stuporous from sleep. A blue splash of moonlight fell across Georgia, sleeping on her belly to his left. Dreaming, her face relaxed and scrubbed of all its makeup, she looked almost girlish, and he felt a sudden tenderness for her—that, and also an odd embarrassment to find himself in bed with her.

“Angus?” he murmured. “Bon?”

Georgia didn’t stir. Now he heard nothing in the hallway. He slid out of bed. The damp and the cold took him by surprise. The day had been the coolest in months, the first real day of fall, and now there was a raw, clinging chill in the air, which meant it had to be even colder outside. Maybe that was why the dogs were in the house. Maybe they had burrowed under the wall of the pen and somehow forced their way in, desperate to be warm. But that didn’t make sense. They had an indoor-outdoor pen, could go into the heated barn if they were cold. He started toward the door, to peek into the hall, then hesitated at the window and twitched aside the curtain to look outside.

The dogs were in the outdoor half of the pen, both of them, up against the wall of the barn. Angus roamed back and forth over the straw, his body long and sleek, his sliding, sideways movements agitated. Bon sat primly in one corner. Her head was raised, and her gaze was fixed on Jude’s window—on him. Her eyes flashed a bright, unnatural green in the darkness. She was too still, too unblinking, like a statue of a dog instead of the real thing.

It was a shock to look out the window and see her staring directly back at him, as if she’d been watching the glass for who knew how long, waiting for him to appear. But that was not as bad as knowing that something else was in the house, moving around, bumping into things in the hallway.

Jude glanced at the security panel next to the bedroom door. The house was monitored, inside and out, by a collection of motion detectors. The dogs weren’t big enough to set them off, but a grown man would trip them, and the panel would note movement in one part of the house or another.

The readout, however, showed a steady green light and read only SYSTEM READY. Jude wondered if the chip was smart enough to tell the difference between a dog and a naked psychotic scrambling around on all fours with a knife in his teeth.

Jude had a gun, but it was in his private recording studio, in the safe. He reached for the Dobro guitar leaning against the wall. Jude had never been one to smash a guitar for effect. His father had smashed his very first guitar for him, in an early attempt to rid Jude of his musical ambitions. Jude hadn’t been able to repeat the act himself, not even onstage, for show, when he could afford all the guitars he wanted. He was, however, perfectly willing to use one as a weapon to defend himself. In a sense he supposed he had always used them as weapons.

He heard one floorboard creak in the hall, then another, then a sigh, as of someone settling. His blood quickened. He opened the door.

But the hallway was empty. Jude plashed through long rectangles of icy light, cast by the skylights. He stopped at each closed door, listened, then glanced within. A blanket tossed across a chair looked, for a moment, like a deformed dwarf glaring at him. In another room he found a tall, gaunt figure standing behind the door, and his heart reared in his chest, and he almost swung the guitar, then realized it was a coatrack, and all the breath came rushing unsteadily out of him.

In his studio, at the end of the hall, he considered collecting the gun, then didn’t. He didn’t want it on him—not because he was afraid to use it but because he wasn’t afraid enough. He was so keyed up he might react to a sudden movement in the dark by pulling the trigger and wind up blowing a hole in Danny Wooten or the housekeeper, although why they would be creeping about the house at this hour he couldn’t imagine. He returned to the corridor and went downstairs.

He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should’ve reassured him but didn’t. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.

He couldn’t relax, but at the bottom of the stairs he pretended to, a charade he carried on for himself alone. He leaned the guitar against the wall and exhaled noisily.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he said. By then he was so ill at ease the sound of his own voice unnerved him, sent a cool, prickling rush up his forearms. He had never been one to talk to himself.

He climbed the stairs and started back down the hall to the bedroom. His gaze drifted to an old man, sitting in an antique Shaker chair against the wall. As soon as Jude saw him, his pulse lunged in alarm, and he looked away, fixed his gaze on his bedroom door, so he could only see the old man from the edge of his vision. In the moments that followed, Jude felt it was a matter of life and death not to make eye contact with the old man, to give no sign that he saw him. He did not see him, Jude told himself. There was no one there.

The old man’s head was bowed. His hat was off, resting on his knee. His hair was a close bristle, with the brilliance of new frost. The buttons down the front of his coat flashed in the gloom, chromed by moonlight. Jude recognized the suit in a glance. He had last seen it folded in the black, heart-shaped box that had gone into the rear of his closet. The old man’s eyes were closed.

Jude’s heart pounded, and it was a struggle to breathe, and he continued on toward the bedroom door, which was at the very end of the hallway. As he went past the Shaker chair, against the wall to his left, his leg brushed the old man’s knee, and the ghost lifted his head. But by then Jude was beyond him, almost to the door. He was careful not to run. It didn’t matter to him if the old man stared at his back, as long as they didn’t make eye contact with each other, and besides, there was no old man.

He let himself into the bedroom and clicked the door shut behind him. He went straight to his bed and got into it and immediately began to shake. A part of him wanted to roll against Georgia and cling to her, let her body warm him and drive away the chills, but he stayed on his side of the bed so as not to wake her. He stared at the ceiling.

Georgia was restless and moaned unhappily in her sleep.

7

He didn’t expect to sleep but dozed off at first light and then woke uncharacteristically late, after nine. Georgia was on her side, her small hand resting lightly on his chest and her breath soft on his shoulder. He slipped out of bed and away from her, let himself into the hall and walked downstairs.

The Dobro leaned against the wall where he had left it. The sight of it gave his heart a bad turn. He’d been trying to pretend he had not seen what he’d seen in the night. He had set himself a goal of not thinking about it. But there was the Dobro.

When Jude looked out the window, he spotted Danny’s car parked by the barn. He had nothing to say to Danny and no reason to bother him, but in another moment he was at the door of the office. He couldn’t help himself. The compulsion to be in the company of another human, someone awake and sensible and with a head full of everyday nonsense, was irresistible.

Danny was on the phone, craned back in his office chair, laughing about something. He was still in his suede jacket. Jude didn’t need to ask why. He himself had a robe over his shoulders and was hugging himself under it. The office was filled with a damp cold.

Danny saw Jude looking around the door and winked at him, another favorite ass-kissing Hollywood habit of his, although on this particular morning Jude didn’t mind it. Then Danny saw something on Jude’s face and frowned. He mouthed the words You okay? Jude didn’t answer. Jude didn’t know.

Danny got rid of whoever he was talking to, then rotated in his chair to turn a solicitous look upon him. “What’s going on, Chief? You look like fucking hell.”

Jude said, “The ghost came.”

“Oh, did it?” Danny asked, brightening. Then he hugged himself, mock-shivered. Tipped his head toward the phone. “That was the heating people. This place is a fucking tomb. They’ll have a guy out here to check on the boiler in a little while.”

“I want to call her.”

“Who?”

“The woman who sold us the ghost.”

Danny lowered one of his eyebrows and raised the other, making a face that said he had lost Jude somewhere. “What do you mean, the ghost came?”

“What we ordered. It came. I want to call her. I want to find some things out.”

Danny seemed to need a moment to process this. He swiveled partway back to his computer and got the phone, but his gaze remained fixed on Jude. He said, “You sure you’re all right?”

“No,” he said. “I’m going to see to the dogs. Find her number, will you?”

He went outside in his bathrobe and his underwear, to set Bon and Angus loose from their pens. The temperature was in the low fifties, and the air was white with a fine-grained mist. Still, it was more comfortable than the damp, clinging cold of the house. Angus licked at his hand, his tongue rough and hot and so real that for a moment Jude felt an almost painful throb of gratitude. He was glad to be among the dogs, with their stink of wet fur and their eagerness for play. They ran past him, chasing each other, then ran back, Angus snapping at Bon’s tail.

His own father had treated the family dogs better than he ever treated Jude, or Jude’s mother. In time it had rubbed off on Jude, and he’d learned to treat dogs better than himself as well. He had spent most of his childhood sharing his bed with dogs, sleeping with one on either side of him and sometimes a third at his feet, had been inseparable from his father’s unwashed, primitive, tick-infested pack. Nothing reminded him of who he was, and where he had come from, faster than the rank smell of dog, and by the time he reentered the house, he felt steadier, more himself.

As he stepped through the office door, Danny was saying into the phone, “Thanks so much. Can you hold a moment for Mr. Coyne?” He pressed a button, held out the receiver. “Name’s Jessica Price. Down in Florida.”

As Jude took the receiver, he realized that this was the first time he’d ever heard the woman’s full name. When he had put down his money on the ghost, he’d simply not been curious, although it seemed to him now that it was the kind of thing he should’ve made a point to know.

He frowned. She had a perfectly ordinary sort of name, but for some reason it caught his attention. He didn’t think he had ever heard it before, but it was so inherently forgettable it was hard to be sure.

Jude put the receiver to his ear and nodded. Danny pressed the button again to take it off hold.

“Jessica. Hello. Judas Coyne.”

“How’d you like your suit, Mr. Coyne?” she asked. Her voice carried a delicate southern lilt, and her tone was easy and pleasant…and something else. There was a hint in it, a sweet, teasing hint of something like mockery.

“What did he look like?” Judas asked. He had never been one to take his time getting to the point. “Your stepfather.”

“Reese, honey,” the woman said, talking to someone else, not Jude. “Reese, will you turn off that TV and go outside?” A girl, away in the background, registered a sullen complaint. “Because I’m on the phone.” The girl said something else. “Because it’s private. Go on, now. Go on.” A screen door slapped shut. The woman sighed, a bemused, “you know kids” sound, and then said to Jude, “Did you see him? Why don’t you tell me what you think he looks like, and I’ll say if you’re right.”

She was fucking with him. Fucking with him.

“I’m sending it back,” Jude told her.

“The suit? Go ahead. You can send the suit back to me. That doesn’t mean he’ll come with it. No refunds, Mr. Coyne. No exchanges.”

Danny stared at Jude, smiling a puzzled smile, his brow furrowed in thought. Jude noticed then the sound of his own breath, harsh and deep. He struggled for words, to know what to say.

She spoke first. “Is it cold there? I bet it’s cold. It’s going to get a lot colder before he’s through.”

“What are you out for? More money? You won’t get it.”

“She came back home to kill herself, you asshole,” she said, Jessica Price of Florida, whose name was unfamiliar to him, but maybe not quite as unfamiliar as he would’ve liked. Her voice had suddenly, without warning, lost the veneer of easy humor. “After you were done with her, she slashed her wrists in the bathtub. Our stepdaddy is the one who found her. She would’ve done anything for you, and you threw her away like she was garbage.”

Florida.

Florida. He felt a sudden ache in the pit of his stomach, a sensation of cold, sick weight. In the same moment, his head seemed to come clear, to shake off the cobwebs of exhaustion and superstitious fear. She had always been Florida to him, but her name was really Anna May McDermott. She told fortunes, knew tarot and palmistry. She and her older sister both had learned how from their stepfather. He was a hypnotist by trade, the last resort of smokers and self-loathing fat ladies who wanted to be done with their cigarettes and their Twinkies. But on the weekends Anna’s stepfather hired himself out as a dowser and used his hypnotist’s pendulum, a silver razor on a gold chain, to find lost objects and to tell people where to drill their wells. He hung it over the bodies of the ill to heal their auras and slow their hungry cancers, spoke to the dead with it by dangling it over a Ouija board. But hypnotism was the meal ticket: You can relax now. You can close your eyes. Just listen to my voice.

Jessica Price was talking again. “Before my stepfather died, he told me what to do, how I should get in touch with you and how to send you his suit and what would happen after. He said he’d see to you, you ugly, no-talent motherfucker.”

She was Jessica Price, not McDermott, because she had married and was a widow now. Jude had the impression her husband had been a reservist who bought it in Tikrit, thought he recalled Anna telling him that. He wasn’t sure Anna had ever mentioned her older sister’s married name, although she’d told him once that Jessica had followed their stepfather into the hypnotism trade. Anna had said her sister made almost seventy thousand dollars a year at it.

Jude said, “Why did I have to buy the suit? Why didn’t you just send it to me?” The calm of his own voice was a source of satisfaction to him. He sounded calmer than she did.

“If you didn’t pay, the ghost wouldn’t really belong to you. You had to pay. And, boy, are you goin’ to.”

“How’d you know I’d buy it?”

“I sent you an e-mail, didn’t I? Anna told me all about your sick little collection…your dirty little oh-cult pervert shit. I figured you couldn’t help yourself.”

“Someone else could’ve bought it. The other bids—”

“There weren’t any other bids. Just you. I put all those other bids up there, and the biddin’ wasn’t goin’ to be done until you made an offer. How do you like your purchase? Is it what you were hopin’ for? Oh, you have got some fun ahead of you. I’m goin’ to spend that thousand dollars you paid me for my stepdad’s ghost on a bouquet for your funeral. Goin’ to be one hell of a nice spread.”

You can just get out, Jude thought. Just get out of the house. Leave the dead man’s suit and the dead man behind. Take Georgia for a trip to L.A. Pack a couple suitcases, be on a flight in three hours. Danny can set it up, Danny can…

As if he had said it aloud, Jessica Price said, “Go ahead and check into a hotel. See what happens. Wherever you go, he’ll be right there. When you wake up, he’ll be settin’ at the foot of your bed.” She was starting to laugh. “You’re goin’ to die, and it’s goin’ to be his cold hand over your mouth.”

“So Anna was living with you when she killed herself?” he said. Still in possession of himself. Still perfectly calm.

A pause. The angry sister was out of breath, needed a moment before she could reply. Jude could hear a sprinkler running in the background, children shouting in the street.

Jessica said, “It was the only place she had. She was depressed. She’d always been bad depressed, but you made it worse. She was too miserable to go out, get help, see anyone. You made her hate herself. You made it so she wanted to die.”

“What makes you think she killed herself because of me? You ever think it was the pleasure of your company drove her over the edge? If I had to listen to you all day, I’d probably want to slash my wrists, too.”

“You’re going to die—” she spat.

He cut her off. “Think up a new line. And while you’re working on that, here’s something else to think about: I know a few angry souls myself. They drive Harleys, live in trailers, cook crystal meth, abuse their children, and shoot their wives. You call ’em scumbags. I call ’em fans. Want to see if I can find a few who live in your area to drop in and say hello?”

“No one will help you,” she said, voice strangled and trembling with fury. “The black mark on you will infect anyone who joins your cause. You will not live, and no one who gives you aid or comfort will live.” Reciting it through her anger, as if it were a speech she had rehearsed, which perhaps she had. “Everyone will flee from you or be undone like you will be undone. You’re goin’ to die alone, you hear me? Alone.”

“Don’t be so sure. If I’m going down, I might like some company,” he said. “And if I can’t get help, maybe I’ll come see you myself.” And banged the phone down.

8

Jude glared at the black phone, still gripped in his white-knuckled hand, and listened to the slow, martial drumbeat of his heart.

“Boss,” Danny breathed. “Ho. Lee. Shit. Boss.” He laughed: thin, wheezing, humorless laughter. “What the hell was all that?”

Jude mentally commanded his hand to open, to let go of the phone. It didn’t want to. He knew that Danny had asked a question, but it was like a voice overheard through a closed door, part of a conversation taking place in another room, nothing to do with him.

It was beginning to settle in that Florida was dead. When he had first heard she’d killed herself—when Jessica Price threw it in his face—it had not meant anything, because he couldn’t let it mean anything. Now, though, there was no running from it. He felt the knowledge of her death in his blood, which went heavy and thick and strange on him.

It did not seem possible to Jude she could be gone, that someone with whom he’d shared his bed could be in a bed of dirt now. She was twenty-six—no, twenty-seven; she’d been twenty-six when she left. When he sent her away. She’d been twenty-six, but she asked questions like a four-year-old. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? What’s the best dog you ever owned? What do you think happens to us when we die? Enough questions to drive a man mad.

She’d been afraid she was going mad. She was depressed. Not fashionably depressed, in the way of some Goth chicks, but clinically. She had been overcome with it in their last couple of months together, didn’t sleep, wept for no reason, forgot to put on her clothes, stared at the TV for hours without bothering to turn it on, answered the phone when it rang but then wouldn’t say anything, just stood there holding it, as if she’d been switched off.

But before that there’d been summer days in the barn while he rebuilt the Mustang. There’d been John Prine on the radio, the sweet smell of hay baking in the heat, and afternoons filled with her lazy, pointless questions—a never-ending interrogation that was, at turns, tiresome, amusing, and erotic. There’d been her body, tattooed and icy white, with the bony knees and skinny thighs of a long-distance runner. There’d been her breath on his neck.

“Hey,” Danny said. He reached out, and his fingers grazed Jude’s wrist. At his touch, Jude’s hand sprang open, releasing the phone. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

Slowly Jude lifted his gaze. Danny half stood behind his desk. He had lost some of his color, his ginger freckles standing out in high relief against the white of his cheeks.

Danny had been her friend, in the unthreatening, easygoing, slightly impersonal way he made himself a friend to all of Jude’s girls. He played the role of the urbane, understanding gay pal, someone they could trust to keep their secrets, someone they could vent to and gossip with, someone who provided intimacy without involvement. Someone who would tell them things about Jude that Jude wouldn’t tell them himself.

Danny’s sister had OD’d on heroin when Danny was just a freshman in college. His mother hanged herself six months later, and Danny had been the one who discovered her. Her body dangled from the single rafter in the pantry, her toes pointed downward, turning in small circles above a kicked-over footstool. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see that the double-barreled blast of the sister and the mother, dying at almost the same time, had wiped out some part of Danny as well, had frozen him at nineteen. Although he didn’t wear black fingernail polish or rings in his lips, in a way Danny’s attraction to Jude wasn’t so different from Georgia’s, or Florida’s, or any of the other girls’. Jude collected them in almost exactly the same way the Pied Piper had collected rats, and children. He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along.

Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what Florida had done to herself, wanted to spare him. It would be better not to tell him. He wasn’t sure how Danny would take it.

He told him anyway. “Anna. Anna McDermott. She cut her wrists. The woman I was just talking to is her sister.”

“Florida?” Danny said. He settled back into his chair. It creaked beneath him. He looked winded. He pressed his hands to his abdomen, then leaned forward slightly, as if his stomach were cramping up. “Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit,” Danny said sweetly. No words had ever sounded less obscene.

A silence followed. Jude noticed, for the first time, that the radio was on, murmuring softly. Trent Reznor sang that he was ready to give up his empire of dirt. It was funny hearing Nine Inch Nails on the radio just then. Jude had met Florida at a Trent Reznor show, backstage. The fact of her death hit him fresh, all over again, as if he were just realizing it for the first time. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? And then the shock began to coalesce into a sickened resentment. It was so pointless and stupid and self-involved that it was impossible not to hate her a little, not to want to get her on the phone and curse her out, except he couldn’t get her on the phone, because she was dead.

“Did she leave a note?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t get much information from her sister. It wasn’t the world’s most helpful phone call. Maybe you noticed.”

But Danny wasn’t listening. He said, “We used to go out for margaritas sometimes. She was one hell of a sweet kid. Her and her questions. She asked me once if I had a favorite place to watch the rain when I was a kid. What the hell kind of question is that? She made me shut my eyes and describe what it looked like outside my bedroom window when it was raining. For ten minutes. You never knew what she was going to ask next. We were big-time compadres. I don’t understand this. I mean, I know she was depressed. She told me about it. But she really didn’t want to be. Wouldn’t she have called one of us if she was going to do something like…? Wouldn’t she have given one of us a chance to talk her out of it?”

“I guess not.”

Danny had dwindled somehow in the last few minutes, shrunk into himself. He said, “And her sister…her sister thinks it’s your fault? Well, that’s…that’s just crazy.” But his voice was weak, and Jude thought he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself.

“I guess.”

“She had emotional problems going back before she met you,” Danny said, with a little more confidence.

“I think it runs in her family,” Jude said.

Danny leaned forward again. “Yeah. Yeah. I mean—what the Christ? Anna’s sister is the person who sold you the ghost? The dead man’s suit? What the fuck is going on here? What happened that made you want to call her in the first place?”

Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what he’d seen last night. In that moment—pushed up against the stony truth of Florida’s death—he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d seen last night anymore. The old man sitting in the hallway, outside his bedroom door at 3:00 A.M., just didn’t seem as real now.

“The suit she sent me is a kind of symbolic death threat. She tricked us into buying it. For some reason she couldn’t just send it to me, I had to pay for it first. I guess you could say sanity isn’t her strong suit. Anyway, I could tell there was something wrong about it as soon as it came. It was in this fucked-up black heart-shaped box and—this will maybe sound a little paranoid—but it had a pin hidden inside to stick someone.”

“There was a needle hidden in it? Did it stick you?”

“No. It poked Georgia good, though.”

“Is she all right? Do you think there was something on it?”

“You mean like arsenic? No. I don’t get the sense Jessica Price of Psychoville, Florida, is actually that stupid. Deeply and intensely crazy, but not stupid. She wants to scare me, not go to jail. She told me her stepdaddy’s ghost came with the suit and he’s going to get me for what I did to Anna. The pin was probably, I don’t know, part of the voodoo. I grew up not far from the Panhandle. Place is crawling with toothless, possumeating trailer trash full of weird ideas. You can wear a crown of thorns to your job at the Krispy Kreme and no one will bat an eye.”

“Do you want me to call the police?” Danny asked. He was finding his footing now. His voice wasn’t so winded, had regained some of its self-assurance.

“No.”

“She’s making threats on your life.”

“Who says?”

“You do. Me, too. I sat right here and heard the whole thing.”

“What did you hear?”

Danny stared for a moment, then lowered his eyelids and smiled in a drowsy kind of way. “Whatever you say I heard.”

Jude grinned back, in spite of himself. Danny was shameless. Jude could not, at the moment, recall why it was he sometimes didn’t like him.

“Naw,” Jude said. “That’s not how I’m going to deal with this. But you can do one thing for me. Anna sent a couple letters after she went home. I don’t know what I did with them. You want to poke around?”

“Sure, I’ll see if I can lay a hand on them.” Danny was eyeing him uneasily again, and even if he had recovered his humor, he had not got back his color. “Jude…when you say that’s not how you’re going to deal with this…what’s that mean?” He pinched his lower lip, brow screwed up in thought again. “That stuff you said when you hung up. Talking about sending people after her. Going down there yourself. You were pretty pissed. Like I’ve never heard you. Do I need to be worried?”

“You? No,” Jude said. “Her? Maybe.”

9

His mind leaped from one bad thing to another, Anna nude and hollow-eyed and floating dead in scarlet bathwater, Jessica Price on the phone—You’re goin’ to die, and it’s goin’ to be his cold hand over your mouth—the old man sitting in the hall in his black Johnny Cash suit, slowly lifting his head to look at Jude as Jude walked by.

He needed to quiet the noise in his head, a thing usually best accomplished by making some noise with his hands. He carried the Dobro to his studio, strummed at it experimentally, and didn’t like the tuning. Jude went into the closet to look for a capo to choke the strings and found a box of bullets instead.

They were in a heart-shaped box—one of the yellow heart-shaped boxes his father used to give to his mother, every Valentine’s Day and every Mother’s Day, on Christmas and on her birthday. Martin never gave her anything else—no roses or rings or bottles of champagne—but always the same big box of chocolates from the same department store.

Her reaction was as unvarying as his gift. Always, she smiled, a thin, uncomfortable smile, keeping her lips together. She was shy about her teeth. The uppers were false. The real ones had been punched in. Always, she offered the box first to her husband, who, smiling proudly, as if his gift were a diamond necklace and not a three-dollar box of chocolates, would shake his head. Then she presented them to Jude.

And always Jude picked the same one, the one in the center, a chocolate-covered cherry. He liked the gloosh of it when he bit into it, the faintly corrupt, sticky-sweet sap, the rotten-soft texture of the cherry itself. He imagined he was helping himself to a chocolate-covered eyeball. Even in those days, Jude took pleasure in dreaming up the worst, reveled in gruesome possibilities.

Jude found the box nestled in a rat’s nest of cables and pedals and adapters, under a guitar case leaned against the back of his studio closet. It wasn’t just any guitar case, but the one he’d left Louisiana with thirty years before, although the used, forty-dollar Yamaha that had once occupied it was long gone. The Yamaha he had left behind, onstage in San Francisco, where he’d opened for Zeppelin one night in 1975. He’d been leaving a lot of things behind in those days: his family, Louisiana, swine, poverty, the name he’d been born with. He did not waste a lot of time looking back.

He picked the candy box up, then dropped it just as quickly, his hands going nerveless on him. Jude knew what was in it without even opening it, knew at first sight. If there was any doubt at all, though, it fled when the box hit the ground and he heard the brass shells jingle-jangle inside. The sight of it caused him to recoil in an almost atavistic terror, as if he’d gone digging through the cables and a fat, furry-legged spider had crawled out across the back of his hand. He had not seen the box of ammo in more than three decades and knew he’d left it stuck between the mattress and the box spring of his childhood bed, back in Moore’s Corner. It had not left Louisiana with him, and there was no way it could be lying there behind his old guitar case, only it was.

He stared at the yellow heart-shaped box for a moment, then forced himself to pick it up. He pulled off the lid and tipped the box over. Bullets spilled onto the floor.

He had collected them himself, as avid for them as some children were for baseball cards: his first collection. It had started when he was eight, when he was still Justin Cowzynski, years and years before he’d ever imagined that someday he would be someone else. One day he was tramping across the east field and heard something snap underfoot. He bent to see what he’d stepped on and picked an empty shotgun shell out of the mud. One of his father’s, probably. It was fall, when the old man shot at turkeys. Justin sniffed the splintered, flattened case. The whiff of gunpowder itched his nostrils—a sensation that should’ve been unpleasant but which was strangely fascinating. It came home with him in his dungaree pocket and went into one of his mother’s empty candy boxes.

It was soon joined by two live shells for a .38, swiped from the garage of a friend, some curious silver empties he had discovered at the rifle range, and a bullet from a British assault rifle, as long as his middle finger. He had traded for this last, and it had cost him dear—an issue of Creepy with a Frazetta cover—but he felt he had got value for value. He would lie in bed at night looking his bullets over, studying the way the starlight shone on the polished casings, smelling the lead, the way a man might sniff at a ribbon scented with a lover’s perfume; thoughtfully, with a head full of sweet fantasy.

In high school he strung the British bullet on a leather thong and wore it around his throat until the principal confiscated it. Jude wondered that he had not found a way to kill someone in those days. He’d possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn’t happen more often.

They were all there—the crushed shotgun shell, the silver empties, the two-inch bullet from the AR-15, which couldn’t be there, because the principal had never given it back. It was a warning. Jude had seen a dead man in the night, Anna’s stepfather, and this was his way of telling Jude that their business was not done.

It was a crazy thing to think. There had to be a dozen more reasonable explanations for the box, for the bullets. But Jude didn’t care what was reasonable. He wasn’t a reasonable man. He only cared what was true. He had seen a dead man in the night. Maybe, for a few minutes, in Danny’s sun-splashed office, he’d been able to block it out, pretend it hadn’t happened, but it had.

He was steadier now, found himself considering the bullets coolly. It came to him that maybe it was more than a warning. Perhaps it was also a message. The dead man, the ghost, was telling him to arm himself.

Jude considered the .44, his Super Blackhawk, in the safe, under his desk. But what would he shoot at? He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.

He brushed the bullets back into his mother’s candy box, pushed the lid back on. Bullets wouldn’t do him any good. But there were other kinds of ammunition.

He had a collection of books on the shelf at one end of the studio, books about the occult and the supernatural. Around the time Jude was just beginning his recording career, Black Sabbath came out big, and Jude’s manager advised him that it couldn’t hurt to at least imply that he and Lucifer were on a first-name basis with each other. Jude had already taken up the study of group psychology and mass hypnosis, on the theory that if fans were good, cultists were even better. He added volumes by Aleister Crowley and Charles Dexter Ward to the reading list, and he worked his way through them with a careful, joyless concentration, underlining concepts and key facts.

Later, after he was a celebrity, Satanists and Wiccans and spiritualists, who from listening to his music mistakenly thought he shared their enthusiasms—he really didn’t give a fuck; it was like wearing leather pants, just part of the costume—sent him even more (admittedly fascinating) reading: an obscure manual, printed by the Catholic Church in the thirties, for performing exorcisms; a translation of a five-hundred-year-old book of perverted, unholy psalms written by a mad Templar; a cookbook for cannibals.

Jude placed the box of bullets up on the shelf among his books, all thoughts of finding a capo and playing some Skynyrd gone. He ran his thumbnail along the spines of the hardcovers. It was cold enough in his studio to make his fingers stiff and clumsy, and it was hard to turn pages, and he didn’t know what he was looking for.

For a while he struggled to make his way through a strangled discourse on animal familiars, creatures of intense feeling who were bound by love and blood to their masters, and who could deal with the dead directly. But it was written in dense eighteenth-century English, without any punctuation. Jude would labor over a single paragraph for ten minutes, then wouldn’t know what he’d read. He set it aside.

In another book he lingered on a chapter about possession, by way of demon or hateful spirit. One grotesque illustration showed an old man sprawled on his bed, among tangled sheets, his eyes bulging in horror and his mouth gaping open, while a leering, naked homunculus climbed out from between his lips. Or, a worse thought: Maybe the thing was climbing in.

Jude read that anyone who held open the golden door of mortality, for a peek at the other side, risked letting something through, and that the ill, the old, and those who loved death were especially in danger. The tone was assertive and knowledgeable, and Jude was encouraged until he read that the best method of protection was to wash yourself in urine. Jude had an open mind when it came to depravity, but he drew the line at water sports, and when the book slipped from his cold hands, he didn’t bother to pick it up. Instead he kicked it away.

He read about the Borley rectory, about contacting spirit companions by way of the Ouija board, and about the alchemical uses of menstrual blood, his eyes going in and out of focus, and then he was flinging books, lashing them about the studio. Every word was crap. Demons and familiars and enchanted circles and the magical benefits of piss. One volume swept a lamp off his desk with a crash. Another hit a framed platinum record. A spiderweb of gleaming shatter lines leaped through the glass over the silver disk. The frame dropped from the wall, hit the floor, tilted onto its face with a crunch. Jude’s hand found the candy box full of bullets. It struck the wall, and ammo sprayed across the floor in a ringing clatter.

He grabbed another book, breathing hard, his blood up, just looking to do some damage now and never mind to what, then caught himself, because the feel of the thing in his hand was all wrong. He looked and saw a black, unlabeled videotape instead. He didn’t know right away what it was, had to think awhile before it came to him. It was his snuff film. It had been sitting on the shelf with the books, apart from the other videos for…what? Four years? It had been there so long he’d stopped seeing it among the hardcovers. It had become just a part of the general clutter on the shelves.

Jude had walked into the studio one morning and found his wife, Shannon, watching it. He was packing for a trip to New York and had come looking for a guitar to take with him. He stopped in the doorway at the sight of her. Shannon stood in front of the television, watching a man suffocate a naked teenage girl with a clear plastic bag, while other men watched.

Shannon frowned, her brow wrinkled in concentration, watching the girl in the movie die. He didn’t worry about her temper—anger didn’t impress him—but he’d learned to be wary of her when she was like this, calm and silent and drawn into herself.

At last she said, “Is this real?”

“Yes.”

“She’s really dying?”

He looked at the TV. The naked girl had gone slack and boneless on the floor. “She’s really dead. They killed her boyfriend, too, didn’t they?”

“He begged.”

“A cop gave it to me. He told me the two kids were Texas junkies who shot up a liquor store and killed someone, then ran for Tijuana to hide out. Cops keep some sick shit lying around.”

“He begged for her.”

Jude said, “It’s gruesome. I don’t know why I still have it.”

“I don’t either,” she said. She rose and ejected the movie, then stood looking at it, as if she had never seen a videotape before and was trying to imagine what purpose one might serve.

“Are you all right?” Jude asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She turned the glassy, confused look upon him. “Are you?”

When he didn’t reply, she crossed the room and slipped past him. At the door Shannon caught herself and realized she was still holding the tape. She set it gently on the shelf before she walked out. Later the housekeeper shoved the video in with the books. It was a mistake Jude never bothered to correct, and soon enough he forgot it was even there.

He had other things to think about. After he returned from New York, he found the house empty, Shannon’s side of the closet cleaned out. She didn’t bother with a note, no Dear John saying their love had been a mistake or that she’d loved some version of him that didn’t really exist, that they’d been growing apart. She was forty-six and had been married and divorced once before. She didn’t do junior-high theatrics. When she had something to say to him, she called. When she needed something from him, her lawyer called.

Looking at the tape now, he really didn’t know why he had held on to it—or why it had held on to him. It seemed to him he should’ve sought it out and got rid of it when he came home and found her gone. He was not even sure why he had accepted it in the first place, when the tape had been offered to him. Jude teetered then on the edge of an uncomfortable thought, that he had, over time, become a little too willing to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences. And look at the trouble it had led to. Anna had offered herself to him, and he had taken, and now she was dead. Jessica McDermott Price had offered him the dead man’s suit, and now it was his. Now it was his.

He had not gone out of his way to own a dead man’s suit, or a videotape of Mexican death-porn, or any of the rest of it. It seemed to him instead that all these things had been drawn to him like iron filings to a magnet, and he could no more help drawing them and holding on to them than a magnet could. But this suggested helplessness, and he had never been helpless. If he was going to throw something into the wall, it ought to be this tape.

But he’d stood too long thinking. The cold in the studio sapped him, so that he felt tired, felt his age. He was surprised he couldn’t see his own breath; that was how cold it felt. He couldn’t imagine anything more foolish—or weak—than a fifty-four-year-old man pitching his books in a fit of rage, and if there was one thing he despised, it was weakness. He wanted to drop the tape and crunch it underfoot, but instead he turned to put it back on the shelf, feeling that it was more important to recover his composure, to act, at least for a moment, like an adult.

“Get rid of it,” Georgia said from the door.

10

His shoulders twitched in reflexive surprise. He turned and looked. She was naturally pale to begin with, but now her face was bloodless, like polished bone, so she resembled a vampire even more than usual. He wondered if it was a trick of makeup before he saw that her cheeks were damp, the fine black hairs at her temples pasted down with sweat. She stood in pajamas, clutching herself and shivering in the cold.

“You sick?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Picture of health. Get rid of it.”

He gently set the snuff film back on the shelf. “Get rid of what?”

“The dead man’s suit. It smells bad. Didn’t you notice the way it smelled when you took it out of the closet?”

“It isn’t in the closet?”

“No, it isn’t in the closet. It was lying on the bed when I woke up. It was spread out right next to me. Did you forget to put it back? Or forget you took it out in the first place? I swear to God, it’s a surprise sometimes you remember to put your dick back in your pants after you take a piss. I hope all the pot you smoked in the seventies was worth it. What the hell were you doing with it anyway?”

If the suit was out of the closet, then it had walked out on its own. There was no percentage in telling Georgia that, though, so he said nothing, pretended an interest in cleaning up.

Jude went around the desk, bent, and turned over the framed record that had dropped to the floor. The record itself was as busted as the plate of glass on top of it. He popped the frame apart and tipped it on its side. Broken glass slid with a musical clash into the wastebasket by his desk. He plucked out the pieces of his smashed platinum album—Happy Little Lynch Mob—and stuck them in the trash, six gleaming scimitar blades of grooved steel. What to do now? He supposed a thinking man would go and have another look at the suit. He rose and turned to her.

“Come on. You should lie down. You look like hell. I’ll put the suit away, and then I’ll tuck you in.”

He put his hand on her upper arm, but she pulled free. “No. The bed smells like it, too. It’s all over the sheets.”

“So we’ll get new sheets,” he said, taking her arm again.

Jude turned her and guided her into the hallway. The dead man was sitting two-thirds of the way down the corridor, in the Shaker chair on the left, his head lowered in thought. A drape of morning sunshine fell across where his legs should have been. They disappeared where they passed into the light. It gave him the look of a war veteran, his trousers ending in stumps, midway down his thighs. Below this splash of sunshine were his polished black loafers, with his black-stockinged feet stuck in them. Between his thighs and his shoes, the only legs that were visible were the legs of the chair, the wood a lustrous blond in the light.

No sooner had Jude noticed him than he looked away, did not want to see him, did not want to think about him being there. He glanced at Georgia, to see if she had spotted the ghost. She was staring at her feet as she shuffled along with Jude’s hand on her arm, her bangs in her eyes. He wanted to tell her to look, wanted to know if she could see him as well, but he was too in dread of the dead man to speak, afraid the ghost would hear him and glance up.

It was crazy to think somehow the dead man wasn’t going to notice them walking past, but for no reason he could explain, Jude felt that if they were both very quiet, they could slip by unseen. The dead man’s eyes were closed, his chin almost touching his chest, an old man who had nodded off in the late-morning sun. More than anything Jude wanted him to stay just as he was. Not to stir. Not to wake. Not to open his eyes; please, not to open his eyes.

They drew closer, but still Georgia didn’t glance his way. Instead she laid a sleepy head on Jude’s shoulder and closed her eyes. “So you want to tell me why you had to trash the studio? And were you shouting in there? I thought I heard you shouting, too.”

He didn’t want to look again but couldn’t help himself. The ghost remained as he was, head tipped to the side, smiling just slightly, as if musing on a pleasant thought or a dream. The dead man didn’t seem to hear her. Jude had an idea then, unformed, difficult to articulate. With his closed eyes and his head tilted just so, the ghost seemed not so much to be asleep as to be listening for something. Listening for him, Jude thought. Waiting, perhaps, to be acknowledged, before he would (or could) acknowledge Jude in return. They were almost on top of him now, about to walk past him, and Jude shrank against Georgia to avoid touching him.

“That’s what woke me up, the noise, and then the smell—” She made a soft coughing sound and lifted her head to squint blearily at the bedroom door. She still didn’t notice the ghost, although they were crossing directly in front of him now. She came up short, stopped moving. “I’m not going in there until you do something about that suit.”

He slipped his hand down her arm to her wrist and squeezed it, shoving her forward. She made a thin sound of pain and protest and tried to pull away from him. “What the fuck?”

“Keep walking,” he said, and then realized a moment later, with a pitiful throb in the chest, that he had spoken.

He glanced down at the ghost, and at the same time the dead man lifted his head and his eyes rolled open. But where his eyes belonged was only a black scribble. It was as if a child had taken a Magic Marker—a truly magic marker, one that could draw right on the air—and had desperately tried to ink over them. The black lines squirmed and tangled among one another, worms tied into a knot.

Then Jude was past him, shoving Georgia down the hallway while she struggled and whined. When he was at the door to the bedroom, he looked back.

The ghost came to his feet, and as he rose, his legs moved out of the sunlight and painted themselves back into being, the long black trouser legs, the sharp crease in his pants. The dead man held his right arm out to the side, the palm turned toward the floor, and something fell from the hand, a flat silver pendant, polished to a mirror brightness, attached to a foot of delicate gold chain. No, not a pendant but a curved blade of some kind. It was like a dollhouse version of the pendulum in that story by Edgar Allan Poe. The gold chain was connected to a ring around one of his fingers, a wedding ring, and the razor was what he had married. He allowed Jude to look at it for a moment and then twitched his wrist, a child doing a trick with a yo-yo, and the little curved razor leaped into his hand.

Jude felt a moan struggling to force its way up from his chest. He shoved Georgia through the door, into the bedroom, and slammed it.

“What are you doing, Jude?” she cried, pulling free at last, stumbling away from him.

“Shut up.”

She hit him in the shoulder with her left hand, then slugged him in the back with her right, the hand with the infected thumb. This hurt her more than it hurt him. She made a sick gasping sound and let him be.

He still held the doorknob. He listened to the corridor. It was quiet.

Jude eased the door back and looked through a three-inch opening, ready to slam it again, expecting the dead man to be there with his razor on a chain.

No one was in the hallway.

He shut his eyes. He shut the door. He put his forehead against it, pulled a deep breath down into his lungs and held it, let it go slowly. His face was clammy with sweat, and he lifted a hand to wipe it away. Something icy and sharp and hard lightly grazed his cheek, and he opened his eyes and saw the dead man’s curved razor in his hand, the blue-steel blade reflecting an image of his own wide, staring eyeball.

Jude shouted and flung it down, then looked at the floor, but already it wasn’t there.

11

He backed away from the door. The room was filled with the sound of strained breathing, his own and Marybeth’s. In that moment she was Marybeth. He couldn’t recall what it was he usually called her.

“What kind of shit are you on?” she asked, in a voice that hinted at a hillbilly drawl, faint but distinctly southern.

“Georgia,” he said, remembering then. “Nothing. I couldn’t be more sober.”

“Oh, the hell. What are you taking?” And that subtle, barely-there drawl was gone, receding as quickly as it had come. Georgia had lived a couple years in New York City, where she’d made a studied effort to lose her accent, didn’t like being taken for a cornpone hick.

“I got off all my shit years ago. I told you.”

“What was that in the hall? You saw something. What’d you see?”

He glared a warning at her, which she ignored. She stood huddled before him in her pajamas, her arms crossed under her breasts, hands tucked out of sight against her sides. Her feet were spread slightly apart, as if, should he try to move past her into the rest of the bedroom, she would block his way—an absurd prospect for a girl a hundred pounds lighter than he was.

“There was an old man sitting out in the hall. In the chair,” he said at last. He had to tell her something and didn’t see any reason to lie. Her opinion of his sanity didn’t trouble him. “We walked right by him, but you didn’t see him. I don’t know if you can see him.”

“That’s lunatic bullshit.” She said it with no special conviction.

He started toward the bed, and she got out of his way, pressed herself to the wall.

The dead man’s suit was spread neatly across his side of the mattress. The deep, heart-shaped box lay on the floor, the black lid resting next to it, white tissue paper hanging out. He caught a whiff of the suit when he was still four paces away from it and flinched. It hadn’t smelled that way when it first came out of the box, he would’ve noticed. Now it was impossible not to notice it. It had the ripe odor of corruption, something dead and spoiling.

“Christ,” Jude said.

Georgia stood at a distance, a hand cupped over her mouth and nose. “I know. I was wondering if there was something in one of the pockets. Something going bad. Old food.”

Breathing through his mouth, Jude patted down the jacket. He thought it very likely he was about to discover something in an advanced state of decomposition. It would not have surprised him to find that Jessica McDermott Price had stuffed a dead rat into the suit, a little something extra to go with his purchase, at no additional charge. Instead, though, he felt only a stiff square of what was maybe plastic in one pocket. He slipped it out for a look.

It was a photograph, one he knew well, Anna’s favorite picture of them. She had taken it with her when she left. Danny snapped it one afternoon in late August, the sunlight reddish and warm on the front porch, the day swarming with dragonflies and glittering motes of dust. Jude perched on the steps in a worn denim jacket, his Dobro over one knee. Anna sat beside him, watching him play, her hands squeezed between her thighs. The dogs were sprawled in the dirt at their feet, staring quizzically up at the camera.

It had been a good afternoon, maybe one of the last good afternoons before things started to go bad, but looking at the photograph now brought him no pleasure. Someone had taken a Sharpie to it. Jude’s eyes had been marked out in black ink, covered over by a furious hand.

Georgia was saying something from where she stood a few feet away, her voice shy, uncertain. “What did he look like? The ghost in the hall?”

Jude’s body was turned so she couldn’t see the photograph, a lucky thing. He didn’t want her to see it.

He struggled to find his voice. It was hard to get past the unhappy shock of those black scribbles blotting out his eyes in the picture. “An old man,” he managed at last. “He was wearing this suit.”

And there were these awful fucking black scribbles floating in front of his eyes and they looked just like this, Jude imagined telling her, turning to show her the snapshot at the same time. He didn’t do it, though.

“He just sat there?” Georgia asked. “Nothing else happened?”

“He stood up and showed me a razor on a chain. A funny little razor.”

On the day Danny took the picture, Anna was still herself, and Jude thought she’d been happy. Jude had spent most of that late-summer afternoon beneath the Mustang, and Anna had stayed close by, crawling under herself to pass him tools and necessary parts. In the photo there was a smear of motor oil on her chin, dirt on her hands and knees—an appealing, well-earned grime, the kind of filth you could take pride in. Her eyebrows were bunched up, a pretty dimple between them, and her mouth was open, as if she were laughing—or, more likely, about to ask him a question. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? What’s the best dog you ever owned? Her with her questions.

Anna had not asked him why he was sending her away, however, when it was over. Not after the night he found her wandering the side of the highway in a T-shirt and nothing else, people honking at her as they went past. He hauled her into the car and pulled back his fist to hit her, then slugged the steering wheel instead, punching it until his knuckles bled. He said enough was enough, that he was going to pack her shit for her, send her on her way. Anna said she’d die without him. He said he’d send flowers to the funeral.

So: She at least had kept her word. It was too late to keep his.

“Are you messing with me, Jude?” Georgia asked. Her voice was close. She was creeping toward him, in spite of her aversion to the smell. He slid the picture back into the pocket of the dead man’s suit before she could see. “Because if this is a joke, it sucks.”

“It isn’t a joke. I guess it’s possible I’m losing my mind, but I don’t think that’s it either. The person who sold me the…suit…knew what she was doing. Her little sister was a fan who committed suicide. This woman blames me for her death. I talked to her on the phone just an hour ago, and she told me so herself. That’s one part of this thing I’m sure I didn’t imagine. Danny was there. He heard me talking to her. She wants to get even with me. So she sent me a ghost. I saw him just now in the hall. And I saw him last night, too.”

He began to fold the suit, intending to return it to its box.

“Burn it,” Georgia said, with a sudden vehemence that surprised him. “Take the fucking suit and burn it.”

Jude felt, for an instant, an almost overpowering impulse to do just that, find some lighter fluid, douse it, cook it in the driveway. It was an impulse he immediately mistrusted. He was wary of any irrevocable action. Who knew what bridges might be burned along with it? He felt the slightest flicker of an idea, something about the awful-smelling suit and how it might be of use, but the thought drifted away before he could fix on it. He was tired. It was hard to pin a solid thought in place.

His reasons for wanting to hold on to the suit were illogical, superstitious, unclear even to himself, but when he spoke, he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for keeping it. “We can’t burn it. It’s evidence. My lawyer is going to want it later, if we decide to build a case against her.”

Georgia laughed, weakly, unhappily. “What? Assault with a deadly spirit?”

“No. Harassment, maybe. Stalking. It’s a death threat anyway, even if it’s a crazy one. There’s laws on that.”

He finished folding the suit and set it back in its nest of tissue paper, inside the box. He breathed through his mouth as he did it, head turned from the stink.

“The whole room smells. I know this is pussy, but I feel like I might yak,” she said.

He slipped a sideways look at her. She was absentmindedly clutching her right hand to her chest, staring blankly at the glossy black heart-shaped box. She had, until just a few moments before, been hiding the hand against her side. The thumb was swollen, and the place where the pin had gone in was now a white sore, the size of a pencil eraser, glistening with pus. She saw him looking at it, glanced down at herself, then up again, smiling miserably.

“You got a hell of an infection there.”

“I know. I been putting Bactine on it.”

“Maybe you ought to see someone about it. If it’s tetanus, Bactine won’t take care of it.”

She closed her fingers around the injured thumb, squeezed it gently. “I pricked it on that pin hidden in the suit. What if it was poisoned?”

“I guess if it had cyanide on it, we’d know by now.”

“Anthrax.”

“I spoke to the woman. She’s country-fried stupid, not to mention in need of some superior fucking psychiatric drugs, but I don’t think she would’ve sent me anything with poison on it. She knows she’d go to jail for that.” He touched Georgia’s wrist, pulled her hand toward him, and studied the thumb. The skin around the area of infection was soft and rotten and pruned up, as if it had been soaking in water for a long time. “Why don’t you go and set in front of the TV. I’ll have Danny book an appointment with the doctor.”

He let go of her wrist and nodded toward the door, but she didn’t move.

“Will you look and see if he’s in the hall?” she asked.

He stared for a moment, then nodded and went to the door. He opened it half a foot and peeked out. The sun had shifted or moved behind a cloud, and the hallway was in cool shadow. No one sat in the Shaker chair against the wall. No one stood in the corner with a razor on a chain.

“All clear.”

She touched his shoulder with her good hand. “I saw a ghost once. When I was a kid.”

He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t met a Goth girl yet who hadn’t had some kind of brush with the supernatural, who didn’t believe, with utter, embarrassing sincerity, in astral forms or angels or Wiccan spellcraft.

“I was living with Bammy. My grandmother. This was just after the first time my daddy threw me out. One afternoon I went in the kitchen to pour myself a glass of her lemonade—she makes real nice lemonade—and I looked out the back window, and there was this girl in the yard. She was picking dandelions and blowing on them to make them fly apart, you know, like kids do, and she was singing to herself while she was doing it. This girl a few years younger than myself, in a real cheap dress. I pushed up the window to yell out to her, find out what she was doing in our yard. When she heard the window squeak, she looked up at me, and that’s when I knew she was dead. She had these messed-up eyes.”

“How do you mean messed-up?” Jude asked. The skin on his forearms prickled and tightened, going rough with gooseflesh.

“They were black eyes. No, they weren’t even like eyes at all. It was more like…like they were covered over.”

“Covered over,” Jude repeated.

“Yes. Marked out. Black. Then she turned her head and seemed to look over at the fence. In another moment she hopped up and walked across the yard. She was moving her mouth, like she was talking to someone, only no one was there, and I couldn’t hear any words coming out of her. I could hear her when she was picking dandelions and singing to herself, but not when she got up and seemed to be talking to someone. I always thought that was a strange thing—how I could only hear her when she sang. And then she reached up, like there was an invisible person standing in front of her, just on the other side of Bammy’s fence, and she was taking his hand.

“And I got scared all of a sudden, like got chills, because I felt something bad was going to happen to her. I wanted to tell her to let go of his hand. Whoever was taking her hand, I wanted her to get away from him. Only I was too scared. I couldn’t get my breath. And the little girl looked back at me one more time, kind of sad, with her marked-over eyes, and then she came up off the ground—I swear to God—and floated over the fence. Not like she was flying. Like she was being picked up by invisible hands. The way her feet dangled in the air. They bumped into the pickets. She went over, and then she was gone. I got the flop sweats and had to sit down on the kitchen floor.”

Georgia darted a look at Jude’s face, maybe to see if he thought she was being foolish. But he only nodded that she should go on.

“Bammy came in and cried out and said, ‘Girl, what’s the matter?’ But when I told her what I saw, that was when she got really upset and started crying. She sat down on the floor with me and said she believed me. She said I had seen her twin sister, Ruth.

“I knew about Ruth, who died when Bammy was little, but it wasn’t until then that Bammy told me what really happened to her. I always thought she got run over by a car or something, but it wasn’t like that. One day, when they were both about seven or eight—this was 1950-something—their mother called them in for lunch. Bammy went, but Ruthie stayed out, because she didn’t feel like eating and because she was just naturally disobedient. While Bammy and her folks were inside, someone snatched her out of the backyard. She wasn’t ever seen again. Except now and then, people at Bammy’s house spot her blowing on dandelions and singing to herself, and then someone who isn’t there takes her away. My mother saw Ruth’s ghost, and Bammy’s husband seen her once, and some of Bammy’s friends, and Bammy, too.

“Everyone who saw Ruth was just like me. They wanted to tell her not to go, to stay away from whoever was on the other side of the fence. But everyone who sees her is too scared by the sight of her to speak. And Bammy said she thought it wouldn’t ever be over until someone found their voice and spoke up. That it was like Ruth’s ghost was in a kind of dream, stuck repeating her last minutes, and she’ll be that way until someone calls out to her and wakes her up.”

Georgia swallowed, fell silent. She bowed her head, so her dark hair hid her eyes.

“I can’t believe the dead want to hurt us,” she said finally. “Don’t they need our help? Don’t they always need our help? If you see him again, you should try to talk to him. You should find out what he wants.”

Jude didn’t believe that it was a matter of if, only when. And he already knew what the dead man wanted.

“He didn’t come for talk,” Jude said.

12

Jude wasn’t sure what to do next, so he made tea. The simple, automatic gestures of filling the kettle, spooning loose tea into the strainer, and finding a mug had a way of clearing his head and slowing time, opening a useful silence. He stood at the range listening to the kettle tick.

He did not feel panicked, a realization that brought him some satisfaction. He was not ready to run, had doubts there was anything to gain from running anyway. Where could he go that would be better than here? Jessica Price had said the dead man belonged to him now and would follow him wherever he went. Jude flashed to an image of himself sliding into a first-class seat on a flight to California, then turning his head to see the dead man sitting next to him, with those black scribbles floating in front of his eyes. He shuddered, shook off the thought. The house was as good a place as any to make a stand—at least until he figured out some spot that made more sense. Besides, he hated to board the dogs. In the old days, when he went on tour, they always came on the bus with him.

And no matter what he’d said to Georgia, he had even less interest in calling the police or his lawyer. He had an idea that dragging the law into it might be the worst thing he could do. They could bring a case against Jessica McDermott Price, and there just might be some pleasure in that, but getting even with her wouldn’t make the dead man go away. He knew that. He’d seen lots of horror movies.

Besides, calling in the police to rescue him rubbed against his natural grain, no small matter. His own identity was his first and single most forceful creation, the machine that had manufactured all his other successes, which had produced everything in his life that was worth having and that he cared about. He would protect that to the end.

Jude could believe in a ghost but not a boogeyman, a pure incarnation of evil. There had to be more to the dead man than black marks over his eyes and a curved razor on a golden chain. He wondered, abruptly, what Anna had cut her wrists with, became conscious all over again of how cold it was in the kitchen, that he was leaning toward the kettle to absorb some of its ambient heat. Jude was suddenly certain she had slashed her wrists with the razor on the end of her father’s pendulum, the one he’d used to mesmerize desperate suckers and to search for well water. He wondered what else there was to know about how Anna had died and about the man who’d been a father to her and who had discovered her body in a cold bath, the water darkened with her blood.

Maybe Danny had turned up Anna’s letters. Jude dreaded reading them again and at the same time knew that he had to. He remembered them well enough to know now that she’d been trying to tell him what she was going to do to herself and he’d missed it. No—it was more terrible than that. He had not wanted to see, had willfully ignored what was right in front of him.

Her first letters from home had conveyed a breezy optimism, and their subtext was that she was getting her life together, making sound, grown-up decisions about her future. They arrived on rich white card stock and were composed in delicate cursive. As with her conversation, these letters were filled with questions, although, in her correspondence at least, she didn’t seem to expect any answers. She would write that she had spent the month sending out job applications, then rhetorically ask if it was a mistake to wear black lipstick and motorcycle boots to an interview at a day-care center. She would describe two colleges and wonder at length about which would be better for her. But it was all a con, and Jude knew it. She never got the job at the day care, never mentioned it again after that one letter. And when the spring semester rolled around, she had moved on to applying for a spot at a beauticians’ academy, college forgotten.

Her last few letters were a truer picture of the place she’d been in mentally. They came on plain, ruled paper, torn out of a notebook, and her cursive was cramped, hard to read. Anna wrote that she couldn’t get any rest. Her sister lived in a new development, and there was a house going up right next door. She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When she tried to sleep at night, the hammers would start up again, just as she was drifting off, and never mind that there was no one over there. She was desperate to sleep. Her sister was trying to get her on a treatment plan for her insomnia. There were things Anna wanted to talk about, but she didn’t have anyone to talk to, and she was tired of talking to herself. She wrote that she couldn’t stand to be so tired all the time.

Anna had begged him to call, but he had not called. Her unhappiness wore on him. It was too much work to help her through her depressions. He’d tried, when they were together, and his best hadn’t been good enough. He’d given it his best, it hadn’t panned out, and still she wouldn’t leave him alone. He didn’t know why he even read her letters, let alone sometimes responded to them. He’d wished they would just stop coming. Finally they had.

Danny could dig them out and then make a doctor’s appointment for Georgia. As plans went, it wasn’t much, but it was better than what he had ten minutes before, which was nothing. Jude poured the tea, and time started up again.

He drifted with his mug into the office. Danny wasn’t at his desk. Jude stood in the doorway, staring at the empty room, listening intently to the stillness for some sign of him. Nothing. He was in the bathroom, maybe—but no. The door was slightly ajar, as it had been the day before, and the crack revealed only darkness. Maybe he had taken off for lunch.

Jude started over toward the window, to see if Danny’s car was in the driveway, then held up before he got there, took a detour to Danny’s desk. He flipped through some stacks of paper, looking for Anna’s letters. If Danny had found them, however, he’d tucked them somewhere out of sight. When Jude didn’t turn them up, he settled into Danny’s chair and launched the Web browser on his computer, intending to do a search on Anna’s stepdaddy. It seemed like there was something about everyone online. Maybe the dead man had his own MySpace account. Jude laughed—choked, ugly laughter—down in his throat.

He couldn’t remember the dead man’s first name, so he ran a search for “McDermott hypnosis dead.” At the top of Jude’s search results was a link to an obituary, which had appeared in last summer’s Pensacola News Journal, for a Craddock James McDermott. That was it: Craddock.

Jude clicked on it—and there he was.

The man in the black-and-white photograph was a younger version of the man Jude had seen twice now in the upstairs hallway. In the picture he looked a vigorous sixty, his hair cut in that same close-to-the-scalp military bristle. With his long, almost horsey face, and wide thin lips, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Charlton Heston. The most startling thing about the photograph was discovering that Craddock, in life, had eyes like any man’s eyes. They were clear and direct and stared into Forever with the challenging self-assurance of motivational speakers and evangelical preachers everywhere.

Jude read. It said that a life of learning and teaching, exploring and adventuring, had ended when Craddock James McDermott had died of a cerebral embolism at his stepdaughter’s home in Testament, Florida, on Tuesday, August 10. A true son of the South, he had grown up the only child of a Pentecostal minister and had lived in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, and later Galveston, Texas.

He was a wide receiver for the Longhorns in 1965 and enlisted in the service upon graduation, where he served as a member of the army’s psychological operations division. It was there that he discovered his calling, when he was introduced to the essentials of hypnosis. In Vietnam he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He was discharged with honors and settled in Florida. In 1980 he was wed to Paula Joy Williams, a librarian, and became stepfather to her two children, Jessica and Anna, whom he later adopted. Paula and Craddock shared a love built upon quiet faith, deep trust, and a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.

At this, Jude frowned. It was a curious sentence—“a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.” He didn’t even know what it meant.

Their relationship endured until Paula passed away in 1986. In his life Craddock had attended to almost ten thousand “patients”—Jude snorted at the word—using deep hypnotic technique to alleviate the suffering of the ill and to help those in need to overcome their weaknesses, work that his oldest stepdaughter, Jessica McDermott Price, carried on still, as a private consultant. Jude snorted again. She had probably written the obituary herself. He was surprised she hadn’t included the phone number for her service. Mention that you heard about us in my stepfather’s obit and receive 10 percent off your first session!!!

Craddock’s interest in spiritualism and the untapped potential of the mind led him to experiment with “dowsing,” the old country technique of discovering underground water sources with the use of a rod or pendulum. But it was the way in which he led so many of his fellow life travelers to discover their own hidden reservoirs of strength and self-worth for which he will be best remembered by his surviving adopted daughter and his loved ones. “His voice may have fallen silent, but it will never be forgotten.”

Nothing about Anna’s suicide.

Jude passed his gaze over the obit again, pausing on certain combinations of words that he didn’t much care for: “psychological operations,” “unexplored possibilities,” “the untapped potential of the mind.” He looked again at Craddock’s face, taking in the chilly confidence of his pale black-and-white eyes and the almost angry smile set on his thin, colorless lips. He was a cruel-looking son of a bitch.

Danny’s computer pinged to let Jude know that an e-mail had come through. Where the hell was Danny anyway? Jude glanced at the computer’s clock, saw he’d been sitting there for twenty minutes already. He clicked over to Danny’s e-mail program, which picked up messages for both of them. The new e-mail was addressed to Jude.

He flicked a glance at the address of the sender, then shifted in the chair, sitting up straight, muscles tightening across his chest and abdomen, as if he were readying himself for a blow. In a way he was. The e-mail was from craddockm@box.closet.net.

Jude opened the e-mail and began to read.

dear judewe will ride at nightfall we will ride to the hole i am dead you will die anyone who gets too close will be infected with the death on you us we are infected together we will be in the death hole together and the grave 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 knuckles, and bled into the transmission. It was a rough kind of courtship, and it suited him well.

Around that time Anna had come to live with him. Not that he ever called her by that name. She was Florida then, although somehow, since he’d learned of her suicide, he’d come to think of her as Anna again.

She sat in the backseat with the dogs while he worked, her boots sticking out a missing window. She sang along with the songs she knew and talked baby talk to Bon and kept at Jude with her questions. She asked him if he was ever going to go bald (“I don’t know”), because she’d leave him if he did (“Can’t blame you”), and if he’d still think she was sexy if she shaved off all her hair (“No”), and if he’d let her drive the Mustang when it was done (“Yes”), and if he’d ever been in a fistfight (“Try to avoid them—hard to play guitar with a broken hand”), and why he never talked about his parents (to which he said nothing), and if he believed in fate (“No,” he said, but he was lying).

Before Anna and the Mustang, he had recorded a new CD, a solo disc, and had traveled to some twenty-four nations, played more than a hundred shows. But working on the car was the first time since Shannon had left him that he felt gainfully employed, doing work that mattered, in the truest sense—although why rebuilding a car should feel like honest work instead of a rich man’s hobby, while recording albums and playing arenas had come to seem like a rich man’s hobby instead of a job, he couldn’t have said.

The idea crossed his mind once more that he ought to go. Put the farm in the rearview mirror and take off, it didn’t matter for where.

The thought was so urgent, so demanding—get in the car and get out of here—that it set his teeth on edge. He resented being made to run. Throwing himself into the car and taking off wasn’t a choice, it was panic. This was followed by another thought, disconcerting and unfounded, yet curiously convincing: the thought that he was being herded, that the dead man wanted him to run. That the dead man was trying to force him away from…from what? Jude couldn’t imagine. Outside, the dogs barked in concert at a passing semi.

Anyway, he wasn’t going anywhere without talking to Georgia about it. And if he did eventually decide to light out, he would probably want to get dressed beforehand. Yet in another moment he found himself inside the Mustang, behind the wheel. It was a place to think. He’d always done some of his best thinking in the car, with the radio on.

He sat with the window halfway down, in the dark, earth-floored garage, and it seemed to him if there was a ghost nearby, it was Anna, not the angry spirit of her stepfather. She was as close as the backseat. They had made love there, of course. He had gone into the house to get beer and had come back, and she was waiting in the rear of the Mustang in her boots and no more. He dropped the open beers and left them foaming in the dirt. In that moment nothing in the world seemed more important than her firm, twenty-six-year-old flesh, and her twenty-six-year-old sweat, and her laughter, and her teeth on his neck.

He leaned back against the white leather, feeling his exhaustion for the first time all day. His arms were heavy, and his bare feet were half numb from the cold. At one time or another, he had left his black leather duster in the backseat. He reached for it and spread it over his legs. The keys were in the ignition, so he clicked the engine over to the battery to run the radio.

Jude was no longer sure why he had climbed into the car, but now that he was sitting, it was hard to imagine moving. From what seemed a long way off, he could hear the dogs barking again, their voices strident and alarmed. He turned up the volume to drown them out.

John Lennon sang “I Am the Walrus.” Jude let his head rest on the back of the seat, relaxing into the pocket of warmth under his jacket. Paul McCartney’s slinky bass kept drifting away, getting lost under the low mutter of the Mustang’s engine, which was funny, since Jude hadn’t turned the engine on, only the battery. The Beatles were followed by a parade of commercials. Lew at Imperial Autos said, “You won’t find offers like ours anywhere in the tristate area. We’re pulling deals our competition can’t come close to matching. The dead pull the living down. Come on in and get behind the wheel of your next ride and take it for a spin on the nightroad. We’ll go together. We’ll sing together. You won’t ever want the trip to end. It won’t.”

Ads bored Jude, and he found the strength to flip to another station. On FUM they were playing one of his songs, his very first single, a thunderous AC/DC ripoff titled “Souls for Sale.” In the gloom it seemed as if ghostly shapes, unformed wisps of menacing fog, had begun to swirl around the car. He shut his eyes and listened to the faraway sound of his own voice.

More than silver and more than gold,You say my soul is worth,Well, I’d like to make it right with God,But I need beer money first.

He snorted softly to himself. It wasn’t selling souls that got you into trouble, it was buying them. Next time he would have to make sure there was a return policy. He laughed, opened his eyes a little. The dead man, Craddock, sat in the passenger seat next to him. He smiled at Jude, to show stained teeth and a black tongue. He smelled of death, also of car exhaust. His eyes were hidden behind those odd, continuously moving black brushstrokes.

“No returns, no exchanges,” Jude said to him. The dead man nodded sympathetically, and Jude shut his eyes again. Somewhere, miles away, he could hear someone shouting his name.

“…ude! Jude! Answer me Ju…”

He didn’t want to be bothered, though, was dozy, wanted to be left alone. He cranked the seat back. He folded his hands across his stomach. He breathed deeply.

He had just nodded off when Georgia got him by the arm and hauled him out of the car, dumped him in the dirt. Her voice came in pulses, drifting in and out of audibility.

“…get out of there Jude get the fuck…

…on’t be dead don’t be…

…leeeeeese, please…

…eyes open your fucking…”

He opened his eyes and sat up in one sudden movement, hacking furiously. The barn door was rolled back, and the sunshine poured through it in brilliant, crystalline beams, solid-looking and sharp-edged. The light stabbed at his eyes, and he flinched from it. He inhaled a deep, cold breath, opened his mouth to say something, to let her know he was all right, and his throat filled with bile. He rolled onto all fours and retched in the dirt. Georgia had him by the arm and bent over him while he horked up.

Jude was dizzy. The ground tilted underneath him. When he tried to look outside, the world spun, as if it were a picture painted on the side of a vase, turning on a lathe. The house, the yard, the drive, the sky, streamed by him, and a withering sensation of motion sickness rolled through him, and he upchucked again.

He clutched the ground and waited for the world to stop moving. Not that it ever would. That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it. He spat, wiped at his mouth. His stomach muscles were sore and cramped, as if he’d just done a few dozen abdominal crunches, which was, when you thought about it, very close to the truth. He sat up, turned himself to look at the Mustang. It was still running. No one was in it.

The dogs danced around him. Angus leaped into his lap and thrust his cold, damp nose into his face, lapped at Jude’s sour mouth. Jude was too weak to push him away. Bon, always the shy one, gave Jude a worried, sidelong look, then lowered her head to the thin gruel of his vomit and covertly began to gobble it up.

He tried to stand, grabbing Georgia’s wrist, but didn’t have the strength in his legs and instead pulled her down with him, onto her knees. He had a dizzying thought—the dead pull the living down—that spun in his head for a moment and was gone. Georgia trembled. Her face was wet against his neck.

“Jude,” she said. “Jude, I don’t know what’s happening to you.”

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.

Craddock was waiting for him with his razor, even in sleep. The blade dangled at the end of its gold chain before the broad face of a Vietnamese man, who was naked save for a white rag belted around his waist, and seated in a stiff-backed chair in a dank concrete room. The Vietnamese’s head had been shaved, and there were shiny pink circles on his scalp, where he’d been burnt by electrodes.

A window looked out on Jude’s rainy front yard. The dogs were right up against the glass, close enough so their breath stained it white with condensation. They were yapping furiously, but they were like dogs on TV, with the volume turned all the way down; Jude heard no sound of them at all.

Jude stood quietly in the corner, hoping he would not be seen. The razor moved back and forth in front of the Vietnamese’s amazed, sweat-beaded face.

“The soup was poisoned,” Craddock said. He was speaking in Vietnamese, but in the way of dreams, Jude understood just what he was saying. “This is the antidote.” Gesturing with his free hand at a massive syringe resting inside a black heart-shaped box. In the box with it was a wide-bladed bowie knife with a Teflon handle. “Save yourself.”

The VC took the syringe and stuck it, without hesitation, into his own neck. The needle was perhaps five inches long. Jude flinched, looked away.

His gaze leaped naturally to the window. The dogs remained just on the other side of the glass, jumping against it, no sound coming from them. Beyond them Georgia sat on one end of a seesaw. A little towheaded girl in bare feet and a pretty flowered dress sat on the other end. Georgia and the girl wore blindfolds, diaphanous black scarves made of some sort of crepelike material. The girl’s pale yellow hair was tied into a loose ponytail. Her expression was an unreadable blank. Although she looked vaguely familiar to Jude, it was still a long-drawn-out moment before it came to him, with a jolt of recognition, that he was looking at Anna, as she had been at nine or ten. Anna and Georgia went up and down.

“I’m going to try to help you,” Craddock was saying, speaking to the prisoner in English now. “You’re in trouble, you hear? But I can help you, and all you need to do is listen close. Don’t think. Just listen to the sound of my voice. It’s almost nightfall. It’s almost time. Nightfall is when we turn on the radio and listen to the radio voice. We do what the radio man says to do. Your head is a radio, and my voice is the only broadcast.”

Jude looked back, and Craddock wasn’t there anymore. In his place, where he had sat, was an old-fashioned radio, the face lit up all in green, and his voice came out of it. “Your only chance to live is to do just as I say. My voice is the only voice you hear.”

Jude felt a chill in his chest, didn’t like where this was going. He came unstuck and in three steps was at the side of the table. He wanted to rid them of Craddock’s voice. Jude grabbed the radio’s power cord, where it was plugged into the wall, and yanked. There was a pop of blue electricity, which stung his hand. He recoiled, throwing the line to the floor. And still the radio chattered on, just as before.

“It’s nightfall. It’s nightfall at last. Now is the time. Do you see the knife in the box? You can pick it up. It’s yours. Take it. Happy birthday to you.”

The VC looked with some curiosity into the heart-shaped box and picked out the bowie knife. He turned it this way and that, so the blade flashed in the light.

Jude moved to look down at the face of the radio. His right hand still throbbed from the jolt it had taken, was clumsy, hard to manipulate. He didn’t see a power button, so he spun the dial, trying to get away from Craddock’s voice. There was a sound Jude at first took for a burst of static, but which in another moment resolved into the steady, atonal hum of a large crowd, a thousand voices chattering all together.

A man with the knowing, streetwise tone of a fifties radio personality said, “Stottlemyre is hypnotizing them today with that twelve-to-six curveball of his, and down goes Tony Conigliaro. You’ve probably heard that you can’t make people do things they don’t want to do when they’ve been hypnotized. But you can see here it just isn’t true, because you can tell that Tony C. sure didn’t want to swing at that last pitch. You can make anyone do any awful thing. You just have to soften them up right. Let me demonstrate what I mean with Johnny Yellowman here. Johnny, the fingers of your right hand are poisonous snakes. Don’t let them bite you!”

The VC slammed himself back into his chair, recoiling in shock. His nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed, with a sudden look of fierce determination. Jude turned, heel squeaking on the floor, to cry out, to tell him to stop, but before he could speak the Vietnamese prisoner whacked the knife down.

His fingers fell from his hand, only they were the heads of snakes, black, glistening. The VC did not scream. His damp, almond-brown face was lit with something like triumph. He lifted the right hand to show the stumps of his fingers, almost proudly, the blood bubbling out of them, down the inside of his arm.

“This grotesque act of self-mutilation has been brought to you courtesy of orange Moxie. If you haven’t tried a Moxie, it’s time to step up to the plate and find out why Mickey Mantle says it’s the bee’s knees. Side retired in order….”

Jude turned, reeled toward the door, tasting vomit in the back of his throat, smelling vomit when he exhaled. At the very periphery of his vision, he could see the window, and the seesaw. It was still going up and down. No one was on it. The dogs lay on their sides, asleep in the grass.

He shoved through the door and banged down two warped steps and into the dusty dooryard behind his father’s farm. His father sat with his back to him, on a rock, sharpening his straight razor with a black strop. The sound of it was like the dead man’s voice, or maybe it was the other way around, Jude no longer knew for sure. A steel tub of water sat in the grass next to Martin Cowzynski, and a black fedora floated in it. That hat in the water was awful. Jude wanted to scream at the sight of it.

The sunshine was intense and direct on his face, a steady glare. He staggered in the heat, swayed back on his heels, and brought a hand up to shield his eyes from the light. Martin drew the blade across the strop, and blood fell from the black leather in fat drops. When Martin scraped the blade forward, the strop whispered “death.” When he jerked the razor back, it made a choked sound like the word “love.” Jude did not slow to speak with his father but kept going on around the back of the house.

“Justin,” Martin called to him, and Jude flicked a sidelong look at him, couldn’t help himself. His father wore a pair of blind man’s sunglasses, round black lenses with silver frames. They gleamed when they caught the sunlight. “You need to get back in bed, boy. You’re burnin’ up. Where do you think you’re goin’ all dressed up like that?”

Jude glanced down and saw he was wearing the dead man’s suit. Without breaking stride he began to pull at the buttons of the coat, undoing them as he reeled forward. But his right hand was numb and clumsy—it felt as if he were the one who had just chopped off his fingers—and the buttons wouldn’t come free. In a few more steps, he gave up. He felt sick, cooking in the Louisiana sun, boiling in his black suit.

“You look like you’re headed to someone’s funeral,” his father said. “You want to watch out. Could be your’n.”

A crow was in the tub of water where the hat had been, and it took off, fanning its wings furiously, throwing spray, as Jude went past it in his stumbling, drunkard’s gait. In another step he was at the side of the Mustang. He fell into it, slammed the door behind him.

Through the windshield the hardpack wavered like an image reflected in water, shimmering through the heat. He was sodden with sweat and gasping for breath in the dead man’s suit, which was too hot, and too black, and too restricting. Something stank, faintly, of char. The heat was worst of all in his right hand. The feeling in the hand couldn’t be described as pain, not anymore. It was, instead, a poisonous weight, swollen not with blood but liquefied ore.

His digital XM radio was gone. In its place was the Mustang’s original, factory-installed AM. When he thumbed it on, his right hand was so hot it melted a blurred thumbprint in the dial.

“If there is one word that can change your life, my friends,” came the voice on the radio, urgent, melodious, unmistakably southern. “If there is just one word, let me tell you, that word is ‘holyeverlastinJesus’!”

Jude rested his hand on the steering wheel. The black plastic immediately began to soften, melting to conform to the shape of his fingers. He watched, dazed, curious. The wheel began to deform, sinking in on itself.

“Yes, if you keep that word in your heart, hold that word to your heart, clasp it to you like you clasp your children, it can save your life, it really can. I believe that. Will you listen to my voice, now? Will you listen only to my voice? Here’s another word that can turn your world upside down and open your eyes to the endless possibilities of the living soul. That word is ‘nightfall.’ Let me say it again. Nightfall. Nightfall at last. The dead pull the living down. We’ll ride the glory road together, hallelujah.”

Jude took his hand off the wheel and put it on the seat next to him, which began to smoke. He picked the hand up and shook it, but now the smoke was coming out of his sleeve, from the inside of the dead man’s jacket. The car was on the road, a long, straight stretch of blacktop, punching through southern jungle, trees strangled in creepers, brush choking the spaces in between. The asphalt was warped and distorted in the distance, through the shimmering, climbing waves of heat.

The reception on the radio fizzed in and out, and sometimes he could hear a snatch of something else, music overlapping the radio preacher, who wasn’t really a preacher at all but Craddock using someone else’s voice. The song sounded plaintive and archaic, like something off a Folkways record, mournful and sweet at the same time, a single ringing guitar played in a minor key. Jude thought, without sense, He can talk, but he can’t sing.

The smell in the car was worse now, the smell of wool beginning to sizzle and burn. Jude was beginning to burn. The smoke was coming out both his sleeves now and from under his collar. He clenched his teeth and began to scream. He had always known he would go out this way: on fire. He had always known that rage was flammable, dangerous to store under pressure, where he had kept it his whole life. The Mustang rushed along the unending back roads, black smoke boiling from under the hood, out the windows, so he could hardly see through the fog of it. His eyes stung, blurred, ran with tears. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see where he was going. He put the pedal down.

Jude lurched awake, a feeling of unwholesome warmth in his face. He was turned on his side, lying on his right arm, and when he sat up, he couldn’t feel the hand. Even awake he could still smell the reek of something burning, an odor like singed hair. He looked down, half expecting to find himself dressed in the dead man’s suit, as in his dream. But no; he was still in his tatty old bathrobe.

The suit. The key was the suit. All he had to do was sell it again, the suit and the ghost both. It was so obvious he didn’t know why it had taken so long for the idea to occur to him. Someone would want it; maybe lots of people would want it. He’d seen fans kick, spit, bite, and claw over drumsticks that had been thrown into the crowd. He thought they would want a ghost, straight from the home of Judas Coyne, even more. Some hapless asshole would take it off his hands, and the ghost would have to leave. What happened to the buyer after that didn’t much trouble Jude’s conscience. His own survival, and Georgia’s, was a matter that concerned him above all others.

He stood, swaying, flexed his right hand. The circulation was coming back into it, accompanied by a sensation of icy prickling. It was going to hurt like a bitch.

The light was different, had shifted to the other side of the room, pale and weak as it came through the lace curtains. It was hard to say how long he’d been asleep.

The smell, that stink of something burning, lured him down the darkened front hall, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. The door to the backyard patio was open. Georgia was out there, looking miserably cold, in a black denim jacket and a Ramones T-shirt that left the smooth, white curve of her midriff exposed. She had a pair of tongs in her left hand. Her breath steamed in the cold air.

“Whatever you’re cooking, you’re fuckin’ it up,” he said, waving his hand at all the smoke.

“No I’m not,” she said, and flashed him a proud and challenging smile. She was, in that instant, so beautiful it was a little heartbreaking—the white of her throat, the hollow in it, the delicate line of her just-visible collarbones. “I figured out what to do. I figured out how to make the ghost go away.”

“How’s that?” Jude asked.

She picked at something with the tongs and then held it up. It was a burning flap of black fabric.

“The suit,” she said. “I burned it.”

16

An hour later it was dusk. Jude sat in the study to watch the last of the light drain out of the sky. He had a guitar in his lap. He needed to think. The two things went together.

He was in a chair, turned to face a window that looked over the barn, the dog pen, and the trees beyond. Jude had it open a crack. The air that came in had a crisp bite to it. He didn’t mind. It wasn’t much warmer in the house, and he needed the fresh air, was grateful for the mid-October perfume of rotten apples and fallen leaves. It was a relief from the reek of exhaust. Even after a shower and a change of clothes, he could still smell it on him.

Jude had his back to the door, and when Georgia came into the room, he saw her in reflection. She had a glass of red wine in each hand. The swaddling of bandages around her thumb forced her to grip one of the glasses awkwardly, and she spilled a little on herself when she sank to her knees beside his chair. She kissed the wine off her skin, then set a glass in front of him, on the amp near his feet.

“He isn’t coming back,” she said. “The dead man. I bet you. Burning the suit got rid of him. Stroke of genius. Besides, that fucking thing had to go. Whoo-ee. I wrapped it in two garbage bags before I brought it downstairs, and I still thought I was going to gag from the stink.”

It was in his mind to say, He wanted you to do it, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t do her any good to hear it, and it was over and done with now.

Georgia narrowed her eyes at him, studying his expression. His doubts must’ve been there in his face, because she said, “You think he’ll be back?” When Jude didn’t reply, she leaned toward him and spoke again, her voice low, urgent. “Then why don’t we go? Get a room in the city and get the hell out of here?”

He considered this, forming his reply slowly, and only with effort. At last he said, “I don’t think it would do any good, just to up and run. He isn’t haunting the house. He’s haunting me.”

That was part of it—but only part. The rest was too hard to put into words. The idea persisted that everything to happen so far had happened for reasons—the dead man’s reasons. That phrase, “psychological operations,” rose to Jude’s mind with a feeling of chill. He wondered again if the ghost wasn’t trying to make him run, and why that would be. Maybe the house, or something in the house, offered Jude an advantage, although, try as he might, he couldn’t figure what.

“You ever think you ought to take off?” Jude asked her.

“You almost died today,” Georgia said. “I don’t know what’s happening to you, but I’m not going anywhere. I don’t think I’m going to let you out of my sight ever again. Besides, your ghost hasn’t done anything to me. I bet he can’t touch me.”

But Jude had watched Craddock whispering in her ear. He had seen the stricken look on Georgia’s face as the dead man held his razor on a chain before her eyes. And he had not forgotten Jessica Price’s voice on the telephone, her lazy, poisonous, redneck drawl: You will not live, and no one who gives you aid or comfort will live.

Craddock could get to Georgia. She needed to go. Jude saw this clearly now—and yet the thought of sending her away, of waking alone in the night and finding the dead man there, standing over him in the dark, made him weak with dread. If she left him, Jude felt she might take what remained of his nerve with her. He did not know if he could bear the night and the quiet without her close—an admission of need that was so stark and unexpected it gave him a brief, bad moment of vertigo. He was a man afraid of heights, watching the ground lunge away beneath him, while the Ferris wheel yanked him helplessly into the sky.

“What about Danny?” Jude said. He thought his own voice sounded strained and unlike him, and he cleared his throat. “Danny thought he was dangerous.”

“What did this ghost do to Danny? Danny saw something, got scared, and ran for his life. Wasn’t like anything got done to him.”

“Just because the ghost didn’t do anything doesn’t mean he can’t. Look at what happened to me this afternoon.”

Georgia nodded at this. She drank the rest of her wine in one swallow, then met his gaze, her eyes bright and searching. “And you swear you didn’t go into that barn to kill yourself? You swear, Jude? Don’t be mad at me for asking. I need to know.”

“Think I’m the type?” he asked.

“Everyone’s the type.”

“Not me.”

“Everyone. I tried to do it. Pills. Bammy found me passed out on the bathroom floor. My lips were blue. I was hardly breathing. Three days after my last day of high school. Afterward my mother and father came to the hospital, and my father said, ‘You couldn’t even do that right.’”

“Cocksucker.”

“Yup. Pretty much.”

“Why’d you want to kill yourself? I hope you had a good reason.”

“Because I’d been having sex with my daddy’s best friend. Since I was thirteen. This forty-year-old guy with a daughter of his own. People found out. His daughter found out. She was my friend. She said I ruined her life. She said I was a whore.” Georgia rolled her glass this way and that in her left hand, watching the glimmer of light move around and around the rim. “Pretty hard to argue with her. He’d give me things, and I’d always take them. Like, he gave me a brand-new sweater once with fifty dollars in the pocket. He said the money was so I could buy shoes to go with it. I let him fuck me for shoe money.”

“Hell. That wasn’t any good reason to kill yourself,” Jude told her. “It was a good reason to kill him.”

She laughed.

“What was his name?”

“George Ruger. He’s a used-car salesman now, in my old hometown. Head of the county Republican steering committee.”

“Next time I get down Georgia way, I’ll stop in and kill the son of a bitch.”

She laughed again.

“Or at least thoroughly stomp his ass into the Georgia clay,” Jude said, and played the opening bars of “Dirty Deeds.”

She lifted his glass of wine off the amp, raised it in a toast to him, and had a sip.

“Do you know what the best thing about you is?” she asked.

“No idea.”

“Nothing grosses you out. I mean, I just told you all that, and you don’t think I’m…I don’t know. Ruined. Hopelessly fucked up.”

“Maybe I do and I just don’t care.”

“You care,” she said. She put a hand on his ankle. “And nothing shocks you.”

He let that pass, did not say he could’ve guessed the suicide attempt, the emotionally cold father, the family friend who molested her, almost from the first moment Jude saw her, wearing a dog collar, her hair hacked into uneven spikes and her mouth painted in white lipstick.

She said, “So what happened to you? Your turn.”

He twitched his ankle out of her grasp.

“I’m not into feel-bad competitions.”

He glanced at the window. Nothing remained of the light except for a faint, reddish bronze flush behind the leafless trees. Jude considered his own semitransparent reflection in the glass, his face long, seamed, gaunt, with a flowing black beard that came almost to his chest. A haggard, grim-visaged ghost.

Georgia said, “Tell me about this woman who sent you the ghost.”

“Jessica Price. She didn’t just send him to me either. Remember, she tricked me into paying for him.”

“Right. On eBay or something?”

“No. A different site, a third-rate clone. And it only looked like a regular Internet auction. She was orchestrating things from behind the scenes to make sure I’d win.” Jude saw the question forming in Georgia’s eyes and answered it before she could speak. “Why she went to all that trouble I can’t tell you. I get the feeling, though, that she couldn’t just mail him to me. I had to agree to take possession of him. I’m sure there’s some profound moral message in that.”

“Yeah,” Georgia said. “Stick with eBay. Accept no substitutes.” She tasted some wine, licked her lips, then went on. “And this is all because her sister killed herself? Why does she think that’s your fault? Is it because of something you wrote in one of your songs? Is this like when that kid killed himself after listening to Ozzy Osbourne? Have you written anything that says suicide is okay or something?”

“No. Neither did Ozzy.”

“Then I don’t see why she’s so pissed off at you. Did you know each other in some way? Did you know the girl who killed herself? Did she write you crazy fan letters or something?”

He said, “She lived with me for a while. Like you.”

“Like me? Oh.”

“Got news for you, Georgia. I wasn’t a virgin when I met you.” His voice sounded wooden and strange to him.

“How long did she live here?”

“I don’t know. Eight, nine months. Long enough to overstay her welcome.”

She thought about that. “I’ve been living with you for about nine months.”

“So?”

“So have I overstayed mine? Is nine months the limit? Then it’s time for some fresh pussy? What, was she a natural blonde, and you decided it was time for a brunette?”

He took his hands off his guitar. “She was a natural psycho, so I threw her ass out. I guess she didn’t take it well.”

“What do you mean, she was a psycho?”

“I mean manic-depressive. When she was manic, she was a hell of a lay. When she was depressive, it was a little too much work.”

“She had mental problems, and you just chucked her out?”

“I didn’t sign on to hold her hand the rest of her life. I didn’t sign on to hold yours either. I’ll tell you something else, Georgia. If you think our story ends ‘and they lived happily ever after,’ then you’ve got the wrong fuckin’ fairy tale.” As he spoke, he became aware that he’d found his chance to hurt her and get rid of her. He had, he understood now, been steering the conversation toward this very moment. The idea recurred that if he could sting her badly enough to make her leave—even if it was just for a while, a night, a few hours—it might be the last good thing he ever did for her.

“What was her name? The girl who killed herself?”

He started to say “Anna,” then said “Florida” instead.

Georgia stood quickly, so quickly she tottered, looked as if she might fall over. He could’ve reached out to steady her but didn’t. Better to let her hurt. Her face whitened, and she took an unsteady half step back. She stared at him, bewildered and wounded—and then her eyes sharpened, as if she were suddenly bringing his face into focus.

“No,” she breathed softly. “You’re not going to drive me away like that. You say any shitty thing you want. I’m sticking, Jude.”

She carefully set the glass she was holding on the edge of his desk. She started away from him, then paused at the door. She turned her head but didn’t quite seem able to look into his face.

“I’m going to get some sleep. You come on to bed, too.” Telling him, not asking.

Jude opened his mouth to reply and found he had nothing to say. When she left the room, he gently leaned his guitar against the wall and stood up. His pulse was jacked, and his legs were unsteady, the physical manifestations of an emotion it took him some time to place—he was that unused to the sensation of relief.

17

Georgia was gone. That was the first thing he knew. She was gone, and it was still night. He exhaled, and his breath made a cloud of white smoke in the room. He shoved off the one thin sheet and got out of bed, then hugged himself through a brief shivering fit.

The idea that she was up and wandering the house alarmed him. His head was still muddy with sleep, and it had to be close to freezing in the room. It would’ve been reasonable to think Georgia had gone to figure out what was wrong with the heat, but Jude knew that wasn’t it. She’d been sleeping badly as well, tossing and muttering. She might have come awake and gone to watch TV—but he didn’t believe that either.

He almost shouted her name, then thought better of it. He quailed at the idea that she might not reply, that his voice might be met with a ringing silence. No. No yelling. No rushing around. He felt if he went slamming out of the bedroom and rushing through the unlit house, calling for her, it would tip him irrevocably toward panic. Also, the darkness and quiet of the bedroom appalled him, and he understood that he was afraid to go looking for her, afraid of what might be waiting beyond the door.

As he stood there, he became aware of a guttural rumble, the sound of an idling engine. He rolled his eyes back, looked at the ceiling. It was lit an icy white, someone’s headlights, pointing in from the driveway below. He could hear the dogs barking.

Jude crossed to the window and shifted aside the curtain.

The pickup parked out front had been blue once, but it was at least twenty years old and had not seen another coat in all that time, had faded to the color of smoke. It was a Chevy, a working truck. Jude had whiled away two years of his life twisting a wrench in an auto garage for $1.75 an hour, and he knew from the deep, ferocious mutter of the idling engine that it had a big block under the hood. The front end was all aggression and menace, with a wide silver bumper like a boxer’s mouthpiece and an iron brush guard bolted over the grill. What he had taken at first for headlights were a pair of floods attached to the brush guard, two round spots pouring their glare into the night. The pickup sat almost a full foot off the ground on four 35s, a truck built for running on washed-out swamp roads, banging through the ruts and choking brush of the Deep South, the bottoms. The engine was running. No one was in it.

The dogs flung themselves against the chain-link wall of the pen, a steady crash and clang, yapping at the empty pickup. Jude peered down the driveway, in the direction of the road. The gates were closed. You had to know a six-digit security code to get them open.

It was the dead man’s truck. Jude knew the moment he saw it, knew with a calm, utter certainty. His next thought was, Where we going, old man?

The phone by the bed chirped, and Jude half jumped in surprise, letting go of the curtain. He turned and stared. The clock beside the phone read 3:12. The phone rang again.

Jude moved toward it, tiptoeing quickly across cold floorboards. Stared down at it. It rang a third time. He didn’t want to answer. He had an idea it would be the dead man, and Jude didn’t want to talk to him. Jude didn’t want to hear Craddock’s voice.

“Fuck it,” he said, and he answered. “Who is it?”

“Hey, Chief. It’s Dan.”

“Danny? It’s three in the morning.”

“Oh. I didn’t know it was so late. Were you asleep?”

“No.” Jude fell silent, waited.

“I’m sorry I left like I did.”

“Are you drunk?” Jude asked. He looked at the window again, the blue-tinted glare of the floodlights shining around the edges of the curtains. “Are you calling drunk because you want your job back? Because if you are, this is the wrong fuckin’ time—”

“No. I can’t…I can’t come back, Jude. I was just calling to say I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I said anything about the ghost for sale. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

“Go to bed.”

“I can’t.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I’m out walking in the dark. I don’t even know where I am.”

Jude felt the back of his arms prickling with goose bumps. The thought of Danny out on the streets somewhere, shuffling around in the dark, disturbed him more than it should’ve, more than made sense.

“How’d you get there?”

“I just went walking. I don’t even know why.”

“Jesus, you’re drunk. Take a look around for a street sign and call a fuckin’ cab,” Jude said, and hung up.

He was glad to let go of the phone. He hadn’t liked Danny’s tone of spaced-out, unhappy confusion.

It wasn’t that Danny had said anything so incredible or unlikely. It was just that they’d never had a conversation like it before. Danny had never called in the night, and he’d never called drunk. It was difficult to imagine him going for a walk at 3:00 A.M., or walking so far from his home as to get lost. And whatever his other flaws, Danny was a problem solver. That was why Jude had kept him on the payroll for eight years. Even shitfaced, Danny probably wouldn’t call Jude first if he didn’t know where he was. He’d walk to a 7-Eleven and get directions. He’d flag down a cop car.

No. It was all wrong. The phone call and the dead man’s truck in the driveway were two parts of the same thing. Jude knew. His nerves told him so. The empty bed told him so.

He glanced again at the curtain, lit from behind by those floods. The dogs were going crazy out there.

Georgia. What mattered now was finding Georgia. Then they could figure out about that truck. Together they could get a handle on the situation.

Jude looked at the door to the hallway. He flexed his fingers, his hands numb from the cold. He didn’t want to go out there, didn’t want to open the door and see Craddock sitting in that chair with his hat on his knee and that razor on a chain dangling from one hand.

But the thought of seeing the dead man again—of facing whatever was next—held him for only a moment more. Then he came unstuck, went to the door, and opened it.

“Let’s do it,” he said to the hallway before he had even seen if anyone was there.

No one was.

Jude paused, listening past his own just slightly haggard breathing to the quiet of the house. The long hall was draped in shadows, the Shaker chair against the wall empty. No. Not empty. A black fedora rested in the seat.

Noises—muffled and distant—caught his attention: the murmur of voices on a television, the distant crash of surf. He pulled his gaze away from the fedora and looked to the end of the hallway. Blue light flickered and raced at the edges of the door to the studio. Georgia was in there, then, watching TV after all.

Jude hesitated at the door, listening. He heard a voice shouting in Spanish, a TV voice. The sound of surf was louder. Jude meant to call her name then, Marybeth—not Georgia, Marybeth—but something bad happened when he tried: His breath gave out on him. He was able to produce only a wheeze in the faint sound of her name.

He opened the door.

Georgia was across the room in the recliner, in front of his flat-screen TV. From where he stood, he couldn’t see anything of her but the back of her head, the fluffy swirl of her black hair surrounded by a nimbus of unnatural blue light. Her head also largely blocked the view of whatever was on the TV, although he could see palm trees and tropical blue sky. It was dark, the lights in the room switched off.

She didn’t respond when he said, “Georgia,” and his next thought was that she was dead. When he got to her, her eyes would be rolled up in their sockets.

He started toward her, but had only gone a couple of steps when the phone rang on the desk.

Jude could view enough of the TV now to see a chubby Mex in sunglasses and a beige jogging suit, standing at the side of a dirt track in jungly hill country somewhere. Jude knew what she was watching then, although he hadn’t looked at it in several years. It was the snuff film.

At the sound of the phone, Georgia’s head seemed to move just slightly, and he thought he heard her exhale, a strained, effortful breath. Not dead, then. But she didn’t otherwise react, didn’t look around, didn’t get up to answer.

He took a step to the desk, caught the phone on the second ring.

“That you, Danny? Are you still lost?” Jude asked.

“Yeah,” Danny said with a weak laugh. “Still lost. I’m on this pay phone in the middle of nowhere. It’s funny, you almost never see pay phones anymore.”

Georgia did not glance around at the sound of Jude’s voice, did not shift her gaze from the TV.

“I hope you aren’t calling because you want me to come looking for you,” Jude said. “I’ve got my hands full at the moment. If I have to come looking for you, you better hope you stay lost.”

“I figured it out, Chief. How I got here. Out on this road in the dark.”

“How’s that?”

“I killed myself. I hung myself a few hours ago. This road in the dark…this is dead.”

Jude’s scalp crawled, a trickling, icy sensation, almost painful.

Danny said, “My mother hung herself just the same way. She did a better job, though. She broke her neck. Died instantly. I lost my nerve at the last second. I didn’t fall hard enough. I strangled to death.”

From the television across the room came gagging sounds, as if someone were strangling to death.

“It took a long time, Jude,” Danny went on. “I remember swinging for a long time. Looking at my feet. I’m remembering lots of things now.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“He made me. The dead man. He came to see me. I was going to come back to the office and find those letters for you. I was thinking I could at least do that much. I was thinking I shouldn’t have bailed out on you like I did. But when I went in my bedroom to get my coat, he was waiting there. I didn’t even know how to knot a noose until he showed me,” Danny said. “That’s how he’s going to get you. He’s going to make you kill yourself.”

“No he’s not.”

“It’s hard not to listen to his voice. I couldn’t fight it. He knew too much. He knew I gave my sister the heroin she OD’d on. He said that was why my mother killed herself, because she couldn’t live knowing what I had done. He said I should’ve been the one to hang, not my mom. He said if I had any decency, I would’ve killed myself a long time ago. He was right.”

“No, Danny,” Jude said. “No. He wasn’t right. You shouldn’t—”

Danny sounded short of breath. “I did. I had to. There was no arguing with him. You can’t argue with a voice like that.”

“We’ll see,” Jude said.

Danny had no reply for that. In the snuff film, two men were bickering in Spanish. The choking sounds went on and on. Georgia still did not look away. She was moving just slightly, shoulders hitching now and then in a series of random, almost spastic shrugs.

“I have to go, Danny.” Still Danny said nothing. Jude listened to the faint crackle on the line for a moment, sensing that Danny was waiting for something, some final word, and at last he added, “You keep walking, boy. That road must go somewhere.”

Danny laughed. “You aren’t as bad as you think, Jude. You know that?”

“Yeah. Don’t tell.”

“Your secret is safe,” Danny said. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Danny.”

Jude leaned forward, gently set the phone back in its cradle. As he was bent across the desk, he glanced down and behind it and saw that the floor safe was open. His initial thought was the ghost had opened it, an idea he discarded almost immediately. Georgia, more likely. She knew the combination.

He pivoted, looked at the back of her head, at the halo of flickering blue light, at the television beyond.

“Georgia? What are you doin’, darlin’?”

She didn’t reply.

He came forward, moving silently across the thick carpet. The picture on the flat-screen came into view first. The killers were finishing off the skinny white kid. Later they would get his girlfriend in a cinder-block hut close to a beach. Now, though, they were on an overgrown track somewhere in the bush, in the hills above the Gulf of California. The kid was on his stomach, his wrists bound together by a pair of white plastic flexi-cuffs. His skin was fish-belly pale in the tropical sunlight. A diminutive, walleyed Anglo, with a clownish Afro of crinkly red hair, stood with one cowboy boot on the kid’s neck. Parked down the road was a black van, the back doors thrown open. Next to the rear fender was the chubby Mex in the warm-up suit, an affronted expression hung on his face.

“Nos estamos yendo,” said the man in the sunglasses. “Ahora.”

The walleyed redhead made a face and shook his head, as if in disagreement, but then pointed the little revolver at the skinny kid’s head and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flashed. The kid’s head snapped forward, hit the ground, bounced back. The air around his head was suddenly clouded with a fine spray of blood.

The Anglo took his boot off the boy’s neck and stepped daintily away, careful to get no blood on his cowboy boots.

Georgia’s face was a pale, rigid blank, her eyes wide and unblinking, gaze fixed on the television. She wore the Ramones T-shirt she’d had on earlier, but no underwear, and her legs were open. In one hand—the bad hand—she had clumsy hold of Jude’s pistol, and the barrel was pushed deep into her mouth. Her other hand was between her legs, thumb moving up and down.

“Georgia,” he said, and for an instant she shot a sidelong glance at him—a helpless, pleading glance—then immediately looked back to the TV. Her bad hand rotated the gun, turning it upside down, to point the barrel against the roof of her mouth. She made a weak choking sound on it.

The remote control was on the armrest. Jude hit the power button. The television blinked off. Her shoulders leaped, a nervous, reflexive shrug. The left hand kept working between her legs. She shivered, made a strained, unhappy sound in her throat.

“Stop it,” Jude said.

She pulled the hammer back with her thumb. It made a loud snap in the silence of the studio.

Jude reached past her and gently pried the gun out of her grip. Her whole body went abruptly, perfectly still. Her breath whistled, short and fast. Her mouth was wet, glistening faintly, and it came to him then that he was semihard. His cock had begun to stiffen at the smell of her in the air and the sight of her fingers teasing her clit, and she was at just the right height. If he moved in front of the chair, she could suck his dick while he held the gun to her head, he could stick the barrel in her ear while he shoved his cock—

He saw a flicker of motion, reflected in the partly open window beyond his desk, and his gaze jumped to the image in the glass. He could see himself there and the dead man standing beside him, hunched and whispering in his ear. In the reflection Jude could see that his own arm had come up, and he was holding the pistol to Georgia’s head.

His heart lurched, all the blood rushing to it in a sudden, adrenalized burst. He looked down, saw it was true, he was holding the gun to her head, saw his finger squeezing the trigger. He tried to stop himself, but it was already too late—he pulled it, waited in horror for the hammer to fall.

It didn’t fall. The trigger wouldn’t depress the last quarter inch. The safety was on.

“Fuck,” Jude hissed, and lowered the gun, trembling furiously now. He used his thumb to ease the hammer back down. When he had settled it into place, he flung the pistol away from himself.

It banged heavily against the desk, and Georgia flinched at the sound. Her stare, however, remained fixed on some abstract point off in the darkness before her.

Jude turned, looking for Craddock’s ghost. No one stood beside him. The room was empty, except for himself and Georgia. He turned back to her and tugged on her slender white wrist.

“Get up,” he said. “Come on. We’re going. Right now. I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re getting out of here. We’re going someplace where there are lots of people and bright lights, and we’re going to try to figure this out. You hear me?” He could no longer recall his logic for staying. Logic was out the window.

“He isn’t done with us,” she said, her voice a shuddering whisper.

He pulled, but she didn’t rise, her body rigid in the chair, uncooperative. She still wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t look anywhere except straight ahead.

“Come on,” he said. “While there’s time.”

“There is no more time,” she said.

The television blinked on again.

18

It was the evening news. Bill Beutel, who had started his journalism career when the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the breaking story of the day, sat stiffly behind the news desk. His face was a network of spiderweb wrinkles, radiating out from around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. His features were set in their grief expression, the look that said there was more bad news in the Middle East or that a school bus had gone off the interstate and rolled, killing all passengers, or a tornado in the South had inhaled a trailer park and coughed out a mess of ironing boards, splintered shutters, and human bodies.

“…there will be no survivors. We’ll bring you more as the situation continues to unfold,” Beutel said. He turned his head slightly, and the reflected blue screen of the teleprompter floated in the lenses of his bifocals for a moment. “Late this afternoon the Dutchess County sheriff ’s department confirmed that Judas Coyne, the popular lead singer of Jude’s Hammer, apparently shot and killed his girlfriend, Marybeth Stacy Kimball, before turning the weapon on himself to take his own life.”

The program cut to video of Jude’s farmhouse, framed against a sky of dingy, featureless white. Police cruisers had parked haphazardly in the turnaround, and an ambulance stood backed up almost to the door of Danny’s office.

Beutel continued to speak in voice-over: “Police are only beginning to piece together the picture of Coyne’s last days. But statements from those who knew him suggest he had been distraught and was worried about his own mental health.”

The footage jumped to a shot of the dogs in their pen. They were on their sides in the short, stubbly grass, neither of them moving, legs stretched stiffly away from their bodies. They were dead. Jude tightened up at the sight of them. It was a bad thing to see. He wanted to look away but couldn’t seem to pry his gaze free.

“Detectives also believe that Coyne played a role in the death of his personal assistant, Daniel Wooten, thirty, who was found in his Woodstock home earlier this morning, also an apparent suicide.”

Cut to two paramedics, one at either end of a sagging blue plastic body bag. Georgia made a soft, unhappy sound in her throat, watching one of the paramedics climb backward into the ambulance, hefting his end.

Beutel began to talk about Jude’s career, and they cut away to file footage of Jude onstage in Houston, a clip six years old. Jude was in black jeans and black steel-toed boots, but bare-chested, his torso glowing with sweat, the bearish fur on it plastered to his breast, stomach heaving. A sea of a hundred thousand half-naked people surged below him, a rioting flood of raised fists, crowd surfers tumbling this way and that along the flow of humanity beneath.

Dizzy was already dying by then, although at the time almost no one except Jude knew. Dizzy with his heroin addiction and his AIDS. They played back-to-back, Dizzy’s mane of blond hair in his face, the wind blowing it across his mouth. It was the last year the band had been together. Dizzy died, and Jerome, and then it was over.

In the file footage, they were playing the title song off their final album as a group, “Put You in Yer Place”; their last hit, the last really good song Jude had written, and at the sound of those drums—a furious cannonade—he was jolted free from whatever hold the television seemed to have over him. That had been real. Houston had happened, that day had happened. The engulfing, mad rush of the crowd below and the engulfing, mad rush of the music around him. It was real, it had happened, and all the rest was—

“Bullshit,” Jude said, and his thumb hit the power button. The television popped off.

“It isn’t true,” Georgia said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “It isn’t true, is it? Are we…are you…Is that going to happen to us?”

“No,” Jude said.

And the television popped back on. Bill Beutel sat behind the news desk again, a sheaf of papers clasped in his hands, his shoulders squared to the camera.

“Yes,” Bill said. “You will both be dead. The dead pull the living down. You will get the gun, and she will try to get away, but you will catch her, and you will—”

Jude hit the power button again, then threw the remote control at the screen of the television. He went after it, put his foot on the screen and then straightened his leg, shoved the television straight through the open back of the cabinet. It hit the wall, and something flared, a white light going off like a flashbulb. The flat-screen dropped out of sight into the space between cabinet and wall, hit with a crunch of plastic and a short, electrical, fizzing sound that lasted for only a moment before ending. Another day of this and there would be nothing left to the house.

He turned, and the dead man stood behind Georgia’s chair. Craddock’s ghost reached around the back to cup her head between his hands. Black lines danced and shimmered before the old man’s eye sockets.

Georgia did not try to move or look around, was as still as a person faced with a poisonous snake, afraid to do anything—even to breathe—for fear of being struck.

“You didn’t come for her,” Jude said. As he spoke, he was stepping to the left, circling along one side of the room and toward the doorway to the hall. “You don’t want her.”

In one instant Craddock’s hands were gently cradling Georgia’s head. In the next his right arm had come up to point out and away from his body: Sieg heil. Around the dead man, time had a way of skipping, a scratched DVD, the picture stuttering erratically from moment to moment, without any transitions in between. The golden chain fell from his raised right hand. The razor, shaped like a crescent moon, gleamed brilliantly at the end. The edge of the blade was faintly iridescent, the way a rainbow slick of oil is on water.

Time to ride, Jude.

“Go away,” Jude said.

If you want me to go, you just have to listen to my voice. You have to listen hard. You have to be like a radio, and my voice is the broadcast. After nightfall it’s nice to have some radio. If you want this to end, you have to listen hard as you can. You have to want it to end with all your heart. Don’t you want it to end?

Jude tightened his jaw, clamped his teeth together. He wasn’t going to answer, sensed somehow it would be a mistake to give any reply, then was startled to find himself nodding slowly.

Don’t you want to listen hard? I know you do. I know. Listen. You can tune out the whole world and hear nothing but my voice. Because you are listening so hard.

And Jude went on nodding, bobbing his head slowly up and down, while around him all the other sounds of the room fell away. Jude had not even been aware of these other noises until they were gone: the low rumble of the truck idling outside, the thin whine of Georgia’s breath in her throat, matched by Jude’s own harsh gasping. His ears rang at the sudden utter absence of sound, as if his eardrums had been numbed by a shattering explosion.

The naked razor swayed in little arcs, back and forth, back and forth. Jude dreaded the sight of it, forced himself to look away.

You don’t need to look at it, Craddock told him. I’m dead. I don’t need a pendulum to get inside your mind. I’m there already.

And Jude found his gaze sliding back to it anyway, couldn’t help himself.

“Georgia,” Jude said, or tried to say. He felt the word on his lips, in his mouth, in the shape of his breath, but did not hear his own voice, did not hear anything in that awful, enveloping silence. He had never heard any noise as loud as that particular silence.

I am not going to kill her. No, sir, said the dead man. His voice never varied in tone, was patient, understanding, a low, resonant hum that brought to mind the sound of bees in the hive. You are. You will. You want to.

Jude opened his mouth to tell him how wrong he was, said, “Yes,” instead. Or assumed he said it. It was more like a loud thought.

Craddock said, Good boy.

Georgia was beginning to cry, although she was making a visible effort to hold herself still, not to tremble. Jude couldn’t hear her. Craddock’s blade slashed back and forth, whisking through the air.

I don’t want to hurt her, don’t make me hurt her, Jude thought.

It ain’t going to be the way you want it. Get the gun, you hear? Do it now.

Jude began to move. He felt subtly disconnected from his body, a witness, not a participant in the scene playing itself out. He was too empty-headed to dread what he was about to do. He knew only that he had to do it if he wanted to wake up.

But before he reached the gun, Georgia was out of the chair and bolting for the door. He didn’t have any idea she could move, thought that Craddock had been holding her there somehow, but it had just been fear holding her, and she was already almost by him.

Stop her, said the only voice left in the world, and as she lunged past him, Jude saw himself catch her hair in one fist and snap her head back. She was wrenched off her feet. Jude pivoted and threw her down. The furniture jumped when she hit the floor. A stack of CDs on an end table slid off and crashed to the floor without a sound. Jude’s foot found her stomach, a good hard kick, and she jerked herself into a fetal position. The moment after he’d done it, he didn’t know why he’d done it.

There you go, said the dead man.

It disoriented Jude, the way the dead man’s voice came at him out of the silence, words that had an almost physical presence, bees whirring and chasing one another around the inside of his head. His head was the hive that they flew into and out of, and without them there was a waxy, honeycombed emptiness. His head was too light and too hollow, and he would go mad if he didn’t get his own thoughts back, his own voice. The dead man was saying now, You need to show that cunt. If you don’t mind me sayin’ so. Now get the gun. Hurry.

Jude turned to get the gun, moving quickly now. Across the floor, to the desk, the gun at his feet, down on one knee to pick it up.

Jude did not hear the dogs until he was reaching for the revolver. One high-strung yap, then another. His attention snagged on that sound like a loose sleeve catching on a protruding nail. It shocked him, to hear anything else in that bottomless silence besides Craddock’s voice. The window behind the desk was still parted slightly, as he had left it. Another bark, shrill, furious, and another. Angus. Then Bon.

Come on now, boy. Come on and do it.

Jude’s gaze flitted to the little wastebasket next to the desk and to the pieces of the platinum record shoved into it. A nest of chrome knife blades sticking straight up into the air. The dogs were both barking in unison now, a tear in the fabric of the quiet, and the sound of them called to mind, unbidden, their smell, the stink of damp dog fur, the hot animal reek of their breath. Jude could see his face reflected in one of those silver record shards, and it jolted him: his own rigid, staring look of desperation, of horror. And in the next moment, mingled with the relentless yawping of the dogs, he had a thought that was his own, in his own voice. The only power he has, over either one of you, is the power you give him.

In the next instant, Jude reached past the gun and put his hand over the wastebasket. He set the ball of his left palm on the sharpest, longest-looking spear of silver and lunged, driving all his weight down onto it. The blade sank into meat, and he felt a tearing pain lance through his hand and into the wrist. Jude cried out, and his eyes blurred, stung with tears. He instantly yanked his palm free from the blade, then clapped his right hand and the left together. Blood spurted between them.