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 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 onto 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 anymore 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.
Chapter Two
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 imposters, 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 make-up. 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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Heart Shaped Box
by Joe Hill
Copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
William Morrow
Copyright © 2007
Joe Hill
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-114793-7
