Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill Page B

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 wasonly 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
    H e 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