Read Online Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill - Free Book Online Page B

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 notwhen 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