Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill

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 waspulled 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.
     
    C raddock 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