Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill Page B

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. Hewatched, 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