20th Century Ghosts (2 page)

As the car begins to move, though, so does the boy. He touches her hip and Cate bites back a startled scream. He moves his hand over her body, touching her face last. He whispers that his name is Jim, and that he's been traveling with the giant for a week, ever since the big man killed his parents.

"He made holes in my eyes and he said after he did it he saw my soul rush out. He said it made a sound like when you blow on an empty Coke bottle, real pretty. Then he put these over my eyes to keep my life trapped inside." As he speaks, Jim touches the smiley-face buttons. "He wants to see how long I can live without a soul inside me."

The giant drives them both to a desolate campground, in a nearby state park, where he forces Cate and Jim to fondle one another sexually. When he feels that Cate is failing to kiss Jim with convincing passion, he slashes her face, and removes her tongue. In the ensuing chaos—Jim shrieking in alarm, staggering about blindly, blood everywhere—Cate is able to escape into the trees. Three hours later she staggers out onto a highway, hysterical, drenched in blood.

Her kidnapper is never apprehended. He and Jim drive out of the national park and off the edge of the world. Investigators are unable to determine a single useful fact about the two. They don't know who Jim is or where he's from, and know even less about the giant.

Two weeks after her release from the hospital, a single clue turns up by U.S. mail. Cate receives an envelope containing a pair of smiley-face buttons—steel pins caked with dry blood—and a Polaroid of a bridge in Kentucky. The next morning a diver finds a boy there, on the river bottom, horribly decomposed, fish darting in and out of his empty eye sockets.

Cate, who was once attractive and well liked, finds herself the object of pity and horror among those who know her. She understands the way other people feel. The sight of her own face in the mirror repels her as well. She attends a special school for a time and learns sign language, but she doesn't stay long. The other cripples—the deaf, the lame, the disfigured—disgust her with their neediness, their dependencies.

Cate tries, without much luck, to resume a normal life. She has no close friends, no employable skills, and is self-conscious about her looks, her inability to speak. In one particularly painful scene, Cate drinks her way into courage, and makes a pass at a man in a bar, only to be ridiculed by him and his friends.

Her sleep is troubled by regular nightmares, in which she relives unlikely and dreadful variations on her abduction. In some, Jim is not a fellow victim, but in on the kidnapping, and rapes her with vigor. The buttons stuck through his eyes are mirrored discs that show a distorted image of her own screaming face, which, with perfect dream logic, has already been hacked into a grotesque mask. Infrequently, these dreams leave her aroused. Her therapist says this is common. She fires the therapist when she discovers he's doodled a horrid caricature of her in his notebook.

Cate tries different things to help her sleep: gin, painkillers, heroin. She needs money for drugs and goes looking for it in her father's dresser. He catches her at it and chases her out. That night her mother calls to tell her Dad is in the hospital—he had a minor stroke—and please don't come to see him. Not long after, at a day care center for disabled children, where Cate is part-timing, one child pokes a pencil into another child's eye, blinding him. The incident clearly isn't Cate's fault, but in the aftermath, her assorted addictions become public knowledge. She loses her job and, even after kicking her habit, finds herself nearly unemployable.

Then, one cool fall day, she comes out of a local supermarket, and walks past a police car parked out back. The hood is up. A policeman in mirrored sunglasses is studying an overheated radiator. She happens to glance in the backseat—and there, with his hands cuffed behind his back, is her giant, ten years older and fifty pounds heavier.

She struggles to stay calm. She approaches the trooper working under the hood, writes him a note, asks him if he knows who he has in the backseat. He says it's a guy who was arrested at a hardware store on Pleasant Street, trying to shoplift a hunting knife and a roll of heavy-duty duct tape.

Cate knows the hardware store in question. She lives around the corner from it. The officer takes her arm before her legs can give out on her.

She begins to write frantic notes, tries to explain what the giant did to her when she was seventeen. Her pen can't keep pace with her thoughts, and the notes she writes hardly make sense, even to her, but the officer gets the gist. He guides her around to the passenger seat, and opens the door. The thought of getting in the same car with her abductor makes her dizzy with fear—she begins to shiver uncontrollably—but the police officer reminds her the giant is handcuffed in the back, unable to hurt her, and that it's important for her to come with them to the precinct house.

At last she settles into the passenger seat. At her feet is a winter jacket. The police officer says it's his coat, and she should put it on, it'll keep her warm, help with her shivering. She looks up at him, prepares to scribble a thank you on her notepad—then goes still, finds herself unable to write. Something about the sight of her own face, reflected in his sunglasses, causes her to freeze up.

He closes the door and goes around to the front of the car to shut the hood. With numb fingers she reaches down to get his coat. Pinned to the front, one on each breast, are two smiley-face buttons. She reaches for the door, but it won't unlock. The window won't roll down. The hood slams. The man behind the sunglasses who is not a police officer is grinning a hideous grin. Buttonboy continues around the car, past the driver's side door, to let the giant out of the back. After all, a person needs eyes to drive.

In thick forest, it's easy for a person to get lost and walk around in circles, and for the first time, Cate can see this is what happened to her. She escaped Buttonboy and the giant by running into the woods, but she never made her way out—not really—has been stumbling around in the dark and the brush ever since, traveling in a great and pointless circle back to them. She's arrived where she was always headed, at last, and this thought, rather than terrifying her, is oddly soothing. It seems to her she belongs with them, and there is a kind of relief in that, in belonging somewhere. Cate relaxes into her seat, unconsciously pulling Buttonboy's coat around her against the cold.
 

It didn't surprise Eddie Carroll to hear Noonan had been excoriated for publishing "Buttonboy." The story lingered on images of female degradation, and the heroine had been written as a somewhat willing accomplice to her own emotional, sexual, and spiritual mistreatment. This was bad ... but Joyce Carol Gates wrote stories just like it for journals no different than
The True North Review
, and won awards for them. The really unforgivable literary sin was the shock ending.

Carroll had seen it coming—after reading almost ten thousand stories of horror and the supernatural, it was hard to sneak up on him—but he had enjoyed it nonetheless. Among the literary cognoscenti, though, a surprise ending (no matter how well executed) was the mark of childish, commercial fiction and bad TV. The readers of
The True North Review
were, he imagined, middle-aged academics, people who taught Grendel and Ezra Pound and who dreamed heartbreaking dreams about someday selling a poem to
The New Yorker
. For them, coming across a shock ending in a short story was akin to hearing a ballerina rip a noisy fart during a performance of
Swan Lake
—a faux pas so awful it bordered on the hilarious. Professor Harold Noonan either had not been rooming in the ivory tower for long or was subconsciously hoping someone would hand him his walking papers.

Although the ending was more John Carpenter than John Updike, Carroll hadn't come across anything like it in any of the horror magazines, either, not lately. It was, for twenty-five pages, the almost completely naturalistic story of a woman being destroyed a little at a time by the steady wear of survivor's guilt. It concerned itself with tortured family relationships, shitty jobs, the struggle for money. Carroll had forgotten what it was like to come across the bread of everyday life in a short story. Most horror fiction didn't bother with anything except rare bleeding meat.

He found himself pacing his office, too excited to settle, "Buttonboy" folded open in one hand. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window behind the couch and saw himself grinning in a way that was almost indecent, as if he had just heard a particularly good dirty joke.

Carroll was eleven years old when he saw
The Haunting
in The Oregon Theater. He had gone with his cousins, but when the lights went down, his companions were swallowed by the dark and Carroll found himself essentially alone, shut tight into his own suffocating cabinet of shadows. At times, it required all his will not to hide his eyes, yet his insides churned with a nervous-sick frisson of pleasure. When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.

Later, when he was a professional and it was his business, his feelings were more muted—not gone, but experienced distantly, more like the memory of an emotion than the thing itself. More recently, even the memory had fled, and in its place was a deadening amnesia, a numb disinterest when he looked at the piles of magazines on his coffee table. Or no—he was overcome with dread, but the wrong kind of dread.

This, though, here in his office, fresh from the depredations of "Buttonboy" ... this was the authentic fix. It had clanged that inner bell and left him vibrating. He couldn't settle, wasn't used to exuberance. He tried to think when, if ever, he had last published a story he liked as much as "Buttonboy." He went to the shelf and pulled down the first volume of
Best New Horror
(still the best), curious to see what he had been excited about then. But looking for the table of contents, he flipped it open to the dedication, which was to his then-wife, Elizabeth. "Who helps me find my way in the dark," he had written, in a dizzy fit of affection. Looking at it now caused the skin on his arms to crawl.

Elizabeth had left him after he discovered she had been sleeping with their investment banker for over a year. She went to stay with her mother, and took Tracy with her.
"In a way I'm almost glad you caught us," she said, talking to him on the phone, a few weeks after her flight from his life. "To have it over with."

"The affair?" he asked, wondering if she was about to tell him she had broken it off.

"No," Lizzie said. "I mean all your horror shit, and all those people who are always coming to see you, the horror people. Sweaty little grubs who get hard over corpses. That's the best part of this. Thinking maybe now Tracy can have a normal childhood. Thinking I'm finally going to get to have a life with healthy, ordinary grown-ups."

It was bad enough she had fucked around like she had, but that she would throw Tracy in his face that way made him short of breath with hatred, even now. He flung the book back at the shelf and slouched away for the kitchen and lunch, his restless excitement extinguished at last. He had been looking to use up all that useless distracting energy. Good old Lizzie—still doing him favors, even from forty miles away and another man's bed.
 

That afternoon he e-mailed Harold Noonan, asking for Kilrue's contact information. Noonan got back to him less than an hour later, very much pleased to hear that Carroll wanted "Buttonboy" for
Best New Horror
. He didn't have an e-mail address for Peter Kilrue, but he did have an address of the more ordinary variety, and a phone number.

But the letter Carroll wrote came back to him, stamped RETURN TO SENDER, and when he rang the phone number, he got a recording:
This line has been disconnected.
Carroll called Harold Noonan at Katahdin University.

"I can't say I'm shocked," Noonan said, voice rapid and soft, hitching with shyness. "I got the impression he's something of a transient. I think he patches together part-time jobs to pay his bills. Probably the best thing would be to call Morton Boyd in the grounds department. I imagine they have a file on him."

"When's the last time you saw him?"

"I dropped in on him last March. I went by his apartment just after 'Buttonboy' was published, when the outrage was running at full boil. People saying his story was misogynistic hate speech, saying there should be a published apology and such nonsense. I wanted to let him know what was happening. I guess I was hoping he'd want to fire back in some way, write a defense of his story for the student paper or something ... although he didn't. Said it would be weak. Actually, it was a strange kind of visit. He's a strange kind of guy. It isn't just his stories. It's him."

"What do you mean?"

Noonan laughed. "I'm not sure. What am I saying? You know how when you're running a fever, you'll look at something totally normal—like the lamp on your desk—and it'll seem somehow unnatural? Like it's melting or getting ready to waddle away? Encounters with Peter Kilrue can be kind of like that. I don't know why. Maybe because he's so intense about such troubling things."

Carroll hadn't even got in touch with him yet, and liked him already. "What things?"

"When I went to see him, his older brother answered the door. Half-dressed. I guess he was staying with him. And this guy was—I don't want to be insensitive—but I would say disturbingly fat. And tattooed. Disturbingly tattooed. On his stomach there was a windmill, with rotted corpses hanging from it. On his back, there was a fetus with—scribbled-over eyes. And a scalpel in one fist. And fangs."

Carroll laughed, but he wasn't sure it was funny.

Noonan went on, "But he was a good guy. Friendly as all get-out. Led me in, got me a can of soda, we all sat on the couch in front of the TV. And—this is very amusing—while we were talking, and I was catching them up on the outcry, the older brother sat on the floor, while Peter gave him a homemade piercing."