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

enthusiasms—he really didn’t give a fuck; it was like wearing leather pants, just part of the costume—sent him even more (admittedly fascinating) reading: an obscure manual, printed by the Catholic Church in the thirties, for performing exorcisms; a translation of a five-hundred-year-old book of perverted, unholy psalms written by a mad Templar; a cookbook for cannibals.
    Jude placed the box of bullets up on the shelf among his books, all thoughts of finding a capo and playing some Skynyrd gone. He ran his thumbnail along the spines of the hardcovers. It was cold enough in his studio to make his fingers stiff and clumsy, and it was hard to turn pages, and he didn’t know what he was looking for.
    For a while he struggled to make his way through a strangled discourse on animal familiars, creatures of intense feeling who were bound by love and blood to their masters, and who could deal with the dead directly. But it was written in dense eighteenth-century English, without any punctuation. Jude would labor over a single paragraph for ten minutes, then wouldn’t know what he’d read. He set it aside.
    In another book he lingered on a chapter about possession, by way of demon or hateful spirit. One grotesque illustration showed an old man sprawled on his bed, among tangled sheets, his eyes bulging in horror and his mouth gaping open, while a leering, naked homunculus climbed out from between his lips. Or, a worse thought: Maybe the thing was climbing in.
    Jude read that anyone who held open the golden door of mortality, for a peek at the other side, risked letting something through, and that the ill, the old, and those who loved death were especially in danger. The tone was assertive and knowledgeable, and Jude was encouraged until he read that the best method of protection was to wash yourself in urine. Jude had an open mind when it came to depravity, but he drew the line at water sports, and when the book slipped from his cold hands, he didn’t bother to pick it up. Instead he kicked it away.
    He read about the Borley rectory, about contacting spirit companions by way of the Ouija board, and about the alchemical uses of menstrual blood, his eyes going in and out of focus, and then he was flinging books, lashing them about the studio. Every word was crap. Demons and familiarsand enchanted circles and the magical benefits of piss. One volume swept a lamp off his desk with a crash. Another hit a framed platinum record. A spiderweb of gleaming shatter lines leaped through the glass over the silver disk. The frame dropped from the wall, hit the floor, tilted onto its face with a crunch. Jude’s hand found the candy box full of bullets. It struck the wall, and ammo sprayed across the floor in a ringing clatter.
    He grabbed another book, breathing hard, his blood up, just looking to do some damage now and never mind to what, then caught himself, because the feel of the thing in his hand was all wrong. He looked and saw a black, unlabeled videotape instead. He didn’t know right away what it was, had to think awhile before it came to him. It was his snuff film. It had been sitting on the shelf with the books, apart from the other videos for…what? Four years? It had been there so long he’d stopped seeing it among the hardcovers. It had become just a part of the general clutter on the shelves.
    Jude had walked into the studio one morning and found his wife, Shannon, watching it. He was packing for a trip to New York and had come looking for a guitar to take with him. He stopped in the doorway at the sight of her. Shannon stood in front of the television, watching a man suffocate a naked teenage girl with a clear plastic bag, while other men watched.
    Shannon frowned, her brow wrinkled in concentration, watching the girl in the movie die. He didn’t worry about her temper—anger didn’t impress him—but he’d learned to be wary of her when she was like this, calm and silent and drawn into herself.
    At last she said,