Full Dark, No Stars

The door-latch began moving. At first it only trembled, as if the hand trying to operate it was too weak to lift it entirely clear of the notch. The movement ceased, and I had just decided I hadn’t seen it at al —that it was a delusion born of the fever—when it went al the way up with a little clack sound and the door swung open on a cold breath of wind. Standing on the porch was my wife. She was stil wearing her burlap snood, now flecked with snow; it must have been a slow and painful journey from what should have been her final resting place. Her face was slack with decay, the lower half slewed to one side, her grin wider than ever. It was a knowing grin, and why not? The dead understand everything.

She was surrounded by her loyal court. It was they that had somehow gotten her out of the wel . It was they that were holding her up. Without them, she would have been no more than a ghost,

malevolent but helpless. But they had animated her. She was their queen; she was also their puppet. She came into the kitchen, moving with a horribly boneless gait that had nothing to do with walking.

The rats scurried al around her, some looking up at her with love, some at me with hate. She swayed al the way around the kitchen, touring what had been her domain as clods fel from the skirt of her dress (there was no sign of the quilt or the counterpane) and her head bobbed and rol ed on her cut throat. Once it tilted back al the way to her shoulder blades before snapping forward again with a low and fleshy smacking sound.

When she at last turned her cloudy eyes on me, I backed into the corner where the woodbox stood, now almost empty. “Leave me alone,” I whispered. “You aren’t even here. You’re in the wel and you

can’t get out even if you’re not dead.”

She made a gurgling noise—it sounded like someone choking on thick gravy—and kept coming, real enough to cast a shadow. And I could smel her decaying flesh, this woman who had sometimes

put her tongue in my mouth during the throes of her passion. She was there. She was real. So was her royal retinue. I could feel them scurrying back and forth over my feet and tickling my ankles with their whiskers as they sniffed at the bottoms of my longjohn trousers.

My heels struck the woodbox, and when I tried to bend away from the approaching corpse, I overbalanced and sat down in it. I banged my swol en and infected hand, but hardly registered the pain.

She was bending over me, and her face… dangled. The flesh had come loose from the bones and her face hung down like a face drawn on a child’s bal oon. A rat climbed the side of the woodbox,

plopped onto my bel y, ran up my chest, and sniffed at the underside of my chin. I could feel others scurrying around beneath my bent knees. But they didn’t bite me. That particular task had already been accomplished.

She bent closer. The smel of her was overwhelming, and her cocked ear-to-ear grin… I can see it now, as I write. I told myself to die, but my heart kept pounding. Her hanging face slid alongside

mine. I could feel my beard-stubble pul ing off tiny bits of her skin; could hear her broken jaw grinding like a branch with ice on it. Then her cold lips were pressed against the burning, feverish cup of my ear, and she began whispering secrets that only a dead woman could know. I shrieked. I promised to kil myself and take her place in Hel if she would only stop. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. The dead don’t stop.

That’s what I know now.

After fleeing the First Agricultural Bank with 200 dol ars stuffed into his pocket (or probably more like 150 dol ars; some of it went on the floor, remember), Henry disappeared for a little while. He “laid low,” in the criminal parlance. I say this with a certain pride. I thought he would be caught almost immediately after he got to the city, but he proved me wrong. He was in love, he was desperate, he was stil burning with guilt and horror over the crime he and I had committed… but in spite of those distractions (those infections), my son demonstrated bravery and cleverness, even a certain sad nobility. The thought of that last is the worst. It stil fil s me with melancholy for his wasted life ( three wasted lives; I mustn’t forget poor pregnant Shannon Cotterie) and shame for the ruination to which I led him, like a calf with a rope around its neck.

Arlette showed me the shack where he went to ground, and the bicycle stashed out back—that bicycle was the first thing he purchased with his stolen cash. I couldn’t have told you then exactly where

his hideout was, but in the years since I have located it and even visited it; just a side-o’-the-road lean-to with a fading Royal Crown Cola advertisement painted on the side. It was a few miles beyond Omaha’s western outskirts and within sight of Boys Town, which had begun operating the year before. One room, a single glassless window, and no stove. He covered the bicycle with hay and weeds and