Dagger Key and Other Stories

A bough ticked the side of the cabin; the light-heavy twitched toward the door. Shellane was beginning to understand why Gerbasi enjoyed playing out these scenes—he wanted the fear to grow strong so he could smell it. But though Shellane was not free of fear, it was weak in him, and he thought he must be proving a profound disappointment to Gerbasi.

“You look to me like a man who’s holding good cards, but don’t know he’s in the wrong game,” Gerbasi said.

“Do I have to fucking beg you to shoot?” Shellane asked.

“Hey.” The light-heavy came up beside Gerbasi. “Maybe he’s wearing a wire.”

“He was, they’d already be down on our ass ’cause of what’cha said about Broillard. But something ain’t kosher.” Gerbasi let the gun dangle at his side. “Tell me what’s going on, Roy, or I’m gonna hafta give ya some pain.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do. You understand? I don’t give a shit about anything.”

Gerbasi said, “No, explain it to me.”

“If you had a soul, I wouldn’t need to explain it. You’d feel the same as me. You’d be sickened by what you are.”

“I told ya the guy’s crazy,” said the light-heavy.

“You don’t shut your goddamn mouth, I swear to Christ I’m gonna put one in ya,” Gerbasi told him.

“Jeez!” said the light-heavy. “Fine. Fuck…whatever.”

“The man’s tired of living,” Gerbasi went on. “That’s all he’s saying. Right, Roy?”

“Right.”

“Remember Bobby Sheehan? Man just looks at me and says, ‘Fuck you, Marty.’ Not like he was pissed off. Just weary. Just fed up with it all. I asked, man, I said, ‘Fuck’s wrong with you, Bobby? This how you wanna go out? Like a fucking sick dog?’ And he says, ‘A sick dog’s got it all over me. A sick dog don’t know what’s making it sick.’ It’s kinda like that, ain’t it, Roy?”

“Fuck you, Marty.”

Gerbasi stepped around behind Shellane, and a weakness spread from the center of Shellane’s chest outward, resolving into a chill that coiled the length of his spine. He fixed his eyes on the door, but he seemed to see everything in the room, and he sensed his isolation, the gulf of the surrounding dark with its trillion instances of life. Spiders, beetles, roosting birds, serpents, badgers, moles, fish streaming through the dim forests of the lake bottom. Every least scrap of vitality enviable to him now. Somehow from that darkness he managed to summon the image of Grace’s face. The brightness of her olivine eyes struck deep into him, calmed the fluttering thing that was his life, and filled him with acceptance. This was the end to which he had come. This woman, this unstable chair, this badly hung door, this shabby room drenched in orange lamplight. He felt he was falling forward into a dream.

“You wanna say a prayer?” Gerbasi asked. “I’ll give you a minute.”

Shellane did not answer, absorbed by the particulars of his vision.

“You hear what I said, Roy? Want me to give you a minute?”

“Now would be good,” said Shellane.

In the beginning there was the memory of pain, a pain so vast and white it seemed less a condition of the mind and body than the country of his birth. But it was only a memory and did not afflict him for long. There followed a period of vagueness and confusion, but as he walked, moving through the dark, fogbound country of his death, he came to think that death had not left him much the worse for wear. He recalled what Grace had said about the process and realized that he, too, was coming to feel stronger, more settled in his head…and yet he also felt strangely out-of-sorts, plagued by an ill-defined sense of foreboding. He presumed this feeling would intensify once he reached the black house, and that it contributed to the low energy and aimlessness of the house’s residents; but he told himself that none of them had been informed with such clear purpose and determination—he believed this would shield him to an extent from the effect. And when he saw the gabled roof rising from fog and the black fist protruding from the wall, even after he opened the door and was drawn inside, he remained hopeful, focused on his intention to find Grace, to escape with her. Where they might escape to…Well, that was not something upon which he had expended a great deal of thought. The potentials of the afterlife undoubtedly incorporated worse places than the house, and should they manage to reach a better one, what would they do then? He recognized there were many things he might have considered before acting. Matters of personal as well as metaphysical consequence. But they involved questions best answered by both him and Grace, and so would have to wait judgment.