The Dead Man: Hell in Heaven (2 page)

Suddenly Matt wished he’d never come to this town. Never turned off on the exit or even seen the sign.

Because he found he liked this woman who’d gone out of her way to apologize to the stranger they’d mistaken for their prodigal son.

And he could see in her eyes that something bad was coming.

How bad he didn’t know.

If he had, he might have climbed on his bike and kept going. He might have let it carry him off a cliff. Anything but stay here and watch this road run red with blood.

Instead, he leaned in close to her frightened face. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

“Will you stay?” she said. “Just for one night.”

He started to speak, but before he could get a word out she flushed a deep red. “I’m talking about staying in my guest room,” she said quickly. “I’m not some crazy old spinster addled by loneliness, desperate to be fulfilled by the travelling stud.”

“I’m not much of a travelling stud,” Matt said. “And that thought never crossed my mind.”

“It’s just that there’s something wrong here,” she said. “And no one else can see it. They’re all so happy, and they don’t understand …”

“Understand what?”

She looked up at him, and now her eyes were filling with tears. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Maybe seeing is the wrong word. It’s a feeling. A sense that things aren’t right, that they might never be right again. Am I making any sense at all?”

If they’d been having this conversation a year ago, Matt would have said no. Before he died, he’d believed in nothing he couldn’t see with his own eyes.

But he’d learned so much since then.

“I can stay for a night,” he said. “Is there something special I should be looking out for?”

The woman exhaled so heavily Matt wondered just how long she’d been holding her breath. Since he’d come into town?

“Matt,” she said.

“Yes?”

She started to correct herself, then her face broke into a broad smile so pretty Matt was mildly sorry she wasn’t looking for the travelling stud. She pointed up at the banner that was fluttering gently in a soft breeze.

“You should be looking out for Matt when he comes,” she said. “Just keep an eye on him, let me know if you sense anything strange.”

“I’ll try,” Matt said. “But obviously I’ve never met him. I won’t be able to tell if he’s changed. In fact, I’ll be the only one here who can’t.”

“It won’t be that obvious,” she said. “He’s going to be just like he always was.”

Matt shook his head, confused.

“I’ve read the letters he’s sent since he’s been gone,” she said. “They all sound just like him. Even the handwriting’s right. But there’s something in there that’s just a tiny bit off. It’s like when you go to the movies and the projector gets a tiny bit out of synch. You can’t actually tell the voices don’t match the lip movements. But after a couple of minutes you have to turn it off, because you feel there’s something wrong there.”

“War can change a person,” Matt said. “He might have seen some terrible things over there.”

“This is something else,” she said. “I mean, if it’s anything at all, it’s not that. And maybe it isn’t anything. God knows that’s what everyone else around here thinks.”

“It may be what I think, too,” Matt said.

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope I’m only a crazy old lady who’s imagining things. If you end up telling me that, you’ll make me the happiest woman in Heaven.” Her face darkened over. “But don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. I need the truth.”

“The truth is what you’ll get,” Matt said.

“Then let me show you what you’re getting out of the deal,” she said. “My house is just a couple of blocks from here. But then, what isn’t?”

“Would you like a lift?”

She looked eagerly at the motorcycle, then over at the crowd. A couple of the older women outside the grocery store were casting suspicious looks in their direction.

“I think I’m calling enough attention to myself as it is,” she said. “Can I give you directions and meet you at my house?”

“I can walk with it,” Matt said, grabbing the handlebars and wheeling the bike toward her.

She waited until he’d caught up with her, then she turned and walked back to the beginning of the block. Turning right, she led him up a quiet street dotted with small bungalows, each with an extravagant garden in front. She noticed him looking at some of the flowers.

“It’s so unendingly white here for so many months in the winter, we long for color the rest of the year,” she said. “Which is just one of the many fascinating facts I can tell you about Heaven, Washington. Is there anything you want to know?”

“How about your name?”

She stopped so short he nearly hit her with his front wheel. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize,” then she broke off. “I’m Joan. Joan Delaney.”

Delaney
.

She nodded gravely.

“That’s right,” she said. “Matt’s my son.”

Joan Delaney’s guest room was covered in faded rose-print wallpaper. The bedspread on the single bed was a bright blue and yellow chintz. The bed and chair and the little desk were all worn with age, but there wasn’t a speck of dust on any of them.

To Matt, it felt like home.

Not like any home he’d ever lived in. His parents had been partial to mid-century modern furniture, and his mother’s interest only extended as far as buying the stuff, not so much keeping it dusted. This felt like the ideal of home, the one we all have in the back of our heads.

And Joan’s welcome had made him feel like he was the one returning after years away. She’d apologized for not being able to offer him much for dinner, since she had been planning on eating at the big barbecue the town was preparing for her son’s return. But she found a bowl of homemade beef stew in the freezer, and she said it wouldn’t take long to heat it on the wood stove if that was all right with him.

“Only if you let me help,” Matt said.

“I don’t know how you can, unless you’re planning on going back in time to when I made the stew,” Joan said.

“Your wood pile is looking a little low,” Matt said. The scuttle next to the stove was down to a couple of small pieces. “Let me refill it.”

Joan put up a token objection, but Matt insisted. He went out to his bike and dug his grandfather’s axe out of the saddlebag, then snapped the leather cover off its gleaming head and walked around to the back of the house, where a huge pile of stacked wood waited for him.

Matt picked a large log off the pile, placed it on the stump that a thousand gouges said was used for this purpose, and brought his axe down, splitting it in two. Tossing the pieces aside, he grabbed another log and split it, feeling the warm burn in his muscles as the halves skittered apart.

Even if Joan’s scuttle had been full, Matt would have volunteered for this duty. He hadn’t chopped a stick of wood since he’d been on the road, and as his arms rose and fell, placed a log and split it, brushed aside the pieces and grabbed another, he knew this was what had been missing from his life. Crazy as he knew it would sound to anyone else, the simple, repetitive motion of lifting the axe and letting it fall was the one thing he’d ever found that kept him centered. Now, when the rest of his life had been stripped away, he discovered that he needed this ritual more than ever.

Matt grabbed another log off the pile and froze. The pile had a hollow spot in it, a hole that reached all the way down to the ground. There was no way this was accidental; Matt could see that someone had used a few small sticks to keep the logs from falling in on themselves.

At the bottom of the hole, something gleamed whitely.

A bone.

And another. And another.

Matt bent down to peer into the hole. There was a stack of bones at least a foot high.

What kind of bones Matt didn’t know. They weren’t human; they were too small for that. But they seemed to come from all sorts of creatures. Matt imagined dogs and cats, but they could have just as easily been raccoons and squirrels. Some kinds of forest pests. Certainly there was nothing wrong with killing animals like these. For all he knew, people around here ate them.

So why were these bones hidden inside a secret compartment in a woodpile?

And why did they have teeth marks in them?

This could all mean nothing. There might be a perfectly natural explanation for it if you understood how these people lived.

But Matt had grown up in a time when you couldn’t turn on the TV or pick up a paper without seeing a story about some serial killer or another. And the one thing they all seemed to have in common was that they started off by hurting animals.

If Matt Delaney had built this vault and stocked it with bones before he went off to war, then maybe his mother had been right to worry. Because if the boy had started out with a mind toward murder, he’d just spent two years perfecting its practice.

And now he was coming home.

Joan’s beef stew was the best meal Matt had eaten in as long as he could remember. They stayed up into the night, drinking homemade blackberry wine and talking about her son.

Not exclusively, of course. Matt had lots of questions about the town of Heaven. But Joan didn’t have any real answers for him. She didn’t even seem to understand the questions.

“Do people dress differently here?” she said, surprised, when he asked about the people’s clothing. “I guess I never really noticed. It’s just the way things have always been.”

“That was kind of my point,” Matt said with a smile. “Everywhere else I’ve ever gone, the way the things have always been has always changed. Maybe not for the adults, but kids want to follow fashion.”

“I’d like to say it’s because our people are driven by such a strong moral core that we don’t let outside influences change us,” Joan said, matching his smile, “but it probably has more to do with how isolated we are.”

“I didn’t think that kind of isolation was possible anymore,” Matt said.

“You’ve got to work at it a little,” Joan said.

“No TV?” Matt said.

“I think Ruth Stalmaster has one,” Joan said. “Her mother used to watch it for hours on end. Of course there was nothing on the screen but snow and static, but Ermajean Stalmaster was well into senility by then. Aside from that, there’s really no point. No one’s going to string hundreds of miles of cable to bring TV to a handful of homes.”

“They have satellites now, you know,” Matt said.

“They’ve got a lot of things out in the rest of the world,” Joan said. “That doesn’t mean we need them to make our lives complete.”

“So it was a conscious choice?” Matt said. “To shut the world out?”

“That sounds so … inhospitable,” Joan said. “I think we just chose to keep ourselves in. We live simple lives filled with simple pleasures. I don’t think any of us believes that we’re superior to anyone else because of it. We’re not some crazy religious cult, no matter what you may think about people who don’t watch TV.”

“I never said anything like that,” Matt said.

“But you thought it,” Joan said. “And no, we’re not a secret race of telepaths, either. Saw it on your face.”

“Guilty as charged,” Matt said.

“This is our town, and this is our life,” Joan said. “God knows it’s not for everybody. But it makes us happy.”

Matt thought back to those faces he’d seen on the main street—hard, desperate, tired faces—and wondered how true that really was. But he was a man who got his greatest pleasure from chopping wood every morning. Who was he to say what made other people happy?

“I guess people don’t come and go very often,” Matt said.

“Every once in a while someone goes,” Joan said. “I don’t remember anyone who left and came back.”

And now she was waiting for the return of a boy who had been sent overseas to kill people
, Matt thought.
No wonder she’s concerned.

“So your son is going to be the first?” Matt said.

A troubled frown crossed her face. “I never really thought about it that way.”

“And he’s not just coming back from the next town over,” Matt said. “If he’s been in Afghanistan or Iraq—”

“I don’t know where he was stationed,” Joan said. “He was never allowed to tell me.”

That didn’t sound good to Matt. Soldiers on regular duty didn’t have to keep their locations secret. What was the kid doing that was so terrible it had to be classified? And how bad would that mission turn if Mr. Dark got involved?

“Maybe you should tell me a little about him,” Matt said.

Joan did. Matt Delaney had always been a quiet boy. Of course, that probably had a lot to do with the fact that there were so few other children for him to be noisy with. But he’d always preferred books to toys. Mostly what he liked, though, was helping other people. Joan had a framed picture of him at age five struggling with a broom twice his height, trying to sweep the front porch of the Heaven Market. He was remarkably handy, and he’d spent his teenage years helping everyone in town with any repair they couldn’t do for themselves. He’d never told his mother what made him run off and join the army, but she believed it was because he was looking for a way to help the entire country.

That’s why everyone in town had gathered on Main Street to welcome him back that day, and why they’d be out the next one, too. Everybody loved Matthew Delaney.

As Joan talked about her son, Matt felt the same strange sense he’d had when he first saw the banner welcoming Matt Delaney home. The other boy’s early life sounded so much like his own, although in a happier, more successful retelling. It was almost like she was trying to convince him that he had actually grown up here.

Joan pulled out a book of photos, and Matt studied them carefully. At least the most recent ones. He didn’t care what her son had looked like when he was a child. He needed to know the face of the young man who was coming back.

Because Matt suspected he wouldn’t be able to see much of it when they actually met. If the Delaney kid had changed in the way his mother thought, his face probably wouldn’t be there anymore. The skin would be rotting off, eyeballs drooping from their sockets, great festering sores spreading across his blackening tongue.

And Matt would be the only one who would be able to see it.

But that didn’t mean he had any idea what to do once he saw it.

If the kid was infected, Matt knew one thing. He was going to protect Joan Delaney from the creature that had been her son.

How he was going to do it—a total stranger warning a small town against the young man they’d all loved for years—he had no idea.

But he’d been given this power, and if there was a reason for it, then this had to be why.