Where We Live and Die Read online

  Which is what he did the morning after I saw the glider moving by itself.

  My mother was watching him for the day, and I had just brought him out of the house to take him over to her place. I was walking across the deck, juggling the baby and the diaper bag and a travel mug full of coffee and my car keys, when the baby suddenly whipped his head around, waved at the glider and shouted an enthusiastic greeting.

  “Hi!”

  Little hand waving back and forth just as fast as it could go. Big smile showing off those baby teeth. Eyes sparkling. My kid is a charmer, but there was nobody there to charm—at least that I could see.

  “Hi,” he said again, as if he was speaking to someone he knew. When I turned toward the glider, I saw that it was moving. It stopped as I gave it my full attention, as if it had been rocking back and forth unnoticed, and the person doing it had gotten up when I focused my attention on it. That was when I started to get creeped the fuck out.

  I carried the baby down to the car, and as I opened the back door and bent over to strap him into his car seat, he looked over my shoulder, waved again and shouted “Hi” a third time. He was staring at the top of the driveway.

  Inside the house, Sam howled.

  My hands and fingers felt numb. I fumbled with the straps on the car seat. Once the baby was safely inside, I started the car. Howard Stern came on, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I was too busy putting it all together in my head. The car wreck. The leaf cyclone at the top of the driveway. Cassi getting spooked out on our deck. The weird dream I’d had. The porch glider moving on its own. And now this.

  I drove slowly to the top of the driveway. I stopped, looking both ways for oncoming traffic before pulling out. The makeshift monument was still there. The flowers were dead and gone, but the cross remained—a lone reminder of what had occurred there. I bit my lip, waiting for the baby to wave at the cross and say hi, but he didn’t. He was busy playing with a pacifier. In hindsight, I’m glad he didn’t.

  If he had, I think I might have screamed.

  * * *

  I dropped him off at my mom’s, and then stopped in to see Bill Wahl and Ned Senft (some old friends of mine who are the proprietors of Comix Connection, a Central-Pennsylvanian chain of comic book stores). It turned out that Bill and Ned weren’t in that day. Manager Jared Wolf was working the counter. He was his usual friendly, gregarious self, but I found it hard to talk. My mind wasn’t on comic books. It was on what had just happened. It must have been obvious because before I left the store, Jared asked me if I was feeling okay.

  When I got home, I considered ripping that stupid cross out of the ground and tossing it over the bridge and into the creek. I imagined it floating along on the current until it ended up in the Susquehanna River, and then bobbed along until ultimately landing in the chemical stew that is the Chesapeake Bay, and from there into the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe taking it down and smashing it in the road. Or driving over it. Or setting it on fire. Or using it for target practice.

  But I did none of these things. I put it out of my mind. There was weirdness afoot, and it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to ignore it. I told myself these were nothing more than a string of coincidences, and the only reason I suspected something more sinister was because of what I did for a living.

  I got out of the car and went to work. At the end of the day, I drove back to my mother’s house and picked up the baby. When we got home, and I got him out of the car, he glanced at the top of the driveway, now half-hidden in the encroaching evening gloom, and said, “Hi.” When he waved, I peered into the shadows, wondering if something was waving back at him.

  * * *

  He’s done that ever since—every single day. Every time we bring him outside, he waves at the top of the driveway and says, “Hi.” One night, when he woke at 3am and absolutely refused to go back to sleep, I took him out to the car. Sometimes, driving him around will make him sleep when nothing else will. It was pitch black outside. There was no moon. No stars. No light of any kind. We literally couldn’t see five feet in front of us, let alone the top of the driveway. That was the only time he didn’t do it.

  Cassi says he’s talking to the passing trucks, or our neighbor’s goat, or a variety of other things, none of which are supernatural. I’ve never told her who I suspect the baby is saying hi to.

  ENTRY 12:

  Things went on like that for a while. There were no more leaf cyclones and the glider didn’t move, but the baby still waved and said hello every morning, and I still had weird dreams some nights. They were always the same—the girl sitting on the glider, staring at her cell phone with a sad expression.

  I didn’t do anything about it. I mean, stop and think about it for a minute. What could I do? Call an exorcist? That shit only works in the movies. In real life, I wouldn’t know where to start. I couldn’t very well call up the Vatican and say, “Hi, this is mid-list horror novelist Brian Keene. I’d like to hire an exorcist to come chase a ghost away from my house.” And although I know some occultists and ghost hunters, I couldn’t ask them for advice either. Mason Winfield and Bob Freeman would have probably been happy to come check it out, but Mason is near Buffalo and Bob lives out in Indiana, and I couldn’t afford their travel and lodging expenses. It would have been embarrassing to ask them for help and then tell them it would have to be on their own dime. Vince Harper, former head of Bereshith Publishing and Shadowlands Press, was closer, and as far as I knew he was still involved in the OTO, but I had no idea how to get in touch with him. He’d sort of fallen off the grid after leaving his publishing gig in the horror genre. I still miss him. Vince was a good guy, and these days, good guys are in short supply in this business.

  The main reason I didn’t act, however, was because I just didn’t believe it. It’s one thing to write fictional stories about ghosts. It’s something very different to actually believe those things are occurring to you in real life. That’s the appeal of horror fiction. In real life, the monsters are the ones abducting and killing children or flying hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers or looting our treasury and sending our kids off to fight a bullshit war just so they can line their own pockets and the pockets of their corporate buddies or eradicating our Bill of Rights in the name of national security. Those are the real monsters. Watch an hour of that shit on CNN or MSNBC or FOX and you’re more than ready to curl up with a fictional monster. Zombies, werewolves, vampires and ghosts are an escape from the real world because they don’t exist in the real world.

  Except that I was apparently being confronted with proof of a ghost’s existence, and since that was impossible, the only other option was to question my sanity—which was no option at all. No way could I be going crazy. I had too many fucking books to finish. Insanity is not conducive to meeting deadlines, nor does it provide for one’s family.

  So I forced myself to ignore all of it. The dreams were just that—dreams. And Cassi was right. The baby was just saying hi to the neighbor’s goat and the trucks racing by. These are the things I told myself, and they worked, for the most part…

  …until I heard the cell phone.

  It was a Wednesday night. The baby was asleep. Cassi and I were curled up on the couch, watching the final season of The Shield. I’d seen all of the episodes already, but she could never stay awake late enough to watch them on their original air-dates, so I’d bought the whole season on DVD when it came out. I love The Shield. I genuinely believe that it, along with The Sopranos and The Wire, is the best series ever on television. Vic Mackey is a perfect example of how to write a sympathetic character. He’s an absolutely loathsome individual, and yet we, the viewers, root for him every week. That is great writing.

  But I digress. Anyway, we were watching The Shield. Vic was busy stabbing Ronnie in the back when I got up and went into the kitchen to get a bottle of water. Since I’d seen the episode already, I didn’t pause the DVD. I opened the refrigerator, reached inside for a bottle, and that was when I heard the beep
ing. At first, I ignored it. A lifetime of heavy metal concerts, military service, and shooting guns on the weekend with Coop and Jesus, as well as hereditary hearing loss, has left me with all kinds of weird little sounds in my ears. Usually, it’s a ringing noise. It comes and goes. It seems at its worst when I’m tired or drunk.

  The sound I heard now was different. I stood there, cool mist swirling out of the open refrigerator, and listened. The baby has a toy cell phone that beeps and rings when you push the buttons. I thought that perhaps Smokey (my wife’s indoor cat) was playing with it. She’s not yet a year old and still has a lot of kitten in her, and she likes to play with the baby’s toys. Turn your back for one second and she’s wandering off with his Curious George doll or batting a block around on the floor. After a few seconds, it occurred to me that I couldn’t be hearing the baby’s toy phone because we’d picked up all his toys before he went to bed—a nightly ritual we make sure to engage him in. I sing the “Clean Up” song from Barney while we do it. I use a Barney voice because it makes the baby laugh.

  That wasn’t what was happening this time, but there was no way to tell her that. I walked up to the window and looked out into the darkness. Our porch light, which is motion sensitive and comes on even when something as small as a squirrel runs by, was dark. The beeping continued, and it wasn’t my imagination. The sound was coming from the glider.

  “Do you want me to pause this?”

  I jumped, startled. Cassi was standing between the kitchen and the living room. When I turned around, I saw that her expression was puzzled.

  “What are you doing?”

  I shrugged. “I thought I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “It sounded like…a cell phone. You know, like when someone is dialing or texting? The little beeps that the keys make?”

  She paused, frowning. “I don’t hear it.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, I thought to myself.

  “You want to go outside and check it out?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “It was probably nothing.”

  * * *

  One week later, I was hauling the trash cans up to the road so that the garbage men could pick them up the next morning. It was dark out, and I had a flashlight in one hand so that speeding cars wouldn’t plow into me.

  At the top of the driveway, I heard the beeping sound again.

  I’ve written about characters feeling “an icy finger running up their spine” but until that moment, I’d never experienced it in real life. Indeed, I didn’t think it was something you actually could experience in real life. I’d always thought it was just one of those standard euphemisms that are occasionally required in horror fiction.

  I shined the flashlight around, but there was nobody there. It was just me, the trees, our mailbox, our neighbor’s mailbox and trash cans, and that wooden cross, now looking much more weather-beaten and worse for the wear.

  The beeping stopped.

  I leaned the trash cans against the guardrail and the beeping recommenced. Headlights pinpointed me, and I heard a pickup truck come around the corner. It zipped past me fast enough to ruffle my jacket. After it had passed, and the darkness returned, the road was silent.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said out loud.

  I started down the driveway and the beeping rang out behind me.

  I ran all the way to the deck. I was out of breath when I got inside. Cassi asked me what was wrong. I smiled and waved a hand, indicating that I’d answer her as soon as I’d stopped hyperventilating. When I could talk again, I lied, and told her that I ran down the driveway to get some exercise.

  ENTRY 13:

  The dreams continued sporadically throughout the spring and into the summer. With them came more glider rocking and phantom texting during my waking hours. If they had happened every day, I really do think I would have lost my shit, but they didn’t. There was no rhyme or reason. No way of predicting when it would occur. Weeks would go by without a single nightmare and then I’d have four in a row. A month would pass without the glider moving on its own or those haunting, disembodied beeps, and then there would be a flurry of activity that lasted several days.

  There were little things, too—occasional, one-time occurrences that didn’t seem connected to all of this at the time, but certainly do now, in hindsight.

  Example 1: The baby has this toy locomotive. It’s big. He can push it along and walk behind it, or sit atop it and scoot along with his feet. It has all kinds of buttons and little animal figures that pop out of the side. Every time it moves or you press a button, the train sings (loudly) “Chugga chugga, choo choo, spin around. Every letter has a sound.” Annoying, yes. Thank God it only plays the song once. If the baby wants to hear it again, he has to push it or press another button.

  One afternoon, while the baby was at his grandparent’s house, Cassi and I went grocery shopping. When we came home, the locomotive was playing the song, over and over and over again. There was nobody home at the time. The dog was cowering on the couch, staring at it, and the cat was hiding in the bedroom. We had to take the batteries out to get it to stop. I didn’t chalk it up to the girl on the glider. I attributed it to “the dog or the cat must have bumped it and the song got stuck and just kept repeating.” When we put new batteries in it, the locomotive operated normally again.

  “Chugga chugga, choo choo, spin around. Every letter has a sound.”

  I can’t stand that fucking train.

  Example 2: In late May, I was working out in my office one night. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before or not (and I’m too lazy to go back and check) but my office is separate from the house. If someone were to walk down my driveway, they would pass by my office before they reached the house. Anyway, I’m sitting there writing something (I can’t remember what) and Max, who was curled up on my lap, suddenly jumps down, runs over to the wall, arches his back and hisses. Had someone been on the other side of that wall, they would have been standing in my driveway. Max hissed again and when I went to him, I found that he was inconsolable. I grabbed my Taurus .357 and hurried outside, expecting to find a coyote or another stray cat or maybe some crazed fan standing in my driveway.

  But there was nothing.

  There are a lot more of these examples, but it’s late and I’m tired and I don’t have time tonight to put them all down on paper. Suffice to say, it was a weird few months.

  Was I scared? Well, of course I was fucking scared. You would be, too. Either our house was haunted or I was losing my goddamn mind, and since I wasn’t the type to believe in ghosts, and since Cassi or my friends or my neighbor hadn’t reported hearing anything weird or seeing anything unusual, option number two was looking more and more likely every day.

  In early June, I decided that I’d been hallucinating all this time. I became convinced that I had a brain tumor, and that was what was causing the hallucinations. It seemed plausible enough. Tumors had popped up elsewhere on my body that summer. If spring is the growing season, then my body had a bumper crop. There were a total of nineteen, all of which had quite literally sprung up in just a couple of weeks. They were scattered throughout my body—arms, chest, abdomen, thighs, and elsewhere. The smallest was about the size of a marble. The biggest was like a ping pong ball.

  Needless to say, I was scared—scared in ways that a self-rocking glider and phantom cell phone tones couldn’t begin to touch. Obviously, I had cancer. I mean, what else could the tumors be? I wondered how I’d gotten them. My dad’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, perhaps? Or maybe it was the fact that I’ve used tobacco since I was twelve and I drink like a fucking fish? Eventually, I decided it didn’t really matter how I’d gotten cancer. The how wasn’t important. What mattered was what happened next.

  It was a strange summer. I felt like I’d become one of my own characters. I was Tommy O’Brien from Terminal or Harold Newton from “Marriage Causes Cancer In Rats.” I was meant to be working on novels and novellas and short stori
es and comic books for a variety of small press and mainstream publishers who would dick around with my paycheck, my rights, and everything else. Instead, I found myself facing mortality and, for the first time, considering—I mean really considering—my own eventual death. I made sure all my shit was in order. Talked with Nate Southard and Mike Oliveri and brought them up to speed on where everything was (because if I did die, they’d be best suited to finish any uncompleted manuscripts). Checked into my life insurance policy and made sure it was up-to-date.

  And then I went to the doctor. He was less than comforting. He said it could be cancer, or it could be something called lipoma—a benign tumor composed of fatty tissue. I asked him if he could be any more specific, if perhaps he could narrow it down to one or the other. He said that he couldn’t, but that a specialist could. So I went to see the specialist. He said it was most certainly lipoma and that normally, that wouldn’t be a concern, but in my case, several of the tumors were growing toward major organs, including my heart, liver and kidneys. So he sent me to see a surgeon. It turned out that the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and one of the girls who ran the office were all fans of my work. On the day of my surgery, the three of them brought books for me to sign. I did. Then they knocked me out and I went under the knife. They removed ten of the nineteen growths, including a particularly nasty fucker that had, according to the surgeon, grown its own circulatory system and was sending tendrils toward my heart.