At last she settles into the passenger seat. At her feet is a winter jacket. The police officer says it’s his coat, and she should put it on, it’ll keep her warm, help with her shivering. She looks up at him, prepares to scribble a thank you on her notepad—then goes still, finds herself unable to write. Something about the sight of her own face, reflected in his sunglasses, causes her to freeze up.
He closes the door and goes around to the front of the car to shut the hood. With numb fingers she reaches down to get his coat. Pinned to the front, one on each breast, are two smiley-face buttons. She reaches for the door, but it won’t unlock. The window won’t roll down. The hood slams. The man behind the sunglasses who is not a police officer is grinning a hideous grin. Buttonboy continues around the car, past the driver’s side door, to let the giant out of the back. After all, a person needs eyes to drive.
In thick forest, it’s easy for a person to get lost and walk around in circles, and for the first time, Cate can see this is what happened to her. She escaped Buttonboy and the giant by running into the woods, but she never made her way out—not really—has been stumbling around in the dark and the brush ever since, traveling in a great and pointless circle back to them. She’s arrived where she was always headed, at last, and this thought, rather than terrifying her, is oddly soothing. It seems to her she belongs with them, and there is a kind of relief in that, in belonging somewhere. Cate relaxes into her seat, unconsciously pulling Buttonboy’s coat around her against the cold.
IT DIDN’T SURPRISE Eddie Carroll to hear Noonan had been excoriated for publishing “Buttonboy.” The story lingered on images of female degradation, and the heroine had been written as a somewhat willing accomplice to her own emotional, sexual, and spiritual mistreatment. This was bad…but Joyce Carol Oates wrote stories just like it for journals no different than The True North Review, and won awards for them. The really unforgivable literary sin was the shock ending.
Carroll had seen it coming—after reading almost ten thousand stories of horror and the supernatural, it was hard to sneak up on him—but he had enjoyed it nonetheless. Among the literary cognoscenti, though, a surprise ending (no matter how well executed) was the mark of childish, commercial fiction and bad TV. The readers of The True North Review were, he imagined, middle-aged academics, people who taught Grendel and Ezra Pound and who dreamed heartbreaking dreams about someday selling a poem to The New Yorker. For them, coming across a shock ending in a short story was akin to hearing a ballerina rip a noisy fart during a performance of Swan Lake—a faux pas so awful it bordered on the hilarious. Professor Harold Noonan either had not been rooming in the ivory tower for long or was subconsciously hoping someone would hand him his walking papers.
Although the ending was more John Carpenter than John Updike, Carroll hadn’t come across anything like it in any of the horror magazines, either, not lately. It was, for twenty-five pages, the almost completely naturalistic story of a woman being destroyed a little at a time by the steady wear of survivor’s guilt. It concerned itself with tortured family relationships, shitty jobs, the struggle for money. Carroll had forgotten what it was like to come across the bread of everyday life in a short story. Most horror fiction didn’t bother with anything except rare bleeding meat.
He found himself pacing his office, too excited to settle, “Buttonboy” folded open in one hand. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window behind the couch and saw himself grinning in a way that was almost indecent, as if he had just heard a particularly good dirty joke.
Carroll was eleven years old when he saw The Haunting in The Oregon Theater. He had gone with his cousins, but when the lights went down, his companions were swallowed by the dark and Carroll found himself essentially alone, shut tight into his own suffocating cabinet of shadows. At times, it required all his will not to hide his eyes, yet his insides churned with a nervous-sick frisson of pleasure. When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.
Later, when he was a professional and it was his business, his feelings were more muted—not gone, but experienced distantly, more like the memory of an emotion than the thing itself. More recently, even the memory had fled, and in its place was a deadening amnesia, a numb disinterest when he looked at the piles of magazines on his coffee table. Or no—he was overcome with dread, but the wrong kind of dread.
This, though, here in his office, fresh from the depredations of “Buttonboy”…this was the authentic fix. It had clanged that inner bell and left him vibrating. He couldn’t settle, wasn’t used to exuberance. He tried to think when, if ever, he had last published a story he liked as much as “Buttonboy.” He went to the shelf and pulled down the first volume of Best New Horror (still the best), curious to see what he had been excited about then. But looking for the table of contents, he flipped it open to the dedication, which was to his then-wife, Elizabeth. “Who helps me find my way in the dark,” he had written, in a dizzy fit of affection. Looking at it now caused the skin on his arms to crawl.
Elizabeth had left him after he discovered she had been sleeping with their investment banker for over a year. She went to stay with her mother, and took Tracy with her.
“In a way I’m almost glad you caught us,” she said, talking to him on the phone, a few weeks after her flight from his life. “To have it over with.”
“The affair?” he asked, wondering if she was about to tell him she had broken it off.
“No,” Lizzie said. “I mean all your horror shit, and all those people who are always coming to see you, the horror people. Sweaty little grubs who get hard over corpses. That’s the best part of this. Thinking maybe now Tracy can have a normal childhood. Thinking I’m finally going to get to have a life with healthy, ordinary grown-ups.”
It was bad enough she had fucked around like she had, but that she would throw Tracy in his face that way made him short of breath with hatred, even now. He flung the book back at the shelf and slouched away for the kitchen and lunch, his restless excitement extinguished at last. He had been looking to use up all that useless distracting energy. Good old Lizzie—still doing him favors, even from forty miles away and another man’s bed.
THAT AFTERNOON HE e-mailed Harold Noonan, asking for Kilrue’s contact information. Noonan got back to him less than an hour later, very much pleased to hear that Carroll wanted “Buttonboy” for Best New Horror. He didn’t have an e-mail address for Peter Kilrue, but he did have an address of the more ordinary variety, and a phone number.
But the letter Carroll wrote came back to him, stamped RETURN TO SENDER, and when he rang the phone number, he got a recording: This line has been disconnected. Carroll called Harold Noonan at Katahdin University.
“I can’t say I’m shocked,” Noonan said, voice rapid and soft, hitching with shyness. “I got the impression he’s something of a transient. I think he patches together part-time jobs to pay his bills. Probably the best thing would be to call Morton Boyd in the grounds department. I imagine they have a file on him.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“I dropped in on him last March. I went by his apartment just after ‘Buttonboy’ was published, when the outrage was running at full boil. People saying his story was misogynistic hate speech, saying there should be a published apology and such nonsense. I wanted to let him know what was happening. I guess I was hoping he’d want to fire back in some way, write a defense of his story for the student paper or something…although he didn’t. Said it would be weak. Actually, it was a strange kind of visit. He’s a strange kind of guy. It isn’t just his stories. It’s him.”
“What do you mean?”
Noonan laughed. “I’m not sure. What am I saying? You know how when you’re running a fever, you’ll look at something totally normal—like the lamp on your desk—and it’ll seem somehow unnatural? Like it’s melting or getting ready
to waddle away? Encounters with Peter Kilrue can be kind of like that. I don’t know why. Maybe because he’s so intense about such troubling things.”
Carroll hadn’t even got in touch with him yet, and liked him already. “What things?”
“When I went to see him, his older brother answered the door. Half-dressed. I guess he was staying with him. And this guy was—I don’t want to be insensitive—but I would say disturbingly fat. And tattooed. Disturbingly tattooed. On his stomach there was a windmill, with rotted corpses hanging from it. On his back, there was a fetus with—scribbled-over eyes. And a scalpel in one fist. And fangs.”
Carroll laughed, but he wasn’t sure it was funny.
Noonan went on, “But he was a good guy. Friendly as all get-out. Led me in, got me a can of soda, we all sat on the couch in front of the TV. And—this is very amusing—while we were talking, and I was catching them up on the outcry, the older brother sat on the floor, while Peter gave him a homemade piercing.”
“He what?”
“Oh God, yes. Right in the middle of the conversation he forces a hot needle through the upper part of his brother’s ear. Blood like you wouldn’t believe. When the fat guy got up, it looked like he had been shot in the side of the head. His head is pouring blood. It’s like the end of Carrie, like he just took a bath in it, and he asks if he can get me another Coke.”
This time they laughed together, and after, for a moment, a friendly silence passed between them.
“Also they were watching about Jonestown,” Noonan said suddenly—blurted it, really.
“Hm?”
“On the TV. With the sound off. While we talked and Peter stuck holes in his brother. In a way that was really the thing, the final weird touch that made it all seem so absolutely unreal. It was footage of the bodies in French Guyana. After they drank the Kool-Aid. Streets littered with corpses, and all the birds, you know…the birds picking at them.” Noonan swallowed thickly. “I think it was a loop, because it seems like they watched the same footage more than once. They were watching like…like in a trance.”
Another silence passed between them. On Noonan’s part, it seemed to be an uncomfortable one. Research, Carroll thought—with a certain measure of approval.
“Didn’t you think it was a remarkable piece of American fiction?” Noonan asked.
“I did. I do.”
“I don’t know how he’ll feel about getting in your collection, but speaking for myself, I’m delighted. I hope I haven’t creeped you out about him.”
Carroll smiled. “I don’t creep easy.”
BOYD IN THE grounds department wasn’t sure where he was either. “He told me he had a brother with public works in Poughkeepsie. Either Poughkeepsie or Newburgh. He wanted to get in on that. Those town jobs are good money, and the best thing is, once you’re in, they can’t fire you, it doesn’t matter if you’re a homicidal maniac.”
Mention of Poughkeepsie stirred Carroll’s interest. There was a small fantasy convention running there at the end of the month—Dark Wonder-con, or Dark Dreaming-con, or something. Dark Masturbati-con. He had been invited to attend, but had been ignoring their letters, didn’t bother with the little cons anymore, and besides, the timing was all wrong, coming just before his deadline.
He went to the World Fantasy Awards every year, though, and Camp NeCon, and a few of the other more interesting get-togethers. The conventions were one part of the job he had not come entirely to loathe. His friends were there. And also, a part of him still liked the stuff, and the memories the stuff sometimes kicked loose.
Such as one time, when he had come across a bookseller offering a first edition of I Love Galesburg in the Springtime. He had not seen or thought of Galesburg in years, but as he stood turning through its browned and brittle pages, with their glorious smell of dust and attics, a whole vertiginous flood of memory poured over him. He had read it when he was thirteen, and it had held him rapt for two weeks. He had climbed out of his bedroom window onto the roof to read; it was the only place he could go to get away from the sounds of his parents fighting. He remembered the sandpaper texture of the roof shingles, the rubbery smell of them baking in the sun, the distant razz of a lawnmower, and most of all, his own blissful sense of wonder as he read about Jack Finney’s impossible Woodrow Wilson dime.
Carroll rang public works in Poughkeepsie, was transferred to Personnel.
“Kilrue? Arnold Kilrue? He got the ax six months ago,” said a man with a thin and wheezy voice. “You know how hard it is to get fired from a town job? First person I let go in years. Lied about his criminal record.”
“No, not Arnold Kilrue. Peter. Arnold is maybe his brother. Was he overweight, lot of tattoos?”
“Not at all. Thin. Wiry. Only one hand. His left hand got ate up by a baler, said he.”
“Oh,” Carroll said, thinking this still somehow sounded like one of Peter Kilrue’s relations. “What kind of trouble was he in?”
“Violatin’ his restraining order.”
“Oh,” Carroll said. “Marital dispute?” He had sympathy for men who had suffered at the hands of their wives’ lawyers.
“Hell no,” Personnel replied. “Try his own mother. How the fuck do you like that?”
“Do you know if he’s related to Peter Kilrue, and how to get in touch with him?”
“I ain’t his personal secretary, buddy. Are we all through talking?”
They were all through.
HE TRIED INFORMATION, started calling people named Kilrue in the greater Poughkeepsie area, but no one he spoke to would admit to knowing a Peter, and finally he gave up. Carroll cleaned his office in a fury, jamming papers into the trash basket without looking at them, picking up stacks of books in one place and slamming them down in another, out of ideas and out of patience.
In the late afternoon, he flung himself on the couch to think, and fell into a furious doze. Even dreaming he was angry, chasing a little boy who had stolen his car keys through an empty movie theater. The boy was black and white and flickered like a ghost, or a character in an old movie, and was having himself a hell of a time, shaking the keys in the air and laughing hysterically. Carroll lurched awake, feeling a touch of feverish heat in his temples, thinking, Poughkeepsie.
Peter Kilrue lived somewhere in that part of New York, and on Saturday he would be at the Dark FutureCon in Poughkeepsie, would not be able to resist such an event. Someone there would know him. Someone would point him out. All Carroll needed was to be there, and they would find each other.
HE WASN’T GOING to stay overnight—it was a four-hour drive, he could go and come back late—and by six A.M. he was doing 80 in the left-hand lane on I-90. The sun rose behind him, filling his rearview mirror with blinding light. It felt good to squeeze the pedal to the floor, to feel the car rushing west, chasing the long thin line of its own shadow. Then he had the thought that his little girl belonged beside him, and his foot eased up on the pedal, his excitement for the road draining out of him.
Tracy loved the conventions, any kid would. They offered the spectacle of grown-ups making fools of themselves, dressed up as Pinhead or Elvira. And what child could resist the inevitable market, that great maze of tables and macabre exhibits to get lost in, a place where a kid could buy a rubber severed hand for a dollar. Tracy had once spent an hour playing pinball with Neil Gaiman at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, D.C. They still wrote each other.
It was just noon when he found the Mid-Hudson Civic Center and made his way in. The marketplace was packed into a concert hall, and the floor was densely crowded, the concrete walls echoing with laughter and the steady hollow roar of overlapping conversations. He hadn’t let anyone know he was coming, but it didn’t matter, one of the organizers found him anyway, a chubby woman with frizzy red hair, in a pinstripe suit-jacket with tails.
“I had no idea—” she said, and, “We didn’t hear from you!” and, “Can I get you a drink?”
Then there was a rum-and-Coke in one hand,
and a little knot of the curious around him, chattering about movies and writers and Best New Horror, and he wondered why he had ever thought of not coming. Someone was missing for the 1:30 panel on the state of short horror fiction, and wouldn’t that be perfect—? Wouldn’t it, he said.
He was led to a conference room, rows of folding chairs, a long table at one end with a pitcher of ice water on it. He took a seat behind it, with the rest of the panel: a teacher who had written a book about Poe, the editor of an online horror magazine, a local writer of fantasy-themed children’s books. The redhead introduced them to the two dozen people or so who filed in, and then everyone at the table had a chance to make some opening remarks. Carroll was the last to speak.
First he said that every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism.
He said that most horror and fantasy was worse than awful: exhausted, creatively bankrupt imitations of what was shit to begin with. He said sometimes he went for months without coming across a single fresh idea, a single memorable character, a single striking sentence.
Then he told them it had never been any different. It was probably true of any endeavor—artistic or otherwise—that it took a lot of people creating a lot of bad work to produce even a few successes. Everyone was welcome to struggle, get it wrong, learn from their mistakes, try again. And always there were rubies in the sand. He talked about Clive Barker and Kelly Link and Stephen Gallagher and Peter Kilrue, told them about “Buttonboy.” He said for himself, anyway, nothing beat the high of discovering something thrilling and fresh, he would always love it, the happy horrible shock of it. As he spoke, he realized it was true. When he was done talking, a few in the back row began clapping, and the sound spread outward, a ripple in a pool, and as it moved across the room, people began to stand.