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Rust is twelve the first time he sees a dead man. He’s deep in the woods behind their already remote house, and the sheer empty vastness of the land makes stumbling across another living soul unlikely. So it makes a certain kind of sense that the man isn’t living anymore.
A deer, he thinks when he first hears the crunching snow, the rustling brush that don’t keep pace with Rust’s quiet footsteps. But no, the movement is all wrong for that, and he briefly considers the possibility of a bear before realizing there’s a man moving slowly towards him through the trees. Rust holds his breath, becomes a statue, half hidden by a tree. He doesn’t recognize the man—doesn’t not recognize him either, he’s too bundled up for identification—but man is just another bit of wildlife out here, easier avoided than tangled with.
It’s not until the man is a dozen yards away he pauses and swivels slowly, locking eyes with Rust, and now Rust breathes in raggedly, his gloved fingers clutching hard at the tree in front of him. Half the man’s face is a bloody wreck, exposed bone and slick red muscle never meant to see daylight. Rust has cleaned all manner of game, watched blood soak into the snow and entrails slip out like wet jewels, but this is a human face, and Rust has to swallow back a wave of nausea.
His first instinct is to run, but he clamps down on that hard, though his knees tremble with the effort. He tries to speak, to ask if the man needs help, but the man only continues to watch him, his one good eye dark and liquid, and Rust recognizes death from a hundred good kills with his father and a dozen botched ones from bad luck or Rust’s unskilled hand. Even if he hadn’t known intimately the difference between dying and dead, there’s a pounding in Rust’s head and a jittery, numb feeling in his fingers that screams the wrongness of this man’s existence. Rust’s throat works. He runs after all.
Once he learns to notice them, they’re common enough. There’s the battered woman who sometimes waits outside the apartment building between Rust’s house and the store, the old man by the auto shop, two different stabbing victims near the bar, and the wistful boy sitting on the edge of the schoolyard. There’s nothing visibly off-putting about the boy, except a slightly odd tilt to his head because, Rust eventually discerns, of a badly broken neck. But everything else about him is wrong in a way that Rust starts to recognize. Not since his very first moment in the woods does he ever mistake a dead human for one still living. His body’s response is physical, not psychological, and the drumlike pounding in his head and throat, the numbness flooding his fingers, alerts him to the dead’s presence whether or not they’ve caught his eye. The dead boy watches the schoolyard for days, but his eyes never focus on anything for long, except Rust. He’s younger than Rust, or was, and slight of build, and finally, despite the crawling feeling on his skin, Rust circles to his edge of the yard, keeping a wary distance. The living students have all scattered for the afternoon, and the yard is quiet.
The boy looks over, aware of but disinterested in Rust, and that gives him the courage to step closer. “Why are you here?” Rust asks, softer than he means to, but no one but a dead boy is there to call him on the way the fear tightens up his throat, squeezing the words smaller in his mouth.
“I don’t know,” he says, sounding puzzled. “Why are you here?”
Rust doesn’t have an answer for that, though his body insists, with its pumping blood and beating heart, that his claim on this world is greater. But he doesn’t know why that should be.
The boy’s name is Mike, and he’s there whenever the yard is empty, disappears like the wind when other people are around. Rust tests himself, pushes against the buzzing in his hands and the sick feeling sliding up his throat to ask Mike’s name, his story. Mike doesn’t know anything about death, isn’t interested in Rust’s questions about anything. He simply exists, like a tree or a stone wall gifted with human speech. He becomes a fixture of Rust’s life much like the moon: sometimes there, sometimes not, but Rust keeps an eye on the sky and Mike’s preferred corner of the schoolyard, tracks the phases and appearances, hoping that keener awareness of a thing will make it easier to comprehend. It never does.
He leans to ignore them. They always notice him, watch him like he wears a beacon of some sort, and maybe he does to them, the same way he can’t help picking them out, the sense of tremors and crawling skin unmistakable. They notice him, but they don’t approach, don’t follow, rarely speak unless spoken to. They don’t do much of anything, and Rust finds that unsettling. In his experience, people always want something.
They appear only when he is alone, and in Texas, he goes long periods where he is never alone. College is a constant stream of people, the streets never quiet, the buildings haunted by sleep-starved students instead of the dead. He meets Claire, and has even less occasion to be completely by himself. They still find him, when he cuts down a quiet side street, or in the rare moments when the buildings are quiet, the living inhabitants all asleep except for Rust. He skirts around the dead like they are slow pedestrians clogging up a sidewalk, shudders away the aura they carry with them. They don’t seem to mind.
She isn’t waiting in the driveway when they get home, though the tricycle is, red as an omen, only slightly dented. She isn’t waiting in the house. But then, she wouldn’t be, because in her absence he has Claire’s wet face, unfamiliar in its grief, and the grating sound of her sobs. Claire cries to herself until the sedatives kick in and she sinks into a dull, hopefully dreamless sleep. Rust stares at the bedroom ceiling. He waits until he hears the drag and whisper of unsteady, toddling feet on the hallway carpet. He rises out of bed, his face already wet, and walks, like Tantalus towards his torment, to meet his daughter.
Like all the dead, she shows little interest in him. He still sits in the corner of her room, every night after Claire falls asleep, and watches her. His hands shake and his stomach clenches, but it’s almost indistinguishable from the sick horror that has become his life anyway, so he pulls his knees up to his chest and bears it. Some nights she isn’t there, and he doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.
Once, he picks her up. From behind, he can’t see where her face is dented from the truck’s bumper, the raw scraped skin over her cracked collarbones. From behind, she looks like his daughter. He picks her up, and his skin goes clammy, fingers numb, and she doesn’t even turn to look at him.
He doesn’t drop her, because she’s still wearing Sophia’s skin, but he never again forgets that his daughter is dead. She is still his daughter. The dichotomy doesn’t hurt less after a bottle of Jack, but it’s harder to focus on.
It’s no surprise when, after a long and violent spiral down, Rust finds himself in North Shore. He only wonders how it had taken this long.
Dora is the first corpse he gets angry at, but then, he’s angry about a lot these days. “Who’s the Yellow King, Dora?” he asks her, a dozen times, and she tells him the wind between the stones, and the last star that burns, and Rust grinds out his cigarette in disgust. “He’ll do it again. You want us to find this bastard or not?” She blinks at him slowly, long hair tangling in her crown. But that’s the difference between the living and the dead: the dead don’t want anything.
Marty wants so many things. He wants to be liked, and he wants to be powerful, and he wants to be good, but he wants to feel good, too. He wants to be a good dad, a good husband, a good cop, but he also wants that instant gratification that negates all those other things. He wants control over the car and its radio, and he wants a hamburger or sometimes it’s a taco kind of a day, but he wants, so much and so strongly that it sometimes takes Rust’s breath away.
When Marty follows Rust into his apartment one night and pushes him up against the wall, fingers gripping at his biceps, his mouth hot and demanding, Rust’s heart pounds and his skin buzzes, but it’s completely different. No one is more alive than Marty Hart.
In Carcosa, the dead swarm like flies, watching Rust navigate the tunnels with flat, vacant eyes. They crowd him, but for all the confusion, they look unerringly towards Childress when he speaks, a silent chorus whose turned heads point the way to the Yellow King, clear as the North Star. They drift out of Rust’s path with small stumbles, each brush of their skin against Rust’s a nauseating lick up his spine. He shudders, grips his gun tighter, for all the good it does him, and pushes on.
The dead don’t scatter for Childress. He charges into a throng of his victims, and they part out of his way as they’d parted for Rust, but they don’t disappear. If anything, the crowd seems thicker than ever, and Rust can’t decide whether to focus on the jackhammering in his skull, the feverish buzz that their attention drapes over him, or the sharp fire of Childress’ knife in his gut.
Marty enters the room like the sun rising, so bright Rust can feel it on his skin. The murmuring congregation is gone between one breath and the next, the room deserted but for Marty and Rust and Childress, and Rust finds himself surprised when Childress doesn’t disappear as well. And then Childress is dead after all, and it’s just the two of them, unless Rust follows, and he still hasn’t made up his mind about that. And there’s the real reason he never put his gun in his mouth any of these long years gone by: he doesn’t put much stock in living, but he’s seen the other side, and it doesn’t look any more appealing.
He’s sitting on Marty’s porch, in a deck chair he’ll probably, but not definitely, be able to get back out of by himself when the time comes. But Marty’s there beside him, so his continued invalid status remains frustrating, but not a cause for concern. There’s a robin working on a nest in the back corner of the porch, dropping bits of grass all over the smooth painted planks. Rust is content to watch it go about its business, though Marty will probably fuss and sweep the area later, and get dive bombed for his troubles.
“You hear me, Rust?” Marty asks, a little impatiently.
Rust replays Marty’s last words in his head, rolls them around like the first sip of good whiskey in his mouth. There’d been a lot of lead up about apartment hunting and moving help and how it doesn’t negate the job offer, but Rust doesn’t really remember the details because it had all ended with, or you could just stay, you know. Rust hadn’t missed the forced casualness in Marty’s voice, the way his hands rubbed across his thighs, gripped his knees so he wouldn’t fidget. They wander anyway now, at Rust’s long silence, gripping the armrests, touching the seams on his jeans. Marty’s desires are quieter these days, their focus shifted somewhat over the last twenty years, but they will never be any less in their magnitude.
He burns with his living, fills the space of the office, the house, the car, the damn grocery store, until there is no room for death to enter in. Rust knows they will catch him out sometimes, that they will always be waiting. But even when Marty’s asleep, his breath in Rust’s ear is a promise he doesn’t even know he’s making, Marty himself a sentry against the disquieting, disinterested dead.
“I want to stay,” he says, and Marty can’t know all that it means, not really, but he knows enough because he smiles. He smiles hard enough that he ducks his head, like his bare feet are deserving of that look instead.
There are still so many ghosts, but then there is Marty. Rust reaches out, and Marty takes his hand.