CHAPTER TEN

Four days passed before Tab remembered to try the technique Dr. Clifford suggested for talking back to the closet man with no eyes. Had the man whose name he’d never learned gone away on his own? He hoped so but didn’t know.

The day of his dad’s funeral arrived. They conducted Tim Beard’s service outdoors at two o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday. Tim had loathed the idea of being buried underground. Instead, they were supposed to entomb him in a vault drawer that sat among a stack of vault drawers with a view of the highway about forty yards away. Unfortunately, the vaults were full, so Dad would be buried in a casket in the ground after all.

Tab only knew about his dad’s fear because he’d once overheard his parents talking about a scene in a movie from the Eighties, something about a snake and a rainbow. Tab didn’t like snakes, but he couldn’t understand why a movie about rainbows would be scary. Unless it was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That was a scary movie. Well, it had been when he saw it at six years old, anyway. He wasn’t sure he would feel the same about it if he saw it today. Briefly, he imagined his father alive in his casket, pounding on its padded ceiling from six feet beneath the earth, screaming in vain that he was not dead yet. Sleep tonight would be hard to find.

Cars raced by the cemetery at a harrowing pace. They made the preacher—a squat man sprouting tall, dyed black televangelist hair who had been hired by Thompson Funeral Home—challenging to hear. Tab sat with one leg tucked under the other, his right shin dangling off the edge of a metal folding chair. He tried not to rock, because his rocking resulted in long, annoyed sighs from the folks who sat behind him. There was comfort in the motion when he was forced to sit. But often, his feeling that he was inconveniencing someone else outweighed his own desire to be comfortable.

His attention turned to his thumbs, which were at war with each other in his lap. Now and again, as the preacher droned on, Tab thought he could sense the familiar, comforting baritone of his father’s voice on the wind. It was inconceivable that the man wouldn’t walk up to them after the service and demand to go home. At times, the wind sounded like it whispered Tab’s name.

The funeral director, a tall woman with a solemn face and world-weary eyes, pinned a white flower on the lapel of Tab’s suit jacket before the service. Jeremy got one, too. She instructed them to place their flowers on their dad’s casket after the pallbearers carried it to the gravesite. Tab protested. He wanted only to be invisible among the strangers who had come to see his father laid to rest. His mom had said he and Jeremy were “honorary pallbearers” and therefore had to help.

He’d only known it was time for him to play the part when his brother stood up and unpinned his own flower from his suit. Tab followed, shaking off the daydreams into which he’d disappeared during the eulogy. He mimicked his brother to the letter, standing behind him in a short line as the other pallbearers, all grown men who were either friends or coworkers of the adult Beards, tossed their flowers onto the casket. Tab was last in line.

He didn’t look at the casket when he tossed the flower. It was too much. He had intended to cast it among the others, watch to ensure it didn’t slide off, and walk away. But just as his hand returned to his side, the frigid fingers of another wrapped around his wrist. He glanced backward, thinking his mother had taken hold of him. She was not there. No one was. He glanced at his wrist and recoiled in horror. The fingers ensnaring him were farm-hardened and freezing. They had emerged from the wall of his dad’s casket.

He saw no hole in the side of the box. It was as if the mortician had lobbed off the arm below the wrist and fastened it to the side of the casket as some sort of morbid, post-mortem prank. Caked-on rolls of makeup covered wormlike scars from his dad’s accident. The cold and hard palm and fingers gripped his hand like the clutches of a stone sculpture.

Startled, Tab swiveled his head toward the crowd. No one seemed to notice what was happening to him. They waited patiently—or impatiently, it was hard to tell—for him to walk away. Then they could shake their heads sadly, offer the family condolences, and go about the rest of their day. Tab yanked on his arm, struggling to break free. His feet slid out from under him. He stared with longing at his mom, wanting to run to her side, pleading for her help. She only stared at his predicament from melancholic, unseeing eyes.

He pulled once more, hearing the body give and slide across the casket floor with the effort. When he looked at the box again, the corpse’s full arm, shoulder, and half its head had emerged from the wall. Its eyes fluttered open. The stitches that held them closed made wet pop sounds as they cut through the eyelids. His dead father’s right eye rolled in its socket, trained on Tab. The right side of its face curled into a familiar paternal grin. Its mouth never opened, yet it spoke.

Hey, son, it said. A gravelly gargle was embedded within the voice, along with an unnatural echo that made it sound like three or four dads speaking in chorus. I’m sorry I had to leave.

“Please let go,” Tab cried. A tear rolled down his left cheek. He strained against the corpse’s grip. The effort only caused the dead man to slide farther out of the casket wall. “Please.”

I can’t do that yet, Tab. I need to tell you something. Well, I need to warn you about something. Your mother, Tab. Your mother is a cheater. She cheated on me and it made me commit murder.

Tab’s heart raced, its rapid beats reverberating in his chest, leaving him struggling to breathe. He plucked at the fingers with his free hand, frantic.

“I don’t wanna know,” he said. “Let me go!”

Listen to me, son. I don’t remember a whole lot right now. The void is messing with my memories. But I do know a few things I have to tell you. The man in your closet? His name is Roy. He’s here because of what we—what I—did to him.

The earnestness in his dead father’s voice broke through his panic. Tab relaxed his arm. The dead hand’s grip on him loosened in response.

“What did you do to him?”

We’re the reason he’s dead, son. And he’s the reason I’m in this casket today. I was riding the John Deere and he was there. It was like you said it is when you see him in your closet. He’s not there, and then he is. I thought he was a real person, so I swerved. Then the tractor threw me.

The memory of his nightmare in the back seat of his mother’s car swam to the front of Tab’s mind. “I was there, too,” he said. His father’s eyebrows shot upward, questioning. The makeup the mortician had applied to his face cracked in the folds of his forehead. Tab had a crazy moment when he considered making suggestions for correcting the work. He was no makeup expert, but his art experience had taught him that a lighter touch often created better results. The horror of the situation caught up with him, dispensing with the thought in short order.

“I was there in a dream,” he added. “I saw you wreck. Didn’t remember it until now, but I saw it happen. Didn’t see him, though.”

Roy.

“Yeah. Roy.” Tab’s father released his wrist. It fell limp at Tab’s side. “What does he want?”

Tim eyed his son with sadness. He says he wants to protect you. From your cheating mother, I guess. He doesn’t have the same feelings for your mom and brother as he does for you, though. He made me promise I would leave Earth in death. That he would leave if I left. I can’t do it right now, Tab. I waited too long. Stayed so I could watch over you and Mom and Jeremy. But my time will come again, and I’ll be gone. He’ll take care of you, though. You watch out for your mom. I don’t want her hooking up with that Seb guy from Facebook. Or that handsome head-shrinker she’s taking you to see nowadays.

His dad’s corpse began to recede into the casket wall again. Strength is fading, he said. I should go.

Tab cried in the open now, sniffling as tears ran from the corner of each eye. “I miss you, Dad,” he said. “I love you.”

I love you, too, son. However, something in the words rang hollow, lifeless. As if they had been spoken by someone who resembled his dad but wasn’t. Tab thought maybe that was just how you sounded in death.

Then he was gone.

Tab turned his back to the casket. His gaze landed on his mom, who stood in front of her chair with her hands clasped together. She stared at Tab, her eyes soft and shining, her lower lip turned down in a sympathetic pout. She drifted up to him, produced the clean handkerchief she’d had folded between her palms, and dabbed at the snot and salty water streaming down his face.

“I know, Tab. I know.”

But she didn’t know. How could she? How could anyone gathered around him and his father’s casket comprehend what he’d just seen and heard? No one else reacted to it. Most folks stared at the sky or at their feet. Some stared ahead, seemingly seeing nothing at all. Waiting.

His mom took his hand, leading him back to his seat. Together with Jeremy, they observed the strange men in business suits crank a handle on the odd device on which his dad’s casket sat. A platform of nylon straps lowered the casket into the ground at a snail’s pace. When it reached bottom, two men on either side pulled the straps away, rolled up the green astroturfing they’d used to cover the spoils, and began to shovel loose dirt on top of his dad. The clods made unpleasant thud sounds when they hit.

Tab twisted away as they went about their work and the crowd began to disperse. A lump rose in his throat. His belly hitched. He was about to blubber again. Jeremy would pester him about it later, no doubt. His brother hadn’t shed a single tear for their dad except on the day they found his body in the field.

Tab transitioned his gaze away from the grave, toward the grass leading to the noisy highway at the cemetery border. Amid a scattering of gleaming modern gravestones stood the man whose name his dad had said was Roy. The man with gross, gory holes for eyes. Tab bet those eye sockets smelled, too. Literal stinkeye. Even without eyes, he sensed the man’s stare. A gigantic shit-eating grin marked the lower half of his stubbly face. One thick, crusty finger beckoned to him. The man bent at the knees as he gestured, almost as if he was calling a dog.

Tab squeezed his eyes shut tight. He waited, then flung them open again, hoping the vision would be gone. Instead, Roy had closed the distance between them seemingly without moving a muscle. He stood in front of Tab’s mother now. She did not appear to see him. He knelt, resting his hands on one knee, staring at Tab nose-to-nose from his empty eye sockets.

“Sad day for you, huh, boy? Happy one for me, though! I seen you talking to your old man.” He indicated the space where the casket had been with a sideways nod of his head. “Couldn’t hear him, though. What’d he say to you? I reckon he was filling you in on some stuff, huh? Reckon he was telling you why I’m hanging around?”

Tab sat silent, allowing his eyes to drift away from the visage before him. The man seemed able to read his thoughts, respond to them. So Tab would not speak. In spite of what his dad said, Roy—Stinkeye Roy—had done nothing to gain his trust. Well, except for telling him Alfie was safe.

He focused his mind elsewhere, wanting to protect the conversation he’d had with his dad’s dead body. He replaced his thoughts about it with memories of Alfie sleeping at the end of his bed. Watching Jeremy play his video games. His mother beaming while he played with toys on the living room floor.

His mom. A pang of guilt stabbed his chest at the thought of her. His dad had said some vile things about her, nasty things. Things Tab was not ready to believe. Think on something else. Like visiting Dr. Clifford and Dr. Patel on the same afternoon.

Dr. Clifford!

“You’re not here,” he said to Roy. “I name you Stinkeye Roy, and you’re not here. You can’t hurt me.”

Roy glowered at him. “Don’t call me that,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m here to help you, like your dad said.”

“How do you know what my dad said? You said you didn’t hear. And call you what? Stinkeye? Stinkeye Roy?”

“Shut up. I’m your elder. You need to show me some respect.”

“No, you shut up. You’re dead. You are not welcome in my life, Stinkeye Roy. You are not welcome in my closet. You are not welcome in my room. You are not welcome in my house.”

“I can go wherever I want, kid. I’m here to protect you.”

“You are not welcome on my family property. You are not welcome anywhere I am. You killed my dad, so I’m taking away your power.”

Roy chuckled. There was a sinister echo to it. “You think I killed your dad? Sure, I was there. But so were you.”

Tab paused in his litany, unable to conjure any other places he could list where Stinkeye Roy was not welcome. He was right, though. Tab had been there, too. His dad had been driving straight at him until the second the tractor careened onto its side and threw him into the air. But he hadn’t been there in person, at least as far as he knew. It had only been a dream in the back of his mom’s Accord.

Tab glared at the dead man. “What are you trying to say? My dad said he saw you standing in the field. He had his accident because he swerved to try to miss you.”

“That so?” Roy answered. “Well, you’re the only living person able to see me. Your dad saw me when he was already in between planes, I think. He might as well have already been dead. I talked to him.

“Then again, he was alive when he was on the tractor, boy. So it wasn’t me who caused him to die all alone in the field. It wasn’t me he saw. It was all you.”

A hot bolt of electricity ran down Tab’s spine. What if he hadn’t been dreaming in the back of the car that day?

His mind wandered back to another episode of Unexplained Phenomena that had been on in the background one night. That one had been about something called an out-of-body experience. One segment was about a mother whose son had gone to war. While she was reading one night, her son appeared to her. He stood in front of her and stretched out a hand but said nothing. At the same time, halfway across the world, the young soldier in reality lay dying on the battlefield.

Had his dad misremembered? Tab thought it was possible. If the last face he had seen was Stinkeye Roy’s, his dying brain might’ve replaced Tab’s translucent, out-of-body form with the man’s image in his memory. But Tab was skeptical.

“You’re trying to confuse me,” he said. “I said you’re not welcome here. Now go away.”

Roy raised a palm in front of him, smiling. “Alright. I’m going, but I ain’t gone. You think about what I said, boy. Ain’t no way your dad saw me standing there. You killed your dad with the little drawing you made. If I was there, it was only on account of you putting me there. Your bad wishes did it, not me.”

He remained for one more second, long enough to drop his hand to his side. Then he wasn’t.

Tab fingered the bump on his temple. It was hot to the touch, throbbing in time with his adrenaline-addled heart.