Unbury Carol

Josh Malerman is a New York Times bestselling author and one of two singers/songwriters for the rock band The High Strung. His debut novel, Bird Box, is the inspiration for the hit Netflix film of the same name. His other novels include Unbury Carol and Inspection. Malerman lives in Michigan with his fiancée, the artist/musician Allison Laakko.

AT THE FUNERAL OF JOHN BOWIE Harrows, situated at the northernmost point of the Trail, savored its distance from the meat of the rabid road. It was easily the most affluent town in both counties; the homes of Harrows were larger, often constructed of stately stone, some with as many as ten bedrooms. The garden yards were as wide as the fabled Trail itself, some roofs as high as the willows. Even better: Harrows enjoyed more sunlight than the other towns, as the shadows cast by the arching of those willows concluded where the wheat fields began, just south of the border. Sunny and secluded, remote and rich, Harrows was a very desirable place to live. But that didn't preclude its citizens from dying. John Bowie found this out the bad way. "One of a kind," Carol Evers said, standing beside her husband, Dwight, looking into the open grave of her friend John Bowie. The tears in her eyes reflected the unboxed man below. One of Harrows's most likable men, Bowie was a very funny thinking-man who added to every affair he attended. His lively eyes often smiled behind his thick glasses, and his ceaseless appetite was welcomed by all who had spent an afternoon cooking for a party. John Bowie was a good man. John Bowie was a fun man. John Bowie was also a homosexual who posed no threat to Dwight Evers, Bowie being the closest friend Carol had. For this, Bowie was the only person outside her husband whom Carol had told of her lifelong condition. It wasn't an easy thing for her to reveal. And yet it had come out of her, so easily, one clear evening on the back porch of her and Dwight's home. John had been discussing books and magic tricks, two of his most profound interests, when Carol suddenly rose from the bench and told him. I've died before, John. Many times. Though famous for a healthy sense of humor, John wasn't one to take such a statement lightly. And Carol's green eyes often betrayed when she was serious. Tell me, he'd said, his boots resting upon a wooden stool, his body hunched in a wicker chair. It was Carol's favorite posture he assumed. Perhaps that was what loosened her lips. Tell me about every single time. And Carol did tell John Bowie about every time she'd died, every time she could remember. The doctors, she said, had no name for her condition. But she'd come up with one of her own many years ago. Howltown, she'd said. That's what I started calling it around age eight. I guess I was influenced by the names of the Trail-towns. The only places I knew of. And it is something of a town. To me. No sheriff, of course. No boardwalk, no bank, no booze. No nothing. But it's a place, here on the Trail, all the same. Even if I'm the only one who visits. She'd paused. John noticed an odd combination of expressions on her face; Carol was both recalling her youth, when she named her coma, and despairing that it still existed. To someone outside the coma, she continued, I appear . . . dead. Hardly a heartbeat. Far from fogging a mirror. And a pulse as slow as a slug. There's no light in there, John. I can hear the world around me, but I can't move. And the wind in there . . . it howls. So . . . Howltown. Pretty neat, huh? She told John how afraid she once was of the isolation of the coma. How her mother Hattie's constant tinkering in the workroom acted as an anchor to reality. Without Hattie, I'd have broken in there. Gone mad. She told him of the hoarse breathing that acted as music in Howltown. And how Hattie said it must be Carol's own. She told John about the falling sensation, too. From the second it starts, I'm falling. I fall into the coma and I don't touch ground until I wake. John could see the relief in the face of his brilliant friend as she spoke. Carol, John knew, hadn't told anybody but Dwight. She was embarrassed over it, he surmised, convinced that