Alice Isn’t Dead

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

Published by HarperVoyager

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Joseph Fink 2018

Jacket design by Rob Wilson © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Joseph Fink asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008323707

Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008323721

Version: 2018-10-15

Dedication

To Meg, who took this road trip with me. And to Jasika and Jon, who made it possible for me to share it.

This isn’t a story. It’s a road trip.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I: Thistle

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part II: Bay and Creek

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Part III: Praxis

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

PART I

THISTLE

WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?

Because the dead return, because light reverses, because the sky is a gap, because it’s a shout, because light reverses, because the dead return, because footsteps in the basement, because footsteps on the roof, because the sky is a shout, because it’s a gap, because the grass doesn’t grow, or grows too much, or grows wrong, because the dead return, because the dead return.

1

Keisha Taylor settled back into the booth and tried to enjoy her turkey club. The turkey club did not make this easy.

A diner attached to a gas station, a couple hours outside of Bismarck. A grassy place between towns. Keisha’s main criteria for choosing the diner had been ample parking for her truck. Once upon a time people chose food based on the season, or the migration patterns of animals. She selected her meals based on the parking situation.

Her difficult relationship with what the menu called “The Chef’s Special Club” was made more complicated by a patron in the booth adjacent to hers. The man was eating an omelet, scooping big chunks of egg with long, grease-stained fingers, and shoving them into his mouth, each bite followed by a low grunt. He was a large man, with a face that sagged on one side, a lump on the top of his shoulder, and a long fold of extra skin hanging from one arm. His clothes were filthy and she could smell him from where she sat. He smelled like rot. Not bad, exactly, but earthy, like fruit disintegrating into soil. His dirty yellow polo shirt had the word Thistle on it. He was staring at Keisha with eyes that went yellow at the edges. He chewed with his mouth open, and his teeth and food were both a dull yellow.

Keisha did her best to look anywhere else. At the crowd of bystanders behind the on-location reporter on the muted televisions, a crowd she reflexively scanned for a familiar face. Or the bathroom door as the cook took his third visit since she had arrived. At a van driving by on the highway with a cartoon logo of chickens and the name praxis! in bubble font. But the man’s grunts were insistent and soon she couldn’t look anywhere else. And then, to her horror, he got up, omelet hanging from his lips, and limped toward her like his legs had no muscle, mere sacks of meat attached loosely to his torso.

“Doesn’t look much like rain,” he said, plopping himself across the table from her and licking the egg off his lips with long wet passes of his pale tongue. The smell of damp earth got stronger. Her heart was pounding, as it often did when she felt trapped, which she often did. Her life, at the best of times, was a minefield of possible triggers for her anxiety, and this was not the best of times. “Hope you don’t mind if I join you,” he said. Not a question or a request, but a joke. He laughed, and his jaw sank crookedly into his neck.

“I was hoping to eat alone,” she said down at her sandwich.

“Good people deserve good things.” She didn’t know what to say to that. He scratched his cheek, and some of the skin peeled away. “It’s dangerous out here.”

She didn’t want to engage with him at all, felt even responding negatively might encourage him, so she started to slide off the duct tape patchwork that had once been a booth, grabbing her backpack and making a determined look toward the door against the pulsing of her panicked heart. He held a hand up, and she froze, wanting to leave but not able to find a way to do so.

“Want to see something funny?” he said, in a voice with no humor in it.

It is often said that bad experiences are like nightmares. But what Keisha noticed most in this moment was how real it was, how she couldn’t escape its reality, how she would never be able to convince herself she had remembered any part of that evening incorrectly.

He got up, wiping the egg from his hands onto the word Thistle on his chest. His face was slack and not arranged right. He walked over to a table where a man sat. A truck driver probably. The man looked like a truck driver, she thought. What does a truck driver look like?

“Hey, Earl,” the Thistle Man said.

“Huh?” said Earl, frowning. The Thistle Man grabbed him by the back of his neck and Earl’s face went blank.

The Thistle Man guided Earl gently out of his seat, like a parent shepherding a sleepy child. Earl’s eyes were empty pools of water. Neither Earl nor the Thistle Man paid their checks. No one made a move to help. No one looked.

Keisha didn’t know what to do. She walked toward the door, wanting to help, having no idea how.

“You planning on paying for that?” said her waitress.

“What? Yeah. I was just. Yeah.”

Keisha handed over what she thought was the right amount, left some sort of tip, and then was outside in a night unusually hot for early midwestern spring.

The lights on one side of the gas station were out. And in the shadows, the man in the Thistle shirt was cradling Earl. Earl was fully awake again, but the man’s arms clung like ropes around Earl, and he couldn’t move. She could see the pulsing of his muscles as he tried, the strain in his face. Behind them, in a different world, people sat eating waffles and sausages.

“Shh,” the man in the Thistle shirt said to Earl, who tried to scream in response, but the scream was lost in the baggy flesh of his captor. The loose-skinned man didn’t seem human. He was like a boogeyman from a vaguely recalled nightmare. The Thistle Man. He bent down and took a bite out of Earl, at the artery in his armpit. Earl made a noise like a balloon letting out air, and blood poured down his torso. He was crying, but still couldn’t move. The Thistle Man reached his long fingers into the wound and tore off fragments of flesh, lifting them to his mouth. The movement was the same mechanical movement he had made with the omelet.

Keisha had only a moment to decide how to respond and didn’t need even that. She ran, of course. Ran for her truck with her breath and heartbeat deafening in her ears. The Thistle Man chuckled as she went, slurping another fragment of Earl’s body into his mouth.

As Keisha started the engine, she looked at Earl, who looked back at her. A man who had expected to go to sleep tonight, who had ideas about what the next few days would be like for him, had some sort of plan for the future. Who was, instead, watching the one person who could help him driving herself to safety, leaving him with only a monster to accompany him in his dissipation.

Although Earl and his murderer didn’t know it, there was another witness. A small figure in a hoodie, standing behind one of the fuel pumps, the hood drawn over the face. The figure in the hoodie wasn’t running away but was no more able to help than Keisha. Some moments can’t be changed.

2

Alice’s funeral had been a strange occasion. Not because she wasn’t well liked. Almost everyone liked Alice the moment they met her. She had an ease and a casual intimacy that transformed the people she met instantly into friends. In this way she balanced out Keisha, who was withdrawn and anxious. At a party on her own, Keisha would feel lost, but with Alice she was able to step into conversations, letting her wife lead the way whenever her own line of thought faltered.

The funeral was strange because Alice’s death had been strange. No cause of death. No body. No certainty. There was a disappearance, and after a long and increasingly hopeless search, the presumption of death. And so Alice’s friends and her family mourned while holding the thought that maybe, after all, Alice was alive somewhere, although none of them, least of all Keisha, believed it.

Meanwhile the funeral presented Keisha with what was, in a practical way, a party to navigate, and she did not have Alice to help her. Instead Keisha carried her grief through the crowd, and her friends reached out and softly touched her and murmured, and she kept moving room to room, as though in one of those rooms, somehow, Alice would be waiting.

Two years after the funeral, knowing Alice wasn’t dead, there were times Keisha hated her, of course. But through all of that she loved her. Loved her more than she had ever loved anyone. And so she would continue to look for the wife she loved and hated.

Keisha tucked up her legs on the small berth in the back of her truck’s cab. On the pillow next to her, unread because she couldn’t find the concentration, was one of the books from the library she had collected under the passenger seat. Outside the cab, she heard, as she swore she had heard every night since that night at the gas station diner, the whisper-scratch of fingernails. A sound so quiet it was easily mistaken for silence. But she was sure it was the boogeyman, the Thistle Man, waiting for her to get curious or afraid enough to investigate.

“This better be worth it, Alice,” she whispered. Nothing ever could be.

She saw the Thistle Man again and again in the weeks following the murder. Behind the bathrooms at rest stops, in the snack aisle at gas stations, sitting alone at the biggest booths of the smallest roadside bars, places with one kind of beer on the menu and video poker in the bathrooms. Clumsy and brutal movements, like he didn’t understand how his body worked. Sharp, yellow teeth. Yellow fingernails, not cigarette yellow, but translucent yellow below the surface.

In Horse Cave, Kentucky, she saw him in the buffet line at the Love’s Travel Stop. He was leering at her, and eating pizza with snatches of his spindly fingers, and she, no longer hungry, put the jerky she had been about to buy back on the shelf.

In Haugan, Montana, she saw him perusing the bargain knife selection at the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar and Gift Shop, the biggest gift shop in the state. Animatronic statues of angels flapping their wings. Ceramic wolves in ceramic landscapes. Signs with cutesy sayings like “A Closed Mouth Gathers No Foot.” He held up a knife and winked at her and then laughed at something the salesman said. Later he would eat the salesman alive.

In Davis City, Iowa, the Thistle Man crossed the street in front of her. The town was small, almost all of it visible from its main intersection. Her breath caught when she realized what was gazing back at her from the crosswalk, smiling into the hanging folds of his skin, and winking, and then the light was green and she tested out the limits of her truck’s acceleration.

In each instance, no one else reacted as though there were anything off about the Thistle Man. It wasn’t that they didn’t see him. She noticed many of them look at him, but then their gazes slid off him. He wasn’t invisible. People saw him and then decided they didn’t want to.

The night of the Iowa encounter, still shaken by what she had seen, she stopped to treat herself to a hot dinner rather than a protein bar eaten while driving. “So what do you do, honey?” said the man at the counter next to her. She had gone through some version of this conversation almost daily for the year she had been on the job. Please don’t. Please, no, she thought. I just want to eat this food and get back on the road, where the miles turn to cents turn to dollars turn to a paycheck.

She nodded to the trucks parked outside. It was a truck stop. There was no one in this restaurant who had any other job except the people cooking the food and the people serving it. What else? her nod said.

He looked at the trucks, then looked at her, and grinned to show he had a new and exciting thought, a thought that would really change things for her.

“Honey, you don’t look like the trucker type.”

She wasn’t big, she wasn’t white, she wasn’t male. Her hands shook as a rule, and her voice was soft when she spoke at all. But she drove a truck. She did it for a living. What does a truck driver look like?

Your days are numbered, motherfucker, she wanted to say. There’s a new world coming. Get out of the way or get on board, I don’t care which.

She took her food and moved to an empty table across the room. He made more of a meal of innocently throwing up his hands than he did of the lukewarm meat loaf on his plate.

“I was just saying, honey. Jeez.”

She thought about dinners she and Alice had back home, before Alice’s disappearance, before Keisha’s long search. Nights where they made pizza. Dough from scratch. Sauce from scratch. Cheese from the store.

Keisha had loved making the dough for the crust. Flour and water in her hands, first separate then merging into a silky whole, the yeast and gluten giving it life and breath. Her hands and her shirt covered in flour because she had never gotten in the habit of wearing an apron. They would open a bottle of wine and eat the pizza they made and watch whatever on TV and fall asleep in a wine-and-bread coma.

Love is cooking together. It’s creating together. That’s what Keisha thought. She didn’t know what Alice thought. It turns out she had never known what Alice was thinking at all.

Flour on their hands. Sauce on their hands. Their hands on their hands. Something forgettable on the television. Leg upon leg. That was a life, she thought.

She could go to the police. She could tell them, what? She had witnessed a monster eat a man, in a murder no media had reported on? And this same monster was now following her, although she couldn’t prove it?

No, for now she would have to take this on herself, as scared as she was. Later that night, dinner over, man ignored as he tried to engage her again on her way out, and a good fifty billable miles of road driven, she switched on her CB radio, held the mic up to her mouth for a long time on the open channel.

“We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art,” she said, to whoever was listening. “Like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”

She stopped to think but kept the send button held. She didn’t want a response. She had heard enough from other people that night.

“You freed me, and I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t want you to. I am more free now than I have ever been, and I am spiraling across this country. Maybe you are too. I want our lines to cross. Even one more time.”

She put the mic back. Switched the radio off.

Hand upon hand, she thought, upon leg upon heart upon couch upon a day where we made pizza together. That’s love, Alice. That’s what it’s made of. And so what is this?

3

Grass and barns and metal windmills. Kansas scenery had delivered on Keisha’s expectations.

Her anxiety was a low, manageable buzz. She had a song she liked on her phone. She hadn’t bothered to figure out how to connect the phone to the truck’s stereo, and so let it play tinny and soft from the phone’s speakers, bopping along to a melody she couldn’t quite hear but knew well enough to sing anyway. Sitting next to her was the second volume of a comic series that she was looking forward to starting over dinner. The air through the window was dry and cool. Not that she was ever calm, but if she were to be calm, it would look like this.

She had stopped to pee at a McDonald’s with a plaque indicating it once was a historical school of some sort, but now it wasn’t a school, it was a McDonald’s, and she peed at it. Given how often people stop at those places to use the toilet without spending any money, she wondered, were they more restaurantor public bathroom on a sheer numbers level? It was an interesting question, and she had nothing but flat road hours to think it over. No plans to stop again until dinner, and dinner would be as late as she could make it. There would be miles done today. She could use the pay, and even more so the sense of movement. The feeling that she was getting somewhere even if she would have to turn right around and head back.

Thump. She felt the vibration through her seat before she heard the noise. Thump thump. THUMP. At first she thought it was her tires going funny, but then realized the sound was coming from the trailer. To be heard all the way up in the cab, above the whoosh of the air and the growling cough of the engine, it must have been seriously loud. (And there it was again, THUMP.) A beast the size of a grizzly bear, running back and forth, slamming into the walls.

There her fear was, right where she always left it, deep in her throat. Metal and acid washed over her tongue and perspired out onto her palms. Her chest was a closing door. A monster in her trailer. Ridiculous. Absurd. A fairy tale. But hadn’t she seen monsters on these roads?

No way from the trailer to the cab, and so she just wouldn’t stop. She would drive and drive forever. She wouldn’t eat, her truck wouldn’t take fuel, she would be saved by the miracle of sheer movement. Because she couldn’t bear to think what would happen when her body or her truck forced her to stop.

THUMP, and her heart echoed the sound with a beat so hard she felt the skin of her chest pulse outward. Thanks to her anxiety, fear was a constant pulse in her life. And now this terrible racket. And she was alone in Kansas. Grassland out to the end of it.

When it gets dark over the grass, it really gets dark. Like being on an ocean, the distant lights of towns like ships. Only her on the road and a fuel tank that was down to a quarter. She would need to stop soon. There was no avoiding this conflict, but she could control how it was confronted. She had to find a way to do it that would be least likely to get her killed. Good luck to her. In the darkness of the fields there was a single billboard, well lit and maintained. It had a picture of a smiling family, and against a soft pink background it said a company name. PRAXIS.

She settled on pulling off in the parking lot of a Target. At least the crowds. Or if not crowds, then at least other people. And if not other people, then at least the lights, bright and sterile across the vast lot. The lights would keep her calm after the long empty of the grassland.

Keisha clutched her heavy flashlight, and she crept around the trailer. There was no noise, not a hint of movement. She had parked as close to the entrance of the store as possible, a bank of automatic doors blaring a welcoming fluorescence out into the cool evening, but still there were only a few cars around. Her hand shuddered as she reached for the latch. A metallic clink. The groan of the handle upward. The rattling complaint of the door opening.

She squinted into the darkness. Her cargo had been pallets of paper towels, and the boxes were torn open by swipes of what seemed to be giant claws. The towels were shredded and tossed about. And there was no need to search for the cause. A yellow baseball hat. Yellow fingernails. Skin in loose folds in places and in other places stretched over angular protrusions. Sharp teeth. Eyes, yellow and pink. Polo shirt, yellow and dirty. The word Thistle on the right breast.

“It seems we keep running into each other,” he said, in his hollow, rattling voice. “How crazy is that?”