by Blake Crouch
I stood up and stomped on the slug in case it was hurting. It stuck to the bottom of my shoe like nasty gum. I was getting ready to go home when a man got out of a gray car that was parked at the end of the street near the woods. He was very tall and had long black girl hair. He came toward me. I was afraid but he didn’t even look at me. He just walked right past me up the street.
Something fell out of his pocket onto the road but he didn’t notice. I went over and picked it up. It was shiny and expensive-looking.
"Mister!" I yelled. The man turned around. "You dropped this."
The long-haired man came back. He looked down at me. He didn’t smile. Most grownups smile at little kids. "You dropped this," I said. He opened his hand and I put the shiny thing in it. "What is it?" I asked. It looked very neat.
"A laser pointer. It makes a laser beam."
His teeth were scary—brown and jagged like he didn’t brush them ever.
"How?" I asked.
"Open your hand. I’ll show you. Come on, it doesn’t hurt." I opened my hand and a red dot appeared. It was the neatest thing I ever saw. "You should see it at night," he said. "If it were dark I could shoot this beam across Lake Norman and it would light up an entire house. But you have to be very careful. If you shine it in your eye it’ll blind you. You want to try it?"
"Yessir." He handed me the laser pointer.
"Push the gray button," he said. "Shine it on my hand."
I pushed the button and shined it on his hand.
The long-haired man sat down in the road and took his laser pointer back. Then he took a piece of yellow candy from his pocket and ate it. I wanted one too but I didn’t ask.
"What’s your name?" he said. He was smiling now.
"Ben Worthington."
"Ben, that was awfully nice of you to tell me I dropped this. You could’ve kept it. You’re an honest boy. If I give this to you will you be careful not to shine it in your eye?"
"I would be very careful."
"I can’t give it to you right now. I have to use it this afternoon but—"
"Why?"
"I lost something in a tunnel and I have to find it with this."
It made me sad that I couldn’t have it right now.
"But maybe… No, I shouldn’t. Your parents probably wouldn’t let you have—"
"Yes they would."
"No I don’t think—"
"They would too."
"Ben, if I give this to you you can’t show it to your parents. Or your brother. He would steal it and play with it. Your parents would take it and throw it away."
"I won’t tell them."
"You promise?"
"Yessir, I promise."
"You can’t tell them about me either."
"I won’t." He got up and looked down at me.
"Later tonight I’m going to come knock on your window. You have to go to your backdoor and open it so I can give this to you. Can you do that, Ben?"
"Yessir."
"You have to do it very quietly. If anyone wakes up and sees me I’ll have to leave and you won’t be able to have the laser pointer. Do you want to have it?"
"Yessir."
"Say that you want to have it."
"I want to have it."
"Say it again."
"I want to have it."
"You’re obedient. That’s a good boy. I have to go now. I’ll see you tonight."
"Can I do the laser again?" The long-haired man sighed.
I didn’t think he was going to let me but then he said, "All right, once more."
8
LUTHER Kite straddles the thickest limb of the pine fifteen feet off the ground. It is suppertime on Shortleaf Drive, quiet now that the children have been called home, each house warm with lamplight and lively with the domestic happenings of a Sunday night.
His stomach rumbles. He has not eaten. He will eat afterward because this is North Carolina, land of Waffle Houses that never close. He’ll consume a stack of pancakes and scrambled eggs and sausage links and torched bacon and grits and he’ll drown it all in maple syrup. Especially the bacon.
A breeze stirs the branches and the vivid dying leaves sweep down in slowmotion upon the street. The sky has darkened so that he can no longer see the silhouette of the water tower that moments ago loomed above the rampart of loblollies across the lake. Only the red light atop the bowl signals its presence.
The October night cools quickly.
It will be warm inside the house he has chosen.
He smiles, closes his eyes, rests his head against the bark.
Just four hours.
The moon will have advanced high above the horizon of calligraphic pines, burnishing the empty street into blue silver. He sleeps perfectly still upon the limb, the smell of sap engulfing him, sweet and pungent like bourbon.
9
HORACE Boone had used credit card information to track Andrew Thomas to a postal outlet in Haines Junction, Yukon.
But he didn’t leave right away.
He continued working in Anchorage from April to August, saving everything he earned. In September he quit his job at Murder One Books, put what few possessions he owned into storage, and embarked in his stalwart Land Cruiser for the Yukon with four thousand dollars, a suitcase of clothing, and blind faith that he would find Andrew Thomas.
Upon arriving in Haines Junction, Horace staked out the downtown, studying the village’s sparse foot traffic for his man.
On the fifth morning, while wondering if he’d made a giant mistake, he watched the same long-haired man who’d graced Murder One Books several months back, enter Madley’s Store to retrieve his mail.
Horace was elated.
The next day, his twenty-fourth birthday, Horace rented a rundown trailer on the outskirts of the village and began taking copious notes for the book he wholeheartedly believed was going to make him a rich and famous and oft-laid writer.
His second week in the Yukon he ventured onto Andrew Thomas’s property late one night and spied on the cabin from a distance with binoculars.
The following week he’d crept all the way up to a side window, watched the man wash his supper dishes and write in his loft late into the night.
Now, more than halfway through October, his fourth week in Haines Junction, Horace had decided to take his first real chance.
It was Monday morning and the snow from two days ago still dallied in the shadows of the forest. A full but feeble moon remained visible in the iris-blue morning—a clouded cataractous eye.
Horace sat behind the wheel of his Land Cruiser in that worn space between the trees where he always parked. Andrew Thomas’s Jeep passed by right on schedule, village-bound, a dirtcloud rising in its wake. On this calm morning it would be almost an hour before the dust of its passage had settled.
Horace closed his purple wire-bound notebook and set it in the passenger seat.
He’d already finished outlining the second chapter of his memoir, tentatively titled Hunting Evil: My Search for Andrew Thomas. He was so excited about the book he was having trouble sleeping. It was a concept that couldn’t miss because he might be the only person in the world who knew the whereabouts of the most notorious murderer of the last decade.
Horace had grown up poor.
He wasn’t handsome.
Never been popular in school.
Writing was all he had.
He believed that after twenty-four years of having to see his stupid reflection in the mirror he was entitled to wild success.
Horace climbed out of the Land Cruiser and started down the faintly tread path to Andrew’s cabin, making sure he didn’t track through the patches of snow and leave evidence of his presence here.
He soon glimpsed the cabin through the trees.
He reached the front porch.
Turned the doorknob.
His hypothesis was correct: people who live in the wilderness aren’t compelled to lock their doors.
He stepped inside, his heart
convulsing epileptically, brain teetering between exhilaration and outright terror. Unbuttoning his down jacket, he slung it over the railing of a daybed and commanded himself to settle down. He would hear Andrew’s Jeep coming down the driveway long before it reached the cabin.
Stepping forward, he glanced once through the monster’s home, committing to memory every detail—the sinkful of dishes in the kitchen, the halfeaten pie on the breakfast table, ashes steaming in the doused fireplace, the bearskin rug at his feet. The place smelled of woodsmoke, baked raspberries, venison jerky, and spruce. The floorboards creaked beneath him. He couldn’t believe that he was actually here.
He unlaced his boots, walked in sockfeet to the ladder, and climbed into the writing loft. His eyes gravitated first to the poster of Edgar Allen Poe and those stormy melancholic eyes. Then he read one of the numerous Post-It notes stuck to the rafters:
describe the woman in Rock Springs in the puffy pink jacket who heard Orson yelling in the trunk
Stepping carefully over an unfolded roadmap of Wyoming, Horace found himself standing before Andrew Thomas’s writing desk, bookended by bookshelves, cluttered with a typewriter, dictionary, Bible, thesaurus, and The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees (Eastern Region).
He found what he’d come for in the middle drawer—unbound pages stacked neatly between boxes of red felt-tip pens. Taking a seat in Andrew’s chair, Horace lifted out the manuscript with trembling hands. What in the world has this man been writing?
The title page:
"Desert places"
a true story by
Andrew Z. Thomas
Horace heard something outside, stopped breathing to listen. He decided it was only wind moving through firs. He turned the title page over on the desk and read the short preface:
The events described hereafter took place over seven months,
from May 16 to November 13, 1996.
***
"And I alone have escaped to tell you."
- Job 1:17
Horace flipped the page to Chapter One and began to read.
On a lovely May evening, I sat on my deck, watching the sun descend upon Lake Norman. So far, it had been a perfect day. I’d risen at 5:00 a.m. as I always do, put on a pot of French roast, and prepared my usual breakfast of scrambled eggs and a bowl of fresh pineapple. By six o’clock, I was writing, and I didn’t stop until noon.
10
IN the North Carolina night Luther shins down the pine. On the ground he checks the time and dusts the bark off his jeans. He shoulders the Gregory daypack that holds the tools of his trade: duct tape, latex gloves, .357, small tape recorder, hairnet, two pairs of handcuffs, four Ziploc bags, sharpening stone, and one very special bowie, constructed of a five and a half inch battle-proven blade and ivory hilt. He appropriated the knife seven years ago from Orson Thomas’s desert cabin. He treasures it and is thinking of giving it a name.
Shortleaf Drive runs for a quarter mile along the shore of the moonlit lake, a cul-de-sac at each end, the houses built on roomy wooded lots, draped in sweet suburban silence.
As Luther walks down the road he registers all sounds: the handful of chirping crickets which will be silenced by month’s end, a jet cruising in the darkness overhead, the horn of a distant train carrying across the water.
The Worthingtons live in the brick ranch with long eaves, second from the cul-de-sac, surrounded and shaded by tall broad oaks. The house is dark. Because the blinds aren’t drawn he is tempted to sit in the driveway and stare through those windows into rooms he will soon inhabit. But that isn’t how one carries oneself on a residential street at 1:30 in the morning. So he moves on down the driveway past a Volvo and minivan, each adorned with the obligatory bumper stickers boasting of terrific Honor Roll children.
He creeps along the side of the house into the backyard. The grass runs down to the water where a pier is rotting into the lake. A monster oak stands in the center of the lawn, an elaborate tree house built twenty feet up upon its staunchest limbs. A rope swing hangs from a branch overhead and on this calm October night is absolutely still, like the minute hand of a watch that no longer keeps time.
Luther kneels down in the grass below the boy’s window, thankful that the old oak shades him from the brilliant harvest moon. He unzips his backpack and removes the latex gloves. After pulling his hair into a ponytail he slips on a hairnet and rises.
The window comes to his waist.
He peers inside.
The boy lies asleep in bed. A nightlight spreads soft orange illumination upon the wall beside the open doorway.
Caricatures of stars shine weakly from the ceiling.
Luther aims the laser pointer and a red dot appears on the boy’s pillow. The laser moves onto his face and holds against the eyelid. The boy jerks his head, rubs his eyes, and is still again. The pinpoint of bloodlight finds the eyelid once more. The boy sits up suddenly in bed.
With his middle knuckle Luther raps twice against the glass.
Seven-year-old Ben Worthington regards the dark shape of the man at the window.
The laser shines on Ben’s pajamatop.
In the blue darkness the boy looks down at the glowing dot on his chest, then back at Luther, smiling now, remembering.
Luther smiles too.
Ben waves to Luther and climbs down out of bed. He walks in pajamafeet through scattered Legos to the window. Sleeplines texture the left side of his face.
"Hey!" he says at full volume.
Luther touches his index finger to his lips, dangling the laser pointer between his thumb and forefinger.
And boy and man whisper plans to make their rendezvous at the back door.
11
FOUR hours later Horace returned the manuscript to the drawer. He sat for a moment in Andrew’s chair in sheer shock. If he were to believe the preface, that this manuscript was true, then Andrew Thomas was one damned unlucky human being.
He climbed down from the loft, laced his boots, buttoned his jacket, and stepped out into the premature darkness of the afternoon.
On the way back to his Land Cruiser, he couldn’t stop thinking about Orson Thomas and Luther Kite, how they’d destroyed Andrew Thomas’s life.
A splinter of pity worked its way in.
Having grown up with all those terrible stories about Andrew Thomas, that manuscript was hard to believe. Maybe it was full of lies. But why would a man living in the middle of nowhere in assumed anonymity have any reason to lie? What if the monsters were really Orson and Luther?
He was running through the woods now, eyes watering from the cold.
When the idea hit him, Horace laughed.
But by the time he’d reached the Land Cruiser, he knew what he would have to do for his book.
Next time he came out here, he would drive right up to Andrew Thomas’s cabin, knock on the door, and politely ask the alleged serial killer for an interview.
12
BEN Worthington turns the deadbolt as Luther grins at him through a pane of glass. When the boy has opened the backdoor, Luther extends an arm from behind his back and unfurls his long slender fingers to reveal the coveted laser pointer.
"All yours," Luther whispers.
The boy steps through the doorway onto the deck, bigeyed as his little fingers grasp what has been foremost on his mind since midafternoon.
Luther gently places his right hand against the back of the boy’s skull and his left palm flat against his forehead.
"You’re a bad boy, Ben," Luther says, and twists his little head around one hundred eighty degrees.
The warmth of the house envelops him as he closes and relocks the backdoor. He stands in the kitchen holding the dead boy in his arms, the linoleum Kool-Aid-sticky beneath his feet.
The sink blooms with dishes.
The odor of burnt popcorn permeates the air.
Two greasy Tupperware bowls sit on the Formica table beside him, the unexploded kernels still pooled in the bottom.
