by Blake Crouch
Said they have this lodge on a remote island that would be perfect for the administration of painings.
We reentered the thicket on the other side. Scrub pine instead of live oak. A roomier wood.
The trail split and Violet stopped.
"Which way?" she whispered.
"I’m not sure. Let’s keep walking south."
"What are we looking for exactly?"
"A lodge of some sort."
"I don’t think anyone else is on this island, Andrew."
"Yeah, I’m starting to wonder that myself."
We continued southward, the air now perfumed with wet pine and cold enough to cloud our breath.
It was just after nine o’clock when the trail ended, having deposited us on the bank of a wide slough that separated Portsmouth from Evergreen Island. I remembered this feature from the map and my heart sank. If the Kite’s lodge stood on Evergreen we’d have to bushwhack east for half a mile and bypass the slough via the tidal flats that connected these barrier islands. It would take all night.
Eastward, I could see where the backwater eventually emptied after several hundred yards into the flats. The sea lay hidden behind distant dunes.
"Look," Violet whispered.
I turned, gazed back into the wood.
"Do you see it?"
A speck of orange light twinkled somewhere in the pines. It could’ve been a ship on the sound. It could’ve been ball lightning.
"Let’s go," I said. "Pull your hood down so you can listen."
Violet rolled her hood back and pushed her hair behind her ears.
Leaving the path, we struck out into the pines in search of the light. The suction of our boots in the mud seemed positively deafening and the light grew no closer. I had an awful premonition that it would suddenly wink out, stranding us in the pathless dark.
We walked on, faster now between the pines, and for the first time that orange luminescence seemed closer.
I took the .45 from the inner pocket of my rain jacket.
"I see it," Violet said.
We crouched down in a coppice of oleander.
Tucked away in some live oaks at the terminus of a black creek stood a little wood lodge. A lantern or candle (some source of natural firelight) glowed through the only window. A boat was moored to the small dock.
"Is that it?" she asked.
"I have no idea."
We walked on. I was soaked with sweat underneath my raingear.
Within twenty yards of the lodge, I pulled Violet behind a tree and whispered in her ear: "Wait here and don’t move."
I drew back the slide on the .45 and moved quietly toward the structure.
Halfway there I stopped to listen.
The wind had died, the silence absolute save the knocking in my chest.
I crept to the window but because the lodge had been raised several feet off the ground on four-by-fours I couldn’t see inside.
Three deliberate breaths and I walked around to the steps leading up to the front and only door.
At the top I glanced over my shoulder, saw Violet still hunched near the tree.
I put my ear to the door, listened.
Not a sound.
I grasped the doorknob and turned it as slowly as I could, a line of icy sweat trilling down my left side.
With the tip of my boot I nudged the door and let go.
It swayed partly open.
Hinges squeaking.
The only movement inside came from fireshadows on the walls and ceiling.
The furnishings were scanty—a ratty futon, card table bearing dirty plates, a bowl of pistachio shells, a jug of water. The place stunk of scorched eggs and spoiled fish. A candle, almost burned down to the brass, had been set on the windowsill, the sole source of light.
I steadied my hands, knelt briefly on the stoop to rest my trembling knees.
Then I stood, stepped through the threshold, kicked the door all the way open.
Sweet Jesus.
Movement in the right corner.
I swung around, nearly shot Beth Lancing, duct-taped to a folding chair, eyes gone wide with horror, head shaking, hair in shambles, cheeks marbled with bruises and mud.
Lowering the gun, I stepped toward her, reached to pull off the tape covering her mouth, but stopped.
"Beth," I whispered, "J.D. and Jenna are safe. I’m here to take you home to them. Don’t scream when I take the tape off."
Frantic nodding.
I ripped off the tape.
"Andy, he’s waiting for you."
"What?"
"A man with long black—"
From the woods, Violet screamed my name.
Footfalls pounded up the steps to the lodge.
Before I could move, the door slammed shut.
45
I called out to Violet as I jerked on the door.
It wouldn’t open.
Outside Violet screamed.
I ran to the window, glimpsed a long-haired shadow sprinting into the woods. Taking the candle from the sill, I set it on the floor and busted the glass out with the handgun.
The window was too small for me to crawl through. Violet could’ve done it.
I charged the door, rammed it with my shoulder. It barely moved, the wood an inch thick, probably padlocked from the outside.
I lifted the candle and put it on the card table. There was a boning knife on a dirty plate and I took it, walked around to the back of Beth’s chair.
"I’m gonna cut you loose," I whispered.
"Where’d he go?"
"I had a detective with me. A young woman. I think he went after her."
"She have a gun?"
I pointed to the table. "That’s it."
I sliced through the duct tape, freed her wrists, then her ankles.
Beth stood and faced me, haggard, half-naked, clothed only in a torn teddy.
I took off my rain jacket and fleece and wrapped her in them.
"I didn’t murder Walter," I said.
"Just get me out of here."
"I’m not sure how."
"Shoot the door."
I took the .45 from the table, pressed the magazine release. It popped out. I counted the rounds.
"Nine bullets," I said. "I’ll waste three on the door but that’s it."
I shoved the magazine back in.
"Wait," Beth whispered. "What if he doesn’t know you have a gun?"
"So?"
"So let him think it. He unlocks the door—bang, bang."
"Okay. Let’s sit. I don’t feel safe standing up."
I thought of Violet, fighting for her life out in those woods, couldn’t imagine that young woman surviving Luther. My fault if she died.
Candlelight bathed the walls. It was freezing in here and I had no idea of what to say to Beth.
My best friend’s widow.
So much history between us, so many unanswered questions, I just sat there beside her and tried not to let the weight of it all crush me.
"Has he hurt you?" I asked.
"No. Not bad. Where are we?"
"The Outer Banks. Been in this lodge the whole time?"
"No, just tonight. I don’t know where he kept me before that. All I remember is darkness and stone. What’s today?"
"Thursday, sixth of November."
"Ten days."
"What’s that?"
"How long I’ve been apart from my kids."
She shivered. The candleflame shivered.
We sat in silence.
She said finally, "Tell me how he died."
"Beth—"
"I want to hear it, Andy, and I want to hear it from you. But first, pass me that jug on the table. He gave me a few sips earlier, but I’m still so thirsty."
I fetched her the half-empty jug. She took a long pull, then gave me the water.
I flicked off the cap and we sat down in the corner, passing the jug back and forth.
The water was cool and faintly sweet.
> Finally, I dove in—told her about Orson and the desert and the threat he made against her family, her children. I told Beth about how Walter and I went and found Orson and kidnapped him from his home that Friday evening seven years ago.
I said, "So we drove out into the countryside with my brother in the trunk. Already dug the hole earlier that evening. We dragged Orson out and put him in the backseat. We needed to find out where Luther was—that’s the man who just kidnapped you. Orson had sent him to find you all those years ago.
"When Orson came to, he riled Walter, talking about what Luther was going to do to you and the kids. Walter wanted to shoot him, Beth. Right there. He lost his head. But I knew if we didn’t find out from Orson where Luther was, you and the kids would be dead. No question."
I swallowed, growing colder, Beth’s eyes never moving from my face. Even in the poor light she seemed to have aged more than seven years since I last saw her.
"Walter pointed his gun at Orson. I told him no. He wouldn’t listen. He was so mad. It was a stupid fucking thing to do, but I pointed my gun at Walter. Told him, God I remember it so well, ‘you kill him, you kill your family.’ Out of nowhere, Orson kicked the back of my seat and my gun went off. He was gone instantly, Beth. Swear to you."
She closed her eyes.
She let out an imperceptible sigh, then was quiet.
All I could hear was the wind stirring the pines.
The silence became oppressive.
After a long time, she whispered, "You buried him?"
"I’ll take you to the spot when we get out of this."
"I hate you, Andy," she said. Her voice was thick with tears. "Do you know how much I hate you?"
"Yeah. I do."
She leaned into me and I put my arm around her.
As she quietly wept the candle expired and the lodge grew so dark I could see only the navyblack of the sky through the window.
Iced updrafts rising through slits in the floor.
I waited, thinking my eyes would adjust, but they never did.
"Andy," she whispered. Her voice sounded strange and distant, as though she were calling out to me from the bottom of a deep well.
"What?"
"Something’s not right."
"What are you talking about?"
"My head…I feel dizzy…it’s…so heavy all the sudden."
Now that she mentioned it, my head felt weird too.
Maybe we were just hungry.
But when I glanced down at the empty jug between my legs, it dawned on me what had happened.
"Oh, Beth, I think we fucked up bad."
46
VI leaned against the live oak as Andrew stepped into the lodge. She watched the black creek, lined with marsh grass, meandering west between the pines. Had the night been clear, she’d have seen where it widened to join the distant sound.
On the periphery of vision something moved.
She saw a black shape emerge from the woods and move quickly toward the lodge.
At first she thought it was a deer, bounding. Then her blood iced as though she’d glimpsed a demon, watching in silent terror as it reached the steps.
She screamed, "Andrew!"
The thing with long black hair slammed the door to the lodge and padlocked it as Andrew shouted her name.
Then it looked right at her.
Vi reached instinctively for the .45, felt her bony hip.
Before she could even stand, the shadow had descended the steps and was running toward her.
Vi shrieked, sprang to her feet, and bolted into the woods, tree trunks screaming by, her animal panting drowning even the sound of her predator’s footsteps.
She ran and ran and did not look back, expecting at any moment to feel a hand come down on her shoulder and drive her into the ground.
The grove of live oaks turned back into thicket.
She tripped on a dead vine.
Fell.
Chest heaving now against the ground.
In the distance she heard her pursuer flailing about in the thicket.
It stopped.
She held her breath.
Silence.
Her ears adjusting.
Now she could clearly hear the sound of its panting. Much closer than she thought.
She prayed the woods were as dark to him as they were to her.
When her heart quieted she could hear her eyes blinking and nothing else.
A moment passed, then came the rustling, like footfalls on brittle leaves.
Craning her neck, she looked back, saw the shadow stepping gingerly through the thicket.
It stopped fifteen feet away, just a spindly bush between them.
Vi wondered if it were enough to hide her.
The thing walked toward the bush, so close now she imagined she could smell it. The brush shifted beneath her, made a crackling she thought was deafening.
The monster twitched, pushed its hair behind its shoulders.
It stood motionless for what seemed hours.
Listening.
Then abruptly it turned and started back toward the lodge.
Vi couldn’t bring herself to move even when the sounds of its thrashing had grown indiscernible from the snaps and creaks of the island’s other nighttime murmurs.
She didn’t want to budge. Ever.
If I move, he’ll hear me, come back, find me, kill me. But I have to get off this island.
She lay in the thicket for another hour, praying for the will to stand and push on.
Vi had been making her way through the woods for thirty minutes when she stopped and sat down in the tangle of undergrowth. Closing her eyes, she pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to faze out the adrenaline and the panic. She wanted to boil the moment down to the facts and proceed from there. That’s what a strong cop would do.
She took several deep breaths, then stood up again and continued on, flinging the possibility from her mind that she had miles and miles of this thicket still ahead of her.
In keeping with the trend of her day, things degenerated. The undergrowth became so dense she was spending thirty seconds on each step, untangling the vines from around her ankles, whacking the labyrinth of limbs out of her way.
When she failed to unwind one persistent vine she found herself lying facedown in mud.
She did not get up.
She lay there and cried, then filled with anger at the tears, and resisted allowing the totality of this "fucking bad fucking day" to envelop her. You can’t think about it. It’s too much. Just get up and do your job, Viking. It could be worse. A lot worse. You could be dead. Now. Get. Up.
She struggled to her feet. Waded on. Mad. Weak. Right on the verge.
Ten steps later she broke out of the thicket. From claustrophobic vegetation to the sprawling spaciousness of a tidal flat, the wind spilling over the distant dunes, carrying the briny reek of the sea. Eerie black plants rose out of the alkaline soil—salt-sculpted formations, otherworldly and demonic, like the remnants of some nuclear apocalypse.
The flat extended north to south as far as she could see and she tore across it, her boots sinking in the mud, the wind chilling her down, arms pumping, swallowing great mouthfuls of air.
She ran and ran.
The moon, only a sliver of it, materialized behind a ragged gauze of cloud.
God, it was cold in the clearing night. A star appeared here and there, and still she ran, straight ahead toward the small rise of dunes, though she didn’t know they were dunes. She didn’t know the sea lay just beyond them or that she was crossing a tidal flat. A strict mainlander, her knowledge of sea level began and ended with the Grand Strand of Myrtle Beach:
Wings.
