by Blake Crouch
The voices of the paramedics reached them, yelling for someone to unlock the front door.
What Beth heard next was the sound the blade made, moving in and out of her— footsteps in squishy mud.
He did the work with the casual efficiency he used to clean fish, then put the lid back on and ran out of the bedroom.
Beth heard a window break across the hall. He was escaping through the backyard.
Her heart sputtered, trying to beat, failing, the pain tempered by the expanding vacuum the life left as it rushed warmly and fast out of her throat.
It occurred to her that she couldn’t breathe but she was gone before it mattered.
63
MY head was clearing, the bleary shapes clamoring back into focus.
Still disoriented from a bash on the head that had knocked me unconscious, I found myself immobilized in an uncomfortably straight chair in a lowlit stone room that smelled of solder and copper and freshly-hewn oak.
Violet had been thrown in a corner onto a pile of sawdust, hands bound with duct tape, another strip across her mouth, tears streaming down her face as she watched me through horrified eyes.
The Kites operated in a tizzy of movement all around me—Maxine cinching the leather ankle restraints, Luther tightening the chest strap, Rufus pressing my head against the tall chairback. He pulled a leather strap flush against my forehead, ran it through the buckle, and said, "Best be pulling these straps tight as can be, cause he’s gonna jerk like the dickens."
As all six leather restraints were buckled and viciously tightened, I noticed the copper wire running from the chair into a generator.
"What are you gonna do to me?" I asked, my throat tight with dehydration and fear.
"Boy, we’re gonna run electricity through your body until you are dead," Maxine said, coming forward in a daisy print housedress, her jaw swollen, bright black eyes shining.
"Why?"
The old woman knelt at my feet, and with a pair of rusty scissors, began cutting away my fleece pants below the knee, the backs of my legs pressed against the cold plates of copper. Then she trimmed the sleeves of my shirt below the elbows so my bare forearms made contact with the electrodes on the armrests.
"Why are you doing this?" I failed to hide the tremor in my voice.
"Because we can, my boy, because we can." Maxine chuckled.
In the corner opposite Violet, Rufus poured a big bag of seasalt into a basin of water while Luther vigorously stirred the saline solution with a wooden spoon.
"Luther," I said. "Luther, you look at me and tell me why—"
"Where’s that razor, Sweet-Sweet?" Maxine asked.
Rufus pulled a razor from the pocket of his tattered leather jacket and handed it to his wife. She walked behind the chair and I felt the blade scraping across my skull as she shaved a ragged circle on the crown of my head.
Logic told me to shut the fuck up, that nothing I said would make any difference. But I wasn’t operating on logic now.
I saw Maxine reach behind the generator and lift a Carolina Tarheels baseball cap, juryrigged with a chinstrap and a long copper wire curving out of the top.
"Please listen," I said as she walked over to the basin and dipped the underside of the hat in the saltwater, letting the sponge affixed to the inside saturate. "Look, I’ve done terrible things. I understand how a person comes to be that way, but you don’t have to do this. Let’s find a way to—"
Rivulets of lukewarm water ran down my face, salting my lips as she fitted the skullcap onto my head. She fastened the chinstrap, moved out of the way as Luther and Rufus approached bearing dripping sponges.
"Luther, I apologize. I feel terrible about what happened. You have to believe that. I’m so sorry I left you—"
"To freeze and bleed to death in the desert. I’m sure you are now. But aren’t you curious?"
"About what?"
"How I escaped."
"Oh, well yes—"
"It was the damnedest thing, Andrew. One of the Maddings’ ranch hands showed up on a snowmobile about an hour after you left. Young man saved my life. Took my place on the porch. If it wasn’t for him, I guess you’d be doing a lot better right now."
They began to rub my legs and forearms with a peculiar solemnity, sousing with warm saltwater wherever my skin touched the copper plating.
Don’t you dare beg these monsters for your life. It’s what they get off on.
"Maxine, please look at me."
She looked at me.
"What if it were Luther sitting here? Wouldn’t you want someone to show your son a little mercy?" On "mercy" my voice broke. "I’m someone’s son, too."
"Not anymore," Luther said.
There was a can of unleaded gasoline sitting next to a circular saw. Rufus picked it up, unscrewed the gas cap on the generator, and topped off the tank.
"Beautiful, would you christen the chair?"
The old woman picked up a bottle of Cook’s from behind a stack of unused lumber, stepped toward me, and swung the bottle into the chairback. It broke off at the neck, soaking my lap with warm fizzing spumante.
Maxine said, "And we’re operational."
The Kites applauded, hugs all around.
"Remember, son," Rufus said, "we don’t have all night. Keep in mind we’re not safe here anymore. We need to be on the first ferry of the morning. Now, Andrew, don’t you worry about little Violet. She’s coming with us. I think my boy has a crush."
Maxine and Rufus stepped back, standing arm-in-arm in a corner as Luther approached the generator.
"No," I said, "please don’t do that, Luther just wait a—"
When he gripped the pullstring I raged against the restraints.
To my surprise, Luther waited, watching me with a sort of perverse patience, allowing me to exhaust myself, making sure I knew I wasn’t leaving his chair under my own strength.
I quit struggling.
Nothing left.
Hyperventilating dizzy black stars.
I looked at Luther.
Looked at Rufus and Maxine.
At Violet.
She was sitting up now, her eyes closed, lips moving.
Are you praying for my soul?
Luther yanked the pullstring and the generator roared to life, flooding the small stone room with the stench of gasoline and a growling lawnmower-like clatter.
He squeezed his hands into a pair of rubber gloves and spit out the white pit of a Lemonhead, looming before me now, one hand grasping the skullcap wire, the other holding a wire sticking out of the vibrating generator.
All they had to do was touch.
He adjusted his grip, the ends just inches apart.
I haven’t made peace with anything.
And the circuit closed, a blue stream of electrons arcing between the wires, sparks flying, the generator sputtering, a sharp coldness spreading from my head through my knees to the ends of my toes, the current glutting me with its boundless ache.
Then came a lightning slideshow of last images:
Smoke rising from my arms—my body shaking—the Kites’ fixation on my pain—Violet slipping out of the room—my world detonating into pure and blinding white.
64
THE generator shuddered to a halt.
Andrew Thomas sat motionless in the chair, candy-scented smoke rising from his arms and legs, bellowing out of the skullcap.
In the new silence, soft sizzles could be heard emanating from his body.
Luther put an ear to Andrew’s heart and listened.
After a moment, Rufus said, "We good?"
Luther grinned.
"If it is beating, I can’t hear it and it won’t be for long."
Luther started unbuckling one of the wrist restraints but Rufus said, "Just leave him, son. We don’t have time to mess with…where’s Violet?"
Vi was running through a pitchblack corridor, her hands and mouth still duct-taped, praying again for the soul of Andrew Thomas.
She stop
ped and took five deep breaths through her nose.
The generator was silent now and somewhere in the black maze she heard the Kites coming.
And she was running again—straight into a door.
The way out.
She kicked the door open and moved through into a place of awful-smelling darkness.
The old woman’s voice echoed down the tunnel.
Vi closed the door with her foot, eyes desperate for even a sliver of light.
All around her burgeoned the fetor of death.
Just keep walking. This is the way out.
She walked headfirst into someone’s chest.
The person moved away and she jumped back into someone else.
She shrieked through the tape as the door behind her burst open.
A lantern illuminated the room and what she saw in that firelit semidark brought Vi to her knees.
There were perhaps ten of them, hanging by chains from the ceiling, in various stages of decay, their feet just inches off the floor so they appeared to stand of their own volition.
Why have You sent me to hell?
Though she knew the Kites were standing in the threshold behind her, blocking the only way out, Vi couldn’t resist the impulse to look at the faces all around her.
Some had been there for a long long time and they’d disintegrated into carrion, rags, and bones.
The boy who’d tried to save them dangled in a mangle of damage in a far corner.
The ones she’d bumbled into were still swinging—two men near where she knelt, their clothes and wounds still fresh, heads drooped down, masked in gloom.
She peered up at their faces—wrecked.
One of the men was large and mustached.
The other was thinner, taller, younger, and something fluttered in Vi’s brain.
The duct tape arrested her screams but she managed to bash her head into the stone wall three times before Luther came over and dragged her away.
She’d seen the dead man’s long soft hands, recognized the wristwatch, and she knew the pinstripe button-down, rent by buckshot, because she’d given it to Max for his last birthday.
"That’s a bad girl," Luther told her. "Don’t you do that. You’re precious. He’s gone, and you’re never going to see him again, so what’s the use in crying?"
Luther knelt down and stroked her cheek.
He took a syringe from his pocket and jammed the needle into her arm.
"You make my insides taste like sugar," he said. "I’m gonna love you up so much."
"Guess it’s time," Rufus said.
Luther lifted Violet in his arms and the Kites walked together out of the hanging room, through the basement corridors, past the electric chair, and up the creaking stairs.
They emerged from the front door into a bible black predawn, Violet asleep now, in the arms of Luther, in the arms of the drug.
And the yellow rind of a moon was sinking into the sound, the live oaks wrenched and gleaming, frost murdering the beach grass, as they piled into the ancient pickup truck and fled their crumbling house of stone.
K I N N A K E E T
65
WHEN I came around, the odor of my death was everywhere: scorched hair, leather and gas, hot copper, cooked flesh.
I was still strapped to the chair, now in total darkness.
So many shades of pain I couldn’t pick the worst.
I strained against the leather.
The left wrist strap must’ve been partially undone because my arm broke free.
I unbuckled my right wrist, and with both hands ripped off the singed and crumbling restraints.
I staggered to my feet, fell back into the chair, stood up again.
My burns raged as I floundered through the darkness, hobbling along as fast as I could, limbs shaking, one arm outstretched to protect my face, the other tracing the stone wall.
It occurred to me that I was dead, wandering through some outlying region of hell, and still I walked on in the dark for what seemed decades, into deadends and black rooms, through corridors that turned back into themselves, all the while the pain mounting.
I leaned over and puked.
Then came the sharpest stab of dread I’d ever known.
It whispered, Welcome to eternity.
Panic eclipsed the pain, my mind beginning to splinter, when I tripped and fell into a staircase.
My frenzy abating.
Gazing up into darkness.
Still no sign of light.
I crawled up the steps, rotten and doddering beneath me.
My head collided with a wall of wood.
I groped for a doorknob.
The door squeaked open and I tumbled into the foyer of the House of Kite, draped in the sulky gray silence of early morning.
Struggling to my feet, I moved on through the narrow hallway into the kitchen, the dead quietude of the house convincing me they’d fled, taken Violet with them.
I glanced at my forearms in the weak dawnlight that spilled through the kitchen window, the undersides blistering and striated with electrical burns. My calves and the crown of my head had been similarly ravaged, all scorched where the electricity had entered and left my body.
There wasn’t a phone in the kitchen and a search of the library and living room turned up nothing.
Through the living room’s gothic windows I saw a gray Impala parked in the front yard.
Limping back into the kitchen, wreathed in a miasma of spoiled flounder, I found the lopsided ceramic bowl on the breakfast table, filled with keys.
I grabbed them all, and disowning the pain, started for the front door, for Violet.
66
I moved like a wavering drunk through the bending beach grass, crumpling finally across the hood of the rusting Impala, winded, stonewalling the pain.
The day had dawned cloudy and freezing, pellets of sleet tinkling on the metal, the sootcolored sound writhing in chop beyond the house of stone.
I climbed behind the wheel of the car, started shoving keys into the ignition. The fourth one turned and the engine hiccupped and revived to a stammering idle.
Shifting into drive, I stepped on the accelerator, the back tires slinging weeds and sand as the car surged between the elegiac live oaks and sped down the dirt road into thicket gloom.
Curtains of dying Spanish moss swept across the windshield, the Impala bumping along through puddles, over washboards that threatened to rattle the car apart.
When I reached the pavement of Kill Devil Road, I followed it east toward the ocean, past slumbering beach houses nestled among live oaks and yaupon.
I stopped at the intersection of Old Beach Road and Highway 12.
My insides quivered with nausea.
Night thawing in the eastern sky.
I knew the Kites were leaving Ocracoke by ferry.
That left me two choices.
They could either take the one departing from Silver Lake Harbor, or the ferry that embarked from the north end of the island. The ferries that left Silver Lake for Swan Quarter and Cedar Island ran less frequently and required reservations to insure passage. The ferry from Ocracoke to Hatteras was free and ran on the hour, beginning at 5:00 a.m.
The dashboard clock showed 4:49.
I scoped Highway 12, vacant at this hour, lights from the Pony Island Motel twinkling nearby.
Hatteras.
I punched the gas, accelerating through the northern outskirts of Ocracoke Village, past Jason’s Restaurant, the post office, Café Atlantic, and Howard’s Pub.
It was twelve lonely miles to the north end of Ocracoke and the ferry to Hatteras. I had eleven minutes to get there, in a shitty car, on the verge of losing consciousness.
The speedometer passed eighty, the engine screaming as the Ocracoke Light waned in the rearview mirror.
Gray dawnsky, dunes, and marsh blurring by.
The wild dog sea rabid and foaming.
