by Blake Crouch
This alternate ending takes its turn into left field after the conclusion of chapter 49 and the end of the Portsmouth section, right after Violet has been clubbed in the head by Maxine Kite:
Rufus pulled it from his back pocket, pressed the talk button, said, "Yeah, son, we got her. See you back at the house."
Vi’s brain told her arm to unzip the poncho and take out the gun but she remembered that she didn’t have it and besides the arm wouldn’t move.
"Now that’s what you call a good ol’ fashioned wallop," Rufus said and chuckled.
Then the old man kissed his wife on the cheek and leaned down toward Vi, all gums tonight.
"Her lips are still moving," he said. "Go ahead and clonk her again, Beautiful."
ALTERNATE ENDING
Elizabeth Lancing has lived in pure darkness for forty-one days.
Around Thanksgiving, she stops taking her meals. For forty-eight hours she refuses to eat or drink.
Then, on the verge of death, god saves her.
"Elizabeth."
The voice booms from the darkness above, masculine, calm, almost robotic.
"Elizabeth, I know that you can hear me."
She tries to sit up on the cold hard floor but has no strength.
"Elizabeth? Respond to me…are you wondering if you’re really hearing this voice?"
"Yes."
"You aren’t hallucinating."
"Where am I?" she croaks.
"Where is not important. You want to die don’t you?"
"Who are you?"
"You know, my child."
"I have children. Their names are—"
"I know their names. I created them. I’m going to free you. But first, can you do something for me, Elizabeth?"
"What?"
"Eat. You’ll die otherwise, and I won’t be able to help you. Next time I come, I’ll tell you many things. Prepare yourself. Oh, Elizabeth?"
"Yes?"
"Jenna and John David are safe. I can see them now."
# # #
god returns the next day. He’s spoken to many people in this small stone cell. Some believed. Some laughed. One told god to go fuck himself in the ear. Most had already gone mad and half-brained themselves on the rock by the time he came.
god finds Elizabeth Lancing asleep on the floor. The voice wakes her and speaks to her, though not of the fuzzy, comforting things she expects. It speaks of illusions she has accepted her whole life. god says he speaks truth—truth with teeth and big sweaty balls.
He doesn’t ask her to believe. Only to muse. Particularly on evil. He says that evil is a misnomer for the diamond core of man’s soul.
In parting, god says, "Consider how you might rid yourself of that definition, Elizabeth. Next time I come, I’ll tell you how you might do it, and if you’re interested, I’ll free you. If not, you may continue with your plans to die in the darkness you now inhabit and never see Jenna or John David again."
# # #
Pain divided by cushions of beautiful numbness…
# # #
I can see the sound from my bed. Blue sky. Navy water. A thread of green running between. Sometimes the leg throbs. Sometimes it burns. Sometimes I don’t feel a thing, not even my eyes.
Those are the blissful times, and I stare out the window and watch clouds gather over the sound and do not wonder or care where I am.
# # #
Orson keeps vigil at my bedside. He says I’m going to die. I tell him I don’t care one way or the other.
# # #
I lie in a windowless stone-walled room, a bare light bulb shining above my head.
An old man I’ve never seen before is stitching up my leg below the knee.
He glances at me and stops, his arms red up to the elbows.
The old man wipes his brow, says, "Give him some more gas, Beautiful."
# # #
Sometimes I see a strange sky. Cloudless. Sunless. Bright blue but without depth, almost as though I were staring into a blue television screen. While I stare at this sky, a voice speaks into my ear. Then I see things. I see the things it tells me to see.
# # #
Violet King has begun to splinter. Solitude can do that to you. Silence and unending darkness will most certainly do that to you. Her eyes have not seen light in fifteen days, her world now six by six by eight, enclosed by cold stone walls.
Her last memory is of a lavish yacht. She doesn’t recall how she earned the fracture along the top of her skull. Though it is healing, stitches would’ve helped, and the headaches have not let up.
She is still being fed and watered. One square meal a day. And though she thinks she wants to die, she continues to eat the slop that is put before her, ravenously. She believes if she doesn’t eat, she will die. The possibility grows more enticing each day, and though the idea of starving herself to death is occurring with increasing frequency, she has not yet taken the first step, which would be shoving the plate of food back under the door.
Vi was raised to think that if you commit suicide, you go to hell. It is the belief of a Catholic, not a southern Baptist, but for some reason her father believed it, so she believes it, too. However, as her notion of hell is eclipsed by her reality, she may reconsider her conviction.
# # #
The meal is always the same: an apple, steamed broccoli, browned hamburger meat, and two slices of white bread. Sometimes she keeps it down. Usually she doesn’t. Her morning sickness rages on. Incredibly, she has not miscarried.
# # #
The baby growing inside her is the only reason she’s still alive, the only reason she continues to eat. Vi has taken to talking to her stomach. She also sings. But the sound of her voice makes her cry. She hears the brokenness of it. A person she doesn’t know.
# # #
Today is Thanksgiving, but Vi has lost all concept of time. Lately, she can’t distinguish between sleeping and consciousness. It’s all that same quiet darkness. Hope has ceased to exist even in her dreams.
# # #
One day she decides that she’s in hell, and that the world of light and love and a man named Max was something she had imagined to pass this black eternity. She had become so good at dreaming, at conjuring that pretend, perfect life, it had alleviated her torture here. But something has snapped her back into hell. She will try to dream it all up again.
# # #
She fails. Her mind is leaving her. She hasn’t eaten in two days, because she doesn’t think she’s pregnant. Becoming a mother was a part of that lovely dream. Her deepest fear now is that she won’t die. Souls don’t require sustenance. She is unbreakable and will go on forever, a bottomless container, capable of holding oceans of pain.
# # #
I drift so far back. Is this a memory? A dream?
It’s a Saturday in late June. I’m nine or ten. Daddy wakes us up at 6:00 a.m. and tells us to get dressed. Mom’s at the beach with her sisters. Just the boys this weekend.
We climb into the station wagon and ask Daddy for the fifth time where we’re going, but he only grins and says, "Have to wait and see." He’s a great lover of surprises.
We ride in the front seat, me in the middle. At a nearby bakery, Daddy buys a dozen doughnuts, and I hold the box in my lap. By the time we reach the visitor parking lot of Stone Mountain State Park, the box is empty and our fingers sticky, our faces stained with chocolate icing and jelly and custard fillings. I’m a little mad at Orson, because he ate all of the crème-filled chocolate ones.
We reach the summit of Stone Mountain a little before 11:00 a.m., and Daddy throws a blanket out on the rock. With one strong warning not to go beyond the ledge of stunted pines, where the dome of granite begins to slope precipitously, he sets us loose—something Mom would never have done.
Orson and I spend the next hour chasing each other across the acres of sunlit rock. The June sunlight is strong, and the water collected in the small craters of the mountain is warm as bathwater. We take off our shoes and socks a
nd dip our feet in and pretend we’re on the moon.
After lunch, we lie down on the blanket beside Daddy. Orson drifts off, but I stare out across the folds of Appalachian forest rippling off into the horizon. June bugs zip by, clicking noisily, and a yellow jacket seems interested in the uneaten triangle of Orson’s peanut butter and honey sandwich.
I glance over at Daddy and see that he’s asleep, too. I lay flat on my back and stare up at the sky which has begun to fade from the crisp blue of morning into the bleached baby blue canvas that may birth thunderstorms in several hours. I feel a prick. The yellow jacket must have stung my arm.
And I stare at the sky and stare at the sky and it turns bluer and flatter and the mountains disappear and Orson and Daddy disappear and then a voice speaks out of the heavenly pixels.
"That was a lovely memory, Andy. So nice to hear you speak of Orson. Your brother was very special."
I feel like I’m floating. I try to speak, but now my words come out mangled.
"Don’t talk, Andy. You couldn’t possibly form a coherent sentence. The pain was coming back, so I gave you another injection. Shall we go deeper this time? How about I talk and you listen?"
"Muuh. Ah. Muuh."
"Don’t try to speak anymore, Andy. I just want you to absorb my voice. I know you’re still a little disoriented. Not sure where you are. Maybe you’re afraid. Well, you’re going to let go of all of that. Fear has its place, but not here, not now.
"You ever been driving somewhere and you suddenly became alert and realized you didn’t remember the last twenty miles? I’m going to bring you to that state, Andy. I want you to lose all context and focus solely on the sound of my voice.
"You’re behind the wheel of a luxury sedan on a long, boring stretch of road. The dotted line moves beneath the wheels. Engine hums hypnotically. Sun shines in. You’re nice and warm, the seat soft and comfortable beneath you. And your eyes begin to lower and lower…and lower. And now your eyes are closed and the sound of my voice is all you hear. And we go deeper and deeper, and the sleepiness feels so good, so warm, that you want to go deeper and deeper…and deeper.
"My voice is now the only thing that exists. Squeeze my hand, Andy."
I squeeze the voice’s hand.
"We’re going to talk about values, Andy. Right and wrong. Good and evil. I want you to picture a row of great stone tablets. The rules of man have been chiseled into these tablets, and all your life you’ve abided by them and been put upon by them.
"These tablets stand on the edge of a cliff. And now there’s a man lurking behind them. Do you see him? Squeeze my hand if you can see him."
I see the man behind the tablets. I squeeze the voice’s hand.
"Now that man is pushing the tablets over the cliff. One by one. And they’re shattering, Andy. They’re shattering into millions of pieces on the ground. Squeeze my hand if you see them shattering."
I see them shattering. Hear the rock breaking. I squeeze the voice’s hand.
"That man standing on the cliff is you, Andy. You have just broken those terrible tablets that have been imposed upon you. You’re free now, Andy. Free to make your own right and wrong. Free to create your own values. Good and evil, as you’ve known it your entire life, does not exist. Evil is an illusion. Good is an illusion. You’ve broken those awful tablets.
"So now, when you see something, violence for instance, you will laugh and laugh and laugh, because it’s hysterically funny. Do you know why it’s funny? Because it’s meaningless. It’s so utterly meaningless, and people have attached to it such grave meaning. When you see an act of violence, Andy, you will laugh and say ‘How meaningless.’ Values no longer concern you, Andy. You are above them. They are falling away beneath you. You have just taken the first step toward becoming something better."
# # #
god comes to Vi after she pushes her third meal in a row through the slot beneath the door. god always waits until they try to starve themselves to death. It is a sign of their malleability.
When she hears the voice from the darkness overhead, she thinks she’s crossed into delirium. Weak, starving, she has hardly the strength to sit up, so she rolls over onto her back and stares into the blackness above.
"What’s up, God?" she says.
"Are you mad at me, Violet?"
"You do this to me?"
"’Fraid so."
"Then I’m mad at you."
Vi laughs in god’s invisible face. god laughs, too. The sound of god’s laughter is the most disturbing thing she’s ever heard. Her subconscious image of God is one of those oil paintings of a hippie, blatantly Caucasian Jesus in a clean, white robe, staring out of the canvas with sad, penetrating eyes. God isn’t supposed to laugh. Her God is holy and solemn, and if Vi were honest with herself, perfectly boring.
Under most circumstances, Vi would disregard any voice that intimated it was God. But after thirty days in soundless, pitch black isolation, when a voice suddenly speaks to you and tells you he’s God, you have no perspective from which to refute it.
"Everything you’ve been told about me is wrong," god continues.
"I couldn’t agree more."
"You want to die here, Violet?"
"No."
"You’d like to see your husband again? Max?"
She lets that name and what it could do to her bounce off her like a rubber ball.
"Of course I would."
"Then I need you to eat, Violet. Can you do that for me?"
"Why?"
"We have things to talk about, and you’ll be dead soon at the rate you’re going."
"Why can’t you just save me?"
"I’m doing exactly that, Violet. Only the things I’m saving you from, you may not want saving from."
"Like what?"
"Values. Comfortable illusions. Lies you’ve been told all your life by cowards."
"I don’t un—"
"You will understand. If you trust me. Do you trust me?"
"No."
"Then you’ll die here alone."
"Okay, I’ll try."
And she means it, and so begins the process of lying to herself. God has come to her. He’s come to save her. It’s so much easier to believe than the truth—whatever that may be.
# # #
And the captives sleep—two in darkness, dreaming of god, half-mad with sensory deprivation, one in bed, out of his mind on painkillers. They are being mindfucked each day. Whether the things god tells them will stick remains to be seen. Suggestion is powerful coupled with narcotics and exhaustion and isolation. But it can’t loose what isn’t there. god is looking for his diamond core. Where it is, he will nurture. Where it isn’t, or rather, where it can’t bear itself, he will make a brutal end.
But now god is sitting on a couch with his wife, a fire blazing in the hearth, Bing Crosby filling the musty corridors of his great stone house.
As he watches his son decorate the Christmas tree, his old wife rises to replenish her hot chocolate.
Would Rufus care for some more? He certainly would.
Luther hangs the final ornament, a wooden airplane he’s had since childhood, then comes and sits beside his father.
It’s a raw December evening beyond those drafty windows, and the cold fog spilling in from the sound has begun to enwrap the two live oaks in the front yard.
But they are warm, the logs hissing, popping, just the boys now. Rufus puts his arm around Luther, thinking of Christmas, fast approaching, his boy being home, the three souls now under his care, and the miserable little wretch named Horace, writing for his life upstairs.
You would think such a man did not know happiness, that his life of darkness would make him a creature of anger and melancholy and fear.
"Merry Christmas, son. Came together beautifully, didn’t it?"
And they sit watching the fire together, Rufus reflecting on the days to come. He’s quite joyful for someone whose passions direct them to go spelunking in the shunned caves of huma
n psyche. It would be comforting to say that Rufus did not know happiness, that he was swallowed up in misery and self-hate.
But it would be a lie.
# # #
Next comes Christmas Eve. Maxine Kite carries the last casserole dish of candied yams up the staircase to the third floor cupola of the ancient house. Her guests have been dressed and seated. The long table is candlelit, moonlit. Through the west wall of windows, a thin moon lacquers the sound into glossy black. Through the east wall of windows, the Atlantic gleams beyond the tangle of live oaks and yaupon. The tourists gone, the island silently twinkling, the evening is cold and glorious and more star-ridden than any night in the last three years.
