by Blake Crouch
The class is giddy, and as the teacher cranks the engine and they roll down the driveway through the thicket of live oaks, Luther passes around the mask and gives everyone a hit of gas from the silver tank between his legs.
Through gaunt, sunken eyes, Beth looks over the edge at the path speeding beneath the tires. Vi leans her head against Luther’s shoulder, and Andy lies on the rusted bed, staring up through spindly, leafing branches at pieces of a cobalt sky.
He wears a silly grin on his face. They all do.
At the end of Old Beach Road, Rufus turns north onto Highway 12, and they cruise the strip, passing realties and B&Bs and motels and gift shops. The tourists are back, out in force on this cool spring evening.
Just beyond Howard’s, Rufus makes a right turn onto the dirt road called Ramp 72. For three miles, over tidewater creeks and marshland, it winds toward the ocean. When the dirt road turns to soft white sand, Rufus stomps the gas pedal, and the truck hauls through a gap in the dunes straight for the sea. Upon reaching the harder, tidesmoothed sand, Rufus turns south, the old pickup truck now hurtling to the end of the island.
The sky is endless out here, the ocean stretching east into approaching darkness, the sand reaching south and west into the horizon, where the falling daystar, now halfway below the dunes, deepens from red into oxblood.
The incoming tide runs up under the truck, and the tires spray cold saltwater on everyone. Laughter abounds. Gleeful shrieks. Even Luther smiles.
Headlights of other Jeeps and trucks are visible far in the distance, cutting their own trajectories across the beach. Rufus veers up into the softer sand to avoid a fisherman marching in waders out into the surf.
At the end of the island, Rufus parks the truck beyond the reach of the tide and kills the engine. With the vegetation of Ocracoke hidden beyond distant dunes, there is nothing to see but acres upon acres of white beach, the inlet and sand spits to the south, and the sea, now shimmering and crimson as it catches the parting rays of sunlight.
Rufus and Maxine step down into the sand.
"Off with the shoes!" Maxine declares. Though the bruise on her jaw is fading, she still speaks predominantly from the right side of her mouth.
The class climbs out of the truck and the barefooted party lumbers off together toward the sea, like a flock of psyche patients.
"Gas ’em up!" Rufus says, and Luther, toting the heavy tank, calls Andy, Beth, and Vi over and hits them again with a ridiculous dose of nitrous oxide.
"Let’s run into the ocean!" Vi screams, and she sprints toward the sea, followed by Beth and then Andy, limping on his bad leg.
Not until he’s knee-deep in saltwater does Andy register the stinging. Though it’s been more than a week, the wounds on his back and legs are still fresh and raw from his hour-long whipping session with Maxine. But they’re friends again. Because they’re even.
After a cold frolic in the ocean, Andy and Beth stagger down the beach toward the rest of their party. In the distance, Rufus and Maxine have stopped to talk to someone, and Luther has left the tank in the sand and gone running after Vi, who has taken it upon herself to hike to a rise of dunes a half mile away.
Beth and Andy fall down in the sand and laugh until it hurts.
Andy stops laughing when he doesn’t remember what he was laughing about.
"I’m so happy," Beth says. "I’ve never been so happy."
"Oh fuck, my buzz is fading."
They scramble to their feet and head for the tank. Andy puts the mask over his mouth and inhales several deep breaths.
"I think you have to turn it on!" Beth yells.
"Why are you yelling?"
"Oh, sorry. Hey, old fart!" Beth hollers at Rufus. "Come show us how to work this thing!"
Rufus jogs over, opens the valve, and gives them so much gas that Beth and Andy both lose all motor coordination and collapse in the sand.
Side-by-side, they lie there, staring up into the sky. The first stars and Mercury twinkle in the heavens, throbbing like tiny glowing hearts.
"I feel like I knew you in another life," Beth says.
"Me, too."
"I feel so good."
"Yeah."
"Oh, God I feel good!"
Beth rolls over on top of Andy.
"I love you."
She kisses his mouth.
"Oh, God I love you so much I want to."
"Okay."
Rubbing against him now.
"Love me, oh, love me right up!"
"But I can’t feel my eyes."
Then Andy is sitting in the bed of the moving truck. It’s full blown night. Cold and starry. The man who Rufus and Maxine befriended is sitting next to Luther, talking his ear off. Andy catches a fragment of the one-way conversation.
"…don’t know if you’ve ever been out of the country, but when you come back, it’s so difficult to buy into all this capitalist bullshit, especially when you’ve lived six months in a third world country where people don’t even have fuckin’ clean water to drink. Hey, could I get a little more of that?"
Luther helps the world-traveler to another lungful of laughing gas.
Andy leans against the side of the truck as they bump along the dirt road, back toward the village and the House of Kite. Even through the haze of gas, he can see the fate of the world-traveler in Luther’s face, gone absolutely horny for violence. And Luther sees that he can see it and offers the mask to Andy.
Andy takes the mask and lies flat on the truck bed, staring up into the night sky. He breathes deep and long. Beth and Vi have lost consciousness. He isn’t far behind. It briefly dawns on him—the sheer horror of it all—and he wonders what he is becoming.
Then the last lungful of gas hits him, and the euphoria is back, thank God, and the numbness and the all-is-forgiven now and perhaps Rufus is right you are not a bad person you are not really here but now nothing matters and thank you God thank you God and the sky is throbbing again, and the stars twirling then exploding into a thousand flinders of light.
# # #
On a late afternoon toward the end of July, the screams of a woman filled the stone house. You could even hear her from the front yard, standing in the wet, mosquito-ridden heat between the two live oaks. Andy and Beth certainly heard it, locked in their cramped dark cells underneath the house. They’d heard screams down here before, but this time was different. They recognized the young woman’s voice, and even through the antipsychotic fog, both reached the same conclusion: the Kites were killing Violet.
In the candlelight of Vi’s cell, amniotic fluid glistened in the dirt between her legs. Her hands had been balled into fists for more than an hour. Her larynx ached with strain.
Maxine Kite knelt beside her as Rufus leaned against the doorframe smoking a pipe.
"Take me to a hospital!" Vi begged. "It’s not coming."
"It is coming," Maxine said. "This is just—"
"No it’s not! It hurts so much!"
Another vicious contraction.
She screamed again.
Rufus chuckled.
"Pretend it’s the olden times," he told Vi between groans. "Just got to tough it out there, little lady."
Luther came down the creaking steps and peered over his father’s shoulder.
"Miracle of life, son," Rufus said.
"What are you going to do with it?"
"With what?"
"Ahhhhhgg!"
"The baby."
"I don’t know."
"What does that feel like?" Luther asked Vi.
"Fuck you!" Vi roared.
"Boy, she’s a tad busy right now," Maxine said.
Vi looked up at the Kites, their faces eerily grotesque in the firelight. This must be hell.
"Get out!" Vi screamed. "Get out all of you!"
No one left, and the contraction intensified. Lifting her head off the pillow, she grabbed her thighs and groaned for all she was worth.
A bloody head emerged.
When it was out
up to its bellybutton, the little boy screamed "what the fuck?" at the world—a scared, fragile bawling that filled Vi with the purest joy she’d ever known.
She pushed the rest of the baby out.
It lay facedown in the dirt, crying.
"What is that?" Luther asked, pointing at the bloody mass beside the infant.
"It’s the placenta, boy. What feeds the baby."
"They eat that in some cultures," Rufus said. "It’s a delicacy. Mm, boy."
"Would somebody cut the cord?" Vi asked, crying now. "I need to hold him."
"Luther, go fetch a pair of scissors from the kitchen."
Vi sat up. She reached down, lifted the tiny, wailing creature out of the dirt, and brought him into her chest. She kissed his slimy head and whispered to him.
"What’s today?" Vi asked Maxine.
"I don’t know."
"Please. I want to know his birthday."
Luther returned with a pair of scissors. He pushed by his father and told his mother to get out of the way.
"Boy, you let me—"
"I want to do it."
Maxine relinquished her place beside the young mother, and Luther knelt down.
"Turn him over," he said.
Vi held her son up under his arms, facing Luther. The infant and the monster stared at each other, the baby’s eyes rolling around in its head, Luther’s black orbs taking in this bloody little miracle.
"Be careful, please," Vi said.
Luther took hold of the umbilical cord and clipped it a half-inch from the bellybutton. Vi pulled her baby back into her breast.
"What’s its name?" Luther asked.
"Max," Vi said.
"After my mother?"
"After my husband. I need to nurse him now. Can I have some privacy please? Please."
Luther got up and walked out of the room. Maxine followed him and Rufus closed and locked the door behind them all.
Alone in the candlelight, Vi wept. She removed her T-shirt, wiped off the baby, and pushed back her blond hair that clung to her sweaty face. Then she took Max into her swollen breast and began to nurse.
The sucking of the infant produced the only sound in the cell.
Vi closed her eyes.
The soreness between her legs was nothing now compared to those contractions. Loneliness, joy, and horror came in equal measure. She looked down at her infant son, eyes open and shining, sucking away. She stroked his cheek, the firelight dancing across his face. All she wanted now was her husband, looking down on them. She was certain of it—Max would’ve cried.
Vi started to pray, but stopped herself. The fuck had He done for her? She should be grateful that He allowed her to give birth before an audience of psychopaths? Did He need to hear her say she wanted her child to live? How could He not know that?
Count your blessings. Look on the bright side. Fuck the bright side. This should’ve happened in a hospital with my husband. We missed sharing this together.
For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that she was all alone and always had been. She’d bought into the God of suburbia. Comfy, predictable, and manmade to revolve around man. The God of her Baptist upbringing was clearly unconcerned with her current predicament. He’d denigrated the birth of her son by allowing it to occur in a basement that she’d probably never leave.
Her God was fine on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings when all was hunky-dory. And it was even possible to write off the tragedies that befell others as "part of God’s plan." But hold that sentiment up to the flaming knowledge that your newborn child will never see his father, that he might die horribly before he’s even a week old, and see if it doesn’t burn.
When life turns into a real horrorshow, the God she knew was about as useful as a water gun in a war. She felt blasphemous for thinking it, but He was no comfort to her now. She was drowning. He was watching. Either impotent to deliver her, or unwilling. And especially if it were the latter, she had no use for such a god.
# # #
Luther’s room stands at the south end of the third floor, unchanged for more than twenty years. His toy chest still occupies the corner, filled with the playthings he treasured as a lonely child. Even his stuffed animal collection remains—hanging from the ceiling in a rusty wire fruit basket. Dolphie the dolphin, Birdie the blackbird, Polar Bear, and Clementine the barn owl were the major players.
Luther enters his bedroom and closes the door. He approaches the window. Across the sound, a line of late day thunderstorms clobbers the mainland. Zigzags of lightning strike the water a few miles offshore, but their thunder never reaches Ocracoke.
Luther glances back at the desk beside his bed. He’s written only half a page in that leather-bound journal, and it’s utter shit.
"You’re no different from the rest of them," his father told him last night. "Best figure out what you believe and why. Time’s a wastin’."
Luther feels very peculiar. He hasn’t encountered the emotion of fear since childhood, though it isn’t fear of his father and what he may do to him if Luther doesn’t write an exceptional treatise. He could give a remote shit about Rufus. Fuck Rufus. Fuck the goddamn old codger of a bastard. What Luther fears is his own expanding emptiness. He thinks of Baby Max, the moment the infant’s head broke free into the world, and acknowledges it for what it was: the most powerful thing he’d ever witnessed.
Luther lies down on his bed and stares up at the cracks in the ceiling as the storms pass over the island.
It’s dusk when he rises out of bed, takes Dolphie from the fruit basket, and walks downstairs. His mother and father are in the kitchen, flirting and cooking dinner for the guests. He smells wafts of browned hamburger meat and steamed broccoli. As he opens the small door under the staircase, he overhears Rufus say, "Why don’t you grab holt of my stick and see what you’re in for tonight, you old stinky woman."
The downstairs runs the length and breadth of the hundred and eighty-six year-old house, unique to the island as the vast majority of residences sit several feet above ground to protect them from the flooding nor’easters and the storm surges of hurricanes. Consequently, this basement has been underwater numerous times since its construction.
It served as slave quarters in the 1830’s. Servant quarters at the turn of the century. And one of the most extensive wine cellars in North Carolina in the 1920’s. Ten years ago, Rufus wired two of the rooms for electricity.
The rest are lit by candle or not at all.
The stone in one of the rooms is charred black all the way up to the ceiling.
In another, the rock is stained burgundy.
Though Luther has spent many hours down here, he’s still prone to losing his way, especially when he ventures beyond the cluster of rooms near the stairs. Two thirds of the basement lies behind the staircase, a maze of confusing passageways that were lined with wine racks eighty years ago. Broken glass and pieces of cork can still be found in some of the alcoves.
One of the Kites’ favorite pastimes is playing hide and seek with the failed converts. The game is started by turning the guest out of their cell and spotting them a two minute head start into the labyrinth. Then the entire Kite family sets out in search of them. Sometimes they play with headlamps or candles. Sometimes they play in the dark.
Because Rufus has never trusted a body of water to keep a body hidden, all of his failed experiments are stored down here.
It’s deathly silent as Luther arrives at Vi’s cell and unlocks the door. She sits naked against the wall, snoring, the baby asleep on her chest, wrapped in her T-shirt, the candles all but melted away.
He drops the stuffed animal on the floor.
Vi wakes, startled.
"I want to hold Max," Luther says.
"Why?"
"I just want to."
"He’s sleeping."
"I won’t hold him long, and I’ll be careful."
Luther steps forward, leans down, and lifts the baby out of her arms.
"Supp
ort his head," Vi says.
Luther cradles the baby’s head in the crux of his arm.
Vi takes the pillow from behind her back and hides her nakedness.
"What’s today," she asks.
"Why?"
"I want to know my son’s birthday."
