The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  Paul said, “You didn’t shoot me. You didn’t.” He sat back down in the chair, paling. Devlin could hear the fading suck of his punctured lung, the man emitting soft, drowning gurgles. She pulled the hammer back once more and aimed at Kalyn.

  “If you move,” Devlin said, “I’ll kill you, too.”

  FIFTY

  Devlin rushed back into the corridor, ran down the stairwell and into the passage. She heard voices in the dining hall, but she kept going, back into the lobby. It was much darker here, now illuminated only by candles and lanterns. As she entered the first-floor corridor, she heard it—rapid footfalls on stone, people running through the lobby, a man yelling. Devlin glanced back, saw a group of shadows appear at the far end. She rushed into the alcove, started up the stairwell, came out onto the second floor. The wolf loped down the corridor toward her, its head low, sniffing the hardwood floor. Devlin fired off three shots, then turned, ran back into the stairwell, sprinting up two more flights, emerging finally onto the last floor.

  There were footsteps below her now and more coming up the stairs from the lobby. You have to find a room and hide. She ran through the corridor, trying doorknobs on both sides of the hall—locked, locked. She could hear the wolf running up the stairwell, growling. Locked. Locked. Shouting resounded in the lobby. Locked. Room 403 opened.

  She stepped inside, shut the door, out of breath, on the verge of tears. It was completely dark in the room. She ran to the window, looked through it, light from the veranda glittering on the billions of snowflakes loading the fir trees with tons of powder, burying saplings, boulders, swirling madly as the wind blew drifts to the second floor.

  She heard doors opening, shutting out in the corridor, the slams getting closer. A wardrobe stood to the left of the door. She set the gun on the bed, got behind the wardrobe, put all her weight against it, straining to shove the enormous piece of furniture across the floor. It inched. They were coming, just a few doors down now.

  The wardrobe finally slid. She pushed it behind the door, then went to the desk, pulled it away from the window, braced it against the wardrobe.

  Outside, someone said, “I can’t see through this peephole.”

  “Unlock it.”

  “It is unlocked.”

  The door shook. “There’s something blocking it.”

  Another man’s voice came very quietly and very evenly through the barricade. “Can you hear me?” Devlin made no response. She picked up the gun. “Open the door right now.” She didn’t move. After a moment, the footsteps trailed away, and she stood trembling in the darkness of the bedroom, the only sound the whisper of snow striking the glass. Another minute passed. Could they have left? Oh, please God, please. She thought she heard the echo of footsteps, but the sound was soft and she couldn’t be sure.

  There was a knock, and his voice passed through the door.

  “Gonna let me in, do this easy?”

  Devlin looked at the wardrobe braced against the door, realized with a horrifying pressure between her eyes that this was it. End of the line.

  “I will break it fucking down.”

  The knock was explosive this time. She thought he’d destroyed his hand, until the second and third and fourth blows came and the door began to splinter. She squeezed back the hammer, pulled the trigger twice, shot a pair of holes through the wardrobe and the door, the gun nearly jumping out of her hands. After her ears quit ringing, it was quiet, and she thought for a moment she’d hit him.

  Soon he started up again. The wardrobe began to shudder, the ceiling rained plaster dust and paint chips, and the chandelier was tinkling. Her legs quaked so violently, they barely kept her upright. Tears streamed down her face.

  As he broke through the back of the wardrobe, she backpedaled toward the closet.

  Now she could hear him thrashing around inside. The wardrobe doors were flung open. He stood amid the old dresses, and she could see his face only by the faint illumination of the lantern that he held. The ax thudded blade-first onto the hardwood floor and he climbed out, set the lantern by the ax. He drove his shoulder into the side of the wardrobe and inched it back into the corner. The ravaged door stood exposed, wrenched from its hinges and leaning back against the door frame.

  He picked up the flashlight and the ax and came toward her, the dome of his bald head shining with sweat in the firelight. She recognized his blue jeans and boots—Ethan, from breakfast this morning.

  He stopped when he saw the revolver in her hand, the weapon twitching with each heartbeat. Devlin put both fingers on the hammer, pulled it back, squeezed the trigger. Click.

  He lunged forward, slapped the gun out of her hand. As it slid across the floor, he pressed her up against the window, their hearts heaving into each other. She could feel the cold of the storm through the glass, the cold of the ax blade against her leg. He gazed down at her, their breath pluming in the lantern light. His smelled of wine.

  Thunder resounded, porcelain figurines rattling on a nearby bureau.

  He ground his teeth together. “He was my brother, and now he’s dead.”

  “He was going to—”

  “He was my brother. Now he’s dead.”

  He let go of the ax and his fingers glided through her black curls, his fist closing on a handful of hair.

  “That hurts,” she cried.

  “You have no idea.” And he dragged her screaming toward the smashed door, which he kicked aside. She clung to his arm as he hauled her out into the corridor and past the rooms on the fourth floor, the wolf trotting alongside, snapping at her face. It was just the two of them now, the others gone, firelight glinting off the brass numbers.

  405.

  407.

  409.

  Devlin screamed, dug her fingernails into his arm. He shrieked and she tore herself away, ran back down the corridor. On the fifth stride, she tripped, fell, glanced back toward the lantern and the shape of Ethan and the wolf, fast approaching.

  The moment she regained her footing, he was upon her.

  FIFTY-ONE

  When she opened her eyes again, the first thing she saw was the blurry image of her feet sliding across the stone floor of the lobby and past the hulking tower of the freestanding hearth, its blaze burned down to the embers, the only light coming from Ethan’s lantern.

  Devlin was being dragged by her hair. Her right eye throbbed and she could see only a slit of the world through it. The Texans who stood in their kimonos at the far end of the lobby resembled a collection of phantoms in the dark.

  One of them yelled, “What you got there, Ethan?”

  “Not your fucking concern!”

  Ethan produced a knife from his pocket, grabbed her jacket, and sliced the blade through it, cleaving two layers of fabric—her fleece and the long underwear shirt. He ripped them off, then unbuttoned her jeans, slid them down her legs, and threw her to the floor. He tore off her pants, stripped away her long underwear bottoms, her panties, then set her back on her feet.

  She stood dazed, embarrassed, and numb with shock as he shoved open the heavy iron doors to the storm.

  “No, please, I’ll—”

  He pushed her outside, and she stumbled back into one of the pillars. Ethan lifted a long, thin whistle to his lips and blew, the frequency too high to register with her ears. Then the doors slammed shut, Ethan ramming home the three bolts on the other side.

  Her feet ached. She looked down at them, but they were submerged in the snow the wind had blown against the pillar. She ran at the door and beat her fists against it and screamed. On a summer evening, her voice would’ve carried across the lake and up the mountain slopes. This night, the blizzard destroyed the echo and her voice went wherever the wind took it. She turned away from the doors, looked down toward the lake. She stamped her feet, snow continuing to fall onto the porch.

  She turned back to the doors, put her lips to the snow-glazed iron: “It hurts. Please.” She registered the desperation in her voice. It scared her like nothing els
e had.

  Devlin shut her eyes. I’m going to die out here. She ran out naked into the snow. It was waist-deep, numbing. She collapsed, sank into a drift. Above the chattering of her teeth there was only the hush of the storm, until a howl erupted across the lake.

  She looked up, her head nodding with cold. The howl came again, closer this time. She struggled to her ice-burned feet. In the nearby woods, more howls answered. Not the wolves, please God, not the wolves.

  Now she glimpsed something—a shape bounding through deep powder. There were tears and snowmelt in her eyes, and when she blinked them away, she saw the wolf. She looked back up the corridor of spruce leading to the lodge. The five-story tower, the projecting four-story north and south wings, stood black against the storm.

  A series of explosions shattered the silence. She felt the vibration in her chest. Somewhere in the distance, an avalanche thundered down a mountainside.

  An idea struck her—she envisioned climbing up to the veranda. She would break a window, slip into the library.

  Now the wolf was coming toward her through the snow.

  By the time she reached the end of the south wing, she was moaning from the pain. Her hair hung in her eyes and when she tried to brush it away, it broke off. To stay above the snow, she held on to the cold rock of the first level, making her way around the chimney to the back side of the south wing, coughing now in painful, choking fits.

  Thirty yards from the veranda, her left foot stepped on something. She bent down, brushed away the snow. Screamed. A woman sat against the stone wall, naked, half-eaten. While new snow blanketed the dead girl’s face, Devlin pushed on toward the veranda, swimming through snowdrifts as deep as she was tall.

  Now the burning had begun to subside in her feet and hands, her extremities assuming a clumsiness that made it impossible to grip the stone wall. She looked down at the deadweight hanging at the ends of her arms, imagined the flesh and the bone and the blood freezing solid in her fingers, wondered if she’d already lost them.

  The steps to the veranda were buried, the balustrade covered. She fought her way through the snow, her cheeks going numb, the dull intoxication of hypothermia beginning to cloud her brain. From below she could see the French doors leading into the library, the glass panes fogged, firelight ricocheting off a wall of books.

  Devlin heard something behind her, turned, saw three wolves emerge around the corner of the south wing, only their heads visible, rising and falling in the deepening snow.

  She backed up to the foot of the stone steps, nothing to do now but watch them come, steel herself to die. She closed her eyes, felt the snow collecting on her face, her eyelids, the tip of her nose. Possessed by a strange, sudden warmth, she sensed the delusional euphoria lurking, and she welcomed it. Her lips moved in rhythm with her thoughts. She was thinking that she would have a little nap to gather her strength and when she woke she would climb out of the snow and go inside and sit by the fire.

  But there was no great urgency. She could last the night if she had to. She could last until spring, until the thaw. She was finally comfortable and getting warmer by the minute.

  Devlin heard the wolves coming now, tramping toward her through the snow, snarling, the sound of their great jaws snapping closed all around her like gunshots in the night.

  What They Lost

  FIFTY-TWO

  Twenty minutes had passed since he’d thrown the teenager out into the storm, and in the dining room, the oblivious Texans were still playing Hold ’Em for foolish stakes, trashed beyond all reason.

  He’d lived in this lodge and run its business going on ten years, with nothing approaching this level of catastrophe—Gerald dead, now Paul, and that woman, Kalyn, still unaccounted for, though Donald, that imminently capable sociopath, would surely find her before dawn, as he had so many others.

  Ethan reclined in one of the brown leather chairs in the vicinity of the library’s hearth, his legs stretched across the matching ottoman. He’d left his brother in his bedroom in that chair by the fireplace, Gerald in the south-wing alcove, where Kalyn had slit his throat. He’d deal with it all in the morning—the cleanup, public relations with the Texans, if they even remembered—and think of nothing more tonight but how monumentally fucked up he was about to get.

  He filled his lungs with a hefty intake of smoke.

  When it finally hit him, Ethan let the long bamboo pipe slip from his fingers and eased back into the chair, grinning stupidly at the ceiling, blowing smoke rings at the fire.

  Through the opium fog, he heard a banging sound, thought for a moment it was his heart, since frequently, after a big hit, it raced and thumped in his chest like a blacksmith shaping out a piece of iron. But this wasn’t that. He could feel his heartbeat, which was soft and slow; there was something comforting about its methodically steady pace.

  He rarely hauled himself out of the chair on nights he smoked, preferring to pass out before the warmth of the fire, letting the twisting flames and the coals and the sounds they made occupy his mind.

  It took considerable effort to maneuver out of the chair. At last, he did, looked down at his feet when finally standing, puzzled at the strange sensation, as if he was watching appendages that didn’t belong to him. He certainly couldn’t feel them, even as he walked onto the freezing stone of the lobby, where Donald was already waiting in the vicinity of the door with his shotgun.

  Ethan said, “Tenacious little thing, isn’t she? Give me that.” He swiped the shotgun out of Donald’s hand. “Wanna watch her go airborne?” he asked.

  The guard chuckled as Ethan slid back the three iron bolts and pulled open the doors.

  From Don’s perspective, it appeared as if the back of Ethan’s head exploded, his knees buckling, his body dropping like an inanimate sack of bones to the stone, a razor shard of Ethan’s skull lodged in Don’s eye.

  A figure stood in the threshold, shadowy and formless in the candlelight. Don was backpedaling, reaching for the Glock in his jacket as a second muzzle flash blinded him, followed by a fragment of white-hot pain that was the end.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Will Innis, frostbitten, mauled, half-delirious with cold and exhaustion, limped through the open doors into the lodge, glancing down at the two men he’d shot, both undoubtedly gone, great pools of blood like black lacquer in the light of a nearby lantern.

  Footsteps resonated through a passage at the other end of the lobby, and uncomfortable with the .45, the way it had seemed to spring out of his hand when he’d pulled the trigger, he traded it for the shotgun of the first man he’d killed.

  Pumping it, he aimed down the passage as three shadows emerged into the lobby, silhouetted by candlelight.

  One of them shouted, “Ethan, you having a little target practice without us?”

  The first blast filled the lobby.

  Will pumped again, fired again, the men running now, chased by two more thunderous booms that put everything quiet.

  Will hurried across the lobby into the dimly lighted passage, glimpsed three men in kimonos on the floor, one sprawled and unmoving, two whimpering like puppies as they dragged themselves across the stone, leaving dark, sluglike trails in their wake.

  Devlin lay on the porch in several inches of snow, shaking violently, naked. Will’s eyes flooded at the sight of his daughter like this.

  He lifted her out of the snow, carried her into the lodge, and as he pulled the doors closed and shot home the bolts, a wolf howled somewhere out in that snowy dark. He hadn’t managed to kill any of them.

  On the other side of the lobby, through an open door, what appeared to be fire shadows moved along the walls. Will carried Devlin past the free-standing fireplace into the library, where a fire raged in the hearth.