Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

  He won’t make a mess in here.

  “Jason.”

  My chest is heaving, I’m starting to hyperventilate, black spots detonating across my field of vision.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, “and I can hurt you just as easily inside this car.”

  I’m not getting enough oxygen. I’m starting to freak out.

  But I manage to say, breathlessly, “Bullshit. You don’t want my blood in here.”

  —

  When I come to, he’s dragging me out of the front seat by my arms. He drops me in the gravel, where I sit dazed, waiting for my head to clear.

  It’s always colder near the lake, and tonight is no exception. The wind inflicts a raw, serrated bite on my exposed skin, which is covered in gooseflesh.

  It’s so dark out here I can see five times the number of stars as in the city.

  My head is throbbing, and a fresh line of blood runs down the side of my face. But with a full load of adrenaline shotgunning through my system, the pain is muted.

  He drops a flashlight in the dirt beside me and shines his at the disintegrating edifice I saw as we drove in. “After you.”

  I clutch the light in my hand and struggle to my feet. Stumbling toward the building, my bare feet trample sodden newspaper. I dodge crumpled beer cans and chevrons of glass that glitter under the beam.

  Approaching the main entrance, I imagine this abandoned parking lot on another night. A night to come. It’s early winter, and through a curtain of falling snow, the darkness is ribboned with flashing blues and reds. Detectives and cadaver dogs swarm the ruins, and as they examine my body somewhere inside, naked and decomposed and butchered, a patrol car parks in front of my brownstone in Logan Square. It’s two in the morning, and Daniela comes to the door in a nightgown. I’ve been missing for weeks and she knows in her heart I’m not coming back, thinks she’s already made her peace with that brutal fact, but seeing these young police officers with their hard, sober eyes and a dusting of snow on their shoulders and visored caps, which they shelve respectfully under their arms…it all finally breaks something inside of her she didn’t know was still intact. She feels her knees liquefy, her strength giving way, and as she sinks onto the doormat, Charlie comes down the creaky staircase behind her, bleary-eyed and wild-haired, asking, “Is it about Dad?”

  As we close in on the structure, two words reveal themselves on the faded brick above the entrance. The only letters I can make out spell CAGO POWER.

  He forces me through an opening in the brick.

  Our light beams sweep across a front office.

  Furniture rotted down to the metal frames.

  An old water cooler.

  The remnants of someone’s campfire.

  A shredded sleeping bag.

  Used condoms on moldy carpet.

  We enter a long corridor.

  Without the flashlights, this would be can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark.

  I stop to shine my light ahead, but it’s swallowed by the blackness. There’s less debris on the warped linoleum floor beneath my feet, and no sound whatsoever, save for the low, distant moan of wind outside these walls.

  I’m growing colder by the second.

  He jams the barrel of the gun into my kidney, forcing me on.

  At some point, did I fall onto the radar of a psychopath who decided to learn everything about me before he murdered me? I often engage with strangers. Maybe we spoke briefly in that coffee shop near campus. Or on the El. Or over beers at my corner bar.

  Does he have plans for Charlie and Daniela?

  “Do you want to hear me beg?” I ask, my voice beginning to break. “Because I will. I’ll do anything you want.”

  And the horrible thing is that it’s true. I would defile myself. Hurt someone else, do almost anything if he would only take me back to my neighborhood and let this night continue like it was supposed to—with me walking home to my family, bringing them the ice cream I’d promised.

  “If what?” he asks. “If I let you go?”

  “Yes.”

  The sound of his laughter ricochets down the corridor. “I’d be afraid to see what-all you’d be willing to do to get yourself out of this.”

  “Out of what, exactly?”

  But he doesn’t answer.

  I fall to my knees.

  My light goes sliding across the floor.

  “Please,” I beg. “You don’t have to do this.” I barely recognize my own voice. “You can just walk away. I don’t know why you want to hurt me, but just think about it for a minute. I—”

  “Jason.”

  “—love my family. I love my wife. I love—”

  “Jason.”

  “—my son.”

  “Jason!”

  “I will do anything.”

  I’m shivering uncontrollably now—from cold, from fear.

  He kicks me in the stomach, and as the breath explodes out of my lungs, I roll over onto my back. Crushing down on top of me, he shoves the barrel of the gun between my lips, into my mouth, all the way to the back of my throat until the taste of old oil and carbon residue is more than I can stomach.

  Two seconds before I hurl the night’s wine and Scotch across the floor, he withdraws the gun.

  Screams, “Get up!”

  He grabs my arm, jerks me back onto my feet.

  Pointing the gun in my face, he puts my flashlight back into my hands.

  I stare into the mask, my light shining on the weapon.

  It’s my first good look at the gun. I know next to nothing about firearms, only that it’s a handgun, has a hammer, a cylinder, and a giant hole at the end of the barrel that looks fully capable of delivering my death. The illumination of my flashlight lends a touch of copper to the point of the bullet aimed at my face. For some reason, I picture this man in a single-room apartment, loading rounds into the cylinder, preparing to do what he’s done.

  I’m going to die here, maybe right now.

  Every moment feels like it could be the end.

  “Move,” he growls.

  I start walking.

  We arrive at a junction and turn down a different corridor, this one wider, taller, arched. The air is oppressive with moisture. I hear the distant drip…drip…drip of falling water. The walls are made of concrete, and instead of linoleum, the floor is blanketed with damp moss that grows thicker and wetter with each step.

  The taste of the gun lingers in my mouth, laced with the acidic tang of bile.

  Patches of my face are growing numb from the cold.

  A small voice in my head is screaming at me to do something, try something, anything. Don’t just be led like a lamb to slaughter, one foot obediently following the other. Why make it so simple for him?

  Easy.

  Because I’m afraid.

  So afraid I can barely walk upright.

  And my thoughts are fractured and teeming.

  I understand now why victims don’t fight back. I cannot imagine trying to overcome this man. Trying to run.

  And here’s the most shameful truth: there’s a part of me that would rather just have it all be over, because the dead don’t feel fear or pain. Does this mean I’m a coward? Is that the final truth I have to face before I die?

  No.

  I have to do something.

  We step out of the tunnel onto a metal surface that’s freezing against the soles of my feet. I grasp a rusted iron railing that encircles a platform. It’s colder here, and the sense of open space is unmistakable.

  As if on a timer, a yellow moon creeps up on Lake Michigan, slowly rising.

  Its light streams through the upper windows of an expansive room, and it’s bright enough in here for me to take in everything independently of the flashlight.

  My stomach churns.

  We’re standing on the high point of an open staircase that drops fifty feet.

  It looks like an oil painting in here, the way the antique light falls on a row of dormant gener
ators below and the latticework of I-beams overhead.

  It’s as quiet as a cathedral.

  “We’re going down,” he says. “Watch your step.”

  We descend.

  Two steps up from the second-to-highest landing, I spin with the flashlight death-gripped in my right hand, aiming for his head…

  …and hitting nothing, the momentum carrying me right back to where I started and then some.

  I’m off balance, falling.

  I hit the landing hard, and the flashlight jars out of my hand and disappears over the edge.

  A second later, I hear it explode on the floor forty feet below.

  My captor stares down at me behind that expressionless mask, head cocked, gun pointed at my face.

  Thumbing back the hammer, he steps toward me.

  I groan as his knee drives into my sternum, pinning me to the landing.

  The gun touches my head.

  He says, “I have to admit, I’m proud you tried. It was pathetic. I saw it coming a mile away, but at least you went down swinging.”

  I recoil against a sharp sting in the side of my neck.

  “Don’t fight it,” he says.

  “What did you give me?”

  Before he can answer, something plows through my blood-brain barrier like an eighteen-wheeler. I feel impossibly heavy and weightless all at once, the world spinning and turning itself inside out.

  And then, as fast as it hit me, it passes.

  Another needle stabs into my leg.

  As I cry out, he tosses both syringes over the edge. “Let’s go.”

  “What did you give me?”

  “Get up!”

  I use the railing to pull myself up. My knee is bleeding from the fall. My head is still bleeding. I’m cold, dirty, and wet, my teeth chattering so hard it feels like they might break.

  We go down, the flimsy steelwork trembling with our weight. At the bottom, we move off the last step and walk down a row of old generators.

  From the floor, this room seems even more immense.

  At the midpoint, he stops and shines his flashlight on a duffel bag nestled against one of the generators.

  “New clothes. Hurry up.”

  “New clothes? I don’t—”

  “You don’t have to understand. You just have to get dressed.”

  Through all the fear, I register a tremor of hope. Is he going to spare me? Why else would he be making me get dressed? Do I have a shot at surviving this?

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Hurry up. You don’t have much time left.”

  I squat by the duffel bag.

  “Clean yourself up first.”

  There’s a towel on top, which I use to wipe the mud off my feet, the blood off my knee and face. I pull on a pair of boxer shorts and jeans that fit perfectly. Whatever he injected me with, I think I can feel it in my fingers now—a loss of dexterity as I fumble with the buttons on a plaid shirt. My feet slide effortlessly into a pair of expensive leather slip-ons. They fit as comfortably as the jeans.

  I’m not cold anymore. It’s like there’s a core of heat in the center of my chest, radiating out through my arms and legs.

  “The jacket too.”

  I lift a black leather jacket from the bottom of the bag, push my arms through the sleeves.

  “Perfect,” he says. “Now, have a seat.”

  I ease down against the iron base of the generator. It’s a massive piece of machinery the size of a locomotive engine.

  He sits across from me, the gun trained casually in my direction.

  Moonlight is filling this place, refracting off the broken windows high above and sending a scatter of light that strikes—

  Tangles of cable.

  Gears.

  Pipes.

  Levers and pulleys.

  Instrumentation panels covered with cracked gauges and controls.

  Technology from another age.

  I ask, “What happens now?”

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  He waves my question away.

  A weird calm settles over me. A misplaced sense of peace.

  “Did you bring me here to kill me?” I ask.

  “I did not.”

  I feel so comfortable leaning against the old machine, like I’m sinking into it.

  “But you let me believe it.”

  “There was no other way.”

  “No other way to what?”

  “To get you here.”

  “And why are we here?”

  But he just shakes his head as he snakes his left hand up under the geisha mask and scratches.

  I feel strange.

  Like I’m simultaneously watching a movie and acting in it.

  An irresistible drowsiness lowers onto my shoulders.

  My head dips.

  “Just let it take you,” he says.

  But I don’t. I fight it, thinking how unsettlingly fast his tenor has changed. He’s like a different man, and the disconnect between who he is in this moment and the violence he showed just minutes ago should terrify me. I shouldn’t be this calm, but my body is humming too peacefully.

  I feel intensely serene and deep and distant.

  He says to me, almost like a confession, “It’s been a long road. I can’t quite believe I’m sitting here actually looking at you. Talking to you. I know you don’t understand, but there’s so much I want to ask.”

  “About what?”

  “What it’s like to be you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He hesitates, then: “How do you feel about your place in the world, Jason?”

  I say slowly, deliberately, “That’s an interesting question considering the night you’ve put me through.”

  “Are you happy in your life?”

  In the shadow of this moment, my life is achingly beautiful.

  “I have an amazing family. A fulfilling job. We’re comfortable. Nobody’s sick.”

  My tongue feels thick. My words are beginning to sound slurred.

  “But?”

  I say, “My life is great. It’s just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been.”

  “You killed your ambition, didn’t you?”

  “It died of natural causes. Of neglect.”

  “And do you know exactly how that happened? Was there a moment when—?”

  “My son. I was twenty-seven years old, and Daniela and I had been together a few months. She told me she was pregnant. We were having fun, but it wasn’t love. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. We definitely weren’t looking to start a family.”

  “But you did.”

  “When you’re a scientist, your late twenties are so critical. If you don’t publish something big by thirty, they put you out to pasture.”

  Maybe it’s just the drug, but it feels so good to be talking. An oasis of normal after two of the craziest hours I’ve ever lived. I know it isn’t true, but it feels like as long as we keep conversing, nothing bad can happen. As if the words protect me.

  “Did you have something big in the works?” he asks.

  Now I’m having to focus on making my eyes stay open.

  “Yes.”

  “And what was it?”

  His voice sounds distant.

  “I was trying to create the quantum superposition of an object that was visible to the human eye.”

  “Why did you abandon your research?”

  “When Charlie was born, he had major medical issues for the first year of his life. I needed a thousand hours in a cleanroom, but I couldn’t get there fast enough. Daniela needed me. My son needed me. I lost my funding. Lost my momentum. I was the young, new genius for a minute, but when I faltered, someone else took my place.”

  “Do you regret your decision to stay with Daniela and make a life with her?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  I think of Daniela, and the emotion breaks back through, accompanied by the actual horror
of the moment. Fear returns, and with it a homesickness that cuts to the bone. I need her in this moment more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life.

  “Never.”

  And then I’m lying on the floor, my face against the cold concrete, and the drug is whisking me away.

  He’s kneeling beside me now, rolling me onto my back, and I’m looking up at all that moonlight pouring in through the high windows of this forgotten place, the darkness wrinkled with twitches of light and color as swirling, empty voids open and close beside the generators.

  “Will I see her again?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  I want to ask him for the millionth time what he wants with me, but I can’t find the words.

  My eyes keep closing, and I try to hold them open, but it’s a losing battle.

  He pulls off a glove and touches my face with his bare hand.

  Strangely.

  Delicately.

  He says, “Listen to me. You’re going to be scared, but you can make it yours. You can have everything you never had. I’m sorry I had to scare you earlier, but I had to get you here. I’m so sorry, Jason. I’m doing this for both of us.”

  I mouth the words, Who are you?

  Instead of responding, he reaches into his pocket and takes out a new syringe and a tiny glass ampoule filled with a clear liquid that in the moonlight shines like mercury.

  He uncaps the needle and draws the contents of the vial up into the syringe.

  As my eyelids slowly lower, I watch him slide the sleeve up his left arm and inject himself.

  Then he drops the ampoule and the syringe on the concrete between us, and the last thing I see before my eyes lock shut is that glass ampoule rolling toward my face.

  I whisper, “Now what?”

  And he says, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  I’m aware of someone gripping my ankles.

  As hands slide under my shoulders, a woman says, “How’d he get out of the box?”

  A man responds: “No idea. Look, he’s coming to.”

  I open my eyes, but all I see is blurred movement and light.

  The man barks, “Let’s get him the hell out of here.”

  I try to speak, but the words fall out of my mouth, garbled and formless.

  The woman says, “Dr. Dessen? Can you hear me? We’re going to lift you onto a gurney now.”