by Blake Crouch
“Like what? What would you like for me to write?”
“A love story, Andrew. Something with a happy ending. People read love stories, too, you know.”
I laughed out loud and lifted up the glass. “So you think I should switch to romance? My fans would love that, let me tell you.”
“Now you’re just being ugly,” she said as I sipped the tea. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Mocking your own mother.”
“I’m not mocking you, Mom. I think you’re hilarious.”
She frowned again and looked back at the television. Though strong-willed and feisty, my mother was excruciatingly sensitive beneath her fussy exterior.
“Have you been to Dad’s grave yet?” she asked after a moment.
“No. I wanted to go with you.”
“There were flowers by the headstone this morning. A beautiful arrangement. It looked fresh. You sure you didn’t—”
“Mom, I think I’d know if I laid flowers on Dad’s grave this morning.”
Her short-term memory was wilting. She’d probably taken the flowers there yesterday.
“Well, I was there this morning,” she said. “Before it clouded up. Sat there for about an hour, talking to him. He’s got a nice spot under that magnolia.”
“Yes, he does.”
Staring into the olive shag carpet beneath my feet, at the sloped dining room table next to the kitchen, and that first door in the hallway leading down into the basement, I sensed the four of us moving through this dead space, this antiquated haunt—felt my father and Orson as strongly as I did my mother, sitting in the flesh before me. Strangely enough, it was the smell of burned toast that moved me. My mother loved scorched bread, and though the scent of her singed breakfast was now a few hours old, it made this deteriorating house my home, and me her little boy again, for three inexorable seconds.
“Mom,” I began, and I almost said his name. Orson was on the tip of my tongue. I wanted her to remind me that we’d been carefree children once, kids who’d played.
She looked up from the muted television.
But I didn’t ask. She’d driven him from her mind. When I’d made the mistake of talking about him before, she had instantly shut down. It crushed her that he’d left, that thirteen years ago Orson had severed all ties from our family. Initially, she dealt with that pain by denying he’d ever been her son. Now, years later, that he’d ever been born.
“Never mind,” I said, and she turned back to the game show. So I found a memory for myself. Orson and I are eleven, alone in the woods. It’s summertime, the trees laden with leaves. We find a tattered canvas tent, damp and mildewed, but we love it. Brushing out the leaves from inside, we transform it into our secret fort, playing there every day, even in the rain. Since we never tell any of the neighborhood kids, it’s ours alone, and we sneak out of the house at night on several occasions and camp there with our flashlights and sleeping bags, hunting fireflies until dawn. Then, running home, we climb into bed before Mom or Dad wakes up. They never catch us, and by summer’s end, we have a jelly jar full of prisoners—a luciferin night-light on the toy chest between our beds.
Mom and I sat watching the greedy contestants until noon. I kept the memory to myself.
“Andrew,” she said when the show had ended, “is it still cold outside?”
“It’s cool,” I said, “and a little breezy.”
“Would you take a walk with me? The leaves are just beautiful.”
“I’d love to.”
While she went to her bedroom for an overcoat, I stood and walked through the dining room to the back door. I opened it and stepped onto the back porch, its green paint flaking off everywhere, the boards slick with paint chips.
My eyes wandered through the overgrown yard, alighting on the fallen swing we’d helped my father build. He would not be proud of how I’d cared for his wife. But she’s stubborn as hell, and you knew it. You knew it better than anyone. Leaning against the railing, I looked thirty yards beyond, staring into the woods, which started abruptly where the grass ended.
Something inside of me twitched. It was as though I were seeing the world as a negative of a photograph—in black and gray, two boys rambling through the trees toward something I could not see. A fleeting image struck me—a cigarette ember glowing in a tunnel. There was a presence in the forest, in my head, and it bowled me over.
I could not escape the idea that I’d forgotten something.
17
I left my mother’s house before dusk, and for the forty miles of back roads between Winston-Salem and my lake house near Davidson, I thought of Karen. Normally, I’d banish her from my thoughts at the first flicker of a memory, but tonight I allowed her to remain, and watching the familiar roads wind between stands of forest and breaks of pasture, I imagined she sat beside me in the Jeep.
We ride home in one of those comfortable stretches of silence, and within an hour, we’re walking together through the front door of my house. You throw your coat on the piano bench, and as I head for the kitchen for a bottle of wine, I catch your eyes, and see that you could care less about wine tonight. So without music, or candles, or freshening up, we walk upstairs to my bedroom and make love and fall asleep and wake up and go again and fall back asleep. I wake up once more in the night, feel you breathing beside me, and smile at the thought of making us breakfast. You’re excellent company in the morning, over coffee, in our robes, the lake shimmering in early sun.…
I was speaking aloud to an empty seat, with Davidson still fifteen miles away.
Last I heard, Karen was reading manuscripts for a small house in Boston and living with a patent attorney. They were going to be married in Bermuda over Christmas. Try this, Andy: Around 8:30, you’ll unlock the front door, walk into your house, and go straight upstairs to bed. Alone. You won’t even feel like a drink.
I awoke to the earsplitting scream of the stereo system in my living room downstairs, the speakers pumping Miles Davis through the house at full volume. It was two o’clock in the morning. I remained motionless under the covers, in utter darkness, thinking, Someone is in the house. If you turn on the light, you’ll see him standing at the end of your bed, and if you move, he’ll know you’re awake and kill you. Please God, let this be a power surge, or something fucked up in the circuitry. But I don’t own a Miles Davis record.
As the music rattled the windows, I reached my left hand to the bedside table and opened the drawer, expecting at any moment for lights to blind me, followed by the immediate onset of unthinkable pain. My hand touched my new pistol, a subcompact .40-caliber Glock. I couldn’t remember if I’d chambered the first round, so I brought the handgun under the sheet and, pulling back on the slide, felt the semijacketed hollow-point poke out of the ejection port, ready to fire.
For two minutes, I lay in bed, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Then, squinting so he wouldn’t see the whites of my eyes, I scoped out my room: At a glance, I seemed to be the only occupant. Unless he’s in the closet. Rolling to the other side of the bed, I lifted the phone to dial 911. Miles blared through the receiver. Oh Jesus.
I planted my feet on the carpet and crept toward the door, thinking, Don’t go down there. Orson could be anywhere in this house. I know it’s him. Please be dreaming.
The exposed second-floor hallway ran the length of the living room, with my bedroom at the end. At my door, I stopped and peered down the empty hallway. Too dark to see anything in the living room below. I did, however, notice the red and green stereo lights glowing by the staircase. Through the tall living room windows, I could see the woods, the lake, and that remote blue light at the end of Walter’s pier. I might die tonight.
Finger on the light switch, I couldn’t decide whether or not to turn on the track lighting in the hallway. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m up yet. I won’t alert him to the fact.
There were three open doors leading into black rooms along the right side of the hall, the oak banister on the left. My heart clanged lik
e a blacksmith’s hammer. Get to the staircase. I sprinted down the hall as “So What” masked my footsteps. Crouching at the top of the staircase, freezing sweat burning in my eyes, I stared through the banister at the expansive living room—the couch, the baby grand, the wet bar, the hearth—ambiguous oblique forms in the shadows below. Then there were the places I could not see—the kitchen, the foyer, my study. He could be anywhere. Resisting waves of hysterical trembling, so intense that I kept my finger off the trigger, I thought, He’s doing this for the fear. That’s what gets him off.
Anger displaced my terror. I stood up, charged down the staircase, and ran into the living room.
“Orson!” I screamed above the music. “Do I look scared? COME ON!”
I moved to the stereo and cut it off. The gaping silence engulfed me, so I turned on a lamp beside the stereo, and the soft, warm light it produced eased my heart. I listened, looked, heard and saw nothing, took five deep breaths, and leaned against the wall to tame my renascent fear. Go out through the kitchen and onto the deck. Get away from here. Maybe he’s just fucking with you. Maybe he’s already gone.
As I started for the back door, something in the bay-windowed alcove between the kitchen and the living room arrested my exit. An unmarked videotape stood atop the glass breakfast table. Picking it up, I again glanced over my shoulder at the hallway above and then into the foyer. Still nothing moved. I wanted to search my study and the three guest rooms on the second floor, but I didn’t have the equanimity to roam my house, knowing he skulked in some corner or nook, waiting for me to stumble blindly past.
Returning to the stereo and the entertainment center, I inserted the videotape into my VCR, turned on the television, and sat down on the sofa so I could watch the screen and still see most of the living room.
The screen is blue, then black. The date and time emerge in the bottom right-hand corner: 10/30/96, 11:08 a.m. That’s today. No, yesterday now.
I hear a voice, then two voices, so low and muffled that I turn up the volume.
“Would you like for me to sign it?” …“Would you?” …“Be happy to.” …“You got a pen?” …“Shit, I don’t— oh, wait” …“You want me just to sign it?” …“Could you do it to …sign it to my girlfriend?” …“Sure.” …“What’s her name?” …“Jenna.” …“J-E-N-N-A?” …“Yep.” …“She’s gonna love this. Thank you so much.”
The screen still dark, the sound of a car engine vibrates the television set, and then the first shot appears—through the back window of a moving car and from a few hundred feet away—me walking up the steps to my mother’s house. The screen goes black and silent.
Still 10/30/96, now 11:55 a.m. The picture fades in, and the camera slowly pans a dark room. Oh God. Concrete walls and floor. The objects in the room are the giveaway: two red bicycles, a dilapidated exercise trampoline, a fake white Christmas tree, mountains of cardboard boxes, and several stacks of records—the small windowless basement of my mother’s house.
The cameraman holds on a shot of the fourteen steps that lead upstairs, and then the picture jerks nauseatingly as he ascends. The first hallway door creaks open, and the camera zooms in on my face as I sit quietly on my mother’s couch, watching the muted television. “Such a good son to visit her,” he whispers. Then the cameraman closes the door and tiptoes back down the steps.
After placing the camera atop a stack of our father’s records, Orson squats down in front of it, the staircase behind him now, and the screen blackens.
The picture returns from the same position in the basement—10/30/96, 7:25 p.m. Orson leans into the lens and whispers, “You just left, Andy.” He smiles. He wears a mechanic’s suit, though I can’t tell its color in the poor basement light. “I don’t want you to worry, Andy,” he whispers. “This following you around thing is quite temporary. In fact, as you watch this now in your living room around two in the morning, I’ll be hundreds of miles away, driving into the capital of this great nation. And when I finish there, I’ll be blending back into the faceless masses for a good long while.” Orson sneezes twice.
“Because you can’t keep your mouth shut, I’m considering having a friend of mine visit Walter and his beautiful family. Would that upset you? I think you’ve met Luther.” He smiles. “He’s a fan.” Orson pulls a length of wire from his pocket. “In one minute, it’ll occur to you that you have this all on tape. Well, you had it all on tape. Remember that. Shall we?” Orson lifts the camera and continues to whisper as he climbs the staircase. “The rage you’re about to feel will liberate you, Andy. Think of it that way. Oh, one last thing—watch the news tomorrow morning.”
He opens the door to the hallway. Somewhere in the house, my mother is singing. Orson slams the door, opens it, and slams it again before rushing back down the steps. Setting the camera back on the stack of records, he moves offscreen, somewhere in the semidarkness, amid the innumerable boxes. I have only a view of the staircase now and a section of the bare concrete wall.
Silence. At the top of the steps, the door opens.
“Andrew, did you come back in?” My mother’s voice fills the basement, and I begin to tremble, my head shaking involuntarily back and forth. Descending five steps, she stops, and I can see her legs now. I’m muttering, “No” continuously, as if it will drive her back up those steps.
“Andrew?” she calls out. No answer. After three more steps, she leans down so that she can see into the basement. She inspects the rows of clutter for several seconds, then straightens up and clumps back up the staircase. But her footsteps stop before she reaches the door, and she goes back down again to where she was and looks directly into the camera. I see the confusion on her face, but it’s not yet accompanied by fear.
My mother walks carefully to the bottom of the staircase and stops before the camera. She’s still wearing that green dress, but her white hair is down now. She stares curiously into the lens, that sharp crease wrinkling up between her eyebrows.
“HI, MOM!” Orson screams. She looks behind the camera. The fear in her face destroys me, and as she shrieks and runs for the staircase, the camera crashes to the concrete floor.
After the screen turned blue again, I sat for five seconds in unholy shock. He did not kill our mother. He did …I smelled Windex. A hard metallic object thumped the back of my skull.
Lying on my back beside the couch and staring up through the windows, I saw that morning was now just a few hours away—that purple-navy tinge of dawn leeching the darkness from the sky. As I struggled to my feet, the tender knot on the back of my head throbbed on mercilessly.
The television was still on. Kneeling down, I pressed the eject button on the VCR, but the tape had already been removed.
After hanging up the phone in the kitchen, I trudged up the steps to my bedroom. I returned the Glock to the drawer and lay down on top of the covers, bracing myself for the tsunami of despair to consume me. I closed my eyes and tried to cry, but the pain was too intense, too surreal. Could this have been a new nightmare? Maybe I walked down there in my sleep and banged my head. Dreamed a fucked-up dream. That is a possibility. Hold on to that. She’s sleeping. I could call her now and wake her up. She’ll answer the phone, peeved at my rudeness. But she’ll answer the phone, and that’s all that matters.
In darkness, I reached for the phone and dialed my mother’s number.
It rang and rang.
18
ON a cold, clear Halloween morning, the world watched Washington, D.C., as city police, FBI, Secret Service, and a myriad of media swarmed the White House. It had begun before dawn.
At 4:30 a.m., a jogger running down East Street noticed a pile of cardboard boxes stacked in the frosty grass of the Ellipse, close to the site of the national Christmas tree. Upon returning home, she called 911.
By the time the police arrived, the Secret Service was already on the scene, and suspicion immediately arose that the boxes might contain explosives. So the president was flown to a safe location, the White House staf
f evacuated, and the quarter-mile stretch of East Street behind the White House occluded.
In Washington, bad news travels fast. By eight o’clock, local and network news crews were camped along the perimeter that the police had established two hundred yards from the boxes. The story broke on every news channel in the country, so by nine o’clock, as a bomb-squad robot rolled toward the portentous heap of cardboard boxes, the world was watching.
For two hours, cameras zoomed in on technicians in bomb-resistant suits as they utilized the robot and X-ray unit to investigate each cardboard box. When a box had been cleared, it was set inside an armored truck. Each was opened, but the cameras were too far away to determine what, if anything, was inside. There were at least a dozen boxes, and the bomb squad treated each one as if it contained a nuclear bomb. Their precision made the task tedious, and eleven o’clock had passed before the last box was cleared and the armored truck drove away.
Speculation began. What was inside the boxes if not a bomb? A hoax? An assassination attempt on the president? Rumors and unconfirmed reports swirled through the coverage until a statement was issued by the FBI at 1:30 as East Street reopened.
Special Agent Harold Trent addressed the nation of reporters, speaking into a cluster of microphones, the back side of the White House visible behind him beneath the late October sky. Twelve boxes, most between one and three cubic feet in volume, had been taken into possession by the FBI. No explosive devices had been found. Inside each box was what appeared to be a human heart and a corresponding name.
The reporters fired questions: Were the names those of real people? Would the names be released? Were there any suspects? Why were the boxes left near the White House? Agent Trent refused to theorize. The investigation had only begun, and a special FBI task force would be assembled to work with state and local police until the person or persons responsible had been taken into custody.