Survive the Night

by Riley Sager

  When Maddy didn’t return to the dorm that night, Charlie had assumed she’d hooked up with someone from the bar. Fake Bon Jovi, maybe. Or the guy in the fedora. If he existed at all. Charlie had her doubts.

  Worry didn’t set in until noon, when Charlie returned from class to find the dorm room still untouched by Maddy’s presence. Charlie couldn’t help but think of the day her parents died. How she had remained unconcerned as time slipped by, oblivious to the fact that she had become an orphan. Refusing to let history repeat itself, Charlie spent the rest of the day going from dorm room to dorm room, asking everyone in the building if they’d seen Maddy. No one had. Charlie’s next move was to call Maddy’s mother and stepfather, asking if they’d heard from her. They hadn’t. Finally, at midnight, exactly twenty-four hours since she’d last seen her, Charlie called the police and reported Maddy missing.

  She was found early the next morning.

  A cyclist had discovered her on his daily ride, drawn by an unusual sparkle in the middle of a field nine miles outside of town. It was Maddy’s purse, its sequins glinting in the morning sun.

  Maddy lay next to it, facedown in the dirt, dead for at least a day.

  At first, everyone—the police, the town, the university—had hoped it was a normal murder, as if such a thing existed. Foul play that could easily be solved. A jealous ex-boyfriend. An obsessive classmate. Something that made sense.

  But there were the multiple stab wounds to contend with. And the fact that her wrists and ankles had been bound with rope. And the missing tooth, an upper canine that dental records indicated hadn’t been missing before she disappeared.

  It was the tooth that led police to conclude the worst: Maddy was another victim of a man who had struck twice before.

  The Campus Killer.

  Charlie grudgingly admired the authorities’ restraint in the nickname. The Silence of the Lambs had hit theaters seven months earlier, entering Buffalo Bill and Hannibal the Cannibal into the pop cultural lexicon. Instead of going for something in that same morbidly catchy vein, the police opted for simplicity.

  He was a killer.

  He prowled Olyphant University’s campus.

  He snatched women and tied them up and yanked out a tooth after stabbing them to death. That was attention-grabbing enough for most people—and the general public didn’t even know about the missing teeth. Only the victims’ families were told that gruesome detail. Charlie had found out simply because she was the first person the police talked to after finding Maddy’s body, and they needed to know immediately if she’d been missing a tooth. The detectives begged her not to tell anyone else, and she hadn’t. Not even Robbie. She understood it was something the cops needed to keep to themselves to differentiate between a random stabbing and the work of the Campus Killer.

  Charlie had learned the nickname the day she arrived at Olyphant. The Campus Killer had struck a month earlier, sending the whole university into a panicked frenzy, even though the victim was a townie and not a student. Her freshman orientation included a lesson in self-defense. Rape whistles were distributed with ID cards. On campus, girls never walked alone. They moved in packs—great, unwieldy groups of nervous giggles and shining hair.

  During campus-sponsored mixers or late-night chats in the dorm lounge, the murders were talked about in hushed tones, like urban legends whispered around a campfire. Everyone knew the names of the victims. Everyone claimed to have some tangential connection. A shared class. A friend of a friend. A glimpse on the street two nights before they were killed.

  Angela Dunleavy was the first, murdered four years earlier on a rainy night in March. She was a senior who worked part-time at a bar downtown. One of those places that made its waitresses wear tight T-shirts in the hope the college boys would leave bigger tips. She went missing shortly after last call and was found the next morning in a patch of woods on the edge of campus, bearing the then-novel signs of the Campus Killer’s handiwork.

  Tied up.

  Stabbed.

  Tooth pulled.

  There were no leads, no suspects. Just a horrific murder that police had stupidly assumed was a onetime thing.

  Until the second victim was found a year and a half later. Taylor Morrison. The townie killed a month before Charlie’s freshman year, her body dumped on the side of a maintenance road two miles away. She worked in a bookstore two blocks from Olyphant, which was close enough to campus for her death to be lumped in with Angela Dunleavy’s.

  When a year passed without another murder, people started to breathe a little easier. After two years, the rape whistles stopped but the self-defense classes remained. By the start of Charlie’s junior year, no one roamed campus in groups and the Campus Killer was barely mentioned.

  Then Maddy was murdered, and the vicious cycle began anew. Only this time Charlie was part of it. A supporting player to Maddy’s morbid starring role. She talked to so many people in the days following the murder. Local detectives. State police. Even two FBI agents. A pair of women dressed nearly identically in silk blouses and black blazers, their hair pulled back in severe ponytails.

  Charlie told them everything.

  She and Maddy had gone to a bar to hear a cover band. No, she wasn’t yet twenty-one, an admission that caused her not a second’s hesitation. Maddy was dead. Her killer was still out there. No one gave a shit about her fake ID. Yes, she and Maddy had argued outside the bar. Yes, she had walked away even though Maddy had begged her to stay. And, yes, the last two words she uttered to her best friend were indeed “fuck off,” a realization that, when it hit, sent Charlie running to the police station bathroom to throw up in the sink.

  It got worse when she returned to those tough-chick FBI agents and learned everything they knew about Maddy’s final moments.

  That no one could remember seeing Maddy back in the bar after Charlie left.

  That two people exiting the bar five minutes after Charlie saw Maddy leaving the alley with a man, although they didn’t know for sure because he had already rounded a corner, giving only a glimpse of white sneaker.

  That based on her time of death, authorities believed the man Maddy followed out of the alley was the same person who killed her.

  “I saw him,” Charlie said, stunned by the realization that what she’d seen hadn’t entirely been a movie in her mind.

  The FBI agents straightened in their chairs.

  “What did he look like?” one of them asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you saw him.”

  “I saw someone. But it might not have been the man Maddy left with.”

  One of the agents gave her a look hot enough to peel wallpaper. “You either saw someone or you didn’t.”

  “I did see someone.” Charlie’s voice was weak. Her head spun. Nausea continued to churn in her stomach. “But I also didn’t.”

  She had no idea if the person she saw looked anything like his real-life counterpart. The movies in her mind sometimes warped things until they were no longer recognizable. It was entirely possible that the man she’d seen was cobbled together by her imagination using pieces of a dozen different leading men. Part Mitchum, part Lancaster, part Burton.

  Charlie had to spend an hour explaining the movies in her mind. How they worked. When they happened. How very often the things she saw weren’t really there, including men in dark alleys. Even after all that, the agents insisted she sit down with a sketch artist, hoping that describing what she saw would somehow jolt her into remembering what had really been there.

  When that didn’t work, they tried hypnosis.

  After that, too, failed, Charlie was sent to a psychiatrist.

  What followed was reluctant talk about Maddy’s murder, her parents’ deaths, the movies in her mind. Then came the prescription for the little orange pills, which Charlie was told would make them go away.

 
The psychiatrist stressed that Maddy’s death wasn’t Charlie’s fault. That each person’s brain is different. That it works in unusual ways. It does what it does, and Charlie shouldn’t blame herself for what happened.

  Charlie disagreed. She had known that night that what she saw outside the bar was a movie in her mind. She could have waited until it passed, revealing the true picture. Or she could have returned to Maddy, apologized, and demanded they walk home together.

  Instead, she simply turned and walked away.

  In the process, she both failed to save Maddy’s life and avoided gleaning any identifying details about the man who murdered her.

  Looked at from that perspective, all of it was Charlie’s fault.

  Time passed.

  Days and weeks and months.

  Charlie eventually cut herself off from everyone but Robbie and Nana Norma. She didn’t even have the mental strength to attend Maddy’s funeral, a fact that didn’t sit well with everyone else in the dorm, who chartered two buses to shuttle them to Middle-of-Nowhere, Pennsylvania, for the service. Right up to the moment of departure, there’d been needling and disbelief and guilt trips from the girls on her floor.

  I can’t believe you’re not going.

  She was your best friend.

  I know it’ll be hard on you, but this will give you a chance to say goodbye. You’ll regret it if you don’t go.

  Only Maddy would have understood her reasons. She knew about Charlie’s parents and the double funeral that had rewired her brain just so she’d be able to cope with it. Maddy wouldn’t have wanted her to go through that again.

  So Charlie stayed behind. A decision she definitely doesn’t regret. Her preference was to remember Maddy alive and laughing and being her usual dramatic self. She wanted her memories to be of Maddy dressing like Liza in Cabaret to go to a statistics class. Or of last Halloween, when the two of them went to a costume party as the Gabor sisters and everyone assumed they were Madonna in Dick Tracy, even though both of them spoke with exaggerated Hungarian accents. Charlie certainly didn’t want to remember Maddy as some lifeless shell in a casket, her face tinted orange by too much mortician makeup.

  But the bedrock truth is that not attending Maddy’s funeral was an act of cowardice on her part. Quite simply, she couldn’t face Maddy’s family and their justifiable anger. The phone call had been enough—that tear-streaked confrontation with Maddy’s mother, who had lashed out with a vengeance only a grieving woman could possess.

  “You saw him. That’s what the police are saying. That you saw the man who killed my daughter but can’t remember what he looked like.”

  “I can’t,” Charlie said, sobbing.

  “Well, you fucking need to remember,” Maddy’s mother said. “You owe it to us. You owe it to Maddy. You left her behind, Charlie. The two of you were out together, and you left without her. You were her friend. You were supposed to be there for her. But you abandoned her with that man. Now my daughter is dead and you can’t even bring yourself to remember anything about him. What kind of friend does that? What kind of person does that? An awful one. That’s who. You’re truly awful, Charlie.”

  Charlie hadn’t voiced anything in her defense. Why bother when everything Mrs. Forrester said was true? She had abandoned Maddy. First in life, when Charlie turned away from her outside the bar, and then again in death, when she couldn’t remember a single identifying feature about the man who killed her. In her mind, Maddy’s mother was right—she truly was an awful person.

  So Charlie spent the day of Maddy’s funeral alone watching Disney movies, one right after the after. She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. She simply sat on the dorm room floor surrounded by white plastic VHS cases.

  Robbie, who did attend the funeral, told Charlie that maybe she should have gone. That it wasn’t so bad. That the casket was closed, a family friend had sung “Somewhere” from West Side Story, and that the only moment of drama happened graveside as Maddy was lowered into the ground. That’s when Maddy’s grandmother, overcome with grief, tilted her head back and screamed into the blue September sky.

  “I think it would have helped you,” he said.

  Charlie didn’t want or need that kind of help. Besides, she knew that, in time, she’d be okay. A heart can only grieve for so long. That was what Nana Norma told her a few months after her parents died. Charlie knew it to be true. She still missed her parents. Not a day went by when she didn’t think of them. But her grief, which at the time had felt so heavy she thought she’d be crushed by its weight, had transformed into something easier to bear. She had assumed the same would happen with Maddy.

  It didn’t. The pain she felt continued to be as heart-shattering as the day she learned Maddy was dead. And she couldn’t take it anymore. Not the grief. Not the guilt. Not the squinty-eyed looks of pity cast her way during the rare occasions she went to class. Which is why she’s leaving Olyphant. Even though she knows fleeing the scene of her crime won’t make her feel any less guilty, Charlie nevertheless hopes being back home with Nana Norma, lost in a haze of old movies and chocolate chip cookies, will somehow make it easier to deal with.

  “Yeah, I thought that was you,” Josh says after Charlie’s brutal assessment of herself. “I read about what happened in the paper. Do you want to, I don’t know, talk about it?”

  Charlie turns toward the passenger-side window, now fogged up again. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “You’re dropping out of college because of it, so, yeah, I think there is.”

  Charlie sniffs. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about.”

  “I’m going to anyway,” Josh says. “First, I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a horrible thing that happened. And a horrible thing you went through and are still going through. What was your friend’s name again? Tammy?”

  “Maddy,” Charlie says. “Short for Madeline.”

  “Right. Just like Charlie is short for Charles.”

  Josh gives her a look, pleased with himself for steering them back to an earlier joke. Charlie’s stony expression doesn’t change, and Josh moves on.

  “They never caught the guy who did it, right?” he says.

  “No.”

  Charlie shivers slightly at the acknowledgment that, thanks to her, the man who killed Maddy hasn’t been caught, may never be caught, may spend the rest of his fucking life reveling in how he’d gotten away with murder not once but three times.

  That the police know of.

  So far.

  The idea that the Campus Killer could—and most likely will—strike again prompts another fearful shiver.

  “Does it worry you that they never caught him?”

  “It makes me angry,” Charlie says.

  After the initial shock and grief had worn off, Charlie turned to anger pretty quickly. She spent all those sleepless nights seething over the fact that Maddy was dead and her killer wasn’t and how utterly wrong that was. Sometimes she’d spend all night pacing the room, envisioning B-movie scenarios in which she took her revenge. In these mental movies, the Campus Killer was always the dark, human-shaped blank she’d seen outside the bar, onto which she inflicted every act of violence she could think of.

  Shooting. Strangling. Beheading.

  One night, the movie in her mind had her stabbing the Campus Killer in the chest and plucking out his heart, which glistened on the tip of her knife, still beating. But when she looked down at the body, it wasn’t a human-shaped blank she saw. It was someone she knew all too well.

  Herself.

  After that one, Charlie started planning her escape.

  “I think I’d be worried,” Josh says. “I mean, he’s still out there. Somewhere. He might have seen you, right? He might know who you are and try to come for you next.”

  Charlie shivers again, this one more intense than the others. A shudder. One she feels all the way
down to her core. Because Josh is right. The Campus Killer probably did see her. Maybe he even knows who she is. And although Charlie saw him, too, she wouldn’t know it was him even if he was sitting right next to her.

  “That’s not why I’m leaving school,” she says.

  “So it’s a guilty conscience, then.”

  Charlie says nothing, allowing Josh to add, “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

  “I don’t.”

  “But you are. It’s not like it was your fault.”

  “I saw him,” Charlie says. “Yet I can’t identify him. Which does make it my fault. Even if I could identify him, there’s still the fact that I abandoned Maddy. If I had stayed with her, none of this would have happened.”

  “I don’t blame you for any of that. I’m not judging you. I guess you think others do—”

  “I know they do,” Charlie says, thinking about that call with Maddy’s mother, how afterward she’d felt hollow. How she still feels as empty as a football, to quote Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

  “Why? Were people mean to you?”

  “No.”

  If anything, everyone was suffocatingly kind. All those weepy-eyed girls coming to her door with food and cards and flowers. There were invitations to trade dorm rooms, to go on group outings (“There’s safety in numbers!”), to join a prayer circle. Charlie declined them all. She didn’t want their sympathy. She didn’t deserve it.

  “Then maybe you should stop beating yourself up over something you couldn’t control.”

  Charlie’s heard it all before, from literally everyone except Maddy’s family. And she’s tired of it. Tired of being told what to feel, that it wasn’t her fault, that she needs to forgive herself. So tired of it all that a lump of anger explodes in her chest like a firecracker—white-hot and shimmering. Fueled by its burn, she whips away from the window and, practically snarling at Josh, yells, “And maybe you should shut the fuck up about something that has nothing to do with you!”

  The outburst surprises Josh, who’s so startled he sends the car shuddering off the road for a few jarring seconds. Not surprised is Charlie, who always suspected such an explosion would arrive at some point. She just didn’t think it would be in a car with a man she doesn’t know, her voice booming through the pine-scented interior. Now that it’s happened, she’s left breathless, shaken, and completely ashamed of herself. She slumps back in her seat, suddenly exhausted.