by Blake Crouch
Before we meet, let me emphasize the futility of escape, deception, or destroying me. If you’ll open the middle drawer of the desk, you’ll find an envelope. Take a moment to look inside.
When I opened the envelope, I gasped: photos of me reaching down into Rita Jones’s grave, a crudely sketched map of my lake property, disclosing the location of four bodies, and three typed pages giving details of the killings and revealing in which closet of my house the paring knife could be found. There was also a newspaper clipping regarding the sentencing of a man whose name (along with all other pertinent information) had been blacked out. Across the headline, he’d scribbled "INNOCENCE TAKES THE PUNISHMENT FOR MY CRIME." I returned to the letter.
Prayers for my health and safety are in order, because there is another envelope with a map, showing where the bodies really are and telling where the knife really is. In two months, someone will deliver that envelope to the Charlotte Police Department. If I’m not there to stop them in person, you, Andrew Thomas, will go to prison. People have been convicted with less evidence than I have against you, and I’ve already put two individuals on death row for my crimes. (Like the newspaper clipping?)
Last thing. Know that your mother’s safety hinges on your conduct here. Now, you’ve had quite a journey. Rest as much as you like, and when you’re ready to learn why I’ve brought you here, knock on the door.
I returned to the bed and, leaning against the barred window, looked out again upon the desert. My eyes filled with tears as I beheld the wilderness. Aside from the windblown motion of the tumbleweeds dispersing their seed, there was no movement. It was a wasteland, a deadened landscape, which at another time might have been serene. But in my present condition, it only enhanced the foreboding. Wiping my eyes, I rose from the bed, and my heart galloped as I approached the door.
4
A slot six inches high and a foot wide had been cut into the center of the sturdy wooden door. I knelt down and pushed on the metal sheet, but it wouldn’t budge. Standing again, I drew a deep breath. Weak and hungry, it was impossible to know how long I’d lain unconscious in this room. My arms were sore and speckled with needle pricks.
Timidly, I knocked on the door and then retreated to the bed. Footsteps soon approached, clicking softly against the stone outside. The metal panel slid up, and I glimpsed another room: bookshelves, a stack of records, a white kerosene heater, a breakfast table….
In place of the panel, a flap of bubble wrap descended. Someone stood before the opening, though only a form without detail, blurred behind the sheet of quarter-size plastic bubbles.
"Come here," he said. I inched toward the door. When I was a few feet away, he said, "Stop. Turn around."
I turned and waited. The bubble wrap crinkled, and I assumed he’d lifted the plastic and was now appraising my condition. After a moment, he said, "Come to the door." The slot had been cut at waist level, and when I reached the door and knelt down to peer out, he said, "No, no, don’t look at me. Sit with your back to the door."
I obeyed. Though it terrified me to be in proximity to him, I emphatically reassured myself that he hadn’t brought me into a desert just to kill me in my first moments of consciousness.
"How do you feel?" he asked, and in his voice I sensed true concern. He sounded nothing like the man on the phone. His voice had a slight buzzing quality, as if he spoke with the aid of a speech enhancement device. Though his voice was familiar, I couldn’t place him, and I distrusted my perception after spending an indeterminate number of hours unconscious under a slew of narcotics.
"I feel groggy," I said, my tone as demure as possible. I didn’t want to excite him.
"That’ll wear off."
"You wrote those letters? Killed that teacher?"
"Yes and yes."
"Where am I?"
"Suffice it to say that you’re in the middle of a desert, and were you to escape, you’d die of thirst and heat exhaustion before you reached the outskirts of civilization."
"How long will I —"
"No more questions regarding your quasi-captivity. I won’t tell you when or where you are."
"What will you tell me?"
"You’re here to get an education." He paused. "If you only knew. The substance of your learning will become manifest, so be patient."
"Can I please have my things?"
He sighed, the first sign of frustration boiling under his breath. "We’ll talk about that later." Then his voice softened, shedding its edge. "Pretend you’re an infant, Andrew. A tiny, helpless infant. Right now, in your room, you’re in the womb. You don’t understand how to use your senses, how to think, how to reason. Rely on me for everything. I’m going to teach you how to see the world again. I’ll feed your mind first. Fatten it up on the most brilliant thinkers in human history." A white hand pushed through the bubble wrap and dropped a book onto the floor.
"Your first meal," he said as I lifted a hardback of The Prince. "Machiavelli. The man’s a genius. Undisputedly. Are you familiar with Hannibal, the general from Carthage who ransacked Rome? Marched his men across the Alps with an army of war elephants."
"I know who he was."
"Well, he marched his army all over the Mediterranean coast and Eastern Europe, but what made Hannibal’s army singular was that there was no dissension among his soldiers. Different nationalities, beliefs, languages, and no dissension in the ranks. You know what made that peace possible?" he asked. "In the words of Machiavelli, Hannibal’s ‘inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valor, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.’ " He was silent for a moment, and I could hear only the dry, scorching wind pushing against the glass panes and my captor’s escalated breathing. " ‘Inhuman cruelty,’ " he repeated. "That gives me chills." His voice had turned passionate, as though he were speaking to his lover. "So," he said, "start reading that tonight, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Are you hungry?"
"Yes, I’m starving."
"Good. I’m gonna make dinner now, so why don’t you start on that book. I hope broiled shrimp on angel-hair pasta sounds good to you." He ripped the bubble wrap away and shoved the metal panel back over the opening. My head dropped in relief that he was gone, and I sat motionless in my white bathrobe, staring vacantly into the floor.
A small lamp, screwed into the wall, exuded dim, barely sufficient light onto the pages. Because he’d yet to give me the duffel bag, I didn’t have the aid of my glasses, so my eyes were failing me.
I dropped The Prince onto the floor, having finished half of it. I hoped that would be enough for him. When I reached up and turned off the lamp, the placid light of a full moon flooded in between the bars, soft and soothing. I would’ve dreaded to spend my first conscious night in the perfect darkness of a new moon.
The room had grown unbearable from a day’s accumulation of sunlight, and though the heat had dissipated from the desert with the onslaught of night, it had lingered in my room. So I’d opened the window when the sun set, and now the dry chill of the desert night infiltrated the room, forcing me to burrow under the fleece blankets.
Closing my eyes, I listened. Through the open window, owls screeched and coyotes or wild dogs yapped at the moon, though they seemed a great distance away. Since dinner, I hadn’t heard a peep from him. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing.
For the last hour, jazz music had filled the cabin. It came quietly at first, stealing in like a whisper, so that I heard only the guttural rumblings of a bass. The volume rose, and the ride cymbal pattern and the offbeat swish of a closing hi-hat pulsed into the room. When the piano and trumpet and saxes climaxed through the wall, I suddenly recognized the song, and it took me back twenty years, to a different time, a different life. It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing "All Blues," a moody, blues form piece in 6/8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.
&
nbsp; An acute scream soared above the music. I sat up and listened. Another scream ruptured the night. Clutching the iron bars, I turned my eyes on the desert, but saw nothing save miles of moonlit sagebrush. Again, a scream — a woman’s, closer than before.
Fifty feet away, a figure stumbled through the desert, choking for breath. When it was halfway past the window frame, a second, larger figure entered on the left side. It lunged upon the smaller figure and drove it into the ground at the foot of a greasewood shrub.
I heard a female voice, crying, shriller screams, pleadings, but the words were indecipherable when they reached my ears. The larger figure kicked at the ground. Then it knelt down, thrusting.
More screams, the loudest, most piercing yet. Silence.
Now only the large figure stood, staring at the ground. In a measured pace, it walked back in the direction from which it had come, pulling by long black hair what it had chased through the desert. I heard the footsteps and what it dragged sliding through the dirt, the woman’s legs still twitching.
Suddenly, it turned and looked in my direction. Moonlight, bluish and surreal, streamed across the stranger’s face.
I froze. My brother, Orson, stood smiling on the desert.
5
A stiff purple dawn unfolded on the desert, ending a terrible, sleepless night. I realized from here on out, whenever I closed my eyes, I would always see a man on a moonlit desert, dragging a woman through the dirt by her hair.
At the approach of footsteps, I sat up in bed. A dead bolt turned and the door swung open, revealing a man of my proportions: same thin, muscular build, same stark blue eyes. Similar but not identical, his face looked like the ideal of mine, more handsome in its superior proportionality. He stood grinning in the doorway, and in contrast to my unkempt graying hair, his crew cut shone a perfect brown. In addition to black snakeskin boots and faded blue jeans, he wore a bloody white T-shirt with sweat marks extending down from the armpits. I wondered fleetingly why he perspired so profusely before the sun had even risen. His arms were stronger than mine, and as he leaned against the door frame, he took an aggressive bite out of a large burgundy apple.
I couldn’t speak. It was like seeing not the ghost of a loved one, but the demon. Tears burned in my eyes. This is not real. This cannot be my brother, this terrible man.
"I have missed you so much," Orson said, still hovering in the doorway. I could only stare back into his blue eyes.
Orson had disappeared from Appalachian State University our junior year, my last image that of him standing in the doorway of our dorm room.
"You won’t see me for a while," he had said. And I hadn’t, from that day to this. The police had given up. He’d just vanished. My mother and I had hired detectives: nothing. We feared he was dead.
Now he apologized. "I wouldn’t have had you see that last night. The consequence of using old rope, I guess." I noticed fresh scratch marks on his neck and face. Specks of glitter glinted on his cheeks, and I wondered if they’d come off the woman’s fingernails when she struggled. "You want breakfast?" he asked. "Coffee’s brewing."
I shuddered, repulsed. "Are you kidding me?"
"I wanted to keep you in here for several days before bringing you out and revealing myself, but after last night…well, there’s really no use is there?"
Sweat slid down my sides.
As he bit again into the apple, Orson began to walk up a short hallway. "Come on," he said.
I climbed down off the bed and followed him out of my room, heading toward the front of the cabin. My legs felt unstable, like they might sink right down into a puddle on the floor.
"Have a seat," he said, pointing to a black leather sofa pushed against the left-hand wall. As I walked into the living room, I glanced behind me. At the terminus of a narrow hallway, two rooms, side by side, constructed the backbone of the cabin, mine on the left, a door without a dead bolt or a centered metal panel on the right. A small Monet of a skiff gliding under a stone bridge hung from a log between the two doors.
The walls of the living room were covered, floor to ceiling, with books. They stood on rustic shelves that protruded from the logs, and I was amazed at the diversity of the titles. I recognized, on the end of one shelf, the colorful jackets of the five books I’d written.
My brother walked to the other side of the room, which became a tiny kitchen. A record player sat on a stool by the front door, a three-foot stack of records beside it. Orson looked at me and, smiling, set the needle on a record. "Freddie Freeloader" sprang out from two large speakers, and I eased down on the sofa.
As the song progressed, Orson took a seat on the other end of the couch. The way he stared unnerved me. I wanted my glasses.
"Do you think I could have my things now?"
"Oh, you mean this?" Nonchalantly, he pulled my .357 out of his jeans pocket. "I did tell you to bring the Smith and Wesson, didn’t I?" His voice filled with angry sarcasm as his cold eyes dilated and burned through me.
"I’m sorry," I said, shifting uncomfortably on the couch, mouth running dry. "Wouldn’t you have done the same? I mean, I didn’t know —"
"Trying to put me in your shoes won’t work." He walked to the record player and lifted the needle. The cabin now in absolute silence, he moved to the center of the living room.
"You fucked up, Andy. I told you just bring clothes and toiletries, and you brought a gun and a box of bullets." He spoke casually, as though we lounged on a back porch, smoking cigars.
"When you don’t follow my instructions, that hurts both of us, and the only thing I can think of to do is show you that not following them isn’t in your best interest." He opened the cylinder of the .357 and showed me five empty chambers. "You fucked up once, so we’ll load one bullet." He took a round from his pocket and slipped it into a chamber.
I grew sick with fear. "Orson, you can’t."
"Andy-Andy-Andy. You never tell a man with a loaded weapon what to do." He spun the cylinder, flipped it back into the gun, and cocked the hammer. "Let me explain how this punishes me also, because I don’t want you to think I’m doing this just for kicks.
"I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you out here, and if your luck suddenly runs out and the twenty percent chance of this bullet being in the hot chamber bites your ass, I’ve done a lot of work for nothing. But I’m willing to take that chance to teach you a lesson about following my instructions."
When he pointed the gun at my chest, I uselessly held out my hands. He squeezed the trigger — click — and took a bite of his apple. I could hardly breathe, and as I buried my face in my hands, Orson put the record back on. The music started again, and he snapped his fingers to the offbeat, smiling warmly at me as he returned to the couch. When he’d removed the round from the chamber, he set the gun on the floor and plopped back down beside me. A wave of nausea watered my mouth, and I thought I might be sick.
Holy fucking shit, he’s out of his goddamned mind. I’m going to die. I’m alone in a desert with a psychopath who is my brother. My fucking brother.
"Andy, you’re free to roam the house now, and the desert. The shed outside is off-limits, and I’m gonna lock your door every night when you go to bed. You can quit pissing in the bowl. Shower at the well by the outhouse. It’s cold, but you’ll get used to it. The electricity comes from a new generator out back, but I’ve been too busy to put in plumbing."
"May I use the outhouse now?" I asked, scarcely able to muster my voice.
"Sure. Always let me know when you leave. I don’t ever want to have to come find you."
Still shaking, I crossed the room and opened the door to sunlight ripening upon the russet wilderness. I shivered, girding the white bathrobe I’d worn for the last two days more snugly around my waist. When I reached back to shut the door, Orson stood in the threshold.
"I have missed you," he said.
I looked at him, and for a second he was vulnerable, like the brother I’d loved when we were young. His eyes pleaded for
something, but I was in no condition to consider what they wanted.
"Who was she?" I asked.
He knew damn well who I meant, but he said nothing. We just stared at each other, a connection kindling that had lain dormant almost to its death. There remained combustible matter between us. I wasn’t going to wait for him to close the door, so I turned away to walk down into the chilled dirt.
"Andy," he said, and I stopped on the steps, but I didn’t look back. "Just a waitress."
6
I stood on the rickety front porch, in the shadow of a tin roof supported by rotten four-by-fours. A strong, steady breeze blew in from the desert, carrying the sweet, piquant smell of sagebrush, scorched earth, and flowers unknown to me.