by Blake Crouch
He hesitates, listening: the muted breath of warm air murmurs up through vents in the floor. A water droplet falls every fifteen seconds from the faucet into a slowly filling wineglass and in another room the second hand of a clock ticks just on the edge of audible. The refrigerator hums soothingly. As the icemaker releases new cubes into the bin, the sound is like a great glacier shelf calving into the sea.
Luther kneels down, stows the boy beneath the table. Then he moves on into the dining room, turns right, and passes through a wide archway into the den.
Plushycushioned furniture has been arranged in a semicircle around the undeniable focal point of the room: a gargantuan television with satellite speakers positioned strategically in every corner for a maximum auditory experience. A third Tupperware bowl has been abandoned between two pillows on the floor. Bending down, he scoops out a handful of popcorn and crams it into his mouth.
He walks to the edge of the hallway, eyes still adjusting to the navy darkness. The electronic snoring of the kitchen cannot be heard from this corridor of the house. But there are other sounds: the toilet runs; a showerhead drips onto ceramic; three human beings breathe heavily in oblivious comfort. Beneath this soundtrack of suburban sleep the central heating whispers on and on, safe as his mother’s heartbeat.
Luther stands in the hallway scraping chunks of popcorn from his molars, thinking, They need this noise. They would go mad without it. They think this is silence…they have never known silence.
He steps through the first doorway on the right, a bathroom. Opening the medicine cabinet above the sink, he takes out a box of grape-flavored dental floss. When his teeth are clean to his satisfaction he returns the floss to its shelf and closes the cabinet. Stepping back into the hall he tiptoes across the carpet into the first room on the left.
A black and orange sticker on the door reads "Private—Keep Out!" and below it in stenciled characters: "Hank’s Hideout."
The room is tidy—no toys on the floor, beanbags pushed into the corners.
A dozen model airplanes and helicopters hang by wires from the ceiling.
A B-25 sits near completion on a desk. Only the wings and the ball turret remain to be affixed.
He smells the glue.
A bevy of Little League trophies lines the top of a dresser, each golden plastic boy facing the bed, frozen in midswing. Luther reads the engraving on the base of one of the trophies.
Hank’s team is called The Lean, Mean, Fighting Machine.
He won the sportsmanship award last year.
Removing his backpack, Luther lies down beside Hank atop a bedspread patterned with a map of the constellations. The boy sleeps on his side, his back to the intruder. Luther watches him for a moment under the orange gleam of a nightlight, wondering what it must feel like to have a son.
Because he’s dreaming, the boy’s neck snaps more easily than his little brother’s.
Luther rises, unzips the backpack. He takes out the gun, the handcuffs, the tape recorder, Orson’s bowie. The gun is not loaded. Silencers are hard to come by and under no condition will he fire a .357 at two in the morning in a neighborhood like this.
Slipping the handcuffs into his pocket, he moves back into the hall and arrives at last in the threshold of the master bedroom where Zach and Theresa Worthington sleep.
In the absence of a nightlight the room is all shape and shadow.
He would prefer to stand here, watching them from the doorway for an hour, glutting himself on anticipation. But this isn’t his only project tonight and the sun will be up in four hours.
So Luther sets the tape recorder on a nearby dresser and presses record. Then he thumbs back the hammer on the .357 and strokes the light switch with his latex finger though he does not flip it yet.
Zach Worthington shifts in bed.
"Theresa," he mumbles. "Trese?"
A half-conscious answer: "Wha?"
Luther’s loins tingle.
"I think one of the kids are up."
13
ELIZABETH Lancing couldn’t sleep. She’d gone on her first date with Todd Ramsey tonight and a spectrum of emotions swarmed inside her head, giddiness to guilt. Todd had taken her to a French restaurant in Charlotte called The Melting Pot. Initially she’d been horrified at the prospect of making conversation over three hours of fondue but Todd was charming and they’d fallen into easy conversation.
They started out discussing their law firm where Todd had just made partner and Beth had been a legal administrator for five years. At first they resisted the gossip but Womble & Sloop was a rowdy firm and the fodder was bottomless and irresistible. This transitioned into a brief exchange on their philosophies of employment and how neither of them knew anyone whose work afforded absolute fulfillment. They posited finally that the ideal job did exist but that finding it was such an excruciating chore most people preferred instead to suffer moderate unhappiness over an entire career.
Toward the end of dinner, as they dipped melon balls and strawberries into a pot of scalding chocolate, the conversation took an intimate turn. They sat close, basked in prolonged eye contact, and compared only the idyllic slivers of their childhoods.
Beth knew that Todd had been recently divorced. He was well aware that her husband had disappeared seven years ago through some mysterious connection to Andrew Thomas. But neither came within a hundred miles of the other’s baggage.
After dinner Todd took her home. It was eleven o’clock and cruising north up a vacated I-77, Beth watched the pavement pass, mesmeric in the headlights. Riding with Todd she felt foreign to herself in a fresh and frightening way. Like the start of college and autumn. Not a thirty-eight-year-old single mother of two.
She came very near to holding his hand.
She wanted to.
Had he reached out she would not have pulled away.
But the part of her that had lived eleven years with another man and bore his children and experienced the loss of him quietly objected. So she kept her hands flat against her newly-purchased sleek black A-line, partly out of fear, mostly out of respect, thinking, Next time perhaps but not tonight Walter.
Now Beth had climbed out of bed and come downstairs where she stood at the kitchen sink looking through the window at the black waters of Lake Norman, the moon high and lambent, an ivory sun in a navy sky.
The lake was no longer smooth. An easy wind had put ripples through that black plate of water and disturbed the reflection of the moon. Beth could hear the fluttering leaves and see them spiraling down out of sleeping trees into the frosting grass.
Next door, the Worthingtons’ rope swing had begun to sway—some wayward specter revisiting a childhood haunt at this wee hour of the morning.
The clock on the stove read 1:39.
She took a glass from the cabinet and filled it from a bottle of water. Following those wonderful glasses of shiraz that had accompanied her supper, she was parched and downed the glass in one long gulp.
Instead of returning to bed, Beth walked through the dining room into the den and curled up on the sofa beneath an afghan. She wasn’t remotely tired and this exacerbated her realization that it was now Monday and she would be staggering into work in six short hours.
Moonlight streamed through the French doors leading out onto the deck where the shadows cast by Adirondack chairs lengthened as the moon moved across the sky.
She wore an old satin teddy Walter had given her years ago for Valentine’s Day. Because all the lights were off downstairs, when she crinkled the fabric the blue crackling of static electricity was visible as it danced in the satin.
She ruminated on Walter. He was more vivid in her mind than he’d been in a long while. What she felt toward him wasn’t sadness or nostalgia or even love. It was beyond an emotion she could name. She thought of him now as light and time and energy—a being her earthbound soul could not begin to comprehend. Did he watch her now? she wondered. From some unfathomable dimension? She had the warmest inkling they would meet agai
n as pure souls in the space between stars. They would communicate their essences to one another and luminously merge, becoming a single brilliant entity. This was her afterlife, to be with him again in some inconceivable form.
Beth heard the footfalls of one of her children upstairs. Rising from the sofa, she walked into the foyer, the hardwood floor cool, dusty beneath her bare feet. She climbed the carpeted staircase to the second floor and upon nearing the top felt the insomnia begin to abate and her eyes grow leaden. She was tired of thinking. Perhaps she would sleep now.
The stairs bisected the second floor hallway.
To her left the corridor extended past two linen closets and Jenna’s bedroom and terminated at the closed door of the bathroom, behind which John David urinated hard into the toilet.
Beth went right toward her bedroom at the opposite end of the hall. Passing another pair of closets and the playroom, she approached the open doorway of John David’s bedroom. Before leaving on her date with Todd she’d made J.D. promise to clean it up.
She stopped at his doorway and peeked inside. Though it was dark, she could see that the floor was still buried in clothes and toys. J.D. and Jenna had been playing Risk since they came home from church. The game board rested at the foot of the bed, framed by dirty blue jeans.
Beth drew a sudden breath.
John David was sleeping in his bed.
She heard the bathroom door creak open.
Turning, she looked down the corridor.
With the bathroom light now switched off she could only see the silhouette of a tall dark form standing in the bathroom doorway.
So it was Jenna in there.
"Hey, sweetie," Beth called out, her voice betraying scraps of doubt.
The form at the other end of the hallway did not move or respond.
"Jenna? What’s wrong, Jenna?"
Beth’s heart thudded against her sternum.
Behind her John David mumbled incoherently. She closed the door to his bedroom, a salty metallic taste coating her throat with the flavor of adrenaline and dread.
She was ten steps from her bedroom door.
Gun in closet. Top shelf. Nike shoebox. Think it’s loaded.
Stepping out into the middle of the hall, she began to backpedal slowly toward her room, squinting through the darkness at the motionless shadow, thinking, I haven’t fired that gun in seven years. I don’t know if I remember how.
Her hand grasped the doorknob. She turned it, backing through the threshold into the master bedroom.
The shadow remained at the other end of the hall.
Phone or gun?
She could scarcely catch a sufficient breath. Some part of her wondered, prayed that this was a recurrence of one of those awful dreams she’d suffered in the wake of Walter’s death.
Much as she hated to let that thing out of her sight she was impotent without a weapon. Beth turned and moved deftly to the bedside table. She lifted the phone. Jesus, no. The line was dead and her cell phone was downstairs in her purse.
Beth slid back the door to the closet as the unmistakable resonance of thick-soled bootsteps filled the hallway.
She hyperventilated.
Do not faint.
Standing on her tiptoes, Beth reached for the top shelf and grabbed the shoebox with her fingertips and pried it open. It contained a box of bullets but the .38 was gone. She noticed other boxes on the floor at her feet—he’d been rummaging while she was downstairs.
The footsteps stopped.
The house was silent.
A wave of trembles swept through her, sapping the strength from her legs, forcing her to the floor. The thought of her children stood her up again and she walked to the doorway of her bedroom and peered down the hall.
It was empty now.
"I’ve called nine-one-one on my cell phone!" she yelled. "And I’m holding a shotgun and I’m not afraid to use it!"
"Mom?" Jenna called out.
"Jenna!" Beth screamed.
In a knee-length flannel nightgown her daughter stepped from her bedroom into the hallway. Jenna was taller than Beth now, prettier. She’d inherited her daddy’s good looks and athleticism, missed her mother’s plainness.
"Why are you yelling, Mom?"
"Get back in your room and lock the door!"
"What’s wrong?"
"Now, goddammit!"
Jenna ran crying into her room and slammed the door.
"I don’t want to shoot you but I will," Beth hollered at the darkness.
"How can you shoot me when I have your gun?" a calm masculine voice inquired.
The shadow emerged from the playroom and walked toward her.
Beth flicked the light switch on the wall.
The hallway lit up, burning her eyes and flooding the shadow with color and texture.
The man who approached her had long black hair, a face whiter than a china doll, and smiling red lips. He tracked bootprints of blood across her hardwood floor. It speckled his face, darkened his jeans and long-sleeved black T-shirt.
Beth sank down onto the floor, immobilized with terror.
Luther came and stood over her, said, "I haven’t hurt your children and I won’t long as you’re compliant."
Beth saw the ivory hilted knife in his right hand. It had seen use tonight.
Jenna’s door opened. The young girl poked her head out.
"I’m all right, baby," Beth said, her voice breaking. "Stay in your room."
Luther turned and gazed at the teenager.
"Obey your mother."
"Why are you doing this?" Jenna cried.
"Get in your room!" Beth yelled.
"What is happening?"
"Get in your room!"
Jenna’s door slammed and locked.
When Beth looked back up at the intruder she saw he’d traded his knife for a blackjack.
"Turn around," he said. "I need to see the back of your head."
"Why?"
"I’m going to hit you with this and I’d rather it didn’t smash your face."
"Don’t you touch my children."
"Turn your head."
"Swear to me you won’t hurt—"
Luther seized her by the hair and whacked the back of her skull.
14
ACCORDING to the official website www.wafflehouse.com, the thirteen hundred Waffle Houses in the United States collectively serve enough Jimmy Dean sausage patties in twenty-four hours to construct a cylinder of meat as tall as the Empire State Building. And in one year they serve enough strips of Bryan bacon to stretch from Atlanta to Los Angeles seven times.
Luther recalls these amusing factoids while cruising down the offramp of I-40, exit 151, in the city of Statesville, North Carolina. Though it’s 4:13 a.m., two establishments remain open for business. There’s the never-closing Super Wal-Mart on his side of the underpass and the wonderful Waffle House—just a left turn at the stoplight and two hundred yards up the street. Its lucent yellow sign cheerfully beckons him. He smiles. He hasn’t enjoyed that smoke-sated ambience in awhile.
Luther pulls into a parking space and turns off the ’85 Impala. In addition to stinking of onions, the car has been running hot and he worries it won’t endure the remainder of his journey. With respect to his sleeping cargo, breaking down would be an unthinkable disaster.
Intricately patterned frost has crystallized on the windshield of the car beside his, a web of lacy ice spreading across the glass. Touching the fragile crystals, he shivers and takes in the predawn stillness of the town. From where he stands the world consists of motels, gas stations, fast food restaurants, the drone of the interstate, and the sprawling glowing immensity of that Super Wal-Mart in the distance, set up on a hill so that it looks down upon its town with all the foreboding of a medieval stronghold.
Luther heads first into the bathroom. Though his work clothes rest safely in a trash bag in the backseat, he hasn’t had the opportunity to wash up. His hands and face are bloodspattered and he watches th
e water turn pink and swirl down the drain.
Even at this hour of the morning, Waffle House is buzzing, the bright light from the huge hanging globes bouncing off a murky cloud of cigarette smoke. The grill sizzles on without respite, the smell of the place a potpourri of stale coffee, smoke, and recycled grease.
A waitress moseys over to Luther’s booth.
"Know what you want, sweetie-pie?"