by Blake Crouch
It was a long time before she stood up again, and when she did, silence flooded in.
She glanced back over her shoulder, now a hundred and fifty feet away from those double doors.
She went on, got another fifty feet before the noise stopped her.
Somewhere in the factory—the tiny, helpless wail of her son.
"Max!" she shouted, spinning around.
She made her way toward him, pushing through a series of wheel presses, the cries getting louder.
"Max, I’m coming!"
He sounded in pain, but her heart was soaring because he was alive.
A vertical milling machine, twenty feet tall, stood against the far wall, and it sounded like Max’s cries were coming from the top of the machine.
Vi reached the base of the mill and scrambled up onto the table, grabbing the overarm and straining to pull herself up. Digging her shoes into the cutter, she hoisted herself on top of the machine, Max’s screaming now right in her ear.
She wiped the sweat out of her eyes and looked for him in the lowlight.
"Max!" she yelled. "Max!"
And then she saw it, and her heart stopped.
A small, digital recorder stood several feet away on the top of the machine. Violet crawled over and lifted it, staring down at the speaker her son’s voice was coming through.
She threw it as hard as she could and it disappeared among the machines and shattered.
For three seconds, everything was silent again.
The doors behind her slammed shut.
She looked back across the forest of machinery, eyes locking in on him.
Oh God.
A man with long black hair stood in front of the double doors, and even from this distance, she could see that he was smiling.
Lines of sweat trailed down her sides and her head was swimming and the taste of metal on the roof of her mouth.
Neither of them moved for what seemed ages.
Violet could hear the hum of the lights overhead.
Despite the distance between them, she could see that he wore a black tracksuit and black shoes. His face, so pale it bordered on luminescent, seemed to have its own light source.
He turned away from her and reached toward something beside the door, Violet squinting to see what he was doing.
At first, it sounded like another door slamming, but the sound accompanied the first row of lights at the other end of the building winking out, the noise echoing through the factory, ricocheting between the walls.
Then came the next row, and the next, and the next, Vi watching in horror as the lights above her head went dark, everything beginning to dim around her, and then the final row of lights at the far end of the factory shut off, leaving her stranded in darkness.
Vi eased off the edge of the vertical mill and lowered herself onto the table.
When she finally reached the floor, she extended her hands and slowly turned a complete circle, grasping for a tactile sense of her surroundings, to set her bearings, but all she accomplished was losing track of which direction she was facing.
The panic and the sheer darkness overwhelmed her, and she dropped to her knees and crawled across the concrete, through puddles of old grease and rat droppings until her head impacted the metal facade of some invisible machine.
Blood ran down the bridge of her nose from a gash in her forehead.
She still couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but when she reached up, her fingers touched a metal roof just inches above her head. Steel legs surrounded her—she’d crawled under a machine.
Far across the room, she heard a sound like hanging chains clanging against each other.
Then footsteps.
"Violet?" he said, just a voice in the dark, still on the far side of the factory. "There’s eighty thousand square feet of floor space in here. I just locked the doors behind me. You could still escape through the doors on the other end, though that’s doubtful. Did you hear Andy screaming?"
She shut her eyes, trying to reorient herself and realizing there was no conceivable chance she might find her way to the other end of the room without inflicting serious bodily damage. She’d have to hunker down. Stay put. If she didn’t make a sound, he couldn’t find her. He was as blind as she—
The lights returned.
Darkness followed.
For a split-second, she saw the fading negatives of the machines all around her.
Then nothing, her eyes zeroing out the afterimages.
Again, the hanging globe lights burned down above her.
Again, she saw the machines under the harsh and sudden glare.
Darkness.
Afterimages.
One of them was Luther, still far back in the warehouse, his profile a frozen negative.
At first she mistook it for a gunshot, but it was only the sound of those lights cutting on and off, and in that blink of illumination, she glimpsed Luther coming down the ruins of an assembly line toward where she crouched under the machine.
He’d seen her.
Darkness again.
Frozen afterimages.
The patter of Luther’s footfalls on the concrete as he moved toward her.
Lights.
Vi crawled out from under the machine and clambered to her feet.
Darkness.
Footfalls.
The afterimage of Luther less than a hundred feet away.
Lights.
She turned and started to run in that brief illumination, and when the lights went out, she dodged the negatives of the machines until even those had faded into darkness.
She squatted down behind a large planer and waited for the lights to come again.
Her mouth running dry.
Gasping for breath.
Lights.
Luther had stopped twenty feet away, and he stood at the engine lathe where she’d taken cover just moments ago, peering underneath it.
Darkness.
She stared at his frozen afterimage, and when the lights came back, Luther was moving slowly toward her.
Vi ducked down.
Her hands sweating and she wiped them off on the nylon shell of her tracksuit to get a better grip on the knife.
His footsteps stopped.
Couldn’t have been more than eight or ten feet away now.
For three cycles of light and dark, he didn’t move.
She knew what she would do.
Lights.
She peered over the lip of the planer.
There he was, his back to her now.
Quietly, she stood, letting her eyes take everything in, branding the machinery in her immediate vicinity and Luther Kite into her brain. When the lights went out, all she had to do was step two feet out from the planer and rush four steps to his afterimage in that narrow corridor of open space between the machines.
Stab him in the dark.
But don’t kill him. You have to find out what he knows. Max could still be alive.
She was altering her grip on the knife when the lights died.
Go, Violet.
His afterimage appeared—a perfect negative of Luther standing with his back to her, and she could even see that he held something in his right hand which hung at his side.
Now.
She took two careful steps out from the planer and cocked back the knife in her right hand and rushed him.
Four quick, soft steps, and then she stopped where she imagined he stood and brought the bowie down in a hard, fast blow into the dead center of his back.
She had braced herself against the expected impact, so when the blade passed through air, her shoulder nearly came out of socket and she staggered forward into nothing.
Oh God.
The lights blazed down and her eyes burned.
He wasn’t there.
As far as she could see, nothing but the machines and—
Out the corner of her right eye—movement.
Violet spun around, fumbling with the knife, strugg
ling to regrip it.
He was right there, two steps away and already swinging a blackjack in a wide, fast arc.
There was no pain when it connected with the side of her head, but her knees melted, the strength retreating from her extremities in a rush of emptiness.
Then she was sitting in the floor and staring up at Luther as the lights winked out in that gunshot of sound, and she kept staring at his negative, could’ve sworn she saw his smile frozen in the humming-white afterimage.
He struck her a second time in the black—a savage blow to the back of her head—and this impact hurt, but only for a second.
Andy
WHAT broke me out of the agony was the sound of a door opening somewhere behind me. After several seconds, Luther emerged into my field of vision, carrying Violet in his arms across the concrete floor of the warehouse.
"What have you done?" I screamed.
He laid her limp body down upon the wooden gurney that stood ten feet away from mine, and I watched as he buckled in her ankles and wrists and secured her head to the board with a leather strap that ran across her forehead.
Then he came over and cinched down the identical restraint across mine.
"When we begin," he said, "the first thing you’ll do is try to knock yourself unconscious. That would be a crying shame, as they say."
"Luther."
"What, Andy?" He stared down at me through those soulless, black eyes.
"What are you going to do to her?"
He looked over at Violet’s gurney and cracked the faintest smile.
"I love her, Luther," I said. "I know you cannot possibly understand what that means, but there is nothing more powerful in this world—"
"I think I might disagree with you," he said. "I’ve come to the conclusion that fear and pain trump everything. Those are the elemental building blocks of humanity."
"If you honestly think that, how have you not killed yourself?"
Luther looked down at me.
"It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness." He patted my hand. "A German theologian named Jacob Boehme wrote that beautiful sentiment, which your brother shared with me many years ago in the desert. Can you not imagine that in the same way nature and love speaks to the hearts of most people, that this—" he swept his arm, gesturing to the warehouse, the control panel, Violet, the three canyons of scourged flesh down my right leg—"speaks to me?"
He turned away and walked across the warehouse, disappearing through a door I hadn’t noticed before, near where the control panel stood.
Two seconds later, the lights went out.
Her voice came to me through the darkness—terrified, confused, pained.
"Andy?"
"I’m right here, Violet."
"Where?"
"About ten feet away."
"I can’t move."
"We’re strapped to gurneys. Are you hurt?" I asked.
"He hit my head with something. I have a crushing migraine. I heard you screaming."
Though the pain in my legs had receded, it was still all-consuming. I could barely handle it.
"I’m okay," I said through gritted teeth.
"What was he doing to you?"
"It’s not important."
"I’m sorry, Andy." She was crying. "I came back here to find Max and you. Where’s Max?"
"I don’t know. I’m so sorry."
"He’s going to kill us, isn’t he?"
"I don’t know what he wants," I lied.
"I killed this homeless man," Violet said, and I could hear the tears in her voice.
"I heard everything," I said. "That wasn’t you. He forced your hand with Max."
"We’re going to die," she said. "Aren’t we?"
I couldn’t bring myself to answer that.
"There’s this part of me that thinks we’re still up in the Yukon," she said. "Living in those woods. Just you, me, and Max. And that this is all a terrible nightmare. We could’ve been so happy."
"I know."
"We could’ve been a family."
Tears ran down the sides of my face.
"No matter what happens," I said, "when he comes back, just hold onto this—I love you, Violet."
"I love you, Andy."
"There is nothing he can do to touch that."
Violet
OUT of the darkness, a light appeared, shining down into her face from the ceiling thirty or forty feet above her head.
Her first instinct was to crane her neck to the left so she could finally see Andy, but she couldn’t move her head.
It made no difference.
If she stared straight ahead, an enormous mirror leaning against the wall reflected the two of them, ten feet apart and strapped to identical wooden gurneys.
Andy was naked.
His skin held a sickly, gray pallor, and his right leg was covered in blood.
Beside the mirror, a door in the wall swung inward.
Luther appeared.
She felt an anticipation not dissimilar to the fear she’d always known sitting on the thin sheet of paper in the doctor’s office, waiting on the doctor to arrive.
Luther stood at a control panel mounted to a small cart, equidistant from the chairs.
As he turned several knobs, Violet felt her chair begin to vibrate.
Luther approached.
He set a small remote control in her left hand and positioned her finger over the single red button.
Said, "Don’t drop this now. No matter what."
"I did exactly what you told me. Where’s Max?"
He said nothing, just stared down at her.
"I want to see my son!"
"I understand that."
"Well?"
"That might be a touch difficult to arrange."
Her stomach fell away.
"What are you talking about?"
"Max is with his new mommy and daddy now."
"I don’t understand—"
"Max’s cries were previously recorded. I sold him, Violet. Four days ago. For seven thousand dollars. I’d have taken five."
"To who?" She shrieked the words.
"His name’s Javier, but that’s really neither here nor there. Just think of it this way...now he’ll grow up with a daddy, too."
Violet wept from her core, and Luther just watched her, soaking in her misery like it was sunshine.
"Tell me about it," he said finally.
"What are you talking about?" she cried.
"Killing Matthew."
"There’s nothing to tell."
"Well, he’s dead, right?"
"Yes."
"So how’d he get that way?"
"Don’t pretend like you weren’t listening to every word."
"You better make a fucking effort here."
"I stabbed him through the heart."
"Okay."
"And he died right away."
"Did his blood get on you?"
"Yes."
"Did you taste it?"
"No!"
"It’s worth trying for the experience. Did you look into his eyes while he died?"
"What?"
"Did you look into his eyes while he—"
"Yes."
"You watched the emptiness come into them."
"Yes."
"Do you know that’s the moment I live for? Not saying there’s isn’t much fun to be had arriving at that emptiness, but the moment it comes....holy fuck. I hope it wasn’t lost on you. What else?"
"What else what? I don’t understand what you want to hear!"