by Blake Crouch
Breathless, Maxine sets the yams on the tablecloth beside a platter of steaming crab cakes. Then she takes a seat at the end of the table, opposite her husband, and releases a contended sigh. "Mrs. Claus" is spelled out in rhinestones across the front of her bright red sweater.
Dressed up as Santa Claus, Rufus occupies the head of the table. To his left sit the spasmodic Andrew Thomas, Elizabeth Lancing, and Violet King, their faces twitching involuntarily. At Rufus’s right sit Luther and Horace Boone. Luther also wears a Santa hat but does not look happy about it. Horace holds a leather-bound journal in his lap. His legs and torso have been duct-taped to the chair, and he trembles.
"Beautiful," Rufus says, addressing his wife, "I think I speak for everyone when I say this looks absolutely scrumptious."
Rufus rises and steps behind Andy, Beth, and Vi—a haggard-looking bunch. The ladies have been helped into two of Maxine’s faded house dresses. Andy wears one of Rufus’s tattered leisure suits—too tall and too narrow in the shoulders.
"Would Miss Violet care for some cranberry relish?" Rufus asks.
Vi looks up over her shoulder and smiles at the vibrating three-headed god.
"Ha-ha-ha, yes Miss Violet would."
Rufus scoops a spoonful of relish onto her plate and inquires if she’d care for a serving of mashed potatoes and gravy.
"Oh please. I’m eating for two, you know."
"Is that right?" Rufus says. "Well, I’ll be."
Vi’s head seizures intensely for five seconds.
"Thhhhhhhhhhhhhhhat was fun!"
Luther reaches for the broccoli casserole.
"Boy!" Maxine yells. "Not until the guests are served!"
When Rufus has finished serving the twitching threesome, he returns to his chair at the head of the table, removes his Santa hat, and says, "Dig in, everybody."
As the platters are passed around, Horace watches the three tremblers across the table try to feed themselves. Roughly one out of every three attempts ends in someone missing their mouth and shoving the food directly into their face. When Beth inserts a spoonful of yams down the neck of her dress, Vi giggles, then chokes and snorts mashed potatoes through her nose. The entire table laughs, and Rufus says, "Boy, the Christmas cheer is just palpable."
Then the party goes quiet and the room fills with eating sounds. Luther’s plate is covered in raw oysters on half shells. He lifts one after another, shaking a few drops of Tabasco sauce onto the cool oyster, and sucking it down his throat like a swallow of briny spicy snot.
"Oh my God!" Andy suddenly exclaims, peering at something under the table.
Rufus finishes off a hushpuppy and gently takes hold of Andy’s arm.
"What is it, Andy?" he asks.
"What happened to my leg?"
"Oh," Rufus chuckles. "Had to do a little surgery. That bear trap nearly took it off. I told Luther it was too big a snare. You almost lost the leg. Thought I might have to saw it off. Yeah, that’s about ninety stitches there."
Andy glares at Rufus, his head convulsing violently, then bursts out in laughter.
"Thank you!" Andy shouts.
Rufus lifts his fork, smiling, "Merry Christmas, Andy, you get to keep your leg!"
Again, the table erupts in laughter, everybody but Horace, who just stares at his plate, food uneaten, tears welling from his bloodshot eyes.
"Why the long face, boy?" Maxine asks. "You ain’t hungry?"
"He’s just nervous, Beautiful," Rufus says. "Totally understandable. He’s waiting for the verdict. Show everybody your book, Horace."
The boy lifts the slim leather journal up from his lap for everyone to see.
"That right there is Horace Boone’s Philosophy of Evil."
"I didn’t know you were a writer," Vi says.
Beth has passed out in her food.
Andy stares at a grouping of peas on his plate, mesmerized.
"That’s wonderful," Maxine says, "what you got to be nervous about, boy?"
"It’s shit," Rufus says. "That’s what he’s got to be nervous about."
Horace buries his face in his hands.
"I told him the first night he was here, ‘Horace, I didn’t invite you. If you want to stay, convince me you’re worth it.’"
Rufus takes a half shell from his son’s plate and sucks out the oyster.
Wiping his mouth, he continues, "I told him about my collection of treatises. I explained what would happen if I didn’t find favor with his, and he accepted the risk. So Horace, look at me you big crybaby."
Horace looks across the table at the hideous Santa Claus.
"For the record, I have not found favor with your treatise. Your rage is great, but your mind is small. You long to burn people. To smell cooked flesh. Eat human ash. Interesting cravings, sure, but Horace, you would murder without calm. You’d do it out of fear and confusion and rage. It would be brutal, but it would serve your deficiency, not your strength. You’re a kitty-cat who wants to be a lion."
"Rufus, just give me—"
"You were told not to speak. In short, you aren’t what I’m looking for, Horace. Few are. I saw your heart in your words, and it’s a broken, desperate organ, for which I have no use."
"Pop," Luther says, "why don’t we just let him burn one of the girls?"
Rufus turns and smiles at his son. He lifts his hand, scratches his nose, and backhands Luther across the face.
Vi giggles.
Andy licks peas, one by one, off his plate.
Beth snores.
Maxine shakes her head.
Horace weeps.
Luther glares.
"You go on and take him downstairs, son. I don’t care what you do with him. I might be down later. Better say goodbye to your idol, Horace."
Crying hard now, Horace glares at Andy and his peas.
"You misjudge your former hero," Rufus says. "I knew his brother. That’s the stock I’m looking for. That’s a lion who wishes to God he were a kitty. Leave your pathetic book on the table. I want it for my collection. Merry Christmas."
Luther rises, discards his Santa hat, and pushes his long black hair behind his shoulders.
Horace begins to beg.
Maxine pinches his cheeks as Luther slides Horace’s chair back from the table.
"You give a shit about this chair, Mama?" Luther asks.
"No, why?"
Luther drags the chair to the edge of the staircase and kicks it down.
Bones crack. Screaming ensues.
Maxine tilts her head back and laughs long and low.
"Thanks for dinner, Mama," Luther says.
Then he kisses her cheek and heads down the steps toward the whimpering boy.
"I tell you Andy…Andy, quit it with the peas already."
Andy looks up and grins at Rufus. His long hair and beard have been trimmed haphazardly, both now streaked with gray.
"You really let that boy down. You know, he followed you all the way out here from Canada. In the Vancouver airport, he overheard you calling for information on ferries to Ocracoke. Showed up at my front door the night before Miss King came knocking. I mean if it hadn’t been for him, you might have pulled one over on us. You used to be that boy’s hero until he read your manuscript. If he’d had it his way, you’d be dead right now. You don’t know how much he begged me to let him set you ablaze."
A series of clunks is followed by a scream as Horace and his chair descend another flight of steps.
Maxine giggles. "That Luther—he’s so funny."
"That boy thought you were the biggest fraud he’d ever seen. Called you a gentle spirit in his treatise."
"Oh, no," Andy says. "I’m very mean. I killed a guy once in the desert. Put a hole—BANG!—right through his head. And I shot your son! Ha! Ha! Did you know that? I tried to kill Luther, but he didn’t die."
Rufus smiles. "You’re a hoot, Andy."
"I’m a hoot, too," Vi says. "Hoot. Hoot."
"Yes, you are. You know a strapping young
man named Max dropped by about a week ago."
Vi takes a sip of sweet tea, gurgles it, and spits it back out onto her plate.
"He came with your former sergeant, Barry something. A big bear of a man. Apparently, the whole police community of North Carolina is searching for you, young lady. They think Andrew Thomas, the Heart Surgeon," Rufus winks at Andy, "kidnapped you and buried you somewhere on Portsmouth."
"That is a riot!" Vi exclaims. "I’m right here!"
"Your husband looked absolutely heartbroken. He sat down in the living room, in the very chair you parked your caboose in when you stopped by in early November. He misses you terribly."
"He’ll get over it."
Beth wakes up suddenly from her nap, yams clinging to the side of her face.
"Feel rested, Miss Lancing?" Rufus asks.
"Lancing?" Andy says. "I knew a Lancing once. I killed a Lancing once. BANG!"
Andy slams his fist down on the table. Maxine chuckles.
"We were sitting in a car together. Then BANG! Blood everywhere."
Beth looks at Andy. She grabs the back of his neck, pulls him in close, and plants a sloppy kiss across his mouth.
"Hey, I knew your husband," Andy says. "What was his name?"
"Walter," Beth says dreamily.
"You know, he was an all right kind of guy."
Beth giggles. "He’s dead now."
"Oh, sorry to hear that."
"Well, it was for the best."
"Honey, do you have any kids?" Maxine asks as Horace’s chair thumps down the final flight of steps.
"Um, yeah."
"Where are they?"
"Who gives a flying fuck? I abandoned them."
"Why’d you go and do that?"
"Cause I didn’t want to be a mother anymore. Anything else, Miss Nosy?"
Rufus raises his wineglass of sweet tea.
"I’d like to propose a toast," he says. "To Andy, Elizabeth, and Violet. May our time together not end in your death."
A scream resounds from the lower recesses of the house, but Rufus continues, unfazed.
"May you break your tablets. May you find your way into the darkness and out again. And may you learn true freedom. Freedom from values. Drink with me."
The threesome clumsily locate their glasses and the party drinks.
Then Rufus and Maxine help their guests to a room on the third floor and shoot them all full of Ativan.
Leaving the supper dishes until morning, they walk hand in hand downstairs to the first floor. Rufus unlocks the small door under the staircase and holds it open for his wife.
As they progress together down this last rickety flight of steps to join their son in the basement festivities, Maxine inquires, "What’s that smell, Sweet-Sweet?"
They reach the bottom of the staircase and stand on the dirt floor amid the dim labyrinth of stone rooms.
Rufus chuckles.
"That’s gasoline, Beautiful. Old Horace is gonna get his wish after all. It’s a Christmas miracle!"
# # #
Winter on Ocracoke Island is a season of desert beauty—the lonely beaches ravishing and ravaged by the cold belligerent sea. The village streets are empty, the tourists having long since fled, wanting no part of a truly wild place. Nor’easters blow through, one after another. There is only wind and rain and skies of slate and the ongoing defiance of these eroding ribbons of land called the Outer Banks, daring the great Atlantic to consume them.
In February, two men walk up the beach north of Ramp 72, amid driving rain and spindrift and the deafening crush of surf. No other soul has ventured out into this raw gray madness, and on such a morning this barrier island feels like more than just the fringe of eastern America.
The slower of the two men stops walking, stoops down, and pries an enormous conch shell out of the sand. He turns it over several times, finding it perfectly intact.
"Here." Rufus hands the shell to Luther. "We’ll take it back to Mom."
They continue on up the beach, the wind to their backs, whipping the sea oats, the old man musing on what it will be like after the Great Regression. Luther has heard it a thousand times, and what he once suspected, he now wholeheartedly yet secretly believes: his father is full of shit.
But Luther dutifully listens.
The wind reverses, now howling out of the north, spitting rain into their faces. They turn and walk back toward the access road.
"I love it like this," Rufus says. "Look at the chaos."
He points out into the rabid sea, pulverizing the beach.
"How’s your treatise coming?"
"It’s good, Pop," Luther lies.
"Can’t wait to read it. See what four years in those Manhattan libraries taught you."
Rufus playfully bumps shoulders with his son. Luther musters a dead smile.
They walk awhile without speaking, over kelp and driftwood and the footprints of sandpipers and myriad shells and all that the waves have flung ashore. Rufus puts his arm around Luther and grins against the knowledge that he’s losing his son.
# # #
They’ll have no linear memory of the winter they are spending in the belly of the house. Only slivers to haunt the people they become. Slivers of darkness and silence and faceless voices and hilarious violence. They won’t remember the space between injections and gas, when the fogginess lifted just enough to let the inhuman horror of it all sink in.
# # #
"Breath deep, young lady." Vi inhales the gas. The world floats down and sinks through her and woooooooooooow.
"Now I want you to watch this tape."
"Okey doke."
As Vi fixates on the home video, the television screen begins to pulsate. It’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen. The star hangs upside down by his feet, and he keeps screaming and screaming.
From the other side of the room, Andy yells, "How meaningless!"
Another shot of NO2 and now Vi laughs hysterically.
That quiet man with the long black hair is in the movie, too, and he’s the one making the star scream. When the screaming stops, the movie ends.
Vi tries to give a standing ovation but keels over on the dirt floor.
"I see you enjoyed that."
"Oh, so much. Can I watch another one?"
"Of course you may. We have many. But first…"
Here comes the mask of joy.
# # #
Sometimes the three captives watch the movies together, filling the basement with their strange laughter and rolling around like idiots in the pile of spent whippits.
Their favorite is Headless Harry. Luther graciously plays it for them again and again.
# # #
One night, Luther sits on an old couch in that dim screening chamber of the basement, watching Beth and Vi, sprawled out on the floor, engrossed in the tape he made of Horace Boone.
Andy sits rocking in a corner. The gas hit him wrong tonight, so he’s shaky and panicky and having a conversation with his dead brother.
Beth turns suddenly and looks up at Luther as Horace’s screams reverberate off the stone walls. Even through the fantastic haze, she registers the black absence in his eyes.
"Can I have one?"
She points to the bag of Lemonheads in Luther’s lap. He hands her one.
"Here," she says cheerfully and offers him a condom swollen with nitrous oxide. "Why don’t you come down here and watch Flamin’ Boone?"
Luther reaches forward, pinches the lips of the condom above Beth’s fingers, and leans back into the couch. After hyperventilating for twenty seconds, he brings the mouth of the prophylactic to his lips and inhales the gas. When he’s done, he flicks the limp rubber across the room, and his eyes fix on Horace, now charred, smoking, and softly groaning.
Beth still eyes Luther, so high on gas that the sounds from the television throb through her like waves.