Desert Places: a Novel of Terror

by Blake Crouch

  “It happened late one afternoon during a thunderstorm,” he said. “In a drainage tunnel that ran beneath the interstate. The water was only a couple inches deep and the tunnel was high enough for a man to walk upright in. We played there all the time.

  “We’d been exploring the woods since lunch, when a line of storms blew in. To escape the squall, we ran down to the creek and followed it up to the tunnel. Thought we’d be safe from lightning under the concrete, but we were standing in running water.”

  I see you in the dank tunnel darkness.

  “I was telling you,” he continued, “that Mom was gonna whip our asses for staying out in the storm.”

  I turned away from Orson and set the syringe on the floorboard. Night was full-blown, and darkness pervaded the car, so Orson was imperceptible beside me. I only saw his words, scarcely audible over the moan of the storm, as they dragged me into that alley.

  Our laughter reverberates through the tunnel. Orson splashes me with water, and I splash it back onto his skinny prepubescent legs. We stand at the mouth of the tunnel, where the runoff drops two feet into a waist-deep muddy pool that we think is filled with snakes.

  Two hundred feet away, at the opposite end of the tunnel, we hear the noise of careless footsteps in shallow water. Orson and I turn and see that the dot of light at the other end is blocked now by a moving figure.

  “Who is it?” Orson whispers.

  “I don’t know.”

  Through the darkness, I detect the microscopic glow of a cigarette.

  “Come on,” he whines. “Let’s go. We’re gonna get in trouble.”

  Thunder shakes the concrete, and I step across the dirty current and stand by my brother.

  He tells me he’s afraid. I am, too. It begins to hail, chunks of ice the size of Ping-Pong balls pelting the forest floor and flopping fatly into the orange pool. More scared of the storm than the approaching footsteps, we wait, apprehensive. The tobacco cherry waxes, and we soon catch the first waft of smoke.

  The man who emerges from the shadow is stocky and bald, older than our father, with an undomesticated gray beard and forearms thick as four-by-fours. He wears filthy army fatigues, and though hardly taller, he outweighs us by a hundred pounds. Staggering right up between us, he looks us up and down in a utilitarian fashion, which does not unnerve me like it should. I still don’t know about some things.

  “I been watching you all afternoon,” he says. “Never had twins.” I’m not sure what he means. He has a northern accent, and a deep voice that rumbles when he speaks, like a growling animal. His breath is rancid, smoky, and sated with alcohol. “Eenie, meanie, minie, moe. Catch a tiger by her toe. If she hollers, let her go. Eenie, meanie, minie, moe.” He points a thick grease-stained index finger into Orson’s chest. I’m getting ready to ask what he’s doing, when a fist I never see coming catches me clean across the jaw.

  I come to consciousness with the side of my face in the water, my vision blurred, and Orson moaning.

  “Keep crying like that, boy,” the man says, winded. “That’s nice. Real nice.”

  My sight clears, but I don’t understand why Orson is on his knees in the water, with the man draped over him, his enormous villous legs pressed up against the back of Orson’s hairless thighs. His olive pants and underwear pulled down around his black boots, the man hugs him tightly as they rock back and forth.

  “Hot damn,” the man whispers. “Oh, good God.” Orson screeches. He sounds like our cocker spaniel puppy, and still I don’t understand.

  The man and Orson look at me at the same instant and see that I’m conscious and curious. Orson shakes his head and sobs harder. I cry, too.

  “Boy,” the man says to me, his face slick with sweat. “Don’t you move. I’ll twist your brother’s little neck off and roll it like a bowling ball.”

  So I lie there with my face in the water, watching the man moan. He closes his eyes and starts hugging Orson faster and faster. As he comes, he bites Orson’s shoulder through a blue T-shirt, and my brother howls.

  The man looks so happy. “Ah! Ahh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhhhhh!”

  Willard pulls out and Orson collapses into the water. There’s blood all over my brother’s ass. It runs down the backs of his legs. He lies in the water, half-naked, too stunned to cry or even pull up his pants. Willard takes a cigarette from his breast pocket and lights it.

  “You’re a sweet piece,” he says, reaching down toward my brother, who’s still curled up in the water. Orson screams.

  I sit up against the concrete wall. It’s no longer hailing, and Willard stumbles through the water toward me, his pants still down around his ankles. I’ve never seen a man’s erection before, and though beginning to fade, it’s ungodly huge. He stops in front of me.

  “I can’t love you like I did him,” he says, dragging on the cigarette. “Ever sucked on a dick?” I shake my head, and he steps into me. My jaw is swollen, but I forget the pain when I smell him. He holds himself in his hand and brushes it against my cheek.

  “You put that in your mouth, boy, or I’ll twist your head off.”

  Tears slide down my cheeks. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

  “Boy, you take that now. And you do me good. Like you mean it. And mind those braces.”

  The moist bulbous head of his cock touches my lips, and I take it for a full minute.

  A grapefruit-size rock drops beside me into the water, and Willard staggers back into the opposite wall and sinks down into a sitting position in the water. He’s dazed, and I don’t understand what’s happened until I see Orson’s hand lift the rock back out of the water.

  Because Willard is holding his left temple, he never sees Orson wind up again. The rock strikes him dead in the face this time, and I hear the fracture of bone. The man’s face is purple now, rearranged. On his hands and knees, he struggles toward the mouth of the tunnel. Taking the rock again, Orson mounts him, like we used to ride on our father’s back, and brings the granite down into the man’s skull. Willard sustains four blows before his arms give out.

  With both hands, Orson lifts the rock up high and dashes the man’s head out like a piece of soft fruit. When he’s finished, he turns to me, still astride Willard, his face speckled with blood and pulp.

  “Wanna hit him some?” he asks, though there isn’t much left to hit.

  “No.”

  He lobs the rock into the pool and comes over and sits down beside me. I lean over and vomit. When I sit back up, I ask him, “What’d he do to you?”

  “Put his thing in my butt.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Look at what else.” Orson shows me his tiny penis. There’s a blister on the end, and it makes me cry to see it.

  I walk over to Willard and roll him over. He doesn’t have a face. His skull reminds me of a cracked watermelon shell. I find the soggy pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. The lighter’s inside the pack, so I take it, along with one cigarette, and sit back down beside my brother. Lighting the cigarette, I pull down my pants and brand myself.

  “We’re still the same,” I say, whimpering as the pain comes on.

  Willard Bass was a fly buffet when the dogs found him. Though our parents forbade us from playing in the woods for the remainder of the summer, they never seemed to notice that their sons had been hollowed.

  It’s funny. I don’t remember forgetting.

  Silence reigned for a long time after Orson finished. The darkness inside the car became complete, and the storm raged on.

  “Guess you think that explains a lot,” I said.

  “No. You want to know what I think? I think if you and I had never gone into that tunnel, we’d still be in this desert. I am not who I am because I was raped when I was twelve. Willard Bass was just gas on my fire. When will you see it?”

  “What?”

  “What’s really in you.”

  “I do see it, Orson.”

  “And?”

  “And I hate it. I fear it. I respect
it. And if I thought for a moment it could ever control me, I’d put a gun in my mouth. Time for your injection.”

  33

  WHEN I woke up, I didn’t hear the wind. The clock read 10:00 a.m. Orson was breathing heavily, and though I shook him, he wouldn’t stir.

  It had grown uncomfortably hot inside the car, so I shut the vents. I turned the windshield wipers on, and they knocked off a wedge of snow. The sun shone into the front seat with eye-splitting brilliance.

  The snow depth had risen above the hood, and as I stared out across the white desert, I saw only an occasional tangle of mature sagebrush poking up through the snow. The sky was orchid blue.

  I saw a white ridge several miles ahead, and I wondered if it was the same one that rose behind the cabin and the shed.

  Watching my brother sleep in the passenger seat, I felt a knot swell in my stomach. Bastard. I’d dreamed about Willard Bass making me take it. The rage lingered, festering in my gut, and the more I shunned it, the more it swelled. He should not have done that to me.

  “Orson, wake up!” I slapped his face, and his eyes opened.

  “Oh my,” he mumbled, sitting up. “There’s three feet on the ground.” Orson cracked his neck. “Roll down my window.” A clump of snow fell onto Orson’s lap as the glass lowered into the door. “I see the cabin,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Two black specks on the horizon.”

  I squinted through the passenger window. “Are you sure that’s it?”

  “There isn’t another structure within fifteen miles.”

  “How far is it?”

  “A mile or two.”

  I reached into the backseat, grabbed an armful of clothes from the suitcases, and dropped them on the console between Orson and me. “I’m gonna let you out of the cuffs till we reach the cabin.”

  “We’re going now?” he asked, incredulous. “There’s no way we’ll make it.”

  “Orson, we can see it. We got less than a quarter of a tank of gas left. That’s not enough for another night of heat, and what if there’s another storm coming? We’re going.”

  “Any of these clothes waterproof?”

  “No.”

  “Then forget it. That ice will saturate cotton, and it’ll take us several hours at least to reach the cabin in snow this deep. Ever heard of frostbite?”

  “I’ll risk it. I’m not staying in this car another night with you.”

  I dug the handcuff key out of my pocket.

  “I’m sorry I told you about Willard,” he said. “Andy?”

  “What?”

  “You gonna forget again?”

  “Don’t say another fucking word to me.”

  The snow came up just shy of my waist. I’d never walked in snow so deep that each step required you to expend the energy of a toddler climbing a staircase. I made Orson walk several yards ahead of me, and, just as he’d predicted, we hadn’t taken fifty awkward steps before the ice began to soak through the layers of my khakis and sweatpants. We’d gone a quarter of a mile when the initial icy burn set in above my knees, like a swarm of needles poking in and out of my raw red skin. It hurt to walk. It hurt to stand still, and by the time we’d hiked a mile through the snow, even my eyes burned from the sunny crystal glare. I wondered how I could possibly reach that minuscule black dot, which still seemed a fixture on the horizon.

  Orson trudged on at his tireless gait, showing no sign of pain or fatigue. The burning in my legs had grown so unendurable that my forehead broke out into a cold sweat.

  “Hold up!” I shouted, and Orson stopped. He was twenty feet ahead, bundled up in two T-shirts, a sweater, a sweatshirt, and a black leather jacket. His legs appeared bulky beneath the long johns, sweatpants, and jeans I’d given him from Walter’s suitcase.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I just need a breather.”

  After a moment, I lifted my grocery-filled suitcase up over my head, and we continued on. My legs and feet turned numb shortly thereafter, so I battled only the stinging in my eyes. The sole relief came from closing my eyes, but I couldn’t shut them long enough to quell the pain while Orson walked uncuffed ahead of me.

  With the cabin three football fields away, my legs were spectacularly numb. I kept thinking of that medical definition I’d found for snow blindness while doing research for Blue Murder—a sunburn directly on the cornea. It watered my eyes just to think of it, and I fixated on locking Orson into that spare bedroom and falling asleep under his fleece blanket in the soothing darkness of the cabin.

  Orson glanced back at me, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. He wore my sunglasses. Did you swipe them from the top of the dashboard while we dressed for this snow trek? I was going to scream at him to stop, but I thought, Fuck it, we’re almost there.

  Even when squinting, I couldn’t adequately shield my eyes from the glare, so I let them close entirely, and it felt wonderful. I’m just going to shut them for a moment, I thought, moving clumsily and blindly now through the snow.

  After six gargantuan steps, I opened my eyes to check on Orson.

  He was gone.

  Dropping the suitcase, I took the Glock out of my waistband and looked in every direction—nothing but smooth unending snow, which drifted randomly in gentle mounds.

  “Orson!” I screamed. My voice cracked and echoed across the blinding white expanse. “Orson!” No sound, not even wind. Trying to follow his tracks through the snow, my eyes watered, and the salt in the tears exacerbated the sting.

  I sensed suddenly that someone was running up behind me, and I spun around and pointed the gun back in the direction of the car. The snow sparkled, pristine and empty. Fear tickled my loins. The white Lexus, half-buried and camouflaged in snow, existed now only as a silver glimmer in the distance. Sunlight struck the speck of its windshield like a flake of mica.

  He’s out there, I thought, turning back toward the cabin. He’s lying in the snow, and all I have to do is follow his footprints. I saw where they ended less than fifty feet ahead.

  “Stand up!” I shouted. “I won’t shoot you, Orson! Come on! Don’t do this!”

  Nothing moved. I grabbed up the suitcase, and I had taken three steps, when something occurred to me. Kneeling down in the snow, I hollowed out a sufficient space to sit. With my leather-gloved hands, I attempted to tunnel into the thirty-six-inch wall of snow, and, to my horror, succeeded. During the storm, the wind had compressed the snowpack, so now I could shovel out a passageway, which barely exceeded one foot in height and two feet in width, while keeping the surface above intact. In essence, a man could tunnel unseen under the snow.

  I stood up, becoming colder now through my torso. The footprints ahead of me meant nothing. Even as I reached the end of Orson’s tracks and saw the suitcase he’d left behind, I knew that he could be anywhere in the immediate vicinity, hiding, waiting just two feet below the surface.

  Dropping the suitcase again, I sprinted off into the snow, running in slowly expanding circles and screaming at my brother to show himself. I ran myself dizzy and finally collapsed on top of our suitcases, back again where Orson’s tracks had terminated.

  On the cusp of blindness, I feared that the numbness in my legs masked tremendous pain, which warmth would soon unthaw. The Glock in my hands was useless, and conceding that for the moment he held the advantage, I came to my feet and bounded on through virgin powder toward the cabin.

  34

  REACHING into the side pocket of my frozen khakis, I took the key that Orson had promised me would unlock the front door. Punching it through the icebound keyhole, I turned the key. The door opened; hauling the suitcases behind me, I entered the cabin.

  I wagered that no one had been here in months. There was an unpalatable scent in the air, as if I’d climbed into an attic or a crawl space. My effete vision made the interior of the cabin dusky. I staggered across the stone floor so I could look out the window that faced south, the direction from which we’d come. Tho
ugh late in the afternoon, the sun blazed as it descended over the bluff. Nothing moved in the sprawl of dazzling white, and I took comfort in knowing that were he to approach the cabin now, I would undoubtedly see him.

  My attention turned from my brother to the morbid condition of my legs. I could feel nothing below the knees, and I imagined this was the sensation an amputee might endure when first walking on a prosthetic appendage. I need heat, I thought, limping toward the kitchen.

  My snow blindness caused me to see everything in crimson. Nothing had changed. Orson’s cornucopia of books still lined the walls, and on the northern edge of the living room, the perfectly organized kitchen stood against the wall, minus a functional sink. The doors to the back bedrooms were closed, and when I saw them, and that small Monet between the doors, my stomach dropped.

  I noticed Orson’s record player on the stool by the front door, along with the stack of jazz records he’d left behind. I would’ve put on a record, but there was no power, and it dawned on me that I should find the fuel supply and crank the generator before nightfall.

  Beside the stove, I found what I was looking for—the white kerosene heater. I couldn’t find a corresponding can of kerosene, but when I lifted the heater, I heard a plentiful sloshing of fuel inside its tank. After dragging it into the living room and setting it before the black leather couch, I pressed the electric starter, and, to my surprise, the heater ignited on the first attempt. Warmth flooded the subfreezing cabin, and as the drafts of heat splashed at my face, I began removing the sweaters and sweatshirts that had kept me alive on that hike from the car to this cabin.

  Leaving the pile of clothes on the floor, I sank down into the couch, unlaced my boots, and pulled the ice-encrusted shoes off my feet. I stripped the stiff socks, the khakis, sweats, and finally the wet long underwear that stuck to my legs. Below my knees, my skin had turned waxy white. I touched my pallid calves, and though they felt cold and hard like a corpse’s, the tissue underneath was still malleable. My feet looked much worse. The ends of my toes were tinged with blue, and when I pinched the soles of my feet, there was no sensation of pain or pressure.