by Blake Crouch
“Sir, you don’t understand the day I’ve had.”
“And you don’t understand what you’re asking. You want me to take you to Ocracoke in the dead of night? Across that shallow inlet? Look, we only came in this close to get Gloria ashore.”
“Your wife can stay, I don’t care, but you are going to take me to Ocracoke right now. I’m not asking.”
“Did something happen on this island?”
“I’m not going into it. You just—”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell me something, sweetheart.”
Vi stood up.
“All right, fine. Andrew Thomas—heard-a-him?—the serial killer?—is on this island as we speak. I need backup. I need—”
“Oh jeez.”
Sam looked down at the bucket. He stepped toward the dunes and chucked the vomit into the sand.
When he came back he said, “You better be who you say you are. I spent a third of my pension on that yacht, and if my mate grounds her on the shoals of Ocracoke Inlet, the state of North Carolina is going to reimburse me. I guarangoddamntee you that.” He turned and poked his head into the tent. “Get dressed, Gloria. We’re going back to the boat.”
“You are shitting me.”
48
WE sat huddled together in the corner. The lodge was absolutely black.
“He put something in the jug of water, didn’t he?” Beth said.
“I think so. Oh, man, if I don’t get up, I’m gonna pass out right now.”
I struggled to my feet, Violet’s .45 clenched in my hand.
A whirlwind spun behind my eyes.
“I can’t stay awake much longer,” Beth whispered.
I staggered over to the broken window, peered out into the woods.
The live oaks glowed in the new moonlight, their twisted limbs lathered in electric blue. The marsh grass that surrounded the lodge stood so still it appeared frozen.
Through the fuzziness, I thought of Violet again, wondered where he’d left her, hoped the thing had been done quickly.
I felt so woozy now.
Beth was whispering my name and it sounded like, “Anananandydydydy.”
As I turned my head the darkness blurred.
She was slumped over, motionless in the corner.
“Anananandydydydy.”
Then it occurred to me that Beth was unconscious.
The voice belonged to a man and it was coming from somewhere outside.
I looked back through the window.
A shadow appeared at the thicket’s edge, its pale face glowing like a moon in the dark.
Luther.
It emerged from the woods and started toward the lodge.
I aimed the .45 through the window, then realized my hands were empty.
The gun lay at my feet.
When I bent down for it, my legs liquefied.
I stumbled backward.
Crashed into the table.
Plates shattering.
I was down on my back.
Footfalls thumping up the steps.
My consciousness twirling and falling out from under me.
The door unlocked, flung open.
And I was gone.
49
AS Vi stepped aboard the 61’ Queenship Sportscruiser, Rebecca, she instantly understood why Gloria was green. The seas rollicked, the yacht tottering so fiercely she had to grab hold of the railing the moment her feet touched the teak deck.
The dinghy was halfway back to the beach by the time Vi had steadied herself. She watched Sam’s wife run it aground and drag the Boston Whaler beyond the reach of the tide. Gloria hadn’t spoken a word to her during the short boat ride to the yacht. She’d just glared. Her husband had begged her to stay on the yacht in light of the fact that a serial murderer was also on the island. But Gloria said in parting: “There’s no way. Fact, I hope he finds me, cuts me up into a thousand pieces. Be better than this fucking nausea.”
Now he led Vi through the curved glass curtain wall that opened from the aft deck into the salon, where she sat down at the end of an L-shaped sofa.
Cherry wood everywhere. Italian leather. A flat-screen TV. Wet bar. Expansive windows, port and starboard.
Vi imagined that on a sunny day in the middle of the sea, the view was nothing but miles and miles of sky and green water.
Pedro, the ship’s mate, emerged shirtless from the crew quarters deep in the hull.
“Gloria no come?” he asked.
“She went back ashore. Head on up and get us going. You know Ocracoke Inlet, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know him. Be bad tonight. Bad any night. No good idea.”
“I know, Pedro.” Sam glanced at Vi. “Can’t be helped.”
As Pedro ascended to the pilothouse, Sam said, “There’s the phone. I’ll be up with Pedro. Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to get there if we don’t ground her.”
He flicked on more lights as he walked through the galley and disappeared up the curving staircase into the pilothouse. After a moment Vi heard the engines fire up, little more than a muffled gurgle in the insulated recesses of the hull.
Her stomach lurched as the boat began to move.
She picked up the phone, then set it down.
She put her face into her hands and took long penetrating breaths.
Taking up the phone again, she dialed her sergeant’s home number.
Talking with Sgt. Mullins before anyone else (911, Coast Guard, SBI) would be the smart move. He’d tell her exactly how to proceed.
A sleepy voice answered, “Hello?”
“Hey, Gwynn, it’s Vi. Look, I’m sorry to be calling so late, but I need to speak with Barry. It’s—”
“He’s on call tonight, and you just missed him. He had a suicide.”
“Oh, well, I’ll just page him then. Thanks.”
Vi hung up the phone.
Her hands still trembled.
She looked down the companionway that accessed the master and VIP staterooms.
It all felt so surreal. The violence, the fear, the sudden luxury.
She thought of Max and almost called him. But the gentleness, the everydayness in her husband’s voice would have broken her in two. If she didn’t ease herself out of this nightmare it would shatter her.
Reaching for the phone to page Sgt. Mullins, she realized she didn’t know the number for the yacht. She rose from the sofa but the moment she started for the staircase, a wave of nausea engulfed her.
She barely made it to the galley before spewing her lunch into the sink. Turning on the spigot, she washed the mess down the drain and splashed water in her face. Her forearms against the countertop, she held her head over the basin for ten minutes, eyes closed, praying for the nausea to pass.
Her stomach finally settled and she had just started for the pilothouse to get the phone number for the yacht when Sam came quickly down the staircase.
“We’re here,” he said. “Come on. I gotta get back to Gloria.”
Vi followed Sam back out onto the aft deck. The night was colder, the moon now unveiled and shining down upon the harbor.
Sam offered his hand and Vi took it. He helped her step up onto the dock.
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “I know this was a big inconvenience, and I hope Gloria feels better.” Sam just rolled his eyes and walked back into the salon.
As Vi headed up the dock she heard the twin diesel engines come to life again. Glancing over her shoulder, she watched the yacht cruising back out into the harbor.
Vi reached Silver Lake Drive and stopped.
Sam had deposited her near the deserted Coast Guard station and the ferry docks.
The lights of Ocracoke shone and reflected in the harbor—a cold twinkling silence. It was midnight and she didn’t have a key to her room at the Harper Castle B&B.
The Coast Guard station was dark.
I’ll just have to wake somebody up.
She would’ve run but it was all she could do to walk,
her legs still burning from the sprint across the tidal flat. As she walked along the double yellow line she thought of Andrew Thomas, wondered if he’d still be alive when she saw him next.
She felt overjoyed to be back on Ocracoke. The safety was palpable. She could sense the seven hundred sleeping residents all around her.
She started to say a prayer of thanks.
A car approached from behind.
Stepping back onto the shoulder, she watched an ancient pickup truck come rumbling slowly toward her. It pulled up beside her and squeaked to a halt.
The passenger window rolled down and Rufus Kite leaned forward from the driver seat, his eyes hollowed in the absence of light—two oilblack pools.
“Miss King? Thank God.”
“What are you doing—”
“Oh thank God. Everyone’s looking for you.”
“Who’s looking for me?”
“Someone saw you with Andrew Thomas in Howard’s Pub. Everyone’s looking for you. Come on, get in.”
The passenger door swung open.
“I’ll take you back to the house,” he said. “We’ll get you cleaned up. I imagine you have some very important phone calls to make.”
“Well, yeah I do, but… No, I think I’ll just walk over to the Silver Lake Inn.” She motioned down the street to a three-story motel on the waterfront. “I’ll wake someone up if I have to, but I don’t want to trouble—”
“No trouble at all. Hop in. Besides, I don’t think anyone’s there, Miss King.”
An odd tone in his voice. Not mere insistence.
Something rustled in the back of the truck.
“Look, I appreciate the offer, but—”
Maxine Kite sat up from the truck bed and climbed out of the back wielding a mallet. Vi was backpedaling, on the verge of running, when Maxine cracked her skull open.
Vi’s knees went to jelly and her cheek hit the cold pavement, blood running across her eyelid, down the bridge of her nose, over her lip, between her teeth. She heard a door screech open, saw Rufus step down onto the road on the other side of the truck, watched his boots come toward her, wondering if this throbbing sleepiness at the base of her neck meant she were dying.
Vi rolled onto her back.
Swallowed blood.
Warm liquid rust.
The spindly branches of a live oak overhung the road. Between its limbs the night sky shone in pieces—cloudless, black, filling up with stars.
Rufus and Maxine stood arm-in-arm grinning down at her.
A walkie-talkie crackled.
Rufus pulled it from his back pocket, pressed the talk button, said, “Yeah, son, we got her. See you back at the house.”
Vi’s brain told her arm to unzip the poncho and take out the gun but she remembered that she didn’t have it and besides the arm wouldn’t move.
“Now that’s what you call a good ol’ fashioned wallop,” Rufus said and chuckled.
Then the old man kissed his wife on the cheek and leaned down toward Vi, all gums tonight.
“Her lips are still moving,” he said. “Go ahead and clonk her again, Beautiful.”
S W E E T – S W E E T
&
B E A U T I F U L
However, there is a locked room up there
with an iron door that can’t be opened.
It has all your bad dreams in it.
It is hell.
Some say the devil locks the door
from the inside.
Some say the angels locked it from the outside.
The people inside have no water
and are never allowed to touch.
They crack like macadam.
They are mute.
They do not cry help
except inside
where their hearts are covered with grubs.
—Anne Sexton, “Locked Doors”
F o u r D a y s L a t e r
50
MONDAY morning, 10:00 a.m., Horace Boone leaned back in his chair and sipped from an enormous mug of coffee, watching through the window as the sun made its brilliant ascent above the Outer Banks, whetting the sky into cloudless November cobalt.
It should’ve been a lovely morning, sitting in that warm sunlit nook of the Ocracoke Coffee Company, amid the smell of fresh coffee beans and newspapers and baking pastries and the murmurs of browsing customers in the adjoining Java Books.
But Horace was a wreck.
It had been four days now since he’d watched Andrew Thomas board the Island Hopper with that pretty young woman and taxi out through Silver Lake harbor into the sound. He’d waited and waited, staring through the windshield as the sky dumped cold unrelenting rain. An hour had passed and the Island Hopper returned without them.
By nightfall there was still no sign of them so he made his way back to the Harper Castle B&B, had supper, and went to bed.
First thing Friday morning, he returned to the Community Store docks. The Jeep Cherokee that Andrew and the woman had arrived in was gone. Horace drove to Howard’s Pub, saw that the Audi Andrew had rented wasn’t there either.
Behind the wheel of his own subcompact rental, a tiny white Kia, Horace felt the hot tears begin to roll down his cheeks. Up until a few days ago he’d sensed that he was fated to tail Andrew Thomas and record his story. He’d managed to follow him nearly three thousand miles from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Denver International Airport. There, he’d lost Andrew in security, waited all weekend in despair near a stand of payphones in the food court of Terminal B, berating himself for flushing his savings on this ridiculous endeavor. Watching the stream of travelers, he resolved to fly back to Anchorage, apologize profusely to Professor Byron, and finish his MFA in the creative writing program. This last year of his life had been derailed by a twenty-four-year-old megalomaniac who fancied he would write a book about Andrew Thomas and become famous.
As Horace gathered his backpack and came to his feet he stared down the terminal and watched in astonishment as the man he thought he’d lost glided toward him on the moving walkway. Andrew Thomas walked right up beside him, grabbed a payphone, and with his back turned to Horace, proceeded to make a phone call.
Horace felt certain he was hallucinating but he stood there and listened as Andrew called the North Carolina Department of Transportation and inquired about the ferry schedules from the mainland to a place called Ocracoke Island. Had Horace any lingering doubt about whether fate and fortune were in his pocket, he then observed Andrew hang up, redial, and book a room at the Harper Castle B&B on Ocracoke for the following week.
His rejuvenation was instantaneous.
Once on Ocracoke, Horace spent Wednesday and Thursday following Andrew’s movements throughout the island—the two trips to the stone manor on the sound, Andrew’s visit to Tatum Boat Tours, Bubba’s Bait and Tackle, his peculiar meeting with the pretty blond at Howard’s Pub, and finally, Andrew and the blond’s departure on that boat in the middle of a nor’easter.
Apparently they had returned late in the night and for some reason left the island. Had Horace waited by the docks he might be with them now. Instead he’d come thousands of miles only to lose Andrew permanently on a small island off the coast of North Carolina. He’d let the story of a lifetime slip away. Andrew was long gone by now, pursuing Luther Kite, in a story that Horace would never get to tell.
No question, he’d missed the party.
Horace set the coffee mug down on his little table and lifted the purple notebook containing the first four chapters of his book on Andrew Thomas. He didn’t have the heart to write about Andrew this morning. Thumbing through the pages, he relived the thrill of finding him and standing outside the window of Andrew’s cabin in Haines Junction, watching the master write. For a month at least, Horace had known hope.
Rising from the table, he acknowledged that this would probably be his final morning on Ocracoke. But he wasn’t going to waste it as he’d done the last three days—driving aimlessly around the island searching for A
ndrew’s Audi and that blue Jeep Cherokee. Tonight he would try one last thing and if that proved futile (as he suspected it would) he’d fly back to Alaska, beg his parents for a little money, and never again do anything this reckless and stupid.
51
BETH and Violet stirred as we entered our fourth period of light.
It passed through a crack in the stone and slanted through darkness—a dusty shaft of daylight come to illuminate our miserable faces for an hour.
We sat across from one another in a cold stone room, our wrists manacled and chained to an iron D-ring, bolted to the rocky floor between our feet.
A doorway opened into a dark corridor, through which spilled the disconcerting sounds of hammering and drilling that had been ongoing without respite for what seemed like days.
I raised my head.
In the twilight I could see that the women were also conscious.
A stream of water trickled down the stone beside Violet.
Two roaches crawled through the oval patch of daylight at my feet.
A strained and hopeless silence bore down upon us.
Beth wept softly as she always did when the light appeared.
Violet sat stoical, a line of dried blood streaked from her scalp across the left side of her face.
There was nothing any of us could say.
We just stared at each other, three souls in hell, waiting for the darkness to come again.
52
LUTHER drilled the last hole into the right armrest. Rufus was screwing a leather ankle strap into the left front leg of the chair. Because the wood was oak the old man had to lean into the Phillips head to make the screw turn.
“Lookin’ good, boys.”
Maxine stood in the narrow stone doorway, a glass of lemonade in each hand, the single bare light bulb accentuating deep creases in her face. “My Heart Belongs to Jesus” was spelled out in rhinestones across the front of her bright purple sweater.
Father and son lay their tools on the dirt floor. Rufus grunted as he struggled to his feet. He walked over to Maxine, leaned down, planted a kiss on her forehead. Her big baby black eyes sparkled, her only feature that showed no age.