by Blake Crouch
"Is it open?" she asked.
I knelt down, studied the hasps. "No. But it isn’t locked."
"Was it?"
"I’m ninety percent sure it...fuck."
"What?"
Vi hurried over.
I touched the floorboards.
"They’re wet." A cold, sinking blast of panic ran through me. "Someone was up here while we were down there."
She looked at me, her eyes flooding.
A lump swelling in my throat.
"He’s here, isn’t he? He found us and took my son."
I headed for the ladder.
Immediately, I could tell something was off—a softness in my knees that I realized was numbness.
"I don’t feel right," I said as I reached the ladder and started down.
Through her tears, Violet said, "I’ve been getting more and more lightheaded. I thought it was the wine."
I descended carefully, a tremor in my legs threatening to upend my balance. My mind redlined, the last sixty seconds such a nightmare I wondered if this was really happening. I’d had a dozen dreams in the last year that he’d somehow found us, and every time I’d wake sweating in the night, paralyzed by naked fear until that wash of relief would sweep over me, reality reinstated. I’d go to the kitchen sink, drink a glass of water, and wait for the nerves to recede.
My feet touched the floorboards at the base of the ladder.
Violet still cried hysterically in the loft and the numbness in my legs still grew, and I was still in this horrifying moment, either unable to wake, or worse, there was no nightmare to wake from.
My knees hit the floor beside my bed, and I reached underneath it.
Pulled out the shotgun, but it was too light, too small, and it wasn’t black metal but orange and green plastic.
I stared at the Nerf toy in my hands and said, "What the fuck is happening?"
My voice sounded strange, as if it had been relegated to some alcove in the back of my head. I turned and the room moved slower than the swivel of my head, the firelight leaving trails across my field of vision.
Violet stood at the bottom of the ladder, swaying on her feet.
"He drugged us," I said, and she responded but I couldn’t interpret her words, which dissolved in a swarm of echoes.
I staggered to the front door and pulled it open.
Rain fell through the sphere of illumination cast by the porchlight.
Unflinching darkness beyond.
My breath steamed in the cold, and I could feel the chill on my face, but there was distance from it—a chemical apathy getting stronger by the minute.
I stumbled down the steps into a puddle, the freezing water seeping through my socks, realized I still held fast to the Nerf shotgun. I threw it down in the mud.
My CJ-5 stood just beyond the light’s reach, and I moved toward it on rubber legs.
I kept a loaded hunting rifle in the back, had been hoping to shoot an elk that would feed us through the winter.
I collided into the door of the Jeep, fumbling for the handle.
It swung open and I climbed in, reaching back between the seats as the rain hammered the hard-top.
The Remington was gone.
He’d taken it, too.
I stepped back down into the mud and stared at the porchlight thirty feet away, blinding me through the rain.
My head felt heavy, fingers too, like they were trying to pull me down into the mud.
I could hear Violet sobbing in the cabin. It occurred to me that a loss of consciousness was imminent, and despite the effect of the drug, this recognition terrified me.
I wondered how long he’d been watching us, how long he’d been planning this night. He’d spent time inside the cabin—known how to take Max, the location of my shotgun, the rifle, and God knows what else.
I started back toward Violet, but after four steps, my face hit the frigid mud, and I stared sideways at the open door of the cabin, the interior walls awash in firelight.
Violet had gone quiet, now crawling toward the door.
I tried to call out to her but couldn’t muster my voice.
She slumped down across the threshold and didn’t move.
My eyes had begun to close of their own will, the porchlight dimming away until it was nothing but a distant star.
Now the white noise of the rain faded, and with it the cold, and as I slipped under, I held onto a final, horrifying thought—this wasn’t the end of anything, certainly not my life. This was possibly the last moment of peace I would ever know, because when consciousness returned, I’d be waking up in hell.
Violet
SHE opened her eyes and instantly shut them again.
The light was breathtaking, piercing.
Disorientation ruled her every sense.
She buried her face between her arms, but still the light crept in to scorch her retinas.
She thought, I’ve been in darkness a long, long time.
And then: Max.
She wept, and the quality of her voice suggested that she was outside.
The ground beneath her was hard and ungiving—pavement perhaps.
There was no sound. Certainly not the everpresent whoosh of wind moving through spruce trees to which she’d grown accustomed during the last year. She couldn’t recover her last waking memory, only the emotions associated with it—fear and loss.
Violet rolled onto her back and forced her eyes to open.
Thirty seconds of punishing brilliance, and then the world darkened and she saw that she was staring into a low, gray cloud deck.
She sat up.
Found herself in a neighborhood in the middle of a street.
Houses on either side.
She struggled onto her feet. Weak. Like she hadn’t stood in months.
So thirsty her head pounded.
She limped across the pavement toward the closest residence, then into the yard, through the tall grass, and up the creaking steps.
Banged on the front door.
"Hello? I need help please. Hello?"
Her voice sounded strange. Unused. She stepped back and waited. No footsteps forthcoming on the other side. No sound anywhere except the hollow scrape of an empty beer can rolling across the road behind her.
Maybe it was the fogginess in her head, but she’d completely missed it—the front windows held no glass. She approached the one right of the door and stared through the cobwebs into darkness.
Disintegrating furniture.
The smell of mold and must.
Decaying wood.
She headed down the steps and crossed the yard, stopping when she reached the sidewalk of the adjacent house. Didn’t even bother knocking on this one’s door, because the abandonment was obvious—same glassless windows into darkness, its entire frame listing.
Violet walked back out into the middle of the street.
Every yard was overgrown.
Every house dark.
"Hello!"
Her voice echoed down the street and nothing answered.
She started walking, then jogging.
After three blocks of crumbling factory houses, she bent over gasping. Her legs had no strength. They buckled and again she was sitting in the middle of an empty street, her arms wrapped around her legs—something, anything to hold onto.
She had to be dreaming. Nothing about this felt real.
A thought flashed through her mind—I’m dead. It explained the confusion, the weakness, the holes in her memory, these surreal surroundings. And she thought of her son and what that meant, a whole new string of questions erupting, and she wept again, deep, racking sobs and stinging tears, and she could have cried all day and into the night if one ever came, but she was abruptly silenced by a voice that started speaking in her head.
Andy
TOTAL darkness.
Day after day after day.
Strapped naked to a wooden chair lined with strips of freezing metal, leather restraints securing my ankles, w
rists, and head.
Utterly immobilized.
No food.
No water.
No sound but the occasional creak of metal somewhere high above me.
The sole luxury a hole that had been cut out of the bottom of the chair, presumably so I wouldn’t get an infection and die of my own filth.
When my thirst became all-consuming and the desperation descended, someone would inevitably enter and approach in the dark. I’d feel a straw push between my chapped and cracking lips, and for thirty seconds I’d gulp down all the water I could take in. Sometimes, my captor would feed me cold soup or a wedge of stale bread, never speaking, and I would call out as their footsteps trailed away from me, begging for a word, an acknowledgment, something, but I was never answered.
In my waking moments, I obsessed over Violet and Max until the thought of whatever had become of them reduced me to sobs. I passed through phases of fear, boredom, terror, and finally, into madness.
It stalked me—I could feel it creeping up in the dark, scraping at the back of my skull, fueled by sensory deprivation. Often, I didn’t know whether I was awake or sleeping. Lights blossomed in the pitch-black, each display more intense than the one preceding.
Movies for a breaking mind.
I talked to myself.
I sang.
Mostly, I wept.
Then cycled through it all over again, until I finally arrived at a simple, overpowering wish to die. The pain of this immobilized consciousness, of lying in the dark waiting for something I knew not what, freezing and thirsty and hungry and confused and no concept of it ever ending was beyond any physical pain I’d endured.
And then it happened. I came shivering out of a fever dream and something was different—an object rested in my right hand—small, longer than it was wide, hard plastic, one side covered in rubber buttons.
A voice—soft, southern, and familiar—was suddenly in my head.
"You have a choice, Andy. This will be the first of many, and once done, it cannot be undone. In your right hand, you’re holding a remote control. If you want to see something, press the large button toward the front."
I realized I held a smaller device in my left hand.
"What’s in my other hand?"
"That’s for later."
"Where are Violet and Max? Luther? What have you done with them?"
He made no answer.
I sat in the dark fingering the large, circular button, savoring this first new sensation in days—the friction of the rubber against the ridges on my thumb.
I didn’t want to do it. I knew nothing remotely good could come from it, but anything would be better than continuing to sit here in darkness.
This, I couldn’t bear.
So I pushed the button.
Violet
"HELLO, Violet."
She brought her hand to the earpiece in her left ear, hadn’t even noticed it until this moment.
"Acknowledge that you can hear me."
"Where’s my son?" she asked.
"I’m holding him."
She took in a quick shot of oxygen, tears welling, her throat beginning to close.
"If you hurt him in any—"
"He’s safe—for the time being."
"I don’t believe you."
Max’s unmistakable cry blared through the speaker into her ear. She could have picked it out of a million.
"See, you just made me pinch him. There, there, little man. Hush now."
"Max, it’s Mama. I’m right here." She couldn’t hear him anymore. "Please don’t hurt him. I’ll do anything you want."
"So glad to hear you say that."
"Is Andy okay?"
"Andy...has been better. But he’s alive."
"What is it you want?"
"Get your ass up."
Vi came to her feet, made a slow turn, eyeing the abandoned factory houses up and down the street. She touched the earpiece again, gave it a soft tug. It didn’t budge, but she could feel her skin stretching.
"It isn’t coming off," Luther said. "Not without a scalpel. Start walking."
"Which way?"
"Toward the water tower."
She started walking.
"You can see me?" she asked.
He didn’t answer.
The water tower stood a quarter of a mile away, its silver tank dulled and heavily graffitied.
Still, she could read the palimpsest of the tower’s namesake.
"You’re feeding my son?"
"He’s being fully cared for, Violet."
"I need to see him."
"That can certainly be arranged."
"How?"
"Obedience, of course."
She was closing in on the tower now.
A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounded the base.
"Up and over," he said.
She ran her hands through her hair which had been pulled into an off-center ponytail, then touched the fence, a heavy coating of rust on the metal. As she began to climb, she noticed she wore a pair of tennis shoes and a black tracksuit that had never belonged to her.
Near the top, she made a lateral move across the fence and swung her leg over between a gap in the barbed wire, caught the leg of her tracksuit on a stray jag of metal coming down, ripped a six-inch tear.
Gasped at the coldness of blood and the burn of torn flesh.
She hit the ground on the other side, turned, stared up at the tower—a hundred and seventy-five feet of rusted metal that should’ve been razed years ago.
It creaked, swaying visibly in the wind.
"There’s something for you at the top. Something you’re going to need."
"The top of the tower?"
"That’s right."
Violet saw where the lowest rung of the ladder stopped six feet above the concrete foundation.
"I can’t reach that."
"I’m sure you’ll think of something."
She stepped onto the broken concrete and stopped directly under the ladder. When she stood on the balls of her feet and reached her hands up, her fingers just grazed the bottom rung. Bending her legs, she jumped and grasped the lowest rung with one hand, then both, grunting as she pulled her eyes parallel with her blanching knuckles.
Her right arm shot up, fingers catching on the next rung and tightening around the metal.
She cried out, fighting through the next pull-up, the hardest she’d ever done.
Her knees slid over the bottom rung and she let her weight rest upon it.
Gasping.
Sweat burning in her eyes.
Violet clung to the rusting ladder, allowing her pulse rate to slow. When she could breathe without panting, she got her tennis shoes onto the bottom rung and stared up toward the base of the water tank.
"Is this safe?" she asked.
"Does it look or feel safe?"
She began to climb.
The ladder itself was impossibly narrow, a foot wide at most. As she stepped onto each new rung the weight of her footfall set the metal vibrating on a low and haunting frequency.
Forty feet up, and she still hadn’t looked down, maintaining a hyperfocus on each rung, down to the rust-speckled metal. It was all that mattered—making clean steps. Certainly not the world opening up all around her, or the perceptible leaning of the tower that grew more pronounced the higher she climbed, or the picture her mind’s eye kept conjuring—the bolts that held this ladder to the top slowly pulling out of their housings.
The wind pushing against her carried tiny ball-bearings of sleet.
Halfway up, she had to stop and make herself breathe.
Not breathless from exertion, but fear.
When she opened her eyes, she was staring down the length of the ladder between her feet, figuring it must be seventy or eighty feet to that concrete slab at the tower’s base. It moved back and forth, or seemed to at least, though she knew that was the tower itself swaying and a surge of bile lurched up her throat.
&nb
sp; Hold it together. You’ve been through worse. This is for Max. For Andy.
"You aren’t freezing on me up there, are you?"
"No."
Her words thick in her throat, palms sweating, sliding too easily across the metal rung. There was a tremor in her right leg as she started to climb again. Exhaustion and fear and the adrenaline running out, leaving her muscles shaky.
But she kept climbing.
A freezing drizzle needled the side of her face.
The steps becoming slippery.
Vi looked up. Three more rungs. Almost there.
She pushed on.
Two more.
Then reached up, her right hand clutching the water-beaded railing, and pulled herself onto the catwalk that encircled the water tank.
It spanned twenty-four inches, but at least it had a railing, a flimsy semblance of protection.
A small camera, just out of reach, had been mounted to the water tank.
It aimed down toward where the ladder joined the catwalk.
Violet flattened herself on the cold metal, her heart beating against it. She didn’t want to do it, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking out across the urban wasteland that sprawled beneath her—block after block of derelict neighborhoods. A six-story housing project—black windows, a crumbling playset in what remained of the courtyard. She craned her neck. Abandoned factories loomed in the distance around the other side of the tower. A series of buildings. Brick chimneys, smokeless and soaring into a ceiling of slate. Everywhere, nothing but industrial decay. A ghost town. Only in the far distance, a mile or more away, did she discern the hum of automobiles, and further on, the feeble skyline of the city.
The speaker crackled in her ear.
"Get up."
Vi wiped the rainwater out of her eyes and got back onto her feet.
"I told you I had something for you, didn’t I?"
"Yes."
"That was a lie. Not something. Someone."
Violet felt a vibration under her feet. She grabbed hold of the loose railing, didn’t like standing upright, the swirl of vertigo threatening.
She staggered back over to the ladder and looked down.
They’d only just started, but someone climbed quickly, with purpose.
"You’re coming up here?" she asked.
"That’s not me. Her name is Jennifer. She woke up here just like you, about an hour ago. Also like you, she’s a new mother. Her daughter, Margot, is sharing a crib with Max as we speak."