by Blake Crouch
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, struggling 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 th
is 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!"
Andy said, "He wants to hear you say you liked it."
Luther turned and glared over at Andy, then reached under Violet’s armrest and disengaged something.
She felt the armrest come loose.
Luther swung it around so her left arm was stretched back behind her head.
He performed the same operation on the right armrest.
In the mirror, she watched as he knelt down at the base of the gurney and slid out a steel platform which housed a system of cables, gears, and pulleys. This, he locked into place just behind her wrists, and resecured them with a pair of nylon restraints that he cinched down so hard the tips of her fingers began to tingle with blood loss. He clipped the new restraints into a locking carabiner.
Next, he attended to her ankles, trading the padded-leather restraints for nylons.
She wanted to ask what he was doing but feared the answer.
When he’d finished with her, Luther moved Andy into the same position and then returned to the cart between the two of them.
He stared down at the control panel for a moment before turning his attention to Violet.
"Are you familiar with the rack?" he asked.
She was.
Discovery Channel.
Several years ago.
A special on the Inquisition that, in spite of her profession as a homicide detective, had given her nightmares for a week.
"Torture isn’t what it used to be," he said. "Somehow, the infliction of pain has gotten a reputation as barbaric. And I think that’s tragic. We learn about ourselves through all intensities, not the least of which is pain."
Luther turned something on the control panel, and Violet felt the nylon restraints begin to tighten.
The vertebrae in her spine cracked, the pressure building as the quarter-inch gauge cable tugged her arms and legs in opposing directions.
The tension had just become uncomfortable when the gears stopped turning.
"Just so we’re clear, you both understand the concept behind the rack?"
No one answered.
"Andy?"
"The purpose is to pull the appendages, stretching them until dislocation occurs." Violet detected the strain in Andy’s voice. "Once the joints are separated, severe muscle damage occurs. Many victims of the rack, who weren’t subsequently executed, never had the use of their arms and legs again."
The unstoppable weight of terror pushed into Vi.
"I did what you asked," she said. "I killed that man."
"Yes, you did, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now you’re both holding a remote control in your left hand, and I took the liberty of placing your thumbs on the buttons. Only one of the racks can turn at a time. Andy, we’ll start with you. When the pain becomes too much, you can stop the stretching by simply pressing that button. But you must know that when your machine stops, Violet’s starts. Violet, when the pain becomes too much for you to bear, feel free to transfer your agony back to Andy."
"Luther," Andy said. "Please—"
"Don’t you dare beg this piece of shit," Violet said.
Luther laughed. "There’s the girl I love."
Andy
IN the mirror’s reflection, I could see the gears begin to turn beneath the gurney.
So, so slowly.
The pressure-build almost unnoticeable.
Gentle even.
Then my bare feet began to point toward the wall and I felt my lats elongating.
Still no more painful than an early-morning stretch.
Only a stretch that never eased.
The muscle- and joint-tension continuing to build, and now the first impulse to fight against that steady pulling overcame me, and I tugged against the cables, my elbows and knees bending slightly at the joints.
The tension relieved for three beautiful seconds, and then the relentless pull of the cables straightened them back out.
God.
Now there was pain.
M
anageable, but growing, and for the first time in the last few hours, I forgot what Luther had done to my leg.
The sensation was of my calves and the muscles in my back beginning to rip, but that pain was almost instantly eclipsed by the incomprehensible pressure in my knees and elbows.
Joints extending and then hyperextending.
I heard myself grunting.
Saw Violet’s face in the mirror, watching mine.
Beyond terror.
She was speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear her. Couldn’t hear anything over the straining in my voice getting louder with each passing second.
"Luther," I said through my teeth. "All right, turn it off."
Sweat trickled down into my eyes and now I felt what could only be the cartilage beginning to stretch, and the pain was like a thousand needles sliding into my joints.
"Please!"
Through the sheet of tears, I could see the blurred image of Luther standing between the gurneys, watching me.
Each micron of time, the pain and the pull intensifying, and I realized I was screaming, and that nothing I had ever experienced had approached this level of complete agony.
Press the button, it’ll stop.
Press the button, Andy.
You’re being ripped apart.
You’ll take the pain back from her, but you just need a moment of relief.
A moment to think.
I felt my finger depress the button on the remote control.
The noise and hum beneath my gurney stopped, and that bright, cutting pain retreated.
I was gasping for breath, and I looked at Violet in the mirror, saw her watching me, tears running down her face as the cables began to stretch her feet.
"Push the button, Vi," I said.
"No."
"Vi—"
"I can take it, Andy."
"No, you can’t. Give it back to me."
I pressed my button, but nothing happened.
I could hear Vi straining now, fighting against that first uncomfortable tug.
In the mirror—her face the definition of dread.
"Luther, what do you want?" I said.
"This."
"But this will be over soon."
"Define soon."
"You know what I mean. Eventually, we’ll be dead."
"Please shut up, Andy. I’m trying to enjoy—"
"You want more than this, Luther."
Violet groaned.
Her head was still immobilized and she stared into the ceiling, eyes bulging with disbelief.