by Blake Crouch
Staring down at it made Donaldson feel both excited and a touch apprehensive.
He played his fingers across the top.
“No wonder you had it specially delivered. Ivory is illegal.”
“It gets better. Go on. Open it.”
Orson watched as Donaldson flipped the brass hasps and slowly opened the box.
Only when Donaldson’s eyes lit up, did he charge.
Five steps covered in the blink of an eye.
Driving his shoulders into the man’s stomach, scooping him up under his fat thighs, and slamming him to the desert floor.
Orson felt the breath rush out of Donaldson as he crushed the man’s knife hand under his knee, pinning it to the ground.
Then he grabbed his brand new toy from the velvet-lined interior of the walnut box.
The knife felt exquisite in his hand.
The ivory hilt was cool, and it fit perfectly to his grasp.
He touched the pristine, unblemished blade to Donaldson’s throat.
“Carbon steel. Three millimeters thick. I’m more than a little tempted to try it out on you, fat man. Ever heard a scream in the desert? The echo goes on forever. Should I show you?”
Donaldson grunted, his face pinched. “Sweet talk like that turns me on. How much was the blade?”
“Three hundred seventy-five dollars. Plus a very reasonable shipping fee.”
“Promise me something. If you let me live, let me know where you got it. I want one.”
Orson gazed down into the man’s eyes. There was fear there, sure, shining up through the chubby cheeks and the doughy fat. But something else, too. Something unexpected.
Excitement.
Maybe even arousal.
Orson sighed.
“What?” Donaldson asked. “Either shit or get off the pot, brother.”
“I don’t know, but this feels…wrong.”
“Wrong?” Donaldson shifted his bulk, giving Orson a bit of a bounce, reminding him, incongruously, of the first time he and Andy had ridden horses.
They’d been nine.
Sweet Andy. I still miss you, brother.
“Killing my own kind,” Orson finally said, “that’s what feels wrong.” But still he pushed the blade a few microns deeper into the flesh of Donaldson’s throat, imagined that last layer of skin beginning to split under the pressure of the blade. “How many like us do you think are wandering around out there?”
“More than you’d think.”
There was a snicking sound, metallic and unmistakable.
Orson felt something spear into his bare ribs.
He grinned.
“You had a second blade. Ankle holster?”
“Smaller than the one you have right now, but enough to puncture a lung. Ever seen a lung punctured?”
“Of course.”
Donaldson’s face softened. “I love that half-gasp, half-flapping sound.”
“I love the wet, gurgling noise of someone taking a deep breath while their lungs are filling up with blood.”
“I have an idea,” Donaldson said.
“Hit me.”
“We’re never gonna trust each other.”
“True.”
“And even if we become the best friends in the world, we’d probably always want to kill each other.”
“True.”
“Maybe it’s best we go our separate ways.”
Orson considered this. “Two lions passing each other in the dark?”
“Exactly. And we both live on to kill another day.”
“Or we could cut each other to shreds. Blaze of glory and all that.” Orson winced, feeling Donaldson’s blade nick his rib cage. “But separate ways sounds cool, too. I want to still be doing this when I’m seventy.”
A line of blood had begun to bead out across Donaldson’s throat, Orson wondering how much of the fat man’s head he’d be able to cut off before his lung collapsed, and if he could then make it into town to the hospital before he bled to death.
“Count of three,” Orson said. “And we disarm.”
“That didn’t work out so well the last time.”
“Second time’s a charm. One…two…three.”
Neither man so much as flinched.
“Why don’t you be the bigger man, Donaldson, and throw your knife away first? I am the customer, after all.”
“I’m not feeling that so much. How about you go first? As a gratuity for the one who carried your new toy so many miles to its new home.”
Dust swirled around them.
Out of the corner of his eye, Orson noticed a jackrabbit racing through the sagebrush.
“It gets awful cold out here when the sun drops,” Orson said. “Coyotes come out. Can I trust you?”
“Probably not. Be a helluva way to die, getting eaten by coyotes.”
Orson eased the pressure of the blade, just a hair. “Your turn. We’ll do this in baby steps.”
Orson felt Donaldson’s blade pull away from his ribs.
Orson lifted the blade completely from the surface of his neck.
Donaldson followed suit.
And then Orson rolled off the man onto the ground and jumped to his feet. “Need a hand up?”
“I can manage.”
Orson smiled, watching Donaldson struggle onto his feet like a bloated elephant. “That was graceful.”
“Nice takedown earlier.” Donaldson widened his stance. “Want to try it again?”
“If I want to take you down, you’ll be the last motherfucker to know about it. Look, I gotta get home, and if you want to be out of this desert before nightfall, you’d better hit the road.”
Orson backed away, moving toward his car.
“Hold it, asshole.”
Orson paused.
“The knife.” Donaldson pointed at Orson’s blade. “Where’d you buy it?”
“Custom knife maker in Montana. Works out of Bozeman. Last name’s Morrell.”
Donaldson nodded.
Then he folded up both of his knives, pocketed them, and backed away toward his sedan.
Out in the desert, a coyote mourned the sun as it slipped under the horizon.
The pair of buzzards had flown on, nowhere to be seen.
As Donaldson opened his car door, Orson called out, “So what’ll you do to blow off all this steam we just built up?”
Donaldson shrugged. “Probably take it out on a hitchhiker.”
“Just be sure and watch yourself,” Orson said. “Never know who you might pick up.”
A Brood of Hens
New England, 1992
“Historians typically delineate four manifestations of the Inquisition.”
He hated this class.
“The Medieval Inquisition.”
He hated the professor.
“The Spanish Inquisition.”
But more than anything…
“The Portuguese Inquisition.”
…he hated the subject.
“And the Roman Inquisition.”
Hated history. Hated looking back on things, hated dwelling on events long-since passed and people long-since dead.
“Can anyone tell me the purpose of the Inquisition? No takers? Okay, how about you?”
He was only twenty years old, but he’d made it his life’s work to live in the present. To occupy the moment.
“Excuse me…Mr. Kite?”
Shit.
Luther looked up from his desk on the back row of Room 107 in Howard Hall.
Professor Parker had stepped out from behind the lectern to stare a hole through him from across the room. The guy was young—couldn’t have been much older than thirty—but he dressed like a crusty old coot in a beige wool suit, red bow tie, and green suspenders. Parker probably hadn’t had a moment of fun in his entire life.
“Mr. Kite? Yoo-hoo! You with us? Terribly sorry to wrench you up out of your nap, but we’ve kind of got a class going here.”
Luther cleared his throat and straightened up in
his desk, felt his face growing hot with a deep, scarlet flush.
“Sorry.”
“Care to take a shot at answering my question?”
“Could you repeat the question please?”
Professor Parker smiled. “Of course. Be thrilled to. Can you tell me the purpose, the objective if you will, of the Inquisition?”
Luther hadn’t read the assigned pages. In fact, he hadn’t even cracked the book that had cost him, his parents actually, a hundred twenty dollars in the student bookstore. He hadn’t wanted to come to this stupid college in Vermont to begin with, but his father had insisted, and now, only half a semester in, he was flunking every one of his classes.
“The purpose?” Luther asked.
Parker smiled. “Yes, the purpose.”
“Um…”
“Did you read the assigned pages?”
“Not really.”
“Not really. Okay. Would you like me to answer the question for you?”
“Sure, that’d be great.”
A ripple of laughter spread through the classroom. Had he caused that? He wasn’t trying to be funny. In fact, he was fairly certain he’d never made anyone laugh in their entire life. Just wanted this moment to be over.
He didn’t like the way Parker was watching him across the room. Luther had disappointed all of his professors during his underwhelming two-month tenure at Woodside College. He knew they hated him, wanted him out of their classes, but none of them had stared at him quite like this. Maybe he was imagining things, but it was almost like Parker wanted to hurt him.
“The objective of the Inquisition, Mr. Kite,” Parker said, returning to the lectern and adjusting his gold, wire-rim glasses, “was to combat heresy, and in this regard, the Inquisition only had jurisdiction over baptized members of the Church. Maybe I’ll throw Mr. Kite a softball now. Mr. Kite?”
“Yes?”
“By what means did the Inquisition examine, interrogate, and punish heretics?”
“Um…torture?”
“Very good, Mr. Kite. Excellent. Yes, the Inquisition is perhaps best known for its sadism and unrelenting cruelty. After all, it gave us the Pear, the Garotte, the Wheel, the Spike, Punishing Shoes, Heretic’s Fork, the Boots, the Hanging Cage, Head Crusher, Judas Cradle, Iron Maiden, and that most brilliant method of inflicting revelatory, false-confession-inducing pain, the Rack.”
Luther sat just a bit straighter at his desk.
One of the jocks a few rows down raised his beefy arm.
Parker called on him.
“Is the Rack that thing where they string you up outside and leave you for the crows?”
“No, not even close.”
Parker removed his glasses and smiled at the class.
“The Rack…” He stopped himself. “Do any of you scare easily?”
Luther glanced around. No one raised their hands, but he thought he noticed a few of his female classmates shifting uncomfortably in their seats.
“No one?” Parker said. “Great. Okay, the Rack…it was a wooden frame, with rollers at both ends, one bar to which the legs were fastened, and another bar for the wrists. The heretic’s limbs were gradually pulled as tension was added to the chains connecting the bars to the rollers. This brought upon excruciating pain as the joints became dislocated. Eventually, separation occurred. Cartilage ripping. Complete muscle fiber failure. The noise of snapping bones and ligaments was often used as an intimidation device for onlooking heretics, waiting their turn on the Rack.”
Luther had been watching the horrified and sickened expressions of his classmates, loving it, but as he turned to look back toward the lectern, he saw something even better.
Parker.
My God.
He was really enjoying this.
Relishing it even.
Soaking in his students’ disgust and horror like a cool breeze.
He hated each and every one of them, and as Luther realized this, he couldn’t stop the smile that was slowly spreading across his face.
He’d misread this man completely.
He was one of the bad guys.
A Glaring of Owls
The North Carolina Outer Banks, 1993
Orson
It was early summer on the island, and the place was crawling with tourists. He hadn’t reserved a room, and since everything was booked to capacity, he’d taken to camping out on the beach out of the back of the van he’d rented two weeks ago in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
It had taken him a day to find the stone house on the sound, tucked back a few quiet streets away from the village.
The first time he’d laid eyes on it, the dark, penetrating sadness of the place had overwhelmed him.
Three stories of scarred stone.
Dark windows.
An overgrown lawn that hadn’t seen care in years.
He’d had to wait all day, hiding out in the bushes, to see the person he’d come for—that tall, pale kid with long, black hair who’d flunked out of Woodside College last fall—and it was after ten o’clock at night when Luther finally emerged.
Orson had followed him from forty yards back as his former student strolled the live oak-lined streets into the village.
Luther took a walk around the harbor, stopping once at a public dock to people-watch, before heading home again.
Hopefully this is a nightly habit, Orson thought as he headed back to his van on the beach.
Because if it was, tomorrow night, he’d take Luther.
Luther
The next evening, Luther stepped outside into the muggy night, cicadas filling the air with their incessant clicking.
He pulled his hair back into a long ponytail and started down the drive.
His father had sent him out again to try and pick up a tourist.
Last night, he’d struck out. Sure, he could’ve taken some chances, gone out on a limb, but their first rule on the rare occasions when they hunted on their own, small island, was to Take No Risks.
The downside was that visitors predominately kept to the touristy parts of the island and rarely ventured into the quieter—
He abruptly stopped walking, and a smile crept across his lips.
There was someone moving toward him thirty yards ahead. Of course it was still too dark to see, but he could bump into them, strike up a conversation, find out if they were visiting, maybe where they were staying. It was always important to check dead guests out of their motels and get their cars off the island, make sure they didn’t have any family who would stick around and ask troublesome questions.
The person was approaching, now only twenty feet away.
Tall, broad-shouldered. Definitely a man.
Not ideal, but workable.
If he didn’t bring someone home tonight, Rufus was going to yell at him again.
Or worse.
“Hello,” Luther said as the stranger approached.
The two men stopped in the middle of the street, in a dark spot out of reach of the surrounding streetlamps.
“Nice night,” the stranger said.
“Yeah, definitely. Out for a stroll?”
“Not exactly.”
Luther was about to step a little closer, see if he could tease out some info about where the man was heading, but half a breath later he was on his back, the world spinning, a bee sting pinch in the side of his neck.
“Don’t fight it, Luther,” the man said, his voice strikingly familiar as he held a hand on his chest and put his weight on it.
Luther did fight it, thrashing out his arms and legs, but a languid blackness began to seep into his peripheral vision, eventually blurring out his focus and forcing him into unconsciousness.
Orson
“I…I know you.” Luther was still doped up, his head lolling on his neck, a line of drool escaping his pale lips.
“You should,” Orson said. “You flunked out of my class.”
Luther was sitting up against a metal pole, to which he was attached by a bright and shiny
length of chain. His hands were free, and he was in some sort of a shed. “You do this to all the students who flunk your class?”
Orson laughed, giving Luther a slap on the shoulder. He felt good about this one.
“Lemme ask you something. When you were approaching me on the sidewalk. Were you actually shopping?”
“Shopping?”
“I got the feeling you were sizing me up.”
Luther stayed quiet.
“You hard up for money, Luther? What were you going to do? Try and take my wallet?”
“Something like that,” Luther grunted.
“Most people I bring here look scared. Are you scared, Luther?” Orson asked.
“Of what? You? You gonna give me another of your boring lectures?”
Orson walked over to the door and pulled it open. A waft of cool, dry air swept into the shed, coupled with the spicy scent of sagebrush and something else. He grabbed the handles and headed back inside, pushing a man who’d been strapped to a wheelchair with fifty feet of barbed-wire.
“I thought I smelled blood,” Luther said.
Orson grinned. “Oh, we’re going to do the brave thing? All right. I’ll play along.” He pushed the young man into the middle of the shed.
He was naked, eyes bugging out, still stunk of alcohol.
Orson said, “This is Juanito. Six hours ago, he was drinking beers down in Rock Springs. He passed out on the bar, woke up in the parking lot. Unfortunately for our friend, I picked him up.”
Juanito’s chest started rising and falling, his stomach bulging and retracting, the barbs digging into his gut with every expansion.
Luther said, “You might want to—”
Orson quickly removed the man’s ball-gag and he spewed what must have been a gallon of sour beer onto the floor.
“Too much cerveza?” Orson asked, laughing.
The man launched into a stream of Spanish that sounded to Orson like quite a bit of begging so he jammed the ball-gag back into his mouth.
“You remember that time we went for coffee back in Vermont?”
Luther nodded.
“I thought I saw something in you then. Something in your papers, too. They were god-awful, don’t get me wrong, but I think you’ve got…potential.”
“For what?” Luther asked.
Orson smiled and pulled his Morrell knife out of a leather holster attached to his jeans.