by Blake Crouch
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?”
“Sh
opping?”
“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.
It was a beautiful weapon. He took a moment to appreciate the view, how it felt in his hand.
He set it on the concrete floor of the shed within range of his student, and then took a step back.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Orson said. “This is a test.”
“Your tests were always too hard,” Luther said.
“Well this one is a little outside the curriculum. Go on. Pick up the knife. You should be able to reach it.”
Luther leaned forward, the chain allowing him to move four feet out from the pole.
“Pretty blade,” Luther said as he lifted it.
“Now I’m wheeling Juanito over,” Orson said, pushing the wheelchair within range. “Here’s what I’d like you to do. Get a good grip on that beautiful ivory handle and—”
Before Orson had finished his sentence, Luther sprang to his feet and thrust the blade into Juantio’s throat, twisting it so violently it cocked the man’s head at a funny angle.
The arterial spray was spectacular, and Orson was still laughing uncontrollably by the time it had diminished to an irregular spurt.
The wheelchair had rolled back after the initial blow, just out of Luther’s reach.
He was straining desperately, the knife still in his hand, to deliver another thrust.
Orson clapped as he walked back over to Luther.
“I swear I had a feeling about you,” Orson said.
“Yeah, well, it was mutual. Ever since that day in class when you lectured on the Inquisition, I thought you might have the Darkness, too.”
“The Darkness?”
“It’s what my father calls it.”
“Calls what?”
“Whatever you and I are.”
Somewhere out on the desert, a coyote yapped.
Orson was still smiling.
“Luther, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
A Murder of Crows
Indiana, 1995
Charles Kork had seen movies where a character got a flat tire and was so mad he kicked it. That had always seemed pointless and stupid until now. Staring at the shredded tire and ruined rim on his Honda Accord, Kork didn’t just want to kick the damn thing. He wanted to take out his hunting knife, stab the fucker about a hundred times, and then toss it into a bonfire while imagining its screams of agony.
And of course he didn’t have a spare, because that was currently serving as one of the front tires, which had chosen to pop a week prior. Some asshole mechanic had warned him, last oil change, that his tires were bare and constituted a hazard. It had turned out to be prophetic. While the first flat was just a slow leak, this one had been a full-force blowout at sixty miles an hour, causing him to spin the car in a complete circle before fishtailing onto the shoulder alongside the road. Lucky he didn’t flip the car.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was that Kork had the mutilated body of a stripper in his trunk.
He kicked the tire a few times, swearing into the empty, mid-afternoon sky, and then stepped away and tried to think.
Middle of goddamn nowhere.
But he’d seen a state patrol car an hour ago. Even on lonely country roads like this, cops patrolled. Eventually, one would pull over, offer to call a tow truck.
What were the odds that he could buy a new tire without anyone knowing about the body?
Worst of all, he’d bought the car using his real name, and his goddamn fingerprints were all over it.
Kork took a deep breath, let it whistle out through his clenched teeth, watching his breath steam. He knew what he had to do. And it had to be fast, before a cop—or just as bad—some nosy motorist, stopped by with a big cornfield smile and a “got you a flat tire there, friend?”
Kork looked up and down the road. Indiana had to be the flattest fucking state in the country. He could see for miles in either direction. In all directions. He might as well have been on stage at Woodstock. Anyone coming would see him immediately.
And the fucking crows!
They were everywhere.
Circling and dive-bombing the fields. Scavenging for missed ears of corn.
So he’d better hurry.
It was a fall day. The morning had been colder than shit, a hard freeze overnight, but the sun had burned through the cloud cover and now it blazed down onto his face. He could feel the early pressure of a headache building.
Fumbling for his keys, Kork walked around the rear of the car to the trunk. He popped it, staring at the blue plastic tarpaulin, recalling all of the fun things he’d done to the whore only a few hours ago. His new favorite toy, a propane torch, lay next to the body. He’d gone through a whole fourteen ounce cylinder on the girl. It not only prompted screams so loud they made her throat bleed, but it smelled positively delicious.
Charles didn’t go there, of course. Cannibalism was for psychos. But he could admit to salivating a bit. Barbeques would be a lot more fun if the pigs and chickens were alive when you cooked them.
The same smell wafted up at him now, making him wish he’d stopped for lunch earlier. All he’d had was a few handfuls of popcorn from a jumbo bag he’d bought at a gas station last night.
Kork reached for the body, ready to lift it out, and got a pleasant shock when the bag jerked.
“Holy shit. The bitch is still alive.”
Charles had been pretty sure the whore was dead when he wrapped her up. He’d slit her throat pretty deep.
“You’re a fighter, I’ll give you that,” he said, hefting her out of the trunk and onto his shoulder. Moving quickly, he carried her ten yards into the cornfield and dropped her squirming body onto the cold, plowed earth.
He kicked at a clod of dirt, his work boot bouncing off without it budging an inch.
Frozen. Fucking frost.
Charles had a little hand shovel in his tool kit, but it wouldn’t be enough to bury a body. Especially
with the ground so cold.
But leaving her exposed was just asking for trouble. He’d been planning on dumping the body in a river. Water washed away a lot of trace evidence. Creepy-crawlies nibbled at the feet and fingers. And with new DNA technology, where the cops could get a genetic fingerprint from a strand of hair or a drop of saliva, he had to be extra cautious.