by Blake Crouch
“And if I don’t?”
“Aren’t we past the threats, my love?”
Andy screamed something and then the line went dead.
She could hear the freezing rain coming down again, feel the shudder of her heart against the filthy floor. She lay there in the dark and the cold. Waiting. For something to change. For reality to break through and end this nightmare.
But the rain kept falling and the fire dwindling and the cold sinking in.
After awhile, she came to her feet. The knife blade reflected the firelight. She stared at it, then picked it up.
“Throw some wood on the fire,” Matthew grumbled from his cardboard box.
“Sure.”
Violet walked over to the scrap wood heap, grabbed several pieces of crown molding flaking off dark paint, and tossed them into the oil drum.
“You were talking to yourself,” Matthew said.
Violet moved slowly across the floor to the foot of the cardboard box and squatted down by the opening. As the new flames licked up out of the drum, she saw Matthew in the lowlight sprawled under sheets of old newspaper, lying on his back, his eyes open, blinking slowly—glassy from the wine.
“How do you live like this, Matthew?” she whispered.
“Always wanted to live in nature,” he said. “Someplace pretty, you know? Now I do. This is my wilderness. I think the concrete barrens are beautiful like the desert is. Empty and quiet. Those abandoned buildings, that water tower...they’re my mountains. Sometimes, in the evening in the summertime, I’ll just go walking through the ruins. It reaches some part of me. Some itch I was never able to scratch.”
“Don’t you miss your family?”
She saw his Adam’s apple roll. “The man I was when I was home was nothing I was proud of. So compromised.” The corners of his eyes shone with wetness. He looked at Vi. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
She gripped the knife behind her back.
“Is it supposed to be so hard you think?”
She couldn’t see anything through the sheet of tears. “And sometimes harder.”
Vi could feel the momentum building inside of her, the adrenaline push, lifting her toward something.
“I want to think,” Matthew said, “that there’s some benefit to this road I’m on, you know? That I’m...gaining something. Something no one else has. That enlightenment is right around the corner.”
“Something to make it all worthwhile.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you ever just...” Her hand sweating onto the leathered handle of the bowie. “...want it all to end?”
“Yes,” he said. “God yes. Death is...all I think about.”
He shut his eyes and he kept them closed as he continued to speak.
“Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal. A man awaits his end dreading and hoping all. Many times he died, many times rose again. A great man in his pride confronting murderous men casts derision upon supersession of breath. He knows death to the bone. Man has created death. Isn’t he lovely, Yeats?” His eyes were still closed.
Violet could scarcely breath. She was thinking of Max and nothing else, Matthew looking serene for the moment, and he was asking her if she had any poetry under memory that she might share with him, just a verse or two to rattle around in his head while he drifted off to sleep.
She told him that she did.
She was thinking of Max.
Her heart racing and her mouth running dry.
She started one she’d memorized in high school that had always stuck.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.”
Matthew whispered, “I love this one.”
She brought the knife around, had intended to drive it straight down in a single, fluid motion, but seeing the blade poised over Matthew’s chest stopped her.
She kept telling herself do it do it do it do it, but nothing happened.
She couldn’t move.
A droplet of sweat fell from her brow and struck a piece of newsprint covering Matthew.
Several seconds had passed since she’d finished the line of poetry and any moment now his eyes—
Matthew’s eyes opened—a flicker of contended calm before he saw the knife and what must have been a visage of primal terror staring down at him.
Do it do it do it do it do it do it.
Matthew’s lips parted, as if to speak, but instead he started to sit up.
Violet stabbed him through the chest—the blade buried to the hilt, and she was on top of him and leaning all her weight into the knife, twisting, and she could feel his heart knocking frantically against the blade, the vibration traveling through the steel and leather up into her hand—four perceptible beats and then it stopped and Matthew let out a stunned gasped.
For a long time, she didn’t move.
Just stared down into Matthew’s eyes, watching the intensity of life recede into a glazed emptiness.
She couldn’t stop trembling.
At last she rolled off of him.
Already, his blood was pooling on the cardboard and soaking through the right knee of her tracksuit. She crawled out of the box and got three steps toward the oil drum before she spewed her guts across the floor, stood bent over retching until she could produce nothing more than dry heaves.
“I did it,” she said, gasping. “You hear me you son of a fucking bitch, I did it.”
She spit several times. The acidic tang of bile burned her throat.
“I want to see Max,” she said, her body quaking with the malevolence of what she’d done. “Luther. Luther!” she screamed.
Luther didn’t answer.
“Luther!”
“You have a lot to learn,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Trust. Specifically, when not to give it.”
Her son screamed through the earpiece.
Violet’s legs failed and she was suddenly on her knees and screaming, her fingers raking through her hair. Luther was still talking, but she didn’t hear a thing. Everything drowned out by the rage and the cries of Max.
“Please, Luther!” she begged. “I did what you asked. Please!”
Max’s wailing intensified.
She jumped to her feet and wiped her eyes, rushed over to the cardboard box and took hold of the knife, pulled it out of Matthew’s chest, the blade lacquered in blood. She wiped it against her pant leg and hurried out of the alcove and back into the corridor. The darkness so perfect she had to trail her hand along the wall for a guide and brace against the garbage that covered the floor.
Thirty seconds later, she stumbled out into the lobby and through the ruined double doors into the rain.
Her son still screaming, and she screamed back, “Stop hurting him!”
The crying became louder, like someone driving a nail through her eardrum. She couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand the thought of what Luther was doing to him.
“I’m going to kill you!” she screamed.
Violet grabbed the earpiece, ripped it out.
Immediately, a flash of searing pain and the heat of blood streaming down the side of her neck.
She dropped the earpiece and stomped it into pieces with the heel of her tennis shoe and ran out into the night.
The rain pelted her face and the sky flushed with the pinkish tint of city-glow from the lights of downtown.
Across the concrete barrens, just darkness and the slightest silhouette of things—the water tower, trees, smokestacks.
She ran through an abandoned neighborhood, her shoes soaked through to her socks.
Gulping air.
The weakness in her legs growing more pronounced by the moment as the freezing rain poured down on her.
Under the pink sky, the profile of factories loomed in the distance.
She broke out of the neighborhood, found herself running across a wide expanse of fractured concrete—a parking l
ot treed with old light poles.
By the time she reached the first building, her heart was screaming in her chest, and her eyes burned with sweat—a moment’s reprieve from the cold.
The building stood fifty feet tall. Brick. Graffitied and with giant, multi-pane windows, mostly emptied of glass. Vi jogged along the side of the building until she came to a pair of double doors.
She struggled to drag them open against their rusted hinges, then slipped inside, out of the rain.
As the doors eased shut behind her, she stood dripping and panting and straining to see, waiting for her eyes to adjust, to begin to work again.
Darkness.
Her pulse thrumming against her eardrum.
She wiped the sweat and rainwater from her eyes and blinked against the sting.
Already, she was cooling down.
Drenched through, the chill beginning to muscle in.
She couldn’t imagine walking back out into that freezing rain, but continuing on into this building, in complete darkness, seemed no better.
She crumpled down onto the floor, her sobs echoing down some corridor whose terminus she could not see.
Her son was at that monster’s mercy.
She’d killed two people in the last eight hours.
And the man she loved was in all likelihood going to be killed horribly.
By the time she’d gotten back on her feet, she was shivering violently, her fingers barely able to grasp the knife.
The skin behind her right ear sang with agony, blood still pouring down her neck.
She started forward into the black, one slow and shuffling step at a time, the knife outstretched in one hand, the other trailing along the wall. She kept thinking she’d suddenly see something, that the darkness would dissolve away, but it held.
Twenty steps.
Thirty.
Forty.
She stopped counting after a hundred.
Then the point of the knife touched something hard.
She stopped, reached forward.
A wall.
She’d come to a point where the corridor branched to the left.
Righting herself, she moved on, and ten steps later, the wall her fingers had been following came to an end.
She stopped and listened.
Water dripped in the distance and there was something above her now.
Sky.
Just the faintest orange tint of it.
The frame of the window sharpened into focus and in that weak light that filtered in, she saw that she stood in the ruins of a long, factory floor.
Her eyes pulling every possible detail out of the skylight.
Equipment everywhere.
The remnants of an assembly line.
Immense machines.
Broken-down robotic arms.
Conveyor belts that hadn’t moved in years.
She walked carefully down the line, glass crunching under her feet.
Her teeth chattering.
The smell of grease still prevalent.
The factory must have stretched two or three hundred yards from end to end, and as she neared the other side, she started seeing half-assembled cars on the conveyor belt—no wheels, no engine blocks, doorless, and all rusted into oblivion.
At the other end of the factory she stopped. Heard the rain falling on the roof fifty feet overhead.
She moved through a pair of double doors and before passing again into darkness, saw the first few steps of a metal stairwell in the shreds of light.
There was nothing to do but descend.
She gripped the wobbly railing and headed down.
Baby steps from stair to stair, her footfalls causing the metal to resonate.
She went down three landings before the stairs ended.
Standing once more in darkness—no light, no sound, not even the drip of water—and the smell of must and mold overwhelming. She staggered blind for three steps until the point of her knife touched a wall.
She coughed violently.
It took her several minutes to find her way out of the stairwell into another corridor.
She went on, the sense of disorientation growing stronger with every step, the pointlessness of this setting in: she was wandering in darkness in the lower levels of an abandoned building with not the faintest concept of where she was going, or that it might lead her to Luther and Max.
At the next break in the wall she moved through a doorway and out of the corridor.
She could go no further.
Whatever room she’d entered felt small and more confined based upon how it killed the echo of her coughing.
She walked into a table, then several steps later, some object that stood several inches taller than her and much wider.
A panel of glass.
Plastic buttons along the right side.
A vending machine.
This was a break room.
Violet crawled through the dark under one of the tables and unzipped her jacket, which she balled up into a sopping pillow.
She huddled there with her knees drawn into her chest, and it was a long time before she stopped shivering and longer still before her mind and body succumbed and sailed her off into sleep.
Andy
HIS voice was suddenly in my ear, but it wasn’t coming through the tiny speaker.
I could smell the lemon candy on his breath. The peculiar odor of Windex.
I hadn’t heard him enter this room, hadn’t heard his approach.
He’d simply materialized beside me.
“She ripped her earpiece out,” Luther whispered. “Now I have to go find her. This is okay. Not as planned, but okay. You’ve been wondering about the control in your right hand, no?”
I said nothing.
“It isn’t on yet, but it will be soon. I have this thing I’ve been dying to try out. Well, two of them actually. A his and a hers. I can tell you think you love Violet, but have you ever wondered how much? How deep it runs? I invented a way to tell. It answers a very primitive question, Andy—do you love the ones you love more than you fear incomprehensible pain? Is there a point where the pain becomes so all-consuming, that if you had the choice you’d shift the agony to the one you love most? We’ll know shortly.”
“Stop this,” I rasped, and there would have been tears in my eyes but for the severe dehydration.
“Andy, I’m giving her the chance to see what she’s capable of. To see the darkness in her heart and not turn away from it.”
A light clicked on, far overhead.
Luther held a spoon to my mouth.
“You’re going to need every bit of your strength,” he said. “Eat.”
It smelled like rancid apple sauce, but I was so hungry.
He fed me four bites out of the baby-food jar, and I had just begun to suspect that it wasn’t apple sauce after all, but some other putrid fruit or vegetable, spoiled beyond recognition, when he set the jar aside.
“Yum,” he said. “Right?”
I was fighting the urge to vomit.
“It’s amazing. What is it?” I asked.
“Beets.”
I threw up all over myself.
“That’s disgusting, Andy.”
“Honestly, Luther. Did you kill him?”
“Kill who?”
“Max. Her child.”
He just smiled.
I stared into his face for the first time in over a year. His hair was shorter than I remembered, only down to his shoulders, but still a coarse, pure black that held an unnatural, quasi-purple sheen, like the skin of a black snake. His face also shone with a preternatural paleness and his teeth were rotting. He popped a lemonhead into his mouth.
“I think it’s great that you’re writing again,” Luther said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your manuscript. I found it in the cabin. I’m considering trying to get it published when I’m done with you. Good title, Desert Places. My only fear is that no one will believe what y
ou went through if I try to pass it off as non-fiction. Wouldn’t make a bad potboiler though. Who was your agent?”
I just glared at him.
“Come on, Andy, this book could be huge. Set me up for life. Help me complete my renovations here. You’re a celebrity.”
“If I agree to help, will you let Violet go?”
“Oh, I’m sure I can come up with some other way to elicit your cooperation that’s fun for me. Speaking of...” He smiled, spit the white lemonhead pit across the floor. “We should give Violet a little help in finding us. This is a big factory, after all.”
Luther walked across the room toward a waist-high cart with a control panel on top the size of a laptop. On the side of the cart, a rack of tools had been mounted to the metal frame.
“I kidnapped this brilliant engineer,” Luther said over his shoulder. “He not only built and wired these chairs, but he was their first occupant. I’ve got plans for this entire place—there’s so much potential—but for now, meet my new toy.”
He wheeled the cart toward my chair.
This was the most light my eyes had seen in I didn’t know how long, and I drank in my first decent glimpse of the place—a warehouse of sorts, ten or fifteen thousand square feet, with a high ceiling.
Across the room, I noticed another chair like mine. A bulky coil of cables extended out from the underside of the wooden gurney, and then the package spliced—one group running into the control panel, another disappearing through the wall.
My chair, I realized, was identical.
Luther stood at the control panel, smiling down at me.
“You truly cannot imagine how fun this is. I told my IT guy I wanted a device that could establish immobilization and then deliver heat, cold, electricity, perforation, abrasion, blunt force trauma, pressure—all the elemental forces. Imagine if the Inquisition had had the benefit of electricity? So Andy...” He was turning a knob now, something beneath me beginning to hum, a subtle vibration in the chair. “What’s your pleasure?”
Violet
SHE realized that she was awake.
Still shivering.
Still lying on a hard floor in the pitch-black.
Her right ear throbbed, and when she touched it, her fingers grazed a swatch of dried blood and skin that had begun to scab over.