We turned a multitude of corners, passed through various small rooms, one with a low ceiling and empty wine racks on either side of us, another with an old chair and the remnants of a bed frame. There lingered a certain foreboding, a dread attending these rooms and tunnels. You could feel it. Awful things had happened here.
I had no idea where we were when Rufus stopped suddenly and faced us.
He pointed down the corridor, toward a flimsy wooden door at the end.
"You and Violet take these youngfolk through that door. You’ll understand what to do."
Rufus handed me the lantern and took a flashlight out of his pocket. Then he and Luther left us, disappearing around the corner. We stood there, listening to their footsteps trail away, watching the lanternlight and shadows play haunting games on the crumbling walls.
I set the lantern on the floor, lifted the young man’s hands, and dragged him to the end of the passageway. Vi was shaking, mumbling to herself when I returned, so I took the dead woman’s colder hands and dragged her over to her husband.
Vi picked up the lantern, brought it over.
"It’s going to be all right after this, isn’t it?" she said. "We did what they wanted. They’ll give Max back to me."
"I hope so."
As I pushed open the door, Vi’s lantern winked out.
The darkness was total.
"Oh, come on."
We stumbled into the room.
"God, it smells in here," she said. "What is that?"
"Fix it," I said. "Turn the flame back up."
"I don’t know how."
I groped for Vi’s shoulder, found it, and ran my hand down the length of her arm.
"Give it to me," I said. "Vi, give it here, don’t you feel my hand? I’m touching your—"
"No you’re not."
I jerked my hand back as though I’d accidentally touched a glowing burner.
"You fucking around, Vi?"
"No."
I stepped back, tripped, and fell into someone.
They moved and I shrieked, "Who’s there?"
"Andy, what’s wrong?"
"Turn on the lantern!"
"I can’t!"
Crawling around in the dirt now, disoriented, my head bumped into someone’s kneecap. I scrambled away and struggled to my feet, frantic, arms outstretched before me like a blind man.
When my hands palmed a pair of shoulders, I reached up and felt the face.
Mush and bones.
The lantern illuminated the room.
We gasped in unison.
There were probably a dozen of them, hanging by chains from the ceiling, in various stages of decay, their feet just inches off the floor, so they appeared to stand of their own volition.
The ones I’d bumbled into were still swinging as I pushed my way through them back out into the passageway.
The lantern shook in Vi’s hand. We both trembled now.
"This is hell," she said. "We’re in hell, Andy."
I thought I heard distant cackling somewhere in the basement.
"They want us to hang them up like the others?" she asked. "Is that it?"
"I think so."
"I can’t do it."
"Just come hold the lantern for me."
"Andy—"
"Vi, I’m about to lose it, too. Let’s just do this and get the fuck out of here."
I dragged the young woman into the room. In a far corner, a chain hung from the ceiling. Thank God she was small. Standing her up, I wrapped the chain under her arms and cinched it tight enough so she could dangle.
When I’d finished, I couldn’t help but glance at her nearest neighbor—scorched blacker than a roasted marshmallow, its eyes shone like boiled eggs.
Horace Boone was watching me.
I dragged Steve inside, but my skin crawled, and I’d lost the composure to hang him up. So I left him sitting in the corner behind his wife and rushed back out into the passageway.
I took the lantern from Vi and turned up the flame. We walked together back down the corridor, the way we’d come, Vi grasping my arm, still trembling. We turned a corner, and the passageway split. I couldn’t remember which way to go, so I took the corridor that branched right.
The lantern provided just enough illumination to see a few steps ahead. Beyond the ellipse of firelight, the darkness gaped with a silence that seemed to hum, though I knew that sound was only the blood between my ears.
The corridor abruptly terminated. I imagined some failed convert stumbling blindly into this wall, hearing Rufus or Luther, maybe even Maxine coming for them through the darkness.
Returning to the intersection with the wider corridor, we veered into the left-hand passageway, soon passing through the cramped room with the old chair and bed frame. I felt reasonably sure I could get us to the staircase now, but after a series of turns, we arrived at another dead end.
We wandered through the dark tunnels for another twenty minutes, growing increasingly unnerved at our inability to find our way out. At one point, we heard distant shouting, though I couldn’t tell if it came from upstairs or somewhere in the basement.
We were walking through a particularly narrow passageway when Vi stopped and pointed ahead.
"Light," she whispered.
The passageway ended, and we emerged from the labyrinth on the opposite side of the staircase from which we’d all entered just an hour ago. The screening room and those stone rooms where we’d agonized in pitch-black isolation loomed just ahead.
An ax leaned against the wall.
We swung around the staircase and there, perfectly still, stood the Kite family—Luther, Rufus, Maxine. The old woman held baby Max in her arms, his tiny head resting on her shoulder, snoozing.
"Thought we might have to come find you," Rufus said.
"Yeah, we got turned around in there," I said.
I glanced at Vi. She eyed her baby.
"How’d you kids like the trophy case?" Maxine asked.
None of them had moved.
"Charming little room," I answered, mustering a sarcastic smile.
"Heard y’all hollering," Maxine said. "Funny stuff."
As Luther stared a hole through me, Vi stepped forward. I pulled her back.
"What is it, young lady?" Rufus asked.
"Give him back to me."
Rufus sighed. "Violet, I’m afraid I’ve got a piece of bad news."
"What?"
"Have a seat against the wall. Max, give her the baby."
Maxine walked over and presented the baby to its mother. Vi sat down with him, crying now, and it was a full minute before she tore her eyes away from her sleeping son.
The old man and his wife towered over Vi. She gazed up at them, tears plowing through the dirt on her cheeks.
"Here’s the thing," Rufus said. "We think you were terrific today. Really. Hell, you drew first blood. Unflinching. Brutal. Lovely. But I think Andy has a lot more in the way of potential. He was icy out there. Calm. And he’s a thinker. More than I can say for my own son."
"I don’t understand," Vi said, stroking the nape of her son’s neck. "I don’t—"
"Andy needs our full attention, Violet. It’s just not fair to him to keep you around."
"But I did what you wanted."
"Kiss your son goodbye and hand him back to Maxine."
"You lied."
"Rufus, just a—"
"Andy, don’t make this worse."
Maxine reached down and grabbed little Max under his arms.
"No!" Vi screamed. "Get away from him!"
The baby awoke, emitting a tender cry.
"There, there," Maxine cooed. "Let’s not—"
Vi cocked her right arm and cracked the old woman’s jaw with the back of her fist.
Maxine roared and wrangled the baby away from its mother.
Vi started to rise, but Rufus stamped his boot into her chest and pinned her back against the wall.
"Now you’ve pissed her off," he said.
br />
Maxine wiped blood from the corner of her mouth. Then she took hold of the baby’s ankles and held it upside down, little Max now screaming and flailing.
Vi wailed, too, as Maxine began to spin around, swinging the baby faster and faster.
"Now we start inching toward the wall!" she called out, her faded house dress twirling, her snowy hair whipping around like a shock of white cotton candy. "And after this, we’ll all play hide and seek! See, the fun never ends!"
I lunged for Maxine, but Rufus caught me on the chin with an elbow and my knees buckled.
I hit the ground, Vi screaming, the room spinning, expecting at any moment to hear the fracture of the tiny skull meeting the stone.
Luther caught the baby in his hands and snatched it away from his mother.
In shock, Maxine steadied herself, leveling her gaze on her son.
"Boy, are you loony?"
She grabbed Luther’s earlobe, so short she could only yank down.
"I dare you to hold onto that baby two more seconds," she seethed.
Rufus was in stitches.
As I struggled to my feet, Luther set the infant in the dirt.
When Maxine stooped for the baby, Luther lifted his mother off the ground and slammed her flush into the rock wall. There was a hollow pop when her head snapped back. Luther set her down on her feet, but her eyes rolled up in her head and she dropped.
Rufus charged his son, scooping him under the knees and driving him into the dirt floor. Vi sprang up, rushed over to Max, grabbed him, and scrambled up the staircase.
Rufus’s physical strength was staggering. In a matter of seconds, he’d straddled Luther, one hand on his neck, the other raining blows upon his pale face, laughing while he beat his son, laughing while I lifted the ax and limped toward them.
Luther’s loss of consciousness did nothing to detour his father’s hysterical rage.
Standing behind them now, I hoisted the ax.
It fell, the weight of the head propelling it earthward.
Rufus thought to glance back at me just as the blade clove his spine.
I jerked it back out as he convulsed, toppling backward into the dirt. When he stopped shivering, I thought he was dead, but his eyes blinked calmly, and he grinned at me, arms twitching, legs now and forever inert.
He said, "I can’t move my legs."
"Yeah, I got your spine."
"Beautiful?" he called out. He turned his head, saw Maxine sprawled motionless against the stone. I thought he might call out to her again, but instead he looked back at me, reached out, and grasped my hand.
"I still believe in you," he said. "I know you see past the illusions."
"Had a little regression of our own, didn’t we?"
He grinned and winced, the pain flooding in now.
"Rufus, I just want you to know…" I leaned in close to insure he heard every word. "I think you’re full of shit."
Rufus grunted, shook his head.
"No you don’t," he whispered, then smiled and closed his eyes, full of peace and joy, as though he were ascending into some invisible glory.
His fingers opened, he let go of my hand, and died.
# # #
I took the ax with me and limped up the rickety staircase. Vi was crouched on the top step with baby Max, shivering.
"It’s locked," she whispered as I neared them. "I can’t get it open."
"Scoot down a few steps."
With Vi safely beneath me, I buried the ax blade in the small door, heard it splinter, hinges creaking. On the fifth blow, it burst open. I stepped across the threshold into the foyer, glimpsed late afternoon sunlight streaming through the living room windows, gilding clouds of dust.
I turned and looked down at Vi.
"Come on up here and wait for me," I said, starting back down into the basement.
"Where are you going?"
"Luther."
She grabbed onto my leg, said, "He saved my son."
"He’s a psychopath, Vi. I let him off once. You saw how many people died. I’m not making that mistake again."
I tore my leg away and continued my descent.
As I approached the bottom, Luther stirred and sat up. Rufus had obliterated his face.
I raised the ax.
"Andrew, what are you doing?"
Two steps, and I was upon him.
I swung the ax at his neck, but he caught the helve an inch below the blade. Before I could jerk it away, he swept my feet out from under me. I hit the ground, and when I looked up, he was circling me with the ax.
"Roll over on your stomach."
"Why?"
He turned the blade on its blunt edge.
"I’m going to try not to smash your skull in. But no promises."
# # #
Vi stands in the foyer as Luther emerges from the basement, his black hair matted to the blood on his face.
"Did you kill him?"
"No."
Luther walks into the kitchen and takes the keys to the ancient pickup truck from a lopsided ceramic bowl on the breakfast table. The stench of raw flounder is overpowering, an association he will never be rid of.
He returns to the foyer.
The little blonde stares at him.
Luther stops to look at the infant, wanting to touch it.
Resisting.
Its mother says, "Thank you for what you did. But I don’t under—"
"I don’t understand it either."
Luther opens the massive front door.
The sun is gone.
Still a few miles offshore, storms race in from the sea, their oncoming thunder rattling the windows, the sky gone green, the air heavy, reeking of rain and ozone.
# # #
Vi prodded me back into consciousness, squeezing my hands, whispering my name. Before I even opened my eyes, I could feel the ache in my skull.
I sat up, foggy-brained, fingering the tender knot on the back of my head.
"Let’s go," Vi begged, her voice seeming to echo. "It’s getting dark out, and I despise this place."
My gaze fell on Maxine, slumped against the wall, then Rufus, lying in a calm black puddle. Painfully, I turned my head and stared into the dark tunnels leading into the innards of the basement, to the trophy case, and its standing dead.
"Where’s Luther?" I asked.
"Gone. He took the truck, but there’s another car out front. I found some keys in the kitchen. Cash, too. About a hundred and fifty dollars."
"Have you called anyone?" I asked.
"Andy, I just want to get off this island."
Vi helped me up, and then we climbed the steps and walked together out of that stone house into the storm-cooled evening, two exiles, stateless and bewildered.
# # #
We reach the north end of Ocracoke at dusk and board the ferry.
Vi stays in the Impala with Max, asleep in her arms.
I step out, walk to the bow.
A father and his six or seven-year-old son lean against the railing, wind disheveling their hair, a satisfied, end-of-day peace emanating from them.
The man looks over, nods.
"Fine night, eh?"
I watch the island diminish until nothing of it remains but the distant steady glow of the Ocracoke Light, twelve miles south. When it slips under the horizon, leaving only the black waters of Hatteras Inlet and the clear August sky, flushed with sunset, I pray I’ve seen the last I will ever see of that island.
# # #
I drive us north on Highway 12. The road is empty tonight, wind whisking sand from the dunes across the pavement.
West, beyond the sound, somewhere over the mainland, the last trace of warmth dies on the horizon.