The Hike

  “Is it dead?”

  “Looked like it.”

  “Did it move?”

  “No.”

  Ben stood still. He could smell the cricket’s guts from the bottom of the staircase: a belly full of old digested fungal mat bits, putrefying and oozing into the floorboards . . . a rotten thing spreading its rot all over.

  “You gonna go up there?” Crab asked.

  “I’m working up to it.”

  “You sure take your time working up to everything. Won’t be any easier to walk up there five minutes from now.”

  “No, I guess it won’t.”

  Ben started up the stairs and the massive bug’s carcass came back into view. The eyes leaked jellied whiteness. It made Ben want to tear his skin off. He would never be able to ascend or descend a staircase again without anticipating a cave cricket the size of a horse being there, ready to pounce. If he ever made it back home, he would have to move his family to a ranch-style house. His current house had three floors. Too many floors. No more attics or basements. Burn all the attics and basements.

  Behind the cricket, he saw the control panel. It looked brand new. It was polished chrome, with a red lever and two large black knobs. Alongside each knob was an empty black square. Through the plate glass window past the controls, Ben could see the ocean in full. Directly in front of this particular house, he could now see a silhouette in the water, the black outline of something substantial. But the silhouette didn’t move at all. It wasn’t a fish. Something was anchored to that spot on the ocean floor.

  “Do you know what’s out there?” he asked Crab. Crab shimmied up to the windowsill.

  “Looks big, whatever it is.”

  Ben yanked on the lever but it wouldn’t give. He felt the knob on the right, letting his fingertips slide over the smooth matte finish. The sides of each knob had reeded edges, and he could see a tiny number etched into each notch: from zero to ninety-nine. The console looked like a piece of very expensive stereo equipment, like some crazy engineer from Denmark had perfected the craft of knob twirling and forged this as his masterpiece.

  Ben gave the left knob a turn and felt it click. The black square next to the dial turned red. He turned it another click and the square turned green. Then yellow. Then white. Then purple. Then pink. Then back to black. He turned the other knob and the same colors appeared.

  He tried the lever again but it wouldn’t budge.

  “There’s some combination here that’ll make the lever work,” he said to Crab.

  “So what is it?”

  “I have no idea. Usually, with puzzles like this, there’s some other element. There’s a clue to solving it. We just have to find the clue.” He pressed his hand to the ceiling, looking for a soft spot—some kind of secret compartment. But the room was bare. He raced downstairs and searched through the ransacked kitchen and living area for hints, but all he could find were loose coat hangers and musty throw pillows. He tore open the pillows, little cubes of gray foam bursting out and tumbling all over. He tore off the wallpaper and searched for holes in the crawl space. He ran outside the house, making sure that he wasn’t overstepping the property line and angering the path. Then he searched the house’s undercarriage, feeling eagerly along the timbers and around the pipes. Still, the clue eluded him. He went back inside and broke things that were already broken.

  He came back up to the attic, at a loss.

  “I can’t find anything,” he said to Crab. “I looked everywhere.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “What do you mean, I didn’t?”

  Crab extended a pincer out at the cricket.

  Ben understood perfectly. Now that he thought about it, he remembered reaching through the cricket’s eye and feeling something in there, but he had assumed it was just a body part.

  “You wouldn’t want to go in there for me . . . ,” he hinted to Crab.

  “Shit, no.”

  Ben went back to the dials and feverishly began attempting every possible combination of colors and numbers, but it was pointless. The colors and numbers lined up differently after successive full spins, rendering the permutations endless.

  He turned back to the monster insect. Its hind legs were reared up, and its thin antennae extended out in all directions, as if it wanted to touch everything.

  Ben reached into the eye with his bad hand. He threw up on the floor as he dug deeper inside the monster’s innards, feeling around for the object he chanced upon the first time around. Finally, after far longer than he had expected or hoped, he seized a small hard disc and yanked it from the cricket’s eye. It was covered in smeared, yellowing pus. He dragged the disc along the attic floor to clean it off, picking up bits of dust and sand along the way. Finally, he was able to make out a red side to the disc and a white side. The red side said 61. The white side said 12. He turned to the controllers and spun the knobs to line up the combination: Red 61 on the left, White 12 on the right.

  He yanked the lever and it flipped back effortlessly. Out the window, he saw a churning in the ocean where the giant silhouette was. The water roiled and bubbled, and up from the shallows a 70-foot-long hovercraft emerged, with a clean white body made of reinforced fiberglass and a thick rubber skirt splaying out from the bottom. The hovercraft faced out toward the ocean, and Ben could see its massive, twin-propeller airfoil tower up at the rear. It looked as if it could blast away the entirety of the sea. The hovercraft was tethered to a cleat in a dock slip that was shaped like a giant tuning fork, and Ben watched as the path in the sand reformed and created two distinct parallel lines leading to the dock.

  “Oh, that’s what that was,” Crab said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE CRAFT

  Ben’s hand was still bleeding from the fight with the cricket. He was all out of cheesecloth, so he wandered down to the beach—staying within the path—and washed his sliced palm in the surf. It wasn’t an easy task; the incoming waves kept kicking up loose sand that spilled into the cut. He found himself having to endlessly rinse everything off. Crab waited ten feet behind him.

  The hovercraft was enormous, a mansion on the sea. Ben had never ridden in one before. Given recent events, he didn’t expect anyone to be inside the thing.

  “Are you coming with me?” he asked Crab.

  “That boat looks fancy as hell. I’d get on that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I need water and food, though. If you don’t feed me, I’ll just pitch over the side and you can go eat shit.”

  “I’m sure we can figure out something. Do you know who’s doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  Ben gestured all around. “This. Is this God?”

  “Who’s God?” Crab asked.

  “Are you God?”

  “You call me God, I call you Shithead. Same deal as calling me Frank.”

  Ben searched for the beginning of a proper explanation. “Do you know what humans are?”

  “Yes. I’m looking at one right now. Not a very impressive one.”

  “Okay, well, humans have families. Male humans and female humans get together and have human babies and all that.”

  “Sounds like a riot.”

  “I’m trying to make this as clear as I can. I’m not trying to wow you.”

  “Go on.”

  “I have a family. We live in a place called Maryland.”

  “I know Maryland. I got family there.”

  “Great. Yesterday I took a trip, away from Maryland, and I got lost. You with me so far?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then I ended up here, and I don’t know where I am. I don’t know which way Maryland is. I don’t know what town this is. I don’t know what ocean that is out there. I don’t even know if I’m still on Earth, or if I ate some kind of bad mushroom or something. I don’t know anything. But t
his path opened up and anytime I leave it, something tries to kill me. And so here I am. I have to have keep following this path. I have to hope that it will guide me back home somehow, when it’s this same path that keeps leading me farther and farther away from it. And I don’t know who’s doing this to me. So I’m very frightened, Crab. I feel like my family has died, or maybe I died. I didn’t even get to say good-bye to them. It just hurts. Does that make sense to you?”

  Crab waited a moment to answer.

  “I thought you said you were gonna get me food.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Just get on the boat.”

  Crab skipped lightly over the gaps in the dock as Ben slipped his dirty brown socks and rotting shoes back on and slung the backpack over his shoulder. Approaching from the slip, he could see the deck of the craft come into view. It was a glorious vehicle, outfitted like a luxury yacht. There was a leather banquette that wrapped around the main deck, all trimmed in curved, lacquered walnut. There was a separate tanning deck toward the bow, with sturdy lounges and block stools. In the center of the deck, there was a set of white sliding doors with tinted windows, beckoning passengers into the craft’s interior. Ben stepped aboard, unlatched some of the storage compartments under the banquettes, and found all the necessary maritime safety equipment: life jackets, flare guns, fire extinguishers, deep-sea fishing rods, and more.

  He walked through the sliding doors and was greeted by a main interior that was larger than his home. It was like an indoor peninsula, with a panoramic view of the sea that stretched around from port to starboard. There was a full galley kitchen and two dining tables and, dead in the center of the room, a fully stocked surf-and-turf buffet. The food all looked freshly prepared, as if an entire staff of servants had put it out and then disappeared the moment Ben stepped aboard: mountains of peeled shrimp, freshly shucked oysters and clams, lobsters perched atop silver tubs of crushed ice. A bottle of Dom Perignon sat in a chilled bucket, legs of cool condensation running down the side . . . beckoning him to come and drink. Ben walked up to the raw bar and took a whiff.

  “How can this food all be fresh?” he asked Crab.

  “I dunno.”

  Ben then wandered over to a big bowl of cracked crab legs. Stone crab. Ben had heard about stone crab, but had never tasted it. He looked at Crab for approval.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “All right, all right,” Ben said. “Someone had to have put this food here. Someone must be on board.”

  He was paranoid now, feeling eyes around him. He imagined some race of creatures with X-ray vision staring up at him through the floorboards.

  “Come with me,” he said to Crab, and Crab scurried behind as Ben went below deck to the staterooms and opened every closet and turned down every top sheet. He checked every last cupboard and latrine, but there was no sign that any other living being was gracing them with his presence. This stuff was all just here somehow. Conjured.

  He went back up to the buffet.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked Crab.

  Crab bobbed up and down.

  “Then let’s eat.”

  Ben grabbed a plate (it was warm) from a side stack and loaded up on everything: giant dollops of caviar and whole lobster tails and warm slices of flank steak from a hotel pan and oyster after oyster after oyster. Then he popped the champagne and started drinking it right from the bottle.

  “Damn,” said Crab. “You like to party.”

  “Someone may aff well enjoy thisth stuff,” Ben said, his mouth full of beef. And then, just past Crab, he saw an outlet with a thin white wire running out from it. It was a charger. For his phone.

  I can charge my phone.

  He took the phone out of his shorts pocket and plugged it into the jack. The outlet was dead.

  “I have to turn on this boat,” he said to Crab.

  “How?”

  There was a spiral staircase in the center of the main cabin. Ben grabbed the charger and bounded up the staircase with the excitement of a child running around the inside of a 747. At the top of the staircase he entered the bridge. There was a full 360-degree view of the surrounding sea and coastline, a sonar monitor, a console with hundreds of little buttons and knobs, a main throttle, and a ship’s steering wheel. It was a regular steering wheel, not the wooden one you spin around on a pirate ship. Ben was hoping for the wooden wheel.

  The ignition still had the key in it. He grabbed it and turned hard enough to break it off.

  The craft’s engine sputtered to life behind him and then began to roar. Little rectangular lights bleeped and blooped all over the console. The craft rose up in the air and blew a wake in every direction, creating a hydraulic force field around itself. The sun was setting now. And quickly. As the darkness set in, Ben saw two parallel lines of phosphorescent algae begin to glow and stretch out into the water. The path wanted him to go straight out into the ocean.

  There was an AC outlet resting flat on the front of the console and Ben plugged the charger in with his phone attached. The phone booted back up, but with no logo. No spinning wheel. No white screen. Instead, Ben saw an old woman spring up on the screen. She was sitting in a white room in a plush chair. She was wearing a white frock and a bright red overcoat. Ben remembered her right away.

  “Mrs. Blackwell?”

  “Find the Producer,” she told him.

  “Who is the Producer?”

  “Stay on the path, and find the Producer.”

  “Where do I find this Producer?”

  “At the end of the path, of course.”

  “Is my family alive?”

  “The Producer will answer all of your questions. Go now. The beach will sink into the ocean in two minutes, and it will take you with it if you do not leave immediately.”

  The phone flicked off. Ben pushed the power button again, but there was nothing. Find the Producer. He threw the phone across the bridge and kicked the console.

  “Uhhh, Ben?” said Crab. “You’re wasting time.”

  Ben turned and saw the water beginning to envelop Courtshire. It crept up the sands and was rising to meet the wooden dock slip. They had to leave. Ben grabbed the throttle.

  “Wait!” Crab yelled, “You forgot to . . .”

  Ben rammed the throttle forward, paying no heed to Crab. The twin propellers started to hum, and then shriek. But the craft wouldn’t move. The water continued rising. Ben realized his mistake immediately.

  “The craft is still moored!”

  He ran back down the staircase, Crab skittering behind, and flew out the sleek double doors of the main cabin. The roar of the propellers was drowning out everything as he grabbed the rope stretching out from the cleat anchored to the frame of the dock. It was pulled firm and taut, the full force of the propellers bearing down on it. Ben tried to reach down and slip the rope off the cleat, but immediately realized his folly in leaving the throttle on. The loop wouldn’t budge and he could see the sandbar sinking down into the ocean, ready to take the craft with it. It weighed down on the rope and now the craft was tilting upward, like a plane ready for takeoff. In a few moments, it would flip entirely, capsize, and be pinned against the ocean floor.

  “We have to cut the engine,” Ben said. He went back into the cabin as Crab started to pinch the rope. He wasn’t the biggest crab, but his pincers could do some damage when the situation called for it. The rope began to fray, strand by strand.

  Ben ran up the staircase as the hovercraft tilted farther upward, the spiral staircase leaning and flattening to horizontal. Once Ben reached the top, the pull of gravity was so strong that he found himself pressed against the back window of the bridge, the controls virtually impossible to reach. He threw himself to the floor and began scaling it like a wall as the craft went up and up and up. He wasn’t going to make it. Whoever t
his Producer was, he would never see his face. He would never see Teresa or the kids again. All those days and years with them, and he just needed one more second. Not even a second. Just a frame. A twenty-fourth of a second. A final snapshot of everything he loved, before the sea claimed him. He reached for the throttle one more time but it was no use.

  And then, without warning, the ship broke free and soared up in the air. Ben flew back against the hard glass and felt it shatter from the force of impact. Now he was falling out of the bridge tower, the broken glass shredding his skin, and he slammed hard against the fiberglass shell covering the twin propellers as they blew the hovercraft up and way.

  Now came the really mean part, because gravity was asserting itself once more, and the craft started to flatten back out. And in 3, 2, 1 . . . BOOM. It splashed back down in the ocean like a humpback whale, displacing thousands of gallons of seawater and throwing Ben to the deck. Before he could recover, the acceleration kicked in and he was thrown back and to the side and then, finally, overboard.

  Ah, but the rope. There was a frayed end of rope hanging off to the side, cut loose from the dock thanks to Crab’s diligent work. Somehow, Ben found the rope in the dark. He clung to it as the hovercraft picked up speed and jetted out into the great wide blue. It was at cruising speed now, and Ben felt his feet dragging along the surface of the ocean, the water pounding away at him as he biffed and bashed into the rubber skirt of the craft. He wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer. He called out for Crab, not knowing where he was, or if he was even still aboard.

  “CRAB!”

  Crab peeked over the edge of the main deck. “What?”

  “Cut the engine!”

  “Why?”

  “Just cut the engine!”

  Crab scurried back to the cockpit, but he was too small to push down the throttle or turn the key. Under the console was a series of connecting wires, so he found a wire under the ignition and gave it a good, hard pinch.

  The mighty roar of the propellers and the engine died down, and the rope finally slackened in Ben’s raw hands. His feet were dipping into the calm waters now as he swung forward and found himself dangling straight down the side of the craft. He began to scale the rope, drawing from a reserve of energy he never knew he had until this moment. It would cost him his last ounce of strength. Cost him everything, really. Dying here would have been just as fine as dying later on, but still he pushed on, pulling himself upward and feeling the sting of the wet and salty rope as it dug deeper into his wounded hand. This would be the last time he’d be able to use his hands for a while.