The Last Word, page 9
How to pick a lock?
How to tie a clove hitch?
How to slice a carotid artery?
How to pass a police polygraph test?
This was his greatest power. As username HGKaneOfficial always liked to say in his online writing group: In a story, the author is God.
“Oh, come on.”
She twists the key again and again. Her heartbeat thuds in her eardrums. Laika watches from the back seat.
Mom. What’s wrong?
She punches the steering wheel. Rain falls in sheets now, clattering against the Toyota’s metal roof, blurring the house lights through glass.
Why are you afraid?
She knows she’s wasting valuable time. She tells herself to stay calm, to work the problems. An unseen psychopath. A dog that may or may not have ingested poison. No car, no Wi-Fi, no cell signal. The killer’s prep work is immaculate.
But . . .
She remembers the landline phone inside Jules’s house. The author may be God, in his own words, but there’s no way he can possibly know about this phone because Emma unplugged it herself more than a month ago. Long before she reviewed Murder Mountain.
It’s still there. In the pantry.
She eyes the front porch through rain-streaked glass. Taking shelter inside is her only option anyway. There’s nothing but acres of grass, open beach, and locked cabins in both directions. Still, she considers ditching the dead car and running for help. Deek’s house is a quarter mile away. Can she make it?
Her blood chills with déjà vu. She’s read this scene before. Exactly this, somehow.
It’s how Psych died. After the ranger’s truck failed to start, the young woman gave up on the sputtering engine, slid out the door, and fled back for the cabin. She made it halfway before a high-caliber bullet paralyzed her from the waist down.
She remembers how H. G. Kane described Psych’s fall—as if her spinal cord were snipped by invisible scissors—and the ghoulish fascination as he marinated in the small horrors of her malfunctioning body. The bone fragments on her jacket. The spreading pool of urine. The way she kept dragging her limp lower body on shredded elbows with tears sparkling in her eyes, still begging him to let her go, not yet grasping the permanence of her injury.
She can hear the author’s breathy whisper, like he’s inside the car with her. Her skin tingles and she checks the back seat again—only Laika’s white face.
It’s just her and her dog.
She reminds herself to stay calm.
Fleeing on foot isn’t an option. He’s almost certainly guarding the grassy open space with a firearm. In Murder Mountain, the unnamed killer carried a Savage AXIS .30-06 bolt-action with an infrared night scope, lethal to half a mile. Twice the distance to Deek’s house. If she tries to escape his perimeter, he’ll kill her. No question.
A quarter mile is a death sentence.
But . . . hopefully twenty feet isn’t.
“We’re running to the house,” she whispers. “Get ready.”
To Laika. To herself.
Mostly to herself.
She releases the door’s lock. She pushes it open with her fingertips and steps outside into the rain. It’s a downpour now, rock-hard, loud enough to drown out approaching footsteps. She twists open the back door to let Laika out. No time to be afraid.
She races for the front porch, her palms slicing the air, icy droplets exploding off her shoulders. Laika pounds beside her, panting.
As she runs, she braces for a high-caliber bullet to the lower back.
He shot Emma Carpenter in the spine—
It never comes.
She reaches the porch. Key chain in hand, she fumbles for the slippery lock—“Shit!”—and senses a dark form climbing the cedar steps behind her as she jams the key inside and twists, twists with slick fingers and rising dread as his gloved hands reach behind her to clamp onto her throat—but then the door bangs open. She crashes into warmth, into safety. She almost smashes Laika’s tail in the door behind her.
She whirls, locking the latch.
Through the peephole, the front steps are empty. Was he really there?
Where is he?
Doesn’t matter. Getting back inside is a victory. There’s safety in close quarters. The night vision rifle from Murder Mountain will be cumbersome indoors. She flicks on every light on the main floor, revealing every unknown space—no crouched figure in the coat closet, no deadly ambush behind the kitchen island—and with her wet shoes squealing, she races to the pantry and finds Jules’s ancient Trimline telephone sitting on a shelf exactly where she left it weeks ago, still wrapped in its black spiral cord. Untouched.
He’s sabotaged her car.
He’s blocked her cable modem, her cell signal.
But he can’t possibly know about this, Emma’s twentieth-century surprise, as she plugs the cord into the wall and mashes 911 on the spongy keypad.
He cut the phone lines, too.
“Fucking seriously?” She hurls the phone at the wall.
All homes built in the last century are linked with standardized telephone cables, which, courtesy of Google, he understood to be buried twelve to eighteen inches deep alongside the nearest county road (which was obviously Wave Drive, a quarter mile from Emma’s front door). All it took was a small shovel and a wire cutter.
Emma was grasping it now. The convenient horror “tropes” for which she’d one-starred Murder Mountain were now her inarguable reality.
No gun.
No car.
No phone.
There could be no escape for this story’s victim, no lifeline to police or outside help. In Murder Canyon, a remote trailhead inaccessible by vehicle. In Murder Forest, a campsite unpatrolled by park rangers. In Murder Lake, the body of water itself is the barrier.
Tonight was different, though.
Emma had already performed most of Murder Beach’s prep work herself. He didn’t need to wait weeks for her to take a camping trip or drive across the state alone. She had no family, friends, or meaningful human relationships to complicate the hunt. She’d willingly isolated herself on this rainy island, and he took no chances in severing the few remaining strings that linked Emma to the outside world.
She wanted isolation?
She got it.
By this point in an H. G. Kane novel, the victims are often trembling and sobbing. They’re reactive, prey animals without agency. They rarely show grit or determination before they die their lovingly detailed deaths. But Emma Carpenter was different.
In the living room, a flicker of orange light surprised him.
She’d . . . lit a cigarette.
Smoking: the ultimate deal-breaker on the homeowner’s waiver. Not that it mattered now, and Emma damn well knew it. No Dollar Tree fan this time. Puffing with a trembling hand, she approached the windows and stared outside through blurry sheets of rainwater. She cupped her fingers to the glass, squinting out into acres of coastal prairie. Searching for her killer.
She scanned left to right, across the tall grass to the snarling breakers and back, and for just a moment her gaze passed over her concealed killer’s form in the grass—something resembling eye contact. For just a split second, by pure accident, she looked directly at the shrouded form of the person who was here to take her life.
Then her gaze moved on.
She had no idea.
She knows he’s out there.
Somewhere in that sea of waist-high grass, invisible to her.
Staring back at me.
The motion sensors haven’t tripped, and in a way the darkness is comforting. It shows a perimeter of safety. For now. With her cigarette in her gritted teeth, she moves to the whiteboard and uncaps a dry-erase marker. HELP, she writes to Deek. CALL 911.
His faraway house is dark, near invisible on the horizon. Only the faint glow of a bedroom lamp in an upper window. The old man is probably in bed, reading or drinking or both. He’d promised to keep an eye out—but it might be hours before he wanders downstairs to check his telescope. If he even remembers to.
“Shit.” She hurls her marker.
Two spaceships. Alone in the void.
In the meantime, she’s memorized every entry point in the house. She chews on her cigarette and runs down her mental checklist: two locked doors on the main floor, plus two windows that can’t be opened. But he—whoever he really is—has already entered the house freely. He’s the author of tonight’s story and he carries every key. She’s barricaded the front door with a tipped end table, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
She takes a breath.
And lets it out.
She can’t help but wonder—how will H. G. Kane write her story in Murder Beach? Will he use her real name? How will he describe her appearance, her actions, her personality? Being seen makes her skin crawl.
He’s outside. Somewhere.
In her right hand she hefts Jules’s kitchen knife, getting a feel for the balance. She can stab. She can slash. With some luck tonight, she might still ensure Murder Beach is never written at all.
Some serious luck.
For better or worse, Emma knows she possesses two advantages that those poor Appalachian hikers Prelaw and Psych didn’t. First, she knows she’s in H. G. Kane’s book. She understands the motivations of the deranged man outside, at least in some part.
And second?
It hurts to face this, but Emma doesn’t mind if she dies tonight. Not fully. Not quite. She’s invested, yes, but only in the same mild way she hopes a horror-movie heroine survives the house full of malevolent ghosts. For months, her grief has locked her into a death spiral, a stalled plane in a slow, inexorable glide. But tonight, in a grimly upside-down way, that gives her an edge.
An edge he won’t expect.
As she tosses her cigarette in the sink, she thinks: I’m not afraid of you.
10
The bird that hit the window days ago is starting to feel like an omen. It hit the very microsecond she’d clicked to submit her fateful review of H. G. Kane’s Murder Mountain—a fleshy and startling thud against glass, as if on cue.
Emma doesn’t believe in the supernatural.
Usually.
But she remembers sitting on the porch with Shawn four years ago, watching an orange sun rise over the Wasatch Range. Sipping ginger tea in oversize mugs, red-eyed and fuzzy-headed from last night’s Halloween party. She still had black Catwoman eyeliner gooped on her eyelids. They’d discussed kids before, sometimes in jest, sometimes approaching sincerity, always softened with if and when and maybe. But this time, on this clear and cold morning, her husband rubbed his hair, mussed from sleeping in his Batman cowl, took a long sip of his steaming tea, and spoke plainly.
I want kids, he said. With you.
Let’s make a family, Em.
To this, she can’t remember what she said—if she’d agreed or joked or said nothing at all—but she remembers how she felt. In the end, you’ll remember feelings more than words, and in that moment, as hungover Batman and Catwoman watching the sun rise on a blistered front porch, her heart felt like it would swell out of her chest.
That’s when it happened.
A gruesome thud on the window directly between them, and gray-brown feathers wafted over the deck. The precision in its timing felt deliberate, like that suicidal little finch knew exactly what lay ahead for Emma and Shawn. Years of trying and failing to conceive. The sympathetic doctors. The chalky-tasting vitamins. The empty baby room. The ovulation tracker with the stupid pink flower petals. The arguments. The aching, vacuous uncertainty, the future held hostage by the present. The nights of telling him her stomach hurt so she could cry privately on the toilet. Even in the moment, they’d recognized the eeriness with nervous laughter.
Hope that wasn’t a sign, Shawn had said.
She can’t remember if they buried the dead finch in the backyard, but she hopes they did. And here on the Strand, years later, after that (larger and more colorful) coastal bird slammed meatily into Jules’s window, she’d taken care to bury it in the backyard by the firepit. The handbook on the windowsill had identified the dead bird as a red-breasted sapsucker, native to the Washington coast.
But this was also a troubling revelation, because of H. G. Kane’s words that very day. His bizarre response online; some bullshit non sequitur about little sapsuckers like you.
Sapsucker.
The bird that died at her window. Just minutes prior.
Since that day, Emma had assured herself it was just a coincidence, that the author’s insult had aligned perfectly with an unrelated incident he should have no knowledge of. But tonight, maybe she knows better. H. G. Kane has been toying with her, hinting—in his own devilish way—that he’s closer than she realizes. That he commands an omniscient power. That she’s trapped in his story, where not even a sapsucker falls without his knowing.
Her stomach swirls. It should be impossible.
And she can’t lose her grip on reality. Not now.
But . . . how else could he know?
She needs to know what the creature outside looks like.
What gear he’s brought. What weaponry he’s carrying. She needs to see his face, without a mask, to make him something human.
The blackness outside is as solid as painted concrete, impenetrable. Standing at the window, she’s aware of how exposed she is to gunfire. But, she reminds herself, guns aren’t the preferred tools of H. G. Kane. In Murder Mountain, the villain fired his rifle only when the hikers were on the verge of escape. Maybe guns aren’t gory enough, or maybe they kill too quickly. Either way, Emma can use this against him.
Walking room to room, she switches off every light and lamp on the main floor. She hopes the killer is surprised by this. Then she returns to the living room window and waits in silence, letting her pupils adjust to the low light.
For this, she needs darkness.
“Let’s see what you are.”
She presses the Polaroid—Jules’s vintage camera, snatched from the bookshelf—flat to the glass. She thumbs the flash shutter button halfway and waits for the green light. Then she presses hard, a satisfying click-crunch.
The camera blasts an X-ray of light. A freeze-frame of raindrops captured mid-fall, a chain link fence, and farther out, the sandy trail’s edge. Then blackness again, and the afterimage lingers in her eyes like a negative.
No sign of him.
The instant photo drops out of the camera and slaps to the floor at her feet. Laika whimpers beside her, as if sensing the tension.
“It’s okay,” she lies.
She tiptoes to the next window. Again, she holds the shutter button halfway, waits for the green light, and snaps another photo. Another vivid flash pierces the darkness. She sees Jules’s muddy lawn, overgrown rhododendrons, and acres of yellow dune grass beyond. Another bright blizzard of paused raindrops.
No intruder.
“Where are you?”
He’s been a step ahead of her for days. He’s anticipated her moves with unsettling precision. In a novel, the author may very well be God.
But in the real world, Emma is confident God doesn’t exist. It’s just a man out there.
Right?
Right. Another photo slaps to the hardwood at her feet. Laika sniffs it.
Maybe he’s just trying to scare me. Maybe he’s giving up and leaving—
No. She won’t dare hope for that. H. G. Kane didn’t drive all the way to Washington to teach her a cautionary lesson about writing mean-spirited reviews.
Last window.
Laika whines with dread.
“Come on.” Emma presses the camera flat against the glass. She presses the flash shutter button a final time, trying not to consider other possibilities (what if he’s already inside the house?), and before igniting the darkness she can’t help but imagine illuminating the author’s face just inches from hers behind the glass, every detail exposed in IMAX clarity. Eye to eye with her own murderer, a heartbeat before he punches a gloved fist through the glass and grabs her windpipe.
Click-crunch. A seizure of bright light.
In the frozen microsecond, Emma can see the space in front of her is clear, the planters are clear, the empty firepit is clear, the old chairs are—
There he is.
Her chest tightens. The details are already gone, the imprint fading from her retinas, but she knows what she saw, what she’s photographed: a crouched figure.
“Found you.”
He’s closer than she expected. If Jules’s motion sensors have a detection range of thirty feet, he’s exactly one foot farther. It’s unsettling how confidently he’s mapped the home’s defenses. He understands precisely how close he can creep without—
The photo lands at her feet, startling her.
It’ll take a few minutes to develop. She kneels to grab it, and with her free hand she charges and snaps again—click-crunch—illuminating the grass outside.
The figure is gone.
“Shit.”
But she refuses to betray her frustration. She knows she needs to lock herself and Laika in a defensible room, to prepare for the attack she knows is coming. But first she has to say one final thing to the lurker outside. He seems to have learned every nuance of her solitary life, every weakness, every private inch of her. But she’s been paying attention, too.
She breathes into the window, fogging the glass. Then with her index finger, she traces one word in reversed letters:
AMATEUR
PLEASE DON’T KILL ME, she wrote on the glass.
PLEASE
Watching the terrified woman beg for her own life pleased him. Inside that glass house, Emma Carpenter was starting to understand the reality of her situation, that by barricading the front and back doors she’d only managed to buy herself time. A handful of minutes and seconds. He’d find another way inside, or he’d make one. He’d wriggle through the crawl space like a fleshy python or scale the drainpipe.
Begging wouldn’t save her.
Or her dog.
