Blake Crouch: Locked doors

I’d always cherished my solitude but never more than now, sitting alone in a rocking chair on my front porch this cold Friday evening.

Stars shone through the crowns of the trees.

The constellations were sharp.

There are no cities in the Yukon to muddy the sky with manmade light.

As I rocked, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my down vest, I closed my eyes, resisting one of those twinges of surreal nostalgia that make you acutely aware of all the living you’ve done and how the choices you’ve made have led to this moment of introspection. I was forty-one years old, and I couldn’t begin to stomach the totality of my life-too checkered, too sprawling. So I tried to live safely and habitually, moment to moment.

It passed, those lethal thoughts of Walter, my mother, and the things I did in Orson’s desert now receding back into the prisons I’d built for them.

Though I had supper to make and words to write, I opted for an evening stroll. Rising, I pulled my hair into a ponytail and stepped down off the porch. I followed a deer run through the spruce grove, the air glutted with the spicy scent of sap, branches brushing against my vest, twigs snapping under my boots.

It was late October-ice rimmed the pond and autumn waned, the arc of the sun diminishing noticeably each day. Even the aspens had shed the last of their heartshaped leaves. Only the spruce held color, an ashy bluegreen, some stunted and withered from the harsh winters, others full and majestic despite existing a mere four hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.

I reached the meadow. Above the trees on the far side, the first peaks of the St. Elias Range towered in the west, hulking and austere, their snowpack blue beneath the stars. These mountains stretched on for a hundred fifty miles through the southeast leg of Alaska, west to the Pacific. They contained Canada’s highest mountain and the largest non-polar icefield in the world, a hundred mile river of ice that crept down from the slopes of the Icefield Ranges into the sea.

But the mountains are nothing but cold boring piles of shattered rock when the sky is blazing with the aurora borealis. I gazed up into the cosmos and felt it move me. It always moved me.

As a southerner who’d only glimpsed the northern lights in photographs, I’d thought of this lucent phenomenon as a still life fixture in the sky. But tonight it was a flickering ribbon that appeared to spring from a point of origin just beyond the mountains. It rose and curved sharply, a green mane running parallel to the horizon-a shock of glowing ions forty miles above the earth. It seemed an ethereal symphony should accompany this skyfire but the night maintained its massive silence.

Breathing deeply and contentedly, I laid down in the grass, and staring into that burning sky, filled once more with the rapture of knowing I was home.

HORACE Boone left his trailer in the village of Haines Junction after dark and followed the one-lane dirt road that passed by Andrew Thomas’s mailbox en route to the trailheads of the St. Elias Range. He pulled off the road a quarter mile from Andrew’s long winding driveway and parked his old Land Cruiser out of sight in the woods.

It was a ten minute jog through evergreens to the cabin.

The scrawny young man ran it easily in the dark, slowing to a careful walk when he glimpsed the glowing windows in the distance.

Stealing up to a window on the side of the cabin, he peered in, heart beating wildly. This was only the second time he’d come and by far the most exhilarating thing he’d ever done on a Friday night.

The monster stood at the sink washing his supper dishes, the walls of the cabin flushed with firelight. He wore black fleece pants, chili pepper-print fleece socks, and a long johns top. His hair fell in a matted tangle halfway down his back.

A book lay open on the small table behind Andrew. He’d apparently eaten his supper while reading by lanternlight.

When he’d dried and put away the last of the dishes, Andrew added wood to the fire, stoked it into a steady blaze, and climbed the ladder up into a loft.

From his cold perspective the voyeur could just make out the furnishings of Andrew’s writing nook-a desk, bookshelves, a typewriter, and little notes (perhaps two dozen of them) affixed to the rafters overhead. A poster of Edgar Allen Poe was also tacked to one of the beams. It fluttered in updrafts from the hearth.

Andrew sat at the desk and then faintly through the glass came the patter of his fingers on the keys.

The master was writing.

Horace grinned, mind racing to process every detail. They would be so important.

This time a year ago he’d just quit the University of Alaska’s MFA creative writing program. The meltdown had occurred during a meeting with his faculty advisor, the thirty-something Professor Byron, just a cocky toddler for the academic world. Horace had decided that his thesis was going to be a collection of short stories, all horror, and when he told this to Byron, the professor laughed out loud.

“What?” Horace said.

“Nothing, it’s just…I mean if you think you’re going to make a name for-”

“I’m sick of writing whiny, my-life-sucks fiction set in suburban kitchens.”

“You think that’s what we teach here?”

“I mean, God forbid a story actually have a fucking plot.”

“Mr. Boone-”

“You know I tried to read your book, um, what was it called, Fighting the Senses.”

Byron stiffened, straightened his glasses.

“Booooooooring. That isn’t what I want to write.”

The professor smiled, pure acid, said, “You know who didn’t think it was boring?” and pointed to a cutout of his glowing New York Times review taped prominently to the wall beside a bookshelf. “Now here’s the deal, Mr. Boone. I do not accept your thesis proposal. Come back in a week with a real idea or I’ll bounce your ass. You won’t return for spring semester. Good day.” And with that Byron had turned around in his swivel chair and begun typing an email.

So as instructed Horace returned the following week with a new thesis proposal: a comic book. The villain was a pretentious fucking ass named Byron and his superpower was the keen ability to eradicate the joy of writing from starry-eyed students. Horace was the hero, his superpower was quitting, and he stormed out of the office brimming with self-righteous indignation.

He found a job after Thanksgiving as a bookseller at Murder One Books near the campus, spent days helping customers find the perfect mystery, nights trying to produce his own collection of short horror fiction. After two weeks he’d started twenty stories and abandoned them all. By January he’d quit writing altogether, lost the energy and excitement of creation. Those winter months in Anchorage, he sank through frustration, depression, and settled comfortably into apathy. Fuck writing, reading. He lived for the small pockets of pleasure-a case of Rolling Rock, reality TV, and sleeping. His dream of becoming a writer bowed out with hardly a whimper and he never missed it until one life-changing day.

Shivering, watching the shadows play on Andrew Thomas’s back, he thought of the cold and sunny April afternoon six months prior, when the most infamous suspense novelist in the world had strolled into his Anchorage bookstore and given direction to his life.

Having watched the customer browse the bookshelves for the last forty minutes, I know irrefutably that this is the writer and murderer, Andrew Thomas, regardless of his thick beard and long shaggy hair. It’s the piercing eyes and soft mouth that give him away.

At last he approaches the counter. He looks as I would expect-wary, cold, a man who has seen and done things that most people could not contemplate. My palms sweat, mouth so dry my sandpaper tongue feels leathery and feline.