Desert Places: a Novel of Terror - By Blake Crouch Page 0,21

to the bed, against the wall, Orson had constructed another bookshelf, much smaller, but crammed with books nonetheless. Against the far wall, beneath an unbarred window, stood the freezer chest. Orson was reaching down into it as I walked up behind him.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Hearts,” he said, closing the freezer.

“How many?”

“Not nearly enough.”

“That a trophy?” I pointed to a newspaper clipping tacked to the wall near the freezer. Skimming the article, I found that the names, dates, and locations had been blacked out with Magic Marker. “‘Mutilated Body Found at Construction Site,’” I read aloud. “Mom would be proud.”

“When you do a good job, do you like to be acknowledged?”

Orson locked the freezer and walked across the room. Prostrating himself on the bed, he stretched his arms into the air and yawned. Then he lay back on top of the red fleece blanket and stared into the wall.

“I get like this after they’re gone,” he said. “An empty place inside of me. Right here.” He pointed at his heart. “You couldn’t imagine it. Famous writer. I mean absolutely nothing. I’m a man in a cabin in the middle of a desert, and that’s it. The extent of my existence.” He kicked off his boots, and grains of sand spilled onto the stone. “But I’m more than what’s in that freezer,” he said. “I own what’s in that freezer. They’re my children now. I remember every birth.” I sat down and leaned back against the splintery logs. “After a couple days, this depression will subside, and I’ll feel normal again, like anyone else. But that’ll pass, and I’ll get a burning where the void is now. A burning to do it again. And I do. And the cycle repeats.” He looked at me with dying eyes, and I tried not to pity him, but he was my brother.

“Do you hear yourself? You’re sick.”

“I used to think so too. A tenet of stoicism advises to live according to your nature. If you try to be something you aren’t, you’ll self-destruct. When I accepted my nature, violent as it is, I made peace with myself. Stopped hating myself and what I do. After a kill, I used to get much worse than this. I’d contemplate suicide. But now I anticipate the depression, and that allows me to take the despair and sense of loss in stride.” His spirits improved as he analyzed himself. “I actually feel better having you here, Andy. It’s quite surprising.”

“Maybe your depression stems from guilt, which should be expected after murdering an innocent woman.”

“Andy,” he said, his voice brightening, a sign that he’d changed the subject. “I wanna tell you something that struck me when I read your first novel, which was good, by the way. They don’t deserve the criticism they get. They’re much deeper than slasher stories. Anyway, when I finished The Killer and His Weapon, I realized that we do the same thing.”

“No. I write; you kill.”

“We both murder people, Andy. Because you do it with words on a page, that doesn’t exonerate what’s in your heart.”

“People happen to like the way I tell crime stories,” I said. “If I had the chops to write literary fiction, I’d do that.”

“No, there’s something about murder, about rage, that intrigues you. You embrace that obsession through writing. I embrace it through the act itself. Which of us is living according to his true nature?”

“There’s a world of difference between how our obsessions manifest themselves,” I said.

“So you admit you’re obsessed with murder?”

“For the sake of argument. But my books don’t hurt anyone.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“How do my books kill?”

“When I read The Killer and His Weapon, I didn’t feel alone anymore. Andy, you know how killers think. Why they kill. When it came out ten years ago, I was confused and terrified of what was happening in my mind. I was homeless then, spending my days at a library. I hadn’t acted on anything, but the burning had begun.”

“Where were you?”

He shook his head. “City X. I’ll tell you nothing about my past. But every word in that book validated the urges I was having. Especially my anger. I mean, to write that protagonist, you had to have an intimate knowledge of the rage I lived with. And of course you did—” he smiled—“my twin. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tool of writing to channel that rage, so people had to die. But your book …it was inspiring. It’s kind of funny when you think about

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