If we’d never stepped into your tunnel, we’d still be in this desert.
Mom…
Walter…
I will not be returning to North Carolina.
As the cold strengthens, the madness seems to ebb, and my mind clears.
Peace overruns me.
I’m nearly asleep when the distant mumble of a car engine reaches me. For a moment, I consider whether I should lie here and die. I’ve stopped shivering, and false warmth flows through me.
I struggle to sit up. Headlights appear, heading northbound out of Rock Springs. I rise, brush the snow from my clothes, and trudge stiffly into the road. A transfer truck, I predict, and standing on the dotted line, I wave my arms when the beam strikes me.
Much to my surprise, the bumper of a long white suburban stops ten feet from my waist.
The driver’s window lowers at my approach, and a man several years my junior smiles until he sees the bruises that blacken my face. Elbows on the console, his pretty wife looks warily at me, the side of her face lit blue by the lucent dashboard clock. Three children sleep in the backseat, spread across one another in a tangle of small sibling appendages.
"Are you all right?" the husband asks.
"I don’t know. I just…I need a ride to the next town. Wherever you’re going. Please." The man glances at his wife. Her lips purse.
"Where’s your car?"
"I don’t have one."
"Well, how’d you get here?"
"Will you please take me to the next town? You’re the only car that’s passed all night."
The man turns once more to his wife, their eyes consulting.
"Look, we’re going to visit family in Montana," he says. "But Pinedale is about fifty miles up the road. We’ll take you that far. You can hop in through the back."
"Thank you. I’ll grab my things."
"Richard," his wife mutters.
I lift my suitcases from the snow and walk to the back of the suburban. Opening the cargo doors, I stow my luggage on the floor and climb inside.
"Please keep it down back there," the wife whispers. "We want them to sleep through the night." She motions to her children as though she were displaying jewels.
The rear bench seat has been removed, so I find a place on the floor amid the family’s luggage: a red cooler, canvas bags, suitcases, a laundry basket filled with toys. With my suitcases at my feet, I curl up against the cooler and draw my knees into my chest. We begin to move, and I stare out the back window, watching the linear moonlit strip of highway spooling out beneath the tires with increasing speed.
We climb subtly for a half hour. Then we’re cruising along a plateau, and I’m looking back across the desolate flatland, scanning for two black specks in the sea of snow.
In the front seat, the woman whispers to her husband, "You’re a sweet man, Rich." She strokes the back of his neck.
The vents channel warmth into my face, and the speakers emit a solacing oceanic ambience: sparse piano, waves and seagulls, the calming voice of a man reading Scripture.
And as Orson, Luther, and the Maddings harden on the cabin porch, in the massive desertic silence, I bask in the breathing of the children.
FOREWORD TO LOCKED DOORS
This book was born over Thanksgiving in 2002. Instead of going home to spend the holiday with our families, my wife and I decided to do Thanksgiving just the two of us in the North Carolina Outer Banks. I'd heard they were haunting and beautiful, and on some subconscious level, I'm sure I was hoping the setting would inspire me for the Desert Places sequel, which I was struggling to conceptualize.
We decided to stay in a B&B on the remote island of Ocracoke, so the day before Thanksgiving, we left our apartment in Chapel Hill and headed east.
It was during the ferry ride over to Ocracoke when I started to get excited.
These barrier islands felt like they existed at the edge of the world—narrow spits of land with the Pamlico Sound on one side, the Atlantic on the other, and a slate-gray November sky hanging over it all.
The island itself was even better.
Small. Quaint. Quiet. Completely off the beaten path.
The beaches were practically empty.
The lighthouse was spooky.
The live oaks with their Spanish moss draping from the branches looked like a southern gothic nightmare.
But what really blew my hair back was the island just across the inlet to the south of Ocracoke.
Portsmouth.
It had an abandoned village on the north side, and it was during my tour of that ghost town by the sea, that the story of what would become Locked Doors finally hit home. I knew I had to set the Desert Places sequel there. Suddenly, I saw it all so clearly, and it was the exquisite scenery of the Outer Banks that made that happen.
So I hope you enjoy the book, and if you ever have the opportunity to visit the North Carolina Outer Banks, in particular Ocracoke Island, don't hesitate.
I haven't begun to do them justice.
Blake Crouch
LOCKED DOORS
* * *
Seven years ago, suspense novelist Andrew Thomas's life was shattered when he was framed for a series of murders. The killer's victims were unearthed on Andrew's lakefront property, and since he was wanted by the FBI, Andrew had no choice but to flee and to create a new identity. Andrew does just that in a cabin tucked away in the remote wilderness near Haines Junction, Yukon. His only link to society is by e-mail, through which he learns that all the people he ever loved are being stalked and murdered. Culminating in the spooky and secluded Outer Banks of North Carolina, the paths of Andrew Thomas, a psychotic named Luther Kite, and a young female detective collide. LOCKED DOORS is a novel of blistering suspense that will scare you to death.
L U T H E R
For the angels who inhabit this town,
although their shape constantly changes,
each night we leave some cold potatoes
and a bowl of milk on the windowsill.
Usually they inhabit heaven where,
by the way, no tears are allowed.
They push the moon around like
a boiled yam.
The Milky Way is their hen
with her many children.
When it is night the cows lie down
but the moon, that big bull, stands up.
—Anne Sexton, "Locked Doors"
1
THE headline on the Arts and Leisure page read: "Publisher to Reissue Five Thrillers by Alleged Murderer, Andrew Z. Thomas."
All it took was seeing his name.
Karen Prescott dropped The New York Times and walked over to the window.
Morning light streamed across the clutter of her cramped office—query letters and sample chapters stacked in two piles on the floor beside the desk, a box of galleys shoved under the credenza. She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below.
Leaning against a bookcase that housed many of the hardcovers she’d guided to publication, Karen shivered. The mention of Andrew’s name always unglued her.
For two years she’d been romantically involved with the suspense novelist and had even lived with him during the writing of Blue Murder at the same lake house in North Carolina where many of his victims were found.