The Hike (6 page)

“H
ello?” He was getting tired of shouting out “HELLO” to no one.

The scratching continued.

“I have a knife!” he cried. “But I'm not here to hurt anyone. Is it okay to come up?”

The scratching grew fevered. It sounded like a bunch of kids were gouging the door with forks.

And then it stopped.
Did I cause that?
Ben thought. No. No, he didn't. Whatever was behind that door stopped scratching because it felt like it, and not because of the white guy holding a cocktail knife. At home, Ben could cut an intimidating presence. You can say a lot with silence and a scar. His kids called him Scary Dad whenever he got mad, and he would use that to his advantage when he needed them to listen.
You guys don't want Scary Dad, right? So please put on your shoes.
He could turn into Scary Dad all too easily, and hated himself for it. But Scary Dad worked. Scary Dad could get them to fall in line. But that was with small children. It would not be as easy to make whatever was behind that door quake in fright.

The scratching came back, and then it went silent again, and then it came back, and then it returned, off and on.
It's the wolf. It didn't get me at the tower, and now it's here.
Perfectly logical conclusion. He listened for growling, but there was only the scratching and scraping.

He waited for a random gap in his mounting terror: that lull that sometimes occurs in your brain whenever you psych yourself out for something, like jumping into a cold pool. He found it, took a deep breath, and walked raggedly up the staircase, as if he were dragging along an unwilling participant. Then he seized the knob and turned it before he could change his mind. He pushed the door open.

He wished that he hadn't.

Inside the attic was a cave cricket. He knew the species well from the basement of his Maryland home, with their sickly, mottled brown shells, and their creepy extended hind legs, and their probing antennae, and their curved, larval backs. They didn't bite. They weren't poisonous. They just
jumped.
Constantly and chaotically, without rhyme or reason. Before you hit them, they would leap in great bounds out of the way: past you, behind you, over you. It was like they could teleport. They would come jumping through the heat ducts and terrify the whole family. He and Teresa would suck them up with a vacuum, but you had to get them on the first try, otherwise they knew you were coming for them, and they would never stop hopping. They made
him
jump. One time, a cave cricket came at him and he jumped so high he bashed his head on the ceiling. It hurt for a week.

This cave cricket in front of Ben in the attic was over six feet tall.

It was in the back of the attic, facing sideways. Behind it was some kind of control console that Ben couldn't make out, because there was a very large cricket in front of it. Ben wanted to die. He turned and reached for the door but that was an enormous mistake, because the cricket got spooked and jumped up, landing on him and knocking him to the floor.

“Oh my fucking God.”

He could feel its slimy underbelly rubbing against him. Then it jumped again and smashed him in the head with one of its hind legs. Ben started screaming, yelling out nonsense and cursing as loudly as possible to scare it, and to make himself feel as if his voice were a separate companion in the room, there to aid him.

The cricket jumped again and landed on him. Its round black eyes loomed over him. They were unreadable. Maybe it wanted to kill him. Eat him. Gut him and lay eggs inside him.

He stabbed the pathetic cheese knife upward at the cricket and the blade bounced off its exoskeleton, breaking off at the handle. It was drooling on him now, secreting some kind of noxious syrup that coated him and was gradually immobilizing him. Ben was flailing and screaming and the cricket leapt around some more, battering his midsection and knocking him over one, two, three more times.

Ben reached into his sack and yanked out the loaf of bread, throwing it to the back of the room. The cricket seized on it hungrily and Ben felt little choice but to mount the distracted insect, with the bare cheese blade still wrapped in his right hand. He was clenching it so tightly that it cut through his palm, but he couldn't feel it digging in. The cricket leapt again and smashed Ben against the ceiling. He grasped at its antennae like they were reins and brought the blade down into its hulking black eyeball, slicing across the lens.

White ooze gushed out of the eyeball. The cricket's jumping became more furious. It was like a stuck bull now. Ben fell off and dropped the knife in the process. He could discern a pattern to it now. Four jumps: one forward, one sideways, a short one back, and then sideways again. He could time it. He dodged the cricket's leaps and found himself facing its blinded eye. With one swift motion, he plunged his fist into the eye socket and buried his arm shoulder deep in the cricket's head, punching
through its brain. The cricket finally came to rest in the center of the room and collapsed, the white fluid seeping down Ben's side and soaking him entirely. Hysterical, he fled down the stairs and ran out to the front deck, so he wouldn't have to look at the thing again.

He sprinted from the deck, fell to the sand, and screamed until he was wheezing.

O
nce Ben could scream no more, he began to talk. He couldn't hold it back any longer. Teresa was gone but he spoke to her through his tears as if he were speaking to God. “Teresa, please help me. . . . I love you so much. I just wanna be home. Please Teresa. Please God, help me find my way home.” The sides of his mouth turned down like levers and his jaw quivered uncontrollably as he opened his mouth and wailed, giving him the face of a Greek tragedy mask.

His hand was bleeding and began to throb. He grabbed a bit of cheesecloth from inside the backpack and wrapped it around the wound. The cloth turned red in an instant.

He was gonna have to go back up to the attic. Whatever was behind that cricket was his “prize” for besting it. Better go claim it. But he didn't want to go back. The idea of seeing the thing again paralyzed him . . . seeing its innards spilled out on the floor, watching it come back to life because why wouldn't it at this point? Why should anything make sense now? Why
wouldn't
it reanimate and pounce on him and gobble him right up?
Throw the dogfaces in there while you're at it, God. Be that much of a prick.

He remembered burying his knife into the monster's eye and threw up into the sand nearby, covering up the pile of vomit. Then he lay back down and hyperventilated. When his youngest son, Peter, was a year old, the pediatrician said the little boy's head was too large. The doctor took out the charts for weight and height and head size—those baseline curves that they always used to tell if your boy was bigger than other children (
Well done, boy!
) or smaller than other children (
Good thing he won't be fat!
). As the doctor drew the growth curve of young Peter's head for Ben and Teresa, his pen left the paper. Peter had broken the percentiles. The doctor explained that there may be water building up in Peter's brain. They were going to do a scan on his head and if they found anything, a neurosurgeon would have to drain the water by cutting it open and breaking apart the plates of his skull.

Ben took Peter to the hospital and watched the neurosurgeon sedate him and feed him into the ghastly MRI machine, which looked like a container used on an alien spaceship to store kidnapped human specimens. The results took two weeks to get back to Ben and Teresa. They were negative. No surgery needed. Soon his body would catch up to his head and everything would be in correct proportion. The nurse on the other end of the phone delivered the news as if she were ordering a pizza.

This nightmare . . . This is what that surgery would have been like for Peter. This is what it's like to have your skull taken apart and rearranged. . . .

“Hey.”

Someone one the beach was talking to him. Sounded like an older man.

“Hey, you,” the voice said.

“Hello?”

“Here. I'm over here, shithead.”

Ben propped himself up on his elbows and came face-to-face with a
small blue crab. It was up on its hind legs in the center of the path. There were no human beings behind it. Ben looked left and right to get a full panorama of the sandbar. The crab was the only living thing he saw.

“Are you . . . the crab talking to me?” he asked it.

“Yeah, amigo. I'm the crab.”

“Why are you talking?”

“I don't know. Why are
you
talking?”

Ben stood up and kicked sand at the crab.

“Hey, stop that.”

“Leave me alone,” Ben said. “Whatever my mind is doing to me, STOP IT.”

“You should go back up in that attic and see what's what.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why should I tell you anything else? You kicked that sand at me.”

Now the crab dug down out of sight. Ben ran to the spot and started digging furiously.

“Get back here,” he said to it.

“Piss off!”

Ben felt a hard pinch on his fingertip and yanked his hand out of the sand, yowling in pain. He stomped on the spot where the crab had dug in.

“I'm gonna . . . I'm gonna fucking crush you!”

“That's not gonna work,” said the muffled crab voice. “Stop doing that. You're being stupid.”

“I hate you!”

“Don't dig down here again. You'll be needing that hand to work the controls.”

“Controls of what?”

No reply.

“CONTROLS OF WHAT?!”

No reply.

“GOD DAMMIT!”

Ben sucked on his fingertip and whirled around to face the beach house. The cricket was in his head again—twitching, jerking, regaining its strength, becoming hungry. Menace on top of menace.

“I can't go,” he said to the crab. “I can't go back in there alone.” He turned to the spot in the sand. Now that Ben had heard another voice—a benign voice, though not exactly friendly—he couldn't bear to let it go. “Will you come with me?”

No reply.

“Please?”

“Why do you need me?” the crab asked.

“I need someone. Anyone, even if it's a hallucination. I'm sorry I got pissed at you, all right? I can't be alone one second longer or I'll go mad. I know I've
already
gone mad, but I'll swim out into the ocean and never come back if I have to be alone another moment.”

The little crab popped back out of the sand.

“You won't fuck with me if I go?” it asked Ben.

“I promise.”

“'Cause I can take that whole finger off, you know. I'm just that strong and you're just that clumsy.”

“Deal.”

They walked toward the house together, side by side.

“What's your name?” Ben asked.

“I'm a crab. I don't have a name.”

“Well, where did you come from?”

“Idaho. Where do you think I came from? The fucking sea.”

“Do you have any friends?”

“No.”

“How old are you?”

“I don't know.”

“Where are we?”

“Beats the shit outta me.”

“I'm gonna give you a name.”

“Don't give me a name,” said the crab. “I've done just fine so far without one.”

“Frank.”

“I don't want to be fuckin' Frank. I'm a crab. Don't go naming me or I'll clip a toe off.”

“Fine.”

“If you call me Frank, I'm gonna call you Shithead.”

“Okay, I got it. Understood. Crab it is.”

Ben stopped at the sliding doors that opened to the deck of the cricket house.

“How do you know what's up there?” he asked Crab.

“I took a look around once.”

“Have you ever seen people on this beach?”

“No. Apart from you.”

“How did you know I'd been in the house?”

“Because I saw you go in and then come screaming out like a fuckin' horse on fire. It didn't require any ace detective work.”

“If you saw what I saw, you'd be screaming, too.”

“What's
your
name, buddy?” Crab asked.

“Ben.”

“That's only a little bit better than Shithead.”

“I take it back. You can go back to the ocean now.”

“I'm just messing with you.”

“Yeah, well, you picked the wrong time to be messing with me.”

“All right, all right, I can ease up. So are we going in that house? Or are we just gonna stand here?”

“We're going. I just need a moment.” He turned to Crab. “Can you send someone a message for me if I don't make it out of this house alive?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not your courier, dickhead. I'm just walking up here to see if you spaz out again.”

Ben didn't bother trying to move this particular bit of conversation forward. He walked into the house and over the broken furniture and went back up the flight of stairs, pausing at the bottom of the third-floor staircase. The door to the attic was still hanging wide open. Nothing up there made a sound.

“I don't suppose you'd wanna look up there for me before I go,” he said to Crab.

“Eh, I got nothin' better to do.”

Crab skittered along the wooden toe-kick lining the staircase and zipped into the attic. He came back down seconds later.

“There's a big fucking cricket in there.”

“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.