I will wake up in my room at the Harper Castle.
It will be warm.
The sun will reflect off the harbor.
I will get dressed and walk outside into the cool morning.
I will walk to the Ocracoke Coffee Company.
I will write this scene tomorrow over breakfast.
And if that pretty cashier is there, I will talk to her.
Tell her I’m a writer.
Ask her on a date, because I’ve never done that before and after tonight what is there to fear?
Horace dropped the hacksaw and tightened the shoulder straps on his backpack.
He sat leaning against the stone wall.
His entire body quaked and the more he tried to deny it the more he knew how gravely fucked he was. He’d never known this caliber of terror. It seemed to coat his insides like melted silver. And what magnified it was the knowledge that he’d come here on his own, dragged himself into the shit.
Down the corridor he thought he heard footsteps in the dirt.
Horace came to his feet.
The footsteps stopped.
Someone exhaled.
He strained to listen.
The darkness gaped with a silence that seemed to hum though he knew that sound was only the blood between his ears.
A light overhead flicked on and off.
So brief was its illumination he’d have missed them had he blinked.
But he didn’t.
And in that half-second snapshot of light he glimpsed tunnel walls, dirt floor, ax and shotgun, and not twenty feet away, the two men who held them-one old, one young-grinning at him.
A voice emerged from the darkness.
“What do you think you’re doing, young man?”
Horace could hardly breathe.
“I was following Andrew Thomas.”
“Who are you?”
“Horace Boone.”
Horace backed slowly into the tunnel as they conversed in darkness.
“I saw Andrew Thomas in a bookstore in Alaska last April.” Then fighting tears, “I’ve been following him because I want to write a book about him. I swear that’s all. I have a notebook in my backpack that’ll prove it.” His voice broke at the end.
“You came here on foot?”
“I left my car in the trees near your mailbox. I just want to write a book about-”
“And you’re here alone?”
“Yessir. I’m so sorry. I know I shouldn’t’ve-”
“Well, Luther, what do you think? Should we give him a head start?”
“Fuck no.”
A flashlight suddenly burned in Horace’s eyes.
He saw the twenty-eight-inch barrel pass through the lightbeam, shook shook, and he dove to the floor as the light went out.
There was an orange blossom.
Earsplitting boom.
He smelled gunpowder as the spray of buckshot hit the stone behind him.
And Horace was back on his feet, running blind into the dark.