To this day, there is vigorous debate as to how exactly he managed to shatter reinforced glass with such speed and ease. Engineers and glassmakers have asserted that even a sword as finely forged as his limited-edition Thaitsuki Tonbo Sanmai Katana (his now-infamous calling card) should have taken several bludgeoning strikes to weaken the glass’s integrity. Some conspiracy theorists like to cite this as evidence that a second killer was involved, or that the Strand Beach authorities were somehow remiss in their management of the crime scene. Sadly, Emma Carpenter herself is deceased and unable to comment. That leaves me. And you’re reading this book, dearest readers, because you want the truth. You can find speculation anywhere. Take it from the man who was literally there.
He didn’t strike the glass. That’s what the armchair CSI agents don’t understand.
He impaled it.
A driving, two-handed thrust delivered from an impressive core of physical strength. Thousands of newtons of kinetic energy concentrated into a single pointed tip just molecules wide. A panel of the living room’s sea-facing windows, six feet by twelve, disintegrated instantly. A waterfall of shards crashed to the flowerbeds at his feet.
Then he climbed inside.
Crushing a windowsill of jagged glass teeth beneath his latex-gloved palm, he vaulted up onto the home’s main floor. At two hundred and sixty-eight pounds he was hefty but undeniably powerful, and capable of feats of catlike agility. This maneuver didn’t even wind him. His tactical boots landed on glass fragments—crunch, crunch—and he searched the dark interior for the woman he was here to murder.
On his way inside, he kicked aside a coffee table. Emma’s e-reader hit the floor and a glass nautical ball shattered. He was aflame with adrenaline, his skin flushed hot, his heart slamming. This was the blood rush before the kill, the climax of many days of methodical buildup. He’d studied his victim’s solitary habits and had drawn his plans. He’d dug up phone lines with a garden shovel and packed poison pellets into raw chicken breasts. And just like him, his readers had eaten their vegetables—the stage setting, the backstory, the character development—and would now be rewarded for their patience. Finally, for reader and writer alike, the action could commence.
The grisly good stuff.
The guts. The screams and sinew. The money shots.
He inhaled the room’s air. A familiar cocktail of scents: stale blankets, dog fur, mothballs, and the subtle odor of Emma herself. He knew it all.
Above, he heard skittering movement. He recognized this, too—Emma’s golden retriever was in the upstairs bedroom, pacing and crying with gopher poison in her stomach. He knew his victim wasn’t up there, though.
Emma was in the kitchen.
He crept deeper into the house—his footsteps quieting on a bearskin rug—with his katana at the ready. He gripped the sword’s battle-wrapped handle (the tsuka) in an arched pose, edge out. This was a textbook display of the versatile chūdan-no-kamae stance. The katana, as he knew, is among the most fatal armaments ever conceived, a cutting instrument capable of severing muscle, tendon, and ligament in a split second. A single slice can dwarf the damage of most high-caliber gunshots, and even when wielded by an amateur, a katana can easily amputate a human limb or head.
He was no amateur.
This weapon’s nightmarish power is difficult to overstate. It is also, perhaps, difficult to fully convey to readers who have never held one. But one of his all-time favorite jokes might help, as often quoted by username HGKaneOfficial in his online writing critique group:
Two samurai warriors sit around a campfire and argue over who is the finer swordsman. The first samurai sees a housefly buzz past and decides to settle the argument. He slashes his katana in a sudden blur, bisecting the insect in midair.
“See?” he says. “Can you do that?”
The second samurai acknowledges that the feat is indeed impressive. And when a second fly appears, he wields his own katana as well.
The fly buzzes past, seemingly unharmed.
The first samurai laughs. “You missed.”
“No,” the second insists. “I didn’t.”
“But your fly is still alive!”
“That’s true,” the second says. “But he will never have children.”
Now his tactical boots clicked on tile.
He’d reached the kitchen.
The dark room was empty. No trace of Emma. He stood still, dripping with rainwater, and listened for creaks, whimpers, or even a heartbeat. His hearing had always been acute, bordering on the supernatural. His childhood doctor once told him he had “golden ears,” another blessing for a human apex predator.
Still, he heard nothing.
Not even a breath.
From where he stood, he could see the entire room—the row of barstools, the stainless-steel fridge and electric stove, the hastily searched cabinets under the sink, and six feet away, in the room’s exact center, the kitchen island.
Emma is crouched behind it.
Rigidly still, with her back pressed to the wood cabinet.
Don’t breathe.
She knows he’s standing in the room with her. Just six feet away. She can’t see him, but she can hear his huffing breaths, still winded from climbing through the shattered window. His panting is hoarse. Raking. Animalistic. Rainwater drips off his clothes and taps tile. She hears the shriek of wet boots as he takes another step forward.
She clasps a hand over her mouth.
Don’t you dare breathe.
But she can’t hold it any longer. It’s going to explode out of her chest. She feels it bubbling up her throat, unstoppable. She’s thinking about Laika, poor innocent Laika, waiting upstairs with poison in her stomach while Emma hides in the kitchen with a sword-wielding psychopath standing just feet away—
Another wet footstep. Closer.
How could he have known about the hydrogen peroxide? Did he foresee this exact situation and steal the bottle during one of his nighttime infiltrations? Did he write it out of existence? H. G. Kane is cheating, somehow.
She hears his sword rise—a whisper of sliced air. It seems to slip between molecules. Then an earsplitting crash, and she flinches (don’t gasp, he’ll hear you) as ceramic shards scatter across the floor. One piece lands beside her. On it, a bulging black eyeball. RIP to Jules’s Chihuahua Stewie.
She struggles to focus. She’s seconds away from passing out or exhaling an involuntary gasp, and either way, he’ll hear her and raise his sword and—
Work the problem. She tries to pin her thoughts down, like wriggling snakes.
If I die here, so does Laika—
Jules’s wine bottle drops, too, with a wet shatter. A tendril of red liquid inches past Emma’s right ankle. Silently, she lifts her shoe away from it.
He’s playing, tipping things off the counter with his sword. Like a school shooter wandering a locked-down campus, searching for stragglers to kill, amusing himself with small acts of destruction. Or maybe he’s smarter than that. Maybe he’s trying to startle Emma into gasping, into revealing herself—
Stay calm.
She can’t. She can’t breathe. She’s cornered. And Laika is going to die upstairs—
Focus.
She clasps a palm to her mouth, parts her lips, and quietly exhales through gritted teeth. Letting her lungs depressurize, muffled by her fingers. Every muscle in her chest is taut. Equalizing pressure is a slow and agonizing process.
With a rain-soaked killer standing just feet away. Listening for her.
Finally it’s over. Her lungs are empty.
Good. Now inhale.
Upstairs, Laika whines a pained yelp, and Emma’s thoughts race frantically again: What if it’s already too late? What if my efforts are in vain and Laika is already dying—
A shrill grinding screech. It seems to fill her brain, crowding out every other thought. He’s running his blade edge along the stainless-steel fridge now. Jules’s magnets drop to the floor, click-clattering like loose teeth—
Stay calm.
His boot lands beside her hand. Almost stepping on her fingers.
Silence.
He’s stopped there. Right around the island’s edge, towering above her. Over the grape odor of the wine, she can smell his breath. Mtn Dew. Stale body odor. And something else, dense and overwhelming in its strange clarity, dwarfing all others . . . the scent of butter?
If he looks down, she knows, he’ll see me.
Even in darkness, she can see his boot with perfect clarity. The black laces, double-knotted. The treads crusted with gritty sand, slivers of wet grass. Slowly she draws her hand away.
She waits with ice-cold sweat on her skin.
But her stomach hardens into a cast-iron ball as she realizes he’s not searching anymore. He’s found her already, somehow, homing in with a strange animal cunning. He’s about to peer over the countertop and raise his sword. It’s all over.
He knows where I am.
Behind the island counter.
He sensed Emma was crouched against it, just inches away. He had a preternatural sort of awareness, a gift for anticipating the movements of his prey. The front door was blocked by a tipped end table. No tertiary rooms to cut through. He’d searched the living and dining rooms. By elimination, he’d pinpointed her here.
He sidestepped the kitchen island, raising both arms for a cleaving downward strike. With such force, the katana’s carbon steel edge would slice through the soft flesh of the crouched woman’s shoulder, bisecting her collarbone, amputating every nerve and tendon to her right arm, and driving all the way down to her ribs.
Instead, his blade swished through empty space and dug into a cabinet door.
Emma crawls around the island.
Go. Go. Go—
Behind her, a huffed grunt. “I see you—”
And a hoarse wooden scrape—he’s tugging his sword free—as Emma scrambles into a sprint. Through the living room, rounding a corner and climbing the stairs two steps at a time. His thick voice howls after her: “I see you, Emma—”
From the kitchen, a thunderous crash—ripping his sword out must have torn the cabinet door off its hinges. He’s frighteningly strong. And he’s following her—I see you—stomping through the living room now. But Emma is too quick. She’s already upstairs.
She crashes through the bedroom door, bruising an elbow. Whirling, slamming the door shut, still wishing for a damn lock. Inside, Laika turns to face her.
Mom. You’re back.
No time. She can hear the author’s tactical boots climbing the stairs after her now, brittle rising creaks. Carrying that horrific steel sword.
Down the hallway.
To the door.
Her heart flutters: the unlocked bedroom door.
The heaviest furniture nearby is an oak armoire stuffed with Jules’s summer clothes. A hundred pounds, at least. Emma wraps her arms around it in a frantic bear hug and rocks it, one ancient leg to the other, tipping the monstrous thing toward the door, but she’s already too late. To her horror, the doorknob turns.
The door opens—
As the armoire crashes down against it.
The vanity mirror shatters on its way down, spilling razor-sharp shards to the floor. Emma steps back from the improvised barricade, her heart slamming in her chest. Watching the doorknob rattle furiously. Blocked.
Backing away, she grabs Laika in a bracing hug.
“I love you.”
Then she grips the animal’s throat vise-tight, and in her other hand, she raises the object she snatched from the kitchen countertop: a clear glass saltshaker. She thumbs off the cap.
“Sorry, Space Dog—”
As she pours it down Laika’s throat. All of it. The retriever struggles, gagging, sputtering, but Emma forces most of it down. H. G. Kane may have removed hydrogen peroxide from tonight’s story, but he overlooked salt. A few tablespoons of cooking salt can induce vomiting in a dog almost as surely as peroxide, and she’s force-fed Laika at least half the shaker.
So . . . bombs away.
Laika coughs, licking her lips. Mom. What the hell?
Behind her, the door bashes inward. A violent jolt; the shock rattles Emma’s teeth. The author is brute-forcing his way inside, and he’s even stronger than she feared—Jules’s hundred-pound armoire scrapes impossibly across hardwood, and Emma’s heart hitches with terror as the bedroom door inches open anyway—
Then the armoire thuds against the bed.
Definitely blocked.
She allows herself to breathe again. It comes out as a gasp. Gripping Laika’s white fur with her knuckles, she listens as he jostles the bedroom door one last time before giving up. The doorknob jangles a final time, released.
Then silence.
Outside, the wind growls.
Laika whimpers again—with that aching bellyful of salt, she’s going to detonate any minute—but Emma holds her close, listening for the man’s footsteps in the hall outside. The rustle of his trench coat. The swish of his bizarre sword. Any sign of what he’s doing next.
She hears nothing.
It’s like he’s evaporated. And in the growing silence, something else rises to the surface in her mind. The intruder’s smell. That strange and oily odor that radiated off him in the kitchen. She’s certain she’s smelled this same odor in the house before, ever since she first arrived on the Strand, weeks before she one-starred Murder Mountain. Weeks before she summoned H. G. Kane to this isolated coast. It’s impossible. She can’t trust her own memory. She can’t trust time.
Like the dead bird at her window, this alien figure controls it all.
In a story, the author is God.