Read Online The Hike by Drew Magary - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œDo you know what’s out there?” he asked Crab. Crab shimmied up to the windowsill.
    â€œLooks 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.
    â€œThere’s some combination here that’ll make the lever work,” he said to Crab.
    â€œSo what is it?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI can’t find anything,” he said to Crab. “I looked everywhere.”
    â€œNo, you didn’t.”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œYou wouldn’t want to go in there for me . . . ,” he hinted to Crab.
    â€œShit, no.”
    Ben went back to the dials and feverishly began attempting every possible combination of colors and numbers, but it was pointless. Thecolors 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,