Out of Bounds

About the book

About Out of Bounds

He deadbolted the door at eleven o'clock. At six the next morning there was a token on his nightstand, six inches from his head. No marks on the door. No dust disturbed on the sill. Nothing forced. For ten years he and Marcus played the same game — small discs of pine, notched with a knife and painted a dull red, hidden in places nobody should have been able to reach. A storm drain. The air vent of a dead grain elevator. Whoever got caught bought the coffee that week. Then Marcus got a mortgage, and a wife, and a daughter, and stopped answering. Eight months of silence. Now the tokens are back, and they are turning up in places that get harder to explain. A medicine cabinet in a sealed bathroom. A jacket pocket on a crowded street. The center of a steering wheel, inside a locked car, in a gated garage. So he changes the locks. He spends eleven thousand dollars on cameras and a lock that opens for nothing but his own thumb. For thirty-six hours the system records an empty apartment. Then four seconds of static — and a token on the floor beneath the lens. The entry log says one person came through that door that night. It has his name on it. Out of Bounds is a psychological horror novella about the distance between being hunted and being alone, and about a man who would rather be haunted than forgotten.

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