The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  “With Mr. Wallace?”

  “Sometimes, I suspect they go to the cribs.”

  “Mr. McCabe loves you,” Gloria said, then felt a pinch under the table.

  She turned and met her husband’s disapproving eyes.

  “So, Mrs. McCabe,” Ezekiel said, “how’s Mr. McCabe finding his job at the mine?”

  “Still just a mucker, but him and Mr. Wallace been dirt washin on Billy’s day off. Lookin for someone to grubstake ’em.”

  “Well, here’s hoping he sees some color in his pan.” He raised his glass of water, and when he’d taken a sip, turned his attention to the little girl. As he quizzed Harriet on her studies, Gloria nibbled on a piece of corn bread and stole glances at her husband. She was still wildly in love with him, this solid, gorgeous man with a thick mustache, long sideburns, and the most ardent eyes she’d ever seen, especially when in a state of passion—anger or otherwise—as if there were lava at his core. She’d convinced him to wear his four-button sack coat for the occasion, an outfit he despised, and which, in his words, made him look like “a feathered-out got-damn banker.”

  At length, Gloria’s attention drifted away from their table, and she picked out pieces of other conversations about towns that were booming, towns that were busting. As she eavesdropped, she noticed the table closest to the musicians’ platform. Ten people occupied one side, but at the far end, a woman ate by herself, completely ignored. She estimated the woman to be in her mid-forties, and even from across the room, Gloria could tell that she’d been striking years ago. Now she just looked tired, ragged out in a burgundy bustle ball dress with white lace at the ends of the sleeves and intricate beading of a style fashionable in the seventies.

  “Would you excuse me?” Before Ezekiel could reply, she was on her way, stopping finally across the table from the woman in the outdated dress. “May I sit here, Rosalyn?” Gloria asked. The woman smirked, her hair pinned up in a mass of garnet curls, her cheeks rouged.

  “If you don’t care what all these hypocrites think, I sure don’t.” As Gloria set her food on the table and pulled out the chair, she couldn’t help but note the thrill of hearing a woman speak her true mind again.

  In proximity, Gloria saw that the woman was even more striking but even more ruined. It broke her heart. She thought of her mother, what she might have become had the syphilis not claimed her. “How are you likin the—”

  “I don’t do pity too well. What possessed you to come over here?”

  “I seen you around.”

  “So’ve half the men in this room. And they feign outrage that I dare partake of this feast in their presence, laughing up their sleeves. You know I used to be loved in this town? Like royalty.”

  “Look, I just saw you were alone.”

  “Well, you done your good deed, so why don’t you head back over—” Rosalyn stopped herself, reached out, touched the long blanched scar under Gloria’s bottom lip. “Where’d you work, honey?”

  Gloria flushed, took a sip of water. “I don’t … anymore.”

  “I said when you did.”

  “Leadville.”

  Rosalyn smiled. “Hell of a place. You’re stunning. Bet the men loved you. What happened to your chin?”

  “I had a customer who went insane. Thought we were married, and that I was cheatin on him.”

  Rosalyn laughed out loud. Heads turned.

  “This town’s in high water,” Gloria said. “Don’t mind my asking, why’ve you stayed? Thought you might’ve gone to Cripple Creek.”

  Rosalyn smiled, wisdom and a lifetime of buried rage in her eyes. “Been a whore all my life. I’ll finish out in Abandon and, when it goes, take what money I got, go somewhere where nobody knows me. Where it don’t snow. Buy a house. Tend a garden.”

  “Marriage?”

  “I’m afraid man’s a species that’s been ruined for me.”

  Gloria sliced through a piece of roast.

  “How’d you become so respectable?” Rosalyn asked.

  “Fell in love with a good man.”

  “Not many a those left, are there?”

  • • •

  Now they Black Hawk waltzed, the fiddlers sawing away, the clack of high-top lace-ups and stovepipe boots slamming the floorboards. Looking over her husband’s shoulder, Gloria saw Rosalyn sitting by herself in a rocking chair beside the stove.

  “It’s shameful,” she said to him.

  “You know who that woman is?” Ezekiel spoke into his wife’s ear.

  “Wipe that feature off your face. She’s a human being.”

  “Would you have people unriddle your past?”

  “Would you have people treat me like I didn’t exist?”

  They bumped into the Ilgs. “Excuse us, Sawbones.”

  “Merry Christmas, Sheriff. Look at you in full war paint. Ma’am.” The doctor doffed his bowler.

  When they’d broken from the crowd, Ezekiel said, “That woman ain’t my concern.”

  “Is decent human behavior? You’re gonna dance with her.”

  “Damn if I will.”

  “Zeke!”

  He glanced over her shoulder, whispered, “God bless that man.”

  Gloria turned, saw Rosalyn rise to accept the hand of Stephen Cole. Soon the preacher and the whore were stomping together.

  9

  Ezekiel and Gloria walked down the plank sidewalk. It had been shoveled that morning, but a foot and a half of powder had fallen since then. Gloria tucked her gloved hands under the wool of her hooded cape. Aside from the ruckus of the dance hall, Abandon stood in that kind of mad silence that set in during the worst of blizzards. There appeared to be no one else out, and the snow fell so hard, they could see only the nearest streetlamp. Beyond lay only faint suggestions of lantern light.

  They arrived at the entrance to the hotel, the door starred with snowballs—the handiwork of bored children. Across the street, there was light in the saloon and they could hear the sound of Christmas carols being played on a broken piano. They entered the dark lobby. There hadn’t been anyone at the front desk since the owner had left town three months ago. Gloria brushed the snow off her cape and followed Ezekiel up the staircase.

  The corridor was empty, completely dark. They stopped at number six, the only room with light sliding under the door.

  Ezekiel knocked. They waited. He knocked again.

  “I don’t reckon she’s gonna answer,” Gloria whispered.

  “Mrs. Madsen,” Ezekiel said through the door. “It’s Zeke and Glori Curtice. We’re leaving something for you. Merry Christmas.”

  Gloria set the basket on the floor. It contained two oranges, a can of sardines, and a piece of chocolate cake from the town feast. On a scrap of parchment, Gloria had written, “Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from your friends the Curtices.”

  They went back outside and trudged on through the snow.

  “Saw Oatha Wallace today,” Ezekiel said. “He was in the benzinery this morning. Told him my brother’s over two months short now.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “What he says every time. That Nathan and the others decided not to go last minute, since the weather looked ominous. I called him a black liar.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Don’t know, Glori, it’s past me, but that man’s bad medicine. Snaky.”

  “What if it turns out Nathan was with him?”

  “I may be sheriff, but it won’t be settled in no goddamn court a law.” They turned onto a side street and followed a path beaten down in the snow, saw families huddled before fireplaces in those cabins on the hillside that were still inhabited—tiny islands of warmth and light in the storm.

  “Need to warn you, Ezekiel,” she said. “I wanna say something about our little whistle.”

  Ezekiel stopped, faced his wife. It was so dark outside, he could only make out the whites of her eyes.

  “Told you. We don’t talk about it.” The tremor in his voice was grief, n
ot anger, and it made Gloria’s throat tighten.

  “I just need to say something, Zeke. You don’t got to talk—”

  He grabbed her arms. “Said I don’t wanna hear it.”

  “But I need you to,” she said, and her eyes burned as they flooded. “I can’t go on tonight and tomorrow pretending it’s like it’s always been. Only been a year, and I miss him. That’s all I wanted to say. That I miss Gus so much, I can’t breathe when I think about him.” Her husband’s eyes went wide. He turned away from her, his nose running. “I’m empty, Zeke, ’cause we don’t talk about him. That don’t make nothing better. Just makes us forget, and do you wanna forget your son?”

  Ezekiel sat in the snow. “I ain’t forgot Gus. Ain’t nothin in this whole goddamn world make me forget my boy.”

  She knelt behind him, Ezekiel wiping his face and cursing.

  “You reckon we’ll see Gus again when we die?”

  “Glori, if I believed that, I’d a blowed my goddamn head off a year ago. This is above my bend. Why you doin this to me?”

  “ ’Cause I don’t remember what he looks like! He’s just a blur in my head. Remember that day I wanted to get our picture made and you wouldn’t?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, goddamn you for that, Zeke.”

  The wind had changed directions and the snow needled Gloria’s face. She turned her back to the barrage of ice. Ezekiel was saying something, but she couldn’t hear. She moved forward, their faces inches apart. She asked him what he’d said.

  “Said he came halfway above my knee. Close your eyes, Glori, maybe you can see him. His hair was fine, color a rust, and his skin so white, we used to say it looked like milk. He had your eyes.” Ezekiel cleared his throat and wiped his face again. “And when I … Jesus … when I kissed his neck, my mustache would tickle him and he’d laugh so hard, scream, ‘No, Papa!’ ”

  Gloria had closed her eyes. “Keep going, Zeke.”

  “And he called my knee his horsey, and he named it Benjamin.”

  Ezekiel had stopped. Gloria opened her eyes. Her husband was shaking. He leaned forward into her cape and wept.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s all right.”

  “Naw, it ain’t,” he said. “I lie in bed sometimes and try to picture what Gus would a looked like at ten or fifteen or thirty. I imagine him turned out a man. We was robbed, Glori. It ain’t never gonna be all right again.”

  Ezekiel picked himself up and then lifted Gloria in his arms, both covered in snow. She bawled as Ezekiel carried her up the hill toward their dark cabin in the grove of spruce.

  10

  Bart Packer glided through the darkness in his sleigh, the whisper of the runners drowned out by the clinking of chain loops and the singletree groaning in the cold. A half mile south of town, and with the snow blowing in every direction, he could hardly see beyond the horses.

  He’d have missed it, but the horses knew the way, making the turn just past the grouping of snow-loaded firs. They pulled the sled up a series of switchbacks and after awhile slowed to a walk, their legs punching through the snow, their nostrils flaring like bellows, Bart slapping the reins against their rumps, hollering, “Get up there! Go on, girls!” They climbed several hundred feet above the floor of the box canyon. The trail leveled out. “Now get on!” he yelled, and he worked the reins furiously until the horses trotted in the powder.

  He wasn’t rushing them out of meanness or impatience. Nothing riled Bart like the mistreatment of horses, but they were approaching the most dangerous section of the ride home, where the trail passed through a gap between steep slopes that produced slides every winter. If caught in an avalanche tonight, he’d have almost no chance of survival.

  When the sled had passed safely through the gap, Bart drew up the reins and brought the horses to a halt. He stepped down into the snow. It rose to his waist. He unfastened an ax from the side of the sleigh and waded over to a pool of ice the size of a wagon wheel. He hacked at the mouth of the spring, chipping away the ice until he could see water flowing down the rock. He let the horses blow. While they drank, he climbed into the sleigh and pulled a flask from a pocket of his wool overcoat, then leaned back, wrapped in the buffalo robe, sipping brandy, listening to the pair of horses slurp the icy water.

  Maybe it was the alcohol, but he imagined his lips tingled from their contact with Miss Hartman. He replayed the kiss. Why had he waited so long? Cause of your pride, man. Your fucking pride.

  The horses lifted their heads and neighed. They backed away from the spring and stomped their hooves. Bart grabbed up the reins.

  “What is it, girls?” His first thought was they’d sensed a slide. He peered up, listening for the rumble of snow raging down through the darkness above him, heard only the horses nervously clicking their teeth on the steel bits. He took a final swig of brandy, stuffed the flask into his coat, and had just lifted the reins to put his team into motion when one of the horses snorted.

  Bart cocked his head, strained to listen. He heard the whoosh of animals struggling through deep snow. Two riders appeared twenty feet up the trail, their horses buried to their stomachs. It occurred to Bart that they resembled phantoms in the snow.

  He blinked, half-expecting them to have vanished when his eyes opened, but they were still there, and close enough that he could see the clouds of vapor pluming from their horses’ nostrils.

  “Evening!” Bart called out. There was no answer, and he thought maybe they hadn’t heard him, so he yelled, “Merry Christmas!” The rider on the left said something to his companion, and Bart heard the click of tongues. The riders came up on either side of the sleigh. They wore wide-brimmed hats topped with several inches of snow, had draped themselves in blankets and wrapped their faces in pieces of a torn muslin shirt, so that Bart could only see their eyes. Those belonging to the rider on his left exuded a cold focus. The other pair of eyes were wide and twitching with fear and nerves.

  “Merry Christmas,” Bart said, more cheer in his voice than he felt, and wondered if he was facing a couple of road agents. “Hell of a storm. Ain’t on the prod. Just trying to get my ass to a fire—”

  “I’d appreciate you shuttin that fuckin hole in your face.” The rider on the left had spoken, his voice low, metallic.

  Bart said, “Sir, I’m sorry, I don’t understand what the problem—” The business end of a double-barreled scattergun peeked out from under the rider’s blanket. “You shoot that gun, sir, you’re liable to bring a slide down on us all.”

  “Didn’t you hear what he said?” Bart looked at the rider on his right. He was smaller than his partner, much younger, barely a man, if that. But what struck Bart was his accent. Pure Tennessee.

  “I don’t understand,” Bart said. “You work for me, son.”

  The boy’s eyes darted to his companion, then back to Bart.

  “N-n-n-n-not no more I don’t, Mr. Packer.” Bart saw the six-shot Colt patent revolver trembling in the boy’s hand, a huge sidearm, decades old, a relic from before the war.

  “Easy son,” Bart said, and though his intoxication had faded fast, he was far from clearheaded. He thought for a half second that maybe he’d been caught in a slide and was lying packed in snow, suffocating, hallucinating this nightmare. “What in holy hell are you doing? I don’t under—” The other man put his horse forward and rammed the barrel of the shotgun into Bart’s face. Blood poured through his mustache, between his teeth, down his chin.