The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  Isaiah called out, “Bolt cutter,” and Stu came forward with his pack, unzipped it, and produced the requested tool. One easy snip and the chain fell onto the sandstone. Isaiah grabbed the door handles, hesitated. “Larry,” he called out. “It would be awfully tragic if some heavy shit was to fall on my head. Why don’t you come do the honors?”

  Abigail watched her father walk under the portico.

  “Your show now,” Isaiah said as Lawrence pushed open the doors and led the way inside.

  24

  Jesus, this place is huge.” Isaiah let the beam of his headlamp pass through the foyer. “My light doesn’t even reach the far end. We safe in here, Lar?”

  “No, but this is the most stable part of Packer’s mansion.”

  The foyer smelled dank, redolent of mildew and wet wood. From her spot in line, Abigail shone her light on the cracked marble floor, saw piles of scat, puddles of ice. Through a hole in the roof, snowflakes drifted down. She removed one of her mittens, let her fingertips graze the stone wall—cold and soft and wet, carpeted in dead lichen.

  “There’s a journal in my pack,” Lawrence said. “I need to see it.”

  Isaiah unzipped it, pulled out a black spiral-bound notebook. As Lawrence took it and sat down on the cascading staircase, Abigail couldn’t stop herself. “What’s going on here, Lawrence?”

  Isaiah grinned. “You don’t know?” He laughed, his southern-tinged voice reverberating through the foyer. “Nice, Larry. Very nice. More I get to know you, more I like you.”

  When Abigail aimed her light in her father’s face, she recognized the guilt and the circuit closed, connecting on some primordial level to that girl who still inhabited her, and a subconscious memory, twenty-six years old, of that exact look of shame when her daddy had slipped into her bedroom one night to say that he had to go away.

  “What have you done?”

  “I’m sorry, Abby. I’m so sorry.”

  “For what? Tell me.” Isaiah’s hand passed through the beam of light. She fell. The darkness tingled. Emmett started forward, but his nose ran into the barrel of Stu’s machine pistol. He held up his hands, retreated.

  Isaiah knelt down, grabbed Abigail’s ponytail, lifting her head so their eyes met. “My man’s got some serious shit to attend to. Next time, the fist will be closed. You’ll lose teeth. Now get the fuck up.” He jerked her by her hair, pulling her to her feet. “And shut the fuck up.”

  “That isn’t necessary,” Lawrence said, his voice trembling.

  “Tend to your notebook,” Stu warned.

  Abigail touched her cheek. The bruise burned.

  “All right, Lar. Where we going?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure, since I haven’t actually seen it. This is all theoretical, based on my research. I was gonna try to find it on this expedition.”

  “You bullshitin me, Larry? Don’t make me—”

  “Will you give me two damn minutes here? I’m not saying I can’t take you to it. I just need more time.” Lawrence studied his notebook, flipping through several pages.

  Somewhere nearby, water dripped, followed by a faint and distant scratching. From high above, came the chirp of a pika. Lawrence finally closed his notebook, stood up. “Bart’s wing.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Lawrence guided them out of the foyer, toward the staircase that rose up the center of Emerald House. “Last one of these we went up collapsed,” he said to Isaiah.

  “You haven’t been up here?”

  “Not since last summer. I’m sure it’s weakened.”

  “Then you best tread lightly. I’ll be behind you.”

  Abigail was third in line, and to her relief, this staircase felt much sturdier than that flimsy death trap in the hotel. Part of the banister was missing, but none of the steps creaked.

  As they reached the next floor, Stu whispered, “Isaiah, hold up. I hear something.”

  Their beams of light swept through what remained of the second level—tall door frames and window frames, three wings still intact, the south reduced to a hole so gaping, you could drive a bus through it, snow blowing sideways into the mansion and slowly rotting everything it touched. Another winter or two, the water damage would reach the stairwell.

  “Stu, I don’t know what I’m gonna do if this is another false—”

  Isaiah suddenly lifted his machine pistol, motioned for his partners to do the same. Abigail heard it, too—the rapid patter of footsteps. Isaiah and Stu moved soundlessly, side by side, away from the stairs, toward the west wing.

  Twenty feet in, Isaiah stopped and held up his hand, pointing at a closed door a little ways into the passage. Isaiah looked at Stu, counting down from three with the fingers of his right hand. He kicked the door, which exploded back off its rusted hinges.

  The mansion filled with earsplitting shrieks, like those of women being murdered. A host of shadows flew out of the room, toward the stairs. June screamed, and amid blinding muzzle flames, Abigail heard panting and the muffled clatter of machine pistols.

  A half dozen coyotes blitzed past Abigail, heading down the stairs and into the foyer, their yaps at once jovial and demonic as they escaped through the oak doors into the night.

  25

  Lawrence led them to the east wing of the second floor. Abigail’s head was killing her, and the left side of her face was hot, swollen. Her headlamp revealed a place of absolute decay, the wood-paneled walls warped and blackened with mold. They passed through a small sitting area and arrived at a pair of French doors. Lawrence pushed them open, the hinges grinding rust into rust.

  As they entered a short hallway, Lawrence pointed out the first door on the right. “That was Bart’s office,” he said. “Door on the left opens into the guest room.”

  Abigail shone her light inside—sparsely furnished, with two single beds, their posts and headboards smashed, mattresses disintegrated into mounds of rotted down, a capsized chest of drawers, fireplace, wardrobe.

  They went on, passing large picture frames that had fallen from the walls and lay in pieces on the floor.

  “So what you got in that notebook that brought you to this wing?” Isaiah asked.

  “In 1889, Packer hired an architect named Bruce Price to design this mansion. I had a breakthrough last winter at the New York Public Library, when I found Price’s notes on the final floor plan. The original blueprints don’t show this wing’s true layout.”

  Lawrence opened the door at the end of the hall and entered, followed by Isaiah and the rest of the party.

  Packer’s bedroom formed the eastern extremity of Emerald House—twelve-foot ceilings and large windows still holding glass that in decent weather would’ve offered a jaw-dropping view of the basin and lake. The walls tapered to a fireplace at the narrow end of the room, spacious enough to roast six-foot logs.

  Isaiah motioned to Abigail and the Tozers. “Ya’ll sit by the bed and stay quiet.” As Abigail sat down beside June, her headlamp brightened the headboard of Packer’s bed. She noticed that a word had been carved into the wood, probably by some asshole with no respect for the past, just hoping to memorialize his girlfriend’s name: LANA.

  It felt good to get off her feet, but her thermal underwear had soaked through with freezing sweat. She unzipped her purple Moonstone parka and her pink fleece jacket.

  “I have water in my pack,” she said. “May I take it out?”

  “Stu, ya’ll searched their packs back in Abandon?”

  Stu and the other masked man had sat down near the hearth, their machine pistols trained on the captives.

  “Yeah. Their packs are fine.”

  Lawrence stepped through an open doorway beside the entrance to Packer’s room.

  “What’s in there?” Isaiah asked.

  “This was Bart’s closet.”

  “Motherfucker was livin the good life.” They disappeared into the walk-in closet. Abigail couldn’t see her father, but she could hear him knocking on the walls.

&nb
sp; Lawrence spoke: “If we were to break through this one, we’d be in Bart’s office.”

  “Well, hell, let’s be sure.”

  “I’ve measured. There’s nothing strange about the rooms on this side of the hallway. They match up perfectly with the original architectural plans. Now follow me.” Lawrence and Isaiah emerged from the closet and walked back into the hallway. After a moment, Abigail heard Lawrence’s voice again, indistinct and followed by more wall knocking.

  She worked her arms out of the day pack’s straps, reached in, and pulled out a Nalgene bottle, the water pumped and purified from the safe part of the stream that Scott had fly-fished the previous evening. The image of him dying in that hotel lobby felt like a stray ember behind her eyes.

  The water tasted cold and faintly sweet, so unlike the lead-tainted piss that ran out of her tap in New York. As she drank, she tried to ignore the red dots that traipsed across her chest.

  Lawrence and Isaiah returned to Packer’s bedroom.

  “This past summer, I made a thorough search of that guest room and found nothing,” Lawrence said. “But I knew there was space between that room and Packer’s room that was unaccounted for. I was getting ready to investigate Packer’s room, when the Forest Service showed up. I didn’t have a permit to be here, and the fine would’ve been huge. I had to sneak out of the lodge.” He approached the enormous wardrobe to the right of the doorway, grabbed the side of it, tried to slide it out from the wall. “It’s bolted down or something.”

  “We’ve got grenades.”

  “Wanna bring the whole wing down?”

  He pulled open the doors, climbed inside, Abigail listening as he banged around. After a moment, she heard “Aha.”

  Isaiah smiled. “What I like to hear. What you got, baby?”

  Lawrence’s voice came back muffled. “Entire back panel”—he struggled with something—”slides out.” A panel of wood flew out of the wardrobe and crashed onto the floor.

  Isaiah was peering in now. “Would you look at that,” he said. “You’re a genius, Larry.” Isaiah pointed at Abigail. “Come here. We may need you. It’s a tight fit.”

  Abigail got up, crossed the floor. She stood beside Isaiah and looked into the wardrobe. With the panel removed, a black steel-hinged door was visible, three feet by two feet.

  “Looks like some serious shit,” Isaiah said. “Hope for your sake you can open it.”

  “Well, the bad news is this locking mechanism. Dates back to the 1860s. There are four locks, requiring three different keys.” He touched the various keyholes. “Here’s the pin tumbler lock. Here’s the barrel lock. These two are bit styles.”

  “Ah fuck. We are gonna have to toss a couple grenades in here.”

  “Won’t do anything. If this is the kind of door I suspect it is”—he rapped his knuckles on it—”it’s made of ten layered one-eighth-inch steel sheets. But there’s some good news, too.”

  “Pins and needles, Lar.”

  “See here? Three of the locks are already open. Only thing standing in our way is this bit lock, which has a turned bolt sealing the door.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Lawrence faced Isaiah. “I’ll be needing a guarantee.”

  “A guarantee.”

  “I spent the last ten years trying to find what’s in here. Now, I’m willing to let it go—”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “—if I have your assurance none of us will be harmed. Give me that, I’ll get you inside.”

  “That’ll put your little heart at ease?”

  “It will.”

  “Yeah, all right, Larry. You get me in there, you’ll all walk out of these mountains.”

  “That’s the truth?”

  “You questioning the word of a marine?”

  Lawrence let his pack drop to the floor. He unzipped the outer pocket, scrounged inside. After a moment, he withdrew something, held it up in the light of his headlamp.

  Isaiah grinned through his mask at the long, toothed key. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Found it in a safe in Bart’s office last summer. I don’t know for certain that this will open that bit lock, but it is the right type of key for it.”

  “And what do we think is in there?” Abigail asked.

  “Summer of 1871, Bart Packer was broke and prospecting alone in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. One afternoon, he got stuck above timberline in a thunderstorm. Found an overhang high on the mountain, took shelter there. He was waiting for the storm to pass when he felt an icy draft coming from behind. He turned around, noticed an opening in the rock, and crawled through it. When he got his candle lit, he found himself in a large chamber, and not ten feet away sat a headless skeleton clad in Spanish armor. Bart correctly deduced that he was looking at a conquistador, who’d most likely been in that cave since the 1500s. What lay beside the bones of this ancient conqueror was a pyramid of gold bars, ninety-one in all, twenty-two pounds apiece. That’s about a ton of pure gold.

  “When Abandon was in its heyday, it would’ve been worth six-hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Today, with gold trading at eight hundred and two dollars an ounce, Bart’s ninety-one bars are worth over twenty-five million. Now, there may not be ninety-one bars in here. But even if he spent half of that, twelve and a half mil’s a good payday.”

  “And you were just using this expedition as an excuse to find this gold?” Abigail said. “What were you planning to do? Sneak off with it without telling anyone?”

  “No, of course not. Scott and I—”

  “Scott knew?” Suddenly, that look between Scott and her father at the trailhead made perfect sense.

  “—couldn’t haul it all out ourselves. That’s seventeen miles, and even if everyone carried as much weight as they possibly could, it’d take at least two or three trips. Besides, it’s not just about the dollar value. Abigail, this was going to be a huge historical—”

  “You son of a bitch. You selfish son—”

  “Time to open that motherfucker, Lar.”

  Lawrence sighed, turned away from his daughter.

  He took his time, delicately working the key into the lock.

  The key turned and the mechanism clicked.

  “It worked,” Lawrence whispered. He grabbed the handle, and when he’d heaved open the steel door, Isaiah shoved him aside and climbed into the wardrobe, his headlamp shining into a secret room the size of Packer’s walk-in closet—walls, floor, and ceiling made of stone.

  “You’re fuckin kidding me.”

  26

  Larry, where are my gold bars?”

  “I don’t understand. They should be in there.”

  Isaiah shoved Lawrence out of the wardrobe. “Sit down!” he yelled at Abigail. “Not you, Larry.” Isaiah backed Lawrence up against one of the giant windows.

  “I’m telling you. They should be there. Maybe someone else—”

  “You holding out on me?” Isaiah unsnapped the ankle sheath under his trousers.