by Blake Crouch
“I swear,” Lawrence said. “They should’ve been in there. I don’t know—”
“Maybe that’s the case,” Isaiah said, then suddenly pressed the sharp, thin bone of his forearm into Lawrence’s neck. “But how do I know? Really. Know. You aren’t lying?”
“I swear to you I’m not. Please—”
“Words don’t convince me, Larry, but you know what does? Pain. For instance.” Isaiah gently removed Lawrence’s glasses, dropped them on the floor, crushed them under his boot heel. “I’m gonna cut out your right eye—”
Abigail’s stomach turned. Not happening.
“No, please—”
Isaiah leaned harder into Lawrence’s windpipe, briefly cutting off his air supply.
“—and give you thirty seconds to rethink your answer. If you’re still maintaining you don’t know where they are, I may be more inclined to believe you. Know why?” Lawrence shook his head, eyes bulging. “Because right now you don’t understand what real pain is. You think you do. You don’t. But when I’m holding your warm eyeball in the palm of my hand, you’re gonna have a much better idea. You’ll know that I’m willing and fully capable of taking you apart piece by piece. This is not about torture. It’s about me knowing in my heart that you’re telling the truth.”
“Isaiah, just listen. I need a minute to—”
“Sorry, Larry. This is the only way.”
“Stop it, please,” Abigail begged. “He’s my father. He doesn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, we’re about to find that out for certain.”
Isaiah set the point of the dagger under the lower lid of Lawrence’s right eye.
Lawrence struggled to cover his face.
“Hold still, goddamn it! Want me to accidentally push this into your brain?”
Abigail jumped up and lunged for Isaiah, but someone tackled her from behind.
She tried to fight him off, but he had her by the wrists in no time, his weight pinning her to the floor.
She stared up into that masked face, inches from her own, didn’t smell vodka, reasoned it couldn’t be Stu. What she could see of his eyes seemed strangely comforting, something familiar about them, so deep, burdened. Because you recognize them.
Abigail whispered, “You weren’t killed. That was an act, for our benefit.”
She jerked a wrist free and ripped off the man’s mask, saw the scarred, bearded face of their guide, Jerrod Spicer.
“The fuck, Jerrod?” Isaiah said.
“You’re with them?” Lawrence said, incredulous.
“She recognized my eyes.” Jerrod got up, screamed, “Fuck! How do we walk away now?”
“You knew it might come to this,” Isaiah said. “That was always a poss—”
“It’s already come to a whole helluva lot more than you said it would. Why don’t you take off your—”
Isaiah stepped back from Lawrence, ripped off his mask. “Happy?” Abigail’s headlamp illuminated the face of a thirty-something black man she would’ve thought exceptionally handsome under different circumstances, his smooth-shaven features in perfect proportion—pronounced cheekbones, intense mud-colored eyes, dimples that caved when he let loose his broad and malignant smile.
Jerrod lifted off Stu’s face mask, and the first thing Abigail noticed were the ringlets of Stu’s curly black hair, then the week’s worth of stubble, thin lips, sunken, red-rimmed eyes, saddest she’d ever seen. He’d been handsome once, but whatever monster was eating him inside had also sucked the life from his face, drawing it into an ax-thin blade of emaciation.
Jerrod took Isaiah over to the window. Stu got up and joined them. They whispered. Abigail looked at her father. He still stood against the window, knees shaking, crying, the floor wet under his hiking boots and a dark stream sliding down his cheek and into his beard, as if he wept blood. It took him a moment to muster his voice.
“There’s one more place to look,” Lawrence finally said.
They stopped talking. Isaiah walked over, crowded him up against the glass again.
“Larry, I sincerely pray for your sake you aren’t fucking with me.”
27
They made their way back to the stairwell.
“What’s up here?” Isaiah asked as they ascended the second flight of steps.
“Servants’ quarters.” They reached the third floor, this level more devastated by the elements than the first or second. Up ahead, in the west wing, the gabled roof had caved, their headlamps showing snow falling through the ceiling. “We need to go up one more,” Lawrence said.
They climbed, wood creaking, bowing where they stepped.
Abigail was the third to emerge into the cupola. She shone her light on walls lined with empty shelves, the books having long since disappeared, taken by vandals or reduced by time and moisture to wads of leather, paper, glue. Two chairs and a sofa had disintegrated on the floor. Half the stones had fallen out of the two hearths. Abigail edged toward an opening in the middle of the floor, peered down, her light beam shining to the ground level.
“All right, Lar. Where is it?”
Lawrence carefully moved over to one of the bookshelves and knelt down, the floor cracking. When he stood again, he held an eight-foot brass pole, severely tarnished, with a hooked end. He looked up. They all looked up, lights converging on a square door in the ceiling. Lawrence reached up, unlatched the rusted lock, pushed open the hatch. Snow fell through the hole into the library.
“You been up there before, Lar?”
“No. I always thought it was too dangerous. If the floor were to give way, it’s a fifty-foot fall. But all things considered, I think it’s worth the risk.”
“How the hell we gonna climb up through that hatch?”
Lawrence pointed back to the bookshelf. “With that ladder.”
Jerrod and Stu pulled the ladder out from under the long bookshelf, hoisted it up, and braced it against the opening.
“Doesn’t exactly look like a Craftsman product,” Isaiah said, grazing his gloved hand across a cracked wooden rung.
“I’ll go up first. Test it.”
“No, she will.” He waved Abigail over. “What’s up there, Lar?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
“That wouldn’t bode well for you, for any of you.” He looked at Abigail. “Up you go.”
She grasped the sides of the old ladder and began to climb, carefully easing her weight onto each rung. The fourth one snapped, but she caught herself. The tenth rung was missing. As she neared the top, snow collected in her hair. Then she scrambled out of the hatch, stepping onto the roof of Emerald House.
“Stay in one spot!” Lawrence shouted up at her. “I have no idea how stable it is up there!” She backed away from the opening, leaned against the wrought-iron railing that surrounded this small open veranda, snow blowing so hard into her face that she choked on it, had to cover her mouth with her hands.
Lawrence came up, then Isaiah, Emmett, June, and finally Stu and Jerrod.
Abigail rubbed her arms, and as she stood watching her father, it hit her: There was nothing on this veranda but an inch and a half of snow, and he looked nervous in the beam of her headlamp, like he was trying to pass off Monopoly money for true currency.
“Well,” Lawrence said, kneeling down, inspecting a corner of the veranda, brushing the snow off the stone. “I’m just at a total loss, Isaiah.”
Abigail gripped the iron railing. June and Emmett stood beside her, Isaiah with his back to her, near a skylight that had long since been liberated of its glass.
“You’re at a loss,” Isaiah said. The hood of his parka had fallen back, snow collecting in his black hair. “What exactly does that mean, Larry?”
“It means … it means I don’t know where the gold is. I thought I did, but I don’t. I’m horribly disappointed, believe me.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“But it just isn’t here. I don’t know where else to look, and that’s the truth. So here’
s what I’m thinking. We don’t know a thing about you, so what if you three just leave us here, disappear into the night. We never see you again. You never see us. And we never say a word. Not even about Scott. We’ll pretend this never happened.”
“He’s right,” June said, staving off tears. “Emmett and I would just be so grateful to be home again. To put all this behind us. I’m sorry you didn’t find the gold you were looking for, but can’t this be over now? You men came wearing masks, which tells me that you didn’t come into these mountains intending violence.”
“We could just leave, Isaiah,” Jerrod said. “Scott and Lawrence know more about me than any of us, but I’d be willing to walk.”
Lawrence said, “Look, we could spend tonight in Packer’s mansion, give you guys a chance to head out. I’m telling you, it’d be like this never happened.”
Isaiah stared at the snow-dusted stone beneath his feet. “Stu,” he said, “you got an opinion about this you’d care to toss into the hat?”
“I’m with you, man. Whatever you wanna do, I’m with you.”
Isaiah nodded. He turned around, looked at Abigail and the Tozers, who were standing together on the east side of the veranda. He approached them, faced Emmett.
“I don’t think I caught your name.”
“Emmett Tozer.”
“Cool if I call you Em?”
“Sure. June calls me that all the time.”
“Well, Em.” He pointed at Lawrence. “For this, you can thank that motherfucker.”
He raised the machine pistol to Emmett’s forehead, a red bead drawn between the man’s widening eyes.
June screamed, “No, it’s not his fault!”
The Glock coughed a burst of fire, and the back of Emmett’s head blew out. He dropped to his knees, fell over sideways. In the low light, the blood looked like steaming oil as it blackened and spread through the snow.
June threw herself over her husband’s body, shrieking his name.
Abigail tasted that salt and metal in the back of her throat again. The worst moments of your life you never see coming. She turned and spewed over the railing, knew as the bile burned her throat that she’d spend the rest of whatever life she had left trying to sever herself from this moment.
“You happy, Lar, you greedy motherfucker?” Isaiah said, his voice rising.
Abigail sank down into the snow. She could barely hear Isaiah speaking over the wind and June wailing, “Em, come back! Don’t you do this!”
“Know what’s gonna happen next?” Isaiah was in Lawrence’s face now, Lawrence backed up into a corner of the veranda behind the hatch. “I’m gonna make that bitch get down on her knees, and you are gonna watch me put a bullet through her head. Then I’m gonna get—”
Lawrence cried, “No, don’t. I’ll—”
Isaiah grabbed his throat. “Don’t ever fucking interrupt me! Then I’m gonna get this bitch”—he pointed at Abigail—”but I’m not shooting this one. I’m gonna take this knife and slowly cut her throat, let you watch her drain.”
Abigail looked at Jerrod, noticed his legs quaking. Stu had pulled the bottle of vodka out of his backpack and begun to work off the cap.
“And then, if you’re still maintaining you don’t know shit …” Abigail made herself stand. She wiped her mouth. “… I’m gonna go to work on—”
“Isaiah!” Jerrod yelled.
“What?”
Jerrod started toward him. They met at the skylight, both men covered in snow.
“What the fuck?” He pointed at Emmett’s body. “I did not sign up for this shit.”
“What are you saying? You want out? That it?”
“I don’t—”
“You know, you never had the stones to finish the hard shit, did you?”
“I don’t want out. I just … You didn’t say it’d be like this.”
“Well, it is, so stop your fuckin crybabyin.”
Isaiah lifted his machine pistol, started toward June, who still lay sobbing on top of her husband. “You watching, Larry?”
“I’ll tell you whatever—”
“You can tell me after. Just wanna be sure you know I am not fucking around with you.”
He stopped and put the gun to the back of June’s head.
Lawrence pushed off the railing, lunged toward Isaiah, screaming, Jerrod and Stu running toward him, Isaiah swinging his machine pistol toward Lawrence, Abigail thinking, I’m about to watch my father die.
Lawrence’s fourth step brought him past the skylight, and all seven of them suddenly occupied the same twenty-five square feet of floor space.
There was a deep crack, like a rafter fracturing, and the veranda of Emerald House caved in.
1893
28
The preacher and the Curtices reached Abandon at noon, having descended from the massacre at Emerald House in half the time it had taken them to hike up into the basin. Ezekiel hurried them down the desolate middle of Main and up a side street toward their cabin, his jaw set, eyes more intense than Gloria had seen them in a long while, enveloped in a slow burn.
The preacher said, “Zeke, I think we should alert the town to—”
“Ain’t arguin with you about it anymore, Stephen.”
“We’ve got vicious murderers roaming—”
Ezekiel spun around. “Do I come into God’s house of a Sunday morning, tell you how to preach a sermon?” Stephen shook his head. “Don’t counsel me how to proceed in matters a law.”
“Zeke.” Gloria grabbed his arm. “Look.” The hillside above town was dotted with smoking cabins, half-buried in snow and tucked into groves of tree-line spruce, web-trodden paths branching from each one to the side street. Bessie McCabe staggered toward them along the path from her cabin, Harriet in her arms, neither dressed for the weather, wrapped only in quilts, Bessie’s flour-sack underpinnings showing through, and no hat to be seen on mother or child as the snow gathered in their hair. Gloria could see that Bessie’s face was flush with cold, the bruises on her left cheek turning purple and yellow around the edges.
“Everthing all right?” Ezekiel asked.
“Seen you comin up the street,” she whispered, trembling.
“You’re poorly,” Gloria said.
Bessie looked downslope toward town, her eyes stormy with the weight of some damning choice. “I believe he’s cut his wolf loose.”
“Who?” the preacher asked.
Tears were running over her lips now. “My Billy.” And Bessie’s bare hand emerged from the blankets, grasping the bar of gold, snow falling on it, melting, making the yellow metal glisten. “He give me this this mornin, all wrapped up, like some Christmas present. Wouldn’t tell me nothin of how he come to have it.”
“Where’s your husband right now?” Ezekiel asked.
“He left a few hours ago with Mr. Wallace.”
“Know where they went?”