by Blake Crouch
Incline Thine ear unto my cry. For my soul is full of troubles.
In the distance, a horse snorted. Stephen raised his head, saw Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe loping through the powder on their mounts, leading a train of burros down from the pass.
And my life draweth nigh unto the grave.
Stephen ducked under the bank and burrowed deep into the snow, taking the cape from his black greatcoat and draping it over his head to keep the powder from falling into his collar.
I am counted with them that go down into the pit. I am as a man that hath no strength.
The preacher sat motionless and buried, his back to the snowbank, watching Russell Ilg’s mare wandering between the boulders.
Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom Thou rememberest no more. And they are cut off from Thy hand.
He heard the tinkle of harness bells on the other side of the snowbank, no more than ten feet from where he sat.
Someone said, “Whoa now.”
He envisioned Billy and Oatha tugging at their reins.
“Reckon these are Ezekiel’s?” Oatha’s voice. They were studying his tracks.
“O-o-o-or maybe that horse yonder.”
Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.
“Naw, that horse come from farther up. These here are the tracks of a man.”
Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and Thou hast afflicted me with all Thy waves.
“I’ll climb down and check it out if ye want, Oatha.”
Stephen closed his eyes.
Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction. Lord, I have called daily upon Thee, I have stretched out my hands unto Thee.
“They was just the two a them, right?”
“Yeah, I think—”
“Think?”
“Th-th-th—”
“You little stutterin greener, you better—”
“They was just the two a them. I know it for a fact. And we saw the other’ns body back there.”
“Well, all right, then. Naw, don’t get down.”
Oatha clicked his tongue and the pack train moved on. When he could no longer hear the harness bells, Stephen staggered out of the drift and brushed the snow from the wool of his coat.
He stood alone on the mountain, a hundred feet below the pass, listening to the wind and the sound of it pushing grains of snow over the surface like sand skimming a beach. He thought of home in the South Carolina low country, and the memory of it filled him with heartsickness in this frozen desolation.
Stephen found Russell’s horse sheltering itself on the lee side of a giant boulder. He swung up into the saddle, quirted the horse on its snow-matted neck, rode upslope in the tracks of the pack train.
At the Sawblade, the wind blew steady and scaldingly cold.
It had scoured out the snow and built a cornice on the north side, allowing Stephen to dismount onto bare rock.
He followed the burro tracks along an icy ledge. Despite the dizzying exposure, he couldn’t stop himself from peering over. He saw a red crater two hundred feet below—one of the burros had lost its footing, gone over, exploded in the snow like a viscera bomb.
The ledge ended at a recess in one of the jagged spires upthrust from the pass like a rotten canine tooth. He spotted an opening at knee-level in the back wall, a small claim hole just wide enough for a man to crawl through.
Stephen loosed the cloth buttons, reached into his coat. He thought he had a match in one of the pockets, but he didn’t find it.
He approached the hole. It went back four feet, then opened into darkness. He crawled in, wriggled himself through the tapering passageway, then finally emerged, the ground solid beneath his feet, though he had no sense of the chamber’s dimensions.
He extended his right foot. It struck something hard.
He removed his gloves, squatted down, reached forward, his fingers grazing the cold gold, bars and bars and bars of it, stacked upon one another in a cube that rose above his knees.
He lifted one of them, held it to the light that drizzled in through the hole, and as he stood in that semidark, staring down at the chunk of yellow metal, he considered the blood that had already been shed for it and wondered how much more was to come.
He thought of all the people in that haunted town two thousand feet below, how they’d endured this brutal wilderness and all its impositions—the cold, the thin air, the loneliness, maddening isolation—for just a fraction of what he held in his hand.
And in that moment, he no longer regarded the residents of Abandon and the thousand other mining camps scattered like bacteria through the West as people of ambition and courage. They were a cold, dirty, desperate, miserable lot. He saw them now so clearly. They had crossed the plains and made homes in these savage mountains and borne their myriad afflictions not because they were brave pioneers pursuing a dream. They had come for no other reason but that their ravenous hearts raged with greed.
The preacher crumpled down in the cave and wept.
STEPHEN.
At the sound of his name, he went rigid with fear.
34
Stephen crawled out of the cave and walked back up to the pass.
Above him, the clouds had broken up, beams of afternoon sunlight passing through, bronzing random patches of forest, summits, ice fields with the strongest light he’d seen in days.
The mare stood waiting for him on the windswept rock.
As he reached her and put his foot into the stirrup, he heard it, though owing to the wind, he couldn’t immediately determine from which direction the sound had come. He looked downslope, and with the mist clearing, he could see all the way into the canyon and a line of specks near the Godsend mine—Oatha and Billy and the burros on their way back to Abandon.
He heard it again—a faint howl.
Others joined in, each of varying pitch and duration, like a discordant symphony of owls and geese and baying dogs.
Stephen pulled his foot out of the stirrup and walked to the other side of the pass, stood bracing against the wind, shielding his face with his gloves.
At first, there was little to see. Clouds sailed toward him and over him—mammoth schooners. Fog swirling in the depths below, hiding the long, broadening valley, the lake several miles south, the open country beyond. He’d taken this trail to Silverton once before—much faster than the wagon road, though more dangerous because it required a steep descent along a series of narrow ledges that switchbacked down from the cirque.
Now he gazed at those ledges, observed that the wind had blown them clean of snow, traced their dwindling switchbacks with his finger for several hundred feet until it passed over something that, from his vantage on the pass, resembled a trail of black ants ascending out of the fog.
He stood bewildered, listening to the alien howls until another sound became prevalent—unshod horses pounding the rock.
Out of sheer amazement, he stepped forward and squinted down at what looked to be an entire town on horseback—women in print dresses, suitcoated men, some still wearing their filthy workclothes, and a hatless blonde leading the procession, poorly dressed for the conditions in a bright gold evening gown. As they drew near, he puzzled at their horses’ hides, decorated with pagan hieroglyphs depicting wolves, bear, coyote, elk, eagles, trees, cacti, mountains, clouds, the arc of rivers, and as the riders rounded another switchback, facing him now, he saw that the woman in front wore the painted face of a heathen, and the gold gown was drenched in blood, the original owner’s entire scalp having been stitched into the warrior’s tonsured head, the curly yellow hair still pinned up in the fashion of the day, and around that heathen’s waist hung a belt of sunburned noses and he appeared to be smiling, his bloodstained teeth filed down into razor points, and his horse’s mane interwoven with the hair of numerous scalps still warm, still dripping, and those behind him equally outlandish, one rider naked save for cape and bowler, another so caked with blood that he seemed to be rusting, one in
nothing but a blue bonnet, one in a shredded corset beaded with eyes, and they bore weaponry of every design and from across the ages—shotgun, rifle, revolver, knife, lance, bow, sword—some holding rocks still smeared with blood and brain, others wielding sharpened human femurs, one gripping a crude mace constructed of oak and leather and shards of quartz, and this parade of demons cackled and groaned, conversing in a strange, unholy tongue that sounded like some ancient form of necromancy.
“God Almighty,” said the preacher.
The trail they climbed had no destination but Abandon.
2009
35
Abigail thought she’d broken her back, but then she managed to lift her head and suck in a breath of air, realized she’d only had the wind knocked out of her. She lay on the stairs on her back, wood creaking all around her, threatening to give. Somewhere above, a man groaned. Dust and snow clouded her headlamp’s triangle of light. Someone said her name. She looked down at her father sprawled a few steps below.
“You okay?” he whispered. She nodded. June wept above them, and Abigail couldn’t determine if the source was grief or pain. She glanced up, saw she’d landed just below the cupola, her headlamp shining into the library, spotlighting the pale, terrified face of June, the woman clutching a bookshelf and standing on the only ribbon of flooring still attached to the struts. With the sky exposed, snow fell into the stairwell column of Emerald House. Abigail lay midway down the third flight of steps. There was a sudden crack, and she watched something break through the ceiling, her light catching on a flash of blue ski jacket streaking past, realized it was Emmett, his body dropping through darkness, crashing into the second flight of stairs, nearly hitting Jerrod, punching a hole through the steps, the second floor, finally slamming into the ground level as June screamed out from the library.
Stu yelled, “Quit moving! You’re gonna break this section of floor, too.”
Abigail shone her light down and across to the next flight of stairs, where Jerrod and Isaiah clung to the middle section, the top half having been severed from the third floor by Emmett’s fall.
Lawrence snapped his fingers. Abigail saw him motioning for her to climb down to him.
She descended carefully, and as she neared him, he reached up, turned off her headlamp.
His mouth pressed against her ear, he whispered, “We’re leaving. Step where I step and keep quiet.” Lawrence stood slowly. The step he occupied creaked. As he and Abigail moved down toward the third floor, Isaiah’s voice rose up from below.
“Stu, where you at?”
“Up here in the library.”
“You hurt?”
“Fuckin ribs are killing me. You?”
“Me and Jerrod’re scraped up, but we’ll live. The other two with you?”
“No.”
“Laaarry?” Isaiah purred his name as a beam of light swung through the debris onto the stretch of stairs where Abigail and her father had landed. “I’m not seeing you and the cute bitch.” A red dot appeared on the third flight of steps. “Sound off, motherfucker.”
Abigail could see the bright bulb of Isaiah’s headlamp a few feet away. With the upper portion of the second flight of stairs destroyed, there was no way that he or Jerrod could reach the third floor, but they could sure as hell see them and shoot. He had only to turn around. Lawrence grabbed his daughter’s hand, whispered in her ear, “Follow me.”
They crept around the stairwell toward the west wing, just a narrow corridor of gray rotting wood that seemed to joggle with the motion of Lawrence’s headlamp, the hall lined with doors, some closed, some ajar, most having rusted out of their hinges and toppled over onto the floor. Fifteen feet in, Lawrence stepped on a floorboard that squeaked. They froze, as if to retract the sound, Lawrence switching off his headlamp.
“That you, Lar?” Abigail felt blind, thought of all the scary movies she’d seen, horror novels she’d read, realized nothing even approached this level of fear. She could have dreamed no better nightmare.
“Tell you what,” Isaiah continued. “You do the smart thing, come on back, all’ll be forgiven. But you run? Better not ever let me catch your ass.”
Movement on the second flight of stairs.
“He’s coming,” Abigail whispered.
“But he can’t reach us from those steps.”
She heard a noise, glanced back. It sounded like quiet microexplosions shredding the floor and the ceiling. “What is that?” she asked. “Is this wing about to collapse?” The little explosions moved closer: one here, two there. When Lawrence flicked on his headlamp and shone it on the floor, they both saw it pockmarked with tiny holes.
“Shit,” he whispered. “He’s underneath us, shooting up through the floor.”
They ran, surrounded by the muffled thunk of rounds passing through the floor and ceiling, decayed wood raining down, the jingle of shell casings dropping on the second floor like handfuls of pocket change, then a pause, followed by an intense thirty-round burst just ahead. Lawrence pulled Abigail through a doorless doorway, pushed her against the wall, the room small, part of the servants’ quarters, boasting only a ruined bed and a wardrobe.
“There’s a stairwell at the end of this wing,” Lawrence said. “We’re gonna take it—”
“But they’re right underneath us.”
“And getting ready to find out that the end of the second floor’s west wing is rotted out. They’ll have to go back to the main stairwell. That’s the only way down for them.”
After another fury of machine-pistol fire, Lawrence said, “He’s reloading. Let’s go.” Abigail followed him back into the corridor, their footfalls noisy on the old wood. She heard someone yell “Fuck!” and wondered if Isaiah had reached the caved-in portion of the second floor. Up ahead, the wing terminated into a sitting area—crumbling furniture and overturned bookshelves grouped around a hearth. Above it all, a chandelier drooped from the ceiling, and through the broken windows, snow streamed in sideways.
Four strides from the sitting area, Abigail’s right foot went through.
“Lawrence!” she screamed, up to her elbows, both legs sticking out of the second-floor ceiling. He sprinted back as the wood under her elbows broke. She dropped, but he had a solid grip around her wrists. Abigail looked down past her dangling feet, her headlamp jolted on, shining through a giant hole. The floor cracked under Lawrence’s knees.
“I’m about to go through,” he grunted, straining to lift her, the machine pistol at work again, ripping through the wood behind Abigail.
“Hurry,” she whispered. During a brief reloading silence, Lawrence pulled her up, and they rolled into the sitting area as a slew of bullets eviscerated the spot where Abigail had punched through. They scrambled to their feet, tracking through blown-in snow.
“It’s over here,” Lawrence whispered, leading her to the northeast corner of the sitting area. “I don’t think he can get a clear shot at us in the stairwell.”
“Is it safe?”
“Don’t know.” Lawrence took the stairs two at a time. They descended through the second floor, finally emerging onto the ground level, their headlamps blazing through a kitchen replete with giant washbasins, two fireplaces, a brick oven, a clay oven, and numerous cabinets, all surrounding a long butcher-block island. The windows had held their glass, so there was no snow or wind, only silence.