by Blake Crouch
“Yeah, my attitude’s been, Fuck the Forest Service. I’ve been coming up from Arizona every year to spend time in this canyon, do a little elk hunting on the side. But it’s a real thrill to meet you, Lawrence.” Quinn reached out to shake his hand. “I’ve read everything you’ve written on Abandon.”
51
They came upon June at the base of the steps. She was standing by her husband, one hand on the banister that had run through him, the other caressing his shaved head.
“Just us, June,” Abigail said.
She glanced up at them, void of expression, catatonic.
“Who’s that with you?” she asked.
“This is Quinn. He was being held here by Isaiah and Stu.”
Quinn froze when he saw Emmett, brought his hand to his mouth, whispered, “Oh God. June, is it? I’m so sorry. Is there anything—”
“No, there isn’t. I just need to be alone with him.”
Abigail touched her arm, said, “Maybe you should—”
“No! Go!”
They left June with her husband and sat down nearby on the cascading staircase that flowed toward the large oak doors.
Abigail pulled three water bottles out of Lawrence’s pack and rolled two of them across the floor to Quinn.
“Thank you.” Quinn unscrewed the cap and ravenously downed the entire twelve ounces in one long gulp. Then he leaned back against the steps and gingerly ran his fingers across his face as if reading Braille, trying to picture how the damage had distorted it.
“Isaiah did that?” Abigail asked.
“Quite a violent streak in that man.”
“So what, exactly, happened to you?”
Quinn opened the second bottle of water and took another long drink. “I arrived in Abandon last Wednesday morning. Wednesday night, very late, I woke to the sound of footsteps near my tent. Frightened me pretty bad. I called out, asked who was there. No one answered. Of course, I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I unzipped the tent and crawled outside. There were two men in masks with guns standing there.”
He shivered, as if just speaking about it rekindled the fear. “Isaiah and Stu brought me to this mansion. They kept demanding that I show them where ‘it’ was. I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. They said I was lying. They beat me. Tied me up and left me in one of the rooms on the third floor. Several times a day, they’d come back, ask if I wanted to tell them or if I needed another beating. I would always say the same thing: I didn’t know what it was they wanted.
“Tonight, after working me over for a while, they blindfolded me and slapped a piece of tape on my mouth. Few hours later, I heard a ruckus on the floor below and voices I hadn’t heard before. Suppose that was you guys. I managed to find an edge on the old chair they’d strapped me to, finally cut through the tape around my wrists about an hour ago.”
“You made all that racket up there that caught Stu’s attention?” Abigail asked.
“Yeah. I’d crept downstairs, seen there was only one of them guarding June, and I knew it was my only chance. When Stu came up, he was drunk, and I managed to overpower him.”
Quinn sipped his water. Outside, the wind still made that strange unnerving sound like ghosts humming.
“So why’d you come to Abandon in the first place?” Lawrence asked.
Quinn smiled. “Well, why are you here?”
Abigail sensed something in the current between the two men.
Lawrence said, “I was giving June and her husband a tour of the ghost town. They’re paranormal photographers.”
“That’s all, huh?”
Abigail realized what it was: distrust. These two historians sizing each other up, attempting to gauge how much the other one knew, what to let on, what to keep to themselves.
“What was it again that you were looking for up at the pass? I think I heard Abigail say something about—”
“All right, should we quit jerking each other off here?” Lawrence said. “Anyone who’s studied Abandon in depth knows that a sizable quantity of Packer’s gold has never been accounted for.”
“And you’ve been searching for it.”
It got quiet for a moment. Then Lawrence said, “Yeah. And you?”
Quinn nodded. “You an honest man, Lawrence?”
“Guess that depends.”
“What if I were to tell you that I have something in my jacket that might be able to help us out?”
“I’d be interested.”
“Interested enough for full disclosure?”
“Assuming it cuts both ways.”
Quinn reached into his pocket, handed Lawrence a rusted key attached to a nylon rope.
“Where’d you get this?” Lawrence asked.
“Full disclosure?”
“Yeah.”
“From an old man on his deathbed.”
“What’s it open?” Abigail asked.
“I’ve spent the last ten autumns of my life trying to find an answer to that.
I know it doesn’t open anything in this crumbling mansion or the ghost town or the mill.”
Lawrence got up, limped over to the entrance of Emerald House, threw the doors open, stood watching the snow.
Abigail called out, “You all right?”
After a moment, he returned, stared down at them, and Abigail could hear the change in his voice as soon as he opened his mouth.
“There’s almost two feet of snow on the ground,” he said. “I know it’s late, and we’re all past the point of exhaustion, but with the snow dumping like this, an avalanche would make it impossible to find. We’d have to wait until next summer, when the snows broke. Besides, it’s not safe to be in Emerald House with all this snow piling up on the roof.”
Quinn stood up, said, “I don’t understand. What are you getting at?”
“I might know what your key opens.”
1893
52
Under calmer circumstances, Gloria might have noticed the sky—clouds striated with a thousand tones of orange, like you were staring up into the guts of an overripe peach, and some of them still bleeding pink curtains of snow.
But she couldn’t see anything through the window of tears.
Someone yelled her name.
Gloria stopped, turned back, looking downslope at the chapel far below, the clang of its bell echoing through the canyon.
The last of Abandon’s residents trudged up the web trail, the closest of them Emma Ilg, wrapped in a black manta, her purple gown bulging out of the bottom, encrusted with ice. Emma stopped below Gloria and hunched over to catch her breath in the thin air.
When she looked up, she said, “Have you seen Russ—What’s wrong?”
Gloria shook her head, tears streaming.
“Billy McCabe and Oatha Wallace … know ’em?”
“Know of them. Why?”
Gloria went to pieces. “I think they killed our husbands.”
Emma’s ruddy face turned cold, rigid. “No. Don’t you say that to me. Russ and Ezekiel are up ahead. They’re trying to find us—”
“Listen to me, Emma.”
“I will not hear—”
“Billy and Oatha murdered Mr. Packer last night and made off with his gold. That’s why our husbands rode up to the pass. But it’s been four hours and Zeke hasn’t come back to me.”
“How do you know they’re gone?”
“ ’Cause Billy came to my cabin and was on the verge of killin me before—”
“You’ve seen them dead?”
“No.”
“Then they aren’t. My husband’s up ahead.”
“Please, Emma—”
“Don’t speak another word to me!” Emma pushed her way up the trail, knocking Gloria down into the snow as she passed.
A ways up the mountain, a woman screamed.
• • •
“Al, get your fuckin hands off me,” Joss said.
“Come on, they’s children up ahead a you. Watch that mouth—”
&nb
sp; “Don’t tell me how to be. You got these wrist irons too tight. They’re strangulatin my hands. And I need a brain tablet.”
“I’ll fix ’em when we get there and get you a smoke. Simmer down.” Joss glanced up toward the end of the canyon. With the storm having passed, she could finally see the steep white slope two miles south that led up to the Sawblade. She squinted her eyes, trying to raise the black specks zigzagging down like a line of warrior ants, thought she’d rather go it alone, take her chances in Abandon, than holed up with this miserable bunch of pilgrims.
Near the rimrock, the trail had become an icy staircase, stomped down and smoothed over by the passage of a hundred pairs of webs.
“How you expect me to climb with no hands?”
“Haul in your neck. I’m helpin you, ain’t I?”
Joss purposely tripped, and Al had to grab her under both elbows to keep her from sliding down the mountain.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “Can you climb ten more steps?”
As Joss struggled to her feet, her fingers grazed over the bowie knife jammed down into her canvas trousers, and she thought, It will be such a pleasure to stick this in you, you stackwad cocksucker.
Fifty feet back down the trail, Joss heard a woman scream.
• • •
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He rode up to the pass with Mr. Wallace, honey.”
“What for?”
“Don’t you worry about that.”
Bessie walked ahead of her daughter as they climbed the slope above town, her mind running in ten directions at once. The gold. The murders. Heathens riding down from the pass. They’d been delayed in getting to the chapel, because Billy had told them to go home first and pack for the trip to Silverton. But she was with him now, and despite everything, it felt right. He was her husband, after all. The Good Lord commanded that she obey him.
The trail steepened, and just ahead lay a series of icy steps that climbed the remaining distance up the cuesta to the rimrock.
“All right, Har, I need to hold your hand on this part.” Bessie turned around. “Harriet!” she screamed. “Harriet!” She couldn’t see anything downslope, standing high enough above town that a slice of the sun still lingered over the far side of the canyon.
“What’s wrong, ma’am?” An Englishman leading his wife and two daughters stopped on the trail just below.
“You seen my daughter? She’s yea high. Six years old. Curly black hair. She was right here with me not a second ago.”
“No, I sure haven’t seen—”
“Oh Jesus. Excuse me.” Bessie tried to scoot by, but the big bearded Englishman stretched his arm out to stop her.
“Ma’am, now you gotta keep climbing. We’re in terrible—”
“I’ve lost my daughter!”
“And someone’s gonna find her and they’ll bring her along.”
“Sir, please step out of my way.”
“You’re holding up the line.”
“Harriet! Harriet!”
As Bessie tried once more to step around him, he scooped her up, threw her over his shoulder, and continued up the steps toward the rimrock, Bessie flailing and screaming, the Englishman shushing her.
“We’re gonna get everyone safely inside, and if she isn’t there, I’ll go find her myself. That’s a promise.”
But Bessie’s desperate screaming drowned him out. She even surpassed the church bell until the mountain swallowed her.
2009
53
June whimpered, “I should’ve stayed with Emmett. He’s all alone in that place.”
Abigail walked with her arm around June, supporting her, and within earshot of the two professors. “I know,” she said, “but we can’t split up, and with the snow coming down like this, the roof of Emerald House could collapse.”
They made a careful descent out of Emerald Basin, down the steep switchbacks to the canyon floor, Lawrence and Quinn talking shop while they fought their way through the snow.
Even though her tailbone was in agony, Abigail felt revived by a second wind as they passed their buried tents, the llamas standing together in a mass of fur and breath clouds. It was almost four in the morning when they entered the ghost town of Abandon, a pride of headlamps moving between the dark and snow-fraught buildings—some swaying in the wind, on the brink of collapse.
She caught a fragment of what Lawrence was saying: “… tempting, but my first priority is getting June and my daughter out of here.”
As they approached the north end of Abandon, Abigail improved her pace, came up between the professors, said, “So where are you taking us, Lawrence?”
He glanced back. “Not much farther now. All will be revealed.”
At the end of town, Lawrence turned and led them up the east side of the canyon. After a hundred yards, Abigail’s headlamp shone on something through the heavy snow—that ruined church in the spruce, its iron bell capped with snow, its cross powder-blown and listing in the wind.
They hiked on, the snow rising almost to her knees. Soon they were climbing again, Abigail using her hands and feet now, the slope so steep that she had to kick her boots in to avoid slipping. At the moment she didn’t think she could climb anymore, Lawrence reached back and pulled her and June up onto a wide ledge.
They’d arrived at the base of the rimrock. From here, the canyon wall rose vertically into darkness, and Abigail was on the verge of asking where they could possibly go from here when she saw it—behind Quinn, an opening to a mine shaft, seven feet high and wide enough for several to walk abreast into the mountain.
“How have I never seen this?” Quinn said.
Lawrence pointed to the rock around the opening. “Because of the way the rock overhangs, you can’t see the shadow of the tunnel from the canyon floor. You’d have to stumble upon it by sheer dumb luck, like I did last year.”
He turned and walked into the mine.
“Warmer in here,” Quinn said.
“Most of the mines around Abandon stay a balmy thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit year round. Refreshing in the summer.”
Abigail and June followed them in.
The wind died away.
“How’s your ankle holding up, Lawrence?” Abigail asked.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m on pure adrenaline now.”
Water dripped from the ceiling onto the hood of Abigail’s jacket.
The air smelled dank, of water and minerals.
“What is this place?” she asked.