by Blake Crouch
“They used to call it a ‘shoofly,’ ” Lawrence said, his voice echoing off the rock and trailing away deep into the mountain. “It’s just an entryway into the mine.”
She shined her headlamp into the distance, where the tunnel seemed to narrow, and thirty feet ahead, Abigail saw their headlamp beams converge upon a small iron door.
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Shadowgees had been placed every twenty feet on the wet, rocky floor, like luminarias for a subterranean party. Gloria hurried along the downward-sloping tunnel into the mountain, following the echo of voices in the darkness ahead.
The day hole narrowed, and she came at last to a small iron door built into the rock. A man she recognized as the Godsend’s assayer manned the entrance, and he offered his hand, escorting her through.
“You can head on over that way with the others, ma’am, and do watch your step on this uneven rock.”
Lanterns and candles and more shadowgees illuminated the rock in firelight, and as she passed into the main chamber, the whole of Abandon overwhelmed her in a hundred-strong chorus of weeping and shouting and voices in varying strains of panic—bawling, terrified children; mothers and fathers trying to comfort them, many failing to hold back their own tears; a handful of men barking orders, attempting to manage the chaos; huddles of roostered miners, cursing whatever breed of heathen dare descend into their canyon and making pronouncements of war and grandiose predictions of the hell they would unleash on any savage who breeched the iron door; and Emma Ilg, flitting from person to person, a manic fly, asking if they’d seen her husband.
Gloria found a spot along the wall between two distraught families, crumpled down on the cold rock, and buried her face in the sleeves of her woolen jacket. Heathens are coming and Zeke is gone. She kept repeating it to herself, as if verifying that the nightmare was real, crying harder and harder as the pandemonium lifted to a crescendo.
Someone touched her shoulder. She looked up, and for a split second, out of sheer will and hope, she thought she saw Ezekiel squatted down in front of her, and her heart ruptured for him.
But it was the shunned madam she’d met last night at the dance hall, a thousand years ago, shivering under her bright red capote, her burgundy curls dusted with snow.
“It’s Rosalyn,” the old whore said. “What’s wrong, honey? Where’s your husband? He ride up to the pass with the other men?”
Gloria shook her head, but when she tried to tell her about Zeke, the words froze in her throat. Rosalyn sat beside her, reached over, and pulled Gloria’s head down into her lap. She pushed back the hood of Gloria’s cape and ran her fingers through her blond hair.
A voice rose above the din. Children stopped crying. The rowdy miners hushed. Gloria lifted her head from Rosalyn’s lap, saw all eyes on Bessie McCabe, who was standing amid the crowd, ripping out clumps of hair, and screaming Harriet’s name, her voice filling the cavern, reverberating down the tunnels, firelit tears glistening on her bruised face.
Stephen Cole rushed through the iron door toward Bessie. He embraced her and they sank down together on the floor, the preacher cradling her in his arms like a baby, rocking with her, whispering, “Calm down, my child, calm down. We’ll find her.”
• • •
Joss spotted Lana Hartman across the cavern, sitting quietly against the wall, her eyes shut tight, lips moving as if in prayer.
“Al, I told you I gotta see a man about a horse.”
They stood twenty feet from the iron door, and even in the weak, shadow-ridden light, Joss saw the boy’s pale complexion flush.
“Can’t you hold it a little while longer?” he whispered.
“Let me go on down that tunnel there, have my piece a privacy.”
“You know I can’t let you out a my sight.”
“You promised you’d loosen these wrist irons,” she whined.
“Hell, Joss. Hell.” The young deputy reached into his slicker, worked the key off the big ring attached to one of the belt loops on his dungarees, and waved it in Joss’s face. “Zeke Curtice’ll put me in the boneyard if I let you run a blazer on—”
“Al.” Joss smiled, watched how easily the boy’s face disarmed, knew for a fact he’d take full advantage if he ever got the chance. “You’re too close to the belly. Watch me squat if you want.”
“Might have to, Joss,” he said, then sighed. “Turn around.”
Al lifted her black serape and unlocked the wrist irons.
“Bring a happy jack,” she said, and Al picked one of the shadowgees off the floor and followed his prisoner into the empty passage.
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As Lawrence rapped his knuckles on the iron, Abigail’s headlamp shone on the surface of a door so overrun with rust, it resembled brown mold. It stood closed and locked by means of a thick crossbar held in place with a padlock the size of a small shield.
Quinn reached into his down jacket and pulled out the key.
“Full disclosure, Lawrence. How’d you find this place?”
“On my final day last fall, I climbed up the east side of the canyon to take a picture of the ghost town from above, and happened to stumble upon this mine. You have to understand—at the time, I was so absorbed in my search for Oatha and Billy’s claim hole that I didn’t think twice about this shaft. Besides, there are countless mines above Abandon. Figured it wasn’t anything special. But if you found that key in Bart’s suite, and it fits that lock … Shit, my heart must be going a hundred miles an hour.”
“I know, mine, too.” Quinn held up the key. “Shall I?”
“Absolutely.”
Quinn slipped the key into the hole.
“Is it working?”
“Don’t know yet. The mechanism feels pretty stiff, so I’m going slow. Don’t wanna break it off.” Quinn carefully turned the key. “I think it’s working.” He slid the padlock out of the crossbar and set it down. “Jeez, that’s heavy. Help me with this, Lawrence.” The two men lifted the crossbar out of the deep iron brackets and dropped it on the rock.
With the crossbar gone, the door was naked save for a small lever on the right side near the rock, which appeared to function as a doorknob.
Lawrence lifted the lever.
From inside came the rusted squeak of a bolt moving.
The door swung inward and clanged against the rock, a strong, cold draft sweeping in, the mountain sucking air deep into itself, as if trying to breathe.
“Unbelievable,” Lawrence whispered as Abigail felt June’s grasp tighten around her hand.
“Lawrence, when did you first come to Abandon?” Quinn asked.
“Nineteen seventy-nine.”
“You’ve got me beat. Do the honors.”
Lawrence crossed the threshold, Quinn following close behind. As she entered, Abigail moved her headlamp along the walls, saw a grouping of holes in a sweep of unblasted rock, the product of a day spent double-jacking more than a hundred years ago.
She heard Lawrence gasp, and she broke away from June and went to her father’s side. “What’s wrong?” His headlamp was trained on an alcove fifteen feet off to the right of the iron door, his dimming light illuminating a collection of tattered burlap sacks, ten in all. Lawrence unclipped his backpack, took a deep, trembling breath, then limped into the alcove and knelt on the rocky floor. He reached into one of the sacks. His head dropped.
“What?” Quinn said. “They empty?”
Lawrence chucked something through the darkness.
A brick of solid gold thudded on the rock at Abigail’s feet. Then another. And another. She reached down, picked one up. The bar looked small in her hand, but it felt disproportionately heavy for its size, the yellow metal gleaming under her lamp, its surface marred with chinks and divots, cold as a block of ice.
“You’re holding more than two hundred and eighty thousand dollars right there,” Quinn said.
Lawrence wept.
Abigail went to him in the alcove, asked, “What
is it?”
He shook his head. “Waited a long time for this.”
Quinn had been rifling through the sacks. “I count sixty-one bricks,” he said.
Lawrence closed his eyes as he did the math. “Almost eighteen million. God, my whole body is tingling. Look at that.” His right hand shook in the beam of his headlamp.
Abigail glanced over her shoulder, saw June wandering off into another part of the mine.
“I’m gonna go check on her,” she said.
Abigail struggled to her feet, walked over to June, found her staggering through the dark, shaking her head and muttering to herself.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Abigail asked. “You okay?”
When June looked back, her face had gone pallid and chalky, her eyes sunken, the small woman as bloodless as a cadaver.
She turned suddenly and vomited on the rock.
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When Stephen Cole raised his left arm, the noise in the chamber began to wane. Soon there was no sound but the occasional squall of a child. He stood in the center of the cavern, taking a moment to regard the horrified faces—these men, women, and children of Abandon who sat huddled together along the walls.
“Would you close your eyes with me?” he said.
Hats came off. Heads bowed. Children were shushed.
“Father.” Stephen Cole fell to his knees. “We come before You on this, the night of our Savior’s birth, a greedy, wicked, corrupt assembly. It is a dark hour. We have provoked Your wrath and for that I fall on my face and beseech Your forgiveness.” The preacher prostrated himself, his cheek against the cold rock floor. “I lift up the children to You, dear God. Children! I beg You.” His voice unraveled. “I beg You. Deliver them. Let them not be afraid, and if it be possible, allow this cup to pass.” The preacher’s tears ran down into the crevices of the rock. He whispered, “What of grace? Oh, my Father, what of grace? But not as I, but as Thou wilt. In Your Son’s holy name. Amen.”
Stephen wiped his face and rose to his feet, dusted the silt from his greatcoat, replaced his visored felt hat. He approached the town blacksmith, a small, well-liked man named Mason Stetler.
“Mason,” he said, “I leave the town to your care. You’re capitan. I’m going out that door now, and I’m going alone. If you hear a knock in quick intervals of three, know that it’s me, but don’t open it for any other reason. Better paint for war.”
“Mind your hair, Stephen. Got a shootin iron?”
“Yes.”
Someone grabbed Stephen’s arm. He turned, faced Gloria Curtice, her wet, probing eyes still grasping for a shred of hope.
Stephen shook his head and embraced her. “Zeke is with our Lord now,” he whispered. “With your little boy. Be dreadnought.”
Her knees failed. As Gloria collapsed, wailing on the floor, her anguish masked another sound that emanated from the nearby passage—loud but brief, a sharp cry of pain.
• • •
Stephen carried a shadowgee, an old Colt single-action Army, and a shotgun up the tunnel. When he stepped out onto the ledge, he extinguished the flame and sat down on the rock. It was a good, protected rincon. The sun had gone away and bled the clouds into a deepening blue that cast the mountains in a gray-metal twilight.
He gazed down on Abandon situated in the gloom of the canyon floor, lifeless and dark, wondering how those six men fared who’d ridden up to the pass.
He wasn’t afraid, enwrapped instead in the clutches of the most peculiar detachment he’d ever known, as if he existed somewhere above himself, watching everything unfold apart from the fear and the anticipation.
Still, a part of him kept listening for gunshots, unsure if the crack of their reports could carry this far from the pass.
Soon it was full-on night. He grew cold, his head exploding now.
Down in the canyon, specks of firelight winked on.
He returned to himself. His hands shook.
As the procession of lights moved through the empty town, Stephen took two shells from the pocket of his greatcoat and broke the breech of the double-barreled shotgun, whispering as he slid them home, “Wilt Thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise Thee? Shall Thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave? Or Thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark?”
The scalp hunters were already to the north end of Abandon, and Stephen watched them turn their mounts toward the chapel, following the tracks of the fleeing townspeople. His lips moved again in the dark, “Oh, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass.”
• • •
Joss emerged from the passage and took a seat on the outskirts of the cavern, her hands hidden under her serape, blackened and sticky with blood. If a saloon regular saw her, they might puzzle at Al’s absence. A reasonable explanation would be required.
She’d just set about inventing that lie when the roar of a shotgun filled the passage outside the iron door.
Everyone made a collective gasp, children crying, Mason Stetler yelling for every able man with a weapon to come forward, almost two dozen springing up, crowding the iron door in a ragtag battalion.
They waited.
Joss counted five staccato shots from a revolver. Three shotgun blasts. Then silence.
• • •
Stephen dropped two shells into the shotgun and reloaded the revolver from his cartridge belt.
Two heathens dead in the tunnel behind him. Two on the brink.
He was unscathed, but his heart beat so fast, he couldn’t think.
More lights approached, already to the chapel several hundred feet below. He could hear their horses snorting, the sound of hooves breaking through powder.
He took several steps back into the tunnel, his whole body quaking. He closed his eyes, tried to still himself.
The riders closed in on the rimrock.
He exhaled when he saw Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe dismount. They waded through the snow and climbed up onto the ledge, stood just outside the entrance to the mine.
Oatha’s claybank eyed the preacher warily, and as had happened on more than one occasion in the last week, Stephen saw the horse’s brown teeth lengthen and sharpen in the firelight.
Oatha hawked his plug of tobacco into the snow. His lantern hung down at the level of his knees, his face and Billy’s all gone to shadow and grotesque patterns of light, eyes shining, breath vapors clouding. Oatha wiped the tobacco juice from his chin with the back of his glove.
“You know somethin, Preach,” he said. “I’m feelin a little red-eyed toward you.”
“Why’s that, Mr. Wallace?”
“Weren’t no injerns up at the Sawblade. We rode around for—”
Movement in the tunnel drew Oatha’s eye.
He raised the lantern, peered around Stephen, the firelight falling upon one of his fellow miners, John Hurwitz, dragging himself off a pile of bodies, whimpering, his blood running out ahead of him down into the mine.
“The fuck’s goin—”
At close range, the buckshot excavated most of Oatha’s face.
His knees locked, and he pitched backward over the ledge.